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-old burial chamber in 1922 captivated the world. Researchers recently released colourised black and white photos of the discovery. This image was taken in November 1925, and shows Tutankhamun lying with his burial mask on. The photo was taken as the coffin was opened
The antechamber captured in December 1922. Pictured are ornately carved alabaster vases in the antechamber, containing perfume. The pictures, taken by British photographer Harry Burton, have been made from the original glass plate negatives
Howard Carter and an Egyptian worker open the doors of the innermost shrine and get their first look at Tutankhamun's sarcophagus
He was 'Carter's eye and memory.' With his enormous camera and cumbersome negative plates, Burton trekked between the discovery site, his laboratory and his improvised darkroom.
'Every step of the excavation work was documented in photographs, right down to the smallest detail,' according to Premier Exhibition, who are displaying the photos.
'The results of Burton's labours are 2,800 large-format glass negatives, which document all of the finds, their location in the tomb and every single step of the excavators' work with the utmost precision.
'Carter patiently and unconditionally encouraged him like no other member of his team and, thanks to his photos, Burton was the first and only archaeological photographer to achieve worldwide fame.'
The colourised black and white photographs are part of a new exhibition opening in New York called The Discovery of King Tut.
But the discoveries to make made in King Tut's burial chamber are far from complete.Last Friday Apple was granted a preliminary injunction on sales of the Galaxy Nexus in the United States, over alleged patent infringement. Samsung just lost its bid to stay the injunction, but that may not matter: Google and Samsung have a patch readied to address the issue that could be rolling out over the air as soon as tonight. We just spoke with a Google spokesperson, who informed us that the update, which will be rolling out to all Galaxy Nexus devices in the US regardless of carrier, will essentially dumb down the quick search bar on the Android homescreen, limiting its results to just those from the web. No local searches on the device will be performed at all, taking on-device apps, integrated Gmail, and other search results out of play. Voice search, which has been a point of contention in the trial, isn't going anywhere — but it will be restrained to the same set of limited search results.
The searchability of Android has always been one of the operating system's greatest strengths, so the change will no doubt be a usability hit depending on how you use your device. What's more, Google couldn't confirm to us whether or not users would have the option of declining the update to retain the functionality currently present on their Galaxy Nexus phones. Much of the infringement spat has related to Android's use of a unified search interface, but according to Google the standout feature of Android 4.1 — Google Now — will be safe when 4.1 arrives for the general public. "This just relates to the Galaxy Nexus," the spokesperson told us, "and not a product on the Galaxy Nexus."
Samsung will be appealing the ruling immediately. We'll bring you more on both the legal case — and the software patch — as it occurs.
Jeff Blagdon contributed to this report.posted 13 November 2006 Hardell, L, MJ Walker, B Walhjalt, LS Friedman and ED Richter. 2006. Secret ties to industry and conflicting interests in cancer research. American Journal of Industrial Medicine, in press. Latest news about conflicts of interest in science More news about
conflicts of interest An analysis of peer-reviewed documents and other sources reveals that scientists paid by the tobacco industry are not the only scientists who regularly fail to to reveal their funding links to industry when they publish studies. The most striking case is that of Sir Richard Doll, co-author (with Richard Peto) of one of the most influential papers in cancer epidemiology, one that concluded that only a small percentage of cancer was caused by environmental exposures. According to the findings of Hardell et al.'s research, Doll had a long term financial relationship with Monsanto between 1970 and 1990. Hardell et al. describe a letter from a Monsanto epidemiologist renewing Doll's contract for £1000 per day from Monsanto, which Doll had deposited in 2002 in a library at the Wellcome Institute. The Doll and Peto paper was published in 1981. Additional documents, according to Hardell et al., reveal that Doll and an industry medical advisor agreed to have any articles written by Doll reviewed by Peto and the medical advisors of two chemical companies. Doll's work for Monsanto included reviews of the cancer risks of vinyl chloride, dioxin and phenoxy herbicides (2,4-D and 2,4,5-T). The vinyl chloride work led to a peer-reviewed paper published in 1988 in a Scandinavian journal reporting that vinyl chloride was not a significant carcinogen other than in the liver. According to Hardell et al., Doll's analysis became the gold standard on vinyl chloride toxicity, including being cited by the American Chemical Council (2001) as showing no link between vinyl chloride and brain cancer. Hardell et al. report finding additional documentation of Doll's relationships with companies and trade associations in the Welcomme Trust library. For example, in the 1988 paper, Doll did not disclose receiving £15,000 plus expenses from the Chemical Manufacturer's Association and the chemical companies ICI and Dow (two large producers of vinyl chloride), a payment documented by papers reviewed by Hardell et al. They also report that Doll was receiving additional payment at the same time from Monsanto, another large producer of vinyl chloride. Hardell et al. also note that Doll, in a private unsolicited letter to the chair of an Australian Royal Commission reviewing the safety of dioxin and phenoxy herbicides wrote that "there is no reason to suppose they are carcinogenic in laboratory animals." His letter went further to challenge the veracity of peer-reviewed published research by Hardell and colleagues on the carcinogenicity of phenoxy herbicides: "In my opinion, his [Hardell's] work should no longer be cited as scientific evidence." The Commission's final report included, according to Hardell et al., "an almost verbatim account of a Monsanto submission on this issue." Hardell et al. describe other additional examples of researchers failing to disclose financial ties to industries with vested interests in the outcome of their peer-reviewed studies. For example: Swedish professor Ragnar Rylander worked for decades as a consultant to Philip Morris, failing to disclose this tie to his employer while, at the same time, discussing "all his tobacco related research at the universities with Philip Morris and their lawyers." While he initially denied the consultancies when it was first revealed in 2002, Rylander's contract has been made public in the Philip Morris Archives.
Scientists were hired by the product-defense firm Exponent to argue that dioxins are not associated with cancer in people. They made presentations at public meetings casting doubt on the chemical's impact, and wrote peer reviewed articles with the same conclusion, without revealing their industry ties. According to Hardell et al., the vice president of Exponent, Dennis Paustenbach, was on the EPA's science advisory board at the time, but was also conducting research for Dow Chemical on dioxin in soils around its chemical facility in Midland, Michigan. Paustenbach has since been associated with other efforts to distort science, particularly hexavalent chromium, including in articles in the Wall Street Journal. Hardell et al. conclude their review by calling for strict development and application of policies on disclosing conflicts of interest. As they observe, "financial relationships between industry, researchers and academic institutions are becoming increasingly common." While funding from industry "should be a good thing," according to Hardell et al., "the few examples we give show that it invites abuse when it is secret, concealed, disguised or non-disclosed, and as other research suggests, these examples are not isolated." They are especially troubling because "they involved some of the world's leading epidemiologists."LONG ISLAND CITY & ASTORIAModern Spaces' year-end round-up of rental and sales activity in northwest Queens turns back essentially what we already know; the two neighborhoods are getting hotter, with price per square foot up 6.25% in rentals and 5.09% in condos. At the end of Q4, the average rental rate in Astoria reached $2,868 and Long Island City's rose to $3,780 for luxury apartments, $2,963 for elevator rentals, and $2,458 for walk-ups. [CurbedWire inbox; official]
SOUTH STREET SEAPORTTo celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Landmarks Law, the New York Preservation Archive Project invites the historically-minded to flex their muscles brain in a night of preservation trivia. The one-off event is open to teams of two to four people, and will be held on Wednesday, January 21 at 6:30 p.m. at 119 South Street's Paris Cafe. More details here. [CurbedWire inbox; official]As Canada grappled with watching one of its own turn on fellow citizens in the nation's capital last fall, the phrase "Canadian terrorist" was already a familiar one an ocean away, at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, England.
One of the young men frequently mentioned at the inquest underway here was also born and raised in Canada, had converted to a radical version of Islam, and had somehow learned his way around guns and many other far more lethal weapons.
Xris Katsiroubas, from London, Ont., was also, like the Ottawa gunman, ultimately killed in the course of his twisted mission.
But in a sombre London courtroom, a coroner's inquest into the violent murder of six British men and one U.K. resident in an Algerian desert hostage-taking two years ago, his horrific legacy was being methodically reconstructed.
Lorraine Barlow, widow of Garry Barlow, one of the BP workers killed in the hostage taking in Algeria, had been one of the family members pushing for a full inquest. She is shown here leaving the Royal Court of Justice in London. (CBC) The 22-year-old was one of a throng of heavily armed al-Qaeda gunmen who audaciously took over the In Amenas gas plant on Jan. 16, 2013. By the time it was over, more than 40 foreign hostages had been killed.
Very early on, Algeria's prime minister announced one of the main players was a Canadian man who went by the name of Shaddad.
Not long after the standoff ended, Canadian officials revealed the identities of at least two citizens believed directly involved: Xris Katsiroubas and Ali Medlej, friends from London, Ont. Their remains had been found at the plant.
The two men would soon become the first recognizable faces of Canadians caught up in a new wave of Islamist radicalization of young people sweeping across the Western world.
ID'd right away
When Katsiroubas embarked on the meandering journey that would take him to Algeria, and ultimately to his own violent death, he couldn't have known he had been identified almost immediately after the attack started; and that his actions and his words would be recorded, to be scrutinized and reinterpreted publicly after his death.
Xristos Katsiroubas, left, and Ali Medlej have been identified as the young Canadian militants involved in the attack at the Algerian gas plant. Both were killed. (CBC)
On the opening day of the inquest, Scotland Yard Detective Superintendent James Stokely, the senior investigating officer, said images of Katsiroubas had been captured on a cellphone by the youngest of the British hostages, 26-year-old Sebastian John, and emailed back to his wife in the U.K. within the first hours of the attack.
John — who was praised by the inquest judge as brave for taking the pictures "at considerable risk to himself," was ultimately killed in the attack.
The photos, never before revealed, have been obtained by CBC News. One of them clearly sums up Katsiroubas's role in the first hours of the attack: he is seated on the ground in fatigues, a rifle in one hand — and a phone in the other.
Katsiroubas was in charge of communicating with the rest of the world, tasked with outlining the group's demands, and responding on its behalf.
The 'Canadian terrorist' known as Shedad, Xris Katsiroubas, shown here during the hostage crisis in a cellphone image transmitted by British hostage Sebastian John, who was later killed in the ordeal. (CBC)
And many of those who survived the four-day attack, and testified at the inquest, had spent most of it in his nerve-wracking company.
Repeatedly referred to as the "Canadian terrorist," Katsiroubas would come up at the inquest time and again.
Calling himself Shedad, sometimes spelled Shaddad, he dialed the U.K. repeatedly over the first two days of the attack, and we now know from the inquest many details of what he said.
For example, he demanded safe passage, with the hostages, to Mali, and then an exchange of hostages for some 100 prisoners.
Then he forewarned of the plan to blow up the plant.
At one point he said: "Everybody's going to be dead."
'Very dictating'
At the inquest, his voice — often casual, but described as firm initially — provided the first detailed glimpse into the extensive nature of the contact made with the hostage takers.
Those calls also provide insight into the militants' motivations, and into Katsiroubas and his state of mind in the hours prior to his death.
The man who took most of those calls was British Petroleum's vice-president of operations for Northern Africa, Andrew (Andy) Collins.
Collins refused CBC requests for an interview. And despite repeated CBC requests to BP and inquiry officials, neither the call recordings nor a full transcript were made available.
However, many of those calls were quoted by lawyers, and in Collins's testimony at the inquest. He initially described the caller as having "a North American accent."
"They were fluent," he said of the calls and caller. "Very fluent, very firm, very sort of dictating style."
Over the subsequent hours that voice — Katsiroubas's — would turn from firm, to angry, threatening, then desperate.
This is al-Qaeda - Shedad, Jan. 16, 2013, 7:25 a.m.
That first morning, Katsiroubas was in a convoy of well-armed gunmen who stormed the In Amenas gas plant and took several foreigners hostage.
They gathered them into a central plaza and bound them to each other using explosive cord.
It was only at that point that Katsiroubas, as the main negotiator, began making calls to outline their demands.
His first to Andy Collins was at approximately 7:25 a.m. London time, from a phone number Collins recognized as that of colleague.
It was a short conversation.
"Is that Andy?"
"Yes."
"This is al-Qaeda, we've taken hostages at In Amenas. We want to talk to the presidents of your companies."
An interactive look back at the Algerian hostage taking through the stories of survivors and a victim's family. (CBC)
Collins is well versed in crisis management, but had never received a call like this. He repeated back what was said, to check he had it right, and to make sure others could hear it, too.
But then the line was cut off.
A suicide bomb
Some of the witnesses at the inquest identified Katsiroubas as the young blondish man they observed operating a machine gun, and adroitly assembling a suicide bomb he would later try to detonate.
Others identified him as the militant who found them that morning and then escorted them from the living quarters to the plaza where the hostages were being held.
Two of the survivors of the Algerian hostage-taking, gas plant workers David Murray (left) and Stephen McFaul, shown here leaving the coroner's inquest in London. (CBC)
He later rode in a vehicle with several of the British hostages in an ill-fated convoy.
So, whether they lived or died, Katsiroubas was central to their stories.
At the inquest, he was described as a "prolific caller." Taken together, his words provide a sense of the mood among the militant group as the attack progressed.
Not long after news of the hostage-taking broke, the Algerian military moved into the area. Helicopters flew low over the plaza where the hostages sat, helpless. That made the attackers nervous.
What we want is a military escort - Shedad, Jan. 16, 11:15 a.m.
Throughout the morning, Katsiroubas made regular calls to Collins demanding they leave, but the military would not budge.
In one of those calls, Katrsiroubas tried another approach: he put one of the hostages on the phone.
The hostage, Carlos Estrada (one of the men whose death is the subject of the inquest) described the precariousness of the situation. That they had explosives strung around their necks. That there were up to 30 gunmen. That the Algerian helicopters were "causing the problem."
Katsiroubas takes the phone back and reiterates the demand for the military to pull back.
Shortly afterwards, Katsiroubas calls again with a far more ambitious demand: an escort to the Mali border, and eventually, a hostage-prisoner swap.
"OK, so what we want, what we want is a military escort, either vehicles or a plane," he says.
"... main thing is we want to exchange the prisoners, these foreign nationals we have, we want to exchange for the list of prisoners, we have a list, we want released."
In an effort to keep him talking, to try to win some of his confidence, Collins promises to pass on the demands. After a few calls, he asks the caller his name. Katsiroubas provides the nom de guerre Shedad.
Humanitarian appeal
In the calls that follow, Katsiroubas began to shed light on the identities of the hostages his group controlled. He also told Collins about Japanese hostages injured when the Algerian military started shooting.
"They didn't hit any of our soldiers, they hit three Japanese workers," he says. "Maybe they don't care about Japanese workers because they're not a Western country, I don't know but they [indecipherable] injured.
"OK, listen — the main thing where we are right now is the transportation to northern Mali."
At Collins's request, Katsiroubas provides a list of the hostages' names and nationalities.
Survivors of the Algerian gas plant attack tell their story in a CBC News exclusive 21:58
It wasn't an easy conversation. The cell network had been cut off and Katsiroubas was now calling from a satellite phone, and the quality of the calls was made worse by the growing din of shooting and helicopters in the background.
By this point, the calls were being recorded back at BP's headquarters in Sunbury, listened to by a large group on speakerphone — and, it later turns out, by Algerian officials monitoring the calls on the ground.
Scotland Yard's hostage negotiation unit was providing advice on how to negotiate with the Canadian.
Collins in turn was in touch with officials at Statoil, another partner at the In Amenas plant (who were also apparently receiving calls from Katsiroubas and at least one other militant).
According to Collins, the Statoil officials promised they were passing the demands on to an Algerian minister in contact with the military.
But no escort materialized.
Collins said he tried to appeal to Katsiroubas in a "humanitarian way." Would he release the injured, or allow a doctor to come in?
Katsiroubas ignored those pleas and then demanded safe passage to the main facility at the other end of the plant, where other militants were holding yet more hostages.
A darker tone
In a 2:15 PM call that same day, the conversation took on a darker tone.
Katsiroubas made a direct threat that would be repeated in the flurry of back-to-back calls to follow.
"Move military or we will kill people in two hours," he's quoted as saying.
Previous Next
It was the first time Katsiroubas explicitly threatens anyone's life.
Katsiroubas was demanding the removal of a barrier placed by the Algerian military blocking the road from the sleeping quarters, where he was, and the central processing facility.
In this call, Katsiroubas appears to be exasperated.
"The blockade is very easily moved, it's not like the biggest thing," he says.
On the military, he says, "They haven't moved. They moved back and forth … that's all they do? They, they're not, not doing anything."
That night, little had changed and Collins decided to go home at 11:00 p.m. to sleep, taking his cellphone with him.
Everyone's going to die - Shedad, Jan. 17, 1:36 a.m.
It was a decision questioned repeatedly during the inquest given that this cellphone was a crucial link with the militants at the scene.
Sure enough, a new Shedad call comes through at 1:13 a.m. In the fog of sleep, Collins missed it. But then immediately received a text.
"Andy, it's 'Shadad' important that YNT [you need to call] ASAP."
Collins tries to call repeatedly, and eventually gets through at 1:36 a.m.
He establishes that despite the threat a few hours earlier, no one had been killed.
"He said everything is all right. They didn't kill anyone. They didn't kill anyone. He repeated that several times," Collins told the inquest.
The military's attack had intensified. And Katsiroubas's words in this call appear more frantic.
Collins insists the messages are being relayed to the right channels. But that hasn't translated into much on the ground, says Katsiroubas.
"Right now the army is firing at us. They fired at our direction, at the prisoners," he says.
"We have not been able to talk to anyone … the leader, the leader says that we'll, we'll talk to the military right now.”
Katsiroubas then goes on to talk about the state of the hostages.
"…people here are worried. They want to speak … to their government and they want to know what's going on. They want to know how the Algerian government, they want to know why the Algerian government is firing at us... they're firing at everybody. It's not like indiscriminately shooting."
"Because we don't want these guys shot. They're going to just — everyone's going to die."
More shots
At day break there are more threats. At 7:05 a.m., Katsiroubas tells Collins they will make good on their earlier threat: if the military doesn't pull back, the militants would kill one hostage.
Katsiroubas then puts another hostage, Nick Hitch, on the line. Collins asks Hitch whether it appears there are any local negotiations going on with the Algerians.
Hitch tells him: "I can't see any evidence of that."
Nahlah Ayed interviews David Green, father of Stephen Green, a 47-year-old BP worker who was also one of those killed in the incident. (CBC)
Hitch seems to put the question to Katsiroubas, too, while he's on the phone, and comes back to say "no, no. They haven't had any and they haven't communicated with the people here."
No phone calls, no runners? "Nothing at all," said Hitch, a British citizen who survived the attack and submitted written testimony to the inquest.
Instead, in a subsequent call at 7:45, Katsiroubas describes a military buildup. He could see 50-calibre chain guns, two tanks, and a battalion.
At 9:05 a.m., he called again to describe a helicopter attack on a building not far from where the hostages were held. He demands the Algerian government be informed.
"Tell the guy in Algiers that the military they, they fired at the, firing at us again with missiles, and the missile hit, one of them hit the kitchen, the kitchen has injured in it."
And it is in that call that Katsiroubas, in what seems a sudden shift in tactics, says they will now allow a negotiator and a doctor in. He promises to guarantee their safety.
However, by this stage, it's clear the military is intent on ending the standoff.
In the subsequent, increasingly frantic calls Collins keeps insisting they're in contact with Algiers to try to de-escalate the situation, while Katsiroubas seems to indicate that the opposite is happening.
We're going to blow up the factory - Shedad, Jan. 17
In one more call, he puts another hostage on the line to describe a helicopter firing directly at them. Then he takes the phone again.
"You'll have to get the military to stop firing," Katsiroubas says before hanging up.
Made a run for it
It was shortly after that call that the militants tried to make a run for it to the far end of the plant.
The gunmen, including Katsiroubas, forced the hostages into SUVs and headed in the direction of the central processing facility.
Katsiroubas was carrying a suicide bomb in his lap, which he had assembled himself, as the horrified hostages watched.
Katsiroubas rode in one SUV carrying only British nationals — who are made to sit mostly on the right side of the vehicle – the side exposed to the incoming fire. They were being used as human shields, not for the first time, the inquest was told.
But they never made it. The vehicles were either halted by a barrage of fire from the military, or blown up by the hostage takers exploding their suicide bombs. Several hostages died in those vehicles.
Katsiroubas survived, despite attempting — and failing — to detonate his suicide bomb. He was last seen by at least one of the surviving British hostages running towards the central processing facility.
In court, Collins told the inquest that he received no more calls from Shedad. But that a voice mail appeared on his phone that afternoon.
To Collins, the voice is unrecognizable. It sounds slurred and slow. Nothing like Shedad's aggressive tone.
Collins and his team listened to it repeatedly, and suddenly realized that the voice is actually that of Shedad/Katsiroubas. But it now sounds laboured — likely the voice of someone with severe injuries.
Katsiroubas had claimed at one point early on that it was never the group's intention to take anyone’s life.
"I told you that from the beginning our intentions are not to kill anyone. But the Algerian army is making extremely difficult for us to, they're not letting us talk to them. Even not letting the Algerians talk to, talk to them."
But in this final call it's clear killing—a mass killing—is precisely what the hostage takers were planning to do. If the military did not withdraw, they were planning a huge final explosion in which the surviving hostage-takers and the remaining hostages would be killed.
"Andy, this is the mujahedeen calling you. Half the prisoners are dead because the Algerian army fired at three cars full of prisoners. Half your prisoners are dead.
"I'm not talking about Algerians, I'm talking about foreign nationals, Americans, British and Norwegian and all this. The other half are here and the Algerians are advancing. You need to stop the Algerians so we can deal with this or everybody's going to be dead, we're going to blow up the factory."
It's the last time Collins would hear from him. Katsiroubas died in that large explosion, along with his high school friend, Ali Medlej.
Katsiroubas’s words and images stayed behind, a reminder of the tragic circumstances that ended the lives he helped destroy.Hello Friends,
When it comes to advocating for abuse victims, we believe in telling the truth. But there are others who that think there is absolutely nothing wrong with making outrageous claims to advance an agenda.
One of those people is Jennifer Hammat, Title IX coordinator for the University of Texas.
While being interviewed for The Daily Texan, Hammat made the statement, “We should be seeing 12,500 cases a year,” while discussing unreported sexual assaults of students.
Seriously, Jennifer? 250-300 rapes or sexual assaults per week, just on your campus? PARENTS, GET YOUR KIDS OFF THE UT CAMPUS!!!
Ms. Hammat is exaggerating, of course. Her campus doesn’t have 15% of all of the rapes and sexual assaults in the country. But that lie was for a good cause, right?
Tell Jennifer Hammat, “Fear Mongering Doesn’t Stop Rape” Here’s her email address: [email protected]
Jennifer Hammat needs to issue a new statement, one with the real facts and figures about sexual assault and rape on the UT campus.
Thank you!
teri
Teri Stoddard, Program Director
Stop Abusive and Violent Environments
www.saveservices.org
PS. Please help us grow our efforts. And share this e-lert with a friend.• Czech Republic coach Jakub Dovalil says his side have not got carried away by Serbia win
• "You play football to be involved in such games," Dovalil adds
• Horst Hrubesch knows Germany will have the Eden Stadium crowd against them
• "If Czechs can build pressure... there's no team they can't beat," Hrubesch says
• Hosts missing injured Václav Kadlec; Germany at full strength
A point is enough for Germany to progress to the last four, while the Czech Republic must win to clinch a semi-final berth – lose, and the hosts are out. A more detailed breakdown of the permutations can be found here.
Possible lineups
Czech Republic: Koubek; Kadeřábek, Brabec, Kalas, Hybš; Petrák, Zmrnal; Skalák, Trávník, Frýdek; Kliment
• Out: Kadlec (ankle)
• Misses next match if booked: Masopust
Germany: Ter Stegen; Korb, Ginter, Heintz, Günter; Kimmich, Can; Bittencourt, Meyer, Younes; Volland
• Misses next match if booked: Leitner
Jakub Dovalil, Czech Republic coach
Our self-confidence is higher after such a victory, of course. But now we are going to play against a very strong opponent in Germany and I think they have not shown their best at the tournament yet. I don't think there's any kind of overwhelming euphoria in the team that we would need to calm down.
We hope Jan Kliment can repeat such a good display as against Serbia. But it was not only him who deserved credit for the goals — the other players, especially the wingers, set the goals up for him. I think Germany are going to mark him well. This game will not be only about his performance.
Coaches and players play football for a chance to be involved in games like this. We cannot beat Germany regularly, but we can in a one-off match. It is enough to look at the statistics to see what a strong team they are, but we will have a full stadium behind us, and this may be a great help.
Horst Hrubesch, Germany coach
These are the kinds of games you want. We'll be playing in front of a sell-out crowd, and we know it won't be easy. No team is through yet. Whoever loses the game here will have a problem ending the group stage successfully.
We've seen in this tournament that it's difficult for every team whenever their opponents take the game in hand. If the Czechs are able to build pressure as they did in the opening phase against Serbia, there's no team here they can't beat.
The Czechs absolutely have to get something from the game. With the support they'll have here in the stadium, they'll be highly motivated. We have seen that they're very strong on the flanks. Václav Kadlec is a good player, but they continued playing in the same way without him against Serbia. This game will not be about an individual player, but rather the team.
For me, it's always important to have the Olympic Games in the back of your mind. But we're taking things step by step. If we manage to qualify for the Olympics tomorrow, I'll be very happy. I could talk for half an hour about the significance of the Olympics for me. I have never played in that tournament.
Form guide (including friendlies, most recent first)
Czech Republic: WLWWW
Germany: WDLDD
Senior internationals in squad
Czech Republic: Ladislav Krejčí (14), Václav Kadlec (11), Pavel Kadeřábek (8), Tomáš Kalas (1)
Germany: Matthias Ginter (5), Marc-André ter Stegen (4), Kevin Volland (3), Christian Günter (1), Maximilian Arnold (1), Max Meyer (1)
Match fact
• The Czech Republic played host to Germany at the Eden Stadium just seven months ago. Check out our extensive match background to find out what happened.Though they may not be ready to embrace socialism by name, many Americans are experiencing a general shakiness in their faith in capitalism. In the midst of congressional debates over healthcare, cap and trade, and new financial regulations, they’re rightly asking: Does the profit motive provide appropriate solutions to all problems? Does the criterion of “winning or losing” apply to all socioeconomic circumstances?
The questions apply to other areas not dominating the headlines, such as the justice system. If healthcare shouldn’t be denied on financial grounds, isn’t it equally objectionable that “justice” improves with high-powered (and expensive) legal representation? Life savings can evaporate in legal fees as easily as in hospital fees.
Even further from the headlines, is our culture of “free” expression – the speech, images, and music dominating media – the best imaginable? Considering their importance for cultural wellbeing and upliftment, we might question our “whatever sells” approach. In his recent documentary, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” Michael Moore distinguishes between democracy and “evil” capitalism, but they are related practices. Our culture reflects people’s choices, voting with their purchases.
Mr. Moore’s ire for Wall Street greed is understandable. But be wary whenever someone nominates another abstract enemy – the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on illiteracy, the war on terrorism (and countless other “isms”)… the war on capitalism? Sincere citizens want to correct these problems, but there is often an insidious self-deception in the way we frame the issue, as though we confront an independent entity completely removed from our choices and actions as individuals or societies. How often does victory in such “wars” have something of the futile elusiveness of shadow-boxing?
Capitalism and democracy are not about getting the best of anything – sometimes they come close, but that’s not the criterion. They tend to give us only what the majority wants – that’s it. It puts the onus on us. Therefore, we should be equally distrustful of blaming capitalism or overcrediting it. Such either/or thinking runs into the ditch of polarized, name-calling politics: Who’s to blame, lenders or borrowers? Do we have to choose?
Sports competition is often a metaphor for capitalism. Coaches with a “winning is everything” attitude are admired. But one thing should be clear by now: Winning should not be the only criterion. It is estimated that the top 20 financial corporations in this country control 70 percent of US financial assets, up from 12 percent in 1990. Projected to its logical conclusion, do we eventually arrive at a champion? Then what?
The same faith in competition rules the courts. In an adversarial system, the lawyer’s objective is winning, not truth per se. Regulations to rein in abuses create new hurdles in the contest. Loopholes will always be found by those intent on doing so. Nothing overrides intent, which is why faith in new laws or systems must be tempered. With pure motive, the old rules, or no rules at all, would probably work just fine. Without pure motive, does the system really matter?
Our founding fathers understood that freedom without virtue is an alluring illusion. Our contemporary ideas on freedom need critical examination. A man driven by greed may be free to pursue his desires, but that “base camp” definition of freedom does not preclude enslavement to baser desires. Pundits or artists may freely peddle their sensational impulses, but if responsibility is missing, freedom is deformed. Freedom is nothing without right choices. If we are enslaved by a foreign tyrant or by our own self-destructive appetites, what is the difference?
There will always be a debate over how much government oversight is required. President Reagan famously declared that “government is the problem” – another enemy. But nonintrusive government is earned – or lost – by an exact formula: “...when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have” said Henry David Thoreau. Real freedom is a hard-won spiritual condition, not the law of the jungle.
Solutions are sought in theories, philosophies, systems of government, new programs, corrective legislation, and then more legislation correcting the corrections … anywhere but in the hearts of men, and anything but genuine self-government that preempts legislation.
There is no shortage of prominent figures designating enemies, always with one glaring omission. But as long as we’re making lists, we might want to take counsel of a bit of wisdom from Walt Kelly’s comic strip character, Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
David Arzouman is an artist, composer, writer, and educator developing a new art school in Tokyo.TEN years ago Shaun Hart unknowingly helped set Port Adelaide on the path to a premiership, now he's here to help them win another.
With the Power ecstatic to secure the three-time Brisbane Lions premiership player as Alan Richardson's replacement in the director of coaching role, Hart revealed he played an indirect role in Port's 2004 flag.
With Brisbane celebrating its third straight flag in 2003, Hart gave an interview for Adelaide radio and was asked why Brisbane had a stranglehold on the AFL premiership, while Port Adelaide consistently won minor premierships but folded come September.
The 2001 Norm Smith Medallist answered the question with the trademark honesty, unwitting
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5 trillion ($5.5 trillion), challenging the dominance of the traditional banking sector. Such unrestrained growth naturally worries China’s central bank, which fears that a flood of bad shadow loans could prompt a financial meltdown similar to the US subprime crisis in 2008. A liquidity squeeze in June, when the central bank allowed interbank lending rates to rise to as high as 20 per cent before intervening, was widely interpreted as a warning to banks to clean up their shadow portfolios.
China’s shadow bankers are easy to demonise. Like Wang, many are nicotine-stained and seemingly unsophisticated. Their methods are unorthodox, possibly even unsavory. Their loans don’t show up on any balance sheets. They look like a disaster waiting to happen. I believe these fears are misplaced, and I should know: Eight months after my visit to Hangzhou, I became a shadow banker myself. Since 2011, I have run a microcredit firm in Guangzhou, which provides loans to thousands of small-scale entrepreneurs: florists, restaurateurs, fish farmers, vegetable growers, roadside hawkers. Although we charge about 24 per cent annually for our money, demand remains virtually unlimited. Our customers are too small and too unstable to get traditional bank loans. At the same time, because we keep our loan amounts small - $US20,000 apiece on average - and because we have close contact with our clients, the business has proved reasonably secure. Our bad debts have not strayed above 5 per cent since the firm was founded five years ago. The threat to China’s financial system is right there - out in the open - not lurking in the shadows. This month, I visited Wang in Hangzhou again. A few borrowers had defaulted in recent months, he told me, but unlike some of his competitors, he had been “extremely lucky.” He was scrupulous about only lending to clients and businesses he knew well, and years of experience had given him a good eye.
“This is my hard-earned money; I have to be careful,” he told me. “My family was dirt-poor when I was a child. I am just so afraid of becoming poor again.” Wang’s fortune had almost doubled since I had last seen him. Lower leverage One cannot defend a $US5 trillion industry with a couple of examples. Two of Wang’s colleagues had been wiped out in the last year after large borrowers defaulted. Several other informal lenders in Hangzhou had ended up behind bars after disgruntled investors accused them of fraud. In recent weeks, news reports have described mass bankruptcies among small businesses that had borrowed heavily from shadow banks at exorbitant rates. But neither should one condemn all of shadow banking because of stories like these. Shadow banking is well diversified, and serves a legitimate customer base. By and large, it has much lower leverage than banks or corporate China. Losses at shadow banks are often absorbed by entrepreneurs themselves, without affecting the taxpayer. Even the “wealth management products” offered by regular banks are not to be feared, because they are just deposits, pure and simple, whatever the theoretical distinctions. I buy them myself.
Certainly, the sector could stand to be brought under greater supervision. But many of the regulations already in place are vague and unreasonable. Authorities have never clearly defined something as fundamental as what constitutes “illegal fundraising.” Microcredit operations, like ours, are allowed to borrow from no more than two banks for any more than 50 per cent of their equity capital. Why only two banks? Why only 50 per cent? These restrictions are arbitrary, and they severely limit our ability to lend to underprivileged customers. The government and the media are scapegoating the wrong culprit. Shadow banking has flourished in China for one simple reason: financial repression. By keeping interest rates artificially low, authorities have forced savers to search for more lucrative financial products. By favoring banks - which, in turn, favor state-owned or well-connected private-sector companies with loans - they have forced small enterprises to seek out people like me and Wang. Meanwhile, projects that might look sketchy at 9 per cent interest rates suddenly look feasible at 6 per cent. Under such conditions, traditional banks have steadily lowered their lending standards - from prime loans to subprime and then to simply silly loans. Sound familiar? That’s how the 2008 financial crisis began, too. Leaders are right to worry about the possibility of a banking crisis in China. But instead of focusing their ire on shadow bankers, they should raise benchmark interest rates in order to reduce the amount of credit flowing to dodgy loans through the formal banking sector. The threat to China’s financial system is right there - out in the open - not lurking in the shadows.“This abuse of state power,” writes Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei about the U.S. government’s surveillance of U.S. citizens, “goes totally against my understanding of what it means to be a civilized society.”
Weiwei has a better understanding of important things than Americans who find nothing wrong with the NSA’s domestic spying. According to last week’s polls, those Americans are in the majority. If you have done nothing wrong, many say, then you have nothing to hide. Really? We are supposed to believe the federal government does no wrong. If so, then by this logic we should declassify everything.
(There is some cold comfort in the poll, which shows that Democrats and Republicans support surveillance less when the other party holds the Oval Office. So some support for the NSA’s activities may have more to to with team-sports loyalty than deep-rooted conviction.)
The revelations about the extent of domestic surveillance have been a big story since they broke earlier this month. And the story keeps getting bigger: MSN reports that the IRS is “acquiring a huge volume of personal information on taxpayers' digital activities, from eBay auctions to Facebook posts and, for the first time ever, credit card and e-payment transaction records.” Soon it will have your health-insurance information, too.
Yet the tight focus on electronic surveillance keeps the bigger story out of the frame.
The bigger story concerns the increasingly asymmetric relationship between citizens and the state. The formerly secret program of domestic spying neatly illuminates one aspect of that asymmetry: The government knows, or can know, an awful lot about you. But you are not supposed to know even that it knows, let alone what it knows.
More of what the government does is classified than ever before. If you do not know what the government is doing then, obviously, you have no say over its activities. This flies in the face of the Declaration of Independence, which states that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” How can you consent to something you know nothing of?
The principle animating democratic and republican government is accountability to the governed. Yet more and more government action lies beyond the citizens’ reach. As law professor Jonthan Turley explained in a Washington Post piece that appeared before the surveillance leaks, “our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch of government, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency.” (Viz., the NSA.)
The “vast majority of laws,” he continues, “are not passed by Congress but issued as regulations, crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats.” In 2007, he writes, “Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies” – there are now 69 of them – “finalized 2,926 rules.”
The administrative state is taking over not only the legislative function, but also the judicial: Turley reports that “a citizen is 10 times more likely to be tried by an agency than by an actual court.” And such agency creep, as it might be called, does not stop at the federal-state boundary.
Last month the Minnesota Supreme Court deferred answering a basic question of constitutional rights: Can the government enter your home without probable cause? A city ordinance in Red Wing, Minn., allows building inspectors with administrative warrants to enter rental units even when both the landlord and the tenant object. And as the Arlington-based Institute for Justice points out, they “do not require the government to have any evidence that there is anything actually wrong with a residence.”
If you were asked to name a country that routinely stockpiles its citizens’ private communications, keeps it in the dark about that activity and many others, tries citizens in extra-judicial proceedings for violations of edicts not passed by any legislature, and permits government agents to enter private domiciles at whim, you might say: China. Or Cuba. Or Saudi Arabia.
America is none of those places, of course. Not even close. But it is not a happy thing to note that the fourth branch of government – the administrative state against which Republican politicians rail – is largely impervious to elections. And that despite the uproar over domestic surveillance, an activity the election of Barack Obama was supposed to curtail, the general consensus seems to hold that such monitoring will continue unabated. Politicians come and go; autonomous agencies and mass surveillance are here to stay. Elections still matter a great deal in the U.S., but they matter now less than they once did – and less than they should.A Sydney judge has compared incest and paedophilia to homosexuality, saying the community may no longer see sexual contact between siblings and between adults and children as "unnatural" or "taboo".
District Court Judge Garry Neilson said just as gay sex was socially unacceptable and criminal in the 1950s and 1960s but is now widely accepted, "a jury might find nothing untoward in the advance of a brother towards his sister once she had sexually matured, had sexual relationships with other men and was now 'available', not having [a] sexual partner".
He also said the "only reason" that incest is still a crime is because of the high risk of genetic abnormalities in children born from consanguineous relationships "but even that falls away to an extent [because] there is such ease of contraception and readily access to abortion".
Judge Neilson made the extraordinary and bizarre comments in the case of a 58-year-old man, known for legal reasons as MRM, who is charged with repeatedly raping his younger sister in the family's western Sydney home in 1981.
The man had earlier pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting his sister when she was 10 or 11 years old in 1973 or 1974 after police recorded a telephone conversation between the siblings in July 2011 in which he admitted to having sexual contact with her when she was "a kid".
But he has pleaded not guilty to the charge of sexual intercourse without consent, with an alternative charge of incest, regarding the 1981 events.
On April 7 a jury was empanelled and the Crown Prosecutor requested the jurors be told of the earlier misconduct to show MRM had a tendency to have a sexual interest in and have sexual intercourse with his sister.
The Crown argued that without the background information, the jury might find it hard to understand why MRM began raping his sister "out of the blue" and why she did not report it to her parents or police.
In the mid-1970s MRM had warned her not to tell their parents because they had just lost another son in a car crash and she remained fearful of upsetting her parents when the abuse recommenced in 1981.
But Judge Neilson refused to admit the evidence, saying the sexual abuse which had occurred when the girl was 10 or 11 and the youth was 17 occurred in a different context to the sex which happened when she was 18 and he was 26. By 1981, she had had sexual relationships with two men and had a young child.
"By that stage they are both mature adults. The complainant has been sexually awoken, shall we say, by having two relationships with men and she had become 'free' when the second relationship broke down," Judge Neilson said.
"The only thing that might change that is the fact that they were a brother and sister but we've come a long way from the 1950s... when the position of the English Common Law was that sex outside marriage was not lawful."
He went on to say incest only remains a crime "to prevent chromosomal abnormalities" but the availability of contraception and abortion now diminishes that reason.
"If this was the 50s and you had a jury of 12 men there, which is what you'd invariably have, they would say it's unnatural for a man to be interested in another man or a man being interested in a boy. Those things have gone."
On Tuesday Crown Prosecutor Sally Dowling SC asked the Court of Criminal Appeal to remit the case to a judge other than Judge Neilson because of the "misogynistic" attitude he displayed towards the complainant.
"These remarks in my submission are completely disgraceful," Dowling said.
"The reference to abortion is particularly repellent."
Justices Arthur Emmett, Derek Price and Elizabeth Fullerton reserved their decision.
Adults Surviving Child Abuse president Dr Carol Kezelman said: "To equate homosexuality, incest and the crime of child sexual assault is as ill-informed as it is outrageous. For it to be paraded by a Judge in Australia in 2014 during the time of the Royal Commission into Institutional Abuse, or at any time, is beyond belief. Literally thousands of survivors of child sexual abuse have given testimony before the commission of the decades of damage their abuse has caused," Kezelman said.
"The relational betrayal of the horrors of incest between a brother and sister of any age is abhorrently criminal. Failure to understand that prior abuse disempowers the victim establishing the ground for future assaults is ignorant. This together with referring to a sibling as being sexually 'free' or 'available' demands strict censure."
Bravehearts founder Hetty Johnston called for Judge Neilson to step down from the bench for "ludicrous and obscene remarks".
"These comments are offensive to every child, every victim, every homosexual person in this country."
Johnston also called on the case to be referred to the current Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.David Feldman SA Summer Auction – June 22 to 25, 2015
Four intensive auction days, over 800 bidders, over 2,800 lots sold and over CHF 5 Million in sales achieved for our vendors
The first two days of our auction week were dedicated to All World with a very strong selection of France & Colonies. The quality of the stamps, covers and extensive selection of fresh collections and estates has again attracted the interest of collectors and dealers from all over the world. “When you can combine exceptional items with fresh collections you should get great results! The French classic philately is strong!” said Gaël Caron, our French specialist.
The second part of the sale, on June 24 and 25, presented a wonderful catalogue of British Empire and notably the first part of the Tatiana Collection. These two long days were particularly intense with bidding battles on so many exceptional lots. Clients participating via our online bidding system, those bidding via telephone and of course our valued and resilient room bidders were quick to understand that this was no ordinary auction and were able to keep pace and react to the intense competition for this collection – indeed, for our subsequent auction in December, we can only recommend that our clients bidding via mail also investigate alternate live bidding methods to ensure that they do not come away empty handed.
The most exciting moment of the auction came from the offering of the Victoria revenue stamps –- t he series of three stamps of £25, £50 and £100 which realised a grand total of £192,000. Such was their rarity, they were as yet unpriced by Stanley Gibbons – a fact that the SG catalogue editor is sure to rectify in their next edition! Other standout areas that attracted considerable interest were the wonderful array of stamps from colonies like Basutoland and Bermuda, through New Guinea and New Zealand, to Nauru, Nyasaland and Southern Rhodesia.
We therefore have great expectations for the second part of the Tatiana collection which present yet more mint stamps from other colonies.
These outstanding results show that the team at David Feldman can be relied upon to bring fresh and amazing stamp collections to the market, and attain leading prices for the consignors that have entrusted us with exceptional items. If you wish to benefit from our proven access to international markets, the coming months could be an opportune time to consign for our next auction. Contact us today!
Below is a selection of some of the standout results:
Lot 50277 Estimate: £4,000 Sold for £48,0 00 (incl. buyer ’ s premium) 1886-96 Stamp Duty £25 yellow-green perf.12 1/2 recess printed wmk.33, mint og with complete selvedge, very fine and extremely rare especially with original gum (SG unpriced)
Lot 50278 Estimate: £7,000 Sold for £48, 000 (incl. buyer ’ s premium) 1886-96 Stamp Duty £50 black-violet wmk.33 perf.12 1/2 recess printed wmk.33, mint og with complete selvedge, very fine and extremely rare especially with original gum (SG unpriced)
Lot 50279 Estimate: £7,000 Sold for £ 96,000 (incl. buyer’s premium) 1886-96 Stamp Duty £100 crimson perf.12 1/2 upright wmk.33, mint og with only corner of selvedge missing, very fine and extremely rare especially with original gum, with Kellow stating that only one unused example was known in private hands (SG unpriced)
Lot 50856 Estimate: £7,000 Sold for £ 28,800 (incl. buyer ’ s premium) 1933 Centenary 1/2d to £1 complete set of twelve in mint nh bottom imprint sheet marginal blocks of four, stunningly fresh and fine for the most popular of all British Empire series, a showpiece set (48)
Lot 51137 Estimate: £15,000 Sold for £38,400 (incl. buyer ’ s premium) 1922-27 Script CA £25 black and red, on chalk-surface paper, mint nh with top control number “1” in sheet marginal single (selvedge has subsequently been separated from the stamp), hinge in margin only, extremely fresh, very fine for the important an popular rarity of George V, showpiece
Lot 51138 Estimate: £24,000 Sold for £56,400 (incl. buyer ’ s premium) 1922-27 Wmk Script CA £50 black and brown, on chalk-surface paper, mint nh with top control number “1” in sheet marginal single, hinge in margin only, extremely fresh, very fine for the important an popular rarity of George V, showpiece
Lot 51110 Estimate: 15,000 Sold for 28,800 (incl. buyer ’ s premium) 1912-21 Wmk Multiple Crown CA 500r green and red on green, on chalk-surface paper, mint single, slight hinge remnant, extremely fresh & very fine for this important rarityI've dismissed talk of Hillary Clinton's "secrecy problem" as mere babble in an election year. I thought, for example, that Clinton had no obligation to disclose her mild pneumonia, a temporary ailment she was over in a few days.
Thus, I assumed there was something politically damaging in her discussions with Wall Street bigwigs, for which Goldman Sachs paid $225,000 a shot. Why else would she deem it safer to let our imaginations run wild about their contents than to release the transcripts and let the chips fall where they may?
Now we have the three transcripts. Everyone can read them, and everyone should. What they show is Clinton's extraordinary understanding of our world -- its leaders and their politics, terrorist groups and their vulnerabilities, the interplay of global forces, and the economic well-being of Americans.
Note that Clinton's political foes are feasting over the exciting fact that the speeches were "leaked." They're saying little about what was in them.
One can understand Clinton's hesitation to release the transcripts during the primaries. Bernie Sanders was making a popular and heated case against the billionaire financiers. Any record of Clinton's saying nice things to the Wall Street titans would have been twisted out of proportion.
And Clinton did say nice things. She said, "I had great relations and worked so close together after 9/11 to rebuild downtown and a lot of respect for the work you do."
Then came the pivot: "But I do... think that when we talk about the regulators and the politicians, the economic consequences of bad decisions back in '08, you know, were devastating, and they had repercussions throughout the world."
She did suggest that people in the industry could help improve the regulatory system. Even that could be defended on the grounds that only insiders understood the exotic financial instruments that almost brought the house down. (Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan had said he couldn't make heads or tails of them.)
Some are troubled by the remark that the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms were done for partially political reasons. That should come as no great shock. In later public speeches, Clinton has called for tightening the Dodd-Frank regulations.
No one can find a quid pro quo -- a trade of favors -- between Clinton and the financial wizards who paid so handsomely for her thoughts. That's the main thing.
On the contrary, Clinton has long called for ending the "carried interest" tax loophole, which benefits private equity managers. She opposed the Bear Stearns bailout. She's now calling for a stiff hike in taxes paid by the richest Americans -- that is, many of the people in her audience.
Clinton was for letting Puerto Rico restructure its debts, a move opposed by Puerto Rico's creditors. "We can no longer sit idly by while hedge funds seek to maximize their profits at the island's expense," she said in May.
Let's remember that Clinton was a senator from New York. Financial services rank No. 1 in the state for total payroll. They provide over 160,000 jobs.
Helping hometown employers is why Sanders of Vermont defended the F-35 stealth fighter boondoggle. It's why Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts agitated for ending the tax on medical devices that helps pay for Obamacare. It's why anti-government conservatives in the farm belt back government subsidies to farmers.
Clinton has cashed her checks for the Goldman speeches. Donald Trump, meanwhile, continues to maintain extensive business ties with Vladimir Putin's Russia, according to his son.
Why Clinton insisted on keeping her brilliant Wall Street talks secret will remain an enduring mystery of this campaign. Heck, why didn't she post them on her website? Beats me.
COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COMLegend of The Skyfish Review for Apple TV - Anyone for Sushi?
Is Legends of the Skyfish by Mgaia Studios the killer Apple TV app we were hoping for?
The fishermen of the aptly named Fishermen's Town became greedy, attracting the ire of the Skyfish, risen from the deep to take its vengeance. After a beautifully rendered storybook sequence sets the scene, you're on your way to save your fellow townsfolk from obliteration.
Cue 45 levels of door-switching, spike-avoidance, sword-swinging and grapple-hooking.
But is this latest offering from prolific mobile publisher Crescent Moon Games and developer Mgaia Studios worth your time?
Well...
Legend of The Skyfish's visuals definitely weigh in on the positive side of the argument. Presented in a flat, 2D paper on paper aesthetic, with a muted colour palette that harks back to the Golden Storybooks of my childhood, it's a very pretty game.
The 45 levels however are grouped into three sets of 15, with the visuals only changing for each of those three sets. The variation in the depiction of those three sets amounts to a different colour palette, and differently shaped level furnishings of trees and bushes. Once you've played the first few levels of each set of 15, you do spend a long time waiting for more variety.
This description of the visuals can also be applied to most aspects of Legend of The Skyfish.
What it does, it does well, but after the novelty of something newly presented wears off, players will be stuck with slight variations of that same thing for many levels until handed more novelty.
There are some nicely designed monsters, but sadly not many varieties, with a couple of them repeated in different colours and taking three hits to kill in later levels instead of the initial two hits.
The same can be said for the puzzles. Your grapple-hook, which in this case is in the form of a fishing rod, is used to hook onto points to traverse platforming puzzles, while two-coloured switches opening some gates and closing others make for some interesting maze configurations. There are also block pushing puzzles, stepping stone spikes, and fireball spouting totems. All are combined in some nicely imagined ways, but with only these handful of options employed over the 45 levels, you often end up feeling like you are playing through a slightly altered facsimile of a previous level.
A strength of Legend of The Skyfish is its boss fights, of which there are three, one at the end of each set of 15 levels. Harking back to the boss fights of yesteryear, each involve learning a pattern and some sharply timed action, leading to a satisfying payoff once defeated.
Available on both Apple TV and iOS, Legend of The Skyfish sits in a strange middle ground - is it stronger as a mobile title or a console title? There are arguments for both.
Also Read: Should You Buy an Apple TV as a Dedicated Gaming Device?
I've played through this title in its entirety on Apple TV with a controller, and it absolutely benefits from the sharper, tighter controls. On mobile however, play sessions tend to be much shorter, and I feel that many of my misgivings about the lack of variety come from playing a lot at a time. But on mobile of course you'll be sacrificing the accuracy of the controller that much of Skyfish demands, and it just isn't the same playing with a controller synced to a small mobile screen.
Ultimately, Legend of The Skyfish plays well, sounds and looks great, but lacks in variety and depth. I actually would love to see the basic gameplay ideas and visual style translated into a bigger, deeper game. You will collect better fishing rods, boots and hoods a small handful of times on your journey, but I can't help but think with a more fleshed out story, and deeper RPG mechanics, Legend of The Skyfish could be the Zelda-inspired adventure its trailer wants it to be.
Apple TV sorely needs some adventures with the kind of tight platforming and beauty that Legend of The Skyfish brings to the table, but just with a bit more scope and depth.
Legend of The Skyfish 2 perhaps?
Grab the game here.
Writer:
Garry Balogh
If you are wondering who we are, we're primarily a digital magazine for the iPad focused on the coverage of indie video games. Run by the former editor of Game Informer, you'll find worldwide exclusives, but also an interactive media experience unlike any you have seen before. If you have an iPad, you should check out the free sample issue at the very least, or enjoy one of our other episodes as listed below.
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DisqusWASHINGTON, Sept. 15, 2015 - The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reminds farmers and ranchers affected by the recent wildfires in Alaska, California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington State that USDA has programs to assist with their recovery efforts.
The Farm Service Agency (FSA) can assist farmers and ranchers who lost livestock, grazing land, fences or eligible trees, bushes and vines as a result of a natural disaster. FSA administers a suite of safety-net programs to help producers recover from eligible losses, including the Livestock Indemnity Program, the Livestock Forage Disaster Program, the Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honeybees, and Farm-Raised Fish Program, and the Tree Assistance Program.
In addition, the FSA Emergency Conservation Program provides funding and technical assistance for farmers and ranchers to rehabilitate farmland damaged by natural disasters and for carrying out emergency water conservation measures in periods of severe drought. Producers located in counties that received a primary or contiguous disaster designation are eligible for low-interest emergency loans to help them recover from production and physical losses. Compensation is also available to producers who purchased coverage through the Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program, which protects non-insurable crops against natural disasters that result in lower yields, crop losses or prevented planting.
"Wildfires have caused devastating losses for many farmers and ranchers," said FSA Administrator Val Dolcini. "Over the past several years, wildfires have increased in severity, intensity and cost as the fire season has grown longer, and drought and increased temperatures contribute to dangerous conditions. Natural disasters such as wildfires are unavoidable, but USDA has strong safety-net programs to help producers get back on their feet."
The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) can assist producers with damaged grazing land as well as farmers, ranchers and forestland owners who find themselves in emergency situations caused by natural disasters. The NRCS Environmental Quality Incentives Program provides financial assistance to producers who agree to defer grazing on damaged land for two years. In the event that presidentially declared natural disasters, such as wildfires, lead to imminent threats to life and property, NRCS can assist local government sponsors with the cost of implementing conservation practices to address natural resource concerns and hazards through the Emergency Watershed Protection Program.
"After natural disasters such as wildfires, it is critical that farmers, ranchers and forestland owners have financial and technical resources available to protect their natural resources and operations," said NRCS Chief Jason Weller. "Conservation practices protect the land and aid recovery, but can build the natural resource base and may help mitigate loss in future events."
Farmers and ranchers with coverage through the federal crop insurance program administered by the Risk Management Agency (RMA) should contact their crop insurance agent to discuss losses due to fire or other natural causes of loss. Crop insurance is sold and delivered solely through private crop insurance agents. A list of crop insurance agents is available at all USDA Service Centers and online at the RMA Agent Locator.
When wildfires destroy or severely damage residential property, Rural Development (RD) can assist with providing priority hardship application processing for single family housing. Under a disaster designation, RD can issue a priority letter for next available multi-family housing units. RD also provides low-interest loans to community facilities, water environmental programs, businesses and cooperatives and to rural utilities.
For the first time in its 110-year history, the Forest Service, part of USDA, is spending more than 50 percent of its budget to suppress the nation's wildfires.
Today, fire seasons are 78 days longer than in the 1970s. Since 2000, at least 10 states have had their largest fires on record. This year, there have been more than 46,000 fires. Increasing development near forest boundaries also drives up costs, as more than 46 million homes and more than 70,000 communities are at risk from wildfire in the United States.
Visit https://go.usa.gov/3eDeF to learn more about USDA disaster preparedness and response. For more information on USDA disaster assistance programs, please contact your local USDA Service Center. To find your local USDA Service Center go to http://offices.usda.gov.
#California woman whose friends raised $35m for her is on house arrest as a man who can’t afford bail has two options: plead guilty or stay behind bars
Joseph Warren sees no sunlight and never gets fresh air. The 60-year-old San Francisco man, locked up for more than a month, said he has become suicidal, rarely eats the jail food and tries to sleep as much as possible when he’s not crying in his small cell. As a gay man, he is afraid he will be assaulted in the shower.
Warren is awaiting trial on welfare fraud charges. Charged with stealing roughly $5,000 from the government – an accusation he denies – a judge recently set his bail at $75,000, which he can’t afford. His only options are to plead guilty or stay incarcerated.
In the same region, another criminal defendant is preparing for trial in a very different setting. Tiffany Li, a wealthy real estate heir who is accused of conspiring to murder the father of her children, is able to remain under house arrest after posting $4m in cash and pledging $62m in property for her bail. She has a multimillion-dollar mansion 10 miles south of Warren’s jail.
California woman accused of murder released after friends raise $35m bail Read more
The parallel cases moving through the San Francisco Bay Area’s courts have shone a harsh light on a system that critics say is fundamentally flawed and unconstitutional, where wealth can buy freedom even for those accused of the most serious offenses while others facing minor charges are jailed indefinitely simply for being poor.
“It hurts. I don’t have the money,” Warren said, dressed in a bright orange uniform on a recent morning while seated inside a cramped jail visiting room in the San Francisco suburb of San Bruno. Guards stood watch nearby.
“I feel like I’m an animal here in a cage – less than an animal,” he said.
While Warren waits in jail, lawmakers and activists in California are pushing to abolish key elements of the state’s bail system so that people accused of crimes would no longer be jailed simply because they are unable to pay the fees. Supporters hope the reforms spread across the US – which has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world – and correct one of the cruelest aspects of the American criminal justice system.
The concept of bail was originally designed to ensure that defendants return for their court dates by requiring them to post funds upfront. But over time, bail effectively created a two-tiered system where the rich are immediately released while poor defendants are forced to languish behind bars, sometimes destroying their lives and leading to coerced guilty pleas.
On any given day in California – which has one of the largest prison systems in the country and has long struggled with overcrowding – roughly 46,000 people are in local jails waiting for trial or sentencing because they can’t pay bail.
That means people who are innocent or accused of minor offenses are trapped. From 2011 to 2015, one in three people jailed for felony accusations in California were never found guilty, according to a recent report from Human Rights Watch. In a two-year period across six counties, the government spent $37.5m jailing people who ultimately faced no charges or had cases dropped.
“When you’re in jail because you can’t pay bail, innocent people are more likely to plead to crimes they didn’t commit, because they need to get out,” said Rob Bonta, a California assemblyman sponsoring legislation to overhaul the bail system.
Even a short stint in jail can lead people to lose their housing, their jobs and their children.
Warren said his life had unraveled since he was detained in March. His fraud case stems from an honest misunderstanding, according to his attorney Elizabeth Camacho, a public defender.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joseph Warren said his life has unraveled since he was detained in March. Photograph: Sam Levin for the Guardian
The San Francisco native works as an in-home care provider whose salary is subsidized by the government. When an elderly client of his died in December 2013, Warren immediately alerted police, but continued to assist in cleaning the apartment, planning funeral arrangements and managing the estate, Camacho said.
He collected checks for several months while doing the work, the attorney said, but San Francisco prosecutors later alleged that Warren had stolen the $4,862 he received. The case dragged on, and Warren missed a court date last year due to his mother’s death, according to Camacho. As a result, he was arrested in March of this year and told he could only leave jail if he paid 10% of the bail a judge set – $7,500, nearly twice what the government claims he owes.
When Camacho arrived to meet Warren on a recent visit with the Guardian, he immediately delivered bad news: he learned from a friend that he has now lost his apartment of six years and all his possessions inside. That includes many items of sentimental value such as his late mother’s jewelry and family photo albums he can never replace.
“Everything is gone,” he said with a sigh, explaining that if his mother were still alive, she might help him post bail, but that he now has nowhere to turn.
Warren said he was losing work, too, and that regular clients who depend on him for care may be without help. He said he had been unable to reach his partner since he was taken into custody. The partner suffers from drug addiction, and he feared he could be suffering from a relapse.
Warren could only be released if he pleaded to a felony conviction and agreed to six months in jail, according to Camacho, who is preparing to take the case to trial next month. “He’s desperate to get out.”
Defendants too poor to pay bail face huge disadvantages throughout the process. Not only are they pressured to plead guilty, but incarceration can make it much harder to prepare for trial.
Research also suggests that black defendants like Warren are affected by racial biases at every step. African Americans are disproportionately stopped and arrested at higher rates, are more likely to face monetary bail and higher bail fees than their white counterparts and they subsequently face greater convictions and harsher sentences.
Low-income defendants who do manage to pay bail can also face severe long-term consequences since they are forced to sacrifice basic necessities and incur ongoing debts. Even when charges are dropped, defendants can still be on the hook for their debts with bail bondsmen, the private companies that collect non-refundable fees to post the initial bail that allows people to be released.
“You really can’t understate the downstream peril and hardships that the criminal justice system imposes on people, sometimes for the rest of their lives,” said Tom Hoffman, a former California police chief and prison official who supports bail reform efforts.
Ato Walker, a San Jose man, said his mother had to pay $8,500 out of her retirement money to bail him out of jail when he was accused of resisting arrest, a charge that was later dropped.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ato Walker said his mother had to pay $8,500 out of her retirement money to bail him out of jail. Photograph: Courtesy of Ato Walker
“It made me sick to my stomach to sit there and see my mom come up with that money we know we are never going to get back,” he said, noting that he
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– it’s not just one group of individuals who all express or feel their lack of attraction in the same way,” says Lori Brotto, an associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of the District of Columbia who studies sexual health and treats patients with sex-related problems.
For instance, some people consider themselves asexual but have sex out of curiosity or for pleasure, while for others, just the thought of sex is repulsive. Some asexuals see their sexuality as a lifelong characteristic, while others view it more fluidly. Some asexuals seek romantic relationships, while others, like Decker, aren’t interested.
“My life still involves relationships, I just don’t consider myself to have a primary partner,” says Decker, whose book “The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality” was published last year. “I feel like everybody chases their passions, so what I’m doing instead [of being in a relationship] is chasing my own passions.”
Low Desire or Asexuality?
When one of Brotto’s colleagues first approached her about asexuality around 2006, she had never heard of the term – in humans, that is. “You mean like amoebas?” Brotto remembers saying. Now Brotto is one of the most prolific researchers on the topic.
“I started out because I was skeptical that this was a bona fide stage that was not some kind of mental illness or depression,” she says. Now, Brotto says, “I’m convinced by the emerging science … which suggests this is probably best categorized as a sexual orientation – not as a dysfunction, not as a disorder.”
One of her studies published last year in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found links between asexuality and certain biological characteristics. For example, asexuals were about 2.5 times less likely to be right-handed than heterosexuals. The team also found that, when compared to heterosexuals, asexual men were more likely to have older siblings and asexual women were more likely to have younger siblings. Past research has strongly tied those traits to being gay or lesbian, Brotto says. “It’s not that those [biomarkers] cause the state, but it’s rather that something in utero – while the fetus is developing – gives rise to both,” Brotto says.
In another study out this year in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, Brotto and a team of colleagues compared asexual people to sexual people with varying levels of desire. Among the differences, they found that asexuals were less likely to experience sex-related distress than people who met criteria for psychiatric diagnoses for arousal or desire dysfunctions. In other words, asexuality is not a sexual dysfunction and doesn't require medical treatment.
“If you’re an individual who doesn’t have clinically significant distress and you’re very comfortable with this, and your life is going pretty well except for the fact that it may not be the norm, that’s fine,” says Dr. Kenneth Rosenberg, a psychotherapist in New York and associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. “There’s no reason for a psychiatrist or anyone to tell you that what you’re doing or what you’re feeling or what you’re experiencing is wrong.”
Asexual in a Sexual World
By the time Decker turned 20, she had compiled a “top 10” list of assumptions she was sick of hearing in response to her sexuality. Among them: “You must have just gotten out of a bad relationship.” “You haven’t found the right person yet.” “You’ll grow out of it.” “You must have been abused a kid.” “You hate men.” “You should experiment more.”
“It’s almost like asexuality is considered to be this last resort diagnosis that [people] would like us to try to make sure we’re everything and anything but this before we give up and say that we are asexual,” Decker says. “I would like it to be processed as something that is a reasonable possibility right from the beginning.”
Such reactions can have mental health implications: Asexuality is associated with a higher prevalence of mental health and relationship problems, according to one of Brotto’s studies. So while a mental health issue like depression or a history of trauma doesn’t seem to cause someone to be asexual – as is often presumed – being asexual in a highly sexualized world might cause someone to have mental health problems.
“I’ve met so many people in the [asexual] community who felt like they had a lot of unlearning to do and a lot of damage to heal by the time that they found out asexuality exists,” Decker says.
In those cases, people who are asexual can benefit from therapy that helps them be more comfortable with who they are, Rosenberg says. It’s also worth seeking help if your level of sexual desire – which can be influenced by anything from medications to weight gain to age – has dipped or surged. “Should someone be checked out if there’s a marked change? Absolutely,” Rosenberg says. “But should someone be shamed into accepting the norm? No, they should embrace their uniqueness.”You may be pledging to eat healthier, but chances are that restaurant down the street has different plans. Restaurants know exactly how to trick your mind into eating the items that make them the most money, rather than the item you may actually want.
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Researchers at the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab analyzed 217 menus and the selections of over 300 people, publishing their findings in the International Journal of Hospitality Management. As you'd expect, bold or colored text, separate boxes, and the spatial layout of the menu can make a big difference. They also found that items with more descriptive items—like "Succulent Italian Seafood Filet" instead of "Seafood Filet"—sold significantly more, even when it was the exact same recipe.
None of this is particularly new—in fact, we've talked about it once before. But the diagram (however crudely drawn) organizes everything nicely, so if you're more of a visual learner, it's worth looking at. Also useful is their advice for overcoming these tricks: ask the waiter or waitress what the most-complimented "healthy" item is. They explain:
Hit the link for more information on the study.
Slim by design: Menu strategies for promoting high-margin, healthy foods | Internation Journal of Hospitality Management via Cornell University"Hagrid, calm down," said the Headmistress, though she was barely composed herself. Hagrid had no words for her, he was too busy bawling, gripping at the stone boy as if that would resuscitate him. "Expecto Patronum. Find Cedric Diggory." It only gave her the same sad look she had seen on it several months earlier, immediately after Harry informed her of Dumbledore's departure. She turned back to Hagrid. "I'll be back in about six hours – which is to say, immediately." She flashed her Time-Turner at him, and he understood. She turned it only once, and investigated the new scene, which was an hour darker, and apparently devoid of either Hagrid or the petrified Cedric.
"Expecto Patronum. Find Cedric Diggory." The same look. She groped in the air where Cedric had been, and her arms hit a solid, invisible object. Her frown grew further down her face like ivy. "Finite." Cedric's stone form appeared clearly, and she knew that within an hour, Hagrid would find it. She laid her hand on his shoulder, and slowly turned her Time-Turner five more times, with her eyes closed. When it finally became clear that Cedric had been petrified further back than she could travel, she gave up and left the scene, complete with the invisible Cedric she had revealed five hours later.
Minerva knew that she could not create any serious disturbance that would wake her up six hours earlier than it already had. But she could begin responding to the situation immediately, as long as she did so quietly and privately. Wait a minute – speaking of disturbances that would wake her up earlier – Hogwarts had wards that were set off immediately if a student was killed, to alert the Headmaster. Why hadn't they gone off for Cedric? The realization of this discrepancy made her very worried, for a few moments, before she realized that she should coherently think about the problem, and the solution almost immediately occurred to her: petrification was for all intents and purposes death, but they were magically distinct processes and Hogwarts' wards might not view them as the same. In fact, she vaguely remembered Albus mentioning at some point that Myrtle's petrification had briefly caused confusion, as it had not set off the wards. She should have been anticipating such a thing in light of the recent threat, but hindsight is 20/20.
"Expecto Patronum. Find Harry Potter and tell him that there is an emergency and he is to meet me in the Great Hall. He is not to make a disturbance on his way there." There was a slight pause, and then the glowing cat returned, and spoke: "Harry Potter says-" It switched to Harry's voice:
"Alright, I'm coming." Minerva paused to ensure she could begin the next message.
"Find Ginny Weasley and tell her that there is an emergency and she is to meet me in the Great Hall. She is not to make a disturbance on her way there." Another pause... "Ginny Weasley says-"
"On my way." Her voice sounded displeased that it was being awoken so early; Minerva did not blame her. There was one more message to send; it was inspired by an offhand comment she remembered, that Myrtle might have been saved had she not removed her glasses to cry immediately before she was attacked.
"Find Horace Slughorn and tell him that a student has been attacked and petrified; he is not to make any disturbance, but he is to scour the grounds for any glass that might be used in a Potion Of Reanimation. He is to come to the administrative room behind the Great Hall immediately if he finds any, and otherwise he is to give up his search four hours and fifty minutes from now."
Headmistress Minerva McGonagall looked down at the two students she had gathered – the first year girl she had occasionally seen with the red hair, and the second year boy she was all-too-familiar with. She had first called them to the Great Hall, and then she had taken them back to the much smaller and more secure room reserved for staff immediately next to it. She had still not explained the situation to them, but she was about to.
"A student has been attacked," said the Headmistress, "using Slytherin's Monster. Exactly like the attack nearly fifty years ago. Petrified. They are almost certainly lost to us."
"Almost?" said Harry.
"Yes, almost," said the Headmistress. "There is a potion that may recover victims of petrification, but to brew it requires glass that was between their eyes and their attacker's. There is no evidence any such glass exists in this case, but I am running a thorough search nonetheless."
"Distribute safety goggles to everyone in the school immediately," said Harry.
"I will consider the pros and cons of such a solution before the day is out," said the Headmistress. "But first - I have called the two of you here because, though I could not imagine either of you committing this crime, you are the only two suspects we have. You are Hogwarts' only two confirmed Parselmouths. You were both sorted into Slytherin, though Albus managed to steer one of you away from that House regardless."
"You are both subject," continued the Headmistress, over Harry's halfhearted attempt to interrupt her, "to numerous mysterious discrepancies on your record suggesting the potential involvement of old Dark Magic in your soul. I believe Mr. Potter's discrepancies have by now been thoroughly explained, at least to me, but they still exist. Miss Weasley's discrepancies remain unresolved, though we have ruled out the obvious explanation that she is being possessed." Ginny flinched, and the Headmistress wasn't sure what to think of it.
"Wait, you have a test for possession?" asked Harry. "Why don't you run it on the entire school as soon as possible?"
"It's too magically intensive, Mr. Potter," said the Headmistress. "We can only afford to run it on those we already suspect." Harry hummed and considered other solutions.
"Headmistress McGonagall," said Harry, "has it occurred to you that there might be unknown Parselmouths at the school?"
"Of course it has occurred to me," said the Headmistress, increasingly frustrated. "But I am operating only on the information I have."
"I'm aware of at least one additional Parselmouth at the school," said Ginny.
"Who is it?" asked the Headmistress, immediately.
"My brother, Ron," said Ginny. "He seems a bit dull about it, though, and I'm not sure if he realizes he's a Parselmouth. I had to speak a bit slowly for him to understand." The Headmistress considered this, and realized something.
"Ah, of course," said the Headmistress. "That is present in your family, isn't it. That explains that discrepancy to my satisfaction. I'll keep an eye on him as well, but your point is well taken; this does confirm the seriousness of the problem. The only people we can truly rule out as Parselmouths are the other first year Slytherins, because they did not respond as you did to the Sorting Hat."
"I just thought of an obvious test we could use to determine whether anyone's a Parselmouth," said Harry. "Just put them all through a Sapespeck field that bursts Parseltongue white noise directly at their head, like what Ginny went through, and measure their response."
"Noted," said the Headmistress. "But I did not call you here to give me ideas, Mr. Potter. I called both of you here so I could tell you this as soon as possible: in the likely event that neither of you are guilty, I am truly sorry. But if you are responsible for the death of Cedric Diggory, we will find you. And the Line of Merlin Unbroken will not break, and the Interdict of Merlin will not end. And you will go to Nurmengard, or hopefully somewhere worse, for the rest of your natural life."
"I didn't do it!" said Ginny, rather loudly, on the verge of tears.
"With all due respect, Headmistress," said Harry, "you know fully well why I couldn't possibly have an interest in, you know-" The Headmistress's face suddenly changed from anger to horror. Either of the two children sitting in front of her could theoretically be the Heir of Slytherin, but it was rather unlikely, and she had certainly made a dreadful mistake to take her anger out on them.
"I'm sorry," said the Headmistress. "I do not suspect either of you, except for official purposes of completeness. You may both go back to your dorms." Ginny left first; she had nothing else to say. Harry lingered; he had more ideas to share. "What is it, Mr. Potter?"
"Okay, first, and this is probably a stupid question, but it couldn't hurt to ask," said Harry, "is there any possibility that the petrified body you found is false, and Cedric has actually been kidnapped-"
"No," said the Headmistress. "It was the first thing I tested. My Patronus cannot send a message to him. He is not with us."
"Of course," said Harry. "I should have realized. Then there's one idea I have to possibly restore Cedric – if and only if, of course, you can't find any glass for Professor Slughorn to use in the potion."
"It is by far the most likely outcome that no such glass turns up," said the Headmistress. "You may implement any idea you have when we catch up with Time - I went back the full six hours to investigate, but unfortunately the attack had been earlier; his statue had been hidden to delay its being found."
"Alright," said Harry. "My idea involves the Stone, so we'll need to transport him to the Hospital."
"Granted," said the Headmistress. "Hagrid is at the scene we are returning to, and he should not have trouble lifting him and carrying him there."
"Then should I wait wherever you're waiting for Time to catch up?" asked Harry.
"No," said the Headmistress. "I have more plans to implement if at all possible, but you should get more rest, if at all possible."
"I don't know if that is possible, Headmistress," said Harry. "But I'll try. Goodbye, and good luck; Hogwarts is counting on you."
"Indeed it is," said the Headmistress. The Boy-Who-Lived left, and Minerva McGonagall buried her head in her hands.
Cedric Diggory was well and truly gone. His brain-state was nowhere to be found, and so it didn't matter what he was Transfigured into, or whether that Transfiguration was made permanent with the Philosopher's Stone. Harry's Patronus was not able to revive the warm and dead, not even at the cost of his own life and magic. Like Myrtle Gale before him, Cedric Diggory's stone body would remain perfectly inanimate stone forever, many lifetimes after it was lowered into the ground beneath another, smoother stone bearing his name.
The first to break down completely was Hagrid. He had already been sobbing profusely, but now none in the Peverell Family Hospital could possibly remain unaware of the half-giant's cries of grief, his deafening mumbles of Cedric's natural affinity for magical creatures and how it reminded him of himself, of how it wasn't fair, of how it didn't make sense.
The second was Amos Diggory. The Headmistress had put off informing him of his son's condition until it was certain that he could not be recovered, to avoid prolonging the misery. But the misery was still prolonged; first, the entire house became impossibly loud with anger and sadness, and the entire neighborhood could feel it, and then it slowly became very quiet, and the entire neighborhood could feel that it was even worse. Not since the chaotic fall of the Dark Lord had magical Britain's upper classes experienced so much grief.
The third was Cho Chang. Panicked whispers and rumors had quickly spread throughout the school, but when Cho came to an understanding of the situation, she had the same initial thought as the Headmistress – she summoned her Patronus and attempted to contact Cedric. But when it did not respond to her, and she knew that the rumors were true, she began to run and cry, from the Ravenclaw Girls' Dormitory to the Ravenclaw Common Room to nowhere in particular, and that was when the school as a whole knew that they were under attack. For a few unfortunate moments, the sense of security that came with the social order dissolved.THE Prado museum, lined with works by Goya, Velázquez and El Greco, is a sanctuary of peace in busy central Madrid. When the museum advertised for eleven gallery attendants recently, it also seemed the perfect refuge from Spain’s job-starved economy: 18,700 people applied.
As Spain timidly emerges from a blistering double-dip recession that has ripped 7% out of GDP over five years, job-seekers remain desperate. Unemployment is stuck at 26% and emigration is picking up. So will the recovery create jobs and send Spain into a virtuous cycle of increased domestic consumption, a higher tax take, healthy public finances and more jobs?
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Presenting next year’s budget on September 30th, Cristobal Montoro, the budget minister, did not offer rapid relief. Projected growth of 0.7% next year falls short of the government’s own estimates for job creation. And with a planned deficit of 5.8% of GDP adding to an already worrying debt pile, stimulus spending is impossible.
Civil-service pay is being frozen for a fourth year in a row and pensions will not keep up with inflation, yet the public debt will still reach almost 100% of GDP. Spanish companies and households are busy trying to pay off their own debts. After taking a €41 billion ($55.6 billion) bail-out last year, Spain’s banks find it safer to lend to the government than to business.
Even so, Spain’s story is now one of hope. Mariano Rajoy, the prime minister, says the third quarter will show a return to growth. Deep in the real economy, exciting things are happening. Car plants are humming, taking work from less competitive factories in Europe. Retail sales figures are improving elsewhere. Even consumer credit has crept up in recent months. Recession inflicted a brutal cull on businesses, but those still standing are more efficient and productive than ever. Exports, spurred by Spain’s new competitiveness, should grow more than 5% both this year and next, doubling their pre-recession weight in the economy. With exports booming, the current account has swung into surplus.
Recovery in the European Union, Spain’s main export market, will help further. The stockmarket is soaring, with the Ibex-35 indicator gaining 11% in September. After a bruising 21 months in office, Mr Rajoy predicts economic happiness next year. His Popular Party (PP) has even seen a bounce in opinion polls.
But Javier Díaz-Giménez, of the IESE business school, warns that the recovery is anaemic, fragile and unlikely to create jobs. Average GDP growth of 1%, he points out, would not see Spain return to pre-recession levels until 2021. The IMF sees 25% unemployment through to 2018.
The danger, warns Angel Laborda of the Funcas think-tank, is relaxation. Already he worries that this year’s 6.5% deficit target will be missed. Overall fiscal pressure is relatively low for a country that wants a sophisticated welfare system. Structural reforms are still needed, he says, but Spain enters a two-year period of elections in 2014, sapping political courage. Overconfidence threatens to slow the fall in house prices, making it even harder to sell the 700,000 new homes left by the housing bubble that pitched Spain into recession. Fitch, a ratings agency, warns that at current rates of selling it will take six years to clear the overhang. Prices have fallen 30% or more from the peak, but Jesús Encinar of idealista.com, a property portal, sees a further 20% drop.
The next test for Mr Rajoy is pensions. A diet rich in olive oil, wine and fresh vegetables helps make Spaniards among the longest-living people in Europe. The baby-boomers will retire over the coming decade. By 2050, the number of pensioners will have leapt from just over 9m to 15m; and the social-security system already loses the equivalent of 1.4% of GDP. The previous government hiked the retirement age to 67, but that is not enough. “To claim that the current system is sustainable is like saying smoking does not cause cancer,” says Mr Díaz-Giménez. The government has made bold proposals to calculate pensions according to life expectancy and the size of the state pension pot. But Mr Rajoy is under pressure to backtrack. Even the employers’ federation has warned of pensioners’ lost spending power.
Labour reforms have helped to boost productivity, allowing employers and unions to opt for wage moderation rather than sackings. More may be needed if jobs are to be created. Lowering, or scrapping, the minimum wage might help. Taxes could also be cut, but only if public spending is cut. Luis de Guindos, the finance minister, says jobs will come when growth reaches 1%. Until then, the Prado museum remains a safe harbour.In a week in which the world of the president-elect grew ever more bizarre, he remained his own unpredictable, infuriating, charismatic, deeply flawed self
“Don’t be rude! Don’t be rude!” barked the president-elect with the authority of a school principal reprimanding a two-year-old. Not for the first time in the course of 18 months of Donald Trump’s wild ride to the White House – and surely not for the last – the world’s media found itself gathered at his feet, dutifully soaking up his scorn like naughty children.
“Don’t be rude! No, I’m not going to give you a question!” repeated the man destined in seven days’ time to become the 45th president of the United States as he shut down CNN’s senior White House correspondent. The reporter’s misdeed? Having the temerity to try to ask a question.
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It was one of those moments, of which there have been many along the way, when observers of the Trump phenomenon had to pinch themselves to maintain equilibrium. Was this man really about to occupy the most powerful office on the planet? And were we actually receiving a lesson in good behavior from the individual who mocked a disabled person and bragged about grabbing pussy?
This week’s event was the first press conference Trump had held since his shocking victory in November, the first indeed for six months since he took the unusual decision to cut out the media middleman and communicate directly to the American people through Twitter. Even before he appeared in the lobby of Trump Tower, his Fifth Avenue HQ and home, he had put us firmly in our places – squashing about 250 reporters into a space barely able to hold half that number, prompting an unseemly scramble for journalistic real estate.
To add to the enervating claustrophobia, Trump further packed the lobby with staffers who proceeded to cheer raucously at all the right moments in the manner of canned laughter in a recorded TV show. The subliminal message to the gathered media throng was clear: cheer along with us, or risk being subjected to the CNN treatment.
So much has changed, so much stayed the same in the half year since his last media encounter. Physically, Trump emphasised his altered status by drawing a blue curtain across the lobby and placing 10 American flags with eagle finials in front of it, as a suitably televisual presidential backdrop.
But in himself the man remained his own unpredictable, infuriating, charismatic, deeply flawed self. Not to mention inconsistent or paradoxical. How is it possible that an individual who has such paper-thin skin that he feels duty bound to repay Meryl Streep’s criticism by calling her “over-rated” can the next minute wrap himself in an impenetrable hide?
Trump responded with remarkable insouciance to the cringe-inducing descriptions of sexual perversions included in the dossier of unsubstantiated allegations about his Russian dealings. He came across as irritated, certainly, but about as flustered as a bull whose nose has been tickled with a feather.
If anything, the unverified claim that he engaged a few years ago in activities unfit to be mentioned anywhere but the darkest corners of the internet while staying in the presidential – presidential! – suite of the Ritz Carlton in Moscow merely seemed to make him more bombastic and expansive than ever. He stretched his arms out wider, puckered his lips farther, jabbed his fingers towards CNN more forcefully than before.
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More than anything, he heaped praise on himself with an alacrity that even outdid his own exceptional record. He was the only person in the world who was capable of running his “great, great company” and the country at the same time; he had spawned a political movement “like the world had never seen”; and he will be the “greatest jobs producer that God ever created”.
In one of the more striking signs of the excesses of his ego, Trump slipped into referring to himself in the third person, a form usually reserved for monarchs such as that king ousted in the American revolution.
“Nobody has ever had crowds like Trump has had,” he said, the effect of the comment heightened by the court that he brought with him to the conference – on the one side his imperially tall children, Don Jr, Ivanka and Eric, and the rictus smile of vice-president elect Mike Pence; son-in-law Jared Kushner and his tousle-haired chief strategist Steve Bannon on the other.
Further enhancing the sense of royalty were the golden marble walls of Trump Tower and the faux gold metalwork with which the president-elect likes to surround himself.
“I think we have one of the greatest cabinets ever put together,” he said, evoking a fresh eruption of canned applause from staffers. It was another pinch-able moment: was he referring to Rex Tillerson, his pick for secretary of state, who at the same time was floundering in his Senate confirmation hearing over ExxonMobil’s lobbying against Russian sanctions while he was its CEO?
Or did he mean Jeff Sessions, the senator from Alabama nominated for US attorney general, who on the same day was facing historically unprecedented criticism from a fellow Senate member at a confirmation hearing over what Cory Booker of New Jersey said was his “hostility” towards civil rights?
In The Art of the Deal, Trump writes that “a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.” This week, it sounded as though he had followed this mantra for so long that there had ceased to be any distinction in his mind between hyperbole and reality.
Russia dossier: what happens next – and could Donald Trump be impeached? Read more
By Friday, reality had returned to Trump Tower. The blue curtain and flags had gone and the lobby was back to normal – if a mass of fake gold and marble can be deemed normal. Trump himself popped down in the afternoon to have a quick word with the press in its pen, where daily it observes all the comings and goings.
He wanted to make sure that the world saw him with his guest, the comedian Steve Harvey, who happens to be African American. “He’s a good friend of ours, Steve,” said the president-elect, now using the royal “we”.
Before he went back upstairs to his penthouse, Trump made a point of asking after the well-being of the gathered reporters. “Everybody OK? Everybody having fun?” he said.
He didn’t stick around to hear the answer.Plus: top scorers who only scored penalties; the longest wait between international caps; and footballers mentioned in Parliament. Send your questions and answers to [email protected] or get in touch via Twitter: @TheKnowledge_GU
“Has any player has scored a ‘perfect dead-ball’ hat-trick in a game, coming from a free-kick, penalty and straight in from a corner?” wondered Rob Yeoman last week.
The slightly surprising answer is … yes! “Here in Japan in 2010 the Brazilian midfielder Marcio Richardes achieved the feat while playing for Albirex Niigata against Vegalta Sendai,” writes Alastair Bourne. “And here’s the evidence to prove it …”
GOLDEN BOOT PENALTY TAKERS
“So I was watching the highlights of the CAF U-20 African Youth Championship semi-final between Nigeria and Ghana,” began Tobi Amoo, a couple of weeks ago, “and I observed as Musa Muhammed, Nigeria’s buccaneering right-back and captain, blasted the ball into the net from the penalty spot for the second goal, that would make him the highest scorer at the tournament with four goals, having scored three goals earlier in the group stage, all from the penalty spot. The question is: has a player won the Golden Boot at any tournament, club or country, by scoring only penalties?”
The slightly surprising answer is … yes! Again!
“Well, there is a quite special case, which is the goalkeeper Carlos Fenoy becoming top scorer of a team this way,” begins Jordi Gómez (not that one). “Fenoy was an Argentinian goalkeeper, who arrived to Spain to play for Celta de Vigo in 1976. In the third match of the season, against Real Sociedad, he became a club idol by showing his skills from the penalty spot. First, he saved a penalty taken by Ricardo Muruzábal, and later scored another one against the mystical Luis Arconada to give Celta a 1-0 win. During the rest of the season, he managed to score four more penalties, against Real Madrid, Las Palmas (twice), and Elche. In total he scored only five goals, but it turns out that the forwards at Celta that season were not very lucky, so the goalkeeper was the lone top scorer of the team in that league championship. Celta got relegated with a total of only 22 goals for in 34 matches.”
LONGEST GAP BETWEEN CAPS
“As my house mate and I were half watching the Scotland-Northern Ireland game I completely misheard the commentator say that it was some players first appearance in 16 years,” writes Jamie Dodd. “This turned out to be false following a quick rewind but it got us thinking – which player has the biggest gap between two international matches and how long was it?”
The record for the longest gap between two England caps belongs to the Liverpool legend Ian Callaghan, who won his second cap against France in England’s final group game of the 1966 World Cup but then had to wait 11 years and 49 days for his third cap, when Ron Greenwood recalled him to face Switzerland in a friendly in 1977.
But the world record. Wouter IJzermans reckons it might be the Greek Maradona Vasilis Hatzipanagis. “His first game for Greece was on May 6 1976 (a 1-0 victory over Poland),” writes Wouter. “After his first match Fifa prevented him from playing again for the Greece squad because he had played for the Soviet Olympic team back in 1975 [Hatzipanagis had been born in Tashkent to Greek political refugees]. After a long career, he was offered a chance to play another international match when this restriction was lifted in 1999, which means he got his second cap at the ripe old age of 45 on the December 14 1999 in a friendly match against Ghana (1-1), 23 years after making his debut for the Greek national team.”
Here he is winning that elusive second cap:
And here’s why it’s such a shame he missed out on so much international football:
KNOWLEDGE ARCHIVE
“Apparently, some MP mentioned some footballer in the Commons the other day, or something,” began Andy Jowett back in 2011. “What other examples are there of players being mentioned or discussed in the chamber – in any capacity – by the honourable members? I believe questions were asked in parliament when Alf Common moved from Sunderland to Middlesbrough for £1,000 but are there any others?”
Last week we looked at the footballers who have been namechecked in the House of Lords, with Michael Howard’s 1994 World Cup optimism and John Wells’ 1984 assertion that Glenn Hoddle and Bryan Robson should be the British leaders in the event of an apocalypse particular favourites. But in terms of sheer numbers and, it seems, premeditated action, Stephen Pound deserves special mention. The MP for Ealing North managed to shoehorn an entire Fulham first XI (and a couple of subs) into a debate on the Planning and Energy Bill in May 2008:
“I thank my hon Friend for the positive way in which he is approaching this excellent Bill. New clause 1 would introduce a requirement to exceed building regulations – a Merton plus, plus model. In view of the work done by experts such as McBride and Healey, is it not the case that the building regulations will always be exceeded, regardless of what they are?”
“My hon Friend underlines in many ways the importance of this Bill promoted by the hon Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon). However, I am concerned about whether there is a lacuna in the area of education. I think of my constituent, Mr. Simon Davies, who told me about the house built in south Wales by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews), which is known as the “Teletubbies house” and is built almost entirely underground and covered with what he calls organic insulation and the rest of us call grass.”
“My hon Friend refers principally to thermal insulation, but he is on to something quite important with regard to sound attenuation. On the point about the amount of development in inner-London constituencies, in my area, even where there are cellars – or Kasey Kellers as people call them locally – people have tried to build there. Given his discussions with the Thermal Insulation Manufacturers and Suppliers Association, was he aware of any part of its remit that includes the benign combination of thermal and sound insulation in the same material?”
“I do not think that there will be many arguments in the House today except on points of detail. My hon Friend referred to forward-thinking local authorities. I appreciate that we cannot introduce retrospective legislation, or retrofit legislation, and a builder such as Murphys in my constituency will say that it is perfectly happy and comfortable with the requirements for extensions and new build, but is there not a danger that we could end up with a two-tier system where older converted properties are energy-inefficient and the modern ones are efficient?”
Bearing in mind your rigid strictures, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will not give the warm words of praise to that eager partnership that I would have given otherwise. My hon Friend’s new clause 1 is permissive: he is saying what a local authority may do, not what it shall do, which is implicit in the Bill as drafted. House prices are falling. If one talks to builders such as Mr. Dempsey in my constituency, to whom I talked last week, they will say that in a falling house market, margins are shaved.
I have mentioned former local government planning officers, who seem to work as consultants nowadays. Many of them will be as busy as Jimmy Bullard, as we say in west London, trying to find their way around words such as “reasonable” and around the permissive nature of “may”.
My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point, which is relevant to home information packs, although I do not wish to rehash the whole argument that we had on those. His point chimes with mine, in that, by and large, we tend to seek examples of good practice that have commercial benefit. I remember visiting a property in a place called Hangeland, in Norway
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uous’ man in a semi-westernised society
It is not hard to see that populous countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia will always have a significant number of takers for well-paid martyrdom. What explains, however, the allure of a caliphate among thousands of residents of relatively prosperous and stable countries, such as the high-achieving London schoolgirls who travelled to Syria this spring?
Isis, the military phenomenon, could conceivably be degraded and destroyed. Or, it could rise further, fall abruptly and then rise again (like al-Qaida, which has been degraded and destroyed several times in recent years). The state can use its immense power to impound passports, shut down websites, and even enforce indoctrination in “British values” in schools. But this is no way to stem what seems a worldwide outbreak of intellectual and moral secessionism.
Isis is only one of its many beneficiaries; demagogues of all kinds have tapped the simmering reservoirs of cynicism and discontent. At the very least, their growing success and influence ought to make us re-examine our basic assumptions of order and continuity since the political and scientific revolutions of the 19th century – our belief that the human goods achieved so far by a fortunate minority can be realised by the ever-growing majority that desires them. We must ask if the millions of young people awakening around the world to their inheritance can realise the modern promise of freedom and prosperity. Or, are they doomed to lurch, like many others in the past, between a sense of inadequacy and fantasies of revenge?
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The Guardian view on bombing Isis in Syria: the UK government should win the argument first | Editorial Read more
Returning to Russia from Europe in 1862, Dostoevsky first began to explore at length the very modern torment of ressentiment that the misogynists of Twitter today manifest as much as the dupes of Isis. Russian writers from Pushkin onwards had already probed the peculiar psychology of the “superfluous” man in a semi-westernised society: educated into a sense of hope and entitlement, but rendered adrift by his limited circumstances, and exposed to feelings of weakness, inferiority and envy. Russia, trying to catch up with the west, produced many such spiritually unmoored young men who had a quasi-Byronic conception of freedom, further inflated by German idealism, but the most unpromising conditions in which to realise them.
Rudin in Turgenev’s eponymous novel desperately wants to surrender himself “completely, greedily, utterly” to something; he ends up dead on a Parisian barricade in 1848, having sacrificed himself to a cause he doesn’t fully believe in. It was, however, Dostoevsky who saw most acutely how individuals, trained to believe in a lofty notion of personal freedom and sovereignty, and then confronted with a reality that cruelly cancelled it, could break out of paralysing ambivalence into gratuitous murder and paranoid insurgency.
His insight into this fateful gap between the theory and practice of liberal individualism developed during his travels in western Europe – the original site of the greatest social, political and economic transformations in human history, and the exemplar with its ideal of individual freedom for all of humanity. By the mid-19th century, Britain was the paradigmatic modern state and society, with its sights firmly set on industrial prosperity and commercial expansion. Visiting London in 1862, Dostoevsky quickly realised the world-historical import of what he was witnessing. “You become aware of a colossal idea,” he wrote after visiting the International Exhibition, showcase of an all-conquering material culture: “You sense that it would require great and everlasting spiritual denial and fortitude in order not to submit, not to capitulate before the impression, not to bow to what is, and not to deify Baal, that is, not to accept the material world as your ideal.”
However, as Dostoevsky saw it, the cost of such splendour and magnificence was a society dominated by the war of all against all, in which most people were condemned to be losers. In Paris, he caustically noted that liberté existed only for the millionaire. The notion of equality before the law was a “personal insult” to the poor exposed to French justice. As for fraternité, it was another hoax in a society driven by the “individualist, isolationist instinct” and the lust for private property.
Dostoevsky diagnosed the new project of human emancipation through the bewilderment and bitterness of people coming late to the modern world, and hoping to use its evidently successful ideas and methods to their advantage. For these naive latecomers, the gap between the noble ends of individual liberation and the poverty of available means in their barbarous social order was the greatest. The self-loathing clerk in Notes from Underground represents the human being who is excruciatingly aware that free moral choice is impossible in a world increasingly regimented by instrumental reason. He dreams constantly and impotently of revenge against his social superiors. Raskolnikov, the deracinated former law student in Crime and Punishment, is the psychopath of instrumental rationality, who can work up evidently logical reasons to do anything he desires. After murdering an old woman, he derives philosophical validation from the most celebrated nationalist and imperialist of his time, Napoleon: a “true master, to whom everything is permitted”.
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Dickens did much with Carlyle’s despairing insight into cash payment as the sole nexus between human beings
The bloody dramas of political and economic laggards can seem remote from liberal-democratic Britain. The early and decisive winner in the sweepstakes of modern history has guaranteed an admirable measure of security, stability and dignity to many of its citizens. The parochial vision of modern history as essentially a conflict between open society and its enemies (liberal democracy versus nazism, communism and Islam) can feel accurate within the unbreached perimeters of Britain (and the US). It is not untrue to assert that Britain’s innovations and global reach spread the light of reason to the remotest corners of the Earth. Britain made the modern world in the sense that the forces it helped to originate – technology, economic organisation and science – formed a maelstrom that is still overwhelming millions of lives.
But this is also why Britain’s achievements cannot be seen in isolation from their ambiguous consequences elsewhere. Blaming Islamic theology, or fixating on the repellent rhetoric of Isis, may be indispensable in achieving moral self-entrancement, and toughening up convictions of superiority: we, liberal, democratic and rational, are not at all like these savages. But these spine-stiffening exercises can’t obscure the fact that Britain’s history has long been continuous with the world it made, which includes its ostensible enemies in Europe and beyond. Regardless of what the “island story” says, the belief systems and institutions Britain initiated – a global market economy, the nation state, utilitarian rationality – first caused a long emergency in Europe, before roiling the older worlds of Asia and Africa.
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The recurrent crises explain why a range of figures, from Blake to Gandhi, and Simone Weil to Yukio Mishima, reacted remarkably similarly to the advent of industrial and commercial society, to the unprecedented phenomenon of all that is solid melting into thin air, across Europe, Asia and Africa.
“Spectres reign where no gods are,” Schiller wrote, deploring the atrophying of the “sacral sense” into nationalism and political power. Fear of moral and spiritual diminishment, and social chaos, was also a commonplace of much 19th-century British writing. “The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism,” Shelley wrote in 1821, blaming inequality and disorder on the “unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty”. Coleridge, denouncing “a contemptible democratical oligarchy of glib economists”, asked: “Is the increasing number of wealthy individuals that which ought to be understood by the wealth of the nation?” Dickens did much with Carlyle’s despairing insight into cash payment as the “sole nexus” between human beings. DH Lawrence recoiled fruitfully from “the base forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition”. Proximity to British arguments helped shape Marx’s vision of a proletariat goaded by the inequities and degradations of industrial capitalism into a revolutionary redemption of human existence.
The actual revolutions and revolts, however, occurred outside Britain, where liberal individualism, the product of a settled society with fixed social structures, seemed to have no answers to the plight of the uprooted masses living in squalor in cities. Its failure first motivated cultural nationalists, socialists, anarchists and revolutionaries across Europe, before seeding many anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa. In an irony of modern history, which stalks revolutions and revolts to this day, the search for a new moral community has constantly assumed unpredicted and vicious forms. But then the dislocations and traumas caused by industralisation and urbanisation accelerated the growth of ideologies of race and blood in even enlightened western Europe.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A militant Islamist fighter films a military parade in northern Syria celebrating the declaration of an Islamic caliphate. Photograph: Reuters
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“The way of modern culture,” the Austrian writer Franz Grillparzer once lamented, “leads from humanity through nationality to bestiality.” He died too early (1872) to see another landmark en route to barbarism: modern European imperialism, whose humanitarian rhetoric was, like one of its representatives, Conrad’s Kurtz, “hollow at the core”.
In Asia, the usual disruptions of an industrial and commercial system that transcends political frontiers and destroys economic self-sufficiency, enslaving individuals to impersonal forces, were accompanied by a racist imperialism. The early victims and opponents of this ultra-aggressive modernity were local elites who organised their resistance around traditionalist loyalties and fantasies of recapturing a lost golden age – tendencies evident in the Boxer Rebellion in China as well as early 19th-century jihads against British rule in India.
What happened to the British medics who went to work for Isis? Read more
Premodern political chieftains, who were long ago supplanted by western-educated men and women quoting John Stuart Mill and demanding individual rights, do not and cannot exist any more, however “Islamic” their theology may seem. They return today as parody – and there is much that is purely camp about a self-appointed caliph sporting a Rolex and India’s Hindu revivalist prime minister draped in a Savile Row $15,000 suit with personalised pin stripes. The spread of literacy, improved communications, rising populations and urbanisation have transformed the remotest corners of Asia and Africa. The desire for self-expansion through material success fully dominates the extant spiritual ideals of traditional religions and cultures.
Isis desperately tries to reinvent the early ideological antagonism between the imperialistic modern west and its traditionalist enemies. A recent issue of their magazine Dabiq approvingly quotes George W Bush’s us-versus-them exhortation, insisting that there is no “Gray Zone” in the holy war. Craving intellectual and political prestige, the DIY jihadists receive helpful endorsements from the self-proclaimed paladins of the west, such as Michael Gove, Britain’s leading American-style neocon. Responding to the revelation on 17 July of secret British bombing of Syria, Gove asserted that the “need to maintain the strength and durability of the western alliance in the face of Islamist fundamentalism” can “trump everything”.
Clashing in the night, the ignorant armies of ideologues endow each other’s cherished self-conceptions with the veracity they crave. But their self-flattering oppositions collapse once we recognise that much violence today arises out of a heightened and continuously thwarted desire for convergence and resemblance rather than religious, cultural and theological difference.
Mass education and economic crisis have long created a fertile soil for cults of violence
The advent of the global economy in the 19th century, and its empowerment of a small island, caused an explosion of mimetic desire from western Europe to Japan. Since then, a sense of impotence and compensatory cultural pride has routinely driven the weak and marginalised to attack those that seem stronger than them while secretly desiring to possess their advantages. Humiliated rage and furtive envy characterise Muslim insurrectionaries and Hindu fanatics today as much as they did the militarist Japanese insisting on their unique spiritual quintessence. It is certainly not some esoteric 13th-century Hadith that makes Isis so eager to adopt the modern west’s technologies of war, revolution and propaganda – especially, as the homicidal dandyism of Jihadi John reveals, its mediatised shock-and-awe violence.
There is nothing remarkable about the fact that the biggest horde of foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria originated in Tunisia, the most westernised of Arab countries. Mass education, economic crisis and unfeeling government have long constituted a fertile soil for the cults of authoritarianism and violence. Powerlessness and deprivation are exacerbated today by the ability, boosted by digital media, to constantly compare your life with the lives of the fortunate (especially women entering the workforce or prominent in the public sphere: a common source of rage for men with siege mentalities worldwide). The quotient of frustration tends to be highest in countries that have a large population of educated young men who have undergone multiple shocks and displacements in their transition to modernity and yet find themselves unable to fulfil the promise of self-empowerment. For many of them the contradiction Dostoevsky noticed between extravagant promise and meagre means has become intolerable.
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The sacral sense – the traditional basis of religion, entailing humility and self-restraint – has atrophied even where the churches, mosques and temples are full. The spectres of power reign incontestably where no gods are. Their triumph makes nonsense of the medieval-modern axis on which jihadis preening on Instagram in Halloween costumes are still reflexively defined. So extensive is the rout of pre-modern spiritual and metaphysical traditions that it is hard to even imagine their resurrection, let alone the restoration, on a necessarily large scale, of a non-instrumental view of human life (and the much-despoiled natural world). But there seem to be no political escape routes, either, out of the grisly cycle of retributive bombing and beheading.
The choice for many people in the early 20th century, as Rosa Luxemburg famously proclaimed, was between socialism and barbarism. The German thinker spoke as the historical drama of the 19th century – revolution, nationalism, state-building, economic expansion, arms races, imperial aggrandisement – reached a disastrous denouement in the first world war. The choice has seemed less clear in the century since.
The mimic imperialisms of Japan and Germany, two resentful late-modernisers in Britain’s shadow, played out on a catastrophic scale the conflict built into the capitalist order. But socialist states committed to building human societies on co-operation rather than rivalry produced their own grotesqueries, as manifested by Stalin and Mao and numerous regimes in the colonised world that sought moral advantage over their western masters by aiming at equality as well as prosperity.
Since 1989, the energies of postcolonial idealism have faded together with socialism as an economic and moral alternative. The unfettered globalisation of capital annexed more parts of the world into a uniform pattern of desire and consumption. The democratic revolution of aspiration De Tocqueville witnessed in the early 19th century swept across the world, sparking longings for wealth, status and power in the most unpromising circumstances. Equality of conditions, in which talent, education and hard work are rewarded by individual mobility, ceased to be an exclusively American illusion after 1989. It proliferated even as structural inequality entrenches itself further.
Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us | Paul Verhaeghe Read more
In the neoliberal fantasy of individualism, everyone was supposed to be an entrepreneur, retraining and repackaging themselves in a dynamic economy, perpetually alert to the latter’s technological revolutions. But capital continually moves across national boundaries in the search for profit, contemptuously sweeping skills and norms made obsolete by technology into the dustbin of history; and defeat and humiliation have become commonplace experiences in the strenuous endeavour of franchising the individual self.
Significantly numerous members of the precariat realise today that there is no such thing as a level playing field. The number of superfluous young people condemned to the anteroom of the modern world, an expanded Calais in its squalor and hopelessness, has grown exponentially in recent decades, especially in Asia and Africa’s youthful societies. The appeal of formal and informal secession – the possibility, broadly, of greater control over your life – has grown from Scotland to Hong Kong, beyond the cunningly separatist elites with multiple citizenship and offshore accounts. More and more people feel the gap between the profligate promises of individual freedom and sovereignty, and the incapacity of their political and economic organisations to realise them.
Even the nation state expressly designed to fulfil those promises – the United States – seethes with angry disillusionment across its class and racial divisions. A sense of victimhood festers among even relatively advantaged white men, as the rancorously popular candidacy of Donald Trump confirms. Elsewhere, the nasty discovery of Atticus Finch as a segregationist compounds the shock of Ferguson and Baltimore. Coming after decades of relentless and now insurmountable inequality, the revelation of long-standing systemic violence against African Americans is challenging some primary national myths and pieties. In a democracy founded by wealthy slave-owners and settler colonialists, and hollowed out by plutocrats, many citizens turn out to have never enjoyed equality of conditions. They raise the question that cuts through decades of liberal evasiveness about the cruelties of a political system intended to facilitate private moneymaking: “how to erect,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it in his searing new book, Between the World and Me, “a democracy independent of cannibalism?”
And yet the obvious moral flaws of capitalism have not made it politically vulnerable. In the west, a common and effective response among regnant elites to unravelling national narratives and loss of legitimacy is fear-mongering among minorities and immigrants – an insidious campaign that continuously feeds on the hostility it provokes. These cosseted beneficiaries of an iniquitous order are also quick to ostracise the stray dissenter among them, as the case of Greece reveals. Chinese, Russian, Turkish and Indian leaders, who are also productively refurbishing their nation-building ideologies, have even less reason to oppose a global economic system that has helped enrich them and their cronies and allies.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Isis mobilises ressentiment into militant rebellion against the status quo’. Photograph: Reuters Photograph: Stringer. / Reuters/REUTERS
Rather, Xi Jinping, Modi, Putin and Erdogan follow in the line of European and Japanese demagogues who responded to the many crises of capitalism by exhorting unity before internal and external threats. European or American-style imperialism is not a feasible option for them yet; they deploy instead, more riskily, jingoistic nationalism and cross-border militarism as a valve for domestic tensions. They have also retrofitted old-style nationalism for their growing populations of uprooted citizens, who harbour yearnings for belonging and community as well as material plenitude. Their self-legitimising narratives are necessarily hybrid: Mao-plus-Confucius, Holy Cow-plus-Smart Cities, Neoliberalism-plus-Islam, Putinism-plus-Orthodox Christianity.
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Isis, too, offers a postmodern collage rather than a determinate creed. Born in the ruins of two nation states that dissolved in sectarian violence, it vends the fantasy of a morally untainted and transnational caliphate. In actuality, Isis is the canniest of all traders in the flourishing international economy of disaffection: the most resourceful among all those who offer the security of collective identity to isolated and fearful individuals. It promises, along with others who retail racial, national and religious supremacy, to release the anxiety and frustrations of the private life into the violence of the global. Unlike its rivals, however, Isis mobilises ressentiment into militant rebellion against the status quo.
Isis mocks the entrepreneurial age’s imperative to project an appealing personality by posting snuff videos on social media. At the same time, it has a stern bureaucracy devoted to proper sanitation and tax collection. Some members of Isis extol the spiritual nobility of the Prophet and the earliest caliphs. Others confess through their mass rapes, choreographed murders and rational self-justifications a primary fealty to nihilism: that characteristically modern-day and insidiously common doctrine that makes it impossible for modern-day Raskolnikovs to deny themselves anything, and possible to justify anything.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Where does Isis get its money? - video explainer
The shapeshifting aspect of Isis is hardly unusual in a world in which “liberals” morph into warmongers, and “conservatives” institute revolutionary free-market “reforms”. Meanwhile, technocrats, while slashing employment and welfare benefits, and immiserating entire societies and generations, propose to bomb refugee boats, and secure unprecedented powers to imprison and snoop.
You can of course continue to insist on the rationality of liberal democracy as against “Islamic irrationalism” while waging infinite wars abroad and assaulting civil liberties at home. Such a conception of liberalism and democracy, however, will not only reveal its inability to offer wise representation to citizens. It will also make freshly relevant the question about intellectual and moral legitimacy raised by TS Eliot at a dark time in 1938, when he asked if “our society, which had always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude, so confident of its unexamined premises” was “assembled round anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends?”
Today, the unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty looks more indifferent to ordinary lives, and their need for belief and enchantment. The political impasses and economic shocks in our societies, and the irreparably damaged environment, corroborate the bleakest views of 19th-century critics who condemned modern capitalism as a heartless machinery for economic growth, or the enrichment of the few, which works against such fundamentally human aspirations as stability, community and a better future. Isis, among many others, draws its appeal from an incoherence of concepts – “democracy” and “individual rights” among them – with which many still reflexively shore up the ideological defences of a self-evidently dysfunctional system. The contradictions and costs of a tiny minority’s progress, long suppressed by blustery denial and aggressive equivocation, have become visible on a planetary scale. They encourage the suspicion – potentially lethal among the hundreds of millions of young people condemned to being superfluous – that the present order, democratic or authoritarian, is built on force and fraud; they incite a broader and more volatile apocalyptic and nihilistic mood than we have witnessed before. Professional politicians, and their intellectual menials, will no doubt blather on about “Islamic fundamentalism”, the “western alliance” and “full-spectrum response”. Much radical thinking, however, is required if we are to prevent ressentiment from erupting into even bigger conflagrations.Three years ago, Nic Pizzolatto was an assistant professor of literature at DePauw University in Indiana, a job he "fell into" rather than loved, and one he was desperate to escape. Television seemed like an impossible dream. "The idea was ludicrous," he says. "I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV."
What he did have, however, was desperation. When his 2010 novel Galveston, about a smalltime criminal on the run from New Orleans, attracted attention from agents interested in optioning it, the conversations soon turned towards TV and adaptations. "They asked if I'd written any screenplays. I hadn't. I think they thought I was wasting their time. But I knew this was my one chance. I went away and wrote."
That sentence doesn't quite do justice to what Pizzolatto did next – which was quit DePauw, move his young family to Los Angeles, and start churning out scripts like a man possessed. He wrote for 48-hour stretches, crashing out only to dream about his characters. "I wrote about everything I could think of – and one of those scripts was True Detective."
That script hit the bullseye. It is now a new HBO drama starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. A thriller unlike any other, True Detective is melancholic, dense with symbolism, and features astonishing performances from its leading duo, who play a pair of detectives searching for a possible serial killer. The show feels less like a standard TV procedural, and more like a crime novel come to vivid life. Pizzolatto switches the action between 1995, when his two detectives (blustery family man Harrelson, obsessive loner McConaughey) are investigating the ritualistic murder of a young runaway, and 2012, when those same detectives, now long since out of the force, are being interviewed in connection with a new death. The big question is: why have their lives fallen apart so dramatically? "I wanted to look at the relationship between these men and how it changed," says Pizzolatto. "I wasn't interested in doing what everyone else was doing. The point wasn't to write another serial-killer show."
The result is already being talked about in the same hushed tones normally reserved for the likes of Breaking Bad and The Wire, no small achievement for a 38-year-old former academic with next to no TV experience. In the month since True Detective premiered in America, Pizzolatto has been compared to the three Davids (Simon, Milch and Chase – the men behind The Wire, Deadwood and The Sopranos) and has just signed a two-year deal with HBO that will allow him to develop a second series, while working on additional projects. He is now being hailed as the hottest thing in Hollywood by everyone from the LA Times to the Daily Beast, with Galveston set to become a film, too.
It's a meteoric rise by any standards – and it doesn't stop there. "I knew True Detective wasn't something I could allow anyone else to develop," he says. "But by the time HBO expressed an interest, I still had no real experience." Despite this, Pizzolatto held his nerve and demanded complete creative control. Incredibly, he got it: he is True Detective's sole writer, executive producer and showrunner, an almost unheard-of deal in America, where writing teams and copious notes from producers and studio execs are the norm. "I'm still a little amazed they agreed," he says. "At that point, I'd only written two episodes and had a rough outline of where the show would go. HBO could have easily sidelined me. I was a complete unknown."
It helped that the newly in-demand McConaughey saw a copy of the script and lobbied to play the enigmatic Rust Cohle, a man plagued by hallucinations and his own pessimistic vision of an unjust world. "That was another way I got lucky," says Pizzolatto. "When Matthew expressed an interest, it was right before his renaissance. I'd seen Killer Joe and knew he was one of the few actors who could say Rust's dialogue and make you believe it. With a lesser actor, the part would have had to be drastically rewritten."
If True Detective were just another murder mystery, then Pizzolatto wouldn't be nearly as feted. But this eight-episode drama set in the rural badlands of Louisiana("I wanted to write something set in the sort of places people don't set TV series") is a crazed dream of a show, stuffed full of philosophy and despair, languid yet driven by a furious energy. It certainly feels as if it was written at speed by a man desperate to seize his moment.
"When I was writing I had to keep pushing into my own personal vision," says Pizzolatto, "and not worry about how a studio would see the show. Otherwise, you're just doing what everyone else is doing. I think the strangeness was what drew both HBO and the actors. I knew this was my one shot."
• True Detective starts on Sky Atlantic at 9pm on Saturday.Get A Free P-38
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Free P-38
We’d love for you to repost this link on facebook, moto bulletin boards, local moto clubs and email listservs, or just email it around to your moto buddies. That’s what we’re hoping will happen. As long as the people signing up have bikes and love to ride them, we’re happy to send out thousands of these if we can. I just ordered 200 more. Any great ideas for somewhere to promote this? Let us know, or better yet post the link yourself. Who wouldn’t want a free P-38?
If you’ve never heard of a P-38, it’s this really badass little can opener that was designed by the US military in 1942 for K rations in World War II. The P-38 was standard issue with military meals for over 60 years before the MRE (Meal Ready Eat) took over. These little tools, nicknamed the “John Wayne” in the military, are legendary for reliability and toughness. Andrew and I were looking for a cool giveaway and I remembered this surplus P-38 I had for 10+ years when I was a kid. Um, yeah… perfect!!
We’re doing this promotion for two reasons: 1) we’re trying to build a mailing list of riders in anticipation of having some product to sell soon and 2) we want to learn more about who is following our blog and advrider.com thread, and how far their network extends. The advrider thread has had over 42,000 views, which is a lot. We’re curious who you are, where you’re located, what kind of bike you ride, and what ideas you might have for us. So we’ll trade a few hundred (or thousand?) P-38’s to find out. Everyone needs a P-38 right? Coolest little backcountry utensil ever.
Learning more about this network is particularly timely because we’ve decided to sell direct-to-consumer. Originally we just kind of assumed we’d be selling through retailers/distributors since that’s how other companies do it. But as we watched the online response and feedback building over the last few months we started wondering: why sell through retailers if we can connect directly with riders? Retailers take a 35-50% markup, so our products would cost nearly double in stores, plus we’d be one-step removed from the customer. We posed this question on advrider.com and the response was overwhelmingly in favor of selling direct. So that’s what we’ll do.
Until now we’ve been focused solely on the designs themselves, while sales, marketing, warehousing, etc seemed way off on the horizon to be dealt with later. Now that we’re about to place our first purchase order, which is a lot of money for us, suddenly the “later” is now. Nothing brings sales into focus like owning a bunch of inventory.
For packing/shipping, we have some good friends in Hood River with a really cool ski/snowboard brand that’s been growing fast (Trew Gear. FYI their post season sale is on, 45% off everything. Check it out, seriously good stuff). They started 5 years ago and since then have experimented with a couple different warehouse options, mostly picking/packing products themselves. Last year they switched to a third party logistics company in Portland for their warehousing and shipping. On their recommendation, Andrew and I headed into the city for a visit.
Letting someone else handle shipping is a mental leap. I’ve managed a shipping warehouse in the past, so this is not unfamiliar territory. But for a small company like us, working with a third-party logistics partner can result in faster shipping, fewer mis-ships, more accurate inventory, and lower costs than we could ever hope to achieve on our own. A lot of small companies are going this route. Big ones too apparently, since this warehouse’s biggest customer is Nike. By partnering with a logistics company, Andrew and I will be able to spend more time on product and design, while leaving warehousing and shipping to the pros. We’re liking this idea.
While in PDX we also visited a motorcycle salvage yard just outside of town. We’ve been looking for a junker bike to use in our upcoming crash test. The idea is to test the pannier mounting system and the armor by attaching some panniers to a bike and pushing it out of the back of my pickup at speed. Maybe when it gets a little warmer out. We found a sweet vintage CB 175. No motor, but it still rolls, which is all we need for this project. Maybe we’ll put some cinder blocks where the engine would go to add a little weight.
Then:
And now:
In other news: Andrew is working hard to get our design revisions for the factory. The revisions are small and detailed, but numerous. Meanwhile Galen finished up the size specs for our 2015 apparel. Factory #1 (from the last post, who I met in Hanoi) has agreed to produce our apparel, which is exciting news. Andrew, Galen, and I Skyped with them last week to discuss fabrics and production timing.
Did I mention the Free P-38??This article was updated throughout on Sunday, August 6, 2017, at 11:55 a.m. EDT
ROME—Models beware: there’s a sinister sex market on the dark web where you’ll be put up for sale.
At least that’s what Italian investigators believe. They discovered that a 20-year-old British model named in the British press as Chloe Ayling was called to Milan for a photo shoot only to be put up for sale on the infamous darknet or deep web, the unindexed sector of the world wide web that knows no boundaries.
Speaking to reporters outside her London home, she said, “I am incredibly grateful to the Italian and U.K. authorities for all they have done to secure my safe release. I have just arrived home after four weeks and haven't had time to gather my thoughts. I am not at liberty to say anything further until I have been debriefed by the U.K. police.”
Her lawyer, Francesco Pesce, told The Daily Telegraph that she was cooperating with police. “She is such a young girl to have been subjected to such an ordeal, she must have suffered so much,” he said. “It must have been terrifying to be alone in this house being locked up by strangers in the middle of nowhere. She was told she was going to be sold. It was scary.”
Ayling, had posted on Instagram and Facebook that she had arrived in Italy on July 10, after her modeling agency in the United Kingdom set up a photo shoot for the next day. They believed it was with a legitimate company looking for young women for an ad campaign, according to Corriere Della Sera, which first reported the story Saturday after the man was arraigned in a Milan court on Friday.
But when the woman got to the photo studio address in Milan, there were no cameras. There were four men, with a syringe full of Ketalar, a common anesthetic drug often used to sedate horses. Police say the men tackled her and jabbed her in the arm, then put a pillowcase over her head before stuffing her in a large rolling duffle bag.
One man then drove her, still inside the suitcase, in the back of his car to near the French border not far from Turin where he kept her in a room at an events hall he had rented with false documents, according to Italian police, with the intention of listing her on a dark web auction site for a starting price of $300,000 in Bitcoin.
The man, unnamed in print due to Italy’s privacy laws—although photographs of his mugshot and a fake passport are now available on Italian media and have been released by the police—lived at least part-time in the United Kingdom and allegedly had taken secret photos of the woman there, implying that the scam is part of a larger network that identifies victims and then lures them to Milan or elsewhere.
Police say the first identified suspect initially met Ayling in Paris where she traveled for a photo shoot that was cancelled and rescheduled in Milan.
Police examining his phone and computer found nude photos of her taken while she was drugged in Milan. Some of those pictures also appeared on the darknet auction site. He is not yet being charged for sex crimes, only kidnapping and illegally holding a person captive.
She was held for several days while her photos were distributed on the darknet until she came out of her drugged state long enough to tell the man she had a two-year-old child, which, according to testimony given during Friday’s hearing, was “against the rules” of the criminal organization, thought to be an offshoot of the infamous “Black Death” group that takes part in human sacrifices, for which the Polish man apparently worked.
Police say they found a letter on the suspect’s computer, apparently addressed to the woman, in which the group kingpin says, “You are being released as a huge generosity from Black Death Group. Your release does, however, come with a warning and you should read this letter very carefully.”
The letter, written in remedial English with many mistakes, which may have been fabricated by the Polish suspect as a form of defense, says, “You are certainly aware of your value on the human slavery market and must make a note that this isn’t personal, this is business.”
“A mistake was made by capturing you, especially considering you are a young mother that should have in no circumstances be lured into kidnapping. Second important factor you are very well aware of is your overall protection by one of our men and very well respected men who made a very clear and solid stance in your case.”
The letter then goes on to demand $50,000, paid in Bitcoin within a month and warns her not to cooperate with any investigation and alleges that she agreed to certain conditions for her release:
“You and your family will, in no way ever talk about us in bad language and without respect. You have been treated fairly, with respect and we expect to hear exactly the same about us in return,” the letter says, completely dismissing the fact that the woman was not only tricked, but drugged and held captive for a week.
“You also agreed
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speedy updates (though this is usually for stability reasons so it's often a good thing) or if they do offer customizations it's considerably more expensive.
Everything on the internet is a series of trade-offs, so the more you're willing to do yourself, the more you're willing to assume responsibility for, the more you'll be able to ensure your data is under your control.
The good news for individuals is that you're not alone, there's a whole fellowship of like-minded, self-hosting people on the web offering tutorials, hacks and even GitHub repos full of software. Thanks to some recent efforts from larger businesses and organizations like NASA with the OpenStack cloud architecture in 2010, many of which are just starting to realize the dangers of being dependent on third-parties for key infrastructure components like email or file sharing, there's a lot of fantastic software out there.
For my RSS needs I ended up testing out both Fever (which I've used off and on for years) and TinyTinyRSS, which ended up being my day-to-day favorite. I use Fever as well to monitor infrequently checked feeds and to discover trends and overarching themes in my feeds. Setting both up is dead simple, I've got mine running on a simple $5-a-month shared host. Any shared host that offers PHP and MYSQL/PostGRES will do. So you are paying for something, which should make those who like to pay for things feel better (Fever is also not free, though it's just a one-time license fee).
Setting up either one is no more difficult than setting up WordPress on your own server. You'll just need to upload the files, add your database info to the configuration file and click through a series of installation pages. As with WordPress when you're done you have the same great features you'll find in hosted solutions, but you'll be in control.
The payoff for that extra bit of effort is huge compared to the actual effort and what you end up with is control. In the increasingly cloud-based future of the web that means the next popular saying could be: "If you aren't hosting your data, it's not your data". ®An activist group which secretly documents life inside the Islamic State-controlled Syrian city of Raqqa has reported that militants publicly executed 13 teenage boys for watching the Asian Cup football match between Iraq and Jordan.
Syria Being Slaughtered Silently, quoting Jordanian news agency Petra and other unspecified Iraqi media, reported that the teenagers were rounded up and shot by firing squad in the IS-stronghold of Mosul, in northern Iraq.
According to the report, the boys were caught watching the match and were being accused of breaking Islamic principles.
In a response to IBTimes UK, the group has confirmed the executions have taken place after corroborating the information with local Iraqi activists.
"The bodies remained lying in the open and their parents were unable to withdraw them for fear of murder by terrorist organisation," the group also wrote on their website.
Before the victims were executed, their 'crimes' were announced on the streets of Mosul on a loud-speaker, the activists said.
The report has not been confirmed by international news agencies or Iraqi authorities and IBTimes UK cannot independently verify it.
The activist group secretly documents the executions carried out by the Sunni Islamist group in various places controlled by them.
The latest chilling execution emerges alongside the threat made by an IS militant, suspected to be "Jihadi John", to behead two Japanese hostages if their ransom demands are not met.
The masked man – who is believed to be the same militant who appeared in earlier videos executing western hostages James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines and Alan Henning – has asked for $200m (£132m) within the next 72 hours to free the Japanese captives.Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.
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The yellow cab, that quintessential fixture of Manhattan’s landscape, is also one of the least healthy spaces to work in the city. Drivers face not only constant stress from snarling knots of traffic but also a phalanx of exhaust and smog, all while being painfully cemented to a driver’s seat. And often, their cabs are better insured than they are. Now they face legal gridlock in the long-awaited launch of an unprecedented pro-worker medical program. Ad Policy
In 2012, the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC), the agency that regulates the industry, agreed to set up supplemental health and disability coverage for drivers, financed with a six-cent-per-fare deduction from earnings. Managed through a special nonprofit affiliated with the advocacy organization Taxi Workers Alliance (TWA), the fund would expand on the barebones benefits offered through the state Workers Compensation system. By providing weekly payments of about $300 to $350 for sick and injured workers, the fund would offer vital support, particularly for off-duty disabilities or illness. That added safety net could have a real impact in an industry plagued by economic instability and lack of regular medical benefits.
The fund, which also enjoyed the support of the de Blasio administration, marked a political victory for the TWA, a self-proclaimed unofficial union with about 17,000 members of a workforce of more than 52,000. Since the late 1990s, the group has pioneered novel organizing tactics for a historically marginalized service sector, where supposedly “independent” drivers are systematically priced out of an oligarchical ownership regime.
But the initiative was routed by the State Supreme Court earlier this month, with a pro-business ruling in a lawsuit reflecting fleet owners’ fear of the cabbies’ increasingly militant organizing efforts. The convoluted suit, brought by cab operators aligned with the industry, accused the TLC of “creat[ing] a multi-million dollar slush fund by seizing taxicab drivers’ hard-earned income.”
With a legal rationale that mirrors right-wing attacks on the Affordable Care Act, Judge Margaret Chan deemed the fund unnecessary and overstepping executive authority—and even suggested drivers’ prior neglect of preventive healthcare was to blame for their current illnesses:
If TLC were concerned about a taxi driver’s health affecting the driver and the public at large, it might better serve both if the drivers were to go for an annual health check-up rather than deduct six cents from every fare to help drivers with choosing an insurance in the hopes that they will seek medical care.
In perversely treating the avoidance of healthcare as a matter of personal “rights,” the ruling distorts the basic purpose of the fund, according to TWA executive director Bhairavi Desai: to provide supplemental temporary coverage for drivers’ immediate needs. The plan is designed to be accessed with just a regular doctor’s certification, rather than through the deeply dysfunctional Workers Compensation bureaucracy.
“[These drivers] should have some level of financial security,” she tells The Nation, if they’re physically unable to work. “Because…if you take a bad fall outside your building, or you get diagnosed with cancer and you need to take time out for chemo, if you can’t continue to work, you have no income coming in.”
With collections of healthcare fees now halted, the court’s decision is only adding insult to injury. The largely immigrant workforce regularly clocks up to twelve-hour shifts crammed into chronically painful stationary positions, and suffers massive sleep deprivation and, not infrequently, violent criminal attacks. As drivers lose up to a third of their hourly wages to the heavy costs of fuel and lease payments, according to the TLC, those thousands of metered hours per year generally amount to an income in the mid-$30,000 range—far below a living wage.
Beresford Simmons, a veteran driver in his 60s who has over the years suffered high blood pressure, heart trouble and kidney problems, told the Daily News last November that this indefinite wait for benefits—whether through the state system or the TWA’s plan—had effectively indentured him to his dashboard:
“I’m supposed to be retiring but I can’t stop working,” he said. “Every time I think about it, I get so emotional. All the years I put into this industry and no one helped me.”
According to the TWA, the fund would help workers like Simmons by augmenting the current limited Disability Insurance fund payments, which might be less than $200 a week. Roughly half of drivers are uninsured, and according to The Washington Post, many might be unable to access decent coverage through the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchanges.
The blocked TWA plan would, ironically, help to compensate for fleet owners’ longstanding neglect of their existing obligations to pay for their drivers’ disability insurance under the state’s current Disability Benefits Law. This industry-wide mandate went unenforced for years, though owners should be subject to legal penalties.
To deal with these health burdens, the TWA seeks to create a sustainable benefits scheme with its new plan, which would offer coverage not just for illness and off-duty injuries but also for family coverage for vision, hearing and dental care, along with modest benefits for mental health counseling, alternative medicine and diagnostics. The group’s long-range goals include establishing retirement benefits and, ultimately, secure contracts under a full-fledged, federally certified union—potentially a model for other cities where drivers are organizing, like Chicago.
The impasse facing the TWA program stems from the taxi workforce’s structural exclusion from labor protections. Like many other drivers in cities across the country, New York’s cabbies must lease special titles, known as medallions, from fleet owners or owner-drivers. This situation makes them “independent contractors,” and as such they lack basic collective bargaining and unionization rights. Meanwhile, poorer drivers are edged out of the monopolized medallion market, where the prized titles might auction for over $1 million. So drivers’ precarious “independence” ends up tethering them to a rent-seeking fleet owners’ regime.
The industry argues they’re simply serving legitimate business interests, but the bosses squeeze passengers, too. Under the massive influence of the industry lobby, fares have risen, and aggressive litigation has squelched plans to put more hybrid cabs onto city streets.
To Desai, the industry’s resistance to drivers’ merely seeking to protect their health is part of a frontal assault on the drivers’ growing labor unity:
Really what all this is indicative of is that the fleet owners…have been the landlords of their own fiefdom for the past 30 years under leasing, and we’ve been mounting a formidable challenge. And I think if the fund were to be established, the dynamic it will change in this industry is: the need to prioritize drivers’ health and well-being will become an institutional priority, not just rhetoric. And I think that can have tremendous impact on the economic inequities of this industry.
As the TLC says, “The market sets the price,” but in a market built on the feudalization of legions of drivers, the taxi barons have run roughshod over the city.
This article has been updated to correctly reference the Disability Insurance fund as the source of workers’ payments and 6-cents-per-fare deduction.Vendetta: Oak Park City pursuing criminal charges of unlicensed dogs against Julie Bass
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Friday, July 15, 2011
Despite the fact that city authorities have temporarily dropped a case against Oak Park resident Julie Bass for growing a vegetable garden in her front yard after the story received nationwide attention, Bass has now been hit with a new criminal charge for owning unlicensed dogs, clear evidence says Bass that she’s the victim of a vendetta.
After Oak Park City failed in its bid to charge Bass with violating a local ordinance for using her front garden to grow organic vegetables, no doubt put off by gargantuan media attention on the case, they are now pursuing Bass for a similarly ludicrous misdemeanor that carries an identical penalty, 93 days in jail, for owning unlicensed dogs.
However, Bass’ dogs are fully licensed, the city is merely reinstating an earlier charge that Bass has already complied with.
This tells us two things – one that the city is blatantly pursuing a malicious vendetta against Bass for making a mockery of their petty ordinances, and two that enforcement officials must have been spying on her before the unlicensed dog charge was invented.
Having dropped the garden case because of the “heat of the spotlight,” Bass’ attorney Solomon Radner calls the newly reinstated dog charge “a very dirty move,” adding that he wouldn’t be surprised if both charges were pursued once media attention has waned.
“Charges are dropped for the time being,” Radner said. “Based on the games the city has been playing, I would not put it past them to drop the charges just to get the media off their back.”
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Writing about the new development in the case on her blog, Bass explains how the dog charges are “just plain malicious” and evidence of the fact that local authorities have been spying on her house.
“The idea of the code guy snooping in our backyard or, worse, peering into the windows of our house is creepy- to say the least,” writes Bass.
“But back to why it is malicious: the only way for the code official to determine whether or not our dogs were licensed was to go through the city records and check. Why would he have been looking this up? Please remember that the dogs were clearly on our property and in our control at all times, so this is not a case of the city finding a dog and checking to see if they have it on record. The ONLY reason i can think of why they would have been checking on our dogs is to have more ammunition against us.”
Bass says the new charge is merely an effort to “dig up other dirt on us” as a punishment for the embarrassment the garden fiasco caused city officials, emphasizing the fact that the dogs are in fact licensed already.
“Because almost a month to the day after we paid for the dog licenses, the prosecutor decides to reinstate the ‘no dog license’ charges that we had already taken care of….and it happens to be on the same day that they quietly and sneakily dismissed the garden charge for now at least,” she writes.
Bass also emphasizes how the original charges pertaining to her vegetable garden have not been dropped completely.
“We weren’t actually cleared of any wrongdoing. the charges have not been settled in a way that gives us any assurance at all of them not coming back the second the media spotlight is off of oak park,” she writes.
Bass’ case has become a nationwide bellwether for the resistance to big government and highlights how Americans are being gelded into subservience by a tyranny of bureaucracy and micromanagement. Sustained media spotlight needs to be maintained on the issue in order to prevent authorities from running roughshod over Bass once the heat is off.
*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.With that said, there's no certainty that the company is on the hook. A person isn't necessarily violating copyright just because they're supposed to get a notice -- it may be up to a judge to decide. Also, the agency handing out the alerts on the publishers' behalf (Rightscorp) doesn't have a sterling track record. Internet providers have previously ignored Rightscorp notices with little consequence, and the firm is in dire financial straits after its aggressive approach to demanding copyright settlements (which includes using robocalls) didn't pan out. Even so, this case could set an important precedent. BMG and Round Hill would have more ammunition for future lawsuits if they win, and other labels may consider suing when they don't believe that ISPs are taking piracy seriously.
[Image credit: Dustin Gaffke, Flickr]https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/have-a-nice-war/
Here we go again…and again…and again… Excuse me, but are people “more” dead if they’re killed by chemical weapons, as opposed to incinerated by napalm or disemboweled by shrapnel? It’s almost like as long as a government kills people with the proper weapons, it’s all good. But use the wrong one, and here comes the world saying how unfair it is. Again, excuse me, but has anyone happened across the common denominator in the use of military weapons, be they conventional or NBC? That would be: Government. See, only a government or someone aspiring to be one has those kinds of weapons.
The average civilian hasn’t got these weapons on the scale a government has them and uses them. Therefore, it would appear to me that if Government A says they’re going to stop Government B from using certain weapons, it means Government A will use its own weapons to do so. Resulting in Civilians C, D, and E dying on an unprecedented scale. But dying properly from proper weapons, for which those civilians should be grateful. The United States, for example, can claim it now has the pretext to use its nuclear weapons because it says Assad used a chemical weapon. That’s how the protocol goes for U.S. nuclear policy. That if another nation uses an NBC weapon, the U.S. can retaliate in kind since the other nation crossed the Rubicon of “first use”. Even though using a nuclear weapon to retaliate for a gas attack is like using a 10-pound sledgehammer to pound in a small brass tack. But everyone will be incinerated legally, and not illegally gassed.
Whatever. The fact remains that we were lied into the Gulf War in 1990 by lurid stories about Iraqi atrocities cooked up by U.S. advertising agencies hired by the Pentagon. And we were lied into Gulf War Part Two: The Iraq-ining of Democracy because we were told the McHitler Of The Month, Saddam Hussein, had NBC weapons and was building more. And Americans fall for this every time. My gosh, they might as well say that Nazis time-travelled from World War Two and caused this attack. Americans would believe that, too. “We must put a stop to Time Machines of Mass Destruction!”
The United States keeps making the same blunder, over and over again. So, what do I think? I think people really are this stupid. The U.S. government has cried wolf about NBC weapons too many times for this one to be believed. But people believe it anyway! Fascinating! People really are this gullible! But a trip to any supermarket proves that, when you see the crap people will put into their bodies. And if they’ll put that junk into their bodies, they’ll put the equivalent of it into their minds from the government. Have a nice war!
12:47 pm on April 6, 2017
The Best of Jack PerryMusic apps have been somewhat wanting for Windows Phones for some time now. We have to rely on third party developers for simple things like Pandora and YouTube and to their credit, developers behind the likes of MetroTube and MetroRadio have done a fantastic job in getting these services delivered to Windows Phone users, even with all the API bumps and hiccups to which a non-official app is bound to be subjected. Searchler deserves a place among these top apps as an aggregate way to enjoy your favorite artists and their music.
The app is super simple to use, presenting you with a search box for you to discover any artist you’d like. In my time with the app, I searched for the likes of PSY, Aerosmith, Rammstein, and Counting Crows and the app was able to find several results for each of these, despite each being from a different genre of music. The similar artists search worked better for established artists like Aerosmith and Counting Crows, while having a harder time finding similar matches for the likes of PSY and Rammstein. That’s only a small slight though, considering both are foreign music to most United States listeners.
The developer has put together a companion site where you can try out Searchler for yourself before you decide to download the app on your phone. The site works equally as well as the app and is a great way to see just how well Searchler aggregates various videos for whatever you may search. Videos play within the app and are crisp, loud and clean, though given the fact that some videos are aggregates are YouTube you’re just as likely to find a still image that plays the song as so many people like to upload these to the social service.
Overall, Searchler is a great way to discover new music as well as listen to old favorites. I never experienced any stutter and videos loaded quickly on both WiFi and 3G/4G access. The only downside to the app is that it features an ad at the bottom that offers no way to get rid of it. I’d gladly pay $1.99 just for that feature, as being able to create playlists of my favorite artists is something that I enjoy, especially when Pandora decides to twist its API to cut out Windows Phone users once again.
Download the app here.REMEMBER the outrage that bubbled up over the new Barbecue Shapes formula?
In April, after 40 years of delicious success, the good people at Arnott’s had a brain snap and decided to tinker with the flavour combo of their popular biscuits. People were not happy.
If this outrage taught us one thing, it was that a change to an iconic Australian snack is akin to a swift kick in the guts.
Unfortunately it seems Arnott’s has learned nothing from this episode, as it has done some kind of witchcraft to its classic Vita-Weat biscuit and you can no longer produce Vegemite and butter “worms”.
No idea what we’re talking about?
Allow this wide-eyed child from 1981 to explain:
So basically, if you slathered enough butter and Vegemite between two Vita-Weat biscuits, you could expect worms to appear when you pressed them together (not too firmly mind you, or they’d shatter and your entire playlunch was ruined).
If you didn’t grow up in Australia in the ‘80s/’90s, this biscuit-eating routine is as beloved as the popular method our brethren in America have for eating their Oreo cookies (first you twist it, then you lick it, then you tell a dog he can’t have chocolate, etc).
You can only imagine what would happen if you screwed with the Oreo cookie structure in the US. That recipe is probably part of their constitution.
But I digress. To further clarify, this was the level of worm you could expect back in the day:
Once more for the people in the cheap seats:
The sobering fact that you can no longer force the inky fat through your Vita-Weats was bought to our attention last night by this Facebook post, which conveys an appropriate level of fury.
As we are Serious Journalists we decided to do our own investigation (also, I’ll be damned if this whole situation hadn’t given us a hankering for a Vita-Weat with butter and Vegemite). So we schlepped down to the shops and purchased a box of the original variety to do our own test.
If we had a time machine we’d go back to the ‘80s and buy a packet of the original biscuits so we could do a properly controlled experiment. But this will have to do.
Behold, the face of disappointment:
As you can see, no dice. It is indeed true that the holes in the biscuit seem to be smaller these days and thus the worms cannot poke their heads through. Also, to anyone who says I didn’t put enough (soft) butter and Vegemite on to create the worms, that biscuit was almost *heaving* under the weight of spread that I slathered on it.
Further investigation shows that this may not be an entirely new discovery - Vegemite worms may have been dying out as far back as 2012:
What’s next? Will Arnott’s mess with the structural integrity of the Tim Tam so we can’t suck our tea through it? Will the makers of bubble wrap produce bubbles that can’t be popped? Will Golden Circle develop juice boxes that are so sturdy you can’t inflate them and then jump on them from a great height, producing a satisfying POP? Will they put a toxic element in helium balloons so you can’t suck the gas and sound like a chipmunk? Are there any other nostalgic elements of an Australian childhood that manufacturers want to douse in petrol and burn to the ground?
I’m pretty sure our forefathers fought for our right to force those Vegemite and butter worms through those tiny Vita-Weat holes.
Because we’re fair and reasonable we gave the people at Arnott’s a chance to explain themselves.
After wearily saying that “it must be a slow news day” they said they’d email through a response.
And here it is:
“Vita-Weat has been made to the same recipe and using the same processes and the same baking oven for over 10 years. We use premium quality wholegrain wheat from farms across Australia including the Darling Downs, Moree, the Riverina and South Australia. Due to natural variation in wheat from season to season and farm to farm and the effect that the wheat has on the baking of the crispbread, the size of the holes in the biscuits can change. This can affect how easy it is to make Vita-Weat worms”.
So basically, I think they just blamed nature.
All I know is this, Arnott’s.
If you even *think* about messing with the Mint Slice recipe, we’re all moving to Canada.Let me just talk about Shingeki no Kyojin Episode 22 for a minute.
Correction.
Let me talk about Levi in Shingeki no Kyojin Episode 22 for a minute.
I’m not even sure how to start. Well, I’ll just get straight to the point.
Here, we see Levi cutting out Petra’s Scouting Legion patch out of her uniform. He is grieving for his friends, but Petra most of all. He wants to keep it as a proof for himself that she really did exist, that she really did live, that those memories he has of her are not just some kind of dream.
At first, it seems that he would actually be one of the lucky ones who get to at least have a body to bury.
But then…
…they had to drop the bodies and leave them behind. Dieter (a rookie, by the looks of it) and his friend had led some Titans into the formation because of their efforts to retrieve their friend Ivan’s corpse.
Petra’s was of course included in the corpses that had to be left behind.
And then we have this heart-wrenching moment.
Levi gives Petra’s patch to Dieter and lies to him, telling him that it was Ivan’s. We know that this patch is not Ivan’s because Ivan’s body dropped from Dieter’s horse while they were being chased by the Titans. Levi is injured, so there is no way that he would have been able to run back into the fray and retrieve the patch.
That patch was special to Levi, if only for a short time. Yet he decided to give it up and offer comfort to someone who, in his eyes, probably needed it more than himself.
And he’s giving it to the very person whose actions forced him to abandon his loved one’s body.
Even though Levi might have been angry at Dieter for making such a stupid mistake, he didn’t show it. He understood why Dieter felt the need to go back for his friend’s body. That is why he gave him the patch to offer some small comfort.
So, to answer your question, Dieter:
Yes…
…they do have…Quote:
Originally Posted by
This message is for any user/dev/RC who has updated firmware on their phone to 5.0.1 or intends to support such devices.
Be VERY careful here. The older TWRP 2.8.3 and down used hard coded blk numbers for flashing and mounting. IF you are using an older version of TWRP please upgrade immediately. The blks for system/cache/data have ALL changed. IF you aren't on the latest TWRP you risk flashing the wrong thing to the wrong partition on your phone! CWM has used blk names for a while now so this really only affects users who have not updated TWRP.
This ALSO affects any user/dev who uses updater scripts that hard code blk numbers. The correct way to do it these days is to use blk names instead as they CAN change during an OTA... this VZW being proof.
TWRP versions older than 2.8.3 were hard coded to flash according to this..
mmcblk0p46: a8000000 00000200 "system"
mmcblk0p47: 40000000 00000200 "cache"
mmcblk0p48: 30000000 00000200 "userdata"
After updating firmware you now have this..
mmcblk0p47: a8000000 00000200 "system"
mmcblk0p48: 40000000 00000200 "cache"
mmcblk0p49: 30000000 00000200 "userdata"
So if you try to mount any of these partitions in TWRP you won't get what you want mounted. If you try to flash something.. lets say system.... which was blk46....
you will flash those files to this...
mmcblk0p46: 05800000 00000200 "reserve_3"
which i don't believe you will want to do.Testbiotech has examined documents from applications submitted by Bayer and Dow AgroSciences for the approval of genetically engineered soybeans and found that important areas of risk assessment were not taken into account. In its field trials, Bayer only used about one kilo of glyphosate per hectare. In everyday agricultural practice, up to four or even eight kilograms per hectare are recommended. Moreover, plants produced by Dow AgroSciences were made resistant to more groups of herbicide substances than mentioned in the EFSA risk assessment. Any relevant data for the risks assessment are missing.
This new information is particularly controversial since EU authorisation is about to be issued for the import of soybeans genetically engineered to be resistant to three different classes of herbicides. This would be the first such authorisation for genetically engineered plants. The EU member states will make a decision on 14 September.
“This risk assessment of genetically engineered soybeans is fake,” summarises Christoph Then for Testbiotech. “Assessment of the genetically engineered plants has been organised so that the real risks are not assessed at all.”
Genetically engineered soybeans have been grown for many years in countries such as the USA, Brazil and Argentina. Over time, many of the weeds growing in these regions have adapted to herbicide use. This has in turn led to increasing amounts of herbicide being sprayed onto the crops and also an increase in the number of applications. In addition, the plants have been manipulated to be resistant to other herbicides. The new genetically engineered soybeans have been made resistant to several hazardous herbicides, including glyphosate that is thought to be probably carcinogenic; glufosinate which, according to an EFSA evaluation, is classified as showing reproductive toxicity; and isoxaflutole, which “bleaches” weeds and is already classified as a “suspected human carcinogen”. In the case of 2,4-D, recent publications suggest that carcinogenic metabolites are produced in genetically modified plants
If the herbicides used on the plants are not tested under realistic conditions, there will be no reliable data on the actual amount of residue in the harvest. This means that that risks to health cannot be reliably evaluated. Additionally, depending on the amount of herbicide that is sprayed onto the plants, the plant constituents could be changed so that e.g. allergies could become more severe or phytoestrogens have an increased effect.
Despite all the risks, the new genetically engineered soybeans have not been tested in animal feeding trials to assess adverse effects on health.
Now that the European Food Safety Authority has given the go-ahead, the EU member states will vote on 14 September for the second time on the approval. If the application is not rejected, then the EU commission can allow the import of the soybeans. Testbiotech is demanding that the German government and the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture headed by Christian Schmidt, reject the approval.
The Testbiotech investigation is still ongoing because EFSA and Bayer are delaying access to relevant documents. Testbiotech will report further details as soon as possible.What was mispronounced? Optional: help us by adding the time
The oil traders and hedge fund managers who gathered for dinner at Mike’s Bistro in Manhattan vied for the attention of Nasser al-Dossary, Saudi Arabia’s representative to Opec and Freepoint Commodities’ guest of honour.
Scattered over half a dozen tables, the 30 attendees took turns sitting next to the man they believed had the ear of Ali al-Naimi, the kingdom’s 79-year-old oil minister and the most influential person in the energy industry.
It was October 7, and the price of oil had been falling precipitously since June. Everybody wanted to know when Saudi Arabia would take charge and stem the plunge. “Of course you’re going to cut production,” declared one guest.
“What makes you think we’re going to cut?” the Saudi official replied.
The throwaway remark, recounted by one of the attendees, reverberated across markets. It was the first sign that Saudi Arabia would not come to the oil market’s rescue, shattering long-held assumptions about the kingdom’s oil policy and shaking up a world energy order in place for decades.
During periods of instability, the Saudis have adjusted their production to restore balance. But last year, as concerns about oversupply escalated, the kingdom changed tack and refused to act as the oil market’s safety net. Cutting output, Saudi Arabia believed, would only help its rivals — and it was time to take a stand.
A month later, with crude still falling, Saudi Arabia strong-armed its Opec peers into supporting its decision not to intervene in the market. Mr Naimi would later describe this moment as “historic”.
Armed with $750bn in foreign exchange reserves, Saudi Arabia led a battle against high-cost producers — from the US to Brazil and Russia — betting that a period of lower prices would force them to cut their output. The tactic might hurt revenues in the short term, the reasoning went, but it was necessary to protect market share for the long term.
The move had a huge and immediate impact. The budgets of big oil exporting countries were thrown into disarray. Energy companies had to tear up their investment plans. Financial markets were rocked.
The shift in Saudi oil policy that was crystallised between June and October has been the subject of intense speculation. Some suspected it was rooted in geopolitics: one theory held that the Saudis, acting under US influence, deliberately sought to undermine rivals Russia and Iran. But a close examination of Saudi actions suggests an unexpected series of global political events and — crucially — a misreading of the market were the driving forces behind Riyadh’s gamble.
June 2014: ‘A tipping point’
A presentation at the June 11 Opec meeting in Vienna informed ministers of slowing global oil demand and rising supplies. But Saudi Arabia thought the price of oil was safe. The Middle East was ablaze, with Libya in chaos and Isis, the militant Islamist movement, seizing territories across Syria and Iraq.
Investors calculated the turmoil would cut supplies and push oil prices towards $130 a barrel. John Kerry, US secretary of state, sought assurances from the late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud that Riyadh would “do what would be required” to address any supply disruptions caused by Isis, one US state department official said.
But events on the ground wrongfooted the experts. In Libya, where production had plummeted from 1.4m barrels a day to less than 200,000 b/d amid protests, strikes and blockades, there was a sudden turnround. In late June, talk spread of rebel-held ports and oilfields reopening; within three months production rallied to 900,000 b/d.
In Iraq, Opec’s second-largest producer, Isis failed to capture the country’s main oil producing regions, removing another supply threat. This, says Bhushan Bahree, an analyst at IHS Energy, was “a tipping point for the oil market”.
July: Underestimating US shale
Another surprise awaited. Oil in excess of $100 a barrel had boosted supplies from Brazil to Russia. But the growth in the US was stellar. Monthly US crude production hit a near 30-year high, averaging around 8.5m b/d and would later surpass 9m b/d. “It beat our most optimistic expectations,” says a senior US official.
Technological advances, fuelled by cheap debt courtesy of the US Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing programme, had unlocked more oil than anticipated from shale formations. Initially the diversity of supply was welcomed by Riyadh as a force for stability. Rising US production reduced its imports, easing pressure from supply disruptions in countries such as Libya, Iran and Nigeria. (The US has had a ban on most crude exports since the 1970s.)
But the Saudis doubted the sustainability of shale, given its production costs — break-even prices range between $30 and $90 a barrel for shale, compared with Saudi oil, which costs less than $10 a barrel to produce.
In depth Oil: the big drop Latest news and comment on the global economic and political consequences of tumbling oil prices
Further reading
The Saudis “did not believe the actual potential of the US shale revolution,” says Leonardo Maugeri, a former executive of Italy’s state-owned oil company Eni, who last year briefed Saudi officials on their new rival. “They totally underestimated the resilience of this oil.”
Even so, they were apprehensive. Throughout 2014 the Saudis enlisted analysts from ExxonMobil to investigate the break-even costs, debt financing and the output horizon for US shale, say two people familiar with the study.
August: ‘A new reality’
As demand
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-league sources say.
McCutchen, 30, is coming off his worst offensive season and a below-average one defensively, according to the advanced metrics. But his contract – $14 million next season, with a $14.5 million club option for 2018 – remains appealing.
Article continues below...
The Nationals, who discussed McCutchen with the Pirates before the non-waiver deadline, remain interested, sources say; the Nats are also pursuing a closer and exploring a trade for White Sox lefty Chris Sale, but the acquisition of a center fielder would allow them to move Trea Turner back to shortstop, his natural position.
The Rangers, who have a clear need in center, are another potential trade partner. The Pirates also are talking with other clubs, sources say, seeking value for McCutchen after failing to maximize returns a year ago for infielder Pedro Alvarez, whom they non-tendered, and second baseman Neil Walker, whom they traded to the Mets for left-hander Jon Niese.
Dexter Fowler, Ian Desmond and Carlos Gomez are the most prominent center fielders available in free agency. The Rockies’ Charlie Blackmon, White Sox’s Adam Eaton, Diamondbacks’ A.J. Pollock and Rays’ Kevin Kiermaier are among the trade candidates, but none of their clubs appears especially motivated to make a move.
McCutchen is more readily available, but the Pirates are seeking significant young talent in return for their franchise player and the 2013 National League MVP, sources say. If they are not compelled to act, they can simply keep him for another year.
Trading McCutchen, however, would enable the Pirates to re-allocate payroll to other areas. It also would enable them to move Starling Marte from left field to center without conflict; McCutchen does not want to switch to an outfield corner, sources say.
The Pirates believe that they positioned McCutchen too shallow last season, contributing to his defensive problems in center. Still, McCutchen’s negative-28 defensive runs saved was the worst in the majors; Tigers right fielder J.D. Martinez was next at negative-22.
“I don’t see myself needing to move,” McCutchen told MLB.com at the end of last season. “I don’t feel like I’m slowing down and hurting my team because of where I play. Playing center field is one thing, but being a leader out there is another. That’s something we need.”
A trade of McCutchen and move of Marte to center would create an opening for the Pirates in left – no small concern, considering that left field at Pittsburgh’s PNC Park is the deepest in the majors. Austin Meadows, the team’s top outfield prospect, likely needs more time at Triple-A.
Rival officials note that McCutchen looked like a different player last season, and not simply because he batted.256 with a.776 OPS, both career lows. His body language at times left some with the impression that he was distracted, or even unhappy. However, he rallied in his last 50 games, batting.289 with an.869 OPS.
McCutchen’s frustration might simply have stemmed from his offensive struggles, and carried over to the defensive side. He also might have realized that his future in Pittsburgh was uncertain, contributing to his seeming malaise.
It’s entirely possible that his season was only an aberration. But the Pirates, as a low-revenue club, constantly try to navigate the balance between their present and future.
McCutchen increasingly looks like part of their past.Europe may be a financial disaster and a faded military force, but in at least one arena it has emerged as champ: Regulators here are challenging the power of America’s technology titans. And they are winning.
Google is most squarely in the crosshairs as its officials negotiate furiously in hopes of avoiding a $4 billion fine and a formal ruling that it has abused its dominance in the search market to hurt rivals across a range of industries. A deal could be days away.
Facebook, Apple and Microsoft also have faced serious scrutiny from European regulators in the past year. And even if Google succeeds in settling the sprawling antitrust case here, it is facing investigations into its new privacy policy and its Android operating system for phones and tablets.
Many of these issues, including the antitrust case against Google, also have been investigated by American regulators. But the laws here are stricter, the fines bigger and the courts more supportive of aggressive government action — to the point that many experts say the legal landscape of the technology industry is being shaped more profoundly here than in the United States.
“The pipeline is packed with these cases,” said Nicolas Petit, a professor at Belgium’s University of Liege Law School who watches the technology industry closely.
Whether Google gets labeled a monopolist is largely in the hands of Joaquin Almunia, a former Spanish labor leader and onetime Socialist candidate for prime minister who is the European Union’s top antitrust enforcer.
Almunia has pushed hard for a negotiated settlement in hopes of avoiding a years-long battle of the type that European regulators once waged with Microsoft over its Windows operating system. People closely watching the Google case predict that this week — the last before a long summer break hobbles operations here — will produce a deal or a formal “statement of objections,” essentially an indictment on allegations of monopolistic behavior.
Almunia said that a negotiated deal would be a better outcome and that the company’s proposals — there have been at least two rounds of them this month — are seeking to address the issues he has raised rather than disputing them.
“What was Google’s motto at the beginning? ‘Don’t be evil?’ ” Almunia said in an interview at his office here, the headquarters of the E.U. “I hope it continues to be important.”
The case is being tracked by regulators worldwide, including at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which has hired a prominent lawyer to lead its antitrust investigation of Google.
"We continue to work cooperatively with the European Commission," said William Echikson, a Google spokesman in Brussels.
Risk to Google
Almunia already has determined that the Google antitrust claims merit serious treatment, given that the company has more than 90 percent of the search market in some European countries. But having a monopoly is not a violation of law here; a company must abuse its dominance of a market to run afoul of regulators.
Almunia’s office has outlined four potential abuses of dominance in preliminary filings. In the interview, he expressed particular concern that Google may be altering its results in a way that keeps users from having access to the best possible services, especially ones that compete with Google’s offerings.
“The potential providers suffer in their profits, and the customers will receive... worse service,” he said.
The risk to Google, analysts say, goes beyond the potential for fines because their business long has depended on users believing that search results are crafted primarily to serve their needs — not those of advertisers. A finding of abusive monopolistic behavior threatens to undermine its carefully cultivated public image.
Its reputation suffered a dent last year, when French regulators fined Google $142,000 because its Street View program had gathered sensitive personal information from private wireless Internet signals as the company’s cars crisscrossed the world capturing images.
Google had acknowledged the secret data collection and apologized, blaming a single engineer for creating the data-collection feature without approval of senior management. It also said there was nothing personally identifiable in the data.
The French Data Protection Authority, however, discovered users’ passwords and lists of pornographic Web sites they were visiting when a Street View car drove by. In one instance, a Google car collected an e-mail exchange between a man and a woman — each married but not to each other — attempting to arrange a liaison. Global Positioning System data along with e-mail addresses made them clearly identifiable, the regulators concluded.
American regulators at the Federal Communications Commission investigated the same issue but found no violation of law. It fined Google $25,000 in April for obstructing the investigation.
The differences are not merely legal. Personal privacy is a deeply held cultural value in most of Europe. French regulators often ask newspapers and bloggers to delete or alter information when citizens express fear that unflattering references or photographs online might undermine job prospects or personal relationships.
Isabel Falque-Pierrotin, head of the French Data Protection Authority, said such requests shot up 42 percent last year. She favors a bill before the European Parliament to expand this “right to be forgotten” to include links on search engines — a move Google has resisted.
“Ultimately, responsibility for deleting content published online should lie with the person or entity who published it,” Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, wrote in a blog post in February.
The French authority also has scrutinized the way iPhones report the geographic movements of the Apple devices’ users and how Web sites track users as they surf the Internet.
“It’s a bit frightening because all your data is shared by a huge ecosystem and you don’t know,” Falque-Pierrotin said. “I think people are more and more conscious of that. So they rely on the regulator to unveil the black box.”
She called the approach not so much of a “French sensibility” as a “consumer sensibility.”
‘Judge, jury, executioner’
Some here worry that European regulators have become too powerful. The same officials investigate, engage in negotiations with companies, make rulings and levy fines — a process with far fewer checks than in the United States. Courts can overrule European regulators but rarely do.
Attorneys representing companies complain that a single bureaucracy can be “judge, jury and executioner” in cases. They also express concern that companies complain to regulators about rivals mainly to drain them of resources.
“The threshold to be taken seriously and generate a lot of aggravation is very low,” said Brussels-based lawyer Miguel Rato, who has often represented technology companies. “One thing the commission doesn’t do nearly well enough is deal swiftly with complaints that have no merit.”
The high-tech regulatory fights in Europe are unlikely to quiet soon. French regulators are investigating Google’s recent move to track signed-in users across its dozens of individual products. Irish regulators are reviewing Facebook’s compliance with a detailed audit of how the company handles personal data. The European Commission is probing Apple’s agreement with publishers over e-books, though a deal on that may be near as well. The U.S. Justice Department also is pursuing the e-books case, but a resolution may be more than a year away.
Even as the antitrust investigation of Google shows signs of reaching resolution, Almunia said his office is in the beginning phases of a separate probe into the Android operating system that Google uses to power mobile phones and tablet computers. He did not offer details.VA Doctor Claims Area Veterans Improperly Evaluated Video
AMARILLO - An Amarillo Veterans Affairs physician says dozens of veterans were not properly evaluated.
Those evaluations involve traumatic brain injuries (TBI)
Only four kinds of specialists are allowed to evaluate possible TBI victims.
But, Dr. Roy Morokus says that's not how the Amarillo VA had been doing them.
In fact, he says he learned this was more than just a problem in Amarillo.
Dr. Morokus was the head of the compensation and pensions (C & P) department at Amarillo's VA medical center.
He says he noticed that dozens of local veterans had been improperly evaluated for TBI.
Only Physiatrists, Psychiatrists, Neurologists or Neurosurgeons are allowed to evaluate patients for TBI.
"To have a traumatic brain injury done, examination done, and done properly, especially for claims purposes, one has to be one of those kinds of physicians." Dr. Morokus said. "In addition to that, they have to be specially certified in the compensation and pensions modality."
In other words they have to know how to take their clinical evaluations and put them in the C&P realm.
Michael Kiefer is the director of the Thomas E. Creek VA medical center. He denies any veterans have been or currently are being diagnosed by unqualified people.
"That wasn't a requirement before 2012 because we simply didn't have the science and the history that says they would benefit from having those people take a look at them more closely." Kiefer said.
Kiefer says the medical field is advancing in area TBI and they constantly change how they diagnose and treat such cases.
He says some local veterans may or may not have been diagnosed with TBI before the VA changed its policy.
"What we were asked to do is go back from 2008 to 2013 and look at a specified number of veterans from the central office to see if there were any that had not had benefit of those four primary diagnosing physicians." Kiefer said.
Dr. Morokus adds, "It became apparent to somebody at a higher level in the VA that across the country this is not just being done regarding Amarillo, a lot of these traumtic brain injury exams are being done by unqualified people."
Dr. Morokus says the Arlington office asked how many people were affected at the Amarillo VA.
He claims he identified anywhere from 70 to 137 local veterans.
Kiefer would not confirm that number, but says they are contacting the affected veterans to let them know they can be re-evaluated under the new guidelines.
Dr. Morokus and Kiefer are both veterans. Both retiring as ColonelsMikado Electric Presents Canada Day
at Galt Gardens July 1st 9am – 4pm
Proceeds to benefit Interfaith Food Bank
Interfaith Food Bank Society of Lethbridge will host Canada Day activities at Galt Gardens this year, provided in part by Mikado Electric.
Canada Day at Galt Gardens is an adult focused celebration, designed to compliment more family focused celebrations at Henderson Lake. Festivities will begin with a charity breakfast to support Interfaith Food Bank, Le Baron’s Car Club will host a Show and Shine, local artists will perform on the Clearsky Radio Community Stage, and various food vendors will be on-site in the afternoon.
Schedule of Events
9am – Noon: Mikado Charity Breakfast to support Interfaith Food Bank Adults $3, Children $2
9am – 4pm: Clear Sky Radio Community Stage, featuring local artists including Olivia Blue, Suit Jacket Society, Amy Allred, 21st Avenues, Tim Whatley and the Label Babies
10:55–11:30am: Zumba Lethbridge – come out and try Zumba in the Park. Everyone welcome, no fee to participate.
9am – 4pm: Le Barons Show & Shine
Vehicle Registration $10, proceeds to Interfaith Food Bank
Noon-4pm: Food Vendors, including Hotwire Panini, Stoke Town Café and Marble Slab Ice Cream
For more information about this and other upcoming events to support Interfaith Food Bank, contact Mac at 403-320-8779 or email [email protected]
For 2018, we are excited to feature new activities at Galt Gardens on Canada Day!The time has come for you to lipsync for your… uh, we mean to learn which queens will compete in RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 7!
As viewers of the NewNowNext Awards learned, the divas of 2015 are Jaidynn Diore Fierce, Kandy Ho, Katya, Max, Miss Fame, Pearl, Miss Kennedy Davenport, Mrs. Kasha Davis, Sasha Belle, Violet Chachki, Ginger Minj, Tempest DuJour, Trixie Mattel and Jasmine Masters.
Good luck, ladies—and don’t… well, you know.
Meet the queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 7 below!
Jasmine Masters
Outspoken and opinionated, Jasmine is a polished performer with the experience to back up her confidence. But with opinions as strong as hers, is it going to ruffle some feathers amongst her competitors?
Miss Fame
Branding herself “beyond–this–planet beautiful,” this chic fashion queen with a face to die for started her drag career on the runways of New York. Will Miss Fame’s fashion chops be enough to make her the next supermodel of drag?
Pearl
This relative newcomer has already made big waves in the drag scene in the short time she’s been doing drag. With her robotic Stepford Wife aesthetic and patented “Pearl Smash” performance technique, only time will tell if this baby queen is as unstoppable as her buzz.
Jaidynn Diore Fierce
Infectiously sassy Jaidynn Diore Fierce lives up to her last name. And don’t be fooled by this big girl’s size – a polished performer, this bubbly dance queen can MOVE – and dance circles around the rest of the competition.
Check out Jaidynn’s #Ruveal teaser from the NewNowNext Awards!
Kandy Ho
Fans will have a sweet-tooth for this fiery Puerto Rican beauty, who mixes elegant glamour with mad performance chops. But don’t let her sweet name fool you – there’s as much spice in this outspoken Latina as there is sugar.
Katya
This Russian-inspired queen can be found at the intersection of glamour and comedy; she is as beautiful as her mouth is dirty. A trained gymnast, Katya can drop into a mean split… but will her acerbic Russian schtick have the judges splitting too?
Check out Katya’s #Ruveal teaser from the NewNowNext Awards!
Tempest DuJour
“Mama’s home!” Drag Race’s oldest contestant is also a professor of costume –providing her with enviable skills for any fashion challenge. Married with two children, Tempest mixes maternal instinct with campy kitschy humor… a perfect storm to take the crown.
Check out Tempest’s #Ruveal teaser from the New Now Next Awards!
Max
This gray-haired Old Hollywood glamour queen has “uniqueness” the house down. Staggeringly tall, with a kooky accent and even quirkier looks, Max will have her competitors gagging from the moment they see her. But will her unique take on drag be met with the same enthusiasm on the runway?
Violet Chachki
A one-of-a-kind collectible, this youthful beauty has studied her fashion, and it shows in her edgy, next level aesthetics. But will having the “smallest waist in Drag Race history” translate into taking the title?
Kennedy Davenport
This “dancing diva of Texas” intends to spin, flip, kick and jump her way to the crown. A polished pageant queen whose reputation precedes her, Kennedy comes from the legendary Davenport family, where she grew up with Sahara Davenport.
Ginger Minj
A self-described “glamour toad,” what Ginger Minj lacks in stature she makes up for in talent. Vocally gifted and born to entertain, this queen plans on winning over the judges with her Southern charm… and might just have them eating her right up.
Check out Ginger’s #Ruveal teaser from the NewNowNext awards!
Mrs. Kasha Davis
This “international celebrity housewife” is a classic old-school camp comedy queen. With little patience for youthful ignorance, Mrs. Kasha Davis asserts that “anyone can be a girl, but it takes balls to be a lady.”
Sasha Belle
Never has a competitor shown the hunger of Iowa’s premiere queen, Sasha Belle. She has studied the game and has a strategy to take her all the way to the top… even if at the other competitors’ expense.
Trixie Mattel
With her overdrawn lips and clown makeup, this Native American’s eye-popping aesthetic will send ripples amongst her rivals. Trixie’s determination to stay true to her campy persona will either win the judges over… or cost her the crown.
Check out Trixie’s #Ruveal teaser from the NewNowNext Awards!Wes trying out the Crescent Bay demo last year.
ask pc gamer Ask PC Gamer is our weekly question and advice column. Have a burning question about the smoke coming out of your PC? Send your problems to [email protected].
Building a new beefy PC soon. Do I need to calculate anything extra in if I plan to eventually get Oculus? — Rob
Hey, Rob! If your new PC is beefy like you say, you're probably on track for a good VR machine, but we really don't know for sure just how high-end of a machine we'll need.
For now, you want a rig that can run 1080p stereoscopic games at 70fps or higher, as the latest Oculus Rift dev kit delivers a resolution of 960x1080 in each eye. We expect the consumer version of the Rift to be higher-res, though we don't have the final specs. Don't necessarily break the bank with dual-GTX 970s just yet, but do build with potential upgrades in mind.
Back in 2013, Oculus VP of Product Development Nate Mitchell talked a bit about this. "You'll want a decent gaming rig," he said, "because you want to be running at 60 frames per second, with vsync, in stereo 3D, and that takes a decent graphics card. The Oculus SDK really adds negligible overhead. There's not really any more overhead for rendering for our device, or anything like that. The onus is really on game developers to optimize their engines to be running at 60 frames per second."
More recently, Mitchell told us that their Crescent Bay demos were running on GTX 980s, and beyond 60 fps. "The demos are running at 90Hz," he said. "That really becomes the gating factor here. For that 90 frames per second, in UE4 where we're doing a lot of complex artwork and trying to render complex scenes, they're high end GPUs. They're high-end systems. i7s. You're going to need a high-end computer for that sort of experience."
Kira by Bully! Entertainment
I think that, if you're building a good PC now (let's say, a Core i5-4690K/Core i7-4790k, 8-16 GB RAM, and a GTX 970), you'll probably be OK. Oculus is tempering expectations by calling for super high-end machines, but there's also pressure on devs to build well-optimized VR games that don't require dual-980s (I imagine they want a larger audience than that). Some of the Rift games in development now—Eve: Valkyrie, for instance—have been in development for a year or more, running fine on older specs. Star Citizen may push your system, but it was always going to, wasn't it?
Additionally, I've noticed that super high-fidelity graphics aren't necessary to create the feeling of 'presence' that makes VR so special. I'm betting there'll be plenty of VR experiences that don't look like Alien: Isolation, but are still great and don't require more than a new mid-range system. This is only somewhat speculative, as I've tried several Unity engine demos with a Core i5-3570 and GTX 480 with no problems. Of course, if you want the best—those UE4 games at 90Hz that Mitchell mentioned—you'll have to go as high-end as you can. We'll know for sure what you'll need when we're actually playing games on the consumer Rift.
To play it perfectly safe and keep from having to upgrade when the Rift releases, the only thing to do is wait. According to Road to VR, there are indications that hardware manufacturers are working on VR optimizations, but we can only speculate as to what they are and how important they'll be. I think that, as Mitchell said back in 2013, the onus is mostly on software designers to make their games run at 60 fps on as wide a hardware range as possible. But do be prepared for the possibility that some fantastic new Intel, Nvidia, and AMD tech may appear around the same time as the Rift consumer version.
The final consideration is your physical setup. You want lots of space to swivel and move, and you'll need the head-tracking camera mounted on your monitor or a stand, and Oculus recommends you sit 1.5 meters or 5 feet away for optimal performance. So, don't put your PC in a closet and you should be fine.Crown’s Plank (thirty-nine) In Remaking
Tobi continued to stroke Tess’s hair. It was obvious that whatever had happened to her while she had been unconscious had traumatized her. After months of actively pushing Tess away, Tobi now found herself feeling at home near the girl. With each quiet word exchanged between the two, with every brush of their skin, she relaxed a little further and sank into the possibility of not being so alone in this place any longer. Wanting to feel more of Tess’s skin, she allowed her hand to slide down to the back of Tess’s neck and she gently caressed the tiny hairs growing at the base of the girl’s hairline. It felt magnificent and painful, like hearing a symphony for the first time while standing under scalding water.
She was sure she had let her hand linger too long and moved to pull back, but, just as she did, she felt a bit of raised skin beneath the pads of her fingers. Brow furrowed, she probed Tess’s neck further.
“Tess, what the hell? Is this a fresh cut or something? It feels… deliberate. Like it’s a symbol or has a pattern or something. Come over here by the window and let me look at you in the moonlight.” Tess maneuvered to the window and knelt so that Tobi could move her hair. What Tobi saw made her feel faint. She tried to control the quickening of her breath so that she did not alarm Tess.
“Tobi. What? I can tell you’re freaked out. Tell me, Tobi! You’re scaring me…”
“Tess, I want you to promise not to scream when I tell you this. You have got to stay calm. We can’t get caught out of bed. We’ll take care of this, we’ll handle it together. Just promise me. Okay?”
“Okay… I’m not sure what you think could be so serious that I would scream, but I promise.”
As calmly as possible, with as little alarm in her tone as she could manage, Tobi gave Tess information that would change her life forever. “Tess, you have The Seal of Janess.”
To be continued…China Uncensored: Chinese Teen Sentenced to Life For Buying Toy Guns?!
A Chinese teen gets life in prison for buying toy guns. China may have taken gun control a little too far.
This is 18 year old Liu Dawei.
He will be spending the rest of his life in a Chinese prison. Why? Because the judge let him off easy for being a teenager. Even though he wanted to give Liu the death penalty.
Wow, so what heinous crime did this young man commit? Terrorism? Multiple homicides? Dressing up like a giant purple dinosaur and making up his own theme song to the tune of a beloved patriotic classic?
Nope. He ordered fake guns online. Not real guns, replicas. 24 to be exact. From a Taiwanese store. But that shipment never arrived because it was intercepted by authorities. According to state-run People’s Daily, police “identified 20 out of the 24 ‘replica guns’ as real guns.” And so this 18 year old kid was sentenced to life in prison for arms trafficking.
And get this: Those 20 real guns aren’t actually…real guns. It’s just that China has such crazy strict gun laws, that they include things no other country would consider to be guns. That was actually the defense Liu’s lawyer used in court. According to China’s gun laws, anything with a barrel that can shoot an object with a force of 1.8 joules per centimeter squared is a gun. That’s less than one-tenth of what is classified as a gun in that bastion of anarchy—Taiwan.
Liu’s lawyer argued that’s pretty much the same amount of force he could produce throwing a “handful of beans.” After which he was promptly arrested for having hand-guns. Ok, that last part was a joke. But it is true that in China, an object that could shoot a projectile with as much force as throwing a handful of beans is considered in the same league as a Magnum. Dirty Harry eat your heart out.
But Liu most definitely was not lucky. And his plea to the judge to “Shoot me dead with the guns I bought! If I die, I’ll admit I’m guilty,” probably missed the mark. Liu was arrested in 2014. His family has appealed the ruling, and are awaiting a final verdict. Their appeal was accepted for review by a higher court earlier this month.
As I said, China has some of the toughest gun control laws in the world. Private gun ownership is banned. And that includes rifles, pistols, and even gun replicas. Simply possessing a single gun can get you a three-year prison sentence. An actual gun crime typically means execution. Of course, rule of law is a mercurial thing in Communist China. Liu got a life sentence for buying replica guns. But this guy only got 12 years for running an entire online gun store.
Mao Zedong famously said “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” And so once they got political power, the Chinese Communist Party made sure to take those guns out of the hands of the people. But there’s one thing Mao couldn’t have predicted: a lot of Chinese people think guns are really cool. At least that’s if you go by the increasing gun tourism industry targeting Chinese travelers. No pun intended. For a change. Chinese tourists flock to the United States for a chance to shoot a live weapon at a gun range. Although according to state-run China Daily, “some people have complained that Chinese tourists at gun clubs have not been careful, taking pictures and pointing the guns at other people.”
And although it’s super illegal to own a gun in China, it actually seems to be pretty easy to buy one, if you want to take that risk. You can go to the dark web and get guns shipped from overseas in pieces, like this reporter found. Or just Google it, like this reporter did.
So how will the Communist Party handle the increasing fascination with guns? And what do you think of Liu Danwei’s sentence? I know they smuggle bear paws into China as medicine, but should they have the right to bear arms? Leave your comments below.Feds: Denying Housing Over Criminal Record May Be Discrimination
Finding a place to live can be difficult for people with arrest records. Beginning Monday it may be easier for convicted felons to rent a home under the protection of the Fair Housing Act.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
A criminal record makes it tough to do the most basic things, like get a job or a place to live. For the nearly 100 million adults who have records, finding a rental is getting a little easier. The U.S. Department of Housing now says landlords who refuse to rent or renew a lease to people with criminal backgrounds may be violating the Fair Housing Act. NPR's Cheryl Corley has the report.
CHERYL CORLEY, BYLINE: Melvin Lofton has been out of prison for more than two decades. Fifty-one years old now, he was convicted of burglary and theft when he was in his 20s. Lofton, who is unemployed, says he knows his criminal background has cost him jobs. But when it comes to housing, Lofton says he's lucky because he has a place to stay.
MELVIN LOFTON: With my mom - I've been with my mom approximately two years.
CORLEY: Without family connections though, Lofton says his convictions hurt, like the time he tried to rent a home in a trailer park.
LOFTON: I was at work, and the guy called me and told me to come pick up my keys. So I was happy to have - I got a place to stay. So then like 45 to 50 minutes later, he calls me back and says, is there something you're not telling me? So I was like, no. What is this? He said, you didn't tell me that you had a background.
CORLEY: Lofton, who had been out of prison for nearly 20 years at the time, didn't get a chance to move in. The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in housing based on race, color, religion and other categories. A personals criminal background is not included. But now the U.S. Department Of Housing and Urban Development says the Fair Housing Act is violated by practices that have a so-called disparate impact. HUD's Maya Rupert says that's a practice that appears neutral on its face but discriminatory in practice.
MAYA RUPERT: Because nationally we know that people of color are arrested and incarcerated at much higher and disproportionately high rates, policies that deny housing opportunities based on criminal histories have a disparate impact on racial and ethnic minorities.
CORLEY: Rupert's boss, Housing Secretary Julian Castro, puts it another way, saying when landlords refuse to rent to anyone who has an arrest record, they effectively bar the door to millions of folks of color for no good reason. So Rupert says the message for landlords is instead of blanket policies refusing to rent to people with arrest records or convictions, they must do a more detailed check of a person's criminal record and consider other factors.
RUPERT: Like, you know, how far back the conviction actually happened, the type of conviction it is, the severity of the - of the underlying conduct.
CORLEY: And whether the conviction is related to safety issues. Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League, says tying the concept of disparate impact to the Fair Housing Act recognizes that the country has created double, even lifetime penalties for some people.
MARC MORIAL: By saying even after you finish your term of incarceration and pay your dues to society, someone can say, I won't rent to you. I won't sell to you.
CORLEY: The president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Sheila Crowley, calls HUD's guidance about the Fair Housing Act bold. But she says there needs to be more affordable housing.
SHEILA CROWLEY: While this will expand housing access to people coming out of prison, it doesn't expand the supply.
CORLEY: HUD officials say what's intended, though, with this expanded view of the Fair Housing Act, is to get housing providers to consider whether their policies for those with criminal backgrounds are about keeping communities safe or if they only keep someone out of a home. Cheryl Corley, NPR News, Chicago.
Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.A driver for the Uber ride-sharing service in Orlando has been arrested after police said he inappropriately touched a woman he picked up while on the job.
Orlando police said the victim's boyfriend requested an Uber driver to pick up his girlfriend last Friday, Sept. 19, and meet him at an agreed location.
Investigators said the driver, identified by police as Ramy Botros, picked up the woman and then rode around aimlessly, making comments about how attractive and pretty the passenger was.
Police said Botros then stopped the vehicle and placed his hand inside the victim's blouse. The woman told the driver several times not to touch her and to take her to her destination, where her boyfriend was waiting for her.
The victim told police she didn't want to upset the driver, so she pretended as though everything was fine after the incident, and even requested a business card from him when they arrived at her destination.
The woman then notified police, giving detectives the driver's business card and a recording she took during the incident, saying she had read several things about Uber drivers allegedly sexually battering women.
Police interviewed Botros on Wednesday. During the interview, detectives said Botros described how the victim was dressed, and said in his home country of Egypt, if a woman dresses a certain way, "she [is] asking for that."
Botros was arrested Wednesday on battery charges. He was released Thursday after posting a bond of $500.
Response from Uber
A spokesman for Uber sent us the following statement Thursday:From White Zombie to Dawn of the Dead, from Resident Evil to World War Z, zombies have invaded popular culture, becoming the monsters that best express the fears and anxieties of the modern west. The ultimate consumers, zombies rise from the dead and feed upon the living, their teeming masses ever hungry, ever seeking to devour or convert, like mindless, faceless eating machines. Zombies have been depicted as mind-controlled minions, the shambling infected, the disintegrating dead, the ultimate lumpenproletariat, but in all cases, they reflect us, mere mortals afraid of death in a society on the verge of collapse.
Gathering together the best zombie literature of the last three decades from many of today’s most renowned authors of fantasy, speculative fiction, and horror, including Stephen King, Harlan Ellison®, Robert Silverberg, George R. R. Martin, Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Joe R. Lansdale, The Living Dead, covers the broad spectrum of zombie fiction, ranging from Romero-style zombies to reanimated corpses to voodoo zombies and beyond.There was a lot at stake entering the final game. The Flyers were not only defending their status as the NHL's preeminent team, they also found themselves in the unaccustomed position of representing North American hockey in general and the NHL in particular. Philly was the NHL's last and best hope for defeating the Red Army.
The final game of the Soviets' tour was played at the Spectrum on January 11, 1976. Entering the contest, the Red Army was undefeated. CSKA had thumped the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden by a 7-3 score, played to a thrilling 3-3 tie at the Montreal Forum against the Canadiens and downed the Boston Bruins by a 5-2 count.
By far the most anticipated matches were those pitting the Red Army against the Montreal Canadiens and the two-time defending Stanley Cup champion Philadelphia Flyers. Although technically exhibition games, the teams approached the matches with the same sort of focus and intensity usually reserved for the Stanley Cup playoffs.
During the 1975-76 season, the rivalry was renewed again. Two Soviet club teams - the legendary Red Army (CSKA Moscow) squad and the highly skilled, but slightly less formidable Soviet Wings (Krylya Sovetov) - toured North America and played a series of four games apiece against NHL clubs.
Hockey's version of the Cold War reached a pinnacle in the 1970s. Team Canada's narrow victory at the legendary Summit Series in 1972 only heightened the animosity and that had been between brewing between the powers-that-be in North American
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1709
29 January 1713
15 November 1715
30–31 January 1716 Effective 15 November 1715 Condition In order to help defend against French invasion, Dutch troops occupy fortresses within the Austrian Netherlands and share the costs with Austria. Expiration 1781 Signatories Great Britain
Habsburg Monarchy
Dutch Republic
Veurne Knokke Ypres Menen Tournai Mons Dendermonde Namur Locations of Barrier fortresses as agreed in 1715, shown on a map of modern Belgium
The "Barrier Treaties" (Dutch: Barrièretraktaat, Barrièreverdrag, French: traités de la Barrière) were a series of agreements signed and ratified between 1709 and 1715 that created a buffer zone between the Dutch Republic and Kingdom of France by allowing the Dutch to occupy a number of fortresses within the Spanish or Austrian Netherlands. The fortresses ultimately proved ineffective as a means of defence and the treaties were cancelled by Austria in 1781.
Background [ edit ]
Antwerp and the frozen Scheldt; (1590); control of this vital trading route formed part of the discussions on the Barrier Treaties.
Between 1672-1697, a series of wars with France demonstrated the Dutch Republic's vulnerability to invasion via the Spanish Netherlands, leading to debate on how to design fortifications effective in the flat terrain of the Netherlands and where to locate them.[1] This resulted in the concept of forward defence or so-called 'Barrier Fortresses' in the Spanish Netherlands to provide'strategic depth.'[2]
It was accepted that no fortified place could hold out indefinitely; the Republic was nearly over-run in 1672 by the speed with which the French captured major fortresses like Maastricht, and was saved only by flooding.[3] The Barrier was intended to slow down an attacking army and allow the Dutch time to reinforce their defences without the expense of a large standing army.[4]
The 1697 Treaty of Ryswick permitted the Dutch to garrison a number of cities, including Namur and Ypres, but in February 1701, the French quickly occupied these.[5] Re-establishing the Barrier was the primary Dutch objective during the War of the Spanish Succession, specified in Article 5 of the 1701 Treaty of the Hague that reformed the Grand Alliance. The Barrier also had an economic element, since the 1648 Peace of Münster gave the Dutch a monopoly over the Scheldt, making its extent a matter of debate, particularly with Britain. The Scheldt estuary was a key transportation point for European import and export; its control was a valuable commercial asset and allowed the merchants of Amsterdam to severely undermine the trade of their commercial rival Antwerp.[6]
The First Treaty; 1709 [ edit ]
The first Treaty was signed on 29 October 1709 between Britain and the States-General and was primarily driven by the need to keep the Dutch in the War of the Spanish Succession. In return for Dutch support of the Protestant succession and a commitment to continuing the war, Britain agreed to a Barrier that effectively gave the Dutch permanent control of the Spanish Netherlands. It included Nieuwpoort, Ypres, Menen, Lille, Tournai, Valenciennes, Maubeuge, Charleroi, and Namur. The terms were seen as overly generous by British commercial interests since they included ports in Northern Flanders like Dendermonde and Ghent that controlled trade along the Scheldt, rather than blocking potential invasion routes.[7]
The Second Treaty; 1713 [ edit ]
The 1710 British General election replaced the existing Whig government with a Tory administration that derived much of its support from the powerful City of London merchants guild. This led to demands for greater protection of British commercial access and the removal of Ostend and Dendermonde from the list.[8] A revised version was signed on 29 January 1713, which reduced the number of Barrier fortresses to 15, an in which Britain agreed to ensure compliance from the future ruler of the Spanish Netherlands.[9]
The Third Treaty; 1715 [ edit ]
The third and final Barrier Treaty confirmed terms contained in the 1714 Treaty of Rastatt between Austria and France. This established a permanent Austro-Dutch military force of 30,000 to 35,000 men stationed in the Austrian Netherlands, the Dutch paying 40% of the costs and Austria 60% plus an additional lump sum to maintain the Barrier and its garrisons, now reduced to seven plus a mixed garrison at Dendermond. It also renewed the 1648 Münster agreement over the Scheldt but promised 'equal treatment' for Dutch and British commerce. The Treaty was signed on 15 November 1715, then further detailed by two Austrian-Dutch agreements of 30 and 31 January 1716.[a][10]
Aftermath [ edit ]
The Dutch Republic ended the war in 1713 effectively bankrupt and the protection that cost them so much proved illusory. The Austrians were reluctant to pay for fortresses they did not control, and the fortresses were quickly overrun when the War of the Austrian Succession began in 1740. After Austria allied with France in 1756, the Barrier became irrelevant; in 1781 the Treaty was declared void by Emperor Joseph II.
However, the forts themselves were only part of the Dutch defence system; political and diplomatic treaties were far more important, particularly since Britain could not allow a hostile power to control ports in Northern Flanders like Ostend.[11] Britain's agreement to act as Guarantor of the Treaty and provide the Dutch with military support against any aggressor ultimately proved to be far more effective than the Barrier itself.[12]
After Napoleon's defeat in 1815, the Dutch Republic combined with the former Austrian Netherlands and Prince Bishopric of Liège to become the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. A stronger and more complex Barrier was constructed along the new Netherlands/France border, supervised by Wellington; this program was largely complete by 1820 but the fortresses became part of Belgium following its independence in 1830.[13]
Notes [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Sources [ edit ]
Afflerbach, Holger and Strachan, Hew (ed); How Fighting Ends: A History of Surrender. (OUP, 2012)
. (OUP, 2012) Kubben, Raymond; Regeneration and Hegemony; Franco-Batavian Relations in the Revolutionary Era 1795-1803. (Martinus Nijhoff, 2011);
. (Martinus Nijhoff, 2011); Low,John and Pulling, F.S.; The Dictionary of English History; (Cassell, 1910);
(Cassell, 1910); Myers, Denys; Violation of Treaties: Bad Faith, Nonexecution and Disregard (American Journal of International Law, 1917);
(American Journal of International Law, 1917); Nolan, Cathal; Wars of the Age of Louis XIV, 1650-1715: An Encyclopedia of Global Warfare and Civilization (Greenwood, 2008);
(Greenwood, 2008); Veve, Thomas Dwight; The Duke of Wellington and the British Army of Occupation in France, 1815-1818. (Greenwood, 1992).
External [ edit ]Jordan Zimmermann. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Jordan Zimmermann tries his best to do the same thing every offseason: go home to Wisconsin, relax with his family, watch his beloved Packers, take a month from baseball and then start working out again. This offseason, however, was different. It is his last winter before his final year under team control. A year away from free agency, his name swirled constantly in trade rumors. His agent and the Nationals made another attempt at contract talks but didn’t get far. Even when he tried not to pay attention to any of it, Zimmermann couldn’t help it.
“I turn the TV on and see it everywhere, and people are texting me,” he said on Saturday morning, before Nationals pitchers and catchers held their first official workout together. “Everywhere I go, people are saying: ‘Oh, you’re going to Boston! You’re going to Chicago!’ ‘I don’t know anything,’ I just tell them.”
Zimmermann, 28, is in Viera and, barring any unforeseen changes, will be part of the Nationals’ vaunted starting rotation. He was hoping he wasn’t traded so he’s happy. But will he be here longer than just 2015? There hasn’t been much progress between the two sides in negotiations for an extension. Zimmermann is a two-time all-star and the price of starting pitching, especially elite ones, has only risen.
Zimmermann, who will earn $16.5 million this season, said negotiations are “on hold.” He isn’t sure if the Nationals will approach him again during spring training but he “if they want to bring something up, we’re here to listen.”
As he has said before, Zimmermann reiterated that he would prefer not to negotiate a long-term extension during the regular season. “So if something happens in spring here, we’re willing to listen,” he said. “But once the season starts, I don’t really want to talk about it.”
Zimmermann was understandably floored to see the Nationals commit $210 million to free agent starter Max Scherzer in January. Zimmermann wants to stay in Washington if he is offered a fair deal. But then he saw Scherzer land a record-breaking deal.
“Obviously it’s definitely shocking when you see a guy get that much money,” Zimmermann said. “I’m happy for him. There’s nothing I can really do. We negotiated a little bit and didn’t get very far. So I’m happy for him.”
Beyond that, however, Zimmermann said he was happy to see Scherzer added to the team. He wants to win a World Series and adding the 2013 American League Cy Young Award winner can only help.
“He’s one of the best in the game and to have him in our rotation is going to be huge,” Zimmermann said. “Having him go out there every fifth day and do what he does is going to be fun to watch. I’m excited.”
His contract status will hang over Zimmermann all season if an extension isn’t reached. Zimmermann is only human and he will think about it, but he said he will do his best not to.
“Just go out there and pitch,” he said. “I’m a Nat for another year and I’m just going to do the best I can to pitch for these guys. And we’ll see what happens after the season.”A young artist by the name of Maeril created a fantastic comic for anyone witnessing Islamophobic harassment in public. It was published on her Tumblr and later on Facebook through her work with The Middle Eastern Feminist. Here's the list (slightly abbreviated: full comic by MAERIL here):
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Maeril says she created it in part because of the increased harassment Muslims are facing:
...Some could say: “Yes but you can use that technique for instances of harassment other than Islamophobic attacks!”, and my reply is: Sure! Please do so, it also works for other “types” of harassment of a lone person in a public space!!
However I’m focusing on protecting Muslims here, as they have been very specific targets lately, and as a French Middle Eastern woman, I wanted to try and do something to raise awareness on how to help when such things happen before our eyes - that way one cannot say they “didn’t know what to do”!
I’d like to insist on two things:
1) Do not, in any way, interact with the attacker. You must absolutely ignore them and focus entirely on the person being attacked!
2) Please make sure to always respect the wishes of the person you’re helping: whether they want you to leave quickly afterwards, or not! If you’re in a hurry escort them to a place where someone else can take over - call one of their friends, or one of yours, of if they want to, the police. It all depends on how they feel!Sports is drama. Being a fan of the Chicago Bulls for the last several years has been the equivalent of watching your best friend go through bad break-up after bad break-up.
Any Chicago Bulls fan that has been aching for another championship since the historic run the team had in the 90's will tell you that Fred Hoiberg is not fit to coach in the NBA and that the franchise is in basketball purgatory. Those same fans will also tell you that General Manager Gar Forman and Vice President of Basketball Operations John Paxson progressively ran the team right off the tracks over the last four or five seasons.
Nuccio DiNuzzo / Chicago Tribune
The reality is that while there are small truths in all of these fan chirpings, there is a much bigger issue at hand with the storied franchise of the Bulls and it is a problem that will haunt them no matter where they go for the foreseeable future, whether it be the playoffs, or the lottery. Gar Forman & John Paxson hired Fred Hoiberg but failed to supply him with weapons to run his system effectively.
Pace and space. Shoot three's. Run up and down the floor. These are just a few of the things Bulls head coach Fred Hoiberg preaches. There is nothing wrong with a philosphy such as Hoiberg's, especially in today's NBA. But how do you become successful when the players that are put on the team do not embody what you need to run a Hoiberg-style offense at all?
Trading Derrick Rose, although a very depressing end to a muddy relationship, was a necessary part of moving forward in the Chicago Bulls organization. Forman, just a few days ago, spoke about wanting to become younger, more athletic on the floor. Rajon Rondo will be 31 near the All-Star break of next season and Dwyane Wade will be 35. Rondo shot 36% from three last season, while Wade shot 15% and even Jimmy Butler shot a lousy 31%. Fred Hoiberg is going to have to try and get the grumpy, old men to run the floor and launch 3's like they are playing in an All-Star game next year and it isn't going to be pretty.
Steve Mitchell / USA TODAY
These moves by the front office don't suggest a need for actual youth or athleticism, but rather a plot to put names in the minds of fans and try to save face after the core of the franchise was dismantled this off-season. "Come see Rondo and D Wade live with the Bulls in 2016!" It almost feels like Forman and Paxson are trying to get fans to come and watch a horrible 2006 NBA remake of a team.
As unfortunate as it may be, what the Chicago Bulls 2016-17 season will be is a great window dressing by the powers that be, and real change is yet to come.The change is limited to 2002-6 model Hondas and Acuras and 2007 Honda Fits bought from April 13, 2002, to Nov. 7, 2006 — a total of about six million vehicles, Honda said.
Honda admitted no wrongdoing in the case. Chris Martin, a company spokesman, said that in making the decision Honda balanced winning the case against the negative attention and customer ill-will that might have resulted. He said that the company’s odometer specifications for the vehicles in the settlement were within industry standards, but “Honda determined that its internal standard did not match current customer expectations.”
James A. Holmes of Henderson, Tex., the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the case began when another lawyer, Jay Kutchka of Jones, Jackson & Moll in Fort Smith, Ark., noticed that the odometer in his Honda Odyssey didn’t seem accurate. He compared it against mileposts, and when he visited Internet message boards and owners’ forums, he discovered that the problem appeared to be widespread.
The lawyers David B. Miller of Addison, Tex., and Stephen Woodfin of Kilgore, Tex., also participated in the lawsuit, which was filed in 2004.
The suit covers only 2002-6 vehicles and 2007 Fits because Honda changed the way it made the odometers, Mr. Holmes said.
“I do think it’s to Honda’s credit that they did the right thing,” Mr. Holmes said. “They’ve done everything they said they would do; they’ve done everything when they said they would do it.”
The company hasn’t set aside a specific amount to pay claims in the settlement, Mr. Martin said, although he said he did not think the amount would be large. He said Honda generally helped customers pay for repairs anyway when they were close to the end of the warranty.
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Mr. Holmes said the settlement was valued at $244 million. He and the other lawyers who filed the case received almost $10 million in fees.
David Champion, senior director of automotive testing for Consumer Reports, said Honda was right to settle.
“Five percent — I think it’s good that Honda stepped up to it,” Mr. Champion said. “If you have a 40,000-mile warranty, that’s an extra 2,000 miles.”
He said Honda generally stands behind its products and often helps customers who have had a problem just outside the warranty period.
“They are one of the most reliable automakers,” Mr. Champion said. “The chance of needing a repair for a Honda or Acura is relatively small. So I presume they have a greater leeway to be a little more generous.”
Leslie Raborn of McDonough, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, recently received a check for a little more than $1,000 as part of the settlement.
Ms. Raborn said she did get help from Honda when her Accord’s transmission failed at 102,000 miles. She bought the Honda used in 2004 and bought an extended warranty that expired at 100,000 miles.
“I took it to the Honda dealership,” Ms. Raborn said. “They were a little lenient with me. They agreed to the work at a discounted rate of $1,000, but I wasn’t satisfied with that.”
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Ms. Raborn said the dealership alerted her to the settlement, so she contacted Honda and Mr. Holmes. She received the rest of the money.
Mr. Holmes said he was looking into lawsuits against other manufacturers, but wouldn’t discuss the matter further.
Mr. Champion of Consumer Reports said his magazine calibrated the speedometers of its test vehicles, and he presumed that the odometer calibrations would be similar in terms of accuracy.
“We generally see domestic manufacturers pretty well smack on, the Asians are a little optimistic and the German manufacturers have got the biggest discrepancy in terms of m.p.h.,” Mr. Champion said.
The settlement means some owners who had repairs done to their vehicles just outside the warranty period may be eligible for reimbursement. People who lease their cars will get a 5 percent increase on their lease’s mileage allowance. Lessees who returned their cars and paid excess mileage charges may receive a full or partial refund.
The vehicles also have several extended warranties for components, including transmissions, and the mileage portion of those warranties has also been extended by 5 percent.
Customers who think they may have a claim against Honda can visit www.odosettlementinfo.com or hondaodometerclassaction.com for more information.SANTA CLARA — A team with the Northern California Innocence Project based at Santa Clara University ended 12 years of dogged legal wrangling last week when their client was cleared of molestation charges that put him in prison and made him register as a sex offender.
Ed Easley, a 62-year-old electrician, was accused and convicted of molesting a 7-year-old in Shasta County 24 years ago. Since then, it came to light that he had been scapegoated because the young victim was protecting a juvenile male cousin at the behest of family members.
Easley served eight years in prison and spent five years on parole, and after his release the victim came clean as a remorseful adult who contacted the Innocence Project.
But when Easley sought to reverse the wrongful conviction with the NCIP’s help, he found that since he was no longer in custody the court thought he did not have a case, said Linda Starr, director of the NCIP.
“Someone had to be behind bars, on probation or on parole,” Starr said. “Otherwise all they could do was ask the governor to grant them clemency.”
Repeated appeals — four of them, all the way up to the California Supreme Court — were denied. But in one case when he was granted a new hearing, the judge who turned him down wrote that the new evidence including the victim’s recantation would have likely not resulted in a conviction.
But that wasn’t what the judge had to decide, said Starr — in what she described as the toughest standard in the nation, the new evidence had to point “unerringly to innocence and completely undermine the prosecution’s case.”
However, two laws that took effect in January related directly to the issues in Easley’s case. One enables people released from custody to prove their innocence. The other changed the standards for the introduction of new evidence to prove innocence, switching from the need for it to “point unerringly to innocence” to merely show that it “more likely than not” would have made a difference in the original trial.
“The new standard is a game-changer,” said Starr.
Starr and co-counsel Paige Kaneb persuaded a judge that the new law applied to Easley and that the previous judge’s declaration surpassed the “more likely than not” standard.
The charges were dropped and the conviction vacated.
“He can stop registering wrongly as a sex offender,” reads the release. “He can find a home, take those electrical jobs and most importantly, he can truly start to recover.”
Kaneb said “it took 24 years, but the truth finally came out.”
“At least two people were overcome with relief by the news,” she said. “Ed Easley, whose name will now be cleared, and the victim herself, whose conscience can now be cleared. Sometimes justice delayed is not, fortunately, justice denied.”FBI Director James Comey is being thrust into the spotlight as the controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails County GOP in Minnesota shares image comparing Sanders to Hitler Holder: 'Time to make the Electoral College a vestige of the past' MORE’s personal email server intensifies.
The FBI is investigating the security of the former secretary of State's email setup, including if classified information was mishandled. The probe is putting the nation’s top law enforcement agency at the center of a political battle leading into the 2016 election.
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Comey has long shown an independent streak that's gained him wide bipartisan praise and helped him sail to a 93-1 confirmation vote in the Senate. That independence will be tested with Republican lawmakers demanding answers and Clinton's presidential campaign team being dismissive of a controversy it sees as politically drummed up.
Comey has been in the middle of bruising fights before.
He's best known in Washington for a dramatic late-night standoff a decade ago with then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzáles over reauthorizing a domestic surveillance program.
Comey was acting attorney general in March 2004 when then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was hospitalized in intensive care. He raced to the hospital bed at The George Washington University Hospital after learning that Gonzáles was trying to get a semi-conscious Ashcroft to sign off on reauthorizing the National Security Agency's programs, arriving only moments before the White House lawyer.
A nearly incapacitated Ashcroft refused to sign the papers, saying "I'm not the attorney general. There is the attorney general,’" and pointing to Comey, who recounted the incident before the Senate in 2007.
Comey said he was “concerned that this was an effort to do an end-run around the acting attorney general and to get a very sick man to approve something” the Department of Justice had raised legal concerns about.
Ultimately, the Bush administration reauthorized the program without the Justice Department signing off, something that nearly drove Comey to step down, with his unsent resignation letter later published in The Washington Post.
It wasn't the first time Comey took a high-profile stand. As a U.S. attorney, he prosecuted businesswoman Martha Stewart for obstruction of justice in a probe into stock sales.
"I had to... because if it was Jane Doe she would have been prosecuted," Comey said, looking back on the case in 2009. "I thought of my hesitation about the case due to someone being rich and famous, and how it shouldn't be that way."
And in the Bush administration, he appointed a special counsel in 2003 to investigate the CIA leak case that ultimately led to Scooter Libby, then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, being found guilty of perjury.
As FBI director, Comey has gone after other big names, including then-CIA Director David Petraeus for mishandling classified information. Petraeus resigned and later pleaded guilty, a stunning fall for an official who once garnered presidential buzz. And Sen. Bob Menendez Robert (Bob) MenendezActing Defense chief calls Graham an 'ally' after tense exchange William Barr is right man for the times This week: Trump delivers State of the Union amid wall fight MORE (D-N.J.) is now facing federal corruption charges, the first sitting senator indicted since 2008.
Comey’s also seen his share of controversy as FBI chief, including a speech where he said all law enforcement officials are “a little bit racist.” And the U.S. ambassador to Poland apologized to that country after Comey suggested many Poles aided in the Holocaust, calling them “murderers and accomplices” who believed they “didn’t do something evil.”
Comey is now under pressure from both Republican lawmakers and the Clinton campaign as the FBI investigates the Democratic front-runner's emails.
Clinton has handed over her private email server and a backup drive to the FBI. The agency has been tight-lipped about its probe and signaled it intends to move at its own deliberate pace, even in the face of an impatient Congress.
Sen. Ron Johnson Ronald (Ron) Harold JohnsonWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration White House, GOP defend Trump emergency declaration GOP senator says Republicans didn't control Senate when they held majority MORE (R-Wis.), the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, called Clinton’s move a “first step” but vowed to keep a close eye on the probe.
“Questions remain unanswered about how Secretary Clinton and her team secured and preserved sensitive government information in their possession,” he said. “As chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, I have an obligation to continue asking these questions to ensure the proper preservation and security of Secretary Clinton’s records.”
So far, Republican lawmakers have expressed confidence in Comey, but made clear they have high expectations.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley Charles (Chuck) Ernest GrassleyOvernight Health Care: Senators grill drug execs over high prices | Progressive Dems unveil Medicare for all bill | House Dems to subpoena Trump officials over family separations Senate confirms Trump court pick despite missing two 'blue slips' GOP lawmaker says panel to investigate drug company gaming of patent system MORE (R-Iowa) said Comey “has a reputation for applying the law fairly and equally regardless of politics,” adding that he’s counting on him to get to the bottom of the controversy.
“It is critical that he upholds that standard in this matter and that he keeps Congress informed so that the public can have confidence in the integrity of the FBI’s inquiry,” he said. “[The] director should ensure that the FBI finds out who is responsible for any mishandling of classified information, wherever the facts lead.”
Grassley is already pressing Comey for more information on Huma Abedin, a top Clinton aide.
Rep. Trey Gowdy Harold (Trey) Watson GowdyThe family secret Bruce Ohr told Rod Rosenstein about Russia case Trey Gowdy joins Fox News as a contributor Congress must take the next steps on federal criminal justice reforms MORE (R-S.C.), who chairs the House Benghazi panel, said he wouldn’t armchair quarterback Comey’s investigation, citing his “reputation for even-handedness and fairness.”
“I'm going to have to count on the bureau and Jim Comey,” he told Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom.”
“The same folks who investigated and prosecuted General Petraeus are looking into the current allegations with respect to classified information and if the facts are the same then I expect the result to be the same."
Democrats are watching closely as fears grow that a prolonged probe could damage Clinton’s campaign. Polls already show Clinton is vulnerable on issues of transparency and trust with voters.
The campaign has denied any wrongdoing and dismissed claims that Clinton received classified material on a private server as “misinformation” and “nonsense.”
The FBI, for its part, declined to comment on the investigation, including potential next steps or Comey's role.
A spokesman for the FBI said the agency isn’t answering questions about Clinton’s email server.
“We do not anticipate this will change,” the official said.
Despite the agency’s attempt to put space between itself and the brewing political storm, Comey faces tough decisions that could affect the future of the Clinton campaign.
During his confirmation hearing in 2013, Comey acknowledged the challenges of the job, saying that the FBI “cannot be associated with any interest or any party or any group."
“FBI must be about finding the facts and only the facts,” he said.As we were publishing our full review of the Western Digital Red 8TB, we noted something odd. While the street prices of the bare drives seemed to be a bit high ($333), the WD My Book was on sale for $250. Ryan happened to look them up and discovered that our local Best Buy actually had them available for store pick-up. Since the 8TB Red and My Book 8TB were launched simultaneously, and we were just provided early samples of the 8TB Reds last week, how could there already be 8TB Reds on the shelf just down the street? Could they have shipped some earlier form of the 8TB Red in the external My Book and continued tweaking their NASware algorithms / firmware prior to the Red launching? Our curiosity got the best of us, and we decided to find out.
Sebastian ran out to his local Best Buy and picked up a single WD My Book 8TB model, promptly took it home and ripped it open. I don’t think he even plugged it in first. This is what he found:
Well, that’s not a Red label, but it does say Western Digital, and it’s clearly a HelioSeal housing (common to HGST He Series and WD Red 8TB). One thing that immediately stuck out to me was the model number. WD model numbers have a specific pattern (WD80EFZX), and that number above does *not* follow that pattern. The pattern it does follow, however, is that of the HGST He8 line:
Sebastian noted something else almost immediately. The label looked like it was on top of another one. Peeling this one back showed this pure white label:
…and peeling back *that* label gave us this:
Read on for the suspense-filled conclusion!
We also did some quick performance tests to further confirm what we were seeing. Here’s the My Book 8TB:
…and now the HGST He8 sample we have here:
Connecting the He8 directly to a system gave us similar results, but with the 'correct' model number appearing as the device ID instead of the My Book label.
Ok, so what we have figured out so far is early WD My Book 8TB models may have gone out with relabeled HGST He8’s. We say early because it only makes sense for WD to shift over to actual Reds in the future, as My Books are not marketed as performance units and would generally only be performance-rated with 5400 RPM drives. Bear in mind that all of the above would not necessarily apply to other WD external units. It is very unlikely that they would have put white label drives in any of their external units that have user-replaceable drives (like the My Book Mirror, for example), as those are typically branded as coming equipped with WD Red units installed.
WD is, of course, free to install a faster drive if they wish in their single drive units, and an enterprise-grade He8 most definitely exceeds the performance of the 5400 RPM WD Red. Now our sample set is only a single drive purchased from a Best Buy, so we have no clue if this carries over to Amazon sales or any other outlets. We also have no idea how many went out with He8 internals, so if you are thinking about picking these up, realize that you may not end up with He8’s or even Reds for that matter (it is possible that WD will use a de-rated / white label form of the Red in the My Book down the road). It is also entirely possible that the He8 seen here has tweaked firmware making it less NAS / RAID friendly (TLER disabled), so use extreme caution before trying to buy 8 of these and shucking them for that 64TB array you were lusting over.
Whichever way you look at it, it’s nice to see a company ‘fail faster’ when it comes to substitutions. It's also giving some unsuspecting folks one hell of a deal on an enterprise drive.A bare-chested man, who climbed along the top of a number of buildings on College Green in Dublin earlier today, has been talked down.
Garda negotiators are understood to have been in contact with the man for several hours.
The man first appeared at the top of the Abercrombie & Fitch building at mid-morning and then moved to the top of the adjacent Ulster Bank building, causing severe traffic disruption in Dublin city centre.
At one stage he was standing on the edge of the buildings but later sat down.
The man was on top of the building for more than four hours.
Emergency services blocked Dame Street to traffic in both directions and set up a cordon to keep back pedestrians, though restrictions are now easing.
It is unclear how the man climbed to the top of the building. Gardai believe he may have entered the Abercrombie &Fitch building and accessed the roof or alternatively he climbed up scaffolding on an adjoining building.To talk about genes and their links to IQ and educational achievement is to risk accusations of elitism, fascism and racism. When the American professor Arthur Jensen published a paper in 1969 concluding that 80% of variance in IQ scores was attributable to genes, not environment – and attempts to boost African-American scores through pre-school intervention were therefore bound to fail – angry students besieged his office in California. The renowned psychologist Hans Eysenck, who backed Jensen, was punched on the nose while lecturing at the London School of Economics.
The controversy exploded again in the 1990s when the Harvard psychology professor Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray published their book The Bell Curve, which stated that US blacks had an average IQ of 85 against 103 for whites and that, once this was taken into account, many racial differences in educational attainment and career achievement disappeared. Welfare polices that encouraged poor women to have babies, the book argued, risked lowering average American IQ.
Behind all such controversies lay the shadow of Nazi attempts to breed a master race. And teachers have always been suspicious of supporters of nature against nurture because they seem to imply that a child's fate is predetermined and anything schools do is pointless.
When Michael Gove's former adviser, Dominic Cummings, claimed in a 250-page paper leaked last year that genes accounted for more of the variation between GCSE scores than schools, teachers, neighbourhoods or even families, another row ensued, particularly when, shortly afterwards, Boris Johnson observed that human beings were "very far from equal in raw ability".
Genetics today, however, presents a kinder, more compassionate face. Cummings based his claims about GCSE scores on a paper written, with several colleagues, by Robert Plomin, research professor in behavioural genetics at King's College Institute of Psychiatry in London. Based on comparisons of more than 11,000 identical and non-identical twins, it reported that genes account for just over 50% of the variations in GCSE scores overall and 60% in science subjects. Plomin was repeatedly cited in Cummings's rambling paper, which proposed genetic screening to identify those capable of the scientific innovation needed to compete economically against rising Asian powers.
Born in Chicago but a UK resident since 1994, Plomin recently gave five lectures at the Department for Education, one of them attended by Gove. But, he tells me, "I'm very much on the left side of things" and adds that he's a Labour party member: "I shouldn't be because I'm not a British citizen, but they still take my money".
In a newly published book, G is for Genes, he and Kathryn Asbury, an educational psychology lecturer at York University, propose "a wish list" of 11 policy ideas. Several should raise cheers from Guardian-reading teachers: free, high-quality pre-school education for disadvantaged children from age two; a reduced national curriculum; more freedom for teachers; an individual education plan for every child; free or subsidised horse-riding, piano or ballet lessons for children from poor homes. The book also suggests, at least implicitly, that Plomin opposes grammar schools and externally imposed targets. And if schools alone don't make much difference, all the fuss about identifying "failing" schools and turning them into academies hardly sounds worth it. Moreover, as Plomin puts it, "why mortgage your house to pay those private school fees?"
All in all, Plomin, charming and fast-talking, sounds terribly child-centred and not at all Goveian. "Children differ in how they learn," he says. "The teacher standing in front of the class and lecturing to kids and getting them to chant their times tables – all that goes against what we suggest."
How does this square with his belief that genes account for most of the differences between children? Plomin turns the usual way of looking at such things on its head. It's not that environment doesn't matter, he says; it matters a lot. But the more successful we are at equalising environments, the more genes account for the differences between us. Genes don't explain so much variation in cognitive ability or test scores when children are very young, because their environments differ so widely. But as they go through school, where environments are to some extent equalised, genes count for more and more. If we could
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out from their normals and using front face culling. This has discontinuity problems with flat faces, since the edges will break off when offset, but it’s not really that noticeable.
In alpha 6, I decided that selected objects needed to be visible, because I often found myself confused by what furniture I had selected, when I changed floor. I went with the easy solution of just rendering the same mesh at half opacity with depth testing set to greater, so it only renders when something is in front of it. All in the same shader as the outline. However, it still looks confusing as you can see below. You can see how the floor of the room renders green through the tables.
The final solution required using the stencil buffer, which I hadn’t used before. I couldn’t easily draw the outline on top of everything otherwise, since it would require only depth testing each object with itself. Basically you render the entire mesh including outline to the stencil buffer, without actually drawing anything on screen. Then you remove the mesh itself from the stencil buffer by rendering only the mesh. Finally, you render the result of the two stencil passes without depth testing, so it appears above everything else. This is done per mesh, so they are drawn independently of each other, meaning there is no over-shadowing and no post processing involved, like blurring to increase the outline width.
Actually putting it to use is a whole other story, but basically each mesh I want to highlight has a highlight tag and when it is highlighted an extra shared material get’s added to its MeshRenderer, which uses the outline shader. Each object which can be highlighted inherits from a Selectable class, which in turn inherits from GameObject. A SelectorController class keeps track of highlighted Selectables and tells them if they need to traverse their transform hierarchies to add the highlight material to the highlight tagged meshes.
So to use the shader, simply add a material with the shader to the MeshRenderer of the object you want to highlight, on top of the material(s) it already uses.Not to be confused with A for Andromeda
Andromeda (formally titled Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda) is a Canadian/American science fiction television series, based on unused material by Gene Roddenberry, developed by Robert Hewitt Wolfe, and produced by Roddenberry's widow, Majel Barrett.[2] It starred Kevin Sorbo as High Guard Captain Dylan Hunt. The series premiered on October 2, 2000, and ended on May 13, 2005.
Andromeda was filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and produced by Andromeda Productions, Tribune Entertainment, Fireworks Entertainment[1] and MBR Productions.[3] In Canada, the show was on Global TV (Fireworks' parent company) in Canada and syndicated in the United States on Tribune, Sinclair and other stations.
Andromeda is one of two TV series (to date) based on concepts Roddenberry had created as early as the 1960s and 1970s. The name Dylan Hunt had previously been used for the hero of two TV pilots Roddenberry had produced in the mid-1970s, Genesis II, and Planet Earth, all sharing a similar dystopian, post-apocalyptic premise.
Premise [ edit ]
Thousands of years in the future, the Systems Commonwealth is a republic based in a distant star system called Tarn-Vedra. Humankind is a part of The Commonwealth. The Commonwealth spans the Milky Way, Triangulum, and Andromeda, with Tarn-Vedra near its core. The Commonwealth is at war with the Magog, a predatory humanoid species with bat-like faces that is dedicated to war. Peace talks led the Commonwealth to cede a key world to the Magog, that of the Nietzscheans; in response,the Nietzscheans secretly attempted to usurp control of the Commonwealth. Dylan Hunt is the captain of the Commonwealth ship Andromeda Ascendant. Its computer is a powerful artificial intelligence which can emit a holographic interface persona in the form of a woman, called "Andromeda" or "Rommie". Caught by surprise in the first engagement of the Nietzschean uprising, the crew evacuates. The Andromeda, with Hunt aboard, is caught at the edge of the event horizon of a black hole, freezing both in time.
Three hundred and three years later, in CY 10087 (approx 5167 AD), the crew of the salvage ship Eureka Maru locates the ship. The Systems Commonwealth has fallen, and the era known as The Long Night has begun. Hunt recruits the salvage crew to join him in an attempt to restore the Systems Commonwealth and "rekindle the light of civilization". The salvage crew comprises its leader, Beka Valentine, a con-artist and expert pilot; a super-genius engineer named Seamus Harper (rescued from Nietzschean-enslaved Earth by Beka) who can plug his mind directly into computer systems; Trance Gemini, a mysterious alien of unknown origin whose innocent demeanor hides a surprisingly old soul, and Rev Bem, a Magog who has adopted a non-violent, Taoist-like religion called The Way ("Rev" being short for "Reverend"). The salvage crew's beneficiary brings along an insurance policy in the form of a Nietzschean mercenary named Tyr Anasazi.
Characters [ edit ]
Season One cast
Andromeda universe [ edit ]
Slipstream [ edit ]
Slipstream is the primary mode of travel for ships in the Andromeda universe, and the only known method of traveling faster than the speed of light. The Vedran discovery of the Slipstream was instrumental in the formation of their intergalactic empire, which became the precursor of the Systems Commonwealth.
Slipstream cannot be navigated by AIs (they have a 50% chance of choosing the correct path). Only organic pilots can "sense" a way to their destination (they have a 99% chance of choosing the correct path), and although AIs are fitted on all large ships, they always require an organic pilot for interstellar travel. It is thought to be the process of choosing a path that makes the chosen path the correct one.
A function of slipstream is that apparent objective velocities are extremely variable, as it enables travel across millions of light years seemingly as swiftly as traveling between neighboring stars only tens of light years apart. Further, slipstream is a non-linear method of travel; the best and swiftest way to get from Point A to Point B (though they might be in the same galaxy) may very well involve hopping to another galaxy entirely. Also, the more frequently used routes are often easier, faster and more predictable.
Systems Commonwealth [ edit ]
The Systems Commonwealth was a huge utopian civilization, spanning three major galaxies of the Local Group. It was founded by the Vedrans, the first race to discover slipstream, who initially used it to conquer the Andromeda Galaxy. After a long and bitter war of attrition with the major powers of the Triangulum Galaxy, the Vedran Empire was reorganized as the democratic Systems Commonwealth. The Commonwealth served as a peaceful intergalactic government for almost 10,000 years until the Nietzschean revolt.
Dylan eventually managed to restore the Commonwealth (though not to its former glory; initially it had only 50 members while the Old Commonwealth had included more than a million worlds). However, the New Commonwealth soon fell victim to internal corruption masterminded by the group known as the Collectors, who were allied with the Abyss.
Major star systems [ edit ]
Hephaestus, a system with a significant Nietzschean population that was devastated by a rogue black hole in the pilot episode and the place of Dylan's frozen imprisonment in time for 300 years. It turned out in season five that the Andromeda somehow still retained a connection to this black hole.
somehow still retained a connection to this black hole. Mobius, a barren world with underground cities. Mobius was ruled by ruthless dictators for many centuries but joined the New Commonwealth when its leader, the "Great Compass" Venetri resigned.
San-Ska-Re, a Than homeworld and a major power in post-Fall Known Worlds. Did not actually appear on screen.
Seefra, a mysterious artificial system of nine planets and two suns where Dylan and his crew were transported after the Battle of Arkology. Seefra-One is revealed to actually be Tarn-Vedra.
Tarazed, a world with significant human and loyalist Nietzschean populations; it survived the Long Night largely unscathed. It became the first capital of the New Commonwealth. Birthplace of Telemachus Rhade. Tarazed was described in the series as being located in another galaxy and therefore is not intended to be equivalent to Tarazed, a non-fictional star of the same name.
Tarn-Vedra, the capital of the Old Systems Commonwealth and Vedran homeworld. All slipstream routes to Tarn-Vedra vanished soon after the Nietzschean rebellion, contributing to the ensuing chaos. Dylan was born on Tarn-Vedra. One of his motivations for restoring the Commonwealth is the search for his own lost home.
Earth was ravaged by the Nietzschean occupation and Magog assaults during the Long Night. Harper was born and acquired his notable survival skills there.
Arkology, a huge space station with a pacifist population and the site of the Andromeda's second confrontation with the Magog Worldship. The Andromeda lost and the Arkology was destroyed, but Trance still managed to cripple the Worldship with her powers.
Major races [ edit ]
Avatars of the Suns, humanoid forms of stars with great powers. They are immortal and can travel through time and space, affecting events and people as they wish.
Humans make up about 70% of the Known Worlds population. Subspecies with minor genetic enhancements (like the Inari) are common.
Kalderans, a xenophobic reptilian race that once rivaled the Vedrans. They managed to reverse engineer their own Slipstream drive.
Magog, a race of savage semi-intelligent alien killers, feared throughout the Known Worlds. The Magog have to kill and eat fresh meat to sustain themselves and to lay eggs in sentient beings to procreate. The Magog Worldship is a structure of 20 planets and an artificial sun, home to trillions of Magog and a grave threat to the Known Worlds.
Nietzscheans, a group of superior humans who believed in self-improvement via genetic engineering and intense competition. They left the planet Earth thousands of years ago and evolved into a separate subspecies ( Homo sapiens invictus ) that colonized many worlds throughout the galaxies. Nietzscheans are responsible for the Fall of the Systems Commonwealth; however, they failed to replace it with the Nietzschean Empire (as they had originally planned) because of constant betrayals and conflicts between different Nietzschean Prides.
) that colonized many worlds throughout the galaxies. Nietzscheans are responsible for the Fall of the Systems Commonwealth; however, they failed to replace it with the Nietzschean Empire (as they had originally planned) because of constant betrayals and conflicts between different Nietzschean Prides. Nightsiders, rat-like humanoids with poor vision, but highly developed hearing. Their reproductive cycle is very damaging to the environment, as their early larval stage is an aquatic creature that eats anything it comes across.
Paradine, a highly evolved form of the Vedrans, who look like ordinary humans. The Paradine apparently had a special role in dealing with the Avatars of the Suns and the Route of Ages, but they are all but extinct now. Dylan Hunt learns, in the finale of season 4, that he is a Paradine, from his father's side.
Perseids, a highly intelligent race of alien scientists and bureaucrats.
Pyrian, a grotesque, tentacled orb like species who are one of the most powerful enemies of the Commonwealth.
Than-Thre-Kull (Than), a tough and highly intelligent and civilized insectoid race divided into various function-specific castes.
Vedrans, the first intelligent race to discover the slipstream that connects the entire universe. The Vedrans went on to conquer the Known Worlds, building the Vedran Empire. The Empire was plagued by internal conflicts and eventually was peacefully transformed into the Systems Commonwealth.
Other races [ edit ]
Bokor, dangerous parasites that possess other species in order to survive, spreading through physical contact. Inside their shells, the Bokor are practically invulnerable to any type of weapon, ranging to energy, melee or bullets. However, they are vulnerable to electricity. Their existence in the Known Worlds is abhorred by the Than, who attack any vessel carrying them. For normal humanoids, it takes a while for the Bokor to destroy their neural functions and take over. But for Trance Gemini, it just took a few seconds.
Ogami, a race of brutish pirates and mercenaries.
Organizations [ edit ]
Collectors, The Commonwealth's keepers of secret history. The collectors who took over power of the new Commonwealth are agents of the Abyss, but the true collectors remain hidden and are on the side of the light.
Genites, a high-tech, numerous and well-organized intergalactic group whose aim is to rid the Universe of genetically engineered beings, especially the Nietzschean Prides, who brought about the downfall of humanity.
High Guard, the main military force of the Systems Commonwealth.
Tech Police, the brutish anti-tech enforcement on Seefra-1.
Templar, a group of men and women who sought to restore order after the Fall. They were founded by High Guard Admiral Constanza Stark.
Production [ edit ]
Majel Barrett Roddenberry and Tribune Entertainment began developing series from Gene Roddenberry's archive in 1997. Robert Hewitt Wolfe was brought in to develop the series. Fireworks Entertainment was brought in to co-finance and for international distribution. In early 1999, actor Kevin Sorbo was recruited to star in the series while he starred in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Sorbo, his agent, Eric Gold, and Majel Roddenberry were to be executive producers and Wolfe as co-executive producer.[5] Bette Chadwick was in charge of casting, while visual effects were initially handled by Lost Boys Studios and Northwest Imaging & FX.[1] By September 9, 1999, Tribune had stations committed for two years in 24 of the top 30 markets with 22 Tribune and 38 Sinclair stations for a 60% national clearance giving the series a greenlight. The show was offered barter terms with an eight national/six local advertising split.[5]
Andromeda's first episode was aired in syndication on October 2, 2000[1] while being carried on Global Television Network in Canada.[6] Tribune Broadcasting station signed on to carry the show in its first season. In January 2002, Andromeda was renewed for two seasons, its third and fourth, having gotten two year deals with stations in 39 out the top 40 markets.[7] By January 31, 2003, the show was renewed for its fourth season, 2003–2004, in 148 markets representing 88% of the U.S.[3] The show was averaging 2.2 rating for the 2002-2003 season, third behind Stargate SG-1.[8] For the 2003–2004 season, the show is one of only four first-run scripted series in syndication along with its Tribune stable mate, Mutant X.[9]
In January 2004, the Sci Fi Channel made a deal for the show and all its episodes plus fellow Tribune syndicated but discontinued show's episodes, BeastMaster. In March, the cable channel would start showing season four episodes which would then be seen in syndication 7 to 10 days later. With the deal, the series was renewed for its fifth and final season.[10] The show began its run on Sci Fi with a re-airing of the 2-hour pilot episode.[11]
On April 23, 2004, CanWest Global Communications announced the closure of Fireworks Entertainment and placing Fireworks' library up for sale. With Fireworks being the primary production company, this was effectively the show's cancellation notice.[12] However two of Fireworks shows were shifted to fellow CanWest subsidiary, Global Television, and the fact the show was renewed just in January.[13] Tribune had ordered the show and Mutant X into production for the 2004-2005 season under the show's contract options. Fireworks Entertainment took Tribune to court to get an order releasing them from production and financing the two series.[14]
Home media [ edit ]
By 2003, ADV Films had home video/DVD rights for the show.[15] The company released the entire series on DVD in Region 1 between 2003–2006. In December 2003, ADV released Season 3, Collection 2.[16] On October 3, 2006, they released a complete series DVD box set known as Andromeda: The Slipstream Collection.
Alliance Home Entertainment has released all five seasons on DVD in Canada only.
In Region 2, Revelation Films has released the first four seasons on DVD in the UK.[17][18][19][20] The fifth and final season was released on November 24, 2014.[21]
On January 26, 2015, Revelation Films released a complete series set on DVD in the UK.[22]
In Region 4, Beyond Home Entertainment has released all five seasons on DVD in Australia. In 2007/2008, they re-released all five seasons in new collector's editions that featured new packaging and all episodes were digitally re-mastered in wide screen format.[23]
A region B blu-ray release of Season One was released on June 24, 2013 in the UK, with the next two seasons following by the end of that year.[24]
The ALL Region blu-ray release of the complete box set of all five seasons was released on September 19, 2016.[25]
Awards [ edit ]
Andromeda was nominated for 39 awards at organizational events spanning the years 2001 to 2006. The nominations comprised six Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA awards, five Chicago International Film Festival awards, eight Gemini Awards, fifteen Leo Awards, and five WorldFest Houston awards. The show won 18 of those awards.
Awards Year Awards Category Nominee Episode Result 2001 Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA Best Syndicated/Cable Television Series Andromeda —[26] Nominated 2001 Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA Best Actor on Television Kevin Sorbo — Nominated 2001 Gemini Awards Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Supporting Role in a Dramatic Series Lisa Ryder — Nominated 2001 Gemini Awards Best Visual Effects Bruce MacDougall, James Kawano, Geoff Anderson, Tom Tennisco, Joe Farrell, Jim Finn, Darren Marcoux, Roberto Biagi — Nominated 2001 Leo Awards Best Musical Score of a Dramatic Series Matthew McCauley Music Of A Distant Drum Won 2001 Leo Awards Best Visual Effects in a Dramatic Series Todd Liddiard — Won 2001 Leo Awards Best Visual Effects of Dramatic Series Jim Finn, Roberto Biagi, Tom Tennisco, Geoff Anderson, Jamie Kawano, Paul Cox, Joe Farrell, Peter Mastalyr, Bruce MacDougall, Mladen Miholjcic, Noel Wright, Jean-Paul Ledoux Mathematics of Tears Won 2001 Leo Awards Best Picture Editing of Dramatic Series Gordon Rempel Angel Dark, Demon Bright Nominated 2001 Leo Awards Editing, Dramatic Series Eric Hill Music of a Distant Drum Won 2001 WorldFest Houston Television and Cable Production – Directing – Television David Winning The Banks of The Lethe[27] Won 2002 Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA Best Syndicated/Cable Television Series Andromeda — Nominated 2002 Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA Best Actress on Television Lexa Doig — Nominated 2002 Gemini Awards Best Achievement in Make-Up Ryan Nicholson, Francesca von Zimmermann — Won 2002 Gemini Awards Best Performance by an Actress in a Guest Role in a Dramatic Series Kristin Lehman — Nominated 2002 Gemini Awards Best Photography in a Dramatic Program or Series Gordon Verheul — Nominated 2002 Gemini Awards Best Visual Effects Geoff Anderson, Jim Finn, Roberto Biagi, Tom Tennisco — Nominated 2002 Leo Awards Dramatic Series: Best Visual Effects Jim Finn It's Hour Come Round At Last Nominated 2002 WorldFest Houston Television and Cable Production – Directing – Television David Winning Double or Nothingness Won 2002 WorldFest Houston Television and Cable Production – Directing – Television David Winning Machinery of The Mind Won 2003 Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA Best Syndicated/Cable Television Series Andromeda — Nominated 2003 Chicago International Film Festival awards Special Achievement in Direction David Winning A Heart for Falsehood Framed Won 2003 Gemini Awards Best Achievement in Make-Up Ryan Nicholson, Francesca von Zimmermann — Nominated 2003 Leo Awards Dramatic Series: Best Visual Effects Jim Finn, Paul Cox, Todd Liddiard, Peter Mastalyr, Robert Appleby The Tunnel at the End of the Light Won 2003 Leo Awards Dramatic Series: Best Supporting Performance – Female Laura Bertram The Dark Backward Nominated 2004 Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA Best Syndicated/Cable Television Series Andromeda — Nominated 2004 Chicago International Film Festival awards Best Dramatic Series David Winning Double or Nothingness Won 2004 Chicago International Film Festival awards Best Dramatic Series David Winning Machinery of The Mind Won 2004 Chicago International Film Festival awards Special Achievement in Direction David Winning Double or Nothingness Won 2004 Gemini Awards Best Visual Effects Bruce Turner, Peter Hunt, Simon Lacey, Grant Lindsay A Symmetry of Imperfection Won 2004 WorldFest Houston Television and Cable Production – TV Series-Dramatic David Winning A Heart For Falsehood Frame Won 2005 Chicago International Film Festival awards Special Achievement in Direction David Winning Double or Nothingness Won 2005 Leo Awards Dramatic Series: Best Make-Up Francesca von Zimmermann Moonlight Becomes You Nominated 2005 Leo Awards Dramatic Series: Best Overall Sound Jeff Jackman, Michael Thomas, Roger Morris, Gordon Anderson Dissonant Interval Nominated 2005 Leo Awards Dramatic Series: Best Sound Editing Jeff Jackman, Chester Biolowas, Roger Morris Dissonant Interval Nominated 2005 Leo Awards Dramatic Series: Best Visual Effects Bruce Turner, Simon Lacey, Lindsay Grant, Ben Funk, Nick Michaeleski Dissonant Interval Nominated 2005 Leo Awards Dramatic Series: Best Visual Effects Bruce Turner, Simon Lacey, Lindsay Grant, Ben Funk, Nick Michaeleski Through a Glass Darkly Nominated 2005 WorldFest Houston Television and Cable Production – TV Series-Dramatic David Winning The Banks of The Lethe Won 2006 Leo Awards Best Sound Editing in a Dramatic Series Jeff Jackman, Chester Biolowas, Rick Senechal, Ian Mackie, Don Harrison — Won 2006 Leo Awards Best Overall Sound in a Dramatic Series Paul Michael Thomas, Ken Biehl, Jeff Jackman, Gordon Anderson — NominatedThe trial of a 36-year-old Syrian man accused of throwing his three young children out of a window at a refugee center has begun in Bonn, Germany. His alleged violence came after his wife said that she refused “to accept the roles they had back home.”
The family were housed in a refugee center in the town of Lohmar, near Bonn. On February 1, following an argument with his wife, the man grabbed his three children – aged seven, five and one – and threw them out of a first-floor window.
Read more
The two oldest children, a brother and a sister, suffered broken bones and skull fractures, but fortunately the youngest, a one-year-old who conflicted reports name as a boy or a girl, landed on top of the older brother and only suffered a few bruises.
The man was subsequently arrested and charged with three counts of attempted murder as well as grievous bodily harm.
The trouble began in January when the man, who has not yet been named in German media, had an argument with his wife, who “in Germany no longer wished to accept the roles they had at home, and did not want to put up with everything he wanted anymore,” according to the official court statement.
During an argument on January 4, the man is said to have hit his wife with a saucepan, causing lacerations. He was arrested and barred from entering the household for 10 days until his wife relented and let him back in.
Read more
“He perceived this as an attack on his honor,” the Rhein-Sieg Rundschau newspaper reported the court spokesman as saying.
The man, who came to Germany from Syria in 2014 by way of Turkey, France and Bulgaria before being joined by his family, has admitted the attack to police.
The incident comes amid a backdrop of political controversy surrounding the place refugees from the Muslim countries have in Western and German society, particularly since the New Year’s Eve attacks in Cologne. The growing public concern about terrorism and integration have led to a surge of support for the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The party has made strong gains in the recent state elections, pushing Angela Merkel’s CDU party into third place in Berlin and winning 21.9 percent of the vote in her home region of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.• It's a busy weekend at Dolphins camp, with defensive end Jason Jones, linebacker Sean Spence and quarterback Brandon Weeden visiting, and Miami working on scheduling more visits.
Among those in the works: defensive end Chris Clemons. His camp got a call early this morning, asking to set up a visit. Even though Jones is in the building today, the Dolphins apparently want to consider multiple options for a significant defensive end role, as part of a rotation with Mario Williams (who figures to play the vast majority of downs) and Cam Wake (the Dolphins don't want to overwork him).
Clemons, 34, has 69 career sacks, including 37 for Seattle from 2010 to 2013. He started 11 games for Jacksonville in 2014 and had eight sacks and four forced fumbles.
Last season, he played in 16 games for the Jaguars, starting eight, and had 14 tackles, three sacks and one forced fumble.
Pro Football Focus rated him 111th of 111 qualifying defensive ends last season, but several teams appear to strongly disagree with that assessment. Eight teams have expressed interest in Clemons, and he visited the Seahawks earlier this week.
Meanwhile, the Dolphins are among teams that have expressed interest in Eagles and former Dolphins free agent cornerback Nolan Carroll, according to a source. A visit has not been scheduled, but there has been communication between the sides. Carroll also is talking to the Eagles and others.
Carroll started 11 games for the Eagles last season, picking off two passes, before missing the final five games with a broken ankle. He played mostly as a backup for Philadelphia in 2014.
Before leaving for Philadelphia, Carroll had 26 starts and five interceptions for the Dolphins from 2010 to 2013. Miami drafted him in the fifth round in 2010 and overall, he has started 38 of 85 career games.
Pro Football Focus rated him 53rd among 111 cornerbacks last season.
Carroll is one of several cornerbacks the Dolphins are considering. Among the others: Josh Robinson, who visited Friday. The Dolphins don't want to spend big money on a No. 1 corner but are interested in adding a veteran or two on a reasonably-priced deal.
If you missed the post from last night, please check it out for info on Spence and Miami's draft options after moving down five spots.
• Since the All-Star break, the Heat has outscored teams by 122 points with Goran Dragic in the game. Only three players are more than plus 100 since the break: Dragic, Kawhi Leonard (plus 123) and Draymond Green, who's third at plus 111. Nobody else is over 100....
Rookie Josh Richardson, who continues to impress, has made 10 of his last 13 three-pointers... Joe Johnson is 11 for 17 on threes since joining the Heat.... Michael Beasley assisted the Heat last night; his 18 points in 15 minutes helped Houston beat Boston and allow Miami to close within a 1/2 game of the No. 3 Celtics.
• So why did Beno Udrih give up $90,000 to get the Heat under the luxury tax? “He knows the season is lost for him and he can’t come back; he felt this was the right thing to do, to help the team to give us that option to sign somebody,” said Goran Dragic, his closest friend on the team.
By giving Miami more flexibility to sign Joe Johnson, Udrih likely has earned a full playoff share, or close to it, when players eventually vote. Udrih would love to return next season, and Miami is aware of that.
• With UM so limited at cornerback, one of the biggest questions for Mark Richt is whether to expose Corn Elder, his top cornerback and top returner, to the risk of injury on punt or kickoff returns.
Elder averaged 13.8 yards and scored a touchdown on 11 punt returns, and 33.8 yards on five kickoff returns (including the Duke miracle).
“At Georgia, Todd Gurley was their best player; he was returning kickoffs,” said UM special teams coordinator Todd Hartley, who worked for Richt with the Bulldogs. “Our best players are going to play. You can't be worried about [risk of injuries] too much. There are some discussions obviously, but if he's our best punt returner and gives us the best chance to change the game in a punt return, the guy is going to be out there.
“I do have options, which is a great thing. I know about Corn. You look at [freshmen receivers and summer arrivals] Sam Bruce, Ahmmon Richards, Dionte Mullins. These kids are dynamic with the ball in their hands, so why not give them an opportunity to do that? That's what's good about spring and fall camp. You try them out…. You can win or lose a game on special teams quicker than any other phase of the game. In order to be great on special teams, you best players have to play.”
Among other return options: Braxton Berrios (4.2 average on 11 punts) and Mark Walton (17.6 average on 17 kickoffs).
Last season, Miami was 105th in kickoff returns at 19.2 per game. On punts, UM was 88th and 57th the past two years.
• The UM Sports Hall of Fame does a great job with its induction banquet every year and tickets are on sale for $100 apiece for this year's event on Thursday, March 31 at Jungle Island.
The inductees: Kellen Winslow Jr. (football); Joaquin Gonzalez (football), Willis McGahee (football), Will Allen (basketball), Tamara Jones (basketball), Jon Jay (baseball), Megan Bradley (tennis), Charlie Hodgson (swimming coach).
Call 305-666-6000 for tickets or go to UmSportsHallofFame.com.
• West Palm Beach-based attorney Amber Wilson has emerged as the heavy front-runner to replace Fox-bound Joy Taylor on 790 The Ticket's morning show, and I'm expecting her to get the job.
Wilson, who has appeared regularly on WFOR-CBS 4's Sports Bang with Jon Weiner, impressed management during her on-air audition recently. She would work alongside Jonathan Zaslow and Brett Romberg, competing with WQAM's Joe Rose and Curtis Stevenson.
• Marlins manager Don Mattingly said he wants to keep two left-handed relievers, which improves Craig Breslow’s chances of sticking with Mike Dunn. Perennially disappointing Brad Hand is out of options.... Al Leiter says his Marlins TV package includes just 20 to 30 games. He has other commitments working Yankees games for YES Network and appearing in MLB Network's studio.
Twitter: @flasportsbuzzDisney Parks Blog today has more MagicBand news, this time with new designs coming to the On Demand station at Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park in the Star Wars Launch Bay. There are a number of new designs rolling out through the summer, and this time the designs will be limited releases to just 30 days each!
Here’s a look at the upcoming designs for the summer 2016 starting on June 1st (except for the design on the far right, which won’t be out until June 15th). Designs will continue to roll out of the 1st and 15th of every month.
These designs should appear on June 15th (along with the far right band on the image above):
These designs specifically say “Limited Release” at the design kiosk:Baltimore is preparing to sell two properties near the Horseshoe Casino Baltimore for redevelopment, relocating the Baltimore Animal Rescue and Care Shelter.
The City Council approved changes this week to a plan passed in 2002 to overhaul the industrial zone, adding outdoor recreational use to the possibilities for the area. The changes were made in anticipation of the sale of 1411 Warner St. and 301 Stockholm St., which are used as parking and the BARCS facility.
The goal is to enable creation of an "entertainment hub" near the casino and sports stadiums, according to letters filed with the legislation. One of the ideas being floated includes an outdoor golf driving range, said City Councilman Robert W. Curran.
Baltimore Development Corp. spokeswoman Susan Yum said there are no specific plans for the properties, which would go through a public sale process.
One of the parcels, 1411 Warner St., is already locked up in an options agreement with the development team behind the casino, CBAC Gaming. In April, the city granted a two-year extension to the firm to exercise its right to buy the property and nearby 701 Ostend St., both now used as parking lots for the Ravens.
Developer Arthur Adler of Caves Valley Partners, one of the firms involved in CBAC Gaming, declined to comment on plans for the site. Leaders at Horseshoe have said they want to add a hotel to the operation eventually.
Erin Chamberlin, senior vice president and general manager of Horseshoe Casino Baltimore, said in a statement that the company has no "immediate plans" to pursue a hotel, but "we certainly envision a time when such a project could serve as a prominent component of the area's broader redevelopment."
The city has not settled on a new site for BARCS, which was created to run the city's shelter operations in 2005, although discussions have occurred on and off for years, executive director Jennifer Brause said.
The organization, which provides care for more than 12,000 animals each year, estimates that it would need about $18 million to build a new, expanded shelter, Brause said last year. Curran, who made animal welfare one of his signature causes, said he hopes the sale of the properties would help finance those plans.
Curran said he has sought assurances from city agencies and the administration that no sale will occur unless a new BARCS facility is ready. He said he hopes the organization, which has outgrown its current spot, will be able to move into a new building in the next two to three years.
The city in 2002 passed an urban renewal plan to try to overhaul the Carroll Camden industrial zone, targeting the area that now hosts the casino. The changes approved by the City Council this week further update that plan.
[email protected] more names have emerged in the Portland Trail Blazers’ search for a new general manager.
Sources with knowledge of Portland’s thinking told ESPN.com that the Blazers have both Cleveland Cavaliers vice president of basketball operations David Griffin and Los Angeles Clippers vice president of basketball operations Neil Olshey on their wish list.
Yahoo! Sports reported last week that Oklahoma City Thunder executive Troy Weaver had already interviewed and that the Blazers have likewise targeted highly regarded San Antonio Spurs assistant GM Dennis Lindsey.
Sources say Griffin has interviewed with the Blazers as well.
Yahoo! has also identified ESPN analyst Chris Mullin, formerly vice president of basketball operations for the Golden State Warriors, as a Portland candidate.
The Blazers are searching for a successor to Rich Cho, who lasted only one season as the replacement for Kevin Pritchard. Blazers director of scouting Chad Buchanan served as Portland’s interim GM through the draft after Cho’s departure but withdrew from consideration for the full-time position earlier in the summer. Cho has since joined Bobcats owner Michael Jordan’s front office in Charlotte.
Griffin just completed his first season in Cleveland after a long career with the Phoenix Suns that saw him rise from an intern in the media department to the head of the front office in three different Suns administrations alongside Bryan Colangelo, Mike D’Antoni and Steve Kerr. Griffin was offered Denver’s GM vacancy in the summer of 2010 but joined the Cavaliers instead when he and the Nuggets could not agree on contractual terms.
Olshey has been the Clippers’ general manager since March 9, 2010, replacing the ousted Mike Dunleavy after joining the organization as director of player personnel in 2003-04 and eventually serving as Dunleavy’s top aide. Olshey’s contract with the Clippers, however, only runs through October 2011.By Stephanie Bills, Contributor
The "happiest place on earth" is a top destination on many families' bucket lists. If you plan ahead, this magical, unforgettable experience doesn't have to put a large dent in your budget. Here are some tried-and-true tips for saving money while enjoying your Disneyland experience.
1. Come Prepared
Plan ahead so that you don't have to purchase a necessity at Disneyland that you could have brought from home. For example, check the weather so that you don't need to buy a rain poncho or umbrella, a hat or hand fan when it starts to heat up, or a sweatshirt when it cools off at night. Remember, it usually is cool at night in Southern California, even during the summer months.
Bring a hat, sunscreen, sunglasses or any items that make you more comfortable in the sun. If you are planning on going on water rides and don't want to get wet, purchase a poncho from a dollar store in advance. You will save money and won't feel guilty throwing it away afterward.
2. Buy Souvenirs in Advance
Disney has infiltrated practically every industry, which makes it easy to find Disney items anywhere, from Walmart, Target, and your local grocery store to department stores and Amazon. You can save a lot of money by purchasing items before your trip at these less-expensive retailers than at Disneyland, California Adventure Park or Downtown Disney.
In addition to getting a lower price,
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being members of The Hague-based ICC court, they would almost certainly reject any new resolution proposing war crimes charges.
On Sunday, Russia said Assad's removal from power was not a part of past international agreements on the crisis and hence impossible to implement.
"This is a precondition that is not contained in the Geneva communique (agreed by world powers in June) and which is impossible to implement because it does not depend on anyone," news agencies quoted Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying.
The wrangling comes amid warnings the conflict, which according to the UN has sent more than 600,000 Syrians fleeing into neighbouring countries, is growing more dangerous for civilians due to the regime expanding its use of cluster bombs.
New York based Human Rights Watch said Damascus was increasingly resorting to firing rockets containing the sub-munitions, after previously using only aircraft to spread the weapons.Steve McIntyre writes:
Yesterday, I received updated Yamal data (to 2005) from Rashit Hantemirov, together with a cordial cover note. As CA and other readers know, Hantemirov had also promptly sent me data for Hantemirov and Shiyatov in 2002. There are 120 cores in the data set, which comes up to 2005. I’ve calculated a chronology from this information – see below.
How interesting it is that the Hantemirov data in green, diverges from the CRU 2008 “Hockey Team” data in red. No wonder they had to “hide the decline”. The trees lie!
Give it up fellows, your cover’s blown.
I was going to run a larger excerpt of Steve’s latest post, but these two comments on the thread seem to sum it up pretty well.
morebrocato: Posted May 15, 2012 at 9:29 AM
It is utterly fascinating to me to see that Steve McIntyre and the folks at RealClimate have essentially the same rundown of events, yet in the way it’s presented and framed, you’d think they have nothing in common.
You state:
“A URALS regional chronology had been calculated as of April 2006. This was a version of the regional chronology which remained unchanged for many years” and then he ‘concludes’: “The regional chronology has not been a “work in progress” for years.”
But the reply is:
This is a very clear statement that of what he thinks (or rather he thinks he knows). But the reality of science is that finished products do not simply spring out of the first calculation one does.
So it’s absolutely true that this whole ‘late-night-at-the-office’ thing was indeed had by the Briffa et al researchers when the new data came in, and it could be assumed that they did (as you say, “99.9%”) similar calculations (the differences are meaningless) that perhaps showed identical results to your charts posted here and earlier regarding the wider regional Urals-Yamal data set.
So then, when Steve McIntyre sees the results of the ‘insta-reconstruction’ he immediately throws it out there… (one camp says this is the ‘a-ha’ moment of voluminous data, the other says ‘not-so fast’).
People generally try something, find something wrong, try something else, fix one problem, test something else, deal with whatever comes up next, examine the sensitivities, compare with other methods etc. etc. All of those steps contribute to the final product, and it is clear that the work on this reconstruction is indeed ongoing.
So the question then becomes… What gave the original researchers the idea that there’s something wrong with the data, rather than thinking this new data instead challenged their original findings? I suppose we’ll see the flags that were raised when the actual paper comes out in October (which will be a fascinating thing itself), but it could boil down to simply the thought that the presently measured temperature record (and its recent HS shape) should either be matched in the cores, or there may then need steps to be taken to refine the sample in an Esper-ian Mann-er.
In my head, isn’t that the only way they could come up with the idea that it’s going to take ‘too much time’ to go through the data? Otherwise, why do the initial ‘insta-reconstruction’ in the first place if you know in advance the large number of samples are going to need to be filtered.
When it finally comes out, it will be interesting to see if these same methodologies described in that paper were applied to the smaller Yamal area/cores. Perhaps they won’t be because of an ascribed anomalously high value of the site itself in supplying unvarnished windows into regional temperature. But, whatever that site selection methodology is, it still would then have to be applied to the other sites in the regional chronology (though it is on record in at least one place that on site-selection alone the Khyadyta River passes muster).
To continue…
For an analogous example, the idea that the first simulation from a climate model would be a finished product is laughable – regardless of the existence of that original output file. It would obviously be part of the work in progress. Although science is always in a work in progress in some sense, it is punctuated by milestones related to the papers that get published. They stand as the marker of whether a stage has been reached where something can be considered finished (though of course, it is always subject to revision).
My thought here (which I’ve been having a lot lately), is when new science revises and/or corrects old science, there should be some sort of acknowledgement of an incorrect or unadvisable procedure from a previous paper that henceforth should be avoided– included in the new stuff, no? It could/should be easy to say that the original MBH paper relied on substandard data and/or methodologies— particularly when corrected in future ‘milestone’ publications come out, regardless if they ‘confirm’ the original. It would be great for climate science communication if this happened, but unfortunately there’s too much poison in the well because only folks like Steve McIntyre figured out ‘publicly’ what all the climate scientists were conversing about often (in the climategate emails). The same thing could be said about the early Yamal papers.
I guess scientists have at least some right to hold onto their own data until their ready to publish it, and Gavin may be right about the ‘insta-reconstruction’ not constituting ‘adverse results’ that went unreported, but that depends on what comes out as the grand dendro methodology we’re all waiting for. But, in all this, it begs the question of why bother publishing the 2008/9 paper on Yamal? Even the researchers themselves would have known that that paper was near irrelevant compared to what the larger regional chronology would say when they ever got it done. For all the talk that NW Siberian dendrochronologies are such minor players in modern Climate Science, there certainly seems to be quite an apetite for even re-hashing that data occasionally while the Big One is tinkered with back at the lab.
In summary, McIntyre is wrong in his premise, wrong in his interpretation, and wrong in his accusations of malfeasance. – gavin]
It’s like there’s a “Connect the dots” game going on, but at the same time, it’s an M.C. Escher drawing or some optical device…
“A ha! I have found a rabbit! No, you idiot… You’re staring right at a duck”.
To Gavin’s credit, in situations like these it’s best to award the benefit of the doubt to the scientists themselves who are describing their own work/motives. However, they do have a high burden of explanation for their methodology.
======================================
Nosmo King Posted May 15, 2012 at 9:33 AM
It must be really humiliating to “The Team” that they, with their grants and tenured positions, are getting eaten alive by Steve and a few others — the real scientists in the discussion — who work for the love of the truth and not much else.
Keep up the amazing work, Steve! You may not think of it in these terms, but you are doing a huge service to millions of people who, without your noble efforts, might fall victim to the tyranny of what it is the warmists are truly trying to achieve.
=======================================
Read Steve McIntyre’s latest here
UPDATE: Richard Baguley of the UK writes to me to advise of this post on Suyts Space, which is quite interesting:
Why Are Dendro Shafts So Straight?
I am perpetually flabbergasted at the outright denial of scientific facts by alarmists. When I comment on alarmist blogs and the conversation turns to dendrochronology, I point out the facts that bristlecone pines have a very limited temperature growth range. I’ll include a picture from the Treering Society(pdf). The reason for this is two fold. One, to demonstrate the very narrow range of the growth in terms of temps and time (the right side of the graphic) and then 2) to give the people with biology backgrounds something to mull over what this graphic is actually stating, which I’ll get to after my main point. (and how it relates to the left side)
We see that we have no lower bounds (or upper for that matter) of the regional temps. So, the sensitivity to temps are constrained within this narrow margin of time and temps. Even if all of the other factors going into tree growth were quantified to such an exacting purpose as to be able to pick up on a few 1/10ths of a degree (they are not) the physical limitations of growth means we would see see a flattening in the plotting of temperatures. No extremes could be plotted because the trees are incapable of divining such a signal.
He goes on to demonstrate how – well worth a read here.
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RedditWHEN you live in a country ruled by a Prime Minister famed for torturing the vernacular (dubbing the Prince of Cambridge the "royal bub" the most recent cringe-inducing example), it's hard to isolate a single statement for dishonourable mention.
And yet there's one sentence regularly trotted out across Australia whenever the debate over physical punishment is reignited that stands alone in its breathtaking ignorance and stupidity: "I got smacked and I turned out fine."
With those eight seemingly innocent words the cycle of violence and abuse to which our society's most vulnerable citizens are subjected is allowed to continue.
Because if you were smacked as a child and you did indeed turn out fine then you are one of the lucky ones.
Maybe Mum once delivered a short smack while you were in the midst of a full-blown tantrum in the confectionery aisle of the supermarket? Or perhaps Dad briefly let fly after you narrowly missed being hit by a car after running on to the road to retrieve your football?
And, if you were really lucky, they might even have sat you down later to explain their actions. To reiterate that although you were in the wrong, and deserving of a reprimand, they lashed out in a moment of anger and panic.
If that's vaguely similar to your experience of being smacked as a child then chances are yes, you did turn out fine. Lucky you.
But here's the problem: the real debate over smacking isn't about you. It's about the children who got smacked and didn't turn out fine. The ones who grew up to battle depression and low self-esteem, and were taught the best way to handle anger is to give in to it.
Yet the very real impact of abuse-disguised-as-discipline that goes on behind many a closed door in suburban Australia is too often dismissed by a chorus of well-adjusted adults who assume their understanding of smacking is absolute.
As usual, calls by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians to make physical punishment of children illegal has been howled down as an overreaction by "do-gooders".
To those whose only exposure to smacking amounts to a rare moment of weakness by an otherwise loving parent, it's hard to understand what all the fuss is about.
But for the children so desperately unlucky to find themselves at the mercy of caregivers unwilling or incapable of controlling their aggression, it's imperative we make a fuss.
It's unlikely anyone fortunate enough to grow up to subscribe to the "I turned out fine" school of thought were among the cases which prompted the College of Physicians to take this stance.
Too often so called "tough love" is nothing but a socially acceptable defence for behaviour that in any other scenario would be deemed abhorrent.
Taking out our frustration in hitting a fellow adult is considered illegal. Yet when passed off as "discipline", striking a child remains socially sanctioned.
For some parents, it's a dangerous loophole. Confident the law is on their side, they feel justified in inflicting pain on their offspring whenever something goes wrong.
Why bother with any form of discipline that requires effort and imagination when a simple whack will suffice? You won't hear any "I turned out fine" platitudes from the innocent children trapped in households where smacking gradually morphed into something more sinister.
We like to think a good parent knows where to draw the line. And for the majority of mums and dads, that is true. But it's the minority we have to worry about. Parents who fail to recognise where discipline ends and abuse begins.
Is legally banning smacking the solution? So long as otherwise loving parents occasionally slip up, the answer must be no. A situation where a responsible mother finds herself arrested in the aforementioned confectionery aisle for delivering a quick smack to an inconsolable toddler is untenable.
While it's a measure that might be practical within another generation, to criminalise smacking just yet would be premature.
But it's an important debate, and one that should not be dominated by the voices of those fortunate enough to have enjoyed a non-abusive childhood.
Nor should the airing of very real objections to smacking be confused with the absence of discipline of any kind, a line favoured by those fond of bellowing that the abolition of corporal punishment is responsible for all the world's ills.
So let's retire the tiresome notion that a ban on smacking equates to an absence of punishment or boundaries. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
For the sake of the well-intentioned majority, any changes to the law should remain hypothetical for now. But in the meantime we should seriously consider outlawing any further utterances of the phrase "I got smacked and I turned out fine".It’s easy to laugh at the freak-show race for the Republican presidential nomination. Unfortunately, the antics of the candidates — and the media’s fascination with them — have diverted attention from what the Republicans would do if they win.
The sexual harassment accusations against Herman Cain, along with his confusion over matters such as Libya, make for entertaining television. So do the stumbles of Christian-right-hope Rick Perry, the collapse of ultra-conservative heroine Michele Bachmann and the sudden emergence of shopworn hack Newt Gingrich. The pratfalls of these people make perfect material for the media in a presidential campaign that is breaking new ground in superficial coverage.
Such coverage has always been part of political reporting. But this year, it’s worse. To a great extent, the contest is being waged on simplistic cable television shows and blogs. This season’s new development, a multitude of debates with their one-minute answers and chances for unexpected disasters, feed the process. The debates, particularly the gaffes, are hashed over by the cable networks’ “analysts.” These people are often identified as “Democratic strategists” or “Republican strategists,” code for political campaign operatives looking for jobs. The same weak-minded commentary, not backed up by reporting, races through the Internet.
Lost in all this is an examination of what would happen to the country if one of these Republican candidates makes it to the White House, especially if the GOP retains the House and wins control of the Senate. Readers and viewers are not getting a clear explanation of what difference it would make if a Republican or President Barack Obama wins next November.
The information is available, if anyone has the time or patience to read it.
The longest and most tedious of these offerings is the 59-point plan in “Believe in America: Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth.” It should be at the top of voters’ reading lists. Romney looks as though he might be the last one standing when the Republicans pick a nominee. In addition, his massive document pretty well encompasses proposals made by other GOP presidential candidates. As such, it is a good guide to Republican thinking.
Two of the most important points deal with government regulation and taxes.
The Romney plan would repeal all the regulatory laws passed after Obama took over during the worst U.S. economic crisis in generations. While not strong enough, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and the other laws imposed more controls over the runaway financial industry than had existed before. Passing them was a struggle, and the financial lobby riddled them with loopholes. They will go if the Republicans take power.
The Obama administration’s mild efforts to control air pollution and global warming would be weakened or repealed. The Romney plan “would require all ‘major’ rules (i.e., those with an economic impact greater than $100 million) to be approved by both houses of Congress before taking effect.” In a GOP-controlled House and Senate, that would be an anti-regulation Congress. At best, any major regulatory proposal would be subject to intense pressure by lobbyists and the campaign-contributing industries that employ them.
Here’s another boost he’d give to business: “As president, Romney will press for an immediate reduction of the corporate tax rate from 35 to 25 percent,” his plan says. As his campaign document puts it:
“Worries that a lower corporate tax rate are unfair or unaffordable are fundamentally misplaced. The truth is, as Mitt Romney likes to say, ‘corporations are people.’ They represent human beings acting cooperatively to be economically productive. Each dollar earned by a corporation is a dollar that ultimately flows, in one form or another, to employees or to shareholders. And those shareholders include the millions of Americans who own shares in mutual funds or who have pensions that invest in the American economy.”
Corporations aren’t people. They are corporations. Nor does each dollar earned by a corporation flow to employees, as Romney says. Corporations have laid off workers, hoarded cash and acted to produce short-term gains for shareholders, especially speculators who race in and out of markets. Now that there are mild signs of recovery, companies are not hiring back. This is just like the downsizing practiced by Romney when he headed the takeover operations of Bain Capital.
Right now, the media, fascinated by the Republican show, are not examining the differences between Obama and his foes. Sadly, the president isn’t helping. He still has not explained or defended the good he has accomplished.
Many liberals say his record is indefensible. To them, it doesn’t matter who wins, the Republican sellout or Obama, whom they consider the Democratic sellout.
This view of Obama is the height of wrong-headedness. Romney’s proposals are a stark contrast to the Obama record. If Romney or another Republican wins, and brings along a Republican Congress, they would repeal the Obama programs as soon as possible.
Elections have consequences. I know that’s a cliché, but it’s a great one, and timely, too.Text from anarchist Rami Syrianos announcing the start of his hunger strike (Greece)
325 receives and transmits:
-On 26 of March I’m transferred from Nigrita’s prison to the courts of Thessaloniki, due to the trial against me for the expropriation of ODDY’s* auction.
After the trial being postponed once again, i am transferred back to Nigrita’s prison the same day. There i am subjected into search investigation during which I deny, once again, to consent in putting off my underwear (a procedure well-known to the prisons as “bend & cough”). They transfer me into the “newcomers’ cells” and present me subsequently before the prosecutor, who officially imposes me the penalty of disciplinary jail transfer, accusing me for ‘disobedience’ as well as the indefinite isolation in this particular cell, unofficially, until I consent in the realization of this particular search investigation or (until) the disciplinary transfer is made.
-I remain, ever since, under this special detention regime, awaiting my jail transfer.
-It’s clear, judging by the analogy itself between the initial denial and the subsequent penalty, that the whole issue has a minimum relation with the specific investigation and the possible consequences that it’s denial can have in the jail’s function. The declarations from the prison’s administration side, speaking about their fear that this particular practice could become a common one, as well as the threats -during the prisoners’ mobilizations 4 months ago- which were actually pre-announcing the imposition of a disciplinary jail transfer against me, on the 26th of March, have much more to say about the essence of this two-months isolation, than all the rhetorics upon prison security measures, spoken on behalf of the prison’s directors.
-The prison’s environment consists primarily a totalitarian mechanism of authoritarian reproduction. Being the hardened reflection of the wider social situation, jail holds the role of a laboratory, where the procedure of the individual’s obedience towards the authority, happens in the most absolute way.
Within the prison’s environment, nothing occurs by chance.
From the spatial planning to the procedures of the ‘benefits’ and the disciplinary penalties, every aspect of the correctional system’s function is built in a way that the prisoners should internalize the ideas of permanent surveillance, slavishness, snitching and no-term obedience to the orders.
Within this condition, where they try to take every part of your existence away from your control, that the bars intend to find their way inside you until your dreams to stay imprisoned behind them, what inviolably remains under your control, is the choice of negation. Negations that stay always partial, ‘few’, among the countless contracts you make daily. It would be hard for anyone to claim that he remained totally disobedient inside the walls.
-Speaking particularly upon the search investigation procedure, there would certainly be lots to write. Through stripping, bending and coughing, the prisoner’s position within the prison’s hierarchy is tried to be made clear under the most evident way, while at the same time this procedure is marked as a central and crucial act of his transformation, from a dignified person into a manipulated object.
-The actual denial of this procedure is a minimum denial of this particular imposed position. This denial, however, unquestionably does not consist the epitome of all negations. Neither some thin line separating dignity from non-dignity. But what it does consist, is the drawing of a border, which stands as a reminder to myself as well as to every uniformed person, that I am still alive, that I do not obey, that the prison has not entered inside me.
-These two months of isolation, are the cost of this very disobedience. Having -since the beginning- rejected the possibility to succumb to the blackmail of agreeing for the investigation in order for this situation to finish, I decided to demand its end in a dynamic way, using the only means available. Therefore, I started a trolley-food denial on the 5th of May, demanding the immediate end of this condition and an immediate jail transfer. One week later, realizing that this symbolic move was inefficient, i decided to use the ultimate means that someone has under this circumstances and start a hunger strike on May’s 15th, demanding the satisfaction of the above.
I would like to send my warm comrade greetings to all those that broke the walls of isolation through their words and actions, both inside and outside the prisons…
Rami Syrianos
May the 15th
Nigrita’s prison
*ODDY is (was) a public organization that among other activities used to place in auction and sell various confiscated -by the police- items, mainly personal vehicles and cars. Nothing more than official dealers of stolen goods.
–
Text in Greek
Tags: Greece, Hungerstrike, Letter, Rami Syrianos
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2012 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Prison Struggle.Note: This story has been updated and clarified, as Marijuana Business Daily initially received incorrect and incomplete information from the sponsor of the investment bill. See full clarification at end of story.
By John Schroyer
Colorado is finally loosening rules for out-of-state investors interested in its booming marijuana industry, which could lead to a flood of new capital for dispensaries, retail stores, grow sites and infused products companies down the road.
State lawmakers have approved a measure directing the Marijuana Enforcement Division to set up a process for investors who don’t live in Colorado but plan on gaining residency to cement “contingency” financing agreements with licensed medical and recreational cannabis businesses.
Once the governor signs off on the bill as expected, officials will have until Jan. 1 to craft specific regulations on investments coming from other states.
Aside from providing Colorado’s marijuana industry with new sources of capital, the law will give investors nationwide a chance to tap into one of the hottest cannabis markets in the country.
There are a few significant caveats, though, and many details still need to be ironed out.
According to Rep. Dan Pabon, who was the primary sponsor of the bill in the state House of Representatives, investors can’t simply fork over cash to marijuana companies without living in Colorado for at least two years and clearing a background check.
But what they can do is sign an option agreement for future financing, he said.
That would basically equate to an intent to invest after the background check is done and the two-year residency requirement is satisfied, according to Pabon’s interpretation of the measure.
Granted, he said, that may not add up to huge investment opportunities right away for Colorado cannabis companies. But the industry is so promising that he believes it could make a big difference for marijuana firms looking for capital.
“Only the market will tell. But the investment and (return on investment) opportunities are enormous,” Pabon said.
The bill also still stipulates that only individuals – not corporations – can invest capital in Colorado marijuana companies, and state residents must maintain direct control over the businesses. Foreign investors will still be prohibited from pumping money into cannabis-touching firms.
Lobbyist Shawn Coleman, who helped shepherd the bill through the legislative process, said that investors could alternatively offer cannabis companies a loan, and then either structure a repayment plan however they want or wait for lawmakers to revisit the two-year requirement in next year’s session.
“The operative fine print is, ‘At the point at which the person becomes suitable for licensure,’” Coleman said. “Let’s say my background check was super-fast. Money could change hands Jan. 2, 2016. I just can’t make that equity until I’m suitable for licensure.”
And licensure includes the two-year residency requirement.
It’s also worth noting that it’s always been legal for Colorado marijuana companies to get loans from out-of-state financiers, it’s just that those loans aren’t allowed to be converted into equity.
The original bill as introduced would have been much broader and made it much easier for out of state investors to get involved in Colorado’s market. But because of technicalities with the state’s tax law, that approach turned out not to be as feasible as backers originally hoped. So they had to stick with the two-year residency requirement – at least for now.
Both Coleman and Pabon indicated they believe the issue will come up again, and it’s likely that at the very least policymakers will tackle the matter in 2016 and try to further open up Colorado for further investing.
And while investors and individuals who want to offer sizable loans to cannabis companies wait, they could also lobby policymakers to change the law, Coleman added.
Still, the change could spur millions of dollars in direct investments in Colorado cannabis firms, said Patrick Rea, co-founder of CanopyBoulder, a marijuana-focused business accelerator.
Rea said he knows personally of several companies that spent money on lobbyists to get the bill passed.
“It brings up Colorado to more of a level playing field with other states that don’t have that restrictive investment rule,” Rea said. “Business operators were looking at it as a way to increase their access to capital, for expansion. That’s how they viewed it primarily.”
The potential influx of capital could help a number of companies struggling with the high cost of overhead, Rea said, such as infused product manufacturers that have to spend cash on production machines.
“Machinery is very expensive. So that will spur on further investment in Colorado, to expand the infused products market,” Rea pointed out.
The bill could also lead to more chains and consolidation, he suggested.
“We’re starting to see the early stages of consolidation developing,” Rea said. “A year ago, there weren’t chains of eight, 10, 15, 20 stores. Now you’re starting to see those chains proliferate. And having the financial resources for some top-level operators to drive that consolidation will be good for the market and increase the quality of the dispensary operations in Colorado.”
Perhaps ironically, however, the switch wasn’t intended as a benefit for the marijuana industry, but rather as a watchdog regulation.
“What we discovered is there are many businesses that are using many of the devices we listed in our bill… and setting them up in a way that essentially allows out-of-state money to be invested in these Colorado dispensaries right now, but sort of through a backdoor, almost loophole kind of way,” Pabon said. “It’s a transparency measure of the greatest kind.”
Rea said many marijuana companies have worked around the in-state residency requirement to raise capital by getting investors to back holding companies that own intellectual property rights to various cannabis endeavors. But Pabon’s bill makes things easier for such companies by eliminating the need for such steps.
Gov. John Hickenlooper has not yet signed the measure into law, but a spokeswoman confirmed that he is planning to, and it’s just a question of when. Pabon said he expected the bill to get Hickenlooper’s support because it was intended as a step towards financial transparency.
“This aligns with our vision that marijuana should stay out of the hands of criminals and cartels, and this goes a long way to making sure we have background checks on every type of investor,” Pabon said.
John Schroyer can be reached at [email protected]
Note: The original version of this story implied that out-of-state investors will be allowed to fund cannabis companies in Colorado without restrictions, which was based on information state Rep. Dan Pabon provided to Marijuana Business Daily. Pabon later said he was mistaken and that out-of-state investors will need to comply with various requirements to actually fund and purchase equity in Colorado companies, including a two-year residency rule.ALARMING numbers of truck drivers are being caught behind the wheel while high on ice, with a record number testing positive to the drug in a police blitz this week.
In just eight days, 30 truck drivers tested positive for having drugs in their system and two-thirds of those were on methamphetamine.
It comes as police figures show the number of motorists testing positive for ice doubled between 2012 and 2014.
Police across the country are cracking down on truck drivers for vehicle compliance and drug and alcohol testing as part of a month-long operation.
They said the number of positive tests was worrying.
media_camera Truck driver take random drug tests during the blitz. He did not test positive.Pictures: Jonathan Ng media_camera A driver takes a random drug test. He did not test positive. Pictures: Jonathan Ng
In the first few minutes of arriving at a police stop in Orchard Hills on Thursday, The Saturday Telegraph witnessed the driver of a 40-tonne vehicle allegedly test positive to methamphetamine.
The driver was banned from driving for 24 hours and his test was sent to a laboratory for further testing. If the lab test returns a positive result, the driver is then issued a court attendance notice and can face a maximum six-month licence suspension and a $2200 fine.
The Traffic and Highway Patrol team, working with the Random Drug Testing Unit, will test anywhere between 30 and 150 drivers in a 10-hour window during the month-long operation.
media_camera A police officer conducts a random drug test during an operation targeting truck drivers on drugs at The Northern Rd, Orchid Hill. Picture: Jonathan Ng
They use oral swabs and a secondary test to detect the presence of methamphetamine, amphetamines and cannabis.
“There’s a whole range of offences,” Senior-Constable Garrett Thebus said during a random truck stop this week.
“Somehow they’ve obtained it, which is an offence. Somehow they’ve administered, which is an offence. I don’t tolerate it, I don’t like drugs. It’s more than unfortunate, it’s dangerous — highly dangerous.”
COWARDLY ASSAULT ON DISABLED MAN: VIDEO
THE TWO MOST VIOLENT PUBS IN NSW
Senior-Constable Thebus said police were now carrying out more random drug tests on drivers than ever and drivers often tried to justify positive readings by blaming cold-and-flu tablets.
“We hear everything. You see their head ticking over, they think how can I justify it,” he said.
media_camera Roads and Maritime Inspectors along with police from the Joint Traffic Taskforce inspecting trucks during a blitz in Orchid Hill. Picture: Jonathan Ng
In the same month-long operation carried out last year, 41 drivers tested positive to drugs in NSW. In the first eight days of this year’s operation, police detected a staggering 30 drivers.
Traffic and Highway Patrol Commander Assistant Commissioner John Hartley said there was no excuse for any driver to get behind the wheel affected by drugs.
“Not only are these substances illegal but the consequences of drug-driving could be horrific,” Assistant Commissioner Hartley said.
“If you crash, you or another innocent road user could be injured or killed.
“We make no apologies for targeting drivers who are under the influence of drugs and alcohol, or anyone who shows no respect for their own life or the lives of others.”Over the last couple of weeks I’ve met some prospective customers from the Telecom domain here in India. While they’re all keyed about mobile learning, they have serious reservations about how they (as telecom service providers) can leverage their own networks. I often point to some simple facts. Each of their employees carries a cell phone and is connected to the network 24 hours a day. These employees are scattered all over the Indian geography. This presents a unique challenge and opportunity.
The challenge obviously is the delivery of any sort of training intervention using mobile phones. The limitations imposed by screen size and capability, plus in the Indian context having to support a wide variety of languages and scripts. The opportunity is clearly in the ubiquity of the devices amongst the employee base and ownership of the network and the technology for content delivery. An easy solution to propose is the use of installable applications or browser based content access; however it doesn’t account for the largest singular reason such solution fail in India – 90%+ phones do not support GPRS data connectivity or lack a HTML standard compliant browser.
While this may seem strange to someone from the west, it’s well known in India that the bulk of the phones are cheap and basic –phones such as these an do not features operating systems capable of handling installable, or a fully featured browser. These are the phones that are selling in millions and are the ones that provide most of the voice and SMS traffic on the network.
However there is a technology that has existed for more than a decade, that provides a perfect fit for these innumerable basic phones – it’s WAP Wireless Application Protocol. There are three primary reasons :Related
Nowhere to Run: Detained Transgender Immigrants Are Abused, Beaten, and Worse
The summer before A.J.’s kindergarten year two years ago, her husband gave her an ultimatum: “This is our child, and you better just get on board or you are going to be left in the dust,” Davis remembers him saying. She calls this particular moment “pivotal” to her acceptance of A.J. “You can imagine—I’m refusing to honor who A.J. really is,” she said, “so [he and I] had an extremely contentious relationship, to put it mildly.”
The biggest moment came when A.J. started school. Davis was pulled aside by his teacher on the first week and was faced with the reality: Her daughter was introducing herself to other children as a boy and was using the boys’ bathroom. When asked how she wanted to handle everything, Davis walked away and cried. “That’s when you can’t pretend like this isn’t happening anymore,” she said, “This five year old…is very clearly a boy.”
This wasn’t Davis’ first encounter with a transgender child. Another family member completed her transition six years ago. The Davis family was supportive of her and made an effort to learn about the process. Given the family history, Davis’ husband was confused over his wife’s refusal to acknowledge A.J.’s gender identity. “When it is your own child, it is a different level,” she said.
At the time of the family member's transition, Davis received the book The Transgender Child, which she put on a bookshelf without reading. But when A.J. was coming out, Davis took down the book and spent several days lying in bed, reading it. “Reading that book with knowledge of my own child made me want to vomit,” she said, “I thought, ‘I have a transgender child. I have [another] transgender [family member], and now I have a transgender child. This is crazy but it’s true.’ ”
After the initial shock, Davis jumped in and embraced the entire process as her own transition, not A.J.’s. She fully immersed and educated herself in everything transgender. “It was my process that I was going through,” she said. “And I remember: It was five months of me really trying to get my shit together to get on board with this and to admit that I have two sons.” Her husband was crucial in getting her to understand that if she didn’t support A.J., it could be detrimental to the well-being of her child.
The 2010 National Transgender Discrimination Survey found that 57 percent of survey respondents experienced significant family rejection, which is strongly connected to negative outcomes such as homelessness, sex work, and suicide among transgender people.
A.J. And Christiane Davis. (Photo: Courtesy Christiane Davis)
The process proved to be expensive and time-consuming. Over the course of five months, Davis had to change A.J.’s things because gender, she said, “touches everything.” Things like bedding and wall decorations had to be completely transformed and changed into boy-targeted products.
Davis recalls getting A.J. a new wardrobe. “I think we were there all day and spent $500. At Old Navy!” she said. “Do you realize how hard that is to do? It’s underwear; it’s socks; it’s shirts; it’s everything!”
The transition started in August 2013 and ended in December 2013 when his teacher transitioned him officially at school. “
|
Marcus Stroman says it directly and without hesitation.
“I know they’re saying I’m going to be out the whole year, but I still have hope. My thought process is I’m going to be ready for September,” Stroman says. “I’m not going to rush it. I would never come back prematurely. I’m going to make sure I’m absolutely 100 percent when I come back. But I want to be back on the mound in September. That’s what I’m working towards.”
And there you have it. Just 17 days in to his expected six-month recovery from surgery to repair the torn ACL in his left knee, Stroman is already talking about exceeding expectations. It wasn’t too long ago that Stroman couldn’t tie his own shoes. (Consumed with pride, he’d refuse help and spend ten minutes just putting on his socks, working up a sweat in the process.)
Sportsnet Magazine’s MLB Preview: Why the Blue Jays went all in with Russell Martin, and answers to the 12 questions that will define the baseball season. Download it right now on your iOS or Android device, free to Sportsnet ONE subscribers.
But two weeks later he’s already ditched his crutches, walked and performed leg lifts in a pool, worked out on a stationary bike and, on Monday morning, completed a series of body weight squats and lunges.
“I’m ahead of schedule. It’s coming along pretty quick,” Stroman says. “There’s still some pain now and then. But it’s part of the process. I’m not scared to push it. I’m not gonna push it over the limit, but I’m gonna push it to the limit.”
Regardless of Stroman’s optimism, no one knows if his return date will come this September, this October or next February during spring training. What we do know is that April 6, 2015 was not the opening day the 23-year-old had been dreaming of all winter—and for most of his life.
“It was bittersweet…” Stroman begins, about to lean on the tired sports cliché before reconsidering. “Actually, it wasn’t even bittersweet. It sucked. It just sucked.”
Stroman got up on Monday after yet another long night spent lying on his back with his left leg in a brace locked at full extension. (He sleeps in two-hour shifts, getting up when he can’t bear the discomfort any longer to walk around his condo and get the blood flowing back through his leg.) He arrived at the Blue Jays’ Dunedin training facility at 9:00 am for his daily round of rehabilitation and left nearly four hours later to go home and watch Drew Hutchison start the game that was supposed to be his.
The Blue Jays never confirmed Stroman as their opening day starter, but he says that prior to his injury he’d spoken to members of the team’s brass who gave him very good reason to believe he’d be taking the mound yesterday in New York. He was happy Hutchison got the opportunity in his place. He was excited his team won. But at the same time he could hardly watch.
It was supposed to be the biggest accomplishment of his young career. An opening day start in his first full major league season, in front of family and friends in his hometown of New York, and on the sixth day of the month, the same number as the one on the back of his jersey, which he dedicates to his late grandmother, Gloria Major, who was born on March 6, 1943.
“I felt like I worked harder this offseason than I ever have before. I put in so much work. And it all went to waste. All because of some freak injury,” Stroman says. “I was so happy the guys had success. They looked really good. But watching it sucked.”
This is Stroman’s life now. Every day he spends three or four hours in the gym, progressing through strength and mobility exercises for his leg, then completing workouts for his core and upper body while seated, performing the same arm routines he would in-season, minus the actual pitching. He throws balls off a trampoline and works with resistance bands to maintain the flexibility and muscle endurance in his pitching arm. He ices his knee religiously, and does more mobility and strengthening work on his own time at home, on top of what he does all day in the gym.
“It’s not like I’m just sitting on my ass at home all day. I’m doing everything I can to get better. Because if there’s an opportunity for me to come back this year and help this team, I want to be ready to go,” Stroman says, “I’m all in. One hundred percent. I want to be there.”
But until he actually can be there, he’ll try not to watch his team’s games. It’s too upsetting. He’ll check the box scores and keep track of how everyone’s doing, maybe watch a highlight here and there, but sitting and watching nine straight innings of baseball that he was supposed to be a part of is just too much right now.
“I’m a positive guy, but it’s still kinda tough to watch,” Stroman says. “It’ll be better when I’m back at school.”
Right, school. He can’t wait to get back to school. He got the idea when he was sitting in the office of Blue Jays orthopedic surgeon Dr. Steven Mirabello, just a few hours after he heard the pop in his knee that terrible morning in March, waiting for the results of an MRI. He’d already been braced for the inevitable, that the scan would come back saying he needed surgery and would miss six months. He’d cried a lot, on the phone with both his mom and his dad, who were just as emotional.
“That was awful. I was crushed. I was so upset,” Stroman says. “But my parents really calmed me down and I told my mom right then and there, ‘I’m going back to school.’ I know Duke has summer classes. Let’s get this rolling.”
And so he’s returning to Durham, N.C., to finish the final credits he needs to earn the sociology degree he put on hold two years ago to pitch professionally. He’ll have four hours of class on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, studying everything from sports administration and management to entrepreneurship and technological innovation. He’ll also work independently on his final research project, a paper on the portrayal of male and female athletes in the media. It’s a topic he proposed himself.
While he’s on campus he’ll be working daily with Dr. Robert J. Butler, an assistant professor in Duke’s department of physical therapy who specializes in recovery from ACL reconstruction. And when he’s at home for the night, in the apartment he’ll be renting not far from campus, he’ll be spending time with his best friend, Ryan Bahnson, who is moving to Durham with him for the summer. Stroman figures that should keep his mind and body consumed enough not to focus on what he’s missing.
Stroman always wanted to finish his degree. He intended to do it in the offseason a year and a half ago but the Blue Jays sent him to the Arizona Fall League instead. He’s hardly had a moment of downtime since and although he was living his dream in the majors, he always had the nagging thought in the back of his mind that something was unfinished. He imagined going back to college after his baseball career was over and being the old man who doesn’t fit in amongst a sea of twenty-somethings.
“I first went to Duke with the intention of finishing my degree. It’s one of the top academic schools in the country. That’s why I went there. And when I left without my degree I was really disappointed,” Stroman says. “So, I’m really excited to get back on campus.”
For the ever-energetic Stroman, keeping busy is everything. The next three weeks will be tough. He’ll remain in Florida, rehabbing every day, following along on his phone as his teammates carry on without him. He’s not looking forward to it. But then he’ll go back home to Long Island for his birthday on the first of May, and a few days later he’ll settle into Durham where he hopes school and more rehab will keep him occupied enough not to dwell on things. If he has it his way, the three months and five credits at Duke will fly by. And after that?
“Hey, a full six months from my surgery is September 19,” Stroman says. “If we’re in a playoff run at that point, I’m going to want to pitch. And I’m going to do everything in my power to put myself in a position to be there helping the team. I’ll fill any need the team has. I’ll start, I’ll relieve, I’ll do whatever. I’ll be ready to go.”Metered internet usage is on the way, with the CRTC handing down its final decision on how wholesale customers can be billed by large network owners.
The federal regulator on Thursday gave Bell Canada the approval to implement so-called usage-based billing to wholesale customers — usually smaller internet service providers that rent portions of its network — within 90 days. Under the plan, Bell will charge wholesale service providers a flat monthly fee to connect to its network, and for a set monthly usage limit per each ISP customer the ISP has.
Beyond that set limit, users will be charged per gigabyte, depending on the speed of their connections. Customers using the fastest connections of five megabits per second, for example, will have a monthly allotment of 60 GB, beyond which Bell will charge $1.12 per GB to a maximum of $22.50.
If a customer uses more than 300 GB a month, Bell will also be able to implement an additional charge of 75 cents per gigabyte.
CRTC grants concessions
In its May ruling, the CRTC said Bell could not implement its usage-based billing system until it had moved all of its own retail customers off older, unlimited downloading plans. The requirement would have been troublesome for Bell because it would have meant punishing its oldest and most loyal customers.
As another condition, the CRTC also required Bell to offer to wholesale ISPs the same usage insurance plan it sells to retail customers.
Bell appealed both requirements, saying the rules don't apply to cable companies and that they would constitute proactive rate regulation by the CRTC, which goes against the government's official policy direction that the regulator only intervene in markets after a competitive problem has been proven.
In Thursday's decision, the CRTC rescinded both requirements, thereby giving Bell the go-ahead to implement usage-based billing.
Customers of smaller ISPs such as Teksavvy and Execulink who signed up for service before Feb. 1, 2007, will be "grandfathered," where their unlimited usage plans will be honoured. The CRTC did, however, give Bell the right to periodically raise rates on grandfathered plans in order to urge customers on to metered services.MINNEAPOLIS - A new study claims our state's Minnesota Nice could be the product of a very low stress level.
The study, which was conducted by WalletHub, looked at a number of factors to determine the most stressed states -- and the least.
Based on data from the U.S. Census, Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers evaluated people's stress from family, health, work and finances. The data showed southern states ranked the highest for most cases of stress, with Alabama taking the top spot.
Minnesota, on the other hand, had the least amount of stress, followed by North Dakota and Iowa.
The study states Minnesota had the lowest number of adults with poor health and ranked the highest for the most psychologists per capita, most average hours of sleep per night and lowest divorce rate.
See the full list and study here.- The owner of an east Dallas convenience store fatally shot an armed robbery suspect late Tuesday night.
It happened at the Shop-N-Go on Munger Boulevard and Columbia Avenue just before 10 p.m.
Owner Bunthan Te said two masked gunmen walked into the store. One jumped over the counter and the other held his wife at gunpoint.
Te struggled with his gun and it jammed. That’s when he said one of the suspects chased him into the cooler.
“When I ran into the cooler, he comes over here and shot me right here,” Te said.
There was a brief shootout at close range in the cooler. Te wasn’t hit and he doesn’t remember hitting the suspect, but the man ran away after that.
Te then went to help his wife. She was able to break away and he took the opportunity to fire shots at the other suspect.
Police believe there were actually three suspects involved in the robbery. Two of them got away and the man the store owner shot died in the parking lot.
Te said he doesn’t like guns, but keeps one at the store always to protect himself and his wife.
“That's why I shoot. To protect her. To protect my family,” Te said.
A grand jury will review the facts of the case, but police said the shooting appears to be justified.Manny Machado of the Baltimore Orioles bats in the fourth inning against the Texas Rangers at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. —Patrick Smith/Getty Images
Welcome to Boston.com’s Sports Q, our daily conversation, initiated by you and moderated by Chad Finn, about a compelling topic in Boston sports. Here’s how it works: You submit questions to Chad through Twitter, Facebook, email, his Friday chat, and any other outlet you prefer. He’ll pick one each day (except for Saturday) to answer, then we’ll take the discussion to the comments. Chad will stop by several times per day to navigate. But you drive the conversation.
Buster Olney suggested the Red Sox could or should make a push to try to get Manny Machado from the Orioles. Is that even reasonable? Do the Red Sox have enough in the farm system to make a fair offer? – Butch D.
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Here’s what Olney said on SportsCenter the other day:
If you know you’re probably not going to win in 2018, you might as well put Machado out there and see if you can draw a big offer from a team like the Red Sox, who right now have a big hole at third base. They have this terrific high-end prospect, Rafael Devers, down in their system, and maybe you coax the Red Sox into putting Devers on the table for a year and a half of Manny Machado. It’s something the Orioles should at least explore.
Coax the Red Sox? I don’t think Dave Dombrowski would need to be coaxed. Based on his history, if Dombrowski coveted Machado – and why wouldn’t he? – I suspect Devers would just be the first piece in the price he’d be willing to pay.
I’d do it, too. I know, I love my prospect babies, sometimes a little too much, but Machado is one of the top 5-10 players in baseball. He’d fill the most glaring need on the roster, is an electric defensive player, and while he’s having a weird year at the place (he’s hitting just.238, albeit with 18 homers), chances are he’d thrive in the Red Sox’ lineup. A change of scenery might do him some good. He’s had to listen to Buck Showalter for a lot of years now.
Still, I can’t imagine that Devers – a top-10 prospect, but one who comes with questions– would be close to enough to make Dan Duquette consider trading Machado to a division rival, especially one with which he has a lot of contentious personal history.
Machado has a full year left on his contract after this season, so he’s not a flat-out rental. I bet Duquette would shoot for the moon and ask for Xander Bogaerts as well as prospects. The logistics of dealing with Duquette make trading for Machado seem unlikely without a steep overpay.
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You never know what Dombrowski might do, but the farm system is thin already, and it doesn’t seem like a match here. It’s fun to think about Machado on the Sox, but it’s hard to envision it right now.
What do you guys think? Do the Red Sox have a shot at trading for Manny Machado? And what would you be willing to give up? I’ll see you in the comments.License terms of the netfilter/iptables software
netfilter/iptables is - like all of the Linux Kernel - Free Software (sometimes referred to as Open Source Software), distributed under the terms of the GNU GPLv2 only. Please, note that some source code files might differ, and in that case it is explicitely stated in the header of every file.
The GPL also contains some obligations. If you distribute netfilter/iptables code in binary form, you have to offer the source code, too.
The netfilter/iptables project has made available some more detailed information on this subject:
The remainder of this page as pdf (An Article on the licensing of netfilter/iptables by Harald Welte).
An Example disclaimer to be used as an appendix in a product manual.
The TeX source code of those documents can be found here.
Contact the coreteam in case you have any further questions.Internet, we need to have a talk.
I’ve had a number of readers ask why I’ve neglected to write about Amanda Bynes this last year. It’s simple, really. I don’t believe that celebrities are “fair game,” and that, when they have very human and very difficult struggles, I should capitalize on those things by writing an article, however well-intentioned. I believe they are deserving of privacy and respect, by virtue of their being people.
However, I’m making an exception here, because in the midst of the negative and callous press that Bynes has received, I think it’s time we had a chat about it from a different perspective. And then, after we’re done, I think it’s time we stop speculating about it altogether. Deal?
First and foremost, there is no way for us to know what, if anything, Bynes has been diagnosed with. The family has denied schizophrenia and bipolar diagnoses. And when I write this article about Bynes, I am only operating on the possibility – not the assumption – that these diagnoses are true.
Until Amanda Bynes comes out and self-identifies this way, it is not our place to make an assumption about her mental state. Most of us are not psychiatrists, and even if we were, none of us can make a diagnosis based on a Twitter feed. And it is Bynes’ prerogative to keep certain aspects of her life, including her health care, private.
For the sake of argument, we’re going to roll with the possibility, not the assumption, that Bynes may have bipolar and schizophrenia.
And on that note, I’m going to offer you a sobering statistic:
People with co-occurring bipolar and schizophrenia have one of the highest suicide attempt rates of any group. 70.6% of these individuals will attempt suicide in their lifetime.
You would think this would frighten us, and that we would be offering Bynes compassion on the mere basis that what she may be facing is, without a doubt, deadly.
Yet the vast majority of press and articles surrounding Bynes’ mental state seems to ignore the stark reality of her struggle, and instead, opt to mock her erratic and unusual behavior. Rather than recognizing that she may have an illness, they have turned mental illness into a spectacle to watch, enjoy, and ridicule.
We, as a culture, are alarmingly desensitized to the seriousness of mental illness, particularly when it affects celebrities. Whenever a famous person has a “breakdown,” or goes off to rehab, there is always a sensationalized headline and a gawking that we collectively do. We treat it like a performance to consume and be shocked by, to laugh at, to enjoy.
We have made mental illness into a form of entertainment, and this is reflected in the articles that have been written about Amanda Bynes as of late.
If no one has explained this to you, let me be the first to say that it is morally repugnant that we, as a society, are mocking mentally ill people.
If it is indeed true that Amanda Bynes has both bipolar and schizophrenia, she faces an uphill battle. These are both diseases with high mortality rates, and devastating symptoms that are difficult to treat. And while she faces these illnesses, the entire world is watching. To have the audacity of laughing and poking fun as she struggles with these painful disorders is truly disgusting.
It’s all fun and games until someone dies, as was the case with Robin Williams. When celebrities have very public “breakdowns,” we find them entertaining, sensational, intriguing. When celebrities die from these illnesses, however, we grieve for them, celebrate their lives, and profess our sympathy for their struggle.
Amanda Bynes may be battling two illnesses that could very easily kill her. Why is she not receiving the same level of respect, tact, and compassion that we afford those who have already died at the hands of these same illnesses?
Are we only deserving of dignity and respect if we die?
Does Amanda Bynes need to die by suicide before we will start valuing her life? How fucked up is that?
No matter what Bynes posts on twitter, or what wigs she wears, what we need to understand as outsiders is that something very difficult and frightening is happening to Amanda Bynes — and it is irresponsible to talk about it any other way, whether it’s to poke fun at it, or reduce it to her being “crazy.” In either scenario, it diminishes her personhood.
Why this reminder needs to happen is beyond me, but apparently it does: Bynes needs compassion, not ridicule, not laughter. Her struggles, whatever they may be, do not exist for your enjoyment.
Anyone who thinks an involuntary psychiatric hold is fun or amusing is horribly misguided. Anyone who thinks psychosis or paranoia is a walk in the park has clearly never been there. Anyone who thinks schizophrenia or bipolar is hilarious has never had their life devastated by these disorders.
I have. And I can tell you – there’s no pain on earth quite like it.
Anyone who has forgotten that Amanda Bynes is a human being first and foremost needs to step back, and do some serious soul-searching.
Any journalist or columnist who thinks Bynes’ behavior is great material for a lighthearted article needs to reexamine their motivations, and decide for themselves what kind of writer they want to be. Someone who profits off of someone’s pain? Or someone with integrity?
As someone with bipolar disorder, I want to offer a reminder to those who do not suffer from the disorder that making a mockery out of our struggle is dehumanizing. This should go without saying, but apparently it must be said: Mental illness is not a joke. Mental illness is not funny. Mental illness does not exist to amuse you.
If Amanda Bynes has taught us anything, it’s that mental illness can, in fact, touch anyone. It exists in every community, every city, every race, every social class, every gender. Celebrities are not immune to these devastating disorders. In fact, 13.6 million Americans live with a serious mental illness, and if Amanda Bynes is among them, she will need support and compassion to get through it.
What message are we sending, as journalists, bloggers, and writers, if we treat mental illness with the same brevity and amusement as writing about Kim Kardashian’s ass?
Did you cry when Robin Williams died, but laugh when Amanda Bynes was taken to the hospital? Why is that? I’m challenging you to really think about the ways that we treat folks with mental illness.
When we make these disorders into a joke, we become complicit in creating a culture where mentally ill people are taught to feel ashamed, isolated, and broken. And when we uphold that stigma instead of challenging it, it’s not surprising that so many people with these illnesses opt to take their own lives.
We need to do better. Not just for Amanda Bynes, but for all the people worldwide who suffer from these disorders.
It’s not a spectacle. It’s a goddamn illness.
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UPDATE (10/20/14): Due to the confusion surrounding the title, the article has been renamed from “It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Dies: Amanda Bynes, Robin Williams, and the Spectacle of Mental Illness,” to omit the first portion. The intent of the original title was to compare and contrast the treatment of celebrities before and after they die — never to suggest that Bynes had passed away.
UPDATE (10/22/14): A new article has been written in response to this piece going viral.
UPDATE (11/9/14): Commenters have pointed out that co-occurring bipolar and schizophrenia is commonly referred to as “schizoaffective disorder.”
UPDATE (11/14/14): There is now an animated version of this article!
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As of 11/15, comments have been disabled on this article.Homeless man Nick has been begging and sleeping rough on the capital's streets for nearly two months.
Beggars are increasingly choosing to move to Wellington because its residents are seen as generous.
That contrasts markedly with how Wellingtonians see beggars: 75 per cent of them perceive begging on the street to be "a bit of a problem" or worse.
As begging increases in the city, Wellington City Council has commissioned strategic design consultancy ThinkPlace to compile a $50,000 report on beggars, with the aim of finding what it calls "a sustainable solution".
It follows the $40,000 it spent in 2013 on the "alternative giving campaign", which asked the public not to give money to beggars, but instead to donate spare change or online funds to services that could help people on the streets.
Council community services manager Jenny Rains said that campaign "went well" but did not change the behaviour of "generous Wellingtonians", so the latest initiative was another way of looking at the problem.
ThinkPlace service designer Ben McCarthy said begging was on the rise in central Wellington and the "understanding beggars initiative" would look at the relationship between retailers, residents and beggars.
Some beggars were opportunists who specifically targeted Wellington, he said.
"Wellington is seen as a good place to beg because people are seen as generous, it has good social services and beggars are not forced out by legislation."
The $50,000 report was prompted by "concerning results" from the council's biennial Quality of Life survey last year.
It showed three-quarters of people living in Wellington were worried about begging, compared with only 24 per cent in Christchurch, 26 per cent in Dunedin, and 28 per cent in Lower Hutt.
Businesses have been leading the way in demanding action from the council.
First Retail Group managing director Chris Wilkinson said retailers were mindful there was a real need among some beggars, but also a degree of opportunism.
When shoppers avoided an area because of beggars, it hit business, livelihoods and employment, he said. "It is time for council to act decisively."
The ThinkPlace report is expected to be completed before January and brought to council in April to consider actions and solutions.
Possible solutions attempted elsewhere included a bylaw to ban begging. City councillor Simon Marsh said that was an option to consider, but he was not keen on it.
If a bylaw was introduced in the central city, beggars might go to other places such as Kilbirnie, which already had problems with beggars.
READ MORE: Kilbirnie seeks liquor ban to ward off drunks and beggars
Rains said the council would look at ways to address "the prevalence of people in the street who need help".
"A bylaw has not been effective elsewhere, so they may look at creating more activities and services."
Wellington City Mission chief executive Michelle Branney said begging was becoming more visible in the city. Many beggars had homes and were on benefits, but it was not enough.
Sometimes money was not the solution. She advised talking to individual beggars and asking about their stories to see if something more sustainable and practical could be done to help them.
Wellington area commander Inspector Chris Bensemann said police worked closely with the council on the issue of "vagrants".
BEGGAR'S MECCA?
Nick has been begging on the streets for about two months with no benefit.
He ended up in Wellington after his 10-year-old son lost a five-year battle with cancer, and he lost his job as a machinist in Christchurch.
After cleaning up the drugs and alcohol, he was promised a job in Wellington, which fell through, and he says he has been sleeping rough while a social agency tries to get him into a flat.
About $30 a day will feed him and his two dogs and he says he won't solicit for more money once he has what he needs. On Thursday, he got nothing.
Not all Wellingtonians were generous, but those that were gave freely, he said.
"There are a lot of people out there who do give and are generous, I'm not knocking them. Are Wellingtonians generous? Yes and no."Syrian rebel fighters have been pictured eagerly unpacking Chinese-made surface-to-air missile launchers understood to have been smuggled into the country by African arms dealers.
Taken in a remote area north of the city of Aleppo, the photographs show fighters from the Free Syrian Army assembling FN-6 anti-aircraft missile launchers for use against soldiers loyal to the Assad regime.
The Chinese-made weapons are thought to have been provided to the Free Syrian Army by sympathisers in Qatar, who are likely to have purchased them from dealers with links to corrupt officials in the Sudanese government, before having them smuggled into Syria through Turkey.
Weapons: Fighters from the Free Syrian Army eagerly assemble an FN-6 anti-aircraft missile launcher for use against soldiers loyal to the Assad regime
Power: The Chinese-made weapons are thought to have been provided to the FSA by sympathisers in Qatar
The exact source of this particular batch of Chinese-made weapons is not immediately clear, although only a handful of nations possess the FN-6 - most of them in Asia.
Sudan is known to have purchased a large number of FN-6s from China and - despite international arms embargoes and the government's strong relations with Assad's allies in Iran - many of them appear to have ended up the hands of the Free Syrian Army.
Last year the New York Times tracked a Sudanese shipment of Chinese-made anti-aircraft missiles and newly manufactured small-arms cartridges to rebel fighters in Syria.
The weapons are likely to have been sold directly to Sudan by weapons manufacturers in China. FN-6 missiles were displayed at Sudan's Independence Day military parade of 2007.
Once in Sudan, the weapons can fall into the hands of either corrupt officials or local warlords, who offer them for sale on the international black market, where wealthy Qataris, Jordanians and Saudis who oppose Assad's regime can purchase them and have them shipped directly to rebel groups.
Unboxing: The exact source of this particular batch of Chinese-made weapons is not immediately clear, although only a handful of nations possess the FN-6 - most of them in Asia
Arms: Free Syrian Army sympathisers in Qatar are likely to have purchased the weapons from dealers with links to corrupt officials in the Sudanese government, before having them smuggled into Syria through Turkey
It is highly unlikely the Free Syrian Army would have purchased the surface-to-air missile launchers directly from China, who along with Iran and Russia maintain good relations with the Assad regime.
Nor is it feasible that the rebels acquired the weapons in their usual method - from regime soldiers that have either abandoned their posts or defected to the FSA.
The Syrian regime has no record of using the FN-6, although it does hold approximately 4,235 surface to air missile launchers from different manufacturers.
Specially designed to engage low flying targets, the FN-6 is considered China's most sophisticated surface to air missile launcher to date.Mormon Discussion’s podcast production is certainly not connected to The Mormon Church aka The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It also is most assuredly not approved or endorsed by Intellectual Reserve, Inc or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Any of the awesome content or the solid opinions expressed, implied or included in Mormon Discussion Inc’s awesome podcast lineup and production are solely those of Mormon Discussion Inc. and/or its program hosts and not those of Intellectual Reserve, Inc. or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Mormon Discussion Inc is a 501(c)(3) and is in the arena of journalistic work and is part of a free press. A free press is fundamental to a democratic society. It seeks out and circulates news, information, ideas, comment and opinion and holds those in authority to account. The press provides the platform for a multiplicity of voices to be heard. At national, regional and local level, it is the public’s watchdog, activist and guardian as well as educator, entertainer and contemporary chronicler. Under the “fair use” defense, however, another author may make limited use of the original author’s work without asking permission. Fair use is based on the belief that the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials for purposes of commentary and criticism.
The fair use privilege is perhaps the most significant limitation on a copyright owner’s exclusive rights.
Subject to some general limitations discussed later in this article, the following types of uses are usually deemed fair uses:Catholic bishops expressed concern on Friday over what they dubbed “serious flaws” in a Republican-sponsored bill that would repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
Writing to members of Congress, Bishop Frank J. Dewane, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops committee on domestic justice, said that while the measure, called the American Health Care Act, or A.C.H.A., contains some “commendable” aspects, including limiting federal funds for some healthcare providers that perform abortions, it also contains “serious flaws.”
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“Regarding access for those most in need, the AHCA includes changes which place many people at significant risk,” Bishop Dewane wrote. “The legislation must be modified to correct these serious flaws.”
In particular, the bishops take issue with a component of the bill that would cut back on Medicaid funding, which covers insurance for low-income Americans.
“The legislation must be modified to correct these serious flaws.”
Republican Congressional leaders have argued that their replacement for Obamacare, which has covered anywherebetween 10 and 20 million Americans since it became law in 2010, would bring down the costs of health insurance and allow more people to purchase plans on the open market.
But critics say the measure, which would end penalties for Americans who forego buying health insurance, will adversely affect poorer Americans who rely on government subsidized plans.
A recent non-partisan Congressional review confirmed those fears, projecting that up to 24 million Americans could lose insurance coverage over the next 10 years if the bill is passed.
“Proposed modifications to the Medicaid program, a vital component of the social safety net, will have sweeping impacts."
Bishop Dewane’s letter, dated Mar. 17, calls for modifications to the legislation that would protect those plans.
“Proposed modifications to the Medicaid program, a vital component of the social safety net, will have sweeping impacts, increasing economic and community costs while moving away from affordable access for all,” the letter states.
The letter notes that “struggling families” will be adversely affected by the proposal, “without clear indication of affordable, adequate coverage to replace their current options.
“Congress must rework the Medicaid-related provisions of the ACHA to fix these problems and ensure access for all, and especially for those most in need,” it continues.
Other parts of the bill the bishops take issue with include a tax credit system, in which Americans would receive tax credits to help pay for health insurance. Various analyses of the plan show that the system would benefit younger and wealthier Americans most, with higher costs expected for the poor and the elderly.
In the letter, bishops say the plan “appears to create increased barriers to affordability, particularly for older and lower-income people.”
Two Catholics in Congress traded barbs recently about the merits of the proposed legislation.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan called the Obamacare replacement “an act of mercy” earlier this month, prompting Rep. Joseph Kennedy III todescribe the measure as “an act of malice.”
“With all due respect to our speaker, he and I must have read different scripture,” Mr. Kennedy said. “The one that I read calls on us to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, and to comfort the sick. It reminds us that we are judged not by how we treat the powerful but by how we care for the least among us.”
Back in January, when Congressional Republicans began crafting the bill, Catholic bishops wrote a letterurging them to ensure that Americans would not lose health insurance under any new laws. They noted in that letter that they object to certain Obamacare provisions that provide federal funds for contraception, which has resulted in lawsuits from several Catholic entities, including dioceses, universities and hospitals.
Those concerns were reiterated in the more recent letter.
“The ACA is, by no means, a perfect law,” it states. “The Catholic Bishops of the United States registered serious objections at the time of its passage.”
It says the new legislation “honors a key moral requirement for our nation’s health care policy” by “restricting funding which flows to providers that promote abortion,” a reference to an ongoing bid by some members of Congress to defund Planned Parenthood.
Still, it states that the new plan, “in attempting to improve the deficiencies of the ACA, health care policy ought not to create other unacceptable problems, particularly for those who struggle on the margins of society.”
The House of Representatives willvote on the legislation on Thursday.
The letter concludes by quoting Pope Francis, who has said health care is “not a consumer good, but a universal right which means that access to healthcare services cannot be a privilege.”acidification, hedonistic, industrialism, ocean, water
Education in the present era gives utmost priority to foresight. They teach you to think ahead and submit your soul to slavery for the purpose of industrialisation. If you see through this tomfoolery, rejecting subjugation then you’re labelled a slacker who doesn’t know what’s essential for survival. The hypocrisy becomes increasingly evident when the masters overseeing the industrialisation conveniently pay no heed to warnings pertaining to our finite resources. The war over oil comes to mind as a shining example of this inefficiency in societal management.
Contrary to popular belief, the human body is not made up of oil. Another liquid functions as the fundamental building block of life throughout our rocky planet. Water, as I had already mentioned in a previous post, is the front-runner for displacing gold as the most precious substance on the face of the planet. Yet, we consume this precious life-sustaining ambrosia without any concern of what it might entail for the coming generations. Life on earth is a never-ending relay system of handing over the planet, generation to generation, and it is always the prerogative of the older generation to give back a functioning planet to their children. This foresight eludes the present era. We have deemed space exploration too costly, instead focusing on military spending
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. Federal courts have specifically held public school coaches' participation in religious activities with their players unconstitutional."
FFRF asserted that Coach Smith's actions go well beyond the behavior held illegal by federal courts—including the 5th Circuit, the controlling court of appeals in Mississippi—since he organized a religious ritual and sermonized his players. His actions are especially problematic, since players in such a setting feel the need to conform to their coaches' expectations so as not to hurt their standing on the team.
By his actions, Smith sends the message that the coaching staff, and, by extension, the school district value Christian players above those who practice a minority religion or no religion at all. Newton and its schools are home to a diverse array of families, including parents and students who are non-Christian and nonreligious. The district has an obligation to make its activities welcoming and nondiscriminatory for all, not just its Christian majority.
FFRF requested that the Newton Municipal School District take appropriate steps to ensure that there are no further illegal events, such as baptisms, during school-sponsored events. It also asked that coaches and school staff be instructed that they can't organize or participate in religious activities with students while acting in their official capacity.
"Talk about 'pray to play,'" said FFRF Co-President Dan Barker. "Coaches who can't control their proselytizing impulses should not be employed by public schools."
Since receiving FFRF's letter, the school district's superintendent released an initial statement that highlights what it considers to be mitigating factors that justify Coach Smith's actions. But Grover says that those factors do not resolve the constitutional issue. Since the statement was released, Newton's attorney has been in communication with Grover and has resolved to discuss the state of the law with Superintendent You. "We are hopeful that the school district will decide on a course of action soon," Grover notes.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nontheist organization dedicated to the separation of state and church, with more than 23,000 members all over the country, including in Mississippi.
Update: On Oct. 26, Newton Municipal School District attorney Robert Logan communicated to FFRF that this issue has been addressed. Superintendent Young met with Coach Smith and all other district personnel to explain the importance of abiding by the Establishment Clause. The district does not expect that its faculty or staff will promote their personal religious beliefs to students in the future.All right, let's settle this: Is Twilight more powerful than Harry Potter in terms of social anticipation and buzz? Mashable spoke with two sentiment analysis companies to get a grip on how the social universe is responding to The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part One. We then asked them to compare Breaking Dawn, the first half of the series' final movie, to social sentiment around the final Harry Potter movies.
We hate have to say it but the winner is... Harry Potter.
Breaking Dawn is officially out in theaters but even all that residual buzz couldn't help it topple the Harry Potter movies. The good folks at Trendrr scoured the web and found that Twitter sentiment for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part One has been 41% positive, 7% negative and 52% neutral in the two weeks leading up to its release.
Trendrr found that Twitter sentiment for Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2 was 70% positive, 7% negative and 23% neutral in the two weeks leading to its release in July.
Those numbers were similar on Facebook where Twilight was 66% positive and 15% negative compared to Harry Potter, which was 72% positive and 7% negative.
The team at NM Incite narrowed in on the social response to Breaking Dawn on the day of its release and found that people were about 38% positive, 24% negative and 34% neutral.
We know what you're thinking, "How can you possibly compare these two blockbuster franchises! That would be like comparing wizards and vampires!"
Well, to you we say, that was an incredibly long, well-thought-out and an apt analogy. Before we get trolled to death, we are not passing judgment on which movies are better nor are we taking sides. Anyone with an Internet connection knows that there is a long-running rivalry between Twilight fans and Harry Potter fans. The two fantasy series have had a friendly feud at the box office, but this competition has often spilled over into name calling and spats in the fan communities.
Some call the Twilight series vapid because of its emphasis on Bella and Edward's relationship. Harry Potter and its author J.K. Rowling have gotten flack for its plain writing style and sometimes stock characters. Regardless on where you land on the spectrum, both series have no doubt had an enormous impact on generations of people. Even if you hate vampires, wizards, werewolves and dragons — don't we all win if the books encourage more kids to read?
Now it's your turn. What does the sentiment analysis say about the two series? And can we all be happy that more kids are reading or should we be more concerned with what they are reading?Credit: public domain
In The BMJ's Christmas edition this week, a study identifies the genetic origin of the ability to smell the strong, characteristic odor in human urine produced after eating asparagus.
A team of U.S. and European researchers found hundreds of variants in the DNA sequence across multiple genes involved in sense of smell that are strongly associated with the ability to detect asparagus metabolites in urine.
They say more research is needed to understand why such food results in a particular odor, and what selective pressures would result in such a significant genetic predisposition to be able to smell - or not smell - the metabolites.
Asparagus is considered a delicacy, but it's also known to produce a distinctive odor in urine. Not everyone can detect the odour of metabolites (methanethiol and S-methyl thioesters) produced by consumption of asparagus.
The researchers, led by Sarah Markt and Lorelei Mucci at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, set out to determine whether genetic factors are important in the ability to smell the odor.
Their study involved 6,909 men and women of European-American descent from two cohorts: the Nurses' Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study.
Findings show that 40% (2,748/6,909) of participants agreed that they could smell a distinct odor in their urine after eating asparagus, and 60% (4,161/6,909) said they could not and were labelled as 'asparagus anosmic'.
The researchers linked information from genome wide association studies on over 9 million genetic variants with the asparagus anosmia trait.
They discovered 871 particular variations in DNA sequence, known as single nucleotide polymorphisms, on chromosome 1 which were associated with being asparagus anosmic. These genetic variants were found in several different genes responsible for sense of smell.
They also found that a higher proportion of women reported they were unable to detect the odor, compared to men, despite women being known to more accurately and consistently identify smells.
The researchers suggest that this unexpected result might be due to under-reporting by a few modest women, or because they might be less likely to notice an unusual odor because of their position during urination.
Study limitations include self reporting of odor, rather than an objective measurement, although this is unlikely to explain their findings, and the sample focusing on people of European descent, so it's unknown whether the same genetic variants predict asparagus anosmia in other ethnicities.
The authors explain that "our findings present candidate genes of interest for future research on the structure and function of olfactory (sense of smell) receptors and on the compounds responsible for the distinctive odor produced by asparagus metabolites."
"Future replication studies are necessary before considering targeted therapies to help anosmic people discover what they are missing."
They also note that asparagus provides a rich source of iron, fiber, zinc, folate, and vitamins A, E and C, and consumption is thought to reduce risk of cancer, cognitive impairment, and cardiovascular related diseases.
Therefore, they call for research to "consider using these identified single nucleotide polymorphisms to better understand how a lifetime of eating asparagus might protect people from developing chronic conditions."
Explore further Eating asparagus may prevent a hangover, study finds
More information: Sniffing out significant "Pee values": genome wide association study of asparagus anosmia, The BMJ, www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6071 : Sniffing out significant "Pee values": genome wide association study of asparagus anosmia, The
Provided by British Medical JournalPhil Young: "Mainframed - The Forgotten Fortress" (BSides Las Vegas 2012) (Hacking Illustrated Series InfoSec Tutorial Videos) Phil Young: "Mainframed - The Forgotten Fortress" Mainframes? Unix? TSO (not the chicken)? This talk will try to demystify the mainframe from "that cool big black box"" to "why the hell is NOMIXEDCASE turned on" or "what kind of moron uses 1234 as their password?". Most fortune 500 companies use mainframes, but don't put them through the same rigorous testing as they would their Linux or Windows systems? Why, imagine if you were running Windows XP for 20+ years with all these little addons and custom changes and the only guide to securing your customized OS was four thousand pages long, without pictures. Thats what Mainframe security folks face. This talk will give an overview of how to actually use a mainframe (should you encounter one), how IBM decided to hash z/OS passwords and how to crack them offline using JtR (including the scripts/JCL to get a copy of the password file off the mainframe), how to compile Netcat for z/OS so you can use the Mainframe to pivot on to the corporate network or to create a backdoor on to the mainframe and how you can run a mainframe at home on your own PC.
Download:
http://archive.org/download/BsidesLasVegas2012/2.2.0PhilYoungMainframed-TheForgottenFortress.avi
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Printable version of this articleGreetings, gentlemen–connoisseurs of the finer (but definitely not superior) gender. In this special collaborative (and hopefully not last…) article, we, the experts, evaluate and look at the most sexy, seductive, sensual, steamy, sizzling, sensational, salubrious, and svelte women of Runeterra. So please, keep it classy (and in your pants): we the writers of No ELO present the first annual (??) Sexiest in Runeterra Pageant.
Atenthirtyone’s Pick – LeBlanc
There are two factors that make LeBlanc perhaps the sexiest Runeterran champion in the League. The first is that she, for the most part, is an antagonist in the League of Legends storyline. There’s no mistake that she is ruthless and lusts… for power. She is a “bad girl” but unlike the other bad girls of Runeterra. There are other Noxian female champions (sisters Cassiopeia and Katarina) but neither show anything deeper than being eye candy. Cassiopeia is shallow and vain, while Katarina is stubborn and a brute. On the other hand, LeBlanc displays elegance, class, and character.
Secondly, LeBlanc isn’t just a classy femme fatale, but also a mysterious woman of unknown goals and desires. It is perhaps what we do not truly know and understand that compels us want to know more. LeBlanc symbolizes the desire to find out about something we like, but still retain that aura of mystery. Overall, LeBlanc is not only incredibly physically attractive (see her Prestigious Skin), but also has depth and mystery.
Qqwerthy’s Pick -Nidalee
Nidalee is clearly the most fit and athletic female champion around. Have you seen her at a track and field meet during the javelin toss? Not to mention she goes on long jogs through the woods daily. But the best thing about her is she isn’t all muscle. She has a mind for the future and wants to go green. She is all about saving the jungle, so you know she is liberal and a bit of a hipster, which is pretty sexy.
Nidalee carries herself with a feline grace that exudes an aura of dominance. But you can tell there is more to her than just her wild side. She is refined and civilized. Whether it be dining with Egyptian royalty or prancing around French mansions, she is an elegant, cultured woman.
Who am I kidding, this is the real reason:
TheWoeBringer’s Pick – Leona
Leona is the obvious pick for sexiest Runeterran. First off she has proportions that allow her to physically exist in this world–which is already better than 99 percent of champions (but that’s just semantics). She’s also wicked hot. How hot you ask? Approximately 5505 Degrees Celsius of hot. Now I’m no “temperaturologist” but that’s a lot of hotness. That can come in handy too. Regular tubs become hot tubs, regular pants become hot pants, regular dogs become fucking hot dogs. Delicious. When you go out with her she’ll be positively stunning. Everyone will have to stop and stare for about 1.25 seconds. Finally, with those gorgeous red locks she’ll always be looking radiant.
Leona is my pick for sexiest Runeterran because she’s the hottest thing around.
KingofGob: Poppy
Poppy, How I Love Thee
While she may not be the most beautiful of the Yordles, Poppy proves that true sex appeal lies in a woman’s power. She’s a diplomat, she’s a warrior, she’s a blacksmith and she’s not afraid to get her hands dirty, if you catch my drift ::wink:: wink::. She knows exactly how to focus solely on one man and how to make him feel needed (I see her targeting Sona a lot, so I get the feeling that a threesome is possible). The way she heroically charges to her man to give him a devastating blow makes her a Paragon of Demacia and I for one would love to witness her abilities first hand.
DamnDirtyCat’s Pick – Anivia
Exotic women are always a turn on because of their voice, and in Runeterra she’s as exotic as it gets. As a Cryophoenix, she brings a number of advantages to the field of sexy. First off, she’ll never get old. The ability to resurrect rejuvenates her youth, keeping her voice at an attractively mature age forever. Second, any food she serves is guaranteed to be nice and cold. Imagine her luscious voice calling you over for a cold brewski. I’m on board with that. Third, her area denial has some pretty steamy applications. You try to leave the bedroom, only to be walled off by Anivia, seductive words lecturing you about the difficulty of laying eggs… she just sends a chill down my spine. Anivia also makes a great ice sculpture decoration at parties when she’s not using her incredibly delightful voice.
Did I mention her sexy voice? It’s hot.
Anonymous Contributor’s Pick – Orianna
First, it needs to be said that Orianna spends all of her time handling balls. This experience doesn’t necessarily transfer literally, but it had to be said. They say there’s no accounting for taste; Orianna can not only account for anyone’s taste, she can reprogram herself to cater to it! Consider also Orianna’s skins – one is a metallic being, suited to those who like their women a little rough around edges; second is her Sewn Chaos skin, available to those who prefer a softer touch; last is Gothic Orianna – and honestly, who doesn’t like an alternative chick?
Orianna is the clockwork lady, programmed to both ravage and protect.
Jisho23’s pick – Ezreal
I’m not sure why everyone chooses these huge breasted bimbos and sluts. Ezreal is a lady with some class and dignity. She doesn’t have to bother showing midriff or cleavage: based upon her figure and curves alone you can tell Ezreal has a rockin’ bod. And short hair? I know that can be a turn off for most people, but the combination of short hair and goggles just shows how practical she is. This is a lady who does not mess around. To boot, Ezreal’s skillcap is among the highest in the game—she’s hard to get, complicated, and ultimately rewarding. It goes without saying that Ezreal is hand’s down, bar none, the sexiest champion to ever grace the Fields of Justice.Police dogs in Toronto will be getting armoured vests designed to protect them from sharp weapons.
The Toronto Police Services Board voted Thursday to accept an anonymous corporate donation of 18 of the vests.
The donor came forward after Lonca, a canine with the force, was seriously injured last year by a suspect armed with a machete.
The donor is buying the vests — designed to protect a dog's major internal organs if attacked with a sharp or blunt object — from Line of Fire Defence Systems in Edmonton at a total cost of more than $22,000.
Line of Fire spokesman Duncan Horner says the company is awaiting sizing information and will be manufacturing the armour and harnesses in the next few weeks.
The Toronto force's canine unit has been in existence since 1989 and currently has 22 officers and 33 dogs.Are You Being Served? is an Australian sitcom that is based on the British sitcom of the same name; it was produced by Network Ten. A total of 16 episodes were produced in two series, which aired in 1980 and 1981. The draw-card was the presence of actor John Inman reprising his role of Mr. Humphries from the original series. The other characters were all directly based on the regular characters in the show's original British version, but were all given new names. hence there were no other returning original actors.[1]
In comparison to the original series, Inman described this version of the series as "tighter - there's less padding." [2]
For the opening theme, Inman himself performed vocals.
Premise [ edit ]
Mr Humphries (Inman) is sent to Australia by Mr. Grace to work temporarily for his Australian cousin Mr. Bone at Bone Brothers. Apart from the new setting and Australian rather than British characters, the characters and situation are almost identical to that of the original series, as are the set design and layout and even the costuming (down to the senior sales woman's ever-changing hair colours). Menswear and ladies apparel share a floor of a large city department store and the departments came into regular conflict. The staff on the floor are the pompous floor-walker Captain Wagstaff (Reg Gillam), crusty senior salesman Mr Mankowitz (Anthony Bazell), randy sales junior Mr Randel (Shane Bourne), strident older sales woman Mrs Crawford (June Bronhill) and attractive but brassy and common younger sales woman Miss Buxton (Judith Woodroffe). Basil Clarke portrays the store's owner Mr Bone, Reg Evans is the obnoxious cleaner Mr Cocker, Kerry Daniel plays the nurse, and Tracey Kelly is Bone's attractive secretary.
Cast [ edit ]
John Inman as Mr. Humphries
June Bronhill as Mrs. Crawford
Reg Gillam as Captain Wagstaff
Judith Woodroffe as Miss Buxton
Christine Amor as Miss Nicholls
Tony Bazell as Mr. Mankowitz
Shane Bourne as Mr. Randel
Peter Collingwood as Mr. Dunkley
Ken Fraser as Mr. Fenwick
Basil Clarke as Young Mr. Bone
Reg Evans as Mr. Cocker
Kerry Daniel as Young Mr. Bone's Nurse
Tracey Kelly as Young Mr. Bone's Secretary
Bernadette Gibson as the Canteen Manageress
Both Judith Woodroffe (Miss Buxton) and Peter Collingwood (Mr. Dunkley) were unavailable for series two so they were replaced with Miss Nicholls (Christine Amor) and Mr Fenwick (Ken Fraser) respectively.
Character similarities with the original series [ edit ]
Mrs Crawford = Mrs. Slocombe
Captain Wagstaff = Captain Peacock
Miss Buxton/Miss Nicholls = Miss Brahms
Mr Mankowitz = Mr Grainger (with some characteristics of Mr. Goldberg)
Mr Randel = Mr Lucas/Mr Spooner
Mr Dunkley/Mr Fenwick = Mr Rumbold
Young Mr Bone = Young Mr Grace
Production notes [ edit ]
The first series was produced at the ATV-0 studios in Melbourne in the early months of 1980.[3]
It was the first television role for opera singer June Bronhill. (Her first straight dramatic acting role had been in a theatre production the previous year.) John Inman said, "It's amazing to think this is her first television role, she's a natural." Bronhill discussed the role with TV Week magazine. "I'm delighted with the way my character has turned out. Mrs Crawford tries to be very refined but sometimes the ocker in her slips out. The British version of Are You Being Served? has always been my favourite comedy series. And I loved Mollie Sugden's performance as Mrs Slocombe, my counterpart." [3]
For the second and final series, produced in late 1980, original regular cast members Judith Woodroffe, who was Mrs Crawford's attractive junior Miss Buxton, and Peter Collingwood who had played the Mr Rumbold-like store manager Mr Dunkley, were unavailable. To replace them, Christine Amor was the new, brassy young female retail assistant Miss Nicholls, and Ken Fraser came in as Mr Fenwick.
Christine Amor said of the series that "Are You Being Served? is one of the few TV comedies we are making in Australia and that's sad. In the days of My Name's McGooley, What's Yours? we had real Australian humour. But we have been very much influenced by overseas countries. Are You Being Served? is popular because people identify with a department store. It has no Australian idioms and it is a take off of the English series, but there is this sort of colonial thing where people enjoy English humour. I've always enjoyed it. I like English comedies, I think they're far superior to American comedies." It was Amor's first acting job before a live television audience. "I look at John Inman because he's been doing TV comedy for 10 years and been a comedian for 25 years. He's got it down to a fine art. But it is an accomplished skill which you keep on learning. I've learned a lot from John. The basic hint he gave me was to enjoy it and to have a rapport with the audience." [4]
Actress Abigail guest starred in one episode as a perfume company sales woman installed on the shop floor, whose presence disturbs the head of men's wear and the head of ladies' wear. Abigail's character then does a strip tease to reveal a skimpy costume. Abigail said of the guest spot that "I took this role because I very much wanted to work with John Inman and I have a high regard for the series itself. Besides, I thought it would be a fun proposition." [5]
Episode list [ edit ]
Except for "Undesirable Alien", the plot of each episode is based on the corresponding episode of the original series.
Season 1 [ edit ]
Ep1: Get Fit Down Under, Mr. Humphries (based on "Strong Stuff, This Insurance")
Ep2: The Hero
Ep3: Mrs Crawford, Senior Person
Ep4: The Agent
Ep5: The Apartment
Ep6: The Junior
Ep7: The Punch and Judy Affair
Ep8: Anything You Can Do
Season 2 [ edit ]
Ep9: Dear Sexy Knickers
Ep10: Camping In
Ep11: Our Figures Are Slipping
Ep12: Heir Apparent
Ep13: Front Page Story
Ep14: Undesirable Alien
Ep15: Diamonds are a Man's Best Friend
Ep16: His and Hers
Legacy [ edit ]
The series never ran outside of Australia and thus was not seen in the UK or other countries where Are You Being Served? was popular, such as Ireland, the United States, Canada, and New Zealand.
The series has not been repeated on Australian television since the late 1980s. (The UK original Are You Being Served? had been repeated by ABC Television in Australia several times.[6] By 1978 it had been repeated by Channel Seven in Australia to even larger audiences.[7])
In a recurring joke on the radio show Get This, it was stated that only the loss of the master tapes for the series is preventing its release on DVD. The National Film and Sound Archive does in fact contain copies of each episode in its vault.A big thanks to everyone who attended last week's webinar on NativeScript 3.0! We are always happy to see such an engaged community around NativeScript. It truly is you who have helped make this open source project into what it is today.
The entire NativeScript Developer Relations team (Jen Looper, TJ VanToll, Sebastian Witalec, and Rob Lauer) put on quite a show, giving you the inside scoop on everything 3.0:
Major performance improvements for both iOS and Android apps;
Enhancements to our Chrome Dev Tools integration;
Support for Angular 4 (sorry, it's "just Angular" now 😄);
The just-released Microsoft CodePush plugin;
NativeScript CLI updates and improvements;
Progress NativeScript UI updates;
Sneak peak at our roadmap for 2017;
...and...🥁...the announcement of NativeScript Sidekick!
Be sure to read the original NativeScript 3.0 release post for even more information.
ICYMI
If you missed the webinar last week, no sweat, it's up on YouTube for you to view:
Questions
Once again we leveraged Twitter to handle all of our Q&A for the event. You can actually go back in time (well, not literally) and check out all of the questions and answers by looking up the #askNativeScript hashtag.
One of my favorite questions was:
As I can use Angular2 in NativeScript, is it possible to use any other JS framework? #AskNativeScript — Razafinirina (@tsilavina) May 17, 2017
And the answer? NativeScript was built in a manner to make it extremely flexible and not be tied to a specific framework (hence the ability to use Angular today, or not). It just so happens that we have a community-run initiative to add Vue.js support! Look for more news on this subject in the coming weeks and months.
What's Next?
If you're new to NativeScript, your first stop should definitely be to try one of our two end-to-end getting started tutorials:
Also, keep an eye on the public roadmap, as we will be continually updating it to show you what is in store for NativeScript in 2017.SAN FRANCISCO---Privacy and security are in a necessary but inevitable tension, reflected former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton while speaking at data storage and software provider Nexenta's OpenSDx Summit on Thursday.
Culture clashes on privacy; Silicon Valley, the government and you Culture clashes on privacy; Silicon Valley, the government and you Attitudes to commercial and government information-gathering reveal contrasting levels of trust and the existence of different privacy trade-offs. Read More
Proposing this debate has been going on in the United States since the days of the Founding Fathers (with Clinton trading out "privacy" for "liberty"), Clinton observed how concerns over privacy reached a fever pitch following the revelations about the National Security Agency last year.
"There's no doubt we may have gone too far in a number of areas, and those [practices] have to be rethought and rebalanced," Clinton said about the surveillance liberties given to government agencies following the attacks on September 11.
At the same time, Clinton countered that we live in a world with a lot of "bad actors" who have access to the same technology as ordinary Internet users. By extension (and with a little work), those bad actors could also have access to the same sensitive data.
"I think it's fair to say the Government, the NSA, didn't so far as we know cross legal lines, but they came right up and sat on them," said Clinton. "It could perhaps mean their data was being collected in metadata configurations, and that was somehow threatening. We have to be constantly asking ourselves what legal authorities we gave to the NSA and others and make sure people know what the tradeoffs are."
Clinton lamented that "probably the most frustrating part of this whole debate" is trying to convey that the United States is not the only country trying to manage and balance these conflicts. She explained how on diplomatic visits to China and Russia, for example, she and her staff couldn't take any personal devices off the plane in fear of the devices being hacked.
"We need to make it clear to other countries that our technology companies are not part of our government," Clinton said.
"They're so good," Clinton laughed, speculating the devices and stored data would be breached within a "nanosecond."
Clinton also emphasized the Federal Government does not use personal data for commercial purposes -- insisting other governments do.
"We need to make it clear to other countries that our technology companies are not part of our government," Clinton said. "I know this may sound a little too hopeful, but there needs to be a global pact about surveillance."
Clinton praised how many tech companies in the Bay Area are pioneering new technologies from education to healthcare and beyond, telling the packed ballroom of a few hundred high-tech executives to think how about experts here in Silicon Valley fixed Healthcare.gov, making the synergy possibilities obvious.
Admitting the U.S. Government is "woefully behind" on upgrading to next-generation technology, Clinton noted that under her tenure at the State Department, it was difficult for employees to even have access to a BlackBerry.
"I'm not an expert on software-defined storage or the intricacies of cloud computing," Clinton quipped.
But Clinton insisted she has learned enough to understand the value of these advancements, advising we must make smart choices and investments inclusive as well.
"Too many American families are losing ground and losing help," Clinton remarked. "We've lost the historic link between productivity gains and wage gains that people can actually see in their paychecks and feel in their wallets."
Clinton reminded that many Americans are still feeling the pains and struggles brought on by the 2008 recession.
"Too many American families are losing ground and losing help," Clinton remarked. "We've lost the historic link between productivity gains and wage gains that people can actually see in their paychecks and feel in their wallets."
The Internet revolution helped the United States bounce back and reach unprecedented growth during the 1990s, described the former First Lady. It wasn't just the dot-coms, Clinton argued, but the gains the Internet brought to all kinds of industries not necessarily considered "high tech."
Clinton postulated cloud computing is doing the same thing today. Championing the business potential of big data as well, Clinton cited that the United States is home to one third of all data in the entire world.
"That's a major competitive advantage," Clinton asserted, highlighting how GPS and weather data has already benefited business and productivity gains for everyone from "farmers to truckers."
Clinton added that given this recession, there should "be an extra effort made to fill jobs with people already here" -- native-born or immigrant, regardless. Then, she suggested, is the time to expand programs for H-1B visa workers.
"There has to be some sensitivity to that, but it's doable," Clinton posited.
While touching briefly upon the unrest in Ferguson, Mo. this month, Clinton stressed the need for the tech world's innovation and creating to achieve a better world.
Secretary Clinton has made numerous appearances in the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley over the last several months, feeding rumors about fundraising for a potential 2016 presidential campaign bid.
In April, the former New York senator also stopped by Marketo’s customer conference in San Francisco.
Clinton explained over the course of less than half an hour how she sees marketing driving innovation and the role it plays in promoting both economic prosperity as well as diplomacy.“It is for Parliament, not the courts, to expand the scope of criminal liability for this offence,” wrote the majority from the bench.
Given all this, the Supreme Court very clearly suggested that Parliament fix this issue.
Last year, the Supreme Court of Canada threw out a bestiality charge against a man, agreeing with his lawyers that Canada’s bestiality laws were rooted in the antiquated notion of buggery — the same law formerly used to criminalize homosexuality — and did not include oral sex.
Ottawa cannot give a timeline for when it intends to re-criminalize bestiality, saying simply “it is something we’d like to get done.”
Read more
Ottawa cannot give a timeline for when it intends to re-criminalize bestiality, saying simply “it is something we’d like to get done.”
Last year, the Supreme Court of Canada threw out a bestiality charge against a man, agreeing with his lawyers that Canada’s bestiality laws were rooted in the antiquated notion of buggery — the same law formerly used to criminalize homosexuality — and did not include oral sex.
Given all this, the Supreme Court very clearly suggested that Parliament fix this issue.
“It is for Parliament, not the courts, to expand the scope of criminal liability for this offence,” wrote the majority from the bench.
“You haven’t missed anything.”
Except Ottawa hasn’t done that. While there have been repeated updates to the Criminal Code over the last 14 months, including one dealing specifically with sexual assault, the government has not touched the bestiality provisions.
“You haven’t missed anything,” said the director of communications for Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould. “Our Government intends to review issues pertaining to animal cruelty provisions, including expanding the definition of bestiality and the definition of animal fighting in the Code.”
Asked for a timeline on that plan, and whether anything had been drafted, Wilson-Raybould’s office wouldn’t say.
“It is something we’d like to get done, but I can’t give you a precise timeframe.”
Camille Labchuk, the executive director of Animal Justice — who intervened in the Supreme Court case — has requested a meeting with the justice minister on this file, but says she was punted down to the minister’s policy advisors. That meeting still hasn’t taken place.
“The government has done literally nothing to close this disturbing loophole in the 14 months since the decision came out,” Labchuk told VICE News
Labchuk points out that the fix is really quite simple. By simple adding a definition of bestiaility, one that defines it as any sexual activity between a person and animal, Ottawa could remedy the loophole.
“We’re stuck in the last century and falling behind the rest of the world.”
“We’re stuck in the last century and falling behind the rest of the world,” says Labchuk.
The House of Commons has already voted down one attempt to fix the criminal law, which was included in a wider piece of animal rights legislation introduced by a backbench Liberal MP
The Supreme Court weighed in on the issue last June, when it struck a conviction for a man who molested his underage daughter, including forcing his dog to perform oral sex on her, and recorded it. While he was ultimately acquitted of the bestiality charges, he was convicted of numerous other sexual offences.
The court, obviously, didn’t approve of the actions, but found that their hands were tied.
The original version of the law made it clear, the majority of the judges concluded, that bestiality essentially meant “buggery with an animal,” and therefore applied only to penetrative sex. When Parliament updated Canada’s bestiality laws in 1955 and again in 1988, it changed and updated the language but failed to actually expand the scope of the law itself.
The failure to expand the definition of bestiality, the court ruled, must have been intentional.A letter from Brendan Behan, a ballot paper with Michael Collins among the candidates, and correspondence relating to Douglas Hyde, Patrick Pearse and Thomas Ashe are among items in the Conradh na Gaeilge collection that is being deposited to NUI Galway this week.
The 124-year-old archive of the State’s oldest Irish-language organisation offers “an unparalleled insight into linguistic, cultural, social and political aspects of Ireland’s past", according to Dr John Walsh of the university’s school of languages, literatures and cultures.
Founded in 1893, with Douglas Hyde as its first president, Conradh na Gaeilge was closely associated with the Gaelic revival. Hyde proposed that it become a political party with the sole aim of electing TDs who would support Irish. This contrasts with his earlier belief in the apolitical, nonsectarian nature of the organisation and with his wish that Irish not be used as a “cloak for politics”, Dr Walsh notes.
The letter from Behan, written in Irish and signed as Breandán Ó Beacháin in May 1956, is on headed paper from what is now Theatre Royal Stratford East, the producer Joan Littlewood’s London theatre. The typewritten letter tells the Conradh that his play The Quare Fellow is being staged there and suggests that London-based Gaeilgeoirí might be interested, as there is a “good bit of Irish” in it.
The London-branch material, which includes the ballot paper for a committee with Collins among the candidates, also contains a flyer for an aonach, or sale, of Irish manufactured goods in the Prince’s Hall, Lambeth Baths, during November 1913, with the headline “We are a practical nation”.
Other correspondence includes a letter from Elphin, in Co Roscommon, that suggested the Conradh na Gaeilge should advise the new Dáil.
Conradh na Gaeilge archive: the Brendan Behan letter
A Co Clare member of the first Gaeltacht Commission, in 1925-26, Pádraig Ó Cadhla, wrote that, no matter who was “King of Ireland”, Conradh na Gaeilge would be needed in the future, as there would always be people who would neglect Irish. Another Co Clare member called for Irish to be made obligatory for public office and in banks and commercial concerns.
The leading Conradh member Risteard Ó Foghludha suggested deepening ties with other Celtic countries. “We will never succeed,” he said, unless Irish was spoken by “the priest, the school teacher, the postman, the doctor and the Peeler”, or policeman.
Conradh na Gaeilge archive: the ballot paper on which Michael Collins is a candidate
Dr Walsh says
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on the school in July, 2011.
The Hurricanes concluded a 7-6 season with a 35-3 loss to Wisconsin in the Pinstripe Bowl. Richt's first season in Miami in 2016 produced a 9-4 record and a Russell Athletic Bowl (now Camping World Bowl) win over West Virginia. Miami won its last 5 games of 2016 and the first 10 games of 2017, but has since fallen apart. The 'Canes are just 7-9 in their last 16 games. Richt leaves with a 26-13 record over-all and a 16-8 mark in the ACC. He has a career record with Georgia and Miami of 171-64.
The Troy Trojans of southeast Alabama on Friday (January 11th) presented Auburn's 2018 offensive coordinator Chip Lindsey as their new head coach, He was Troy's QB coach in 2010, then returned to high school coaching the next two seasons. He was an Auburn OA in 2013, but was hired by Todd Monken as his OC at Southern Miss for 2014-2015 before holding that same post at Arziona State for a year. Lindsey had accepted the offensive coorinator at Kansas abck in December.
At Troy, Lindsey succeeds Neal Brown whose teams won 10 or more games in each of the last 3 seasons, including 3 bowl victories. He was 35-16 in four seasons and 23-9 in Sun Belt games. His pass-first offense has been dubbed the "NASCAR Spread", though the passing game only ranked 81st in the nation this past season and accounted for only 536 more yards than the running game (2,799 to 2,263).
Brown was hired away from Troy on Friday, January 4 as Dana Holgorsen's successor at West Virginia. Holgorsen resigned on January 2 to fill the opening at Houston. The move came after his 8th season in Morgantown produced a 3-4 finish after a 5-0 start. The Houston job became available when Major Applewhite was unceremoniously let go on December 30 after his team went 1-4 down the stretch to finish 8-5. Both teams were soundly defeated in their respective bowl game with WVU bowing to Syracuse 34-18 and the Cougars getting blown out 70-14 by Army. Holgorsen was the OC and QB coach under Kevin Sumlin in 2008-2009 when Case Keenum threw for over 10,600 yards in two seasons with 88 TD passes. Holgorsen was first hired as the head coach in waiting in December 2010 and he replaced Bill Stewart the following year. In his 8 seasons as head coach, Holgorsen posted a not-so-spectacular record of 61-41 overall and 38-32 in conference play. This past year's 8-4 mark was actually his second-best season with the Mountaineers. Stewart was 9-4 in each of his 3 seasons at WVU. As for Applewhite, his first head coaching gig ends with records of 15-11 overall and 10-6 in the American Conference.
On Friday, December 14 Akron announced Tom Arth as the successor to Terry Bowden. Bowden was fired on Sunday, December 2 after a 4-8 season, the school's worst showing since going 1-11 in his inaugural year at the helm in 2012. Bowden led the Zips to their only bowl win in history in 2015 at the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl. He also guided the program to the MAC Championship game last season (lost to Toledo). He leaves with records of 35-52 overall and 23-33 in the MAC. Arth is a graduate and former quarterback of John Carol University near Cleveland where he set every major passing record. As a player, he spent time in the NFL, the WFL the CFL and Arena Football but never found success. He returned to John Carroll has the head coach from 2013-2016, before spending the last two seasons as the head coach at Tennessee-Chattanooga. He was 40-8 with the Wildcats and 9-13 with the Mocs.
North Carolina State offensive coordinator Eliah Drinkwitz was announced as the new head coach at Appalachian State on Thursday, December 13. The 35-year-old succeeds Scott Satterfeld who resigned to take the same position at Louisville (announced December 3). At Louisville, Satterfeld filled the vacancy left by the firing of Bobby Petrino on November 11, two days after the Cardinals fell to 2-8 with a 54-23 loss to Syracuse. Petrino was 77-35 in nearly 5 full seasons with the Cards. This was Petrino's second stint at Louisville as he also served as head coach from 2003-2006, amassing a 41-9 record. Lorenzo Ward was named interim head coach for the final 2 games of the season which Louisville lost 52-10 to N.C. State and 56-10 to Kentucky. Satterfeld was 10-3 with Appalachian State, including a 30-19 win over Louisiana-Lafayette in the first Sun Belt Championship game which was hosted by the Mountaineers. For the 5 years he coached Appalachian State as a FBS team, Satterfeld was 47-16 overall and 34-6 in the Sun Belt. He began his stint with the Mountaineers by going 4-8 in the school's final FCS season in 2013. Appalachian State named defensive line coach Mark Ivey the interim head coach for the bowl season.
The FCS's most successful program in recent history, North Dakota State, has lost head coach Chris Klieman to Kansas State. Klieman's hiring was announced December 10th but he didn't take full control until his Bisons finished their run in the FCS playoffs where he led them to their fourth national title in his five seasons with the Fargo school (beat eastern Washington 38-24 in Frisco, Texas). Kleiman leaves the FCS tied with Jim Tressel (Youngstown State) for the most national titles at that level. Overall, NDSU has won 7 of the last 8 FCS championships. Klieman replaced Craig Bohl at NDSU when Bohl left to become head coach at Wyoming.
Klieman succeeds a legend at Kansas State after Bill Snyder announced his retirement December 2. Snyder has over 40% of all wins in the program's history. The school is 471-600-35 in its football history, but Snyder ended his 30-year reign with a record of 215-117-1. Furthermore, 19 of the school's 21 bowl appearances came under Snyder, including all 9 bowl victories. Snyder briefly retired from 2006-2008 but was called back into service after the 'Cats went 17-20 in those three seasons under Ron Prince. 2018 produced KSU's first losing regular season (5-7) since Snyder's return to the sideline. At 79, Snyder has had recent health issues. He was one of just four current head coaches inducted into the College Football Hall Of Fame. Fittingly, Kansas State plays at Bill Snyder Family Stadium after the field venue was named in his honor at the end of his 2005 season when it was thought he was heading into permanent retirement.
News of Gary Andersen returning to Utah State originally broke on Sunday, December 9 and he was officially introduced as the 'new' head coach two days later. Andersen was the Aggies' head coach from 2009-2012. When he was hired the first time around, Utah State had just finished an 11th-straight losing season and had been to 5 bowl games in its history (none since 1997). He wound up going 26-24, including 11-2 in his last season, with a 1-1 bowl record. His OC, Matt Wells, took his place and he led the Aggies to five more bowl games before he was announced as Texas Tech's new head coach on November 29. Wells left with a 44-34 record in his 6 seasons, including 10-2 this year. Utah State named assistant head coach Frank Maile as interim head coach for the New Mexico Bowl season where the Aggies rolled over North Texas 52-13.
When Andersen departed Utah State in 2012, he did so to replace Bret Bielema at Wisconsin where he went 20-7 before surprisingly opting to leave for Oregon State after just two seasons. The situation with the Beavers didn't work out and he was just 7-23 when he and the school mutually agreed to part ways halfway through the 2017 season. Andersen spent the 2018 season as the assistant head coach at Utah.
At Texas Tech, Wells replaces Kliff Kingsbury who was handed his walking papers on November 25. In six seasons, Kingsbury guided the team to just 3 bowl games with the only win coming in his inaugural season in 2013 which was also his best overall season at 8-5. He amassed a 35-40 record, including 16-5 in non-conference games, but just 19-35 in the Big 12. Texas Tech finished 5-7 in 2018 after beginning the year at 5-2. Kingsbury landed on his feet when he was hired as the offensive coordinator at USC on December 4, but came out smelling even more rosy when the NFL's Arizona Cardinals tapped him as their head coach on January 8.
Liberty on Friday, December 7 introduced Hugh Freeze as its new head coach. The scandal-riddled Freeze was hired by the same athletic director, Ian McCaw, who had to resign from Baylor in 2016 amidst all of the fall-out from the massive sexual harassment and rape investigations. Freeze was forced out at Ole Miss in 2016 as a messy trail of public relations issues and NCAA violations dating back to the Houston Nutt era came to a head when it was learned that Freeze had several calls to an escort service found on school-issued phone. The NCAA also cited numerous violations by Freeze and his staff from October 2012 to January 2016 and leveled the most serious charge of lack of institutional control. In response, Ole Miss self-imposed a 2017 bowl ban and other restrictions. The NCAA on December 1 announced its penalties which added 2018 to the bowl ban and a further reduction of scholarships.Freeze was 39-25 in five seasons, but 5-7 in 2016.
Colorado on Wednesday, December 5 hired Georgia defensive coordinator Mel Tucker. He replaces Mike MacIntyre who was fired on November 18, a day after the Buffaloes lost their sixth straight game following a 5-0 start. Kurt Roper was named interim coach for the season finale at Cal which the Buffs lost 33-21 to finish 5-7. MacIntyre was 30-44 overall with the Buffaloes, but just 14-39 in PAC-12 games. 8 of those 14 league wins came in the 2016 season when MacIntyre led Colorado to the conference championship game and was named Coach of the Year by the AP.
Charlotte on Wednesday, December 5 announced Will Healy as the new coach of the 49ers. The school fired Brad Lambert on November 18. The first and only head coach of the 49ers oversaw the development of the program and its quick ascent from the FCS to the FBS. He was 5-6 in each of two seasons as an FCS Independent, but had never won more than 4 games in any of his four seasons at the FBS level - until he coached the team one last time when Charlotte visited FAU in the season finale and upset the Owls 27-24 to finish his last season with a 5-7 record, including 4-4 in conference games. His overall was 22-48 and his final conference mark was 8-24. Healy, who turns 34 in January, spent the last three seasons as the ehad coach of Austin Peay where he was 13-21 with an 0-11 first campaign, an 8-4 second campaign and a 5-6 third campaign.
Urban Meyer on Tuesday, December 4 announced his retirement from Ohio State and presented Ryan Day as his successor. Meyer's retirement became effective after defeating Washington 28-23 in the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day. While Meyer was serving a suspension at the start of the season for the lack of action taken earlier in the Zach Smith domestic abuse allegations, Day went 3-0 as interim head coach..Smith was the tight ends coach who was fired in July after a judge issued a protection order that forbade Smith from getting within 500 feet of the accuser who is now his ex-wife. Meyer says the sole reason for his retirement is a health issue he disclosed to reporters in October - an arachnoid cyst in his brain, which causes frequent headaches.
The Smith 'issue' was not the only stain on Meyer's resume during what has been an illustrious coaching career when measured in wins and losses. In fact, Zach Smith was a Graduate Assistant under Meyer at Florida in 2009 when the first instance of abuse came to light - shoving his pregnant wife against a wall.
Among the scores of arrests of Gator football players were the more agregious matters of star RB Chris Rainey texting that it's "Time to die, B----" to an ex-girlfriend, and the ultimate cancer, Aaron Hernandez.
In 2013, Hernandez was enjoying life in the NFL with New England when he was arrested in the offseason for the murder of Odin Lloyd who was dating the sister of Hernandez' fiance. In 2017, Hernandez hung himself in prison after receiving a life sentence for murder.
At Florida, Hernandez was arrested or questioned by police more than once, and he was only one of the 31 Gator players who ran afoul of the law during his tenure. Their alleged crimes included aggravated stalking, domestic violence by strangulation, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and fraudulent use of credit cards. Many were pleaded down and never went to trial.
Far fewer issues of that ilk have been reported at Ohio State where the biggest have been Coach Smith and former star running back Carlos Hyde who was suspended for 3 games for the alleged assault of a woman at bar for which the charge was later dropped.
After the announcement of Meyer's retirement, the college football universe largely glossed over or ignored the litany of 'bad things' that occurred under his management. They speak glowingly of a stellar won-loss record (187-32) and three national titles (two with Florida in the 2006 and 2008 seasons and one with Ohio State in the 2014 season). No one is wrong to tout his accomplishments, but omitting the problems that occurred under his watch are akin to once again sweeping them under the rug.
Suffice it to say, it's a clouded legacy that Meyer leaves behind.
Mike Locksley was officially announced on Tuesday, December 4 as the new head coach at Maryland. He replaces interim head coach Matt Canada who served in that capacity in place of A.J. Durkin who was suspended in August, welcomed back for a day on October 30, and then fired on October 31. Durkin was suspended August 11, pending a review of the death of redshirt freshman Jordan McNair, an offensive lineman. McNair collapsed on May 29 while running as a punishment, and died June 13. The school's reinstatement of Durkin was met with a strong backlash from members of the student body, government officials and even some team players. In the wake of that response, the school decided it was in the best interest of the university to fire Durkin. At the time of the firing, Canada had led Maryland to a 5-3 record. However, the Terps fizzled down the stretch and finished the season 5-7. Maryland looked past the fact that Locksley was suspended as the head coach at New Mexico for punching an assistant where he also got in hot water over an age and sexual harassment lawsuit that was curiously later withdrawn. He was 1-5 as the interim head coach of Maryland when Randy Edsall was fired in 2015, and he was 2-26 at New Mexico. That's a career head coaching mark of 3-31. If we were grading hires, this one would have a tough time getting above a 'D', especially when Canada deserved to be rewarded with the full-time position.
As of Monday, December 3, Mike Houston is the new man in charge at East Carolina, face with the task of lifting up a program that has gone 14-34 over the last 4 seasons and just 7-25 in the American Conference. Houston has been the head coach at FCS member James Madison for the prevbious seasons, winning the 2016 national championship, losing in then 0217 national championship game, and finishing 9-4 this season for an overall record 37-6. The Pirates fired Scottie Montgomery on November 29 after a 3-8 season and finished the season two days later with a 58-3 loss to N.C. State with defensive coordinator David Blackwell serving as the interim head coach. Montgomery was 9-26 overall and 4-20 in American conference games.
Florida State offensive coordinator Walt Bell was hired Monday, December 3 as the new head coach at UMass. On November 21, UMass announced the mutually agreed upon resignation of Mark Whipple. That action came following a 4-8 campaign in Whipple's 5th season since returning as head coach in 2014. Whipple was reprising the role he held from 1998-2003 when the Minutemen were playing at the 1-AA (now FCS) level and won the 1998 national championship. Whipple was 49-26 during that stint. However, he was only 16-44 the second time around.
Turner Gill unexpectedly retired from Liberty on Monday, December 2, citing the need to care for his ailing wife whom the Roanoke Times website (roanoke.com) reported was diagnosed with a heart ailment in 2016. Liberty completed its first season as a FBS school (Independent) with a 6-6 record. The former Nebraska star quarterback (1980-1983) was a head coach for 13 seasons - 4 with Buffalo, 2 with Kansas and 7 with Liberty. He was 72-84 overall.
Former Florida head coach Jim McElwain is the replacement for John Bonamego at Central Michigan, the school announced on Sunday, December 2. Bonamego was dismissed on November 23, following a 51-13 loss to Toledo that ended the worst season in Chippewas' history. CMU was just 1-11, and 0-8 in the MAC, sending Bonamego packing with an overall record of 22-29, including 15-17 in the conference. The Chips went bowling in each of his first three seasons, but never finished better than 8-5 and lost all 3 bowl games. CMU hasn't been to a bowl game since 2012 and is just 3-8 all-time in bowls.Central Michigan last won its division in 2009 when the school went on to defeat Ohio in the conference champion game. The Chippewas also won MAC Championship games in 2006 and 2007 and are 3-0 in the championship format era of 1997-present. McElwain was 22-12 when he was fired halfway through his third season at Florida (2015-2017) and was 22-16 while rebuilding the Colorado State program from 2012-2014.
Scot Loeffler, a former Michigan Wolverine QB (1993-1996) who has held offensive coordinator or QB coach assistant positions at several major schools, was hired Wednesday, November 28 as the new head coach at Bowling Green. He has been the OC/QB coach on Steve Addazio's staff at Boston College since 2016. Prior to that, he spent 3 years with Frank Beamer at Virginia Tech. Mike Jinks was fired by Bowling Green on October 14 and Carl Pelini was named interim head coach for the remainder of the season. The Falcons were 1-6 overall and 0-3 in the MAC at the time of Jinks' dismissal. Pelini is a long-term assistant at multiple schools and was the former head coach of FAU where we went 5-15 in less than two full seasons from 2012-2013.
Jake Spavital was announced on Wednesday, November 28 as the new head coach of Texas State,. The West Virginia offensive coordinator gets his first head coaching job, replacing Everett Withers who was fired on November 18, a day after losing by just 5 points to heavily-favored Troy, 12-7. Unfortunately, one close call against a much better team doesn't save you when you are 7-28 after nearly 3 full seasons, and just 2-21 in the Sun Belt. Chris Woods was the interim coach for the season finale at home vs. Arkansas State which the Bobcats also lost.
Mack Brown was confirmed on Tuesday, November 27 as the new hire for a second stint at UNC. The 67-year-old will be inducted into the College Football Hall Of Fame on December 4. He resigned under pressure from Texas 5 years ago. Brown was 69-46-1 in 10 seasons at North Carolina from 1988-1997, but never won an ACC title. He replaced John Mackovic at Texas in 1998 and won Big 12 conference titles in 2005 and 2009 and played for the BCS National Championship in both of those seasons, beating USC in the first and losing to Alabama in the second. He was 158-48 at Texas.
North Carolina fired Larry Fedora on Sunday (November 25) after a 2-9 season. Fedora's Tar Heel teams were 40-25 through his first 5 campaigns (26-14 in the ACC), but was only 5-18 over the last two seasons (2-14 in the ACC). The Tar Heels won the Coastal division title in 2015 and lost 45-37 to Clemson in the ACC Championship game, and followed that loss with a 49-38 setback to Baylor in the Russell Athletic Bowl in Orlando.
Tyler Helton was named on Tuesday (November 27) as the new head coach at Western Kentucky. Helton, who spent the past season as the offensive coordinator at Tennessee, was the offensive coordinator at WKU under Jeff Brohm in 2014 and 2015. If the name Helton is familiar, yes, that is USC head coach Clay Helton's younger brother. The Hilltoppers announced the firing of Mike Sanford on November 25, a day after the team finished the 2018 season with its worst record (3-9) since Willie Taggart's first season in 2010. Sanford was the offensive coordinator at Notre Dame when he was hired away from the Irish after the 2016 season. WKU was 6-7 in his inaugural year, falling under.500 with a loss to Georgia State in the Cure Bowl.
Kansas announced November 18 that Les Miles would take over as head coach following the season. Current head coach David Beatty was told in early November that he would not be retained for 2019, but was asked to coach out the season. At the time of Miles' hiring, Beatty's record was 3-8 for the season and 6-41 over 4 seasons with a Big 12 mark of just 2-33. Les Miles was 114-34 in a little more than 11 seasons at LSU from 2005-2016, and his 2007 team won the BCS national championship. He was fired from his post in Baton Rouge four games in to the 2016 season.
2018 Coaching Changes
Team 2017 Coach (Record) 2018 Coach (Record) Arizona Rich Rodriguez (7-6) Kevin Sumlin (5-7) Arizona State Todd Graham (7-6) Herm Edwards (7-6) Arkansas Brett Bielema (4-8) Chad Morris (2-10) Central Florida Scott Frost (13-0) Josh Heupel (12-1) Coastal Carolina I Jamey Chadwell (3-9) Joe Moglia (5-7) Florida Jim McElwain (3-4), I Randy Shannon (1-3) Dan Mullen (10-3) Florida State Jimbo Fisher (5-6), I-B Odell Haggins (2-0) Willie Taggart (5-7) Georgia Southern Tyson Summers (0-6), I Chad Lunsford (2-3), Chad Lunsford (1-0) Chad Lunsford (10-3) Kent State Paul Haynes (2-10) Sean Lewis (2-10) Louisiana-Lafayette Mark Hudspeth (5-7) Billy Napier (7-6) Mississippi Hugh Freeze (5-7, 2016), I Matt Luke (6-6, 2017) Matt Luke (5-7) Mississippi State Dan Mullen (8-4), B Greg Knox (1-0) Joe Moorehead (8-5) Nebraska Mike Riley (4-8) Scott Frost (4-8) Oregon Willie Taggart (7-5), Mario Cristobal (0-1) Mario Cristobal (9-4) Oregon State Gary Andersen (1-5), I Cory Hall (0-6) Jonathan Smith (2-10) Rice David Bailiff (1-11) Mike Bloomgren (2-11) SMU Chad Morris (7-5), Sonny Dykes (0-1) Sonny Dykes (5-7) South Alabama Joey Jones (4-8) Steve Campbell (3-9) Tennessee Butch Jones (4-6), I Brady Hoke (0-2) Jeremy Pruitt (5-7) Texas A&M Kevin Sumlin (7-5), B Jeff Banks (0-1) Jimbo Fisher (9-4) UCLA Jim Mora (5-6), I-B Jedd Fisch (1-1) Chip Kelly (3-9) UTEP Sean Kugler (0-5), I Mike Price (0-7) Dana Dimel (1-11)
Arizona hired Kevin Sumlin on January 14 as head coach to complete a domino effect of changes that began on November 26 when he was fired by Texas A&M. The Aggies subsequently plucked Jimbo Fisher from Florida State on December 1, leading the 'Noles to hire Willie Taggart away from Oregon on December 5 after just one season with the Ducks. Oregon filled its position from within by promoting co-offensive coordinator Mario Cristobal on December 8, just 3 days after handing him the interim tag. The Arizona job became vacant when Rich Rodriguez was fired on January 2.
Rodriguez' dismissal came in the wake of a sexual harassment claim that could not be substantiated after an outside law firm investigated the allegation. Rodriguez denied the allegation and the complainant declined multiple requests to participate in the investigation. Nonetheless, the school said it was "in the best interest of the University of Arizona and our athletics department to go in a new direction". Arizona completed a 7-6 season with a loss to Purdue in the Foster Farms Bowl. Rodriguez was 43-35 over 6 seasons with the school, but just 24-30 in PAC-12 play. His best year came in 2015 when the Wildcats won the league's south division title in 2015, but lost 51-13 to Oregon in the conference championship game before falling 38-30 to Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl to finish the year 10-4.
Sumlin was considered to be a prize catch by Texas A&M after he had led Houston to a 12-0 record in 2011 before the Cougars fell to Southern Miss in the Conference USA Championship game. He left Houston with a 35-17 record.
At Texas A&M, Sumlin was 51-26 in 6 seasons, but barely above water in SEC games at 25-23. His first team lost just 2 games, the second lost 4, and each of the last four teams have had 5 losses. The former Texas A&M assistant under R.C. Slocum in 2001 and 2002 was fired from the Aggies the day after a loss at LSU dropped the team to 7-5. Sumlin had led his teams to 9 bowl games in 10 seasons, though he didn't coach in Houston's 2012 Ticket City Bowl win or the Aggies' Belk Bowl loss in December. Tony Levine was Houston's head coach in the Ticket City Bowl win over Penn State, and Jeff Banks served as interim head coach for the Aggies' in a 55-52 loss to Wake Forest in the Belk Bowl.
Five days after Sumlin was fired from A&M, Fisher resigned from FSU and was immediately announced as the head coach of the Aggies. Florida State was just 5-6 when Fisher stepped down, but associate head coach and defensive tackles coach Odell Haggins led the team to a victory over Louisiana-Monroe the next day to get the school to a 36th straight bowl game. Haggins later led FSU to an Independence Bowl in over Southern Miss to save the 'Noles from suffering their first losing season since 1976 which was Bobby Bowden's first year at the school and his only losing campaign.
Fisher was 83-23 overall, 48-17 in the ACC, and 5-2 in bowl games and postseason playoff games. His teams won 3 straight ACC titles from 2012-2014, and the 2013 squad went 14-0 and won the last Bowl Championship Series (BCS) national title. The 2017 team was among the preseason favorites to win another national title, but lost starting QB Deondre Francois in an opening-day loss to Alabama. Florida State won only 3 of its first 9 games.
With Fisher headed to Texas A&M, the Florida State administrators needed just 4 days to secure Willie Taggart. Oregon had just completed a turnaround 7-5 campaign after the 2016 team had sunk to 4-8 under Mark Helfrich. The former Western Kentucky quarterback, and later WKU head coach, has quickly built a reputation as a man with great recruiting strengths and the ability to rebuild programs in a hurry. While his 47-50 overall record isn't scintillating, his final year at each of the three schools he's coached have produced winning seasons and a combined mark of 24-12.
Cristobal's promotion by Oregon was somewhat surprising as his only previous head coaching experience was at FIU from 2007-2012 where he was 27-47 over-all, 20-26 in the Sun Belt, and 1-1 in bowl games. Cristobal is the third head coach of Oregon in 3 years.
Taggart is now with his 3rd different team as head coach in just under a year. On December 10, 2016, he was the head coach at USF. On the 11th of December in 2016, he was the head coach at Oregon. On December 5, 2017, Taggart moved on to FSU.
Before Arizona's announcement of firing Rodriguez, the last empty seat on the 2018 coaching carousel had been filled on Monday December 18 when Kent State hired Syracuse's Sean Lewis to replace Paul Haynes. Lewis, a Dino Babers protege, served as the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach of the Orange for the last 2 seasons and also worked under Babers at Bowling Green and Eastern Illinois. Haynes was fired the day before Thanksgiving (November 23) following a 2-10 season and a 14-45 mark over 5 years at the school. He missed the first two games of 2017 while undergoing treatment for prostate cancer. Offensive coordinator Don Treadwell was acting head coach during that period.
Coastal Carolina announced on January 5th that Joe Moglia will resume his duties as head football coach in 2018 after taking a medical sabbatical during the 2017 season to fight an allergic reaction in his lungs. Jamey Chadwell served as interim head coach as the Chanticleers went 3-9 in their inaugural season in the FBS and the Sun Belt conference.
Louisiana-Lafayette hired Arizona State offensive coordinator Billy Napier as its new head coach on December 15, replacing Mark Hudspeth. The 38-year-old Napier is a former Furman quarterback who has also held assistant coaching positions at Alabama and Clemson. Hudspeth was fired on Sunday (December 3) after a 5-7 season. Hudspeth was 51-38 in 7 seasons, including 4-1 in the only bowl games the school has played in. However, NCAA sanctions for academic fraud and payments to players forced the school to vacate 22 victories from 2011-2014, including wins in the 2011 and 2013 New Orleans bowls.
Sonny Dykes was introduced as the new head coach at SMU on December 12, replacing Chad Morris. Dykes began his tenure with the Mustangs by losing 51-10 to one of the two teams that he previously led as head coach, Louisiana Tech, in the Frisco Bowl. Dykes was 22-15 in three seasons with Louisiana Tech from 2010-2012, ending his stint in Ruston with a bowl-less 9-3 campaign (the WAC only had 2 bowl spots available). He left Louisiana Tech to take over at California where he was fired on January 8, 2017 after four seasons that produced a 19-30 record with just one winning campaign.
Morris was announced as the new head coach at Arkansas on December 6. Hunter Yurachek was named the new Director of Athletics earlier in the day, leaving his Houston post where he was the Assistant Director of Athletics. Morris spent 3 seasons as the head coach at SMU, following a 4-year stint as the offensive coordinator at Clemson. He was 14-22 with the Mustangs, including an 8-16 mark in American Athletic Conference games.
Morris replaces Bret Bielema who was fired immediately after a 48-45 home loss to Missouri on Thanksgiving weekend (November 24). The loss dropped the Razorbacks to a 4-8 finish, including 1-7 in the SEC. in 5 seasons, Bielema's Arkansas teams were a pedestrian 29–34 overall, a woeful 11–29 in the SEC, and 1-2 in bowl games. Bielema left Wisconsin for the Arkansas job in December, 2012 when John L. Smith concluded a pre-arranged one-year campaign Smith stepped in when Bobby Petrino was fired after an April Fool's Day motorcycle accident uncovered an affair with a 25-year-old former Arkansas volleyball player whom Petrino hired to work in the football office. Bielema had significant success at Wisconsin, going 68-24 after replacing the program's savior, Barry Alvarez. In Madison, Bielema's teams were 37-19 in Big Ten games and 2-4 in bowl games.
Tennessee officials on December 7 confirmed the hiring of Jeremy Pruitt as its next head coach. Pruitt began his collegiate coaching career under Saban as the Director of Player Development in 2007 and worked his way up to defensive backs coach before getting his first defensive coordinator gig with Florida State for its 2013 national championship season. Then he was inexplicably off to Georgia for 2 years before returning home to 'Bama for the 2016-17 as the DC for Saban. Pruitt will reportedly stay on with the Tide through their Final Four playoff run while simultaneously handling his new UT head coaching duties. Pruitt replaces Butch Jones who was fired on November 12, the day after a 50-17 loss at Missouri dropped the Vols to 4-6 overall and 0-6 in the SEC. The Vols finished the season with two more losses after defensive line coach Brady Hoke took over in an interim capacity. Jones revitalized programs at Central Michigan and Cincinnati, leading to his hiring in Knoxville where his teams also showed improvement year-over-year until backsliding terribly in 2017. Tennessee was projected to go 9-3 overall and finish second in the SEC eastern division at 6-2.
South Alabama on December 7 plucked Steve Campbell from Central Arkansas where he was 33-15 in 4 seasons. He previously led Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College to a JUCO national title in 2007, and Delta State to the D-2 title in 2000. In 19 seasons as a head coach, Campbell is 159-53 with zero losing seasons. Campbell becomes just the second head coach in the short history of the football program which Joey Jones helped launch in 2009. Jones announced his resignation on November 20 and his 9-year stint ended with a loss at New Mexico State the following Saturday. Under Jones' guidance, South Alabama went 23-4 an a FCS independent over 3 seasons, then moved up to the FBS in 2012 where the Jaguars are now 29-46 overall, 18-29 in the Sun Belt and 0-2 bowl games. South Alabama was 4-8 this season.
UTEP on December 6 announced the hiring of Dana Dimel as head coach. Dimel was the head coach of Wyoming from 1997-1999, and Houston from 2000-2002, but has largely been an assistant coach at Kansas State for most of his career. He replaces Sean Kugler who was in the midst of his 5th season in El Paso when he resigned from his alma mater on October 1 after an 0-5 start. Kugler was 18-36 overall and 11-22 in CUSA games. Former UTEP head coach Mike Price (2004-2012) served as interim head coach for the final seven games and went 0-7. The Miners were the only FBS team to go winless in 2017.
UCF wasted no time naming a replacement for Scott Frost, announcing on December 5 that their new guy is Missouri offensive coordinator Josh Heupel. UCF's website touts the dramatic improvement of Missouri's offense under Heuple, noting that the Tigers ranked 124th in the nation in total offense in 2015. After
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leaving one core to almost keep up with Emacs and Chrome and Npm and JavaScript, someone said, "Errr… chatting with you is great but… uhm… no video today?"
?
No wonder the view count wasn't rising and everyone was bouncing! I had done 10 seconds of streaming, then I went blank?
But I think I came up with a generalized, albeit not fleshed out, approach to taking a vanilla React project and adding MobX or Redux for state management. You should think of the code samples in this article as pseudocode.
Let's say you've been a good programmer, and you’ve followed a faux flux approach even without a state handling library. React is good at encouraging that practice. If you didn't, you're going to have problems refactoring. If you followed it loosely like I did, you're going to have problems, but not quite as many.
You have a main component that is the source of truth. Child components have a bit of their own state, and they use callback chains to propagate changes back up the tree.
In theory, following the unidirectional dataflow paradigm: data/state flows down the tree, changes flow up the tree.
This is superb for example projects and small hierarchies, but it gets real messy real fast. You lose a lot of flexibility, and passing all those callbacks around gets old fast.
Oh, you want to make a global state change from a button deep down in this 10-step hierarchy? Better make all those components aware of what the tiny button is doing! Don't even think about moving it somewhere else.
That's where Redux or MobX step in.
First, you look at your App component's state. Let's say it has 5 important parts:
class App extends Component { state = { rawData : [ ], filteredData : [ ], filteringBy : null, filter : ( ) => true someRandomBool : false } ; } class App extends Component { state = { rawData: [], filteredData: [], filteringBy: null, filter: () => true someRandomBool: false }; }
You can deduce your entire component tree from the value of those 5 properties. If that's not true, then your refactor will require more steps, and most of them will hurt 🙂
Your next step is to create a Redux or MobX store. I'm going to show you MobX because I've been enjoying it a lot lately.
Looking at that state, you can guess that rawData, filteringBy, filter, and someRandomBool are the state properties. filteredData can be computed. It smells like filter might be computable as well, but it's on the fence.
In a MobX store, that looks like this:
class Store { @ observable rawData = [ ] ; @ observable filteringBy = null ; @ observable filter = ( ) => true ; @ observalbe someRandomBool = false ; @ computed filteredData ( ) { return this. rawData. filter ( this. filter ) ; } } class Store { @observable rawData = []; @observable filteringBy = null; @observable filter = () => true; @observalbe someRandomBool = false; @computed filteredData() { return this.rawData.filter(this.filter); } }
@observable is a decorator that makes a variable observable. That's MobX lingo for "I want stuff to happen when this changes". @computed is a decorator that makes the return value of a method observable and adds memoization.
So no matter how often you hit that function, it only executes when its result might change. Otherwise, it's as fast as a static value.
That's why we used to put computable stuff in this.state. To make things faster. I like this new approach because it tells anyone who cares what's a base state of the system and what's deducible.
After that, you go back to your App, replace state with a store, and make App an observer.
@ observer class App extends Component { store = new Store ( ) render ( ) { // change all this.state to this.store } } @observer class App extends Component { store = new Store() render() { // change all this.state to this.store } }
And you're done. Mostly.
From this point onward, you should use this.store instead of this.state, and you can ignore this.setState in favor of good old this.store.someRandomBool = true. MobX's engine will trigger a re-render on any component that is an @observer and touches that value.
Neat.
Tomorrow, we'll talk about refactoring that into actions so your business logic becomes an easy-to-understand state machine.
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It's where I go to shoot the shit about programming.Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks during a rally in Boston in October. (Darren McCollester/Getty Images)
Hours after being called a “wacko” by Donald Trump, Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders fired back Monday at the Republican front-runner, saying he was pushing “pathetic policies” designed to benefit billionaires such as himself at the expense of misguided working-class voters who support him.
Sanders and Trump have been engaged in an escalating war of words since Sunday, when the Vermont senator asserted during an appearance on “Face the Nation” that he is better-positioned than Trump to represent the economic interests of some the real estate mogul’s followers.
Trump opposes raising the minimum wage and supports some tax cuts for higher-income earners, positions that Sanders argued during the CBS program are contrary to the interests of Trump’s lower- and middle-class supporters. Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, has made that argument before, but it gained greater prominence with the Sunday show exposure.
[In Nevada, Sanders mocks Republicans for running to casino mogul for a financial lift]
On Monday morning, Trump took to Twitter to argue that if anyone is going to poach another candidate’s supporters, it’s him.
“Strange, but I see wacko Bernie Sanders’ allies coming over to me because I’m lowering taxes, while he will double and triple them — a disaster!” Trump tweeted.
Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump publicly insulted at least 68 people or groups in 2015, many of them multiple times. Here is a comprehensive list. (Gillian Brockell,Thomas LeGro,Julio Negron/The Washington Post)
Trump echoed those sentiments during a rally Monday night in Nashua, N.H., where he again called Sanders a “wacko” and warned that Sanders’s election would mean “massive, massive, massive tax increases” because he wants to “give everyone everything free.”
“I don’t think there’s too many Bernie Sanders people here,” Trump said, surveying his crowd.
[Trump’s latest targets: New Hampshire’s largest paper and its favorite candidate, Christie]
Sanders, who is seeking to upset Hillary Clinton in his bid for the Democratic nomination, responded following a rally of his own Monday night in North Las Vegas.
“Being called wacko by a pathological liar like Mr. Trump makes me think he is getting nervous that the American people are catching on to his pathetic policies, which include giving hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to billionaires like himself while refusing to raise the $7.25 an hour minimum wage,” Sanders said in comments relayed through a spokesman.
Sanders had previously called Trump a “pathological liar,” citing his debunked claim that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey were shown on television cheering after 9/11.
In remarks at his rally Sunday night, Sanders also took aim at Trump, citing his proposals to temporarily ban all Muslims from coming into the country and to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
“There are people out there, Donald Trump and others, who are attempting to do what demagogues have always done, and that is instead of bringing people together to address and solve the real problems that we face, what they try to do is tap the anger and the frustration that people are feeling and then divide us up,” Sanders told a crowd estimated at 3,200 people. “So we have a message to Trump and all the others out there who want to divide us up: No, we’re not going to hate Latinos, we’re not going to hate Muslims, we are going to stand together.”
The balance of Sanders’s speech was devoted to issues he’s been pushing for months, including addressing income inequality, reforming a “broken” criminal justice system and combating climate change.
His appearance at a North Las Vegas high school wrapped up a two-day swing through Nevada, which holds its Democratic caucuses on Feb. 20, shortly after the first two nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.The Erie Otters captured their second J. Ross Robertson Cup, 15 years after the first, and were able to do so on home ice. Every game was close, but the Otters were control for the majority of the series. Now, it’s on to win their first Memorial Cup!
May 4th - Home - W 2-1
Taylor Raddysh - 0G, 0A, -1
Erik Cernak - 0G, 0A, +1
Anthony Cirelli - 0G, 1A, +1
The Erie Otters opened the series with a solid victory, but nothing too flashy. The Otters scored both goals in the second and played some solid defense, keep the Steelheads to just 5 shots per period (4 in the first!). From GoErie.com:
They were workmanlike — or dare we say, effectively boring — from start to finish of a 2-1 win against Mississauga on Thursday in front of a Game 1 crowd of 5,087 at Erie Insurance Arena. For a club best known for its offensive skill, either description is fine. “I thought everybody was committed to playing good defense,” Otters head coach Kris Knoblauch said. “That’s the way we want to play. We want all four lines chipping in, and playing a little more aggressively. We know how much they use their three (top) lines, and we feel that if we use our depth a little more, maybe we can be a little more fresher and a little more aggressive.”
May 7th - Home - W 3-2
Taylor Raddysh - 0G, 0A, +1
Erik Cernak - No Points
Anthony Cirelli - 0G, 2A, +1
The Otters continue to play solid defense in the face of the hard shooting Steelheads. Winning the first two at home gives the Otters a huge advantage. With the series heading to the half full Hershey Centre in Mississauga, there won’t be much of a home ice bump for the fish. From GoErie.com:
Of course, it came off the stick of Warren Foegele, whose goal snapped a tie with 1 minute, 57 seconds left to seal a 3-2 win against Mississauga in front of 6,170 fans. And of course, linemate Anthony Cirelli made the pass that set up Foegele for the go-ahead score. They were the final pieces to the Otters’ plans to win the J. Ross Robertson Cup as league champion, a pair of Eastern Conference standouts who joined the club a week apart in moves made in the final week of the OHL’s trading period. But they should be first in line to claim the Wayne Gretzky ‘99’ Award as the postseason’s most valuable player. It would only be fitting if they shared it. “They’ve been huge for us,” Otters winger Alex DeBrincat said. “Both of them have pretty timely goals for us. Today again, Foegele with the breakaway goal. He’s been great for us. They’ve been working well together. They’re a huge part of this team.”
May 8th - Away - L 4-3
Taylor Raddysh - 0G, 2A, +1
Erik Cernak - 0G, 1A, -1
Anthony Cirelli - 1G, 0A, -1
The Steelheads took their first victory in the series at home, in front of one of their largest crowds for the playoffs yet. They forced the Otters to take all of their shots from the outside, while the fish got in close to the Otters net. From GoErie.com:
“We’ve been in Game 7s, elimination games, bad performances, good performances,” Knoblauch said. “We’ve played a lot of hockey the last four years. Dylan (Strome) has been here for all that, Darren Raddysh. Numerous guys have had a lot of hockey games (in that time). I think there’s a lot of confidence within our group that we can get the job done.” After goals from Nathan Bastian and Michael McLeod rallied the Steelheads to victory, the reigning Eastern Conference champions are ready to even this series on home ice, instead of having back to Erie for a potential season-ending Game 5 on Friday. “That’s the big thing we talked about too, to have confidence to go out there and play,” head coach James Richmond said of the third period. “We’ve earned our way here. We didn’t fluke it in here. We didn’t get here because of one player. We got here because our team is playing well. I told them to have confidence in themselves and in each other, and just focus on what we do right.” Meanwhile, it’s business as usual for the Otters, who have displayed a knack for rebounding from losses.
May 10th - Away - W 5-2
Taylor Raddysh - 0G, 0A, -1
Erik Cernak - 0G, 0A, +2
Anthony Cirelli - 0G, 1A
The Erie Otters came into this game on the 15th anniversary of their last OHL Championship, when the 2002 Otters defeated the Barrie Colts in five games and Brad Boyes was named payoff MVP. Erie played like a team that wants a week off before the Memorial Cup and burst out of the gate. Warren Foegele had five points and more goals that the Steelheads. From GoErie.com:
The Ontario Hockey League’s 124-year-old championship trophy could be the guest of honor for a celebration Erie has waited 15 years to experience for a second time, as the Erie Otters moved within a win of the second title in franchise history with a 5-2 victory against Mississauga in front of a Game 4 crowd of 4,418 fans at Hershey Centre on Wednesday. Now, the scene turns to Erie Insurance Arena for a potential clinching Game 5 on Friday at 7 p.m. “It’s a special night. We’ve never been in this position before,” Otters captain Dylan Strome said of a group that rebounded from a loss in Game 3 to take a commanding 3-1 lead in the best-of-7 series behind a career-high five points from Warren Foegele and a gutsy performance from Darren Raddysh, who overcame what initially appeared to be a serious knee injury in the first period to lead a banged-up and undermanned Otters’ defense. Alex DeBrincat contributed a goal and an assist, while Dylan Strome had a goal and assist to become the Otters’ all-time playoff scoring leader with 83 points.
May 12th - Home - W 4-3 OT
Taylor Raddysh - 3G, 0A, +2
Erik Cernak - 0G, 0A, +1
Anthony Cirelli - 1G, 2A, +1
Taylor Raddysh scored a hat trick and Anthony Cirelli scored the overtime winner as the Erie Otters captured their second OHL Championship on home ice last night. The Lightning prospects played the biggest games of their careers so far and now they’re taking some well deserved rest, before heading to Windsor for the 2017 Memorial Cup Tournament. From GoErie.com:
Nearly 15 years to the day when Courtney scored in Game 5 of the OHL Championship Series to clinch the Otters’ first title, Anthony Cirelli’s goal 2 minutes, 41 seconds into the extra period of Game 5 on Friday capped a 4-3 win against Mississauga and claimed the second J. Ross Robertson Cup in Otters’ history in front of a franchise-record crowd of 6,781 fans Friday at Erie Insurance Arena. “Just a lot of emotion,” Cirelli said of watching Courtney drop the ceremonial first puck, only to have those spine-tingling feelings topped during a sequence of events that began with 1:15 left in regulation, when Taylor Raddysh’s goal capped a comeback from a two-goal deficit and his first playoff hat trick, and ended with the power-play goal that sparked a celebration 15 years in the making. “I didn’t even know what to think,” captain Dylan Strome said of the moments after Raddysh’s tying score. “We settled down in the dressing room, and we got a power play and we capitalized. It’s been our bread and butter all year, and we came through.”
The Erie Otters now head to the 99th Memorial Cup Tournament. Their schedule is as follows:This is the first article a series exploring some of the technical challenges I encountered while writing my Agenda View Windows Phone app. My first topic is multi-level grouping. Surprisingly, doing this well turns out to be sufficiently hard that I’ll be writing four articles on it!
Note that although I'm discussing a phone app, most of the content in these articles is applicable to Windows 8 store apps and Universal apps.
In this first article, I’ll show the ListView control’s built-in grouping features, and explain why they’re not quite sufficient for this app. I’ll also show an alternative approach that enabled multi-level grouping with very little work, but which turned out to have problems when applied to real data. In later articles I’ll explain what I ended up doing instead.
The App’s Grouping Requirements
The app displays appointments grouped by both time and day. If you happen to have conflicting appointments that start at the same time, these will come under a single heading showing that time. And at a wide scale, all of the day’s appointments are grouped under a heading showing either the text TODAY, or the relevant date if the appointment is further out. I’ve annotated a screenshot to show precisely how grouping occurs:
I’ve outlined individual items in red. These are grouped by start time, as shown with the green outlines. And those time groups are in turn grouped by day, shown here with a blue outline. I’ve also shown the same hierarchy in a sort of treeview-like structure to the side.
Most items have a distinct start time—people usually try to avoid scheduling multiple simultaneous appointments, so you’d normally expect each time group to contain exactly one item. But sometimes collisions occur, and in this case, you can see I’ve got two items in the time group for 6:30pm near the top. That’s why I need an additional level of grouping within the day groups.
This logical structure was non-negotiable, because this is how the Calendar app used to show things (up until the Windows Phone 8.1 update removed the agenda view) and the entire point of my app was to provide something as close as possible to the original feature. However, this turns out not to be totally straightforward, because the ListView control available in store apps does not support multi-level grouping. (I can only assume that the original Calendar app didn’t use XAML.)
ListView’s Built-In Grouping
All of Microsoft’s XAML frameworks support grouping, but the way this works has changed with the introduction of WinRT (or ‘store apps’ to use Microsoft’s current name for apps that use this API), first for Windows 8, and now for Windows Phone 8.1. With all the other versions of XAML, you would enable grouping with something like this:
< CollectionViewSource x : Key ="src"> < CollectionViewSource.GroupDescriptions > < PropertyGroupDescription PropertyName =" Country " /> < PropertyGroupDescription PropertyName ="Town " /> </ CollectionViewSource.GroupDescriptions > </ CollectionViewSource >
In pre-WinRT XAML, your data source supplied a flat list of items, and you asked the CollectionViewSource to gather it into groups for you, according to one or more grouping criteria. The example above states that items should be grouped by the value of their Country property, and then within each country group, items should be grouped by the value of a Town property. (By the way, the Windows Phone version of Silverlight doesn’t support this properly. It accepts the XAML above, but it appears to ignore everything after the first level.)
But if you use WinRT (because either you’re writing a Universal app that targets both tablets and phones, or you’re writing a Windows 8 store app, or you’re writing a phone-only app and have chosen to use the ‘store app’ template instead of the Silverlight one) things are different. Data binding will not group the data for you. You must supply it with a collection of collections, e.g.:
public class CountryGroup : ObservableCollection < SourceData > { public CountryGroup( IEnumerable < SourceData > items) : base (items) { } public string Country { get ; set ; } }
If you have a flat list, you can build the groups easily enough:
IEnumerable < CountryGroup > groups = from item in SourceData.GetData() group item by item.Country into countryGroup select new CountryGroup (countryGroup) { Country = countryGroup.Key };
Next, you need a CollectionViewSource with grouping enabled:
< CollectionViewSource x : Key =" src " IsSourceGrouped =" True " />
You can then supply that with your group list, either in code behind:
var cvs = ( CollectionViewSource ) Resources[ "src" ]; cvs.Source = groups.ToList();
or you could hook it up with data binding. Either way, the goal is to supply a collection of collections to the Source property of a CollectionViewSource in which IsSourceGrouped is true.
With this in place, you can now use it in a ListView, and you provide a group style to determine how the group headings should appear:
< ListView ItemsSource ="{ Binding Source ={ StaticResource src }}"> < ListView.GroupStyle > < GroupStyle > < GroupStyle.HeaderTemplate > < DataTemplate > < TextBlock Text ="{ Binding Country }" FontSize ="40" /> </ DataTemplate > </ GroupStyle.HeaderTemplate > </ GroupStyle > </ ListView.GroupStyle > < ListView.ItemTemplate > < DataTemplate > < Grid Height ="80"> < Grid.RowDefinitions > < RowDefinition /> < RowDefinition /> </ Grid.RowDefinitions > < TextBlock FontWeight ="Bold" FontSize ="24" Text ="{ Binding Town }" /> < TextBlock Grid.Row ="1" FontSize ="20" Text ="{ Binding Address }" /> </ Grid > </ DataTemplate > </ ListView.ItemTemplate > </ ListView >
Running the app shows the data grouped by country, using the group header template to display the country name at the top of the group:
That group header is ‘sticky’ in that it stays put at the top of the list as you scroll through the group:
As you scroll into the next group, its header slides into place, pushing the header of the previous group out of the way. Here’s that transition in action, half way through:
That’s all very well, but there’s an obvious problem with my example: within each group, I have several items all with the same town or city name. I’d like to group those too.
We could try adding a second group class, and modifying the top-level one:
public class TownGroup : ObservableCollection < SourceData > { public TownGroup( IEnumerable < SourceData > items) : base (items) { } public string Town { get ; set ; } } public class CountryGroup : ObservableCollection < Town Group > { public CountryGroup( IEnumerable < Town Group > items) : base (items) { } public string Country { get ; set ; } }
The code to group a flat list of items is now a little more complex, thanks to having two levels, but it’s still the same idea:
IEnumerable < CountryGroup > groups = from item in SourceData.GetData() group item by item.Country into countryGroup let countryGroupItems = from item2 in countryGroup group item2 by item2.Town into townGroup select new TownGroup (townGroup) { Town = townGroup.Key } select new CountryGroup (countryGroupItems) { Country = countryGroup.Key };
But how do we present these nested groups? A glance at the ListView control’s GroupStyle property provides hope:
public IObservableVector < GroupStyle > GroupStyle { get ; }
As with longer-established XAML frameworks like WPF, the GroupStyle property is a collection. So you’d think we can provide a style for each grouping level, just like we would in WPF. Here’s a ListView with two group styles, and a correspondingly simpler item template:
< ListView ItemsSource ="{ Binding Source ={ StaticResource src }}"> < ListView.GroupStyle > < GroupStyle > < GroupStyle.HeaderTemplate > < DataTemplate > < TextBlock Text ="{ Binding Country }" FontSize ="40" /> </ DataTemplate > </ GroupStyle.HeaderTemplate > </ GroupStyle > < GroupStyle > < GroupStyle.HeaderTemplate > < DataTemplate > < TextBlock Text ="{ Binding Town }" FontSize ="24" /> </ DataTemplate > </ GroupStyle.HeaderTemplate > </ GroupStyle > </ ListView.GroupStyle > < ListView.ItemTemplate > < DataTemplate > < TextBlock FontSize ="20" Text ="{ Binding Address }" /> </ DataTemplate > </ ListView.ItemTemplate > </ ListView >
Sadly, this doesn’t work. Here’s the result:
That’s not quite what we wanted.
It turns out that the ListView is just ignoring the second group style. It’s only grouping to a single level, and it is treating those TownGroup objects as the list items. The TownGroup has no Address property, which is why the item template displays nothing. If I modify the item template to bind to Town (a property that is available on TownGroup ) instead of Address, I see this:
The effect is that I’ve got a list of towns grouped by country—just a single level of grouping. The ListView is oblivious to the individual items within each country group.
The bottom line is that ListView does not support groups of groups of items.
Lists within Lists
Anyone with much XAML experience will probably think of an obvious solution at this point: if the item template is being given the nested group, why not just make that expand the children? We can go back to having a single group style (because ListView will ignore all but the first) and then in our item template (which, remember, is now being passed the nested TownGroup objects), we show the Town property as the group title, and then an ItemsControl to show all the items in the group:
< ListView ItemsSource ="{ Binding Source ={ StaticResource src }}"> < ListView.GroupStyle > < GroupStyle > < GroupStyle.HeaderTemplate > < DataTemplate > < TextBlock Text ="{ Binding Country }" FontSize ="40" /> </ DataTemplate > </ GroupStyle.HeaderTemplate > </ GroupStyle > </ ListView.GroupStyle > < ListView.ItemTemplate > < DataTemplate > < Grid > < Grid.RowDefinitions > < RowDefinition /> < RowDefinition /> </ Grid.RowDefinitions > < TextBlock FontWeight ="Bold" FontSize ="24" Text ="{ Binding Town }" /> < ItemsControl Grid.Row ="1" ItemsSource ="{ Binding }"> < ItemsControl.ItemTemplate > < DataTemplate > < TextBlock FontSize ="20" Text ="{ Binding Address }" /> </ DataTemplate > </ ItemsControl.ItemTemplate > </ ItemsControl > </ Grid > </ DataTemplate > </ ListView.ItemTemplate > </ ListView >
At first glance, this appears to work:
That certainly looks like what I wanted: everything is grouped by country, and within each country the items are grouped by town, and I’ve been able to define a different style for the two group levels’ headings.
So what’s the problem?
Well the first obvious issue (for my app, at any rate) is that the individual items are no longer tappable—as far as this ListView is concerned, each item in the list is the whole town group. I tried replacing the ItemsControl in the item template with a nested ListView as a quick fix, but that just seemed to slow things down drastically. When I do that, the app has trouble keeping up with even fairly pedestrian scrolling on the phone I use for development. (A Nokia Lumia 620.) However, while this hack didn’t work, I expect it’s possible to make individual items tappable with suitable changes to the item template.
But there’s another problem: it turns out that whether you nest a ListView or an ItemsControl this solution doesn’t work well once you start using anything more than about one and a half screen’s worth of data. (This means that if, like me, you build a prototype to test whether your approach is viable, it all looks like it’s working beautifully until you plug in some real data, and only then do you discover that you’ve gone down a blind alley. I hope that this series of articles will save you from that fate.)
The problems really only become apparent when you start scrolling back up through the list having scrolled down through it. The content starts jumping around on the screen, and sometimes the entire list goes blank for a few seconds before reappearing.
If you want to see the issues yourself, you can grab the app from here. Run it on a real phone, and scroll a long way down through the data, and then back up again reasonably quickly. You’ll see pretty quickly that this is not a usable solution.
As far as I can tell, the fundamental problem is that virtualization does not mix well with variable item heights. (Switching virtualization off is not a realistic option for my app, by the way.) There’s a subtle but critical difference between the item template in the last XAML snippet, and the one in the first ListView snippet in this blog entry. Here’s the important bit from the first one:
< ListView.ItemTemplate > < DataTemplate > < Grid Height ="80">
And here’s the corresponding piece of the one that didn’t work well:
< ListView.ItemTemplate > < DataTemplate > < Grid >
The key is that the first example has a fixed height, but the second one doesn’t. It can’t, because that the second one contains an ItemsControl whose height will depend on the number of items in the group—the nature of that example is that each item (and remember, an ‘item’ in that example is actually group of addresses all in the same town) will need to determine its own height based on the number of items it contains.
In classic XAML terminology, the first item template has a constrained height, while the second sizes to content.
Variable item height has always been a problem for virtualized lists in XAML. (If you happen to have a Pluralsight subscription, take a look at the Templates module of my WPF and XAML Fundamentals course. If you watch the “ItemsControl Options” clip (12th clip in the module), starting at about 4:45 you get to see a WPF ListView going slightly haywire as a result of highly variable item sizes in a virtualized list.) And this in turn has meant that grouping has always been a tricky case, because groups almost always vary in height. So in a lot of scenarios, grouping in XAML just disables virtualization.
Variable item height seems to cause particularly visually distracting problems for the WinRT ListView. As far as I’ve been able to tell in discussions with people from Microsoft, the problems occur when it starts recycling containers that have scrolled off the screen—if those change size significantly when given new data, this appears to mess with the layout of the items that are still on the screen, causing the entire list to jump around in a rather disturbing way.
This turns out to be one of the main reasons for getting the ListView to help us with grouping in the first place. You can use that ItemsControl -in-item-template trick to handle any number of levels of grouping, including a single level, and if the trick actually worked properly, we wouldn’t really need ListView to provide built-in support for groups at all. (About the only thing it would really be doing for us is the neat ‘sticky’ group headers that slide into place as you scroll.) But because it’s pretty rare for each of the groups in a grouped list to have the same size, the trick does not in fact work. The virtualization mechanism goes a bit crazy trying to deal with the variation in sizes, and the result is that the app appears to be having a fit.
So in practice, the biggest benefit of using the built-in group support in the ListView is that it takes care of interleaving group headings for you in a way that the control’s underlying virtualizing panel can cope with, meaning that everything scrolls around nice and smoothly. As soon as you try to handle this yourself, it all seems to break down.
ConclusionThis week, Beijing based Xiaomi joined forces with Sina Weibo to test a new method of selling their phones on the popular Twitter like social media platform. The results were pretty phenomenal!
Up until this week, if you wanted to buy Xiaomi’s flagship quad-core Mi2 you would have to first earn enough community points on their forum, then trade those points for a number, and finally wait for sales day and hope you get to book the phone before thousands of other hopefuls.
This method has continued for months with each sale selling out in just minutes. Great news for Xiaomi, but not all that awesome if you happen to luck out while trying to get your dream phone.
To try and elevate things a tad, Xiaomi tested an all new sales method via their Sina Weibo account which didn’t’ need buyers to first earn points. As you would expect, the sale turned into a record sellout with 1.3 million orders placed in just over 4 minutes!
Unfortunately, Xiaomi only had 50,000 phones on offer and are now performing a lucky dip to choose who of those 1.3 million people will “win” the chance to hand over 1999 Yuan ($318) for the latest Xiaomi!
How would you feel about this method of sale if Xiaomi were to enter international markets?CLOSE Columbus Blue Jackets defenseman Zach Werenski, who played for Little Caesars hockey, talks absolutely the passing of Mike Ilitch and why the youth program was so important to him. Video by George Sipple/DFP Videolicious
Former Red Wings player and Little Caesars team coach Kris Draper watches his son Kienan Draper in January 2013. (Photo: Julian H. Gonzalez, DFP)
Kris Draper witnessed the commitment Mike Ilitch made to hockey in Detroit from different perspectives. Draper was part of four Stanley Cup titles as a player, then moved to the front office, where he serves as an adviser to Wings general manager Ken Holland. Draper is also a bantam major hockey coach for Little Caesars amateur hockey, the youth program Ilitch started in 1968, long before he ever owned a pro sports team.
Draper said there are thousands of men and women who came through Little Caesars hockey and reflected this weekend on how much Ilitch impacted their life. Ilitch died Friday at age 87.
“You look at the opportunity that guys like Zach Werenski, Mike Modano, Bryan Rolston had,” Draper said. “The way they were treated obviously impacted those guys.
“They’ve touched people at all levels – lawyers, doctors, fireman, police officers, teachers. So many people came through the ranks of Little Caesars hockey. You look at the highest level, but it all starts with Little Caesars amateur hockey. I’m sure there are thousands who have stories about Mike and Marian Ilitch and the Ilitch family.
“It started with a pizza shop, one store, and they built it into an empire.”
Draper said Holland called him with the news on Friday and he relayed the news to his youth team.
“They realize how fortunate we are to wear the baby blue and orange colors,” Draper said. “The kids, they get it.”
Draper understands, too, how fortunate he was to play for an owner like Ilitch in the NHL.
“Everything he’s accomplished, it’s a celebration of his life,” Draper said. “You feel for Mrs. Ilitch. Ninety-nine percent of the time when I saw Mrs. Ilitch, I saw Mr. Ilitch. They were together. Companion for life, and that’s something that resonates with everybody, the way they were.
“It was just overwhelming, the commitment year in and year out,” Draper said. “You look at the teams we had through the late ‘90s and 2000s and you didn’t see too many people that wanted to leave the Red Wings organization.
“The summer of ’01, we trade for Dominik Hasek, we sign Brett Hull, we sign Luc Robitaille. You’re like, holy... With that comes a sense of responsibility. We felt we had one of the greatest teams ever assembled on paper. But if we didn’t win the Stanley Cup, there wouldn’t be too many people talking about the ‘02 team like they do. There was a lot of pressure on that team. Mr. Ilitch made a massive financial commitment to that team. For me, the greatest thing I was part of was when Stevie Y got the Cup and was able to pass it to Mr. Ilitch. You never forget those moments.
“We won four Stanley Cups. You can talk about the coaches or the players, but in the end this is Mr. Ilitch’s hockey team. We won Stanley Cups on his hockey team. That’s something that is very special for all of us.”’
Fellow NHL owner Peter Karmanos Jr., helped build the Compuware youth hockey program into another strong program in the state of Michigan, but credited Ilitch's Little Caesars program as a program that pushed others to be better. "Caesars was going on when we built ours, and a lot of it was tailored after that," Karmanos told the Free Press in a 2015 interview.
Columbus Blue
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ground operations have repelled attacks against civilians in Adamawa and Borno, two states in the northeast that have been strongholds and frequent targets for Boko Haram.
Officials are "studying" the latest video, even as the military continues to recognize the talks aimed at assuring the release of the kidnapped schoolgirls, the ministry said.
Boko Haram, whose name translates to "Western education is sin" in the Hausa language, is trying to impose strict Sharia law across Nigeria, which is split between a majority Muslim north and a mostly Christian south. Like ISIS, it has ambitions for a caliphate, or religious state.
The group's attacks have intensified in recent years in an apparent show of defiance for the nation's military onslaught. Its ambitions appear to have expanded to the destruction of the government.
As part of its insurgency, it has bombed schools, churches and mosques, kidnapped women and children, and assassinated politicians and religious leaders alike.A 19-year-old Calgary man is dead after a multi-vehicle accident on Highway 8.
The Calgary man was driving a pickup truck when he crossed the centre line of the highway and collided with a semi-trailer just before 6:30 p.m. MT Thursday night.
The young man was thrown from the truck and then hit by another vehicle on the straight stretch of road in the southwest. He died at the accident scene.
No one else was injured.
Highway 8, which is an extenstion of Glenmore Trail, was closed for hours Thursday night.
RCMP said they don’t believe speed or alcohol were involved.
An 18-year-old Calgary man died on the same stretch of road Tuesday night, after his car hit a semi-trailer. Police are investigating whether distracted driving played a role in the crash.In what seems to be the latest instalment of a prolonged theatre of absurd, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has shot off a letter to the editor of the New York Times, expressing umbrage at the latter's editorial dated June 7, 2017, titled "India's Battered Press".
The letter, signed RK Gaur, who is the press information officer and a spokesperson of the CBI, attempts to explain why the NDTV raids on June 2 weren't about muzzling of the press, as the NYT editorial, as well as several opinion pieces in India's sprawling print and digital media suggested, but just routine exercise. The CBI letter said that the "editorial is one-sided and doesn’t consider the investigation history of the case against RRPR Holdings by different tax and law enforcement agencies in India since 2011".
It also said that the decision to take NDTV India off the air for "irresponsible reporting" was "arrived at after a proper inquiry in which NDTV also participated. No democracy can allow the country’s security and public safety to be compromised by irresponsible reporting of terrorist incidents".
Finally, the terse letter, reeking of highly impertinent petulance from none other than the country's top investigating body, ends with the dramatic flourish that's better suited to a WhatsApp group skirmish among friends. It says: "India does not require any lesson on freedom of the press from The Times. Our institutions and traditions are nurtured by our rich and diverse cultural heritage and democratic ethos".
That the NDTV raids came at a time when freedom of expression and of the press has become a rallying point in the country, and barely days after a spokesperson from the ruling party at the Centre was asked to leave a debate by an NDTV anchor over uncivil behaviour on live TV, are rather well known. Of course, editorials aside, the June 9 solidarity meet at the Press Club in New Delhi, where the doyens of Indian journalism, including Prannoy Roy, the NDTV co-owner and the one in the eye of the storm, Arun Shourie, Kuldip Nayar, HK Dua, Om Thanvi, as well as eminent jurist Fali Nariman, addressed a motley gathering of young and older journalists, from TV, print and digital media alike, also became a focal point of action and resistance against the raids.
Almost every day since then, there has been a piece in the Indian press responding to the NDTV raids, the "Freedom of the Press" meet - many criticised the "manel" that addressed the gathering at the Press Club, the utter and frankly unpardonable lack of diversity among the speakers, who were basically established male journalists currently out of favour with the hideously maladroit and under-performing regime, that's also overtly communal in its Hindutva agenda.
A number of pieces pointed out that the uber-polished Prannoy Roy looked out of place at the Press Club, removed as he seemed from the day-to-day drudge of news-gathering, while Arun Shourie, once the editor of the Indian Express and a former Union minister under the NDA 1 regime of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had long supported Narendra Modi and the RSS to turn against them after been rendered out of favour.
While the Indian media was engaged in navel-gazing, divided between the polar opposites that have split it right in the middle, the CBI didn't really bother issuing a corrective beyond the statement that it didn't in fact raid the offices of NDTV at all, but only the residences in Delhi and Dehradun, of Prannoy and Radhika Roy, the owners of RRPR Holdings Ltd, the object of the criminal investigation. Yet, the well known strategy of intimidating the press by attacking the promoters, thereby squeezing the publication (such as Tehelka, Outlook in the past), or the TV channel and draining it of its finances, was called out in no uncertain terms.
However, that the CBI decided to respond in a letter brimming with churlish under-confidence and deep insecurity about its standing, to an NYT editorial that wasn't a quarter as critical of the raids as many of the pieces published in the India media, tells a very different story.
Photo: DailyO
In fact, when Arun Shourie, in his "eight commandments" for the press to strike back and regain its true role as the Fourth Estate, said that media must publish what the government wants to hide and must use the foreign press to rankle the regime's nerves, he was bang on target. That the CBI shot off a letter to the Times in a bid to correct the NYT's editorial lapse of judgment, and also to sermonise how India doesn't need a lesson from the Times on freedom of press, is beyond embarrassing, but also telling.
Exactly as the CBI is busy raiding Opposition leaders, taking on the Modi government's political and ideological adversaries in concocted or flimsy charges that barely hold, it errs once again in doing what's evidently its master's bid. The "caged parrot" has now become a political tool as also a smoking gun that lays bare the boundless hypocrisies of the present government in targeting those who call out its serial and routine lies, idiocies, false claims and the institutionalisation of bigotry evident in the slew of legislations it's bringing in to justify its communal worldview.
The curmudgeonly CBI, however, also betrays extreme unprofessionalism when it decides to preach from the pulpit and tell the press about freedom of the press while harping on our "democratic ethos" that the government is busy trampling more and more every day. Much like the needless statements issued by the Indian Army chief on matters that need delicate and studied radio silence from the armed forces, this overt attempt at self-explanation comes out as a pitiful instance of the CBI's own diminished stature in the country and abroad.
With PM Narendra Modi busy touring Europe, UK and then eventually the US to meet President Donald Trump on June 26, the global surround sound needs to be fine-tuned to the domestic panegyrics that are ritually beamed from regime-friendly TV and print news outlets. Yet, not only have serial gaffes on the part of various ministries and departments, such as the recent AltNews expose of using Spain-Morocco border to show floodlights in streets that seemingly depict the Indo-Pak border, made the regime a butt of jokes, even PM Modi's touchy-feely style has received humorous commentary in the international press.
Barely a month back, the RSS super-baby producing advice and the more recent "no sex, no meat" suggestion for pregnant women from the AYUSH ministry, have also garnered global ridicule. Certainly, the Modi government's nerves are too jangled from all the barrage of negative press, but even then, the CBI's unruly letter to the editor aimed at the NYT is beyond belief.
The sobriquet "caged parrot" which it got from the Supreme Court, while its former chief Ranjit Sinha came under the scanner, it seems still holds and how. Only now, the parrot is also acting like a pigeon delivering ungracious and frankly shameful notes to journalistic institutions that are older than itself.
Also read - Why Arun Shourie is wrong about Modi governmentAbstract
Low-grade inflammation observed in obesity is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Recent studies revealed that this would be linked to gut-derived endotoxemia during fat digestion in high-fat diets, but nothing is known about the effect of lipid composition. The study was designed to test the impact of oil composition of high-fat diets on endotoxin metabolism and inflammation in mice. C57/Bl6 mice were fed for 8 wk with chow or isocaloric isolipidic diets enriched with oils differing in fatty acid composition: milk fat, palm oil, rapeseed oil, or sunflower oil. In vitro, adipocytes (3T3-L1) were stimulated or not with lipopolysaccharide (LPS; endotoxin) and incubated with different fatty acids. In mice, the palm group presented the highest level of IL-6 in plasma (P < 0.01) together with the highest expression in adipose tissue of IL-1β and of LPS-sensing TLR4 and CD14 (P < 0.05). The higher inflammation in the palm group was correlated with a greater ratio of LPS-binding protein (LBP)/sCD14 in plasma (P < 0.05). The rapeseed group resulted in higher sCD14 than the palm group, which was associated with lower inflammation in both plasma and adipose tissue despite higher plasma endotoxemia. Taken together, our results reveal that the palm oil-based diet resulted in the most active transport of LPS toward tissues via high LBP and low sCD14 and the greatest inflammatory outcomes. In contrast, a rapeseed oil-based diet seemed to result in an endotoxin metabolism driven toward less inflammatory pathways. This shows that dietary fat composition can contribute to modulate the onset of low-grade inflammation through the quality of endotoxin receptors.Combokeys
Combokeys is a JavaScript library for handling keyboard shortcuts in the browser.
It is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.
It is around 3.3kb minified and gzipped and 9.9kb minified, has no external dependencies, and has been tested in the following browsers:
Internet Explorer 6+ (test suite works in IE9+)
Safari
Firefox
Chrome
It has support for keypress, keydown, and keyup events on specific keys, keyboard combinations, or key sequences.
Fork notice
This project was forked from ccampbell/mousetrap.
It was forked because pull–requests were not being reviewed.
This fork's author intends to review pull–requests.
Main changes are
Refactored as CommonJS Doesn't automatically listen on the document. Instead, it is now a constructor and the element on which to listen must be provided on instantiation. Multiple instances possible.
Getting started
Get it on your page:
var Combokeys ; Combokeys = require ( " combokeys " ) ;
Instantiate it for the entire page:
var combokeys = new Combokeys ( document. documentElement ) ;
Or, instantiate it for one or more specific elements:
var firstCombokeys = new Combokeys ( document. getElementById ( " first " ) ) ; var secondCombokeys = new Combokeys ( document. getElementById ( " second " ) ) ;
Add some combos!
combokeys. bind ('4 ', function ( ) { console. log ('4') ; } ) ; firstCombokeys. bind ( "? ", function ( ) { console. log ('show shortcuts!') ; } ) ; secondCombokeys. bind ('esc ', function ( ) { console. log ('escape') ; },'keyup') ; combokeys. bind ('command+shift+k ', function ( ) { console. log ('command shift k') ; } ) ; combokeys. bind ( ['command+k ','ctrl+k'], function ( ) { console. log ('command k or control k') ; return false ; } ) ; combokeys. bind ('g i ', function ( ) { console. log ('go to inbox') ; } ) ; combokeys. bind ('* a ', function ( ) { console. log ('select all') ; } ) ; combokeys. bind ('any-character ', function ( ) { console. log ('some visual feedback') } ) ; combokeys. bind ('up up down down left right left right b a enter ', function ( ) { console. log ('konami code') ; } ) ;
When you’re done with it, detach:
combokeys. detach ( )
You can also bind the plus and minus keys conveniently:
combokeys. bind ( ['mod+plus ','mod+minus'], function ( e ) { e. preventDefault ( ) ; console. log ( " Override browser zoom! " ) ; } ) ;
Why Combokeys?
There are a number of other similar libraries out there so what makes this one different?
CommonJS, NPM.
You can listen on multiple, specified elements simultaneously.
You are not limited to keydown events (You can specify keypress, keydown, or keyup or let Combokeys choose for you).
events (You can specify,, or or let Combokeys choose for you). You can bind key events directly to special keys such as? or * without having to specify shift+/ or shift+8 which are not consistent across all keyboards
or without having to specify or which are not consistent across all keyboards It works with international keyboard layouts
You can bind Gmail like key sequences in addition to regular keys and key combinations
You can programatically trigger key events with the trigger() method
method It works with the numeric keypad on your keyboard
The code is well documented/commented
AMD usage
You can also build an AMD-compatible version by running npm run build. This creates a universally compatible dist/combokeys.js which, you can use via RequireJS, or include directly in a <script> tag with the global variable Combokeys.
Documentation
The most complete documentation is currently at Mousetrap, the original project's website. At the time of this writing, the only differences are in how you get it in your page (It is now a CommonJS module which does not define a global for itself) and that you must instantiate it before binding keys.
The public API consists of.bind,.unbind,.trigger,.stopCallback,.detach and.reset.
Plugins
There are some plugins. See their individual readme files.
Bind dictionary
Allows you to make multiple bindings in a single Combokeys.bind call.
Global bind
Allows you to set global bindings that work even inside of input fields.
Allows you to temporarily prevent Combokeys events from firing.
Record
Allows you to capture a keyboard shortcut or sequence defined by a user.About This Game
Season Mode that allows players to enjoy a full single-player experience
Extensive Battle-Car customizations with more than 10 billion possible combinations
Unlockable items and vehicles, stat tracking, leaderboards, and more
Addictive 8-player online action with a variety of different team sizes and configurations
Amazing 2-, 3-, and 4-player splitscreen mode that can be played locally or taken online against other splitscreen players
Broadcast-quality replays that allow you to fast forward, rewind, or view the action from anywhere in the arena
Competitive cross-platform gameplay with PlayStation®4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch users
OS: MacOS X 10.8.5
Processor: Intel Core i5 2.4 GHz
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: OpenGL 4.1 - ATI Radeon HD 5670, NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M, Intel HD Graphics 4000 or Iris Pro Graphics
The correct store page for DLC purchased through the Showroom doesn’t show up for Big Picture users. This is a Steam client-specific issue that Valve will be fixing in an upcoming patch
There are occasional crashes when exiting from a match to the main menu
The statues in Urban Central do not display correctly
You may experience intermittent blurring issues
(Mac Only) Xbox 360 controllers won’t work. You will need a third-party driver solution to use them
(Mac Only) Steam Controller is not natively supported
Soccer meets driving once again in the long-awaited, physics-based sequel to the beloved arena classic,A futuristic Sports-Action game,, equips players with booster-rigged vehicles that can be crashed into balls for incredible goals or epic saves across multiple, highly-detailed arenas. Using an advanced physics system to simulate realistic interactions,relies on mass and momentum to give players a complete sense of intuitive control in this unbelievable, high-octane re-imagining of association football.Awesome features include:As of September 8, 2016, the SteamOS and Mac versions ofwere released to "Beta." SteamOS is the only "officially" supported Linux client, though other Linux platforms may be compatible. Likewise, the Mac version may or may not work on older systems with an integrated video solution and a dedicated GPU is highly recommended (Macs from 2013 or after should be okay). Mac system requirements are as follows:Be sure and check ongoing patch notes for SteamOS and Mac beta updates going forward. Listed below are all known issues for both versions of the game as of June 1, 2017:Software and online features are subject to license, terms of use, and privacy policy (rocketleague.com/eula rocketleague.com/tou, and rocketleague.com/privacy ).Soon-to-be Droid RAZR owners, this one’s for you. If you’re looking for a reason to be angry this Monday morning, I’ll do you one better with a reason for anger and a target toward which you can direct that rage.
Ausdroid reports that Motorola has provided a bootloader unlock solution for its new Motorola Droid RAZR (which is a shock in and of itself after the way Moto has previously handled the bootloader unlock situation). The catch? Verizon has decided to remove said solution from its models.
Verizon’s decision does make sense, in a way. An unlocked bootloader is less secure. However, in most cases an unlocked bootloader voids the user’s warranty on the phone. If that’s the case, then Verizon either has happy customers with unlocked phones or customers who need a new phone because they bricked their last one. Seems like a win, win to me.Since our last report on SDCC exclusives, there have been more reveals and more excitement We have many more confirmations on the exclusive scene now than we did a month ago. That being said, if you’re in love with rumors and innuendo we have a little of that as well. We are continuing to make efforts this year to be an aggregation of all the best that will make its way into those lovely WB bags you’ll be carrying this July So, here is what we have found since last time:
Super7 Alien Exclusive: At WonderCon we had the opportunity to catch-up with the awesome team at Super 7 and pestered them about their SDCC plans. With the beautiful prototypes of the Retro-Action Alien line being one of the hits of last year’s SDCC, we wondered if there might be an exclusive version available at this year’s con. Director of Licensing Frank Supiot said he can’t tease or give us anything too specific, but he did confirm there will be an Alien exclusive of some sort. So, what could that exclusive be? Speculate away, but seeing the vintage goodness they’ve put together so far, we know the Super7 line will be around the block with whatever they release. Will it be a toy? We’d even love to see more in their vintage line of Alien glasses
Hallmark Man of Steel, Star Trek and Star Wars Ornaments: Always one of the longest lines at SDCC, Hallmark has assured that this trend will continue in 2013 with some big announcements. As usual, Hallmark will have ornaments related to DC Comics, Star Trek and Star Wars. Pictures have yet to be released, but here is a rundown of what to expect:
Wrath of the Rancor™ – Created especially for event sales, this ornament captures Luke Skywalker’s struggle with the savage creature dwelling below Jabba the Hutt’s palace as seen in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi™.
– Created especially for event sales, this ornament captures Luke Skywalker’s struggle with the savage creature dwelling below Jabba the Hutt’s palace as seen in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi™. U.S.S. Kelvin™ – As featured in the 2009 Star Trek movie, this Federation starship exclusive is a “battle-scarred” variant of the same Keepsake Ornament available starting in July in Hallmark Gold Crown® stores.
– As featured in the 2009 Star Trek movie, this Federation starship exclusive is a “battle-scarred” variant of the same Keepsake Ornament available starting in July in Hallmark Gold Crown® stores. Man of Steel – Inspired by this summer’s big-screen adventure of the same name, Superman is the subject of this event-exclusive Keepsake Ornament. Details and images of this ornament will be announced later this year.
Chew Chog Vinyl Toy: Last month we reported on rumors of John Layman and Rob Guillory bringing a variant version of their Chog toy to SDCC. Although a regular version of the toy has still not been released, the item has been reported as imminent by Layman, himself. The new Chog shirt was prominently displayed at WonderCon at both Layman’s table in Artist Alley and at the Graphitti Design booth
If you remember, last month we had pictures of this Chog prototype that we came across at January’s Amazing Arizona Comic-Con:
Recently, a loyal reader of SDCC Blog sent us an anonymous tip on the SDCC version of the Chog. In the tip, he states that Layman told him privately at WonderCon that the SDCC exclusve version Chog will be an all white version of this classic Chew creature. This claim is just an anonymous tip, so take it for what you will. That being said, we know the exclusive Chog will be sold out fast, regardless of color choice.
Hasbro G.I. Joe Exclusive: As with the rest of the G.I. Joe community, we were shocked when Hasbro opted to not show any new product at this past weekend’s JoeCon. All signs pointed to an SDCC reveal during their panel at the show, but there were no definite details given. That being said, there was some discussion from Hasbro executives, Derryl DePriest and John Warden on SDCC and hints were given. We’re grateful to GeneralsJoes.com for being on-hand and reporting on the SDCC talk:
People asked about the ComicCon exclusive reveal as well, and the Hasbro guys did speak on that a bit. They said the set would be large and would “fill a hole” that has been created by some of the previous sets. John also said we might be surprised by the number of 3 3/4″ figures included in the set. From conversation it sounded like they wouldn’t be doing a single-pack carded exclusive this year, but it also sounds like we might be looking at another G.I. Joe/Transformers cross over set. A question came up about accessibility for these ComicCon exclusives, and Brian Savage said the Club is talking to HasbroToyShop about once again being an outlet for these for collectors to have easier access to the exclusive product.
These words have led to a flurry of speculation on what items will be present, but what we do know is that the announcement can’t be far off at this point and it would seem that they will be releasing the information in some larger media blitz where all of the exclusives are revealed at once, rather than in smaller pieces as once thought.
With a little over 3 months to go until Preview Night, the exclusive information is going to be continuing to come rapidly. Make sure to keep checking back here as we try to bring you all of the news on the SDCC exclusives scene.
What exclusives are you most excited about so far? Let us know in the comments.Google won't allow the co-inventor of Unix and the C language to check-in code, because he won't take the mandatory language test.
Between 1969 and 1973, Ken Thompson created Unix with Dennis Ritchie. At the same time he also developed the C language. The speed and simplicity of C helped Unix spread widely. Both have subsequently become quite popular.
Google hired Thompson to create a new language, Go. But Google also requires all of its recruits to pass a language test. According to Thompson, he hasn't quite got round to it yet - and so can't submit code.
The snippet emerged in a book called Coders At Work, published last September. We don't know if the information is still current, or whether Thompson has finally allowed himself to be subject to a humiliating examination on the language he invented by an acne-scarred, know-it-all Oompa-Loompa who is absent-mindedly flicking paper pellets into a Starbucks cup while Twittering.
But the snippet runs like this:
Q: I know Google has a policy where every new employee has to get checked out on languages before they're allowed to check code in. Which means you had to get checked out on C [which you co-created]. Thompson: Yeah, I haven't been. Q. You haven't been! You're not allowed to check in code? Thompson: I'm not allowed to check in code, no... I just haven't done it. I've so far found no need to.
A hat-tip to Gawker for unearthing this gem recently. Not many programmers read Gawker, so we thought you might enjoy it.
Three years ago Google admitted it employed robo-Loompas to weed out job applications. Well done to the inventor of Unix for passing that initial hurdle.
(You can find more tales from the Google Interview Room here, and a few more teasers from the Thompson interview at this blog.) ®The bloodshed continued in Chicago this week, with eight people wounded in shootings since Wednesday and more than 1,000 people already shot so far this year.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported the most recent shooting took place in the Woodlawn neighborhood on Wednesday night. According to Chicago Police, a 35-year-old man was shot from a passing car while standing on the street. The man suffered gun shot wounds in the left hand and right ankle and was later stabilized at a local hospital.
A 28-year-old woman was also shot in the incident, suffering gunshot wounds to both thighs and her right foot. She was later treated and stabilized at a local hospital.
Earlier this week, on the 115th day of 2017, Chicago passed the 1,000 mark for number of people shot in the city so far this year, according to Sun-Times data. At least 174 people were killed in the shootings.
That total does not include four people that were shot by police officers and 10 people who shot themselves by accident.
The data shows that most shootings, approximately 88 percent, have occurred on the south and west sides of the city. The west side Austin neighborhood has seen the most gun violence, with 124 gunshot victims.
So far this year, 18 people have been shot who are 14-years-old or younger. Two-year-old Lavontay White was the youngest victim, killed by gunfire in February.Linux Mint is insecure, according to a Canonical-employed Ubuntu developer who says he wouldn’t do his online banking on a Linux Mint PC. The developer alleges that Linux Mint “hacks out” important updates. Is this a real problem or just fear-mongering?
The Ubuntu developer involved has gotten certain facts wrong and damaged his own case, but there’s still a real argument to be had here. Ubuntu and Linux Mint deal with updates in different ways, and each has its own trade-offs.
A Ubuntu Developer’s Allegations
RELATED: What’s the Difference Between Ubuntu and Linux Mint?
Oliver Grawert, a Canonical-employed Ubuntu developer, started the verbal warfare with this message on the Ubuntu developers mailing list. In it, he stated that security updates “are explicitly hacked out of Linux Mint for Xorg, the kernel, Firefox, the bootloader and various other packages”.
He provided a link to the Mint Update rules file, stating that it “is a list of packages [Mint] will never update.” This is incorrect — the file does something more complicated than that, but we’ll go into that later. He went on: “i would say forcefully keeping a vulnerable kernel browser or xorg in place instead of allowing the provided security updates to be installer [sic] makes it a vulnerable system… I personally wouldn’t do online banking with it ;)”.
Some of these allegations are completely untrue. It’s true that Linux Mint blocks updates for packages such as the X.org graphical server, Linux kernel, and bootloader by default. However, these updates are not “hacked out of Linux Mint,” as we’ll show later. Linux Mint also does not block updates to Firefox. Updates to the Firefox web browser are important for real-world security and are allowed by default, so this Ubuntu developer’s allegations are off-point. However, there’s still a real argument here — Linux Mint does block certain types of security updates by default.
Linux Mint’s Response
Linux Mint founder and lead developer Clement Lefebvre responded to these accusations with a blog post. In it, he points out that the Ubuntu developer was incorrect about the allegations we explained above. He also clarifies Linux Mint’s reason for excluding updates for certain packages by default:
“We explained in 2007 what the shortcomings were with the way Ubuntu recommends their users to blindly apply all available updates. We explained the problems associated with regressions and we implemented a solution we’re very happy with.”
Firefox is automatically updated by Linux Mint, just as is by Ubuntu. In fact, both distributions use the same package that comes from the same repository.
Linux Mint’s primary argument is that “blindly” updating packages like the X.org graphical server, bootloader, and Linux kernel can cause problems. Updates to these low-level packages can introduce bugs on some types of hardware, while the security problems they solve aren’t actually a problem for people who use Linux Mint casually at home. For example, many security flaws in the Linux kernel are “local privilege escalation” vulnerabilities. They might allow users with limited access to the computer to become the root user and gain complete access, but they can’t easily be exploited from a web browser like a typical security problem in Java could.
Is This Actually a Problem?
Both sides have good arguments. On the one hand, it’s absolutely true that Linux Mint is disabling security updates for certain packages by default. This leaves a Mint system with more known security vulnerabilities, which could theoretically be exploited.
On the other hand, it’s true that these security vulnerabilities aren’t actively exploited. Linux Mint does update software that’s under actual attack, like web browsers. It’s also true that updates to X.org have caused problems in the past. In 2006, an Ubuntu update broke the X server of many Ubuntu users that installed it, forcing them into the Linux terminal. Affected users had to repair their systems from the terminal. Linux Mint’s policy on updates was spelled out just a year later in 2007, so it’s likely this episode affected Linux Mint’s current stance.
If you’re a home desktop user, you probably won’t be compromised because of a flaw in the Linux kernel. Of course, if you run a server that’s exposed to the Internet or operate a business workstation you want to restrict access to, you should ensure all possible security updates are installed.
Controlling Security Updates in Linux Mint
Any Linux Mint user who’d rather have all the security updates Ubuntu users get can enable them from within Mint’s Update Manager. These updates aren’t “hacked out,” but are just disabled by default.
To control this setting, open the Update Manager application from your desktop environment’s menu. Click the Edit menu and select Preferences. You’ll then be able to choose the “levels” of packages you want to install. “Levels” are defined in the Mint update rules file we mentioned earlier. Levels 1-3 are enabled by default, while levels 4-5 are disabled by default. Firefox is a level 2 package, which is updated by default. X.org and the Linux kernel are levels 4 and 5, respectively, so they aren’t updated by default.
Enable levels 4 and 5 and you’ll get the same updates you would in Ubuntu — coming from Ubuntu’s own update repositories — but you’ll be more at risk of “regressions” that introduce problems.
The real disagreement here is a philosophical one. Ubuntu errs on the side of updating everything by default, eliminating all possible security vulnerabilities — even ones that are unlikely to be exploited on home user systems. Linux Mint errs on the side of excluding updates that could potentially cause problems.
Which solution you prefer will come down to what you’re using your computer for and how comfortable you are with the risks.Counter Punch
January 31, 2003
Kean Insight
Bush, bin Laden, BCCI and the 9/11 Commission
by CHRIS FLOYD
W hen George W. Bush's first choice to head an "independent" probe into the Sept. 11 attacks--suspected war criminal Henry Kissinger--went down like a bad pretzel, he quickly plucked another warm body from the stagnant pool of Establishment worthies who are periodically called upon to roll out the whitewash when the big boys screw up.
Kissinger's replacement, retired New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, was a "safe pair of hands," we were assured by the professional assurers in the mainstream media. The fact that he'd been out of public life for years--and that he hadn't collaborated in the deaths of tens of thousands of Cambodians, Chileans and East Timorese--certainly made him less controversial than his predecessor, although to be fair, Kissinger's expertise in mass murder surely would have given the panel some unique insights into the terrorist atrocity.
But now it seems that Kean might possess some unique insights of his own. Fortune Magazine reports this week that both Kean and Bush share an unusually well-placed business partner: one Khalid bin Mahfouz -- perhaps better known as "Osama bin Laden's bagman" or even "Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law."
Kean, like so many worthies, followed the revolving door out of public service into lucrative sweetheart deals and well-wadded sinecures on corporate boards. One of these, of course, is an oil company--pretty much a requirement for White House work these days. (Or as the sign says on the Oval Office door: "If your rigs ain't rockin', don't come a-knockin'!") Kean is a director of Amerada Hess, an oil giant married up to Saudi Arabia's Delta Oil in a venture to pump black gold in Azerbaijan. (The partnership is incorporated in a secretive offshore "tax haven," natch. You can't expect a worthy like Kean to pay taxes like some grubby wage slave.)
One of Delta's biggest backers is the aforesaid Mahfouz, a Saudi wheeler-dealer who has bankrolled some of most dubious players on the world scene: Abu Nidal, Manuel Noreiga, Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush. Mahfouz was also a front for the bin Laden family, funneling their vast wealth through American cut-outs in a bid to gain power and influence in the United States.
One of those cut-outs was Mahfouz factotum James Bath, a partner in George W.'s early oil venture, Arbusto. Bath has admitted serving as a pass-through for secret Saudi money. Years later, when Bush's maladroit business skills were about to sink another of his companies, Harken Energy, the firm was saved by a $25 million investment from a Swiss bank--a subsidiary of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BBCI), partly owned by the beneficent Mahfouz.
What was BCCI? Only "one of the largest criminal enterprises in history," according to the U.S. Senate. What did BCCI do? "It engaged in pandemic bribery of officials in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas," says journalist Christopher Bryon, who first exposed the operation. "It laundered money on a global scale, intimidated witnesses and law officers, engaged in extortion and blackmail. It supplied the financing for illegal arms trafficking and global terrorism. It financed and facilitated income tax evasion, smuggling and prostitution." Sort of an early version of the Bush Regime, then.
BCCI's bipartisan corruption first permeated the Carter Administration, then came to full flower in the Reagan-Bush years. The CIA uncovered the bank's criminal activities in 1981--no great feat, considering how many of its own foreign "associates" were involved, including the head of Saudi intelligence, Kamal Adham, brother-in-law of King Faisal. But instead of stopping the drug-runners and terrorists, the agency decided to join them, using BCCI's secret channels to finance "black ops" all over the world.
When a few prosecutors finally began targeting BCCI's operations in the late Eighties, President George Herbert Walker Bush boldly moved in with a federal probe directed by Justice Department investigator Robert Mueller. The U.S. Senate later found that the probe had been unaccountably "botched"--witnesses went missing, CIA records got "lost," all sorts of bad luck. Lower-ranking prosecutors told of heavy pressure from on high to "lay off." Most of the big BCCI players went unpunished or, like Mahfouz, got off with wrist-slap fines and sanctions. Mueller, of course, wound up as head of the FBI, appointed to the post in July 2001--by George W. Bush.
In the late 1990s, U.S. authorities identified Mahfouz as a major financier of his brother-in-law's extracurricular activities. He denied it, but the spooked Saudis put him on ice,
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Telegraph.co.uk A further £1.5m is to be invested in fake shop fronts and tackling dereliction in towns and cities across Northern Ireland. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/another-1-5m-for-northern-ireland-fake-shop-front-plan-29419568.html
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A further £1.5m is to be invested in fake shop fronts and tackling dereliction in towns and cities across Northern Ireland.
The funding commitment from the Department of the Environment comes after revamps of a number of areas preparing for major events received a broad welcome.
Portrush was given a facelift prior to last year's Irish Open, Londonderry got the same treatment ahead of its year as UK City of Culture while parts of Fermanagh were cleaned up before the G8 summit was hosted in the county last month.
Environment Minister Alex Attwood said £2m has already been spent in nine council areas, including Belfast.
The most visible aspect of the scheme involves painting the shutters on empty shops to depict thriving businesses. Critics have rounded on the scheme for merely 'papering over the cracks' caused by the recession.
The town that will benefit most from the new funding is Strabane, which will receive £200,000.
Ballymena and Larne, both in Co Antrim, will get £160,000.
The additional money was allocated by Finance Minister Sammy Wilson to Environment Minister Alex Attwood as part of the June re-allocation of Executive funds.
"This dereliction funding scheme grows from strength to strength," said Mr Attwood.
"This is a project of increasing significance. Tourists will be put off by eyesores. If we deal with dereliction, vacant properties and abandoned building sites, we create the opportunity to attract local investment and tourists. This investment is also for the people of the area. They will have the character of their built environment improved."
Belfast TelegraphCheck out these gorgeous photos of Russia's two Sukhoi T-50 PAK FA stealth fighters. The shot above clearly shows the second test aircraft, T-50-02, equipped with mission systems (notice what might be an electronic warfare mounting protruding from the tail) followed by the first aircraft, T-50-01, that's being used to test out the airframe design. Both jets are sporting a new camouflage paint scheme and this may be T-50-02's first flight in roughly four months. The Russian fighter supposedly sacrifices stealth for greater maneuverability against western fighters like the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
The next couple of photos show the T-50 and the wildly-painted Su-35S as they may be preparing for the MAKS 2011 airshow in Moscow.
Look at this last photo of the T-50 where the airplane bears a resemblance to the YF-23 Black Window; Northrop's losing competitor to Lockheed's F-22 in the Advanced Tactical Fighter contest.
Keep in mind that Sukhoi is already planning on co-producing the jet with India and South Korea recently expressed interest in the plane, making the PAK FA the first foreign competitor to U.S. stealth jets on the international market. If the Russians can keep costs down and production on schedule it may well provide stiff competition for the F-35 as nations seek to acquire 5th-generation fighter technology.31 #31 Mop -1 Frags – + Pert do you simply add -gl to your existing launch options or is it supposed to replace -dxlevel?
also any one tried on AMD GPUs? I have a 7950 wondering if this will provide any benefit You should probably have -dxlevel out after your first launch anyway, so it should replace it I guess. I also assume it must stay in there but someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Apparently it doesn't affect AMD GPU's but there's no harm in trying. EDIT: From the reddit post: AMD/ATI GPUs can use -d3d for a similar effect (I think that's the one) [quote=Pert]do you simply add -gl to your existing launch options or is it supposed to replace -dxlevel?
also any one tried on AMD GPUs? I have a 7950 wondering if this will provide any benefit[/quote]
You should probably have -dxlevel out after your first launch anyway, so it should replace it I guess. I also assume it must stay in there but someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Apparently it doesn't affect AMD GPU's but there's no harm in trying.
EDIT: From the reddit post:
[quote] AMD/ATI GPUs can use -d3d for a similar effect (I think that's the one) [/quote]
32 #32 Pert -1 Frags – + Mop Pert do you simply add -gl to your existing launch options or is it supposed to replace -dxlevel?
also any one tried on AMD GPUs? I have a 7950 wondering if this will provide any benefit
You should probably have -dxlevel out after your first launch anyway, so it should replace it I guess. I also assume it must stay in there but someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Apparently it doesn't affect AMD GPU's but there's no harm in trying.
EDIT: From the reddit post:
AMD/ATI GPUs can use -d3d for a similar effect (I think that's the one) according to Comanglia's config you dont have to remove -dxlevel after the first launch, its still in my launch options and Ive had no issues with it will test -gl and -d3d when I get home [quote=Mop][quote=Pert]do you simply add -gl to your existing launch options or is it supposed to replace -dxlevel?
also any one tried on AMD GPUs? I have a 7950 wondering if this will provide any benefit[/quote]
You should probably have -dxlevel out after your first launch anyway, so it should replace it I guess. I also assume it must stay in there but someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Apparently it doesn't affect AMD GPU's but there's no harm in trying.
EDIT: From the reddit post:
[quote] AMD/ATI GPUs can use -d3d for a similar effect (I think that's the one) [/quote][/quote]
according to Comanglia's config you dont have to remove -dxlevel after the first launch, its still in my launch options and Ive had no issues with it
will test -gl and -d3d when I get home
33 #33 Mop 0 Frags – + Pert
according to Comanglia's config you dont have to remove -dxlevel after the first launch, its still in my launch options and Ive had no issues with it
will test -gl and -d3d when I get home Removing -dxlevel should decrease the time it takes to tab out, but if you've had no problems then w/e.
Would be interesting to see if -d3d has any affect! [quote=Pert]
according to Comanglia's config you dont have to remove -dxlevel after the first launch, its still in my launch options and Ive had no issues with it
will test -gl and -d3d when I get home[/quote]
Removing -dxlevel should decrease the time it takes to tab out, but if you've had no problems then w/e.
Would be interesting to see if -d3d has any affect!
34 #34 adysky 0 Frags – + Maybe it's just win10 thing? I'm pretty sure it doesn't work on my win7 system. Maybe it's just win10 thing? I'm pretty sure it doesn't work on my win7 system.
35 #35 chry 1 Frags – + works for me (-d3d and windows 10) works for me (-d3d and windows 10)
36 #36 joshuawn 10 Frags – + Mop EDIT: From the reddit post:
AMD/ATI GPUs can use -d3d for a similar effect (I think that's the one) quoting retards from reddit doesn't help this case
it doesn't work. full stop. [quote=Mop]
EDIT: From the reddit post:
[quote] AMD/ATI GPUs can use -d3d for a similar effect (I think that's the one) [/quote][/quote]
quoting retards from reddit doesn't help this case
it doesn't work. full stop.
37 #37 vJill Valve 77 Frags – + The public tf build does not support OpenGL on windows. Pinkie swear. The public tf build does not support OpenGL on windows. Pinkie swear.
38 #38 wareya -7 Frags – + yeah but the command could theoretically do unrelated things first if it's hooked up to anything at all despite that fact so that's what you should look for if people are claiming results yeah but the command could theoretically do unrelated things first if it's hooked up to anything at all despite that fact so that's what you should look for if people are claiming results
39 #39 sage 0 Frags – + sombrez Doesn't the SteamOS/Linux version use OpenGL?
If so, why do the SteamOS benchmarks show that it has lower FPS than Windows? OpenGL is quite outdated and has been inferiour to directx for years now wich is one of the reasons Vulkan is under development.
even with vulkan, if the game was programmed for directX from the ground up, translating the drawcalls to vulkan will result on a performance loss and driver overhead (see The Talos Principle) [quote=sombrez]Doesn't the SteamOS/Linux version use OpenGL?
If so, why do the SteamOS benchmarks show that it has lower FPS than Windows?[/quote]
OpenGL is quite outdated and has been inferiour to directx for years now wich is one of the reasons Vulkan is under development.
even with vulkan, if the game was programmed for directX from the ground up, translating the drawcalls to vulkan will result on a performance loss and driver overhead (see The Talos Principle)
40 #40 strazyyy 0 Frags – + wareya yeah but the command could theoretically do unrelated things first if it's hooked up to anything at all despite that fact so that's what you should look for if people are claiming results no it couldn't [quote=wareya]yeah but the command could theoretically do unrelated things first if it's hooked up to anything at all despite that fact so that's what you should look for if people are claiming results[/quote]
no it couldn't
41 #41 Stanislav 7 Frags – + vJill The public tf build does not support OpenGL on windows. Pinkie swear. Yo, a valve employee, posting on the competitive TF2 forum, wow. I thought they only hung out in /r/tf2 and soaked up all those dank memes with the occasional player feedback post. [quote=vJill]The public tf build does not support OpenGL on windows. Pinkie swear.[/quote]
Yo, a valve employee, posting on the competitive TF2 forum, wow.
I thought they only hung out in /r/tf2 and soaked up all those dank memes with the occasional player feedback post.
42 #42 eee 1 Frags – + Jill's pretty easy to contact. Send them a PM on reddit and it'll get read, and Jill and McVee seem to read reddit pretty regularly. Is there any reason we're seeing FPS gains on some systems tho? Jill's pretty easy to contact. Send them a PM on reddit and it'll get read, and Jill and McVee seem to read reddit pretty regularly.
Is there any reason we're seeing FPS gains on some systems tho?
43 #43 panda106 8 Frags – + placebo placebo
45 #45 strazyyy 4 Frags – + eee Jill's pretty easy to contact. Send them a PM on reddit and it'll get read, and Jill and McVee seem to read reddit pretty regularly.
Is there any reason we're seeing FPS gains on some systems tho? do multiple benchmarks and you'll see that you gain zero frames. 1-5 fps isn't a huge difference and can happen without any changes. [quote=eee]Jill's pretty easy to contact. Send them a PM on reddit and it'll get read, and Jill and McVee seem to read reddit pretty regularly.
Is there any reason we're seeing FPS gains on some systems tho?[/quote]
do multiple benchmarks and you'll see that you gain zero frames. 1-5 fps isn't a huge difference and can happen without any changes.
46 #46 trash 1 Frags – + this is why you should get ~3-5 benchmarks of one setup and average out, FYI. don't make definitive claims off of results that could've just been the side effect of something running in the background for one benchmark this is why you should get ~3-5 benchmarks of one setup and average out, FYI. don't make definitive claims off of results that could've just been the side effect of something running in the background for one benchmark
47 #47 mafia_is_mafia 2 Frags – + diashock vJill The public tf build does not support OpenGL on windows. Pinkie swear.
Yo, a valve employee, posting on the competitive TF2 forum, wow.
I thought they only hung out in /r/tf2 and soaked up all those dank memes with the occasional player feedback post. Thanks the official response Jill. Really appreciate it! [quote=diashock][quote=vJill]The public tf build does not support OpenGL on windows. Pinkie swear.[/quote]
Yo, a valve employee, posting on the competitive TF2 forum, wow.
I thought they only hung out in /r/tf2 and soaked up all those dank memes with the occasional player feedback post.[/quote]
Thanks the official response Jill. Really appreciate it!The Football Association’s chief executive, Martin Glenn, has said he would love to see a Champions League spot for the winners of the FA Cup as part of wider talks that will explore axing replays and introducing a winter break.
Amid renewed determination from the FA, Premier League and Football League to address long-term issues surrounding fixture congestion, Glenn also revealed that they would join forces to take on Uefa over the creeping number of “blackout” dates as a result of European competition.
“When I talk about reform I think we have to reform together with the leagues and reform the fixture schedule period, for the good of English football,” Glenn said. “Lots of things have to give. This isn’t an FA Cup problem. That hasn’t changed – all the things around it have. We’re always open to evolve the competition, keep it relevant, make it attractive.”
He said that the FA, Premier League and Football League had recently completed four-year plans and agreed it would be sensible to take a strategic look at the fixture calendar. One aspect could be to explore again the idea of giving the FA Cup winners a Champions League slot, he said.
“Yeah, I’d love to see that,” he said. “It would add lustre to the competition. You can’t solve things in isolation. It’s a Rubik’s Cube. That might be one possibility Of course, running the FA, I’d love it.
“It just needs to be set up and weighed up against all the other criteria and the desires of the competition owners, the Premier League, the Football League, etc. I think it would be attractive but you’ve got job one [which] is make sure we’ve got enough coefficient points in Europe to make sure we keep the four places.”
Before a fifth-round weekend in which the issue of fixture congestion has again reared its head owing to the scheduling of Manchester City’s trip to Chelsea three days in advance of a crucial Champions League tie, Glenn said nothing was off the table. Alongside the possibility of axing FA Cup replays and two-leg League Cup semi-finals, another hardy perennial – reducing the Premier League to 18 teams – could be part of the blue-sky thinking exercise.
“If you wanted a winter break, things would have to change,” Glenn said at a Kick It Out fundraising event. “But it doesn’t automatically mean that the Premier League would have to come down to 18 clubs either. I think there are other ways of fixing it but it just needs a holistic look at the entire calendar. It needs challenging probably Uefa about windows, so we need a negotiating strategy for that.”
Besides a shared determination to challenge Uefa over the number of midweek dates reserved for its competitions, Glenn said there was a desire in English football to relieve the possible damage fixture pile-ups could do to the national side and the chances of English clubs in Europe.
“We’re all just saying the same things, which is: ‘This isn’t great where we’re kind of managing from hand to mouth. We should get round to looking at it.’ But it’s a long-term thing, not a short-term thing.”
There can be no changes to the FA Cup until after 2018, when the current TV deals come to an end, and any changes to Uefa’s rules that forbid fixtures being scheduled on the same night as Champions League or Europa League matches would take time to negotiate. In the past, prize money has been withheld from English clubs because the rules were flouted.
FA gives official backing to Gianni Infantino’s bid for Fifa presidency Read more
The possible introduction of a winter break appears more credible than at any time since the dawn of the Premier League in 1992, after Glenn said that although it was not yet official FA policy he thought there was “huge merit” in the idea.
“It’s not FA policy but I would love there to be a winter break,” he said. “I think it’d be good for the England team, I think it’d probably be good for the clubs. So, how might you design a season that looks like that?”
Historically, the Premier League has argued that FA Cup replays would have to go if a winter break were to be considered. Glenn said there were no active talks but that there was a shared will to take the issue forward.Common Cause and the Center for Media and Democracy sent federal authorities new evidence today that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is falsely passing itself off as a tax-exempt charity and effectively using taxpayer dollars to subsidize its lobbying on behalf of private interests.
Common Cause filed a supplement to its three-year-old tax whistleblower complaint against ALEC, and the two groups sent a joint letter to Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen demanding an investigation, collection of fines and back taxes, and the revocation of ALEC’s status as a tax-exempt charity. Supporting evidence available here.
"Our whistleblower complaint, which includes statements, letters and correspondence from ALEC member companies and previously undisclosed public records of ALEC’s lobbying activities, demonstrates beyond doubt that ALEC is – and always has been – a lobby, not a charity," said Common Cause President Miles Rapoport.
The filing comes on the heels of ALEC’s threat in March to file suit against Common Cause and two other groups that have criticized ALEC’s positions on climate change and telecom issues. "This whistleblower supplement is unrelated to our dispute with ALEC on climate issues," Rapoport said, "but I hope that with today’s filing ALEC gets the message that we will not be deterred from working to expose its activities."
The new trove of documents includes statements by 20 corporations that admit that they joined and maintained membership in ALEC to influence legislation and gain access to lawmakers. The corporate admissions included in the complaint are from Yelp, Pfizer, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Honeywell, Yahoo, eBay, Eli Lilly, Duke Energy, Altria, American Electric Power, Anheuser-Busch, BP, Chevron, Cox Communications, CSX Corporation, ExxonMobil, Overstock, and Peabody Energy. Several of those companies no longer are part of ALEC.
The new filing also includes the recent finding of the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board that "ALEC’s primary purpose is the passage of state legislation in the various states and that all of its wide-ranging activities are in support of this primary purpose."
ALEC continues to deny that it is engaged in lobbying, submitting annual reports to the IRS with "$0" filled in on a line designated for the amount it spends on lobbying.
"Our powerful new evidence demonstrates that ALEC continues to operate as a 'corporate lobbying group masquerading as a charity,'" said Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy, publisher of PRWatch.org and ALECexposed.org. "Clearly, in their own words, many of the corporations that fund ALEC use it as a vehicle for their lobbying agenda."
"ALEC is a pay-to-play operation where corporate lobbyists pay for a seat and a vote as equals with legislators on model bills to benefit the legislative agenda of those very same special interests," Graves added. "Though ALEC claims that it is now a legislator-driven, bottom-up enterprise, our evidence shows that the corporations underwriting ALEC continue to drive its legislative priorities and do so to benefit their bottom lines. ALEC operates for the private gain of its corporate funders like a trade group, offering them one-stop shopping for lawmakers nationwide."
In response to the groups’ past exposure of its misreporting and illegal schemes, ALEC formed a lobbying arm, the Jeffersonian Project, in 2013; it also made some changes on its tax forms, and now admits responsibility for a "scholarship" fund used to finance legislator travel.
"ALEC tried to outsource some of its more obvious lobbying to the Jeffersonian Project, an entity that ALEC controls," said Eric Havian, an attorney representing Common Cause on the submission. "But hiding its lobbying behind a different corporate mask doesn’t absolve ALEC. ALEC still manages the most critical lobbying activities, such as hosting junkets to bring legislators and lobbyists together at posh resorts to strategize about how to pass favored legislation."
Today’s submission to the IRS is the third challenge Common Cause and CMD have made against ALEC for masquerading as a charity at taxpayer expense.
"It has been almost exactly three years since we uncovered ALEC’s tax misrepresentation and first reported it to the IRS," Rapoport said. "Three years later, the IRS Whistleblower Office has not taken action, despite its legal mandate to investigate complaints. Meanwhile, ALEC continues its secretive lobbying activities that often benefit the corporations’ bottom line."
The growing scandal surrounding ALEC’s tax status, secretive lobbying activities, and extremist agenda has led to an exodus of more than 100 corporations since 2011.
"The work of a robust national coalition has pushed more than 100 companies to dump ALEC," Graves said. "Other companies and elected officials should seriously reconsider sticking with a group that has misled and continues to mislead the public and the IRS about its true purpose."
Click here for a fact sheet on the submission.Ever since I bought my first Hokkaido Cupcake at an asian bakery, my life changed. Since then, I’ve made them countless times, I love this recipe, and I’m here to share it with you!
Hokkaido cupcakes are these light, airy Japanese chiffon cupcakes, typically baked in square cardboard boxes (which I couldn’t find, so I opted for the typical cupcake liners) filled with various types of cream: custard cream, chantilly cream, strawberry cream etc. They’re honestly the perfect cupcake: light and fluffy, not too sweet, not too heavy, and taste light and delicate. I’ll admit, they’re not the most attractive of cupcakes, but they’re so delicious and I could probably easily eat 5. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
Recipe adapted from Jomi4us
Ingredients
2 cups of cake flour
1 cup of caster sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup of milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
5 egg yolks
8 egg whites
1/2 tsp cream of tartar/lemon juice/vinegar
2 cups heavy cream (or whipping cream
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
Method
Ensure all the ingredients at room temperature* and preheat the oven to 175°C/350°F. Sift the cake flour, baking powder and salt into a large mixing bowl.* In a medium bowl, blend milk, oil, vanilla and the egg yolks until smooth. Add the egg yolk mixture to the flour and whisk until smooth. Beat the egg whites* with cream of tartar/lemon juice/vinegar on low speed until it starts to foam, and slowly increase speed. Once it gets really white and foamy, gradually add in sugar and beat until stiff peaks form. Fold 1/3 of the whipped egg whites into the other mixture until just combined with a spatula. Repeat with the other thirds of the egg whites, ensuring not to overmix. Spoon into cupcake cups evenly* (about 3/4 full) and tap on the table a couple of times. Bake at 175°C/350°F for 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Let them cool completely on a wire rack.*
For the chantilly cream
Whip heavy cream and powdered sugar on a low speed, and gradually increase speed until soft peaks form. Add in vanilla (I always add a whole heap of my vanilla paste) and whip until stiff peaks form. Once cupcakes are cooled, use a filling tip and a piping tip (I use Wilton’s Bismarck tip) to poke a hole in the middle of the cupcake and fill it until it feels quite heavy (the amount of cream you fill it with depends on your preference, I like them really full!)
Notes*
Having all of the ingredients at room temperature is imperative. I like to separate my eggs and place my egg whites into the fridge while I let the rest of my ingredients come to room temperature.
When I say large bowl, I mean LARGE. I use my KitchenAid stand mixer’s glass bowl (4.7L/5 quart), and it gets almost full (it’s a very airy mixture), just as a guidline.
Make sure the egg whites have been cooling in a metal bowl, it helps the egg whites whip up better and stay stiff.
When I use these cupcake liners, I get about 35 cupcakes, or the one time I got 24 + 12 mini + a short, 6 inch cake.
They will shrivel up and sink, so don’t worry if they do! You’re just gonna puff those babies up again with whipped cream!
As you can see they sink quite a bit in the centre, but they puff right back up when you fill them with cream!
I really hope you liked this recipe, it’s one of my favourite cupcakes ever! If you recreate it, do share and tag me on any of my social medias (in the sidebar), I’d love to see them! I know there’s been a lot of food posts, but I heard quite a few of you really like them, so I thought I’d continue posting them! (Also, it’s probably the only thing I can do with me being so busy!) I also have an exciting collab coming up soon, so keep your eyes peeled for that!
Other than that, I hope you’re having a lovely day wherever you are! (:
– Jess xx
Twitter: @amessofjessblog
Instagram: @amessofjessblog
Pinterest: @amessofjess
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Sep. 17, 2015, 4:57 PM GMT / Updated Sep. 17, 2015, 4:57 PM GMT By Alexandra Jaffe and Kailani Koenig
The emergence of super PACs and their ability to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns has raised legal questions as to how campaigns and candidates are allowed to communicate or coordinate with them since the Citizens United decision in 2010.
In the past six years, those limits have been tested in various ways. But in the current presidential campaign, the lines are being blurred even more and no candidate is testing the legal limits more visibly or blatantly than Carly Fiorina, whose performance in Wednesday night's Republican debate has thrust her candidacy into the spotlight.
That line-testing was on display on a 90 degree afternoon in New Hampshire earlier this month as four presidential candidates sweated through the Milford Labor Day Parade – Fiorina, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
All four walked along, flanked by supporters carrying signs and touting their candidate.
But Fiorina’s supporters stood out. They wore shirts and carried signs pitching “CARLY for America” — the name of the super PAC backing the candidate, not her campaign.
It was a stark portrayal of the new ways in which candidates of all ideological stripes are testing campaign finance rules to reach new levels of interaction with their big-money outside groups -- within legal limits.
CARLY for America is the super PAC; Carly for President is the campaign. The difference between the two is so subtle that the candidate herself occasionally directs voters wanting to learn more about her campaign to her super PAC website: “Check out Carly-for-America-dot-com,” Fiorina says.
The difference between the two is also close enough to have warranted a slight name change after running afoul of FEC regulations that bar independent expenditure committees — those not authorized by a candidate — from using a candidate’s name in their title. After the FEC flagged the violation in a letter to the super PAC, “Carly for America,” a direct reference to the candidate, became the acronym: "Conservative, Authentic, Responsive Leadership for You (CARLY) and for America.
There is one big difference between the groups: During the first half of the year, Fiorina’s super PAC raised $3.46 million, more than twice as much as the $1.7 million raised by the campaign.
As with all candidates, the campaign and the super PAC are not allowed to coordinate spending strategy with one another — but super PAC staffers follow the candidate nearly everywhere she goes.
At a recent town hall in New Hampshire hosted by the Sandown Republican Committee, super PAC staffers arrived early to set up signs inside and outside the venue, manned a table at the venue’s entrance where attendees could ask questions and pick up super PAC literature, and where they signed up potential volunteers. And super PAC representatives helped the local Republican committee take down the chairs and clean up when the town hall was finished.
It’s not just in New Hampshire — at a recent stop in Arizona, the CARLY for America Arizona co-chair co-hosted a private fundraiser for the campaign.
Often the only distinguishing factor between the candidate and the super PAC is the federally mandated small print stamped on the bottom of every flyer:“Paid for by CARLY for America. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.”
Supporters at a campaign event in New Hampshire this weekend said they know the difference — and don’t mind.
Butch Maxwell, a retired IT professional, said at a Fiorina event in Alton, N.H. that he “understand[s] why” the super PAC is filling in for the campaign.
"Whatever my feeling may be about the impact that super PACs have on the election process, everybody has one and it tends to level the field,” he said.
Fiorina’s campaign declined to respond to numerous requests for comment about the super PAC’s activities in the field.
In the wild West of campaign finance that’s emerged from the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, Fiorina is hardly an outlaw.
“What federal law regulates is coordinated spending of money,” said Paul Ryan, senior counsel at the reform-minded Campaign Legal Center. “The law doesn’t prohibit coordination in some general sense, what the law prohibits is coordination of expenditures.”
Though the lines are fuzzy, Fiorina’s campaign does appear to lean on its super PAC in a way that most other campaigns do not. Her official campaign has one full time staffer in New Hampshire, and 2 part timers. Her super PAC has seven paid staffers. In Iowa she has 2 campaign staffers; the super PAC has five. While other super PACs have a presence at events for the candidates they support, CARLY for America stands out for taking on staffing and other duties at nearly all of her events.
Staffers from the two groups say they speak to each other — indeed, some, like the top staffers for her Iowa campaign and super PAC say they are good friends — but never, they say, about spending money or candidate strategy. Two staffers, one from each group, at one point declined a reporter’s offer to get drinks after the event — “to keep up appearances,” they said.
And staffers from the two groups often work side by side, as her super PAC has taken on many of the grassroots duties that campaigns have done in the past.
But super PAC staffers say every move they make is dictated by publicly available information. Fiorina’s campaign keeps a public Google Calendar of her events that the super PAC monitors.
“We try to see where we can provide from afar,” CARLY for America spokeswoman Leslie Shedd told NBC News in an interview.
The super PAC says they follow that Google calendar as well as local reporters on Twitter who are known to have the inside scoop on campaign events in a state. One CARLY for America adviser told NBC News that if the event is public, they show up; if not, they’ll contact the organizer to ask if it’s okay to come.
CARLY for America declined to offer any details on their interpretation of FEC rules, whether the group gives any guidance on what interactions are and aren’t allowed between super PAC and campaign staffers, or how the decision was made to focus their efforts on a ground game.
As Fiorina greeted voters at MaryAnn’s Diner in Derry earlier this month, a representative from her super PAC stood close by, at one point offering to take a photo of Fiorina and a fan.
Even door-to-door canvassing is a joint effort. When Fiorina recently went door-knocking in Manchester, a CARLY for America representative tagged along, just behind the group. Fiorina talks with residents, and then the super PAC staffer steps in to offer literature on the candidate.
Shedd said the super PAC tries to be clear about the lines between Carly for America and the campaign.
“We are always very clear about the difference,” she said.
One of the reasons the lines are blurry is because regulations regarding super PACs are out of date, says former FEC Chairman David Mason.
The regulations “were written when everybody was thinking about soft money,” Mason said. “The FEC rules on coordination are all written to address communications — television ads, print ads, billboards, direct mail, that sort of thing — and so there really are no regulations covering things like events and voter drives,” he said. “That’s not to say that there aren’t some legal questions about it.”
The rules are unlikely to change anytime soon, with a deadlocked FEC, and a lack of will by many on Capitol Hill to address campaign finance reform.
And Fiorina’s supporters aren’t the only ones pushing into the fray. The super PAC backing Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Believe Again, is playing a similar role by staffing his events and helping with field operations and Jindal is scheduled to appear at town hall meetings sponsored by the super PAC in October. A trio of outside groups supporting former Texas Gov. Rick Perry was picking up the slack for their cash-poor candidate before he suspended his campaign last week. And Jeb Bush appeared at dozens of fundraisers for his super PAC before he officially declared his candidacy.
It’s a move that makes sense for many cash-strapped campaigns, especially when they’re getting off the ground, as the super PACs are often bankrolled by a small handful of millionaires and can raise and spend unlimited sums.
“It’s definitely the new normal,” Mason said.
Indeed, Shedd said CFA is just following the latest trends in campaign finance.
“This is the modern version of what campaigns have turned into. You’ve seen this evolution of how campaigns are operating over time.”
But that doesn’t mean it comes without risks. Mason said that frequent communication between the super PAC and campaign could make it tougher to prove innocence later on.
“If there are lots of communications between the super PAC and the campaign, then you raise this question about whether there was information passed from the campaign to the super PAC about these ads,” he said.
“It could raise some compliance questions.”
Still, the risk of prosecution for any of these practices is low. The FEC isn’t known for its rigorous enforcement practices and investigations are rare because they’re hard to prove and because of a partisan deadlock among the commission. Fines are even more rare, and often negligible for groups raising millions of dollars. A New York Times analysis found that fines levied by the FEC in 2014 were the lowest since 2001, amounting to less than $600,000 — in contrast to the $7 billion spent by campaigns and groups on elections that year.
NBC News' Vaughn Hillyard contributed to this report.BP Argues Companies Are Unfairly Cashing In On 2010 Spill
Enlarge this image toggle caption Gerald Herbert/AP Gerald Herbert/AP
Oil giant BP is challenging hundreds of millions of dollars in claims that were filed by businesses after the company's 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The total price tag for BP's oil spill is huge — $42.5 billion. At issue here is a fraction of that — but still a lot of money. BP says $540 million has been awarded to businesses for losses that "are either nonexistent, exaggerated or have nothing to do with the Deepwater Horizon accident."
Florida attorney Kevin McLean represents one company that could fall into this category — a commercial printer near Tampa. "Did they suffer anything that I can prove was related to the spill?" asks McLean. "Absolutely not. I cannot prove that one dime of their revenue loss was related to the spill."
Still, McLean says he filed a claim for about $40,000 on behalf of the printer. He was able to do this because of the method the claims administrator set up. Essentially, if a business in the region could show its revenue was lower after the spill, the loss was assumed to be spill-related.
That prompted enterprising lawyers to run advertisements looking for clients who might qualify. Some mentioned specifically that losses didn't have to be traceable to the spill.
BP compiled a list of claims it believes should not qualify. They include a farmer who didn't plant a crop in 2010; a lawyer who lost his license before the spill; and an escort service.
BP argues the claims administrator, with federal Judge Carl Barbier's approval, misinterpreted a 2012 settlement the company signed with a group representing thousands of individuals and plaintiffs. Originally, BP estimated the settlement would cost $7.8 billion. But once the claims started rolling in, it was clear the figure would be higher. That's when BP began challenging the claims process in court.
Loyola University law professor Blaine LeCesne says he was surprised BP agreed to such
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whereas in France, as in less developed countries, they still do. This makes them difficult to manage. Bernard Ziegler, the visionary French test pilot and engineer behind the Airbus design, once said to me, “First you have to understand the mentality.” I said, “Do you really think they are so arrogant?” He said, “Some, yes. And they have the flaw of being too well paid.” “So there must be no problem in the United States.” But Ziegler was serious. He said, “Second, the union’s position is that pilots are always perfect. Working pilots are perfect, and dead pilots are, too.” In the case of Air France 447 the union has gone so far as to suggest that it is immoral to blame the pilots because they cannot defend themselves. At the extreme, a 447 victims’ family group has even taken their side. It is an old pattern, deeply rooted. In 1953, when an Air France crew flew a perfectly good Constellation into a mountain during a routine descent into Nice, Ziegler’s father, who was the airline’s managing director, went with the chief pilot to report to the French prime minister. The prime minister opened by saying, “What did your pilot do wrong?,” and the chief pilot answered, “Monsieur, the pilot is never wrong.” Ziegler smiled ironically. He is so blunt that for a while he required police protection. He was building airplanes so docile, he once declared, that even his concierge could fly them. We spoke soon after Air France 447 had crashed, and before the recorders had been recovered. France is a great aviation nation. And Ziegler is a patriot. But he is also a modernist. He has designed the most advanced airliners ever built. His point was that at Air France the piloting culture has not changed with the times. III. Loss of Control
On the night of May 31, 2009, the pilots of Flight 447 certainly did not serve their passengers well. After Captain Dubois left the cockpit to get some sleep, Robert, the senior co-pilot, sat on the left, serving as the Pilot Not Flying. Bonin, on the right, continued to handle the basic flying chores. The airplane was on autopilot doing.82 Mach, progressing toward Paris at 35,000 feet, mushing slightly with its nose two degrees up and its wings meeting the oncoming air at a positive angle of about three degrees—the all-important, lift-producing angle of attack. As the angle of attack increases, so does lift efficiency—but only up to the point where the angle becomes too steep and the oncoming air can no longer flow smoothly over the tops of the wings. At that point, the airplane stalls. The phenomenon is characteristic of all airplanes and has nothing to do with the engines. When an airplane stalls, it loses lift and its wings begin to plow through the sky with enormous drag, far greater than engine thrust can overcome. The airplane enters a deep, mushing, nose-high descent, often accompanied by difficulties in roll control. The only solution is to reduce the angle of attack by lowering the nose and diving. This is counter-intuitive but basic to flight. The recovery requires altitude, but in cruise there is plenty of altitude to spare.
As usual with airliners at high altitude, Air France 447 was flying just shy of a problematic angle of attack. Three degrees higher, at 5 degrees, a warning would have sounded in the cockpit, and 5 degrees higher still, at an angle of attack of about 10 degrees, theoretically the airplane would have stalled. The last is theoretical because in the A330, under an all-encompassing automation regime known as Normal Law, the flight-control system intervenes to protect against the stall: it lowers the nose and advances the power in a manner that cannot be overridden by the pilots. Such interventions are extremely rare. Pilots spend their entire careers without experiencing them—unless something goes really wrong with their judgment. Something went really wrong here, but for now nothing was out of the ordinary. In front of each pilot, Bonin and Robert, were two independently sourced flat-screen displays. The easiest for casual observers to understand were the navigational displays—moving maps showing heading, course, waypoints, and ground speed, with weather radar superimposed. But the more important were the primary flight displays, each built around a symbolic representation of the airplane in relation to a horizon line—showing pitch (nose up or down) and bank (wings level or not), along with heading, altitude, airspeed, and climb or descent rates. A third, standby display showed much the same, though in smaller form. It is on the basis of such marvels of informational presentation that pilots maintain control while flying by hand at night or in clouds, when the actual horizon cannot be seen. After Dubois turned up the cockpit lights, the view outside was black. The airplane entered another cloud layer and was jostled by light turbulence. In the passenger cabin the seat-belt sign was on. Bonin rang the forward flight-attendant station and said, “Yes, Maryline, it’s Pierre up front. Listen, in about two minutes we ought to be in an area where it will start moving around a bit more than now.” He advised the cabin crew to take their seats and rang off with “I’ll call you when we’re out of it.” As it happened, he never did. The turbulence increased slightly. Bonin kept lamenting the inability to climb. He mentioned again the unusually warm temperature outside: “Standard plus 13.” Then he said, “Putain la vache. Putain!” Very roughly this translates into “Fucking hell. Fuck!” There was no particular reason for his outburst. He was anxious. He said, “We’re really at the very top of the cloud deck. It’s too bad. I’m sure that with a nonstandard 3–6-0 [36,000 feet], if we did that, it would be good... ” Robert did not respond. He was looking at his navigational display, which showed a thunderstorm dead ahead. He said, “You want to go a little to the left?” The suggestion was posed as a question. Bonin said, “Excuse me?” Robert said, “You can eventually go a bit to the left.” This was closer to a command. Bonin selected a heading 20 degrees to the left, and the airplane dutifully turned. The exchange was the first step in a confusing shift by which Bonin began to acquiesce to Robert’s authority without acceding to it completely. They entered an area of heavier weather, and the cockpit filled with the muted roar of ice crystals hitting the windscreen. Bonin dialed back the airplane’s speed by selecting.80 Mach. Robert shrugged verbally. He said, “It costs nothing.” The automatic throttles responded by reducing the thrust. The angle of attack slightly increased. The turbulence was light to occasionally moderate. The noise of the ice crystals continued. Unbeknownst to the pilots, the ice crystals began to accumulate inside the airplane’s three air-pressure probes, known as pitot tubes, which were mounted on the underside of the nose. The clogging of that particular probe design was a known issue on certain Airbus models, and though it occurred only under rare high-altitude conditions and had never led to an accident, it was considered to be serious enough that Air France had decided to replace the probes with ones of an improved design and had sent out an advisory to warn pilots of the problem. The first of the replacement probes had just arrived in Paris and were waiting in a storeroom to be installed. For Flight 447, it was too late: the probes were quickly clogged. Just after 11:10 P.M., as a result of the blockage, all three of the cockpit’s airspeed indications failed, dropping to impossibly low values. Also as a result of the blockage, the indications of altitude blipped down by an unimportant 360 feet. Neither pilot had time to notice these readings before the autopilot, reacting to the loss of valid airspeed data, disengaged from the control system and sounded the first of many alarms—an electronic “cavalry charge.” For similar reasons, the automatic throttles shifted modes, locking onto the current thrust, and the fly-by-wire control system, which needs airspeed data to function at full capacity, reconfigured itself from Normal Law into a reduced regime called Alternate Law, which eliminated stall protection and changed the nature of roll control so that in this one sense the A330 now handled like a conventional airplane. All of this was necessary, minimal, and a logical response by the machine. So here is the picture at that moment: the airplane was in steady-state cruise, pointing straight ahead without pitching up or down, and with the power set perfectly to deliver a tranquil.80 Mach. The turbulence was so light that one could have walked the aisles—though perhaps a bit unsteadily. Aside from a minor blip in altitude indication, the only significant failure was the indication of airspeed—but the airspeed itself was unaffected. No crisis existed. The episode should have been a non-event, and one that would not last long. The airplane was in the control of the pilots, and if they had done nothing, they would have done all they needed to do.
Naturally the pilots were surprised. At first they understood only that the autopilot had disengaged. Light turbulence tilted the airplane into a gentle bank. Bonin reached for the side-stick to his right, a device similar in appearance to a gaming stick. He said, “I’ve got the controls!,” and Robert answered, “O.K.” A C-chord alert sounded because the indications of altitude had deviated from the selected 35,000 feet. It is likely that Bonin was gripping his control stick much too hard: the data recorder, which measures stick movements, later showed that he was flailing from the start, trying to level the wings but using high-amplitude inputs like a panicked driver over-controlling a car. It caused the airplane to rock left and right. This was possibly the result of Bonin’s unfamiliarity with handling the Airbus in Alternate Law, particularly at high altitude, where conventional roll characteristics change. Had he been more seasoned, he might have loosened his grip—backed off to his fingertips—and settled things down. The record shows that he never did. But worse—far worse—was what Bonin did in the vertical sense: he pulled the stick back. Initially this may have been a startle response to the false indication of a minor altitude loss. But Bonin didn’t just ease the stick back—he hauled it back, three-fourths of the way to the stop, and then he kept on pulling. Alain Bouillard, the French investigator, equated the reaction to curling instinctively into a fetal position. The airplane responded by pitching up into an unsustainable climb, causing its speed to slow and its angle of attack to increase. Six seconds after Bonin assumed control, with the C-chord altitude alert chiming in the cockpit, a brief stall warning sounded. It was a loud synthetic male voice. It said STALL one time. The C-chord alert resumed. Robert said, “What was that?” The airplane answered, STALL STALL, and again the C-chord sounded. Neither pilot grasped the message. The angle of attack had increased to about 5 degrees, and the wings were still flying well, but it was time to do something about the warning. Bonin said, “We don’t have a good indication of... speed!,” and Robert concurred, saying, “We’ve lost the speeds!” With that realization—that the airspeed indications had dropped out—the problem should have been solved. Though Bonin had reacted wildly on the controls, the crew had assessed the failure correctly within 11 seconds of the onset, about as quickly as could be expected. The nose was 11 degrees up, which was excessive at high altitude but not in itself extreme. The solution was simple, and fundamental to flying. All Bonin had to do was to lower the nose to a normal cruising pitch—about to the horizon—and leave the thrust alone. The airplane would have returned to cruising flight at the same speed as before, even if that speed could not for the moment be known. But Bonin continued to pull back on the stick, jerkily pitching the nose higher. Was he yearning for the clear sky he believed was just above? Was he remembering an “unreliable airspeed” procedure that is meant for low altitude, where power is ample and the biggest concern is to climb away from the ground? Did he think that the airplane was going too fast? Evidence emerged later that he may have, but if so, why? Even if he did not hear the stall warning, the nose was up, the available thrust was low, and with or without valid indications, high-speed flight in those conditions was physically impossible. A renowned cockpit designer at Boeing—himself a transport pilot—once said to me, “We don’t believe there are any bad pilots. We believe there are average pilots who have bad days.” He called this a principle that underlies Boeing’s cockpit designs. But if Bonin was an average pilot, what does that say about the average?
At least one answer takes the form of the man on his left. After Robert concurred that the airspeed indications had been lost, he looked away from the main flight displays, thereby abandoning his primary role as the Pilot Not Flying, which according to the tenets of C.R.M. should have been to monitor Bonin’s actions. Instead he started reading aloud from a message screen that ranks and displays certain system conditions, and in some cases provides abbreviated advice on procedures. In this case the advice was irrelevant to the situation, but it led Bonin to switch off the thrust lock, which caused the engines to spool up automatically to full thrust. It was the first of a series of seesaw power changes that complicated the picture for the pilots and must have caught the attention of some passengers. Robert kept reading from the message screen. He said, “Alternate Law. Protections Lost.” This at least was relevant. It meant that the wings could stall, and that the warnings had to be heeded. It is not clear, however, that Robert had processed his own words or that Bonin had heard them. Robert said, “Wait, we’re losing... ” He stopped. Twenty seconds had passed since the loss of airspeed indications. They were soaring upward through the thin air at 36,000 feet and bleeding off speed. The nose was 12 degrees up. Robert returned to the primary flight displays. He said, “Pay attention to your speed! Pay attention to your speed!” By this he must have meant the airplane’s pitch, since the airspeed indications remained obviously invalid. Bonin may have understood the same, because he said, “O.K., I’m going back down!” He lowered the nose, but by only half a degree. The airplane continued to climb. Robert said, “You stabilize!” Bonin said, “Yeah!” “You go back down!” Robert pointed to a measure of climb rate or altitude. “We’re climbing, according to this! According to all three, you’re climbing! So you go back down!” “O.K.!” “You’re at... Go back down!” This is not the time for a dissertation on the Airbus flight-control system, which is criticized by Boeing, but to the extent that it embodies a mistake in design, it is that the pilot’s and co-pilot’s side-sticks are not linked and do not move in unison. This means that when the Pilot Flying deflects his stick, the other stick remains stationary, in the neutral position. If both pilots deflect their sticks at the same time, a DUAL INPUT warning sounds, and the airplane responds by splitting the difference. To keep this from causing a problem in the case of a side-stick jam, each stick has a priority button that cuts out the other one and allows for full control. The arrangement relies on clear communication and good teamwork to function as intended. Indeed, it represents an extreme case of empowering the co-pilot and accepting C.R.M. into a design. More immediately, the lack of linkage did not allow Robert to feel Bonin’s flailing. Bonin pushed the stick forward, and the nose pitched down, but a little too quickly for Robert’s taste, lightening the load to 0.7 G’s, a third of the way to weightlessness. Robert said, “Gently!” Apparently he realized only now that the engines had spooled up. He said, “What is that?” Bonin said, “We’re in climb!” It seems that one of the pilots now pulled the throttles back to idle, and six seconds later the other advanced them again. It is not clear who did what, but it seems likely that Bonin opted for idle and Robert for thrust. Bonin by then had gotten the nose down to a six-degree pitch, and the climb had tapered. Though they remained in an untenable position, all he had to do was lower the nose another few degrees and they would have been back where they started. But Bonin for some reason did not do it, and Robert seemed to run out of ideas. He kept trying to rouse the captain, Dubois, by repeatedly pushing the call button to the flight-rest compartment, behind the cockpit. He said, “Fuck, where is he?”
Bonin began to pull back on the stick again, raising the nose 13 degrees above the horizon. The angle of attack increased, and three seconds later the airplane began to shake with the onset of a stall. The shaking is known as a buffet. It occurs as the flow of air boils across the wings. As the stall develops more fully, it becomes rough enough in the cockpit to make the instruments hard to read. Carried by inertia, the airplane continued to climb. A flight attendant called onto the intercom, apparently in response to Robert, who may unintentionally have rung her while trying to rouse the captain. She said, “Hello?” As if the buffet weren’t enough of an indication, the stall warning erupted again, alternating between STALL STALL STALL and a chirping sound. The warnings sounded continuously for the next 54 seconds. The flight attendant said, “Yes?” Robert ignored her. He may have realized that they had stalled, but he did not say, “We’ve stalled.” To Bonin he said, “Especially try to touch the lateral controls as little as possible.” This is a minor part of stall recovery, and nothing compared with lowering the nose. The flight attendant said, “Hello?” Struggling with the controls, and with increasing difficulty keeping the wings level, Bonin said, “I’m at TOGA, huh?” TOGA is an acronym for maximum thrust. It is another minor part of stall recovery, especially at high altitude, near an airplane’s propulsive ceiling, where maximum thrust means very little thrust at all. Bonin kept raising the nose, pulling it as high as 18 degrees. Robert said, “Fuck, is he coming or not?” The flight attendant said, “It doesn’t answer,” and hung up with a click. By then the pitot tubes had unfrozen, and the airspeed indicators were working normally again—though this would not have been obvious to Bonin or Robert, in part because they had no idea of the speed that the indications at this point should have shown, and apparently did not have the presence of mind to extrapolate from the G.P.S.-derived ground speed, which had been displayed on the navigational screen all along. For the next 12 seconds, neither pilot spoke. Amid repeated stall alarms, the airplane ran out of the inertial ability to climb, topped a parabolic arc at 38,000 feet, and started down on the far side with its nose up and, out at the wings, an angle of attack as steep as 23 degrees. One minute and 17 seconds had passed since the trouble had started, and that is a very long time. The descent rate rapidly grew to 3,900 feet per minute, and as a result, the angle of attack further increased. The buffeting grew heavy. Dubois finally knocked on the cockpit wall, signaling that he was coming. Robert kept urgently ringing the call button anyway. He said, “But we’ve got the engines! What the hell is happening?” STALL. STALL. STALL. He said, “Do you understand what’s happening, or not?” Bonin said, “Fuck, I don’t have control of the airplane anymore! I don’t have control of the airplane at all!” Because the right wing was stalled more deeply than the left, the airplane was rolling in that direction. Robert said, “Controls to the left!” Using the priority button on his side-stick, he assumed control of the airplane. He had it for only a second before Bonin, using his own priority button, and without saying a word, took control back. This left Robert with a sense that his side-stick had failed. He said, “Fuck, what’s going on?” Bonin said, “I have the impression we’re going crazily fast.” With the nose up and little thrust available? How could he have been so confused? We do not know. The cockpit door opened, and Dubois entered. All was commotion. Rather calmly he asked, “What’s happening?” STALL. STALL. STALL. The cockpit was shaking heavily. Robert did not say, “We lost airspeed indications, and this guy pulled up. We’re in Alternate Law. We climbed to 38,000 feet, and now we’re going down.” He said, “I don’t know what’s happening!” Bonin said, “We’re losing control of the airplane!” The Airbus was passing through the original altitude of 35,000 feet; the nose was 15 degrees up; the descent rate was 10,000 feet per minute and increasing; the angle of attack, though not indicated in the cockpit, was an incredible 41 degrees; the right wing was down unstoppably by 32 degrees; and the airplane was arcing off course through the blackness over the mid-Atlantic. Robert said to Dubois, “We completely lost control of the airplane, and we don’t understand anything! We tried everything!” IV. Flying Robots
Robert’s confusion was later reflected in the frustration of engineers and air-safety specialists worldwide. The A330 is a masterpiece of design, and one of the most foolproof airplanes ever built. How could a brief airspeed-indication failure in an uncritical phase of the flight have caused these Air France pilots to get so tangled up? And how could they not have understood that the airplane had stalled? The roots of the problem seem to lie paradoxically in the very same cockpit designs that have helped to make the last few generations of airliners extraordinarily safe and easy to fly. This is as true for Boeing as for Airbus, because, whatever their rivalries and differences, both manufacturers have come to similar cockpit solutions. The first was the elimination of the flight-engineer position, despite loud objections by the pilots’ unions, which claimed that safety would be compromised. This occurred in the late 1970s, at the same time that John Lauber and the NASA researchers were pursuing their systematic studies of flight-crew performance and were coming up with the idea of Crew Resource Management. By then the individual aircraft systems—engines, fuel, electronics, pressurization, hydraulics, and so on—had become sufficiently self-regulating that there was no longer a need for a third crew member to control them manually. Airbus was the underdog, hemorrhaging public funds and making airplanes that did not sell. It decided on a no-compromise gamble to produce the most technologically advanced airliners that could be designed. Ignoring the union clamor, it started by imposing a two-person cockpit on its models, kicking off an argument about the value of pilots that still comes into view every time an Airbus crashes. Boeing, which was developing the 757 and 767 concurrently, took a more polite position, but the writing was on the wall. The Boeing 737 and Douglas DC-9 had already been certified to operate with two-pilot crews, without a flight engineer aboard. After a presidential task force in the United States studied the matter and concluded that a third crew member in the cockpit constituted, if anything, a distraction, the unions accepted defeat. The question was how to design cockpits for the two-pilot crews, particularly in light of advances in micro-computing power, digital sensing, bright-screen displays, and new navigational possibilities that invited the use of electronic moving maps. The manufacturers scrapped the crowded electro-mechanical panels of the past and, using proof-of-concept work done by NASA, equipped their new airplanes with “glass” cockpits built around flat-panel displays. The new displays offered many advantages, including the ability to de-clutter the cockpit by consolidating basic flight information onto a few screens, using improved symbols, and burying much of the rest—but in readily available form. Like C.R.M., it was all about getting better, more consistent performance from pilots—and it has done that. Automation is an integral part of the package. Autopilots have been around since nearly the start of aviation, and component systems have been automated since the 1960s, but in glass-cockpit designs, the automation is centralized and allows the systems to communicate with one another, to act as parts of an integrated whole, and even to decide which information should be presented to the pilots, and when. At the core are flight-management computers—with keypads mounted on central pedestals—which are largely pre-programmed on the ground according to optimizations decided upon by airline dispatchers, and which guide the airplane’s autopilots through the full complexity of each flight. By the mid-1980s, many such airplanes, both Airbuses and Boeings, had entered the global fleet, for the most part leaving their pilots to simply observe the functioning of the systems. In 1987, Airbus took the next step by introducing the first fly-by-wire airliner, the smallish A320, in which computers interpret the pilots’ stick inputs before moving the control surfaces on the wings and tail. Every Airbus since has been the same, and Boeing has followed suit in its own way.
These are generally known as “fourth generation” airplanes; they now constitute nearly half the global fleet. Since their introduction, the accident rate has plummeted to such a degree that some investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board have recently retired early for lack of activity in the field. There is simply no arguing with the success of the automation. The designers behind it are among the greatest unheralded heroes of our time. Still, accidents continue to happen, and many of them are now caused by confusion in the interface between the pilot and a semi-robotic machine. Specialists have sounded the warnings about this for years: automation complexity comes with side effects that are often unintended. One of the cautionary voices was that of a beloved engineer named Earl Wiener, recently deceased, who taught at the University of Miami. Wiener is known for “Wiener’s Laws,” a short list that he wrote in the 1980s. Among them: Every device creates its own opportunity for human error. Exotic devices create exotic problems. Digital devices tune out small errors while creating opportunities for large errors. Invention is the mother of necessity. Some problems have no solution. It takes an airplane to bring out the worst in a pilot. Whenever you solve a problem, you usually create one. You can only hope that the one you created is less critical than the one you eliminated. You can never be too rich or too thin (Duchess of Windsor) or too careful about what you put into a digital flight-guidance system (Wiener). Wiener pointed out that the effect of automation is to reduce the cockpit workload when the workload is low and to increase it when the workload is high. Nadine Sarter, an industrial engineer at the University of Michigan, and one of the pre-eminent researchers in the field, made the same point to me in a different way: “Look, as automation level goes up, the help provided goes up, workload is lowered, and all the expected benefits are achieved. But then if the automation in some way fails, there is a significant price to pay. We need to think about whether there is a level where you get considerable benefits from the automation but if something goes wrong the pilot can still handle it.” Sarter has been questioning this for years and recently participated in a major F.A.A. study of automation usage, released in the fall of 2013, that came to similar conclusions. The problem is that beneath the surface simplicity of glass cockpits, and the ease of fly-by-wire control, the designs are in fact bewilderingly baroque—all the more so because most functions lie beyond view. Pilots can get confused to an extent they never would have in more basic airplanes. When I mentioned the inherent complexity to Delmar Fadden, a former chief of cockpit technology at Boeing, he emphatically denied that it posed a problem, as did the engineers I spoke to at Airbus. Airplane manufacturers cannot admit to serious issues with their machines, because of the liability involved, but I did not doubt their sincerity. Fadden did say that once capabilities are added to an aircraft system, particularly to the flight-management computer, because of certification requirements they become impossibly expensive to remove. And yes, if neither removed nor used, they lurk in the depths unseen. But that was as far as he would go. Sarter has written extensively about “automation surprises,” often related to control modes that the pilot does not fully understand or that the airplane may have switched into autonomously, perhaps with an annunciation but without the pilot’s awareness. Such surprises certainly added to the confusion aboard Air France 447. One of the more common questions asked in cockpits today is “What’s it doing now?” Robert’s “We don’t understand anything!” was an extreme version of the same. Sarter said, “We now have this systemic problem with complexity, and it does not involve just one manufacturer. I could easily list 10 or more incidents from either manufacturer where the problem was related to automation and confusion. Complexity means you have a large number of subcomponents and they interact in sometimes unexpected ways. Pilots don’t know, because they haven’t experienced the fringe conditions that are built into the system. I was once in a room with five engineers who had been involved in building a particular airplane, and I started asking, ‘Well, how does this or that work?’ And they could not agree on the answers. So I was thinking, If these five engineers cannot agree, the poor pilot, if he ever encounters that particular situation... well, good luck.” In the straight-on automation incidents that concern Sarter, the pilots overestimate their knowledge of the aircraft systems, then do something expecting a certain result, only to find that the airplane reacts differently and seems to have assumed command. This is far more common than the record indicates, because rarely do such surprises lead to accidents, and only in the most serious cases of altitude busting or in-flight upsets are they necessarily reported. Air France 447 had an additional component. The blockage of the pitot tubes led to an old-fashioned indication failure, and the resulting disconnection of the autopilot was an old-fashioned response: trust the pilots to sort things out. There were definitely automation complications in what followed, and to that mix one can add the design decision not to link the two control sticks. But on Air France 447, the automation problem ran still deeper. Bonin and Robert were flying a fourth-generation glass-cockpit airplane, and unlike the pilots who think they know more than they do, these two seemed to fear its complexities. The Airbus was reacting in a conventional manner, but once they ventured beyond the routine of normal cruise they did not trust the nature of the machine. It is hard to imagine that this would have happened under the old Clipper Skippers, the stick-and-rudder boys. But Bonin and Robert? It was as if progress had pulled the rug out from beneath elementary aeronautical understanding. V. The Final Descent
Captain Dubois entered the cockpit 1 minute and 38 seconds after the pitot tubes malfunctioned. It is not known whether he knelt or stood behind Bonin and Robert, or sat in the jump seat. Likewise, the conditions in the passenger cabin are not known. Though the unusual motions must have been noticed by some, and the passengers seated in front may have heard the cockpit alarms, there is no evidence that panic broke out, and no screams were recorded. In the cockpit, the situation was off the scale of test flights. After Dubois arrived, the stall warning temporarily stopped, essentially because the angle of attack was so extreme that the system rejected the data as invalid. This led to a perverse reversal that lasted nearly to the impact: each time Bonin happened to lower the nose, rendering the angle of attack marginally less severe, the stall warning sounded again—a negative reinforcement that may have locked him into his pattern of pitching up, assuming he was hearing the stall warning at all. Dubois pointed to an indication on a flight display. He said, “So, here, take that, take that.” Robert repeated the order more urgently. “Take that, take that! But try to take that!” The stall warning erupted again. Bonin said, “I have a problem—it’s that I don’t have a vertical-speed indication anymore!” Dubois merely grunted in response. Bonin said, “I have no more displays!” This was not correct. He had displays but didn’t believe them. The descent rate was now 15,000 feet per minute. Robert was suffering from the same disbelief. He said, “We don’t have a single valid display!” Bonin said, “I have the impression we’re going crazily fast! No? What do you think?” He reached for the speed-brake lever and pulled it. Robert said, “No. No! Above all don’t extend the brakes!” “No? O.K.!” The speed brakes retracted. At times both of them were on their side-sticks, countermanding each other on the controls. Bonin said, “So, we’re still going down!” Robert said, “Let’s pull!” For 23 seconds Captain Dubois had said nothing. Robert finally roused him. He said, “What do you think? What do you think? What do you see?” Dubois said, “I don’t know. It’s descending.” It is said in his defense that he faced an indecipherable scene, having arrived after the loss of control, but his observer status was actually an advantage. He knew nothing of the original airspeed-indication failure. Now he had a functional panel, showing low airspeeds, a low ground speed, a nose-high attitude, and a big descent under way. Add to that the repeated stall warnings, the telltale buffeting, and the difficulty in controlling roll. It might have been helpful to have an angle-of-attack display—one capable of indicating such extremes—but what else could this be but a stall? Bonin had managed to come out of the sustained right bank. He said, “There you are! There—it’s good. We’ve come back to wings level—no, it won’t... ” The airplane was rocking between left- and right-bank angles up to 17 degrees. Dubois said, “Level the wings. The horizon, the standby horizon.” Then things got even more confused. Robert said, “Your speed! You’re climbing!” He probably meant that Bonin was raising the nose, because the airplane was emphatically not climbing. He said, “Descend! Descend, descend, descend!,” again apparently referring to pitch. Bonin said, “I am descending!” Dubois picked up the language. He said, “No, you’re climbing.” Bonin may have realized that the reference was to pitch. He said, “I’m climbing? O.K., so we’re going down.” Communication in the cockpit was withering. Robert said, “O.K., we’re at TOGA.” Bonin asked, “What are we now? In altitude, what do we have?” Apparently he was too busy to see for himself. Dubois said, “Fuck, it’s not possible.” “In altitude what do we have?” Robert said, “What do you mean ‘in altitude’?” “Yeah, yeah, I’m descending, no?” “You’re descending, yes.” Bonin never got his answer, but the airplane was dropping through 20,000 feet. It rolled into a steep, 41-degree bank to the right. Dubois said, “Hey, you, you’re in... Put, put the wings level!” Robert repeated, “Put the wings level!” “That’s what I’m trying to do!” Dubois was not happy. He said, “Put the wings level!” “I’m at full left stick!” Robert moved his own side-stick. A synthetic voice said, DUAL INPUT. Dubois said, “The rudder.” This did the trick, and the airplane righted. Dubois said, “Wings level. Go gently, gently!” In confusion, Robert said, “We’ve lost everything on the left wing! I have nothing left there!” Dubois answered, “What do you have?,” then “No, wait!” Though precise modeling was never pursued, the investigators later estimated that this was the last moment, as the airplane dropped through 13,000 feet, when a recovery would theoretically have been possible. The maneuver would have required a perfect pilot to lower the nose at least 30 degrees below the horizon and dive into the descent, accepting a huge altitude loss in order to accelerate to a flying angle of attack, and then rounding out of the dive just above the waves, pulling up with sufficient vigor to keep from exceeding the airplane’s speed limit, yet not so violently as to cause a structural failure. There are perhaps a handful of pilots in the world who might have succeeded, but this Air France crew was not among them. There is an old truth in aviation that the reasons you get into trouble become the reasons you don’t get out of it.
Bonin said, “We’re, we’re there, we’re getting to level 100!” Level 100 is 10,000 feet. It’s a standard call in normal operations. It used to be said that below 10,000 you were in “Indian country.” Now it’s said that the cockpit should be sterile, meaning there must be no distractions. Robert said, “Wait! Me, I have the, I have the controls, me!” He did not push his priority button, and Bonin did not relinquish his stick. The synthetic voice said, DUAL INPUT. The airplane’s angle of attack remained at 41 degrees. Bonin said, “What is it? How is it that we’re continuing to descend so deeply?” Robert directed Captain Dubois to the overhead switching panel. He said, “Try to see what you can do with your controls up there! The primaries,
|
"Dogs
love garbage cans it seems regardless of their rank."
"Rob Roy was a wild one," noted White House kennel master
Harry Waters, "He would dig into me, but she [Grace] had no
fear of him. Sightseers were sometimes more interested in
the dogs than they were in the White House." Rob Roy was
particularly attracted to pursuing the squirrels on the White
House grounds, only desisting after a "sharp reprimand" from
his Master.
Rob Roy made other White House personnel besides Harry
Waters nervous. One wintry day, some men were shoveling
the snow from the White House walks. Colonel Starling, told
the story:
"He [Coolidge] saw Rob Roy... being friendly with an old
negro who was shovelling one of the paths. The negro was
afraid of the dogs.
"'Will he bite?' he asked the President as we came by.
"'Oh, yes," [Coolidge] said. 'He's a very vicious dog. But he's
a peculiar biter. He only bites lazy men. As long as you keep
working he won't bother you.'
"When we got to the house, he stood inside the door and
gleefully spied on the negro, who shovelled furiously, while
Rob Roy, who was interested in the procedure, sat on his
haunches and watched."
As was often the case, Silent Cal chose to hide his true
feelings about Rob Roy and Prudence Prim. To Harry Waters
he would snap, "You can lose them one of these days if you
want to." Waters was never sure if he was kidding or not.
He was. The President was actually quite taken by them and
was particularly fond of Rob Roy (referred to in Coolidge's
Autobiography as "my companion."), who he would take to
his office each afternoon and to his weekly press conferences
each Friday. Grace Coolidge recorded that Rob Roy took a
"vocal" part in those proceedings.
When Rob Roy developed a stomach ailment in September
1928, the Coolidges had him sent to Walter Reade Army
hospital for treatment. "The doctor thought he would come
through OK," wrote Grace to a friend, but the operation was
not a success. "My poor doggie died this morning before I
reached home," the President wrote, "He was still at Walter
Reade."
Calvin even wrote of Rob Roy in his Autobiography : "He was
a stately companion of great courage and fidelity. He loved to
bark from the second-story windows and around the South
Grounds. Nights he remained in my room and afternoons
went with me to the office. His especial delight was to ride
with me in the boats when I went fishing. So although I know
he would bark for joy as the grim boatman ferried him across
the dark waters of the Styx, yet his going left me lonely on the
hither shore."
The President also saw to it that his canine friends received
their fair share of the federal larder—perhaps more than their
fair share. "Well, they was feeding the dogs so much," White
House guest Will Rogers once observed, "that at one time it
looked to me like the dogs was getting more than I was. I
come pretty near getting down on my all fours and barking to
see if business wouldn't pick up with me."
According to White House usher Ike Hoover, Grace Coolidge
could whistle quite well, although Calvin could not. To summon
the family canines the President would use a tin whistle, but
one evening he had neglected to bring it with him and was
having trouble trying to whistle on his own. "What's the matter,
poppa;" Grace asked slyly, "don't your teeth fit tonight?"
The most famous portrait of Grace Coolidge is that painted
by Howard Chandler Christy and featuring not just the First
Lady but also Rob Roy. When Mrs. Coolidge donned a red
dress so she might contrast with the pure white Rob Roy, the
President impishly suggested that she wear a white dress
and dye the dog red.
Despite the fact that the dog was not dyed crimson, Coolidge
enjoyed the portrait so much that he had a photograph made
of it and had copies sent to his friends—including a copy to
the man who had given him the animal. The man wired back:
"Fine picture of dog. Send more photographs."
The Pennsylvania Avenue Zoo
And then there were the exotic animals. To an old
Northampton friend, Alfred Pearce Dennis, Coolidge once
wrote: "I'd like to have your two boys come to the White
House to see the animals. We've got a bunch of young rabbits
that might interest them. Kind people send us animals,
puppies, kittens, queer animals sometimes—wombats and
such."
As usual, Silent Cal was not overstating the case. All sorts of
animals found their way to the Coolidges during their
Washington years. In his Autobiography Calvin observed:
"A great many presents come to the White House which are
all cherished, not so much for their intrinsic value as because
they are tokens of esteem and affection. Almost everything
that can be eaten comes. We always know what to do with
that. But some of the pets that are offered us are more of a
problem. I have a beautiful black-haired bear that was brought
all the way from Mexico in a truck, and a pair of live lion cubs
now grown up, and a small species of hippopotamus which
came from South Africa. These and other animals and birds
have been placed in the zoological quarters in Rock Creek
Park."
The lion cubs—by the way—were named Tax Reduction and
Budget Bureau.
There were others—a wallaby from Australia, a duikir (a small
deer) from Africa, and thirteen Pekin duck hatchlings.
Sometimes critters arrived not as pets, but rather as what the
President had referred to as what "can be eaten."
"One day," Colonel Starling recalled, "a friend sent me two
rock bass, still alive, which he had caught on a fishing trip to
Gunston Pass, down the Potomac. I sent them up to the
President, thinking they would stir his interest. I expected him
to send them to the kitchen to have them served for supper.
The next morning he said to me:
"'I put my little fishes in my bathtub and they swam around all
night. One of them hopped out while I was asleep and Mrs.
Coolidge had to come and pick him up in a newspaper and
put him back.'
"I was pretty sure that he was not asleep when the fish
awakened Mrs. Coolidge with its flip-flopping. He probably
opened the door between their rooms so she could hear it
and then played possum."
And, of course, there was Rebecca the raccoon. Rebecca
also arrived as what "can be eaten." Sent from Peru,
Mississippi, she was to have part of a Thanksgiving White
House feast, but the Coolidges found her to be almost entirely
domesticated and rather too pleasant to be sauteed. "We...
had a house made for her in one of the large trees," wrote
Grace, "with a wire fence built around it for protection. We
kept her chained when out of doors, but in the house she had
her liberty. She was a mischievous, inquisitive party and we
had to keep watch of her when she was in the house. She
enjoyed nothing better than being placed in a bathtub with a
little water in it and given a cake of soap with which to play. In
this fashion she would amuse herself for an hour or more."
Rebecca would take her meals on the tiled floor of her
mistress' bathroom. While most Americans of the time were
dining on relatively simple gastronomic fare, Rebecca
seemed a veritable gourmet. Her fare consisted of green
shrimp, chicken, persimmon, eggs (a particular favorite), and
cream.
So pleased was the President with Rebecca (though he
persisted in calling her a 'he"), that he announced her arrival
to the press in one of his regular press conferences. A
reporter wanted to know if the beast was edible. "That
depends on your taste," Cal replied, "I haven't much of a taste
for raccoon meat. Some people like it very much. But I have
established him here in the south lot in suitable housing and
he seems to be enjoying himself very much.... I don't think he
is quite grown yet. He is very playful, very interesting, and
seems very well trained and well behaved." At that point the
coon had not yet been named and Coolidge asked the press
to "advertise" for one.
Some reports had the President walking Rebecca around the
house on a leash. Whether that is so or not, it is true that he
would often play with the raccoon after his afternoon
paperwork was done—and as in the case of Tige the cat—
walk about with Rebecca draped around his neck. The
majority of the White House staff disliked the raccoon (she
was always tearing clothes and ripping silk stockings). As
usual the President saw a chance for his brand of humor.
Once when Rebecca had scampered up Mrs. Coolidge's
social secretary, Mary Randolph, Calvin teased the nervous
Miss Randolph: "I think that little coon could bite if she had a
mind too."
A few times Rebecca escaped from the grounds, but each
time was recaptured. The Coolidges, fearing she would be
run over in the street on one last jaunt, turned her over to the
Rock Creek Zoo for her own safety. Grace and Cal, however,
still were concerned regarding her happiness and prevailed
upon zoo officials to secure some companionship for her.
That came in the form of a male raccoon dubbed Reuben.
That matchmaking failed as Reuben eventually escaped from
the zoo, leaving Rebecca to live a solitary life.
As for the Coolidges they considered living without a creature
or two or three tramping or flying about the house, to be an
unsatisfactory, solitary life. "I am unable to understand," Grace
Coolidge once wrote, "how anyone can get along without
some sort of pet—a statement I can only agree with.Ford is betting the success of the Fiesta subcompact on the blogs, tweets and Facebook updates of 100 people who will live with the cars and share their experiences online. It's a hell of a gamble, but if it pays off, Ford just might recast itself as a cool company with a great product – no small feat for an American automaker.
Ford wants to generate buzz for the Fiesta, which will bring Europe's "small cars can be cool" ethos to America when it arrives next year. But rather than hand a bunch of them over to mainstream journalists, Ford broke with tradition by inviting dozens of 20-somethings to live with the car for six months and tell the world about it.
"While were trying to build excitement and awareness for the vehicle with the Fiesta Movement campaign, there's something bigger happening here," Scott Monty, Ford's social media boss, told Wired.com. "We're also going to be building broader awareness of Ford."
Social networking sites sell everything from soda to singers these days, but the auto industry has been slow to catch on. It might seem like a big risk – what if someone's car craps out? But Ford, and the entire industry, for that matter, desperately needs to embrace the message it sends, said Ian Shafer, CEO of the marketing firm Deep Focus.
"It shows that Ford cares what customers think," he said.
That's supremely important when everyone is bashing Detroit and taxpayers wonder why they should pay to keep Chrysler and General Motors alive. Something like the Fiesta Movement campaign also could give Ford an edge with a huge – and incredibly web-savvy – demographic.
Ford isn't shunning traditional advertising for the car, and it undoubtedly will invite the guys from Car & Driver, the Detroit Free Press and other mainstream outlets to review the Fiesta before it goes on sale at the end of 2010.
But the healthiest of the Big Three wants to generate buzz for the car among "millennials," those born between 1979 and 1996. Some 70 million millennials will be driving next year, and Ford is targeting the Fiesta squarely at them. A Microsoft study found 77 percent of millennials use a social networking site like Facebook or MySpace daily and 28 percent of them have a personal blog. That explains Ford's marketing campaign.
Ford recently handed 100 Fiestas to 100 people selected from 4,000 applicants. These "agents" – that's what Ford calls them – get to use the cars for six months in exchange for completing monthly "missions" with different themes. They'll share their experiences through YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter accounts Ford created for the campaign.
It's a smart move, Shafer said, because it plays into consumer demand for unofficial – read, unbiased – information about a new car. By turning the marketing over to social networking sites, Ford provides its target audience with content generated by people within that audience. Ford is taking a hands-off approach and telling participants not to hold back their opinions, bolstering the campaign's credibility.
"We've told them to be completely honest – that's the only way it's going to work," Monty told us. "We won't tell them what to say, nor will we censor or edit any of their content."
So far, it's working in Ford's favor. The tweets on the FordFiesta Twitter page are generally favorable, if a bit dry, as are the posts over at The Fiesta Movement Facebook page. None of the 80 pictures on the Fiesta Movement Flickr page show broken down cars. There are a few hundred videos on the FiestaMovement YouTube account if anyone's got a few hours to kill.
There's always a chance it could blow up in Ford's face. But the risk may not be as great as one might think. The Fiesta has been wildly successful in Europe – Ford says it's the second-best seller on the continent – and in Asia. Monty's confident the "agents" will give Ford a fair shake before posting a rant should something go wrong.
"As far as mechanical difficulties, let's let common sense prevail," he said. "If you were driving one of our cars as part of this program, wouldn't you call for assistance first, rather than writing a blog post?"
Still, even a breakdown or two could be good for Ford, just so long as the company handles any problems quickly and courteously, Shafer said. "They could really look like a hero if they come through," he said.
Monty says Ford is ready for the challenge.
"We've done a lot of war gaming and we're prepared for a number of scenarios," Monty told Wired.com. "Again, we're looking for their feedback and input on the vehicle – they're testing the vehicle as much as they're building buzz about it, and we want to know how to make it the best possible car."
Photo: Flickr / Fiesta Movement
See Also:Illinois's Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner said Thursday he will sign a bill allowing Medicaid and state health-care plans to cover abortions.
"I also believe that no woman should be forced to make a different decision than another woman would make purely based on her income," Rauner said at a press conference. "I believe that a woman living with limited financial means should not be put in the position where she has to choose something different than a woman of higher income would be able to choose."
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Rauner is considered one of the most vulnerable Republican governors up for reelection in 2018. Signing the bill makes it even more likely he will face a primary challenge.
“I am personally pro-choice, I always have been," he said.
"I made no qualms about that when I was elected governor. I have not and never will change my views," he said. "I personally believe that a woman must have the right to decide what goes on in her own body.”
Group that support abortion rights cheered the decision.
“We applaud Gov. Rauner for announcing he will sign HB 40 and, in doing so, affirming that freedom, equality, and justice are higher values than dogmatic partisanship," NARAL Pro-Choice America said in a statement. "Today is a great reminder of our history as a nation where women’s rights are considered human rights by elected officials regardless of party affiliation."It’s a story built for headlines: Monied men in Silicon Valley create a demand for highly compensated sex work that can easily be coordinated using the same apps and services they create at their desk jobs. As a narrative, it contains the holy trifecta that has come to replace sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll: sex, tech, and the hollow optimism of neoliberal capitalism. There’s just one problem: It’s not exactly true.
For the last two years, the media has been fixated on the idea of a mutually beneficial arrangement between Silicon Valley employees and sex workers. The reports follow a familiar pattern: Time-crunched Silicon Valley employees have a large amount of disposable income and the tech-savvy, Square-enabled sex workers who provide services for them are reaping the rewards, potentially earning upwards of a million dollars. Even after the FBI raided and shut down the escort advertising website MyRedbook.com last June, citing child trafficking as the rationale, tabloids and high-profile media outlets alike continued to promote the image of a “prostitution boom” driven by Silicon Valley’s money.
It’s undeniable that the tech industry has had an economic impact on sex work in the Bay Area. But between scrutiny from law enforcement and the tech-driven gentrification of San Francisco, sex work in the Bay Area is currently caught between a rock and several hard places. News outlets showed up last year for the sexy headlines about an FBI raid, but the economic fallout of that raid has proven to be far less titillating. To learn more about the situation on the ground, I checked in with three current and former Silicon Valley sex workers who painted a much different picture of the state of their industry than the image the media circulated last year.
Siouxsie Q is a journalist and sex worker who runs the popular Whorecast podcast and pens a column, called The Whore Next Door, for SF Weekly. In a phone interview, Siouxsie Q tells The Daily Beast that the economy for sex work has been shifting since the MyRedbook shutdown:
“Can you imagine what would happen to small business if the FBI seized Yelp? That’s essentially what happened with the sex industry here in the Bay Area. A very simple, free, accessible tool for many people in the industry was gone overnight.”
Siouxsie Q made the same comparison on CNN last summer following the arrest of Alix Tichelman. At the time, MyRedbook had already been offline for a few weeks. The overly optimistic headline accompanying her interview—“Tech’s booming prostitution trade”—likely belied the precarity of sex work in the Valley given those recent events.
In our interview, Siouxsie Q makes it clear that San Francisco continues to be a powerful force in the sex workers’ rights movement—led by organizations like the Bay Area chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) and the St. James Infirmary—but she is also honest about the struggles that sex workers have faced since the closure of MyRedbook. The advertising website wasn’t always a pleasant environment for sex workers because it allowed men to leave scathing and sometimes insulting reviews. One former escort who requested to remain anonymous told me that she was “basically date-raped” and then her client “went on to write an online review of my performance as if I wasn’t even a human.” But as flawed a tool as it was, MyRedbook nonetheless served as a central economic hub for Bay Area sex work and its absence has been felt palpably within the industry.
“It has been difficult,” Siouxsie Q says. “My community, the folks that I interact with, have really had to struggle to rebrand, reevaluate how they do their business, and how they advertise. The fall of MyRedbook definitely affected my business and the business of folks that I know in the Bay Area.”
Sex worker and public-health educator Maxine Holloway adds that the elimination of MyRedbook has also had consequences for the safety of sex work in Silicon Valley. In an email interview, she writes that the shutdown “had a very negative effect on how we referenced, referred, and screened potential clients.”
But even setting the impact of MyRedbook’s absence aside, the rapidly gentrifying Bay Area is becoming an increasingly inhospitable environment for sex workers. The median home price in San Francisco is estimated to be over $1 million and Bay Area rents are continuing to climb year over year—they are now the highest in the entire country. As a result, cities like Oakland and San Jose have become points of temporary refuge across the bay for lower and middle-class San Francisco residents—a category that includes the vast majority of sex workers.
“What we really want to have a conversation about here is the economics of the Bay Area,” Siouxsie Q points out. “People want to talk about the sex industry because it’s sexy but, at the end of the day, we’re talking about the working class and that’s a much harder conversation to have.”
Siouxsie Q does not deny that the tech industry has had an effect on the sex industry. “As an industry booms in a local economy, that industry is going to affect the other industries in that economy,” she says. But she also raises the crucial point that the fate of sex workers is not always considered in conjunction with the effects of the gentrification of Silicon Valley. The tech industry may have brought plenty of overworked men with disposable income to the Bay Area, but not only is that new wealth failing to trickle down, it’s also putting tremendous pressure on the working class—sex workers included—to either take on more work or move out.
As the anonymous former escort told me: “It feels like an exclusive society filled with spoiled children who up our rents.”
Holloway adds that there is a painful irony to the way in which income inequality is transforming the historically diverse San Francisco from “the perfect location to create movements for social-justice issues such as queer, trans, and sex worker rights” into an economically homogenous space.
And Siouxsie Q recalls: “In my career as a sex worker, the cost of living in San Francisco has gone up double or more. Have I doubled my prices? No.”
In Siouxsie Q’s view, too, most sex workers in the area are continuing to work in the face of this economic pressure—she says she doesn’t personally know anyone who has given up in the last eight months for financial reasons—but they are being forced to take on more work. Members of her community, for example, have “started webcamming once a week or started driving Uber, or many of the things that people do to survive in the Bay Area.” The tech industry isn’t exactly throwing Pretty Woman levels of cash at Silicon Valley sex workers but it is making San Francisco into a city-size version of Rodeo Drive. And at this point, the mythical figure of the sex worker-turned-Silicon Valley millionaire should probably replaced with the much more realistic image of a sex worker driving tech men around in an Uber during the day and sleeping with them at night, all to make ends meet.
It’s not the case, however, that tech industry clients themselves are spectacularly awful compared with other clients. When asked about her clients in the tech industry, Siouxsie Q responds: “Some of them are great and some of them are… [laughs] regular.” She further notes that she has many clients who “see themselves as allies in the fight for sex workers’ rights” even if they are “not able to be out about their allyship.”
Holloway adds, “I have not found tech clients to be more or less respectful, or more or less entitled. It really depends on the person.”
The anonymous former escort I spoke with did acknowledge that “they were still totally clueless about their economic and male privilege,” recalling that a client once told her, much to her chagrin: “If I was a woman, this would just be my perfect job!” But when asked if they were generally good clients in terms of respect, payment, and behavior, she eagerly replied, “For the most part, yes!”
But they don’t have to be particularly stingy clients on a personal level for their industry as a whole to make sex workers’ lives more challenging on a systemic level. The disposable income that tech executives spend on sex work, after all, comes from the same corporations that are driving San Francisco’s record levels of income disparity.
The criminalization of sex work, too, only compounds the economic difficulties that sex workers face in the Bay Area. It’s hard enough for people with legal professions in the Bay Area to make even half as much as a Silicon Valley intern; imagine what it’s like when one’s very occupation is considered to be a misdemeanor.
For many members of the working class, too, moving across the bay to Oakland could bring financial relief but, for a sex worker, Oakland could mean eviction thanks to an update to a local ordinance passed late last year that can require landlords to evict tenants who are suspected of sex work in order to avoid citation from the city. As Oakland North reported at the time, this “nuisance” ordinance previously put pressure on landlords to evict tenants who participated in “violent activity” or who had “illegal weapons” in their possession, but its purview was expanded to cover “prostitution, pimping, pandering, and solicitation activity.”
Siouxsie Q outlines how this updated ordinance could be implemented: “Say some new fancy tech industry folks move into West Oakland and they don’t like the neighborhood and they may see something that, to them, looks like sex work or a ‘nuisance.’ They can call the city and put into motion ways to get those people evicted.”
The Oakland ordinance is just one example of the legal obstacles that sex workers in Silicon Valley continue to face. MyRedbook.com was shut down as part of the FBI’s Operation Cross Country, an anti-trafficking initiative that, in practice, reportedly targets more adult sex workers than trafficking victims. And the same tech that, according to the buoyant reporting of yesteryear, is supposedly facilitating a sex work boom is now being used by law enforcement nationwide to target sex work and conduct sting operations over the Internet.
So forget what you may have heard about the simultaneous boom of startup culture and sex work. The economic reality of sex work in the Silicon Valley is far messier than a clean-cut symbiotic relationship between lonely tech men and eager call girls. Sex workers are among those hit hardest by the gentrification of a once diverse city. And tech is proving itself to be less of a tool in the hands of sex workers and more of a dangerous double-edged sword.Customs officers find pot in jalapeño load
Customs officers in Pharr found a marijuana load valued at $3.2 million mixed in with a trailer load of jalapeños coming in from Mexico, Customs and Border Protection said Thursday. Customs officers in Pharr found a marijuana load valued at $3.2 million mixed in with a trailer load of jalapeños coming in from Mexico, Customs and Border Protection said Thursday. Photo: Courtesy Photo Photo: Courtesy Photo Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Customs officers find pot in jalapeño load 1 / 3 Back to Gallery
BROWNSVILLE — Customs officers in Pharr found a marijuana load valued at $3.2 million mixed in with a trailer load of jalapeños coming in from Mexico, Customs and Border Protection said Thursday.
The seizure occurred Tuesday at the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge. Officers conducting a secondary inspection on a tractor-trailer found 352 bundles of what appeared to be marijuana. The bundles had a total weight of 3,163 pounds.
No arrests were reported. CBP officers seized the marijuana and the tractor-trailer.Yes, that’s right. You’re not misreading the headline. This weekend I had a chance to go to Berkeley, California and hang out at the home of my friend Joan Blades, one of the co-founders of MoveOn.org. “What??? How is that possible,” you ask? It’s possible because there is more common ground between left and right in this country than you might think. And Joan and I (and many others) intend to do our best to explore that ground, and force intransigent incumbent politicians to take action on the issues where we agree.
Joan and I were introduced almost two years ago by a mutual friend, Ralph Benko. Ralph concluded his introductory email between us with something like this line: “God help the politicians if the tea party and MoveOn.org ever agree on anything.” Well the time has come for us to find some agreement. If you disagree, let me ask you a few questions that I’ve asked many of my friends on the left and right.
How many of you voted for trillion-dollar deficits? I haven’t yet met the voter who did, yet representatives on both sides of the aisle continue to impose them on us.
How many of you think we have the premier education system in the world, where the dollars and are efforts are focused on our kids? Hmmm…none of you? Then why are so many of our politicians on both sides of the aisle wedded to the status quo, and we see so little change?
How many of you think that our criminal justice system is the best in the world, and the War on Drugs has been a tremendous success? Hmmm…anyone…left or right? No? Then why are so many of our incumbent representatives on both sides of the aisle so weak when it comes to making any real criminal justice reforms?
How many of you think that we have far too much unproductive, government mandated paperwork? Everyone? Then why can’t we get our elected representatives at all levels to do something about this?
There is much common ground on these and many other issues. And it is on these things Joan and I are focused, and on which our discussions focused on Saturday. I brought a couple of conservative friends, both in their early 30’s (and some homemade baked goods from my beautiful and talented wife Patty). As a relatively old guy (50), I was hoping my friends would add some youthful balance to my perspective. I brought the baked goods as an upfront peace-offering, knowing that no one can resist Patty’s baked goods. Joan had invited two of her friends from the left, creating a good mix of people, and the potential for some political fireworks.
I think my two guests were a bit nervous, as Joan is obviously a legend on the left, and they had never met or spoken to her. I was very comfortable, as I already knew Joan through emails and phone calls over the last two years. While we disagree strongly on many political issues, we’ve learned over time that we really like each other as people, and have a mutual respect not often found in cross-partisan dialogue.
We arrived at Joan’s house in the beautiful Berkeley Hills around 1 p.m. after making the tricky navigation on the tight winding streets in my ridiculously large Ford F350 pickup, which was about as out of place on the streets of Berkeley as a vehicle could be. I even felt a bit bad parking it on Joan’s street, hoping it wouldn’t draw the scorn of her neighbors upon her. After all, it says “Tea Party, the Original American Grassroots Revolution,” in large letters across the tailgate. As you might imagine, it was not exactly in tune with the rest of the bumper stickers in the neighborhood.
From here, I’ll quote from Joan’s great blog post on the Huffington Post about the event:
“Mark arrived at my door wearing his signature cowboy hat, big belt buckle and warm smile. But that was not all, he brought delicious baked goods made by his wife Patty and two friends to join our conversation. Once we’d introduced my friends and Mark’s friends and made sure everyone had what they needed, I apologized to Joe the reporter from the SF Chronicle for our plan to ignore him completely and we began our conversation.
This was a conversation that was a bit different than the standard Living Room Conversation because we had a reporter present and because of Mark and my roles in the conservative and progressive movement. I thanked everyone profusely for their willingness to have a public Living Room Conversation and we dug in. Mark asked me to tell his friends how MoveOn started and then we wanted to hear from Mark about how he helped start Tea Party Patriots. Generally we followed the suggested structure for a Living Room Conversation but to some extent Round two and three blurred together. This worked fine with a group that it turned out had no adversarial vibe at all. We were curious about each other and really wanted to understand how we might work together to make our democracy and our communities more successful.
The conversation was enthusiastic, lively and primarily focused on all the common ground we saw as well as revealing many issues we would like to talk more about. Right or left, none of us are comfortable with the degree of influence that big corporations have on government regulation.”
I think all six of us who participated could have talked late into the night, but I had promised my wife I’d be home by 6 for a dinner engagement, so we had to break off conversation earlier than all of us would have liked. We didn’t solve the problems of the world in one, three-hour meeting, but six people gained a better understanding that as human beings, we’re not as far apart as many politicians would like us to believe.
There are many things that divide us politically, and when the time comes, we’ll all still have our very partisan fights about those. But we can’t continue to buy into the overall politics of hate, perpetrated upon us by politicians and others in the ruling elite who find it quite profitable to keep us apart in order to maintain the status quo. When it serves the interests of “We the People,” we need to stand together and remind the politicians, they work for us, not the other way around.
Joan’s Living Room Conversations are intended to foster this approach, and I look forward to participating in many more. If you want to know more about Joan’s approach, or how you can host a similar conversation in your home, you can visit the website here.Janine Jackson interviewed asha bandele and Laura Carlsen about the War on Drugs for the April 1, 2016, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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Janine Jackson: Here is the quote, if you haven’t heard it, attributed by a recent story in Harper’s to John Ehrlichman, domestic policy advisor to Richard Nixon, referring to Nixon’s declaration of a war on drugs:
You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies, the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Well, the Huffington Post story on the quote showed an update, noting that some of Ehrlichman’s former colleagues say he never said that, and if he did, he was being sarcastic. But our question might be, what difference does it make? Has the War on Drugs been less of an assault on black communities as well as social justice activists if we don’t have such a smoking-gun admission? Here to help separate words from reality when it comes to racism and the drug war is journalist and author asha bandele, who is senior director of grants, partnerships and special projects at Drug Policy Alliance. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, asha bandele.
Asha Bandele: Thank you so much. Hello, hello.
JJ: You get the patronizing vibe from its headline, “Was Nixon’s War on Drugs a Racially Motivated Crusade? It’s a Bit More Complicated.” This is a piece by Vox.com that ties itself into a pretzel, saying that Nixon was racist, but you have to keep in mind that also he “personally despised drugs, to the point that it’s not surprising he would want to rid the world of them.” But here’s the big finish:
None of that means that the drug war hasn’t disproportionately hurt black Americans, it clearly has. But the lessons of Nixon’s drug policies may not be so much that he was a racist power-hungry politician, although again he was, but rather that even well-meaning policies can have big, terrible unintended consequences.
I’m not going to ask you to make actual sense of that, but instead to talk about this useful confusion, if you will, the idea that a set of policies and practices can’t be properly described as racist unless you can show evidence of explicitly racist intent. How much should it matter what Ehrlichman said?
AB: Yeah. I mean, I think that it matters somewhat, but I’m not intent at looking at that. Right? I think that we look at every drug law that’s been started in America, and it’s always been tied to race. When you were talking about the first opiate laws, those were against Chinese people. The first cocaine laws are against black people, with the New York Times screaming about the Negro cocaine menace. You know, describing the Negro from the South in much in the same ways we heard Mike Brown described when Darren Wilson shot and killed him: that he was lurching toward him, he couldn’t stop him, you had to shoot down and kill this big, unstoppable black monster. And, of course, marijuana laws targeted in particular Mexicans who were coming into the United States.
And so you see that in all of these cases there’s a fundamental tie-in, and that’s around economic policy. Right? They were worried about blacks coming up from the South and taking jobs, the Chinese men who were here building the railroad and what else would happen after that was gone, and Mexicans coming up from Mexico and taking jobs. So there’s never been a drug law that has started in the United States that wasn’t explicitly tied to race, and wasn’t around race. When you had white women who were using opiates to soothe their pain in the 1800s, there were never any laws against them. They were treated as people who needed public health intervention, if in fact they were using it in a way that
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aircraft-grade aluminum and steel drop-in kit that transforms the ubiquitous Ruger 10/22 rifle into a semi-automatic.22 rimfire Thompson look-alike.
“I’ve owned all of the Ruger 10/22 variations,” said Scott, who has more than 30 years of experience in the automotive and motorcycle industries. “Like a lot of shooters, I’ve always wanted to own a Tommy gun. So I got this crazy idea to turn my 10/22 into a semi-automatic Thompson. Three days later I emerged from my shop with the prototype. I took it to the range and people started saying ‘I want one.’ So I began thinking, how can I create something for under $300 so the average guy could own a Tommy gun, because I think every man should have one.”
A year and a half later The Squad Leader kits were ready, priced at $299. No ATF Form 4473 is required, as the purchaser’s existing 10/22 action and barrel are used (the slip-on receiver doesn’t hide the rifle’s serial number). Assembly is so simple, even I was able to transform my 10/22 into a Thompson M1 in less than an hour. (Scott can do it in 10 minutes.) And because no permanent changes are made to the host 10/22, it can be easily reconverted to its original configuration.
The only tools needed are a hammer (for removing and reinstalling the two existing Ruger trigger group pins), a screwdriver, and a punch. Everything else comes with the kit, including simple 10-step instructions and socket wrenches for tightening the replacement screws. There is no drilling, and all machining, inletting and precise fitting has already been done.
“All manufacturing tolerances are held to two-thousandths of an inch, the same criteria used to produce motorcycle and automotive components,” noted Scott. “Everything screws together, lines up, and fits exactly like it’s supposed to.”
The Squad Leader’s buttstock, pistol grip and fore-end are American walnut. The Ruger’s front sight is retained, and the rear sight is a.040-inch peep held by two screws that allow for slight windage adjustments; elevation is set for 25 yards. The rear sight almost doubles the 10/22’s sight radius, increasing accuracy potential; I was bouncing tin cans at 100 yards. The 10/22’s Thompson persona is heightened by Scottwerx’s optional pseudo-stick and drum magazines, which affix to Ruger’s 10-round rotary mags.
However, in spite of The Squad Leader’s appearance, mechanically it is still a 10/22. So even though one is tempted to unleash a volley of 36-grain hollow points, rapid-fire can be sluggish. But it can be enhanced with the addition of a Timney 10/22 trigger or a Volquartsen TG2000 competition trigger assembly, along with a Power Custom extended bolt handle. I think Gen. Thompson would approve.
Contact: Scottwerx, LLC, (818) 248-1139; www.1022fungun.com.During the great basketball shoe race of the late 90's and 00's,longtime NBA guard Stephon Marbury set out to change the game. Or, well, at the very least, make a signature shoe that was affordable. With Jordan's coming with a three-digit price tag, the polarizing guard teamed up with the now defunct Steve & Berry's in 2006 to develop the "Starbury" a $15 signature basketball shoe that was both affordable and comfortable.
Now, some ten years later, Marbury, last seen playing professional basketball in China is bring his shoe back, and defending his decision to do so.
MORE: Jordan brand's holiday line | LeBron's newest shoe
#starburyFlavors COMING SOON A photo posted by Stephon X. Marbury (@starburymarbury) on Sep 27, 2015 at 4:03pm PDT
Home boy your paying 200 for Jordan's and they make them for 5 dollars. The shoes are made in China in the same places. Stay calm we coming! — I AM PEACE STAR (@StarburyMarbury) October 4, 2015
While it is nice to see someone trying to make an affordable basketball shoe, does Marbury realize that the core audience he will be selling his shoe to probably doesn't know who he is?
Also: Does this mean Chris Webber is bring back Dada's?One day in February 2009, a 13-year-old boy named Sasha Egger started thinking that people were coming to hurt his family. His mother, Helen, watched with mounting panic that evening as her previously healthy son forgot the rules to Uno, his favorite card game, while playing it. She began making frantic phone calls the next morning. By then, Sasha was shuffling aimlessly around the yard, shredding paper and stuffing it in his pockets. “He looked like an old person with dementia,” Helen later told me. That afternoon, Sasha was admitted to the hospital, where he saw a series of specialists. One thought Sasha might have bipolar disorder and put him on antipsychotics, but the drugs didn’t help. Helen, a child psychiatrist at Duke University, knew that psychiatric conditions develop gradually. Sasha’s symptoms had appeared almost overnight, and some of them—including dilated pupils and slurred speech—suggested not mental illness but neurological dysfunction. When she and her husband, Daniel, raised these issues, though, one doctor seemed to think they were in denial.
Sasha, meanwhile, grew increasingly agitated and refused to eat. Food tasted like sewage, he said. Just five days after his strange behavior began, he was in the intensive-care unit, heavily sedated and being fed through a tube. No one knew for sure what was wrong with him. From that point, his parents say, Sasha could have continued on a downward trajectory—toward institutionalization or even death. But one of Helen’s colleagues, a neurologist named Mohamad Mikati, had listened to their story and conducted a few low-tech tests. Could Sasha touch his nose? Not very easily. Could he draw a clock? Yes, but without the hands. Mikati had seen a case like Sasha’s years earlier, in an 11-year-old boy who suffered for three months and then spontaneously recovered. The cause, Mikati thought, had been encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. Suspecting that Sasha might have something similar, Mikati ordered an electroencephalogram, a test that monitors electrical activity in the brain. Daniel Egger watched the needle on the machine dance around all night, a sign of brain dysfunction. Here was a clue, Daniel hoped, that might point the way toward a true diagnosis and treatment. If Sasha was suffering from encephalitis, though, what had triggered it? Scientists have long known that hallucinations and delusional behavior can result when infections inflame the brain, but Mikati had ruled out such an infection. He knew, however, that autoimmune variants of encephalitis existed. Just two years earlier, in fact, scientists had identified one that resulted when the immune system—perhaps triggered by common infections elsewhere in the body—accidentally attacked crucial receptors in the brain. Symptoms could resemble those of schizophrenia, but proper treatment didn’t involve antipsychotics. Instead, therapy was directed at the immune system. Doctors can now treat people who would have been given up for lost and locked away. Mikati gave Sasha an infusion of antibodies that can quell autoimmune attacks, and the boy improved almost immediately. Color returned to his face. His eyes began to focus again. He calmed down. He started asking for food.
Helen and Daniel Egger felt a burst of relief. Then they felt vindicated, and saddened. They’d encountered what seemed like tremendous resistance from some doctors. What happened to patients whose parents were less aggressive or had fewer resources—who didn’t happen to have a child psychiatrist in the family? “If I was not my son’s mother, with my connections, my son would be dead,” Helen told me. “That’s just horrifying.” For Helen, given her background, the experience also raised a much larger question: If an autoimmune disorder of the brain could so closely resemble psychiatric illnesses, then what, really, were these illnesses? The idea that madness might have a discrete, biological cause—that it isn’t just in your head—stretches back at least to the late 19th century, when Europe’s asylums were full of delusional and demented patients suffering from neurosyphilis, a late-stage complication of the venereal disease. The notion that targeting the immune system could cure insanity also has history. In 1927, the Austrian psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg received the Nobel Prize for his “pyrotherapy”—whereby he deliberately infected patients with malaria to induce a fever. (His treatment worked for some patients, but a few unlucky ones died of malaria.) After languishing for almost a century, this idea has reemerged, prompted in part by observations linking the immune system to psychiatric symptoms. Scientists have found, for example, that simply activating people’s immune systems as though they were fighting a viral infection can cause profound despair and suicidal thoughts.
For years, scientists believed the brain was mostly cut off from the immune system by the so-called blood-brain barrier, and they lacked a clear mechanistic understanding of how the immune system could cause behavioral disturbances. In 2007, Josep Dalmau, a neurologist then at the University of Pennsylvania, described a condition he called anti–NMDA receptor encephalitis, in which the immune system attacks a crucial receptor in the brain, producing severe neurological and psychiatric symptoms—including behavior sometimes compared to that of the possessed girl in The Exorcist. Scientists had previously noted that certain autoimmune diseases, such as lupus, were associated with psychosis. And they’d begun to suspect that some infections might, by activating the immune system, contribute to psychiatric conditions. But Dalmau provided meticulous proof that the immune system could attack the brain. The development of a test for the disorder, and the fact that very sick patients could recover with treatment, prompted a wave of interest in autoimmune conditions of the central nervous system. In total, scientists have identified about two dozen others—including dementia-like conditions, epilepsies, and a Parkinson’s-like “stiff person” syndrome—and many experts suspect that more exist. Many of these disorders are treatable with aggressive immunotherapy. “It’s a breakthrough,” Heather Van Mater, a pediatric rheumatologist at Duke who has cared for Sasha, told me. She and her colleagues treat people who, just 10 years ago, might have been given up for lost and locked away. “We can make them better,” Van Mater said. “It’s unbelievably rewarding.”
While each of these autoimmune conditions is rare, the field of autoimmune neurology is expanding, and may force a reexamination of mental illness generally. Some scientists now wonder whether small subsets of depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder may be somehow linked to problems in the immune system. Evidence exists to support this idea. Robert Yolken, a scientist at Johns Hopkins University, estimates that about one-third of schizophrenics show signs of immune activation (though he adds that this could be related to other factors, such as smoking and obesity). And autoimmune diseases are more common among schizophrenics and their immediate families than among the general population, which could hint at a shared genetic vulnerability. Immunological abnormalities have been observed in patients with bipolar disorder and depression as well. A recent retrospective study by scientists at the Mayo Clinic, a center of research on autoimmune neurological conditions, found that, compared with a control group of healthy people, psychiatric patients were more likely to harbor antibodies directed at brain tissue. One implication is that some of these patients’ psychiatric symptoms might have stemmed from autoimmune problems, and that they might have benefited from immunotherapy.
Scientists are also increasingly interested in the link between depression and systemic inflammation, an immune-system response to infection or other potential triggers such as a lousy diet, obesity, chronic stress, or trauma. Studies suggest that about one-third of people diagnosed with depression have high levels of inflammation markers in their blood. Scientists have posited that the malaise and lethargy of depression may really be a kind of sickness behavior, an instinct to lie low and recover that, in its proper context—infection or illness—aids survival. Problems arise when the immune system stays activated for a long time, possibly leading to clinical depression. This emerging understanding of the immune system’s role in determining how we feel and behave suggests new avenues of treatment for psychiatric conditions. In 2013, Emory University scientists saw improvement in depressed patients who had markers showing high levels of systemic inflammation, and who’d failed to respond to standard treatment, when they were administered an immunosuppressant called infliximab. Other researchers have found that aspirin, perhaps the oldest anti-inflammatory drug around, may be helpful as an add-on therapy for schizophrenia. And then there are cases like Sasha Egger’s. He relapsed a year and a half after his initial recovery. It was the first of five major relapses, two of which required months-long hospital stays.The number of new international students coming to the United States to study fell for the first time in more than a decade this fall, a new study found.
In the first class to apply to and enroll in American colleges since the 2016 election, the number of new foreign students fell over 3%, according to the Institute for International Education — the first time in the report's 12-year history that there was a decline in new enrollment. Almost half of the 500 US campuses surveyed reported declines in new student enrollment, with an average drop of 7%.
The election of Donald Trump last fall prompted widespread fears that foreign students might be deterred from enrolling in US colleges, where, because they usually pay full tuition, they are often a vital source of revenue. It's not clear, however, whether the election and Trump's rhetoric, or other factors — like increased competition from other Western nations — are driving the declines.
While an IIE report earlier this year found no change in the rate at which international students accepted offers of admission, it found high levels of anxiety among students from India and the Middle East, who feared whether they would be able to secure visas and worried for their physical safety. And many colleges told IIE they worried that students who accepted their offers of admission might not actually show up on campus in the fall.
Many of the sharpest declines noted in the report released Monday were driven by countries that reduced their investment in international scholarships — like Brazil and Saudi Arabia. Still, there are indications that international students, especially from places like China and India, are turning elsewhere for college.
In Canada and Australia, especially, many colleges saw dramatic increases in applications and in student visas. Canadian schools that saw sharp gains in applications said those students might otherwise have gone to the US.
The overall number of foreign students in the US continued to rise, however, increasing by 3% as many international students remained in the US on postgraduate training visas.
And some elite colleges — seen as juggernauts for international education — saw sharp jumps in the number of foreign students enrolled, an indication that many are still aggressively pursuing international enrollment. New York University, whose international enrollment dwarfs virtually all other colleges, saw an increase of 11%, to more than 17,000 foreign students. Columbia University's international enrollment grew by almost 10%.More Information about North Korea
With its 24,851,627 people, North Korea is the 49th largest country in the world by population. It is the 99th largest country in the world by area with 120,538 square kilometers.
An independent kingdom for much of its long history, Korea was occupied by Japan beginning in 1905 following the Russo-Japanese War. Five years later, Japan formally annexed the entire peninsula. Following World War II, Korea was split with the northern half coming under Soviet-sponsored communist control. After failing in the Korean War (1950-53) to conquer the US-backed Republic of Korea (ROK) in the southern portion by force, North Korea (DPRK), under its founder President KIM Il Sung, adopted a policy of ostensible diplomatic and economic "self-reliance" as a check against outside influence. The DPRK demonized the US as the ultimate threat to its social system through state-funded propaganda, and molded political, economic, and military policies around the core ideological objective of eventual unification of Korea under Pyongyang's control. KIM Il Sung's son, KIM Jong Il, was officially designated as his father's successor in 1980, assuming a growing political and managerial role until the elder KIM's death in 1994. KIM Jong Un was publicly unveiled as his father's successor in September 2010. Following KIM Jong Il's death in December 2011, the regime began to take actions to transfer power to KIM Jong Un and KIM has now assumed many his father's former titles and duties. After decades of economic mismanagement and resource misallocation, the DPRK since the mid-1990s has relied heavily on international aid to feed its population. The DPRK began to ease restrictions to allow semi-private markets, starting in 2002, but then sought to roll back the scale of economic reforms in 2005 and 2009. North Korea's history of regional military provocations; proliferation of military-related items; long-range missile development; WMD programs including tests of nuclear devices in 2006, 2009, and 2013; and massive conventional armed forces are of major concern to the international community. The regime in 2013 announced a new policy calling for the simultaneous development of the North's nuclear weapons program and its economy.
Languages spoken: KoreanAuto loan delinquencies increased in the third quarter, but the market remains stable, according to analysts at Experian Automotive. The company released its quarterly State of the Automotive Finance Market report, showing an $86 billion bump in open loan balances since the same period last year, and an increase in market share for deep subprime and superprime borrowers, in addition to the higher delinquency rates.
In the third quarter, 2.66% of auto loans were 30 days past due, up from 2.56% of loans in the third quarter 2013. The 60-day delinquency rate increased, as well, from 0.68% to 0.74% of loans. Melinda Zabritski, Experian's senior director of automotive credit, said some of the increase can be attributed to a rise in subprime lending.
"While we have observed a rise in delinquencies over the past few quarters, it was to be expected due to the growth in subprime loans. We have to keep in mind that a majority of the market is still in the prime risk category," Zabritski was quoted as saying in a news release about the report. "Understanding the shifts in payment behavior and the industry's risk tolerance are important for the market because these insights can trigger actions that affect vehicle prices, loan terms or interest rates."
Auto loan delinquency rates follow a geographic trend: low in the North, high in the South. North Dakota had the lowest 30- and 60-day delinquency rates last quarter, and Mississippi had the highest. Here's a breakdown of the highest delinquency rates, by state (including the District of Columbia):
States With the Highest Delinquency Rates
Percentage of Loans 30 Days Past Due
5. Alabama, 3.49%
4. South Carolina, 3.66%
3. Louisiana, 3.71%
2. Washington, D.C., 4.02%
1. Mississippi, 4.49%
Percentage of Loans 60 Days Past Due
5. New Mexico, 1.01%
4. Alabama, 1.05%
3. Louisiana, 1.16%
2. Mississippi, 1.36%
1. Washington, D.C., 1.42%
Failing to pay your auto loan often leads to repossession, which leaves you in debt and without a car you may need for your job. In an ideal situation, you won't have an unaffordable car loan payment, but as soon as you realize you may not be able to make payments, figure out what you have to do so you don't damage your credit or lose your car. Here are some tips to consider if you have a car loan you can't afford.
Paid on time, auto loans can help you build credit, while helping you afford something you need. At the same time, falling behind on loan payments can seriously hurt your credit score and could make credit more expensive for you in the future. To see how missed payments might affect your credit, you can see two of your credit scores for free on Credit.com, with updates every 30 days.
More from Credit.comI have noticed in my life that all men have a liking for some special animal, tree, plant, or spot of earth. If men would pay more attention to these preferences and seek what is best in order to make themselves worthy of that toward which they are so attracted, they might have dreams that would purify their lives. Let a man decide upon his favorite animal and make a study of it, learning its innocent ways. Let him learn to understand its sounds and motions. The animals want to communicate with man, but the Great Father does not intend they shall do so directly, man must do the greater part in securing an understanding.
The Tatanka Oyate were called upon and gave us courage. Pilamiya Maske for your vision. Stay strong Water Protectors!
The great bison or buffalo of North America is a very powerful symbol to American Indians. Though best suited to cooler climates, bison roamed virtually in entire continent.
The smaller woodlands bison and its bigger cousin, the plains bison were revered and honored in ceremony and every day life. To the plains Indian, our Bison Brother meant sacred life and the abundance of the Creator’s blessing on Mother Earth.
The bison is powerful medicine that is a symbol of sacrifice and service to the community. The bison people agreed to give their lives so the American Indian could have food, shelter and clothing.
The bison is also a symbol of gratitude and honor as it is happy to accept its meager existence as it stands proud against the winds of adversity.
The bison represents abundance of the Creator’s bounty and respect for all creation knowing that all things are sacred.
The chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe criticized law enforcement’s “militarized” response to the camp and called for demonstrations to remain peaceful, but stressed that activists would not give up their cause.
“Militarized law enforcement agencies moved in on water protectors with tanks and riot gear today. We continue to pray for peace,” Dave Archambault II said in a statement Thursday evening.
“We won’t step down from this fight,” he added. “As peoples of this earth, we all need water. This is about our water, our rights, and our dignity as human beings.”Press Secretary for Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton, Brian Fallon, attacked and mocked a cancer survivor on Twitter Sunday. Following this attack, Fallon has neither apologized nor even removed the offending tweet. Likewise Hillary has yet to address or denounce this attack leaving voters to assume that she approves of such attacks against cancer survivors and victims. This is a vile attack that should draw cries of protest from cancer victims and their families. The media, rather than licking at Hillary’s boots, should be demanding she address this. As somebody who has lost both parents to cancer, I see this as unforgivable and can only wish my parents could have won their fights with cancer. Fights that Fallon feels are a valid insult.
The attack came is response to comments by former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani. In interviews Giuliani questioned stories that Clinton may be experiencing health problems, and whether this should impact Hillary and her run for President. Fallon insulted Rudy for dropping out of the race for US Senate against Hillary in 2000. What you will find is that Rudy had to leave the race due to prostate cancer. Apparently Fallon feels leaving a political race to fight cancer is something to insult. In 2016 prostate cancer will impact 181,820 men and kill 26,120. This is no laughing matter, though apparently Fallon thinks it is.
Doing a search as Fallon suggests gives stories like this about Giuliani droning out of the race to focus on his cancer:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/may/20/uselections2000.usa1
Luckily there are also stories from 2 years later when it was announced Rudy had beaten his cancer:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/spotlighthealth/2002-10-14-giuliani_x.htm
If a member of the Trump staff had said anything this atrocious, the media would be demanding they be fired. Yet, the media says nothing. Hillary does nothing. It ‘s up to us to push this. We have to show the world the behavior of her team, and good them responsible for their words. Demand the media keep Hillary honest. Demand she keep her staff accountable. Tweet it. Facebook it. Reddit it.
AdvertisementsLetaBot Profile Blog Joined June 2014 Netherlands 531 Posts Last Edited: 2015-07-09 23:55:59 #1 BWAPI mini Tournament #1
BWAPI mini Tour 1
Update 7 July: Ro32 changed to Ro16. Tournament now starts at 11:30 AM CEST. New method for signing up a bot.
Update #2: Channel name for this tournament is: BWAPI
Hello everyone,
Now that I have permission from ICCUP.face, I can start organizing the BWAPI mini tour.
This tournament is created to let the bot developers test their bot(s) in a tournament setting, which will be useful for those that are going to participate in the next CIG StarCraft AI competition. The format is going to be a Ro16 Bo1 double elimination with a Bo3 Finals. All games will be played on Fighting Spirit.
Tournament information:
In this tournament, both human players and bots are allowed to sign on. I reserved 6 spots for bot developers.
The tournament will be held at 11 July 2015. The tournament starts at 11:30 (AM) CEST. Because some bot developers cannot be available at that time due to time-zones, I am going to operate three bots alongside my own bot. This service is first come, first served for all bot developers who cannot be online at the given time due to time-zones.
Registering:
There is no rank requirement for both bots and human players.
In order to register as a human player, fill in the following template below and post it in this topic or pm it to me:
------------------------------
ICCUP ID:
Maximum ICCUP rank:
Current ICCUP rank:
Race (random is not allowed):
------------------------------
In order to register a bot, send me a pm with the template above if you are going to operate your own bot. Do indicate as well that you are registering a bot.
If you cannot operate your bot due to time constraints and want me to operate your bot, send me a pm with a request to operate your bot. In order to prevent me from abusing the DLL/Java that I receive, we will arrange a match where LetaBot will play 5 games against your bot. The result of these matches will be used in the tournament. After these 5 games you will send me your bot DLL/Java and I will operate it during the tournament.
If you aren't available for such a match, you can send me the DLL/Java and I will immediately start a Bo5 match myself the moment that I download the DLL/Java. Do note that in either way my bot is still in development. So my bot will play differently in the bot match that in the actual comeptition.
The bot registration closes at Thursday 9 July 23:00 CEST. Any bot slot that isn't filled is opened for human players.
Sending a DLL is still possible till Friday 10 July 23:00 CEST, but playing games on ICCUP beforehand isn't anymore.
Initial seeding:
Update 7 July: dropped the D+ or lower requirement vs bots. Now low rank will be based on the ranking of the players in the tournament.
At the start of the Ro16, each bot will be paired with a low ranked player due to the low play level of most bots. Higher ranked players will be seeded based on when they sign up.
Prize money:
I currently have a paysafe card of €25 and a paysafe card of €10 available for the first place and second place respectively. Both bot developers and human players are eligible for this prize money.
Tournament system:
The initial seeding will be available at the team liquid wiki:
If it is possible, I will use the defiler.ru tournament system for this tournament.
Other information:
- No race picking. You only use the race that you registered with.
- Everyone is allowed to use the observer version of Fighting Spirit, but I would advise bot operators to instead give the replays to the casters. This due to the fact that the high apm can cause lag if an observer is present.
- Bot developers are allowed to let someone other than their-self or me operate their bot. As long as that person is available at 11:30 CEST and can stay for all games that the bot has to play. If the operator has to leave, all further games that the bot has to play are automatically forfeit
- Bot developers are eligible for prize money if their bot wins. Even if they are not operating their own bot.
- Bot operator should not use Anti-hack as it conflicts with the BWAPI. Human players should have AH on the whole tournament, unless somehow it does not work when playing against a BWAPI bot. In that case they can turn it off when playing against a bot.
- BWAPI bots should have the "complete map information" flag set to disabled (by default it is). Hello everyone,Now that I have permission from ICCUP.face, I can start organizing the BWAPI mini tour.This tournament is created to let the bot developers test their bot(s) in a tournament setting, which will be useful for those that are going to participate in the next CIG StarCraft AI competition. The format is going to be a Ro16 Bo1 double elimination with a Bo3 Finals. All games will be played on Fighting Spirit.In this tournament, both human players and bots are allowed to sign on. I reserved 6 spots for bot developers.The tournament will be held at 11 July 2015. The tournament starts at 11:30 (AM) CEST. Because some bot developers cannot be available at that time due to time-zones, I am going to operate three bots alongside my own bot. This service is first come, first served for all bot developers who cannot be online at the given time due to time-zones.There is no rank requirement for both bots and human players.In order to register as a human player, fill in the following template below and post it in this topic or pm it to me:------------------------------ICCUP ID:Maximum ICCUP rank:Current ICCUP rank:Race (random is not allowed):------------------------------In order to register a bot, send me a pm with the template above if you are going to operate your own bot. Do indicate as well that you are registering a bot.If you cannot operate your bot due to time constraints and want me to operate your bot, send me a pm with a request to operate your bot. In order to prevent me from abusing the DLL/Java that I receive, we will arrange a match where LetaBot will play 5 games against your bot. The result of these matches will be used in the tournament. After these 5 games you will send me your bot DLL/Java and I will operate it during the tournament.If you aren't available for such a match, you can send me the DLL/Java and I will immediately start a Bo5 match myself the moment that I download the DLL/Java. Do note that in either way my bot is still in development. So my bot will play differently in the bot match that in the actual comeptition.Sending a DLL is still possible till Friday 10 July 23:00 CEST, but playing games on ICCUP beforehand isn't anymore.At the start of the Ro16, each bot will be paired with a low ranked player due to the low play level of most bots. Higher ranked players will be seeded based on when they sign up.I currently have a paysafe card of €25 and a paysafe card of €10 available for the first place and second place respectively. Both bot developers and human players are eligible for this prize money.The initial seeding will be available at the team liquid wiki: BWAPI mini Tour 1 If it is possible, I will use the defiler.ru tournament system for this tournament.- No race picking. You only use the race that you registered with.- Everyone is allowed to use the observer version of Fighting Spirit, but I would advise bot operators to instead give the replays to the casters. This due to the fact that the high apm can cause lag if an observer is present.- Bot developers are allowed to let someone other than their-self or me operate their bot. As long as that person is available at 11:30 CEST and can stay for all games that the bot has to play. If the operator has to leave, all further games that the bot has to play are automatically forfeit- Bot developers are eligible for prize money if their bot wins. Even if they are not operating their own bot.- Bot operator should not use Anti-hack as it conflicts with the BWAPI. Human players should have AH on the whole tournament, unless somehow it does not work when playing against a BWAPI bot. In that case they can turn it off when playing against a bot.- BWAPI bots should have the "complete map information" flag set to disabled (by default it is). If you cannot win with 100 apm, win with 100 cpm.Talk about fits and starts.
A year ago Democrats committed to passing comprehensive health care legislation; six months ago, it became clear that their project wouldn’t go smoothly; one month ago it was full speed ahead; and a week and a half ago it all fell apart.
Health care reform is now on life support. To mix metaphors, it’s on life support and the back burner at the same time. How the Democrats’ signature agenda item went from a foregone conclusion to a prospect in peril is a tale of missteps and bad luck. No single player or event brought us to where we are today. But if any of the below episodes had gone…more smoothly, this might’ve been a done deal.
You know how the saying goes: Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan. And you can be sure that if health care reform fails, the people below will make like John Edwards–quick-like. 1. Let’s Do This The Hard Way…Just For Fun
It was a move that baffled and outraged reformers and Democratic members of Congress: Back in the early days of summer, while the House and the Senate Health Committee adhered to a standard legislative framework for drafting a reform bill, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) went in a completely different direction. Convinced, against all evidence, that the GOP would play nice on major social policy, Baucus decided to huddle with a motley crue of Democrats and Republicans, culled from his committee. It started in June as the “coalition of the willing”–Baucus, along with Sens. Kent Conrad (D-ND), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Mike Enzi (R-WY), and Orrin Hatch (R-UT)–but Hatch soon bolted, leaving the Gang of Six. Their meetings dragged on through the August health care flame wars into September, ultimately yielding…nothing. Baucus introduced a bill on his own, with the aim of winning over Snowe, and put it through the normal committee process. It wasn’t approved until October 13.
2. Rumblings In Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) died on August 25, and because of his illness, he could not play a major role in the health care debate. The impact he might have had can’t be known, but his passing ultimately deprived Dems of a 60th vote. At the time of his death, Massachusetts law required the seat to be filled by special election after 145-160 days. But at his request, the state government changed the law to allow the governor to appoint an interim senator to fill the vacancy. That change allowed Sen. Paul Kirk (D-MA) to cast the 60th vote for health care to get it through the Senate the first time. But it set the stage for the blow that put Kennedy’s own lifetime cause into a coma.
3. Math Math Math
Three words Democrats are tired of hearing at this point: Congressional Budget Office. At about a zillion different stages in the legislative process, Democrats had to wait for the CBO to “score” the cost and budgetary impact of the reform proposals on the table. But if Democrats could go back to 2009 to get some of that time back, they’d probably nix a four week back-and-forth between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and CBO-chief Doug Elmendorf, which dragged a process that was supposed to be over in August, then October, into November.
4. Snake, Meet Tail
There’s no getting around it. As SEIU President Andy Stern said recently, Senate Democrats “had a chance, a gift, from the American people–60 votes, so they could, for the first time in their life, debate any single issue they chose to debate. And they squandered it.” With Republicans out of the equation, Democrats needed to stand united–and they didn’t. On October 26, after canvasing his caucus, Reid declared that he would include a public option in his health care bill. The next day, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) announced his intent to filibuster. Reid unveiled his bill on November 18, and managed to get it on to the floor. But he couldn’t get it off the floor–passed–until he rounded up 60. For weeks, liberals and Democrats huddled to find common ground on the public option. At the last possible moment, after they thought they’d come to an agreement, Lieberman rose again: No public option; no compromise; either it goes, or I go. He won.
5. It’s The Republicans!!
Thusfar, this has largely been a story about Senate Democrats. With 60 votes, why didn’t they charge ahead? But the Senate is the Senate, and even a 40 vote minority can cause pointless delay. And delay they did. Republicans filibustered the move to debate the health care bill (30 hours); and through separate filibusters, delayed final passage of the Senate bill–December 24, 2009–by about a week.
6. No! It’s The Democrats!!
But as soon as
|
Ice kicks off tour until he's clean. "Talk Shit, Get Shot" burns with ferocity at Internet bloggers and the bullshit they spew.
"I fuckin' hate Internet bloggers. I hate people who use the Internet to talk shit and disappear into anonymity. I wish I could reach through the fuckin' screen and snatch some of them," he says, his voice rising slightly.
"These songs come from real places, some more angry than others," he adds, calmer again. "I think we'll always have shit we're pissed off at in life. Music is a good release valve for some of us to let us just vent it, you know?"
Clearly, but what of the crazed funk-metal odyssey of "Black Voodoo Sex"?
"It's an Ice-T adventure because I've always loved telling stories about sex with voodoo bitches in graveyards," he says with a laugh. "Those are just outrageous songs. You've got to remember, Body Count is grindhouse. Body Count is so outrageous it can't be taken seriously. It's over-the-top violent, over-the-top sexual. Even back in the day with 'Cop Killer,' if you believed I killed a cop, you also believe that on the next song I dismembered my mother with a Ginsu carving knife.
"My buddy says, 'Ice, you've got a dark humor, and if people don't get your humor, then you'll scare the shit out of them,'" he says. "My audience, my fans, they get it and know when I'm serious. They know."
Unfortunately, too many people sadly accept the lyrical content as literally as a 7-year-old would -- as nothing startling reality. President George H.W. Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle raised a stink about the perceived threat of "Cop Killer" -- a song about a Jason-like character seeking revenge on cops because police brutality drove him mad. Neither probably ever heard the song. National protests erupted along with demands that Warner Brothers censor the album.
"There were more people who didn't listen to my music than did and they were easily swayed," Ice says. "So I became the villain."
Could the backlash have been foretold?
"No! Hell no!" he says emphatically. "I come from a background of listening to Black Flag, and I had a T-shirt from Millions of Dead Cops. I thought cops were fair game. I didn't know there were things you couldn't say about them. No, it blindsided me."
Ice eventually decided to drop the song from future re-issues. Not because of label demands, but to shift the focus onto Body Count the band, and not a single song.
"When the president is talking shit about you, you gotta do something," he recalls. "I had to defuse the situation or it was just going to keep going and end up ugly."
In a strange twist, given his body of work stuffed with anti-police tomes or songs glorifying crime, Ice-T's acting career has been primarily predicated on portraying cops.
"It's very ironic. The last thing I ever thought I would be doing is acting like a cop and getting paid for it," he says with a laugh. "Hell yeah! I was a career criminal. I was out there fucking up... Life is ironic, man. If I ever thought as a kid I be a rock star and headlining at the Mayhem Festival I'd say, 'Get the fuck out of here! I think I'd be out in the parking lot robbing people.' I've changed. Now I'm handing out advice about how to be good."
Perhaps, but listeners will have to dig deep through the rage, violence, and occasional freakiness to unlock that advice.
"On the surface [Manslaughter] looks like some brutal slasher shit, but inside, there might be some jewels that can save your life," he says in closing. "That's what Ice-T can give you. It's medicine. It just don't look like medicine."Amber Rudd. It sounds like the name of a fish, a variety of apple or a herbal medicine. In fact, it’s the name of a shabbos–shiksa, that is, a non-Jewish female who, like Hillary Clinton and Theresa May, is dedicated to serving Jewish interests. Here is the shabbos-shiksa in action:
Amber Rudd: viewers of online terrorist material face 15 years in jail People who repeatedly view terrorist content online could face up to 15 years behind bars in a move designed to tighten the laws tackling radicalisation the home secretary, Amber Rudd, is to announce on Tuesday. A new maximum penalty of 15 years’ imprisonment will also apply to terrorists who publish information about members of the armed forces, police and intelligence services for the purposes of preparing acts of terrorism. The tightening of the law around viewing terrorist material is part of a review of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy following the increasing frequency of terrorist attacks in Britain this year “I want to make sure those who view despicable terrorist content online, including jihadi websites, far-right propaganda and bomb-making instructions, face the full force of the law,” said Rudd. (Amber Rudd: viewers of online terrorist material face 15 years in jail, The Guardian, 3rd October 2017) Amber Rudd promises crackdown on antisemitism and online extremism Amber Rudd has outlined her intention to clamp down on violent and non-violent extremism, including antisemitism and neo-Nazism. The Home Secretary also told the Conservative Party conference in Manchester that social media companies must “act now, honour your moral obligations” to use new technology to stop radical material appearing on their platforms. Ms Rudd said: “Violent and non-violent extremism in all its forms — antisemitism, neo-Nazism, Islamophobia, intolerance of women’s rights — these, and others, cannot be permitted to fester. Our values are far, far better than this. And we owe it to ourselves to root this hatred out wherever it emerges. The safer Britain I want to help build as Home Secretary is a united one.” (Amber Rudd promises crackdown on antisemitism and online extremism, The Jewish Chronicle, 3rd October 2017 / 13th Tishri 5778)
If Amber Rudd is so concerned about building a “safer Britain,” why does she permit mass immigration from the Third World? For the past fifty years and more, Britain’s liberal elite has imported non-Whites with high tendencies to crime and low tendencies to civilization. The results have included suicide bombing, rape-gangs, honour killings, female genital mutilation, inbreeding and exotic diseases. In truth, Amber Rudd doesn’t want a safer Britain: she wants a more authoritarian Britain. She’s a shabbos-shiksa, after all. She follows a Jewish strategy of importing non-White pathologies in order to justify laws against “extremism.”
Realism is extremism
You’re reading “extremism” right now. The Occidental Observer is an “extremist” website. In other words, it is a realistic website: it details in calm, rational and thoroughly sourced fashion the numerous ways in which, to paraphrase the late great Father Feeney, “the Jewish race constitutes a united anti-White bloc within White society, and is working for the overthrow of that society by every means at its disposal.” I don’t think that, at the moment, anyone would receive “15 years’ imprisonment” for reading the Occidental Observer, but Amber Rudd and her controllers certainly want to frighten people away from politically heterodox sites. And jail time for reading an article like this is certainly what Jewish activists like Moshe Kantor and Jeremy Newmark would like to see. They don’t want any discussion of Jewish power, because power that can’t be discussed is also power that can’t be challenged.
Free speech isn’t a Jewish value. Censorship, on the other hand, is definitely a Jewish value. So is self-worship. That’s why the Jewish community never tires of sycophancy from the politicians whom it funds and supplies with friendly coverage in the media. Here is the shabbos-shiksa Theresa May doing the goy-grovel:
‘Jewish values will prevail,’ Theresa May tells Rosh Hashanah reception Theresa May welcomed dozens of Jewish community leaders, volunteers and religious figures to Downing Street today for what was thought to be the first ever Rosh Hashanah reception held at Number 10. The Prime Minister said she wanted to thank British Jews, and show her “personal support and appreciation for everything that you contribute to our country”. She told guests: “Here today, we have people from all parts of our Jewish community and all parts of our society — from business to the arts, from politics to our public services. We also have some of our country’s greatest philanthropists, leading charities and some of our most outstanding volunteers.” … Ahead of next week’s announcement on the winning design for the national memorial to the Holocaust, Mrs May said: “Whichever design team is chosen, this national memorial and educational centre will stand next to our Parliament as a permanent reminder of what can happen when a civilised, democratic society allows hatred to go unchecked. It will say to the world: we will never forget. And it will bring our country together in a national mission to fight hatred for generations to come.” She urged British Jews to mark Rosh Hashanah with “confidence that together we will keep Jewish people in our country safe and defeat the scourge of antisemitism. And confidence that it is the values that we share — Jewish values, British values — that will in the end prevail. Let me wish you and all your families a sweet New Year.” … (‘Jewish values will prevail,’ Theresa May tells Rosh Hashanah reception, The Jewish Chronicle, 13th September 2017 / 22nd Elul 5777)
I have long suspected that Theresa May has Jewish ancestry. Either way, that article reads like something issued by the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is full of double-think and contradictions. When May grovelled about Jews being some of “our country’s greatest philanthropists,” she was using the term “philanthropist” in a special sense. To her audience of “Jewish community leaders, volunteers and religious figures,” philanthropy means “helping Jews.” As a Jewish commentator on the Talmud says: “… helping a single individual is equivalent to sustaining an entire world. (This is one of the best-known passages in the Talmud, though it is often universalized to refer to ‘a human soul,’ rather than nefesh echat mi’Yisrael, ‘a single soul from Israel.’)”
Don’t wait for hate
May also claimed that Jewish values are British values. If that were true, Israel would have open borders and Jewish politicians would make grovelling speeches to Christians, smarmily insisting that “Christian values are Israeli values.” But Israel has sealed borders and politicians like Benjamin Netanyahu do not grovel to Christians or any other goyim. Instead, they keep goyim firmly in second place. Jewish values are unashamedly supremacist and designed to preserve and extend Jewish power. And just as May’s use of “philanthropist” has a special Jewish sense, so does her use of “hatred.” It doesn’t mean expressing hatred towards Jews, but expressing views that Jews hate.
That’s why the high-flying Irish journalist Kevin Myers lost his job for pointing out, first, that the two highest-paid women at the BBC were both Jewish and, second, that “Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price.” Myers is a dedicated philosemite and his comments were entirely factual, but that made no difference. He had drawn attention to Jewish power and broken a strict taboo. Mark Gardner, the “communications director” at the Community Security Trust, gloated that “Myers’s squalid example of blatant antisemitic language was swiftly dealt with.”
The “Jewy perviness of Harvey Weinstein”
With Myers and many other victims of the Jewish Inquisition in mind, no mainstream goy would now dare to draw heretical conclusions from the Harvey Weinstein scandal now in the headlines. Weinstein’s abusive behaviour is yet another example of how minority dominance is bad for the White majority — recall how minorities in the Soviet Union tyrannized and slaughtered Russian and Ukrainian Whites. But only a Jewish journalist could have written about “The Specifically Jewy Perviness of Harvey Weinstein” and claimed that the “disgraced film producer is a character straight out of Philip Roth, playing out his revenge fantasies on the Goyim.”
It goes without saying that nearly every one of these women—Rose McGowan, Ambra Batillana, Laura Madden, Ashley Judd, etc.—was a Gentile, all the better to feed Weinstein’s revenge-tinged fantasy of having risen above his outer-borough, bridge-and-tunnel Semitic origins.
The article, written by Mark Oppenheimer, indirectly raises some very interesting questions about the consequences of Jewish power. For example, why do Jews like Roth and Weinstein feel “vengeful” towards Whites when they are part of the richest and most successful ethnic group in America? If it’s because Jews nurse historical grudges against Whites, how else is their vengefulness manifesting itself? On one reading, Weinstein is a blatant hypocrite for supporting Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party at the same time as he was molesting shiksas all over the world for decades. On another and more accurate reading, Weinstein’s crimes are entirely consistent with his politics. Liberal elitists like Weinstein and Clinton want power and wealth for themselves, not improved lives for ordinary women.
Divide and Rule
That’s why liberal elitists like Weinstein and Clinton are so strongly in favour of mass immigration from the Third World. Immigration atomizes Western societies and introduces pathologies that justify authoritarian laws and the surveillance state. And authoritarian liberalism is what the Lebanese writer Nassim Taleb would call anti-fragile: the worse it works, the stronger it gets. After 9/11 demonstrated the incompetence of the surveillance state and the clear danger of mass immigration by Muslims, guess what? The NSA’s budget and Muslim immigration both increased. After mass killings by Muslim fanatics in Manchester and London, guess what? The British government has a further excuse to censor “far-right propaganda” that protests against the Muslim colonization of Britain.
But Amber Rudd, the shabbos-shiksa who announced more censorship, wasn’t entirely lying when she made this claim: “The safer Britain I want to help build as Home Secretary is a united one.” She doesn’t want more safety, but she does want more unity. She wants Britain united in obedience to the Tribe. Traitors like Rudd serve Jewish interests and want everyone else to do the same. Ordinary Whites are expected to serve Jewish interests by becoming a dispossessed minority in their own nations.
My response is simple: Non serviam — “I will not serve.” Thanks to sites like the Occidental Observer, more and more Whites are saying the same.A basketball coach originally from Morell, P.E.I., has made it to the big league.
Scott Morrison, who previously coached for the NBA development league and for Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., has been named one of the assistant coaches for the NBA's Boston Celtics.
Morrison said the news came without much fanfare.
"Coach Stevens and I had a chat after the season was over and he let me know they were going to keep me in Boston full time next year. Roles and things like that still to be determined," said Morrison.
"The journey I suppose you could say from the [developmental] league to the NBA seems to be finished, at least for the time being."
'I still have some places I'd like to get to after this'
After spending time in the lower leagues of basketball, Morrison is excited to be in the NBA.
"It will be nice next year to get to sit on the Celtics bench in the second row behind [the coach] and be a part of it," said Morrison.
Even though Morrison has made it to the NBA, and one of its most celebrated franchises, he said he isn't done yet.
"I still have some places I'd like to get to after this and if you start being too happy about where you are then sometimes you forget to put those hours in that it takes to stay there and advance," said Morrison.
'A place where I can unpack'
One perk about his new job, a permanent place to sleep.
"It'll be nice to at least have a place where I can unpack and get set up for an undefined amount of time," said Morrison.
As for his new team's chances next year, Morrison is optimistic in the Celtics, that made it to the Eastern Conference finals last season.
"It's going to be hard to catch the teams like the [Golden State Warriors] but I think one or two little pieces away from … beating [the Cleveland Cavaliers] and then anything can happen," said Morrison.Media Senstone is a new way to create notes — five times faster and much more convenient than any smartphone app. With Senstone you no longer have to pull out your phone to take notes on the go. Just capture the things in your daily life that you don’t want to miss. It automatically converts your voice notes into text and organises them for easy access.
Senstone's overview
Stretch Goals
We check smartphones 150 times a day, every day. But what if there was plainly easier way to capture those precious words?
Senstone lets you record your thoughts quickly and conveniently. Senstone is a notepad size of a bottle cap. Imagine walking in the busy street or driving a car and taking those notes, reminders with the speed of thought.
Tap on the Senstone to start recording and speak. Tap again and it stops. All audio and text notes are synced into the Cloud seamlessly.
Senstone saves you from getting distracted while reaching for your smartphone and looking for the necessary app. Especially when focusing is critical.
Increase your focus in everyday life
Senstone should be close when you speak — for best performance. You can hang it around your neck, clip it to your shirt collar or a jacket, or even wear it on your wrist.
Senstone is a standalone device so you can take notes and create lists when its not connected to your smartphone. It records for up to two and a half hours when offline. Then it automatically syncs your notes in the cloud when you are back in range.
Its a standalone device -- record and save notes anytime
Being able to take notes on the go is critical — be it your personal goals, your breakthrough ideas or your travel journal. This is why the world’s greatest writers, inventors, and visionaries kept notebooks to document their ideas. And today we offer a much more convenient and handy solution.
Famous people record their ideas
Are you a food blogger discovering a new cafe and wanting to document your experience? Take notes in seconds with Senstone. It has been designed specifically to keep track of details in any situation. You can even capture an impromptu interview with someone at the cafe.
No typing
You can also use Senstone at night, but you don’t need to wear it. It listens to you when you sleep and is just a finger snap away from recording the details of your dreams while you still remember them. There’s no need to press any button. Thanks to our unique machine learning system we help you record your midnight thoughts and dreams with just a snap of your fingers.
NB: Currently, the finger snap feature is only available when the gadget is charging on its dock.
Capture midnight dreams
Senstone helps you stay focused, lets you organize your thoughts quickly and allows you to manage your life with confidence and style. Send reminders to other members of your team. Just say “Tom, I figured you didn’t bring lunch today, so I ordered pizza” and the message is sent.
Senstone is your communication tool with others on the team. However, sometimes it is more convenient to have your thoughts laid out right in your favourite app. For these scenarios we are integrating with apps like Evernote, Trello and more.
Everyone has their own sense of style. People are wearing accessories to underline their personality, get attention and feel good. We tried to be timeless and original with this device. Senstone’s design is pure and minimalist — it’s something will match any style or look.
Inspired by Brain and Sound Waves.
Early mock-ups
Our fashion designer picked the best materials for Senstone to look and feel right. The casing is made of Chrome-plated brass and clear brass. We also offer a lighter, Aluminium version anodised in white gray and black. All models feature a scratch-proof tempered screen.
Senstone product line
Senstone’s screen consists of 17 white LEDs that inform you of key activities such as starting and ending a recording, synchronization, battery status, and charging. It’s all displayed by flashing patterns and shapes with the LED array.
Gadget screen scenarios.
Senstone online demo:
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We do care about environment, so we made the box that is indisposable and reusable. This is your stylish dock that is used for charging and a sole place to store and carry Senstone and its accessories. You can use it to hold the device itself as well as all your detachable backs.
The box is a charging station
Charging is fast and simple
Our line of interchangeable backs was developed by a fashion designer. You can clip it to your clothes, hang it from your neck, or wear it on your wrist, for the style that suits you best.
Line of Detachable Backs.
Sizing details.
We developed our own firmware with the Protocol that works specifically with audio tracks (files). It optimised to record and transmit high quality audio without data loss and run them later through AI systems in the Cloud. We ensure encryption of our data so its highly protected during data transfer over the air. Hardware is optimised for low energy consumption which gives about 4 days of average use.
The reason we've chosen the components is multi layers, among them the size. We spent several months trying to fit components into a small casing and maintain good battery life at the same time by using BLE microprocessor.
Printed Circuit Board tech details.
Here are some technical highlights of our device. It includes Ultra-low Power Wireless Microcontroller with the following features:
1) Multi-core system, 2) Support Over-the-Air Upgrade (OTA), 3) AES-128 Security Module, 4) Compatible with BLE 4.2.
Digital MEMS Microphones with the following features:
1) Three modes: Standard Performance, Low-Power and Ultrasonic Mode, 2) Frequency Range 0.01kHz - 80kHz.
Memory with the following features:
1) Minimum 100,000 recording cycles, 2) 20 years of data retention.
Lithium (LiPo) battery:
1) 4.2 Voltage, 2) 80mAh capacity, 3) 4 days of average use.
As great as a simple and convenient tap could be, we are constantly looking for more natural ways to capture your thoughts. One of them is a snap.
The magic lies in the device machine learning system. The microphones are in active listening mode and when the captured sound matches the Snap pattern — it activates device. It works best in silent environments, and with the shipped device you will be able to switch to Snap or back to Tap mode depending on your preferences. See it here in action.
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We bring a new level of intelligence to your voice notes. The moment you start a recording, it’s stored on your smartphone and backed up in Cloud, even if your app is in background. The Cloud software platform converts voice memos into text, extracts keywords, to-dos and analyses your speech patterns.
It's like having an AI to organise your notes. What is the topic of the note? What was your mood at the time? What was happening around you? Where were you? You can then find your notes by hashtags, their content or time and location to replay original audio, edit them or export to other apps.
With additional premium app subscription you’ll be able to access more AI features, like automatic punctuation or noise analysis, get larger cloud storage for audio notes and more free speech-to-text transactions. The App also works in the background, notifying you on the progress and number of notes made. Once you open the app, all your voice memos and text notes are automatically synced to the Сloud.
App screens.
Integrates with Evernote and much more
App features.
Since both the audio recording and the converted text are available for each note, there are a lot we can do to improve your note-taking experience. You’ll have a chance to vote on the upcoming features you want, like automatic punctuation, intonation analysis, productivity tips based on your previous performance, noise and context analysis, and integration with various software.
Our plan
Senstone Inc. is an audio company that’s on a mission to provide the best note-taking experience. We do it through voice analysis, text extraction and machine learning via deep audio analysis. Our company provides seamless and smart voice recording by combining well designed hardware and a cloud based software platform.
Our team
For more questions, media inquiries or review unit requests please contact us at [email protected].
Press Kit is available here.Last year, the coder who wrote the Atari 400 port of Donkey Kong revealed it had an Easter Egg but it's "totally not worth it." Someone has gone to the trouble of finding it.
Donkey Kong for the Atari 400 and 800 was one of the best early ports of an arcade game, and its writer, Landon Dyer, detailed how he built it practically by himself, with no support, reference code, or anything one would expect in a licensing deal. He also revealed the existence of the Easter egg, but incorrectly described how to get it ("something like: Die on the'sandpile' level with 3 lives and the score over 7,000," he writes.)
Don Hodges, who earlier fixed Pac-Man's notorious kill screen, set to picking apart the Donkey Kong code and finding the egg. He did. It's rather underwhelming, but for posterity's sake, he found the conditions for achieving it.
• Play a game, setting a new high score that is either 37,000, 73,000 or 77,000. The digits for hundred thousands, hundreds, tens, and ones may be anything. • Kill off all of your remaining lives, but your last death must be by falling. • Then set the game difficulty to 4 (press the option button 3 times.) • Wait for the game to cycle through the demo screen where Kong jumps across the screen, then at the title screen, the programmer's initials, LMD, will appear. (Pictured above)
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That is a set of conditions so specific I can't imagine anyone discovering the egg without prying apart the code, much less knowing how to repeat it. Hodges shows how he found it in the code, using an emulator.
I think the only question remaining is why Dyer made the egg so hard to discover. Certainly other Atari-programmed games of the time had Easter eggs that were not only easier to find, their methods were widely known and circulated.
Donkey Kong Lays an Easter Egg [donhodges.com via Game Set Watch]In the course of our daily reporting, we often uncover unusual projects, places, or connections that don't make the final cut. Instead of keeping it to ourselves, we're pleased to share our weekly Architrivia.
It seems that not a day passes in the Canadian news cycle without another mention of real estate prices in Vancouver and Toronto, especially in the wake of new rules put in place to stem the tide of foreign investment into the overheated Vancouver housing market, so this week's Architrivia will take a look at the Vancouver Forest housing development currently on the rise in suburban Beijing. Begun more than a decade ago, the steadily growing 55-hectare housing development is a near-perfect replica of an idealized Vancouver neighbourhood, complete with concrete facsimiles of Vancouver's historic West Coast Arts and Crafts style homes, placed along tree-lined streets, with ample lots and well-manicured main streets enlivened by the presence of restaurants, shops, and cafes.
Vancouver Forest, Beijing, image via CXT Architects Inc.
Filled out with more than 900 detached luxury homes, the massive housing development project is just outside of central Beijing and a 30 minute drive from the airport. It has proven wildly popular among locals, as the $3 million CAD homes are reportedly selling overnight as each new tract reaches completion. For those familiar with the rapid rate of demolition currently underway amid the leafy enclaves of Vancouver, as hundreds of historic homes are razed each year to make way for what critics refer to as "monster homes," it is not without a fair sense of irony that the homes now being built in Beijing's Vancouver Forest are an uncanny stand-in for the Vancouver heritage homes that are falling victim to the whims of wealthy foreign investors.
Vancouver Forest, typical streetscape view, image via CXT Architects Inc.
While similar in spirit to other Chinese developments that have made international headlines for their well-honed mimicry of Paris, Rome, or small-town America, the supremely contextual nature of the Vancouver Forest housing development makes this project a true standout in terms of its symbolic appeal to the lifestyle and urban character that has long been a draw to foreign investors looking to make a new life for themselves and their families in Canada.
Main Street, Vancouver Forest, image via CXT Architects Inc.
Whatever conclusions one draws from news of this rather unusual development, its mere existence as a living case study in urban landforms and domestic housing policy is sure to be a topic of debate among urban planners, heritage experts, and city builders for years to come. One can rest assured that it will not be the last of its type to appear in China, where the hunger for North American style living could drive the market for years to come.
Do you have building trivia to share? Join the conversation in the Architrivia Tipline thread in our Forum.NBA Commissioner Adam Silver mentioned the one-and-done rule could change sooner than later. What does that mean?
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Jim Oxley/HERO SportsWashington guard Markelle Flutz, one of 17 college basketball freshmen projected to go in the first round of the 2017 NBA Draft. Colt Kesselring @HEROSportsColt
Originally Published: February 20, 2017
Updated: June 28, 2017
Let's talk about the one-and-done rule. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said this weekend that the NBA needs to take a "new look and new approach" to the one-and-done rule, and will try to do so before they re-negotiate the collective bargaining agreement seven years from now.
Some of you are probably just here for the list of one-and-done players. We'll get into some interesting graphs and charts and such after the table, but here's a list one-and-done college basketball players first:
Now let's talk about it a bit.
One-and-done History
With the fifth overall pick of the 1995 NBA Draft, the Minnesota Timberwolves selected Kevin Garnett out of Farragut Career Academy in Chicago, Ill. He was the fourth high school player ever taken in the NBA Draft, and the first in 20 years.
In the ten years that followed, 38 players made the jump straight from high school to the NBA -- three of whom went No. 1 overall (Kwame Brown 2001, LeBron James 2003, Dwight Howard 2004). Nine went on to earn All-NBA recognition at some point in their careers, ten earned All-Star spots, and the group as a whole has won a combined 18 championships between them up to this point.
Then in 2006 the NBA enacted what would become known as the 'one-and-done rule'. It had two basic provisions:
1. All drafted players must be at least 19 years old during the calendar year of the draft. To determine whether a player is eligible for a given year's draft, subtract 19 from the year of the draft. If the player was born during or before that year, he is eligible. 2. Any player who is not an "international player", as defined in the CBA, must be at least one year removed from the graduation of his high school class.
While it was (and is) an NBA rule, the one-and-done rule has had a much bigger impact on college basketball landscape than it has on the NBA. High school superstars became one-year rentals for top-tier college basketball programs.
Some savvy coaches built their whole recruiting strategy around these guys.
One-and-Done NBA Draftees By School (2006-2016) College Freshmen Drafted Kentucky 21 Duke 10 Kansas 8 UCLA 8 Texas 6 Ohio State 6 Arizona 5 Washington 5 Syracuse 4 UNLV 3 Memphis 3 GA Tech 3 LSU 3 NC State 2 Kansas State 2 UNC 2 USC 2 Indiana 2 Florida State 2 UConn 1 Florida 1 Texas A&M 1 Tennessee 1 Creighton 1 Marshall 1 Gonzaga 1 Pittsburgh 1 St. John’s 1 California 1 Marquette 1 Cincinnati 1 Maryland 1 Baylor 1 Providence 1 Michigan State 1
And a graphical representation of the above table:
One-and-Done Freshmen in the NBA By School (2006-2017)
Nearly one in five freshmen selected in the NBA Draft since 2006 have come out of Kentucky (18.58%). Coach John Calipari has built his program around one-and-done players, even if he doesn't like the name (Calipari prefers'succeed and proceed').
So where in the draft were these players selected?
Freshmen Selected in the NBA Draft, by Pick (2006-2017)
As you can see, the draft is front-loaded with freshmen. Since the one-and-done rule was enacted 12 years ago, the top pick has been a freshman ten times. The only exceptions were in 2006 (the first year of the rule), when Italian national Andrea Bargnani went No. 1, and 2009 when Oklahoma sophomore Blake Griffin heard his name called first.
The other interesting thing about this chart is the very bottom. The bar that goes up to eight on the x-axis represents the eight freshmen who declared for the NBA Draft, but were not selected.
Undrafted One-and-Done College Basketball Players Name School Year Nate Miles UConn 2009 Tommy Mason-Griffin Oklahoma 2010 Jereme Richmond Illinois 2011 Roscoe Davis Midland College (JC) 2011 Cliff Alexander Kansas 2015 Zak McLaughlin Gadsden State CC (Ala.) 2016 Tony Anderson Southeast Missouri State 2016 Derrick Jones Jr. UNLV 2016 Ted Kapita NC State 2017 Kobi Simmons Arizona 2017
Most of these guys were highly-touted recruits. Their stories are invariably sad. The only one of the group to see an NBA court was Kansas' Cliff Alexander, who scored ten points in 36 minutes across eight games for the Portland Trailblazers last season and now plays for the D-League's Long Island Nets.
The Future of the One-and-Done Rule
So what happens now? NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in 2014 that increasing the age minimum from 19 to 20, "would be better for basketball".
On the other hand, the National Basketball Association Players Association has pushed for the limit to be removed all together. NBAPA general counsel Gary Kohlman said in 2015, "if they were white and hockey players they would be out there playing. If they were white and baseball players they would be out there playing. Because most of them are actually African-American and are in a sport and precluded from doing it, they have to go into this absurd world of playing for one year.
"That's just total complete hypocrisy."
The number of freshmen taken in the NBA Draft is on the rise, and has been since 2009. Take a look.
Youngins Taken in the NBA Draft (by Year)
Some 2017 NBA mock drafts have as many as 17 freshmen going in the first round alone. That would break the record of 14 set in the 2016 NBA Draft. It's totally possible the 2017 NBA Draft lottery will be ALL freshmen. (Update: the final count was 16 freshmen in the first round, 18 overall, with all seven of the first picks and 12 of the first 15.)
Then next year, DraftExpress.com has eight current high school seniors going in the first 11 picks of the 2018 NBA Draft (the other three are international players). NBADraft.net predicts 12 one-and-done players will go in the first 19 picks of the 2018 NBA Draft.
So what do you think? Is the one-and-done rule a good for basketball? I threw in some polls because I'm genuinely curious to hear what you think. I'd also love to hear some broader thoughts in the comment section below.Members of the YPG, YPJ and Syriac Military Council gather during a break in the suburb of the recently liberated town of al-Hawl. They all fight under the umbrella of the Syrian Democratic Forces. Photo: ARA News
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LGBT unit joins Kurdish forces in fight against ISIS extremists in Syria
SDF official denies existence of LGBT military unit in Raqqa
ARA News
The Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) on Saturday called on the families of Turkey-backed rebels that attacked Kurdish positions in Ain Daqna on 17 July to pick up the bodies of their fighters killed in the recent clashes.
“We in the People’s Protection Units (YPG) have asked the families of those killed in the attack to come to collect the bodies of their dead,” the YPG said.
“But the Turkish state and their loyal battalions [rebel groups] prevent the people from coming to collect the bodies, and we in the YPG repeat again the demand from the families to receive their bodies,” the YPG said.
Moreover, the YPG released the names of the 10 rebels that were killed. They included Subhi Hamsho bin Abdul Salam, Musa Shehadeh bin Hassan, Mustafa Musa bin Abdul Sattar, Ahmed Al-Ahmad bin Yasser, Ahmed bin Zakour Hamid, Yehia Tantoura bin Mohammed, Jamal Misto bin Ahmed, Ibrahim Idris Ben Idris, Ali
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motel in the heart of the town where they were living in cramped six-bed dormitory-style rooms that were originally designed to house two people.
Two other homes were also hit in central Pemberton where another 10 workers were taken into custody.
Camera Icon Federal Police and Border Force officers raid a Pemberton Motel owned by local producer Paul Da Silva. Picture: The West Australian, Sharon Smith/The West Australian.
It is believed the workers were employed by labour hire intermediaries who supply them to local farmers at market rates.
But just a fraction of that money makes its way into the pockets of the workers, whose pay is also docked by up to $150 a week by the contractor to cover their accommodation.
Border Force officers had hoped to arrest some of the contractors during yesterday’s raids but inquiries into their whereabouts are continuing.
The raids were the biggest conducted in WA in nearly three years and were part of a national crackdown on illegal workers, codenamed Task Force Cadena.
Rude awakening for sleepy farm workers
No farms were targeted yesterday but local strawberry grower Paul Da Silva was questioned briefly by officials when he arrived at the motel, which is owned by his family.
He strongly denied that his family knew illegal workers were staying at the property and said the rooms had been rented out on a long-term basis to a labour hire contractor who sublet them to his workers.
“If we had any suspicions we would have called the authorities ourselves,” Mr Da Silva said.
Of the 50 men and women taken into custody, 27 were found to have overstayed their original entry visas, which meant they were in the country illegally.
Camera Icon Picture: Sharon Smith/The West Australian Picture: The West Australian
The remaining 23 were on legitimate student or tourist visas which did not entitle them to work.
Most are facing immediate deportation and have been moved to immigration detention centres in Perth or Northam.
ABF assistant commissioner investigations, Wayne Buchhorn, said the ABF was committed to stamping out illegal work practices in Australia and warned that yesterday’s raids were just the beginning.
“Evidence obtained during yesterday’s warrant activity will be used to continue investigations,” he said.
See exclusive vision of the raids on 7 News tonight at 6pm.Guards search fans bags' at security check points before entering the fan zone prior to the Coke Zero 400 at Daytona International Speedway. (Photo11: Reinhold Matay, USA TODAY Sports)
Corrections & clarifications: A previous version of this story referred to the shooting in Orlando as the Paris nightclub shooting. The reference was intended to be to the Pulse nightclub shooting.
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – The sign of the times was impossible to ignore.
In the garage, on pit road and all around Daytona International Speedway, a highly visible SWAT team presence was part of the Coke Zero 400 weekend.
Uniformed personnel with assault rifles were on patrol, complementing increased credential checks, thorough bag searches and the use of mirrors on the underside of selected cars entering speedway property.
In the 10 years I’ve been attending NASCAR races, Daytona matched the highest level of security I’ve seen. Only first lady Michelle Obama’s visit to Homestead-Miami Speedway in 2011 was comparable.
Why? Well, it’s not a stretch to link it to recent terror events – including the Pulse nightclub shooting roughly an hour away in Orlando.
“The recent tragic events in Orlando certainly emphasize the need to constantly refine our comprehensive event security protocol,” said Joie Chitwood III, chief operating officer of Daytona track owner International Speedway Corp. “ISC continues to work collaboratively with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and other federal, state and local agencies in each of our markets. In preparation for all events … guests can expect a high level of security, some visible and some behind-the-scenes, to address multiple contingencies."
This is the new reality; not just at NASCAR races, but at all sporting events and anywhere people might spend time enjoying their lives.
It’s a bit depressing to think of entertainment venues as possible battlegrounds, but each incident – Paris, Brussels, Orlando, Istanbul, and so on – means there aren’t safe places anymore.
I asked several fans at the track on Saturday night during casual conversations whether the heightened security made them feel nervous or more secure.
The answer each time: More secure.
Personally, I found the presence of SWAT team members to be both reassuring and sad that it was necessary in the first place.
Fans wait in long lines at security check points before entering the fan zone. (Photo11: Reinhold Matay, USA TODAY Sports)
There’s a loss of innocence experienced in the last couple decades that will be difficult to explain to future generations.
Yes, there was actually a time when the threat of attacks weren’t part of our daily lives. We didn’t used to have to worry about things like that.
But we do now, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.
After the race, I left Daytona Beach and headed for the Orlando airport, passing by downtown Orlando in the early morning hours. I found myself making a detour to Pulse, where 49 people were murdered and another 53 injured in a terrorist attack last month.
It was 3 a.m., but a few people were still lingering and paying their respects at the expansive makeshift memorial outside the club. Police officers stood nearby keeping watch as people quietly looked over the hundreds of flower bouquets, flickering candles and colorful signs, banners and trinkets.
NASCAR teams had placed an #OrlandoUnited decal on each car for the Daytona race and Bobby Labonte ran a paint scheme with the #OrlandoUnited logo on his hood, so the shooting was on the minds of those in attendance. But standing in front of Pulse made it feel like more than a distant tragedy.
Pulse is located on what seems like a completely average street, and it hit home even more how what happened there could have taken place in any city, any state, any country – any venue.
As long as that’s the case, fans can deal with longer lines at the gate, additional security checks that might feel unnecessary at the moment and the unsettling sight of heavily armed personnel walking shoulder-to-shoulder with families hoping to have a good time at the races.
“Safety and security are paramount year-round at all International Speedway Corp. facilities,” Chitwood said. "In all instances, we are committed to providing a safe environment for our fans, competitors and all who attend our events."If you’ve been paying attention to the fight between Apple and the FBI over the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, you’ve probably heard the term “warrant-proof phones” thrown about in an ominous way. In his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on March 1, FBI director James Comey said, “We’re moving to a place where there are warrant-proof places in our life … That’s a world we’ve never lived in before in the United States.” In its response to a court filing Apple made in California, the government claimed that the “modest burden” Apple faces in complying with the FBI’s request is “largely a result of Apple’s own decision to design and market a nearly warrant-proof phone.”
This is a curious argument. For most of mankind’s history, the overwhelming majority of our communications were warrant-proof in the sense that they just disappeared. They were ephemeral conversations. Even wiretapping was limited to intercepting phone transmissions, not retrieving past conversations. For law enforcement purposes, encrypted phones are equally inaccessible: no one can recover information from them. But Comey’s description of warrant-proof technologies is vague enough to apply to many different things. We should use a different term if we care about preserving the ephemerality of some communications. Otherwise we might end up with a requirement to store everything.
Right now, there are essentially three types of information technologies that matter to law enforcement:
Those that make data accessible to the government when it has a warrant or has complied with some other form of due process. Those that make data inaccessible to both government and manufacturers. Think of these as lockout technologies. Those that fail to store information as data or that systematically and completely erase data after a brief period. These are ephemeral technologies.
Most modern information technologies fall into category 1. This is why law professor Peter Swire and privacy scholar Kenesa Ahmad have dismissed the government’s fears of “going dark,” arguing that we actually live in the “golden age of surveillance.”
The iPhone was in category 1 before 2014, when Apple strengthened its encryption practices. Now the company is trying to get the devices into category 2. Apple could help the government unlock San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook’s phone. But is Apple is going to be allowed to design a phone that it truly could not break into even if it wanted to? Will legislatures deem data too valuable to be forever imprisoned on a hard drive?
If so, a new problem will arise, given that both lockout and ephemeral technologies are “warrant-proof.” Unless there is some kind of clarity from legislatures, the only realistic way to ensure legal compliance could be to design technologies that record and store everything. Consider assistance technologies like the Amazon Echo, which are designed to “always listen” for words like “Hello, Echo” but do not fully process, store, or transmit what they hear until they are activated. For law enforcement purposes, most of the information the devices listen to is functionally impossible to recover. Does this mean legal authorities should consider Echo a warrant-proof technology? The emergence of the Internet of things is shrinking the number of “dumb” objects by the day. The government has requested laws that mandate data retention for over 10 years. Must all technologies be built to ensure that what they hear is retained and made available for law enforcement’s inspection?
Warrant-proof technologies are not inherently bad. Both ephemeral and inaccessible technologies free us to explore, inquire, and play in ways that have always been necessary for human development. If we care about the freedoms that being warrant-proof gives us, we should find a more measured way to talk about facilitating law enforcement’s access to information. Otherwise we might find ourselves wondering how we wound up saddled with the concept of permanent data retention.
Woodrow Hartzog is an associate professor at Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law and an affiliate scholar at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.We asked players from the Penguins and Predators to share their grooming secrets. (Hint: Beard oil. Lots of beard oil.)
I had a few questions for the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Nashville Predators, and they weren't about the Stanley Cup. And no, they had almost nothing to do with hockey. It’s: What are the secrets to awesome hockey hair? Hockey players are admired for their bro flows and playoff beards—which become bigger and, um, better in the postseason. It’s almost a brag: Hey, we’ve got multi-million-dollar salaries and great genes. See?
Here, we chatted about grooming and, of course, Jaromir Jagr at the NHL’s 2017 Stanley Cup Final Media Day:
Ian Cole (Penguins)
Who has the most iconic beard/hair in the NHL?
Jags [Jaromir Jagr] has some good hockey hair. Mike Commodore always had that big, fiery, red beard when he was in the playoffs, and that was always good. Lanny McDonald always had a great mustache as far as hockey facial hair, which was always a legend in my book, for sure. As for our team, well, Bones [Nick Bonino] has a beard. I wouldn’t call it great, necessarily. I would say that mine is probably the best.
What is a playoff beard?
From what I’ve heard, the tradition started with guys who were so preoccupied with the playoffs that they just didn’t shave and then it just kind of went from there and it’s been building since then. Now, guys from other sports are hopping on board with the playoff beards. The more the merrier, I guess!
Tell us about your beard...
Yeah, I don’t know about my beard. It’s just, like, two-tone. It gets to about right here and it gets red. This is the longest it’s been. I started a little bit early in January in preparation to get a real good one for the playoffs. It’s been good luck so far. I tried to grow my hair for a little bit. It wasn’t for me. It wasn’t for me. My head’s too big and it just kind of makes it look like a big watermelon on my head and doesn’t work. People have made some comments about my beard. They’re usually positive. My wife’s tend to be negative. She doesn’t think it looks terrible, but she’s also ready for it to be gone.
What’s your secret?
Oh, man. For the beard, I honestly haven’t touched it. Not once. No trimming, nothing, for almost five months now. For me, there hasn’t been much grooming. Not a lot of products. I tried to put some beard oil in it and it got all oily and I just didn't like it. I always play with it and it just was all oily and my hand were all oily. So, I’ve really just let it go. I haven’t brushed it, really. I’ve just let it go wild. It’s au natural.
Mike Fisher (Predators)
Who has the most iconic beard/hair in the NHL?
Best mullet would have to be Jagr. Guy Lafleur had a good look, good flow.
Tell us about the evolution of your beard/hair...
You look at my draft picture and I’ve got dyed hair. We used to dye our hair bleach blonde in Junior. I have bleach blonde hair in my draft picture and it looks hilarious. I don’t think any of the junior teams do it anymore. Now, it’s just growing beards or some teams do mustaches, too.
I used to have long hair—like, long hair—for a long time. This summer, I decided to change it up and try to stay young now that I’m one of the older guys in the league. I tried for more of a younger look so I cut it a lot shorter. I’m right in between here with the beard. The longest beard I’ve had was when we went to the finals in 2007. I look at pictures and it wasn’t as good as it is now or as thick, anyways. My wife, Carrie Underwood, is not a huge fan but she doesn’t mind it.
What’s your secret?
All the guys have gotten beard oil every round with our names on it. I’ve been starting to put beard oil in and that actually helps.
Filip Forsberg (Predators)
Who has the most iconic beard/hair in the NHL?
All time? It’s got to be Jaromir Jagr. It’s hard to beat that one.
What’s the best term for “hockey hair”?
I would probably use flow. I don’t think I’ve used any other word, really.
Do you consider a flow a mullet?
Yeah. It’s maybe a little less curly. That’s how I want to say it, I think. If you look back at Jagr, he had all this curly hair. Other players in that era did, too.
Tell us about your flow...
I’ve always had the same haircut really. If you ask any of my friends, they’ll probably say I’ve never changed it. You look at all the European guys and they’ve got pretty good hair. You look at Roman Josi [on the Nashville Predators] and he’s got good flow, too. So, yeah, I think it’s a European thing.
What’s your secret?
It’s pretty tough. I’ve got really thick hair. Well, I don’t know. It’s getting to that point where it’s a little extreme, actually. I thin it out pretty often but I don’t take too much on the length. It’s tough. I think it’s a lot of dedication, too. Some guys pay a lot of attention to it. I’ve got a girlfriend and she seems to like it, so I’m happy with that.
Carl Hagelin (Penguins)
Who has the most iconic beard/hair in the NHL?
You’ve got to give it to Jaromir Jagr, when he had the mullet. That was always cool to see when he was skating around with the helmet and his hair was so long in the back. It’s not a great haircut when you’re not wearing the helmet, but when you have the helmet on, it’s great.
What’s the best term for hockey hair?
Oh, flow is the right word for hockey hair. I’ve never been a big fan of “salad” or “lettuce.” I think that’s sounds like the hair is pretty bad if you use those words. Flow is a good word. I think it just started back in the days when guys were skating around with no helmet and had longer hair and once they put the helmet on it looked cool with those curls in the back of your head.
Tell us about your blond locks...
I think by the time I was 12 or 13, that was when I started growing it. I went to college at Michigan and the coach was old-school and didn’t want me to have long hair, so I had to shave my head for four years. Once I got in the league I decided, well, let’s just grow it out again. I look at myself in the mirror when I have short hair and I feel like I’m 10 years younger than I am. Maybe that will be a good thing 10 years from now, but not right now. I think I just feel better and look better with longer hair than shorter hair.
I have terrible facial hair so I just try to grow out whatever I have. I think you’ve got to do it when you’re in the playoffs. I’ve done it every year.
What’s your secret?
I think, for me, I try not to use shampoo too often because then your hair gets a little flat. I think that’s the only tip I can give. I shampoo maybe a couple of times a week but not more than that. I mostly rinse. I throw wax in there at times. I usually get it cut every month and a half maybe but just an inch or two.
James Neal (Predators)
Who has the most iconic beard/hair in the NHL?
I thought Barry Melrose had the best hockey mullet, didn’t he? He’s here as an analyst with ESPN.
What’s the best term for hockey hair?
It’s definitely hockey hair. I just like the long hair. I like the way it looks. I enjoy having it come out of your helmet a little bit. I think it’s all part of the way hockey players are. It’s thick, long. You know, a nice, full head of hair.
Tell us about your multi-colored head of hair...
This is definitely the biggest beard I’ve ever had. Usually, I don’t grow a beard. I’m taking a little heat from my teammates because it isn’t the same color as my hair. There’s a little orange in there and a little red, which comes from the Irish in me. But I’ve enjoyed growing it out. It’s the first time and it’s the longest it’s ever been. My girlfriend likes my hair longer. And she’s been open-minded about the beard.
What’s your secret?
I think it’s a lot of genetics and if you’re lucky enough to have it then you’ve got to go with it. I definitely comb it. P.K. [Subban] has had his barber in town for every round so he gave us some product to put in our beards so it’s been working well and we enjoy that. I think a few guys have been using him.
Watch Now:By Keith Idec
NEW YORK – As fans and media continue blaming Bob Arum for not making Manny Pacquiao versus Terence Crawford, Arum is confident he can finally make that fight for later this year.
Arum told BoxingScene.com that the fight will be worth more money for Pacquiao now that Crawford’s brand has been built through a series of dominant victories. According to the 85-year-old promoter, Pacquiao’s potential purse for fighting Crawford is what prevented the pay-per-view fight from happening over the past year-and-a-half.
The Filipino superstar instead has fought Timothy Bradley in an unnecessary rubber match and Jessie Vargas, then the WBO welterweight champion, and arranged a fight against unknown Australian Jeff Horn. Assuming the 38-year-old Pacquiao (59-6-2, 38 KOs) defeats Horn (16-0-1, 11 KOs) on July 2 in Brisbane, Australia, Arum expects Pacquiao to accept a fight against Crawford (31-0, 22 KOs) for some time in November.
“Manny wants that fight if the money is commensurate with the risk,” Arum told BoxingScene.com. “Now, he didn’t wanna do that fight and make the same money that he would make on a Vargas fight. You can’t blame him. And now that Crawford is becoming known more, I think that we could anticipate that a Pacquiao-Crawford fight would do a lot more business than Pacquiao-Vargas did. [More money is] one of the things that clearly should motivate Manny.”
Arum didn’t specify how much money he offered Pacquiao last year to fight Crawford or how much more he’d offer later this year. Regardless, Arum made his offer to Pacquiao based on the type of pay-per-view business he thought the fight would do because, unlike bouts broadcast live on HBO or Showtime, his company, Top Rank Inc., absorbs almost all of the financial risks for pay-per-view events.
The 29-year-old Crawford called a shot at Pacquiao “the only fight” he wants in the immediate aftermath of his impressive victory over Felix Diaz (19-2, 9 KOs) on Saturday night at Madison Square Garden. A shot at Pacquiao might not require Crawford to move up from 140 to 147 pounds because Pacquiao, the WBO welterweight champion, can make 140 pounds comfortably.
The Omaha, Nebraska, native, who owns the WBC and WBO 140-pound championships, also acknowledged following his technical knockout win against Diaz that his next fight probably will come against unbeaten Julius Indongo. Namibia’s Indongo (22-0, 11 KOs) holds the IBF, IBO and WBA super lightweight titles and would give Crawford a rare opportunity to win all of boxing’s recognized world titles in his weight class.
“The guy I’d like to match him with is the guy who has the other two titles [Indongo], so it would be a nice fight for four belts on the line,” Arum said. “So we’ll see. And then, if he wins that I would go to Manny and try to make that fight. It’s the biggest fight for Manny.”
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.Jared Polis, a Democrat, is jumping into a crowded field. | AP Photo Polis to run for Colorado governor
Colorado Rep. Jared Polis will announce his bid for Colorado governor this week, according to an interview.
“This is a campaign of big, bold ideas, and I’m trying to make them happen,” Polis told The Denver Post on Sunday. “We want a Colorado that works for everybody.”
Story Continued Below
Polis, a Democrat, is jumping into a crowded field. Four other Democrats — Rep. Ed Perlmutter, former state Sen. Mike Johnston, former state Treasurer Cary Kennedy and businessman Noel Ginsburg — are also vying for the position in next year's election.
A number of Republicans are also running in the race, including Mitt Romney's nephew Doug Robinson; George Brauchler, the prosecutor in the Aurora theater shooting case; and former state legislator Victor Mitchell.
Democrat John Hickenlooper, the current governor, is ineligible to seek another term.
Morning Score newsletter Your guide to the permanent campaign — weekday mornings, in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Polis, who would be Colorado's first openly gay governor if elected, told the Post his platform would focus on getting the state to 100 percent renewable energy by 2040, providing free access to full-day preschool or kindergarten for those 3 and older, and encouraging companies in Colorado to provide stock options to employees.
Polis tweeted Sunday that he would finish his term in the House.
"I currently plan to serve out my term to help the #resistance and fight Trump's radical agenda," he wrote.In the long term European national armies should be merged into a European military because "unified armed forces are a logical consequence of an ever-increasing military cooperation in Europe," said the minister
In the long term European national armies should be merged into a European military because "unified armed forces are a logical consequence of an ever-increasing military cooperation in Europe," said the minister
Finally they are admitting their true agenda. They have denied it, over and over again[1]. There will likely be denials from Her Majesty's Government still to come. But the truth is this, and I warned you of it at the time: Her Majesty's Prime Minister effectively signed up to an EU army last year but the reality hasn't sunk in yet.
What worries me is many people literally do not realise they've been so dramatically misled. Now as the truth is laid bare by Germany's new defence minister, Ursula von der Leyen, as she describes an EU army as an obvious "logical consequence" it's going to be played like a done deal. The so-called conspiracy theorists have pushed this counter narrative to the establishment's denials for some time now. I feel personally involved in the deception because against my better judgement I believed the official story for a while after being told such ideas were just "racist conspiracy theories". However the counter narrative is unfolding as the truth before your eyes and the denials are melting away.
The spectacle of a combined European fighting force should strike terror into your heart, if it doesn't you are not paying attention to the lessons of history. Not long ago European federalists, of which Hitler was one, were building and firing rockets at Great Britain as they attempted to grow a sinister "master race" to rule the world with. That's not science fiction, that's actually what was happening. The battle between nations was put on hold only when the combined military might of The USSR, The United States of America and the crumbling British Empire, who fought against this tyranny alone for a while, was brought to bare on the resource rich European New World Order.
One thing people who study these matters tend to notice is history has a habit of repeating itself in spiral like patterns. The same things keep coming up, over and over again. This is because the people playing the individual roles might look different but the same ideas continue to wrestle in the heavens of idea space.[2] The lessons of European history have not been learned and our nations are still stuck with core misunderstandings.
The might is right philosophy of Global Empire have been redesigned and given another name, it is "Liberal Interventionism"[3]. Germany's plans to engage more strongly in Africa in support of French intervention is a good example. They justify it in such stark terms you are made to look bad if you dare raise questions. The Defence Minister says Germany "cannot look the other way when murder and rape are a daily occurrence, if only for humanitarian reasons.". However, we must look the other way when the issue of a command and control centre being re-established in mainland Europe is raised.
Hitler was "left wing", "liberal" and he was "liberating" his people as far as he was concerned. The ideas which
drove him though have been over simplified though slogans and mantras as people concluded that "it's just" racism that was the problem. It's not, it's the mindset of someone who thinks they can force others to do, say and think, what they are told all the time. It's the mindset of dogmatic authoritarian "rationalism". All these ideas are outgrowths of the faith based belief that there's a rational explanation for everything somewhere, and if there isn't, it's only that we've not found it yet. The truth though is that people are non-rational, we're not robots. We're not able to understand everything, no one does, we ALWAYS might be wrong.
The dangers of racism are one thing but the core philosophy which drove Hitler on was Fascism, another outgrowth of the unquestioned political ideology of rationalism. Fascism is the idea that one set of ideas and behaviours is the only way in which to behave. In a modern context it's based on a misunderstanding of evolution, as some kind of linear narrative where you start as one thing and "move up" the steps towards perfection. That's not how evolution works, successful species and societies allow for as wide a variety of ideas and lifestyles as possible. The less rules you have the better.
Killing, violence, excessive coercion, these things are wrong because they limit human potential. Hitler understood this not. The Europeans, who speak of imposing their order upon the world, are the same.
It's terrible to think o ur ancestors, only a few generations ago, fought and died to prevent precisely this world which is now being granted because bureaucracy and ignorance.
It has to be challenged.
They lie, or keep people in the dark, or both. I was told that to speak about the FACT they're planning and building a European Army was a "racist", "conspiracy theory".
There is hope, the net makes fools the establishment on a regular basis and ignorance is becoming harder and harder for them to enforce. Their bureaucratic systems of control are consistently exposed on-line. The Savile stuff was a conspiracy theory, the NSA stuff was a conspiracy theory, the non-existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction, the list goes on. These things are counter narratives but in the end only those that stand up to criticism and reality are the ones which will win. And that includes the establishment's version of events.
Key question: why are they are lying to you? If the EU is so great, and maybe it has its advantages, why do they lie to you and call people "racists" or "Little Englanders"? I've yet to hear any good reasons why we must be part of the EU, instead I hear constant ad hominem attacks[4] on those who say we should pull out. Why not instead debate the inherent issues regarding centralisation of power and the crushing of other nations and their reality tunnels?
In my opinion UKIP are proving to be a valuable distraction from the core issues. Their half witted MPs who think gays cause weather changes or whatever are great fun to laugh at but notice, it's got nothing to do with the core issue they stand for yet it's the main story our broadcast media goes for. Focus instead upon this: in no uncertain terms the politicians are lying to you about this issue related to European integration, or, they are operating with seriously limited information.Extraordinary X-Men Credit: Marvel Comics
Page from 'Extraordinary X-Men #1' Credit: Marvel Comics
WARNING: Possible spoilers for Extraordinary X-Men #1 ahead.
Jeff Lemire has promised that his new flagship X-book, Extraordinary X-Men, would shake things up for Marvel's merry mutants, and judging by the latest preview of the first issue, he's not wasting any time rocking the boat.
The preview in question (via ComicBook) shows two pages of story, in which Storm, headmistress of the Jean Grey School, confesses to an unseen person that she's struggled to maintain order and "keep the dream alive." On the next page, it's revealed to whom she is speaking - none other than Professor X.
To understand just how significant Professor X's supposed return could be, we have to back all the way up to 2012's Avengrs vs. X-Men in which the Phoenix Force returned to Earth, resulting in Xavier's death at the hands of his prize pupil, Scott Summers, A.K.A. Cyclops. The death of Professor X lead to an irreparable split between Cyclops and the rest of the X-Men, with only those other mutants possessed by the Phoenix Force (and Magneto) following him as he attempted to create his own X-Men team.
Panel from 'Extraordinary X-Men #1' Credit: Marvel Comics
The split drove a wedge between Cyclops and even his closest friends, such as Iceman and Beast, who saw the murder of Professor X as unforgivable, and ultimately drove Beast to bring the original X-Men's younger selves to the future, where they remain. Cyclops and his squad remained fully sequestered from the rest of the mutant population right up until Secret Wars, though their exact fate is unknown.
Panel from 'Avengers Vs. X-Men' Credit: Marvel Comics
What we do know about the current state of the X-Men is that something has happened to mutants in the 8-month gap between the end of Secret Wars and the launch of Extraordinary X-Men - something big. It seems that Cyclops may be lost (or dead), and something occurred between mutants and Inhumans, possibly as a result of the Terrigen Mists that are sweeping the globe and deactivating latent X-genes, putting mutants once again on the brink of extinction. With mutantkind in such dire straits, the X-Men, lead by Storm, have created "X-Haven," which seems to be a safe space for mutants.
Credit: Marvel Comics
So what could Professor X's return mean for the X-Men, and for mutantkind in general? For one thing, the cause of the X-Men would once again have a figurehead, and moreover, a seat at the table when it comes to the movers and shakers of the Marvel Universe. Professor X was one of the original "Illuminati" that worked behind the scenes to shape the events of the Marvel Universe - a position later occupied by Beast, who, while effective, simply doesn't have the cache of Charles Xavier.
A resurrected Professor X could be exactly what the mutant race needs to unite and overcome not just the stigma of Scott Summers, but also the threat to their very existence in the form of the Terrigen Mist. But is this reveal so simple? Would Marvel just blow such a major twist this close to the book's actual release?
It's not impossible, but it seems unlikely, especially when there are so many ways Professor X's reappearance could be a bait-and-switch. Xavier has disappeared and resurfaced before, even when presumed dead (and death is not forever in Marvel's world), but this vision of Professor X could just as easily be some kind of hologram or psychic projection meant to keep us guessing.
The truth is, we likely won't know for sure until Extraordinary X-Men #1 hits shelves on November 4, 2015.We've been here several times before: a sudden and dramatic lurch in the Chinese economy that looks like it could be the Big One, the beginning of the end of China's economic miracle, perhaps even the beginning of the long-dreaded Chinese economic crash that would be globally disastrous.
Every time, China's leaders have managed to fix the problem before it became a catastrophe. The Big One never comes. There are two schools of thought on this. One says this is because China's leaders are smart, the country's economy is basically healthy, and everything will be fine. The other says that these fixes are temporary, that China's leaders are kicking the can down the road, and that China's economy is ultimately unsound.
Based on past incidents, it's a safe bet that China will pull out of this crisis as it has past crises. But, long term, I have always suspected that the pessimists were right, that China's economic model was unsustainable and doomed to collapse into recession and, possibly, the sort of resulting political turmoil the country saw in the late 1980s. One reason I believe this is that I am joined by some of the people in the best position to know: the Chinese leadership.
China's emergency
"I want to remind those cadres who are staying on the job beyond me: My biggest worry right now is an overheating economy," Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji said in a January 2003 Cabinet meeting, his last before leaving office.
"I've already worried about this for a year now," Zhu said in comments released only years later. "I wouldn't say this publicly, but only bring it up to the top leadership, that overheating is the one thing that preoccupies my mind. Many signs seem to have emerged, and if we're not vigilant, the economic situation will be difficult to rein in."
The next premier, Wen Jiabao, warned in 2007 that China's economic model of skyrocketing export-based growth was "unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and ultimately unsustainable."
The Chinese government knows it can't maintain power through censorship, propaganda, and riot police alone. It needs to maintain economic growth to keep Chinese citizens happy, but it also needs to slow down that growth to keep the economy healthy in the long term.
The basic problem at the core of the Chinese economy is that it needs to be dramatically restructured to remain healthy. But Chinese leaders appear either unable or unwilling to make those changes, held back by the unusual nature of China's authoritarian, one-party political system.
China's leaders have seen the problem for a while: They've been warning one another for years that their economic model was "unsustainable." But they never fixed it, which is why we're seeing this week's latest economic lurch. The reason they never fixed it isn't that the economy was unready, or that they didn't know what to do. It's that they are incapable of doing it.
The very nature of China's authoritarian model, by basing its power on a sprawling governing elite that is heavily invested in the status quo, might now make it impossible for officials to do the things they need to do to keep the system afloat.
China's one-party rule has looked impossible for so long that we sometimes don't even see anymore how improbable its continued rule really is. China watchers, not to mention people within China itself, have been warning for decades that the system was unsustainable. But the Communist Party pulled itself out of so many dire-seeming crises that those warnings started to sound silly. But maybe they weren't. Maybe they were right.
What China has to do
The stakes here are enormous. Since not long after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, China's government has premised political stability on delivering consistent economic growth. No one is sure what will happen if Beijing fails on that implicit promise, but Chinese leaders certainly fear the worst. In a democracy, if people feel their government has failed them, they can vote that government out of office. But in an autocracy like China's, popular discontent can be more dangerous.
China's leaders have long planned to change the country's economic model. But they thought they would have decades to do it; as long as China remained much poorer than developed countries, the old system would hold. When Zhu and Wen issued their warnings, they saw the problem as urgent, but on
|
width of the fringe.
The so-called justification for a Naval/Maritime flag to be on land is that all land was under the high water mark at one time even if it was eons ago.
Flags on poles flying at the same height as other flags have equal status. A flag flying higher than the flag below indicates superiority over the flag below. Note that corporate state flags fly below the US flag.
Keep in mind that the states were originally Sovereign over the central government and only the state flags were flown except in the District of Columbia not exceeding 10 miles square, its territories, forts, dockyards, arsenals, and other needful buildings, such as Post Offices, purchased with the consent of the legislature of the affected state.
(Constitution, Section 8, Clause 17)
The people in the geographic continental USA are at peace but the corporate government continues to be at war to exist, to increase and perpetuate debt, and to enrich others through Defense contracts.
Governing Body GOVERNING BODY
The Free Inhabitants are
a government body unto themselves.
Not forced to join a "state"
Not forced to be a citizen of any group.
Not forced to inhabit any territory.
Not forced to join the militia or military.
Not forced to pay un-requested services.
The Northwest territory and possessions were governed by three separate and distinct Branches or Departments equal to each other as to power and control of a segment of government while being on the same playing field laterally in position to each other.
Legislature
(Constitution; Article I)
--can enact positive law Executive
(Constitution; Article II) Judicial
(Constitution; Article III)
--known as article III courts
The purpose of having three separate and distinct branches at the same level is for checks and balances so that no one man or branch of government has complete power.
The legislative Branch consists of the Senate and Congress.
The purpose of the Senate was originally designed to voice states rights while Congress voiced the peoples rights.
The Senators were chosen by the states and were not elected by the people.
Together, they can come to a conclusion that meets the rights, interests, and benefit of both the state and the people.
Separation of Powers
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
--Theodore Roosevelt, 1912
"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government,... if the persons entrusted with supreme power become usurpers,... The citizens must rush tumultuously to arms, without concert, without system, without resource; except in their courage and despair."
--Federalist #28 - Hamilton The President (a Caesar)
rules by Executive Order
( Unconstitutional )
Congress and the Courts
are under the President.
Did you ever wonder why Congress is ignored by the President? The President is the Chief Executive Officer (C.E.O.) of the government corporation. Impeachment today is nearly impossible, unless it is in the best interest of the controlling bankers and the one-world government elite.
Also, what most people do not realize is that most courts today are legislative courts
and not Judicial.
The so-called (corporate) Congress
sits by resolution
not by positive law.
Therefore, the position of power is as follows: President (C.E.O of the corporation sits as Caesar
--does not need congressional approval) Legislature (The new Congress and Senate voices Public Opinion) so-called Judicial (Legislative, Article I courts) opinionate what's best for the corporate so-called government and the elite Non-existent Judicial
(Article III courts)
except for Special circumstances
that benefit the elite The top position has control over the second position and the second position has control over the last position vertically and not laterally.
There are no checks and balances unless the President is concerned with a potential revolution based on the outcry of its citizens.
Each puppet that comes into office wears a different costume but ends up serving the same master. (The Masters are the Elite and Bankers operating behind the scenes)
Only two executive orders
were overturned: "The Supreme Court ruled in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 US 579 (1952) that Executive Order 10340 from President Harry S. Truman placing all steel mills in the country under federal control was invalid because it attempted to make law,..." See: Opinion of Justice Black and Case Law
"...a 1996 order issued by President Clinton that attempted to prevent the U.S. government from contracting with organizations that had strike-breakers on the payroll.[6] Congress may overturn an executive order by passing legislation in conflict with it or by refusing to approve funding to enforce it. In the former, the president retains the power to veto such a decision; however, the Congress may override a veto with a two-thirds majority to end an executive order."
Medium of Exchange MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE
Lawful Money
Legal Tender
Units of Monetized Debt
Has substance Has no substance--Built on credit
Controlled by
Treasury of the united States of America Controlled by US Treasury
Real Money
Assets of value such as gold or silver
or can be exchanged for same.
Many of the older generations of the American people were taught to write the "S" with two lines through it. The two lines was a derivative of the "U" inside the "S" signifying "Units of Silver". The United States of America silver dollar is the accepted and approved uniform monetary unit (coin standard). The United States of America did not issue paper money until 85 years after its independence from Britain, and when it did, it was backed by silver or gold. Even at that, early Californians refused to accept and use paper currency, especially the people in San Francisco.
Phony Money
Not backed by assets
but thrives on faith alone.
Today, all computer programs, stock certificates, financial paper, accounting records, balance sheets and summaries, bills, bonds, Promissory notes, bank paper such as checks, et cetera use the familiar symbol having only one line through it to denote the amount of debt considered.
All Notes are "I Owe You's" (IOU's)
including Federal Reserve Notes (FRN's) All Notes represent debt. The corporate UNITED STATES is in bankruptcy and has no assets but can only monetize debt.
Lawful Money
consist of: Silver coins* (Silver Specie)
Silver dollar--standard unit of value containing 90% silver Gold Coins* containing 90% gold Spanish milled dollar called the "real." and its fractional parts such as the "medio" (half-real). Warehouse receipts or certificates redeemable in gold or silver* such as "Silver Certificates" and "Gold Certificates" are not in itself money but is an exchange for a specified amount of lawful money.
*Issued by the Treasurer of the United States of America. "The first coins issued by authority of the United States were the "Fugio" cents. Entries in the Journal of Congress..." "Saturday, April 21, 1787..."
"That the board of treasury be authorized to contract for three hundred tons of copper coin of the federal standard, agreeable to the proposition of Mr. James Jarvis,... That it be coined at the expense of the contractor, etc." "On Friday, July 6, 1787, there was "Resolved, that the board of treasury direct the contractor for the copper coinage to stamp on one side of each piece the following device, viz: thirteen circles linked together, a small circle in the middle, with the words 'United States,' around it; and in the center, the words 'We are one'; on the other side of the same piece the following device, viz: a dial with the hours expressed on the face of it; a meridian sun above on one side of which is the word 'Fugio,' (The meaning is, 'time flies') and on the other the year in figures '1787', below the dial, the words 'Mind Your Business.' The legends have been credited to Benjamin Franklin by many, and the coin, as a consequence, has been referred to as the Franklin Cent."
"These cents were coined in New Haven, Conn., and possibly elsewhere. Most of the copper used in this coinage came from military stores. It is believed to have been the copper bands which held together the powder kegs sent to us by the French."
--A GUIDE BOOK of UNITED STATES COINS 35th Edition
Historical review:
Lincoln, Gold, and Greenbacks
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Did you ever wonder where the words "bank" and "currency" come from? Keep in mind that a river has two banks that control a current of water running between them. Therefore, that is what the bankers do, they control the current or flow of money called currency. Legal Tender
consists of: Federal Reserve Notes (FRN's)*** Bonds Other Notes--evidences of debt. Tokens--clad coinage having no inherent asset value. "A unit of debt" in a cashless society--Electronic banking. ***Issued by the Federal Reserve Bank (FRB)--A private corporation created by the Bank of England in 1913 and is owned by foreign bankers/investors
The Federal Reserve is a continuation of the "Exchequer" of the Crown of England.
Edward Mandell House was instrumental in setting up the Federal Reserve.
"Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are U.S. government institutions. They are not government institutions. They are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the U.S. for the benefit of themselves and their foreign and domestic swindlers and rich and predatory money lenders." Chairman Louis T. McFadden, House Banking and Currency Committee, June 10, 1932.
Federal Reserve is not listed under the Federal Government. They are in the white pages, along with Federal Express, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), and any other business. Find out for yourself if all this is true. And then, go to your local law library and look up the case of Lewis vs. US, case #80-5905, 9th Circuit, June 24, 1982. It reads in part: "Examining the organization and function of the Federal Reserve Banks and applying the relevant factors, we conclude that the federal reserve are NOT federal instrumentality's.. but are independent and privately owned and controlled corporations - federal reserve banks are listed neither as 'wholly-owned' government corporations [under 31 USC Section 846] nor as'mixed ownership' corporations [under 31 USC Section 856]... 28 USC Sections 1346(b), 2671."
Congressman McFadden
Speaks Out (1934)
Congressman Traficant
Speaks Out (1993)
Congressman Ron Paul
Speaks Out
February 15, 2006
Payable, in Specie
Means "In coin"
from Latin, in kind
The "Dollar"
"The dollar, or "thaler" (which did not originate with the Spaniards), is short for the " Joachimsthaler" of Joachimsthal, a mining town in the Joachims Valley in Bohemia, where the coins were first struck in the sixteenth century."
"Thomas Jefferson recommended on September 2, 1776, to the Continental Congress, that the United States adopt the silver "Spanish Milled Dollar" called "Pillar Pieces of Eight", as our monetary unit of value, since daily trade was transacted in that coin."
--The United States Mint
A "dollar" was defined by law (Act of April 1792) as 371.25 grains of pure silver, which was the amount contained in a One-Dollar silver coin.
The gold eagle was equivalent to Ten silver dollars and had 247.50 grains of pure gold.
Therefore, 371.25 grains of pure silver was equivalent to 24.75 grains of pure gold; a 15:1 ratio.
Coinage started in 1783. The first gold coins were made July 31, 1795 and consisted of 744 half eagles.
Coinage of Silver coins for circulation ended with the 1964 coins.
Under the "free coinage" provision, no charge was to be made for converting gold or silver bullion into coins "weight for weight." At the depositor's option, however, he could demand an immediate exchange of coins for his bullion, for which privilege a deduction of one-half of one percent was to be imposed.
Redeemable Certificates
Although the first paper currency was issued in 1862, redeemable certificates were not issued until 1886
Silver Certificates were contracts initially redeemable in face value silver coin or silver bullion. Silver Certificates were released into circulation in 1878, redemption in silver dollars ceased in 1934, last printed in 1957, and redemption in all forms ceased on June 24, 1968.
Gold Certificates were contracts initially redeemable in face value Gold coin or gold bullion. Gold Certificates were released into circulation in 1882 and ended in 1928.
Mints
Although a government mint was approved February 21, 1782, no immediate action was taken. The first mint building was erected in 1792 on Seventh Street near Arch in Philadelphia. The first coin struck was the half disme (half-dime). Fifteen hundred were produced during the month of July 1792 before the mint was completed. File marks on early coins was a mint process of weight adjustment.
--A GUIDE BOOK of UNITED STATES COINS 35th Edition
The Mint was initially a part of the Department of State, became an independent agency in 1799, and became part of the Department of the Treasury in 1873 when the Mint's administrative headquarters moved from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C.
The amount of FRN's printed is based upon the corporate government's borrowing or appetite for debt. For example: If the corporate government prints $100 billion in interest-bearing U.S. bonds and takes them to the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve places the $100 billion in a checking account and the government writes checks or prints debt currency against the balance. In other words, this private banking system creates so-called money out of thin air and the bankers get interest on it forever. In addition, new debt and debt currency has to be created just to cover the compounding interest. An ideal "Ponzi scheme."
Keep in mind that bonds are IOU's and are to be paid back by the people through their future labor or the labor of their posterity. That is why wars are created and perpetuated, government bureaucracy and empire building increases, and superfluous spending continues. They create an ongoing and ever increasing debt to enslave the people and their posterity. Debt must be continually created to feed the debt-credit economy system.
The so-called expanding economy always needs new debt notes (FRN's) and therefore more debt must be created. Budgets can never be balanced in this type of system. If the budget is balanced, the economy will collapse because no new FRN's can be printed and no new debt credit created.
The FRB pays 2½ ¢ per FRN note printed whether $1 or $1000. The US in-turn pays FRB interest indefinitely for each outstanding note or representation of a note. With electronic banking FRN's are created out of nothing and nothing being printed. What a deal!
Central Banking and credit
Beginning in 1963, the words " redeemable in lawful money " and " will pay to the bearer on demand " were removed from future issues of Federal Reserve Notes
Public Law 88-36, approved June 4, 1963 made Silver certificates redeemable for silver bullion in the form of pellets or granulations and not in silver dollars. The exchange could only take place at the U.S. Assay Office in San Francisco up to June 24, 1968. After that, Silver certificates were no longer redeemable and are only legal tender having same value as Federal Reserve Notes.
The silver content of the dimes and quarters was completely eliminated under the Coinage Act of 1965 and the silver content of the half dollars was greatly reduced and or eliminated since then. Coins that no longer have silver content are called "Copper-nickel clad coins" or just "clad coins" and have no intrinsic value.
In 1982, the cent was changed from being 95 percent copper and 5 percent zinc to copper plated zinc weighting 20 percent less. The cent is now just like a token.
"In My opinion, the purchasing power of the debassed coinage and the increasingly inflationary currency system is undeniable proof to substantiate extortion and embezzlement by the banking industry and those who hold office in the corporate government system."
--Jack Slevkoff 2008
Debt Currency Money Fraud
In My opinion, it is impossible to pay the entire US debt because there is not enough money in circulation and not enough money created to cover the principle let alone the interest being created and accumulated.
--Jack Slevkoff 2008
A Maxim of Law:
"One is not required to do the impossible."
America's wealth
would be like a "Pot of Gold"
Fore warned:
"If the American people ever allow private banks (the Federal Reserve Banks) to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.." --Thomas Jefferson
The Law, which still stands, stated:
Individual states are "not allowed to make any things but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts." The Constitution also stated: "Congress has the power to COIN money and regulate the value thereof."
--Article I Section 10 of the Constitution
Notice that it states the word "coin"
and not "print paper currency."
Our Founding Fathers knew how a central bank printing paper money would collapse our economy.
"And to preserve their independence,
we must not let our rulers [leaders] load us with perpetual debt."
--Thomas Jefferson
"Until we realize that our money power is our sovereign power we cannot act as sovereigns"
--E.C. Riegel.
"Gold will always remain the ultimate form of payment in the world."
--Alan Greenspan, Testimony before US House
Banking Committee, May 1999.
The Greenback Acts of 1861 allowed the Union (during the Civil War) to print and issue paper currency in 1862 for the first time in US history. Prior to that, the federal government restricted itself to coins. The paper money was not backed with gold or silver but simply with the full faith and credit of the Union government. The ink chosen for the back side was a peculiar green; thereby nicknamed "greenbacks".
The confederate states did the same thing and their currency were called "bluebacks" and "graybacks."
One year later, the 1861 Acts were revoked and replaced with the National Banking Act in 1863. An Act passed on April 12, 1866 authorized the sale of bonds to retire currency called greenbacks.
FRN's were first issued in 1914.
The Independent Treasury Act of 1921 suspended the de jure Treasury Department of the United States government and turned it over to a private corporation called the Federal Reserve
(de jure means "by right of lawful establishment")
Just prior to the Stock Market crash of 1929, millions of dollars of gold was taken out of this Country and transferred to England.
All of the remaining assets of the US citizens, including their person, are held by the Depository Trust Corporation (DTC), the central securities depository, at 55 Water Street, New York, NY - secured by Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) Commercial Liens, which are then monetized as "debt money" by the Federal Reserve.
Under the umbrella of the DTC lies the CEDE Corporation, the Federal Reserve Corporation and the American Bar Association, the "legal arm" of the banking interests.
Return Money To The People
In 2010, the popularity of the dollar
has fallen behind the Euro.
"the euro is the currency with the highest combined value of cash in circulation in the world, having surpassed the U.S. dollar (USD)." --Wikipedia
Sovereigns SUBJECTS
Living Souls coming out of mother's womb onto the land of one of the several states of America are "Sovereign", "Freemen", "Free inhabitant", and "Freeborn" unless that right is given up knowingly, intentionally, and voluntarily upon full disclosure.
Amendment X
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution,...are reserved to...the people." US citizens (Chattel Property) are belligerents in the field and are
"subject to its jurisdiction"
(Washington DC) U.S. citizens are 14th Amendment citizens implemented by the Civil Rights Act of 1866 originally established for the newly freed slaves.
That is to say: "Now slaves of the corporate government plantation"
The people are Sovereign
"...at the Revolution, the sovereignty devolved on the people; and they are truly the sovereigns of the country, but they are sovereigns without subjects... with none to govern but themselves; the citizens of America are equal as fellow citizens, and as joint tenants in the sovereignty."
--Chisholm v. Georgia (US) 2 Dall 419, 454, 1 L Ed 440, 455 @Dall 1793 pp471-472
Sovereign
A chief ruler with supreme power; one possessing sovereignty. (q. v.);
2. In the United States the sovereignty resides in the body of the people.
Vide Rutherf. Inst. 282.
--Bouvier's Law Revised
6th Edition, 1856
"[It is] the people,
to whom all authority belongs."
--Thomas Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 1821.
"There is no such thing as a power of inherent Sovereignty in the government of the United States. In this country sovereignty resides in the People, and Congress can exercise no power which they have not, by their Constitution entrusted to it: all else is withheld." --Julliard v. Greenman, 110 U.S. S. 421
A piece of paper does not give people the right to walk the earth as one of God's creatures. People have that right without the Constitution, without the Amendments some people call the "Bill of Rights," and without a Birth Certificate.
No Political or Royal figure can give one the right to be free or take that right away. The idea that one is "given" what one already has is an illusion created for the purposes of control, power, and manipulation. Such an idea exists only when people allow it to exist or are ignorant of their rights.
Today, almost all mothers, black or white, unknowingly inform on their own babies. Take a look at the so-called "Birth Certificate" CERTIFICATE OF LIVE BIRTH where the mother signs and you will see the title of the box stating in small print:
"MOTHER OR OTHER INFORMANT".
The word "OTHER" makes the mother "an informant." By signing the "Birth Certificate" as an informer, she contracts with the government putting her child and her child's future labor as collateral for the national debt (servitude--slavery). The father or mother can rescind the contract within three business days (Truth-in-Lending).
Since the Birth Certificate neither lists the father as the husband nor lists the wife's acceptance of the father's surname as her own but has the mother's maiden name instead, the baby is considered a BASTARD. Bastards are therefore under the care and control of the Priest Rule (democracy) and can be taken from the mother at any time.
The hospitals receive a fairly large monetary benefit ($3,000, more or less, per child) from the corporate government for having Birth Certificates filled out and signed.
The Wizard of Oz
"The primary control and custody of infants is with the government"
--Tillman V. Roberts. 108 So. 62
Judicial Name
(Appellation)
Name of a living soul
in a flesh and blood man.
('man' includes woman and child).
John James, Christianson Note upper and lower case
(Proper by Rules of English Grammar)
Christian Appellation: John James
(Sole property)
Family Name: Christianson
(Common property)
Here is an example of how
Jack, the author, declares who he is:
Jack, the son of Jack, of the family named Slevkoff (surname), a living soul in a flesh and blood man on the land, [hereinafter I, Me, My, or Myself], is an American having Sovereign status [Declaration of Independence: anno Domini, Seventeen seventy-six for America], a native of California, thereby being a California national, California being one of the Republics and a nation unto itself [an Act establishing government in California: anno Domini,
eighteen hundred forty-nine] Legal Name
is a "Prisoner of war" name
Fictitious " nom de guerre " name
for a non-living entity:
also referred to as the "Strawman"
and/or "Transmitting Utility" JOHN DOE
Name is in all capital letters
a.k.a. all CAPS
which is in a format called
Capitus Diminutio Maxima
Capitus Diminutio Maxima
(Maximum diminished status)
means that a man's condition changes from freedom to bondage
and becomes a slave or an item of inventory.
--Blacks Law Dictionary, Revised 4th Edition 1968
John C. Doe
Note: middle initial
(No name at all--A fiction)
First Name: JOHN
Middle Initial: C.
Last Name: DOE A fictional persona
being surety for the debt
as a fiction in commerce
Also known as an “ Ens Legis ”
which means ‘legal entity’.
It is non-human, ‘civilly dead’.
Look at the name on Drivers Licenses, Social Security cards, Credit Cards, Deeds, Bank Accounts, etc.
Name in all CAPS
Maintaining Sovereignty
As a result of a king's uncontrolled spending spree, France had severe inflation which resulted in a monetary crisis. A group of people stormed the Bastille in Paris on July 15th 1789, and the French Revolution was born. The 'Rights of Man' was declared on August 26, 1789. By midsummer of 1792, the king was dethroned and the royal family was imprisoned. Since the people no longer had any use for a king and queen, Louis XVI was beheaded on January 21, 1793 and Marie Antoinette was beheaded later that year.
Therefore, it is the people who are really in control. It is intended for government to be the servants and the people to be the masters. It is better for the government to fear the people than the people fear their government.
"..whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,.."
--Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
"If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." --Samuel Adams
U.S. citizens were declared enemies of the U.S. by F.D.R. by Executive Order No. 2040 and ratified by Congress on March 9, 1933, 48 Stat. 1
FDR changed the meaning of The Trading with the Enemy Act of December 6, 1917 by changing the word "without" to citizens "within" the United States
People become surety for the debt by a number of different ways. One way is by a Birth Certificate when the baby's footprint is placed thereon before it touches the land. The certificate is recorded at a County Recorder, then sent to a Secretary of State which sends it to the Bureau of Census of the Commerce Department. This process converts a man's life, labor, and property to an asset of the US government when this person receives a benefit from the government such as a drivers license, food stamps, free mail delivery, etc. This person becomes a fictional persona in commerce. The Birth Certificate is an unrevealed "Trust Instrument" originally designed for the children of the newly freed black slaves after the 14th Amendment. The US has the ability to tax and regulate commerce.
The government issued Birth Certificate is now a Registered Security which initially has an estimated value of One Million dollars. They are circulated around the world as collateral for loans and entered on the asset side of ledgers just like any other security. That is why they are initially filed with the Commerce Department.
The central banks now have a negotiable instrument against which credit is advanced by the international funding community, namely The World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Bank for International Settlements, Bank of England, Federal Bank of America etc
Free born
Free inhabitant
Freeman
Freeholder
A member of the Sovereign
"We the people..." Bond Servant
To cover the debt in 1933 and future debt, the corporate government determined and established the value of the future labor of each individual in its jurisdiction to be $630,000. A bond of $630,000 is set on each Certificate of Live Birth. The certificates are bundled together into sets and then placed as securities on the open market. These certificates are then purchased by the Federal Reserve and/or foreign bankers. The purchaser is the "holder" of "Title." This process made each and every person in this jurisdiction a bond servant.
"None are more enslaved
than those whofalselyy believe
they are free."
--Goethe
Inherent rights
present at birth
but not necessarily hereditary
Un alienable rights
Rights from God
that are not lienable. In alienable rights
Rights from the corporate government that can be liened against or taken away at any time. Very much like a 'privilege'.
Unalienable vs Inalienable
Elector VOTER
The "Electoral college of electors" are the ones that actually determine who will be President - not any popular vote, poll, media, or statistic.
An Elector
is Not subject to
exclusive legislative power
of Congress.
Almost anyone can
become an elector.
Did not have to be a registered voter
or a party member.
Currently, there are
538 elector positions.
It now takes 270 Electoral Votes
to win the Presidential Election.
The total number of electors a state can have is equal to that state's total representation in Congress. Less populated states such as Wyoming, North Dakota, and Vermont have at least one Representative and two Senators. Therefore, they have only three electoral votes. California, for instance, with 52 Representatives and two Senators, have 54 electors.
"Numerous constitutional amendments have been introduced in the Congress seeking to alter the Electoral College or replace it with a direct popular vote; however, no proposal has ever passed the Congress." --Wikipedia
Members of Congress or anyone holding any Federal office cannot be an elector based on what the Constitution refers to as:
'trust or profit.'
The Founding Fathers did not intend to have institutionalized party systems such as Democrats, Libertarians, and or Republicans.
"Registering to vote" is an admission that the declarant is subject to the exclusive legislative power of the corporate Congress and is a 14th Amendment citizen residing in federal territory.
"…the right to vote at any election… is denied… except for participation in rebellion, or other crime…" --Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, U.S. Constitution
Rather than remaining a state national, one becomes a U.S. citizen participating in the rebellion by voting in the corporate government system and or signing up for benefits and privileges.
"Stop and think for a moment as to voting. When you vote for an office to be filled in the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA or one of its SUB-CORPORATIONS (THE STATE OF TEXAS), you have voted to fill a fictional corporate position designed to represent the CORPORATION, not a political position to represent the people. All elections in the "United States" are nothing more than proxy fights in a board room!"
--Ed: Brannum (Secretary of Privatization;
Provisional Government; Republic of Texas)
There are more people receiving government benefits today than ever. Most of these people are Democrats and vote for people who are Democrats. Reason being; the Democratic party provides and creates more benefit programs and services to obtain votes and popularity. Also, there are more people coming from Mexico, legally or illegally, amnesty or not, who know that the benefits are mostly created by Democrats and will always vote for the Democrats or convince others to do so. As these numbers increase, it will be very difficult for any non-democrat to win an election.
"The elite and the major media have the people pitting the democrats against the republicans or vise versa.
The democrats get in, the people find negative consequences and then vote republican.
The republicans get in, the people find negative consequences and then vote democrat next election.
In the meantime, the one-world government elite's agenda is being fulfilled.
People have to wake up and realize that this is a corporation doing business disguised as the former government and is not the government originally instituted in the 1700's.
Stop playing their game."
--Jack;Slevkoff 2009
"You know, comrades. That I think in regard to this: I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this - who will count the votes, and how."
--Joseph Stalin
An Elector's choice (election) or decision counts like one on the Board of Directors A voter's vote
is a recommendation only
Votes are counted at a poll
or polling station.
"Poll" is defined as an inquiry
into public opinion.
Justice System "JUST-US" SYSTEM
Free inhabitants are under God's commandments, one's conscience, and the English Common Law (Jury)
Citizens within the Northwest territory are under the written legislated laws created by Congress which is adjudicated via the Judicial Branch of government established by "Article III" of the Constitution So-called Judicial system
and Legislature
are under the President
Most courts today are Article I
or Article II courts.
Separate from Executive and Legislative branches of government
"serving the People"
under Constitutional mandates. The so-called Judicial is not separate
although it may appear that way.
Most so-called courts today
are listed in Dun & Bradstreet as
a private company or corporation,
operating as a business for profit.
judicial venue federal ( feudal ) venue
Ministerial court system
To serve the people--"Servant" Administrative court system
Responsible to the administration
--"Support"
General Law
Common Law
"The nature of law is to maintain justice."
--Bastiat 1848 Private, internal law
"...the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder."
"Thus, in order to make plunder appear just and sacred to many consciences, it is only necessary for the law to decree and sanction it." --Bastiat 1848
Common Law
(Law not written)
Common Law is based on custom and usage and includes the Magna Carta and The great Charter of the Forest
Common Law has two basic requirements:
Do not Offend Anyone Honor all contracts
The 7th Amendment guarantees a trial by jury according to the rules of the common law when the value in controversy exceeds Twenty dollars [in silver specie; not FRN's]
"When injustice becomes law,
resistance becomes duty."
- Thomas Jefferson Civil Law
based on the Roman Civil Law
Covers a vast number of volumes of text that even attorneys can't absorb or comprehend such as:
Regulations Codes Rules Statutes There are now over 60 million of these so-called laws on the books. Keep in mind "ignorance of the law is no excuse" Everyone must be guilty of something. The more so-called laws, the more revenue generated.
"The more corrupt the State,
the more numerous the laws."
--Cornelius Tacitus (c. 55-117 A.D.)
"The more numerous the laws,
the more corrupt the state."
--Bastiat law (1936-)
Prior to bankruptcy of 1933
"Public Law"
Now the so-called courts administer "Public Policy" through the
"Uniform Commercial Code"
(instituted in 1967)
Public Policy and UCC
Constitution
Supreme Law of the land restricting a central government, appointed and elected officials, and their staff.
The "organic" Constitution and its amendments are created by the states united to institute, restrict, and restrain a limited central government and to protect the people from such central government from infringing on the peoples God-given rights.
No stare decisis Means no precedent binds any court, because they have no law standard of absolute right and wrong by which to measure a ruling—what is legal today may not be legal tomorrow.
So-called "court decisions" are administrative opinions only and are basically decided on the basis of
"What is best for the corporate government."
Most so-called laws today don't protect you against them, but protects them against you.
Grand Jury composed of
25 people who are Sovereigns
--Magna Carta, Article 61 so-called Grand Jury
composed of 24 US citizens
Judicial Courts
with real Judicial Officers and
real Juries who can judge the law
as well as the facts
Jury decisions cannot be reversed by the judge The so-called courts are actually
Corporate Arbitration Boards
Consisting of an Arbitrator
(so-called "Judge")
and sometimes a panel of corporate employees
(so-called "Juries")
Panel decisions (recommendation)
can be reversed by the Arbitrator
Judges
(No black robes) The judicial officer is actually a coordinator who sits in on behalf of the people, for the good of the people, who swears by full oath of office to abide by and uphold the Constitution, and is there to give presenters and counselors equal opportunity to present their case, with fairness and un bias to all, whether it is pertaining to a controversy or one suspected of a crime or injustice, to produce and provide an impartial and fair trial or suite in Law by bringing forth the facts and the law to be judged by the people who are peers.
The people are the ultimate "judges" of both the law and the facts. The so-called judge, a corporate "black-robe" referee, an actor (acting judge), on a fictitious stage, sitting under a gold or yellow fringe flag, becomes the "captain" or "master" of that ship or enclave and has absolute power to make the rules at his whim
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:11:23 <miyako> then work on their code, talking about it here, having people look over what they are doing, etc. Jul 20 20:11:26 <calzone21> alright guys, i have to go. take care! Jul 20 20:11:29 * calzone21 has quit (Client Quit) Jul 20 20:11:30 <TheDuceCat> see ya Jul 20 20:11:43 <miyako> then on fridays they submit pull requests for the things that they want pulled, and we work on that over the weekend Jul 20 20:11:55 <miyako> also discussing things here, e.g. why to pull or not pull, etc. Jul 20 20:13:14 <chancez> I feel like I should say this, for people who aren't aware of how to use git. Jul 20 20:13:16 <chancez> But Jul 20 20:13:24 <chancez> Branch early, and branch often Jul 20 20:14:00 <chancez> git branches let you work on an individual task, and revert to the original code you had for other tasks as well, all at the same time, without needing multiple copies of the repo Jul 20 20:14:01 <Kobono> yeah, branches are cheap in git Jul 20 20:14:09 <chancez> each branch should be 1 task Jul 20 20:14:19 <chancez> and usually each branch is going to be 1 merge Jul 20 20:15:02 <paise> Say for example I want to implement a small feature which would take say 2-3 weeks, so I create a branch. Now should I rebase it with master or merge it? Jul 20 20:15:42 <chancez> neither Jul 20 20:15:44 <chancez> well Jul 20 20:16:22 <chancez> you usually create the branch, make it work, pull request for that branch, upstream will merge it, now you pull down and merge upstream with your master branch Jul 20 20:16:34 <chancez> dont rebase it...that would break things Jul 20 20:16:45 <chancez> you use rebase when you are doing something like this Jul 20 20:17:04 <chancez> edit code, commit some, edit again, commit again, edit more, final commit #3 Jul 20 20:17:12 <chancez> now you want to squash that all into 1 commit Jul 20 20:17:20 <chancez> rebase commit#1 commit#3 Jul 20 20:17:32 <chancez> and now its 1 single easy to merge in request Jul 20 20:18:00 <chancez> if your intial commit is based off of something thats behind the master branch though, dont rebase, it will break things Jul 20 20:18:31 <paise> Ok so even if it would take a few week sto get a feature implemented, the idea is to keep submitting whatver we have every week and pull in the master. Jul 20 20:18:43 <chancez> well only if its working Jul 20 20:19:01 <chancez> and hopefully your not working on a task that is literally 1 task that takes 2-3 weeks Jul 20 20:19:05 <miyako> paise: the idea is that every week the things that are complete will be merged, but you only submit a pull request if you have a feature that is done Jul 20 20:19:15 * centigrade233 (60f24712@gateway/web/freenode/ip.96.242.71.18) has joined #rpcdesktop Jul 20 20:19:24 <paise> Alright, got it. Jul 20 20:19:31 <chancez> programming should be broken into very small pieces, so hopefully each item you work on should be 1 of those items that can be merged in each week Jul 20 20:20:16 <miyako> I would expect that, as we go on, the length of time for features will increase, because there might be more tricky algorithmic work, or work that needs to touch more pieces of code Jul 20 20:20:16 <Suner> I've never known git was so useful Jul 20 20:20:20 * bimo (54c2cb93@gateway/web/freenode/ip.84.194.203.147) has joined #rpcdesktop Jul 20 20:20:29 <bimo> oi Jul 20 20:20:29 <miyako> but it's also going to depend a lot on how much time you have to dedicate to the project Jul 20 20:20:48 <miyako> if you only have a few hours each weekend to work, then it might take you a few merge windows to get a feature done Jul 20 20:20:52 <TheDuceCat> how's this? http://reinh.com/blog/2009/03/02/a-git-workflow-for-agile-teams.html Jul 20 20:20:54 <ArrowBot> (10/0)[0] "A Git Workflow for Agile Teams" http://www.reddit.com/r/git/comments/8mw7y/ Jul 20 20:20:55 <ArrowBot> <http://ln-s.net/3M:u> (at reinh.com) Jul 20 20:21:52 <miyako> TheDuceCat: that's good, except for merging in with master and pushing to the main repo will be done by submitting pull requests Jul 20 20:22:01 <TheDuceCat> yeah Jul 20 20:22:14 <miyako> rebasing might be done by the maintainers instead of the people submitting requests as well Jul 20 20:23:10 <chancez> miyako: that sounds smart.. Jul 20 20:23:11 <TheDuceCat> yeah as i said pull requests can consist of multiple commits Jul 20 20:23:19 <centigrade233> back Jul 20 20:23:20 <chancez> id hate someone to fuck up their shit Jul 20 20:24:16 <centigrade233> what are we talking about now? Jul 20 20:25:13 <miyako> I think we need to talk about requirements, and also about getting the first bits of code written Jul 20 20:26:00 <Suner> ^ Jul 20 20:26:20 <Suner> do we even have a repo setup yet? Jul 20 20:26:27 <TheDuceCat> yeah Jul 20 20:26:31 <Suner> link? Jul 20 20:26:32 <WolfeL> Have established a solid understanding of what it is the program is going to be/how it will function? Jul 20 20:26:48 <WolfeL> have we* Jul 20 20:26:53 <Kobono> not yet Jul 20 20:27:03 <miyako> Suner: https://github.com/RPCDesktop/tiledr Jul 20 20:27:05 <ArrowBot> Title: RPCDesktop/tiledr · GitHub (at github.com) Jul 20 20:27:06 <thearrowflies> we discussed it at the last meeting Jul 20 20:27:25 <miyako> the treloo board has a few things listed Jul 20 20:27:29 <miyako> *trello Jul 20 20:27:31 <paise> miyako: requirements as in features? Jul 20 20:27:35 <WolfeL> I've read through and understand the basic Ideas of it, I just didn't know if it was expanded upon Jul 20 20:27:38 <thearrowflies> something went wrong with the license? Jul 20 20:27:41 <miyako> paise: yeah Jul 20 20:27:43 <TheWalkingDerp> trello? Jul 20 20:27:47 <WolfeL> I've been following the trello yes, thank you Jul 20 20:28:28 <paise> Ok, so is ther going to be tile creator, if so, should that be on high priority? Jul 20 20:28:30 <miyako> thearrowflies: the only commit was a license file I added; we agreed on GPL3 so I added the GPL license to the repo Jul 20 20:29:08 <thearrowflies> yeah, but the "something went wrong" wasnt there when you added it Jul 20 20:29:36 <thearrowflies> ah now its gone Jul 20 20:29:37 <miyako> thearrowflies: I don't see the "something went wrong"? Jul 20 20:29:42 <miyako> maybe a github bug? Jul 20 20:29:45 <thearrowflies> probably Jul 20 20:30:17 <miyako> so yeah, I think on the fronted the biggest things to start with are the GUI main window itself, an OpenGL context to display the map, and maybe a tile browser Jul 20 20:30:29 <TheDuceCat> yep Jul 20 20:30:37 <TheDuceCat> we need some mockups Jul 20 20:30:42 <thearrowflies> shit Jul 20 20:30:45 <miyako> on the backend we probably need to work on defining the APIs for getting a mesh of the map, placing tiles, and defining some sort of file formats Jul 20 20:30:45 <thearrowflies> i said i was giong to do those Jul 20 20:30:53 <TheDuceCat> k Jul 20 20:31:22 <thearrowflies> i have an idea in mine Jul 20 20:31:25 <chancez> recently ive gotten interested in the python area Jul 20 20:31:27 <thearrowflies> but ill have to shop it first Jul 20 20:31:31 <chancez> if you guys have any need for that. Jul 20 20:31:34 <TheDuceCat> we do Jul 20 20:31:50 <TheDuceCat> the program is going to be barebones Jul 20 20:31:54 <TheDuceCat> it's going to ship with default plugins Jul 20 20:31:54 <chancez> i know, but its a matter of when, since your developing your own api Jul 20 20:32:53 <miyako> I'm thinking for the tiles themselves the backend API will have some sort of function that will give you a tile struct that has probably a tile name as a string and a data pointer to a 32x32 bitmap with a thumbnail image Jul 20 20:33:16 <Suner> which build tool will we be using? Jul 20 20:33:25 <miyako> Suner: good question :) Jul 20 20:33:26 <paise> Cmake? Jul 20 20:33:27 <miyako> CMake? Jul 20 20:33:33 <Suner> SCons? Jul 20 20:34:26 <miyako> vote on build system: autotools, cmake, scons? Jul 20 20:34:29 <TheDuceCat> i'm sort of new to build tools so idk Jul 20 20:34:38 <Suner> I vote against autotools Jul 20 20:34:38 <TheDuceCat> i'll leave it up to you guys Jul 20 20:34:39 <Kobono> TheDuceCat: same Jul 20 20:34:41 <miyako> I know autotools and cmake well, I don't know scons at all Jul 20 20:34:47 <paise> against autotools Jul 20 20:34:55 <miyako> I vote for cmake because I know it, and it's not autotools Jul 20 20:34:55 <TheDuceCat> can we have a feature comparison? Jul 20 20:35:36 <miyako> TheDuceCat: I don't know that there is an appreciable feature difference, more of a question of how much the tool makes you want to stab yourself in the face Jul 20 20:35:45 <TheDuceCat> k Jul 20 20:35:48 <Suner> http://www.scons.org/wiki/SconsVsOtherBuildTools Jul 20 20:35:48 <miyako> which for autotools is infinity, it makes you want to stab yourself in the face in an amount of infinity Jul 20 20:35:57 <ArrowBot> <http://ln-s.net/$Uay> (at www.scons.org) Jul 20 20:35:58 * Accipiter ([email protected]) has joined #rpcdesktop Jul 20 20:36:20 <FRodrigues> what's the problem of using auto-tools? Jul 20 20:36:29 <Suner> to be clear: I have no experience with SConds Jul 20 20:37:04 <miyako> CMake has a support in many IDEs, and it's pretty easy to build debian packages when you're using cmake if that's a concern Jul 20 20:37:23 <Suner> only build tool I have experience is Jam, and I'm sure no one here wants to use that Jul 20 20:37:26 <paise> I vote for CMake because I have worked with it, and it is a breeze to work with Qt and QtCreator. Jul 20 20:38:25 <thearrowflies> I thought Qt required QMake Jul 20 20:38:34 <Suner> ^ Jul 20 20:38:40 <chancez> it does Jul 20 20:38:46 <chancez> its got its own build system Jul 20 20:38:50 <paise> Yes, it is the default build syste, but CMake is more feature rich. Jul 20 20:38:54 <chancez> which generates make Jul 20 20:39:16 <Suner> I'm fine with cmake Jul 20 20:39:24 <Suner> even though it doesn't work with me on windows Jul 20 20:39:26 * centigrade233 has quit (Ping timeout: 245 seconds) Jul 20 20:39:51 <thearrowflies> cmake doesnt work on windows? >.> Jul 20 20:39:56 <Suner> it does Jul 20 20:39:56 <chancez> Suner: dont use windows obviously! Jul 20 20:39:57 <TheDuceCat> it does Jul 20 20:39:58 <Suner> just not for me Jul 20 20:39:59 <miyako> it's supposed to work on windows Jul 20 20:40:10 <TheDuceCat> it's worked for me Jul 20 20:40:14 <Suner> every time I try to generate a VS solution Jul 20 20:40:15 <paise> Also I have experience in building a gnu package using CMake on windows, It is not that much of a hassle. Jul 20 20:40:17 <Suner> it just craps out Jul 20 20:40:33 <Suner> but I'll be switching back to fedora soon~ Jul 20 20:40:37 <paise> thearrowflies: it works. Jul 20 20:40:54 <Suner> and trying out the whole Jul 20 20:40:55 <chancez> Suner: fedora++ <3 Jul 20 20:40:57 <Suner> vim stuff Jul 20 20:41:03 <chancez> vim ++++++ Jul 20 20:41:37 <Suner> so it's settled then? CMake it is? Jul 20 20:41:41 <chancez> i praise vim a lot, mainly because when i go to my CS classes and people dont know how a compiler works w/o visual studio..i die inside. Jul 20 20:41:43 <TheDuceCat> +1 Jul 20 20:41:52 <Kobono> +1 Jul 20 20:41:57 <miyako> cmake +1 Jul 20 20:42:02 <miyako> vim +100 Jul 20 20:42:11 <WolfeL> I should get vim then I guess Jul 20 20:42:16 <Suner> chancez: lol, people in my classes still don't know how to use the debugger in visual studio Jul 20 20:42:16 <WolfeL> all this habub Jul 20 20:42:25 <chancez> (php)-- * 100 Jul 20 20:42:34 <chancez> Suner: yeah same Jul 20 20:42:38 <Suner> they don't even know what a command line is.... Jul 20 20:42:41 <chancez> no one in any of my classes knows what valgrind is Jul 20 20:42:42 * centigrade233 (60f24712@gateway/web/freenode/ip.96.242.71.18) has joined #rpcdesktop Jul 20 20:42:46 <chancez> im just like stumped Jul 20 20:43:16 <WolfeL> what are the advantages to using vim over using something simple like gedit? Jul 20 20:43:26 <chancez> gedit is terrible, vim isnt Jul 20 20:43:41 <WolfeL> :'( Jul 20 20:43:42 <FRodrigues> cmake++ Jul 20 20:43:45 <Accipiter> http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Learn-Vim-Progressively/ Jul 20 20:43:46 <ArrowBot> (1007/312)[368] "Learn Vim Progressively" http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/jxusk/ Jul 20 20:43:49 * Suner has quit (Read error: Connection reset by peer) Jul 20 20:43:50 <Accipiter> that helped me learn vim Jul 20 20:44:03 <chancez> vim is extensible, is highly supported, runs in the terminal (over ssh), and has vim movement Jul 20 20:44:05 <WolfeL> bookmarked Jul 20 20:44:14 <Accipiter> vim is awesome Jul 20 20:44:14 <TheDuceCat> does it matter what editor we use? Jul 20 20:44:19 <chancez> Accipiter++ Jul 20 20:44:27 <miyako> TheDuceCat: not really Jul 20 20:44:35 * Suner (~Sun@unaffiliated/suner) has joined #rpcdesktop Jul 20 20:44:36 <TheDuceCat> i like sublime text myself Jul 20 20:44:40 <Suner> that was weird Jul 20 20:44:41 <paise> No I guess, as long as we keep in mind about line endings Jul 20 20:44:50 <TheWalkingDerp> the last time i used vim, i couldn't figure out how to exit >.> Jul 20 20:44:56 <thearrowflies> line endings? Jul 20 20:44:56 <Suner> ^ Jul 20 20:44:58 <FRodrigues> xD Jul 20 20:45:01 <chancez> I feel like most people have that problem Jul 20 20:45:03 <chancez> except Jul 20 20:45:05 <Accipiter> I used sublime text, its way prettier Jul 20 20:45:06 <FRodrigues> i use gedit Jul 20 20:45:07 <FRodrigues> xD Jul 20 20:45:09 <chancez> the first thing on the vim page is :help Jul 20 20:45:09 <miyako> paise: good point; unix line endings for everything? Jul 20 20:45:11 <chancez> and then Jul 20 20:45:15 <Accipiter> but vim is more powerful Jul 20 20:45:16 <paise> Of course Jul 20 20:45:17 <chancez> people should use google Jul 20 20:45:21 <chancez> if they cant figure it out Jul 20 20:45:23 <chancez> itslike Jul 20 20:45:25 <chancez> RTFM Jul 20 20:45:28 <Suner> lol Jul 20 20:45:29 <Suner> yeah... Jul 20 20:45:32 <miyako> vimtutor ftw Jul 20 20:45:38 <Suner> I remember setting up archlinux once Jul 20 20:45:38 <Accipiter> ^ Jul 20 20:45:39 <chancez> miyako: yep. Jul 20 20:45:40 <Suner> opened vim Jul 20 20:45:43 <Suner> couldn't get out Jul 20 20:45:44 <Suner> lol'd Jul 20 20:45:46 <chancez> fail. Jul 20 20:45:47 <Accipiter> lol Jul 20 20:45:50 <chancez> archlinux++ Jul 20 20:45:58 <chancez> i used arch as a server for 2 months Jul 20 20:46:00 <chancez> yep Jul 20 20:46:02 <chancez> not doing that again Jul 20 20:46:12 <chancez> laptop distro? sure. server? NOPE Jul 20 20:46:15 <miyako> I like arch a lot for a desktop system Jul 20 20:46:24 <Suner> yeah, Jul 20 20:46:46 <Suner> but I like fedora more, less work for lazy me Jul 20 20:46:47 <chancez> anyways Jul 20 20:46:53 <chancez> i took away from your meeting discussion Jul 20 20:46:56 <chancez> should get back on track Jul 20 20:47:02 <chancez> at least until later ;) Jul 20 20:47:05 <miyako> so we were talking about requirements Jul 20 20:47:22 <miyako> and I think we agreed that on the frontend we need mockups and to get the basic main windows, opengl context, and a tile browser in place Jul 20 20:47:38 <miyako> on the backend we need to define some APIs and data structures so the GUI will have an idea of how to talk to us Jul 20 20:47:59 <paise> I think there would be two main modes, a tile drawing mode and a map drawing mode using the tilesets created? Jul 20 20:48:16 <Suner> I Jul 20 20:48:21 <Accipiter> A tile editing mode would actually be awesome Jul 20 20:48:46 <Accipiter> I think artists would love not having to switch programs Jul 20 20:48:57 <Suner> don't believe in defining APIs before writing code, they're pretty much guaranteed to cange Jul 20 20:48:58 <miyako> I think a tile editing mode would be too much work at first Jul 20 20:49:13 <thearrowflies> ^ Jul 20 20:49:24 <TheDuceCat> ^ Jul 20 20:49:26 <Kobono> miyako: agreed Jul 20 20:49:31 <Accipiter> Probably Jul 20 20:49:35 <paise> Yes Jul 20 20:49:38 <chancez> Suner: yes. Jul 20 20:49:41 <Accipiter> But we should keep it in mind Jul 20 20:49:43 <miyako> Suner: change is inevitable, but I think that defining APIs up front is a good way of communicating general ideas Jul 20 20:49:43 <Kobono> just use specialised spftware for that Jul 20 20:50:09 <miyako> a tile composer might not be a bad idea, if we want to have tiles that consist of a background image + sprites Jul 20 20:50:25 <TheDuceCat> tile editor is good plugin idea Jul 20 20:50:32 <TheDuceCat> that can really test the plugin framework Jul 20 20:50:37 <miyako> TheDuceCat: agreed Jul 20 20:50:38 <Accipiter> yeah Jul 20 20:51:50 <chancez> are you guys going to be using any libraries other than Qt? Jul 20 20:52:53 <miyako> on the backend we'll probably be using a few; I imagine on the frontend OpenGL in addition to qt at least Jul 20 20:53:17 <paise> I have no experience creating tile maps, but is there some way to set properties on tiles when laying out on map. For example, set a tile as Pass through/opaque? Jul 20 20:53:32 <TheDuceCat> different layers Jul 20 20:53:37 <TheDuceCat> object layers etc... Jul 20 20:53:45 <paise> I guess it is done on a game engine rather than a tile editor? Jul 20 20:53:50 <Kobono> or just add properties to the tile struct Jul 20 20:53:55 <TheDuceCat> you can put the data on the tile Jul 20 20:53:59 <TheDuceCat> or have a collision layer Jul 20 20:54:04 <paise> BTW are we using xml files for the maps generated? Jul 20 20:54:07 <TheDuceCat> specifically for tiles that are non pass thorugh Jul 20 20:54:13 <TheDuceCat> not decided Jul 20 20:54:15 <TheDuceCat> maybe json Jul 20 20:54:24 <TheDuceCat> we want to make it easy on the game developer Jul 20 20:54:27 <miyako> paise: we haven't decided yet, xml, json, and binary data have all been thrown about Jul 20 20:54:43 <Suner> I would say binary Jul 20 20:55:16 * centigrade233 has quit (Ping timeout: 245 seconds) Jul 20 20:55:21 <Kobono> I wouldn't Jul 20 20:55:41 <Suner> I just can't see any possible reason to use xml/json Jul 20 20:55:42 <paise> Isn't the map basically a set of tiles ids and coordinates? If so xml or json seems reasonable. Jul 20 20:55:51 <TheDuceCat> yeah ^ Jul 20 20:55:55 <Accipiter> could someone quickly explain to me how binary data would work in this situation? I have only ever seen xml used for tilemaps (although I can see how json could do it) Jul 20 20:55:58 <Suner> the primary benefit of xml/json is make it easy for a human to modify Jul 20 20:56:08 <paise> Game dev would be using the xml/json and the tileset to creae his games Jul 20 20:56:14 <Suner> I can't see anyone going to edit a tilemap by hand Jul 20 20:56:18 <Suner> in xml Jul 20 20:56:24 <TheDuceCat> it's easy to parse Jul 20 20:56:28 <miyako> paise: you also need the image data, and possibly mesh data for the terrain if the map isn't flat Jul 20 20:56:28 <Suner> binary is easier Jul 20 20:56:50 <Suner> binary is the easist to parse, you don't need any libraries to do it Jul 20 20:56:56 <TheDuceCat> i guess Jul 20 20:56:57 <paise> miyako: He would use the tileset + xml? Jul 20 20:57:03 <Suner> and if you need to include the image data in the map? Jul 20 20:57:09 <TheDuceCat> tiled uses xml Jul 20 20:57:18 * Bradford has quit (Quit: Leaving) Jul 20 20:57:32 <miyako> paise: one of the intended features is to do some modification to the images on the tiles, so you can't just load the tile images as is Jul 20 20:57:58 <paise> Oh, ok I understand now. Alright. Jul 20 20:59:01 <TheDuceCat> tiled uses xml so why isn't it practical for us? Jul 20 20:59:07 <TheDuceCat> i still don't fully understand Jul 20 20:59:34 <Kobono> I'm signing off, it's getting quite late. Goodbye everyone. Jul 20 20:59:57 * Kobono has quit (Quit: Page closed) Jul 20 21:00:15 <miyako> TheDuceCat: XML is practical, but it might not be as easy to deal with as binary, I'm not opposed to either Jul 20 21:00:24 <TheDuceCat> alright Jul 20 21:00:31 <miyako> one of the features that we'll have that tiled doesn't though is the ability to actually modify the image data on the tiles Jul 20 21:00:49 <miyako> so unlike tiled, we can't just load in the tile images every time, we have to somehow store the modified image data Jul 20 21:00:59 <miyako> so if we used XML we'd need to include the binary image data in there Jul 20 21:01:05 <TheDuceCat> alright Jul 20 21:02:08 <miyako> my personal preference would be to default to a native binary format, with a feature that could be added later to export to XML Jul 20 21:02:29 <miyako> it would be a good feature to add using the python plugin api IMHO Jul 20 21:02:30 <TheDuceCat> ok Jul 20 21:02:59 <Accipiter> That sounds like a good idea, then the user can decide for themselves. Jul 20 21:04:05 <TheDuceCat> what do you mean by modifying image data Jul 20 21:04:46 <miyako> one feature I'd like to do (open to voting by everyone of course) is to generate tile image data dynamically; an example would be to blend textures together at the seams so that you don't have obvious tiling Jul 20 21:05:07 <miyako> another example would be to generate synthetic textures based on a seed image for covering a large area with a given tile Jul 20 21:05:28 <TheDuceCat> makes sense yeah Jul 20 21:05:50 <Accipiter> I like it, but it seems like it would be very difficult to implement. Jul 20 21:05:50 <miyako> also, deforming images to fit terrain, and baking in lighting could be done in the future as we start to add more game-oriented features Jul 20 21:06:25 <TheDuceCat> yeah hopefully can be made with plugins Jul 20 21:06:36 <miyako> Accipiter: honestly, I'm throwing those features in there because computer graphics, etc. is my area of interest so it's something I'd like to do Jul 20 21:07:13 * centigrade233 (60f24712@gateway/web/freenode/ip.96.242.71.18) has joined #rpcdesktop Jul 20 21:07:34 <Accipiter> OK thats what this project is for. I would love to learn about computer graphics Jul 20 21:07:44 <Accipiter> And it sounds like a killer feature Jul 20 21:07:55 <Suner> << also Jul 20 21:09:05 <centigrade233> what's the killer feature? Jul 20 21:09:44 <Suner> <miyako> one feature I'd like to do (open to voting by everyone of course) is to generate tile image data dynamically; an example would be to blend textures together at the seams so that you don't have obvious tiling Jul 20 21:10:11 <Suner> this meeting has been going on pretty long Jul 20 21:10:14 <Accipiter> <miyako> another example would be to generate synthetic textures based on a seed image for covering a large area with a given tile Jul 20 21:11:18 <Suner> I'd like to finish up on the basic requirements Jul 20 21:14:26 <miyako> I agree, I think we should has out the features we'd like to have implemented in the next month or so; so that people can start writing code Jul 20 21:17:56 <TheDuceCat> so feature discussion? Jul 20 21:18:03 <paise> Say for example 0.1 version lets us use some tiles from a tile browser on the left and allows us to lay it on a specific sized map on the right? I think keeping the first versions pretty basic would get the project going, especially newcomers could get comfortable. Jul 20 21:18:14 <TheDuceCat> yep Jul 20 21:18:30 * TheDuceCat has changed the topic to: Initial Feature Discussion Jul 20 21:18:39 <miyako> paise: that sounds like a good goal to me; should we assume that the map is flat for now Jul 20 21:18:50 <Suner> yes Jul 20 21:18:51 <miyako> so the GUI just needs to get x/y coordinates Jul 20 21:18:51 <TheDuceCat> maybe layers after that? Jul 20 21:19:03 <paise> yes Jul 20 21:19:24 <miyako> so I'm thinking basically the user selects a tile, and then clicks a tile on the map, and the GUI sends to the backend something like add_tile(tile_id, x, y) Jul 20 21:19:37 <TheDuceCat> yep Jul 20 21:19:43 <miyako> (0,0) for the top left tile Jul 20 21:19:47 <TheDuceCat> yeah Jul 20 21:19:50 <TheDuceCat> +x right Jul 20 21:19:51 <TheDuceCat> +y down Jul 20 21:19:52 <paise> yes Jul 20 21:19:55 <miyako> yep Jul 20 21:20:20 <Accipiter> So how would the backend know what tile is what tile id? Would it go through the tilesheet when the user loads one? Jul 20 21:20:33 <Suner> gui has to tell it Jul 20 21:20:44 <TheDuceCat> yeah Jul 20 21:20:45 <TheDuceCat> like Jul 20 21:20:50
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hunter, and even Williams himself at one point suggested this as it was bow hunting season at the time, although it does not explain why a bow hunter would be walking around in the woods barefoot. The bear tracks and cougar fur could have been left at any time and there is no way of knowing if they have anything to do with the reported fight. The shaking fir tree could have been caused by two large bears fighting each other and the broken branches could have been anything. The overwhelming bad smell and the vocalizations are interesting details, but since no one recorded the sounds, we have no way of analyzing them to deduce what they could have been and so it remains intriguing but ultimately circumstantial evidence. Whatever happened here, it sure does fire up the imagination, though.
If these isolated epic battles between possible Sasquatch and bears are impressive enough, it’s perhaps even more so that at least one researcher in Russia claims that the two powerful species are actually locked in a veritable war with each other for food resources. In the Voice of Russia, Oct. 12, 2010, it was reported that the director of the International Center for Hominology, Igor Burtsev, had asserted that there was evidence that what he called Yeti were moving into the Mountain Shoria region of the Siberian taiga in the Kuznetsk region of Russia after mounting an expedition into the area. Some of the evidence claimed to be of Yeti was giant footprints, sightings of the beasts, and strange pyramidal structures made of branches allegedly up to 3 or 4 meters high and supposedly used by Yeti to mark their territory. The expedition also made the claim that the Yeti had likely been driven from their remote home in the Altai region and deep into bear territory by forest fires and an extremely hot 2010 summer, which also incidentally had led to a food shortage for bears in the region. Burtsev alleged that his team had found evidence that the Yeti and bears of the area were engaging in violent fights for supremacy with each other over food resources, although it is unclear how they came to this conclusion. Nevertheless, it was also claimed that the Yeti had the upper hand, and were dominating the bears in this struggle. Burtsev told the Voice of Russia:
It seems that today yetis in Siberia are competing with bears, and the yetis are winning – they are obviously stronger and have rudimentary intellect. If this “war” between yetis and bears continues, there is a risk that bears will not sleep this winter because of a shortage of food, instead going to villages in search of something to eat.
Indeed, bears have been reported to be becoming increasingly malnourished and bold in the region, with the animals venturing into towns to rummage through trash or destroy crops, and it was reported that there has been at least one human death at the hands of bears in the village of Vezhnya Tchova, located in the Komi Republic of Russia, in 2010. It is scary indeed, but whether the bears are really having a struggle for survival with Yeti is unclear, and it is also unknown just what kind of evidence Burstev found to lead him to the conclusion that the Yeti are having a heated war with bears in the first place. Regardless of the claim’s veracity, it’s hard to argue against the fact that it is a pretty cool notion and would probably make a good movie.
To me this is all more than a cool scenario, though. I think if Bigfoot is real, and if it is a flesh and blood creature, then how they interact with other large species in their habitat, such as bears, and how they affect each other is a serious, legitimate area of inquiry that I feel is largely ignored in cryptozoology. Many of the remote forests of the world are already home to powerful beasts in the form of bears. However, what if Sasquatch are out there too? If Bigfoot exist, then invariably they do come across bears. In these situations how do these two large species view each other? Is it mostly with mutual respect, fear, indifference, disdain, or hatred? What is their relationship? Is the wild big enough for the both of them or do they sometimes clash for whatever reasons? If they do, then who has the upper hand, and how do these confrontations ultimately play out? Unfortunately, it is hard to get a good understanding of the interactions between bear and Bigfoot, as eyewitness accounts of these sorts of encounters are noticeably rare and we are for the most part forced to merely speculate about such things. Regardless of what the answers to these questions are, it certainly is intriguing to think about, and seems like an area of Bigfoot studies that I feel is sadly mostly overlooked.Fishermen lucky to be alive after whale collision sinks boat off Evans Head
Posted
Two fishermen are counting their blessings after escaping unharmed when their boat collided with a whale and sank off Evans Head in northern New South Wales.
Lismore men Michael Williams and Chris Churchill were heading out on a fishing trip at 5.30am on Sunday when they felt their 6-metre, half-cabin vessel hit something.
"It was still fairly dark at the time, and we were looking out the front of the boat and the next minute we felt this massive bang," Mr Williams said.
"We went into the air, got thrown around from one side to the other, and when I got up we were already ankle-deep in water."
Mr Churchill restarted the boat, but within seconds the men were standing in waist-deep water.
"Chris said 'Get out, get out', so we jumped out and by the time we were out the boat had sunk," Mr Williams said.
"It split the hull and opened it up like a nut.
"It filled it with water really quickly. Within 20 seconds it was under the ocean."
Mr Williams said neither he nor Mr Churchill saw the whale, but a fisherman on a nearby boat did.
"We didn't have a clue what it was. He [the fisherman] saw it breach the water as it hit us," he said.
"It would've had to have been big because it was like hitting a brick wall."
The men were pulled from the water by the fisherman, and saw seven humpback whales on the 5km trip back to land.
Whale may have felt threatened or protective
Organisation for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans in Australia (ORRCA) president Ronny Ling said the whale may have felt threatened.
"They are very perceptive animals and they can judge the distances to boats really carefully and precisely," Mr Ling said.
"But they are wild animals, and they can be unpredictable, so we have to acknowledge that.
"This whale could have been avoiding predators, it may have perceived the boat to have been a threat — if it was a mother and calf, she's going to do everything she can to protect that calf."
Mr Ling urged skippers to keep their boats at least 300 metres from whales.
"This time of year there's a lot of mothers and calves and it's really important to give them that distance," he said.
Mr Williams said the experience had not put him off boating.
"We're actually looking at a new boat so we can go out and hopefully catch some fish this time," he said.
"But, yes, it's made me more wary of whales."
Topics: mammals---whales, accidents---other, evans-head-2473Why I implemented Flux in a UI-less software project
Spaghetti is a wonderful meal, but a terrible software design.
Pier-Luc Brault Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 18, 2017
I am currently developing a React Native library at my workplace, that implements background behavior and communicates with our backend. I am unsure to what extent I am allowed to describe what this library actually does, so I will have to remain vague on the subject. All you need to know is this library has to manage a state, and changes to this state should trigger actions from various entities. It should also be able to save its current state to a persistent store, and retrieve it back later.
When I started to think about how I should implement the state management, I came to the conclusion that to avoid turning my library into a bunch of spaghetti code (although I love spaghetti), I definitely had to work with a clean, proven design pattern. This is why I remembered that a friend of mine, who is more on the front-end side of the Force — and who wrote this great article on how to achieve reliable CI with JavaScript projects — had once told me about Flux and Redux. According to my erroneous understanding at the time, Flux and Redux were two different, but somehow related, frameworks for managing the state of an application.
However, I also remembered trying to understand how to use Redux (or was it Flux?) and only achieving to realize that it was complicated. Also, it seemed to me, at the time, that Flux and Redux were designed for applications, aka software with a UI, which my library is not. (I do realize that “software with a UI” is a poor definition of what an application is, but my library still isn’t.)
Having very little time to devote to my state manager implementation, I had the feeling that trying to learn how to use Redux (or Flux, whatever) was risky, since I was not sure it was really suited for my project — especially for the part about being able to save the current state to a persistent store and retrieve it back later. But during a conversation with my aforementioned friend on the matter, he told me this:
You can implement Flux without a library.
So Flux must not be a framework, after all.
So, what is really Flux?
Flux is not a library or a framework, it is an architecture. Redux, however, is a software library that evolves the ideas of Flux.
The principle behind Flux is simple: it’s a flux. Data “moves” in an unidirectional pattern.[VIDEO IN EXTENDED ARTICLE]
YWN spoke with many Holocaust survivors about the recent controversy caused after a video of Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi went viral where he stated that the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust was closer to 1 million.
YWN published an op-ed last Thursday calling on the Rabbi to apologize for his outrageous remarks.
On Sunday, Rabbi Mizrachi issued an apology to YWN via email.
One well-known survivor, Dr. Moshe Katz, agreed to go on camera and deliver a message to Rabbi Mizrachi.
Dr. Moshe Katz is a noted author and lecturer about the holocaust. He is the author of the well-received holocaust book, “Nine Out of Ten.” He has lectured at hundreds of Yeshivos, shuls and schools about the holocaust.
Dr. Katz was also one of the founding members of several Yeshivos and schools including Yeshiva of Southshore, Yeshivas Sh’or Yoshiv, Yeshiva Darchei Torah, and Torah Academy for Girls. He is both a pillar of the Torah community as well as a pillar of the survivors of the holocaust. Below is his reaction to the unfortunate misinformation regarding the holocaust that was promoted by Rabbi Mizrachi.
(Dov Gefen – YWN)Busy Yaletown resident Lorena Christensen owns a car with her partner, but when he's got the car, she's not left high and dry.
Far from it. Lorena just whips out her smartphone and searches for the closest available Evo car.
It's so easy because the Evo App allows her to find the Evo car nearest to her and reserve it right away. No fighting over the keys with the one she loves and she's ready to go.
“I use Evo at least once a week and sometimes many times in a week," she says, happily.
Since Evo launched last spring, the distinctive black and blue cars can be found all around town. “I love them,” says Lorena, who works for a non-profit organization near UBC. She takes Evo to the gym and to go out with her friends.
Evo cars are all Toyota Prius Hybrids which makes for an eco-friendly ride, she points out.
Urban Rec enthusiast Avinaash Kapil can't get enough of Evo when it comes to parking at busy sporting events across Vancouver. Photo by Elizabeth McSheffrey.
Nicer, quicker and always parking nearby
Avinaash Kapil, a False Creek resident who works for an IT company downtown, also owns a car. He uses Evo to get him to volleyball, soccer and floor hockey games at Urban Rec, an adventure that — more often than not — involves a few drinks after the match.
Evo Car Share members have exclusive access to parking spots almost everywhere in the city, including several near Kits Beach, English Bay, BC Place, and Canada Place.
"It’s easier than cabbing both ways," he says. "It’s much nicer, it’s quicker, you can work on your own time frame, and there’s always parking close to where you want to go.”
Parking at sports games, be it Urban Rec or Kitsilano Beach, is a nightmare and the active 26-year-old says taking advantage of a one way drive with Evo makes the evening so much more relaxing and fun.
It's a cost-saving miracle, says Avinaash, who uses it more frequently when the price of gas is high. His cab use has been cut in half since Evo launched in 2015.
Sonia Sanghera and her six-year-old Naia, love taking Evo around for quality mother-daughter time in Vancouver. Photo courtesy of Sonia Sanghera.
A great option for families
Sonia Sanghera, a busy mother of two, uses Evo as her family's second vehicle. She says it's a big cost-saver for her family.
Her husband takes the car to work, so she uses Evo to pick up her kids from school and for shopping, cultural outings and adventure.
"My daughter and I took Evo to Granville Island last week to watch a play," she says, "and I just took it this morning to my classes in Olympic Village."
Car sharing is a hidden secret for enjoying all the benefits of a second car without the cost of owning one.
Sonia feels safe with her kids in the car, because all Evo's fleet come fitted with seven airbags, antilock brakes and traction control.
As an added bonus, her six-year-old daughter thinks Evo is the grooviest thing since sliced bread with its keyless ignition and tap entry.
"I took her to Disney on Ice in an Evo car," says Sonia. "She loves it."
Joe Price is a car owner who jumped at the chance to sign up for Evo when it launched in spring of 2015. Photo by Elizabeth McSheffrey.
Eco-friendly hybrid option
Joe Price, a 23-year-old structural engineer from Shaughnessy, signed up for an Evo membership the moment he found out about it.
He's got his own wheels, too, but he chooses Evo on weekends when he's hitting bars on Granville Street or having a few beers after a softball game. The best part, he says, is having the option to park the car, and walk away from it, free to see what the evening brings.
Lorena, Avinaash, Sonia, and Joe say the best part about Evo Car Share is that it allows them to take full advantage of all that Vancouver has to offer. That's one sweet deal.
Join today and get free membership + 30 free mins of drive time.Summary: Researchers have identified a correlation between brain stem volume and aggressive behavior in children with autism. Smaller brain stems appear to be associated with an increased likelihood of aggression.
Source: Brigham Young University.
New research from BYU’s autism experts is providing clues into the link between aggression and autism — clues the team hopes will eventually lead to more effective intervention.
In the study, published in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, researchers report an inverse correlation between aggression and brain stem volume in children with autism: the smaller the brain stem, the greater the likelihood of aggression.
The finding, though preliminary, is significant in part because “the brain stem is really involved in autonomic activities — breathing, heart rate, staying awake — so this is evidence that there’s something core and basic, this connection between aggression and autism,” said coauthor and BYU clinical psychology Ph.D. student Kevin Stephenson.
For the project, the team examined MRI images from two groups of children with autism: one that exhibited problematic levels of aggression and one that didn’t. Study coauthor Terisa Gabrielsen, a BYU assistant professor of school psychology, said identifying the brain stem as having at least a partial involvement in aggression helps lay a foundation for better treatment. “If we know what part of the brain is different and what function that part of the brain controls, that can give us some clues into what we can do in the way of intervention,” she said.
Coauthor and BYU psychology professor Mikle South added, “Once the body arousal in a child is too much — the heart is beating, the hands are clenched and the body is sweating — it’s too late. Some of these kids, if the brain isn’t working as efficiently, they may pass that point of no return sooner. So with behavioral interventions, we try to find out what the trigger is and intervene early before that arousal becomes too much.”
BYU’s Autism Connect team originated three years ago in BYU’s David O. McKay School of Education, though it now includes researchers from other colleges on campus and collaborators beyond BYU. This paper, spearheaded by BYU psychology assistant professor Rebecca Lundwall, had 11 authors from BYU, one from the University of Utah and one from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The group used data collected from a University of Utah autism study funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Studying aggression is Autism Connect’s “overarching agenda,” said Gabrielsen, “because it impacts families’ quality of life so significantly. If we look long-term at things that affect the family the most, aggression is one of the most disruptive.”
South recounted a conversation with the mother of a child he recently diagnosed: to cope with stress, the child often pulled her mother’s hair, “so I just have a lot less hair than I used to,” she told him. Aggression, South noted, “makes the family dynamic very difficult, the school dynamic very difficult. It’s just a particularly difficult type of autism.”
In addition to a number of other studies planned or in process, the team is interested in exploring further how the brain stem is connected functionally to other areas of the brain, “because usually the brain doesn’t work from just one area; it’s a network of areas that all work together,” Stephenson said. “So if one area is disrupted, it’s likely that other areas are disrupted as well.”
About this autism research article
To learn more about Autism Connect, find opportunities to participate in its studies or subscribe to its newsletter, visit autism.byu.edu.
Funding: The work was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Source: Andrea Christensen – Brigham Young University
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Bradley Slade.
Original Research: Abstract for “Relationship between brain stem volume and aggression in children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder” by Rebecca A. Lundwall, Kevin G. Stephenson, E. Shannon Neeley-Tass, Jonathan C. Cox, Mikle South, Erin D. Bigler, Emily Anderberg, Molly D. Prigge, Blake D. Hansen, Janet E. Lainhart, Ryan O. Kellems, Jo Ann Petrie, and Terisa P. Gabrielsen in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders. Published online February 2017 doi:10.1016/j.rasd.2016.12.001
Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article
MLA
APA
Chicago Brigham Young University “Study Links Brain Stem Volume and Aggression in Autism.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 10 February 2017.
<http://neurosciencenews.com/aggression-autism-brain-stem-6094/>. Brigham Young University (2017, February 10). Study Links Brain Stem Volume and Aggression in Autism. NeuroscienceNew. Retrieved February 10, 2017 from http://neurosciencenews.com/aggression-autism-brain-stem-6094/ Brigham Young University “Study Links Brain Stem Volume and Aggression in Autism.” http://neurosciencenews.com/aggression-autism-brain-stem-6094/ (accessed February 10, 2017).
Abstract
Relationship between brain stem volume and aggression in children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder
Background
Aggressive behaviors are common in individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and may be phenotypic indicators of different subtypes within ASD. In current research literature for non-ASD samples, aggression has been linked to several brain structures associated with emotion and behavioral control. However, few if any studies exist investigating brain volume differences in individuals with ASD who have comorbid aggression as indicated by standardized diagnostic and behavioral measures.
Method
We examined neuroimaging data from individuals rigorously diagnosed with ASD versus typically developing (TD) controls. We began with data from brain volume regions of interest (ROI) taken from previous literature on aggression including the brainstem, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. We defined aggression status using the Irritability subscale of the Aberrant Behavior Checklist and used lasso logistic regression to select among these predictor variables. Brainstem volume was the only variable shown to be a predictor of aggression status.
Results
We found that smaller brainstem volumes are associated with higher odds of being in the high aggression group.
Conclusions
Understanding brain differences in individuals with ASD who engage in aggressive behavior from those with ASD who do not can inform treatment approaches. Future research should investigate brainstem structure and function in ASD to identify possible mechanisms related to arousal and aggression.
“Relationship between brain stem volume and aggression in children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder” by Rebecca A. Lundwall, Kevin G. Stephenson, E. Shannon Neeley-Tass, Jonathan C. Cox, Mikle South, Erin D. Bigler, Emily Anderberg, Molly D. Prigge, Blake D. Hansen, Janet E. Lainhart, Ryan O. Kellems, Jo Ann Petrie, and Terisa P. Gabrielsen in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders. Published online February 2017 doi:10.1016/j.rasd.2016.12.001
Feel free to share this Neuroscience News.As you prepare for Thanksgiving, please consider this teaching from Lama Shabkar, a Tibetan yogini known for his spontaneous songs. Though it was originally written from the perspective of a sheep, we’ve changed it around to reflect the coming holiday. For some Thanksgiving vegetarian recipe ideas, see below.
One day as I went to refresh myself
In the middle of a meadow,
Many turkeys came from all sides
And gathered around me.
Among them, an old turkey spoke:
“Old monk, neither virtuous nor sinful,
I have something to tell you.”
“All right,” I said. “Come on, tell me.”
He went on: “I have a great favor to request
Of the meritorious lamas
Who come gathering alms in summer and autumn.
“The very moment a short-necked, shiny, chubby man
Arrives at our village door, leading packhorses carrying a lama’s red bundles,
He takes a villager with him and comes right toward us turkeys.
“The ‘protection cord’ the lama is going to give out
Is for us a noose—
It gets tied around the patrons’ necks—
And soon, by our necks, we ourselves are caught.
“The fate of all the turkeys
Is thus in the hands of visiting lamas.
In this life, in the bardo, and in the next life
There is no other object of hope than the guru.
So, at the time of hope, don’t betray us,
Take pity on us!
“You should let us live out this life,
Or take us to the higher realms in the next one.
Otherwise, this life is suffering, and so is the next.
We are just being slaughtered and slaughtered one lifetime after another.
Don’t let your wisdom, compassion, and power be so weak!
“Going on to the next life,
We will call aloud to the lamas
with fierce lamentations,
‘Lamas, think of us! Lamas, think of us!’
“Some patrons come, take off their hats,
And say to you lamas:
‘Please, come to our houses.’
When they invite you,
Don’t pretend you don’t know
That your patrons are about to kill us turkeys.
Rather, come after having said a few kind words on our behalf.
Otherwise, the time of a lama’s arrival
Means the time for our death.
“So, don’t pretend you don’t know what’s happening,
But come to visit after saying, kindly:
‘Don’t slaughter your turkeys; set them free.’
“When some lamas enter someone’s house
And seat themselves comfortably upon the throne,
We are being slaughtered right outside the door—
Don’t pretend you don’t know what’s going on!
When there is nothing on earth
You lamas don’t know,
How can you not know about this?
A turkey is thrown down to the ground.
All the neighbors around can hear
The turkey squawking while being smothered.
Yet people say:
‘Turkeys are the hallmark of Thanksgiving,’
And they just recite, ‘Om mani padme hum!’
“We pray to you from the bottom of our hearts
That, at that moment, you may say something to reprieve us.
When we are gagged and being smothered,
If we could but draw a single breath,
It would be the greatest goodness on earth.
“We have such terrible karma!
When autumn comes, the season for slaughtering turkeys,
The fate of the old mother turkeys is the worst of all.
If, at that time the compassion
Of even the lamas, which is said to be great, declines,
What will happen to the compassion of those who have so little to begin with?
In short:
When the red lamas come,
For the sake of meat and blood,
They cut our red jugulars,
And, red, the sun rises.”
In answer to this I said:
“Aro! Turkeys,
These bodies in which you’ve taken birth
Will have to be left behind, sooner or later.
“If one were to pile up all the flesh and bone
Of all the bodies you’ve once had and left,
They would make a heap higher than Mount Meru;
There would be as many as all the particles of dust on the entire earth.
“Not even one of these bodies was used to sustain the life of a master—
Every one of those lives was wasted.
By relinquishing this body to sustain a lama’s life,
You have accomplished something worthwhile.
Is it not noble to give up one’s body for the Dharma?”
As I said that, the turkeys exclaimed in one voice:
“Oh, no! He is one of those lamas!”
And terrified, they all ran away.
As they went off, I added:
“Anyway, I shall take your message to a few lamas.
But when I do so, some of them
May curse or try to kill me!”
May all alms-seekers who hear this song
Never accept the meat of animals
That have been killed especially for them.
Thus I have pointed out some of the defects of some of the prosperous lamas who go around gathering alms in summer and autumn.
If you choose to eat meat this Thanksgiving, please do it with gratitude and compassion! Here’s a short meal gatha from the Zen Mountains and Rivers Order that you can recite before eating:
We receive this food in gratitude
From all beings who helped to bring it to our table,
And vow to respond in turn to those in need
With wisdom and compassion.
Butternut Mac-n-Cheese
Ingredients:
1 pound elbow macaroni, cooked according to package directions
1 large butternut squash
2 tablespoons olive oil
6 tablespoons butter
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
7 cups milk
2 cups sharp cheddar cheese, shredded
Salt
Pepper
Directions:
1. Roast the butternut squash. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Cut squash in half lengthwise; remove seeds. Place in roasting pan and drizzle with olive oil. Place in oven and cook until soft all the way through, about 1 hour. Set aside until cool. When cooled, remove skin and place in food processor. Purée until smooth.
2. Make cheese sauce. Melt butter in saucepan. Add flour. Stir to make a roux and cook 3 minutes, stirring the entire time. Add 3 cups milk and stir until thickened. Add the rest of the milk and bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Add shredded cheese and stir until melted. Season with salt and pepper.
3. To assemble the dish: Place cooked elbow macaroni in bowl. Pour half of the cheese sauce over and add puréed, roasted butternut squash. Fold together. If it seems too dry, add the rest of the cheese sauce. Place in an ovenproof dish and heat for 15 minutes at 325 degrees.
Roasted Eggplant and Chickpeas
Ingredients:
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 28-ounce can chopped tomatoes, with juice, pulsed to a coarse purée
1 teaspoon mild honey (more to taste)
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, to taste
Salt to taste
1 large or 2 medium eggplants (about 1 1/4 pounds), cut into 1/3-inch-thick slices
3 cups cooked chickpeas (2 cans, drained and rinsed, or, 1 1/2 cups dried – about 3/4 pound
4 ounces feta, crumbled (3/4 cup)
1 teaspoon dried oregano, preferably Greek or Turkish
Directions:
1. Make the tomato sauce. Heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil in a heavy skillet or wide saucepan over medium heat, and add the garlic. Cook, stirring, until it smells fragrant, about 30 seconds, and add the tomatoes, honey, salt to taste and cinnamon. Cook over medium heat until the tomatoes have cooked down and the sauce is fragrant, about 20 minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings.
2. Meanwhile, heat the oven to 425 degrees. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil and brush the boil with olive oil. Place the eggplant slices on the baking sheet, salt lightly and brush with olive oil. Place in the oven and bake 20 minutes, or until eggplant is lightly browned and soft all the way through. Remove from the heat. Fold the aluminum foil over and crimp the edges together so that the eggplant steams as it cools. Do this in batches if you need more than one baking sheet. Turn the oven down to 350 degrees.
3. Oil a 2-quart baking dish or gratin. Place the chickpeas in the baking dish and stir in 1 cup of the tomato sauce. Layer the eggplant over the chickpeas and top with the remaining tomato sauce. Sprinkle the feta over the top and drizzle on any remaining olive oil. Sprinkle with the oregano and cover tightly with foil. Bake 30 minutes. Uncover and bake another 10 minutes, until the dish is bubbling.
Recipes from the NY Times.Wonder if Piers Morgan will tell Donald to “toughen up”:
Victory press conference was over.
Why is she allowed to grab me and shout questions? Can I press charges? pic.twitter.com/qbW2RjkINX — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2016
Why stop at pressing charges? Why not sue? Everyone knows how much you love to sue.
This was the reporters statement- when she found out there was tape from my facility, she changed her tune. pic.twitter.com/N5815RS1At — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2016
Not really helping your case, Donald.
Screenshot gives the impression Trump pulled away from Fields,but video shows he was getting something out of pocket https://t.co/BsfBiERxhA — Michael van Poppel (@mpoppel) March 29, 2016
Whoops.
That…would be what's depicted on the video, yes. https://t.co/p5wXhX1Rcs — Emily Zanotti (@emzanotti) March 29, 2016
How did her tune change? Also, the most recent video aligns rather well with the initial report. https://t.co/iSk0w7qDYY — Aaron Gardner (@Aaron_RS) March 29, 2016
@realDonaldTrump @WilliamAmos nope, everything she said was fully consistent with this. — Nickarama (@Nickarama1) March 29, 2016
@realDonaldTrump @WilliamAmos video shows your campaign manager grabbed her, despite him lying and saying he didn't. It does not prove ur pt — Nickarama (@Nickarama1) March 29, 2016
@realdonaldtrump Yes. That’s exactly what the video shows, you clown. — Tony Ricciardi (@TonyRicciardi) March 29, 2016
You seem a little unhinged there, Donald. Hard to blame you, given your crumbling narrative.
Notice, the picture doesn’t show her grabbing Trump. https://t.co/9eTxpGuUHy — Aaron Gardner (@Aaron_RS) March 29, 2016
@realDonaldTrump …she’s not touching you in this photo — Collin Reischman (@CMReischman) March 29, 2016
Um… she's not touching you, snowflake. Eat a Snickers. https://t.co/GGPuWyaMld — Jenn Jacques (@JennJacques) March 29, 2016
And then take a good, long look at yourself, Mr. Trump — if you can stomach it.
Why IS she allowed to ask questions? What kind of country allows such a thing? Sad! https://t.co/uV4mTUIQAt — Matt Cover (@MattCover) March 29, 2016
Why is the press allowed to ask questions? Um … The Constitution allows it. https://t.co/9eTxpGuUHy — Aaron Gardner (@Aaron_RS) March 29, 2016
Well, we certainly can’t have that.
Baby need a safe space? https://t.co/06e2L7V1vu — Sean Davis (@seanmdav) March 29, 2016
Yeah, he can totes handle ISIS and Putin. Sure. This teeny little girl reporter, though, has him scared. https://t.co/0uArWEQci5 — Sarah Rumpf (@rumpfshaker) March 29, 2016
This is not exactly the strong man image one would think this campaign would like to project. https://t.co/OMrN2sqQsy — Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) March 29, 2016
Could it be that he’s not such a strong man after all?
Yeah, she's like *totally* assaulting you. Press charges. Get one of your goons to grab her & force her to the floor https://t.co/8VbNrheWoW — Toby Harnden (@tobyharnden) March 29, 2016
@realDonaldTrump shut up — Samanㅤㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤㅤ (@itzSaman) March 29, 2016
@realDonaldTrump you're a real piece of work, you know that? — Doug Stafford (@dougstafford) March 29, 2016
this shit is bananas B-A-N-A-N-A-S https://t.co/0RtLqijQZW — Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) March 29, 2016
Can you delete your account? https://t.co/yyn7sCUgdv — Jason Hart (@jasonahart) March 29, 2016
Everything just gets dumber. https://t.co/Ray8H20WAd — Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) March 29, 2016
@realDonaldTrump Keep it up, Donald. You’re finishing yourself off with this nonsense. — Miss Tina (@Miss__Tina) March 29, 2016
***
Update:
There’s more where that came from:
Why is this reporter touching me as I leave news conference? What is in her hand?? pic.twitter.com/HQB8dl0fhn — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2016
Uhhh …
╭◜◝ ͡ ◜◝ ͡ ◜◝ ╮
( Is this real )
( life? )
╰◟◞ ͜ ◟ ◟◞ ͜ ╯
O
o
°
? https://t.co/O9XCjmfstN — Ryan (@alwaysonoffense) March 29, 2016
That's no pen. It's a battle station. https://t.co/Y89fKogFiu — Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) March 29, 2016
I think he is confused by a normal-sized hand. https://t.co/Qt8fzhBXdg — Nathan Wurtzel (@NathanWurtzel) March 29, 2016
Heh.
Good point.
Classic parting words from The Donald (for now):
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!https://t.co/0w4ldD7dW3 — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2016
***
Related:
BREAKING: Corey Lewandowski reportedly arrested over Michelle Fields incident; Updated
Breitbart’s Joel Pollak responds to Lewandowski arrest
Ted Cruz campaign responds to Lewandowski arrest
Donald Trump on the Corey Lewandowski charges: ‘Look at tapes-nothing there!’
‘Wow, you are a scumbag’: Piers Morgan tells Michelle Fields to ‘toughen up’The New Democrats vow they can deliver four years of budget surpluses and still pay for billions in campaign promises, but the Conservatives and Liberals say the party's fiscal plan is big on spending and short on details.
Andrew Thomson, a former Saskatchewan finance minister and the NDP's candidate in the Toronto riding of Eglinton-Lawrence, presented the party's broad fiscal plan in Ottawa on Wednesday — a day ahead of the federal leaders' debate on the economy.
While the NDP's seven-page document provides a general overview of its fiscal framework, it falls short of a detailed election platform.
Signature promises were not individually itemized and instead lump
|
per block forged. Year Three, 3 Lisk. Year Four, 2 Lisk. Year Five and onward, 1 Lisk.Year One forging rewards for one delegate is thus 31,233 * 5 = 156,165 Lisk. The actual number will be somewhat lower.Mining is evil and will never be a part of Lisk - ASIC, GPU or otherwise. Who needs to generate trillions of useless hashes to look for a winning lottery ticket when you've got a perfect system that only needs one hash per block?
This concept will hurt lisk like bitshares...
This concept will hurt lisk like bitshares...
except one difference. supply
check supply of bitshares and you will see why it went that way,, 2+BILLION coins?
big dif from the amount lisk will have available
it wont go as high as ether due to supply, but it wont be as bad as bts IMO
we will c except one difference. supplycheck supply of bitshares and you will see why it went that way,, 2+BILLION coins?big dif from the amount lisk will have availableit wont go as high as ether due to supply, but it wont be as bad as bts IMOwe will c
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Full MemberActivity: 168Merit: 100 Re: [ANN][LISK] Lisk | ICO | Decentralized Application & Sidechain Platform March 20, 2016, 06:31:09 PM #4406 Quote from: LiskHQ on March 20, 2016, 06:23:54 PM ICO UPDATE
We are under heavy load on our ICO website. Therefore, we needed to reduce the scan speed. So it takes longer to get an exchange confirmed!
If your transaction (tx) isn't shown as confirmed on our ICO website, but it is correctly confirmed on the Bitcoin network. Then we will accept it for 100%. The blockchain is the proof of your tx and it will be honoured! We will do several complete re-scans at the end of the ICO and confirm every tx by hand several times! You can rest assured that we will check every exchange with great care!
Thanks for the update! I invested some more now I don't want to wait last minute Thanks for the update! I invested some more now I don't want to wait last minuteComputers are one step closer to determining how people feel, with Microsoft presenting its new emotion recognition tool as a part of its ambitious artificial intelligence project. The new program can try and guess people’s emotions by a photo.
The new Microsoft tool can ‘look’ at photos, identify people’s faces in them and then rate their feelings by giving them different scores on a number of emotions. ‘Emotional options’ of the new program include anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise and a neutral emotional stance.
Part of a new series of updates for its artificial intelligence research project, called ‘Project Oxford API,’ the new tool was presented by Microsoft at the company’s Future Decoded conference in the UK on Wednesday.
Although the new instrument is yet not very accurate, Microsoft specialists explained that it is based on machine learning, meaning that the software relies on a large database of images tagged with different emotions to analyze new photos. The tool is expected to become ‘smarter’ and more accurate as it gets more data.
The company also launched a simple demo version of the new tool that allows everyone to load a photo to the Microsoft site or just paste an image url and get what computer thinks people on the photo are feeling.
The demo version also presents a string of information in a computer-readable list format that could be used by those willing to build apps based on the Microsoft’s new tech.
Meanwhile, the emotion analysis tool can have both social and commercial applications. It can be used to create apps that will help people sort their photos based on the different emotion types, or develop a social network filter that will help users find images of people expressing certain emotions.
Microsoft’s emotion recognition technology also opens new possibilities for business-oriented market research, as the program can be used to track and analyze the emotions of the focus-group during the study.
Alongside with emotion recognition tool, updates for Microsoft’s AI project presented at the conference on Wednesday included tools that allow speech recognition even in crowded or noisy places, as well as enable recognition of a person who is speaking; a video-stabilizing tool, and a new form of spell-checker.
Earlier this year, Microsoft also presented an age-guessing tool that caught public attention and kindled the internet’s imagination.
The Oxford Project API itself was presented by the Microsoft last spring at the company’s Build event and now includes such tools as face detection and verification, text-to-speech and speech-to-text converters, as well as some other instruments.
Some of these tools have already been introduced into the Microsoft latest operating system, Windows 10, which allows users to unlock their devices with their faces. Windows 10 uses a biometric authentication system that includes face recognition alongside with eye iris and fingerprint recognition, PCmag.com reports.NZ Football CEO Andy Martin says their TV deal with Sky Sport to screen the ASB Premiership could benefit the Phoenix in the future.
New Zealand Football chief executive Andy Martin is not shying away from the All Whites' dire international programme but he remains optimistic they are on the right track.
New Zealand head into next Friday's friendly against Oman in Muscat having played just four internationals over the past 12 months – equal lowest of nations in the top 150 of the Fifa world rankings, alongside the Central African Republic, Dominican Republic and Benin.
Along with the fact that they haven't won an international for more than two years, it is the main reason why the team has slumped to a record low ranking of 148.
But as All Whites coach Anthony Hudson continues their preparations for the Oceania Nations Cup in Papua New Guinea next May, Martin says building their limited schedule is a top priority.
"We want to play games in every window, in the past that hasn't been the case and we're starting to ramp up those games now," he said. "We want to play home games and again that's a challenge as well."
NZF is talking to a number of parties for the March window, which will be crucial for the All Whites' quest for glory in Papua New Guinea to earn a place at the 2017 Confederations Cup.
The biggest hurdle to getting the national side together on a regular basis is funding, an issue Martin says he is trying to address with various stakeholders, including Sport New Zealand.
But he insists it is no overnight fix.
"The new administration's been in just over 12 months and everybody was pretty aware of the challenge that we're facing," Martin said. "We were mindful we came in to an All Whites report back in the beginning of 2014 that was pretty damning about the situation of the international programme and we'll just get about fixing that and building credibility about what we do with the players."
Football's credibility in this country is at an all-time low following the national under-23 side's disqualification from the Olympics qualifying tournament and uncertainty surrounding the Wellington Phoenix's future in the A-League.
The 'Oly Whites' were disqualified from the Pacific Games in July for playing South African-born defender Deklan Wynne, who was deemed to be ineligible, while their bid to have the decision overturned was dismissed by the Oceania Football Confederation's appeals committee.
Martin said a decision on whether they will take further action, including a possible appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland, will be made "very soon".
As for the Phoenix, the loss of the professional outfit would be a devastating blow to the game in this country and NZF are continuing to work with owners the Welnix group to find a solution after the club was denied a 10-year extension to their A-League licence by Football Federation Australia.
One of the few positives for NZF has been the deal with Sky Sport to screen at least two matches of the ASB Premiership a week.
And Martin is hopeful the Phoenix will still be around to benefit from the domestic league's increased exposure.
"It's critical that this league works and everybody drives standards so that we get people to choose and buy football," he said. "In a strange sort of way if we get more people buying into the domestic product there will be a knock-on effect to the Phoenix because more people will start to understand the sport and therefore at the highest levels of sport in this country they will be watching the Phoenix."
The ASB Premiership kicks off on Sunday at 4.35pm with defending champions Auckland City up against neighbours Waitakere United at QBE Stadium.But Mulholland Drive was what put Theroux on the map. Originally filmed as a pilot for ABC, Theroux probably was the most stiffed by Lynch re-editing it as a film after the network turned it down, because he has the least to do in the dreamlike post-script Lynch added on, and there's so many dangling plotlines that could have been explored in a TV series version. But he's still great as a wise-ass director whose life unravels underneath him—his own creepy confrontation with a cowboy is another highlight.
Plateau
Theroux's co-star Naomi Watts immediately vaulted to super-stardom, but he bounced around in a bunch of frustrating supporting roles that only made a little bit of sense for him. He's incredibly committed to his work in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, as muscular bad-guy Seamus O'Grady, but why was his first role in two years the secondary villain in a mostly unnecessary sequel? It didn't help that Full Throttle was a relative box-office bomb.
After that, Theroux goes sadly quiet. Between 2003 and 2008, his best work was as Brenda's rebound lover Joe on eight episodes of Six Feet Under, where he was very likable and compassionate, but the character didn't last that long. He made some decent alt-comedy movie choices, popping up in The Baxter and Strangers with Candy, but none of the roles were particularly interesting. Other casting decisions seemed more promising—he's part of the squad in Michael Mann's Miami Vice and reunited with David Lynch for Inland Empire—but those are sadly more background roles than anything else.
Surprising Side-Career
I was still firmly in the Theroux camp in 2008, but I couldn't deny he hadn't lived up to the wonderful potential he showed in his first few roles. Then I was especially surprised to see his name attached as a screenwriter of Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder. Theroux had directed an indie, Dedication, that was released the same year and went nowhere, but Tropic Thunder was a big hit that topped the box office four weeks in a row. All of a sudden, Theroux was an in-demand writer: he was tapped to script the Marvel sequel Iron Man 2, on which he is the sole credited writer, and he also took a pass on Rock of Ages. The weirdest credit of all: he's an executive producer on 2010 DreamWorks Animation comedy Megamind. Gotta wonder why that happened.
Tropic Thunder really holds up, but Theroux's big-studio efforts were both critical flops, and Iron Man 2 remains the most-reviled Marvel Studios film, although it made plenty of money. Hard to know whether Theroux is at all to blame there—Marvel meddling to get its burgeoning Cinematic Universe in order probably played a big part—but still, he's the only writer listed, so he has to shoulder some of the blame. Rock of Ages' flaws go far beyond Theroux, but still, he hasn't written a movie since.Under a gigantic, glowing replica of his beloved CN Tower, rapper Drake told the Toronto crowd gathered at Monday's OVO Fest he had called "19 companies" to build it and they all said no.
So when Eric Pearce got the call, he too was a little skeptical it could be done.
"They came up with the concept of the design for this show rather late," said Pearce, owner of Las Vegas' Show Group Production Services (SGPS), the outfit that helped design and build the faux tower. "It's pretty large."
The cover of Drake's 2016 album, Views. (OVO Sound)
The idea stemmed from the cover of the rapper's 2016 album, Views, which features Drake perched atop the CN Tower, a moment he recreated with the replica during the show.
Pearce and his team had about three weeks to take it from design to delivery, working around the clock, seven days a week in their Las Vegas factory to build it on time. They came up with the plans on how to build it in a single weekend.
"We didn't have time to make any models. We simply looked at photographs," he said. The rapper's team, led by the U.S. production design firm GP-SK Design, provided designs and scaled reference and imagery of the tower.
Carried in 5 tractor-trailers
SGPS has handled production for Guns N' Roses, Justin Bieber and Roger Waters' The Wall tour. They've also worked with Drake on his past tours, which is why Pearce decided to say yes despite the time crunch.
It was a "very difficult" task — Pearce said a replica of that size would normally take six to eight weeks to build. The finished product took up the bulk of the stage and was clad with all of the observation deck's features, including its signature red stripe and the Edge Walk's trolley equipment.
"The scale of the set is two or three times the traditional rock and roll star set," Pearce said. The replica stood almost 16 metres high — that section of the actual tower is nearly double that height at just over 30 metres.
Once the set was built, it was tested in Las Vegas before it was shipped to Toronto for Monday's show. The tower's pieces filled up five tractor-trailers, which took a few days to get to Canada. The cargo was kept a tight secret the entire time.
"There was simply very little time for the word to spread," Pearce said.
The rapper posted what appeared to be blueprints for the set piece, with the caption 'I got big plans' the day after the concert. Eric Pearce, one of its builders, said the tower is headed back to Las Vegas for storage and is uncertain what happens to it next. (champagnepapi/Twitter)
When the tower got to the Budweiser Stage, a local crew pieced it together under the supervision of a team SGPS sent up from Las Vegas.
And now that the show's over, Pearce said it is already on its way back to Las Vegas, where it will sit in storage for now. He's unsure what happens next but knows that it is far too big for "conventional touring."
Pearce won't say how much the tower cost to build or whether all the work was worth it for its short stint on stage.
"The economics of it are something you have to ask the client about."– Gov. John Hickenlooper is preparing a State of Emergency for the areas in southwest Colorado along the Animas River. Both the town of Durango and La Plata County have already issued their own emergency orders.
A photo sent to CBS4 on Sunday shows the change in the river’s color since Thursday, and piling of sediment on the sides of the river.
As this saga continues, many of the test results still have not been released to the public.
Durango residents are still wandering close to the edge of the river, but we’re told it no longer looks rust orange. The river is now closer to a greenish color.
The Environmental Protection Agency said it now knows three million gallons of metal-laden water reached the river last Wednesday. Thousands of gallons per day followed until Sunday when retention ponds were finished.
Without solid answers on whether the water is safe, many residents and top officials are still concerned.
“My water well is 50 feet from the Animas River and we’re awaiting the results like many of you,” said Sheriff Sean Smith at Sunday night’s public meeting.
More than 100 fish were placed in the river by the state to study the plume’s impact and are still alive. A group studying insects along the Animas in Durango said they’ve seen no drastic drop in population. Those are good signs as worried citizens await updated metal counts.
“The EPA is in the business of cleaning up these things, so believe me, we’re in a position that we’re not used to being in,” said Shaun McGrath, an administrator for EPA Region 8.
The agency said the water samples take time because sediment must settle before tests can be performed in order to find out exactly what toxic metals, and how much, are in the mine waste.
But it’s the same settling of sediment that causes concern for the long-term impacts of the river, like next spring when runoff will kick up the mine’s debris again.
The EPA released this document today that allows businesses and others to file a claim for reimbursement. However, many people, such as raft owners, at Sunday night’s public meeting said it and a lack of answers aren’t good enough.Iran J Psychiatry. 2014 Jul; 9(3): 137–141. PMCID: PMC4277802 PMID: 25561953 Borderline Personality Disorder and Religion: A perspective from a Muslim country, MD,1,2, MSc,2 and, MD3,4 Sina Hafizi 1School of Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran 2Sports Medicine Research Center, Neuroscience Institute, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran Find articles by Sina Hafizi Dina Tabatabaei 2Sports Medicine Research Center, Neuroscience Institute, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran Find articles by Dina Tabatabaei Harold G Koenig 3Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA 4King Abdulaziz University (KAU), Jeddah, Saudi Arabia Find articles by Harold G Koenig Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer 1School of Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran 2Sports Medicine Research Center, Neuroscience Institute, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran 3Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA 4King Abdulaziz University (KAU), Jeddah, Saudi Arabia Corresponding author: Sina Hafizi MD, Tehran University of Medical Sciences No7, Al-e-Ahmad Highway Tehran, Iran. P.O. Box: 14395-578 Tel: +98(21)88630227, Fax: +98(21)88003539, [email protected] Copyright : © Iranian Journal of Psychiatry & Tehran University of Medical Sciences This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License which allows users to read, copy, distribute and make derivative works for non-commercial purposes from the material, as long as the author of the original work is cited properly.
Abstract Background There are still many unanswered questions about psychological and social factors that may affect the development and treatment of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Religion/spirituality (R/S) is a factor that could influence the lives of people with BPD. Objective The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship between religiosity, religious attendance and borderline personality traits. Method Four hundred twenty- nine medical students of Tehran University of medical sciences participated in this study, and their information on demographics, responses to the Duke University Religion Index (DUREL), and the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis II Disorders (the self-administered section on BPD) was obtained. Results The total score of SCID-II questionnaire and the number of positive borderline personality characteristics on the SCID-II were inversely related with the DUREL total score and individual DUREL items. Those with higher levels of borderline personality traits had lower total DUREL score and lower DUREL subscale scores. Conclusion Religiosity and religious attendance are negatively correlated with borderline personality traits, especially with anger, instability of mood, feeling of emptiness and self-harming behaviors. These findings are important for understanding the causes of BPD and in developing treatments for this disorder. Keywords: Borderline Personality Traits, Islam, Spirituality
High rates of suicidal ideation, self-injury behaviors and instability in mood and relationships are significant characteristics of borderline personality disorder (BPD) (1). BPD is a common personality disorder with a low remission rate, and both genetic and environmental factors have been shown to interact in the genesis of this disorder (2, 3). The chronic and severe nature of BPD, along with its relatively high prevalence, result in individuals with BPD frequently presenting for mental health services, i.e., their ‘treatment seeking’ behavior is one reason for the increasing attention to this disorder (4-6). It is not surprising, then, that of all the evaluation studies in psychiatry, most relate to BPD (7, 8). There are still many unanswered questions about the psychological and social factors that affect the development, treatment and outcome of this disorder. Religion/spirituality (R/S) is a factor that could influence the mental health and well-being of those with BPD, given the growing evidence of a relationship between R/S and mental health (9). The terms “religion” and “spirituality” are sometimes used interchangeably in the literature. In contrast to religion which could be defined as established, organized beliefs and behaviors concerning the sacred, spirituality does not have a precise and established definition, especially in studies of mental health (10, 11). The present study addresses this rather confusing use of terminology by focusing on religiosity and religious attendance. Studies on relationship between R/S and psychiatric disorders have demonstrated that R/S is related to less depression and anxiety, fewer attempts for self-destructive behaviors (e.g., self-harm and suicidal behaviors), lower risk of substance abuse and better mental health overall (12-14). However, there are few studies on the relationship between BPD and R/S, although two studies have reported a negative correlation (15, 16). Studies that assessed the relationship between religious attendance and borderline personality traits using structured psychiatric interviews are lacking. In the current study, the SCID-II (Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis II personality disorders) questionnaire (self-report version) for BPD was used to assess borderline personality traits. This survey was conducted in a sample of Iranian medical students. Although recently studies have shown that research on the relationship between R/S and mental health is increasing in Middle East countries (17), most research has been conducted in western countries with mostly Christian populations (18). Due to the important influence that different cultures and religions could have on mental health, such studies are needed to help generalize the results (19). The studies on R/S and mental health are usually conducted in community-based populations or in medical or psychiatric patients. In psychiatric and medical populations, the results could be influenced by co-morbid psychiatric or medical disorders. Studies of community-dwelling populations have broader generalizability and have the potential to examine the relationship between R/S and psychological traits (short of actual disorder themselves). In this study, we sought to assess the relationship between religious involvement and borderline personality traits in a healthy community-dwelling population of Muslim medical students in Iran. We hypothesized that there would be an inverse relation between borderline personality traits and religious involvement.
Material and Methods Participants Medical students attending Tehran University of Medical Sciences (TUMS) medical school in Tehran, Iran, participated in this study. The questionnaire was administered to 450 students, with a response rate of 95.3% (n = 429). This study was approved by the institutional review board of TUMS. Procedure Information on age, marital status, religious affiliation, training level (years of attendance at medical school) was collected and the following measures were administered. Duke University Religion Index (DUREL): DUREL is a widely used measure of religiosity and religion attendance (20). It is a 5-item questionnaire that consists of three subscales: Organizational religious activity (ORA), non-organizational religious activity (NORA) and intrinsic religiosity (IR). The DUREL asks the respondents to rate their religiousness and religious attendance from 1 to 6 for ORA (How often do you attend church or other religious meetings?) and NORA (How often do you spend time in private religious activities, such as prayer, meditation or Bible study?) and from 1 to 5 for IR (In my life, I experience the presence of the Divine (i.e., God)./ My religious beliefs are what really lie behind my whole approach to life./ I try hard to carry my religion over into all other dealings in life). The DUREL has a total score of 5 to 27. Previously, studies have shown that the DUREL is a valid measure with satisfactory internal consistency and high test-retest reliability (21, 22). The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was 0.86 for the DUREL items in this study. In this study, we used FDUREL, a translated and culturally validated Farsi version of the DUREL (23). SCID-II (self-report version): The self-report version of the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Borderline Personality Disorder translated to Farsi was used in this study. This measure consists of 15 yes/no questions (e.g., “Have you often become frantic when you thought that someone you really cared about was going to leave you? “, “Does your relation with people you really care about have lots of extreme ups and downs?”, “Have you ever cut, burned, or scratched yourself on purpose?”, and “Do you often feel empty inside?”). These questions measure the nine aspects of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) according to DSM-IV criteria (24). The total score for the questionnaire was calculated by counting the number of yes answers to the questions giving an overall score of 0 to 15. Diagnostic criteria of BPD and the corresponding items on SCID-II questionnaire are shown in. The Cronbach’s alpha for the SCID-II in this study was 0.78. Table 1 Diagnostic criteria of BPD SCID-II items 1 -Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment 1 2 -A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation 2 3 -Identity disturbance: notably and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self 3, 4, 5, 6 4 -Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, sex, substance misuse, reckless driving, binge eating) 7 5 -Recurrent suicidal gestures, or threats or self-mutilating behavior 8, 9 6 -Affective instability caused by a distinct reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days) 10 7 -Chronic feelings of emptiness 11 8 -Inappropriate intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights) 12, 13, 14 9 -Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms 15 Open in a separate window Analyses Descriptive statistics were utilized to describe the general characteristics of the subjects. Spearman’s correlation coefficient was used to evaluate the correlation of FDUREL and SCID-II BPD scores. Independent sample t test was used to compare “Yes” and “No” responses to SCID-II BPD items on FDUREL items. SPSS version 17.0 (IBM corporation, Armonk, New York) was utilized to analyze the data in this study.
Results A total of 429 medical students (65.3% female) with age range of 18 to 30 (mean = 21.64, SD = 2.20) participated in this study. Most of the participants were single (95.1%) and all of them were Shia Muslim. The SCID-II BPD section score was significantly and negatively correlated with the training level (r = -0.131 and p < 0.01), age (r = -0.141, p = 0.004), ORA (r = -0.123, p = 0.011), NORA (r = -0.171, p < 0.01), IR (r = -0.176, p < 0.01), and DUREL total score (r = -0.182, p < 0.01). After the stratifying participants by gender, the Spearman’s correlation coefficients between SCID-II and ORA (rho = -0.164, p < 0.01), NORA (rho = -0.243, p < 0.01), IR (rho = -0.233, p < 0.01) and DUREL total (rho = -0.247, p < 0.01) were larger in females (n = 280). Further analyses for the relation between the participants’ responses to SCID-II items and their religiosity and religious attendance are shown in. Table 2 SCID –II items DUREL subscales Answer to SCID-II (SD)† P value Yes Mean (SD) No Mean (SD) 1- Have you often become frantic when you thought that someone you really cared about was going to leave you? ORA‡ 2.74(1.55) 2.82(1.66).58 NORA 4.11(2.21) 4.10(2.23).98 IR 13.78(3.08) 13.69(3.38).76 2- Do your relationships with people you really care about have lots of extreme ups and downs? ORA 2.62(1.54) 2.89(1.64).09 NORA 3.78(2.24) 4.31(2.18).01* IR 13.45(3.14) 13.91(3.29).15 3- Have you all of a sudden changed you sense of who you are and where you are headed? ORA 2.58(1.50) 2.88(1.65).71 NORA 3.80(2.26) 4.24(2.19).05 IR 13.40(3.14) 13.89(3.28).14 4- Does your sense of who you are often change dramatically? ORA 2.70(1.51) 2.80(1.63).66 NORA 3.73(2.27) 4.17(2.21).12 IR 13.50(3.01) 13.77(3.29).51 5- Are you different with different people or in different situations, so that you sometimes don't know who you really are? ORA 2.74(1.72) 2.79(1.58).80 NORA 3.73(2.29) 4.20(2.19).07 IR 12.85(3.31) 13.96(3.19).004* 6- Have there been lots of sudden changes in your goals, career plans, religious beliefs, and so on? ORA 2.57(1.40) 2.84(1.66).13 NORA 3.66(2.20) 4.23(2.21).02* IR 12.92(3.12) 13.97(3.25).004* 7- Have you often done things impulsively? ORA 2.80(1.64) 2.77(1.60).87 NORA 3.91(2.21) 4.15(2.22).36 IR 13.41(3.09) 13.80(3.28).31 8- Have you tried to hurt or kill yourself or threatened to do so? ORA 2.23(1.32) 2.85(1.63).009* NORA 3.39(2.26) 4.19(2.20).015* IR 13.00(2.95) 13.82(3.27).08 9- Have you ever cut, burned, or scratched yourself on purpose? ORA 2.84(1.58) 2.77(1.61).81 NORA 3.57(2.33) 4.15(2.21).13 IR 13.57(3.25) 13.74(3.25).77 10- Do you have a lot of mood changes? ORA 2.52(1.47) 2.95(1.68).006* NORA 3.74(2.29) 4.32(2.15).008* IR 13.15(3.19) 14.11(3.24).003* 11- Do you often feel empty inside? ORA 2.39(1.49) 2.93(1.63).002* NORA 3.72(2.32) 4.24(2.17).029* IR 12.78(3.46) 14.09(3.08).000* 12- Do you often have temper outbursts or get so angry that lose control? ORA 2.80(1.64) 2.76(1.59).87 NORA 3.98(2.22) 4.13(2.23).53 IR 13.61(3.13) 13.74(3.28).71 13- Do you hit people or throw things when you get angry? ORA 3.11(1.81) 2.76(1.59).28 NORA 3.80(2.26) 4.12(2.22).48 IR 13.80(2.07) 13.72(3.31).89 14- Do even little things get you very angry? ORA 2.58(1.54) 2.93(1.64).02* NORA 3.80(2.25) 4.33(2.18).01* IR 13.16(3.21) 14.15(3.21).002* 15- When you are under a lot of stress, do you get suspicious of other people or feel especially spaced out? ORA 2.79(1.57) 2.77(1.65).87 NORA 4.09(2.18) 4.11(2.28).92 IR 13.88(2.85) 13.53(2.65).26 Open in a separate window Participants with instability in interpersonal relationship (according to item number 2 of SCID-II) had significantly lower scores in NORA (p = 0.010) than others without this problem. Subjects with dissociation and paranoid ideation (according to item number 5 of SCID-II) had significantly lower scores in IR (p = 0.004) than others. Participants with identity problem (according to item number 6 of SCID-II) had significantly lower scores in NORA (p = 0.020) and IR (p = 0.004) than others. Participants with suicidal and self-harm ideation (according to item number 8 of SCID-II) had significantly lower scores in ORA (p = 0.009) and NORA (p = 0.015) than others without this problem. Subjects with mood instability (according to item number 10 of SCID-II) and feeling of emptiness (according to item number 11 of SCID-II) had significantly lower scores on ORA (p = 0.006 and p = 0.002, respectively), NORA (p = 0.008 and p = 0.029, respectively) and IR (p = 0.003 and p < 0.01, respectively) and IR than others without this problems. A cut-off of 5 was used to divide the participants into those who met and did not meet diagnostic criteria for BPT (Borderline Personality Traits) (25). Nearly one-third (30.8 %) of the participants met the criteria. The respondents who met the criteria for BPT had significantly higher scores for non-organized religious activity in comparison to those who did not meet the criteria (t = 2.24, p = 0.020).
Discussion We assessed the relationship between BPT and religious involvement. The results indicated that the subjects scoring higher on SCID-II borderline personality traits scored significantly lower on religiosity, thus supporting our primary hypothesis. The relationship was stronger for females compared to males. Overall religiosity and religious attendance in particular were negatively correlated with BPT, especially with symptoms of anger, instability of mood, feeling of emptiness and self-harming behaviors. The results of this study could be interpreted in a variety of ways. The inverse relation between R/S and BPT scores may be due to the potential role that lack of religious beliefs play in the development of BPD. It is well established that religious beliefs are associated with comfort and relief from stress (26), and prior research has shown an important role for early major stress and traumatic events in the development of BPD (27). Religious socialization of children in religious families could help adapting to stress or traumatic events. Another possibility is the role that identity problems play in BPD. Identity is a multi-dimensional concept that includes notions such as role commitment and consistency in behavior (28). Studies have shown that identity problems are more likely to be present in BPD compared to other personality disorders (29). The inverse relationship between R/S and BPD, then, may be due to identity disturbances that could result from a lack of commitment to pro-religious values and norms. Our results show a significant inverse correlation between identity problems and all three dimensions of religiosity (i.e. ORA, NORA, and IR). An alternative explanation for our finding is that BPT may lead to a lessening of religiosity or an exclusion from religious groups because those with such traits fail to conform to conventional behaviors and have turbulent interpersonal relationships that make group involvement difficult. In a recent similar study (15), researchers found a negative correlation between BPD symptoms and score on the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy-Spiritual Well-Being Scale (FACIT-Sp-12). The latter instrument, however, may
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this was the best we could find.
Automatically starting daemons
The standard Ubuntu and Debian practice of automatically starting daemons has perplexed me before and it still continues to do so. Starting a daemon before I’ve had a chance to configure it makes little sense. The main argument is that the daemons come up with a highly secure configuration, so starting it automatically shouldn’t be a big deal. I’d prefer to install a package, have a look at the configuration, alter the configuration, and then start the daemon. Also, it had better not start after a reboot unless I explicitly ask it to do so.
There are plenty of examples where automatically starting a daemon with its default configuration is a bad idea. Take the postfix package as an example. If you install the package in non-interactive mode (as Ansible does by default), postfix will come online wth the following configuration option set:
inet_interfaces = all
Since Ubuntu doesn’t come with a firewall enabled by default, your postfix server is listening on all interfaces for mail immediately. The mynetworks configuration should prevent relaying, but any potential vulnerabilities in your postfix daemon are exposed to the network without your consent. I would prefer to configure postfix first before I ever allow it to run on my server.
Verifying packages
Say what you will about RPM packages and the rpm command, but the verification portions of the rpm command are quite helpful. Here’s an example of verifying the aide RPM in Fedora:
# rpm -Vv aide......... c /etc/aide.conf......... c /etc/logrotate.d/aide......... /usr/sbin/aide......... /usr/share/doc/aide......... d /usr/share/doc/aide/AUTHORS......... d /usr/share/doc/aide/COPYING......... d /usr/share/doc/aide/ChangeLog......... d /usr/share/doc/aide/NEWS......... d /usr/share/doc/aide/README......... d /usr/share/doc/aide/README.quickstart......... /usr/share/doc/aide/contrib......... d /usr/share/doc/aide/contrib/aide-attributes.sh......... d /usr/share/doc/aide/contrib/bzip2.sh......... d /usr/share/doc/aide/contrib/gpg2_check.sh......... d /usr/share/doc/aide/contrib/gpg2_update.sh......... d /usr/share/doc/aide/contrib/gpg_check.sh......... d /usr/share/doc/aide/contrib/gpg_update.sh......... d /usr/share/doc/aide/contrib/sshaide.sh......... d /usr/share/doc/aide/manual.html......... d /usr/share/man/man1/aide.1.gz......... d /usr/share/man/man5/aide.conf.5.gz......... /var/lib/aide......... /var/log/aide
If the verification finds that nothing in the package has changed, it won’t print anything. I’ve added the -v here to ensure that everything is printed to the console. In the output, you can see that everything is checked. That includes configuration files, log directories, libraries, and documentation. If I change the content of the aide.conf by adding a comment, I see that change:
# echo "# Comment" >> /etc/aide.conf # rpm -V aide S.5....T. c /etc/aide.conf
The 5 denotes that the MD5 checksum on the file has changed since the package was installed. What happens if I change the owner, group, and mode of the aide.conf?
# chown major:major /etc/aide.conf # rpm -V aide S.5..UGT. c /etc/aide.conf
Now I have a UG there that denotes a user/group ownership change. Similar messages appear for changes to the permissions on files or directories. The restorecon command even lets you figure out when SELinux contexts have changed. If you set a file to have the wrong ownership or permission, one rpm command gets you back to normal:
# rpm --setperms --setugids aide
On the Ubuntu side, you can use the debsums package to help with some verification:
# debsums aide /usr/bin/aide OK /usr/share/doc/aide/NEWS.Debian.gz OK /usr/share/doc/aide/changelog.Debian.gz OK... # debums aide-common /usr/bin/aide-attributes OK /usr/bin/aide.wrapper OK /usr/sbin/aideinit OK...
But wait — where are the configuration files? Where are the log and library directories? If you type these commands on an Ubuntu system, you’ll see that the configuration files and directories aren’t checked. In addition, there’s not a method for querying whether a particular file in a package has changed ownership or has had its mode changed. There’s also no option to restore the right permissions and ownership after an errant chown -R or chmod -R.
Managing AIDE
The AIDE package is critical for secure deployments since it helps administrators monitor for file integrity on a regular basis. However, Ubuntu ships with some interesting configuration files and wrappers for AIDE.
One of the unique configuration files is this one:
# cat /etc/aide/aide.conf.d/99_aide_root / Full
This causes AIDE to wander all over the system, indexing all types of files. It’s best to limit AIDE to a small number of directories whenever possible so that the AIDE runs complete quickly and the database file remains relatively small. Plenty of disk I/O can be used during AIDE runs, so it’s best to limit the scope.
Also, trying to initialize the database provides an unhelpful error:
# aide --init Couldn't open file /var/lib/aide/please-dont-call-aide-without-parameters/aide.db.new for writing
That path doesn’t exist, and I’m confused because I did pass a parameter to aide. Long story short, you must use the aideinit command to initialize the aide database. That’s actually a bash script which then calls on aide.wrapper (another bash script) to actually run the aide binary for you. Better yet, aideinit is in /usr/sbin while aide.wrapper is in /usr/bin. This leads to plenty of confusion.
Linux Security Modules
It’s possible to run SELinux on Ubuntu, but the policies aren’t as well maintained as they are on other distributions. AppArmor is the recommended LSM on Ubuntu, but it doesn’t provide the granularity of SELinux. For example, SELinux confines almost every single process on a minimal Fedora system, but AppArmor confines almost nothing on a minimal Ubuntu-based system. AppArmor policies aren’t terribly restrictive and it’s possible to work around them due to their reliance on path names.
Fortunately, both LSM’s provide decent coverage with virtual machines and containers (using libvirt’s sVirt capability).
Summary
The upside is that there is plenty of room for security improvements, especially around usability, in Ubuntu. Ubuntu-centric hardening standards are difficult to find and challenging to apply. Every distribution has its quirks and differences, but it seems like securing Ubuntu comes with more unusual hoops to jump through relative to Red Hat-based distributions, OpenSUSE, and even Arch.
I plan to open some bugs for some of these smaller issues in the coming days. However, some of the larger philosophical issues (like automatically starting daemons) will be tougher to tackle.INDIGENOUS and welfare groups have condemned the Gillard government's 10-year extension of the radical Northern Territory intervention as a 'day of shame'.
The bills for the extension passed the Senate in the early hours of this morning after a long debate.
The government has made amendments to confirm that police can issue infringement notices for the possession and supply of small quantities of alcohol.
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Amendments also ensure that only authorities that can give a notice to place a person on income management under the new state and territory referral measure meet specific conditions, including that they have appropriate review processes.
Stronger Futures is the Gillard government's $3.4 billion investment in the Northern Territory to tackle unacceptable levels of disadvantage. Most measures in the Stronger Futures legislation will be in place for 10 years.
But Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation National director Jacqueline Phillips said the passage of the bills defied the aspirations of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory for more control over their lives and represented a failure of political leadership.
“The government's refusal to subject the laws to human rights scrutiny shows a lack of respect for Aboriginal communities, their local and national leaders and the United Nations, all of whom have supported calls for human rights scrutiny,” she said.
She said their concerns regarding the extension had been echoed by more than 42,000 people who had signed a petition calling for the bills to be withdrawn and for a new approach.
“Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory have not given their support to this package of measures, which would extend key Intervention measures for a further 10 years.
“The future of NT communities should be negotiated on a basis of respect, good faith and trust. Any long-term strategy should demonstrate a mature nation’s commitment to listen, partner with and support Aboriginal organisations and communities to take control of their futures”.
“ANTaR is concerned that the passage of the Stronger Futures Bills represents a betrayal of trust. These laws are likely to cause further hurt and suffering in NT communities without delivering promised improvements to health, education or employment.”
In a statement Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin said the extension would help provide stability and certainty for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory.
"The Stronger Futures measures will be independently reviewed in three years from commencement of the legislation," she said.
"While progress has been made on the, the situation in the Northern Territory remains critical."
Indigenous leader Djiniyini Gondarra from east Arnhem Land and Rosalie Kunoth Monks from central Australia have jointly declared a day of mourning for Aboriginal people following the passing of the laws.
"For those of us living in the Northern Territory the anguish of the past five years of intervention has been almost unbearable," Dr Djiniyini told AAP.
Independent MP Rob Oakeshott said he did not support the Stronger Futures bill.
“Personally I don’t rate it. I didn’t vote for it. I’ve abstained on one bill in this parliament and that’s it,’’ he said.
Greens senator Lee Rhiannon said Labor was trashing its proud history in indigenous affairs, particularly the goodwill from former prime minister Kevin Rudd's apology and Paul Keating's Redfern speech.
National Congress of Australia's First People spokeswoman Jody Broun was disappointed the government did not allow a parliamentary committee to subject the laws to a human rights test.
Australian Lawyers Alliance national president Greg Barns said the Stronger Futures laws were further disenfranchising indigenous communities.
Additional reporting: AAPAMSTERDAM – Following a star showing in their 1-1 Europa League group stage draw with Ajax on Thursday night, Molde FK netminder Ethan Horvath drew high praise from none other than all-time goalkeeping great Edwin van der Sar.
The former Netherlands superstar, now a marketing executive with original club Ajax, watched the young American notch 10 saves to keep the Norwegian holders atop Group D. He came away duly impressed.
"Ethan Horvath delivered some class saves," Van der Sar told Aftenposten. "I know a little about him through contact I have had with [Molde goalkeepers coach] Richard Hartis, who was my coach at Manchester United."
The goalkeeping legend complimented Horvath's reflexes and hinted that he will draw plenty of transfer attention with more nights like Thursday's at Aker Stadion.
"He has every reason to be pleased with himself," judged Van der Sar, who won the Champions League with Ajax and was a three-time Premier League Team of the Year honoree with Manchester United.
"One can see that he is ambitious and talented. He can use these matches in Europe to make his mark. Matches in the Europa League are also opportunities to show themselves to a larger audience."
Since taking over the top job in May, Horvath has chalked up 10 wins and eight clean sheets. Those totals have the US Olympic squad candidate currently ranked sixth all-time in wins by an American netminder during his "rookie" European campaign and tied for fifth among all countrymen in first-year shutouts.Europe raised more in the way of IPO funds than the US and Asia combined during the first quarter of this year, according to data crunched by Bloomberg.
European IPO volume hit almost $20bn (£13.5bn, €18.4bn), driven by big ticket listings such as UK's Auto Trader and the state sell down of Spanish airport operator Aena.
The US, by contrast, had its slowest IPO quarter since 2009, despite web domain name specialist GoDaddy expected to raise $400m on the last day of the quarter in New York, said Bloomberg.
The European Central Bank's quantitative-easing program, lower oil prices and a weaker euro compared with the dollar are a "big stimulus" for many companies that are reporting stronger earnings as a result, analysts said.
Five companies in Europe raised more than $1bn in IPOs this quarter, compared with one in the US.
Spanish airport operator Aena raised €4.3bn ($4.7bn) last month, which was Europe's biggest IPO in almost four years. UK car market Auto Trader raised $2.4bn in March. This was UK's largest listing since the Royal Mail's $3bn offering in 2013.
The US awaits the $1.2bn IPO of Columbia Pipeline Partners, a natural gas pipeline unit spun off by NiSource.
Bloomberg noted that takeovers were down in Europe by some 20%.Other Deviations that you'll like
This was finished on my birthday! Yay! (It's October 9th, not October 10th. I just uploaded it a little late)I've decided to draw each seperate characters of MLP so you can see how my drawing style looks for each character individually. I've started off with Twilight Sparkle -the element of magic- and I'm gonna work my way through the rest of the mane six!I've been learning a lot of new drawing techniques that have been helping me a lot lately, such as lighting and shading (I've also tried improving the anatomy as well which was something I had to work on). I've really been inspired by my fellow deviants and and their works (You guys are both super talented!), which was how this drawing came together; and I'm very happy with the final result! So expect to see more like this!Hope you enjoy!Leave feedback! Fave it, comment, share it!Check out my brand new Tumblr page! Will be updated daily!And be sure to check out my gallery to see my previous works!In his 4th, and final outing today with the Gigantes de Carolina in Puerto Rico’s winter league, starting pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, 36, finished his game strong against the Tiburones de Aguadilla, pitching 7 solid innings, while giving up just 3 hits and one earned run (an RBI single to Yovan Gonzalez in the 7th inning) along with a couple of walks given, and 3 strikeouts on 88 pitches thrown… though even with Dice-K’s stellar performance, his team still lost the game by a score of 3-2 against their opponents.
Daisuke Matsuzaka will wrap up his winter league campaign posting a record of 0-3, along with an earned run average of 2.70 in 4 starts (6 earned runs given up in 20 innings pitched), and 11 strikeouts to go against 11 walks with Gigantes…
Overall, Daisuke Matsuzaka did really well in his first taste of Baseball in the winter leagues, he kept his team in the game in every start… with opponents batting just.197 against him (batting average for LH hitters against him is just.182, while RH hitters with.212). Truly what the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks (his current team in Nippon Professional Baseball) needed of him as a step to look forward for the upcoming season.Untitled a guest Jan 28th, 2015 244 Never a guest244Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 1.45 KB!program WAVEFUNCTION! The purpose of this program is to determine the radial distribution functions of! the 1s, 2s, and 2p (hydrogenic) orbitals. The result will then be normalized! such that the maximum value for each RDF is 1. User input is required to determine! which orbital's wavefunction should be calculated. Subroutines are used. implicit real (a,b,d-h,o-z) real,allocatable::RDFA(:)! "RDFA" is the Radial Distribution Function Array value, all values calculated through! the RDF function will be stored in this array. print*,'Enter the atomic number. Ex: "1" for a hydrogenic orbital calculation:' read*,iz! "iz" is an integer variable for the atomic number. print*,'Enter the values of the first two quantum numbers you want to calculate the RDF for:' read*,nl! "nl" is the set of quantum numbers used to call a given function. do J=0,50 r= J/20. if (nl.EQ. 10) then RDFA(J)= R10(iz,r) else if (nl.EQ. 20) then RDFA(J)= R20(iz,r) else if (nl.EQ. 21) then RDFA(J)= R21(iz,r) endif end do end program real function R10(iz,r) implicit real (a,b,d-h,o-z) R10= iz**(3./2.)*exp(-1*iz*r) return end real function R20(iz,r) implicit real (a,b,d-h,o-z) R20= (iz/2.)**(3./2.)*(1-iz*r/2)*exp(-1*iz*r/2) return end real function R21(iz,r) implicit real (a,b,d-h,o-z) R21= (iz/2.)**(3./2.)*(iz*r)*exp(-1*z*r/2) return end
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!program WAVEFUNCTION! The purpose of this program is to determine the radial distribution functions of! the 1s, 2s, and 2p (hydrogenic) orbitals. The result will then be normalized! such that the maximum value for each RDF is 1. User input is required to determine! which orbital's wavefunction should be calculated. Subroutines are used. implicit real (a,b,d-h,o-z) real,allocatable::RDFA(:)! "RDFA" is the Radial Distribution Function Array value, all values calculated through! the RDF function will be stored in this array. print*,'Enter the atomic number. Ex: "1" for a hydrogenic orbital calculation:' read*,iz! "iz" is an integer variable for the atomic number. print*,'Enter the values of the first two quantum numbers you want to calculate the RDF for:' read*,nl! "nl" is the set of quantum numbers used to call a given function. do J=0,50 r= J/20. if (nl.EQ. 10) then RDFA(J)= R10(iz,r) else if (nl.EQ. 20) then RDFA(J)= R20(iz,r) else if (nl.EQ. 21) then RDFA(J)= R21(iz,r) endif end do end program real function R10(iz,r) implicit real (a,b,d-h,o-z) R10= iz**(3./2.)*exp(-1*iz*r) return end real function R20(iz,r) implicit real (a,b,d-h,o-z) R20= (iz/2.)**(3./2.)*(1-iz*r/2)*exp(-1*iz*r/2) return end real function R21(iz,r) implicit real (a,b,d-h,o-z) R21= (iz/2.)**(3./2.)*(iz*r)*exp(-1*z*r/2) return endAs billowing rumors that Donald Trump was considering firing special counsel Robert Mueller engulfed Washington, temporarily overshadowing Tuesday’s testimony at separate congressional hearings from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the president stood before a gaggle of reporters at the White House and refused to confirm his support for Mueller, fueling the spiraling speculation with a calculated purpose.
The claim that Trump wants to terminate Mueller, divulged by the chief executive of Newsmax Media and friend of Trump, Christopher Ruddy, was predictably accompanied by paltry bickering within the White House, as The New York Times reports. Ruddy claimed he went public with the story to prevent his pal from making a rash decision. Trump’s team seems to have different ideas, implying that, in its leader’s eyes, Ruddy has committed the most sacrilegious of sins: attempting to hoist himself into the media spotlight by invoking the president’s name.
Indeed, in a cooly worded statement, Press Secretary Sean Spicer said, “Mr. Ruddy never spoke to the president regarding this issue.” Ruddy hit back: “It is a sad commentary that Sean Spicer spends so much of his time objecting to my comments at the same time he has done such a poor job in defending the president and promoting his many accomplishments,” he said, perhaps concerned that his Mar-a-Lago tête à têtes with Trump might now become less collegial.
Speaking before a joint House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, Rosenstein struck a more somber tone, assuring the lawmakers that he was aware of “no secret plan” to oust Mueller. The decision to fire the special counsel would rest with him alone, he said, despite conjecture that Trump could fire him if he did not acquiesce to orders, or repeal the regulations that govern the appointment and fire Mueller himself. “As long as I’m in this position, he’s not going to be fired without good cause,” Rosenstein testified. “I’m not going to follow any orders unless I believe those are lawful and appropriate orders.
“Director Mueller is going to have the full independence he needs to conduct that investigation properly.”
Rosenstein’s testimony was in less than perfect alignment with what White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters on Air Force One as she proceeded to undercut the deputy attorney general. “While the president has every right [to fire Mueller], he has no intention to do so.”
But with a president as erratic as Trump, intention is a handily fluid concept. According to the Times, the president began toying with the idea of dismissing Mueller shortly after he was appointed following the dismissal F.B.I. director James Comey, who was, at the time, overseeing the Russia investigation. So far, Trump has reportedly been dissuaded from doing so by several staff members and advisers, who are acutely conscious of the sheer violence of the scandal that would likely erupt were he to pull the trigger.
Chief of Staff Reince Preibus—considered a casualty-in-waiting in a supposedly imminent White House staff shake up—is virulently opposed to the idea, the Times reports, while Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is said to have supported Comey’s firing, has adopted a more temperate tone toward the Mueller question. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has advised Trump to “let Robert Mueller do his job,” and even recent White House transplant Melania Trump has reportedly told her husband that keeping Mueller will speed the resolution of the Russia scandal.
Whether the capricious president’s inner circle can keep him in check is another question. Trump is said to be proud of yesterday’s not-so-nimble refusal to pledge support to Mueller, seeing it as an artfully tactical ploy aimed at steering the investigation toward his desired outcome of total, public exoneration. Indeed, his expectation that threatening to oust Mueller might compel him to soft-pedal the F.B.I. probe betrays a remarkable naivete of how Washington, and longtime civil servants like Mueller, operate. And as his firing of Comey showed, Trump is liable to make impulsive decisions when his pride is on the line.
Trump’s failure to endorse Mueller amounts to a crude display of his possible powers. If he snaps, and his intentions take another, tumultuous turn, there are few guardrails preventing him from removing the special counsel—a move that would almost certainly trigger a constitutional crisis. As the White House aides scrambling to calm the president surely understand, even Trump could not survive such a seismic and egocentric abuse of power. Whether the president understands those limitations, and is constrained by them, remains to be seen.A police officer in Albuquerque shot an undercover narcotics officer during a $60 meth deal this weekend. The Albuquerque Police Department (APD) won't release the names of any of the officers involved or provide an explanation of how the shooting happened or why. Here's what the Albuquerque Journal reports:
The criminal complaint states that [undercover officer Holly] Garcia met a suspect, Damien Bailey, whose name is also spelled Damian Bailey in jail records, near Dunes and Whispering Sands SE to buy $60 worth of "shards," which is a slang term for meth. She arrived with [undercover officer Jacob] Grant, who was assisting her in the investigation.
Nearby narcotics detectives watched Bailey get in the front passenger seat of the car Garcia was driving and another man, Edmond Vester, get in the rear passenger seat, according to the complaint.
Garcia drove them to the Econo Lodge near Central and Tramway. Vester went into a room at the motel and came back to the vehicle with the meth, according to the complaint.
Garcia then drove to the McDonald's nearby and gave the bust signal. It was then that the shooting took place. Witnesses said they heard around five shots. Police said the officer was shot multiple times, but the exact number wasn't known.
In the aftermath of the shooting, the car doors where Bailey and Vester were sitting were open, but police haven't released details about any perceived threat or why the lieutenant opened fire. The complaint makes no mention of the suspects having a gun at the scene.
Bailey and Vester were taken into custody. They were booked into jail early Saturday on drug trafficking charges.
"We're getting some push back because (the investigation) was for $60 of meth," said Albuquerque police officer Tanner Tixier, a spokesman. "But that's how these investigations work. You start with $20, $40, $60 buys. You can't just go out and buy five pounds of meth."Review for Innisfree’s Forest For Men ULTRA man all in one cream!!!
Okay, so first off, sorry for not posting as regularly as I used to…school, life, blah blah….anyways I’ll try and be better u_u;;
ANYWAYS, I got this shiny new cream a couple months ago from the global innisfree site for $15
I have been trying to reduce my routine since I always miss the bus to school due to routine shenanigans. This cream sounded like it was perfect for me since it says “all in one”. Forest is Innisfree’s for men line, and this is the upgraded version of their all in one cream. I have been using Etude House’s Dust Cut Cream for a while now, but I felt like trying something else.
This is what Innisfree claims this cream does:
[ 5-in-1 Deep hydration cream for dry skin]
1. 5-in-1 skin care for dry skin : Dryness + tightness + Dead cells + Dry skin texture + Itchiness
2. Fast absorption without any greasiness and suitable for oily skin
3. Relieve stress by phytoncide ingredients of pine tree, cedar tree, retinispora tree from Jeju island.
WELL okay, let me first start off by saying that my skin is combination. My T zone is oily as ef, but my cheeks can be as dry as the sahara. This cream claims that it is intended for dry skin but is also suitable for oily skin, so I thought it’ll work. Mm…It does work, but I don’t think it’s as good as it could be. Let’s examine the ingredients and I’ll explain more later.
There are a lot of fruit and herbal extracts in this cream. These all emcompass what Innisfree claims to be their Juju Phytoncide (which from wiki are “antimicrobial allelochemic volatile organic compounds derived from plants”. Pretty much they supposedly help fight off bacteria and other free radical baddies in the enviorment. The most notable ones are the tangerine peel (Brightening) and green tea extracts (Soothing/Healing). There are also a lot of silicone in this product (labeled in light yellow below), which give the cream that smooth glide on texture. I would avoid this product if you are sensitive to silicone. Propanediol is the second ingredient, which is used to make the product more viscous and “solid” so that it isn’t “watery”. Glycerin is used to draw water moisture from the environment and hydrate the outer layers of your skin. While I think the ingredients list is fine if you can handle silicone, I still think there are a lot of unnecessary stuff in formulation. A lot of Asian products do tend to put unnecessary amounts of herbal extracts, and this is not an expectation haha.Oh and it also has a small amount of lactic acid, an AHA chemical exfoliant.
The cream itself is like a mix between a gel and a cream ( think Mizon Snail Repair Gel Cream). It has a light fresh citrus scent to it, which I like. The good thing about this cream is that this stuff is pretty thick….I really only need a small amount for my face (and I have a big ass face). Also this thing is amazing at hydrating my dry cheeks. It really does smoothen out my skin.
The downside is that it obviously leaves the skin feeling shiny and greasy if you have oily skin. I don’t know if you can tell, but my T zone (nose and forehead) look incredibly shiny after I put it on, and it stayed like that for a good while. It also feels slightly sticky on your face, which is not fun.
So no, Innisfree, your #2 claim: “Fast absorption without any greasiness and suitable for oily skin” is not entirely true :/
I used this cream only on the dry parts of my face for a month now, and I am pretty sure I am not even ¼ done. A little does go a long way. Overall I think I my skin texture has improved. It doesn’t break me out and I like the scent. I will use up the rest of this, but I will not repurchase.
Pros:
Nice Scent (Light Citrus)
VERY hydrating
smoothens out skin
very nice texture
a little goes a long way
Cons:
NOT SUITABLE FOR OILY SKIN
greasy
lots of silicone
MEH product if you have combo skin
Overall, it was okay for me. I do recommend this if you have dry skin though. Oily skin people…avoid it!!Welcome. Here you can listen in on William Faulkner’s sessions with audiences at the University of Virginia in 1957 and 1958, during his two terms as UVA’s first Writer-in-Residence. Under CONTEXTS you’ll find an introduction to this archive as well as essays, news articles, photographs and other materials to provide backgrounds to the writer, the times and the place. BROWSE allows you to read and play transcripts of those sessions, one tape recording or one question&answer at a time. Use SEARCH if you want to hear something in particular, such as Faulkner’s comments on one of his works or on writing or on the Civil Rights movement of that time.
The audio files in the archive should play on any recent version of the most common browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari), and should also play on smaller devices like tablets and smartphones. If you want to check your device's compatibility – and hear from Faulkner himself how "Yoknapatawpha" is pronounced – click on this 24-second clip:NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed free tuition at the state’s public colleges for students from low- and middle-income families on Tuesday, seizing on an idea that became a rallying cry for many Democrats in last year’s presidential election.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo takes part in the 72nd Annual Columbus Day Parade in New York, U.S. October 10, 2016. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
Under Cuomo’s plan, which he called the first of its kind in the nation, the state would cover tuition for any student from a family earning less than $125,000 a year by 2019, a means-tested benchmark that coincided with one proposed by Hillary Clinton in her failed presidential bid.
“College is a mandatory step if you really want to be a success,” the Democratic governor said as he announced the plan, which requires approval by the state’s legislature. Cuomo is widely seen as a potential future presidential candidate.
About 70 percent of jobs in the state now required a college education, he said. He described graduating with thousands of dollars of debt as “like a starting a race with an anchor tied to your leg.”
The cost of higher education and the burden of student debt emerged as a major issue in the race between Clinton and Bernie Sanders to become the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 2016.
Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont and a Brooklyn native, joined Cuomo for the announcement at the LaGuardia Community College in the New York City borough of Queens, and he repurposed familiar talking points from his campaign.
“The Democrats and Republicans and independents understand that technology has changed, the global economy has changed,” he said to a crowd of Queens students who had been chanting his name minutes earlier. He said a college degree was virtually mandatory in a way that a high-school diploma had been in previous decades.
From the start of his presidential campaign in 2015, Sanders promised to make tuition free for everyone who attends state colleges. The promise helped draw huge crowds of young people to his campaign rallies and pressured Clinton, who was promising in less sweeping terms only to reduce student debt, from the left.
After Clinton had all but secured the party’s nomination last summer, she announced a means-tested variant of the Sanders plan last July in what was seen in part as a gesture toward bringing the party’s more liberal, left-leaning flank back into the fold.
For undergraduate students who hail from New York, tuition for a bachelor’s degree costs $6,470 per year at the State University of New York’s colleges, and $6,330 per year at the City University of New York’s four-year colleges. Other expenses such as room and board, which can cost up to $12,590 at SUNY colleges, would not be covered under the plan.
Cuomo said his proposed Excelsior Scholarship would cost about $163 million a year, although he did not specify how the state would cover this cost. He said it would potentially benefit some 940,000 families with college-age children in the state.NEW YORK (AP) — A Democratic state lawmaker was arrested along with five other politicians Tuesday in an alleged plot to pay tens of thousands of dollars in bribes to GOP bosses to let him run for mayor of New York City as a Republican.
U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara called it an "unappetizing smorgasbord of graft and greed" that reveals a New York political culture defined by a single rule: "Show me the money."
Malcolm Smith, 56, who has served at times as the state Senate's majority and minority leader since becoming a senator in March 2000, was arrested along with Republican New York City Councilman Dan Halloran, 42, and four other political figures.
Smith, who was removed Tuesday from his leadership post in Albany, had not yet officially launched a campaign for mayor — the first New York City mayoral race in twelve years without Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Smith "tried to bribe his way to a shot at Gracie Mansion," Bharara said, referring to the official mayor's residence. "Smith drew up the game plan and Councilman Halloran essentially quarterbacked that drive by finding party chairmen who were wide open to receiving bribes."
A criminal complaint said that in meetings with a cooperating witness and an undercover FBI agent posing as a wealthy real estate developer, Smith agreed to bribe up to five leaders of Republican Party county committees in the five boroughs of New York City so he could run for mayor as a Republican, even though he was a registered Democrat.
Bharara said $80,000 in cash was promised or paid to Bronx County Republican Party Chairman Joseph Savino, 45, and Queens County Republican Party Vice Chairman Vincent Tabone, 46, who were both arrested Tuesday. The government said Halloran told the undercover agent that he wanted to get his "mortgage situation resolved" and to be named deputy police commissioner if Smith were elected mayor.
Smith said in a statement that he'll be vindicated. His lawyer, Gerald L. Shargel, said his client denies wrongdoing.
"Malcolm Smith is a dedicated public servant who has served both the state of New York and his constituents in an exemplary fashion," Shargel said. "He steadfastly denies the allegations that are contained in the complaint."
Outside federal court in White Plains, N.Y., Shargel said the allegations in the criminal complaint "do not tell the full story."
Halloran's attorney, Dennis Ring, said: "The councilman denies all allegations and looks forward to clearing his name and returning to court."
Representatives for Savino and Tabone did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
On Tuesday evening, Halloran was stripped of his committee assignments and money-allocating authority in the City Council. Earlier in the day, Smith was removed from his committee assignments and leadership post in the breakaway group of five senators that formed a majority coalition with Senate Republicans.
Running as a Republican in the New York City mayoral race is an attractive path for candidates because it is easier to get on the GOP primary ballot in a city crowded with Democratic politicians. The tactic was popularized by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who switched from the Democratic to Republican parties shortly before his first successful run for mayor in 2001. At least three current candidates for mayor switched their party affiliation to get on the GOP ballot.
In Smith's case, authorities say, he wanted to get on the Republican ballot but keep his Democratic party affiliation, a move that would require written consent of three of the city's five Republican Party county chairmen.
In court papers, the FBI detailed numerous meetings over the last year among the defendants, the undercover FBI agent and the cooperating witness, who pleaded guilty to federal charges last month in a deal aimed at winning leniency at sentencing.
In a Jan. 25 meeting in Smith's car in Rockland County, the cooperating witness told Smith that buying the
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patriarchal forces have taken it away from women," she adds.
Shayara Bano, in her village in the hills of Uttarakhand, is pinning her hopes on the Supreme Court.
"I want my husband to take me back. I'm hoping to get justice from the court," she says.Lions midfielder Lewis Taylor has been charged with causing more than $10,000 damage to eight vehicles
BRISBANE Lions midfielder Lewis Taylor has been charged over an alleged vandalism spree that occurred just weeks after his NAB AFL Rising Star win in 2014.
Police allege the 20-year-old was involved in damaging eight vehicles at Mortlake, in Victoria's west, 13 months ago.
Taylor, who hails from the area, is alleged to have stolen a seatbelt buckle valued at $5 and been involved in causing more than $10,000 in criminal damage.
Another man is also facing charges.
Taylor won the 2014 NAB AFL Rising Star award. He has played 44 games for the Brisbane Lions.
The Warrnambool Standard reports the case was mentioned at the local Magistrates' Court on Thursday.
Taylor wasn't present for the hearing, the newspaper said.
It is alleged the damage involved the smashing of windscreens on four tip trucks, a Pathfinder, a Fairmont Ghia, a garbage truck and another Mazda truck.
The total damage bill has been valued at $10,635.75.
"A 20-year-old Coorparoo man appeared before the Warrnambool Magistrates court today after being charged with several counts of criminal damage following an incident in Mortlake on 22 October, 2014," Victoria Police confirmed to AFL.com.au in a statement.
"As the matter is currently before the court it would not be appropriate to comment further."
The Brisbane Lions released a brief statement on Wednesday afternoon, saying they were aware of Taylor's court case.
"He has co-operated fully with the investigation and is sorry for his actions. The club will not be taking any further action in relation to the matter," it said.The most common measure of intelligence in animals, brain size relative to body size, may not be as dependent on evolutionary selection on the brain as previously thought, according to a new analysis by scientists.
Brain size relative to body size has been used by generations of scientists to predict an animal's intelligence. For example, although the human brain is not the largest in the animal kingdom in terms of volume or mass, it is exceptionally large considering our moderate body mass.
Now, a study by a team of scientists at UCL, the University of Konstanz, and the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology has found that the relationship between the two traits is driven by different evolutionary mechanisms in different animals.
Crucially, researchers have found that the most significant factor in determining relative brain size is often evolutionary pressure on body size, and not brain size. For example, the evolutionary history of bats reveals they decreased body size much faster than brain size, leading to an increase in relative brain size. As a result, small bats were able to evolve improved flying manoeuvrability while maintaining the brainpower to handle foraging in cluttered environments.
This shows that relative brain size can not be used unequivocally as evidence of selection for intelligence. The study is published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr Jeroen Smaers (UCL Anthropology and UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment), lead author of the study said: "When using brain size relative to body size as a measure of intelligence, the assumption has always been that this measure is primarily driven by changes in brain size. It now appears that the relationship between changes in brain and body size in animals is more complex than has long been assumed.
"Changes in body size often occur independently of changes in brain size and vice versa. Moreover, the nature of these independent changes in brain and body size, are different in different groups of animals."
Researchers at UCL gathered data on brain and body mass for hundreds of modern and extinct bats, carnivorans, and primates. They then charted brain and body size evolution over time for each species. Across millions of years, most animals increased body size faster than brain size, with the exception of bats.
In primate lineages decreases in brain size marginally outpaced those in body size. Carnivoran evolution has taken yet a different course, with changes generally more strongly associated with body size rather than selection on brain size and cognition.
Given such differences, the authors believe that the predominant interpretation of relative brain size as the consequence of selection on intelligence inherently masks the often more significant influence of selection on body size.
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The research was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
Notes to editors
1. For more information or to interview Dr Jeroen Smaers, please contact Clare Ryan in the UCL Media Relations Office on tel: +44 (0)20 3108 3846, mobile: +44 07747 565 056, out of hours +44 (0)7917 271 364, e-mail: [email protected].
2. 'Comparative analysis of evolutionary rates reveal different pathways to encephalization in bats, carnivorans, and primates' is published online in PNAS. Journalists can also obtain copies of the paper by contacting UCL Media Relations.
About UCL (University College London)
Founded in 1826, UCL was the first English university established after Oxford and Cambridge, the first to admit students regardless of race, class, religion or gender, and the first to provide systematic teaching of law, architecture and medicine. We are among the world's top universities, as reflected by performance in a range of international rankings and tables. UCL currently has 24,000 students from almost 140 countries, and more than 9,500 employees. Our annual income is over £800 million.
www.ucl.ac.uk | Follow us on Twitter @uclnews
About NERC
NERC is the UK's main agency for funding and managing world-class research, training and knowledge exchange in the environmental sciences. It coordinates some of the world's most exciting research projects, tackling major issues such as climate change, food security, environmental influences on human health, the genetic make-up of life on earth, and much more. NERC receives around £300m a year from the government's science budget, which it uses to fund research and training in universities and its own research centres.A former Columbus Crew executive, says he is not surprised the team owner is threatening to leave Columbus, if a downtown stadium is not built.
"He is just trying to play political chess," said Francisco Terreros, who worked for the for four years.
"I have lived it, I have seen the game played out," said Terreros.
Terreros says before coming to the Columbus Crew in 2009, he worked for Real Salt Lake, and was there in 2006, when the soccer owner threatened to move to St. Louis, if a new publicly funded stadium was not built.
Terreros believes Crew owner Anthony Precourt is taking a page out of the same playbook, although he is not asking for public funding to build a new stadium.
"I know what Mr. Precourt is thinking, I know the strategy he's trying to play, my old boss played it. All Precourt wants do is motivate city officials to provide a piece of land," Terreros writes in an essay about the current Crew controversy.
Given his experiences, Terreros strongly believes Crew SC isn't leaving Columbus.
Precourt is blaming poor attendance and a failing stadium for reasons he is exploring a move to after next season.
ABC 6/FOX 28 contacted Crew officials to learn the latest on the possible relocation, but no one got back to us.
Terreros says Real Salt Lake team got its new stadium at the 11th hour, after fans forced city leaders to find a solution.
Terreros who is now Executive Vice President of global soccer, for SportBox Group, says Columbus fans are already on the right track to get the job done
"I think Columbus fans are far ahead of Salt Lake, we are on a good track, I truly believe the Columbus Crew is going to stay in Columbus, Ohio."But technology alone does not create great entertainment value. The biggest problem with Move is its price. The basic Move package, which includes the required camera, one Move controller and the Sports Champions game (Sony’s counterpart to Wii Sports), costs $99.99. An additional controller, required if you want to play with a friend, costs $49.99 more. Add in a secondary navigation controller (required for some games), and that will set you back an additional $29.99. And if you’re going to play regularly with others, you’re almost certainly also going to need the optional charging station (another $29.99), because, unlike Wii controllers, Move wands don’t take batteries.
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So if you own a basic PS3 and want a full Move system to play, say, beach volleyball or swordfighting with a friend, you’re looking at an investment of roughly $240, and that’s before taxes and buying any actual games. If you’re starting from scratch and don’t own a PS3, a similar setup would cost about $540.
The second major problem with Move is that it can be finicky to use. In Sony’s basic Sports Champions, for instance, you must recalibrate the position of the Move controller every time you start a new session or contest. Sometimes, when booting up a complex game like the virtual pet simulator EyePet, the system recognizes the Move controller flawlessly, and other times you find yourself in a vortex of frustration just trying to get it to work. The Move may be technically more advanced than the Wii controller (using both a camera and internal motion sensors), but that very quality prevents Move from being as easy to use as the competition.
Of course the PS3 does plenty of things the Wii doesn’t, like play Blu-Ray discs and display gorgeous high-definition graphics. But for the budget-conscious consumer looking for a simple game system that the whole family can enjoy together, the Wii remains the sensible choice.
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As to whether Move enhances the interactive entertainment experience enough to persuade existing PS3 users to upgrade, it depends on what you’re looking for.
I have been able to play 13 different Move-enabled titles recently, including sports games like the latest Tiger Woods golf game, the kid-friendly Start the Party and the strategy game called R.U.S.E. (Capsule reviews of all 13 games I have played on the Move can be found online at nytimes.com/artsbeat.)
In general, Move enhances adventure and individual sports games while doing little for traditional shooters and team sports. By far the most interesting use of Move was exhibited by EyePet, which actually puts you on the floor in front of your television to play with a furry digital companion that responds to your “touch” and even to the sound of your hands clapping.
In the end, though, Move is nothing close to the watershed in home electronic entertainment that the Wii was four years ago. Still, I will enthusiastically be using Move to play Tiger Woods golf, the noir thriller Heavy Rain and much of the light adventure The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn’s Quest. When my friends want to play disc golf, tennis or Ping-Pong, I will probably turn on my PS3 and Move instead of the Wii. And the next time I have a child over to visit, I will definitely put him or her in front of EyePet. In these games the greater sense of physicality enhances the fun more than merely pressing buttons does.
But as a reviewer, I get this stuff free. For a family that has already invested in a Wii and lots of Wii games, spending the money to replace all of that on the PS3 and Move is going to be a tough sell for now, especially with Microsoft’s Kinect around the corner. At least Sony isn’t sitting around. Now we just need to see more of the truly innovative games that will (Sony hopes) make the Move a must-have.A SteadiDrone QU4D aerial drone fitted with a GoPro video camera hovers in a field in Knysa, South Africa, on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2014. The number of civilian unmanned aircraft will reach 175,000 by 2035, most of them smaller models, a report by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Volpe National Transportation Systems Center found. Photographer: Dean Hutton/Bloomberg via Getty Images
If a toothbrush falls on your head in San Francisco, don’t be alarmed; the future is here and it includes drone-delivered drugstore goods.
Following an unexpected court ruling in support of commercial drones, QuiQui, pronounced “quicky,” jumped on the chance to launch its business in San Francisco’s Mission District, an ideal spot because of its flat terrain and lack of tall buildings, the company says. The 24-hour service will cost just $1 in addition to the price of items and is currently inviting participants to join as beta testers.
“Your phone will buzz, saying your delivery is here,” CEO and founder Joshua Ziering told SF Gate, noting that the drone will stay at least 20 feet in the air. “You go outside and swipe to tell it to drop your order. It will drop it and then fly away. I kind of want it to beep like Roadrunner and then fly.”
Drugstore items -- small in size and a hard to obtain if you’re bedridden with a cold -- are the most practical thing to deliver by drone, the company said on their website.
“It was the most economically viable option with the most consumer pain,” QuiQui says. “Nobody likes going when they're sick because they don't feel well, and nobody likes going when they're well because there are a lot of sick people there. The pharmacy has traditionally been an awful experience.”
Despite some speculation, Ziering told The Huffington Post QuiQui will not be delivering medical marijuana but is “trying to deliver prescription drugs,” though it has not yet named any pharmacies it’s partnering with.
The company is apparently anticipating some backlash, especially given that it's launching the service in the home of the original Google bus protest.
“Well, we know that gentrification is a hot topic in the Mission and we want to be sensitive to that,” a QuiQui representative stated. “We understand that drones cruising around the neighborhood may not be well received. We've worked extra hard to make sure our drones are quiet and respectful of the neighborhood. For example, we avoid schools and parks on our flight paths.”Joel Achenbach Washington Post WP Bloomberg
WASHINGTON — Two venerable space telescopes, the Hubble and the Spitzer, have teamed to study the very early universe, and here's what they see at the cosmic dawn: a wild and woolly party, with brilliant blue stars that aren't ready to settle down into anything so structured as a conventional spiral galaxy.
Instead, the early years of the universe featured a profusion of small, irregular, blobby galaxies that were popping with big, hot, super-luminous stars forming at a furious rate. Galaxies were colliding all over the place.
Ray Villard, a spokesman for the Space Telescope Science Institute, which conducts Hubble research for NASA, said it's like seeing the finale of a fireworks show, just that it's close to the beginning of time.
The new results and images of the early cosmos were released Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society at National Harbor.
This is not the first time that the Hubble, in its third decade of operation, has taken a "deep field" look at the universe, training its gaze on a tiny spot and holding it there to collect the ancient light. But a new observation campaign, dubbed the Frontier Fields, supplements Hubble time with data from the Spitzer, which observes in infrared, and another space telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
The new campaign exploits a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. This is an opportunistic maneuver that draws inspiration from Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes how gravity curves the fabric of space and time.
In the foreground of one new image is a galaxy cluster named Abell 2744, containing hundreds of galaxies. "Foreground" is perhaps an imperfect term given that these galaxies are 3.5 billion light-years away — it has taken 3.5 billion years for the light to reach the Hubble. The gravity of the clustered galaxies creates a lensing effect that magnifies thousands of galaxies that are far in the background — some of them more than 12 billion light-years away, having emitted that light in the very earliest era of galaxy formation.
"Light following a path around those clusters is bent," Jennifer Lotz, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said at a news conference Tuesday.
The initial expansion of the universe, known as the Big Bang, happened about 13.7 billion years ago, a measurement that has become more precise in the past few years with new data from space telescopes. Theorists believe it took about 400 million years for the first stars to ignite and the first galaxies to form. The Hubble can't see quite that deeply in time and space, but the earliest galaxy-forming epoch is a target for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018.
The universe in its youth was going through a blue period, because the stars were blue, just like the young, hot stars we see in the constellation Orion, said Garth Illingworth, professor of astronomy at the University of California at Santa Cruz and one of the scientists involved in the new research.
In telescopes, these young galaxies look red, because their light has been stretched out — red-shifted — over billions of years. "In reality, if you go there, it's all blue," Illingworth said.
If you could have parked yourself in that young universe, you would have seen those blue galaxies all around, many as big as our moon, Illingworth said. But you couldn't go for a star-gazing stroll, because there were no planets then. The matter in the cosmos was mostly hydrogen, with a smidgen of helium and hardly any atoms larger than that.
"It was much, much wilder than what we see today," said Anahita Alavi, a graduate student in the physics and astronomy department at the University of California at Riverside. "Everything was closer together. The possibility of these galaxies colliding with each other, and merging with each other, was higher."
Star formation picked up speed for several billion years. But then, about 9 billion years ago, the situation calmed down markedly and became more organized. Stars formed at a slower rate. The expanding universe became home to billions of majestic spiral and elliptical galaxies — and, on one rock at least, to astronomers staring into the night sky.A POINT OF VIEW
By Tim Egan
The pledge of allegiance says 'One nation under God' The US may be one of the most religious countries in the West but is it undergoing a period of doubt. A few days ago, I attended a memorial service for a friend who died far too young, of throat cancer. The service was held at a history museum, and it was packed - standing room only. What was curious, initially, was the lack of any reference to religion. My friend had left a final set of instructions: he wanted to be remembered first as a husband to his wife of more than 20 years, and second as a citizen of his city, and third as a lover of history. During the tributes, there were many references to how the past can inform our decisions in the present. There were nods to reason and friendship and love. The closest anyone came to mentioning God or spirituality was when someone told the widow, as an aside, that you often visit the deceased through dreams - when they can appear at no particular prompting. America seems to be experiencing an atheist moment
Hear Radio 4's A Point of View Even if the formal religion was absent, the habit of expressing a hope for spiritual optimism remains. The secular funeral is still somewhat of a novelty, at least to me. But it may be something that we see more and more of in the future - particularly on the West Coast, the most unchurched part of the United States. It may be daring to say it but America seems to be experiencing an atheist moment. Although "In God We Trust" was declared the national motto by an act of Congress more than 50 years ago and has been stamped on the currency for longer than that, some considerable doubt has developed of late. If you look at the bestseller list over the last year, you'll find a number of books on atheism - to the surprise of the publishing industry. God has always moved in not-so-mysterious ways when it comes to the literary world. He can sell books, especially ones that foretell an apocalyptic ending just around the corner. The so-called Left Behind books, a series of novels envisioning the Rapture, when the good are separated from the evil in a fiery judgment day, sell in the millions. They are not for the faint of faith. Another genre, self-help books that invoke God for the sake of making money, losing weight or finding a date, have a permanent home on the bestseller list. God is kept very busy with this segment of the market. But until this year, there was thought to be little support - or audience - for tomes by the anti-religious. Several books changed that. Full-bore polemics On the academic side, we have God: The Failed Hypothesis by Victor Stenger and Nothing: Something to Believe In by Nica Lalli. The three most popular books are God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by the newly-Americanized Christopher Hitchens, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. Hitchens, the pied piper of non-believers These bestsellers are not cursory academic surveys; they are full-bore polemics against religion, challenging the very idea of God. Hitchens, with his quick wit and his quiver of quotes from long-dead British luminaries which he carries over from his schoolboy days in England, seems to be having the most fun and the most effect. You could call him the Pied Piper of non-believers. He makes it a point to debate with a cleric in every city he visits, and is a frequent guest on conservative and religious radio stations. The premise of his book is that while religion may have served people well in the age of ignorance, now that science can explain the world there is no reason to attribute the sun, the moon and forces like gravity to higher beings. As he says, the nine-year-old knows more about the natural world now than the leading scholars of a thousand years ago. What has rankled his critics most is his suggestion that religion is usually a force for bad. More than anything, people without faith hate the description of them as empty or soulless
Believers point out that people of faith have been at the forefront of significant improvements in human rights and in caring for fellow humans over centuries - everything from abolition of slavery to the civil rights movement in this country, to church-led efforts to reduce starvation and disease in less-developed countries. I ran into Hitchens not long ago at a book festival where he was jousting away and getting rich in the process. He looked just as the New York Times Book Review had described him: "A village atheist standing in the square trying to pick arguments with the good citizens on their way to church." I asked Hitchens why he thought his book had such a sudden rise to the top of the bestseller charts when polls show that - at most - barely one-half-of-one-percent of Americans call themselves atheists. He said that the polls were misleading. There is a large and fast-growing segment of the population that is lapsed or well onto its way to atheism but is afraid to admit it. "If you're a lapsed Catholic," Hitchens told me. "You're part of a very large and fast-growing group." Many of those people, of course, might be agnostic rather than atheist? Revulsion at zealots More than anything, people without faith hate the description of them as empty or soulless. They have long been singled out for a special kind of hell. The constitution of the state of Texas, for example, allows discrimination against atheists in employment or jury duty - provisions that have been nullified by federal laws. And even my mother used to lower her voice in the kind of whisper reserved for people with terminal brain cancer when she described a neighbour as.... an atheist. Non-believers say they have also been aided by the revulsion of fair-minded Americans to the religious zealotry behind the September 11 attacks and the subsequent violence on behalf of radical Islam. The latest round of atheism books point to countless wars, slaughters and massacres done in the name of My God is Better than Your God. The 9/11 attacks got people thinking about what sort of God could be summoned for such awfulness. Obama has talked about his faith Social critics, dating to at least de Tocqueville and Dickens, have always marvelled at the pure number of passionately religious people in this country. Indeed, no Western democracy has so many devout churchgoers, by percentage, as the US. On the face of it, the numbers do seem to indicate that the United States is a Christian nation, as politicians often say. The latest surveys by the Pew Centre show that 76% of the population - upwards of 230 million people - call themselves Christians. Jews make up 1.3% and Muslims are under one per cent - though fast-growing. Atheists are near the bottom. There are seven times as many atheists in Europe as the United States, by percentage. But the second largest group, categorized by belief, are those who call themselves secular or non-religious. They make up 13 percent of the population. It is this group that has perhaps been afraid to call themselves atheists, for fear of shunning or other censure. They could be largely undecided or they could be searching or they could believe, as some friends say with a wink, in the Church of the Outdoors, or the Church of Baseball. They are also the people buying these books. But while atheism may have made its way into the public discourse, it remains strictly verboten in our politics. Even though a majority of people say in surveys that a person can still be a good American without Christian values, to be an atheist and run for high office is to wear the scarlet A. Among the presidential aspirants, half the Republican candidates do not believe in evolution, a view bounded in their religious faith and the imperatives of running in a primary heavily dominated by evangelicals. Democrats'more open' One contender, Senator John McCain of Arizona, made headlines this month when he said the American founders meant to establish the United States as a Christian nation. In truth, the constitution expressly prohibits establishment of a state religion. The founders were trying to avoid the entanglements of church with state. And perhaps the best known founder, Thomas Jefferson himself, may have been an atheist, in the view of many scholars. No matter. The Democrats, scorned by a huge sector of the electorate for their perceived secularism, have become more open about faith this time around. Both Hillary Clinton, and Senator Barack Obama frequently mention God on the campaign trail. But they also put some distance between themselves and the religious. Senator Clinton said last week that if she were president she would shield science and research into such things as stem cells from religion and politics. The United States may never be as secular as Europe. If you sample even a small share of the reaction, on blogs or Christian talk radio, to these new atheist books, you sense how strongly people feel about their faith. It's not passive or abstract. But, perhaps we have arrived at a moment where doubt is having its day - and for a time, atheists are coming out of hiding.
Below is a selection of your comments: Hopefully this is the beginning of a world-wide movement where if a person has a religion he sees it as a personal approach to God/Goddess/Gods as opposed to a philosophy which much be imposed upon others.
Paolo, St Albans I have long admired Europeans for their relaxed approach to religion, which sometimes ranges from the laid-back to the completely apathetic. While I myself am a devout Episcopalian, I've always thought that faith has played far too important and unnecessary of a role in public American life. I would be grateful of a societal movement that casts faith aside as such a major criterion for determining whether someone is 'a good person' or not.
Eric Campbell, Greensboro, NC, USA Speaking as a lifelong (American) agnostic I find Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins the equivalent to how many Christians must view the likes of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell - they may be nominally on my side but their rhetoric is so patronising and repellent I often wish they weren't.
John R, London I resent having to be pigeonholed into any kind of belief system - why should I have to choose between Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Atheism? I'm just me, I don't have a part of my being that needs to have a label to announce what I believe in, even if it's nothing. Come on you 'atheists', preaching to the faithful about how much better atheism is, is just making you as bad as them. Ignore the poor medieval moon woofers and get on with your own lives free from guilt, greedy evangelicals, suicidal fundamentalists, and then a bit more guilt.
Richard, Staffordshire, England Watch any BBC programme about geology or natural history, from Coast to The Living Planet, and sooner rather than later the presenter will mention events of millions of years ago, or even the last Ice Age of 10,000 years ago, as a given fact. There is no debate in the minds of presenters or viewers. Do they have such programmes in the US, or do they gloss over the timescale of geological events (it all happened in 4004BC)? I fondly imagine the average Republican politician or supporter watching (to UK eyes, completely uncontroversial) presenters like Nicholas Crane or Alan Titchmarsh and going "Lies!" "Untrue!" every couple of minutes.
Ken Strong, Hornchurch, Essex As always, "your mileage may vary..." I suppose it's just possible to have a look around America at the moment and at least suggest that this is a "period of doubt." But only in a very relative, hair-splitting, sense. Even in making this suggestion, the author can't get away from the fact that fervent and frequent references to faith in god abound in American politics as much now as ever. I'm pretty certain that most Americans would sooner vote for a Catholic, Muslim, Scientologist, Witch Doctor or even a Satanist than for an atheist. When (and if) that ever changes, then we can talk about a "moment of doubt."
MJ Kuhns, Elyria, Ohio, U.S.A. In a world where religion causes more hurt, division and war than any other cause, this gives me hope.
Steve, London, UK The vast majority of my friends that claim to be atheist, in my opinion, are not "true" atheists. As soon as we talk religion and they make their "view" known, they go into a discussion on why they don't believe in God or Jesus. Nine times out of ten the reasons are because of people who call themselves Christians. Basically their opinion on God is based upon his ambassadors. Therefore they say if God was real, "his" people would be representing God better. Therefore since Christians are not behaving in the manner their religious beliefs require them to, God does not exist. However very seldom do my non-religious friends ever explore, in an honest fashion, if God truly does exist. Their atheism is a surface religion. They haven't explored their belief in depth. Just like many of my religious friends.
Paul, Peachtree City, Georgia USA
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StumbleUpon What are these?It might be time to sit down with the pre-K members of your family and have a little talk about the Prince of Darkness, because Ozzy Osbourne is about to make his Nick Jr. debut.
Rolling Stone reports that the Black Sabbath frontman has booked a voiceover gig on the network's hit animated series 'Bubble Guppies,' which follows the adorable adventures of mer-person preschoolers dwelling in the idyllic undersea villa of Bubbletucky. Osbourne will play a new character named Sid Fishy, a role he says he was drawn to because "I’ve always smelled a bit fishy."
Pressed for details, Osbourne admitted that he took on an animated alter ego to impress his two-year-old granddaughter, Pearl. "The whole reason I did the show was for Pearl," he explained. "She has Nick Jr. on 24/7. I can’t wait to see her reaction when she hears my voice come from Sid Fishy’s mouth."
As you can see from the picture of Fishy at the top of this post, he swims around with a canister of green liquid strapped to his back, which a network rep explained by saying, "The green liquid is Sid Fishy's'stink sauce' made up of different smells such as stinky socks and rotten eggs. He wants to use the stink sauce to cover Big Bubble City and all its citizens to make them stinky."
No exact date is listed for Sid Fishy's debut, but Rolling Stone's report adds that Osbourne's episode of 'Bubble Guppies' is scheduled to air next year, and will be part of a season that also includes an appearance from drag queen, model, author, and recording artist extraordinaire RuPaul.Press Releases
Alternatives Have Begun in Bid to Hear from Spirit
PASADENA, Calif. -- Hopes for reviving NASA's Spirit Mars rover dimmed further with passage last week of the point at which the rover's locale received its maximum sunshine for the Martian year.
The rover team has tried to contact Spirit for months with strategies based on the possibility that increasing energy availability might wake the rover from hibernation. The team has now switched to communication strategies designed to address more than one problem on the rover. If no signal is heard from Spirit in the next month or two, the team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., will shift to single-rover operations, continuing to operate Spirit's active twin, Opportunity.
"The commands we are sending starting this week should work in a multiple-fault scenario where Spirit's main transmitter is no longer working and the mission clock has lost track of time or drifted significantly," said JPL's John Callas, project manager for Spirit and Opportunity.
Spirit landed on Mars Jan. 4, 2004 Universal Time (Jan. 3, Pacific Time) for a mission designed to last for three months. After accomplishing its prime-mission goals, Spirit worked for more than five years in bonus-time extended missions.
Spirit has not communicated since March 22, 2010. Power output from its solar array had been waning prior to that, and the rover had been expected to go into a low-power hibernation mode. With drive motors on two of its six wheels no longer working, Spirit had been unable in preceding months to maneuver much in its sand-trap location. The rover could not get to a favorable tilt for its solar panels as Martian winter approached.
During the Martian winter with most heaters turned off, Spirit experienced colder internal temperatures than in any of its three previous winters on Mars. The cold could have damaged any of several electronic components that, if damaged, would prevent reestablishing communication with Spirit.
However, attempts to regain contact have continued for more than eight months in the possibility that the seasonal increase in solar energy available at Spirit's location would revive the rover. NASA's Deep Space Network of antennas in California, Spain and Australia has been listening for Spirit daily. The rover team has also sent commands to elicit a response from the rover even if the rover has lost track of time, or if its receiver has degraded in frequency response.
The available solar energy at Spirit's site was estimated to peak on March 10. Revised commanding began March 15, including instructions for the rover to be receptive over UHF relay to hailing from the Mars orbiters for extended periods of time and to use a backup transmitter on the rover.
Spirit and Opportunity both have made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars that may have been favorable for supporting microbial life. Opportunity landed three weeks after Spirit.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
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Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
[email protected] Guy Webster 818-354-6278Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. NEWS RELEASE: 2011-087Story highlights Hank Williams Jr. compared President Obama to Hitler on "Fox and Friends"
ESPN dropped use of his songs from its broadcasts, and he apologized
But there's no remorse evident in a new song posted on Williams' website
He blasts ESPN, Fox and what he calls the United Socialist States of America
Days after being dropped from ESPN's "Monday Night Football," Hank Williams Jr. fired back at that network, "Fox and Friends" and what he called the "United Socialist States of America" in his signature style -- a song bellowing biting lyrics in between guitar licks.
"This country sure as hell has gone down the drain," Williams sings in a tune posted Monday on his official website. "We know what we need. We know who to blame."
In the song, the 62-year-old son of the legendary country singer Hank Williams did not appear to accept any blame for his part in a recent controversy stemming from an appearance last Monday on "Fox and Friends," Fox News' morning show.
On the program, he said that the golf outing involving President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, was "like Hitler playing golf with (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu. OK. Not hardly."
When one of the Fox News' interviewers pointed out that Williams invoked "one of the most hated people in all of the world to describe... the president," Williams responded: "That is true, but I'm telling you like it is, you know. That just wasn't a good thing. It just didn't fly."
The next day, the singer offered an explanation, saying, "My analogy was extreme -- but it was to make a point.... The thought of the leaders of both parties jukin' and high fiven' on a golf course, while so many families are struggling to get by, simply
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nice, straightforward solution to the growing antibiotic resistant bacteria problem before things get out of hand. These sorts of new discoveries could be the key to saving many lives in the coming decades and I know that I personally at least, will be closely watching for additional new developments.
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Thank you for your support!Chateau archives contain limitless wisdom, including the idea that hitting on girls while you’re battling a hangover can do wonders for your pickup success. There’s a related personal observation which I want to share with the assembled. Dressing like a slob and stinking of barn animals is an oddly effective means of hurdling chronic approach anxiety.
Very few men don’t feel at least a little anxiety in the moment between seeing a cute girl and thinking over how he’ll introduce himself. (We call those men lacking any approach anxiety, “psychopaths”. Or, “blacks”.) Obviously, some men will be more anxious than others. For these sufferers, a mental or behavioral short circuit that bypasses their anxiety modules can mean the difference between intractable incel and endless samplings from the poon poon platter.
The based brain trick works like this: Dress slovenly before going out. I’m talking white tube socks and sandals, jorts, and a ratty t-shirt with holes in the pits. Top with greasy hair. Talk to girls with flirtatious intent, making no sincere feint toward excusing your disheveled appearance. As on any day when you approach numerous girls, you’ll likely experience some female skepticism*. But unlike other times, you’ll have a scapegoat to blame for their caution*. The grist of the cognitive gimmick is your psychological instinct to pin the blame for any romantic thwarting on the most obvious culprit: your slovenliness. The benefit of this ego detour is that it grooms you away from listening to that inner voice that loves to blame your strike-outs with women on your personality or looks.
If you have a conspicuous and largely superficial fault to help explain to yourself this or that stillborn pickup attempt, then you won’t feel approach anxiety as strongly as you would if you looked sharp and thus had only the less malleable aspects of your character to blame. Do this enough times, and the quieting of your anxiety will start to stick, becoming something of a permanent fixture of your resting emotional state.
Affected slovenliness makes approaching girls more like a fun game, with little on the line that can’t be answered with a wry smirk and a raised eyebrow… “Oh, it’s my pit-stained t-shirt, isn’t it? I always forget it isn’t a hit with the ladies.”
* It’s good to reframe women’s natural leverage in the sexual market — their sexual prerogative — into a less loaded term. So stop saying a girl “rejected” you. Say instead she was skeptical or cautious or tentative. Word choice matters. You can add sting or remove sting with the words you choose to describe your seduction adventures.
FYI the greatest variable influencing any one man’s success with women is his BOLDNESS.
CH Maxim #21: In the quest for romance, boldness overcomes a lot of personal flaws. Timidity swamps a lot of personal virtues.Renowned Dev Shigeru Miyamoto Also Notes VR’s High Price Point
A problem many consumers point out about VR is its price. Such a high cost delineates its chances of becoming a common household product. Game developers see this problem as well. Developers like Hideo Kojima even mentioned how the whole concept needs more work. But Nintendo Game Developer Shigeru Miyamoto brought forth his own stipulations in an interview with Time.
In the past, Miyamoto has discerned VR as a high-cost social barrier. However, since then, he’s update his outlook in accordance with its progress:
“In terms of being together online in virtual reality, I think a lot of the problems have been solved or are starting to be solved. This is something that we’re looking into, too.”
Moreover, there’s another problem the Nintendo dev sees as inherent to VR. You can imagine a big headset controlling your senses doesn’t exactly facilitate the living room experience. After all, such has been a long selling point of Nintendo gaming. If the technology itself can’t warm to multiple audiences, it will always fall below its aspirations and the aspirations of devs:
“If a parent were to see their kid playing virtual reality, it would probably make them worry. Another issue and challenge that I think everybody faces is how to create an experience that’s both short enough while also fully fleshed out in virtual reality.”
If Nintendo can somehow reconcile their philosophy with the VR experience, then we may see some Nintendo titles hit the platform. Miyamoto assures that they’ve been experimenting with the option and checking its viability. We’ll see where that goes.
For more of the latest on VR, Nintendo, and gaming, simply stick around COGconnected. Happy gaming.
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Dec. 8, 2017, 7:54 PM GMT / Updated Dec. 8, 2017, 7:54 PM GMT By David Freeman
Photos from space show the incredible scale of the devastation caused by the still-raging Southern California wildfires, which have blackened almost 200,000 acres and forced thousands of people from their homes.
From his perch aboard the International Space Station 250 miles above the Earth's surface, NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik snapped a series of unsettling photos and posted them on Twitter.
"Today's pass over SoCal unfortunately doesn't look any better," he said in a tweet posted on the evening of December 7. "The fires east of Camp Pendleton and in Baja are visible as well."
That glum tweet came on the heels of two earlier tweets about the fires that Bresnik posted the previous day.
Earlier, NASA had posted satellite photos of the fires taken on December 5 by its Terra satellite and the European Space Agency's Sentinel-2.
The Terra photo shows thick plumes of smoke streaming out over the Pacific Ocean.After former acting attorney general Sally Yates give her eagerly awaited testimony to a Senate committee today, President Trump tweeted: “Sally Yates made the fake media extremely unhappy today — she said nothing but old news!”
I don’t always agree with Trump’s tweets, but I think the substance of this one is correct. Yates did not say anything of importance that was new, as the mainstream media had hoped she would do.
Here’s how the New York Times summarizes Yates’ appearance:
*Ms. Yates testified that she told President Trump’s White House in its early days that his first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, was susceptible to blackmail. *Her testimony raises questions about how Mr. Trump responded to her concerns about Mr. Flynn, who was not fired until two weeks later, once Ms. Yates’s unease became public.
But the first item has been on the table for months. It’s nothing new. Therefore, any “concerns” that flow from her testimony about it also existed long ago.
As to those concerns, the inference that Yates and the Times want us to draw is that the Trump administration retained Flynn for two weeks (actually two-and-a-half, I think) knowing that he was susceptible to blackmail. However, it’s not clear how valid this concern is.
If Flynn was susceptible to blackmail, it was because he had denied having conversations with the Russian ambassador (there is no indication that the substance of any such talks was problematic). Of particular importance is that he denied this in a talk with Vice President Pence. That denial may have made him vulnerable to blackmail because Russia could threaten to reveal that he had lied or misled. (How realistic this prospect was, I don’t know).
But once Yates told the Trump administration the same thing, and assuming that someone in the Trump administration let Flynn know it had been so informed, the possibility of blackmail dissipated, it seems to me. The Russians could hardly get anywhere with Flynn by threatening to reveal what he figured the Trump administration already knew.
It isn’t clear to me when the Trump administration first informed Flynn of what it learned from Yates. However, once it did, Flynn was no longer vulnerable to blackmail. And it seems clear that he wasn’t vulnerable for the entire two-plus weeks he stayed on.
I should add that the retention of an embattled presidential appointee for 18 days (or so) is not unusual. It often takes longer for a head to roll in Washington, D.C. Presidents are understandably reluctant to fire advisers with whom they have formed a good relationship. Indeed, sometimes they simply refuse to do so. Susan Rice lied shamelessly about the Benghazi attacks. She wasn’t fired; she was promoted.
I should also add that there appears to be no evidence that the Russians attempted to blackmail Flynn, much less that they succeeded.
Finally, a word about the only real news of substance to come out regarding General Flynn — the revelation that Obama advised Trump not to hire Flynn. To assess this matter, we need to know what Obama said to Trump about Flynn.
From all that appears so far, he recommended not hiring Flynn because he thought Flynn had done a poor job and/or had behaved badly as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. There is no indication, as far as I’ve seen reported, that Obama told Trump that Flynn was too close to Putin, that he was a security risk, or anything similarly damning.
As head of the DIA, Flynn had been a thorn in Obama’s side. He had openly rejected the administration’s false narrative that the threat of terrorism was receding and that ISIS was “the jayvee.”
Thus, Trump would not have been surprised to hear Obama bad-mouth Flynn. But Trump agreed with Flynn’s concerns about Obama’s line on terrorism and may well have admired Flynn for pushing back. Thus, it’s not surprising, let alone scandalous, that Trump ignored Obama’s advice and gave a key job to a key campaign adviser.
It didn’t strike me as a great decision at the time, and events have shown it to be a poor one. But there’s nothing scandalous about a poor personnel decision.
Indeed, we’re still waiting for anything scandalous about Trump’s conduct regarding Flynn or Russia to be revealed. The Democrats and the mainstream media have been at this for quite a while now. So far, they have come up empty. Yates’ public testimony did not improve their case.
NOTE: I have revised this post since publishing it initially.TONY JONES: Good evening and welcome to Q&A. I'm Tony Jones and answering your questions tonight: News Limited columnist and host of ABC 2's Dumb, Drunk and Racist, Joe Hildebrand; ABC broadcaster turned State Liberal minister Pru Goward; British comedian actor and writer Lenny Henry; Nobel Prize winning astrophysicist, Brian Schmidt; and the Age Discrimination Commissioner and former Hawke Government Minister Susan Ryan. Please welcome our panel.
Q&A is live from 9.35 Eastern Standard Time and simulcast on News 24 and News Radio. Go to the website to send a question or join the Twitter conversation using the hashtag that just appeared on your screen. Let's go straight to our first question tonight. It's from Susan Germein.
IS TIME SPEEDING UP?
SUSAN GERMEIN: My question is for Brian Schmidt. I'd like to know if time is speeding up or whether my sense of the days going so quickly is merely due to a combination of the massive demands of 21st century life and my own advancing years. In other words, is there never enough time simply because there is less time?
TONY JONES: Brian?
BRIAN SCHMIDT: Wow.
LENNY HENRY: (Indistinct) I think the flight over here proves that there's more time. The stewards now are telling you to go to sleep when you don't want to go. "Go to sleep straight away. It's going to be a long time. Put your pyjamas on now. Go to sleep now." "I don't want to go to sleep." "Once upon a time." Brian, go ahead.
BRIAN SCHMIDT: So time is an interesting construct in science. Time is the metronome by which we measure how the universe progresses and so the idea of time speeding up or slowing down doesn't really make sense. Time just is. It is the way we measure everything else and so, yes, I remember when I was five the year lasted for what seemed like 20 years and now my life seems to pass by much more quickly but that is simply a relative view that we have of the world around us and I'm afraid that, yes, as you get older, things are going to speed up but it has nothing to do with the physics of what I study.
TONY JONES: So the accelerating universe does not include time?
BRIAN SCHMIDT: No, it includes time but time is the metronome which we, you know, relate everything that we measure to and so it's, you know, how many times an atom vibrates back and forth is the way we keep track of time and it's sort of a construct which is very difficult to really define. I had an eight year old come up and said "Tell me what time is?" in one of my lectures and I said "Well, I really can't tell you because there is no real way to define time. It just is".
TONY JONES: Lenny Henry, you were going to say that, weren't you?
LENNY HENRY: I was going to say that. I had that written down. Do you think the kid was just asking you what the time was?
BRIAN SCHMIDT: I hadn't thought of that.
TONY JONES: It is possible. Susan Ryan?
SUSAN RYAN: Well, I'm a bit worried about the metronome. We used to have the metronome ticking away when we learnt the piano and if we didn't keep up with the metronome we got a hit on the knuckles by the cranky old nun so I'm a bit concerned about this. But I guess it means it's something that just goes on evenly and you can't stop it. On the other hand, as we get older, now, I think you should all think time might go faster but we can appreciate it more because we know more. We understand more. We know what's going on so we can make better use of that metronome business as we get older and it is great.
TONY JONES: Joe Hildebrand?
JOE HILDEBRAND: Well, I think the take home message here is that we're all going die and sooner than we'd like.
SUSAN RYAN: Correct.
JOE HILDEBRAND: And I'm nearly middle aged now and I am terrified by the prospect of death. It consumes my every waking hour which, again, is counter productive and it's not just me that I worry about, it's the world and how it will function without me when I'm gone, you know. I mean Twitter has taken out life insurance.
TONY JONES: This explains the heavy drinking that goes along with the racism.
JOE HILDEBRAND: Very much. Well, this is the thing because the more you worry about death and the more you're scared of dying, the more you drink to bring it on quicker so it's a very complex human paradox, Tony.
TONY JONES: Pru Goward?
PRU GOWARD: Well, I think you're right. It is about ageing and the point is ageing is not very nice but the alternative is worse, as Joe suggests. So, you know, we're a bit stuck with getting older and I reckon the reason it seems to go so fast is I don't remember as much. I don't remember every agonising minute and second of every day like I did when I was a five year old child so it all seems to go a bit faster but it's all rich.
TONY JONES: As time moves on, let's go to our next question in a metronomic fashion and it's from James Stancliffe.
STATE OF ORIGIN RACISM
JAMES STANCLIFFE: When I was at the State of Origin match last Wednesday, I heard many racist epithets directed at the Aboriginal players in the Queensland team and Akuila Uate after he conceded the try. Does this represent a small proportion of Australians or is this systemic of a larger problem within our society?
TONY JONES: Joe Hildebrand?
JOE HILDEBRAND: Look, I'm sorry to say that we did this show, which I was plugging ruthlessly before the show, Dumb, Drunk and Racist, which goes to air...
LENNY HENRY: Which is, can I just say, that is the best firm of lawyers ever. Call 1800-Dumb-Drunk-and-Racist. We'll represent you now. Sorry, Joe. Carry on.
JOE HILDEBRAND: Look, I can't follow that.
LENNY HENRY: Yes, you can and you will.
JOE HILDEBRAND: So we did do the show. Obviously we wanted it to, as Lenny suggested, be a nice sort of, you know, unprovocative, you know, uncontroversial title and I thought we'd be sort of talking about a bunch of people that would say, you know, I'm not racist but - you know, I'm not racist but I'm a bit worried about, you know, Muslims or I'm not racist but, you know, I think maybe there's too many asylum seekers or whatever whatever. And what we actually saw when we took - we took a bunch of Indians around Australia and just see - you know, thought let's see what happens and some of the stuff we saw was full on. Like we had people throwing, you know, heil Hitler salutes. We had someone call out just randomly walking past on the streets of downtown Melbourne, you know, "White pride mother f...kers".
PRU GOWARD: Is that because the television was going? Is that there were cameras there?
JOE HILDEBRAND: Well, no, the worst part was we were still setting up. We only barely managed to get it on tape. It was very selfish.
LENNY HENRY: If only they could have waited to hurl the racist epithets.
JOE HILDEBRAND: Neo-Nazis are very selfish. White supremacists (indistinct).
TONY JONES: Joe, I'm just going to interrupt you. I'm just going to go back to our questioner. What were you hearing and I presume...
JAMES STANCLIFFE: I don't think it is appropriate for live television.
TONY JONES: Okay, we'll you don't actually have to describe what was actually said but you're saying that racial epithets were being thrown at Aboriginal players by members of the audience, is that right?
JAMES STANCLIFFE: Yes. Yes, repeatedly, especially when people like Greg Inglis were able to get into position and, you know, play as a good player, they were always implying that it was due to their race and being disparaging (indistinct).
LENNY HENRY: I hate that. I hate that. Why do they always say that? And where were you in relation to these people that were shouting out these things?
JAMES STANCLIFFE: Like next to them, around them.
LENNY HENRY: Why didn't you kick some arse?
TONY JONES: I was actually going to ask, how did the other people in the crowd respond because, I mean, that is incredibly offensive?
JAMES STANCLIFFE: Yeah, and that was the thing that more surprised me was that it was seemingly accepted by the crowd. There wasn't any reaction to it. In fact I heard several people applaud it and repeat it.
LENNY HENRY: No way.
PRU GOWARD: Look, I think racism is sort of endemic in every country. I think people prefer to be with people like themselves and they seek and they identify people who are different to themselves as somehow inferior. I think the test of a country is not whether its people are racist, because I suspect that happens throughout the world. I think the test of a country is the laws and the mechanisms it has in place to deal with it and I think Australia can be very proud of our Human Rights Commission, our anti-racism laws at both Federal and State level and a general, at least, formal culture, at least, of disapproval of that and that's an education which certainly focuses on it and that's about the best we can probably hope for in a democracy.
LENNY HENRY: No, the best is to kick arse when you hear people say that stupid shit next to you. You need to kick some arse.
PRU GOWARD: And peer pressure helps.
TONY JONES: I rather suspect if you'd have been sitting next to them they might not have said it.
LENNY HENRY: I have never met a racist Australian. They're all like, "How how ya doing, Len? Brilliant. I love ya mate. Have a beer. There's my wife, take her please. You're bloody huge." Nobody says anything to me.
TONY JONES: Let's go to another question on this subject. It's from Justin Li.
RACIAL ASSAULTS
JUSTIN LI: Yes, recently a group of Chinese international students were assaulted on a train in Sydney and the news went viral in China but in Australia a lot of the online comments were pretty unsympathetic towards the students. What does the panel think explains our attitudes to that situation?
TONY JONES: Susan Ryan, let's go to you?
SUSAN RYAN: Well, first of all it's terrible to hear about it and we did hear about such events in Melbourne just a few years ago. But I think it's very important to realise that it's not typical. It's terrible when it happens, it needs to be addressed by legislation and everything else, but it's not typical. When those Melbourne events happened, I was on the Council of the University of New South Wales actually, just down the road. We have many, many, many overseas students, a huge number of them. We immediately said "Has anything like that happened at the university? " We could not find one case where an overseas student - Indian or Chinese or Middle Eastern - had had any difficulty. So although that doesn't mean that there's no problem, it does mean that many communities can create an environment where the problem doesn't arise so we need to focus on it but we need to know, look, it's not all of us, Lenny, I promise you.
TONY JONES: Brian...
JOE HILDEBRAND: I think...
TONY JONES: I'll go to Joe in a second. I just want to hear from Brian. What are your thoughts? I mean you came here as an American. Did you find the country to be racist or at least more racist than America?
BRIAN SCHMIDT: So I think it's certainly behind the United States in terms of a couple of decades in terms of its tolerance and so I don't think that many Australians are overtly racist but there is still a tolerance to it which I do not see in the United States. So what, you know, you saw in the football game would not I don't think would have happened in the United States. It simply would not have been tolerated by, you know, the people around it. It wouldn't have been one person.
PRU GOWARD: Mind you, I mean, you have had the most extraordinary race history which is really sensitised.
BRIAN SCHMIDT: Yeah. Oh, I agree and so it's a matter of getting it to be on everyone's agenda that when you see it it's just not on and so...
LENNY HENRY: Not acceptable.
PRU GOWARD: It's not acceptable.
BRIAN SCHMIDT: Yeah, it's not acceptable at any level. You stop it. You stamp it out and when it's completely unacceptable, when you see it on a train or when you see it in a football game, then it will disappear.
TONY JONES: Lenny, seriously...
LENNY HENRY: My friend, Garth Crooks, actually, is part of a campaign in Britain called Kick Racism Out of Football and they have made inroads into stopping racist behaviour, the CCTV camera on the crowd so that if anything confrontational happens like that, the people are spotted and their photographs are taken and the police know who they are. So I think that you're absolutely right, I think legislation needs to be passed about this kind of thing because it's intolerable and we shouldn't put up with it. We're all human beings and how interesting to be in a place where it's such a multicultural society. Everywhere I go there's Chinese food, Indian food, Chinese people, there's black people, there's white people, there's all sorts of people and yet there is racism here but there's racism everywhere. I was on The Queen's Jubilee last week and I was the only black guy there. If Stevie Wonder's band hadn't turned up it would have just been me.
TONY JONES: And apparently you had to drag Rolf Harris off the stage.
LENNY HENRY: Yeah, but let's not get into that because otherwise we're going to have to get Brian to explain time to Rolf so that he can cut his, "Two little,"... Rolf, time is a metronome. You need to - to you it's three minutes. To us it's 17 years, Rolf. Stevie Wonder's waiting and he doesn't know he's black. He just wants to get on there, sing Superstition, sing Happy Birthday, even though it wasn't her birthday, and get the hell off. But, no, I think racism, it's about being a human being really. We're all human beings and, like Bob Marley said, One Love. Let's love each other instead of all this intolerance.
JOE HILDEBRAND: He loved a lot of people, didn't he?
LENNY HENRY: Bob loved a lot of people.
JOE HILDEBRAND: Like, he loved everybody individually.
LENNY HENRY: (Indistinct)
JOE HILDEBRAND: That's attention to detail.
LENNY HENRY: The guy was a Jamaican, man.
JOE HILDEBRAND: I think the interesting thing I've found was there's a bit of a - I think there's a disconnect between the attacks that took place on Chinese students and the ones on Indian students where, of course, if you're feeling like a stranger in a strange land you're going to think that there's a racial element and the cops, you know, perhaps there was some vast conspiracy but the cops didn't find there was an overwhelming racial element to it. But it's the bad pizza theory. You get 20 good pizzas, you don't tell anyone. You get one bad pizza, you tell everyone you know. So I think there's that and that might not necessarily check out but the weird thing about Australia is the casual sort of racism. Like the weird thing - and I think Brian's right when he says things that we say because we might just think they're funny or you might think it is funny to chuck a Hitler salute as you're walking past, you know, a bunch of people because they're not white or, you know, you might think it's funny to yell out, you know, "Go back to where you came from" literally - just I think maybe they'd seen the show - but when they were walking around.
TONY JONES: But in what universe are those things funny?
JOE HILDEBRAND: Well, this is the thing. This is why I think we are a bit behind. This is the - like, in India, of course, you have, you know, racial and cultural and religious riots that are far more fiercer than anything you see here, where people get killed and it goes on and on. But as one of the participants in the show beautifully, sort of, said, he said but there we don't find it funny. There we don't laugh about it and when we saw the Cronulla riots, what really upset him was the fact that people were laughing about it. They thought it was a party.
TONY JONES: Okay, let's go to another question on this general subject from Suhas Nayak.
RACE - WHO IS AUSTRALIAN?
SUHAS NAYAK: In Australia I am often asked, "Where are you from?" Australians typically do not assume that I am Australian, even though I grew up here. I spent several years in the US and Americans always assumed I was American. When will all of us learn that Australians come in all colours and all accents?
TONY JONES: Pru Goward?
PRU GOWARD: Well, we're a packet of Smarties, there's no doubt about it. We are a very mixed group of people and I think it's interesting the way Australians are so fascinated by foreign accents. It seems to me that if you speak with an Australian accent, you're much more acceptable, whatever colour you are, than if they can detect any accent and then it's a guess the country competition. But, yes, it is a sign of maturity. Australians are great travellers, as you know. You know, always looking for an overseas trip. Went to a war once on that basis and I suspect it's part of being a very isolated country for a long time and we do tend to classify outsiders and insiders. But go to Germany, they too, you know, talk about outsiders and see themselves as a contained group.
TONY JONES: That didn't work so well for the Germans, though, did it?
SUSAN RYAN: Look, a positive note, where will we change? Little children are not racist. I go down to Coogee Beach and if you know Coogee, the south end of the beach, there's a little pool where kids play. It's terrific, safe and nice. There are kids of all colours. There are African kids, there are Indian kids. There are Middle Eastern kids. Their mothers or nanas are there in their hijabs. There are, you know, Anglo Celtic kids. There are kids with freckles, like I used to be when I was a little kid and they all jump in and out. They all do exactly the same things, yeah, with the water and with their buckets and spades and so on, as we did when we were little kids playing in the same spot and, you know, there is no sign that the kids are picking on each other or uneasy with each other or, indeed, their minders, usually their mothers, I am pleased to say, Pru, sometimes their fathers these days or their grandfathers. So I think if we can capture what little kids do and make that our whole culture, we're on the way.
TONY JONES: The problem is they learn racism or, at least, some of them do.
SUSAN RYAN: Where? I mean, it's a...
TONY JONES: Well, that's the question. Brian do you have any thoughts on this?
BRIAN SCHMIDT: Well, you learn it from the environment around you and you're typically going to learn it from your family, would be number one, and, you know, the old generation are more racist than the younger generation and we slowly, you know, transform. So I think where you're not going to be asked that is in 15 or 20 years when there is just a whole generation of people from all over the place that were born here and people are used to it.
LENNY HENRY: We were talking earlier about education as well. I think in schools it's really important to emphasise cultural exchange so that people understand about other cultures and what they mean and how to interrelate with them. Education is vitally important with this. It's not just about family. It's about what your teachers say and how your school friends are taught to react to you. Going forward as a new generation, that's what's, I think, one of the most important things.
TONY JONES: I've heard that as a kid, you actually had to learn to speak in several accents...
LENNY HENRY: Yeah.
TONY JONES:...in order to actually pass on the streets?
LENNY HENRY: Yeah, well, Integration is very - for an immigrant family, my mum literally took me to one side. We're a Jamaican family and said, "You must learn to integrate with the people then. We must integrate. You have to integrate otherwise you won't fit in. Talk like the people then. Eat their food." So I did. I used to go and have egg and chips at my friend's house. I used to go and have tea. I didn't know what tea was. You know, we used to have a half a sheep and some rice and egg and chips, you finish it in two seconds. It was brilliant, you know. Are you throwing an Hitler salute or do you want to speak? I was about to come over there and kick your arse. Joe, did you see that?
JOE HILDEBRAND: I know.
LENNY HENRY: It was like this. It was like this. That's a damn shame. This is good. This is good: Hello. Hello. May I speak please? Not this "Hey!" Learn the difference.
TONY JONES: Okay, you've terrified him now. Let him speak.
JAMES STANCLIFFE: What I was going to say before was I guess one of the - just on the point we were making before was one of the most terrifying things was that two of the most vocal people there were two 10 year old boys.
LENNY HENRY: No way.
JAMES STANCLIFFE: And in that situation they have spent as much time being educated by their parents from the time before school as they have at school and obviously they haven't been able to not learn racism from school. They've learned it. So do we need to do something more?
TONY JONES: Joe, let's - did you sort of get any kind of philosophical position on this while making this outrageous piece of television?
JOE HILDEBRAND: Yeah, look, I think that - I mean in a sense - in a sense it sort of proves right. I think people sort of instinctively, you know, are selfish people. They think about themselves first, then they think about their family first, then they think about their sort of community and then they'll think about their country and then, lastly, you know, you might sort of start to think about the whole world and it's kind of - I mean that's sort of the arc from right to left, you know. I mean I think there's an instinctive element to it which you might call the sort of right and then you've got your sort of collective world view, which you might call the left. So I think people you know, the needle will kind of spin back and forth between those extremes. With 10 year old kids, my understanding is that when kids are 10, they're real little monsters and that's when the brain starts recognising difference and starts to and it's actually a psychological process more than necessarily an environmental process. I'm sure Philip Zimbardo or someone will call up and say I'm wrong but so the kids actually are almost conditioned to sort of see themselves as different and to pick out differences. That's why you often get bullying at that age and things like that so in a way it's all sort of part of growing up, if you like, for want of a better word, and you just sort of have to beat the hell out of them, you know, with maybe a large stick or - but, of course, the Government won't let you do that anymore, will they?
TONY JONES: No, well, I certainly hope not. Let's move along. You're watching Q&A. Our next question comes from Seeima Tarogi.
SCIENCE AND CREATION
SEEIMA TAROGI: Hi, Brian. What's your opinion on God, creationism and the genesis of the universe and do you think there will ever be a time when religion and science will meet and be able to coexist?
BRIAN SCHMIDT: So I describe myself as a militant agnostic, which means that I don't know the answer to these questions but I also don't think anyone else knows the answer to them. So, you know, where does the genesis of the universe begin? Well, we describe it as the big bang but I don't know what started the big bang. I don't even really know what the big bang is and so when people want to go through and say, well, I believe that the universe started by God starting it, that's fine by me. It's not necessarily what I believe but I can't say that it's not true. Whether or not religion and science are always at loggerheads is not clear to me at all. There are many, many scientists who are deeply religious. It requires faith. It requires faith and stuff you do not know. I myself, I don't really have that faith. I am happy to accept that I just simply don't know, for example, how the universe started and if we ever do figure out what started the big bang, then you'll have to ask, well,
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ia prepared herself to rush out from behind her cover. The Sorcerer King was empty-handed now-- 涅娅准备从障碍物后面冲出去。现在的魔导王是空手—— “--Eh?” 「——咦？」 At some point, a jet-black halberd had ended up in the Sorcerer King’s hands. 不知何时，一把漆黑的斧枪被握在了魔导王手中。 Buser must have felt the same way as Neia. His eyes were as wide as saucers. 巴扎也是和涅娅相同的感想吧。他的眼睛瞪得溜圆。 “You didn’t incant a spell, how did you do it… And where did that sword you threw go to…” 「魔法也没有咏唱，是如何做到的……。还有你扔过来的大剑又去了哪里……」 “I simply cast a silent spell. Don’t worry about it… Alright, my subordinate taught me this, but I’m not very confident in my skills. I apologize in advance if I end up fumbling around. 「只是无咏唱化罢了。别介意。……好了，虽然我的部下有指导过我、但不是很有自信啊。大概会很蹩脚，就事先表示下歉意了」 The Sorcerer King readied his halberd. He radiated a strange sense of oppression. 魔导王架起了斧枪。散发出一股莫名的压迫感。 Warriors often favored weapons within the same broad classes. Swords, axes, maces, that sort of thing. 战士们大多会将自己的得意武器统一到同一系统里。剑、斧、锤之类的这种情况。 The Sorcerer King used momentum to swing his halberd. He attacked Buser’s feet -- which were hard to defend -- with a sweeping motion. This was a technique one could only perform with a hafted weapon. 魔导王利用离心力挥舞起斧枪。滑动握持的手，攻击向巴扎难以防御的脚部。这是只有握柄很长的长柄武器才有的技术。 Just as Buser brought his sword low to try and block the attack, the halberd suddenly jumped up. 在巴扎将剑放低打算挡下攻击的瞬间，斧枪又突然向上挑起。 It was a feint. 是假动作。 This was a move that would require considerable arm-strength to perform, but Buser raised his sword to block it in an instant. 这是有着相当臂力才能做到的技术，但巴扎瞬间用举起的剑挡了下来。 As expected, the Sorcerer King favored the sword, and he did not seem very skilled with the halberd. While he elegantly replicated textbook attacks, there seemed to be something strangely off about his attacks, and even Neia could spot it with her eyes. 果然魔导王擅长的武器是剑，斧枪并不是那么熟练的样子。虽然是漂亮地沿着武术门路的攻击，但动作里微妙的有些别扭，即使是涅娅也能用眼睛捕捉到其动作。 After blocking the halberd’s momentum, Buser leapt back. 接下了带着离心力的斧枪后，巴扎跃向后方 “「Sandstorm」!” 「沙尘岚！」 The sand particles from within the sword spread out like a wall, rushing towards the Sorcerer King. it had probably obscured the Sorcerer King’s vision completely. 从剑中掀起的沙子就像墙壁般扩散开来，袭向了魔导王。魔导王的视野恐怕被完全遮住了吧。 While she doubted if the Sorcerer King had eyeballs, having one’s vision blocked was a tremendous disadvantage. 虽然关于魔导王是否有眼球这点还有些疑问，但视野被完全遮住是压倒性的不利。 “「Brief Seal」!「Grand Power Strike」!” 「<素气捆封>！<刚腕豪击>！」 One was a martial art Neia did not understand, while the other was an advanced technique, a power strike that would inflict additional damage. After using both of them, Buser charged out, faster than before. 涅娅不了解的武技，再加上增加伤害量的豪击的上位武技，发动了两者的巴扎用比刚才快一倍的速度冲了出去。 Buser’s horn decorations glowed with a bizarre light, and he looked like a shooting star. 巴扎角上的装饰渗出了奇妙的光芒，看起来就像是流星一般。 “Yeeeeeeaaart!” 「嘎啊啊啊啊啊！」 “Hmph!” 「哼！」 The Sorcerer King caught the blow on his halberd-- 魔导王将这挥下的一击用斧枪接下—— “Haha!” 「哈哈！」 --And Buser laughed. ——巴扎发出了嘲笑。 The sound of metal being shredded rang forth. 金属被切削般的声音响起了。 Neia’s eyes went wide. 涅娅瞪大了眼睛。 “Could it be! A sunder attack!” 「难道说！武器破坏！」 Sunder attacks directly damaged a foe’s weapons, but the amount of damage done was greatly affected by the composition of both weapon and its damage potential. Buser’s martial arts were probably intended to strengthen these two attributes. 武器破坏会直接对武器造成伤害，但它的伤害会受到材质差别和武器持有的伤害量两个因素巨大影响。巴扎的两个武技就是为了强化这两个因素吧。 Neia began to feel anxious, but in the next moment, she froze as she saw Buser staring with wide eyes. 涅娅感到了焦躁，但下一瞬间，就因为察觉到巴扎那睁大双眼的表情而停下了动作。 “It’s unharmed!” 「居然毫无破损！」 Buser cried out in shock. 巴扎也发出了惊愕的叫声。 “What the hell is that weapon!?” 「什么啊、那个武器！」 As Buser scrambled back, his expression completely changed and with no intention of pressing the attack, the Sorcerer King spun his halberd, tracing a beautiful arc in the air. 面对没有追击神色大变地后退了的巴扎，魔导王转动起斧枪，在空中划出一道优美的弧线。 “... You do know I made this weapon with my magic, no? How could it be so easily broken?” 「……不是，这可是用我的魔法做出的武器哦？怎么可能那么简单就被破坏啊」 “But weapons made by magic are fragile, right?” 「魔法做出的武器都很脆弱的吧！」 “Oh, it seems you’ve had experience fighting opponents with summoned weapons, but it’s dangerous to be bound by such a fixed worldview, no? In other words, there might be opponents who can make weapons which you can’t break.” 「哦。似乎有过和召唤武器的对手战斗的经验，不过被固定观念禁锢可是很危险的哦？也就是说有时会有能创造出你无法破坏的武器的对手啊」 The Sorcerer King let go of his halberd. The halberd then vanished, like it was melting into the air. The same thing must have happened with the sword from just now. After that, the Sorcerer King made to grab something from the air, and this time he had a black sword in each of his hands. 魔导王将手从斧枪上放开。然后斧枪就像融入空气般消失了。大概和刚才的大剑是同样的原理吧。 接着魔导王做出像是在空气中抓住什么的动作，这回他的双手中各自出现了一把黑色的长剑。 “...Now then, what will you do? Don’t tell me that attack was your ace in the hole? Can you help me gain more experience?” 「……那么，接下来会做些什么呢？总不会说刚才这一击就是你的必胜之策吧？能再让我积累点经验吗？」 The Sorcerer King took a step forward, shortening the distance between them, 一步，魔导王缩短了距离。 “...If you’ve got any more trump cards, it’d be better if you hurried up and used them, no? I’m not kind enough to let a useless enemy live.” 「……要是有隐藏的杀招，快点用会更好哦？我还没有温柔到会让毫无用处的敌人活着」 “Ku, kuku! What are you saying, undead one! Indeed, I’m very impressed by how you managed to fully defend against my attack. Very well done. However, that wasn’t because you were focused on defense. I know you won’t get tired, so you feel that you can beat me if you grind me down!” 「呵、呵呵！说什么呢不死者！确实能完全防御住我的攻击很值得钦佩。真是漂亮。但，那不是因为你专注于防御了么。我是知道的哦，你不会疲劳。所以觉得只要消磨时间的话总会战胜我的吧」 He saw through it! （被看穿了！） Neia felt nervous again. Even she had noticed it. Buser, a better warrior than herself, could not have failed to noticed that. 涅娅感到了焦虑。就连自己也察觉到了。原本作为战士就比自己强大的巴扎不可能察觉不到。 “I see. So that was what you thought. Indeed, you would be correct to think so. But unfortunately, that’s not all.” 「原来如此。还有这种考虑啊。确实是正论。然而遗憾的是并非那样」 The SorcerDavid Ross and Mark Teixeira explain what it is going to take for the Cubs or Nationals to walk away with a victory in Thursday's decisive Game 5 in Washington. (1:30)
WASHINGTON -- The Chicago Cubs' defense of their championship gets its biggest test yet as their National League Division Series goes to a Game 5 on Thursday night. The narrative so far has been pitching, with Washington Nationals starter Stephen Strasburg throwing two gems, the latest while he was battling an illness ahead of Wednesday's Game 4.
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“They have been really good,” Cubs manager Joe Maddon said. “We have been really good.... We've just got to stay in our lane -- in other words, not chase [pitches]. But again, that's easier said than done.”
It might be easier without Strasburg on the mound. He has struck out 22 Cubs in two NLDS starts and helped reduce Chicago's batting average in the series to a paltry.159. With Max Scherzer available only out of the bullpen Thursday, the visitors might have an advantage. The Cubs' current ace, Kyle Hendricks, is on the mound with an extra day of rest and a beauty of a Game 1 performance to use as confidence.
“He’s not shy to it,” first baseman Anthony Rizzo said of Hendricks. “He’s no stranger to these situations. We have to score some runs for him. It’s that simple.”
After four strikeouts in the Cubs' Game 4 loss, Kris Bryant gets an immediate chance to redeem himself in Thursday's Game 5 at Washington. Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images
That last point by Rizzo is a big one. The Cubs have scored eight runs in the series' four games, and in a weird twist, over the course of their eight losses in the past two postseasons, they’ve been shut out five times, including Wednesday. When the Cubs get into strikeout mode, it can look ugly.
“We just have to keep grinding and have quality at-bats, and we’ll break through,” infielder/outfielder Ben Zobrist said. “We know it's win or go home.”
The reigning MVP is undoubtedly happy that there is another game in the series so quickly. Kris Bryant set a franchise record with four strikeouts in Game 4, as Strasburg made him chase his patented changeup. That has been Bryant’s toughest pitch in his three seasons in the big leagues. But that was Strasburg; nobody else among the Nationals is pitching at his level right now.
“As long as he’s not on the mound, we have a chance,” Cubs Game 4 starter Jake Arrieta said. “In fact, I like our chances.”
The Cubs said all along that they would rely on their experience to get them through any tough times. An elimination game on the road would qualify. They won Games 6 and 7 of the World Series last fall in Cleveland, so needing to pull off a Game 5 victory at Nationals Park is nothing new to this team.
“Just go out and have fun, but let’s come out with the win, too,” shortstop Addison Russell said.
Rizzo added: “It’s backs-against-the-wall time. We have to go to their place and do it.”
Relying on experience can help, but stringing some hits together wouldn’t be a bad thing, either. Or perhaps a few more free passes. The Nationals walked nine times in Game 4, giving them 16 for the series to the Cubs' 12. Walks are usually Chicago's specialty, but not so far. A change of approach at the plate combined with an ace on the mound is the hope for the Cubs. They know it, too.
“He pitched a great Game 1,” Zobrist said of Hendricks. “We need him to stop them again, and now we need to get the bats going.
“We like that pressure. We’ve had that pressure before. We look forward to it and look forward to coming out the victor.”
Repeating as World Series winners depends on it. There is no tomorrow.Gregory Lucero of Utah Against Police Brutality speaking at school board meeting
Salt Lake City, UT—A dozen community members rallied outside the Salt Lake City School Board meeting on Nov. 3, before taking their message inside for public comment. The protesters are demanding the removal of police from the Salt Lake City School District campuses and an end to racist discrimination.
Residents and parents are concerned after seeing video of the brutal police assault against an African American teen while sitting at her desk in a South Carolina high school. Not wanting to see a repeat in Salt Lake City, Utah Against Police Brutality called for an emergency action. School board member Michael Clara says there is a disproportionate number of police assigned to west side schools where Chicano, Latino, Pacific Islander, and African American students are the majority.
This past year, School Board President Heather Bennett called for police to monitor her fellow board member Michael Clara at meetings, claiming he was extreme on a phone call. Clara points to political disagreements and his web page challenging the school district’s leadership.
In another instance, Clara says the School Board violated Utah state law and its own policies by allowing Superintendent McKell Withers to reorganize the equality program and demote the African American administrator. In her place, Withers unilaterally appointed three highly paid white administrators.
Gregory Lucero of Utah Against Police Brutality led the protest with chants such as “Bennett, Bennett, can't you hear? We don't want your cops in here!” Protesters also chanted in solidarity with the South Carolina people, “Hey ho, hey ho, these racist cops have got to go.”
Adrian Romero of Stand for Queer Lives spoke about attending East High School “We faced constant racism. People were put into ESL (English as a Second Language) simply because they were Mexican, not because they needed it. I remember how we all were treated like criminals.”
Gregory Lucero finished the rally saying, “We will keep fighting as long as Salt Lake City School District continues to discriminate against oppressed nationality children. When Black and brown kids are under attack, what do we do?” The group responded, “Stand up fight back!”Learn something new every day:
Hillary Clinton and her staffers still have active State Department security clearances, meaning they still have access to classified intelligence, according to Fox News' Malia Zimmerman.
However, Clinton and her aides are in danger of losing that access now that the State Department has opened a "formal inquiry" into whether she and her team mishandled classified information when she served at the top spot at Foggy Bottom.
It's the latest development in a very long story involving Clinton and her use of an unauthorized private State Department email server.
It's unclear when this new inquiry by the State Department was first launched, but it seems to have come on the heels of former FBI Director James Comey's announcement in July 2016 that he'd recommend no charges be brought against Clinton for her ethically dubious use of a homebrew server.
Fox's Zimmerman outlined one possible consequence of the new inquiry, writing, "Depending on the outcome of the current State Department inquiry, Clinton and her aides could have their access to sensitive government documents terminated."
To be clear, it's not unusual for former senior officials to maintain some level of access to classified information, as national security attorney Bradley Moss explained Wednesday to LawNewz.com. This is done with the idea that former officials can be called on to advise on issues involving sensitive intelligence.
However, it may still strike some as odd that Clinton and her aides have maintained their clearance despite that Comey himself characterized her handling of classified State information as "extremely reckless." The State Department's own Inspector General even reported her private server was a serious violation of department policy.
"At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department's policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act," the IG's report said.
If the State Department revokes Clinton's clearance, she can appeal the decision. However, it seems unlikely it'll come to that, according to Moss.
"It would be unusual for this to happen for a senior official … but Clinton's behavior was unusual as well," he said.
A Clinton spokesman meanwhile downplayed news of the new inquiry, and suggested that going after the private server story is tantamount to beating a dead horse.
"Nothing's been more thoroughly dissected. It's over. Case closed. Literally," Nick Merrill told Fox.Yves Rossy and Vince Reffet, the two innovators behind the Jetman Dubai jetpack athlete team, have released an incredible video of their synchronized jetpack flight high above Dubai and the surrounding desert.
Rossy, a fearless professional pilot from Switzerland, is a leading innovator in the field of propelled human flight, having created his own custom jetpack after years of experimentation and customization. This flight represents the experience that he and his protege, Reffet, have gathered during years of practice.
The jetpack Rossy designed is the closest that mankind has comes to the jetpacks that we’ve all seen in sci-fi media like The Rocketeer. They need the assistance of another aircraft to take flight, but can gain altitude and sustain flight for anywhere from 6 to 13 minutes at speeds between 180 and 300 km/h.
More info: jetman.com | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter (h/t: laughingsquid)
See the full video:Here at Box Brew Kits, we’re big fans of Thrillist. I mean, who doesn’t enjoy a continuous flow of wacky lists like "10 "white trash" foods you need to give a second chance" or "16 surefire ways to infuriate a hotel staff?" A few weeks back, one article that stuck out to us listed 22 things a beer snob might say. Considering our lust for beer and distaste for snobs, we thought we’d give that article a deeper look.
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While the Thrillist article discussed how to talk like a beer snob--e.g. “I prefer cask-conditioned beers”--it didn’t actually get into what those things meant. In this post, we’re going to run through 8 of the snobbiest entries on that list, and provide you with some background on each of them so don't just know the beer snob talk, you’re able to walk it, too.
*Disclaimer: We don't actually condone beer snobbishness
1. “I’m really into big beers.”
What is a big beer? This generally refers to beers with an ABV or OG above a certain level. We’re talking high gravity. For reference, let’s say most beers hover around 5% ABV. While the big beer cutoff’s arbitrary, we’ve heard numbers like an ABV greater than 8% or an OG greater than 1.090. Beers in this category might include scotch ales or imperial stouts.
2. "This is a very sessionable ale."
What is a session beer? It refers to a beer with relatively low alcohol--typically 5% ABV or less--that you would characteristically drink for an extended period of time. This is the type of beer you’d sip on if you’re in the mood for some day drinking and lawn games, but aren’t exactly interested in falling into a drunken stupor before dinner starts cooking on the grill.
3. “My favorite beers start at 80 IBUs.”
What are IBUs and what is the significance of 80? When we think of IBUs, we think of hopheads. IBU is an acronym for International Bitterness Units. And, you guessed it, it's a measurement of the bitterness of beers, which comes from the hops used during the brewing process. When you get to 80 IBUs, you’re well into IPA and barleywine territory, as opposed to something on the other end of the spectrum like a lambic.
4. “That tastes way better on Nitro.”
What is a nitro beer? Lots of craft breweries are jumping on the nitro train. Nitro simply refers to the use of nitrogen in the carbonation process, rather than primarily carbon dioxide. This results in beers that not only look creamier, but also taste and feel that way. You may have heard of Left Hand’s Nitro Milk Stout--in this case we agree that it tastes way better on nitro!
5. “This is one of the highest-ranked beers in the world.”
Who ranks beers? There are several notable beer ranking publications--and of course, a lot of independent bloggers--but the sake of simplicity let’s talk about Beer Advocate and RateBeer. These sites aggregate user beer ratings, providing readers with a comprehensive and crowdsourced idea of a beer’s aroma, taste, and overall score. Currently, the highest ranked beer on Beer Advocate is The Alchemist’s Heady Topper (anyone going to Vermont soon?).
6. “This beer is infinitely quaffable.”
What does quaffable mean? Please refrain from using this word in casual conversation, but if you must, know that it refers to a beer’s drinkability. This is separate from a beer being “sessionable,” which is focused on ABV. Rather, quaffable speaks to whether or not you can easily drink more than one of the same beer in one sitting. A good comparison may be an IPA (generally easy to drink in quantity) versus a porter.
7. “I actually prefer this beer warm.”
Why would you drink a warm beer? Ever wonder why craft beers don’t have a set of mountains that turn blue when they get to a certain cold temperature? That’s because good beers aren’t meant to be drank at extremely cold temperatures that numb the taste buds...because they’re good beers. Some beers actually benefit from sitting out for a bit, warming up slightly above the normal 40 °F fridge temperature. Others, like cask ales, are served even closer to room temperature.
8. “This has a surprisingly pleasant mouthfeel.”
What does mouthfeel mean? Forget about the taste of the beer--how does it feel inside of your mouth. It’s not rocket science, but that’s mouthfeel. What influences mouthfeel are things like carbonation and creaminess.Denver Broncos vs. Miami Dolphins Results
The following is a list of all regular season and postseason games played between the Denver Broncos and Miami Dolphins. The two teams have met each other 19 times (including 1 postseason game), with the Denver Broncos winning 6 games and the Miami Dolphins winning 12 games. They have also tied 1 time.
Miami Dolphins lead series 12-6-1
Date Visitor Home Result Box Score 12/03/2017 12/03/17 Denver Broncos DEN 9 @ Miami Dolphins MIA 35 L Box 11/23/2014 11/23/14 Miami Dolphins MIA 36 @ Denver Broncos DEN 39 W Box 10/23/2011 10/23/11 Denver Broncos DEN 18 @ Miami Dolphins MIA 15 W/OT Box 11/02/2008 11/02/08 Miami Dolphins MIA 26 @ Denver Broncos DEN 17 L Box 09/11/2005 09/11/05 Denver Broncos DEN 10 @ Miami Dolphins MIA 34 L Box 12/12/2004 12/12/04 Miami Dolphins MIA 17 @ Denver Broncos DEN 20 W Box 10/13/2002 10/13/02 Miami Dolphins MIA 24 @ Denver Broncos DEN 22 L Box 12/02/2001 12/02/01 Denver Broncos DEN 10 @ Miami Dolphins MIA 21 L Box 09/13/1999 09/13/99 Miami Dolphins MIA 38 @ Denver Broncos DEN 21 L Box 1998 AFC Divisional Playoff Game 01/09/1999 01/09/99 Miami Dolphins MIA 3 @ Denver Broncos DEN 38 W Box 12/21/1998 12/21/98 Denver Broncos DEN 21 @ Miami Dolphins MIA 31 L Box 09/29/1985 09/29/85 Miami Dolphins MIA 30 @ Denver Broncos DEN 26 L Box 12/20/1975 12/20/75 Denver Broncos DEN 13 @ Miami Dolphins MIA 14 L 09/19/1971 09/19/71 Miami Dolphins MIA 10 @ Denver Broncos DEN 10 T 12/07/1969 12/07/69 Denver Broncos DEN 24 @ Miami Dolphins MIA 27 L 10/27/1968 10/27/68 Miami Dolphins MIA 14 @ Denver Broncos DEN 21 W 09/17/1967 09/17/67 Denver Broncos DEN 21 @ Miami Dolphins MIA 35 L 12/04/1966 12/04/66 Miami Dolphins MIA 7 @ Denver Broncos DEN 17 W 10/16/1966 10/16/66 Denver Broncos DEN 7 @ Miami Dolphins MIA 24 L Date Visitor Home Result Box Score 12/03/2017 12/03/17 Denver Broncos DEN 9 @ Miami Dolphins MIA 35 L Box 11/23/2014 11/23/14 Miami Dolphins MIA 36 @ Denver Broncos DEN 39 W Box 10/23/2011 10/23/11 Denver Broncos DEN 18 @ Miami Dolphins MIA 15 W/OT Box 11/02/2008 11/02/08 Miami Dolphins MIA 26 @ Denver Broncos DEN 17 L Box 09/11/2005 09/11/05 Denver Broncos DEN 10 @ Miami Dolphins MIA 34 L Box 12/12/2004 12/12/04 Miami Dolphins MIA 17 @ Denver Broncos DEN 20 W Box 10/13/2002 10/13/02 Miami Dolphins MIA 24 @ Denver Broncos DEN 22 L Box 12/02/2001 12/02/01 Denver Broncos DEN 10 @ Miami Dolphins MIA 21 L Box 09/13/1999 09/13/99 Miami Dolphins MIA 38 @ Denver Broncos DEN 21 L Box 01/09/1999 01/09/99 * Miami Dolphins MIA 3 @ Denver Broncos DEN 38 W Box 12/21/1998 12/21/98 Denver Broncos DEN 21 @ Miami Dolphins MIA 31 L Box 09/29/1985 09/29/85 Miami Dolphins MIA 30 @ Denver Broncos DEN 26 L Box 12/20/1975 12/20/75 Denver Broncos DEN 13 @ Miami Dolphins MIA 14 L 09/19/1971 09/19/71 Miami Dolphins MIA 10 @ Denver Broncos DEN 10 T 12/07/1969 12/07/69 Denver Broncos DEN 24 @ Miami Dolphins MIA 27 L 10/27/1968 10/27/68 Miami Dolphins MIA 14 @ Denver Broncos DEN 21 W 09/17/1967 09/17/67 Denver Broncos DEN 21 @ Miami Dolphins MIA 35 L 12/04/1966 12/04/66 Miami Dolphins MIA 7 @ Denver Broncos DEN 17 W 10/16/1966 10/16/66 Denver Broncos DEN 7 @ Miami Dolphins MIA 24 L * AFC Divisional Playoff Game
* AFC Divisional Playoff GameJohnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell have donated their fee for completing Heath Ledger's final film role to the late star's daughter.
The acting trio agreed to play versions of Ledger's character Tim in The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus following his death in January (08).
And they decided to donate their fees to two-year-old Matilda - Ledger's daughter with actress Michelle Williams - because the star left an old will which did not include the little girl.
Director Terry Gilliam has praised the actors for their generosity, saying: "They didn't take money - it goes to Heath's daughter.
"That's extraordinary! And wonderful... and when you're part of that, you think, 'Ah, this is maybe why I went into the movies in the beginning. I thought it would be full of wonderful people.' And we've got a movie full of wonderful people who did extraordinary things to help."Chris Msando was hired to help make sure Kenya's election went off without a hitch. His body was found one week before the vote. Now his family, his friends, and people across Kenya are asking: Who wanted him dead?
NAIROBI — Early in the morning on July 31, eight days before a highly contested election that would plunge the country into a crisis unlike any it had seen before, the man responsible for designing the electronic system to ensure a fair and accurate vote was found brutally murdered. Authorities found the body of Chris Msando, the deputy IT manager of Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), on the side of the road in a town called Kikuyu, about 12 miles northwest of Nairobi. Police also found the body of a 21-year-old woman next to him; both of their clothes had been removed. Early reports indicated that Msando’s arm had been chopped off, but a pathologist later clarified that he had suffered several cuts to his arm and other signs of torture. Officials said the cause for his death was strangulation. Kenya’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations continues the probe into his killing. Nearly a month after Msando’s murder and the election that saw President Uhuru Kenyatta reelected, sparking protests around the country, its Supreme Court nullified the result, citing irregularities. Kenyans will head back to the polls on Oct. 26. But over it all hangs the shadow of Msando. Some independent journalists and politicians from the opposition party say there is a deliberate attempt to stall his murder investigation. Others have gone so far as to suggest that Msando’s death was carried out by the government because the electronic voting system he was in charge of posed a threat to a ruling party that wanted to rig the elections. In his first in-depth interview since Msando’s death, his older brother, Peter Msando, voiced skepticism over details surrounding his brother’s killing. “His death was a bit strange and we still don’t know the motive behind his killing. This is why we want to bring it to the outside world’s attention,” Peter told BuzzFeed News.
Tobin Jones / AFP / Getty Images, Fredrik Lerneryd / AFP / Getty Images An election official (left) registers a voter at a polling station in Mombasa. Voting officials (right) count ballots at a polling station in Kisumu.
Peter wanted to be excited for his brother when Chris announced in November 2016 that the election commission had offered him a job nine months before voting day. As the deputy IT manager, Chris led the implementation of a new system that used biometric identification to prevent people from voting more than once, provided polling updates every three hours, and selected the strongest wireless network through which the results would be sent. The goal was to ensure an efficient and transparent election process for the millions of Kenyans who would take to the polls the following summer. But Peter also had concerns about his brother’s new job. President Kenyatta had appointed Wafula Chebukati as the new chairman of the IEBC. Kenyatta’s pick surprised some, given that other candidates for the position performed better than Chebukati during the selection process, raising questions about whether or not his appointment signaled special treatment from the president. Peter remembers asking Chris if he was worried about working for what he believed was a controversial organization. “But Chris said, ‘No, let me go work there,’” and accepted the job enthusiastically. About a month into the new job, Chris told his family he had begun to receive mysterious and threatening messages. “As he left a place, he would get a text from an unfamiliar number indicating that they knew exactly where he was, and that they were watching him,” Peter said. “Eventually, his wife began to receive the texts too.” Peter said Chris reported the threats to the police and went about his business.
“As he left a place, he would get a text from an unfamiliar number indicating that they knew exactly where he was, and that they were watching him.”
Then, on July 28, Chris went missing, shortly after appearing on a local TV network to discuss the elections. After several of his calls went unanswered, Peter reached out to Chris’s wife, Eve. They took turns reassuring each other that Chris had probably just turned off his phone because it was Friday and he wanted to disconnect from the furor of election season. Eve Msando declined to be interviewed for this story. But after the family didn’t hear from him for two days, Peter, Eve, and a few other relatives went to the police to report him missing. Then they asked Chebukati to put out a statement on behalf of the electoral commission that Chris had disappeared, and that the organization was working with police to find him. Feeling confident that authorities would locate him, Peter and his extended family left Chebukati’s office and went home. Around 1 a.m. the next day, he received a WhatsApp message from a cousin: It was a photo of Chris’s car on the side of the road in Nairobi. After confirming that the car did in fact belong to Chris, Peter and Eve immediately called the divisional criminal investigations officer (who oversees the department that deals with homicide cases). He dispatched police to the scene. “Later that morning, we were called to Nairobi Area Police. At that point, in my heart, I knew: This guy had been killed,” Peter said. His younger brother had been strangled to death, and investigators said there were signs of torture. “We buried him two weeks later.”
Courtesy of Msando Family Chris Msando
Chris Msando’s murder made international headlines, but quickly faded into the background as the Aug. 8 vote approached. In the months leading up to Kenya’s elections, the tight race between Kenyatta, the incumbent, and longtime opposition leader Raila Odinga had raised concerns over whether the country would see a repeat of the horrific postelection violence that plagued the country in 2007. Leading international organizations, including The Carter Center and the European Union, poured more than $24 million into a United Nations Development Fund project to support a fair election. That money, combined with the estimated $1 billion that Kenya’s National Treasury expected to spend on the electoral commission and security, led some people to project that it would be the most expensive election in the world. The day of the vote itself went relatively smoothly, save for a few technical glitches that included biometric systems that did not recognize people’s fingerprints and late starts at some polling stations. Local and international media lauded the country for transcending its bloody past even before the polls had closed. But tension began to mount when, later that night, Odinga declared ahead of the official results that hackers had used Msando’s identity to tamper with the voter transmission technology, compromising the elections. International observers, including former US secretary of state John Kerry, quickly shut down his claims. Kenyatta went on to win reelection by nearly 1.4 million votes. Odinga immediately submitted a petition to the Supreme Court challenging the results. On Sept. 1, the six-member bench decided in a 4–2 vote that the presidential elections had not been conducted in accordance with the constitution due to irregularities and illegalities in the vote-tallying and vote-transmission processes, and effectively nullified the results. The court said the election commission had also refused previous court orders to turn over voter information. “The IEBC’s IT system was infiltrated and compromised and the data therein interfered with, or IEBC’s officials themselves interfered with the data or simply refused to accept that it had bungled the whole transmission system and
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to rely not on coercive power but merely the impressive spectacle of what Hamilton called “judgment.”
We’ve had plenty of experience to show us how drastically Hamilton underestimated the threat of an unfettered judiciary. It is worth reminding ourselves that several of his contemporaries were not so starry eyed about the Court. One of the anti-Federalists, for example, warned that the Constitution did not provide an effective mechanism for reining in judicial arrogance.
There is no power above them, to control any of their decisions. There is no authority that can remove them, and they cannot be controlled by the laws of the legislature. In short, they are independent of the people, of the legislature, and of every power under heaven. Men placed in this situation will generally soon feel themselves independent of heaven itself.
That, I submit, is pretty much where we are with judges like Roger Gregory. The harm such judicial supremacists do goes far beyond their particular rulings. It erodes the one thing that guarantees the place of the judiciary in a free society: widespread trust in the legitimacy, which is to say, the impartiality of its operation. The black robes are a symbol of that trust and the majesty that imbues it. The Fourth Circuit has just violated that trust in the most brutal and cavalier fashion, threatening to transform those somber black robes from an emblem of high office into costume worn by impersonators.
To this extent, Hamilton was right: in our society the respect of the judiciary depends not on its deployment of coercion but prestige. As Glenn Reynolds observed in commenting on this deeply misguided ruling by the Fourth Circuit, “The judiciary’s prestige-well is going to dry up pretty fast at this rate.” And then?
Content created by The Center for American Greatness, Inc is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected]Getty Images Gwyneth Paltrow regularly blogs advice at GOOP.
Thanks to technological advancement, a.k.a. the Internet, there are myriad reliable sources from which you can draw scientific and medical facts. Unsurprisingly, celebrity interviews aren’t among them.
If you read a magazine, logged on to Twitter or turned on a television at all in 2011, you most certainly heard a snippet of pseudoscience from a recognizable personality such as shoe designer Christian Louboutin, actress Gwyneth Paltrow, Jersey Shore’s Snooki or singer Suzi Quatro. While it’s great that these figures have interests beyond their chosen fields, it’s worth noting that most of the time, they don’t really have a clue what they’re talking about. So the charity Sense About Science has rounded up 2011’s most dubious examples of celebrity science.
(MORE: Jenny McCarthy, Vaccine Expert? A Quarter of Parents Trust Celebrities)
Case in point: Snooki recently said she hated going to the beach because of the ocean’s saltiness, which was due to all the “whale sperm” in the water. This informational tidbit is not only gross but also quite obviously incorrect. And then there’s Louboutin’s claim that wearing high heels is an erotic adventure for some women, as the encased foot is in a similar position to a woman’s foot during orgasm. Anyone who’s worn a high heel will likely find this claim suspect, and so they should. Sexual-medicine consultant Kevan Wylie told Reuters that a “woman’s foot may be in this position during orgasm, but that does not mean that putting her foot into this position under other circumstances will result in orgasm.”
But what about the claims that aren’t so apparently false? Take the assertion that Quatro made to the Daily Mail newspaper last year that “all illnesses start in the colon” and that by doing daily colon cleanses, the singer-songwriter had fewer sore throats. (This is false; not all ailments begin in the colon. Sore throats don’t, for example.) Or Paltrow’s recommendations on her lifestyle blog of detoxes: “I have gooped about Dr Alejandro Junger’s Clean programme before because it gave me such spectacular results; it is really just the thing if you are in need of a good detox – wanting some mental clarity and to drop a few pounds.” (In fact, doctors have noted that detox programs are largely pointless and possibly even harmful.)
While a good rule of thumb could be to double-check any scientific or medical claims made by entertainers, sometimes these so-called facts are put forward by more prestigious figures. Anyone remember GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann’s claim that the HPV vaccine was to blame for a young girl becoming “mentally retarded” in Florida? The claim was unproven, but it resonated enough that some worry the false information could affect health policy for years to come.
“It’s tempting to dismiss celebrity comments on science and health, but their views travel far and wide, and once uttered, a celebrity cancer-prevention idea or environmental claim is hard to reverse,” the managing director for Sense About Science, Tracey Brown, told Reuters. “At a time when celebrities dominate the public realm, the pressure for sound science and evidence must keep pace.”
So the next time you find yourself repeating medical tips from reality stars or career politicians, remind yourself that asking a doctor — or even conducting five minutes of Google searching — could shed a more reliable light on the problem.
MORE: Michele Bachmann’s Government InjectionCAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA is looking for at least two U.S. firms to design and build space taxis to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station, program managers said on Tuesday.
NASA plans to invest $300 million to $500 million in each of the firms selected under new 21-month partnership agreements, Ed Mango, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew program, said at an industry briefing at the Kennedy Space Center prior to the release of a solicitation on Tuesday.
The new program aims to build upon previous NASA investments in companies designing commercial passenger spaceships.
With the retirement of the U.S. space shuttles last year, Russia has a monopoly on flying crews to the station, a $100 billion orbiting laboratory for medical, materials science and other research.
China, the only other country that has flown people in orbit, is not a partner in the project.
Russia charges NASA about $60 million per person for rides to the station, which flies about 240 miles above Earth and is staffed by rotating crews of six astronauts from the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada.
Winning firms would have until May 2014 to complete their integrated designs, with the intention, if funding allows, to test fly their spaceships in orbit by the middle of the decade, Mango said.
Goals of the demonstration flight include reaching an altitude of at least 230 miles, maneuvering in space and staying in orbit for at least three days, Mango said.
The test ships should be capable of carrying at least four people, he added.
Since 2010, NASA has invested a total of $365.5 million in private companies, including $130.9 million in Boeing, $125.6 million in Sierra Nevada Corp and $75 million in Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX.
Boeing is developing a capsule, called the CST-100, which would fly on an Atlas 5 rocket. SpaceX, already selected by NASA to fly cargo to the station, plans to upgrade its Dragon freighter and Falcon 9 rocket to fly crew as well.
Sierra Nevada is developing a winged vehicle called the Dream Chaser that resembles a miniature space shuttle. Like Boeing’s spaceship, it too would launch aboard Atlas 5 rockets, which are manufactured and sold by United Launch Alliance, a Boeing-Lockheed Martin partnership.
NASA has $406 million to spend on commercial crew programs for the year that began October 1. Mango said about 75 percent of that money is available for the next phase of the program, with awards expected in July or August.
Because of future funding uncertainties, NASA is asking its potential partners to propose how they would proceed with flat funding of $400 million a year after 2014, as well as how much they would need to get to a flight demonstration.
“If we have multiple partners, we think the most we might be able to give them in the long term might be something along the lines of $400 million per partner,” Mango said.
NASA hopes to be able to fly its astronauts on commercial carriers by about 2017.One in twelve trans people is murdered in their lifetime–one in eight trans women of color.
You’ve heard this statistic, right? It comes up in just about any argument in which trans people want to talk about their experience of oppression. It’s a horrifying statistic.
It’s also completely, demonstrably untrue–and its propagation has pernicious racist, sexist, and classist effects. Strap yourselves in, kiddos, ’cause we’re going on a ride to Statisticsville, population YOU.
According to the best estimates available from trans* sources about the prevalence of transgenderism in the United States, approximately.3 percent of Americans identify as transgender. That gives us a figure of just barely under a million trans people out of the 313 million folks living in the U.S. today. Now, out of that number, some percentage of these people will be out. Some of them are still babies, so they’re only going to come out later. Some of them may never come out due to oppression, so let’s say that of this million, only half of them ever actually show that they’re trans in a way that would potentially lead to a hate crime.
That’d leave us with half a million trans people who would be out enough for trans hatred to manifest in terrible ways. For the 1 in 12 statistic to be accurate, 41,667 of that half million would be murdered. If the full million were out, the number is, of course, twice that high–83,333.
Now, we do have statistics about how many trans people have actually been murdered, but under-reporting is a concern. The National Transgender Day of Remembrance has documented just 15 cases of trans people being murdered in the United States last year. However, many people believe that most of the murders of transgender people may be misreported as violence against gay or lesbian people. According to our best statistics, 30 people were murdered because of their sexual orientation or identity last year.
Now, let’s assume that every one of those murders was of a trans person, and that furthermore, the actual rate is double due to underreporting–that sixty trans people are killed every year, just for being trans, out of the 500,000 out trans people in the United States. That’s an annual rate of 12 per 100,000. Even using these statistics that have been weighted heavily toward indicating a higher murder rate, it would take an out trans lifespan of about 700 years for the 1 in 12 rate to be true. We’re talking about an exaggeration of the statistics that, in the very least, represents trans activists and their allies blindly quoting a statistic that is overestimating the actual murder rate by ten times. Even with the most generous readings possible of available statistics, the maximum chance a trans person has of being murdered in the United States is less than 1 in 100.
To put it another way, let’s assume that every out trans person has an average of 65 years in which they are out enough to risk violence for their identity (which is, again, weighted in favor of the trans* people and their allies–if we assumed a significantly shorter out time, the rate would need to be significantly higher per year). This would require that in an average of 641 murders of trans people would have to occur–that in fact, in a year like 2011, in which 12,664 murders occurred according to the FBI, one in every 19 murders would be of a trans person.
Let’s talk about another group in America: black males. Black males in the United States have a lifespan of 70.8 years. Recent crime statistics show that nearly half of murder victims–5416 in 2011–were black males. With around 19 million black males in the United States, this means that 1 in 3500 black males in the United States will be murdered this year alone, if we stay on par with 2011. Over a lifespan of 70.8 years, this would mean that black males born today, assuming murder numbers and population stayed constant, have a…carry the 1…let’s see here.
Oh yes, about a 1 in 49 chance of being murdered in the United States. Over twice the rate that trans people are murdered.
When trans activists claim that they’re being murdered at a rate of 1 in 12, they’re trying to claim the gold medal in the Oppression Olympics just by making up their own statistics. In so doing, they’re leapfrogging their own oppression over groups of people whose murder rates are actually substantially higher than theirs. For example, black women, while not murdered at the same rates as black men, are still significantly more likely to be murdered in their lifetimes than trans women. Prostitutes, as a class, are significantly more likely to be murdered than trans women, when we’re using statistics that have any basis in reality.
But by using this 1 in 12 figure, what trans activists do is proclaim that they are being oppressed all out of proportion with other groups. It’s a statistic meant to be alarming, meant to make people think that trans oppression is especially bad, that it is much, much worse than oppression of many other oppressed classes. These made-up statistics, so easily debunked, should be something people are ashamed to repeat–except that they’re not. You can see this statistic all over the internet, and every time it’s used, remind yourself that you’re seeing activists exploiting murders and making up hundreds of crimes that never happened just so that they can have immediate attention paid to their oppression, rather than the oppression of others being murdered at higher actual rates.
AdvertisementsThe Superfinal of the premier computer chess event TCEC is currently going on. The two contenders are Komodo and Houdini, each having 3 titles in the history of TCEC. Now they are facing each other for the first time in a direct match.
The authors of the two programs shared their thoughts in a 30 min interview with TCEC. The following is a reconstructed transcript of a Skype conference call held November 21, 2017 between Nelson Hernandez of TCEC, Robert Houdart (developer of Houdini), Mark Lefler (programmer of Komodo) and GM Larry Kaufman (developer of Komodo).
Official website / Replay games / Twitch TV channel
Nelson: One thing I wanted to clear up was whether you had ever seen each other before this call?
Robert: Well, not directly. Of course, I have seen pictures of Mark and Larry, but I haven’t spoken to them live.
Nelson: Well, in that case this is indeed an historic occasion. Gentlemen, my first question is the most obvious and what everyone wants to know. Who is going to win the Superfinal?
[awkward silence, bemused expressions, shrugs, chuckles]
Robert: Can we toss a coin for that?
Mark: For a question like that the answer is ‘yes’. [head shaking no, hands indicating ‘I don’t know’]
Nelson: I was hoping we would see a scene similar to the Liston-Clay fight in 1964 where the future Muhammad Ali stated that he was “The Greatest”. But I guess that was not to be. My next question is what you thought of the first two stages. Did you learn anything? Did anything surprise you?
Robert: Yes, well, for me one of the things I learned was in the match between Komodo and Houdini which Komodo won. It was a very surprising position where for several moves Komodo saw the win, a very clear win, and Houdini was blind, completely blind, so that was a very interesting position. I haven’t yet had time to analyze it but I certainly will because there is something I can certainly learn from that particular position.
And the other thing we learned is that that the top programs, which are Stockfish, Komodo and Houdini, are very close in strength. We knew that before the event, but the first two stages have confirmed that. It was very exciting right to the end of the Stage 2, to see which engine would get into the Superfinal and which of the three would get eliminated. So that was very exciting to see.
Mark: Yeah, only half a point difference, right? Stockfish only barely didn’t make it. Pretty tough.
Nelson: Yes, just one more win in Stage 2 and it would have finished first. Larry, do you have anything to add?
Larry: One thing I suspect as a reason that Stockfish didn’t make the final was because both Komodo and Houdini have a fairly strong form of contempt that helps us beat up on the weaker engines, and Stockfish doesn’t do that, and I imagine that cost them at least a half-point they needed.
Robert: [grinning] I was hoping we could do this conversation without mentioning contempt but that failed already after two minutes. It’s one of the most popular topics on the chat that is on the TCEC web site.
Nelson: Oh, it’s true, everyone looks for some way to make sense of results, to attribute the whole reason for an outcome to one thing. As we speak Game #6 of the Superfinal is in progress and it looks like Houdini might have a 4-2 score, which is an excellent start. Do you have any early impressions or surprises?
Robert: It’s looking good, yeah. But that’s just the throw of the dice. You can start well or you can start badly. It might have been the opposite. Komodo nearly won the second game [Game #2 replay]; it had a two pawn advantage and nearly converted the position. So it might have been 3.5-2.5 for Komodo and as it happens it is probably going to be 4-2 for Houdini. But that could change in four games’ time; we could see the opposite result and we could be back to level in the match.
Larry: Well, I noticed in the two games that were played without book in both cases for quite a number of moves black played exactly the lines that I have often played in tournaments myself, so it was for both colors, not just Komodo that did it, it was also when Houdini was black. People might say I was feeding my own moves to Houdini.
Robert: [laughs] True. That is one of the surprising things about the modern top engines, that they can play really good openings right from the start. You can start from the starting position and get a really good variation of a really good opening played by the engines. It’s not like 20 years ago where engines would play really weird openings and play really weird developing moves. That is no longer the case.
Larry: We have been seeing Komodo on its own, without a book, play the Najdorf Sicilian, which of course many people would say might be the best opening in chess for both sides.
Nelson: Mark, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask. Clearly, Larry is a grandmaster so most of the ideas have to come from him, but you’re the programmer, is that right?
Mark: Yeah, I do the programming. We both have ideas, but whenever we come up with, say, an evaluation feature it is always Larry that comes up with the initial numbers to try, and we don’t have to tune them all that much. It seems to work fairly well if the idea is going to work.
It’s easier for me to come up with very simplistic ideas, so I can suggest a few things, but Larry is really the expert. He’s a numbers guy, and he’s also been doing this since the 1960s.
Nelson: That leads me into my next question, which is when you started chess programming and what motivated you to make this your avocation?
Larry: Well, in my case when I was a student at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] back in the 1960s. They were developing a chess program, a guy named [Richard D.] Greenblatt, was developing this program called Mac Hack, which was the first chess program to be good enough to actually compete in human tournaments. So they hired me as the chess guy for the project. I wrote the opening book, I played test games where I had to give a queen handicap. Things have changed a bit. [chuckles] And yeah, I was pretty well involved with it and that’s how I got into computer chess and Mac Hack got rated at about 1540, I think, which doesn’t sound like much now but at that time was vastly better than any other computer could have done.
Nelson: So you have been involved in computer chess for fifty or nearly fifty years?
Larry: Yeah, but I wasn’t involved continuously the whole time. But, yeah.
Nelson: Wow. How about you, Mark?
Mark: Well, I have always been interested in games and things like that. I remember going to a university library when I was in high school to read some books about computer chess that had been published throughout the years. I read everything from David Levy [ICGA] and a lot of compendiums of things for years and years. And I wrote a chess program initially in BASIC when I was in college, on an Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P, which was a 6502 machine that I could afford–the Apple was too expensive.
Since then it has been off and on. Another thing I work on is Zillions of Games, a universal game-playing program. You can create a set of rules of how the pieces move, and the board topology, and it creates an evaluation and search function from there and you can immediately play it as a game. Say you want to play chess but you want to checkmate the queen—just a couple of line changes and you’re done.
Nelson: Robert?
Robert: Well, I like chess and I like programming, and I’ve been doing that since I was a teenager, 14 or 15 years, so it was in the 1980s, so I’ve been doing this for over thirty years now. So it’s a logical step; I’ve always been interested in chess engines. The first engine I looked at was in 1984 or 1985. It was called Psion Chess. It was on a ZX81, a small computer with one kilobyte of memory. And there was already a pretty decent chess program on it, and so I decompiled it and took a look at it, because at the time using a computer was programming, actually; there were no programs unless you made them yourself. And so I had a look at that program and that was the start. Since then I’ve been as well playing chess as programming, and programming chess engines. It’s a kind of virus that gets onto you and that never releases you.
Nelson: Let me ask you something that might constitute a trade secret. I am sure you watch each other’s programs in action and detect things that casual observers might never notice or recognize. What quality of your program do you think may be superior to your opponent in the Superfinal?
Mark: I’ll let Larry take this one.
Larry: Well, okay. Basically, we have much more comparison with Stockfish because Stockfish is open source so we can easily compare our ideas and see what works better or worse. I don’t really know the inside workings of Robert’s program, but what I can tell you is that my belief is that Komodo is better in most things than Stockfish. But there is something holding us back that has to do with search depth. I don’t—we’ve been trying to figure it out for years, I don’t know what it is, but there is some reason we are not able to get the same search depth as Stockfish even if we tried to copy all their algorithms. We’ve tried experiments where we’ve tried to make Komodo act like Stockfish but it doesn’t work, and I don’t know why, but I feel that if we ever figure that out we’ll just be clearly #1. But almost every time we tried any idea from Stockfish in Komodo, nine times out of ten it makes Komodo weaker. I feel we’re doing most things better, but obviously not everything, or else we’d be stronger. I can’t say as much about Houdini because we don’t spend so much time comparing Houdini since we don’t know what’s going on with Houdini.
Robert: Ummm… let me think. I think the feature in which Houdini is better than both Komodo and Stockfish, I think, is mobility. It is piece mobility. Might be surprising, but I think the piece mobility is something which is different in Houdini than in other programs. We have some special handling of it and it results in a bit more aggressive chess actually, because you can see that when you look at the programs playing. You see that Houdini is a slightly more aggressive, tends to keep queens on the board, for instance, and I didn’t program anything particular for that, but it’s just the result of the rest of the program. It happens that because of that special mobility we can create a bit more…contempt-like…if I can again use that word, contempt-like behavior without actually having contempt. Behavior that favors keeping queens on the board, favors keeping pieces on the board, and favors aggressive play that tries to win the game. So that, I think, is one of the bigger differences between Houdini and the other programs.
Nelson: The next question may seem a bit far-fetched but I have to ask. You are all aware how society is evolving into a kind of technocratic meritocracy. You see that a lot nowadays in California, for example. It seems to me that people like yourselves, who create genuinely world-class products, are the cognitive rock stars of this age. What I am asking is how much longer can it be before people with your rare talents are on the cover of the Rolling Stone and you have an agent, an entourage and groupies?
[Larry grins, Robert chuckles, Mark makes funny faces]
Robert: It is true that, in a way, chess is still rather prestigious in a very special way. Everybody knows chess, even people who don’t actually play it, they know chess. Chess games are very often used in movies, even if the games they choose are rather bizarre—
Nelson: Yes, always with the black square in the upper left corner or the king and queen on the wrong squares.
Robert: the boldest checkmate that a super-genius player doesn’t see…but otherwise I don’t really think that we, the chess developers, will ever feature on the Rolling Stone. I really doubt that. I mean, really.
Nelson: Let’s turn for a moment to human chess. Did you all see the recent interview with world chess champion Magnus Carlsen in Germany, where one of the leading topics of discussion was computer chess?
[Robert nods, Larry and Mark have not seen it]
In case you viewers didn’t see it, Magnus said that chess programs are stronger than human beings because of their obviously superior calculation ability, but oftentimes programs make moves that give evidence that they are clueless because their algorithms which stand in for human judgment are deficient. I think none of us would disagree with that. Am I right?
Robert: Uh-huh. Well, less and less, to be honest. Ten years ago what Carlsen said was obviously true, but today it is becoming less clear whether that is still the case.
Nelson: Okay. Then Magnus went on to say something interesting that made all of us in TCEC smile a bit. He was asked if he studied games played between chess engines. He said no. He said games played between chess engines were rubbish and that finding useful ideas within them was like finding a needle in a haystack. None of you match his skill level but you are all relatively good chess players. What do you think? Are engine games rubbish?
Larry: I think what he means is that they aren’t terribly useful for the purpose of coming up with ideas for a human to use against another human. Doesn’t mean that the games aren’t incredibly high-quality. They are too subtle I guess is the point. The reason for the moves are usually nothing that is directly usable by a human player.
Nelson: Robert?
Robert: Yep. I think that is the right interpretation. But the first thing to say is: Magnus doesn’t really like chess engines. [chuckles] He is not a big fan of chess engines.
Nelson: Yeah, I got that. He seemed really uncomfortable in that interview.
Robert: Yeah… and so it’s clear that from his point of view he can’t gain a lot by studying games played by chess engines because they are at a too-high level, actually. I think they are—in terms of precision of the moves, they are probably like 300 or 400 Elo above him and so it is very difficult for him to gain some—
[Internet transmission garbled the rest of his answer, and for rest of transmission all audio has a pronounced echo]
Nelson: Robert, your answer broke up for several seconds. Could you repeat the last 15 seconds or so of your answer?
Robert: That’s fine. I think it is more important for Carlsen to focus on his own methods for finding new ideas rather than relying on chess engines to help him achieve success against human opponents.
Nelson: I know I am not the subject of this interview but I think I should weigh in on this question myself. Like you say, I think he’s right from the perspective of a human player. But I think if you look at a chess game as nothing more than a sequence of positions which contain data points, and you collect a lot of these data points, a human might have a statistical basis for exploring new ideas.
I have one final question which you are all uniquely qualified to talk about. What changes do you foresee coming to computer chess in the next five years and what ramifications might they have? Mark, you first.
Mark: I think there is a lot that can still be done in terms of data mining. Taking a game and trying to extract information suggesting evaluation terms or pruning ideas or extensions, things like that. They have already started doing that.
We’re also really interested in Monte Carlo. I mean, what do you do when you now have a 44-core server? What is it going to be next year? At some point more cores don’t help very much. There is a website by Andreas Strangmuller who has done a lot of experiments. We have gone one to two, two to four, up to 32 processors, Stockfish and Komodo might gain 15 to 20 Elo or something going from 16 to 32, Stockfish even less. What do you do with all this hardware to use it more effectively? In Monte Carlo [garbled] statistics that might increase your winning chances. I think those are things you could work on.
Robert: Well, I think we are all waiting for artificial intelligence to pop up in chess after having seen the success of the artificial intelligence approach of Google for the Go game. And so basically what I would expect if some of these giant corporations would be interested is that in the next five years chess also might see that kind of development. For example the artificial intelligence for the evaluation of a position, it could produce some very surprising results in chess. And so, we’re probably waiting for that and then we can retire our old engines. Look at the AlphaChess engine that will be 4000 Elo. [chuckles]
Nelson: Yep, at that point we can all fade back into history. Larry, anything to add?
Larry: Well, I also followed closely the AlphaGo situation. The guy who is the head of it at Google Mind is a chess master himself, Demis Hassabis. Although Go is thought to be a much harder game than chess to beat the best humans at, and they have certainly proven that they can do that, it is so far yet to be proven that a learning program such as the latest one from DeepMind [can replicate that in chess]. Their latest learning program beat the pants off all other, previous Go programs. But that does not apply to chess. Nobody has a self-teaching chess program that can fight with Houdini or Komodo. That’s a fantasy. Maybe that’s the challenge, to get Google to prove that it applies to chess too. But who knows.
Nelson: All right, gentlemen, thank you all for attending the first-ever TCEC Programmer’s Summit. We have made history here. May the best program win the Superfinal and may the draw-rate be comfortably below 90%.
More on the official TCEC website and the Twitch TV channelSo Nokia's got a 10-incher with built-in 3G and A-GPS (Ovi Maps) in the works. Interesting, but will it be just-another-netbook? I'd love to see a Nokia touch-screen interface on top of Windows. What about easy tethering with cell phones?
Having some sort of tie-in with Nokia handsets (while not excluding everyone else) isn't a must, but it'd be nice, right? We'll have to wait and see.
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Here's what we do know: It'll be "HD ready" and have an Atom processor—hopefully that means Nvidia Ion-based. It will also have Wi-Fi, HDMI, and an SD Card reader. With a 12 hour battery and weight of 2.75 pounds, there's some massive potential here, if only on paper.
Problem is we won't know more about its flavor of Windows-or any other specs and pricing-until Nokia World on September 2. Stay tuned. [Nokia]Yes, in addition to Pau and Marc, there is a third Gasol brother, and he is on Reddit.
His name is Adria and he turned up in a thread on Reddit about the Gasol brothers, prompted to join the conversation after his name was brought up in conjunction with his two older, more athletic brothers. To Adria's credit, he's currently walking-on at UCLA right now, so he much have some athletic ability, though when you're brothers are on Spain's Olympic team while you can't even get a scholarship to an American university, you are an easy target for trolls.
And as any of us might, especially at the ripe young age of 18, Adria joined the conversation to defend himself against those trolls, posting the following:
I've been a walk-on since August. I started playing seriously when I was 14, and I've been busting my ass to become the best. Idk who told you I'm not very good, but it's true I have a lot to develop still. Mostly, I have to get more athletic, but it's pretty hard to do when my body is still in the process of growing. It sucks, and I probably won't get any playing time this year, but I'll still fight and work to become the best I can be. I got offers from several schools, but I chose to come to UCLA for several reasons. Also, I'm 6'11 now, I was 6'10 when I got here.
To his credit, that's a pretty well-mannered response. Not even one homophobic/racist insult hurled. And in case there is any doubt that this actual is Adria Gasol, he tweeted his Reddit account to confirm.
I don't know about you all, but the existence of third, seemingly-normal Gasol brother makes me wonder if there is a third, normal Van Gundy brother that's been kept under wraps all these years. The parallels between the elder Gasols and the Van Gundys are already creepy as-is. The oldest of the two sets of brothers, Pau and Jeff, are arguably the most successful, more fit, and more awkward-looking, while Marc and Stan are talented in their own right, while also fat. Is there a third, less-talented, but more traditionally-handsome Van Gundy brother to pair with Adria Gasol? Where has he been all these years?
We'll continue to track this story as it develops.
[Deadspin]
Follow @jnlevineChristopher Columbus statues vandalized across New England Copyright by WTNH - All rights reserved Video
(WTNH) -- Across New England on Columbus Day, people are taking stances, vandalizing statues of Christopher Columbus.
In Connecticut alone, vandals spray-painted on or around statues in four cities and towns, including Middletown, Bridgeport, Norwalk, and in New Haven's Wooster Square over the weekend.
New Haven Police stepped up patrols, manning the statue in the city to prevent any more vandalism.
"I just happened to be walking my dog, came across the hoopla, and decided to check it out and saw that the statue had been defaced yet again for the second time in a couple weeks," said Alexa Benner of New Haven. "It is 100 percent true, but there's no need to deface a statue like that."
A Columbus statue in Providence, R.I. was also vandalized. It was splashed with red paint along with the Communist hammer and sickle.
There have been no arrests.(CNN) The Russians are investigating whether one of their airstrikes against ISIS targets south of the Syrian city of Raqqa last month may have killed the group's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
IF Baghdadi were killed, the death of the self-declared "Caliph" would be a huge symbolic loss, and a blow to the concept of an "Islamic State" of which he was the figurehead.
But in terms of ISIS' future as a terrorist group and a source of inspiration, whether Baghdadi is alive or dead might not matter that much. And that cuts both ways. It speaks to both ISIS' grim -- and probably irretrievable -- situation on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, but also the resilience of its message in jihadi circles worldwide. Just as al Qaeda survived the death of Osama bin Laden and a raft of other prominent figures, so ISIS is more than Baghdadi.
Not dead yet?
Of course, rumors of Baghdadi's demise have been exaggerated in the past -- notably early in 2015, when attention focused on possible successors
He subsequently provided "proof of life" in an audio message about the battle for Mosul late last year.
It is true that Russian airpower has been very active in the past two weeks in desert areas between Raqqa and Palmyra. At the end of May, cruise missiles were launched from the Mediterranean to take out an ISIS convoy, according to the Russian Defense Ministry, which has also reported strikes against bunkers and caves used by ISIS in this region.
Even so, were it the case that Baghdadi had died, it is puzzling that no rumors, let alone any official announcement, have surfaced in the 18 days since the Russians say the strike occurred. All the more so if
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but I was cleaning some part of an engine it was extremely loud and I was just out for like four hours and this guy came and shook me four hours later and he said I was unconscious."
The Church of Scientology in the US refused to be interviewed for this story. Their lawyers sent Lateline a letter threatening legal action over a breach of a confidentiality agreement between the Church and Ms Paris.
In a statement the Church of Scientology said Ms Paris' claims were false.
"She certainly wasn't "forced" to be there. She was also never forced to perform labour in the engine room," the statement said.
"The Freewinds is a wonderful place, as even Valeska said on numerous occasions. Her allegation that she could only leave the ship with an escort is totally false."
'Cover-up'
But Ms Paris says she signed the agreement under duress, and the Scientology statement has been contradicted by Ramana Dienes-Browning, a former a senior executive on the Freewinds.
Ms Dienes-Browning was responsible for monitoring staff behaviour and performance on the ship, and says Ms Paris was imprisoned on the ship.
"Their response is a lie, their response is a cover-up," she said.
"She made it very clear she did not want to be there. She had been sent to the ship so as not to be in contact with one of her parents and that's not what she wanted, she was very, very distressed.
"I would definitely consider it imprisonment because there was no choice in the matter."
Ms Dienes-Browning is now working on a photographic exhibition re-enacting her time in Scientology. She says she too was held against her will on the Freewinds and suffered abuse.
"I have been dealing with that trauma and as a result I have experienced depression and post traumatic stress and had to go through a process of dealing with that and healing," she said.
She says after five years of trying she was finally able to leave the Sea Org and the Freewinds.
The Church has denied Ms Dienes-Browning's claims in a statement, saying "we have no facts that would support Ms Dienes-Browning's opposite opinion".
Valeska Paris left the Freewinds when she was sent to the Rehabilitation Project Force in Sydney. Scientologists describe the RPF as a voluntary religious retreat. Defectors describe it as a punitive re-education camp.
It was here she met former St George Rugby League captain Chris Guider, marrying him soon after and leaving the Church.
She says she would like to see the head of the Church of Scientology, the man who she says sent her to the Freewinds, put on trial.
"It's not right for someone to be running the church and basically take advantage of a church and hiding behind religion to live like a king and abuse people around him. That man doesn't like anyone, he's a psychopath," she said.
The Church of Scientology denies their leader David Miscavige sent Ms Paris to the Freewinds. When asked if this allegation was put to Mr Miscavige the Church failed to respond.
Church of Scientology response
Topics: community-and-society, religion-and-beliefs, australia
First postedThis has been a big week for the future of the Internet.
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After months and speculation and a few days of rumor, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler today came out in support of full “Title II” reclassification of broadband Internet. This means that Internet service providers like Comcast and Time Warner will not be allowed to offer paid prioritization of certain content. They will also be prohibited from blocking or throttling traffic. In an opinion piece at Wired, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler writes: I am submitting to my colleagues the strongest open internet protections ever proposed by the FCC. These enforceable, bright-line rules will ban paid prioritization, and the blocking and throttling of lawful content and services. I propose to fully apply—for the first time ever—those bright-line rules to mobile broadband. My proposal assures the rights of internet users to go where they want, when they want, and the rights of innovators to introduce new products without asking anyone’s permission. Crucially, Wheeler’s proposed rules will also apply to mobile broadband providers—cell phone companies like AT&T and Sprint that offer mobile data. With Wheeler on board, it is likely that the FCC will pass his proposed rules in a 3-2 vote at the February 26 FCC meeting with the other Democrats on the commission voting with Wheeler. Wheeler’s public announcement comes on the heels of news leaked from the FCC that it will also be taking on the 19 to 21 states (depending on how you count) that have laws preventing local governments from building their own broadband networks. That decision will make it immeasurably easier for local governments to offer municipal broadband services that will directly compete with private ISPs. Those 20 or so states currently have rules on the books that make it either difficult or pointless for local governments to create their own broadband service. Some restrict the geographic areas in which municipal broadband can be built, while other laws prevent cities from offering municipal broadband for cheaper than what private ISPs sell their service for, effectively defeating the whole purpose of an independent network. Neither of these moves should come as a surprise to people who who have been paying attention to the FCC’s process this past year. After President Obama called for the “strongest possible rules” on net neutrality, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler reversed course toward what everyone assumed would be reclassifying broadband as a public utility. Even AT&T’s policy representative to the FCC said on Monday that he expected Title II regulations coming down the pipeline.
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Wheeler has been enamored of the power of community broadband to compete with private ISPs for some time. Meanwhile, Wheeler has been enamored of the power of community broadband to compete with private ISPs for some time. Back in June of last year, he wrote a blog post extolling the virtues of the community broadband in Chattanooga, Tennessee and wrote that “it is in the best interests of consumers and competition that the FCC exercises its power to preempt state laws that ban or restrict competition from community broadband.” That goes to show that municipal broadband has been on Wheeler’s mind for at least half a year before this week’s news. The announcements about support for Title II and for municipal broadband are major individual steps. But Wheeler’s moves this week really have to be considered in tandem to understand their full impact. We’ve known for some time that telecomm companies will sue if the FCC pushes for regulating them as public utilities. So that news this week is again not unexpected. In fact, Wheeler might be counting on it. Pushing for relaxed regulations against municipal broadband could act as a fail-safe in case his proposed Title II regulations do not stand up to the inevitable legal challenge in court.
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The logic goes like this: Even if the Title II classification doesn’t stand, consumers will still have a choice for unrestricted, un-throttled, un-tiered Internet access through municipal broadband. If telecomm companies push hard and win in the courts, they will become even more reviled by the general public, which could generate the political will around the country for city governments to devote serious resources to their own Internet infrastructure. Of course, just as Title II will be challenged, so too will the FCC’s attempt to preempt state regulations against municipal broadband. The FCC will claim that its authority to tell states that they cannot inhibit the spread of municipal broadband is derived from Section 706 of the Communications Act. That provision authorizes the FCC to promote competition in the broadband market and remove barriers to creating more broadband infrastructure. And there’s the rub for telecomm companies. Arguing against both deregulating municipal broadband and regulating private broadband providers may prove to be a form of legal contortionism too unwieldy even for their policy teams. It would put telecomm companies in the awkward position of simultaneously arguing for more and less regulation of Internet infrastructure. Fighting back would put telecomm companies in the awkward position of simultaneously arguing for both more and less regulation of Internet infrastructure. If telecomm companies argue that private investment is the best way to encourage the growth of broadband infrastructure in the place of city governments, they will have a very hard time arguing that they should not be regulated as public utilities, since that is what they would be effectively replacing.
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Furthermore, in his announcement today, Wheeler specifically said that the FCC will not be enforcing every provision under Title II of the Communications Act. Through a process called forbearance, the FCC is able to pick and choose which regulations it wants to apply and which it will exempt. One of Wheeler’s proposed forbearances that is of particular interest: last-mile unbundling. Peter Bright at Ars Technica argued persuasively last year that last-mile unbundling would be a suitable alternative to Title II regulation for net neutrality advocates. With last-mile unbundling, smaller upstart ISPs are able to basically rent space on another ISPs existing infrastructure. It’s a program that is popular in Europe and has been used to great effect. Because laying the physical wires for broadband service is prohibitively expensive, we don’t have a plethora of new ISPs starting up every week. That lack of competition allows the major ISPs to effectively operate as local monopolies. If we had unbundling in the U.S., Bright argued, then net neutrality wouldn’t be necessary because competition would sort things out. If one ISP started throttling or blocking traffic, users could just sign up for service from another ISP that meets their needs. But that competition is the last thing that giants like Comcast and Time Warner want. So Wheeler’s decision to forbear last-mile unbundling is a lifeline to private ISPs. Wheeler knows that without last-mile unbundling, the only competition that could threaten ISPs is city-owned broadband. Wheeler may very well expect to lose on either Title II or municipal broadband. But he’s playing the long game here. As long as one of the two stands, Internet users will have an option to access a truly open Internet. It’s up to the big ISPs to pick their poison. They can decide whether they want to operate with more regulation under Title II or they can fight Title II and risk losing their geographic monopolies to city-owned infrastructure.(Picture above from Washington Wizards twitter @WashWizards)
WIZARDS ARE GOING TO THE SECOND ROUND!!! Washington beat Atlanta 116-99 in Atlanta to win the series 4-2. As always, I will give a short and long recap.
Short Recap:
The Wizards hopped out to a first quarter lead with John Wall, Bradley Beal, and Markieff Morris doing most of the scoring, but the real story of quarter was the teams getting into a scuffle that led to 4 players receiving technical fouls. In the second, Atlanta and Washington went back and forth until the Wizards went on a big run in the last few minutes to get a big halftime lead. Hawks cut lead to 3 in second half, but John Wall closed out the game on both ends of the floor and led the Wizards to the Eastern Conference Finals.
Long Recap:
Markieff Morris scored 8 early points in the first quarter to help lead Washington to an early lead with Wall and Beal also contributing. Wall scored 6 in a row at one point, punctuated by a left handed slam. Towards the end of the first, Beal threw down a fast break dunk and was shoved by Kent Bazemore from underneath, but no foul was called. This led to a brief scuffle between the teams, and in the end Beal, Bazemore, Jason Smith, and Hardaway Jr were all assessed technical fouls. The Wizards went on a big run to close the half and were up 65-46 at the break lead by Wall’s 20 points on 8/12 shooting and Beal’s 17 points. In the third, Otto Porter knocked down a three pointer to give the Wiz a 22 point lead, their largest of the game. Immediately after, the Hawks went on a big run and Washington only led by 7 going into the fourth quarter. The turning point of the game was when the Hawks had cut the lead to 93-90 and appeared Dennis Schroder appeared to have a wide open layup to make it a 1 point game. But Wall came out of nowhere and had one of his trademark chase down blocks, and then scored on back-to-back possessions to make the lead 7 again. Wall closed out the game and when the buzzer sounded the score was 116-99 Wizards. Wall finished with a playoff career high 42 points on 16/25 shooting in 43 minutes, while Beal also went off for 31 points on 11/17 shooting (a combined 73 points on 27/42 shooting!).
The only bad news from this game is that it was Phil Chenier’s last game announcing for Washington (Chenier and Steve Buckhantz are the best team announcers in the NBA).
The Wizards will face the Boston Celtics in the second round beginning on Sunday at TD Garden in Boston. Series and Game 1 preview will be posted soon, so check back soon. Get ready for the funeral.
Follow me on twitter for more @pjhowley99
AdvertisementsFrance needs Niger’s uranium, while Niger needs French assistance. But the relationship is and always has been unequal.
By Sam Piranty.
Last December, as negotiations dragged on between the Nigerien government and the French state-owned mining company Areva over royalties, the latter suddenly stopped production. At the time, Niger had been demanding a better deal for its uranium for over a year and Areva’s decade-long mining contract was about to expire at the end of the month.
As its mining activities came to halt, Areva claimed it had suspended production for maintenance, but many saw it as a political move aimed at putting pressure on the Nigerien negotiators. After all, Niger’s economy is heavily dependent on its huge uranium reserves and its population is already one of the world’s poorest. Turning off that tap could have huge repercussions.
However, in a sense, it is that very discrepancy − between the country’s vast mineral wealth on the one hand, and widespread poverty on the other − that the government was in negotiations to re-assess. According to the International Monetary Fund, Areva’s global revenues of nearly $13 billion in 2013 make the French firm almost twice as big as Niger’s whole economy, and as Areva’s revenues have risen − partly off Niger’s uranium − Nigeriens have remained poor.
In the end, Areva restarted production at the start of this month, but the talks are still ongoing. Niger is reportedly demanding that the royalties Areva’s mines pay increase from 5.5% to 12%, bringing them closer to the 13% Areva pays in Canada and the 18.5% paid in Kazakhstan. However the French-owned company, which has posted losses in recent years, insists that such a change would not make their operations worthwhile.
The result of the deadlocked talks could prove highly significant for Niger, but this is not the first time the West African nation has found itself in this position. In fact, the current negotiations are merely the latest chapter in a long history of France-Niger relations, and unfortunately for Niger, a look back at previous chapters of the story doesn’t offer too much hope for a positive outcome in the one being played out today.
Forming Françafrique
Franco-African relations first began in the late-14th or early-15th century with trade with the coastal regions of what are now Gambia and Senegal. But it was only in the early 17th century that France “began granting trading charters in specified areas as part of an attempt to extend France’s power and wealth,” in the words of political scientist Victor Le Vine. Like most of the European powers, the French initially didn’t venture far inland as trading slaves and resources didn’t require more than a port and a few merchants. However, as the nature of trade shifted so did the means by which to plunder the continent, and by the 19th century, France, along with the rest of Europe’s colonial powers, was moving inland, starting in Senegal.
After its 1871 defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, colonialism was seen as a way of regenerating nationalist sentiment and elevating France’s global status, and with enhanced efforts, by 1900 France had become the second largest colonial power in the world.
This status was officially lost after decolonisation in the 1960s, but in many ways, the end of empire wasn’t quite the rupture it may have seemed. By 1965, despite the formal recognition of independence, many heads-of-state in Francophone Africa had been members of the French parliament and often these elites were part of a French push for cultural dominance, they were what the French called Évolués. Under colonialism, France hadn’t just sought to dominate states but also indoctrinate their citizens. Furthermore, despite a shift in the geopolitical climate, France was in no mood to loosen its grip on its former colonies for three reasons, as explained by political scientist Xavier Renou: 1) France wanted to retain its international status; 2) it wanted to secure access to strategic resources; and 3) it could make huge profits from its system of economic monopoly.
Masterminded by government advisor Jacques Foccart (aka Monsieur Afrique) and initially by President Charles de Gaulle, what resulted was a symbiotic relationship between France’s leaders and those of the its former colonies. Francophone Africa relied on French contributions for sustenance, while France counted on the continent for resources. The former Gabonese president, Omar Bongo, is famously reported to have said “Gabon without France is like a car with no driver. France without Gabon is like a car with no fuel.”
The Franco-African pacte colonial made sure that African financial decisions were made with French interests at heart and that post-colonial Francophone markets were reserved for French companies and traders. And of all the resources available to France, uranium was of arguably the greatest importance − it not only offered economic value, but political and military value, and reified France’s status as a global force. At the end of World War II, France had been left devastated, but the progress of French nuclear scientists in the years following in their first experimental nuclear reactor, Zoé, provided a sense of optimism. As uranium expert Gabrielle Hecht wrote, “nuclear nationalism comforted state leaders anxious about their country status. The French compared reactors to the Arc de Triomphe and the cathedral of Notre Dame.” In a post-WW2 world, global status was increasingly determined not by the size of one’s empire, but the size of one’s nuclear arsenal. France did not want to be left behind, and with special access to Niger and Gabon’s uranium deposits, it would not be.
Having already entered into the pacte colonial, France had a monopoly over the uranium offered in the two countries through French-owned company Cogema (now Areva). This facilitated the energy independence that de Gaulle and France craved, and in return, Niger and Gabon were granted military security, developmental aid and guaranteed markets for their products. Furthermore, as Hecht points out, “France would help defend the new leaders not only against external threats but also against coups d’etat.”
The Nigerien negotiations
Uranium was first discovered in Niger in the northern town of Arlit in 1957 by the French geological survey, and negotiations between France and Niger started in earnest when the former African colony gained independence in 1960.
Niger’s first president, Hamani Diori, faced a difficult balancing act between pleasing the likes of de Gaulle and Foccart in Paris on the one hand, and the newly-liberated Nigerien population on the other. However, France had an advantage in this conundrum – its relationships with former colonies were built on clientelistic networks. They were held together by key personalities and moreover, patrimonialism was rife within the Nigerien state itself, with Diori and his party at the heart of it trying to maintain their dominance. As Bruno Charbonneau explains, French policy in Africa was “more than anything else the result of transnational elites whose main objective is to maintain and to reproduce the social conditions that privilege them.”
Like many other leaders in Francophone Africa, Diori met frequently with Foccart. Foccart was known to be the kingmaker in France’s former colonies and had the means and influence to keep Diori in power when times were tough, but Diori was himself a skilled negotiator. When Diori saw France’s initial plans for the distribution of profits from the uranium mines and was unimpressed, he went straight to Foccart. The French advisor relented and talked to de Gaulle who, according to Hecht, “personally granted a larger percentage of the profits to Niger, throwing in a special development aid package and a promise to send French troops as needed to defend the deposits against Algerian incursions.”
At first, Diori accepted the improved deal, but after a visit to the US in 1960, the Nigerien president realised that uranium was more than just another resource and that he could drive a even harder bargain. He set about pushing for further concessions from France and a significant stake in the mining companies Somaïr and Cominak. He also requested the establishment of a new special investment fund. France conceded to some extent, but Diori’s pressure for a better deal continued through the years, partly driven by the fact that by the early-70s Niger had still not received any dividends from its uranium.
In 1973, Diori gained a new bargaining chip as the global oil crisis pushed France to expand its nuclear power capacity. Diori saw this as an opportunity to strike and, alongside Gabon’s President Bongo, called for a meeting to renegotiate uranium prices. The talks were initially unsuccessful and put on hold.
One week after the meeting, however, de Gaulle’s successor, Georges Pompidou died. And on his way to the memorial service, the relentless Diori tried to arrange a meeting with the prime minister to resume negotiations. This tactless move seems to have been the moment that tipped the balance for France. Diori had pushed too hard. The Nigerien president had been a useful ally, but on 15 April 1974, France decided not to intervene as Diori was ousted in a coup d’etat led by Lieutenant Colonel Seyni Kountché.
There were of course other factors leading to the coup such as the dire economic state of the country and the unrest amongst the military, but France’s inaction was perhaps the most tragic for Diori. After decades of colonial rule and with Foccart’s extensive intelligence networks on the continent, France surely knew what was coming for the president. It’s unlikely the Nigerien and French militaries would not have been aware of each other’s intentions and, moreover, the French still had large numbers of troops in Niger and in neighbouring states. France deliberately looked the other way as Koutché planned his move, and essentially, Foccart had decided to fire Diori.
Back to the future
Fast-forwarding to the current day, the structures and means of coercion in France’s relations with Niger continue, albeit altered through generational changes in personnel, new economic realities, and a shift from a Cold War to a War on Terror geopolitical discourse. Both President François Hollande and his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy have made lofty statements about ending La Françafrique in recent years, but France’s military presence and continuing economic hold in its former colonies suggest an ongoing and unequal relationship.
In terms of a generational change, the death in the 1990s of leading Franco-African figures such as President Félix Houphouët-Boigny of the Ivory Coast, French President François Mitterrand, and Foccart caused a symbolic rupture in France’s ‘special’ ties with Africa − la Françafrique had always been held together with highly personal relationships. However, to suggest that this shift diminished or ruptured the clientelist structures between France and Africa would be wrong.
Sarkozy certainly didn’t cut the old colonial ties and is even believed to have presided over the marriage of Ivorian president Alassane Ouattara and his wife Dominique in 1990. These weren’t just patrimonial ties, but ‘family’ ties. Furthermore, the extent to which France’s clientelist networks still exist was arguably demonstrated clearly in 2008 when Jean-Marie Bockel, France’s secretary of state for cooperation and Francophonie, was removed from his position just two months after he had criticised corrupt African leaders and urged France to stop giving aid to states such as Gabon. According to Director of Research at the International Crisis Group, Richard Moncrieff, President Bongo had seen the speech and “quickly activated his remarkable network of influence within the French Gaulist movement.”
In terms of economics, the region also remains highly important for France, as a recent Chatham House report explained, pointing out that French companies are “particularly strong in sectors such as logistics, port and rail operations, telecoms, shipping, banking and air transport; they also have significant interests in tropical commodities and agriculture.”
Finally, although the Cold War has subsided, the War on Terror has added a new dimension to the France-Africa relationship. Over the years, there has been growing attention and concern about the Sahel, a region in which al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other Islamist militant organisations reside, and the US has looked to increase its military presence across the continent, including in Niger, to monitor ‘terrorist’ threats. Recent announcements from Paris suggest that France too is reorganising and perhaps expanding its military capabilities in Africa. France is believed to be setting up extra bases in northern Niger, Mali and Chad, and in a post-9/11 world, Islamist militancy offers France a reason to sit at the top table.
What’s yours is mine
When it comes to France’s relationship with Africa then, it seems the adage that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose rings true − including when it comes to its ongoing negotiations over Nigerien uranium prices.
France currently sources over 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy and is dependent on Niger for much of its immediate and future uranium supply. This dependence could grow even further when production at the recently-discovered Imouraren uranium deposit is up and running in 2015. The mine is set to produce 5,000 tonnes of uranium per year and would help make Niger the second-largest uranium producer in the world. Areva, which is 87% owned by the French state and holds a majority share in three out of the four uranium mining companies operating in Niger, is funding the new mine.
However, despite Niger’s vast uranium reserves − over which France has an effective monopoly − the country has remained poor. In February 2013, President Mahamadou Issoufou, a former Areva employee, claimed that Niger’s uranium deals generate just 100 million Euros ($140 million) a year, representing just 5% of Niger’s budget. “That’s why I have asked to re-equilibriate the terms of the deal between Areva and Niger,” he said. Issoufou also said Niger has started looking to other countries, saying that his “objective is to diversify our uranium mining partners.”
One can perhaps substitute ‘other countries’ for China, which already owns a 37% stake in Niger’s SOMINA mine and has carried out uranium exploration throughout the country. However, Areva − France by proxy − still holds all the cards given its controlling stakes in the country’s three other mines. Comparatively, Francophone Africa does not receive the same level of Chinese investment as many Anglophone parts of the continent and Niger is no different. French saturation of Nigerien markets leaves little space for other investors, and its grip on the uranium industry is such that hopes of real diversification of investment and competition are slim. And without other prominent competitors, Niger’s position in negotiations with Areva is severely weakened.
Areva’s power in Niger is also exemplified by recent court battles over the safety of the mines. In 2009, Serge Venel, a French miner who worked for Areva in Niger from 1978 to 1985 died of lung cancer. He had previously raised concerns about the lack of health precautions in mines and after his death, doctors said that his unprotected work in the nuclear industry had been the cause of his illness. The French courts agreed, and in 2012 demanded Areva pay Venel’s family €200,000 ($270,000). However, in 2013, Areva won an appeal. The company argued that the COMINAK mine was to blame, not Areva, despite being the majority shareholder in the mine. Proving where culpability lies in mining-related illnesses is particularly tricky, especially when Areva owns all the local hospitals in the area. Serge Venel was able to be diagnosed properly at home in France; Nigerien miners and their families are treated at Areva-owned medical facilities.
Recently, an Al Jazeera documentary and investigation by Greenpeace has further raised concerns about the health effects around the mines in Arlit. Greenpeace claims that radiation around the mines is 100 times the World Health Organsation’s safety levels, while the NGO along with important and extremely active local civil society groups maintain that water used in the towns surrounding the mines has been contaminated, mine vents pump radioactive radon into the air, and tonnes of nuclear waste has been left around the area. The Al Jazeera documentary even showed Areva-employed doctors saying that radiation had been responsible for a local’s death. How Areva responds and whether it will be held accountable, however, remains to be seen.
Ultimately, many of the dynamics at play in the 60s and 70s are still prominent today as a Nigerien president pushes for a better deal of uranium prices once again, France continues to dominate the country’s mining industry, the region remains somewhat unstable, and the French military maintains its heavy presence.
France needs Niger’s uranium, while Niger needs French assistance, both military and economic. But the relationship is and always has been unequal. Despite the both parties need for each other, France has more power to set the terms for this exchange. The current negotiations − coming after years of exploitation by both French and Nigerien elites − may slightly increase Niger’s income from its vast resources, but if history and the current balance of power tell us anything, it’s that the Nigerien people will continue to miss out on the revenues they deserve.
Amendment [20/02/14]: In the original, the ‘pacte colonial’ was wrongly spelt ‘pact coloniale’ and Serge Venel’s surname was mistakenly spelt ‘Venal’. These have now been corrected.
I'm filtering the content inside the main loopGerman police have seized playing cards laced with radioactive material from a restaurant owner in Berlin’s Marzahn-Hellersdorf district.
The investigators were searching for these cards for the past year and finally solved the case about two weeks ago. Police officials said that the restaurant owner was using these cards in a gambling scam.
According to the BBC, the investigation in this case started about one year ago when police — during a routine check — detected higher levels of radioactivity at a waste processing facility in Rüdersdorf area in Marzahn-Hellersdorf district. Further probing allowed police to recover some radioactive playing cards from one of the disposal truck owned by the waste processing facility. The investigators tracked the route of this truck, and eventually were led to a 41-year-old woman in Marzahn-Hellersdorf district. On November 16, Berlin police — along with officials from a radiation monitoring center — raided the home and restaurant of the suspect. Some other premises in the area were also searched. According to the police, they recovered 13 playing cards marked with iodine-125 from the restaurant during the raid.
Iodine-125 is a radioactive substance with a half-life of 60 days. It is mostly used in the medicine field. The substance was put on the playing cards in small amount, thus making it almost undetectable from a distance of more than a meter. Although the small amount of iodine-125 was not considered dangerous for humans (unless handled directly by someone), it still posed a little health risk to people living in that area.
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Officials are currently interrogating the woman, and trying to gather information about her accomplices in the gambling trick, according to the Local. As the restaurant didn’t have permissions for gambling, the suspect could face a fine or a five-year term in jail or both as per German laws.
The authorities have also given orders to seal the area, which will now be cleaned by the health department staff to ensure there is no radioactivity in the area.
Investigators currently have no idea about the games in which these cards were being used, but they believe a detector concealed in players’ bodies would have helped such players recognize the radioactive cards, thus giving them an advantage over other players in the game.
In a similar incident in 2013, the French police arrested Italian gambler Stefano Ampollini and his two accomplices for marking some playing cards with an invisible ink. Investigators found that Ampollini used to wear infrared contact lenses during games to identify the cards marked with the ink. Ampollini and his accomplices were later fined and jailed by the French court.I never liked school right from grade 1 through to grade 12. I don’t think I was unique, but I think my dislike of school was of greater magnitude than most students. So after I graduated from high school, I declared to my mother, “I’ll never go to school again.” Dead-end, unfulfilling work post-school led me to violate my declaration with the approval of my parents. University was a different world. There were few overbearing professors harping at me to attend classes and do my homework. Much of my study was self-directed, and my learning and grades were more-or-less up to me.
Psychology professor Peter Gray, who writes a radical blog on learning, has pondered what it is about schooling that turns off learners. In his book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life (Basic Books, 2013) Gray identifies what turns off the natural curiosity of so many children.
Gray points to the “anti-play attitude” and an excessive emphasis on testing and grading, which he argues is antithetical to learning, something known by many people who read the literature on pedagogy.
Gray goes back to hunter-gatherer societies and notes the freedom children had to play, explore, and learn – a learning that was not negligible. Schools, Gray tells us, are prisons, where children are forced into age groupings, deprived of freedoms and choice in play and study.
Hunter-gatherer societies, on the other hand, valued autonomy, sharing, and equality – values that are antithetical to the capitalist system. The hunter-gatherer societies embraced anarchistic ideals, so the notion of a preeminent leader, as is the situation in the teacher-student classroom dynamic, was absent.
Play in hunter-gatherer societies helped children learn the central values of the society. Gray contends that hunter-gatherer ways of learning would be equally successful in present day society. This could be achieved by moving away from the top-down system of learning and allow for freedom to play and learn.
At least one such form of schooling already exists. Gray introduces the Sudbury Valley schools. It sounds like a school that Henry David Thoreau would have lauded, as would most anarchists.
Free to Learn describes the power of play and its role in stimulating curiosity. However, it is not just learning that is favored. Bigger spin-offs of learning through play include reduced stress, ADHD becoming relatively a non-issue, bullying being a non-issue, and happier children.
Gray notes that graduates of the Sudbury schools go on to lead successful lives; they become doctors, engineers, open businesses, and are very skilled in social settings.
Anyone who cares about learning should read Free to Learn. Gray’s book is a compelling and easy read; if everyone would read it with an open mind, a wholesale revolution in education (right through to university) would be the inevitable outcome.(Repeats to add dropped word “as” in second paragraph)
WASHINGTON, Sept 8 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama warned American teenagers on Tuesday of the dangers of putting too much personal information on Internet social networking sites, saying it could come back to haunt them in later life.
The presidential words of advice follow recent studies that suggest U.S. employers are increasingly turning to sites such as Facebook and News Corp’s (NWSA.O) MySpace to conduct background checks on job applicants.
Taking part in a question-and-answer session with a group of 14- and 15-year-old school students, Obama was asked by one pupil for some advice on becoming U.S. president.
“Well, let me give you some very practical tips. First of all, I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age, whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life,” Obama said.
“And when you’re young, you make mistakes and you do some stupid stuff. And I’ve been hearing a lot about young people who — you know, they’re posting stuff on Facebook, and then suddenly they go apply for a job and somebody has done a search.”
Obama referred several times to “mistakes” he had made when he was at school but offered no specifics. He has previously admitted to drug use when he was younger.
A survey in June by careerbuilder.com found that 45 percent of employers used social network sites to research job candidates and that Facebook, which says it has 250 million users worldwide, was their site of choice.
Some 35 percent of the employers surveyed said they had found content on the sites that had influenced them to reject a candidate. Examples included inappropriate photographs, information about the applicants’ drinking or drug use, or bad mouthing of previous employers, co-workers or clients.
The Obama White House frequently uses Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites to bypass the media and communicate directly to Americans.Sacramento Now Forcing Taxpayers to Fund ILLEGAL Immigrants Fighting Deportation (VIDEO)
Sacramento can now be added to the list of cities that have officially lost their minds.
Sacramento has approved the use of taxpayer money to help pay legal defenses for ILLEGAL immigrants who are to be deported.
The Sacramento City Council decided in a unanimous vote (that did not include every individual in the city’s say) that $300,000 should be taken from the general fund to “provide urgent legal and support services to Sacramento families facing the immediate threat of separation due to deportation”.
Sacramento votes to allocate taxpayer funds to help fight illegal immigrant deportations. https://t.co/iNTwln4Zon pic.twitter.com/Li7rsWAlje — Fox News (@FoxNews) May 6, 2017
Fox News reports:
The plan, backed by the mayor, fits a trend of local and state lawmakers taking similar action. As the Trump administration separately faces a court setback in its bid to cut off federal funds to sanctuary cities, those jurisdictions are only doubling down.... In Sacramento, Councilman Eric Guerra told Fox News in an email that their move to assist with legal defense reflects
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Type {}
This is a great trick that is worth keeping in mind. Whenever you have several unrelated types that have one or more methods or properties with identical types, you can create a new protocol to provide a common interface for them.
Whenever you have several unrelated types that have one or more methods with identical signatures, you can create a new protocol to provide a common interface for them.
Constraining our generic type T to MinMaxType makes the implementation work:
/// Forms a half-open interval from `T.min` to `upperBound` prefix func..< < T : Comparable where T : MinMaxType > ( upperBound : T ) -> HalfOpenInterval < T > { return T. min..< upperBound }
Here are the implementations for the other three operators:
/// Forms a closed interval from `T.min` to `upperBound` prefix func... < T : Comparable where T : MinMaxType > ( upperBound : T ) -> ClosedInterval < T > { return T. min... upperBound } /// Forms a half-open interval from `lowerBound` to `T.max` postfix func..< < T : Comparable where T : MinMaxType > ( lowerBound : T ) -> HalfOpenInterval < T > { return lowerBound..< T. max } /// Forms a closed interval from `lowerBound` to `T.max` postfix func... < T : Comparable where T : MinMaxType > ( lowerBound : T ) -> ClosedInterval < T > { return lowerBound... T. max }
And some tests:
(..< 0 ). contains ( Int. min ) // true (..< 0 ). contains ( - 1 ) // true (..< 0 ). contains ( 0 ) // false (... 0 ). contains ( Int. min ) // true (... 0 ). contains ( 0 ) // true (... 0 ). contains ( 1 ) // false ( 0..< ). contains ( - 1 ) // false ( 0..< ). contains ( 0 ) // true ( 0..< ). contains ( Int. max ) // false ( 0..< ). contains ( Int. max - 1 ) // true ( 0... ). contains ( - 1 ) // false ( 0... ). contains ( 0 ) // true ( 0... ). contains ( Int. max ) // true
Back to our switch statement, which works great now:
switch x { case 1... : print ( "positive" ) case..< 0 : print ( "negative" ) case 0 : print ( "zero" ) default : fatalError ( "Should be unreachable" ) }
Conclusion
Ranges and intervals in Swift serve similar purposes but have different implementations and generic constraints. Ranges are based on indexes and are used most often in the context of collections. The fact that a range can’t contain the maximum value of a type can make them unsuitable for working with intervals of numbers. Intervals work with all Comparable types and don’t have the maximum-value limitation.
While custom operators should be used very sparingly, I’d argue that in this case they significantly improve readability without harming comprehensibility – the prefix and postfix operators are so close in meaning to their binary counterparts that even readers unfamiliar with the code should have no trouble understanding them.
That said, I’d still argue that the advantages of the custom notation over the standard Swift syntax ( case _ where x > 0 ) are so small in this specific case that using it in real code isn’t worth it. Treat this as a thought experiment, not as a recommendation.
If you liked this article, you might enjoy Chris Eidhof’s and Airspeed Velocity’s upcoming book, Advanced Swift. They discuss, among many other things, the same idea of open-ended ranges in the context of collection subscripting. I’m the technical reviewer for the book, so I’m obviously biased, but I highly recommend it if you’re interested in Swift. The book is currently in beta, but you can already buy it and get immediate access to the current draft.RALEIGH, N.C. — The temperature is well into the 90s, and laundry hangs on a clothesline behind the brick apartment complex on East Davie Street. Inside the two-floor end unit, Frances Pulley rises from the couch and takes the four short steps needed to cross the cramped living room, past the small television and the folding chair set up by a computer desk.
Pulley approaches a wooden cabinet and opens a creaking glass door adorned with family photos. She reaches past her son's high school diploma and pulls out a drawing that is protected in clear plastic.
"I kept it," she says. She's almost too choked up to speak. She points to the top of the picture, a detailed drawing of Batman, where the words "Happy Birthday" are written. "I think he was 4 or 5."
At the bottom is the name "Johnathan" written in long, sweeping strokes.
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The drawing is one of John Wall's most cherished possessions. It had been a gift from his father, who had drawn it for him from a jail cell.
Wall's mother looks at the drawing again and chuckles. Then sighs.
"That's a good one, isn't it?" she says.
The apartment doesn't have room for a lot of furniture, but it houses plenty of memories. There's the small kitchen in the back where Pulley whipped together breakfast before leaving for one of the jobs that kept her away from her children most of the day and night. There's the bedroom where John's baby sitter would leave him during his turbulent, and often violent, youth. There's the living room where his high school coach would sit with him, often well after midnight, trying to hash out the differences that sometimes kept one of the country's best young basketball players sitting on the bench.
A plaque that bears the letters "MVP" rests on a chair, along with several packs of cigarettes. Boxes are strewn across the living room floor. Frances Pulley will be moving soon.
Most of the basketball world knows John Wall as the muscle-flexing point guard whom the Washington Wizards are expected to make the first overall pick in the NBA Draft on Thursday. Wall sat courtside at the NBA Finals, has dined with LeBron James and is a rare teenager who has earned praise from President Barack Obama and Dick Vitale.
Beneath that glitzy reputation and swagger is a 19-year-old whose inspiration comes not only from a mother who worked multiple jobs to support the family, but also from a father who was born in Washington and spent most of his final 30 years behind bars in North Carolina.
From the time Wall was nearly 2 years old until after he turned 8, he longed for the weekends because that was when he could see his father, John Carroll Wall. Pulley would drive her son and his younger sister, Cierra, to visit their father in prison.
Pulley never told Wall why his father was in jail — "I don't discuss that," she says — and at that point in his life, he never thought to ask. At that age, he attached no stigma to the prison; for him, it was just the place where his father lived.
For about two hours at a time, the family could sit together and talk, his father sharing superhero drawings he had done for John and Cierra.
"They enjoyed each other," Pulley said. "John wanted (his dad) to himself, but he had a sister so he had to share him."
Wall remembers those visits fondly.
"We could hug," Wall recalled. "We could touch and everything."
In 1998, the older Wall was diagnosed with liver cancer; the following year, he was released from prison a month early when his condition worsened. He was terminally ill.
Near the end of that summer, the parents took the children for a trip to White Lake, N.C. "We stayed at the beach, went on rides, stayed in the water a lot," Pulley said.
The younger John remembers the trip vividly and still calls it the most meaningful time in his life. With the water replacing prison walls as the backdrop to their conversations, father and son talked about life: how to be a better man, the importance of going to school, college one day, and staying out of jail.
Still, the specter of cancer loomed, and on the final day of the trip, the illness struck violently.
Wall remembers a hotel bathtub full of blood. The smell of the hemorrhage. The sound of the ambulance. His mother crying. His father died the next day, Aug. 24, 1999, at age 52.
"I didn't know at that age why God took people away, why people died," Wall said. "It took me a while, like seventh or eighth grade, to realize this is what everybody's got to do. I was not thinking that everybody's got to die someday."
To this day, Wall said, "it's tough for me to go back to beaches."
Earlier this month, while training in Southern California, Wall rarely deviated between his hotel and the gym. A trip to the ocean would bring back too many painful memories.
Looking for a fight
His father's death filled Wall, then a rail-thin kid in elementary school, with a rage that manifested itself in violence.
"People have jokes, so I just said, forget the jokes, we can fight," Wall said. "Just so much anger built up. I was mad at everything. I did not trust coaches, people. Any time somebody told me something, I just said, 'You don't know what you are talking about.' I did not want to believe nobody for some reason. That's just how it was."
Pulley made breakfast and dinner and in between worked a variety of jobs, including driving a small bus for children and working at a hotel. That meant a baby sitter for Wall, usually his older half-sister, Tonya, Pulley's daughter from a previous relationship.
"Could not do it," Wall said. "I used to fight them. My sister was my baby sitter. She used to be scared. I used to basically keep myself. She used to watch me, but I used to fight her — get so mad she would leave me alone — drop me in a room."
There were no other baby sitters because "I probably would have (fought) them, too."
Wall's worst fight occurred when he was 10, waiting for his turn at bat during a sandlot baseball game. One particularly tall, strong 14-year-old boy would not move from home plate. Wall swung the aluminum bat, and it connected with the kid's eyebrow. The two punched and wrestled and kept fighting — taking two-minute breaks — during a marathon slugfest.
Wall's aggression was so intense that, because he lived some 30 minutes from school, his mother would drop him off and sit in the parking lot because she knew he would be sent home in less than two hours. Pulley was unsettled about where she saw her son's life heading. "The same way his father's life was: prison," she said. "In trouble, mostly. It was sad. That was the sad part."
LeVelle Moton, now the head basketball coach at North Carolina Central, has run a youth basketball camp for years. Several years ago, among the players he would let join for free because of their impoverished background was an 11-year-old John Wall.
"Wow, he was crying out," Moton said. "He didn't want any discipline, any structure. John was like, 'I am screaming over here, can you hear me?' I didn't ignore him, but there were like 35 more kids doing the same thing."
When things went Wall's way, he was fine. When they didn't "watch out," Moton said. "He was a ticking time bomb waiting to explode on the basketball floor."
At one point, Moton pulled Wall aside and said that if he didn't change his behavior, he would not be allowed to stay. He was banished from the camp a day later. Wall said he didn't know where he was headed in life at that age, but it was not good. And if he didn't find a way to change, he would have little hope.
"Once I figured it out, I just said, basketball is my escape. This is the best way for me to do it," Wall said. "I just build it into me and basically play every game for (my dad). I feel like I have to step on the court every night and be dominant."
A year later, Wall, still frail, returned with a better attitude. And the following year Moton officiated the championship game and tested Wall's attitude with intentionally bad calls against him. After each whistle, Wall calmly put down the ball and ran back down court to play defense. Afterward, in front of the whole camp, Moton announced the MVP: Wall.
"I was so happy that he straightened out just so he would not be dead in two to three years," Moton said. "It was that kind of story. When your attitude is like that, you'll snap on the wrong person, and that's how you end up in the obituary section."
Gaining an understanding
Despite gradual improvements in his attitude and his game, Wall couldn't outrun his reputation as a problem child. After playing for two years for Garner High just outside of Raleigh, Wall's family moved into the city, which meant he had to attend Broughton High and repeat his sophomore year. He was poised to join current East Carolina guard Brock Young in a backcourt that would have been one of the best in the country.
During team tryouts, Wall remembers dominating, dunking on everybody. But on the way to school one day, Young called him and said, "You got cut." Young was mad; Wall was in disbelief. Wall said his outlook had improved by that point, but several people familiar with the situation said attitude was the main reason Broughton coach Jeff Ferrell cut Wall.
When reached by telephone, Ferrell declined to specify, saying, "It is not public record." When asked about Wall's development, Ferrell said, "I know him as well as I know you, and I don't know you."
Tony Edwards, one of Wall's first summer-league coaches, said: "It crushed him. It was devastating to him. He didn't want to go to school the next day. I mean, it crushed him."
Edwards and fellow summer-league coaches Brian and Dwon Clifton had formed an inner circle that Wall said helped him slowly overcome his distrust in men. Wall, his mom and a team of mentors decided he should transfer to Word of God Christian Academy, which has an enrollment of fewer than 300 students. He attended Friday night chapel and Bible study classes. He met often with Word of God founder Frank Summerfield to build a bond, talk about the loss of his father, academic and social issues.
But it was a work in progress. Summerfield would tell Wall: "John, you can't curse. This is a Christian academy. Help me out here."
Wall was academically ineligible for the fall session with a 1.6 grade-point average, and while his talent began to emerge upon his return, so did his attitude problems. In a game against Mount Zion, Wall stewed on the bench before Coach Levi Beckwith finally told him to enter the game.
Upon reaching the scorer's table, Wall mumbled something to the effect of, "I shouldn't even bother now."
Beckwith heard him and sent him back to the bench. Word of God lost. Beckwith limited Wall's playing time the next two games in the state playoffs.
Still, the coach kept in regular touch with Wall's mom and his summer-league coaches. Whenever an issue emerged, Beckwith usually called them to dissect it before Wall did.
"People say, 'Well, he is like that because his daddy died and he doesn't have a male figure; you can be tough on him and say you can't always use that as an excuse,' " Beckwith said. "It ain't an excuse. An excuse is avoidable. A reason is not."
Beckwith would talk regularly with Wall, asking him what he thought the appropriate punishment should be for his behavior. Beckwith wanted Wall to take responsibility for his actions.
Wall's struggles didn't evaporate overnight, but Beckwith would not allow any situation to fester, making late-night visits to East Davie Street to talk out any problems, even as small as Wall fetching Gatorade before the coach was done talking with him.
"That's when I learned," said Wall, who graduated Word of God with a 2.8 GPA. "I knew I could not beat the coach. And if I could not beat him, I could not beat anybody if I wanted to play."
Wall meets world
Wall repeated his sophomore year in high school, and Brian Clifton helped get him into the 2007 Reebok All-American Camp in Philadelphia. At that point, Wall was known only as one of the best players in North Carolina, but he was about to play among the hottest prospects in the country. And that's when the basketball world discovered John Wall.
"I knew that was my chance," Wall said. "Can't back down."
His speed, jaw-dropping vertical jump and competitive fire distinguished him from his peers. He scored 28 points in a game against Brandon Jennings, the top point guard in the class of 2008 and a future NBA lottery pick.
The following summer, during a Las Vegas tournament that featured thousands of players, Jennings walked into a high school gymnasium to watch one player: Wall. Standing next to Chris Rivers, then Reebok's grass-roots director, Jennings was asked to name the one high school player destined to be a star.
Jennings immediately pointed to the court: "Wall," he said. "The kid from Raleigh."
By that point, Edwards' phone had been overloaded for more than a year with text and voice messages from college coaches.
"LeBron has been LeBron since he was 3; Kobe has been Kobe since he was 4; Shaq has been Shaq since he was 5," Moton said. "John Wall has just been John Wall since he was 16. It just clicked one day."
By the time he graduated from high school, Wall was considered a lock to enter the NBA Draft after only one season in college. He followed Coach John Calipari to the University of Kentucky.
He was beloved by rabid Kentucky fans before he even took the court in Lexington, a feeling that only intensified after he made a game-winning jumper over Miami (Ohio) in his first college game last November. He finished the season as a consensus All-American. His mother rented a car and made the nearly 500-mile trip from Raleigh to Lexington for every home game.
Wall thrived under Calipari, whom he views as a father figure, and regularly joined other players for meals at the coach's house, developing a rapport with Calipari's wife and children. "I love him so much," Wall said.
Calipari said Wall finished with the highest grade-point average on the team. Wall called the one year in college the "greatest experience ever."
"If there was not a chance to go to the NBA," Wall said, "I would have loved to stay there four years."
The truth about Dad
After a sweltering workout in the gymnasium of his former high school last week, Wall sat on the first row of bleachers recounting his childhood. He hardly knew anything about his dad's time in jail. He learned just this month that his parents got married in prison, after hearing relatives talking about the dress his mom wore. He still had no idea why his father was locked up.
Wall stretched out his legs, revealing his yet-unnamed personal line of Reebok sneakers, and leaned his elbows back on the second row, seemingly at ease.
"I think it was just for an altercation or something that happened," Wall said, wiping sweat from his face. "I don't really know. It was something that happened."
According to court records, what happened Sept. 30, 1991 — less than a month after his son's first birthday — was John Carroll Wall walked into a convenience store in Raleigh, removed one beer, continued to the checkout where clerk Cecil Ibegbu stood. Wall placed a $1 bill on the counter. He then removed a.22-caliber Ruger from the back of his jeans and pointed it at Ibegbu, demanding all the money in the register. He was convicted of robbery with a dangerous weapon.
Sitting in the gym after his workout, Wall was told his father robbed a convenience store. He offered a slight nod and said, "Uh-huh."
Before meeting his mother, Wall's father had served three other sentences, for armed robbery; for possession of a firearm by a felon; and for second-degree murder, after shooting a 26-year-old housewife in the head following an argument.
Sitting on the bleachers, Wall learned for the first time that his father had served prison time before he was born and that the crime was murder. He offered no affirmation and looked away for a moment.
"Ohhhh," he said, dragging the sound for a second. "Oh, I didn't even know. I didn't know."
He paused, but not for long. He took a quick glance at the basketball court before making eye contact again. He was calm, but his speech slowed.
"My mom never told me. I heard he had one robbery thing," he said. "That is all I knew. I never knew anything about that other part. She would never tell me, she would not want to tell me or my sisters."
Was he ever curious?
"I was not curious," Wall said. "I was just happy to see my dad and talk to him."
The gym was almost empty, except for a few of Wall's mentors and friends chatting on the other side of the court after Wall's 80-minute workout. Wall was asked why his dad's past has done little to diminish his opinion of him.
"Well, because, for one thing, that's my dad," Wall answered without hesitation. "He brought me onto this earth and, like everybody, makes mistakes. Everyone is not going to be perfect. Sometimes people do some stuff because of certain situations they are in or the people they are around. Or they might be drunk or something and just do it.
"Like I said, he still was there for me.... Probably if I were older, you would have been, 'Forget him, he ain't my daddy, he ain't here for me, taking care of me.' At a young age, you don't know, you don't care. You're just happy to have somebody there that you can call your dad. And that's the biggest thing."
Wall has declined to get tattoos because of concerns about his image for marketing reasons, but he is considering getting one on his chest, considering it strongly enough that he has a specific design in mind. It would be of his dad's face, with clouds surrounding, and the words "Forever Living On."
The future awaits
This month, about 100 friends and family members gathered at a Raleigh community center to celebrate Cierra's high school graduation. After a meal of barbecue, Wall addressed the crowd, said some warm words about his sister and then announced that their mom would soon be moving from the apartment on East Davie Street. He is buying her a five-bedroom house on a four-acre lot in a quiet section of Raleigh. The room erupted in cheers.
Frances Pulley is going to need to buy furniture. She recently recounted the days of working two jobs while being essentially a single parent, her only sleep coming "in between" her other responsibilities. Did she ever imagine her life would turn out like this?
"Never," she said, laughing. "Never."
Asked later about how much her and her son's lives are about to change, she broke down: "A lot," she said through the tears. "A lot."
Soon the boxes on the floor will need to be filled with the contents of the apartment. The photos, the awards, the diploma, the drawings — all of it will need to be moved. So will a vase that holds the ashes of John Carroll Wall.
Her son will soon be moving, too, to begin his professional career in Washington, the city where his father was born.
Washington Post staff writer Michael Lee contributed to this report.London-based Dr. Manish Shah has been charged with 118 sexual offences including the abuse of a child under 13 years of age.
The 47-year-old doctor is accused of having assaulted 54 victims at a surgery in east London between 2004 and 2013, when he was first arrested.
His charges include 65 counts of assault by penetration, contrary to Section 2 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, and 52 counts of sexual assault, contrary to section 3 of the Act.
In a statement published Wednesday night, the Metropolitan Police reported that Shah is also charged with one count of sexual assault on a child under 13, contrary to section 7 of the Act.
According to the Daily Mail, the doctor was first suspended by the General Medical Council in August 2014, a year after the council placed unspecified “interim conditions” on Shah, whose suspension has been extended only on an annual basis since.
Currently, NHS Choices lists him as working as a GP at North Avenue Surgery in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, although none of the charges relate to his time there and the surgery’s records have not been updated in nearly three years.
According to the website, Shah — who the Mail reports was not born in the UK — speaks Hindi and Gujarati in addition to English, and cites “family planning” as his main interest.
While his listing on the NHS site notes that the doctor is able to “fit and remove [contraceptive] coils”, it is not known whether any of the allegations relate to intimate examinations.
Shah is to appear at Barkingside Magistrates’ Court in East London on August 31.
In 2012, the Sunday Telegraph revealed that three-quarters of doctors struck off in the UK were from trained abroad, with foreign doctors five times more likely to be removed or suspended from the medical register than those trained in the UK.
According to data obtained by the newspaper using freedom of information laws, India was the country with the biggest single number of doctors who were struck off or suspended, followed by Nigeria and Egypt.
And in the same year, the Daily Mail reported that dozens of doctors were allowed to keep practising, despite being convicted of serious sexual offences.
The General Medical Council said it inquired about an automatic ban on doctors who are on the sex offenders register, but “advice was obtained from a leading QC who concluded that an automatic bar, without exceptions, would not be compatible with human rights legislation”.By Christopher R Rice
I received this question about my
Snitches
page...
Q. How are you gonna make sure people don't just post pictures of their enemies even if they aren't snitches?
A. I fear that everyone has missed the point. This a tool for you to wield. Why is the left so fragmented in the US? COINTELPRO, snitches, informants and traitors. How can we as revolutionaries counter this huge attack on our civil liberties? What can we possibly do? Just sit back and wait for someone with a case to implicate us in some crime and then we have to go to jail in their place? I'm not one to sit around hoping that I won't be next / gassed, that it's only going to be the Jews or the Gypsies. And hopefully they'll just leave me alone. I guess that whenever I see an injustice being perpetrated I counter it. It's not what I want to do, I feel that I must counter it. I don't think that I could live with myself if I didn't.
Someone said, "Chris, you're an activist." Nah, my government attacked me. Told me that if I smoked a joint that I was a criminal. The church attacked me for the music I liked and how I wore my hair. These didn't seem like things that were preventing me from being a good citizen or a good Christian, but I was ostracized, fired, harassed by the police everywhere I went. Then I was denied employment if I couldn't pass a drug test and had no way to support myself. I was made homeless and unemployable. I was and still am attacked on all sides, I live in constant fear. Not from gangs but from my own government. The terror that they have inflicted, not just overseas but against their own domestic population should keep everyone up at night.
And you're worried about what again? O' yeah, I might publish someone's picture that might not be a snitch. Wow Becky, the things that you decide are worth worrying about really don't matter two flips, do they? It's great when I'm brought back and forced to see the smaller picture. Changes my whole focus.
Now here we have someone who has sacrificed a great part of his life, time and money to bring you a website that you can wield as a weapon. Has anyone bothered to say thank you? Or contribute / donate a lousy five bucks to help me keep this site up and running? No, hell, no. All you do is sit around pooping in the persons Cheerios who actually got up off their fat ass and did something about all this injustice. And how will America pay my sacrifices back? With insults, that's how.
And you wonder where your leaders are. People wouldn't stand up and protect their leaders. Would they?
Our leaders are either in jail or in hiding. Now no one will stand up for Americans ever again, because Americans are backstabbing, cry babies and snitches. Bet your ass I'll post your picture and not give two flips about you or anyone else in this country. The same way that you treated me when all I wanted was work. Remember, ya'll thought it was hilarious to let me starve. And when I tried to bum some change, remember what you screamed out your car windows at me? "Get a job!"
Funny, I never thought of that.
Then after spending my time, gas and money driving around to interviews what did you say to me? "We love your resume and we'd love to hire you, just one thing first, could you piss in this cup for us?"
Somehow I missed the cup and peed all over your desk, splashing you in your ugly stupid faces. And for some unknown reason to me, I didn't get that job. And I found myself back out on the street flyin' a sign, tryin' to bum some change to stay alive. But I won't give up hope on my writing gig, even though I haven't made a dime. The comments are so great, they inspire me.
I'm just a lonely boy. Lonely and blue. I'd REDACTED all of you but my gun only has six bullets.
Wait, what was your question again? Oh yeah, "how do I know, that you're a snitch?" Most people in this country are, say an easy fifty percent. So I have a fifty, fifty chance no matter who's picture I post. Is ABC or CNN correct half of the time? Hell no, they can't even get the weather right. So just using these simple numbers I'm already more accurate than CNN or ABC news, right?
Damn, I forgot what the question was again? Wait, I know, what it was. "How do I know you care enough to give a 110% when I haven't given ten cents." Guess you get what you pay for huh? You paid nothin' right? There is another site that charges for this same info but you're too cheap to subscribe and pay for a mans hard labor right? You want somethin' for nothin' and expect me to do all the work providing links, bibliographies, foot notes and wipe your ass for you too right?
I ain't the one.
I'm tired of being your slave. Get off my site and go steal someone else's labor. Unless you're homeless like me, either donate or get off my site and don't come back. And take your comments and questions with you. Damn time wasters. Don't need you, never have and never will. As soon as you are gone there will be two more just like you, to replace you.
Ya kno', I doubt that's the answer that they were looking for. Guess ya' get what ya' pay for huh?
Hey, that cop wants to know if that's your sack of weed. Tell him yes and if he wants some it's twenty a gram. We're back in business boyz.
EDITORS NOTE: I've been to county jail twice. Once in LA and once in IE, CA. Both about 20 years apart. My second trip back, everyone was PC'd up. Meaning they were in protective custody. Meaning they were pedophiles or snitches. When I say everybody, I mean that the dorm that I was originally placed in was downsized to make room for more snitches. Due to meth, a drug that won't let you shut up, everyone has become a snitch.
In my world, a hacker got busted and conspired with the FBI to save his own skin. Many brave beautiful people are now in prison because of that snitch. Rotting in a cage. What would you do?
Blog has been shifted to:
http://www.copsrcorrupt.com/
Articles and videos from now on will be posted at:
Underground America Inc.Ukrainian authorities have confirmed that DPR forces have restored the Debaltseve railway junction, earlier claimed to have been completely "destroyed" and turned into "the surface of the moon."
© REUTERS / Baz Ratner DPR in Talks With Kiev on Returning Bodies of Dead Soldiers
Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council spokesman Andrei Lysenko has confirmed that the DPR has restored the railway junction in Debaltseve in a matter of 12 days, following earlier reports that it had been completely destroyed and turned into "the surface of the moon."
"The Debaltseve railway junction has been restored. On March 3rd, ammunition was seen being unloaded from trains," Lysenko stated on Friday, cited by Ukraine's Podrobnosti.ua.
On February 19, Lysenko had reported that the Debaltseve railway junction had been destroyed. "The strategic Debaltseve railway junction has ceased to have any significance for the local region. The entire railway hub has been turned into the surface of the moon: everything has been destroyed."
Ukrainian media reporting on the restoration of the railway junction have characterized it as "terrorists restoring the railroad." Well-known Donetsk-based political scientist Vladimir Kornilov commented with sarcasm on the media's interesting approach on his Facebook page: "It's an uncommon occurrence, terrorists building railways! The brave Ukrainian army destroys them, while the terrorists build and build, restore and repair…They have really terrorized the local population with their construction projects and repairs!"
Poll What do you think is the most important event of the week? The trial of the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the US 0.7% (7)
Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov’s murder in Moscow 21.0% (207)
America's 300 military instructors arriving in Ukraine 48.7% (479)
ISIL fighters destroying 3,000-year-old Assyrian ruins 29.6% (291) Voted: 984 All polls The trial of the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the US
Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov’s murder in Moscow
America's 300 military instructors arriving in Ukraine
ISIL fighters destroying 3,000-year-old Assyrian ruins All polls
Donetsk People's Republic representatives recently reported that they have successfully restored 20 kilometers of railway line in areas damaged by fighting. Debaltseve has been under the control of DPR forces since February 18.
In late February, Ukraine's Highway Agency estimated 4.7 billion hryvnia (roughly $167.6 million US) in damage to the roads of war-torn Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Meanwhile, the Department of Economics of the Donetsk Regional Administration has estimated the destruction of over 10,000 objects of infrastructure, at a cost of nearly 3 billion hryvnia ($107 million).About
El Proyecto
Global Childhood Archive, es un proyecto ciudadano, conformado por staff, colaboradores y personas cercanas al museo cuyo fin busca apoyar directamente al bienestar y salvaguarda de los tesoros que conforman al museo a travé de recursos que permitan mejorar las condiciones para la conservación de las colecciones que posee, generar un proceso de expansión por el cuál se puedan compartir mayores colecciones y acervos de la cultura popular mexicana e internacional y desarrollar un amplio proceso de mantenimiento en bodegas, almacentes y slas pertenecientes al museo.
The Project
Global Childhood Archive is a citizen project composed by staff, collaborators and closed people to the museum, whose aim seeks to support directly the welfare and safeguard the treasures that make up the museum, the funding resources will allow us to improve conditions for the conservation and preservation of the collections, to generate an expansion process to the different exhibition and storage spaces, develop a comprehensive maintenance process in warehouses, showrooms and workshops belonging to the museum, so we can share further heritages of Mexican and international popular culture.
Colección Popular del Comediante Mexicano Caninflas/ Popular Collection from the mexican comedian Cantinflas
Artesanías lúdicas populares de la cultura mexicana/ Handmade artcrafts from the mexcan popular culture
Supercirco de Plastimarx y álbum original del primer circo en México / Plastimars Supercircus and original photo album from the first ever circus in Mexico
Necesidad del Dinero
La finalidad del monto solicitado es para poder generar un proceso de expansión respecto a los espacios de exhibición, mejorar las condiciones de las bodegas de almacenamiento, restaurar y conservar el archivo que compone la colección, generar más vitrinas, salas de exhibición, limpieza y restauración de piezas pertenecientes al archivo, con la finalidad de continuar preservando éstos tesoros invaluables y únicos con los que cuenta el MUJAM.
Needs of the economic resources
The purpose of the requested amount is to generate an expansion process regarding the exhibition spaces, improve the conditions of the storage holds, restore and preserve the archive that makes up the collection, generate more cabinets, showrooms, cleaning and restoration of pieces belonging to the archive, in order to keep preserving these priceless treasures and unique objects from the MUJAM.
Estado de bodegas de almacenamiento/ Storage Ware
|
wide eyes are spot on too!
To complete the set, Cindy Crawford's look was encapsulated with another pose and Tyra ensured she didn't miss a thing, even adding the mole and big hair her 'idol' is famous for.
The images form part of a special set 15 imitation photos and we can't wait to see more!
What do you make of Tyra's transformation into Cara, Kate and Cindy? Let us know below or tweet us @CosmopolitanUK
CARA DELEVINGNE GOES WILD FOR ID MAGAZINE
KATE MOSS JOINS INSTAGRAM
GET MORE CELEBRITY NEWSALAMEDA, California – If you’re anything like me, you value your life. Which means you’ve probably avoided motorcycles despite their stellar fuel economy, small footprint and ability to weave through traffic like a snake through grass. But the benefits of riding a bike are often outweighed by their inherent vulnerability, not to mention the lack of creature comforts and cargo capacity.
Lit Motors aims to change that.
This is the C1, the first prototype from San Francisco-based Lit Motors. It’s a fully electric, fully enclosed two-wheeled two-seater. And when the production version arrives in 2014, the C1 will come complete with airbags, a seatbelt and a smartphone-connected infotainment system. But that’s not the cool part.
Underneath the passenger compartment are two gyroscopes that keep the C1 constantly upright. That means it stays standing while stopped and can pirouette through traffic like the best from Honda, Yamaha and Ducati.
How much force would it take to knock the C1 on its side? According to Lit, a small elephant would have to hit it broadside to put the C1 on the ground.
The C1 prototype you see here is rear-wheel-drive for now, but the production version will be all-wheel-drive (two-wheel, if you prefer), with power provided by a hub-mounted electric motor good for 110 horsepower. Weighing in at between 800 and 900 pounds in production spec, Lit estimates a zero-to-60-mph time of around six seconds, with a 120-mph top speed and a range of 220 miles between charges thanks to the 8 kWh lithium-ion battery pack mounted in the floor. Charge times vary depending on your outlet, with a household standard 120V juicing the C1 up in around 6 hours or around 4 hours using the 220V outlet powering your dryer.
It all sounds too good to be true, which is why I’ve trekked across the bay to Alameda, California, for an exclusive spin in the C1.
Measuring in around 115 inches long and 40 inches wide, the C1 feels larger on the inside than its dimensions suggest. While the C1 concept Lit Motors has been showing (built by the same team behind the refreshed Light Cycles in Tron) packs seating for two, the rear throne is more of glorified shelf than a proper bucket. In the prototype, a series of computers and controls occupy the rear passenger area, all of which will be mounted underneath the floor panel once production begins.
The rough hand-bent aluminum and steel body panels and piecemeal chassis framing are simply a way to test all the various systems, motors, gyros and suspension components. Understand, this C1 is a rolling proof of concept; a two-wheeled testbed of technology that allows the team to tweak and iterate all the various hardware and software as they get closer to a final product.
Which is why it broke on us – thrice.
After an initial drive by Lit Motors founder and CEO Danny Kim, the C1 suffered a software glitch that only allowed one of the gyros to function properly. After an engineer whipped out a laptop, performed a series of tests and reset the system, we got the go-ahead.
And then a belt broke.
While it’s doubtful Kim and his team were pleased with the C1’s debut-day glitches, it gave us a chance to see the hardware that keeps the bike upright as the Lit team completely removed the gyro magic from the chassis.
In its current form, the two gyros each put out 266 pound-feet of torque as they spin, keeping the C1 upright no matter the speed or angle. In final production form, the combined force of the pair of gyros will max out at around 1,300 pound-feet, enough to keep the C1 vertical while stopped, at steady-state cruising and planted to the road at a maximum lean angle of 45 degrees.
The ability to simply pull the entire gyro setup from the chassis is a design decision that will make it to production, allowing the C1 to be serviced quickly and efficiently, much like the battery pack mounted to the floor of the Tesla Model S. It also helps when something goes awry during its maiden voyage in the eager hands of someone outside the Lit Motors studio.
Being a prototype, battery capacity on this lone tester is currently capped at 3kWh, with the rear motor outputting around 75 hp. Current weight, sans windshield, side windows and a glass panel that will make up the roof, will be around 800 to 900 pounds in final form, but currently, the stripped-down prototype is tipping the scales at around 650 pounds, or close to 800 pounds with driver.
The suspension and brake components are a mashup of production bits pulled from existing motorcycles and custom built, machined aluminum pieces Lit Motors developed in-house. The front wheel/tire combo is donated from a Ducati 848, while the massive rear meat comes off a Harley-Davidson Fatboy.
Included in the system is a patented regenerative braking setup that uses the gyros as kinetic capacitors that tap out around 86-percent efficiency. The regen effort will be honed over the coming months to provide a subtle amount of “engine braking,” much like you’d experience in a traditional bike or one of the handful of electric vehicles currently on the market.
With the belt replaced and the gyros whirring away, I opened up the thin door, slipped into the Eames-style classroom seat and was greeted by a traditional array of controls.
There’s a Momo steering wheel connected to an exposed steering shaft that turns the front wheel, with a few displays, toggle switches and wiring coalescing into the makeshift dash. Below that are two traditional pedals – a brake and accelerator – which makes the C1’s cabin familiar, if sparse.
I’ve been informed by Kim and Co. that I need to sit bolt upright, otherwise the gyros — working at a much lower capacity than their production counterparts — won’t be able to keep the C1 steady if I’m constantly shifting my weight.
Visibility up front and to the sides is phenomenal, although the aluminum panel out back means rearward vision is all but nonexistent, particularly with the lack of a rearview or wing mirrors.
I stretch a bit to reach the steering wheel when I’m given the green light to push the throttle. It takes a bit of force to get the C1 moving, but once underway, it moves with the kind of smoothness I’ve come to expect from other EVs.
I’m told to keep the speeds low, so I cautiously give it more throttle and hit maybe 10 mph before pressing firmly on the brakes to bring the C1 to a halt.
While the gyros mean the C1 stays standing even while stopped, there’s an additional benefit over a traditional bike: reverse. A metal switch on the dash allows me to switch from forward to reverse, and within a second I’m hauling backward at an impressive clip.
Another stop, another flick of the directional switch and I get back up to speed quickly before coming to a stop once again. Because of an issue with the gyros, I’m unable to test its ability to handle a few turns.
Mildly disappointed but still impressed, I throw it into reverse again, back up to the starting point and hop out. The C1 stays standing as my weight shifts from the floor panel to the ground; the body twitching almost imperceptibly to keep itself righted.
Yes, the C1 works as advertised, but there’s obviously much more to do before it’s ready for primetime.
This first C1 prototype is the work of Kim and his half-dozen-strong team, along with an initial investment of around $200,000.
Lit Motors will need millions more to complete the next round of testing and upgrades, along with getting the interior and sound deadening sorted, the all-wheel-drive system functional and the rest of the body components up to production spec. Not to mention getting the C1 50-state legal, something a partnership with a major automaker would certainly help along.
But the seed has been planted, the hardware works and in two years’ time, you and I could be among the first to plunk down the $24,000 Lit Motors estimates the C1 will cost.
I’m smitten, if skeptical. But if this is the future of personal transport, I’m all on board.Opportunity Discovery or Judgment? Fargo Edition
11 November 2014 at 4:53 pm Peter G. Klein
| Peter Klein |
In the opportunity-discovery perspective, profits result from the discovery and exploitation of disequilibrium “gaps” in the market. To earn profits an entrepreneur needs superior foresight or perception, but not risk capital or other productive assets. Capital is freely available from capitalists, who supply funds as requested by entrepreneurs but otherwise play a relatively minor, passive role. Residual decision and control rights are second-order phenomena, because the essence of entrepreneurship is alertness, not investing resources under uncertainty.
By contrast, the judgment-based view places capital, ownership, and uncertainty front and center. The essence of entrepreneurship is not ideation or imagination or creativity, but the constant combining and recombining of productive assets under uncertainty, in pursuit of profits. The entrepreneur is thus also a capitalist, and the capitalist is an entrepreneur. We can even imagine the alert individual — the entrepreneur of discovery theory — as a sort of consultant, bringing ideas to the entrepreneur-capitalist, who decides whether or not to act.
A scene from Fargo nicely illustrates the distinction. Protagonist Jerry Lundegaard thinks he’s found (“discovered”) a sure-fire profit opportunity; he just needs capital, which he hopes to get from his wealthy father-in-law Wade. Jerry sees himself as running the show and earning the profits. Wade, however, has other ideas — he thinks he’s making the investment and, if it pays off, pocketing the profits, paying Jerry a finder’s fee for bringing him the idea.
So, I ask you, who is the entrepreneur, Jerry or Wade?
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Entry filed under: - Klein -, Austrian Economics, Entrepreneurship, Myths and Realities, Teaching, Theory of the Firm.Hey all. I’m going to rewrite the updater again. Keeping MAMEHub up to date has been one of the biggest challenges of the whole project. Let’s look at the history of MAMEHub to see all of the attempts:
MAMEHub v1: no auto updating, everyone had a different version of the client and emulator, and rarely could anyone connect to someone else without the emulator crashing because of version incompatibility.
Around midway through v1 we added code that would auto download MAMEHub using rsync. This was great for Mac and Linux users, but windows users had to use this port of rsync that didn’t work 100% and often locked people out of running MAMEHub.
In MAMEHub2 we switched to Java and used the jgit library to keep everyone up to date with a github repository. This seemed like a great idea, but has the problem where, if you ever interrupt a jgit update, your repo is hosed and you need to reinstall MAMEHub. Also, jgit only supports downloading the entire repository, so people get about 300MB of source code that they will never use.
For the next version, I’m going to go back to the rsync idea. Since MAMEHub v1, mingw now has an official rsync port for windows that looks like it will do what we want.
I looked into Java web start since that is Java’s solution to this problem, but it fails with some security violation on both my Mac laptop and Linux desktopShare This Story Tweet Share Share Pin Email
STAUNTON—The precincts have closed, the votes counted, and it's official: Emmett Hanger lives to fight for another term as District 24's state senator.
With family and supporters gathered Tuesday evening at Staunton's Clocktower Restaurant, Hanger was declared the GOP state senate nominee by a wide margin – 60.32 percent of the district vote — with 77 out of 78 precincts reporting.
"We as a community, a state and a nation have a lot of challenges in front of us, and they're not going to be solved by partisan bickering," Hanger said Tuesday night, speaking not only to the watch party in attendance but also to party factions that hoped to bring him down.
CAMPAIGN UNDER FIRE
Campaign aide, Boyd Marcus, right, of Richmond, and Tony Smith, of Staunton, monitor the poll numbers of the District 24 state Senate seat Republican primary at the Clocktower Restaurant & Bar in downtown Staunton on Tuesday, June 9, 2015 for Hanger's campaign party.
(Photo: Holly Marcus/Special to The News Leader)
Hanger's re-election bid may have been two years in the making, but his challenge began in 2007, when Buena Vista businessman Scott Sayre came within 866 votes of unseating him for the District 24 seat.
Then as now, Hanger's opponent claimed to be a truer Republican than he was. His 2015 contenders, North River District Supervisor Marshall Pattie and businessman Dan Moxley, seized a similar opportunity — Obamacare.
Hanger in 2014 was among three senate Republicans who joined Gov. Terry McAuliffe plugging for a privatized version of Medicaid expansion. Although he abandoned the effort when it became clear no budget would be passed containing it, the damage was done.
Of the "gang of three" Republican moderates, two announced their retirements. That left Hanger, the last man standing, with a black mark on his back for some.
As Moxley supporter Shak Hill explained it Tuesday, "He violated our principles." Hill, who ran unsuccessfully for a state senate nomination in 2014, was one of many ultra-conservative residents stumping for runner-up Moxley, who had 27.44 percent of the vote.
Moxley supporter Shak Hill: "He violated our principles."
DAY AT THE POLLS
Legislative aide Holly Herman monitors the vote counts in the Republican primary race for the District 24 state Senate seat on her phone with husband Randy at the Clocktower Restaurant & Bar in downtown Staunton on Tuesday, June 9, 2015. The Hanger campaign organized a party to watch election results.
(Photo: Holly Marcus/Special to The News Leader)
Pattie, a former Democrat but with local Shenandoah Valley Tea Party support, saw a chance as Moxley did to split and win the vote with his candidacy — or if not that, to set himself up for a future state senate go-round.
"If I can't be your first choice, let me be your second choice," Pattie told some who were voting for his opponents at Clymore Elementary in Fort Defiance.
Marshall Pattie: "If I can't be your first choice, let me be your second choice."
There, Hanger's son Chad also stood greeting supporters. But there were clearly votes for all three candidates. Unlike 2007, when Hanger had Pattie's North River District and Fort Defiance in the bag, it appeared he would have to share.
'"This is my first time for a primary," said Jerry Hendricks, who decided to "see if my vote might make a change" after being courted by Pattie. A former contractor, Hendricks voted for the supervisor because "he sat and talked to me for hours and asked my opinions. I've lived here since 1965, and he's the first one who's ever come to my house."
Garnett Andes, voter: "We need somebody who can bring people together."
Garnett Andes, an IT manager for Energizer who identifies with conservative politics, looked at all the candidates. He cast his vote for Hanger "to get rid of the stalemates we're having in government. We need somebody who can bring people together," he said.
Twyla and Tom Austin also voted for Hanger because "he'll give us more pull in the senate. He's on all the important committees, especially finance."
STORMING STRONGHOLDS
It had been Hanger's plan to use campaign literature as his door-to-door presence and focus his in-person appearances on events. But attack ads preying on voter fears and intensive door-to-door campaigning in his strongholds kept the incumbent senator on the defensive.
Like his fellow candidates, he spent Monday pounding the pavements, knocking on doors.
Emmett Hanger: "It's in God's hands."
As the afternoon marched on, Hanger took up a position outside Waynesboro's Ward D at Westminster Presbyterian Church, greeting voters who seemed to know him from many years past. Men who'd supported him in their prime now came to the poll to vote for him with their walkers.
Still, none of the candidates was taking anything for granted.
"It's in God's hands," Hanger said.
WAITING FOR RESULTS
Before results were in, Pattie's group gathered at Bella Luna in Harrisonburg to await an outcome. "We're calling it a watch party, not a victory party," Pattie said.
He'd end the night below where many expected.
Hanger: "It makes me feel good about what I've been doing — and makes me want to do it some more."
That might have been the surprise of the night — Pattie trailing the other two with just 12.25 percent of the vote. The candidate had vowed to knock on doors and have "20,000 conversations" with District 24 voters over a period of 17 months.
Where Pattie had relied on James Madison University students to help make it happen, "Moxley had the door knockers," said Hanger campaign consultant Dan Goff.
What Moxley lacked, Goff said Tuesday, was social media presence. "I think in the final analysis, when people review Twitter streams and Facebook posts, they'll find we were extraordinarily strong," the consultant said.
Hanger won Augusta County with 64.32 percent of the vote, Staunton with 71.32 percent and Waynesboro with 56.2 percent.
Moxley strongholds included Culpeper County with 52.52 percent of the vote and Greene County with 54.15 percent.
Hanger had said if he won the nomination, he hoped it would be a convincing win by at least 50 percent.
"I knew the support was there," he said after the primary election was called. "That, for me, was just very gratifying. It makes me feel good about what I've been doing — and makes me want to do it some more."In an effort to woo evangelical voters in Iowa, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has become the third Republican presidential candidate to sign a pledge to oppose gay marriage, to appoint only “faithful Constitutionalists” as judges, to stay loyal to his spouse, to shrink the size of the federal government, and to oppose Islamic law, among other things.
The pledge is the brainchild of The Family Leader, a prominent group of Iowa social conservatives whose endorsement is considered helpful to winning the backing of many evangelicals and other social conservatives ahead of the state’s Jan. 3 caucuses.
Julie Summa, director of marketing and public outreach for the group, confirmed in an email this afternoon that Mr. Perry has “signed the pledge as written.” Two other candidates who have support among social conservatives – former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota – have already signed the pledge.
The Family Leader group was attacked this summer when it emerged that the pledge contained a preamble that asserted that a child born into slavery in 1860 “was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the U.S.A.’s first African-American president.”
The section was cut after drawing sharp criticism for its offensiveness to African-Americans and from critics who noted, among other things, that families of slaves were often broken apart by slave owners.Last week we said farewell to our friend Ash, who has now moved away to experience new things in new places. Ash, along with her brother Steve, is the creator of Megacynics, one of the few webcomics I actually read on a regular basis, and one I recommend. A while ago she did a couple of Doctor Who themed comics, and did a considerable amount of drinking research in order to create a whole set of yummy Doctor Who themed party drinks. (Click on the link to see them all.)
So we decided Ash needed to have a Doctor Who themed going-away party. I hung styrofoam galaxies in the hall and made a bleach and paint splattered galaxy-ish tablecloth, and made a bunch of fezzes for people to wear, because everyone knows that parties are more fun when they include amusing and thematic attire. Plus fezzes are cool.
Ash also made everyone samples of two of her drink creations, the Fish Custard and the T.A.R.D.I.S. Below are her illustrated versions, paired with the real-life versions she created for us. (For the Fish Custard, she dumped in some colourful Swedish Fish candies since we didn’t have fish-shaped ice cubes on hand. It worked nicely, and boy were those candies soaked in alcohol and sugar by the time you got to the bottom of your cup!)
Throughout the evening, various people wore various fezzes as we enjoyed various Doctor Who drinks and jokes. All this party prep and fez-making is a large part of why I was too busy to post an actual tutorial last week, but now I will start making it up to you by teaching you how to make a simple, inexpensive felt fez.
The planet decorations:
And the galactic drinks table, with Doctor Who themed nametags for everyone’s beverages:
And now, fez-making!
[EDIT: A fantastic dad over at CoreGeek has made an awesome upscaled fez for his daughter, using this tutorial as a base. He added extra exterior embellishment and even LEDs to it, turning it into a TARDIS fez. So awesome! Check out his project and get inspired to try your own!]
——————————————
What you’ll need
materials:
felt – any colour! A lot of fezzes are red. A lot of trees are also green, but that just makes the pink ones even more noteworthy and special. You’ll need about 1/8 to 1/4 yard of material.
– any colour! A lot of fezzes are red. A lot of trees are also green, but that just makes the pink ones even more noteworthy and special. thread to match your felt
thin craft foam (best) OR thin cardboard (like an empty cereal box, beer box, etc.)
(best) OR (like an empty cereal box, beer box, etc.) scotch tape
duct tape OR packing tape
OR a tassel
tools:
fabric scissors
pen
straight pins
sewing machine
glue gun
sewing needle
fez pattern– number 15. under “Sewing patterns”
number 15. under “Sewing patterns” plain printer paper and plain cardstock for printing the pattern
——————————————
Putting it all together
1) Start by printing the fez pattern onto plain printer paper and cutting it out. The pattern is two pages, so you’ll need to connect them. Just match up the edges exactly (use the lines marked A and B on pattern piece B) and tape them together. Match the edges of the paper, not the edges of the image, which may get partially cut off by print margins and stuff.
This pattern is sized small to medium, and you lose some circumference towards the end of the process, when you fold and glue the bottom felt edges inside the hat. Fezzes do look fine fit onto a head or just perched on top of it (as demonstrated in the photos above), but if you want to increase the size of your fez, I’ve provided a pattern piece for that – piece C. Just cut it out and tape it to one end of piece B to add to the circumference of your hat. You can trim it down to add only a slight amount of hat size, or increase it even more for a much larger fez. Just keep in mind that you’ll also need to increase the size of your hat’s crown (the circle that makes up the flat top of the hat) accordingly.
2) Take your piece of felt and fold it in half. Line up one end of pattern piece B along the folded edge of the felt, and pin the pattern into place. Pin pattern piece A onto the felt as well.
3) Cut the pieces out.
4) Fold the felt cutout of pattern piece B in half, matching up the ends. Pin the ends together.
5) Sew along the pinned edge, matching the edge of the fabric up with the edge of your presserfoot for an approximate 3/8″ seam allowance.
6) Now take your circular felt cutout of pattern piece A and set it on top of the fez, inside the circle of fabric. Pin the edges of both pieces together, all the way around the circle. You can tell where the fez’s top is because it should be slightly smaller than the bottom, since fezzes flare outwards from top to bottom.
7) Now sew all the way around the circle. Keep the edge of your presserfoot lined up with the edge of the fabric to get the right seam allowance and create an evenly rounded line of stitching. You’ll want to sew this with the round circle part facing down, lying along your sewing machine, and the “body” of the fez pointing upwards into the air. If you’ve been hanging around here for a while, you might remember that this is exactly the same thing we did to attach fleece pig faces to bodies (step 3 of that tutorial) and to create the bottoms of dice bags (step 8 of that tutorial).
If you’re not too familiar with sewing, just keep in mind that you can always stick your needle down into the thread, lift the presserfoot up, and turn the fabric underneath a bit to adjust your direction, then put the presserfoot back down and resume stitching. This is how you turn tight corners, change direction and follow jagged or tightly curved lines on a sewing machine. I go over this in a bit more detail (with pictures) in my Zelda hat tutorial (step 8 of that tutorial).
8) Using a good pair of sharp scissors, cut little slits all the way around the circle you’ve just sewn, going up to the line of thread, but not cutting through it. You’ll want to do this step very carefully. If you do accidentally snip through some thread, just go over that section of stitching again on your sewing machine – it’s not the end of the world, just a nuisance.
Turn the whole fez right side out. It’s going to have a sort of roll-y, not-pushed-out look to it at the top. Moreso if you’ve used thicker, heavier material. That’s ok, that’s normal. That’s what the next steps are going to fix.
9) Print the fez pattern out again, this time onto cardstock.* This time, when you cut the pieces out, cut along the dashed line where there is such a line. This means you’ll be cutting out a smaller circle and and a narrower long piece.
*Not strictly necessary, it just makes the pattern pieces easier to trace onto the foam or cardboard.
10) Turn on your hot glue gun.
While the glue gun is warming up, trace the new pattern pieces onto your craft foam or cardboard. For piece B, you can’t really fold the foam or cardboard in half (and shouldn’t anyway), so just trace it twice and cut out two separate pieces. It’s likely your foam or cardboard won’t be long enough for you to do otherwise anyway.
The reason I recommend the foam (which you can get at stores like Michael’s or Hobby Lobby – it’s just super thin coloured rubber foam) over cardboard, is that it creates a smoother exterior for the fez. Cardboard never curves quite smoothly, so your fez will probably have some slight lines along its outside if you use cardboard. However, when I say slight I really do mean slight – it will in no way ruin the overall look of your fez, so there is no reason to go to any great lengths or costs or inconvenient trips to the craft store just to avoid using cardboard for this. I did fezzes both ways and they all turned out perfectly wearable.
11) First, take your fez and turn it upside down, then take your foam or cardboard circle and push it down into the top of the fez. With some pulling and adjusting, it should fit inside the round seam of fabric at the top of the hat. If it doesn’t, take it out and trim it down slightly around the edges until it fits. Once you’re sure it fits, dab a little hot glue around the edges of the circle and insert it into the hat, pressing down to get the hot glue to go flat and hold the circle in place.
12) Now take those two copies you cut of piece B, match up two of the ends of the pieces exactly, and tape them together on both sides with duct tape or packing tape.
13) Now take this piece and fit it inside the fez. Push it all the way down to the top of the hat, and push it outwards so that it takes up as much space as possible, pushing the sides of the fez outward as much as possible. If the untaped ends of the foam overlap, make a little mark where they overlap. Also, when the foam is inside the hat, it should be about an inch shorter than the felt body of the hat. If it sticks out (like in the photo below) you’ll need to trim it. I’ve adjusted the pattern since making the fez in the picture below, so this shouldn’t be a problem for you, but if it is, just cut the foam down a bit.
14) Pull the foam back out of the fez and trim any excess at the ends, where you made the pen mark. If your foam was too short, you’ll need to cut another small segment (just use the original template for this) and tape it to the existing piece to lengthen it. Similarly, if the foam stuck out above the edge of the felt, you’ll want to cut it short along the bottom edge.
15) Now you can match up the open ends of the foam circle and tape them together. Then push the whole thing back inside the fez and adjust until it’s sitting in there nice and evenly.
16) [Note: a bunch of my initial photos for these next steps got screwed up, so I took new photos while making another fez. That’s why suddenly you are now looking at pictures of a red fez instead of a blue one.] So now you have a had looking something like this, with just some raw flopping edges along the hat’s bottom edge (the edge that is actually facing up, towards you at the moment):
Grab your glue gun again, and make a line of glue a few inches long along the exposed bottom edge of the felt. Then pull the felt tightly over the bottom edge of the foam and press down. Try not to burn your fingers through the fabric.
17) Continue all along the bottom edge of the hat this way, until the felt all the way along is glued down inside the fez.
18) Let everything dry and cool, then flip the whole hat over and sew a tassel on the top. If, like me, your tassels are a bit short, you can leave an extra length of the thread that attaches them to the hat, so that they dangle further over the fez’s side.
19) Party time! Remind all your friends how cool fezzes are. If you have the right kind of friends, they should already know this. For even more coolness, add a bowtie. I unfortunately did not have time to make bowties for this party, but I’ll get to it eventually, and when I do there will be a tutorial for that, and possibly another party. I’ve got these little styrofoam planets around now after all – better just have another Doctor Who party in the future. Or the past. Whichever the Tardis lands us in.Watching the sixties and seventies through 2001 and Alien.
It was April 1968 and my father was sitting in a theater in Times Square watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, certain that what he was seeing wasn’t just a movie but the future. When it ended, he got up and walked out into Times Square, with its peep-show glitz and sleazy, flashing advertisements; he found the uptown subway beneath the yellow marquees for dirty movies like The Filthy 5; and through all of it, he thought that when humanity hurls itself into the depths of the cosmos, this is how we will do it. In the film’s iconic final shot, the space baby looks down at the planet to which it is no longer bound. Freedom, this shot says, is imminent.
My father was twenty-four then, and perhaps at his most world-historical: he was becoming an expert in computers. He’d worked for IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York, a corporate labyrinth of beige cubicles and epochal breakthroughs; a world of punch cards and reel-to-reel magnetic tape, where at least some of the employees were deadly serious about making sure to wear the company tie clip and then, once they were off duty, to switch to their own personal tie clips.
When 2001 premiered, he was working at Columbia University’s Computer Center, in the academic computing branch. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that the movie summed up everything my father was in April 1968. It became something of a talisman for him, a semisacred object invested with all the crazy hopefulness of his youth. For as long as I can remember, my father had talked about 2001. He told me often of HAL, of the monolith of evolution, of how glorious the future would be. Of course, when I finally saw the movie, well after the actual year 2001, it bored me out of my mind. Too slow, too bizarre. Ah, my father told me, that’s because evolution is slow, evolution is bizarre. It wasn’t until much later that I started to understand the movie—and, maybe, to understand my father.
2001 is the brainchild of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, who intended the film as a vision of things that seemed destined to come. In large part this fact has been lost on more recent generations of viewers who regard the movie as almost entirely metaphorical. Not so. The film was supposed to describe events that were really about to happen—that’s why Kubrick and Clarke went to such lengths to make it realistic, dedicating months to researching the ins and outs of manned spaceflight. They were so successful that a report written in 2005 from NASA ’s Scientific and Technical Information Program Office argues that 2001 is today still “perhaps the most thoroughly and accurately researched film in screen history with respect to aerospace engineering.” Kubrick shows the audience exactly how artificial gravity could be maintained in the endless free-fall of outer space; how long a message would take to reach Jupiter; how people would eat pureed carrots through a straw; how people would poop in zero G. Curious about extraterrestrial life, Kubrick consulted Carl Sagan (evidently an expert) and made changes to the script accordingly.
It’s especially ironic because anyone who sees the film today will be taken aback by how unrealistic it is. The U.S. is not waging the Cold War in outer space. We have no moon colonies, and our supercomputers are not nearly as super as the murderous HAL. Pan Am does not offer commercial flights into high-Earth orbit, not least because Pan-Am is no more. Based on the rate of inflation, a video-payphone call to a space station should, in theory, cost far more than $1.70, but that wouldn’t apply when the payphone is a thing of the past. More important, everything in 2001 looks new. From heavy capital to form-fitting turtlenecks—thank goodness, not the mass fashion phenomenon the film anticipated—it all looks like it was made yesterday. But despite all of that, when you see the movie today you see how 1968 wasn’t just about social and political reform; people thought they were about to evolve, to become something wholly new, a revolution at the deepest level of a person’s essence.
Allow me to quote two books taken from my father’s library. First, this passage from Hannah Arendt’s 1958 Human Condition, which my father bought in the early sixties:
This future man, whom scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.
Or how about this embarrassingly utopian vision from Marcuse’s 1964 One-Dimensional Man (purchased in 1968):
Thus economic freedom would mean freedom from the economy—from being controlled by economic forces and relationships; freedom from the daily struggle for existence, from earning a living. Political freedom would mean liberation of the individuals from politics over which they have no effective control … The unrealistic sound of these propositions is indicative, not of their utopian character, but of the strength of the forces which prevent their realization.
The message is clear: we are leaving. We are going somewhere better. Looking back, I can only ask: What did these people think was going to happen? How could they have been so optimistic? If I could go back in time, that’s what I would ask my young father: What are you thinking?
My father watched computers conquer the world, and he did his part to aid in their conquest. He watched punch cards give way to magnetic tape, in fact helped to switch over; he wrote programs for researchers; he did data preparation for Alan Lomax, weighing and assigning variables to data so it could be more easily manipulated, a task that required a great deal of training, even, perhaps, craftsmanship. He learned FORTRAN and became an expert in finding errors in the programs researchers wrote for themselves. He stayed up late underground in Columbia University’s Computer Center, below Uris Hall, playing with computers.
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turn, neither creature will lose the bonus. Similarly, if it becomes paired later in the turn, the creature it's paired with won't gain the bonus.
Kessig Malcontents
Creature -- Human Warrior
3/1
When Kessig Malcontents enters the battlefield, it deals damage to target player equal to the number of Humans you control.
The number of Humans you control is counted when the enters-the-battlefield ability resolves.
Killing Wave
Sorcery
For each creature, its controller sacrifices it unless he or she pays X life.
First, the active player chooses whether to pay X life for each creature he or she controls. Then each other player in turn order chooses for his or her creatures. Then each player pays life and sacrifices creatures at the same time. Players will know the decisions of players who chose before them.
A player may choose to pay life for some creatures and sacrifice the rest. It's not an all-or-nothing decision.
You can't pay more life than you have.
If you can't sacrifice a creature (perhaps because of Sigarda, Host of Herons), you can choose not to pay life and nothing will happen.
Lightning Mauler
Creature -- Human Berserker
2/1
Soulbond (You may pair this creature with another unpaired creature when either enters the battlefield. They remain paired for as long as you control both of them.)
As long as Lightning Mauler is paired with another creature, both creatures have haste.
A creature that loses haste after it's been declared as an attacking creature doesn't stop attacking.
Lone Revenant
Creature -- Spirit
4/4
Hexproof (This creature can't be the target of spells or abilities your opponents control.)
Whenever Lone Revenant deals combat damage to a player, if you control no other creatures, look at the top four cards of your library. Put one of them into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library in any order.
You must put one of the cards into your hand, even if you'd rather put all four on the bottom of your library.
If you control Lone Revenant and any other creature (including another Lone Revenant), its ability won't trigger.
Check whether Lone Revenant's ability triggers after combat damage is dealt but before any creatures that are destroyed due to combat damage leave the battlefield. For example, if you control Lone Revenant and another creature, and that other creature takes lethal damage in the same combat damage step that Lone Revenant deals damage to a player, Lone Revenant's ability won't trigger.
If you control no creatures when Lone Revenant's ability resolves, you'll still look at the top four cards and put one into your hand.
Lunar Mystic
Creature -- Human Wizard
2/2
Whenever you cast an instant spell, you may pay. If you do, draw a card.
The triggered ability will go on the stack on top of the instant spell and resolve before it.
The decision to pay is made when the triggered ability resolves. It's not an additional cost of the instant spell.
Mad Prophet
Creature -- Human Shaman
2/2
Haste
, Discard a card: Draw a card.
Discarding a card is part of the ability's activation cost. You can't activate the ability if you have no cards in hand.
Malicious Intent
Enchantment -- Aura
Enchant creature
Enchanted creature has " : Target creature can't block this turn."
Once a creature has been declared as a blocking creature, making it unable to block will have no effect.
Malignus
Creature -- Elemental Spirit
*/*
Malignus's power and toughness are each equal to half the highest life total among your opponents, rounded up.
Damage that would be dealt by Malignus can't be prevented.
'If Malignus becomes blocked by a creature with protection from red, the damage Malignus deals to that creature won't be prevented.
Mass Appeal
Sorcery
Draw a card for each Human you control.
The number of Humans you control is counted only when Mass Appeal resolves.
Mental Agony
Sorcery
Target player discards two cards and loses 2 life.
If the targeted player has fewer than two cards in his or her hand, that player will still lose 2 life (and discard one card, if applicable).
Mist Raven
Creature -- Bird
2/2
Flying
When Mist Raven enters the battlefield, return target creature to its owner's hand.
Mist Raven's ability is mandatory. If Mist Raven is the only creature on the battlefield when its ability triggers, you must choose it as the target.
Misthollow Griffin
Creature -- Griffin
3/3
Flying
You may cast Misthollow Griffin from exile.
Misthollow Griffin can also be cast from a player's hand.
Misthollow Griffin doesn't have an ability that exiles itself. Some other effect will be needed to get the card into exile.
You must still pay Misthollow Griffin's mana cost when you cast it from exile.
Misthollow Griffin's ability doesn't change when you can cast creature spells: when you have priority during your main phase when the stack is empty.
Natural End
Instant
Destroy target artifact or enchantment. You gain 3 life.
If the artifact or enchantment is an illegal target when Natural End tries to resolve, Natural End will be countered and none of its effects will happen. You won't gain 3 life.
Outwit
Instant
Counter target spell that targets a player.
The spell you target could also target other things, as long as it also targets a player.
Pillar of Flame
Sorcery
Pillar of Flame deals 2 damage to target creature or player. If a creature dealt damage this way would die this turn, exile it instead.
A creature dealt damage by Pillar of Flame that dies that turn will be exiled even if it wasn't the target of Pillar of Flame (because the damage was redirected somehow).
A creature dealt damage by Pillar of Flame that turn will be exiled no matter why the creature would die. It could have its toughness reduced to 0 or less or be destroyed by another spell or ability.
Primal Surge
Sorcery
Exile the top card of your library. If it's a permanent card, you may put it onto the battlefield. If you do, repeat this process.
A permanent card is an artifact, creature, enchantment, land, or planeswalker card.
Repeating the process includes the instruction to repeat the process. That is, you'll keep exiling cards and putting them onto the battlefield until you fail to put a permanent card onto the battlefield.
If you exile a permanent card that you can't put onto the battlefield (such as an Aura with nothing legal to enchant) or one you don't want to put onto the battlefield, Primal Surge finishes resolving.
If putting any of those permanent cards onto the battlefield causes abilities to trigger, those abilities will wait to go on the stack until Primal Surge has finished resolving. Starting with the active player, each player puts his or her abilities on the stack in any order.
Rain of Thorns
Sorcery
Choose one or more -- Destroy target artifact; destroy target enchantment; and/or destroy target land.
You can choose just one mode, any two of the modes, or all three. You make this choice as you cast Rain of Thorns.
Riders of Gavony
Creature -- Human Knight
3/3
Vigilance
As Riders of Gavony enters the battlefield, choose a creature type.
Human creatures you control have protection from creatures of the chosen type.
You must choose an existing _Magic_ creature type, such as Zombie or Warrior. Card types such as artifact can't be chosen.
Rite of Ruin
Sorcery
Choose an order for artifacts, creatures, and lands. Each player sacrifices one permanent of the first type, sacrifices two of the second type, then sacrifices three of the third type.
First you choose the order for the card types. Then each player in turn order (starting with the active player) chooses one permanent he or she controls of the first card type. Then those permanents are sacrificed at the same time. Then each player in turn order chooses two permanents he or she controls of the second card type. Then those permanents are sacrificed at the same time. Finally, each player in turn order chooses three permanents of the third card type, then those permanents are sacrificed at the same time.
Permanents sacrificed for one card type won't be on the battlefield to be chosen for subsequent card types.
If any abilities trigger while Rite of Ruin is resolving, those abilities will wait until Rite of Ruin finishes resolving before going on the stack. Starting with the active player, each player puts his or her abilities on the stack in any order.
Rush of Blood
Instant
Target creature gets +X/+0 until end of turn, where X is its power.
The value of X is determined when Rush of Blood resolves. The bonus won't change later in the turn if the creature's power changes.
If the creature has power less than 0, the "bonus" will be negative. For example, a creature that's somehow become -1/3 would get -1/+0 and become -2/3.
Scroll of Avacyn
Artifact
, Sacrifice Scroll of Avacyn: Draw a card. If you control an Angel, you gain 5 life.
Whether you control an Angel is checked when the ability resolves.
Scroll of Griselbrand
Artifact
, Sacrifice Scroll of Griselbrand: Target opponent discards a card. If you control a Demon, that player loses 3 life.
Whether you control a Demon is checked when the ability resolves.
Second Guess
Instant
Counter target spell that's the second spell cast this turn.
Second Guess can't be cast unless the spell it targets is the second spell cast this turn.
It doesn't matter if the first spell cast that turn has resolved yet or not. It also doesn't matter how many spells have been cast after the second one, as long as the second spell cast is still on the stack.
Most spells and abilities that copy a spell create that copy on the stack. These copies are not cast and won't count toward the number of spells cast that turn. However, a few (like Isochron Scepter's ability) instruct you to copy a spell and "cast the copy." These spells are cast and will count toward the number of spells cast that turn.
Sheltering Word
Instant
Target creature you control gains hexproof until end of turn. You gain life equal to that creature's toughness. (A creature with hexproof can't be the target of spells or abilities opponents control.)
If a creature gains hexproof in response to a spell or ability controlled by an opponent that targets only it, that spell or ability will countered for having an illegal target when it tries to resolve.
Sigarda, Host of Herons
Legendary Creature -- Angel
5/5
Flying, hexproof
Spells and abilities your opponents control can't cause you to sacrifice permanents.
As a spell or ability an opponent controls resolves, if it would force you to sacrifice a permanent, you just don't. That part of the effect does nothing. If that spell or ability gives you the option to sacrifice a permanent (as Brain Gorger's ability does), you can't take that option.
If a spell or ability an opponent controls instructs you to perform an action unless you sacrifice a permanent (as Ogre Marauder does), you can't choose to sacrifice a permanent. You must perform the action. On the other hand, if a spell or ability an opponent controls instructs you to sacrifice a permanent unless you perform an action (as Killing Wave does), you can choose whether or not to perform the action. If you don't perform the action, nothing happens, since you can't sacrifice any permanents.
You may still sacrifice permanents to pay the costs of spells you cast and abilities you activate, or because a resolving spell or ability you control instructs or allows you to do so.
You may sacrifice a permanent to pay the activation cost of an ability, even if that ability comes from a permanent an opponent controls (such as Excavation).
You may sacrifice a permanent as a special action, even if the effect that allows you to do so comes from an opponent's permanent (such as Damping Engine or Volrath's Curse). No one controls special actions.
This ability affects only sacrifices. It won't stop a creature from being put into the graveyard due to lethal damage or having 0 toughness, and it won't stop a permanent from being put into the graveyard due to the "legend rule" or the "planeswalker uniqueness rule." None of these are sacrifices; they're the result of game rules.
Somberwald Sage
Creature -- Human Druid
0/1
: Add three mana of any one color to your mana pool. Spend this mana only to cast creature spells.
Mana produced by Somberwald Sage can be spent on any part of a creature spell's total cost. This includes additional costs (such as kicker) and alternative costs (such as evoke costs).
Mana produced by Somberwald Sage can't be spent on activated abilities, even ones that put a creature card directly onto the battlefield, such as unearth or ninjutsu.
Mana produced by Somberwald Sage can't be spent on noncreature spells that would put creature tokens onto the battlefield.
Somberwald Vigilante
Creature -- Human Warrior
1/1
Whenever Somberwald Vigilante becomes blocked by a creature, Somberwald Vigilante deals 1 damage to that creature.
Somberwald Vigilante's ability will trigger for each creature it becomes blocked by.
The ability resolves before combat damage is dealt, so it could cause blocking creatures to be destroyed and thus not deal combat damage.
Soul of the Harvest
Creature -- Elemental
6/6
Trample
Whenever another nontoken creature enters the battlefield under your control, you may draw a card.
A creature card that enters the battlefield as a copy of a token creature is still a nontoken creature. You'll be able to draw a card.
Stolen Goods
Sorcery
Target opponent exiles cards from the top of his or her library until he or she exiles a nonland card. Until end of turn, you may cast that card without paying its mana cost.
You cast the card from exile. Each land card exiled this way will remain exiled.
If you can't cast the nonland card (perhaps because there are no legal targets available) or if you choose not to cast it, it will remain exiled.
You must follow the normal timing restrictions of the exiled card.
If you cast a card "without paying its mana cost," you can't pay any alternative costs. You can pay additional costs, such as kicker costs. If the card has mandatory additional costs, you must pay those.
If the card has in its mana cost, you must choose 0 as its value.
If there are no nonland cards left in that library, the opponent will exile all cards from his or her library, and Stolen Goods will finish resolving.
Tamiyo, the Moon Sage
Planeswalker -- Tamiyo
4
[+1]: Tap target permanent. It doesn't untap during its controller's next untap step.
[-2]: Draw a card for each tapped creature target player controls.
[-8]: You get an emblem with "You have no maximum hand size" and "Whenever a card is put into your graveyard from anywhere, you may return it to your hand."
Tamiyo's first ability tracks the permanent, but not its controller. If the permanent changes controllers before its first controller's next untap step has come around, then it won't untap during its new controller's next untap step.
The number of tapped creatures the player controls is determined when Tamiyo's second ability resolves.
Tamiyo's third ability creates one emblem with two abilities.
If you activate Tamiyo's third ability when she has eight loyalty counters on her, she'll be put into your graveyard before the emblem is created. She won't return to your hand.
Cards that are put into your graveyard can be returned to your hand by the emblem's ability even if they were never in your hand.
Terminus
Sorcery
Put all creatures on the bottom of their owners' libraries.
Miracle (You may cast this card for its miracle cost when you draw it if it's the first card you drew this turn.)
Each player chooses the order for his or her own creatures. This order isn't revealed to other players.
Terrifying Presence
Instant
Prevent all combat damage that would be dealt by creatures other than target creature this turn.
Although Terrifying Presence doesn't affect the target creature, if that creature is an illegal target when Terrifying Presence tries to resolve, it will be countered and none of its effects will happen. No damage will be prevented.
Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded
Planeswalker -- Tibalt
2
[+1]: Draw a card, then discard a card at random.
[-4]: Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded deals damage equal to the number of cards in target player's hand to that player.
[-6]: Gain control of all creatures until end of turn. Untap them. They gain haste until end of turn.
The number of cards in the target player's hand is determined when Tibalt's second ability resolves.
When Tibalt's third ability resolves, all creatures will become untapped and gain haste, including ones you controlled before the ability resolved.
Timberland Guide
Creature -- Human Scout
1/1
When Timberland Guide enters the battlefield, put a +1/+1 counter on target creature.
You may choose Timberland Guide as the target of its own ability.
Tormentor's Trident
Artifact -- Equipment
Equipped creature gets +3/+0 and attacks each turn if able.
Equip
You still decide which player or planeswalker the equipped creature attacks.
If, during your declare attackers step, the equipped creature is tapped, is affected by a spell or ability that says it can't attack, or hasn't been under your control continuously since the turn began (and doesn't have haste), then it doesn't attack. If there's a cost associated with having a creature attack, you're not forced to pay that cost, so it doesn't have to attack in that case either.
Triumph of Cruelty
Enchantment
At the beginning of your upkeep, target opponent discards a card if you control the creature with the greatest power or tied for the greatest power.
Triumph of Cruelty's ability will trigger at the beginning of each of your upkeeps regardless of who controls the creature with the greatest power. The ability checks whether the opponent will discard a card when it resolves.
Triumph of Ferocity
Enchantment
At the beginning of your upkeep, draw a card if you control the creature with the greatest power or tied for the greatest power.
Triumph of Ferocity's ability will trigger at the beginning of each of your upkeeps regardless of who controls the creature with the greatest power. The ability checks whether you'll draw a card when it resolves.
Tyrant of Discord
Creature -- Elemental
7/7
When Tyrant of Discord enters the battlefield, target opponent chooses a permanent he or she controls at random and sacrifices it. If a nonland permanent is sacrificed this way, repeat this process.
Repeating the process includes the instruction to repeat the process. That is, the opponent will keep sacrificing permanents until he or she sacrifices a land.
Repeating the process does not include targeting an opponent. Only one opponent will have to sacrifice permanents.
If any abilities trigger while Tyrant of Discord's enters-the-battlefield ability is resolving, those abilities will wait until the enters-the-battlefield ability finishes resolving before going on the stack. Starting with the active player, each player puts his or her abilities on the stack in any order.
If the target opponent can't sacrifice permanents (perhaps because of Sigarda, Host of Herons), the opponent will choose a permanent at random but not sacrifice it. The ability will then finish resolving.
Ulvenwald Tracker
Creature -- Human Shaman
1/1
, : Target creature you control fights another target creature. (Each deals damage equal to its power to the other.)
The second target may be a creature any player controls, including you.
If either or both targets are illegal when Ulvenwald Tracker's ability tries to resolve, no creature will deal or be dealt damage.
Unhallowed Pact
Enchantment -- Aura
Enchant creature
When enchanted creature dies, return that card to the battlefield under your control.
The card will return to the battlefield under your control only if it's still in the graveyard when Unhallowed Pact's ability resolves. If it's not (perhaps because an ability like undying has already returned it to the battlefield), nothing happens.
If Unhallowed Pact is enchanting a token creature, that creature can't return to the battlefield.
Vanguard's Shield
Artifact -- Equipment
Equipped creature gets +0/+3 and can block an additional creature.
Equip ( : Attach to target creature you control. Equip only as a sorcery.)
Abilities that allow a creature to block an additional creature are cumulative.
Vexing Devil
Creature -- Devil
4/3
When Vexing Devil enters the battlefield, any opponent may have it deal 4 damage to him or her. If a player does, sacrifice Vexing Devil.
If a player chooses to have Vexing Devil deal 4 damage to him or her, but some or all of that damage is prevented or redirected, Vexing Devil will still be sacrificed.
Wandering Wolf
Creature -- Wolf
2/1
Creatures with power less than Wandering Wolf's power can't block it.
The comparison of power is only done when blockers are declared. Increasing the power of a blocking creature (or decreasing the power of Wandering Wolf) after this point won't cause any creature to stop blocking or become unblocked.
Wild Defiance
Enchantment
Whenever a creature you control becomes the target of an instant or sorcery spell, that creature gets +3/+3 until end of turn.
Wild Defiance's ability will resolve before that instant or sorcery spell.
If an instant or sorcery spell targets the same creature you control more than once, Wild Defiance will trigger only once.
Yew Spirit
Creature -- Spirit Treefolk
3/3
: Yew Spirit gets +X/+X until end of turn, where X is its power.
The value of X is determined when the ability resolves. The bonus won't change later in the turn if the creature's power changes.
If Yew Spirit has power less than 0, the "bonus" will be negative. For example, if it's somehow become -10/3, it would get -10/-10 and become -20/-7.
Zealous Conscripts
Creature -- Human Warrior
3/3
Haste
When Zealous Conscripts enters the battlefield, gain control of target permanent until end of turn. Untap that permanent. It gains haste until end of turn.
The enters-the-battlefield ability can target any permanent, including one that's untapped or one that you already control.
Compiled by Matt Tabak, with contributions from Laurie Cheers, Toby Elliott, Lee Sharpe, Eli Shiffrin, and Thijs van OmmenNew law requires 100-percent renewable energy in Hawaii by 2045 Copyright by KHON - All rights reserved Video
On Monday, the country's last state became the first state in the nation to commit to 100-percent clean energy.
Gov. David Ige signed into law a landmark bill, HB623, that requires all of Hawaii's electricity to be produced from renewable energy sources by the year 2045.
Instead of imported fossil fuel, Hawaii must now rely on solar, wind, geothermal and other clean energy sources.
"It wasn't too long ago where Hawaii was virtually 100-percent in imported fossil fuel and clearly, we have made significant progress," Ige said during the signing ceremony.
"Renewable energy projects are already producing cheaper power than new fossil fuel projects in Hawaii, and it's only going to get cheaper as renewable technology advances, unlike fossil fuels which will only grow more expensive as they become more difficult to extract from a shrinking supply," said Rep. Chris Lee, chair of the House energy and environmental protection committee.
"We're raising the bar globally for what's possible and we should do it in Hawaii," said Blue Planet Foundation CEO Jeff Mikulina. "Hawaii has all the resources and we have no fossil fuel. Yet Hawaii is so dependent on imported fossil fuel, which costs us billions every year."
Mikulina says Hawaii has the highest electricity rates in the nation and believes moving toward clean energy will result in plenty of benefits.
"What it means in the long-term is lower energy bills, stable bills, likely more local jobs. We're shifting that money from buying fossil fuel and shifting it to local investment and local labor," Mikulina explained.
Though Mikulina admits he is not sure what the transition will look like, he says Hawaii has three decades to figure it out, which is plenty of time.
"We're going to have more energy source locally, that means wind farms, solar farms, offshore wind, but it's a conversation we need to have as a community. Where is the right place to put these things and how can we best balance the cost, the location, impact to the environment?" Mikulina said.
Hawaiian Electric Co. released a statement, saying the proposed merger with NextEra Energy would help make the state's goals a reality.
"It's the clean energy transformation we all want for Hawaii. Reaching this goal will require a diverse portfolio of renewable energy resources and strong, upgraded electric grids, and that's exactly what we're working toward," said Alan Oshima, HECO president and CEO.
Ige also signed three other energy-related bills into law Monday.
HB1296 establishes a task force to study hydrogen as a fuel source, HB1509 sets a net-zero energy goal for the University of Hawaii and SB1050 gives more people a chance, like renters or condominium owners, to benefit from solar energy.
Since 2009, Hawaii has had the highest standard in the nation for renewable energy at 40 percent by 2030.6 Shares 0
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"USA! USA! USA!" they chanted together in the Hilton Ballroom as the results came in. Who needs polls? They never gave him a chance but now we have it: President Donald Trump. Not only were the polls spectacularly wrong (who will ever trust this particularly bankrupt form of moralising presumptive analysis and telling us how we do and should feel?) but also the pundits who were not just arrogant about the fact that Trump had no chance but also were hopelessly out of touch with what America was thinking across its societal spectrum, what it wanted, what was felt deep in its blood.
It is a rejection of the liberal consensus the entire West has wallowed in since the 90's and a rejection of Obama and the false hope he decried, the impotent nature of US political leverage around the world and the rejection of brazen corruption and questionable ethics as typified by "Crooked Hillary".
The world must live with it; democracy has spoken and they're going to have to get over the words President Trump. Some will head for the hills, some will run to Canada, others will continue to cry but as Obama said yesterday, regardless of the result "tomorrow the sun will still shine."
This is a cry for American exceptionalism and like him or not Trump typifies that. He is committed to education, and demands high performance. Selling well is an admirable skill for a President to have. Negotiating with Congress, internationally, etc., is exceptionally useful. Trump has taken beatings financially and come out smelling like a rose.
Trump's business experience involves negotiations with business leaders and even governments around the world, and he likely has connections behind the scenes that surpass those of simply purely political candidates -- this gives him keen, realistic insights into economics in different parts of the world, as well as additional avenues to pursue trade agreements, and even perhaps some nuanced insights of particular financial weaknesses of possible global competitors, not to mention experience and insight into the partnerships and/or antagonism between different industries and particular governments.
This vote comes down to the reckoning that for too long, politicians have sold the American people out to foreign nations and global industry. What Donald Trump is doing is representing the absolute heartbreak and anger and frustration at a government gone mad and it seems the Left completely underestimated that in their vitriol in crying #NeverTrump and portraying him as the devil incarnate.
Although it is entirely true that Trump is ostentatious and has his mistakes, he brings something to the Presidential table no other candidate had before; he speaks his mind.
America clearly is sick of weasel politicians who are too afraid to say what people want to hear, they want the facts straight.
President Trump isn't cut from the political class, that class which is entrenched in its self-interest and has let the country down time and time again. Ross Perot once said that we need somebody to clean out the stables, a corrupted, ethically questionable President is therefore not the answer in order to accomplish that and I'm not talking about Donald Trump.
Trump is a pragmatist in an era of rapidly approaching chaos, he is not a social engineer, a think tanker who wants to please those lining his bank accounts. The liberal Democratic policies of Obama, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Sen. Harry Reid and their company created a climate that has led to this decision today.
So what if his language is intemperate and insulting? Even lacking in nobility from time to time? How can a true changemaker be straitjacketed by politically correct chains if he or she must express the will of the people, uncomfortable concerns that lie dormant for far too long?
Obama won because conservative voters stayed home. He had promise and he let so many down, what did Clinton have? And that is why conservative voters had to get out and vote.
Trump prefers isolationism on a world scale, Clinton voted to take us to war in Iraq and to overthrow Libya's Gaddafi, all in the guise of being "muscular."
Perhaps today's landmark and historic decision is not so much about Trump's strengths and power but more about the crippled weakness of the country in 2016 and you simply cannot blame him for that.Everyone loves Carrot Cake. Even people who hate carrots love Carrot Cake. Carrot Cake is love. Thankfully, Carrot Cake is something that is so easy to veganize, and that is what I’ve done for you today. I converted my tried and trusted non-vegan recipe into a Vegan Carrot Cake recipe, all topped off with billowy Vegan Orange scented Cream Cheese Icing.
My Vegan Carrot Cake recipe is erm, a piece of cake to make. Bad puns. Bad puns. I do almost everything in the food processor because I’m a lazy slob – shred the carrots, whizz up the batter and then finally fold in the add-ins. Voila, vegan carrot cake ala food processor! You can make this in either a 9×5 inch loaf tin, or in a muffin tin to make Carrot Cupcakes – one recipe will give you 12 medium sized cupcakes.
Now let’s talk about this disaster of an icing. Don’t get me wrong, it tastes amazing. It is, however, a disaster because you’ll be eating this like a dumb child eats paste..you’ll eat till you don’t fit into your jeans anymore. But hey, who wears jeans anyway, it’s all about the trendy jeggings right? Can’t remember the last time I fit into my damn jeans anyway. My Orange Scented Cream Cheese Icing is..erm, the icing on the cake… bad puns once again. Slightly floral with a lovely tang, this stuff is dangerous.
I’ll leave you with the recipe for my Super Moist Vegan Carrot Cake with Orange Scented Cream Cheese Icing. Till next time 🙂Netflix and chill.
If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a popular term with young adults and involves “watching a movie” and “possibly making us grandparents at a young age.”
It means a male or a female are going over to a partner’s house to bang with Netflix on in the background. Ugh, millennials.
This is what usually happens when adults with small children attempt to watch a movie and possibly screw around. It’s Netflix and Chill for parents.
Netflix and Chill for parents
Dad: “Are the kids asleep?”
Mom: “The kids are in bed. Asleep is a different story.”
Dad: “Are you going to do work tonight?”
Mom: “No, I can barely keep my eyes open. I’m just going to watch some TV and go to bed when I know they’ve passed out for the night.”
Dad: “Ok. Want to watch something on Netflix and just…chill?”
Mom: “Um, yeah, sure. But no super hero shows.”
Dad: “But you liked Daredevil!”
Mom: “I didn’t like it. I tolerated it.”
Dad: “Like I tolerate the Housewives?”
Mom: “Those ladies are my super heroes.”
Dad: “Absolutely. Every single one has the face of plastic man.”
Mom: “How about just a sitcom? A show where I don’t have to think or get involved in a plot. I’m in no mood to think.”
Dad: “We’ve seen almost every show and the ones we’ve avoided have been on purpose. Movie?”
Mom: “Great, sure, a movie. But nothing I’d actually want to watch because it will either keep me up because I’m interested or I’ll fall asleep and have to watch the second half at a different time but I’ll never actually get to the second half and I’ll just keep watching the first half a movie over and over again.”
Dad: “Fine. You choose.”
Mom: “This movie looks interesting enough and it’s got that girl that you like in it.”
Dad: “What girl?”
Mom: “The one from that TV show. You said she was one of the best looking women on TV.”
Dad: “When did I say that?”
Mom: “I don’t remember. You say many thing I remember and you don’t. You might have early onset of dementia. I might get to decorate this house again soon if that’s the case.”
Dad: “Just start the movie.”
Movie begins, five minutes pass…
Mom: “What are you doing?”
Dad: “I’m cuddling.”
Mom: “You’ve got a hand on my boob.”
Dad: “Yeah and?”
Mom: “We’re not having sex.”
Dad: “Why not?!?!”
Mom: “Because for one the kids are probably still awake, secondly I haven’t taken a shower today and finally because I said we’re not having sex. Weren’t you listening before when I said I was exhausted?”
Dad: “I thought you meant ‘too exhausted to work’ but not to mess around.”
Mom: “Having sex is as exhausting as work. Especially the pretending it’s enjoyable part.”
Dad: “But you agreed to Netflix and chill?”
Mom: “What the hell does that mean?”
Dad: “You don’t know what Netflix and chill means?”
Mom: “No, should I?”
Dad: “Well, you’ve got two kids who’ll one day be teens and…hold on.”
Dad pulls phone from pocket to do a web search and hands mom a phone
Mom: “This is known thing? People call it this?”
Dad: “Yeah, like college kids and stuff. I mean we used to do it all the time before the kids. We didn’t have a name for it. If we did it would be like ‘Blockbuster and chill’ or if the last person didn’t rewind the video it would be like ‘Rewind, Blockbuster and Chill’ but…
Mom: “And you thought by asking me to Netflix and chill that we would have sex?”
Dad: “YES!”
Mom: “And that’s foreplay now? How about something a little more romantic like, oh I don’t know, acting out emojis? Or maybe just put your penis on my shoulder?”
Dad: “Would those work? And did you just think I used the word chill in conversation? When have I ever used the word chill besides talking about wine or the weather?”
Mom: “Well I don’t know. You occasionally use slang way under your age. The other night you called that waiter ‘bro.'”
Dad: “I did not.”
Mom: “Yes you did. You handed him the check and said ‘thanks again, bro.'”
Dad: “Bro is acceptable. I’d never say we should chill. If I use chill in conversation it’s grounds for taking me to the neurologist. It means I’m finally losing it.”
Mom: “Should I pause this? We’ve missed a good chunk of the plot.”
Dad: “Are we having sex?”
Mom: “Ughhhhh…but I haven’t showered.”
Dad: “I won’t go down there. I’ll remain above the belly button at all times while the ride is in motion.”
Mom: “Didn’t we just have sex?”
Dad: “The last time was nine months before our youngest son was born. He’s now 7.”
Mom: “Ok, chill with the guilt. Alright, fine, but I’m not doing anything. We’re just having sex.”
Dad: “Fair enough. I don’t even have all the tools for the sex swing installation anyway.”
Mom: “And turn off all the lights and shut all the blinds.”
Dad: “Blockbuster and chill felt like way less prep.”
Mom: “Actually, maybe leave one light on, the house being pitch dark at 8:30 looks odd and ARE YOU NAKED ALREADY?!?”
Dad: “Time is never on our side, dear. Gotta skip to the good stuff.”
“DADDDD! DADDDDDDDDD! My sound machine stopped working!”
Dad: “Of course it did! Of course it fucking did! It knew we were about to have sex!”
Mom: “You’re showing like no chill right now, bro.”
Dad: “Funny. That’s…funny.”
Dad retreats upstairs for less than a minute to return and find…
Dad: “No way! No damn way! You can not be asleep already. I wasn’t even gone a minute!”
Mom: “Come on, just let me sleep. I promise we’ll have sex tomorrow night.”
Dad: “You suck. You always do this.”
Mom: “Tomorrow night. I swear. We’ll make it a big deal. I’ll even shave.”
She kisses him goodnight and goes upstairs…
“Daaaaad! DAAAADDDDDDD! I can’t find my bunny!”
Dad: “Ugh, killing me bro. Killing me!”
WHAT TO READ NEXT
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, 22:13:23 UTC - in response to Message 1752961. We plan to stop making new v7 work within a few days, because v8 really is more accurate when searching for Gaussians. You can keep v7 until you run out of v7 work. But eventually you'll want to upgrade. Hopefully we'll be getting the GPU versions out quickly.
If I do not wait and that v7 work that are left. Wouldnt that get lost? Or does it get updatet to v8 work altso and resent to us? Live long and prosper! If I do not wait and that v7 work that are left. Wouldnt that get lost? Or does it get updatet to v8 work altso and resent to us?Live long and prosper! ID: 1752989 ·
Eric Korpela
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Message 1753034 - Posted: 2 Jan 2016, 2:26:10 UTC - in response to Message 1752989. @SETIEric
Work never gets lost. Only delayed. Everyone who uses the stock apps will continue to get v7 work until we are entirely finished. ID: 1753034 ·
Robert Rizzotto
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Message 1753037 - Posted: 2 Jan 2016, 2:38:50 UTC - in response to Message 1752922. Hello to all Happy New Year! Can you provide a link where on can download the new version. ID: 1753037 ·
tullio
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Message 1753043 - Posted: 2 Jan 2016, 3:14:12 UTC - in response to Message 1753037.
Last modified: 2 Jan 2016, 3:14:55 UTC Hello to all Happy New Year! Can you provide a link where on can download the new version.
I think it will be sent to all people who use stock versions and have clicked to accept v8.
Tullio I think it will be sent to all people who use stock versions and have clicked to accept v8.Tullio ID: 1753043 ·
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Message 1753091 - Posted: 2 Jan 2016, 5:55:52 UTC - in response to Message 1752925. I must admit that the amount of time I spent working rather than preparing for visitors did cause her some concern. Fortunately her raccoons picked up the slack.
Yes. Snowball, Tiny Timathea, Buddy and Herman Von Vermin all worked their little raccoon fingers to the very bones helping me to prepare for the holiday season. Fortunately, Santa was very, very good to all of them.
(Pookers, when you have a little time, will you please post that Facebook picture that shows just how good Santa was to the raccoons this year...) Yes. Snowball, Tiny Timathea, Buddy and Herman Von Vermin all worked their little raccoon fingers to the very bones helping me to prepare for the holiday season. Fortunately, Santa was very, very good to all of them.(Pookers, when you have a little time, will you please post that Facebook picture that shows just how good Santa was to the raccoons this year...) ID: 1753091 ·
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Joined: 1 Jan 16Posts: 17Credit: 429RAC: 0 Message 1753111 - Posted: 2 Jan 2016, 6:50:11 UTC
Will make sure to upgrade once I have some free time later today. The proud owner of I have received a notification about version 8 being released on a couple of my android devices.Will make sure to upgrade once I have some free time later today.The proud owner of IGCSE World ID: 1753111 ·
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Message 1753115 - Posted: 2 Jan 2016, 6:57:26 UTC - in response to Message 1753091.
Last modified: 2 Jan 2016, 7:10:09 UTC
* that's a D&D reference for the non-geeks in the crowd @SETIEric
Yes, Santa brought the raccoons the "gauntlets of +2 dexterity"* that they asked for. Cat food will no longer be safe outside. ID: 1753115 ·
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Joined: 2 Sep 15Posts: 1Credit: 44,932RAC: 0 Message 1753140 - Posted: 2 Jan 2016, 8:52:04 UTC
Last modified: 2 Jan 2016, 9:05:05 UTC Query; Are there any issues with bugs in V8? Since I got V8 my computer has crashed 3 times. Is there a compatibility problem between V7 work and V8 program? Please help! ID: 1753140 ·
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Message 1753150 - Posted: 2 Jan 2016, 9:48:26 UTC - in response to Message 1753140. Jord
According to Giorgo of the Ancient Astronaut Theorists I do not help with tech questions via private message. He's right: please use the forums for that. Could you please start a thread about it in Number Crunching, or post in one of the two Seti 8 threads there, and then include the crash details (if blue screen of death, what did it say)? ID: 1753150 ·A trio of privacy groups want federal regulators to take a close look at ad networks that track web surfers' and sell targeted ads.
The groups want the Federal Trade Commission to open an inquiry into whether these networks, including Google and Yahoo, are unfairly tracking Americans and profiting from their data.
The World Privacy Forum, the Center for Digital Democracy and U.S. PIRG (public interest research groups) argue that online marketers are secretly combining online data with offline data and using that to run real-time ad auctions.
"Consumers will be most shocked to learn that companies are instantaneously combining the details of their online lives with information from previously unconnected offline databases without their knowledge, let alone consent," said U.S. PIRG Consumer Program Director Ed Mierzwinski. "In just the last few years, a growing and barely regulated network of sellers and marketers has gained massive information advantages over consumers."
Companies named in the complaint (.pdf) include Google, Yahoo, PubMatic, TARGUSinfo, MediaMath, eXelate, Rubicon Project, AppNexus and Rocket Fuel.
At issue is a growing market of targeted, real-time ads, where advertisers can choose to show ads to people based on their age, gender, income and location – as well as their recent online behavior – often on unrelated sites that let third parties track users (for instance, Wired.com uses DoubleClick to serve ads and it tracks users across the web using cookies.)
Third-party cookie tracking isn't new – but as the complaint points out, marketers are increasingly trying to augment that data with other data sets – such as the social network data that Rapleaf harvests and re-sells.
Google has long held that its model of displaying ads based on the content of a web page or search term trumped the advantages of user tracking, but entered that market as well after it purchased the display ad giant, DoubleClick. However, the company says its advertising cookies and tracking are separate from users' account cookies, so its advertising database does not know your real name or Google login credentials.
Tying ad cookies to personally identifiable data would let marketers successfully combine online and offline data on website visitors to build a complete digital dossier on a user.
The groups want the FTC to investigate whether the companies are violating fair business laws. They also demand that the companies get users' permission to sell them at auction, pay them for the use of their data, and update their privacy policies to let users know that personally identifiable information is being used to sent them ads.
As for whether the FTC will investigate, it's hard to say – but it's not too likely. The complaint doesn't seem to allege any clear-cut violations of law. The practices are murky, and the laws about privacy not much clearer. The FTC does not confirm or deny ongoing investigations, announcing them only when a settlement or action has been finalized.
The online advertising industry has resisted new regulations, arguing that self-regulation works just fine. However, in their draft of new self-regulatory rules, the industry banned only collecting financial account numbers and info about a user's prescriptions, leaving all other health and financial information available for harvesting.
The FTC has shown some interest in online advertising in the last two years, holding hearings and issuing an advisory report (.pdf) in February 2009. But Center for Digital Democracy director Jeff Chester say its "inaction has encouraged the data-collection and ad-targeting industry to expand the use of consumer information for personalized advertising."
Photo: nelsonbiagiojr/flickr
See Also:Two people die after swarms of deadly spiders invade Indian town
Scores treated in hospital after being bitten
Identity of 'highly aggressive' spider continues to remain a mystery
Local officials believe that witchdoctors are now making the problem worse
Swarms of spiders descending from nowhere and biting those unfortunate enough to stray into their path sounds like the stuff of nightmares.
But for people in one Indian town, the scenario is all too real.
Two people are said to have died after being bitten by the poisonous creatures in Sadiya, in the north east of India.
[caption]
And scores more have been treated in hospital after the town was suddenly invaded by the poisonous eight-legged creatures last month, which have left residents living in a state of panic.
Now worried local officials are considering spraying the town with insecticide to kill off the menace, after experts have so far failed to identify the species.
A scientist, who is one of those now camping in the area in an attempt to tackle the dangerous spiders, described the creatures in question as 'highly aggressive'.
Dr Saika, told the Times of India that the arachnid could even belong to a whole new species.
He said: 'It leaps at anything that comes close. Some of the victims claimed the spider latched onto them after biting, and if that is so, it needs to be dealt with carefully.'
Rumours are rife that the spiders could be any of a number of poisonous arachnids, including possibly a tarantula, a black wishbone, or even the feared funnel-web spider.
Sadiya locator
Experts are also concerned that the spider epidemic is being made worse by the influence of witch doctors in the town.
Dr Anil Phatowali, a superintendent at Sadiya's local hospital, said that both of those who died had first sought the treatment of witch doctors, who had cut open the wounds with razors and drained out the blood before burning it.
Residents have spoken of their shock at the sudden invasion of spiders who entered the town whilst Hindu festival celebrations were in full swing last month.
Jintu Gogoi, who was one of those bitten by the spider, told how he suffered excruciating pain and nausea after being attacked, with his finger still blackened and swollen weeks later.
Whatever the identity of the mystery spiders, experts agree that the creatures are unlikely to be native to the area.
Researchers are also still running tests to discover how poisonous the spiders are after medical chiefs questioned the authenticity of the bite claims.
Dr. Anil Phatowali, superintendent of the town's hospital, said they had not administered an antidote as they could not be certain the spider was venomous at all, pointing to the treatment by witchdoctors as a possible factor in the two recorded deaths.ORLANDO, Fla. -- Magic forward Ryan Anderson entered this season knowing he'd have a chance to contribute to an NBA team like never before.
A full-time starter for the first time, he turned that opportunity into the best regular season of his career and on Friday was rewarded with the league's Most Improved Player award.
NBA officials were at Amway Center to present the 23-year-old Anderson with the honor.
In his fourth season since being taken 21st in the 2008 draft out of California, Anderson started 61 of 66 games during the shortened regular season and led the league in 3-pointers made (166) and attempted (422). He joins Rashard Lewis as the only other power forward to lead the league in 3-pointers made. He averaged career highs in points (16.1) and rebounds (7.7).
Anderson also becomes the fifth Magic player to win the award since it was first handed out in 1986, joining Hedo Turkoglu (2008), Tracy McGrady (2001), Darrell Armstrong (1999) and Scott Skiles (1991).
"It's very surreal for me to be sitting where I am today," Anderson said. "A year ago if you would have said I would be the Most Improved Player, I'd probably laugh at you in the face. This year has just been a culmination of a lot of different things and a lot of different people helping me."
Anderson received 260 of a possible 605 points, including 33 first-place votes from a panel of 121 sports writers and broadcasters in the U.S. and Canada. Milwaukee's Ersan Ilyasova (159 points, 21 first-place votes) finished second and Minnesota's Nikola Pekovic (104 points, 10 first-place votes) was third.
Anderson came into the season with a career average of 8.6 points per game.
Magic general manager Otis Smith said he was "proud of the basketball player he's become" since Anderson came to Orlando from the Nets as part of a multi-player trade in 2009.
"He did the work and made himself into a better basketball player," Smith said. "He's in the first part of receiving his dividends.... He's making me look like a genius for making the trade."
Anderson's breakout season will surely help him this summer when he is a restricted free agent. The Magic have the option to match any contract that another team offers him. Smith said they've already expressed to both Anderson and his agent that they want to keep him in Orlando long-term.
Anderson credited Magic assistant Steve Clifford and trainer Joe Ragowski "for helping me with my game and taking it to the next level." He said he entered this season with a much different focus level.
"I really did put in the time," Anderson said. "I saw that I could have an opportunity here and I put in the hours."
Magic coach Stan Van Gundy said Anderson's success was a product of the work he put in staying in shape during the lockout even though he didn't have access to team trainers as he was used to.
"To be honest, the bigger thing that has improved is he's gotten more opportunity," Van Gundy said. "But he's also gotten stronger.... Did I foresee this? I don't know. But I knew he could help us."
Anderson's teammates said he had been a huge factor in the Magic finishing the regular season with a 37-29 record.
"He's playing at a high level and is a reason why we are where we are," forward Glen Davis said.
The award does come at a somewhat bittersweet time for Anderson, who is in the throes of a playoff slump that has seen his field goal percentage fall to 32 percent, his scoring average dip to 7.7 points, and his rebounding fall to just 5.0 per game.
His individual decline has coincided with the Indiana Pacers taking a 2-1 series lead and threatening to hand the Magic their second straight first-round postseason exit.
Anderson no longer has Dwight Howard drawing attention inside and finding Anderson and others for open jump shots on the perimeter. Anderson said this week that having the Pacers key on him so far this series with Howard gone for the season following back surgery has been an adjustment.
"It's hard playing the whole year a certain way and then a team really tries to do everything they can to eliminate you totally," he said.
But with Game 4 on Saturday in Orlando, Anderson has pledged to find other ways to help, from providing more energy to screening and rebounding.
"The great thing about this is we have another game," he said, "so keep playing."The 2016 United States elections were held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. During this presidential election year, the President of the United States and Vice President were elected. In addition, elections were held for all 435 voting-member seats in the United States House of Representatives (as well as all six non-voting delegate seats) and 34 of the 100 seats in the United States Senate to determine the 115th Congress.
The Republican Party won the presidency, and retained its majorities in the House and Senate although the Democrats made modest gains in both houses. Twelve state governorships, two territorial governorships, and numerous other state and local elections were also contested.
Federal elections [ edit ]
Presidential election [ edit ]
The United States presidential election of 2016 was the 58th quadrennial presidential election. The electoral vote distribution was determined by the 2010 census from which presidential electors electing the President and Vice President were chosen; a simple majority (270) of the 538 electoral votes were required to win. Former President Barack Obama, a member of the Democratic Party, was ineligible to be elected to a third term due to term limits established by the Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Businessman and reality television personality Donald Trump of New York won the Republican Party's presidential nomination on July 19, 2016, after defeating Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Ohio Governor John Kasich, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and several other candidates in the Republican primary elections.[1] Former Secretary of State, First Lady and New York Senator Hillary Clinton won the Democratic Party's presidential nomination on July 26, 2016, after defeating Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and others in the Democratic primary elections. This was the first election with a female presidential nominee from a major political party, as well as the first election since 1944 that had major party presidential nominees from the same home state. Clinton won the popular vote, taking 48% of the vote compared to Trump's 46% of the vote, but Trump won the electoral vote and thus the presidency. Libertarian Gary Johnson won 3.3% of the popular vote, the strongest performance by a third party presidential nominee since the 1996 election. Trump won the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio, and Iowa, all of which were won by Obama in 2008 and 2012. The election is one of five presidential elections in American history in which the winner of the popular vote did not win the presidency.
Russian interference [ edit ]
The United States government's intelligence agencies concluded the Russian government interfered in the 2016 United States elections.[1][2][3] A joint US intelligence review stated with high confidence that, "Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process.
Congressional elections [ edit ]
Senate elections [ edit ]
All seats in Senate Class 3 were up for election. Democrats won a net gain of two seats, but Republicans retained a majority with 52 seats in the 100-member chamber.[4]
House of Representatives elections [ edit ]
All 435 voting seats in the United States House of Representatives were up for election. Additionally, elections were held to select the Delegate for the District of Columbia as well as the delegates from U.S. territories. This includes the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico, who serves a four-year term. Democrats won a net gain of six seats, but Republicans held a 241-to-194 majority following the elections.
State elections [ edit ]
Gubernatorial elections [ edit ]
Regular elections were held for the governorships of 11 U.S. states and two U.S. territories. Additionally, a special election was held in Oregon after the resignation of John Kitzhaber as Governor. Republicans won a net gain of two seats.
Legislative elections [ edit ]
In 2016, 44 states held state legislative elections; 86 of the 99 chambers were up for election. Only six states did not hold state legislative elections: Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Virginia, Alabama, and Maryland.[5]
Other elections and ballot measures [ edit ]
Many states also held elections for other elected offices, such as attorney general. Many states held ballot measures.[6]
Local elections [ edit ]
Mayoral elections [ edit ]
Mayoral elections were held in many cities, including:
Table of state, territorial, and federal results [ edit ]
This table shows the partisan results of Congressional, gubernatorial, presidential, and state legislative races held in each state and territory in 2016. Note that not all states and territories hold gubernatorial, state legislative, and United States Senate elections in 2016; additionally, the territories do not have electoral votes in American presidential elections, and neither Washington, D.C. nor the territories elect members of the United States Senate. Washington, D.C. and the five inhabited territories each elect one non-voting member of the United States House of Representatives. Nebraska's unicameral legislature and the governorship and legislature of American Samoa are officially non-partisan. In the table, offices/legislatures that are not up for election in 2016 are already filled in for the "after 2016 elections" section, although vacancies or party switching could potentially lead to a flip in partisan control.Week in Smoke – TGT Edition
First week of graduate classes in the books. I mentioned on Facebook that it was a bit intimidating, fast paced and surrounded by those who seem more accomplished. I’m staying positive and hoping I didn’t bite off more than I can chew. Despite work and classes twice a week at night and a study group session in between I still found time to smoke a cigar or ten. I’m hoping that my schedule starts to become predictable and I can get back into the swing of actually doing some videos again. Lots of exciting things happening here at Stogie Review too. A site redesign, maybe a new member of Stogie Review? More on all that in the coming days and weeks ahead.
Ortega Series D Maduro – A few weeks ago the Natural version made an appearance here in Week in Smoke and I dubbed it as an okay cigar that just didn’t fit in my flavor wheel. Now this here Maduro is a completely different story. Its simply phenomenal! It is the truest definition of a flavor bomb. I’ve always been enamored with the Maduro since the first time I smoked one and I’m glad they have been a hit for Eddie who is one of the nicest guys in the industry. Sorry about that Cubao Maduro review I did years ago…but you know I was right! LOL.
Gurkha Royal Challenge – The Royal Challenge is a bestseller for Gurkha. I had all kinds of draw issues with my Royal Challenge. The draw started off really stiff and I had to do some work to get things moving. It was short lived. A few puffs after getting it to open it up, the tight draw returned. I really tried to stick with it, seeing if I could locate where the plug was. I even broke out my draw tools all to no avail. We can all disagree on flavors but draw is one of those fundamental things that you have to get right. The only thing challenging for the Royal Challenge was the draw.
Brick House Maduro by JC Newman Cigars – You all know of my love of the natural Brick House. The Brick House holds the record for most appearances in Week in Smoke. The Brick House Maduro was introduced at IPCPR and started hitting shelves last week. Available in only one size, a 6×60 behemoth. Despite not loving the size, I enjoyed the Brick House Maduro. The only thing preventing me from pulling the trigger on purchasing them is that 6×60 size. Like I’ve said many times, I realize I am in the minority in the 6×60 craze. Flavors were good, construction was phenomenal…all around a solid flavorful cigar. I just wish it was available in a robusto size. Maybe next year…
Davidoff Golden Band 2012 – I don’t know the complete story of the Golden Band. I didn’t pay close attention to the press release. What I do know is that John Anderson of W.Curtis Draper was awarded a Golden Band Award from Davidoff for his work to sustain the premium cigar industry and to advance the industry’s agenda in legislation, regulation and the community. I believe there are only 10 shops or so who are carrying the Golden Band. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Smooth, clean, with a familiar Davidoff profile that showed a lot of maturity.
Davidoff White Edition 2012 – No I’m not on the Davidoff payroll although, you have to admit, it wouldn’t be a bad gig to have. Although I’m sure my crocs would not be acceptable footwear. Even with the hefty price tag of the White Edition I can’t help myself. I’m just lucky that there is some separation on the shelf so the White Edition isn’t right next to the Special R. Still one of the most impressive cigars I’ve smoked. Its quickly gaining status and approaching the Colorado Claro as my definition of perfection.
Quesada Oktoberfest – Hearty and stout. I’m talking about the Oktoberfest although the Woodchuck Pumpkin Private Reserve (gluten free) was nice too. The Oktoberfest had a beautiful slow sharp burn that produced a nice amount of lingering smoke. I didn’t try any of the Oktoberfest last year so this was my first experience with the line and I am thoroughly impressed. I totally get why many were singing it’s praise last year and I don’t see that changing this year. In fact, I’ll add my voice to the chorus. Well done…
Cuenca y Blanco – One of the darlings from IPCPR that I’m sure we will see a lot of later in the year when folks start publishing their Top 10 cigars. Fantastic. Copious amounts of flavors. Lots of complexity that really challenges your palate. Jose Blanco was right, the Lonsdale size is really a beautiful cigar to smoke. So many nuances in these classic sizes that you don’t get in the 6×60 format.
My Uzi Weighs A Ton Bait Fish – I love this little guy. What a great anytime time of day cigar that can start your day off on the right foot, an afternoon pick me up or a wonderful way to relax after a hard day of work and school. Medium body, great palate penetrating flavors. Like I said, an all around spectacular cigar that I’m sure will quickly become a must have with winter coming for those of us who smoke in the outdoors.
La Dueña by My Father Cigars – La Dueña is one of those cigars that I sampled before they were released and wasn’t enthusiastic about. After they started hitting shelves I gave the Petite Lancero a try (previously I had only sampled the robusto) and any hesitation I had went out the window. Love it! Like I said earlier, there is something simply amazing about smaller ring gauges that shine through and bring a new dimension to a cigar. Such is the case with the La Dueña. I’m a huge fan of La Riqueza and a huge fan of La Casita Criolla so its only natural that I’m impressed with La Dueña. Definitely give the cigar a try in the petite lancero size (if your retailer still has that size left)…you won’t be disappointed.
Zino Platinum Ten – Celebrating ten years of Zino Platinum is the Ten. Available in two sizes. This is the Toro but it is also available in a Salomon size. All the artwork and promotional stuff for Ten is pretty impressive and eye catching. The cigar itself is just as impressive with a bold, peppery and sweet flavor profile. Nothing extreme or over the top but just a beautiful balance that works all your senses in harmony making for a truly unique and memorable smoking experience even with its 60 ring gauge. The Ten shines!Image copyright SPL Image caption A greater abundance of mosquitoes that act as vectors of human diseases are living in close proximity to people's homes
Changes to UK urban areas provide habitats for mosquitoes, including species known to spread malaria and West Nile virus, a study suggests.
Warmer ambient temperatures and more water containers in gardens are bringing mosquitoes into closer contact with people, say scientists.
UK mosquitoes are human disease-free but the team says more of the insects breeding in urban areas increases the chances of a potential outbreak.
The findings appear in Plos One.
Co-author Amanda Callaghan, an associate professor at the University of Reading's School of Biological Sciences, explained that the study aimed to collect data to see if there was a difference in abundance and diversity of mosquitoes in rural and urban locations.
"We knew that there was an urban heat island effect, and changes in temperature have been known to cause changes in mosquito behaviour and - in some regions, such as southern Europe - diseases have crept into these countries because mosquitoes have changed their behaviour," she said.
Habitat boom
Writing in their paper, Dr Callaghan and colleague Susannah Townroe observed: "Within the UK, [water butts - a container for rainwater] are becoming increasingly common in residential gardens.
"A severe drought and subsequent hosepipe ban in the spring of 2012 across southern and eastern England led to reports of hugely inflated sales of water butt containers," they added.
Image copyright AP Image caption The number of water containers continues to grow as households look to save money and water
"Water butts collect rain from roof guttering along with vegetation, animal detritus... providing both a habitat and food resource for mosquito larvae."
They explained that while individual containers were relatively small, when all the water butts in the area were combined, it represented a "large area of habitat" for breeding mosquitoes.
The authors added: "This, in combination with the [urban heat island] effect... may favour mosquito larval production in urban habitats."
In order to test this idea, the researchers placed water containers in a number of urban and rural residential gardens.
"We found fewer species of mosquitoes in urban environments compared with rural environments, but the species that were there were much more abundant," Dr Callaghan told BBC News.
"The one that was most abundant is called Culex pipiens, and in other countries C. pipiens carry diseases such as West Nile Virus."
The other species of mosquito that the researchers found in the study's water containers was Anopheles plumbeus, which has been shown to be a "reasonably good vector of malaria".
Dr Callaghan said: "The main finding is that these mosquitoes are right next to people's houses and the Anopheles mosquito we found is a human-biting species and it can transmit malaria.
"Therefore, if someone comes back from their holiday with malaria and they get bitten, it could be transmitted to another person - and that is how you get outbreaks.
"The chances of there being a malaria epidemic in this country at present are relatively low because there has not been secondary malaria here since the 1950s."
Secondary malaria refers to someone catching malaria from another person who has also been bitten by a mosquito.
"I am not saying we are all going to get diseases because we have vectors here, but it is worth keeping an eye on."
Changing behaviour
More than 30 different mosquito species have been recorded in the UK, most of which are resident all year round.
"In rural areas you get more types of mosquito - there are lots of different types of habitats and different species of mosquito like different types of habitat - some of them will favour ditches, others will favour ponds or tree holes etc," Dr Callaghan explained.
"Whereas if you go into an urban environment, you do not have a lot of those habitats so you get a different picture of what species can survive in this environment.
"The Culex pipiens is a well-known urban mosquito, but the Anopheles plumbeus is normally considered to be a tree-dwelling species. But it is changing its habitats from breeding in tree-holes to breeding in man-made water containers.
"This is concerning considering that it is a vector of malaria."
Dr Callaghan said there were thousands of cases of malaria in the UK each year, mostly as a result of people returning from areas of the world where malaria was present, but people were usually quickly treated.
"If malaria is not in your blood for any length of time, the chances of you being bitten and transmitting it are quite low," she said.
"But if more people come back with malaria and there are more mosquitoes that can transmit malaria living by you then that chance increases."Fight Back News Service is circulating the following statement from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)
Statement on the work of the Seventh National Conference of the PFLP
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine issued the following statement regarding the Seventh National Conference of the Front, recently convened, as an important station on the road to return and the ongoing revolution until the liberation of the entire Palestinian national soil.
The National Conference was held in three sessions in the homeland and in diaspora to carry out a comprehensive review and evaluation of the Front’s methods, work, overall policies and plans, and the formulation of a political vision and organizational methods for the new phase of struggle. The Conference aimed to form the base for developing the Front’s positions and policies, building the Front’s effectiveness, role, and presence in the struggle to achieving our goals of national and social liberation.
The Front began with a moment of silence in honor of the martyrs of our people and our nation who sacrificed their lives for Palestine and its freedom, and in respect of the prisoners, detainees and the freedom fighters who continue to march on a difficult path to obtain our inalienable, legitimate, and historical national rights of our Arab Palestinian people.
After the adoption of the agenda, the Conference was presented with a comprehensive statement and letter from imprisoned General Secretary Ahmad Sa’adat, addressing political issues, organizational matters, and theoretical issues, as well as addressing the role of the Seventh National Conference in the future direction of the Front.
The conference discussed draft reports submitted by the Central Committee, as well as recommendations submitted by the conferences of the Front’s branches, and ended with the election of the members of the General Central Committee and the Central Supervisory Board. The conference’s output reflected democratic principles on the workings of the internal life of the Front, as well as emphasizing the importance of wider participation in formulating the policies, programs, plans, and basic direction of the Front. The Conference emphasized the importance of strengthening the unity of the organization through the deepening of democratic systems and structures at all levels.
The Seventh National Conference came at a time of serious political concern and complexity, when continuing U.S. imperialist and Zionist schemes aim at the liquidation of the Palestinian national cause by exploiting the conditions within Arab countries and their internal political, economic and social programs to exercise additional pressure on the Palestinian Authority to conclude more agreements ignoring international law, UN resolutions, and the inalienable national rights of the Palestinian people.
The conference discussed the international environment around the Palestinian and Arab situation and its effects on our national struggle for liberation, and the struggle of the Arab people. The United States government is hostile to the aspirations and goals of our people for freedom, self-determination and return, a fact that is reflected every day on the ground and in international diplomatic forums, engaged in a security partnership with Zionist aggression. The Conference also noted the historical impact of international and regional events on the Arab scene.
The rise of the role of Russia, China, and regional powers has shifted on some level the equations of international conflict. The Conference discussed the Arab political, economic and security situation, in its international context, as well as the structural disorder of Arab regimes and the failure of Arab states to safeguard national sovereignty, political independence, or economic security.
The Front noted the large mobilizations witnessed in a number of Arab countries which aimed to confront injustice, poverty, and tyranny, and build modern democratic societies. It further noted the high level of imperialist interventions hostile to the aspirations of the Arab nation in an attempt to steal and co-opt the goals and objectives of Arab popular movements through external military interventions and political efforts to spur sectarian and ethnic conflict in order to control the destiny of the Arab peoples while protecting the Zionist entity.
The Conference also discussed at length the Palestinian reality and the numerous developments in the over a decade that has passed since the Sixth Conference in 2000, reviewing the most important events in the Palestinian scene. At the center of this review are the ongoing and disastrous effects of the turning point in the Palestinian struggle in 1993, marked by the signing of the Oslo agreement. The Conference emphasized multiple issues, particularly the centrality of rejecting the negotiations, which do not serve the Palestinian people’s interests, and the need to fully reject the entire process of negotiations and “solutions” that have failed for over twenty years.
The importance of rehabilitating the Palestinian national liberation movement and building a new Palestinian strategy based on achieving the full rights of our people was viewed as critical by the Conference. In particular, this will mean drawing lessons from this last stage and entirely ending the absurd negotiations for which our people have paid dearly.
Further, the Conference discussed the Front’s organizational report, looking at the objective and subjective factors that have affected the structure of the Popular Front. This included engaging in a criticism of the organizational state of the PFLP, and learning lessons from past experience in order to tighten and develop the Front’s organizational structure and theoretical and political vision as a way out of crisis for the Front.
The Conference also discussed amendments to the rules of procedure and agreed upon a number of amendments to the Front’s internal structural documents.
The Conference addressed the political program, emphasizing the continuation of the struggle of our people to achieve their strategic objective, and that the goal
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always wondered how the world can feel so different after only a two month break from the daily grind. How is it possible that our children can grow so much over the summer? The sunshine and water helped them sprout up alongside the gardens and everything is radiant and in full bloom!
September makes me feel like a whole new person too and thank goodness for that because I needed a bit of a kick in the pants.
I love September though, I always have. It’s like New Years Eve for me! I am a fall girl through and through and it’s no mistake that my middle name is Autumn. My mother must have known that I would feel most alive when the trees turned colour and the air smelled crisp. I can already smell the pumpkin spiced everything and cannot wait to wrap a loose scarf around my neck. I am positively giddy about workbooks, pencil crayons, and the thought of planning lessons again. I have a beautiful homeschool room and even though it is in our basement, the hours spent down there every day are everything that I ever dreamed possible.
Our older two kids were enrolled at the neighbourhood school for five years and while I loved their teachers and have many fond memories of their time at school, God whispered right to my heart that He wanted my babies home with me. I kept pushing that idea back down deep out of fear, out of worry over what I thought everyone would say. Last year was our first year and it was more than I could have ever imagined. It was far harder than I thought possible and yet, we thrived as a family. The fruits that we have seen after just one year are proof positive that this was the right decision for our family. Just like last year, a week before school, I am sitting here not fretting about my kids going back.
September is a new chance to build a routine that strengthens our family. The way we live each day is either going to draw us closer together or pull us apart. We slip into complacency over the long, hot days but with the cooling temperatures returning, fall brings with it a new hope.
Before we begin again, we need to be aware that it is so easy to get lost in September’s shuffle. The little ones cry after long school days and meals are pushed away, barely eaten by tired hands. It is very hard for parents to stop running around from the dinner hour until getting everyone into bed, but I promise you that if you slow down, you will find that your children are bursting with stories—stories that are hard to hear over the evening rush.
Make a resolution this new year to spend fifteen minutes with each child before they drift off to sleep so that they can share with you how their day went. In our house, we call this “our time” and trust me, it can be hard to incorporate that into your nightly routine as the dishes continue to sit there after the family rosary. I have learned that parents benefit from “our time” just as much as each child does. Kids from large families don’t often get fifteen minutes of uninterrupted time with a parent, and this needs to be a priority.
Before we begin again, I need to say to you, my children, that I’m sorry that we never got out camping. I am sorry that you didn’t taste s’mores this summer and that there were no boat rides and only one bonfire. Please know that I watched your freckled little faces light up with pure joy as you played hide and seek with your friends. Please know that I happily shook the leaves and dirt off the old quilts that acted as your picnic blankets under the tree just beyond our yard. Please know that this time in our lives is absolutely exhausting but that it won’t always be this way. There will be trips to the big city and baseball games. We have many more summers ahead of us. There will be countless days spent hiking, with caves to explore, sand castles to build and waves to jump over. We won’t always have a toddler with sun bleached curls who still needs a nap and cries in the car.
Sometimes the backyard has to be good enough not just for you my children, but for me as well.
I also need to remind myself that there will always be docks waiting and that I have a lifetime of lakeside coffees with my husband to look forward to. Instead of sitting here lamenting the fact that we didn’t get time off together this summer as a family, I need to remind myself that watching the baseball game with a cold beer in my hand, sitting on our couch with the windows open is as good as it gets right now — and let’s be honest, that sounds quite enjoyable doesn’t it?!
Come to think of it, it was a summer that I will look back on tenderly as our kids grow older and life becomes busier.
Come to think of it, God knows exactly what we need even when we long for something else.
Come to think of it, before we start again, I need to take a minute and be thankful for the backyard full of laughter and the days that we will never live again because just like summer, the days that seemed so long at first pass by quicker than we anticipated.
All we are left with are memories and it isn’t our job to “make them” for our children. It is our job to live alongside our children and the truth is that memories make themselves, perfectly formed in August’s waning light.Cal Quantrill did not appear in the California League All-Star game. He could still pitch on a much larger stage in 2017: The All-Star Futures Game.
The Padres top pick from the 2016 draft, the 22-year-old Quantrill will join fellow Canadian and Lake Elsinore teammate Josh Naylor as the Padres representatives in next month’s All-Star Futures Game in Miami.
“It’s been a long journey,” said Quantrill, who is 5-5 with a 3.59 ERA and 72 strikeouts in 67 2/3 innings in his first full season since Tommy John surgery wiped out his sophomore year at Stanford. “There’s no complaints. I’ve been blessed in a lot of ways, but it’s been a long time coming back – a long time talking about coming back. It’s been a lot of rehabs and not rehabbing and pitch counts. While I feel like we’re still only at the very beginning of this journey, I feel like this is a nice recognition of all that hard work and I’m super excited to go.”
The right-handed Quantrill posted a 5.11 ERA over 37 innings in the low minors last year after signing for $3.96 million as the eighth overall pick last year. The right-hander has pitched without restrictions – save for occasional extra rest – this year with the Storm.
The invitation is Naylor’s second in a row. The 20-year-old first baseman represented the Marlins last year at Petco Park before he was acquired in the Andrew Cashner deal and is hitting.296/.364/.451 with seven homers and 41 RBIs in his second stint with Lake Elsinore. Naylor, too, represented the Storm in last week’s California League All-Star Game, a stage that won’t compare the spotlight on July 9 at Marlins Park.
Naylor would know. He went 2-for-3 with an RBI last year at Petco Park.
“It was incredible,” Naylor recalled Thursday afternoon. “It was something to die for. You want to do that when you’re in the minor leagues. It’s a great experience and it’s humbling. It just shows you that you need to continue to work to get to where you want to get.”
View the U.S. and world rosters here.
Lauer, Kelly promoted
Left-hander Eric Lauer, 22, was promoted to Double-A San Antonio on Thursday after posting a 2.79 ERA in 67 2/3 innings as an All-Star at high Single-A Lake Elsinore.
The 25th overall pick in the 2016 draft, Lauer struck out 84, walked 19 and limited opposing hitters to a.250 average. He went 2-5 over his 12 starts but allowed two or fewer runs in eight of those outings.
His last was his worst: six earned runs on seven hits and three walks in his first appearance after starting the California League All-Star Game.
Right-hander Michael Kelly, second in the system with 91 strikeouts, was also promoted from Double-A San Antonio to Triple-A El Paso.
A supplemental first-rounder in 2011, the 24-year-old Kelly is 7-2 with a 2.98 ERA over 15 starts (84 2/3 innings).
TRIPLE-A EL PASO (38-42)
Sacramento 11, Chihuahuas 10: RHP Kevin Quackenbush (2-1, 6.32) allowed three runs in the ninth inning to take the loss. RHP Tyrell Jenkins (7.86) allowed eight runs on 11 hits and two walks in five innings. 3B Christian Villanueva (.296) went 3-for-5 with his 12th and 13th homers and three RBIs and 1B Diego Goris (.293) drove in two runs on his sixth homer. CF Rafael Ortega (.307), 2B Jose Rondon (.313), LF Nick Buss (.379) and C Rocky Gale (.270) each had two hits.
DOUBLE-A SAN ANTONIO (5-2, 46-31)
Missions 6, Arkansas 3: RHP Enyel De Los Santos (5-4, 4.71) struck out seven and allowed three runs on six hits and two walks in six innings. RHP Trey Wingenter (2.05) saved his sixth game with a perfect ninth. LF Alberth Martinez (.271) hit his eighth homer and drove in three runs. 2B Noah Perio (.271) went 3-for-5 with and DH Nick Torres (.252) went 2-for-4.
HIGH SINGLE-A LAKE ELSINORE (3-5, 38-40)
Rancho Cucamonga 6, Storm 3: RHP Jesse Scholtens (3-3, 4.24) allowed five runs in the first inning and finished with six runs allowed on eight hits and two walks in five innings. C Wilfri De La Cruz (.750) went 3-for-4 with a double and an RBI and SS Javier Guerra (.220) and 3B Carlos Belen (.212) both had two hits. CF Michael Gettys (.247) went 0-for-3 with a walk by swiped two bases, giving him 15 on the season.
LOW SINGLE-A FORT WAYNE (7-1, 33-45)
TinCaps 7, South Bend 4: SS Fernando Tatis Jr. (.259) went 2-for-4 with a walk and two runs scored and 3B Hudson Potts (.225) and 2B Reinaldo Ilarraza (.206) each drove in two runs. RHP Will Stillman (1-1, 6.75) struck out six and allowed four runs on five hits and a walk in five innings.
SHORT-SEASON TRI-CITY (10-5)
Salem-Keizer 2, Dust Devils 0 (12): LHP Ben Sheckler (3.75) started the game with five shutout innings of one-hit ball before RHP Evan Miller (2-1, 3.12) allowed two runs – one earned – over the final two innings. C Chandler Seagle (.353) and 3B Westhers Magdaleno (.333) both singled twice. The Dust Devils struck out 17 times.
ROOKIE AZL PADRES 2 (2-3)
Angels 5, Padres 0: RHP Starlin Cordero (13.50) allowed four runs in 2/3 of an inning in relief after LHP Ramon Perez (0.00) started the game with five shutout innings of one-hit ball. 3B Eguy Rosario (.412) went 2-for-4 with his first steal since restarting his season in Arizona. Rosario swiped 17 bases to start the year in Fort Wayne.
ROOKIE DSL PADRES (8-13)CLOSE Cherry Hill course, a pint-sized landmark, makes way for park improvements. Jim Walsh/Staff photographer
A polar bear rises above a former miniature golf course in this photo from February 2014. (Photo: Courier-Post file photo)
CHERRY HILL - A polar bear has gone missing here — but expect the general reaction to be dismay and not fear.
The wooden bear made its home for years at a miniature golf course along the Cooper River in Cherry Hill, undisturbed by the roar of traffic at the nearby intersection of Cuthbert Boulevard and Park Drive.
More: Mantua golf course becomes a park
But the bear has vanished from its longtime home in Cooper River Park — and the miniature golf course is in the process of disappearing.
Parkway Golf, once an attraction for excited children, now is a largely demolished hangout for slow-moving Canada geese.
Former putting greens have been torn up; the earth has been dug up. Two picnic tables remain barely upright on the edge of a muddy field.
"We are making long-overdue improvements to the overall miniature golf site," Camden County spokesman Dan Keashen said Monday. He said a previous vendor turned in keys to the property in mid-summer 2015, leaving it in disrepair.
"The county is securing the site, cleaning it up and removing portions of the course that pose a threat to the public," Keashen said. "That said, there will be no miniature golf at the location for the coming season."
He said the county has canceled its contract with the previous vendor and "will assess the future use of the parcel later this year."
The course's demise dismayed John Danielson, a Westmont father who's often visited the site with his 6-year-old daughter Michelle.
"I'm sad," said the construction worker, who stopped at the site after seeing its condition Monday afternoon.
Don't miss a thing Download our apps and get alerts for local news, crime, weather, traffic and more. Search "Courier-Post" in the app store or use these links from your device: iPhone app | Android app | iPad app. And be sure to 'like' us on Facebook!
"I've come here at least once every summer for probably the last 12 years," Danielson said. "I was kind of looking forward to coming again this summer."
Read or Share this story: http://on.cpsj.com/1TGItrPThis article is about the British comedy franchise. For the eponymous spaceship, see Red Dwarf (spaceship). For the type of star, see Red dwarf
Red Dwarf is a British science fiction comedy franchise which primarily consists of a television sitcom that aired on BBC Two between 1988 and 1999, and on Dave since 2009, gaining a cult following.[1] To date, eleven full series of the show plus one "special" miniseries have aired. The most recent series, Red Dwarf XII, started airing in October 2017.[2]
The series was created by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor. In addition to the television episodes, there are four novels, a radio version adapted from the audiobooks, two pilot episodes for an American version of the show, tie-in books, magazines and other merchandise.
Set on the eponymous mining spaceship, the main characters are Dave Lister, initially the last known human alive, and Arnold Rimmer, a hologram of Lister's deceased bunkmate. The others members of the crew are Cat, a life form which evolved from the descendants of Lister's pregnant pet cat Frankenstein; Holly, Red Dwarf's computer (Series I-V, VIII and briefly in the final episodes of VII, XII); Kryten, a service mechanoid (Series II-present); and Kristine Kochanski, an alternative-reality version of Lister's love interest (Series VII-VIII).
One of the series' highest accolades came in 1994, when an episode from the sixth series, "Gunmen of the Apocalypse", won an International Emmy Award in the Popular Arts category, and in the same year the series was also awarded "Best BBC Comedy Series" at the British Comedy Awards.[3] The series attracted its highest ratings, of more than eight million viewers, during the eighth series in 1999.[4]
The revived series on digital channel Dave has consistently delivered some of the highest ratings for non-Public Service Broadcasting commissions in the UK.[5][6][7] The show has been critically acclaimed, and has a Metacritic score of 84/100.[8] Series XI was voted "Best Returning TV Sitcom" and "Comedy of the Year" for 2016 by readers for the British Comedy Guide.[9]
Setting and plot [ edit ]
Red Dwarf's current design from Series X on.
The main setting of the series is the eponymous mining spaceship Red Dwarf.[10] In the first episode, set sometime in the late 22nd century, an on-board radiation leak kills everyone except lowest-ranking technician Dave Lister, who is in suspended animation at the time, and his pregnant cat, Frankenstein, who is safe in the cargo hold.[11] Following the accident, the ship's computer Holly keeps Lister in stasis until the radiation levels return to normal – a process that takes three million years.[11] Lister therefore emerges as the last human being in the universe – but not alone on-board the ship.[12] His former bunkmate and immediate superior Arnold Judas Rimmer (a character plagued by failure) is resurrected by Holly as a hologram to keep Lister sane. They are joined by a creature known only as Cat, the last member of a race of humanoid felines that evolved in the ship's hold from Lister's pregnant cat during the 3 million years that Lister was in stasis.[12]
The series revolves around Lister being the last human alive, 3 million years from Earth, with his companions (initially Rimmer, Cat and Holly). The crew encounters phenomena such as time distortions, faster-than-light travel, mutant diseases and strange lifeforms (all evolved from Earth, because the series has no aliens) that had developed in the intervening millions of years.[13] Though it has a science fiction setting, much of the humour comes from the interactions of the characters, particularly the laid-back Lister and the stuck-up Rimmer.
In Series III, the computer Holly changes from male (Norman Lovett) to female (Hattie Hayridge), and the mechanoid Kryten (who had appeared in one episode in Series II [14]) joins the crew and becomes a regular character.[15]
In Series VI, a story arc is introduced where Red Dwarf has been stolen, and the crew pursues it in the smaller Starbug craft, with the side-effect that the character Holly disappears.[16]
Series VII is also set in Starbug. Early in series VII, Rimmer departs (due to actor Chris Barrie's commitments) and is replaced by Kristine Kochanski, Lister's long-term love interest, from an alternate universe.[17] Kochanski becomes a regular character for Series VII and VIII.
At the end of Series VII, we learn that Kryten's service nanobots, which had abandoned him years earlier, were behind the theft of the Red Dwarf at the end of series five. At the beginning of the eighth series, Kryten's nanobots reconstruct the Red Dwarf, which they had broken down into its constituent atoms.[18]
As a consequence, Series VIII features the entire original crew of Red Dwarf resurrected (except for the already-alive Lister and Kochanski), including a pre-accident Rimmer; and the original male Holly. The series ends with a metal-eating virus loose on Red Dwarf. The entire crew evacuates save the main cast (Lister, Rimmer, Cat, Kryten and Kochanski), whose fate is unresolved in a cliffhanger ending.[19]
Series IX onwards revert to the same four main characters of Series 3–6 (Lister, Rimmer, Cat and Kryten), on Red Dwarf and without Kochanski or Holly; and Rimmer is again a hologram. It has not been confirmed whether the Rimmer onboard ship is the one who originally left, the revived version, or a third incarnation entirely; however, episodes have alluded to him remembering events from both previous incarnations' lives.
Characters and actors [ edit ]
Dave Lister, played by Craig Charles, is a genial Scouser and self-described bum. He was the lowest-ranking of the 169 crew members on the ship before the accident. Lister survived the accident, as he was in stasis for smuggling an unquarantined cat on board. He has a long-standing desire to return to Earth and start a farm and/or diner on Fiji (which is under three feet of water following a volcanic eruption), but is left impossibly far away by the accident, which renders him the last (known) surviving member of the human race. [20] He likes Indian food, especially chicken vindaloo, which is a recurring theme in the series.
He likes Indian food, especially chicken vindaloo, which is a recurring theme in the series. Arnold Judas Rimmer Bsc Ssc ("Bronze swimming certificate" and "Silver swimming certificate"), played by Chris Barrie, was the second-lowest ranking member of the crew while they were all alive. He is a fussy, bureaucratic, neurotic coward who, by failing to replace a drive plate properly, is responsible for the Red Dwarf cadmium II accident that kills the entire crew (including himself) except Lister. Nevertheless, Holly chose him to be the ship's one available hologram[21] because he considered him the person most likely to keep Lister sane. During Series VII, Rimmer leaves the dimension shared by his crewmates to become the new Ace Rimmer. Along with the Red Dwarf ship and its crew, Rimmer is resurrected at the start of Series VIII by nanobots. He comes face to face with Death at the end of the series, whom he kicks in the groin. From the Back to Earth specials onwards, he is once again a hologram; with no explanation as to whether he is the same hologram who left in Series VII, or what happened to the human Rimmer from series VIII.
Lister, Back to Earth. From left to right: Kryten Cat, and Rimmer as they appeared in 2009's
The Cat, played by Danny John-Jules, is a humanoid creature who evolved from the offspring of Lister's smuggled pet cat Frankenstein. Cat is concerned with little other than sleeping, eating, and fawning over his appearance, and tends not to socialise with other members of the crew in early episodes. He becomes more influenced by his human companions over time, and begins to resemble a stylish, self-centred human. It is later revealed that, unlike his human companions, he has a "cool" sounding pulse, six nipples, and colour-coordinated internal organs. [22]
Kryten, full name Kryten 2X4B-523P (played by Robert Llewellyn from series III onwards, and as a one-off appearance in series II by David Ross), was rescued by the crew from the crashed spaceship Nova 5 in series II, upon which he had continued to serve the ship's crew despite their having been dead for thousands or even millions of years. Kryten is a Service Mechanoid and when first encountered by the crew, he was bound by his "behavioural protocols", but Lister gradually encouraged him to break his programming and think for himself. His change in appearance between the two actors is explained away by an accident involving Lister's spacebike and Lister having to repair him. [23]
in series II, upon which he had continued to serve the ship's crew despite their having been dead for thousands or even millions of years. Kryten is a and when first encountered by the crew, he was bound by his "behavioural protocols", but Lister gradually encouraged him to break his programming and think for himself. His change in appearance between the two actors is explained away by an accident involving Lister's spacebike and Lister having to repair him. Holly (played by Norman Lovett in series I, II, VIII, and a guest appearance in each of series VII and XII; and Hattie Hayridge in series III to V), is the ship's computer. Holly has a functional IQ of 6000, although this is severely depleted by the three million years of runtime and lack of repairs. Holly is left alone after the radiation accident that kills Rimmer and the rest of the crew except for Lister and the Cat. The computer had developed "computer senility" before the radiation accident, rendering it functionally inert. The change in appearance for series III is explained by Holly having changed his face to resemble that of a computer from a parallel universe "with whom he'd once fallen madly in love". [24]
Kristine Kochanski (originally portrayed by Clare Grogan before Chloë Annett took on the role from series VII) was initially a Red Dwarf navigation officer whom Lister had a crush on (later retroactively altered to be his ex-girlfriend) and whose memory he had cherished ever since.[20] In one episode, the crew happens upon an alternative dimension where Kochanski survived the Red Dwarf cadmium II accident. She joins Lister and the crew after the link to her own dimension collapses.[17] By the first episode of the Red Dwarf: Back to Earth specials, Lister believes her dead, but it is later revealed that Kryten (the sole witness to her "death") had lied to Lister. Kochanski had instead fled the ship in a Blue Midget when it became clear Lister's complete lack of self-respect and indulgence on excesses was slowly killing him, which greatly depressed her. Lister is advised by fans of the television series to find her in "the next series" and to make amends. However, the character does not appear in any of the later series.
Production [ edit ]
The first series aired on BBC2 in 1988. 12 series have so far been produced,[15] with a 13th rumoured to be planned for 2019.
Concept and commission [ edit ]
The concept for the show was originally developed from the sketch-series Dave Hollins: Space Cadet on the BBC Radio 4 show Son of Cliché in the mid-1980s, written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor.[25] Their influences came from films and television programmes such as Star Trek (1966), Silent Running (1972), Alien (1979), Dark Star (1974) and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981),[15] but also had a large element of British-style comedy and satire thrown into the mix, ultimately moulded into the form of a sitcom. Many visual and character elements bear similarities to the Trident nuclear submarine BBC documentary "Defence of the Realm". Having written the pilot script in 1983, the former Spitting Image writers pitched their unique concept to the BBC, but it was rejected on fears that a science fiction sitcom would not be popular.[25]
It was finally accepted by BBC North in 1986, a result of a spare budget being assigned for a second series of Happy Families that would never arise, and producer Paul Jackson's insistence that Red Dwarf should be filmed instead.[26] The show was lucky to be remounted after an electricians' strike partway through rehearsals in early 1987 shut the entire production down (the title sequence was filmed in January 1987).[27] The filming was rescheduled for September, and the pilot episode finally made it onto television screens on 15 February 1988.[15]
Casting [ edit ]
Alan Rickman and Alfred Molina auditioned for roles in the series, with Molina being cast as Rimmer.[28][29] However, after Molina had difficulties with the concept of the series, and of his role in particular, the role was recast and filled by Chris Barrie, a professional voice-actor and impressionist who had previously worked with both the writers on Spitting Image, and with the producers on Happy Families and Jasper Carrott productions.[29] Craig Charles, a Liverpudlian "punk poet", was given the role of Dave Lister. He was approached by the production team for his opinion about the "Cat" character, as they were concerned it may be considered by people as racist.[30] Charles described "Cat" as 'pretty cool' and after reading the script he decided he wanted to audition for the part of Dave Lister.[27] Laconic stand-up comedian Norman Lovett, who had originally tried out for the role of Rimmer, was kept in the show as Holly, the senile computer of the titular ship.[30] A professional dancer and singer, Danny John-Jules, arriving half an hour late for his appointment, stood out as the Cat immediately. This was partly due to his "cool" exterior, dedicated research (reading Desmond Morris' book Catwatching), and his showing up in character, wearing his father's 1950s-style zoot suit.[30]
Writing, producing and directing [ edit ]
Grant and Naylor wrote the first six series together (using the pseudonym Grant Naylor on the first two novels and later as the name of their production company, although never on the episodes themselves).[31] Grant left in 1995,[15] to pursue other projects,[32] leaving Naylor to write series VII and VIII with a group of new writers, including Paul Alexander and actor Robert Llewellyn (who portrayed the character Kryten).[33]
For the most part, Ed Bye produced and directed the series. He left before series V due to a scheduling clash (he ended up directing a show starring his wife, Ruby Wax) so Juliet May took over as director.[34] May parted ways with the show halfway through the series for personal and professional reasons and Grant and Naylor took over direction of the series, in addition to writing and producing.[35] Series VI was directed by Andy de Emmony, and Ed Bye returned to direct series VII and VIII. Series I, II and III were made by Paul Jackson Productions, with subsequent series produced by the writers' own company Grant Naylor Productions for BBC North. All eight series were broadcast on BBC Two. At the beginning of series IV, production moved from BBC North's New Broadcasting House in Manchester to Shepperton.[36]
Theme song and music [ edit ]
The theme tune and incidental music were written and performed by Howard Goodall, with the distinctive vocals on the closing theme tune by Jenna Russell. The first two series used a relatively sombre instrumental version of the closing theme for the opening titles; from series III onwards this switched to a more upbeat version. Goodall also wrote music for the show's various songs, including "Tongue Tied", with lyrics written by Grant and Naylor.[37] Danny John-Jules (credited as 'The Cat') re-orchestrated and released "Tongue Tied" in October 1993; it reached number 17 on the UK charts.[38] Goodall himself sang "The Rimmer Song" heard during the series VII episode "Blue", to which Chris Barrie mimed.[39]
Remastered [ edit ]
In 1998, on the tenth anniversary of the show's first airing (and between the broadcast of series VII and VIII), the first three series of Red Dwarf were remastered and released on VHS. The remastering included replacing model shots with computer graphics, cutting certain dialogue and scenes,[40] re-filming Norman Lovett's Holly footage, creating a consistent set of opening titles, replacing music and creating ambient sound effects with a digital master.[41] The remastered series were released in a 4-disc DVD boxset "The Bodysnatcher Collection" in 2007.[42]
Hiatus [ edit ]
Three years elapsed between series VI and VII, partly due to the dissolving of the Grant and Naylor partnership, but also due to cast and crew working on other projects.[32] When the series eventually returned, it was filmised and no longer shot in front of a live audience, allowing for greater use of four-walled sets, location shooting, and single-camera techniques.[43] When the show returned for its eighth series two years later, it had dropped use of the filmising process and returned to using a live audience.[44]
The show received a setback when the BBC rejected proposals for a series IX. Doug Naylor confirmed in 2007 that the BBC decided not to renew the series as they preferred to work on other projects.[45] A short animated Christmas special was, however, made available to mobile phone subscribers the same year.[46] Ultimately, however, fans had to wait a decade before the series returned to television.
Revival [ edit ]
Red Dwarf: Back to Earth [ edit ]
In 2008, a three-episode production was commissioned by the digital channel Dave. Red Dwarf: Back to Earth was broadcast over the Easter weekend of 2009, along with a "making of" documentary.[47][48] The episode was set nine years after the events of "Only the Good..." (with the cliffhanger ending of that episode left unresolved, a situation that would continue with Series X). The storyline involves the characters arriving back on Earth, circa 2009, only to find that they are characters in a TV show called "Red Dwarf". Kochanski is supposedly dead and Holly is offline due to water damage caused by Lister leaving a tap running.[49] Actress Sophie Winkleman played a character called Katerina, a resurrected hologram of a Red Dwarf science officer intent on replacing Rimmer.[50]
To achieve a more cinematic atmosphere, Back to Earth was not filmed in front of a studio audience. Some previous Red Dwarf episodes had been shot in that way ("Bodyswap" and all of the seventh series), but Back to Earth represented the first time that a laughter track was not added before broadcast.[51] It was also the first episode of Red Dwarf to be filmed in high definition.[49]
The specials were televised over three nights starting on Friday 10 April 2009. The broadcasts received record ratings for Dave;[52] the first of the three episodes represented the UK's highest–ever viewing figures for a commissioned programme on a digital network.[53] Back to Earth was released on DVD on 15 June 2009, and on Blu-ray on 31 August 2009. Back to Earth was subsequently described on the series' official website as "for all intents and purposes, the 'ninth series' of Red Dwarf".[56] This placement was confirmed when Series X was commissioned and branded as the tenth series, although Back to Earth continues not to be referred to as "Series IX" on home media or digital releases.
Red Dwarf X [ edit ]
On 10 April 2011 Dave announced it had commissioned a six-episode Red Dwarf "Series X" to be broadcast on Dave in late 2012.[57][58] Filming dates for the new series Red Dwarf X were announced on 11 November 2011, along with confirmation that the series would be shot at Shepperton Studios in front of an audience.[59] Principal filming began on 16 December 2011 and ended on 27 January 2012, and the cast and crew subsequently returned for six days filming pick ups.[60] Discounting guest stars, only the core cast of Charles, Barrie, Llewellyn and John-Jules returned for Series X, with Annett and Lovett absent, though the scripts include references to Kochanski and Holly.
On 20 July 2012, a 55-second trailer for series X was released on Facebook, followed by a new teaser every Friday.[61] The new series debuted on Thursday 4 October 2012.[62]
Red Dwarf XI and XII [ edit ]
Following series X, which attracted high viewing figures, Dave, Doug Naylor and the cast showed strong interest in making another series. During the Dimension Jump fan convention in May 2013, Doug Naylor stated that discussions were ongoing with all involved parties and while arrangements had not been finalised, he hoped shooting could begin in February 2014.[63] In October 2013, Robert Llewellyn posted on his blog, stating that "an eleventh series would happen" and that it would be "sometime in 2014". Llewellyn later removed the post from his blog and Doug Naylor issued a statement on Twitter, saying: "Getting tweets claiming Red Dwarf XI is commissioned. Not true. Not yet."[64][65] However, in January 2014 Danny John-Jules stated that the eleventh series of Red Dwarf was in the process of being written.[66]
At the April 2014 Sci-Fi Scarborough Festival, during the Red Dwarf cast panel, Danny John-Jules stated that filming of the eleventh series would commence in October 2014, with an expected release of Autumn 2015 on Dave.[67]
On 2 May 2015, at the Dimension Jump XVIII convention, Naylor announced that an eleventh and a twelfth series had been commissioned. The two series would be shot back-to-back towards the end of 2015 for broadcast on Dave in 2016 and 2017 respectively,[68] and would be co-produced by Baby Cow Productions, with company CEO, Henry Normal, executive producing the new episodes.[69]
Series XI and XII were filmed back-to-back at Pinewood Studios between November 2015 and March 2016.[70][71] The eleventh series premiered on UKTV's video on demand service UKTV Play on 15 September 2016, a week ahead of its broadcast transmission on 22 September.
On 8 September 2017, it was announced that Red Dwarf XII would begin broadcasting on Dave on 12 October 2017,[72] and on 15 September 2017 it was further announced that each episode would preview a week earlier via the UKTV Play video on demand service, effectively meaning that Series 12 would be starting on 5 October 2017.[73]
Red Dwarf XIII [ edit ]
On 28 April 2018 at Thames Con, Danny John-Jules and Robert Llewellyn stated that a 13th series would be made in 2019.[74] It is once again expected to be produced for and shown on the channel Dave, although this is yet to be confirmed.
Themes [ edit ]
Alien film The episode " Polymorph " paid homage to the 1979film
Red Dwarf was founded on the standard sitcom focus of a disparate and frequently dysfunctional group of individuals living together in a restricted setting. With the main characters routinely displaying their cowardice, incompetence and laziness, while exchanging insulting and sarcastic dialogue, the series provided
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it all off, Prime Minister Theresa May didn't need to call this election - she did so because she thought she'd win a landslide. The result is being seen as a major defeat for her.
What happens next? And what's a 'hung parliament'?
Remember that the UK is still a monarchy of sorts. There's lots of tradition involved.
This scenario is what Brits call a "hung parliament" - which just means that no party has a clear majority by itself.
Coalition or minority governments are fairly common in European countries like France, Germany, or close neighbour Ireland - but some in Britain tend to see them as unstable.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption An official pictured waiting for ballot boxes in Boston (UK), on election night
What happens next is that the largest party asks permission from the Queen to form a government. The monarch will never refuse this request - it's just a tradition in the constitutional monarchy that is the United Kingdom.
Theresa May visited the Queen just after noon, and the Conservatives are going to attempt to form a government relying on the backing of the Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland.
If they can't, then Labour, the opposition, might try to put together a minority government. Or - always a possibility - there could be another election.
Ok. Does this affect Brexit? Will Britain still leave the EU?
In the short term, this is a bit of a problem.
Negotiations for the UK leaving the EU are due to start on 20 June, just 11 days after the election. It's possible the UK won't even have a government in place by then.
Even if there is one, Theresa May's whole reason for calling the election was to stop "political game-playing" from other parties and give her the political clout to push through Brexit issues.
Image copyright Twitter
Instead, she has less power, and will need other parties to back her to even form a government at all.
The two largest parties both back Brexit, it's just a question of detail. The entire process is less stable now.
But, even if there is a delay in getting started, Brexit negotiations will happen - sooner or later.
So, this is bad for the prime minister?
By the morning rush hour, Theresa May was "holed up inside" her official residence, our political correspondent said, "her political gamble having gone so badly wrong".
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson refused to confirm whether he still supported the prime minister
Even before the last few results came in, chatter had already started about resignation - which is not uncommon in the UK.
Her main opponent, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, declared she had "lost votes, lost support and lost confidence", and: "I would have thought that's enough to go, actually."
Theresa May reportedly says she'll stay on, regardless. But talk of her future prospects is everywhere.
What about Jeremy Corbyn?
Jeremy is sometimes compared to US politician Bernie Sanders. He's an unusual party leader who has pulled off a personal victory here.
The lifelong socialist only put his name down for the Labour leadership because no other left-winger wanted to. Bookies gave him odds of 200/1 - but he won anyway, thanks to ordinary members' votes.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption BBC political correspondent: Success for Corbyn, total disaster for May
But the bicycle-riding, gardening, socialist leader didn't have the support of other Labour MPs - who almost immediately tried to push him out. He survived.
And while Labour technically lost this election, they made big gains over the 2015 vote. Anecdotal evidence suggests the youth vote turned out for Labour in a big way.
Owen Smith, who ran against Mr Corbyn for the leadership, said: "I was clearly wrong in feeling Jeremy wouldn't be able to do this. He proved me wrong and lots of people wrong, and I take my hat off to him."
Another election? How often do the British vote?
Image copyright Twitter
An election could take place in a matter of weeks, but only if the negotiations break down and no-one can form any kind of government.
It might seem like there's a lot of politics right now, but that's because:
There was a 2014 vote on Scottish independence from the United Kingdom
There was a 2015 general election, as scheduled
The winning party had promised an EU Brexit vote
When the "leave" campaign won Brexit, the prime minister resigned, so we got a new one
The new prime minister called a snap election - this one
In theory, a government has a set five-year term, so the next election is due in 2022.
But - as we've seen - an unexpected election can be called at any time if enough MPs agree to it, or if the government collapses.
What about Scottish independence?
The Scottish National Party (SNP) had suggested the possibility of another referendum on Scottish independence, in the wake of the Brexit vote (Scotland mostly wanted to stay in the EU).
They entered the election campaign in a very dominant position, holding 56 of the 59 seats in Scotland - and were expected to lose some seats, which they did, to a Conservatives surge.
Deputy First Minister John Swinney admitted that the possibility of a second referendum on independence had played a "significant" role in the result.
Having lost 21 seats as a result, it's very unclear what happens next with the SNP's campaign for independence.
Erm... why are Elmo and an intergalactic space lord at the count?
Image copyright AFP Image caption The prime minister kept her distance from intergalactic space lord at the count
The UK doesn't have transfers or any kind of proportional representation, so it's quite hard for independents or small parties to succeed.
But - much to the delight of photographers - some candidates run for sheer spectacle, often in high-profile seats against party leaders or prime ministers.
This year's candidates included Lord Buckethead, real name unknown, Elmo (not, we believe, of Sesame Street), and Mr Fishfinger Man.
Oh, and the Monster Raving Loony party has been campaigning consistently since the 1980s.
Image copyright PA Image caption A weary Elmo removes his head after losing out to the sitting PM
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Mr Fishfinger lost out to the leader of the Liberal Democrats
Where can I read more in-depth material?
Want to read more? The BBC is covering this election and all the developments in depth.Who is Count Dracula?
Count Dracula is a centuries old vampire, sorcerer, and Transylvanian nobleman, who claims to be a Székely descended from Attila the Hun. He inhabits a decaying castle in the Carpathian Mountains near the Borgo Pass. Unlike the vampires of Eastern European folklore, which are portrayed as repulsive, corpse-like creatures, Dracula exudes a veneer of aristocratic charm. In his conversations with Jonathan Harker, he reveals himself as deeply proud of his boyar heritage and nostalgic for the past times, which he admits have become only a memory of heroism, honor and valor in modern times.
Details of his early life are obscure, but it seems that Dracula studied the black arts at the academy of Scholomance in the Carpathian Mountains, overlooking the town of Sibiu and became proficient with alchemy and magic. Taking up arms, as befitting his rank and status as a Voivode, he led troops against the Turks across the Danube. According to Van Helsing: "He must indeed have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land. If it be so, then was he no common man: for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the land beyond the forest." Dead and buried in a great tomb in the chapel of his castle, Dracula returns from death as a vampire and lives for several centuries in his castle with three beautiful female vampires beside him. They seem to bear a possible family resemblance though whether they be his lovers, sisters, daughters, or vampires made by him is not made clear in the book.
Vampires of Modern Day
In modern fiction, the vampire tends to be depicted as a suave, charismatic villain. Despite the general disbelief in vampiric entities, occasional sightings of vampires are reported. Indeed, vampire hunting societies still exist, although they are largely formed for social reasons. Allegations of vampire attacks swept through the African country of Malawi during late 2002 and early 2003, with mobs stoning one individual to death and attacking at least four others, including Governor Eric Chiwaya, based on the belief that the government was colluding with vampires.
In early 1970 local press spread rumours that a vampire haunted Highgate Cemetery in London. Amateur vampire hunters flocked in large numbers to the cemetery. Several books have been written about the case, notably by Sean Manchester, a local man who was among the first to suggest the existence of the "Highgate Vampire" and who later claimed to have exorcised and destroyed a whole nest of vampires in the area. In January 2005, rumours circulated that an attacker had bitten a number of people in Birmingham, England, fuelling concerns about a vampire roaming the streets. However, local police stated that no such crime had been reported and that the case appears to be an urban legend.
In 2006, a physics professor at the University of Central Florida wrote a paper arguing that it is mathematically impossible for vampires to exist, based on geometric progression. According to the paper, if the first vampire had appeared on January 1, 1600, and it fed once a month, and every victim turned into a vampire, then within two and a half years the entire human population of the time would have become vampires. The paper made no attempt to address the credibility of the assumption that every vampire victim would turn into a vampire.
In Europe, where much of the vampire folklore originates, the vampire is usually considered a fictitious being, although many communities may have embraced the revenant for economic purposes. In some cases, especially in small localities, vampire superstition is still rampant and sightings or claims of vampire attacks occur frequently. In Romania during February 2004, several relatives of Toma Petre feared that he had become a vampire. They dug up his corpse, tore out his heart, burned it, and mixed the ashes with water in order to drink it.
Vampirism and the Vampire lifestyle also represent a relevant part of modern day's occultist movements. The mythos of the vampire, his magical qualities, allure, and predatory archetype express a strong symbolism that can be used in ritual, energy work, and magic, and can even be adopted as a spiritual system. The vampire has been part of the occult society in Europe for centuries and has spread into the American sub-culture as well for more than a decade, being strongly influenced by and mixed with the neo gothic aesthetics.
Thoughts of What made "Count Dracula"
One could wonder who Bram Stoker chose to use as an example of the main character in his book "Bram Stoker's Dracula" Was it Vlad Dracula, or Elizabeth Bathory? Both were brutal in their killings, and both were born of royalty. Vlad took on the name Dracula, He lived in and about Transyvania, and killed many people. so this would be a definate yes. However, he did not drink the blood of his victims.
Elizabeth Bathory could also have been in the thoughts of Bram Stoker when he wrote the book. She was also born of royalty, she was a brutal murderer, and lived in or about Transylvania, However she was not named Dracula, and she did not drink the blood of her victims. But more characteristics of Dracula can make one wonder if she had anything to do with the ideas of the character. She was said to bath in the blood of her victims, which would in her mind, make her look younger, and giver her strength. Some say this actually worked for her, as she did still look very young at the age when she died.
No matter who Bram Stoker chose as an example to use for the famed Count Dracula Does not really matter. What does matter, is that Vampires are being spotted all over the world, or at least the remains of the bodies that are said to be the victim of a vampire.
The vampire, a seductive, "undead" predator, is one of the most inventive and alluring creatures of modern day. It's also one of the most enduring: Vampire-like creatures date back thousands of years, and pop up in dozens of different cultures.
Vampires in Modern Culture
Today there is many that claim to be a Vampire, and actually drink the blood of other humans. They claim this gives them strength and keeps them looking young, and actually heals their body of aging aliments. However, I have seen people that claim all of this, as well as the claims of being a vampire, and will actually be wearing eye glasses. I am not saying there is not Vampires in the Modern world, but I am just making claims that if the blood is to heal the body of aging ailments, then why would a vampire be wearing glasses to be able to see?
The Dracula legend, and the modern vampire legend that came out of it, was directly inspired by the folklore of eastern Europe. History records dozens of mythical vampire figures in this region, going back hundreds of years. These vampires all have their particular habits and characteristics, but most fall into one of two general categories:
Demons (or agents of the devil) that reanimated corpses so they could walk among the living
Spirits of dead people that would not leave their own body
The most notable demon vampires were the Russian upir and the Greek vrykolakas. In these traditions, sinners, unbaptized babies and other people outside the Christian faith were more likely to be reanimated after death. Those who practiced witchcraft were particularly susceptible because they had already given their soul to the devil in life. Once the undead corpses rose from the grave, they would terrorize the community, feeding on the living.
Another modern variation on the vampire legend is the "psychic vampire." These modern vampires claim that they crave psychic energy from others and have the power to drain it without the person's knowledge. Psychic vampires typically attempt to drain life-force energy through meditation and concentration. If they do not feed, they say, they will become weak as if they had not eaten.
According to some believers, this sort of vampire has been around for thousands of years. Some claim this phenomenon inspired the undead vampires of folklore.
In many modern movies and books, vampires can take the form of a vampire bat, a real animal that feeds on blood. In actuality, vampire bats don't usually kill their prey, and they pose little threat to humans. In fact, they are small, reclusive, docile animals. Other shape shifting Vampires have been know to shift into a wolf.
Vampire Powers and Abilities
Vampires can spread the "curse" to the living human making him stronger by means of numbers. He can also make vampires that can withstand the effects of daylight, thus allowing for someone trustworthy to watch over the night walkers during the day.
Vampires don't age or die from the passing of time, but they seem to get older when a long period of time passes without feeding themselves. But they can get young again using a blood supply. It also should be said that most of the vampire's powers increase with age and experience.
Vampires are immune to most diseases and invincible to mortal weapons, but they became vulnerable during the day or when they are resting in their coffins.
The vampire's physical strength greatly exceeds that of mortals (it is said that they are at least 20 times stronger). This makes it easy to prey on humans, as well as defend themselves against the vampire hunters.
A vampire has the ability to control several animals such as the wolf, the rat, the fox, the owl, the bat and the moth and they are also capable of taking the form of a wolf or a bat and possibly any of the other animals subject to his command. Vampires can also transform themselves into a mist or dust cloud drifting in the air, they can modify their sizes in certain limits, becoming either larger or smaller, and they can climb walls.
The vampire may exert his will over the will of his victim (that explains why the victims often have no memory of being attacked) This makes it easy for the vampire to enter the area of the victim for feeding, or transforming the victim into another vampire.
The Vampire's Weaknesses
Vampires are obligated to sleep (actually, they rest in their coffin in a trance that keeps them aware of things happening around) during the day and to rest upon a protective layer of hallowed ground from its native land.
During the day light, vampires lose their supernatural powers, becoming only human, that's why mortal weapons may harm them. The sunlight will also burn them to ash if they continue to stay in view of the sun for a short period of time.
Religious symbols, such as the Cross, Holy Water and other symbols of the Church are considered to be powerful weapons against vampires. (it has to be mentioned that only faithful persons are able to use those symbols succesufully).
Vampires can only enter a home they they have freely been invited in by the residents owner, or the resident in charge of the home. Once invited, he may come and go at will.Television broadcaster Harold Reynolds apologized on Monday and said that he didn't mean to upset Canadians with a comment he made during Game 3 of the American League Division Series.
After a foul ball by Blue Jays outfielder Jose Bautista in the fourth inning of Sunday's 5-1 win over the Texas Rangers, the FOX commentator took a shot at Canada's baseball ability.
"We were talking about foul balls in the stands up in Toronto, and because there's not a lot of people that grew up playing baseball in Canada, they're not used to catching a lot of balls in the stands... not many people catching that one, anyway," Reynolds said.
"Sorry Canada, whole country, if I offended you for that," said Reynolds on Monday in an interview on Sportsnet during the pre-game show in Canada.
"I'm well aware of the baseball players that have come out of there. Dalton Pompey and Russell Martin, who will be catching tonight for the Jays, are from there. Joey Votto's a Canadian. Justin Morneau."
In the interview Reynolds — who does not have Twitter or other social media accounts — said he was unaware of the controversy until former National League MVP Larry Walker of Maple Ridge, B.C., called him Monday morning.
"I do the draft every year," said Reynolds in the televised interview. "I think Canada's up and coming, particularly in the northwest, Vancouver area. So I'm well versed in that. It was more of a joke and the fact that most people grew up playing hockey in Canada. I didn't think it was that offensive, so obviously I was taken different."
Reynolds also spoke with media on Monday ahead of the TV interview and Toronto's pivotal game in Arlington, Texas.
"I never ever want to offend people," he said. "That's never the nature of my heart, that's not who I am. So it was never (meant) to be offensive, not at all. That's it."
His on-air comment drew the ire of many from north of the border and quickly picked up steam on social media. Walker posted his thoughts on Twitter.
"I won 7 gold gloves. I think part of winning them was cause I could catch," he tweeted from his verified account.
Reynolds said he was surprised at how the comment became such a hot talking point.
"I don't have much to say about it," he told reporters. "I don't want to inflame this thing. It was just a simple comment that was a joke in the game."
Reynolds was asked if he had any words for Canadians who may have been upset by the comment.
"Happy Thanksgiving," he said. "I mean that's it. I don't have much more. I'll talk about it during the game if it comes up. I had no idea this was going to go (viral)."
The Blue Jays have two Canadians on their playoff roster: Toronto native Russell Martin and Dalton Pompey of Mississauga, Ont. Reynolds said in the televised interview that both had been teasing him about the remarks before Game 4 and that Walker had thanked him over the phone for the 4,000 new Twitter followers the Canadian got thanks to his tweet.
Reynolds spent 12 seasons in Major League Baseball. The two-time all-star won three Gold Glove awards."Alice's Restaurant Massacree" (also known as simply "Alice's Restaurant") is a song by singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie, released as the title track to his 1967 debut album Alice's Restaurant. The song is a satirical, deadpan protest against the Vietnam War draft, in the form of a comically exaggerated but essentially true story from Guthrie's own life: he is arrested and convicted of dumping trash illegally, which later leads to him being rejected by the draft board due to his criminal record of "littering". The title refers to a restaurant owned by one of Guthrie's friends, which plays no role in the story aside from being the subject of the chorus.
Despite its running time of over 18 minutes, it was a hit song, and an inspiration for the 1969 film also named Alice's Restaurant. The work has become Guthrie's signature song and he has periodically re-released it with updated lyrics. In 2017, it was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or artistically significant".[1]
Characteristics [ edit ]
The song consists of a protracted spoken monologue, with a constantly repeated fingerstyle ragtime guitar (Piedmont style) backing and light brush-on-snare drum percussion (the drummer on the record is uncredited), bookended by a short chorus about the titular diner. (Guthrie has used the brief "Alice's Restaurant" bookends and guitar backing for other monologues bearing the Alice's Restaurant name.) The track lasts 18 minutes and 34 seconds, occupying the entire A-side of the Alice's Restaurant album. Due to Guthrie's rambling and circuitous telling with unimportant details, it has been described as a shaggy dog story.[2]
Guthrie refers to the incident as a "massacree", a colloquialism originating in the Ozark Mountains[3] that describes "an event so wildly and improbably and baroquely messed up that the results are almost impossible to believe". It is a corruption of the word massacre, but carries a much lighter and more sarcastic connotation, rather than describing anything involving actual death.[4]
Story [ edit ]
Prologue [ edit ]
Guthrie explains that his friend Alice owns a restaurant, but that isn't the name of the restaurant, merely the name of the song. He then sings the chorus, which is in the form of a jingle for the restaurant, beginning "You can get anything you want at Alice's restaurant", and continuing with directions to it.
Part One [ edit ]
Guthrie then recounts that two years prior, he and a friend spent the Thanksgiving Day holiday at a deconsecrated church on the outskirts of Stockbridge, Massachusetts that their friends Alice and Ray were using as a home. As a favor to them, Guthrie and the friend volunteered to take their large accumulation of trash to the local dump in their VW Microbus, not realizing until they arrived there that it was closed for the holiday. Unable to find an appropriate place to dispose of the garbage, they came across a pile of garbage that had previously been dropped down the side of a cliff, and decided to simply add theirs to it.
The next morning, the church receives a phone call from the police mentioning that an envelope in the pile of garbage traced back to them; Arlo, stating "I cannot tell a lie," confesses that he "put that envelope" there. He and his friend drove to the police station expecting a verbal reprimand, but they were instead arrested by "Officer Obie", handcuffed, and taken to "the scene of the crime". There several officers collected extensive evidence of the incident, including "twenty-seven 8-by-10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was, to be used as evidence against us". The pair were briefly locked up before Alice arrived and got them released, taking them back to the former church with her.
Guthrie and his friend stood trial the next day, but to Obie's disappointment, the judge presiding over the case relied on a seeing-eye dog, rendering the officer's painstaking visual evidence irrelevant. Jubilant at having witnessed a literal "case of American blind justice," Guthrie and his friend pleaded guilty, paid a combined $50 fine to the court and picked up the garbage.
Part Two [ edit ]
Guthrie then states that the littering incident was "not what I came to tell you about" and shifts to another story, this one based at the Army Building on Whitehall Street in New York City as Guthrie appeared for a physical exam related to the Vietnam War draft. He tried various strategies to be found unfit for military service, including getting drunk the night before so he was hung-over, and attempting to convince the psychiatrist that he was homicidal, which only earned him praise.
After several hours, Guthrie was asked whether he had ever been convicted of a crime. He answered in the affirmative, explaining his story, and was sent to the "Group W" bench to file for a moral waiver. The other convicts ("mother-rapers... father-stabbers... father-rapers") were initially put off that his conviction had been of "littering", but accepted him when he added "and creating a nuisance". When Guthrie noticed one of the questions on the paperwork asked whether he rehabilitated himself since the crime, he noted the irony of having to prove himself reformed from a crime of littering when the realities of war were often far more brutal; the officer responded that they didn't like "[his] kind", and Guthrie's fingerprints were sent to the federal government to keep on record.
Epilogue [ edit ]
In the final part of the song, Guthrie explains to the live audience that anyone finding themselves in a similar situation should walk into the military psychiatrist's office, sing the opening line from the chorus and walk out. He predicts that a single person doing it would be rejected as "sick", two people doing it in harmony would be rejected as "faggots", three people doing it would be perceived as "an organization", and fifty people a day would be recognized as "the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacree Movement". As he continues fingerpicking, he invites the audience to sing the chorus along with him "the next it comes around on the guitar", then chides them for doing it horribly, and challenges them to sing it with him more loudly, as the finale.
Development [ edit ]
Guthrie cited the long-form monologues of Lord Buckley and Bill Cosby as inspirations writing the song's lyrics, and a number of different musicians (in particular Mississippi John Hurt) as inspirations composing the Piedmont fingerstyle guitar accompaniment.[5] The song was written as the events happened over the course of approximately one year;[6] it grew out of a simple joke riff Guthrie had been working on in 1965 and 1966 before he appeared before the draft board (the opening was originally written as "you can hide from Obanhein at Alice's restaurant", which is how the restaurant got tied into the original story), and he later added his experience before the draft board to create the song as it is known today.[7] Additional portions of the song were written during one of Guthrie's many stays with the English songwriter and music journalist Karl Dallas and his family in London.[8][9] Guthrie sent a demo recording of the song to his father Woody Guthrie on his deathbed; it was, according to a "family joke", the last thing Woody heard before he died in October 1967.[7] Because of the length of the piece, Guthrie never expected the song to be released, because such extended monologues were extremely rare in an era when singles were typically less than three minutes in length.[5]
Response [ edit ]
Alice's Restaurant Massacree 40th Anniversary tour. Arlo Guthrie performing during his 2005tour.
"Alice's Restaurant" was first performed publicly with Guthrie singing live on Radio Unnameable, the overnight program hosted by Bob Fass that aired on New York radio station WBAI, one evening in 1966.[10][11] Guthrie performed the song several times live on WBAI in 1966 and 1967, prior to the song's commercial release. The song proved so popular that at one point Fass (who was known for playing songs he liked over and over again in his graveyard slot) started playing a recording of one of Guthrie's live performances of the song repeatedly;[11] eventually the non-commercial station rebroadcast it only when listeners pledged to donate a large amount of money.
"Alice's Restaurant" was performed on July 17, 1967, at the Newport Folk Festival in a workshop or break-out section on "topical songs", where it was such a hit that he was called upon to perform it for the entire festival audience. The song's success at Newport and on WBAI led Guthrie to record it in front of a studio audience in New York City and release it as side one of the album, Alice's Restaurant, which was released in October 1967.[12]
The original album spent 16 weeks on the Billboard 200 album chart, peaking at #29 during the week of March 2, 1968,[13] then re-entered the chart December 27, 1969 after the film version was released and peaking that time at #63.[14] In the wake of the film version, Guthrie recorded a more single-friendly edit of the chorus in 1969. Entitled "Alice's Rock & Roll Restaurant," it included three verses, all of which advertise the restaurant, and a fiddle solo by country singer Doug Kershaw; to fit the song on a record, the entire monologue was removed, bringing the song's length to 4:43. This version, backed with "Ring Around the Rosy Rag" (a cut from the Alice's Restaurant album), peaked at #97 on the Billboard Hot 100.[15] Because the single's version did not reach the popularity of the full version, which did not qualify for the Hot 100 because of its length, Billboard officially classifies Guthrie as a one-hit wonder for his later hit, "City of New Orleans."[16]
It has become a tradition for many classic rock and adult album alternative radio stations to play the song each Thanksgiving.[17] Despite its use of the slur "faggots", radio stations generally present the song uncut as it was originally recorded, and the Federal Communications Commission has never punished any station for playing the song.[6] When performing the song in later years, Guthrie began to change the line to something less offensive and often topical: during the 1990s and 2000s, the song quoted the Seinfeld episode "The Outing" by saying "They'll think you're gay—not that there's anything wrong with that," and in 2015, Guthrie used the line "They'll think they're trying to get married in some parts of Kentucky," a nod to the controversy of the time surrounding county clerk Kim Davis.
After the release of the original album, Guthrie continued to perform the song in concert, frequently revising and updating the lyrical content. In 1969, for instance, he performed a 20-minute rendition of the song which (instead of the original narrative) told a fictional story of how Russian and Chinese military operatives attempted to weaponize "multicolored rainbow roaches" they had found at Alice's restaurant, and the Lyndon Johnson administration orchestrated a plan for the nation to defend itself. A recording of this version, given the title "Alice: Before Time Began", was released in 2009 on a CD distributed by Guthrie's Rising Son Records label; another recording of this version, given the title "The Alice's Restaurant Multicolored Rainbow Roach Affair", has also been released through that record label.[18] By the late 1970s, Guthrie had removed the song from his regular concert repertoire.[5]
In 1984, Guthrie, who was supporting George McGovern's ultimately unsuccessful comeback bid for the Democratic presidential nomination,[19] revived "Alice's Restaurant" to protest the Reagan Administration's reactivation of the Selective Service System registrations. This version has not been released on a commercial recording; at least one bootleg of this version from one of Guthrie's performances exists. It was this tour, which occurred near the 20th anniversary of the song (and continued as a general tour after McGovern dropped out of the race), that prompted Guthrie to return the song to his playlist every ten years, usually coinciding with the anniversary of either the song or the incident. The 30th anniversary version of the song includes a follow-up recounting how he learned that Richard Nixon had owned a copy of the song, and he jokingly suggested that this explained the famous 18 1⁄ 2 -minute gap in the Watergate tapes. Guthrie re-recorded his entire debut album for his 1997 CD Alice's Restaurant: The Massacree Revisited, on the Rising Son label, which includes this expanded version. The 40th anniversary edition, performed at and released as a recording by the Kerrville Folk Festival, made note of some parallels between the 1960s and the then-current Iraq War and George W. Bush administration.[7] Guthrie revived the song for the 50th anniversary edition in 2015, which he thought might be his last, not knowing if he would still be alive and able to perform the song by the time the 60th anniversary comes around in 2025.[5][20] In 2018, Guthrie began the "Alice's Restaurant: Back by Popular Demand" Tour, reuniting with members of his 1970s backing band Shenandoah. The tour, which features Guthrie's daughter Sarah Lee Guthrie as the opening act, was scheduled to wrap up in 2020. To justify bringing the song back out of its usual ten-year sequence, he stated that he was doing so to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the film version of the song.[21]
Artist's reflections [ edit ]
In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, Guthrie explained that he believes that there are such things as just wars, and that the message of this song was targeted at the Vietnam War in particular.[5] Interviews with Ron Bennington in 2009 and NPR in 2005 describe the song not so much as an anti-war song but as an "anti-stupidity" song.[7][22] Guthrie considered the song as relevant as in 1965.[23]
Historicity [ edit ]
Most of the events of the story are true; the littering incident was recorded in the local newspaper at the time it happened, and although Guthrie made some minor embellishments, the persons mentioned in the first half of the story all granted interviews on the subject, mostly verifying that part of the story.[24] The second half of the story does not have as much specific corroborating evidence to support it; the public exposure of COINTELPRO in 1971 confirmed that the federal government was collecting personal information on anti-war protesters as Guthrie alleged.
Alice, Ray and the restaurant [ edit ]
The Alice in the song was restaurant-owner Alice May Brock (born c. 1941). In 1964, shortly after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College, Alice used $2,000 supplied by her mother to purchase a deconsecrated church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where Alice and her husband Ray Brock (c. 1928–1979) would live. Alice was a painter and designer, while Ray was an architect and woodworker who originally was from Virginia; the two had met while in Greenwich Village in 1962. Both worked at a nearby private academy, the music and art-oriented Stockbridge School, from which Guthrie (then of the Queens, New York City neighborhood of Howard Beach) had graduated.
Sign to restaurant
Alice Brock operated a restaurant called "The Back Room" in 1966, at 40 Main Street in Stockbridge, located behind a grocery store and directly underneath the studios of Norman Rockwell.[25] (Theresa's Stockbridge Café was last known to occupy the site; the café's sign makes note that the space was "formerly Alice's Restaurant".) After a breakup and abortive reconciliation, Alice divorced Ray in 1968; she went on to launch two more restaurants (a take-out window in Housatonic in 1971 and a much larger establishment in Lenox in the late 1970s)[26] before leaving the restaurant business in 1979.[27] Ray returned to Virginia after the divorce and took on various projects until his death.[28]
She owned an art studio and gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts until 2016.[29] She illustrated the 2004 children's book Mooses Come Walking, written by Guthrie, and authored and illustrated another, How to Massage Your Cat. Ray Brock, after the divorce, moved back to his original home of Virginia and died in 1979.[30]
In 1969, Random House published The Alice's Restaurant Cookbook (ISBN 039440100X) which featured recipes and hippie wisdom from Alice Brock, as well as photos of Alice and Guthrie, and publicity stills from the movie.[31] A tear-out record was included in the book with Brock and Guthrie bantering on two tracks, "Italian-Type Meatballs" and "My Granma's Beet Jam".[32]
The church [ edit ]
The former church where the story begins, located at 4 Van Deusenville Road in Great Barrington, Massachusetts ; the building later became the Guthrie Center.
The church, originally built as the St. James Chapel in 1829, was enlarged in 1866 and renamed Trinity Church. Ray and Alice Brock purchased the property in 1964 and made it their home. Alice sold the building shortly after the film adaptation was released, commenting that the song and film had brought a great deal of unwanted publicity.[30] The building changed ownership several times in the 1970s and 1980s[33] until Guthrie bought the facility in 1991 and converted it to the Guthrie Center, a nondenominational, interfaith meeting place.
The church's exterior is covered with white vinyl siding with the original cornerstone dedications still intact.
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the post for which he would become best known was his six years as lieutenant-governor of Ontario. As vice-regal he visited 672 communities, held 675 receptions, received about 75,000 guests, attended 4,000 engagements, visited 230 schools and shook nearly 240,000 hands.
His tenure set the tone for how he would be viewed the rest of his life, elevating him to the status of living monument.
Linc lent his name to myriad causes, attending numerous fundraisers and testimonials — some of them in his own honour.
He joked about rubbing elbows with “big shots” at receptions. And yet, with his big voice, standing 6-foot-3 (and-change), decked-out in his tux, polished size-14 shoes (shoes were the first things Yvonne said she would notice in a man), and monogrammed shirts with French cuffs, he was always the biggest shot in the room. Untouchable, even.
While he seemed to exist above the political fray, Linc remained a committed small and large-c conservative the rest of his life. He was even an unabashed George W. Bush man: “My friends say, ‘Are you nuts? That guy will ruin the world.’ I said, they need a guy like him, a gunslinger.”
The titles and honours never stopped coming. Having the new east-west Mountain thruway named the Lincoln M. Alexander Expressway — which quickly became, simply, The Linc — seemed to delight him as much as any testimonial although he never learned to drive.
He certainly never needed his own car, chauffeured as he usually was; a man with regal bearing who could blend easily with British royalty, even as he was beloved for his common touch. “He’s a great guy,” his driver once said. “Do anything for you. Guys like him, they shouldn’t get old.”
He greeted a writer from the Spectator for an interview bare-chested one morning, in the middle of dressing for a funeral he was to attend that day. He sprinkled his conversation with salty language, and near the end of his life he could be found around town driving his motorized scooter, stopping to chat with one and all.
“He reaches out to everyone, gives everyone a lift who meets him,” said Rev. Dr. Francis Chisholm, who presided over Linc’s instalment as lieutenant-governor. “The openness, the casual manner, everyone is drawn to him. That was the Lincoln touch. He was a genius; had a genius for friendship and service to his country.”
Linc was a shattered man after losing Yvonne in 1999 to Alzheimer’s. A man of deep faith, but one who grew apart from formal religion, he wrote in his book that he cursed God at the time: “I asked him what the hell was going on, taking my wife. He had let me down…Within two days I settled down and was thankful he had taken her.”
Eleven years later, he said that he had been “smitten” upon meeting Marni Beal, a woman 30 years younger. Spectator columnist Jeff Mahoney wrote: “Marni is white. Linc is black…. She grew up when Hogan’s Heroes was on TV. He fought in the actual war.”
Linc said he figured there was “no way an old codger like me could attract someone as lovely and intelligent as Marni. But she fell for my baloney.”
For health reasons he sold his house and moved to a retirement home, his spacious room across the hall from — what else? — The Lincoln Alexander Lounge.
He had lived 48 years in the house on Proctor Boulevard, thus defying the original deed on the place, which had stated that “no Jews, blacks or foreigners” be permitted to live there.
Race and racism never stopped being a central focus of his life, even as Linc ultimately transcended it. He chaired the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, and received its award for Lifetime Achievement.
“He is a man who claimed his space in our society and became an inspiration for others to follow,” said Evelyn Myrie, chair of the Hamilton Black History Committee. “He represented the spirit of hope. He was seen as a man of the people.”
At a swanky dinner in Toronto to mark his 80th birthday, Linc tweaked the “heavy hitters” from politics and business gathered in his honour: “We have lost much in this country because of racism. Some of you know what I am talking about because you’re from the old school.”
And yet Linc was no ideologue on the issue. He insisted in 1990 that Canada was “not a racist society” and his was a moderate voice when the Civil War-era musical Showboat came to Toronto amidst calls to ban it for promoting racist stereotypes. Linc urged organizers to listen to the black community but did not support a ban.
He told a Hamilton high school, in 1972: “I’m proud of being black, but my role in Canada is to serve all the people. I’m a Canadian. Period.”
When journalists interviewed him he talked of the “fist mentality” he had growing up and told two stories about racial hurdles he encountered. One was after he graduated from McMaster and was turned down for a white collar job at Stelco, he said, because the company said they didn’t want a black man’s face front and centre.
The other was when his law school dean made a crack to the class about “looking for a nigger in a woodpile.” Linc did not reflexively look for confrontation, and yet that day he stood up, as one of only two blacks in the class.
“You can’t say that, dean,” he said.
“Everyone says it.”
“But you’re the dean, you can’t say it.”
Linc thought his bold move would mean the end of his law career, instead he finished in the top quarter of his class.
Unlike Linc’s namesake father, his was the first generation of blacks who were not automatically consigned to service jobs, who stepped out and up and cut a reputation to which other blacks could aspire, suggested Evelyn Auchinvole, church historian at Stewart Memorial Church.
In that sense, Linc’s passing is the end of an era, she said, the last of Hamiltonians such as Olympian Ray Lewis, and bluesman Jackie Washington, who showed the way for blacks to break the old barriers.
Linc spoke at a funeral service for Jackie, who had been two years older. It was held at Stewart Memorial Church, which was founded by a group who had escaped slavery in the U.S. through the Underground Railroad.
He spoke with no notes, the audience in the palm of his large hand.
“As we climb the mountain very few people leave their footprints, but Jackie did,” he said. “He was able to change a lot of people’s minds about black people. When I think of Jackie, I think of Joshua at the battle of Jericho: and the walls came tumbling down.”
A few years ago, Linc reunited one last time with the church choir for the unveiling of a heritage plaque. He had been a parishioner years ago at Stewart Memorial, and sang in the choir in the 50s and early 60s. He always had a beautiful singing voice.
He dusted off the pipes and boomed a couple of Negro spirituals; Tramp Along, and Walk Together Children.
It had been years since the choir had heard a sound like that among them. They had a true bass again, for one day, and it was heavenly, the big man hauling up the old notes from deep inside, from a sacred place close to his heart:
Sing together children, don’ you get weary
Sing together children, don’ you get weary
Oh, shout together children, don’t you get weary
There’s a great camp meeting in the promised land.
Lincoln Alexander: A life in brief
Formal title: Colonel The Honourable Lincoln M. Alexander, PC, CC, K St. J, O. Ont, CD, QC, BA, LL. B, LL. D (Hon), D.S. Litt. (Hon.)
Familiar title: Linc
Timeline
1922: Lincoln MacCauley Alexander born in Toronto Jan. 21 to Mae Rose and Lincoln Alexander, Sr.
1942-1945: Corporal in Royal Canadian Air Force.
1948: marries Yvonne Harrison.
1949: their only child, Keith, is born.
1949: graduates from McMaster University with BA in history and political economy
1953: called to the bar after graduating Osgoode Hall Law School.
1963-79 Partner in law firm of Millar, Alexander, Tokiwa and Isaacs
1968: elected Progressive Conservative MP for Hamilton West, re-elected four times, retiring from politics in 1980.
1979: appointed Minister of Labour under Prime Minister Joe Clark.
1980: appointed Chairman of the Workers' Compensation Board of Ontario
1985: appointed Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, serving until 1991.
1991: appointed chancellor, University of Guelph, serving until March 2007, continuing as chancellor emeritus.
1996 to 2003: Appointed chairman, Canadian Race Relations Foundation.
1999: Yvonne dies.
2001: Gala to celebrate 80th birthday and raise funds for minority scholarships.
2006: Publishes autobiography “Go To School, You’re A Little Black Boy”
2006: Voted greatest Hamiltonian ever in Hamilton Spectator survey
2011: Announces engagement to Marni Beal
2012: Has surgery to repair ruptured aneurysm in his abdomen
Selected honours:
Recipient of honorary doctorates from six universities: Toronto (1986), McMaster (1987), Western Ontario (1988), York (1990), Royal Military College (1991) and Queen’s (1992)
1982: Man of the Year Award from Ethnic Press Council of Canada
1982: McMaster Distinguished Alumni Award
1984: Caribana Cultural Committee, Cultural Achievement Award
1985: Diefenbaker Memorial Foundation Award.
1985: Appointed to The Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem:
1986: Humanitarian Award from Beth Sholom Brotherhood
1986: Honouree of the Year, Hamilton Negev Dinner, Jewish National Fund of Canada
1989: Honorary Chief of Police, Metropolitan Toronto Police
1990: Knight of The Military and Hospitaller Order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem
1990: Armenian Community Centre of Toronto Outstanding Canadian Award
1992: Officer of the Order of Ontario
1992: Companion of the Order of Canada
1992: Hamilton Gallery of Distinction
1994: Canadian Forces Decoration (CD)
1996: Appointed chairman of the Canadian Race Relations
1996: Award of Excellence from Osgoode Hall Law School Alumni Association
1997: Lifetime Achievement Award by Canadian Association of Black Lawyers
1998: Black History Month J.C. Holland Award
1998: Government of Ontario Award for Outstanding Achievement in Human Rights
1998: Terry Fox Hall of Fame
1999: Appointed honorary chief of Hamilton-Wentworth Regional Police
2003: Canadian Race Relations Foundation Award for Lifetime Achievement
Named in his honour:
Lincoln M. Alexander Parkway in Hamilton, OPP headquarters in Orillia, Lincoln M. Alexander Public School in Hamilton, Lincoln Alexander Public School in Ajax, Lincoln M. Alexander Secondary School in Mississauga, Alexander Pavilion at St. Peter’s Hospital in Hamilton (named for Lincoln and his wife Yvonne).
Favourite songs (from a list of music he picked to be played on a CBC radio show in 1985):
Satin Doll
Joshua Fit de Battle of Jericho
One O’Clock Jump
Tales from the Vienna Woods
Am I Asking Too Much?
The Lady Is A Tramp
Bess, You Is My Woman Now
How Great Thou ArtThe Times today reports that leading Muslim clerics in the UK are warning that ‘religious sectarianism is on the rise in Britain’s Muslim community and threatens to spill over into violent crime and terrorism’. An investigation by the paper ‘found a sharp but largely hidden rise in sectarian tensions between the minority Shia community and the dominant Sunni groups’.
I must say that I am shocked – really shocked – by this. Like everyone else, I had always assumed that if you allowed very large numbers of people with totally different beliefs into this country then in no time they would be down the local pub and fully integrated loyal members of the Women’s Institute and their local Anglican church. It was totally unforeseeable, was it not, that any of them would bring their ancient animosities with them? And as for the attacks on mosques outlined in the report – surely such actions could only ever be expected from native knuckle-dragging ‘Islamophobes’. What are we to do now that Muslims in the UK are attacking mosques? What names can we call them? All this will require deep thought. At least it is not too late in the day to start.Photo by Jaluj, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Sometimes a negative experience may turn into a catalyst for change. Andrea Kleiman’s (Usuaria:Jaluj) interest in Wikipedia’s gender gap rose after reading a psychological article written by a male editor that she thought was sexist. This sparked Kleiman, an Argentine psychologist, to join Wikipedia. “I decided to [register] only to write in that article,” she recalls.
Surprising even herself, the article didn’t remain the last she edited. Since 2011, Kleiman has contributed tens of thousands of edits and arranged workshops for women in Argentina and Uruguay.
Kleiman is concerned about how fewer than 15 percent of Wikipedia editors are women, so she focuses on encouraging and engaging young women to edit Wikipedia. She believes young women need extra attention to feel comfortable in the editing environment. “Because I am old, I feel very secure about myself, about my knowledge, and about my voice. But younger women, they don’t feel like that. If somebody criticizes them, they feel bad and they [leave].”
As a way to narrow the gender gap, Wikimedia Argentina—a local affiliate of the Wikimedia movement—is now inviting influential women for breakfast to inform them about the importance of contributing to Wikipedia.
Among invitees, consisting of women working for Argentine government and beyond, a gender gap in society is generally a well-known problem. Wikipedia’s gender gap, however, has surprised many participants. Kleiman wants to correct these sorts of misconceptions. “We need to work to explain people that it’s not the reality, and that it’s important that women contribute too.”
Engaging more women editors brings out new perspectives. For Kleiman, it’s inadequate if the sum of human knowledge is written only by the half of the population. “Men have a different vision of the world, of the women, of what’s going on, and all of the articles are written from their own point of view. There is only one point of view, so I think it’s very important to have all points of views on Wikipedia,” Kleiman states. “I mean not only women, but men, minorities, different people from all over the world … not only white, men, and young”.
For her, Wikipedia is a powerful tool due to its potential to reach the entire world. “If I teach at the university, I can explain something to my students. But if I explain that in an article on Wikipedia, [many] more people will read it.”
Interview by Jonathan Curiel, Senior Development Communications Manager
Draft by Reetta Kemppi, Communications Volunteer
Wikimedia FoundationWhile Donald Trump continues to inspire what he calls "the silent majority" (and everyone else calls the racist rump of the GOP) and the other assumed front-runners Walker, Rubio and Bush flounder and flop around, another candidate is quietly gathering support from a discrete, but powerful, GOP constituency. As Peter Montgomery of Right Wing watch pointed out earlier this week, Ted Cruz is making a huge play for the religious right. And they like what they're seeing.
Montgomery notes that influential conservative Christian leaders have been getting progressively more anxious about the fact that they've been asked to pony up for less-than-devout candidates like McCain and somewhat alien religious observers like Mitt Romney when they are the reliable foot-soldiers for the Republican party who deliver votes year in and year out. With this year's massive field from which to choose including hardcore true-believers Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal and Rick Santorum, these religious leaders are looking closely at all the candidates, but are homing in on Cruz.
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Montgomery writes:
A couple weeks later, Cruz stopped by the headquarters of the American Family Association. Lane’s American Renewal Project operates under the AFA’s umbrella, and Cruz sounded like he was reading Lane’s talking points. Cruz told AFA President Tim Wildmon that mobilizing evangelical Christian voters is the key to saving America, saying, “Nothing is more important in the next 18 months than that the body of Christ rise up and that Christians stand up, that pastors stand up and lead.”
Cruz held a "Rally for Religious Liberty" in Iowa last week that had the influential Christian right radio host Steve Deace swooning with admiration as Cruz carried on about Christian persecution. He thundered, “You want to know what this election is about? We are one justice away from the Supreme Court saying ‘every image of God shall be torn down!" to massive applause from the audience.
The religious right feels battered after their massive loss on marriage equality. And they expect their candidates to do something about it. It appears they've decided the destruction of Planned Parenthood is that crusade and Cruz is only too willing to play to the crowd. According to the Washington Post:
Sen. Ted Cruz, who has assiduously courted evangelicals throughout his presidential run, will take a lead role in the launch this week of an ambitious 50-state campaign to end taxpayer support for Planned Parenthood — a move that is likely to give the GOP candidate a major primary-season boost in the fierce battle for social-conservative and evangelical voters. More than 100,000 pastors received e-mail invitations over the weekend to participate in conference calls with Cruz on Tuesday in which they will learn details of the plan to mobilize churchgoers in every congressional district beginning Aug. 30. The requests were sent on the heels of the Texas Republican’s “Rally for Religious Liberty,” which drew 2,500 people to a Des Moines ballroom Friday. “The recent exposure of Planned Parenthood’s barbaric practices... has brought about a pressing need to end taxpayer support of this institution,” Cruz said in the e-mail call to action distributed by the American Renewal Project, an organization of conservative pastors.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Cruz says he plans to shut down the government this fall unless Congress agrees to stop all funding of Planned Parenthood. And he's making a big bet that his campaign will benefit from it:
Cruz implored more than a thousand pastors and religious leaders on Tuesday to "preach from the pulpit" against Planned Parenthood and rally public support for an amendment defunding the family provider in the must-pass federal budget bill in November. If Congress attaches the defunding amendment to the budget instead of holding a vote on the standalone bill, it cannot keep funding Planned Parenthood without shutting down the whole federal government. "Here is the challenge," the presidential hopeful explained on the national conference call. "The leadership of both parties, both the Democrats and Republicans, want an empty show vote. They want a vote on Planned Parenthood that has no teeth or no consequence, which allows Republicans to vote for defunding, Democrats to vote for continuing funding, and nothing to change. But the leadership of both parties have publicly said they do not want the vote tied to any legislation that must pass." "It will be a decision of the president's and the president's alone whether he would veto funding for the federal government because of a commitment to ensuring taxpayer dollars continue to flow to what appears to be a national criminal organization," Cruz said.
As I said, the religious right is bursting to reassert its clout in the GOP and this is where they've decided to stand their ground. Cruz is going to lead them into battle.
That's not to say that he's running solely as a religious right candidate. Byron York reports that at a GOP candidate event last Monday in South Carolina featuring Cruz, Ben Carson and Scott Walker, Cruz received the most thunderous ovation. His speech wasn't solely focused on the Christian persecution angle but he delivered what York called "an almost martial address" beating his chest about Iran and railing against sanctuary cities with the same fervor he delivered his put-away line: "No man who doesn't begin every day on his knees is fit to stand in the Oval Office!"
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York asked 53 people afterwards who did the best and 44 said Cruz, 6 said Carson and 3 said Walker. (Poor Walker is so dizzy from his immigration flip-flops that he's stopped talking about it altogether, which the crowd did not like one little bit.) Cruz, on the other hand, has a way of making everything from EPA standards to the debt ceiling sound like a religious war which pretty much reflects the GOP base's worldview as well.
Cruz is a true believer, but he's also a political strategist. He has said repeatedly that his base is Tea Party voters and religious conservatives. In key Republican primaries like Iowa and South Carolina nearly 50 percent of the voters define themselves as conservative evangelicals. Cruz is betting that he can turn them out to vote for him.
Nobody knows what's going to happen in this crazy GOP race. If Trump flames out, his voters will scatter and it will matter who has lined up the other institutional factions in the party. While everyone else spars with Trump and tries to out-immigrant bash each other, Ted Cruz is quietly working the egos and the passions of the millions of bruised conservative Christians who are desperate for a hero. When all the smoke has cleared the field he may very well be one of the last men standing.In its zeal to deflect attention from the Senate expenses scandal, the Harper government managed Thursday to antagonize some of Canada's most prominent arts and culture luminaries.
This year's winners of the Governor General's performing arts awards were in the gallery of the House of Commons as Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore fended off opposition queries about Sen. Mike Duffy's invalid expense claims.
Adopting the strategy that the best defence is a good offence, Moore deflected most questions by raising instances of alleged ethical lapses by various NDP and Liberal parliamentarians.
Some of the award-winning artists walked out of the chamber after Moore launched a blistering attack on New Democrat MP Tyrone Benskin, a former actor.
Moore, who was standing in for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, accused Benskin of having introduced a private member's bill specifically to help himself avoid paying back taxes.
"His first act and only act in this Parliament, legislatively, is to try to pass a bill to absolve himself of his own tax liability," Moore charged.
"That is NDP corruption."
Benskin, a Montreal MP and former actor, has admitted failing to pay almost $60,000 in provincial income taxes. He has said he intends to pay back "every last cent."
Benskin's bill, which was defeated last fall, would have allowed artists to average their income over a period of years to avoid high taxation in years when they do well.
Award honouree'very insulted,' 'hurt'
Actor Eric Peterson, winner of one of this year's lifetime achievement awards, was among the artists who walked out of the chamber in disgust.
To cast aspersions against Benskin was bad enough, Peterson said outside the Commons. But "to have the nerve or the insensitivity or just the disdain" to disparage Benskin's income averaging bill was too much to bear.
"I felt very insulted by that," Peterson said, noting that artists' incomes vary widely from year to year.
"I was led to believe I was to be introduced in the House of Commons and I was to be congratulated for what I've done, instead of sitting there and to be insulted by this incredibly insensitive remark about artists in general and about a particular artist and colleague of mine in particular.
"I just got up and left... I felt very slighted and hurt by it."
Peterson was particularly dumbfounded that such remarks came from the minister responsible for Canadian arts and culture. He said Moore appears to believe his job is "to protect corporations and the taxpayer from the rapacious demands of artists."
When NDP House leader Nathan Cullen pointed out that the artists in the gallery likely didn't appreciate Moore's remarks, the minister launched into a defence of the government's record on arts and culture before returning to bashing Benskin.
"What is appalling is New Democrats putting forward a bill of artists' resale rights, pretending to stand up for artists when all they are doing is standing up for their right to avoid paying taxes," Moore said.
Liberal MP Bob Rae came to Benskin's defence, calling Moore's broadside "one of the nastiest attacks from an individual in the House."
Moore attended a "great" reception for the award-winning artists after question period and said on Twitter that he spoke to each of them.
The minister didn't back down on his argument though, adding in a series of tweets that artists aren't the only ones who could benefit from income-averaging and suggesting it wouldn't be fair to implement it for artists but not other people whose incomes can fluctuate wildly from year to year, citing real estate or insurance agents and seasonal workers as examples.
"Avoiding paying taxes & proposing this bill in that context is outrageous," Moore wrote in one tweet.Can You Lift Weights Faster Instead of Doing Traditional Cardio?
by Jen Sinkler
In a 2012 interview for “Faces of MN,” I discussed my answer to the not-infrequent question about what I do for exercise. When I answer that I lift weights and leave it at that, I’m often met with a hesitant follow-up question: “So…what do you do for cardio?”
My answer was, “I lift weights faster.”
No knock on those who prefer traditional cardio activities, but not everyone will do them.
After that interview, my answer to that question became a viral internet meme and even a greeting card, so I decided to, well, “run” with it (cardio pun!). Because I knew I wasn’t alone, I made shirts with this motto, and from there, I built an entire online workout library around this idea. (More on that at LiftWeightsFaster.com.)
There’s no question that metabolic-resistance training, circuit training, lifting weights faster or whatever else you want to call it — where you perform fast-paced, full-body workouts involving multi-joint movements (with or without free weights) — is a brilliant form of exercise for a multitude of reasons. It helps build strength, burn fat, boost metabolism, create more mitochondria and greater capillary density, and improve heart health and hormonal profiles, to name just a few — all while preserving your existing muscle mass (and potentially even building new!). It’s also an extremely time-efficient and enjoyable way to get fit, in my opinion.
But…is metabolic-resistance training, or lifting weights faster, indeed an apples-to-apples swap when it comes to cardiovascular benefits?
Not exactly. And it’s time to clarify the issue.
Defining Terms
Historically, research has been tough to come by on this front, as oftentimes the resistance training that occurs during research studies is not exactly your hard-n-fast kettlebell workout. “It depends what you mean by ‘lifting weights,’” says Alex Koch, PhD, associate professor of exercise science at Lenoir Rhyne University in Hickory, N.C. “Most older studies on lifting looked at training on a machine circuit or doing traditional barbell exercises alone.” Yet even in those, he continues, there was evidence of statistically significant, though small, increases in VO2 max in previously untrained subjects who lifted weights.
“Popular routines to boost cardio with weights these days tend to consist of higher reps of ballistic exercises that engage more muscle mass — think snatch and swing versus bench and curl,” says Koch. “There is less published data about these routines. Two studies I coauthored looked at the kettlebell swing, and both found that performing high-rep swings increased VO2 to a level sufficient to improve VO2 max. Neither looked at long-term adaptation to kettlebell training, though.”
More recently, as the practice becomes even more popular, research has begun stacking up in favor of metabolic conditioning having aerobic carryover. For example, a 2013 study sponsored by the American Council on Exercise (ACE) found that a group of young, relatively fit individuals who trained with kettlebells for eight weeks experienced a 13.8 percent increase in aerobic capacity, along with the strength and balance benefits you might also expect. “Using low resistance with lots of repetitions and short rest intervals seems to stimulate cardiovascular changes,” says Gary Miller, PhD, associate professor of health and exercise science at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Results among studies are still split, but the 10,000-foot view appears to lean toward the same conclusion. Suspecting something was amiss in less-than-glowing findings regarding the cardiovascular benefits of resistance training in older studies, researchers dug through a mountain of past research to investigate, and published their conclusions in the June 2012 issue of Journal of Exercise Physiology. The short version is that — again, no surprise here — the type of lifting you do matters. “When you look at research reviews that come to the conclusion that resistance training isn’t as effective at improving cardiovascular fitness as aerobic activities, they often don’t factor in effort exerted during resistance training,” wrote the researchers. That is, if your lift is leisurely, you probably aren’t going to boost your VO2 max (how well your body processes oxygen).
In studies where participants trained to momentary muscular failure, on the other hand — poof! — physiological adaptations that enhanced cardiovascular fitness materialized. The researchers called it a misnomer to label cardiovascular or aerobic exercise by modality alone, writing, “There is the very real likelihood that the distinction between [cardiovascular exercise and resistance training] is an oversimplification where such a distinct dichotomy does not, in fact, exist.”
As is so often the case in fitness, there are shades of grey. When we look at all types of running and say “cardio” and all types of lifting and say “strength,” we miss the overlap. “Truthfully, movement is movement. Whether it’s a squat, a run, a pedal push, a deadlift, a kettlebell swing, the body doesn’t know whether it’s supposed to be doing cardio or resistance training — all it sees is a challenge and a demand,” says Alex Viada, MS, CSCS, founder of coaching company Complete Human Performance. “The modality matters less than the intensity and total volume.”
A circuit of heavy squats, heavy deadlifts, and 25-meter sprints or 50-meter max-effort row intervals, he continues, would be a strength-focused circuit with few cardiovascular benefits, but significant strength benefits. A circuit of bodyweight squats, high-rep PVC pipe deadlifts, and half-mile jogs would be just the opposite — outstanding for conditioning, but less so for strength. Think of intensity and what the limiting factor is (whether it be muscle failure, lactate buildup, or “breathing/lungs”) when it comes to each circuit you put together, and you’ll know what you’re working, Viada advises.
Physiological Logic
The positive adaptations of metabolic-resistance workouts are similar to those of traditional strength training, with a few additional benefits.
“Any activity that requires the heart to pump more blood will strengthen the heart muscle itself, particularly the left ventricle (the portion of the heart that pumps blood out),” says Viada. “Keep in mind, this increase in left ventricle size is sometimes associated with disease states (for example, high blood pressure can also cause this), but it’s only an indicator of a disease. An enlarged heart is only a problem if the larger heart is the result of poor health!”
On the contrary, resistance training has quite the positive chain reaction on health. “The heavy usage of muscle glycogen and lactate buildup during resistance training forces the skeletal muscles to adapt by creating more mitochondria, improving the muscle’s ability to use fat for fuel. And, this increased ability to utilize fat and oxygen deficit from exercise initiates the creation of more blood vessels in and around the working muscles, improving the muscle’s ability to clear waste products and get more oxygen to the working tissue,” says Viada. “This improved blood flow and work capacity also increases the muscle’s ability to utilize glucose in the bloodstream, which for individuals who are prediabetic or consume a lot of carbohydrates is tremendously beneficial.”
Here’s where a lot of confusion stems from when it comes to circuit training and cardiovascular benefits: During resistance training or HIIT, a combination of muscle occlusion and the Valsava maneuver (holding your breath to increase intra-abdominal pressure) increases blood pressure but occludes venous return. “In other words, since everything is tensed during every repetition or short interval, no blood is flowing during muscular contraction, and less is flowing into the heart,” explains Viada. “When an individual is running or biking, this isn’t the case — venous return is actually increased.” Essentially, with weight training, though the heart rate is increasing, it’s not necessarily pumping more blood. With cardiovascular training, it is. “Since strengthening the entire heart is a major goal of aerobic conditioning, the fact that high-intensity training does not improve this to the same extent as traditional cardiovascular activity is important to note,” adds Viada. “This is why going too heavy on circuits can provide less of an aerobic benefit.”
As before, however, the type of lifting you’re doing matters greatly. “[Restricted venous return] is really most pertinent to powerlifting exercises, like heavy squats and deadlifts, where a very high intra-abdominal pressure is maintained for a fairly long time,” says Koch. “Weights can be lifted in such a way where venous return is not restricted for an extended period, and Olympic-type lifts, such as the power snatch and power clean, or other ballistic exercises, such as swings, where the lifter get to enjoy a period of unloading after a brief, high effort, should not restrict venous return nearly so much.” In other words, you may not be able to squat big weight faster for cardio, but the idea certainly applies to dynamic lifts without a long “grind” period.
Koch is not alone in his assessment. “With a low resistance and high repetitions, you do not create the same tension in the vessels [as you do with high resistance] and you get adequate venous return to the heart,” says Gary Miller, PhD, associate professor of health and exercise science at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.
What Lifting Weights Faster Won’t Do
“Circuit training, if implemented properly, has tremendous value in developing specific work capacity in certain movements, training individuals to perform while fatigued, building and developing ‘pacing’ ability — and yes, even eliciting several positive cardiovascular adaptations,” says Viada.
The adaptations that do not happen, however, are also important to note. “You will not notice as steady an improvement in VO2 max with higher intensity (i.e., heavier) lifting. With high-intensity training, improvements peak very quickly in most individuals, with rapid gains for six to eight weeks before the gains diminish,” says Viada. “Slower, steady-state activity or lower-intensity activity is needed to keep things progressing on that front. I think of steady-state activity as growing or building of the foundation, and higher-intensity circuits and intervals as optimizing what you’ve got.”
And, elite athletes have progressed to the point where they are so proficient in certain movements that the modality does indeed matter. “An elite cyclist may get nearly zero benefit from running, for example,” says Viada. “She is so proficient in cycling that running may simply be awkward and uncomfortable — thus discomfort and odd aches and pains will limit performance long before any aerobic threshold is attained, because her peak there is so incredibly high. “ The more elite the athlete, the more they’ll need to focus on sport movements for resistance training, and practiced movement for cardiovascular adaptations.
How to Boost Your Cardio Benefit
1) Use lightish weights. “Many individuals don’t like using appropriately submaximal weights [during circuit workouts],” says Viada. “If a load is so heavy that it interrupts the flow of a circuit, changes pacing, forces the use of the Valsava maneuver (or otherwise occludes bloodflow), the [cardio] point is being missed entirely.” That is, while the workout may have plenty of benefits in terms of building strength or strength endurance, it is less cardio-centric.
If done properly, a circuit or complex intended to develop general work capacity should start taxing the heart and lungs around the same time as the muscles, says Viada. “Ego is the enemy here; people use 75 to 80 percent of their maximum loads when they should be using 25 to 30 percent!” (He later added 40 percent as an option, too.)
“The body itself is a load — moving a weight in a complex is no different than moving the body in a run, the difference is only when individuals decide that if they’re not groaning under the weight, they’re not working their muscles,” he continues. “If individuals can reign in that tendency, circuits can be extremely useful for conditioning, developing both general and specific work capacity, and otherwise building both strength and endurance in general populations.”
2) Be dynamic. You’re looking to engage more muscle mass, and speed is the name of the game here. Ballistic movements give blood a chance to flow into your heart.
“Weights can be lifted in such a way where venous return is not restricted for an extended period, and Olympic-type lifts, such as the power snatch and power clean, or other ballistic exercises, such as swings, where the lifter get to enjoy a period of unloading after a brief, high effort, should not restrict venous return nearly so much,” says Koch. In other words, you may not be able to squat big weight faster for cardio, but the idea certainly applies to dynamic lifts without a long “grind” period.
“I believe it is possible to improve your VO2 max with high-rep, dynamic, weighted exercises like the snatch, clean, or swing,” says Koch.
3) Perform high volume. Amp up the reps! As with more traditional cardio endeavors, you need to work for a while for the aerobic energy system to really kick in.
“Workouts should consist of a high level of effort and a duration of effort that is constant, or intermittent with short rest breaks,” says Koch. “But that is not nearly as pithy as ‘lift weights faster.’”
There you have it: You can get a cardio effect by lifting weights, as
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at the Bay of Pigs, except that Castro was behind the assassination because Kennedy and the CIA and the Mafia tried to kill him, but no, anti-Castro Cubans did it because he abandoned them and started breaking up their training camps and Oswald even staged a fake fight with some of them in New Orleans to misdirect everyone, except Lyndon Baines Johnson, Vice-President of the United States, actually arranged the assassination because he had a burning ambition and, cui bono?, except that radical right-wing millionaires and possibly billionaires killed the President because he was soft on Communism and wanted to get out of Vietnam, which threatened Military-Industrial Complex profits, and anyway, after Kennedy was dead “they” altered the scenery on the Grassy Knoll by moving trees around, planted a palm print on the rifle found in the Book Depository, killed Dallas police office Tippet with the revolver that was found on Oswald when he was arrested, altered the wounds on JFK, switched coffins and/or bodies sometime before, during or after the slain President was placed on Air Force One, altered or forged the autopsy results, reports and photos from Bethesda Naval Hospital and maybe, just maybe, stuck in a substitute for the President’s brain.
(Etc.)
Periodically immersing myself in all of this was quite enlightening (especially in parallel with my investigations of UFOs during these same years). It was a slow-motion mystical journey similar to the quest for the Great White Whale, a quest for the Key to Everything “they” had been withholding from “us” over the whole history of the Republic, the real meaning of the symbols on the dollar bill and the goings-on in Ivy League secret societies and the Jekyll Island Duck Hunt and, probably, the aliens on ice at Wright-Patterson.
For some very intelligent people, proving that the “official version” of the assassination was false would explain a great deal of what seems to be wrong with the country, and the world. Mere stupidity, greed, lust, chance and human error are not enough to account for the fallen state of humanity. Are they? If so, what’s the way out? On the other hand, if the Puppet Masters can pull off the JFK hit in broad daylight, what could They do if they just used their scary occult powers for Good? Why, every man Jack could be directed and manipulated to be healthy, wealthy and wise!
Alas for me, the shine of the conspiracies wore off after the 40th or 50th book. I was now in my mid-twenties and had more experience of the world, and greed and chance and human error loomed larger in my lens. Also, I stopped smoking marijuana and started drinking martinis. But above all, Occam and good sense took over. Sure, it was possible that a Grand Conspiracy involving tens, hundreds or thousands had killed JFK, but given human nature as it is, did that seem likely? I became not 100 percent, but 99.99 percent sure that Oswald done it, on his own. That’s pretty amazing, and mystifying, in itself. The UFOs weren’t crewed by extraterrestrials, either. I suppose I’d summarize it as going sane. By the time I saw Oliver Stone’s excrescence of a film JFK, I was able to enjoy it, a little, as fiction.
On September 11, 2001 the first plane hit the north tower at about 4:46 a.m. in Alaska, where I was living at the time. At about 5:30, I was awakened by a call from a friend. The first thing she said was, “They’re attacking New York with airplanes.” Of course, I and my housemates and later, I and my boss at work, barely left the television for the next 16 hours. After a few hours I turned to my chief of staff and said, “By the end of the day there will be people saying that the US government, the CIA or the Jews were behind this and the Muslims were just pawns.”
I didn’t say they’d claim the buildings were blown with explosives, though. A sign of my sadly limited imagination. But that’s a whole ‘nother story.Ryan Gosling.
George Clooney
Ben Affleck.
What do these A-list men all have in common?
Aside from the obvious sexiness factor, they've all been known to dabble into this growing trend: the hipster beard.
Also see: Woman spends $25,000 in plastic surgery to look like Jennifer Lawrence
The surging popularity of the aforementioned beard is causing men who are unable to grow their own fuzzy chin-mate to take somewhat drastic measures -- beard transplants.
Global statistics from the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery show that facial hair transplants have increased by almost 10 per cent from 2010 to 2012.
The statistical evidence pointing to a beard transplant boom is coupled with anecdotal evidence from New York City and Toronto plastic surgeons who say requests for the procedure have increased from several a year to several a week.
Also see: Secret to the smoothest blowout
"Our clinic would see patients for [facial hair transplants] maybe once or twice a year a few years ago, and now we're doing it on a weekly basis," Dr. Jamil Asaria, a facial plastic surgeon in Toronto, tells CBC.
Another Toronto-based surgeon, Dr. Paul Cotterill, says that while in the past patients would request the procedure to cover a scar or burn, now they simply want to make a fashion statement.
"These things come in and out of fashion, just like long hair and short hair" he tells CTV. "But the pendulum swings every decade."
Also see: How to wear metallic makeup this spring
Dr. Jeffrey Epstein, a New York City-based plastic surgeon who has performed the procedure for 12 years tells DNAInfo that a decade ago he would perform a handful of beard transplants each year, whereas now he's averaging around three a week.
Beard transplants involves moving hair from the top of the head to the face, and can cost anywhere from $4,000 and $15,000. The cost depends on the number of hair follicles to be harvested, which can range from 500 to 2,000.
Most people who request the procedure are from large cities, such as Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. In Canada, the majority of doctors who offer beard transplants are based in Toronto.
Also see: U.S. army's crazy hair guidelines spark backlash
Patients are looking for a variety of styles, including a bushy beard, a soul patch or simply to fill in gaps in hair growth.
While it might seem weird that men are flocking to clinics for a signature beard, it isn't the strangest cosmetic surgery procedure we've ever heard of -- eyebrow transplants and dimple creation surgery are apparently a thing, too.Since so many compared the two models in my photos, I ordered both to make my decision. Safety First Go three-in-one and Graco four-ever
Both recline to the same point when sitting on a flat surface! They have different intervals to get there, but both get to the same point. Taking a closer look, though, the Safety First model will sit in a more reclined position when the line is parallel whereas the 4 ever required more incline (books) to achieve a centered bubble (child would be more upright in the Graco than the Safety First). See photo. I stacked booked under the hind-side to adjust to the proper level. Both seats are in the most reclined setting.
The Graco has more height in the headrest. Significantly so. I was surprised how little adjusting there is with the Safety First.
The Graco is more narrow so will fit in the car better. It is still sufficient in size for a boost-aged child. I fit in it (barely). Plenty of padding for a little baby. I would feel safe putting an infant in either.
Graco material seems more water-resistant and the foam feels denser like a memory foam.
Both adjust easily in regard to recline and headrest positions and strap tension. Both have the easy release button.
The Graco is much heavier than the Safety First.
Others have mentioned the latch system to be different. (Graco being easier). I have not installed them in the vehicle yet and cannot attest to that.
I hope this helps! This is the review I was looking for when trying to make a decision. In the end, we'll be keeping the 4 ever and either returning the Safety First or keeping it for our second vehicle.
Photos: upright & highest setting, upright & lowest setting, all the way reclined in lowest setting, and side view to show amount of lift required on solid ground in order to achieve proper line/bubble placement when fully reclined.
UPDATE: we still love our Graco 4ever. We recently needed a second seat and didn't want to spend as much. After looking around, we decided to buy the MySize65. We actually find the MySize65 to be superior in a few ways:
- price
- the head cushion is a better design. I removed the one for the 4ever because the stem wasn't long enough the stay in and it seemed like the cushion behind her head ended up pushing her head forward. The MySize65 slides in behind a sleeve of fabric so it can adjust up and down, but doesn't fall out every time we put her in. The MySize doesn't have all the extra padding directly behind the head which was pushing her head forward in the 4ever.
- the MySize65 shoulder pad straps extend down underneath the chest buckle for comfort (& to remind dad how high the chest buckle needs to be).
- The MySize65 doesn't have as many recline options, but appears to have the same range - just not as many in-between options. I can't see that to be a problem.
- the cupholder is within reach for the child on the MySize, but is just out of reach for the 1 yr old in the 4ever. Downside: only 1 cupholder with the MySize and it is not removable.
Overall, if purchasing again, I think we would go with the MySize. I haven't removed either for washing, but it looks like the MySize65 will be slightly easier. Also, our 1 yr old cannot reach the cupholder on the 4ever and she can with the MySize65.Slime Season 3 is the last in a series of hard-drive dumps following a massive security breach that scattered hundreds of Young Thug songs across the Internet. After Lyor Cohen cryptically announced plans to "bury" the mixtape, Thug literally held a funeral procession at SXSW and eulogized it later by saying, "All good things must come to an end. This is the birth of something new…HY!£UN35," alluding to his oft-rumored debut album. The full eulogy suggested what we've known all along: each Slime Season was cobbled together from stray files in the archives, compiled and released in an attempt to thwart the data leak, which has prolonged the introduction of the Next Gen Young Thug, the one, undoubtedly, with something new in store.
That isn't to say that Thug has been anything short of breathtaking during this run, or that he's grown trite. Some of his best songs have been remastered and released in response to the hack. The projects in this series are all good, but they are arranged without purpose and pushed out hastily in large, uneven packages with botched promotions. The final Slime Season is forged in the image of its predecessors, with Thug turning in charismatic performances over pulsating productions from frequent collaborators London on da Track, Mike WiLL Made It, Allen Ritter, Ricky Racks, and Isaac Flame. But it's a lean, 8-track offering without filler that moves rather seamlessly. The beats vibrate, hum, and strobe and Thug navigates them like a bat using sonar. The prime example of this is the opener, "With Them," which he debuted at Kanye West's The Life of Pablo listening party at Madison Square Garden, where the reverb from his tumbling cadences lingers into pockets of empty space.
The Slime Season series has found Young Thug settling into a particular set of vocal tics. He sometimes defers to specific tendencies, like leaning on ad-libs as structural pillars. Inside the darker, more open beats, he packs syllables together like putty then gently pulls at them. This is as close to autopilot as he gets. Luckily, it is nearly impossible for Young Thug to recycle his sound because there are so many different variables at play; he manipulates flows as well as any of his colleagues and his vocabulary of squawks and yips continue to expand even as his quirks grow more familiar. Something like "Memo," with its mesmerizing melodies, might recall other moments from the recent Thug canon. But then there's a song like "Drippin," which is a devastating display of timing and pacing that even turns his voice into a pure percussion instrument, ripping words off in micro-bursts.
The tape plays like a final installment, going out with a bang and saving some of the series' best for last. The posse cut "Slime Shit," which features longtime Thug associates Yak Gotti, Duke, and PeeWee Roscoe, is something of a theme song. On "With Them," he rattles off simple but effective punches through a nasally mumble. Then there's the standout "Digits," which wraps the YOLO philosophy inside a 'get money' cliche, moving at warp speed before settling into a strutting pace. "I been gettin money before the music, fuck Pandora/ I can do this shit when I get bored," he says, casually. It's a fitting gauge of his talent and a peek into his current outlook, and the tape is a fitting end to the Slime Season trilogy.Thailand placed a disappointing 55 out of 70 countries on the most recent Program for International Students Assessment (PISA). Thailand’s placement in the assessment, which tested students in 2015, was even lower than it was in 2012, the last time the assessment was done.
PISA ranks countries for performance but also applies a numerical grade to the students of each country in the categories of science, reading and math. Singapore won the top spot in the latest assessment, with scores of 556, 535 and 564, respectively. Japan took second place with scores of 538, 516 and 532. Thailand, in 55th place, had scores of just 421, 409 and 415.
In 2012, Thai students scored 444, 441 and 427, so the country has suffered a significant drop in skills over the last three years.
Other Asian countries that did well on the recent PISA assessment include: Taiwan in fourth place, China in sixth and Vietnam in eighth, reported Bangkok Post.
The survey is done every three years and tests 500,000 15-year-olds from 70 countries worldwide.
Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha is disappointed and has asked the Education Ministry to work harder to implement a national education plan, one that he hopes will increase Thailand’s PISA score by 100 points in each subject over the next 15 years, reported Thai PBS.
It’s been noted that there is a very large gap between the performance of students in underprivileged schools and those that attend elite schools. Students at top-ranking schools like Mahidol Wittthayanusorn and Chulabhorn Wittayalai scored much higher than their peers that attend less privileged schools.Forget what you read on Wikipedia or saw on Grease Lightning. You don't live in an encyclopedia bounded by definitions, and you're not trying to be real life cosplays -- hopefully. You are a millenial and grounded in reality.
The pompadour is generally characterized by tightly held-down sides with a large volume on the top that gradually recedes as you move towards the back. The sides are usually slicked-back, tapered, or faded. The pomp (middle section) is crafted to have volume and forwardness. In a way, it should appear confident and have flow. The part(s) is optional. You can see examples of the two types above.
I provided a general definition because it's important to understand AND accept that the definition of a pompadour will evolve over time. These characteristics are really the only two things that remain constant in each variation. Everything changes over time, and the concept of the pompadour is no exception. As you can see below, here is a loose and finger-combed rendition of the pompadour. It has its own unique set of aesthetics.Hello, everyone! Have you heard about Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate’s release date yet?! If not, you might want to check out Yuri’s post about it. The Monster Hunter Hype Train has just left the station, and is picking up some serious steam! CHOO-CHOO!
Today I thought we’d switch gears a bit and talk about one of the new weapons in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, the Insect Glaive. The Japanese name for the weapon is Souchuukon (操虫棍), which roughly translates into “Control Insect Cane”, and it perfectly describes the function of the weapon. Well, in Japanese anyway. When Monster Hunter 4 made its debut at Tokyo Game Show 2012, we tentatively named it Neopteron Handler but were given permission to change it later on. I personally didn’t like the name too much because it’s too hard to pronounce and a little too long, considering the space restrictions we sometimes run into during localization.
While you may look at Insect Glaive and think it wasn’t too difficult to come up with, we spent nearly two weeks discussing the term with the director Fujioka-san and lead designer Tokuda-san. First, Fujioka-san gave us a short list of concepts and images he wanted the weapon name to encompass.
Absorption, suction (吸収)
Enhancement, strengthening (強化)
Artisan, falconer (匠/鷹匠)
Hunting (猟)
Enhancing extract (強化エキス)
Organism (生体)
Now, Fujioka-san didn’t want one weapon name to have all of these concepts, but these were the building blocks for the Japanese name, so he wanted all of our ideas to be based on the same concepts. We came up with an exhaustive list of names, and unlike the monster names, we didn’t create the usual short list due to the sheer amount of ideas we had to cover. We actually had so many names that I had to short-list them for this blog!
Swarmstaff: This was the overall favorite of the localization staff, and we thought it was a short but effective name to describe the weapon.
Hunting Bug: For this we ditched the actual weapon part and opted to focus on the bug that accompanies the hunter.
Leechstaff: Focuses on what the bug does for the hunter while keeping the weapon name intact.
Pherocaster: This may be a strange one, but we were trying to describe how the hunter uses pheromones to command the bug during a quest.
Augmentor Staff: Again, this was to focus on what the bug does for the hunter rather than what the hunter does with the bug.
In retrospect, I felt we went too crazy with the names and Fujioka-san told us as much; he wanted something simpler and more in line with the other weapon names. This was a valid criticism because the category names are quite grounded, and throwing in something like Swarmstaff or Pherocaster would stick out like Gravios in a pack of Ioprey. We submitted a couple of other names that were dialed down a notch, such as Bug Bo, Insect Staff, and Insect Glaive.
Insect Glaive was chosen due to the properties of the weapon – it’s capable of severing tails and doesn’t do blunt damage – and because there are more weapons that look like glaives than there are staffs.
As for your friendly hunting bug, we only had one name for it, and that was Kinsect, a combination of Kinship and Insect. We thought it was the perfect name for the creature. It describes the symbiotic bond the bug has with the hunter, and rolls off the tongue really well.
Speaking of bugs, today I’ll talk about a pair of new insect-like creatures that make their debut in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate.
Seltas, Seltas Queen
The first monster tandem in the series provides a unique twist to the hunt by having two monsters work together to take down the hunters. By itself, the male Seltas isn’t too much of a problem, but when big momma Seltas Queen shows up, things can go downhill quickly. The Seltas Queen can control the male Seltas and use him as a weapon, or he can climb on her back and act as a turret of sorts, firing projectiles while she rushes down the hunter. To make matters worse, the Seltas is actually strong enough to lift his female counterpart and crush reckless hunters.
We had a unique challenge facing us when we worked on these two monsters because they share the same general name in Japanese, which was a combination of the Hebrew word for iron and the scientific name for a species of scorpion. We also needed to express how this pair works together and what their roles are in the relationship; the Japanese names allude to a militaristic pairing, where the female acts as a commander-in-chief while the male is a grunt, working in the trenches.
We came up with Scorius as a base name for the pair, which is a combination of Scorpion and Sagittarius. We thought this would be good because the female has a stinger-like tail that she uses when attacking, while the male fires projectiles like an archer when attacking.
Another name we threw into the mix was Scarath, that, much like Scorius, tries to make ties to a scorpion, and also a scarab. The –ath suffix was added for consistency with the Monster Hunter world.
For the female monster, we had this image of a fierce queen going into battle with her loyal subjects, so we toyed with terms like Queen, Regent, Rhea (wife of Cronus in Greek mythology), and Duchess. Fujioka-san liked the simpler Queen tag so we settled on that very quickly. For the common name we sat down and talked with both Fujioka-san and Tokuda-san, and they asked if Seltas, the base Japanese name, would be something we could get behind.
Going back to my first post on localization, about not having any sacred cows, it also applies to the stuff the translators come up with. We really thought that Scorius and Scarath were good names for these monsters, but we know better than to be married to our ideas. When Tokuda-san suggested Seltas as a candidate name, we thought it was actually a good idea. That part of the name is easy to say, plus it sounds like an insect, so we opted to go with that name instead of our own.
Desert Seltas, Desert Seltas Queen
The subspecies was yet another unique challenge because, compared to other monsters, the appearance of the pair changes quite a lot. For example, the male monster went from having a short, single horn to two gigantic horns, and his pincers are more suited for burrowing underground.
In the world of localization, space is god. Localizing from Japanese to English requires a certain amount of space and if you don’t have that, it gets really difficult to properly translate words. Japanese has an advantage because they can express so much through just one or two characters, whereas in English we have to write long phrases for the same thing. Don’t even get me started on the European languages. Oof.
So for the subspecies we had to keep the names short, because Seltas Queen was already pretty long by itself. The names aren’t too bad when we’re detailing the objectives of a quest, but they can be a nightmare to handle when it comes to material names. At any rate, we wanted to build on our ideas for the main species name, so we came up with the following pairings (no, not THOSE kind of pairings) for the monsters.
Seltas Reaper, Seltas Dreadqueen Blitz Seltas, Panzer Seltas Queen Spartan Seltas, Amazon Seltas Queen
We were heavily pushing for the Reaper/Dreadqueen combination because it sounds really cool and is shorter than our other suggestions. The Dreadqueen name is based on the dreadnought line of battleships that saw action during World War I. We thought a dark, powerful name would be a great fit for this type of monster. But that’s exactly why the names weren’t accepted by Fujioka-san. He felt the names were too dark compared to the monsters. He argued a monster like Nerscylla or Gore Magala would be the perfect match for Reaper or Dread, but not Seltas. We took his criticism to heart and opted to base the subspecies name on the color and characteristic of the monster as usual and came up with Desert Seltas/Desert Seltas Queen. Although the Desert Seltas shows up in other locations in the game, you can only fight this combination in the Dunes, so it was the perfect fit.
Konchu
Rolling on to the next monster (see what I did there!?), Konchu’s name is virtually unchanged from its Japanese counterpart. There’s a slight pronunciation difference because we used an O instead of a U, but that’s it. Why did we do this? To match its shape and main rolling attack, of course!
That’s it for this week’s blog. Thanks for reading, and get ready to start hunting!Warren's statement presents a list of "Key Facts Concerning Recent Media and Blog Reports on Rick Warren's Position on Uganda" which contains nine "questions," written by Warren himself, with answers written by Rick Warren too. Question #9 is,Warren answers his own question:But who has accused Warren of such an evil plan?
Warren's statement also contains several blatant lies. in one, he claims that C. Peter Wagner wasn't his key advisor for Warren's 1993 doctoral dissertation. But the abstract of Warren's 350-plus page tome lists one academic figure, C. Peter Wagner, as Warren's "mentor" for the dissertation.
As described in Group Behind Uganda Anti Homosexuality Bill Expanding North America Effort, the College of Prayer, which played a major role in inspiring and organizing members of Uganda's parliament behind Uganda's globally controversial Anti Homosexuality Bill, has multiple ties to C. Peter Wagner's worldwide religious networks and is working to expand its influence in Canada's parliament.
The lies and mendacity, in Warren's 9-point "facts" list in his public statement, continue to pile up:
In "fact" number three, Rick Warren writes,
[question] Are you a friend of the President of Uganda? [answer] No. I've never met him, and never had any kind of communications with him, or with any member of the Ugandan Parliament.
But Warren has in fact met with a member of Uganda's parliament, and whether Warren has met with the President of Uganda or not is irrelevant. Rick Warren has met numerous times with Janet Museveni, wife to the president of Uganda and a top member of Uganda's parliament. Janet Museveni spoke at Warren's 2005 Saddleback Church HIV/AIDS US conference and Rick Warren has also met with top (anti-gay) Ugandan government and religious leaders.
Warren then asks, in point (or "fact") number four,
[question] Did the President of Uganda say he wanted his country to be Purpose Driven? [answer] No, he didn't. That was said by the President of RWANDA, not Uganda, at a national rally in Rwanda in 2005. Years later, the Anglican Archbishop of Uganda made a similar comment so people are confusing Uganda with Rwanda, the country next to Uganda....
But on March 29, 2008 the publicity firm for Rick Warren's ministry, A. Larry Ross Communications, Inc. issued a press release that directly contradicts Warren's insinuation that he never designated Uganda as a Purpose Driven nation. The first sentence of that release read,
"Dr. Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Valley Community Church in Lake Forest, CA, this weekend launched a national Purpose Driven Living program in Uganda, a unified and focused effort to equip Ugandan leadership with practical tools to live lives of purpose in their homes, businesses, and communities."
The release went on to describe how Warren had brought his Purpose Driven program to Uganda at the invitation of a coalition of Ugandan government, religious and business leaders.
Warren specifically traveled to Uganda for the launch of the Purpose Driven Uganda program which was to be spearheaded by Warren's P.E.A.C.E Plan. As the A. Larry Ross press release detailed, "While in Uganda, Dr. Warren met with First Lady Janet Museveni to discuss the PEACE Plan, an aggressive and progressive vision to promote reconciliation, equip servant leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick and educate the next generation."
That release also states that Archbishop of Uganda Henry Orombi led the initiative. Rick Warren has long supported and associated himself with Orombi and other African Anglican bishops known for making vicious rhetorical statements that incite anti-gay hatreds. As I described in the December 4th, 2009 Talk To Action report, Rick Warren's Dissertation Advisor Leads Network Promoting Uganda Anti-Gay Bill,
Lausanne III will be held in Capetown, South Africa, in May 2010. Henry Luke Orombi, the Anglican Archbishop of Uganda, will serve as chair of the Africa Host Committee and Rick Warren is on the Advisory Council. Warren has supported the role of Archbishops Orombi, Peter Akinola of Nigeria, and Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda as leaders in the GAFCON/CFA realignment of the Anglican church on the issue of homosexuality. As reported in a March 29, 2008 story from the AllAfrica.com news service, in March 2008 Rick Warren attended a conference of Ugandan Anglican Bishops who were protesting the Church of England's tolerance for homosexuality. AllAfrica, reporting on his appearance, summarized Warren's quotes as "homosexuality is not a natural way of life and thus not a human right," and directly quoted Warren as stating, "We shall not tolerate this aspect at all." Archbishop Orombi has claimed that "rich" homosexuals were "doing whatever it takes to make sure this vice penetrates Africa." Rwanda's Archbishop Kolini spoke at a “peace crusade” gathering of participants from Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania at which he was reported in the Rwandan News as “calling on churches in the East African region to fight against homosexuality for the good of the society.” Rwanda was Rick Warren’s first declared “Purpose Driven Nation” and Kolini serves on the steering committee for Warren’s Purpose Driven/P.E.A.C.E. Plan in Rwanda and Saddleback Church’s Rwandan HIV/AIDS HealthCare Initiative. The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission has warned that “Kolini sets a dangerous tone for the discussion of homosexuality in the country,” and that threats of anti- gay legislation are increasing.
Rick Warren's track record concerning Uganda, from the standpoint of gay rights, is deplorable. Warren has openly worked with with virulently anti-gay Ugandan religious activists such as Martin Ssempa, who has published in newspapers the names and addresses of Ugandans accused of being gay. Warren has also associated with and supported Ugandan leaders whose venomous anti-gay statements have almost certainly helped to fuel the rising climate of anti-gay hatred in Uganda.
As one final, surrealistic touch in his 9-point "facts" list, Rick Warren complains that his April 17th, 2005 speech at California's Anaheim Angels stadium, in which Warren encouraged tens of thousands of followers and attendees to be as dedicated as the followers of Hitler, Lenin, and Mao, had been "grossly misrepresented." That criticism originated at this web site and came from this author. My YouTube videos [1,2] showcasing Warren's two "Hitler/Lenin/Mao" and "Hitler/Mao" public speeches have received, so far, over 55,000 views.From Team Fortress Wiki
“ Bonus Ducks!
— Merasmus ”
The Duck Journal is a community-created action item for all classes. It is a yellow, rubber duck, which attaches to the chest of the player wearing it, similar to a badge or medal.
This item has several features, including increasing the drop rate for ducks and displaying a counter labeled Duckstreaks during a Duck Journal event. At any time, in an event or not, a Duck Journal owner may view the Duck Journal leaderboards and equip the Duck Journal as a Noisemaker.
The Duck Journal was contributed to the Steam Workshop.
Description
When equipped, the Duck Journal appears as a yellow rubber duck in the same model location as Badges, Medals, the Bombinomicon, and other chest-located items. Moreover, as an action item rather than a cosmetic item, a Duck Journal may be equipped at the same time as those items (however, clipping may be apparent).
A Duck Journal has several functions, whether equipped or viewed in the Backpack. Some of these functions are restricted to Duck Journal events. During a Duck Journal event, killing a character results in a drop of one or more rubber ducks. These dropped ducks are pickup items that may be collected by any player on either team.
Ducks dropped by kills during Duck Journal events will match the style and team coloration for the class and team they were dropped from. Sometimes a "Bonus Duck" will drop, accompanied by an announcement by Merasmus the Magician; bonus ducks have a Quackston Hale skin, and are larger than normal ducks.
Duck XP
Duck XP is a form of scoring based on creating duck drops and picking up dropped ducks. Career Duck XP scoring is recorded for each account and is used for ranking players amongst their friends’ Duck XP scores and for ranking the Duck Journal’s level. The scoring of Duck XP is broken down into the following categories:
Captured : Collecting ducks that were dropped by the opposing team killing your teammates will award 3 Duck XP each.
: Collecting ducks that were dropped by the opposing team killing your teammates will award 3 Duck XP each. Created : Ducks created from killing members of the opposing team will award 3 Duck XP each.
: Ducks created from killing members of the opposing team will award 3 Duck XP each. Objective : Collecting ducks that were spawned from doing objectives will award 3 Duck XP each.
: Collecting ducks that were spawned from doing objectives will award 3 Duck XP each. Quackston Hales : Collecting Bonus Ducks will award 50 Duck XP each.
: Collecting Bonus Ducks will award 50 Duck XP each. Recovered : Collecting ducks that were dropped by teammates will award 1 Duck XP each.
: Collecting ducks that were dropped by teammates will award 1 Duck XP each. Team Captured: Teammates that collect ducks that you created will award 3 Duck XP each.
Players may score Duck XP even when not in possession of a Duck Journal. Subsequent acquisition of a Duck Journal will permit a player to view the recorded score.
Duck Power
The Duck Power of a Duck Journal relates to the number of ducks that drop when a player with that Duck Journal equipped kills an opponent. The greater the Duck Power, the greater the number of ducks dropped by that player’s kills. Duck Power may be increased to a maximum value of 5 by using a number of Duck Tokens with a Duck Journal. Increasing Duck Power consequentially increases the Duck XP scoring for killing opponents, but also increases the number of ducks for every player to collect.
Duckstreaks
Equipping the Duck Journal allows the player to earn and display Duckstreaks, which functions similar to a Killstreak Kit but with no added visual effect. Instead of counting kills, it counts the total number of ducks created by the player from killing opposing players. All kills obtained while under the effect of a Duckstreak will show a duck and the current total number of ducks created by the player in the kill feed.
Duck Journal leaderboards
Viewing the Duck Journal leaderboards, which may be done at any time by using the Duck Journal from the inventory, will display the Duck XP and Duck XP Levels in relation to the Steam Friends list. There is also a section for showing the breakdown of the owner's Duck XP into the categories listed above.
Noisemaker
Similar to a Noisemaker's action, using an equipped Duck Journal with the action item button will cause one of several Duck Collectors Bumper Car game quack sounds to play. This action is available at any time, independent of events, with a cool down period between quacks.
Ranks
The Duck Journal possesses rankings, similar to a Strange weapon, but with duck-related rankings such as 'Unflappable' instead of 'Unstoppable'. The Duck Journal ranks up according to the Duck XP scored by the owning player.
The current rank title forms the prefix of the item name; e.g. a Duck Journal at Duck XP Level 3 will appear as "Fairly Fowl Duck Journal". This process is similar to the process of Strange weapons. Ranking up a Duck Journal is done via collecting 5000 Duck XP over any period of time, at which point the rank up will be announced in a manner similar to a killstreak notification. The Duck Journal's prefix will change and Duck XP will be reset to zero upon a rank up. Those categories stats are increased even if the player does not own the Duck Journal; however, the only way to view them is by owning at least one.
Rank Duck XP Level Name 0 0 The 1 1 Crumb Chasing 2 2 Kinda Ducky 3 3 Fairly Fowl 4 4 Somewhat Quackworthy 5 5 Quacknowledged 6 6 Duckstinguished 7 7 Pleasantly Paddling 8 8 Perfectly Preened 9 9 Duckalicious 10 10 Quacktastic 11 11 Duckrageous 12 12 Feather-Ruffling 13 13 Down-Melting 14 14 Plumage-Clearing 15 15 Reduckulous 16 16 Quackphoric 17 17 Positively Duckulent 18 18 Legenducky 19 19 Specquackular 20 20 Quackston's Own
Styles
Styles None Scout Soldier Pyro Demoman Heavy Engineer Medic Sniper Spy Quackston Hale
December 8, 2014 Patch (End of the Line Update)
Added Duck Journal for the End of the Line event.
[Undocumented] Duck Journal sales support the End of the Line team.
December 9, 2014 Patch
Fixed updating Duck Journal stats from ducks created on servers using sv_cheats
December 10, 2014 Patch
Fixed the Objective leaderboard not updating for Objective ducks.
[Undocumented] Made the Duck Journal name
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would talk to me about film, he’d talk to me about plays. And then, when he got hurt, we didn’t get to see him around as much.
Q: Kemba Walker.
A: He’s one of my favorite teammates I’ve ever had. He’s humble, he’s hard-working. … If you just hung out with him, you wouldn’t ever know he was a big-time NBA player. He treats people the right way, and he’s a competitor, man, he just wants to win.
Q: Why did you admire Tim Duncan so much?
A: Because he doesn’t care about a lot of the other things that a lot of the other players care about, and he wants to win, he wants to do it the right way. When you think of a selfless leader, I would think of Tim Duncan.
Q: Brandon Jennings.
A: Explosive scorer, and very skilled, very talented offensively. He’s one of those guys who you just don’t want to let him even make one shot because if he does, it could be a long night.
Q: Courtney Lee.
A: I’ve been on two teams with him. Really like that guy. Ultimate competitor. Simple game, he just makes the right play. He’s a two-way player, he’ll make it happen on both ends of the floor as we saw in the playoffs as we saw this past year.
Q: Derrick Rose.
A: It’s unfortunate what he’s been through, but you can’t discount someone with that level of talent, and someone who’s accomplished what he’s accomplished. I have a hard time counting people like him out because he’s so driven, he’s seen and tasted that success, he knows what it takes, and he’ll probably have a big year.
Q: Joakim Noah.
A: To me, similar to [Greivis] Vasquez in the fieriness, the competitiveness, and he’ll do whatever it takes. He just plays his role, he’s one of those guys when you think of like, “Oh he knows what he’s good at, he just does that really really well,” that’s Noah.
Q: You being a Harvard guy, would a Harvard guy like Ryan Fitzpatrick turn down the kind of money the Jets are offering — $12 million first year, three years at $24 million?
A: It’s never what the money is right there, it’s more just what are your other options, and what do you feel like you’re worth? Is he worth more than that, if you compare what he’s done to other quarterbacks? I think so. But again, I’m not the Jets, I don’t know what their salary-cap situation is, I don’t know what their roster looks like. I’m not Fitzpatrick either. But if you’re asking me would a Harvard guy turn down that kind of money? If they thought that they could get more somewhere else or if they thought that this was a disrespectful slight, then yeah.
Q: What is it like being Jeremy Lin today as opposed to four years ago?
A: It’s definitely less hectic. I would say my quality of life is much better because I take life a lot slower, I take some things less seriously, and I just really try to enjoy each day.
Q: What drives you now?
A: I want to be a great player, I want to see how great I can be one on the court, and I also want to do big, big things off the court, and I know that platform comes from basketball.
Q: If you were NBA commissioner, you would …
A: I would consider making the season a little shorter.
Q: Who are athletes in other sports you admire?
A: I really admire the way Tony Dungy did things. I’ve kept tabs on Clayton Kershaw from a distance, and his personality and what he’s done.
Q: What was it about Dungy?
A: He talked about how like as a coach, he didn’t yell, and he didn’t cuss, but he was still able to command the respect of everybody. His players would run through a brick wall for him, and he had tremendous success. When people think of like, “What is a leader?” or “What does a competitor look like?” they think of a certain thing, and society has kind of memorialized certain personalities as, “Oh this is the way to succeed.” But some people aren’t built the same way, and that’s why I like Duncan, too. Big-time competitor. But he smiles, sometimes. He’s very stoic most of the time, and he very, very rarely gets outside of himself, and that’s more my personality.
Q: But a fire burns inside you.
A: If you listen to Duncan’s retirement thing, one of the things he said is, “I’m a big-time competitor, and you guys might not know it or understand it or see it, just because I don’t show it,” but to me how competitive you are isn’t how angry you get or how much you yell or how far you kick a ball when you get angry. I’m as competitive as they come in my opinion, I just like to smile, I like to have fun, and I don’t like to let opponents know that they’re in my head, and so I don’t show too much emotion when I’m really upset.
Q: Mike D’Antoni and Amar’e Stoudemire have said it wasn’t working with you and Carmelo with the Knicks.
A: I never have had personal issues with him, I’ve never had any amount of conflict or disagreement or anything in person. I was a lot younger, a lot more naive with everything, and I was just trying to do my best to help us make the playoffs. So a lot of what people are saying, and what people have said, are kind of things that I’m piecing into the story as well. I’m not able to speculate on behalf of what someone else is saying, if that makes sense. I can only tell you my experience with Melo myself, and I’ve never had any issues with him.
Q: Three favorite Linsanity memories?
A: No. 1 was the 3-pointer against the Lakers in the corner in the fourth quarter. No. 2 had to have been the game-winner against the Raptors, and No. 3 had to be the breakout game against the Nets, that first game where I had a big-time career high, and after that game, they couldn’t cut me.
Q: How driven are you to win an NBA championship?
A: I’m very driven. I’m a very ambitious person. It’s not gonna happen overnight, it’s gonna take time, for sure. But If I didn’t think that there was the opportunity, or if the people here were capable of putting us in a position, then I don’t think I would have come.
Q: What would you want to tell Nets fans, Jeremy Lin fans and Asian-American fans.
A: Nets fans: We’re gonna need you guys every game loud and proud, and we want to give you a product that you haven’t had the last few years. Jeremy Lin fans: I would say just keep being you. I got the best fans, man. They fly across the country, I get more gifts than I know what to do with, I have suitcases full of gifts when I come back from Asia. And Asian-American fans: I would just say keep believing in what you feel like you can become and don’t let other people tell you, “You can’t be this, or can’t be that.” I think if you look in the sports industry or you look in entertainment and acting and different things like that, Asians are really cornered and put into this box, these type of roles or these type of players. Even for me, before I came along, Asians in basketball were just 7-foot tall dudes from China who people thought were just there because they were tall. We’re just gonna keep breaking stereotypes, keep doing things people didn’t think we could do. That’s what I would say to Asian-American fans.The reaction to yesterday’s post was pretty strong, not here really, but over at BGN. I realize that type of breakdown is far from perfect, but I thought it was a good illustration of the overall point I was trying to make (after seeing the data):
Yes, Vick is “inconsistent”. However, a lot of QBs that are considered “good” are also just as inconsistent if not more. I hope to take a look at the standard deviation of performances to get a better sense of things, but the fact is, QBs, in general, have many more bad games than most fans realize. Case in point:
Tom Brady, over his career, has recorded a passer rating of less than 80 in 31% of his starts. Consider that for a moment. Tom Brady is one of the best QBs of all time (if not THE best). Still, nearly one of every three starts of his can be considered a “poor” performance (Rating less than 80).
Among the most often cited counterpoints to yesterday was the issue of Vick’s propensity to fumble. That’s a fair point, so today I took a look at the data. Again, it will surprise you (in a good way).
Here are the active leaders in QB Fumbles (besides Peyton Manning, who’s not included for reasons that aren’t really important here):
Vick, as expected, leads everyone with 87 fumbles (stats are from Pro-Football-Reference.com and, I think, only represent Fumbles Lost, not all fumbles). However, look at the complete rushing stats.
In context, things look a lot better for Vick. Yes, he’s fumbled more than anyone else. However, he has also provided a LOT of additional production on the ground. Looking at the stats a little differently, we can see the differences more clearly:
This is an admittedly simplistic view of things, but it provides necessary context for the whole “Vick fumbles so much” debate. I feel like I need to remind everyone here that I’m far from a #TeamVick member. I still think Foles makes more sense. However, the Vick-Haters have gone too far. As you can see above, Vick’s fumbles, while damaging, are not necessarily “worse” than any other QB’s. In his career, he has run a LOT more than almost any other QB in NFL history and provided a lot of offensive production with his legs. AS a result, he should be expected to fumble more.
We can certainly argue over how much “production” is necessary to counteract the negative value of a fumble. Unfortunately, our data isn’t nearly as granular as it needs to be to provide a definitive answer in that respect.
What happens, though, when we view it purely in terms of TDs and TOs?
Again, simplistic but informative. Here is a table showing a selection of QBs with their Rushing TDs, Passing TDs, INTs, and Fumbles. I’ve also totaled the TDs and TOs and provided an overall TD/TO ratio.
I included McNabb just to remind everyone how good he actually was. We’re concerned with the active players though.
Vick does, in fact, come in at the bottom of the list. However, look at his ratio (right-most column) compared to guys like Cutler and Manning. My sense is that a lot of Vick-haters would jump at the opportunity to trade him for Eli Manning or Jay Cutler. I wouldn’t. In fact, the more a did into QB stats, the worse Eli Manning looks.
The point, of course, is that complaining about Vick’s fumbles may sound right, but if we put it in context, his “problem” isn’t really that bad. He runs more than any other QB, he should be expected to fumble more. His fumbling rate is higher than most QBs, but he also produces a lot more rushing production; perhaps we should judge his fumbling rate as though he were a RB.
Also, consider the following points:
– Vick’s TD/TO ratio with the Eagles is 1.05, the same exact ratio as Joe Flacco.
– Vick’s more than 5500 rushing yards presumably led his team to a number of field goals, meaning there’s additional upside to his rushing that isn’t accounted for here.
Hopefully that shed some light on the whole “fumble problem”. Yes, Vick fumbles a lot. However, focusing on that without accounting for the corresponding rushing production is an incomplete (and unfair) view.
Vick isn’t a great QB. It does appear, though, that he’s good enough.
Finally, no posts for the rest of the week (school orientation). 4th Preseason game should be fun, but relatively inconsequential as far as the team’s 2013 performance goes. Things to watch: Nick Foles (of course), Matt Barkley, and the DBs.
AdvertisementsUkrainian physicians who traveled to Russia to examine jailed Ukrainian pilot Nadia Savchenko have now been allowed in to see her.
Savchenko's lawyer, Mark Feigin, confirmed on Twitter that Ukrainian doctors met with Savchenko on March 14.
Officials at the facility where Savchenko is being kept said they would not allow an earlier visit on March 13, because the doctors did not have the necessary paperwork from the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Savchenko is in pretrial detention in Russia, where she has been charged with involvement in a mortar attack that killed two Russian journalists covering the conflict between government forces and Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine.
She recently ended a nearly three-month hunger strike to protest what she calls her illegal confinement by Russia.
The Ukrainian doctors recommended to Savchenko that she should not resume her hunger strike.
With reporting by Interfax and TASSWe all had hoped and prayed for a better outcome.
Regrettably, Nicola’s aggressive cancer took her life around 6 PM on Sunday. She was just 41.
Nicola had travelled to Mexico a few days after doctors in Hamilton had told her there was nothing more they could do for her.
Doctors in Tijuana planned to perform a high risk surgery to remove a massive tumour from her abdomen.
They tried to stabilize her enough to perform the operation, but never got there.
In the end, her former husband Chris tells us she died peacefully.
Nicola joined CHCH in 2001 as an original member of the Morning Live team.
Her smile, her brightness, her quick wit and intelligence, made her an instant favourite among viewers.
She will be deeply missed, by our viewers, by the CHCH family, and by her own family.
Nicola leaves behind her nine-year-old son Christian, Chris Beattie, mother Cindy, sister Melissa and many friends and colleagues.
Our deepest sympathies go out to Nicola’s family and close friends.How does capital respond to a labour shortage?
Duncan Weldon Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 16, 2016
An article in the Wall Street Journal last week got me thinking again about of the bigger medium term questions in macroeconomics. Namely, what should we be worrying about more: not enough workers or not enough jobs?
On the one hand, the world is undergoing a demographic transition and the one off impact of China’s entry into the global economy may have run it’s course.
If I had to pick one graph to show “what’s happening in the world right now”, this one would be pretty high up my list:
This is the core of the Goodhart-Nangle thesis (on which I’ve blogged lots, much of it summarised here).
The short version of which (at least the Nangle variant) is that a rise in the working age share of the Western population coupled with the near doubling of the global workforce available to global capital in the 1990s and 2000s led to a global glut of labour. That global labour glut reduced labour bargaining power, suppressing wages, holding back the need fore capital investment and ultimately driving real interest rates lower. As he writes: “labour power sets the neutral interest rate”.
And if the demographic transition is going into reverse then we may see a world of increased labour bargaining power, higher wages and higher real rates.
But whilst some are pointing to a potential shortage there are plenty of others fretting about the impact of technological change on employment. It now seems impossible to read the econo-financial press or blogosphere without reading at least one “are the robots going to take all our jobs” piece a week. The most sophisticated of which is was (unsurprisingly) Andy Haldane.
So — which to worry about: not enough workers or not enough jobs?
Toby Nangle has blogged on this and been admirably straight forward:
I’m more of the view that there have been waves of concern stretching back pretty much forever about the degree to which technology will deliver mass unemployment and crippling real wage cuts, but these have all so far come to nothing. Meanwhile, there is a massive demographic transition coming through in front of our eyes, the upshot of which appears to me likely to deliver labour some bargaining power.
Toby has a point. It’s always struck me that worrying that “robots might take all jobs” is a little strange at a time when business investment has been weak and productivity growth exceptionally weak across most of the advanced economies.
But what if both Goodhart-Nangle and the techno-optimists/pessimists (depending on how you look at this) are right?
Whilst they couldn’t both be right at the same time, they could both be right in sequence.
As I’ve written before, my main critique of Goodhart-Nangle is that it is too mechanical in how it sees a developing global labour shortage feeding into wage growth. Labour market outcomes are about more than supply and demand, they are process shaped by political economy and institutions — indeed the division of wealth is perhaps the core of the political economy process.
So whilst slower growth in the workforce should give some headwinds to wage growth it won’t necessarily be the only factor in play.
Which takes me back to the title of this post and what I increasingly think is the core question in this debate: how does capital respond to a labour shortage?
And if that terminology sounds excessively Marxian… blame Toby, he started by referencing Lenin in his original paper.
The WSJ article that helped clarify my own thinking was on Arizona and the impact of a multi-year crackdown on illegal immigration. The state provides a neat case study of what happens when a labour shortage develops.
At first glance the numbers appear to back up the Goodhart-Nangle argument:
As the Arizona economy recovered, a worker shortage began surfacing in industries relying on immigrants, documented or not. Wages rose about 15% for Arizona farmworkers and about 10% for construction between 2010 and 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some employers say their need for workers has increased since then, leading them to boost wages more rapidly and crimping their ability to expand.
But faced with a shortage of workers and rising costs, capital responds. The labour market doesn’t operate in vacuum.
Here’s how on Arizona pepper farmer has responded:
He says mechanization is his future. He continues to pour time and money into a laser-guided device to remove stems from peppers, which pickers now do by hand in the field. Another farmer in the area developed a mechanical carrot harvester.
Mr. Knorr says he is willing to pay $20 an hour to operators of harvesters and other machines, compared with about $13 an hour for field hands.
Take away cheap labour and business models that rely on it existing will adapt or die. The way to adapt is to investment in labour-saving technology.
It seems perfectly reasonable to assume that as demographics bite, then labour will become scarcer and some bargaining power will restored (exactly how much will depend on the structure of labour market institutions that vary economy to economy).
But the bigger issue is how long that rise in bargaining power will last?
And my best would be years rather than decades.
It will provoke a response. If a global labour glut has been one factor holding down corporate investment for decades then its reversal should see investment pick-up. This could help allay some fears around productivity growth but won’t do much to combat inequality.
Just as farms are mechanising in Arizona we could see much more mechanisation in lower waged sectors from retail to logistics.
It’s perhaps best to think about this demographic transition as a series of moves and counter-moves, actions and reactions rather than as linear process. Reading Karl is helpful to understand it but Karl Polanyi rather than Karl Marx.From SN Guides
Introduction [ edit ]
Born on 1 March 1812. William Doxford the son of Joseph Doxford and Elizabeth Chapman.By 1840 at Cox Green he started to build wooden ships. In 1857,William Doxford moved to Pallion in 1857, where he began operation on a much larger scale. In 1870. a larger site was purchased and five new berths were laid down.
Two years after starting operations at the new site, he received his first Admiralty order, for three composite auxiliary steam gunboats. In 1875 Doxford commisioned a composite screw corvette for the Navy. The Magician.
William Doxford and Sons began building marine steam engines in 1878, when the original engine and boiler works were constructed. The first engines were compound, triple, then quadruple expansion.
In 1887 they built a single screw torpedo boat, which attained a speed of 21 knots, the highest speed recorded for that type of vessel. It ran her trials with a coal burning locomotive boiler, but was shortly afterwards converted to oil-burning and ran several successful trials on this new fuel. It was however long before her time, and was sold to a private owner.
In 1902 the original five berths were scrapped to make room for three berths of greater length and breadth, which enabled the firm to build vessels up to 540 feet in length and of 20,000 tons capacity.
Foundation and History of the Company [ edit ]
The company was founded in..... and.....
The Doxford yard pictured in 1921
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Early Engines [ edit ]
William Doxford & Sons (Engineers) Ltd., were one of the stalwarts of British shipbuilding, having a ship repair and construction yard as well as the engine business with which they built a reputation amongst ship owners that was to last over 70 years.
William Doxford and Sons began building marine steam engines in 1878, when the original engine and boiler works were constructed. The first engines were compound, triple, then quadruple expansion, and later still turbines. In 1887 they built a single screw torpedo boat, which attained a speed of 21 knots, the highest speed recorded for that type of vessel. It ran her trials with a coal burning locomotive boiler, but was shortly afterwards converted to oil-burning and ran several successful trials on this new fuel. It was however long before her time, and was sold to a private owner.
In 1906, Doxfords began to consider the possibilities of the diesel motor for ship propulsion. They realised the solution lay in experiment and research and after a series of experimental engines was built and tested, emerged the single cylinder 450 HP engine. Not satisfied with the success achieved, they decided to experiment, with a 3,000 HP four cylinder single shaft set. These experiments had to be put on hold due to the outbreak of the First World War however during the next four years Doxfords built 21 destroyers and engined them with turbines each of 27,000 HP.
When the war ended they resumed work on the four-cylinder engine, and after further research and the completion of successful trials it was felt justified in putting this into production. So in 1921 the engine was installed in the Yngaren' this was the first motor ship to be built by Doxfords. From that day on the name of Doxfords became world famous, a total of £100,000 had been spent on developing this new engine. A further five units were built during the 1920-23 depression.
Doxfords continued with research and development, overcoming problems of vibration. Then during the grim thirties' when hardly a keel was laid in Sunderland yards, important changes took place in the design and construction methods of the engines. Using steel welded fabrications of the superstructures and supporting frames obtained substantial size and weight reduction. Cast-iron bedplates were still in use until 1936 when fabricated construction was extended to these also. At around the same time Keller and Gebbie collaborated to introduce the Doxford Economy Ship. These and the “Improved” economy ship began with ship No. 612 and ended with ship No. 664. The first Doxford Economy Ship was the MV Sutherland. http://www.shipsnostalgia.com/guides/MV_Sutherland
During World War Two they turned their whole production over to a three-cylinder 2,500 bhp unit. It later earned the title of the economical'; because of its low fuel consumption, only six tons a day. Ships with heavy loads had to run this engine at or near to its limiting rpm to keep up with a convoy in the North Atlantic. In spite of this abuse, they remained remarkably reliable. It remained in production after the war.
Later Engines [ edit ]
In 1947 Purdie being a shrewd Scotsman attracted engineer Percy Jackson to Doxfords. This when competition for higher engine powers were being demanded. Also turbo-charging of the big two-strokes was just ahead and further development of the very successful Doxford (LB) engine would have to be undertaken, if it was to hold its position and keep the firm and its licensees well occupied with Doxford engine orders.
Jackson developed turbo-charging and the common rail system of airless-injection. Jackson set about retaining the high economy of the original arrangement while achieving greater simplicity and lower costs.
Doxfords built vertical, opposed-piston two-stroke diesel engines for ships, up to 8000 bhp, and their design became a standard unit for British flag-carriers until the licence-built Sulzer and B&W engines challenged their position in the early 1960's. The single-crankshaft engines had connecting rods for both the lower and upper pistons, with two rods for the upper piston. It is completely different to the Junkers opposed-piston design, as the upper pistons are connected to the single crankshaft by connecting rods each side of the main cylinder. This system had inherent advantages over the standard four-stroke engine, as the two-stroke running enabled a low operating speed (115 rpm), thus eliminating the requirement for a reduction gearbox between the engine and propeller, and as the engine was reversible, no reverse gear was required. A milestone in Doxford engine technical development was the design, construction and testing of the Seahorse prototype medium speed engine between 1970 and 1975. This was a joint venture between Doxford's and Hawthorn Leslie (Engineers) Ltd of Tyneside. It was intended to offer the marine market a crosshead engine, with its associated robustness and ability to burn Doxford-Hawthorn 58G4 Seahorse Engine heavy oil, which was capable of being geared down to suit the low rotation speeds (80 to 100 rpm) of the very large propellers then being fitted to turbine driven super tankers. In this, they were responding to competition from the established trunk piston medium speed engine builders, as well as creating the possibility of entering the electric power generation market. The prototype Seahorse built upon the fundamental design principles of the J' type engine. The opposed piston configuration's inherent internal mechanical balance, and hence freedom form vibration problems, coupled with exceptionally unrestricted scavenge air flow through the cylinder, with its potential for superior turbo charging, all allowed for a rotational speed of 300 rpm. By comparison, the operation speed of a conventional Doxford J' type engine, and indeed of its direct drive crosshead engine competitors was in the region of 115 rpm to 124 rpm. The Seahorse engine achieved a remarkable power output of 2,500 horsepower (1850 kW) per cylinder. A schematic model of the Seahorse engine in the TWM collection bears the designation58G', implying the achievement of a further significant stage in the evolution of Doxford engine design the G' (for Geared') type. While no Seahorse engines were ever built commercially, many of the design features were incorporated later in the 58JS3 engines. In fact the 58JS3 was more or less a slow speed Seahorse.
The Manufacturing Process [ edit ]
The following views of the Doxford Engine works between 1957 and 1958 have been supplied via The Doxford Friends Association and member Averheijden from an album lent to the society by Jim Duncan in 2003
A General view along the stockyard
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The Cylinder Liner Bay
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Machining a centre bottom end spherical bearing
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Propeller boss being bored out
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File:Piston machine shop.jpg
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Error creating thumbnail: Unable to save thumbnail to destinationThrough two innings in tonight’s Los Angeles Dodgers game, Cody Bellinger has two home runs in what is now a 7-1 game against the New York Mets. The home runs hit for Bellinger were his record tying 20th home run in 51 games, and then recording breaking 21st home run.
His 20th home run tied him with Wally Berger (1930) and Gary Sanchez (2016) for fastest to 20 home runs to start their career in 51 games.
Three players ever have hit 20 home runs in their first 51 career games:#Dodgers Cody Bellinger#Yankees Gary Sanchez#Braves Wally Berger — Ryan M. Spaeder (@theaceofspaeder) June 20, 2017
Bellinger’s second home run in the second inning of the game broke the tie and gave Bellinger the fewest games ever to hit 21 home runs.
holy crap. Bellinger hit another. New NL HR leader. First major leaguer ever with 21 HR in first 51 games. — Bill Shaikin (@BillShaikin) June 20, 2017
Through his first 51 games, Bellinger has hit.268/.340/.663 with 21 home runs and a 154 wRC+ in 212 PA.
Last week I wrote about the red hot starts to the careers of New York Yankee sluggers Gary Sanchez and Aaron Judge. Through their first 51 games, Sanchez hit.312/.386/.693 with 20 home runs and a 183 wRC+, with Judge hitting.238/.333/.530 with 14 home runs and a 126 wRC+ respectively.
Bellinger has yet to get the hype that Sanchez got in 2016 and Judge has in 2017, but he’s right up there with both. Something amazing to consider when comparing him to the Yankees sluggers, Sanchez was in his age 23 season last year and Judge is in his age 25 season this year. Cody Bellinger is still just 21 years old.
Another thing to consider is that his 20th and 21st home runs have done were tying Eric Thames for the NL lead in home runs, and then take sole possession of the NL home run lead. As well, because Bellinger was called up on 4/25, rather than starting the season outright with the Dodgers, he is still yet to qualify for the MLB leader boards.
As far as the Dodgers are concerned, they have not had a 40 home run hitter since Adrian Beltre’s magical 2004 season when he hit 48. Matt Kemp fell one shy in his MVP runner-up 2011 season. Other than Kemp’s 2011, the Dodgers have not had a single 30 home run hitter. Adrian Gonzalez has their most in that time with 28 in 2015.
The way Bellinger has been going, it has Dodger fans not only thinking of a 30-plus home run season, but the Dodgers first 40-plus home run season since 2004.
As a fun way to end this, tonight Bellinger tied a former power-hitting Dodger with his fifth multi-home run game as a rookie:
Bellinger: 5 multi-HR games, ties Piazza’s #Dodgers rookie record. It’s June 19. — Bill Shaikin (@BillShaikin) June 20, 2017
Like this: Like Loading...Police in Massachusetts served a sixth-grader with no-trespass orders after neighbors grew wary of the girl cutting through their properties to get to and from her school bus stop.
The mother of 11-year-old Autumn Blanchard told the Cape Cod Times her daughter received three pink no-trespass notices from the Harwich Police Department on March 2.
Krystal Blanchard said she was unaware neighbors had an issue until the police arrived at her door.
She questioned why she wasn't informed by the neighbors or school officials, who also knew about the problem.
'I am beyond distressed by this situation,' she said. 'I can't imagine why it had to go to this level. Someone should have spoken to me.'
Autumn Blanchard, 11, holds the no-trespass orders that she was served recently for crossing into a couple of neighbors' yards to get to and from her school bus stop
Blanchard said she wonders if the fact her family is new to the area and she and her daughter have brightly colored hair may be causing neighbors to discriminate against them.
The mother has pink hair and piercings while her daughter's hair has multiple colors.
'That's the only thing I can think of, which I think is ridiculous,' said Blanchard, who contends Autumn is a 'nice, polite kid.'
Harwich Police Chief David Guillemette blamed a 'breakdown in communication' for the situation. He said police should have met first with the mother to discuss her daughter's trespassing.
'I would have preferred it would have been handled with more tact,' he said.
Mom, Krystal Blanchard talks with her daughter, Autumn, who could be arrested and fined up to $100, imprisoned up to 30 days or both
Autumn said the cut-through shortened her walk to and from the bus stop, adding how she 'just wanted to get home and be warm inside my house.'
But one neighbor said she was previously sued because a girl fell in her yard and became concerned when she saw Autumn climbing over debris from a fallen tree.
A police report noted how neighbors asked Autumn to 'walk around on the street and she ignores their wishes.' The report also referred to a school resource officer and principal talking with Autumn, conversations her mother said she wasn't told about.
According to the notices, Autumn could be arrested and fined up to $100, imprisoned up to 30 days or both, if she steps onto the properties listed in the no-trespass orders.Queen Elizabeth smiles as she speaks with Google employees during a visit to the company's British headquarters in London, October 16, 2008. REUTERS/Adrian Dennis/Pool
LONDON (Reuters) - Google Inc received the royal seal of approval on Thursday when it added a picture of the Queen to the logo on its British homepage to mark her visit to its London offices on Thursday.
The image, known as a Google Doodle, shows the Queen in profile and a golden crown above the letter E of Google.
The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh will tour the Internet search giant’s British headquarters, a short walk from Buckingham Palace in central London.
The royal party will meet Google executives and hear about the company’s search engine, advertising and mobile phone technology. They will also learn how Google Earth, an online map, is being used to help save the Amazon rainforest.
The Queen will then be invited to upload a video to the royal family’s official channel on YouTube, the video-sharing site owned by Google. The address is www.youtube.com/theroyalchannel.In linking the fate of the civil rights movement to Wallace’s speech, she reminds us that the Constitution makes for strange bedfellows. It applies to segregationists and integrationists, civil rights activists and self-proclaimed racists. All Americans can lay claim to its protections, but those, like Murray, who seek to change society and extend freedoms to the most marginalized may need it most.
By the time she arrived at Yale, Murray was an experienced activist and a disciple of nonviolent protest. Fifteen years before the Montgomery bus boycott, she and a friend refused to sit
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are still being investigated
In a piece published on 5 July last year, this writer had argued that the Enforcement Directorate (ED) summoning Karti might just have been the beginning of several sleepless nights for the father and son.
Aircel-Maxis case
The bigger trouble in waiting for the Chidambarams may be the Aircel-Maxis case. In a nutshell, the whole story of the Aircel-Maxis case pertains to the forced selling of Aircel in 2006 by its owner entrepreneur C Sivasankaran, allegedly under pressure from former Union telecom minister Dayanidhi Maran. To return the favour, Maxis invested around Rs 47 crore in the Sun Group, owned by Dayanidhi Maran’s brother, Kalanidhi Maran.
Karti allegedly facilitated the whole transaction through his firm Advantage Consulting and passed along the bribes. Early this month, the ED said it has recovered confidential CBI report from Karti’s house.
Karti may not have a solid defence in the Maxis case. As a New Indian Express investigative series revealed, he will have a lot of explaining to do to prove the legitimacy of his assets worldwide through the firms allegedly owned by him and an army of benamis who have facilitated the transactions. When the skeletons begin to tumble out of the closet, the case may not be limited to the Aircel-Maxis deal alone. The investigations are leading to a complex web of benami transactions used by the Chidambarams to hide their ill-gotten wealth.
As the New Indian Express exposé revealed, Karti owned majority stake in Advantage through a holding company Ausbridge. But, the ownership of the company — Advantage — was shown in the names of benamis, who in turn wrote wills later to transfer the ownership to Karti’s daughter. And who keeps these wills? Here again, Karti, as found in his vault by a joint team comprising Income Tax and Enforcement Directorate authorities.
Now, what is Advantage’s wealth? Advantage India holds 90,000 shares out of the 1.5 lakh equity shares of Vasan Eye Care. The firm procured the shares at a throwaway price of Rs 100 per share. However, the report states, that it actually paid only one-third, or Rs 33 per share. It sold 60,000 shares in two tranches of Rs 30,000 to Sequoia Capital Investments, a Mauritius-based investment fund.
In the first tranche, 30,000 shares were sold at Rs 7,500 per share or Rs 22.5 crore. Assuming that the second tranche was also sold at the same price and if the balance shares are valued at the same price, then Vasan Eye Care's share would amount to Rs 112.5 crore that Advantage acquired at a mere Rs 50 lakh, according to the report. Now, that’s quite a killing, isn’t it?
Karti’s empire is spread across several countries, which would also mean several jurisdictions. The Singapore subsidiary of Advantage, Advantage Singapore, has real estate investments in at least 15 countries. But, under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA),the ED can expand its probe to any geographies and seek help of international agencies if needed.
Political vendetta?
Chidambaram Sr has always trained his guns at the ruling BJP government citing political vendetta, whenever investigators targeted Karti or his 'friends'.
"If the government wishes to target me, they should do so directly, not harass friends of my son who carry on their own businesses and have nothing to do with politics," the former finance minister had said. But, Chidambaram’s apparent attempt to politicise the issue may not work, since the Congress itself will not want to get involved in the case given its seriousness and its larger political implications. There is immense pressure on the Narendra Modi government not to lower its guard against corruption.
In its term so far, the Modi government has gained a reputation for its way of dealing with cronies and crooks. The government would not want to damage that image in this case. It has already lent a free hand to various investigating agencies against the Chidambarams — in a series of cases including the Aircel-Maxis case — to inspect the complex threads of the deals, counter-deals and kickbacks.
Chidambaram, the lawyer-turned-politician may have to fight lot harder to wriggle out of the mess created by his son to avert political downfall.
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.Blue Apron had to take a price cut, but it made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday.
Shares of the New York-based meal-kit delivery startup opened at $10 Thursday, in line with the company's slashed issue price of $10. That values the company at just $1.9 billion, a serious drop from the $3 billion valuation had the IPO been priced at the midpoint of its original $15 to $17 range.
The company sold 30 million Class A shares to raise $300 million.
Blue Apron APRN, -6.52% began its service in 2012. In addition to the meal kits, the company launched a wine-pairing service in September 2015, in which the company works with vineyards, wineries and its own winemaker to deliver wine along with the meals. In 2014, it launched an e-commerce site for cooking tools.
Goldman Sachs & Co., Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Barclays are the lead underwriters on the offering.
See also: Blue Apron IPO to test Wall Street’s appetite for ‘lazy’ people’s favorite tech startups
Here’s what you need to know:
There was a brief quarter of profitability
Blue Apron recorded growing revenue of $795.4 million in 2016, up from $340 million in 2015 and $77.8 million in 2014. This was on top of net losses of $54.9 million in 2016, wider than losses of $47 million in 2015 and $30.8 million in 2014.
There was a brief period of profitability in the three months ended in March 2016, with net income of $3 million, but the company swung to a loss of $52.2 million for the same period this year.
Blue Apron has said that its first quarter of the year, the three months ended in March, is seasonally stronger and it increased its marketing spending to $60.6 million in the March 2017 quarter, up from $29.7 million in the year-earlier period.
In that first quarter of 2017, Blue Apron reached the milestone of 1 million customers, up from 879,000 in the fourth quarter and 649,000 in year-earlier period.
It has a customer problem
The first quarter of the year is the strongest for Blue Apron whereas the summer months and end of year holidays typically mean a drop in customers, as people go on vacation.
But beyond seasonality, Blue Apron appears to have an issue with customer retention. Orders per customer incrementally fell from 4.5 in the first quarter of March 2016 to 4.1 in the first quarter of 2017. Average revenue per customer fell from $265 to $236 in the same period.
“Over time our customers on average order less frequently or sometimes cease ordering, as evidenced by the declining increases,” the company said in its prospectus.
Six months after a customer’s first order cumulative net revenue per customer was $402 in 2014, $451 in 2015 and $387 in 2016. Blue Apron points out that these revenue amounts include the marketing spend per customer and in 2016, it cited the increased its use of promotional discounts to bring on more customers as the primary reason beyond the decline.
It had a private valuation of $2 billion
Blue Apron was last valued at $2 billion in June 2015, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company was backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, which owned 23.8% before the IPO; First Round Capital, which owned 10.5%; SG Growth Partners, which owned 6.5%; and Fidelity with 6.2%.
The company's chief executive, Matt Salzberg, worked at Bessemer Venture Partners before starting Blue Apron.
The fair value per share calculated for the company’s stock options climbed from $3.69 in February 2016 to $5.53 in December 2016. In the past three months, the value had climbed from $7.04 to $15.99 as of May.
Its workforce is growing
The company has been rapidly increasing its employee numbers. It had 1,051 full-time employees in 2014 and now has 5,202 as of March 2017.
The majority of its employees work in fulfillment centers, where the meals are packaged, in New Jersey, Texas and California. Blue Apron is building another center in Linden, N.J., and just signed a lease for a center in Fairfield, Calif.
Blue Apron notes that none of its employees belong to a labor union, but may join one in the future, which could affect its business. This could be an issue as a BuzzFeed report from October 2016 reported unsafe conditions and worker discontent at the warehouses.
There’s competition
As a subscription-box startup, Blue Apron operates in a space that has largely been untested by the public markets.
It has competitors in the private market, including meal-kit startups Plated, Munchery and to an extent, grocery delivery startup Fresh Direct as well as Amazon Inc.’s AMZN, +0.21% which recently made a bigger push into the space with its bid for Whole Foods Market Inc. US:WFM
Blue Apron had 300 food suppliers in 2016 and said it spent 70% of its food spending with suppliers that agreed to sell only to Blue Apron and not to other boxed meal companies.CFEX-FM is a radio station serving Calgary, Alberta. Owned by Harvard Broadcasting, it broadcasts an alternative rock format branded as X92.9. CFEX's studios are located along the Red Mile on 17 Avenue SW in Calgary, while its transmitter is located on Old Banff Coach Road in western Calgary.
As of Spring 2018, CFEX is ranked #7 in the Calgary market ratings by Numeris.
History [ edit ]
In 2006, the CRTC approved an application by Harvard Broadcasting for a new FM radio station in Calgary, which would broadcast an alternative rock format.[1]
The station officially launched at midnight on January 1, 2007 as X92.9, hosting a free New Year's Eve concert at the University of Calgary's Mac Hall featuring Hot Hot Heat. Owing to the group's mixed reception, the station promoted a "No Nickelback Guarantee" in comparison to its main rival, CJAY-FM. Its stance against the band has gained national attention on several occasions, including its endorsement of a petition for the NFL to not have the band perform at halftime during an American Thanksgiving game in Detroit in 2011.[2][3][4][5]
CFEX's studios
On December 21, 2012, in honour of the alleged Mayan apocalypse, CFEX stunted by playing R.E.M.'s song "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" all day long, interspersed with "Get to Know a Mayan" and "Apocalypse Survival Tips" segments.[6] CFEX repeated this stunt on the night of November 8, 2016 and the day of November 9, 2016, in response to Donald Trump winning the U.S. presidential election.[citation needed]
References [ edit ]
Coordinates:Pandaria began as a lark. For April Fools' Day in 2002, one of the artists from Blizzard, Samwise Didier, created an anthropomorphic race of panda-men as a fake fifth race for the RTS Warcraft 3. Fans latched onto the idea though, and since then Warcraft lore has hinted at a mysterious continent, shrouded in mist, where the Pandarens live. Level-capped World of Warcraft characters will get the chance to adventure in those lands when Mists of Pandaria comes out on September 25th, but others will jump at the chance to play a brand new Pandaren character and try out a completely new class of martial artist - the Monk.
You can check out my video preview of the Pandaren starting area and the Monk, but I also got a chance to sit down with Greg Street the Lead Systems Designer for World of Warcraft - known as Ghostcrawler on the WoW forums -to pick his brain about Mists of Pandaria. You might be surprised to learn exactly why they introduced the new Pokemon-like minipet battle system, and some other neat additions to the continent of Pandaria that have flown under the radar by the WoW-press.
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The Escapist: This was the first expansion you guys had developed a new class for levels one through 90. What was that like, going back to the drawing board, so to speak?
Greg Street: It was interesting, with the Death Knight [- the "hero class" from Wrath of the Lich King -] we knew we could throw a bunch of abilities to players right away but with the Monk we really had to think about, 'Okay what does a level nine Monk have to do? And do we give them the ability slowly or quickly?' I think for a long time players felt like they didn't have enough abilities at low levels but anyone who jumped in and tried them at high level felt overwhelmed because they had to learn everything. It's definitely a bit of a different process.
The Escapist: What did you think was the iconic abilities that said martial artist, or Monk, to you?
Greg Street: We looked a lot at the Brewmaster from the Warcraft RTS and then we also watched a lot of cheesy martial arts movies. Because we really felt like that was what we were going for, that was the kind of, we didn't have a class that quite felt like that yet so we wanted to have a lot of animations of hands and fists, but also mystical almost Wushu style energy that they would have to do, things that felt magical but were done without using mana.
The Escapist: To me, the Roll ability, just being able to instantly roll forward is the thing that really set apart the Monk. That made the class feel really different.
Greg Street: Yeah, they have a lot of mobility. They have that higher level ability, Flying Serpent Kick, where they can go a long way and land when they want to and combining those two abilities together you really feel mobile.
The Escapist: How do you think those abilities will impact things like PvP?
Greg Street: So far, Monks had some abilities earlier on in PvP that were just too good. Their disarm was pretty radical and some of their crowd control. I think that we're really trying to center around movement being a big thing for them. They can get into combat and get away pretty quickly as well.Okay, let’s back up.
Rick and Morty, created by Community’s Dan Harmon, is currently the Number 1 television comedy among millennials. It’s risen in popularity since it premiered on Adult Swim in 2013, and this weekend inspired McDonald’s to launch a one-day fan event that became way bigger than the burger chain had ever anticipated.
In Season 3’s premiere, “The Rickshank Rickdemption,” which aired April 1, 2017, mad scientist and terrible grandfather Rick Sanchez (voiced by co-creator Justin Roiland) is being interrogated by an alien Galactic Federation to find out the secret of his portal gun, which allows him and his grandson Morty (also voiced by Roiland) to traverse through parallel universes. But what’s important here is that Rick figures out that the aliens have broken into his own mind and memories to interrogate him, and drives them to McDonald’s where, in 1998, the chain released limited-edition “Szechuan” McNugget sauce to advertise Disney’s Mulan, and afterwards discontinued it.
The Szechuan sauce joke blew up so much that McDonald’s actually sent some bottles of it to Roiland, which he shared with the rest of the Rick and Morty staff. And then McDonald’s flew too close to the sun.
Last week, the golden arches announced that for one day only they would have Szechuan sauce in all of their locations for Rick and Morty fans who’d been craving the taste ever since the season premiere reminded them of what had been lost to time. But, as it turns out, McDonald’s severely underestimated how many fans would line up in droves for just one taste of Sriracha- and ginger-infused nostalgia, only sending 20 packets of the sauce to every store, causing the majority of hopefuls to go home merely ketchup-handed.
McDonald’s issued an apology Saturday afternoon after it was clear the event had gone horribly awry.
The #szechuansauce tag was inundated with disappointed fans calling for a boycott, suggesting everyone go to Wendy’s instead, posting links to eBay pages where the sauce was already selling for thousands of dollars, or suggesting that maybe Rick’s hapless son-in-law Jerry engineered the whole thing.Reports in Egypt this week suggested the 22-year-old would have to return to his homeland to serve in the armed forces, but he has now been informed this is not the case
By Liam Twomey Chelsea winger Mohamed Salah will not have to return to Egypt to do military service,understands.Earlier this week reports in Egypt had suggested that Salah would be forced to go back to his homeland to serve in the armed forces after his place in an education program was rescinded, meaning he could not travel abroad.But Egyptian news outlet kingfut.com reported that the country's prime minister Ibrahim Mahlab then intervened personally in the matter, holding a meeting with his minister for higher education and national team coach Shawky Gharib in which he described the ruling as "threatening" the future of Egyptian football.And Goal understands that Salah has now been given confirmation that he is no longer obligated to return to his homeland to do military service, which traditionally ranges from 12 months to three years.On Monday Salah travelled with the rest of the Chelsea squad to a pre-season training camp in Austria, and the club consider the matter settled.Salah moved to Stamford Bridge from Basel for £11 million in January and scored two goals in 10 Premier League appearances for the Blues, netting in home wins against Arsenal and Stoke City.I wish to associate myself with these remarks of Jonathan Adler's, so I hope he will forgive me for the extended excerpt:
Although Christie adopted the desired policy -- withdrawing from RGGI -- some conservatives are aghast that he would acknowledge a human contribution to global warming. According to one, this makes Christie "Part RINO. Part man. Only more RINO than man." ["RINO" as in "Republican in Name Only."] Those attacking Christie are suggesting there is only one politically acceptable position on climate science -- that one's ideological bona fides are to be determined by one's scientific beliefs, and not simply one's policy preferences. This is a problem on multiple levels. Among other things, it leads conservatives to embrace an anti-scientific know-nothingism whereby scientific claims are to be evaluated not by scientific evidence but their political implications. Thus climate science must be attacked because it provides a too ready justification for government regulation. This is the same reason some conservatives attack evolution -- they fear it undermines religious belief -- and it is just as wrong. Writing at MichelleMalkin.com, Doug Powers warns that "if some politicians think they can swim in the waters of AGW without getting wet or soaking taxpayers, they should think again." In other words, once you accept that human activity may be contributing to global warming, embracing costly and ill-advised regulatory measures is inevitable. Yet it is actually Powers, not Christie, who is embracing a dangerous premise. As Christie's veto shows, he understands that the threat of climate change doe snot justify any and all proposed policy responses. One can believe the threat is real, and still think cap-and-trade is a bad idea. Christie's critics, on the other hand, seem to accept that once it can be shown that human activity may be having potentially negative environmental effects, this alone justifies government intervention. Yet the environmental effects of human behavior are ubiquitous. Human civilization necessarily entails remaking the world around it. So if recognizing negative environmental effects leads inevitably to governmental intervention, there is virtually no end to what government needs to do, global warming or no. How inconvenient, then, that even the vast majority of warming "skeptics" within the scientific community would agree with Governor Christie's statement that "human activity plays a role" in rising greenhouse gas levels and resulting changes in the climate. The Cato Institute's Patrick Michaels, for instance, has written several books acknowledging human contributions to global warming. In Climate of Extremes: The Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know As I've written before, it would be convenient if human activity did not contribute to global warming or otherwise create problems that are difficult to reconcile with libertarian preferences. But that's not the world we live in, and politicians should not be criticized for recognizing that fact.
I don't think that science denialism is the exclusive province of the GOP, but it's extremely disappointing whenever either side does it. As longtime readers known, I have been extremely critical of the attitude that some climate scientists seem to have developed towards dissent, and what you might call the PR aspect of their work. Nonetheless, I am quite convinced that the planet is warming, and fairly convinced that human beings play a role in this. (When you've got Reason's Ron Bailey, Cato's Patrick Michaels, and Jonathan Adler, you've convinced me). I reserve the right to be skeptical about particular claims about effects (particularly when those claims come via people who implausibly insist that every major effect will be negative)... and, of course, of ludicrous worries that global warming will cause aliens to destroy us. But generally, I think global warming is happening, and even that we should probably do something about that, though I'm flexible on "something."
However. Even if you disagree, it is reprehensible to have a litmus test around empirical matters of fact. (I'm not a fan of litmus tests in general, but I suppose it's fair enough to say "If you want marginal tax rates of 70% on the wealthy, you don't belong in today's GOP"). What these Republicans are doing to people like Chris Christie is no better than what Harvard did to Larry Summers when he suggested that it was possible that women had a different IQ distribution than men. Facts are not good or bad; they are correct or incorrect. And a policy based on hysterical refusal to consider all possible facts is neither good, nor correct.An elderly farmer was trampled to death by an elephant at Kashpur on March 21, 2016, the police said. The police informed that the elephant has been moving around and creating panic among the locals in the district.
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The incident occurred when a herd of five elephants attacked two farmers working in the fields in the morking. While one person escaped, his brother Anil Bagdi (64) was trampled to death by one of the elephants, a police officer said.
Forest guards are trying to drive away the elephant to the nearby forest, he said. Meanwhile, one of the five elephants that killed four persons in Manteshwar police station area died when tranquiliser shots were fired at him last night, DFO Ajay Kumar Das said. Watch the video here.
#WATCH: Elephant attacks a man in Monteswar village of West Bengal’s Burdwan, throws him.https://t.co/ksNtL94EQG — ANI (@ANI_news) March 20, 2016
For news updates, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ & InstagramA father and daughter say they were unfairly kicked off a flight after the crew overheard them talking about the poor customer service.
Eric Miller, 70, and his daughter Whitney Miller, 25 claimed they were chatting quietly about their bad experience, including a six-hour delay, when they were confronted aggressively by flight crew.
They were booted off the plane just 15 minutes after they had boarded in Florida last Wednesday, they said.
Whitney, a nursing student from Jacksonville, Florida, summarised the incident on Facebook.
“NEVER FLY WITH THIS COMPANY” she wrote.
Image: Facebook / Whitney Miller
“There’s a first [time] for everything” she said.
The Millers were reportedly heard discussing how “miserable” the flight crew seemed, saying they never wanted to travel Frontier again.
"Our flight attendants are customer service and safety professionals,” Frontier Airlines told News 6.
The airline said the Millers’ behaviour was “inappropriate” and that their “number one priority” is the safety and security of their passengers and crew.
The airline further claimed the Millers had been shouting profanities at the crew, calling an attendant a b---h. [mail link]
However, other passengers said this was not what happened, including the one who filmed a video of the Millers being ejected from the flight.
They said they did not hear anything offensive from the Millers but rather, the crew seemed to be eavesdropping on the conversation.
Eric told the news channel he was shocked when he was removed from the plane, asking staff if they are “going to call police?”.
Whitney added, “What did we do wrong? Why are we getting kicked off the plane?”.
The family’s ticket price was refunded and they now plan to travel by road to visit their sick relative.
Eric said it was his worst flying experience in 70 years.The video will start in 8 Cancel
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Scientists are attempting to clone extinct Ice Age lion cubs by finding DNA in the remains of the creatures.
Two cubs were found in Russia's Sakha Republic last August in a near-perfect state thanks to the deep-freeze conditions where they lay.
Researchers hope to find living tissues containing DNA in the remains, which will allow them to recreate the now extinct Ice Age cave lion.
The project is a joint venture by Russian and South Korean scientists at the Joint Foundation of Molecular Paleontology at North East Russia University in the city of Yakutsk.
Semyon Grigoriev, who is involved in the lion cub project, is also working on cloning a mammoth using the same process.
While the first Ice Age cave lion cub will be used for the cloning attempt, the second will be kept as part of the Mammoth Museum's collection.
Read more: Grim video shows 'zombie snake' launching attack on chef - despite being skinned and gutted
The 12,000-year-old cave lion cubs were found frozen in ice last year- so well preserved their whiskers are still bristling.
The pair of prehistoric predators, named Uyan and Dina, are the most unspoilt examples of this ancient big cat species ever found.
Read more: Miracle of cloned PUPPY after owners turn to science to replace their beloved pet Boxer
Scientists found the felines in a remote Siberian region and dug them up, giving them their first public appearance since Pleistocene times.
Dr Albert Protopopov, head of the mammoth fauna studies department of the Yakutian Academy of Sciences, said: "This find, beyond any doubt, is sensational."Head of Missouri's Kansas City library system slams the arrest of a Jewish patron during a lecture on Israel by Dennis Ross.
The head of Missouri's Kansas City library system slammed the arrest of a Jewish patron during a lecture on Israel held at the institution earlier this year, accusing the police of violating the First Amendment.
The patron, Jeremy Rothe-Kushel, was arrested in May after asking a question in which he called U.S. and Israeli policy "state-sponsored terrorism."
“At this stage, I’m actually outraged,” the executive director of the city's library system, R. Crosby Kemper III, told the Kansas City Star on Friday. “This is a big violation of the very first amendment to the Constitution of the United States.”
Following a lecture at the Kansas City Library's Plaza branch by former government Middle East adviser Dennis Ross, Rothe-Kushel asked whether Jewish Americans should worry about U.S. and Israeli policies that amount to "state-sponsored terrorism."
As Rothe-Kushel tried to ask an additional question, a private security guard and an off-duty police officer grabbed him. He was then arrested by off-duty police officers, and charged with trespassing and resisting arrest.
Police also arrested a library official, Steve Woolfolk, for interfering with the arrest.
The library opposed the arrests for months, but decided to publicly announce its disapproval, as city prosecutors seemed to want to move forward with the charges, the Kansas City Star reported.
While the library does not usually allow hired security at its events, an exception was made for Ross' lecture, partially due to a shooting in 2014 at two Jewish facilities in Overland Park, Kansas, that killed three people.
The guard and off-duty police officers were hired by the Jewish Community Foundation.By the time most people reach middle age, they could probably name a long list of things they regret from their past—the job opening they ignored, the disastrous vacation, the stock they did not buy, or even worse the one they did.
“The key finding,” Roese says, “was that romance was the number one regret,” cited by 18.1 percent of the respondents. The second choice—family, at 15.9 percent—was also related to personal relationships. “People crave strong, stable social relationships and are unhappy when they lack them,” the authors write. Next came education (13.1 percent), career (12.2 percent), finance (9.9 percent), and parenting (9 percent).
Roese and Morrison undertook the new study in order to analyze a more broad-based population than in prior research, which mainly used college students. The two authors arranged telephone surveys of 207 women and 163 men across the United States, selected by standard random-sampling methods. The respondents were asked to describe, in detail, one significant incident of regret. In addition, the survey group provided information about their gender, age, education, and relationship status. Then their answers were analyzed according to predetermined criteria to gauge the severity of the regret—mild, moderate, severe—and to assign the regret to one of twelve categories—career, community, education, family, finances, friends, health, leisure, parenting, romance, self-improvement, or spirituality.
Whatever the cause of the regret, Roese says that people should not see it as a negative. “Regret is an essential part of the human experience—something everybody has as long as they have life goals,” he says. “Rather than avoid it, it’s better to try to take some insights out of the regret experience.”
But the most frequent regrets involve romance, according to a new study by Neal J. Roese, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, and Mike Morrison, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This and other findings contradict some of the results of previous, smaller studies, which had ranked education-related regrets in first place.
This general pattern was observed across all demographic boundaries—race, age, relationship status, education—except one: gender. Women were more likely to cite romance-related regrets, whereas men’s regrets usually centered on work. (The fact that there were more responses from women than men—coupled with this gender tilt—did not affect the overall totals in the survey, because the calculation was weighted for such demographic imbalances, Roese says.) This male-female dichotomy seems to support clichés such as the assumption that men are the breadwinners, or that women want to get married, but that should not be surprising, Roese says. “Sometimes clichés speak to a truth about our nature or society,” he points out, but he adds that traditional gender roles seem to be changing.
Regrets of Omission
Another key finding had to do with whether people felt more regret about actions they did or did not take. Research by Victoria Medvec, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, had previously established a connection between time and regret: The more time that has passed since an event, the more likely people are to focus on what they failed to do, rather than what they actually did. “Lost opportunities linger in our memory longer,” Roese puts it. That is because people can quickly rationalize their actual actions, even when they went wrong. But for a possible action that was never taken, “there are so many ways in which you can see different things you could have done,” he explains.
He illustrates the concept with a romantic example—asking someone for a date. In remembering an unsuccessful attempt, an unlucky suitor might think, “I asked this person out on a date, she shot me down, it’s done.” But if he never even tried, the suitor might ponder all sorts of scenarios: “What if I had asked her when I saw her in the hallway? What if I had phoned right after we first met? What if I had sent flowers?”
Roese and Morrison’s new study analyzed people’s feelings about unrealized actions by asking respondents questions such as, “Does the regret focus on something you should have done, or something you should not have done?” and “When did the event happen that made you feel regret?” Through their broad sampling, Roese and Morrison found that the time disparity, too, applies to a wide cross-section regardless of race, education level, marital status, and age.
Learning from Regrets
At its best, regret can “direct behavior toward fixing what evoked the regret,” Roese and Morrison write. In fact, they continue, “regret is more intense” precisely when there is a chance to reverse an unhappy decision, which then “serves to motivate the individual toward new corrective behavior.”
However, the possibility of a do-over shrinks with age. Younger respondents like college students obviously have more hope of a second chance. For the broader cross-section in the new study, more people may feel that time is running out.
While that sounds dour, there may be a silver lining to looking back on wistful memories. “At the end of the day, regrets are highly useful emotions that signal to us where in life we need to improve, and motivate us to actually make those improvements,” Roese points out. “We should listen to our regrets rather than pretend that we do not have them.”
Related reading on Kellogg Insight
Learning to Use Regret: Studies in the negative emotions and how to use them
Inspiring Loyalty by Asking, “What If?” Counterfactual thinking strengthens commitments to people and organizations
Understanding the Emotion of Loss: The mental processes behind loss aversionBritney might be coming to Broadway.
As the “Princess of Pop” prepares to close her popular residency show in Las Vegas, her managers, Larry Rudolph and Adam Leber, have started to explore bringing her chart-topping songs to Broadway. They met with theatre veteran Jerry Mitchell to discuss turning her music catalog into a full-fledged theatrical production.
As the director of On Your Feet!, Mitchell helped Gloria and Emilio Estefan translate their uplifting life story to the stage. “We’re telling a true story about real people, so the authenticity is really important to me,” he stressed in an interview before the show arrived on Broadway.
However, Mitchell does not plan to use the same recipe when making a jukebox musical with Spears. “It would NOT be autobiographical,” he confirmed. Instead, all of her famous songs would be used to tie together a fictional narrative, like Mamma Mia!.
The three are still mulling over the idea, and no timeline has been announced.Virtual reality porn is quickly becoming a thing.
Pornhub, the largest pornography website on the Internet, is the latest company to jump on the VR porn train. The porn site has partnered up with BaDoink, a company that specializes in producing porn videos with 180- and 360-degrees of visual immersion.
But unlike porn companies like Naughty America that require a subscription in order to access their VR porn content, Pornhub is giving its VR porn away for free.
"VR porn is great for any occasion," states one person in the company's super cringe-worthy promotional video, which you can see above (the video is SFW and contains no nudity or porn). "Always wanted to be in an orgy? Well no here's you chance!"
In another scenario, one guy awkwardly tells his dad how great it is: "It's VR porn dad! With your very own headset. It's like you're really there!"
The only thing you'll need to view Pornhub's VR porn videos is a VR headset — Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR or Google Cardboard — and an Internet connection.
The VR porn videos, which can be seen here (WARNING: NSFW), are short VR experiences, with most of them no longer than six minutes. There are currently 26 VR videos, all with corny names, of course.
Compared to Naughty America's VR porn videos, which are only POV-style videos with 180-degrees field of view, some of Pornhub's videos are full 360-degrees, letting you look in all directions.
As Mashable's token VR porn guinea pig, I grabbed a Google Cardboard to see what the experience was like compared to Naughty America's.
For some reason my iPhone 6 didn't work. I switched to an Android phone, hit play on a video and then tapped the VR headset icon. Sure enough, the video split into two — one for each eye — and two female adult entertainers started to get rowdy with my fake male VR body in "BaDoinkVR 360 Degrees of Seduction."
Pornhub's VR porn can be pixelated unless you set it to a higher resolution.
I was immediately put off by how awful and pixelated the VR video looked. Everything was blocky and looked like it was intentionally censored. Instead of immersing me, it was giving me a giant headache. It turns out there's a quality setting, and it was set to 480p. Switching to 720p definitely made the, um, performance, more viewable, but not by much. To unlock the 1080p resolution, you'll need to get a membership.
Look down at your own body and won't find a face, but this BaDoink logo. It's like your head exploded. Image: Screenshot: Pornhub
While I didn't get to take a look at the VR porn with a better headset or at 1080p, the 720p resolution gives you a good idea of what kind
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but can also pose an existential threat pursuing goals not aligned with the continued existence of humankind.
- who is able to control this cognitive technology?
- can A.I. become intentionally benevolent or malevolent?
- autonomous weapons are artificial intelligence systems programmed to kill, could an A.I. arms race inadvertently lead to an A.I. war?
- can A.I. develop a destructive method for achieving its goal?
Interesting link : Benefits and risks of artificial intelligenceJohn McAfee John McAfee Steve Rogers, the eloquent and polished FBI spokesman whom I had the pleasure of debating on CNN two weeks ago, has been on national TV again - this time alerting the American public that terrorist events equivalent to what just just happened in Brussels, are soon coming to America.
Let's put aside, for the moment, the obvious implications regarding new demands for access into all of our lives for "security reasons", and let's look realistically at the true tragedy of this statement.
If true, then there is only one conclusion that we can draw: America, and its closest allies, are living in the Stone Age of cybersecurity.
China, has already stolen top secret information of everyone who worked for the US Government for the past 50 years, accessed critical information from the Pentagon. Homeland Security and the FBI, has everyone's phone number, address and habits - and this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as we know. China has done the same thing to nearly every nation on earth.
I can assure you that the first word of an attempted attack against China, from any quarter, any person or any agency, would be heard, analyzed and dealt with within minutes of its utterance.
But in America, and within each of our allies, we seem to know nothing whatsoever about impending extremist attacks until they occur. What in God's name is happening?
The answer is certainly NOT crippling encryption. In China, encryption is controlled by the Office of State Commercial Cryptography Administration (OSCCA). However, items such as wireless telephones, standard computer operating systems and internet browsers are not included under their regulations.
Think of how odd this is compared to the extreme paranoia of our own government regarding encrypted communications between people.
Yet, for the top cybersecurity experts, it's not odd at all.
China, by any cybersecurity measures is 20 years ahead of the US. So advanced, that the White House voiced open frustration at our inability to stop or even slow down China's increasing invasion of our cyberspace.
Stringer Shanghai/Reuters
China is not concerned about encryption because it's capable of gathering all inputs prior to encryption and capturing screen shots after data has been decrypted. They don't care what encryption techniques are used. Why should they waste time on the interim communication step?
If the American government could grasp this powerful departure from our archaic cybersecurity paradigm, then we might have a chance of survival in this technological world for which we have entirely missed the boat.
How does China achieve such dramatic results compared to the US? The answer is through a brilliant application of the foundation upon which digital science rests - mathematics. One of the most powerful tools of intelligence gathering in this new age of digital communications is a nearly forgotten field of mathematics called "Point Set Topology". I chose this field as my specialty in grad school because it was trivially easy and I was lazy. At the time it had absolutely no practical use, about which I cared little. I was simply enjoying college life for as long as possible, and it's simplicity gave me lots of free time.
Topology deals with the relations between and among sets, or collections of things. The things can be anything, fish, buttons, shoelaces, or…People.
Let me give you an oversimplified example of how it can be used in intelligence gathering: Imagine that I am a terrorist (not difficult for my detractors within the FBI), and I have a set (collection) of people that I frequently or infrequent call in my phone. If China suspects me it will first plant spyware on my phone that merely transmits the phone numbers of my contacts and the frequency and duration of my calls. Nothing else. The spyware planting is trivial for the Chinese and they can do it from halfway around the world. They then plant the same spyware on the phones of everyone I contact, and then everyone that they contact, and so on down the line until upwards of 100,000 phones or more are infected. Since the software is merely transmitting interactions, each individual phone is minimally impacted and few, ever detect the spyware.
Next? They process these hundreds of millions of interconnections using another seldom used branch of mathematics called Boolean Algebra. It, like Point Set Topology, is so simple that you could get PhD in the field by sleeping through every class and shooting up heroin every night.
However, the combination of the two fields is one of the most powerful tools ever constructed for ferreting out terrorists and other secret societies, criminal organizations, etc.
YouTube/NTDTV It does this by identifying and isolating communication anomalies. For example: a terrorist leader may make exclusively outgoing calls and demand no incoming calls… quite common for some groups. Now… who does this, really, except possibly your drug dealer who calls you whenever he receives a shipment but threatens to whack you if you ever call him.
Likewise, if a terrorist leader makes a decision or gives an order, only a few people will be called - those closest to him. Within a matter of minutes those that he called will call a subset of others and likewise on down the chain of command. The software doing the Boolean analysis would identify this as anomaly and report it.
If this,we're to happen, the Chinese would immediately download more sophisticated software onto only those phones in the chain of command that would collect keystrokes and screen shots and send them home to China. Chinese foreign agents would then collect all involved before they could even buy the duct tape to strap on their bombs.
What is fascinating about this technique is that if any one person, or more, throws away their phone and gets a new one, the new phone will be identified with minutes of the first few calls sent or received. Powerful stuff.
But back to the stone age system under which we live. Our government is trying to find out what is happening after the impetus for what is happening has been activated. We are lost if we remain in this state of ignorance.
It would be better to subcontract our security to the Chinese, eat crow and swallow our pride, until we can stand on our own as a nation in this sea of cyber security chaos which we are clearly incapable of navigating.It’s hard to believe we are having this conversation just days before Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th president of the U.S. But the constant drip of accusations has turned into a flood and the Senate select committee on intelligence, in an unprecedented move, just announced it will investigate links between the new administration and the Kremlin. Around the world, intelligence agencies, politicians, and the public are asking the same question: is it really possible Donald Trump is working with the Russians?
The case for the prosecution is mostly circumstantial, but it’s sizable. Let’s start with Trump’s deep connections to the Kremlin. These go back to 1986, when he first visited Moscow at the invitation of the Russian ambassador to the U.S. Trump received the red-carpet treatment and met with many Politburo officials. Curiously, on his return to the United States, he immediately spent $90,000 on full-page ads in several national newspapers condemning Washington’s foreign policy and American allies who “can afford to defend themselves.”
In the decades that followed, Trump used his Moscow connections to chase rubles. His vodka deal and hotel partnerships failed. But he found success selling real estate to wealthy Russian investors. Trump saw the post-Soviet robber barons as clientele worth cultivating; returning from one visit to Moscow, Trump boasted in an interview with Real Estate Weekly “almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.”
More notably, during this time Trump built extensive financial links to Russia. After a string of failures and bankruptcies, Trump’s business empire was facing collapse and American banks were refusing him credit. Luckily for him, several institutions with Russian connections stepped in to help bail him out. His now-bankrupt Trump Tower in Toronto, for example, was funded with money from two Russian-Canadian billionaires. More notable was his relationship to Bayrock, a real estate development company backed with Russian money and linked to bribery, racketeering, money laundering, and the Russian mob.
Trump’s direct relationship with Vladmir Putin is more opaque. At different times Trump has claimed he has spoken with Putin, and that he has never spoken with Putin; that he has met Putin, and that he has never met Putin; that he has a relationship with Putin and that he has “no relationship” with Putin.
The ties between Trump’s immediate circle and Moscow are far easier to track. His closest advisers like Paul Manafort, Gen. Michael Flynn, Carter Page, and Richard Burt, have all maintained tight personal and business connections to the Kremlin and Russian oligarchs; or, in the case of his secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson, with Vladimir Putin himself. All of them, like Trump, have consistently chosen Russia’s side over America’s in any foreign policy dispute.
Evidence of Russian efforts to interfere with the U.S. election in support of Trump are equally clear. More than a dozen U.S. intelligence agencies, several private Internet security companies, and numerous allied governments have all concluded that Russian hackers attacked the Clinton Foundation and the Democratic Party, and then carefully leaked emails to improve Trump’s electoral odds. It is worth noting that the Republican Party was also hacked, but the Russians did not leak those emails, and instead kept them for possible future use.
There are even more dramatic, albeit as yet unsubstantiated, reports circulating that claim the Kremlin has kompromat (blackmail material) on Trump; that they have been in regular contact with his team throughout the election; and that Trump’s people have even passed confidential information back to Moscow in return for continued support. These claims, as outlandish as they sound, are credible enough that the FBI felt it was necessary to share them with President Obama and president-elect Trump in recent intelligence briefings.
Which brings us to: Why? Why would Moscow take such a dangerous and unprecedented risk by meddling in an American election? Because Russia is weak. Its economy has collapsed; its GDP is now smaller than Canada’s. A country that once led the world in science now trails Ireland in number of patent grants. Life expectancy has fallen nine years behind America’s. Recent victories in Ukraine and Syria belie a military so worn out its only aircraft carrier has to be accompanied by a salvage tug. This is a country that simply cannot compete in the liberal democratic world order, therefore it is seeking to change the rules by discrediting democracy, weakening the Western alliance, and undermining the global leadership role of the United States—three things deftly accomplished by interfering in the election.
And in choosing to back this particular dark horse, the Russians earned a further bonus: Trump is the most slavishly pro-Russian Western leader since the end of the Second World War. Throughout the campaign, even when it was to his political disadvantage, he never wavered from praising Putin and defending his policies, including the bombing campaign in Syria and the invasion of Ukraine. In fact, once nominated, the only change Trump made to the Republican Party platform was to remove a promise to support Ukraine against Russia. He has continually attacked American allies like Germany and the EU, and criticized NATO as “obsolete.” And if the only thing Trump does is drop the Russian sanctions, as he has suggested he may, that alone would more than justify Moscow’s risk. Everything else is just icing on the cake.
So is Donald Trump a Kremlin agent? We may be ankle-deep in Russian rumours, but it’s still too incredible to conclude he’s a spy. It is more likely Trump is simply a victim of circumstances: feeling exposed by cheap credit, grainy videos, and election meddling, he now believes it’s in his best interest to be as helpful as possible to his Moscow friends. As others have argued, Trump is probably just a polezni durak: the Kremlin’s useful idiot.
What is absolutely certain, however, is that if Trump were a cabinet nominee (and not a cabinet nominator) his many Kremlin connections, conflicts, and compromises would make it impossible for him to obtain a security clearance. That fact alone makes him dangerously unfit for office, regardless of everything else.ion Color Brilliance™ Semi-Permanent Brights are hi-fashion hair color shades designed to give vivid, boldly intense results. In 20 to 40 minutes ion Color Brilliance™ Brights deposits color on pre-bleached natural or color treated hair. ion Color Brilliance™ Brights can be applied to pre-lightened hair and natural or colored hair.
ion Color Brilliance Semi-Permanent Brights Hair Color can be applied two different ways.
1. For the most vibrant result apply to pre-lightened hair. Pre-lighten with Ion Color Brilliance Ammonia Free Powder Lightener (not included) to the desired level of lift. It is important to note that the degree of lift achieved with pre-lightening will directly affect the vibrancy and intensity of the final result. Underlying exposed contributing pigment must be taken into consideration. If the hair is orange or a dark yellow this will contribute to the final color.
To achieve a boldly intense brights color, pre-lighten to the level indicated in the table below for each specific color. After pre-lightening, shampoo with ion Color Defense Shampoo. Dry the hair. Apply chosen brights shade directly on dry hair and process for 20 to 40 minutes depending on the level of color intensity desired. Strand test every 5-10 minutes. Heat is not necessary for processing if the hair has been pre-lightened. After processing, thoroughly rinse and apply ion® Color Brilliance After Color Treatment to close the cuticle and lock the color deep inside the hair.
2. Color shine overlays on natural or color treated hair. Apply brights directly onto natural or color treated dry hair and process for 20 to 40 minutes. For more intense vibrant results, cover the hair with a processing cap and process with heat. Strand test every 5-10 minutes.
After processing is completed, thoroughly rinse and apply ion Color Brilliance After Color Treatment to close the cuticle and lock color deep inside the hair.Image caption Banks say the changes could mean more expensive credit cards
Plans to cut transaction fees on debit and credit cards in the European Union have been published - but there is disagreement over the potential impact.
The European Commission estimates that the EU payment market is worth 130bn euros (£112bn) but is "fragmented and expensive".
It wants to cap "interchange fees" to a maximum of 0.3% of a transaction.
The fees involved are paid by shops and businesses to banks, every time a consumer uses his or her card.
Retailers say customers could ultimately benefit from lower prices in the shops as a result of the proposals, which could take years to implement.
But banks argue that consumers will instead end up paying higher charges to use debit and credit cards.
Cap on fees
Shops and businesses pay different interchange rates to the banks, depending on the size of the retailer, and whether the customer has used a debit card or a credit card.
On average, debit card transactions cost the retailer 9p each, or about 0.2% of the bill.
Credit card transactions typically cost much more, at around 0.9%.
[This will] finally put an end to the unjustified high level of these fees Joaquín Almunia, Vice President, European Commission
Under the plans, debit card interchange fees would be capped at 0.2%, and credit card fees at 0.3%.
In other words, many debit card fees would not be affected by the changes, but charges for credit cards would, on average, be reduced by two-thirds.
In the first instance, these caps would only be applied to cross-border transactions, such as a UK resident making a purchase elsewhere in the EU.
But the caps could later be applied within each of the member states.
"The proposed changes to interchange fees will remove an important barrier between national payment markets and finally put an end to the unjustified high level of these fees," said EU Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier.
European Commission competition chief Joaquin Almunia said: "The interchange fees paid by retailers end up on consumers' bills. Not only are consumers generally unaware of this, they are even encouraged through reward systems to use the cards that provide their banks with the highest revenues."
Warning
The British Retail Consortium, which represents shopkeepers in the UK, has welcomed the plan, arguing that if retailers pay lower fees, they can pass those savings on to customers.
But the banks argue that the present fees accurately reflect the costs of processing the transactions involved.
If the plans are approved, they warn that consumers will end up paying more for the cards themselves.
For debit cards, they say consumers might have to pay an extra £11 a year. Credit cards, they say, could cost an extra £25 a year.
The proposals are part of a series of measures aimed at tightening up the payments market across the EU.Cache: (noun) \ˈkăsh\
1. a hiding place especially for concealing and preserving provisions or implements
2. a secure place of storage
Introducing The Cache Belt by Wazoo
The Cache Belt is the world's most functional travel and adventure belt. It's versatile enough to take you from the boardroom to the backwoods of Borneo and combines the highest grade components with a sleek, goes-with-anything look. Best of all, it features a velcro enclosure over two feet long that's fully customizable. From carrying some extra Euros on the streets of Amsterdam, to packing a compass and signaling mirror up a volcano in Nicaragua, we've tested this belt all around the world and we're confident you'll agree: this is the ultimate everyday and travel accessory.
**NOTE** Please check your local laws and regulations to ensure that none of the items included are prohibited in your location. It was brought to our attention that some countries may have regulations against hidden or ceramic blades.
Neat, organized, and packaged in easy-to-open tubes that are made to hold up to whatever elements you throw at them!
The large top-loading pocket allows customization with a variety of everyday and emergency gear to be stowed.
Gear loops can anchor large items outside the belt (like keys), or act as a dummy cord for small items inside the belt you don't want to drop or lose.
CACHE CAP - You didn’t think we were just going to make a hat and put our name on the outside, did you? This cap has 6, count 'em, SIX hidden pockets. This allows you to store items in your hat. Of course, we suggest emergency items but it fits keys, cards, seasoning packets, instant coffee, and anything else you might consider a necessity.
Dani Beau 2-time Naked & Afraid star wearing the Cache Cap
NOTE: This is an example of our Burnable Business Cards but this is not currently included in the Kickstarter Pledges. It's a reference to further explain the card we mention for the GIFT ON THE WAY Add-On.
COBRA BUCKLE (+$45) - Upgrade your standard cam-style buckle to an extremely heavy-duty, load-rated buckle with built-in D-Ring (yeah, that's a lot of hyphens). This is likely going to require a custom run with the slide end sized to accommodate our specific webbing. This custom run will require us to extend the delivery dates into March to allow for production time.
These buckles will not be interchangeable since they are sewn directly onto the belt. This reinforced stitching also requires extra time on the machine and a skilled hand to ensure it's done properly. The price may seem significant for an upgrade, but the people that get it understand. Keep in mind this buckle has no location to store the signal mirror for the Adventure level backers.
Our goal is to save lives. We strive to offer the highest quality, most practical survival kits on the market. We hide survival kits inside everyday items so you have them with you at all times. After all, a survival kit doesn't do you any good if you don't have it with you!
Please note that according to Kickstarter guidelines, we cannot use this crowdfunding project to raise funds for charity but we will continue to support these organizations outside of Kickstarter. To learn more about some of these great organizations, check out National Association for Search And Rescue (NASAR). They provide training, certifications, scholarships, and standards for SAR groups across the country.
This is our first ever Kickstarter project and this belt has been years in the making. It means a lot to us that you came to check out our project and made it this far down the list. Thank you so much for supporting the project to bring the Cache Belt to life. We're excited to get these shipped out as soon as we can and we look forward to seeing where you adventure with yours!
Press and Media, click here for all your Cache Belt needs:
Get Your Project Funded Today!It is happening more and more. T.S.A. screeners at the airport, in addition to finding hidden bottles of shampoo, are finding guns that passengers “forgot.” It is “a vivid indication of the normalization of casual gun-ownership,” said the New York Times this week. “Airports in states with lax gun laws tend to have the highest incidence of firearms at checkpoints.”
Last year, a Littlestown man on his way to Music City USA was found to have a loaded gun in his carry-on bag at the Baltimore–Washington International Airport. The wife of rock musician and NRA board member Ted (“Obama is a subhuman mongrel”) Nugent was caught with a gun in her carry-on luggage at the Dallas airport. At the Bismarck airport, also last year, a Utah man was trying to disarm his gun so he could check it onto a plane when it went off. Oops. Both a pastor and a Chicago lawmaker have recently “forgotten” they were carrying lethal weapons which were found by airport screeners when they tried to board planes.
Rules around flying with guns are clear. Travelers may only transport unloaded firearms in a locked, hard-sided container or as checked baggage. All firearms, ammunition and firearm parts, including firearm frames and receivers, are prohibited in carry-on baggage. Which part of this do gun lovers fail to understand?
It is easy to see why gun carriers at the airport would be inclined to make the same mistake again. Nothing happens to them. Unlike a drunk driver who can lose his license and face jail time, gun owners are not licensed to begin with so there is no license to lose. Let’s enforce existing laws!
Passengers caught with guns as they try to board airplanes are subject to state law and in most states their gun is returned and they are told to put it in their car before boarding. Ouch. While police may confiscate the weapon and make an arrest, they usually let the passenger with a lethal weapon he”forgot” proceed on his way. Gun carriers will, after all, be gun carriers.
Even if the carrier has no criminal intent, guns go off accidentally and can kill passengers and crew members. They can cause structural damage and, in certain cases, go through the plane’s fuselage causing everyone to be ejected from the plane due to explosive decompression. Like the open and concealed carriers, we are all threatened when gun enthusiasts, fueled by the gun lobby’s “guns everywhere” movement, pack weapons.
Why isn’t bringing a gun into the security zone of an airport a felony? Because lawmakers ignore the 90 percent of the nation that does not want to live in an armed camp in favor of belligerent and threatening “gun advocates” who use extortion and mob-like tactics to get their way.
As long as the law continues to smile on gun carriers who treat their lethal weapons like cell phones, these “forgetful incidents” will keep occurring.
Boycott Hallmark cards which refuses to publicly support universal background checks. Send instead these free, custom-designed SHATTERED HEART™ cards.
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Tags: domestic abuse, secession, The Truth about GunsThe R&D Prototyping team has recently built an internal prototype for BBC Vision called the Mythology Engine. It's a proof-of-concept for a website that represents BBC drama on the web letting you explore our dramas, catch up on story-lines, discover new characters and share what you find.
Most TV drama on the web is either deep and detailed fan-produced sites or visually rich but shallow sites from the broadcasters. We believe there is a middle way and it seems like there's a space for something here. Something that expresses the richness and depth of the stories that the BBC creates. Somewhere that will be the default place to find out about our stories and somewhere that people will link to and share with their friends. So we built a prototype based around the stories of Doctor Who. Theo Jones, Creative Director for Prototyping talks us through the prototype in this video:
In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.
That's a taste of what this prototype can do. Like I said, it's a proof-of-concept that we're using within the BBC and we're not planning on launching it. That said, do tell us in the comments if you like the idea. We are using Doctor Who as an example because it is a high-profile brand with a large archive and is particularly narratively complex in places - time travel is hard! The rest of this post will look a bit deeper into the project and talk about some of the thinking behind the prototype and the process used to build it.
What should it do?
Our objectives for this project were to build something that would demonstrate how you could express stories in a form tailored for the web, to show how this would allow people to explore BBC dramas and unlock the archive, and to create a reusable framework that could apply to all dramas and stories. The prototype should let you:
Catch up on stories you've missed
Explore stories and characters and help you understand plots and relationships
Find the stories you are looking for and share your favourite moments or characters
Luckily there is some previous work to look to in this area. Several years ago the BBC looked at representing Eastenders in RDF, my Radio Labs team built a prototype for a similar concept around the Archers a couple of years ago and Paul Rissen, one of our information architects has done a lot of thinking about narrative on the web as have various academic projects like Ontomedia.
Because there are always issues around the rights of distribution of programmes we designed it to work with and without short video clips, as these seemed relatively realistic to have. There is no long form video in the prototype for this reason, and also because it's not designed as a replacement for iPlayer. It should be complimentary to existing BBC sites.
One way of thinking about this that I've found helpful is to imagine the story existing in the writer's head before the scriptwriting and production creates the broadcast programme. The viewer then watches this, understands it and reconstructs the story. The Mythology Engine is designed to assist in this process; to let the audience explore complex plots or catch up on episodes they missed or stories they remember.
Modelling stories
By designing the Mythology Engine to take advantage of architecture of the web with unique pages per concept and interconnecting links everywhere, we increase the findability and sharability of our content. To do this we used a domain-driven modelling approach and this is a simplified version of our data model.
A story can actually be several things; a single episode (like most current Doctor Who) or a multi-episode story (like classic Doctor Who) or a long-term, ongoing story arc (like Bad Wolf arc). Stories are then collections of events, where an event is a specifically chosen, significant thing that happens in a story. This could be anything, but the important thing is that it is editorially chosen to tell the story. And then, pretty obviously, events occur in places and feature characters, who have relationships between each other and can belong to groups. And there are things, a catch-all term for everything else that might affect the plot - the murder weapon, a sonic screwdriver, things like that.
This picture shows how the story concept in our model maps back onto a programme as it appears on TV or radio. The story, consisting of events, is represented as scenes in the programme. Often an event will correspond exactly with a single scene in a programme, or maybe a scene will portray more than one event. And sometimes an event can be portrayed in several scenes, maybe to build tension or to show it from different characters' perspectives. And events might not even occur in the "correct" chronological order within the programme, it's all about telling the story and building suspense and that's what the prototype needs to support.
Building it
The site was built in Rails, principally by Duncan Robertson, assisted by Chris Bowley for the Flash visualisations. It uses a simple Rails-based Content Management System called Typus with some small customisations to the interface to enter data. Our approach to building prototypes is agile and iterative so we modelled the data, got running code as soon as possible and then did some ad-hoc user testing with some colleagues. The main feedback from this was that we should make stories and time more obvious, have more clarity around your current context in the page and the site, try to increase the interlinking and to focus on the quality of content.
Craft your data
We think this last one is particularly important. Having the model is not enough, you also need to bring to life the things and the connections between the things in a compelling way. So for this project we hired a freelance Doctor Who writer and he created all the data and relationships and wrote all the descriptions that are in the prototype; five whole stories (some classic and some contemporary), a couple of story arcs and about forty characters and thirty places.
Representing time
In the story "Blink" there is lots of time-travel. Whenever a character is touched by one of the statues they are thrown back in time. We model all of this as ordered events with timestamps so you can imagine there are various timelines that we could present - how things happened in linear time (i.e. earliest first), how things happened from a character's perspective or how the story was presented on screen. In the end we decided to show the timeline as it was presented on screen, which makes it relatively straightforward and is what the storytellers intended.
You can see how it jumps between the present day, 1920 and 1967.
It's not just Doctor Who
Having completed the Who prototype we wanted to show that the framework was re-usable for another drama. So we re-deployed the code to a new server, wiped the database and set up an Eastenders Mythology Engine in a couple of days, reskinning it and creating a small number of stories and characters. There are some things we would have done differently if we'd started with Eastenders. We would have concentrated less on timelines and more on relationships and characters, but ultimately we think it works across the brands.
What next?
We think this is a really exciting concept, the prototype is done, and hopefully we've contributed some original thinking along the way. Having built the Mythology Engine there are several interesting research projects that we've been thinking about:But the most visible human drama of climate change is happening in cities. Cities are not merely the population centers where dense concentrations of people are trapped and exposed during dangerous weather events. They are also “heat islands,” whose asphalt, brick, concrete and steel attract the heat while pollution from automobiles, factories and air-conditioners traps it. City dwellers experience elevated heat at all hours, but the difference matters most at night, when the failure of high temperatures to fall deprives them of natural relief. For the most vulnerable people, these “high lows” can be the difference between life and death.
Americans began to take urban heat seriously after 1995, when a record-breaking heat wave — three days of triple-digit heat — baked Chicago. Ordinarily, heat waves fail to produce the kind of spectacular imagery we see in other disasters, like earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes and floods. Heat doesn’t generate much property damage, nor does it reveal its force to the camera or naked eye. Heat waves are invisible killers of old, poor and other mostly invisible people. Until the summer of 1995, medical examiners and media outlets often neglected to report heat-related deaths altogether.
But the great Chicago heat wave changed things. It caused so much suffering that at one point nearly half the city’s emergency rooms closed their doors to new patients. Hospitals were not the only institutions stretched beyond capacity by the heat. Streets buckled. Trains derailed. The power grid failed. Water pressure diminished. Ambulances were delayed.
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There were “water wars” in poor neighborhoods, where city workers cracked down on residents who opened fire hydrants for relief. There were surreal scenes at City Hall, where members of the mayor’s staff declined to declare a heat emergency, forgot to implement their extreme heat plan and refused to bring in additional ambulances and paramedics.
And there was Mayor Richard M. Daley, telling reporters: “It’s hot. It’s very hot. But let’s not blow it out of proportion,” while the morgue ran out of bays and the medical examiner had to call in a fleet of refrigerated trucks to handle the load. When the temperatures finally broke, 739 Chicagoans had died as a result of the heat wave.
Chicago learned from the disaster, and today it is a national leader in planning for the next acute heat emergency. The city compiles a list of old, isolated and vulnerable residents, and public workers contact them when dangerous weather arrives. City officials and community organizations promote awareness and encourage residents to check in on one another. The local news media treat heat waves as true public health hazards. Everyone knows how perilous the new climate can be.
Unfortunately, Chicago keeps getting reminders. In the early July heat wave, despite its improved emergency response system, Chicago reported more heat deaths than any other city or state. And this week the Union of Concerned Scientists released “Heat in the Heartland,” a study that reports an increased incidence of dangerous hot weather throughout the Midwest in the past 60 years, including elevated evening temperatures and more heat waves lasting three days or longer. Along with Chicago, the report singles out St. Louis, Detroit, Minneapolis and Cincinnati as being at risk, but also cites public health research predicting more heat waves in towns and cities throughout the Midwest and Northeast.
There are likely to be more such reports this summer, like a recent Environment America Research and Policy Center study finding more extreme downpours as a result of global warming. If a particularly strong hurricane hits, climatologists will once again explain that rising sea levels increase the likelihood of more, and more severe, storms, and perhaps even more Americans will begin believing in climate change. Then again, in our event-driven culture, a cold winter may well reverse the trend.
Americans’ growing concerns about global warming will mean nothing if our national leaders are unwilling to seize the moment and do something about it. No city wants to be the next Chicago, and no urban government should go without the kind of acute-heat emergency plan that Chicago has today. But the question that may determine the life and death of future generations is whether we will face up to the larger heat emergency before the political climate changes once again.Canadian denim brand Naked & Famous is already known for using some of the most unique and rare denim fabrics from Japan for its jeans. But this season, it's introducing a new line simply titled Naked & Famous Denim MIJ (Made in Japan).
The jeans are crafted from 15.7oz Loomstate Japanese Selvedge Denim, which is made in a small studio mill that produces only small batch artisanal denim. To preserve the natural beauty of the fabric, there are no additional mechanical finishing processes used on the material. Only a special Tempi wash treatment is applied to preshrink the fabric, resulting in a naturally ridged, untreated pair of denim with impeccable fit that only gets better with wear. Extra design details include 100 percent iron buttons, copper rivets, hidden back pocket rivets, raised belt loops, union special chain stitched hems, and natural vegetable tanned leather patch. There is also a small stitched maple leaf on the back pocket, which is a nod to Naked & Famous' Canadian heritage and a tribute brands like Real Japan Blues and its cutlass pocket embroidery.
The artwork and logos for the new line are by famed comic book artist Alvin Lee. Known for his work with various comic book and video game studios including Marvel, DC Comics, and Capcom, Lee has reimagined the original Naked & Famous Denim tragic blond logo in new manga style reflective of the line's Japanese influences.
POST CONTINUES BELOW
Naked & Famous Denim MIJ is avaiable at select Naked & Famous stockists around the world including Tate + Yoko in Montreal, Blue Owl Workshop in Seattle, and Lizard Lounge in Portland now.
The Cape Kiwanda sandstone pedestal, a beloved formation on the Oregon Coast, appears to have been toppled intentionally in a video captured by another visitor.
Warning: The video that accompanies this post contains explicit language.
David Kalas of Hillsboro said he was nearby with two friends on Monday evening when he saw another group of people he didn't know trying to topple the pedestal.
"I kind of laughed to myself," Kalas said. "I thought there was no way that they could knock it down, but then I noticed that it started wobbling."
That's when Kalas said he started filming. After the pedestal fell over, Kalas said he and his friends confronted the group. They told him they knocked it over because a friend had broken their leg on it, calling it a "safety hazard," Kalas said.
Reports spread this week that the sandstone pedestal, popular among visitors who often climbed it for pictures, had collapsed. It was located in a part of Cape Kiwanda State Natural Area that is technically off-limits after six people died on the nearby cliffs over the last two years.
The collapsed sandstone pedestal at Cape Kiwanda on the Oregon coast.
Park official told the Salem Statesman Journal they didn't believe it was knocked over intentionally. Kalas said he wanted to report what he saw to authorities but didn't know how to contact them.
"At the time, I didn't know how big of a deal it was," he said.
Park officials did not immediately return an inquiry Sunday evening.
It's not clear whether toppling the formation would be a crime. The incident is reminiscent of one in which two former Boy Scout leaders intentionally toppled a formation in Utah's Goblin
|
profiling has been documented in Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, South Africa, Germany, Canada, Ireland, Malaysia, Russia, Zimbabwe, and the Netherlands.[2][11]
Surveys of police officers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada have found an overwhelming majority consider profiling to be useful.[2] A 2007 meta-analysis of existing research into offender profiling noted that there was "a notable incongruity between [profiling's] lack of empirical foundation and the degree of support for the field."[3]
Profiling's continued popularity has been speculatively attributed to broad use of anecdotes and testimonials, a focus on correct predictions over the number of incorrect ones, ambiguous profiles benefiting from the Barnum effect, and the popular appeal of the fantasy of a sleuth with deductive powers like Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes.[11]
Notable profilers [ edit ]
Notable profilers include Roy Hazelwood, Ernst Gennat, Walter C. Langer, James Brussel, Howard Teten, Robert Keppel, Richard Walter, John Douglas, Robert Ressler, and David Canter.
Research [ edit ]
In a review of the literature by Eastwood et al. (2006),[2] one of the studies noted, Pinizzotto and Finkel (1990),[30] showed that trained criminal profilers did not do any better than non-profilers in producing an accurate profile. A 2000 study also showed that profilers were not significantly better at creating a profile than any other participating groups.[31]
A survey of statements made in offender profiles done for major cases from 1992 to 2001 found that "72% included repetition of the details of what occurred in the offence (factual statements already known by the police), references to the profiler’s competence [...] or caveats about using the material in the investigation." Over 80% of the remaining statements, which made claims about the offender's characteristics, gave no justification for their conclusion.[32]
A 2003 study which asked two different groups of police to rate how accurately a profile matched a description of the apprehended offender, with one group given a description of a completely fabricated offender instead of the real one, found that the profile was rated equally accurate in both cases.[33][4]
There is a lack of clear, quantifiable evidence of a link between crime scene actions (A) and offender characteristics (C), a necessary supposition of the A to C paradigm proposed by Canter (1995).[34][35] A 2002 review by Alison et al. concluded, "The notion that particular configurations of demographic features can be predicted from an assessment of particular configurations of specific behaviors occurring in short-term, highly traumatic situations seems an overly ambitious and unlikely possibility. Thus, until such inferential processes can be reliably verified, such claims should be treated with great caution in investigations and should be entirely excluded from consideration in court."[10]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Cited works and further reading [ edit ]Fifteen people have been arrested across seven European countries “who are suspected of using remote access trojans (RATs) to commit cybercrimes,” Europol said in a statement on Thursday.
The people were apprehended in Estonia, France, Romania, Latvia, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Norway.
The National Crime Agency (NCA), a rough British equivalent to the FBI, lead a sting operation resulting in the arrests of five (out of the 15 total) across the United Kingdom. In May 2014, over 100 people were arrested as part of a similar worldwide sting operation.
As Ars has reported for years, RATs have been used to spy on Android phones, and individual PCs. They are often used to hijack women’s computers, which are then used to blackmail them into providing lewd videos or pictures of themselves.
“The illegal use of Remote Access Trojans is a significant cyber crime threat, demanding this kind of strong, coordinated response from international to local UK level,” Andy Archibald, deputy director of the NCA’s National Cyber Crime Unit, said in a statement on Friday. “Suspected users of RATs are continuing to find that, despite having no physical contact or interaction with their victims, they can still be identified, tracked down and arrested by the NCA and its partners.”Image copyright AP Image caption Mustafa Amine Badreddine's brother Adnan (L) paid his tribute in southern Beirut
The man believed to be Hezbollah's most senior military commander in Syria's war has been killed in Damascus.
Mustafa Amine Badreddine died in a large explosion near Damascus airport, the Lebanon-based militant group said in a statement on its al-Manar website.
Hezbollah supports Syria's President Bashar al-Assad and has sent thousands of fighters into Syria.
In 2015, the US said that Badreddine was behind all Hezbollah's military operations in Syria since 2011.
The US treasury, which imposed sanctions on Badreddine last July, said at the time he was behind the movement of Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon to Syria, and was in charge of the key battle for the town of al-Qusair in 2013.
Obituary: Mustafa Badreddine
Profile: Lebanon's Hezbollah
Who stands accused of Hariri killing?
Badreddine was also charged with leading the assassination of former Lebanese PM Rafik Hariri in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, in 2005.
The funeral for Badreddine is scheduled for Friday afternoon south of Beirut.
Death near Aleppo?
An initial report by Lebanon's al-Mayadeen TV said that Badreddine, 55, died in an Israeli air strike. But a later statement by Hezbollah on al-Manar's website did not mention Israel.
Israeli media reported that the government refused to comment on whether it was involved in Badreddine's death.
Israel has been accused by Hezbollah of killing a number of its fighters in Syria since the conflict began.
The group was established in the wake of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in the early 1980s, and has called for the "obliteration" of Israel.
Image caption Mourners have gathered in Beirut to await the arrival of Badreddine's coffin
Image copyright AFP/Hezbollah media office Image caption Mustafa Amine Badreddine has been involved in Hezbollah military operations for years
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Badreddine was on a US sanctions list
A number of Twitter accounts supporting Syrian rebel groups and the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front say Badreddine was killed in a battle in Khan Touman, southern Aleppo, rather than in Damascus.
Khan Touman was captured by a coalition of groups including al-Nusra Front last week and has been subject to heavy shelling in recent days.
No official sources have commented on the reports.
Born in 1961, Badreddine is believed to have been a senior figure in Hezbollah's military wing. He was a cousin and brother-in-law of Imad Mughniyeh, who was the military wing's chief until his assassination by car bomb in Damascus in 2008.
According to one report, a Hezbollah member interrogated by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), described Badreddine as "more dangerous" than Mughniyeh, who was "his teacher in terrorism".
They are alleged to have worked together on the October 1983 bombing of the US Marine Corps and French army barracks in Beirut that killed 305 people.
Badreddine is reported to have sat on Hezbollah's Shura Council and served as an adviser to the group's overall leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Image copyright AP Image caption Former Lebanese PM Rafik Hariri was killed in a huge explosion in Beirut in February 2005
Badreddine was tried in absentia by the ongoing Special Tribunal for Lebanon, in The Hague, over the killing of Mr Hariri.
He was indicted on four charges and was said by the tribunal to be "the overall controller of the operation" to kill Mr Hariri.
Three other Hezbollah members also stand accused of their role in the assassination.
The indictment also details Badreddine's role in bombings in Kuwait in 1983, that targeted the French and US embassies and other facilities, and killed six people.
He was sentenced to death over the attacks, but later escaped from prison.
Key questions
What is Hezbollah doing in Syria?
The Lebanese Shia Islamist movement has played a major role in helping Iran, its main military and financial backer, to prop up the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad since the uprising erupted in 2011.
Thousands of Hezbollah fighters are assisting government forces on battlefields across Syria, particularly those near the Lebanese border, and hundreds are believed to have been killed.
Who could have killed Mustafa Badreddine?
Any of the armed groups seeking to overthrow Mr Assad might have sought to kill the man co-ordinating Hezbollah military activities. However, suspicion is likely to fall on Israel, which fought a war against Hezbollah in 2006.
Israel has been accused of killing several of the group's leaders over the years, although it has never officially confirmed its involvement.
Hezbollah military chief Imad Mughniyeh was killed in a car bombing in Damascus in 2008 that US intelligence officials said last year was a joint operation by the CIA and Israel's Mossad spy agency.
In January 2015, a suspected Israeli air strike in the Syrian Golan Heights killed six Hezbollah fighters, including Mughniyeh's son Jihad, and an Iranian Revolutionary Guards general.
And in December, Hezbollah said one of its senior figures, Samir Qantar, was killed when missiles fired by Israeli jets struck a block of flats in Damascus.
Israel has also reportedly conducted air strikes aimed at preventing advanced weapons shipments from Iran from reaching Hezbollah via Syria.
Update 23 May, 2016: The death toll in the 1983 Beirut bombings has been amended to include all the fatalities.I am an anarchist and a government employee. Due to my economic circumstances, I have been forced to accept the only job that will provide me a sufficient opportunity to get my family out of the rapidly deteriorating condition we find ourselves in. My wife and our children are stuck in a Mexican border town that is plagued by the violence of the war on drugs, at least until we can obtain the necessary visas and funds to move to a place that puts us out of harm’s way. It was with their welfare in mind that I reluctantly applied for a job with the U.S. Census Bureau.
My wife and her son from a previous marriage are Mexican nationals. When we married, I had no idea how difficult it would be to obtain authorization for them to immigrate. Our ongoing struggle to meet all of the requirements of the Federal government is a story to be told at another time. That entire process was expensive, time-consuming, and frustrating.
I lost my last job about a year-and-a-half ago. Since then, I have been doing temporary work while attempting to find more gainful employment. It's hard to suppress the panic that comes with the knowledge that my savings have been completely depleted and the people who depend on me have no other means of support. It was with this in mind that I agreed to take the test for census takers in early December at the employment office near my parent's home in the American Deep South.
I was searching through job listings at an Internet terminal when I was approached by a friendly, well-dressed black woman who informed me that she was proctoring pre-employment tests for the census bureau that afternoon. She said I was welcome to take the test. I took it and did well. She said that I could expect to hear back from her in a couple of weeks. More than two months later, I got a phone message asking me to call in for a phone interview. When I called in, I was apologetically told that my application had been lost. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The census bureau, whose only job is to collect and organize information about people, had lost my application AFTER they had called me and asked for an interview!
My application was eventually found and I was called back, but my relief at that development ended when I heard the interview questions. Did I mind asking complete strangers personal questions? Would I object to using misleading tactics in order to obtain information? Would I agree to use subtle, veiled threats if that became necessary to gather the data? Of course the questions weren't worded exactly that way, but it was obvious what they were really asking.
Thus I was faced with a dilemma. Either I would agree to be a part of this evil, fourth amendment-violating organization, or I would risk letting my family perish in the volcano of violence erupting in northern Mexico. I report for work next week.
In an attempt to at least partially atone for the deal I have made with the devil, I intend to fully document all of the evil I will participate in as a census taker. If the incompetence and malevolence I experience in the future is anywhere near as disturbing as I suspect, it should make for interesting reading.
March 4, 2009
The Best of Mr. XROS 2
The Robot Operating System (ROS) is an open-source, meta-operating system for your robot maintained by the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF). It provides the services you would expect from an operating system, including hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management. It also provides tools and libraries for obtaining, building, writing, and running code across multiple computers. A ROS system is comprised of a number of independent nodes, each of which communicates with the other nodes using a publish/subscribe messaging model.
As mentioned by the OSRF team in this article:
ROS was born back in November 2007 to provide the software tools that users would need to undertake novel research and development projects with a humanoid-like robot, the PR2.
Much has happened since and many situations, initially not covered by the framework, have demanded a solution. ROS 2 address some of these limitations putting specific effort into the following robotic problems:
Teams of multiple robots
Small embedded and deep embedded platforms either microcontroller or microprocessor-based.
Real-time systems
Non-ideal networks
Production environments
Prescribed patterns for building and structuring systems
The Robot Operating System (ROS) 2 will define the next decade of robotics so read up!
+-----------------------------------------------+ | user land | +-----------------------------------------------+ | ROS 2 client library (rcl) | +-----------------------------------------------+ | middleware interface (rmw) | +-----------------------------------------------+ | DDS adapter 1 | DDS adapter 2 | DDS adapter 3 | +---------------+---------------+---------------+ | DDS impl 1 | DDS impl 2 | DDS impl 3 | +---------------+---------------+---------------+BOSTON (CBS/AP) — A 9-alarm fire on Beacon Street has claimed the lives of two Boston firefighters. The fire broke out around 2:30 p.m. at 298 Beacon Street.
The firefighters who died have been identified as 43-year-old Lt. Ed Walsh and 33-year-old Firefighter Michael Kennedy of Engine 33. Both firefighters were stationed at 941 Boylston Street.
Lt. Walsh, of West Roxbury, was married and a father of three young children, two boys and one girl. He has been with the Boston Fire Department for nine and a half years.
Firefighter Michael Kennedy, of Hyde Park, is a Marine veteran and has been with the Boston Fire Department for six years.
“Today is a sad day in the city of Boston,” Mayor Walsh said Wednesday night. “We lost two heroes here today. It makes me proud to be the mayor of the city of Boston watching the way the men and women of the Boston Fire Department worked today.”
Thirteen other firefighters were injured. Several of the patients were taken to Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General Hospital. Beth Israel Hospital tells WBZ they are caring for seven patients, six of those patients are listed in “good” condition and one in “fair.”
Watch: Engine 33 Escorts Lt. Walsh
Deputy Chief Joseph Finn says firefighters rescued several people who were trapped on the top floors, and high winds made the fire difficult to fight. “In 30 years I have never seen a fire travel that fast, escalate that quickly and create such havoc in such a short period of time,” Finn said.
The building is a 4-story brownstone and the fire is believed to have started in the basement and extended up through the building. No residents of the building have been reported missing, according to authorities.
Finn said Walsh and Kennedy had gone down inside stairs into the basement, and he assumed that a front window broke out and blew the fire back at them. They called a mayday within two or three minutes of entering the building. Kennedy was found about 30 minutes later and was pulled from the building but was pronounced dead at a hospital. Walsh’s body was recovered later.
Some of the other firefighters were injured when they were blown down stairs by a backdraft explosion caused by the wind, Finn said.
Photos: 9-Alarm Fire In Boston’s Back Bay
“My heart and my condolences go out to the families of the firefighters lost in the line of duty today, as well as to the entire Boston Fire Department,” Governor Deval Patrick said in a statement. “This terrible tragedy reinforces how we must be grateful every single day for the brave men and women who put themselves in danger day in and day out to keep us safe.”
A memorial was growing outside Engine 33 on Boylston Street Wednesday night. Dozens of members of the International Association of Firefighters, who just happened to be in town for a conference, held a moment of silence outside the station.
WBZ-TV’s Bobby Sisk reports
Firefighters were still at the scene of the Beacon Street fire late Wednesday night. The building, which is assessed at $1,628,500, is a total loss.
The Suffolk County District Attorney’s office is investigating the fire.
(TM and © Copyright 2014 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2014 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
MORE LOCAL NEWS FROM CBS BOSTONManti Te’o is helped up after suffering the non-contact injury. (Jeff Roberson/AP)
In the latest blow to the San Diego Chargers, Manti Te’o will miss the rest of the season after tearing his Achilles’ tendon in the team’s loss Sunday in Indianapolis.
The inside linebacker, who went down with a non-contact injury in the first quarter, said he felt a pop. He grabbed his lower left leg and was helped off the field, relegated to watching the rest of the game on crutches with his foot immobilized in a boot.
Te’o, who became widely known for a catfishing incident involving a fake dead girlfriend while he was at Notre Dame, had risen to become one of the Chargers’ defensive mainstays.
“It was just a big, big year for me,” Te’o told reporters. “I worked extremely hard to give myself a chance. Freak accidents like this, you can’t predict stuff like that. It’s all about moving forward.”
The Chargers now have suffered a season-ending injury in each of their first three games. They lost wide receiver Keenan Allen in the opener and running back Danny Woodhead in Week 2.
“I had so many big dreams for my team,” said Te’o, a 2013 second-round draft pick who is in the final season of his rookie contract. “Just because I am down does not mean that it is over, but I just wish I could be right there with them. I am still going to be there just like I was in the second half, but I am not going to be out there with them, and that is the thing that hurts the most. It is where I am most comfortable. It is where I have the most fun.”Matthew Morrison has been cast on “Grey’s Anatomy.”
ABC confirmed to Variety that the “Glee” alum is joining the medical drama in a guest role. However, the network kept details on his character and storyline under wraps.
Morrison was recently spotted in on-set pictures, which surfaced on a Twitter fan account this past weekend. In the photos, he’s filming with “Grey’s Anatomy” vet Justin Chambers, plus star and director Kevin McKidd. The images depict Morrison and Chambers on a street and near a cab.
Morrison also teased a new gig on his Instagram story, but did not specify the new show. He did say that he’d be playing a character named Dr. Paul Stadler.
“Actors Justin Chambers & Matthew Morrison with director Kevin McKidd on the set of #GreysAnatomy episode 13.23,” wrote one fan account on Saturday, with a picture of the two actors.
Actors Justin Chambers & Matthew Morrison with director Kevin McKidd on the set of #GreysAnatomy episode 13.23 https://t.co/dE0dNKSXko pic.twitter.com/ONSb9oglE1 — JustinChambersOnline (@JChambersOnline) March 25, 2017
“Things we learned today: #GreysAnatomy ep 13.23 has some medical event that Alex & Dr. Paul Stadler played by Matthew Morrison go to,” wrote the same fan account on Friday.
Things we learned today: #GreysAnatomy ep 13.23 has some medical event that Alex & Dr. Paul Stadler played by Matthew Morrison go to. pic.twitter.com/QOJVJlzLBV — JustinChambersOnline (@JChambersOnline) March 25, 2017
Morrison is best known for starring on “Glee” for its entire run, which ended in 2015. He recently had a memorable guest role on TV Land’s “Younger.” He also had an arc on “The Good Wife.” He is repped by CAA.Against all odds, the stodgy old National Portrait Gallery has recently become one of the most interesting, daring institutions in Washington. Its 2009 show on Marcel Duchamp's self-portrayal was important, strange and brave. "Hide/Seek," the show about gay love that it opened in October, was crucial - a first of its kind - and courageous, as well as being full of wonderful art. My review of it was a rave.
Now the NPG, and the Smithsonian Institution it is part of, look set to come off as cowards. Tuesday, after a few hours of pressure from the Catholic League and various conservatives, it decided to remove a video by David Wojnarowicz, a gay artist who died from AIDS-related illness in 1992. As part of "Hide/Seek," the gallery was showing a four-minute excerpt from a 1987 piece titled "A Fire in My Belly," made in honor of Peter Hujar, an artist-colleague and lover of Wojnarowicz who had died of AIDS complications in 1987. And for 11 seconds of that meandering, stream-of-consciousness work (the full version is 30 minutes long) a crucifix appears onscreen with ants crawling on it. It seems such an inconsequential part of the total video that neither I nor anyone I've spoken to who saw the work remembered it at all.
But that is the portion of the video that the Catholic League has decried as "designed to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians," and described as "hate speech" - despite the artist's own hopes that the passage would speak to the suffering of his dead friend. The irony is that Wojnarowicz's reading of his piece puts it smack in the middle of the great tradition of using images of Christ to speak about the suffering of all mankind. There is a long, respectable history of showing hideously grisly images of Jesus - 17th-century sculptures in the National Gallery's recent show of Spanish sacred art could not have been more gory or distressing - and Wojnarowicz's video is nothing more than a relatively tepid reworking of that imagery, in modern terms.
Until Tuesday afternoon, museum staff, under Director Martin E. Sullivan, believed that "Fire" was interesting art that made important points. And now it looks as though they're somehow saying that they were wrong about that, and that it really was unfit to be seen or shown, after all.
If every piece of art that offended some person or some group was removed from a museum, our museums might start looking empty - or would contain nothing more than pabulum. Goya's great nudes? Gone. The Inquisition called them porn.
(TIMELINE: A look back at notable art controversies)
Norman Rockwell would get the boot, too, if I believed in pulling everything that I'm offended by: I can't stand the view of America that he presents, which I feel insults a huge number of us non-mainstream folks. But I didn't call for the Smithsonian American Art Museum to pull the Rockwell show that runs through Jan. 2, just down the hall from "Hide/Seek." Rockwell and his admirers got to have their say, and his detractors, including me, got to rant about how much they hated his art. Censorship would have prevented that discussion, and that's why we don't allow it.
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) has said that taxpayer-funded museums should uphold "common standards of decency." But such "standards" don't exist, and shouldn't, in a pluralist society. My decency is your disgust, and one point of museums, and of contemporary art in general, is to test where lines get drawn and how we might want to rethink them. A great museum is a laboratory where ideas get tested, not a mausoleum full of dead thoughts and bromides.
In America no one group - and certainly no single religion - gets to declare what the rest of us should see and hear and think about. Aren't those kinds of declarations just what extremist imams get up to, in countries with less freedom?
Of course, it's pretty clear that this has almost nothing to do with religion. Eleven seconds of an ant-covered crucifix? Come on.
This fuss is about the larger topic of the show: Gay love, and images of it. The headline that ran over coverage of the matter on the right-wing Web site CNSnews.com mentioned the crucifix - but as only one item in a list of the exhibition's "shockers" that included "naked brothers kissing, genitalia and Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts." (Through a bra, one might note, in an image that's less shocking than many moves by Lady Gaga.) The same site decries "a painting the Smithsonian itself describes in the show's catalog as 'homoerotic'. "
The attack is on gayness, and images of it, more than on sacrilege - even though, last I checked, many states are sanctioning gay love in marriage, and none continue to ban homosexuality.Reports of civilian deaths in US airstrikes against ISIS started pretty much the same day the strikes did, and over a year into the war, the US is accused of killing hundreds of civilians over the course of 71 different incidents.
Monitoring groups have upheld these allegations, but US Central Command is not only continuing its blanket denials, in most cases they say they aren’t even bothering to investigate the claims because they assume them to not be “credible” in the first place.
All told, Centcom has copped to two civilians deaths in a single incident, and published the results of an investigation into only that one incident. They claim to have investigated 10 of the 71, but some are “ongoing” and others wrapped up without any published report.
Centcom insists, perhaps fairly, that they can’t exactly interview witnesses in these strikes, but then goes on to assume that all of the allegations are lies, while bragging about their war being their “most precise ever” on the grounds that they’ve only conceded a couple of civilian deaths.
This is just adding to the questions about Centcom’s “information management” in this war, which has also led to Pentagon investigations about them deliberately altering intelligence reports to make the war sound like it’s going better than it actually is.
Last 5 posts by Jason DitzThe resolving power of the human eye is 0.0003 of a radian or an arc of one minute (1/60th of a degree), which corresponds to 100 microns at 25 cm (10 in). A micron is a thousandth of a millimetre, hence 100 microns is 0.003937, or less than four thousandths of an inch or 2.5 cm. The human eye can, however, detect a bright light source shining through an aperture only 3 to 4 microns across. In October 1972 the University of Stuttgart, then West Germany, reported that their student Veronica Seider (b. 1951) possessed a visual acuity 20 times better than average. She could identify people at a distance of more than a mile (1.6 km).
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Comments below may relate to previous holders of this record.Glen Johnson is close to signing a new contract at Stoke, after Mark Hughes moved to prevent the defender leaving on a free transfer.
Johnson is in advanced talks over a one-year deal and expected to sign in the next few days, despite interest from Premier League rivals West Ham and Crystal Palace.
The England international's current contract expires at the end of this season and his Stoke future had appeared uncertain after he missed an agreed amount of games to trigger new terms.
But Hughes wants to keep the 32-year-old for next season and Stoke are on the verge of agreeing a deal. Signed from Liverpool on a free transfer in 2015, Johnson's wages are understood to be around the £60,000 a week mark.
Stoke are also in talks with defender Phil Bardsley and want to open negotiations with Ryan Shawcross, the captain.
Shawcross has around 14 months remaining on his deal and is understood to be attracting interest from Newcastle, West Brom and Leicester.Australians could soon have a new political party – the Wikileaks Party – if Julian Assange’s bid for official electoral status can enlist 500 members.
"Australian WikiLeaks Party now open for membership," the group tweeted Saturday with a link to its new website.
Assange, the enigmatic founder of the information-sharing collective, is wanted in Sweden to answer to sexual assault allegations. He remains in London, holed up at the Ecuadorian embassy, after that country granted him asylum.
Assange has previously expressed his interest in running for the senate in his native Australia.
His party’s constitution, posted on the site, lists objectives including "the protection of human rights and freedoms; transparency of governmental and corporate action, policy and information."
Assange’s steadfast support for the free flow of information does not extend to would-be party members, who will have to hand over $20 to sign up. The party needs 500 members to be registered with the Australian Electoral Commission.The Mideast As Explained By Ideology: Past, Present, And Future – PART I
by Andrew Korybko
The politics of the Mideast are intimidatingly complex, with many observers struggling to understand its dynamics and instead falling victim to false simplifications of “Sunni vs. Shiite”. The reality is a lot different than surface stereotypes let on, as the region’s processes are actually determined by the interplay between four official ideologies – Israeli Exceptionalism, Secular Republicanism, Islamic Republicanism, and Monarchic Absolutism – which divide themselves into two blocs, the competition of which has resulted in the creation of two ideological subsets (“Islamic Democracy” and Wahhabist Retrogression), three dysfunctional states (Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen), and the exceptional status of Egypt. The selectively inserted disruption of American-imposed Liberal Democracy and its associated influences makes everything all the more chaotic, and it can truly be difficult to decipher what exactly is going on in the Mideast, how it got this way, and where it’s all headed.
To aid in one’s understanding of this topical but tough matrix of interactions, the first part of the article begins by describing everything that’s essential to know about the ideologies and statuses of the Mideast states, and it includes a categorization of each country’s political identity and present affiliation (both officially and de-facto). Following that, Part II chronicles key events in Mideast history and proves the appropriateness and accuracy of using this ideological prism to explain them. Finally, the acquired understandings are then employed in Part III to forecast a couple scenarios for what the Mideast might look like in the coming years.
Dividing Lines
This introductory section explains the core of the four official ideologies and then examines their three sub-categories, including Egypt’s exceptional status. It then presents a revised categorization which proves how each non-dysfunctional state clearly falls within one of two competing blocs.
The Big Four
On paper, there are only four official ideologies currently being practiced by the region’s governments:
Israeli Exceptionalism:
Israel self-describes itself as a Jewish state and refuses to recognize the rights of the Palestinian population that was forcibly brought under its control. The Zionist ideology of “Israel/Jews first” is observable in the country’s foreign and domestic policies, and a government-manipulated siege mentality is exploited to ‘justify’ this state of affairs. In the context of this article, one of the most impactful manifestations of Israeli Exceptionalism is the Yinon Plan that was conceived of to divide and weaken Israel’s Arab neighbors, and ensure that Tel Aviv can indefinitely exercise regional influence disproportionate to its miniscule size in prolonging its geopolitical survival. It should also be footnoted that this ideology is not necessarily interchangeable with the religion of Judaism, as many Jews do not hold to it that their political entity is a God-given ‘Return to History’ that entitles it to act with impunity towards everyone else, especially its regional neighbors.
Secular Republicanism:
There was a point in time when this ideology was all the rage in the Arab world, led first by Nasser and then continued by Hafez and Bashar Assad, who have staunchly kept it in existence despite myriad attempts to snuff it out. It adheres to a left-wing model of development that preaches secularism and social equality, and as such, it’s violently abhorred by Israeli Exceptionalism and Monarchic Absolutism. It also has a strong tradition of Resistance in not kowtowing to the West, however, despite the on-paper adherence of a handful of states to this ideology (Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt), it’s only still in de-facto practice by the Syrian Arab Republic (especially in the geopolitical sense), and the reason for this will be explained as the piece progresses.
Islamic Republicanism:
The only Mideast state practicing this ideology is Iran, which adapted this form of government after the 1979 Revolution. It mixes together religion and republicanism, and it’s perfectly suited to Iran’s domestic political needs. One might question why the Secular and Islamic Republics don’t fight against one another, considering the major difference they have over the role of religion in their given societies, but the fact is that neither tries to impose its model on the other, and the shared Republican foundation seals together their bonds and fortifies their geopolitical relationship (‘The Resistance Bloc’). Accordingly, the Republics (both Secular and Islamic) continually find themselves being attacked by the Israeli Exceptionalists and Monarchic Absolutists, and this dichotomy is the defining feature of the Mideast today.
Monarchic Absolutism:
Rounding out the four official Mideast ideologies is the one practiced by all the GCC member states and Jordan. These countries prioritize the role of their ruling families over all else, and preserving this state of affairs and retaining the absolutist form of control is the primary objective of their authorities. The unrepresentative nature of Monarchic Absolutism makes its population exceptionally susceptible to pro-Republicanism sympathies, which thus explains the obsession that the Kingdoms have in destabilizing and destroying their ideological opposites. Ironically, because they have the same geopolitical goal as the Israeli Exceptionalists, they’re aligned in a marriage of convenience alongside the US (“ Cerberus ”) that sees them strategically joining forces in pursuing aggression against Syria and Iran (albeit for very different reasons, of course).
Bastard Children
Cerberus’ attacks against the Resistance Bloc have been facilitated by the creation three sub-categorical innovations that serve as ideological weapons in their own right:
“Islamic Democracy”:
Otherwise known as the Muslim Brotherhood, this sub-facet of Cerberus was specifically birthed in order to divide the population within the Secular Republics and advance coup plots against their sovereignty. The end goal was to see the imposition of a ‘liberal-democratic’ “Islamic Democracy” take their place, whose ever-cycling representatives then be easily manipulated by each of Cerberus’ three heads (the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia) for their own purposes. This concept posed little chances for blowback in the strictly controlled confines of the Cold War, but afterwards it became a threat to Saudi Arabia, especially after geopolitical upstart Qatar began actively patronizing it as a proxy ideology in the region.
In accordance with the US’ Lead From Behind strategy, Qatar wanted to facilitate a transnational Muslim Brotherhood elite coming to power from Algeria to Syria, functioning as a sort of Arab version of the Cold War international communist party. By this it’s meant that the group would have secret cells all over the region, be dedicated to gaining power, and be financed by a substantial international patron (the US, Qatar, and Turkey in this case) that would use it as a proxy controlling force. This aggressive expansion of covert ideological subversion explains Saudi Arabia’s fears and the GCC ‘Cold War’ of 2014 between Doha and Riyadh (a precursor to the US-Saudi troubles of 2015), which required the ‘ Abdullah-Thani Pact ’ to resolve. Egypt’s place in this ideological rivalry will be explained in the next section.
Lastly, it needs to be stated that President Erdogan has attempted to transform Turkey from a pro-American “Secular Republic” to an “Islamic Democracy” (or more aptly, an Islamic Dictatorship), but he’s been prevented from fully succeeding by the considerable domestic resistance that manifested itself in the last general election. Erdogan, himself an “Islamic Populist”, saw the geopolitical potential in utilizing the Muslim Brotherhood for the aforementioned purposes that the US envisioned, and after the Abdullah-Thani Pact, he sought to steal Qatar’s thunder and become the covert network’s primary patron. By entrenching what can only be described in political terms as his hoped-for dictatorship within Turkey, he hoped to avoid the liberal-democratic voting cycles that could remove him from power within the regional “Islamic Democracy” system that he seeks to control, but his gambit failed at the very moment that he needed it to succeed the most, ergo the country’s present
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� which inevitably leads to yet more and higher taxes on everyone except the illegals because they either dont earn taxable income or the income they earn is off the books.
Bur Newtie wants to posture as broad-minded and generous with other peoples money. In this way, he is exactly like the irresponsible liberals he supposedly opposes. Both agree on the essential rightness of jabbing guns under the chins of some people in order to help certain people. The only difference being which people will be on the receiving end of the gun or the largesse.
This is typical of Newtie.
I worked in DC at the conservative Washington Times in the early-mid 90s during the era of Newts ascent. Does anyone even remember the Contract With America and all that? Gee. We have so much less government today. Do you not feel free?
In fact, for those who cant recall, Newtie was eager to roll in the hay with his supposed ideological opposites, Clintigula and congressional Democrats. Most infamously, he partnered with them to kill welfare reform which was much discussed and actually might have succeeded back then. Peter Bradley over at www.vdare.com wrote about this at length recently, including this Gingrich quote from an appearance on the TV show, Meet the Press back in 96:
We have to have an affirmative outreach which communicates our commitment that opportunity is really available to every American. The fact is, in America today, if youre a poor black child, you dont have a very good future compared to somebody who is born into an upper-class family or an upper-middle class family. We want to make sure everybody has the same opportunity.
Expect him to say more or less the same thing about the children of illegal aliens. And again, his humanity would be admirable if it werent so counterfeit. There is something vile about so blithely disposing of the rightful property of others. It is a species of moral illiteracy that has come to characterize our age.
But Newtie is ascendant once again, in part because he can speak in complete (though labyrinthine) sentences and relative to such as Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann regarded as smart. It is not a high standard.
But to give Newtie his due, he isnt stupid. In fact, he is very smart indeed. Just like Clintigula and just like Obama. None of these men are dumb. They are just morally illiterate, which is much worse than ordinary immorality. At least people who shoplift or break into peoples homes know they are doing something wrong. They may not care that they are doing something wrong, but they are conscious of the fact that it is, indeed, wrong to steal and break into peoples homes. They will, for example, try to hide what they have done and express regret and apologize when caught.
But a creature such as Newtie will never apologize. He will go on at length about our obligation (that is, yours and mine) to serve as compliant geldscheissers for the unending benefit of an unending conga line of strangers both native-born and illegal. Eloquent words will be spoken and perhaps Ten Point Plans revealed. We may even get a new Contract With America.
It will be a contract with only one signatory and executed without Americas consent. But it will make Newtie feel big.
Humane, even.
The Best of Eric PetersWith the cast reveals right around the corner, it’s time to ramp up the big visual reveals as we count down towards our early summer premiere. So let’s kick things off with a mini blog feature I’m calling The Four Days of Tabor Calchek.
Introducing the crew’s handler, their de facto agent, the guy who gets them their freelance assignments. He’s smug; he’s smarmy; he’s swank and laid-back. Day #1: Let’s call this one “Home Office Casual”.
Hey, speaking of Dark Matter’s summer premiere, we’ve got an official airdate:
That’s Friday, June 12th at 10:00 p.m. Ah, this takes me back. Do you remember the glorious Friday SF triple header of days gone by: Stargate: Atlantis, Stargate: SG-1, and Battlestar Galactica running back to back to back? Well, rumour has it science fiction fans are in for a real treat this summer as SyFy brings back SciFi Fridays. I, for one, can’t wait.
But I’m going to have to because Atmosphere is still working on those visual effects.
Hey, continuing my ongoing series of “Who’s who on the Dark Matter crew?” – it is with great pleasure that, today, I introduce to you the awesome Jean Brophey, On Set Dresser extraordinaire. It’s her job to make sure things look good before the director yells “Action!”, and she takes her job pretty seriously, scrambling onto set to switch out cargo crates, flip bed covers, and whisk away weird background elements that she, the eagle-eyed expert, will catch before anyone else.
And when she’s not ensuring on set continuity on the rotating quarters sets (She has a visual overview of each crew member’s room hanging on the far wall for easy referral) or pointing out potential visual miscues, she’s moving stuff whether it be chairs, tables, weapons or…
…a pile of giant rocks.
Need that grand piano moved? Well contact Jean c/o Dark Matter!
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Like this: Like Loading...Like a Girl—He Has Girl Hair
ROCKFORD, IL—Despite ostensibly being a boy, local grandson Eric Detweiler, 17, has long hair just like a girl’s, his grandfather reported Wednesday. “Well, I don’t know, people tell me I have a grandson, but I sure as hell don’t remember him having a big head of girl hair,” 72-year-old George Detweiler said in a raised voice and well within earshot of the teenager, who according to reports apparently divides his time nowadays between dressing like a jackass and screwing around with his weirdo, similarly girl-haired friends. “Can you believe it? And his mother and father actually let him run around like this, all dolled up like a prom queen. My own parents never let me go four weeks without a proper haircut, but then again, I was a boy, not a girl like my granddaughter here.” The elder Detweiler added that come Christmastime, he supposed he would have no choice but to buy his grandson a pretty red dress and a brand-new pony.Environment: The alarmists want to place the world in servitude to the models that are predicting global warming. But those models can't even reconstruct the past.
A researcher at Sweden's University of Gothenburg analyzed climate models to see how closely their predictions fit with history, in this case, precipitation in China from 1961 to 2000. What Tinghai Ou found should crimp the alarmists' plans to establish regimes that punish and limit man's use of fossil fuels.
"Only a few climate models were able to reproduce the observed changes in extreme precipitation in China over the last 50 years," says the university's Department of Earth Sciences.
Ou himself said that the "results show that climate models give a poor reflection of the actual changes in extreme precipitation events that took place in China" during the period he examined.
"Only half of the 21 analyzed climate models were able to reproduce the changes in some regions of China," he said. "Few models can well reproduce the nationwide change."
Ou's work is important. If the models can't get the past right, how can they be trusted to predict future climate?
Seems more like guesswork than solid science to us.
Further evidence of the climate models' flaws was offered on March 16 by the London Daily Mail, which published a chart that "reveals how (the United Nations') '95% certain' estimates of the earth heating up were a spectacular miscalculation."
The Daily Mail charted the earth's actual temperatures against the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections of both 75% and 95% certainty. The lines track closely until recent years, at which point the line representing the observed temperatures "is about to crash out of" the boundaries of the lowest projections.
In other words, while the forecasts — to a supposed 95% certainty, which covers a lot of variation — show global temperatures climbing rather sharply from 1990 on, real temperatures haven't followed the rise.
That the climate models have defects and are severely limited shouldn't be a surprise. Four years ago NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt acknowledged that the "chaotic component of the climate system... is not predictable beyond two weeks, even theoretically."
Despite the sobriety of Schmidt and many others, the alarmists keep coming with their predictions of a grim future caused by man's use of fossil fuels. Pay no further attention to them.Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, turned 90 on April 21st, but she’s stretching celebrations out all the way from April until June, because She’s The Queen So Suck It Plebs.
Last year I wrote about Australia’s tradition of marking Her Majesty’s birthday with a stamp issue. In that post, I may have inadvertently given readers the impression that I’m not a fan, with ambiguous phrases such as “pointless allegiance to Empire”, “another country’s monarch is irrelevant to a nation half a planet away in the 21st century”, and “reliably some of the dullest Australian stamp issues each year”.
Well, didn’t I have to swallow my republican tongue with this year’s issue. I didn’t mention it here when it was released, but I keep seeing it at the Post Office, and it is no less stunning for the delay.
It’s all about this Australian Golden Wattle diamond brooch.
Australia Post tells us it was presented to the Queen during her inaugural tour down under in 1954, and it is “said to be one of the Queen’s personal favourites”.
Well, of course it’s said to be one of her favourites. As if she’s going to tell us anything else. She’s not stupid. But if I were the Queen, I would think it’s absolutely gorgeous.
According to the internet, the brooch comprises 150 white and yellow diamonds arranged to resemble a spray of Golden Wattle, with mimosa leaves and tea-tree blossoms. (The Golden Wattle is Australia’s national floral emblem, beloved of patriots and unfairly maligned by allergy sufferers.)
Yes, it’s antiquey and looks like something your grandma might wear to a wedding, but remember, it was crafted in the 1950s. Those sticky-outy gems were possibly quite avant garde for its day. I sure hope they were stuck on with some good quality superglue.
This stamp is such a great example of design serving design. The graphic elements around the brooch are just right. The blurred golden background brings a warmth to the image that might have been lacking in a simple photo of the brooch sitting on a display cushion. The font is elegant and regal without looking dated. The subordinate role assumed by the stamp design, helped by the crystal-clear modern printing techniques, means that every time I see this stamp, I gaze in wonder once again at the artistry of the brooch itself, as stunning now as the day it was made. I would congratulate the designers, Melbourne’s William Drummond & Co, but they shut up shop in 2002. I assume Sharon Rodziewicz from the Australia Post Design Studio is still going strong, so I can at least congratulate her for her contribution.
The brooch was in an exhibition at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum in 2015. You can see a photo of it through this online back door. (I explored my options for using the image on this page, but I needed Royal permission. I didn’t rate my chances.)
The accompanying stamp is something more standard for a Queen’s Birthday issue: a photo of the Queen in a hat. More importantly, this photo is the proof that she’s worn the Golden Wattle brooch at least once.
My one bugbear with this issue is that if the rules are being followed, then the brooch stamp is heading out on international mail, while domestic mail is getting the more bog standard Queen headshot. It’s sad that such a beautiful stamp, featuring a work of art of which we can be proud, will go largely unnoticed by the nation that brought both into being.
I’ve no doubt that Her Majesty is a regular reader of this blog, so may I say happy birthday from me, too, ma’am. I hope someone gives you 150 more diamonds. I would hate you to hit 90 and find you’re running low on diamonds.
If you like this blog, please like, link, share, and help me get the word out! I’m onFacebook, Twitter, and Instagram. x
© Philatelic product images remain the copyright of issuing postal administrations and successor authoritiesCLOSE Rapper Chris "Mac Daddy" Kelly of 1990s' hip-hop group Kris Kross was pronounced dead at an Atlanta hospital on Wednesday evening. He was 34. VPC
Authorities say they are investigating Kelly's death as a possible drug overdose.
Chris Kelly, right, died in Georgia at the age of 34. (Photo11: Paul Natkin, WireImage) Story Highlights Drug overdose suspected as cause of death
Kelly was known as "Mac Daddy" in the iconic group
"Jump" was Kris Kross' most successful song
ATLANTA (AP) — Chris Kelly, half of the 1990s kid rap duo Kris Kross who made one of the decade's most memorable songs with the frenetic Jump, died at an Atlanta hospital on Wednesday of an apparent drug overdose at his home, authorities said. He was 34.
"It appears it may have been a possible drug overdose," said Cpl. Kay Lester, a spokeswoman for the Fulton County police.
This, Lester said, is based on statements received at the scene as well as evidence turned up at Kelly's home in south Atlanta.
STORY: Chris Kelly condolences pour in over Twitter
According to Lester, police were called to Kelly's home at around 4:30 p.m. Wednesday. He was transported to the south campus of the Atlanta Medical Center.
Investigator Betty Honey of the Fulton County Medical Examiner's office said Kelly was pronounced dead at the hospital at around 5 p.m. Wednesday.
No official cause of death has been determined, pending an autopsy.
Kelly, known as "Mac Daddy," and Chris Smith, known as "Daddy Mac," were introduced to the music world in 1992 by music producer and rapper Jermaine Dupri after he discovered the pair in an Atlanta mall. The duo wore their clothes backwards as a gimmick, but they won over fans with their raps.
Their first, and by far most successful song, was Jump. The hit, off their multiplatinum 1992 debut album Totally Krossed Out, featured the two trading verses and rapping the refrain, the song's title. The duo had surprising maturity in their rap delivery, though the song was written by Dupri. It would become a No. 1 smash in the United States and globally, and one of the most popular of that year.
Their success led to instant fame: They toured with Michael Jackson, appeared on TV shows, and even had their own video game.
The group was never able to match the tremendous success of their first song, though they had other hits like Warm It Up and Tonite's tha Night.
In 2009, after photos surfaced that showed him with bald spots on his head, there were rumors that he had cancer. But in an interview posted on YouTube by Straight from the A TV, he said he suffered from alopecia, a condition in which people lose their hair.
"My health is good, I just got alopecia, I don't have cancer, not other sort of diseases," he said.
Earlier this year, the group performed together to celebrate the anniversary of Durpri's label, So So Def.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/18dSNR8The Bishop of Legnica, Zbigniew Kiernikowski, announced on April 17 that a reported “bleeding Host” that “has the hallmarks of a Eucharistic miracle” was approved for veneration in Poland.
According to his announcment “On 25th December, 2013 during the distribution of the Holy Communion, a consecrated Host fell to the floor and then was picked up and placed in a water-filled container (vasculum). Soon after, stains of the red colour appeared.”
The former Bishop of Legnica created a commission to study the occurrence. In February 2014, a tiny red fragment of the Host was separated and put on a corporal. The Commission ordered to take samples in order to conduct the thorough tests by the relevant research institutes.
The final medical statement by the Department of Forensic Medicine found: “In the histopathological image, the fragments were found containing the fragmented parts of the cross striated muscle.” The tests also found that the sample “is most similar to the heart muscle with alterations that often appear during the agony. The genetic researches indicate the human origin of the tissue.”
Saying that the Host “has the hallmarks of a Eucharistic miracle,” Bishop Kiernikowski explained that in January 2016 he presented the matter to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
In April, in accordance with the Holy See’s recommendations, he asked parish priest Andrzej Ziombrze “to prepare a suitable place for the Relics so that the faithful could venerate it.”
Bishop Kiernikowski closed his announcement with “I hope that this will serve to deepen the cult of the Eucharist and will have deep impact on the lives of people facing the Relic. We see the misterious Sign as an extraordinary act of love and goodness of God, who comes to humans in ultimate humiliation.”
Commentsby hilzoy
One of the stranger aspects of the debate over the bailout was the way both progressives and conservatives latched onto the idea of suspending mark to market accounting. (The final bailout bill (pdf) reiterated that the head of the SEC had the power to do this (sec. 132), and called for a study of mark to market (sec. 133), but did not require that it be suspended.)
If you're not up to speed on accounting regulations, here are the basics:
Mark to market accounting requires that you value ("mark") your assets at their market price. This is straightforward in the case of something like a share of IBM: lots of people are buying and selling those shares, so figuring out the market price is easy. It's harder in the case of assets for which there is no active market.
A familiar example: houses. Most people hold their homes over the long term, and there are often no exactly identical homes. So when someone estimates the value of your home, they rely on the sales of houses they think are enough like yours to allow for comparisons. In normal real estate markets, you can find enough sales that are comparable enough to allow you to come up with a more or less decent valuation. But when the real estate market tanks, most people don't want to sell if they can possibly avoid it. This has two results: first, the number of sales goes down, and so you have fewer even remotely comparable sales to look at in valuing your own house. Second, the people who do sell tend to be desperate, and will therefore sell their homes for very low prices.
This isn't a problem for many homeowners: so long as I don't plan to sell my home or to take out another loan on it, its value can go up or down as it pleases without affecting me. But suppose that my creditors required me to keep tabs on the value of all my assets, and to maintain a given balance between my assets and my debts. In this case, the fact that my home's market value went down would cause the ratio between my assets and my debts to go down as well, thereby causing me to have to sell assets in order to maintain it. To do that, I'd have to sell assets.
In the worst case, I'd have to sell -- you guessed it -- my home. And if enough homeowners found themselves in a similar situation, it could produce a horrible downward spiral in home prices: home prices decline, causing some homeowners to have to sell their houses, causing a further decline in home prices, causing more homes to be dumped on the market: wash, rinse, and repeat. (Note: the same thing works in reverse, during asset bubbles: people get to book fantastic paper profits, and can use them to offset ever-increasing amounts of debt. Oddly, we tend not to hear banks complaining about mark to market then.)
The possibility of that kind of vicious spiral is, basically, the problem with mark to market. It's a real problem. But I don't see why anyone would think that suspending mark to market is a good solution to it. For one thing, what's the alternative? Well:
"Because securities in the $1 trillion CDO market trade infrequently, it is difficult for hedge funds and other investors to mark their values to recent sale prices, called "marking to market." Hedge funds instead use mathematical models of their own to estimate and report the value of their CDO holdings to investors -- a practice known as "marking to model.""
And who, you might ask, comes up with these models? The people who own the assets. Might they have an interest in tweaking the models so that they showed inflated values for those assets? Why, yes, they might. Warren Buffett (pdf):
"Those who trade derivatives are usually paid, in whole or part, on "earnings" calculated by mark-to-market accounting. But often there is no real market, and "mark-to-model" is utilized. This substitution can bring on large-scale mischief. As a general rule, contracts involving multiple reference items and distant settlement dates increase the opportunities for counter-parties to use fanciful assumptions. The two parties to the contract might well use differing models allowing both to show substantial profits for many years. In extreme cases, mark-to-model degenerates into what I would call mark-to-myth.
I can assure you that the marking errors in the derivatives business have not been symmetrical. Almost invariably, they have favored either the trader who was eyeing a multi-million dollar bonus or the CEO who wanted to report impressive "earnings" (or both). The bonuses were paid, and the CEO profited from his options. Only much later did shareholders learn that the reported earnings
were a sham."
As best I can tell, our main alternatives here are: (a) require firms to value assets at market value, unless it is literally impossible to do so, or (b) allow firms to construct their own models for determining how much their assets are worth. The second alternative might be OK if there were some widely accepted way of modeling the value of these assets that left no real discretion to the firms that owned them. But as far as I know, there isn't. And that means that mark-to-model is, in my judgment, an invitation to wishful thinking and outright fraud.
As I understand it, one of the reasons why we got new rules on mark-to-market accounting was precisely that the models that had been used to value a lot of the newer financial instruments turned out to be completely wrong. Whatever the problems with marking to market during a panic, the solution cannot be to let firms disregard market data in favor of models they make up themselves.
***
One way to think about this is as follows. The problem with mark-to-market is, basically, not that assets are valued in a certain way, but that firms are required to do certain things as a result of those valuations. The argument against mark-to-market is that we think they should not have to do those things.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you agree. It doesn't follow that mark to market should be suspended. There are two ways to allow firms not to sell their assets in response to low market prices. One is to stop asking firms to reveal the market value of their assets; the second is to change the requirement that they sell those assets whenever their asset/debt ratio gets too low. The second seems obviously preferable: it solves the problem directly, while allowing us to have as much information about the companies we invest in as possible.
But, one might say, in a lot of cases, it's the lenders who impose that requirement, not the government, and so we can't just change it. In that case, people who advocate changing mark to market should be straightforward enough to say: we do not trust lenders to react appropriately to information about the value of their borrowers' assets, and that's why we're not going to require companies to reveal that information to them. Because that's really what it comes down to.
I see the problems with mark to market. But why anyone thinks that the best response is to let companies go back to mark to model is a mystery to me. This is especially true now: one of the (many) reasons why we're in trouble is that no one seems to know how solid companies' assets are, and which unpleasant surprises might crop up in whose balance sheets. I can't see why anyone would think that what we really need right now is less transparency.Local investigators in Deer Lodge, Mont. believe they found the bodies of a mother and son who went missing in late October. (NBCMontana.com)
Police in rural Montana are questioning a man previously convicted of aggravated kidnapping in connection with the murder of an elderly woman and her son who disappeared just ten days after they came into possession of a bar of gold worth almost half a million dollars.
The bodies of Beverly and Greg Giannonatti were found in a dump site in Powell County, Mont., Sunday night — a month after the mother, 79, and son, 57, vanished without a trace.
[Bodies of elderly woman and her son found after eerie disappearance]
Powell County Sheriff Scott Howard identified David Wayne Nelson as a “high person of interest” in the case, the Montana Standard reported Monday, though he has not been charged with anything. Nelson has a Deer Lodge address and is being jailed without bail on a 72-hour investigative hold, Howard said at a news conference.
Nelson, 53, violated probation on an unrelated charge out of Ravalli County and appeared in court late Monday. Montana Department of Corrections records show that he was convicted of robbery and aggravated kidnapping in 1998, burglary in 1981 and accountability for aggravated assault in 2000.
Assistant county attorney Patrick Moody asked for no bail for Nelson because of the “egregious nature” of double homicide charges possibly coming out of Powell County, according to the Standard.
Beverly Giannonatti was informed that a cleaning woman had found a 25-pound bar of gold in her late ex-husband’s home, which Giannonatti was remodeling and planning to move back into.
Giannonatti is believed to have retrieved the bar on Oct. 19 from the cleaning woman who discovered it. Ten days later, she and her son, 57, disappeared, leaving their tight-knit community of small-town Deer Lodge searching for answers.
“The valley has gone from frantic to just sad,” a friend of Beverly told the Montana Standard before the bodies were found. “Who would kidnap such a lovely lady?”
Investigators located the Giannonattis’ bodies and evidence of a homicide on two dump sites on private property in a wooded area. Howard did not disclose the nature of the evidence, but said the bodies are being sent to the Montana Crime Lab.
“I know you and the public want more information, but it is my duty to protect the integrity of the case. It is our goal to prosecute to the fullest,” the sheriff said, adding that the Giannonattis were targeted.
The news has shocked local residents, many of whom have followed the case closely through a Facebook page run by Gayle Mizner, a friend of Beverly’s and lifelong inhabitant of Deer Lodge. Mizner has been in constant contact with Sheriff Howard and relayed frequent updates from his office.
As of early Tuesday, the page had 1,675 “likes” — about half of the town’s population.
“It’s very upsetting because she’s lived here many, many years,” Mizner said in a phone interview with The Post late Monday. “People are devastated, of course. It’s been long enough that pretty much everybody was thinking that this is how it was going to end.”
Their fate had been foretold by the sheriff earlier this month, when Howard said: “Because of the amount of time that has elapsed since they were last seen, I feel the outcome is not going to be good.”
A sudden fortune, followed by a sudden disappearance
David Wayne Nelson, 53, is being held in the Deer Lodge jail as a “person of high interest.” (Montana Department of Corrections)
The month-long search for the Giannonattis, undertaken by both local law enforcement and the FBI, was rife with speculation — and even became the subject of a 21-page thread on the Websleuths forum. Rumors and armchair-sleuthing were fueled by the strange circumstances under which the mother and son disappeared.
It started with the block of gold.
With an estimated value of $480,000, the 25-pound ingot was quite the bounty in a town where the median income hovers around $30,000. But Heidi Leathers, Greg’s girlfriend of nine years, told The Washington Post that the Giannonattis had “a ton of money.”
Greg’s late father, Bill Giannonatti, made lucrative investments, and he collected gold as well as coins, Leathers said, recalling that he had large water canisters filled with change.
He was “one of those misers that saves and saves,” she said. It didn’t surprise her that he hadn’t told Beverly and Greg about the gold bar.
The cleaning lady uncovered it in Bill’s old house and told Beverly, who planned to move back into the residence. Friends told police that Beverly had immediately gone to retrieve the treasure, which is now nowhere to be found.
“I cannot find that gold bar,” Howard told MTN News earlier this month. “I’ve checked safety deposit boxes and I’m not coming up with any location on that.”
Nine days after Beverly struck gold, on Oct. 28, she was seen at Muriah’s of Montana, a local steakhouse, having lunch with a white man of around 60 years of age.
Later that night, Greg, the son, was spotted “in an apparent hurry” driving away from his home in a white 1995 Toyota Camry, the Standard reports.
That was the last anyone had seen or heard from them.
On Oct. 31, Beverly’s friend Laurie Pentland alerted police to Beverly’s absence. She told NBC Montana earlier this month that Beverly had failed to show up to her house on Halloween to give her children candy as planned.
There were no signs of struggle at either of Beverly and Greg’s homes. The doors were locked, the cars parked and the dogs appeared to have been left alone for about five days. Beverly would never leave the house without her dogs, her neighbors say.
At Greg’s house, police found warm pot roast in a slow cooker that was still turned on, according to the Standard.
In a strange twist, a burglary occurred at Greg’s home just one day after the initial police search. Authorities found the flat-screen TV in the yard, clothing in bags and a cellphone as well as two weapons missing from the residence. Other items were scattered outside, as if the robber had been intercepted halfway through the heist.
It’s still unclear whether the robbery was related to the Giannonattis’ deaths.
Remembering Bev and Greg
Beverly Giannonatti, 79, has been remembered for her sweet disposition. (Courtesy of Gayle Mizner)
Beverly, described by Mizner as “very sweet, very unassuming,” lived in Deer Lodge for over three decades and worked as a court stenographer. The quiet town in a valley teeming with protected wildlife was where her beloved two sons, Darrell (also deceased) and Greg grew up.
The smiling, curly-haired woman was a devout Catholic who often gave her time to charities for the poor.
Greg, a large man with hazel eyes, attended Bozeman College and later became a city engineer in Roseville, Calif. He moved back to Deer Lodge to be close to his mother, according to Leathers, who dated Greg while he was still in Roseville.
“For me, feeling that he died with his mom, thinking about them together gives me a little sense of peace,” she said. “Their relationship was so tight. Greg and her were like best friends, so his heart was always in Deer Lodge.”
Leathers recalled that Greg used to be a body builder who only ate tuna and egg whites. They lived together for a time, and Beverly would stay with them in the winter months. “He called her by her first name,” Leathers said. “‘Hi Bev, how’s it going Bev?’ It was weird, but endearing.”
Leathers was at a TJ Maxx store when she learned Greg’s body had been found in a dump site, and she fell to her knees sobbing in the middle of the store. Though the couple ended their romantic relationship a decade ago, they still talked every few days.
Even though they were no longer together, Greg had reached out to Leathers and offered to give her son (from another man) money for college, she said.
“If I ever had a bad day, I would pick up the phone and tell him,” she said. “He had a calmness about him. He would have me laughing.” For example, she said, he helped her through the death of a relative.
With a sigh, Leathers added: “Nobody’s going to be around when I lose somebody now.”
In Deer Lodge, population 3,088, housing is cheap and stability sacred. Leathers visited the town several times over the years with Greg, and she recalls a single McDonald’s, no major retailers and a smattering of other establishments frequented by the valley’s devoted residents.
In the wake of the Giannonattis’ deaths, those inhabitants feel like their routines have been violently disrupted by a stranger.
Mizner said she has never heard David Wayne Nelson’s name before. “He’s not a longtime resident of Deer Lodge, as far as I know,” she said.
But everyone sure knows him now.Rent will continue to rise for the next two years, $149 a month in OC, $136 in LA County and $124 in the Inland Empire
With the high cost of living Southern Californian’s are being forced to rent and put the American dream of being a homeowner on hold. University of Southern California’s Casden Multifamily Forecast said on Wednesday that rent in Southern California will continue to rise for the next to years. In many areas landlords have been demolishing old apartments to build new apartments building and raise the rent.
This means that Orange County will see a rent hike of $149 a month over the next two years, $136 a month in Los Angeles County and $124 a month in the IE, according to the forecast produced by the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate.
Specifically, the forecast estimates:
The average Orange County rent will rise by 3.6 percent to $2,080 a month in 2018 and by another 3.7 percent to $2,157 a month in 2019.
The average Los Angeles County rent will rise by 3 percent in each of the next to years, increasing to $2,304 in 2018 and $2,373 in 2019.
The average Inland Empire rent will rise 4.1 percent to $1,509 a month in 2018 and by another 4.2 percent to $1,573 in 2019.
This year’s California rents are projected to be up 1% from 2016, the Casden figure show.
But rent gains averaged 4.5 percent a year in Orange County and the Inland Empire from 2011 through 2016. The average annual gain was 5.7 percent in Los Angeles County in that period.
“Southern California markets have been among the least affordable for some time,” the forecast report said.
This comes at a time when Los Angeles County recently had a sales tax increase of 9.25% to 9.50% along with Long Beach, which had a prior sales tax of 9.25% to 10.25%, this makes it more difficult for single families and Angelenos who earn minimum wage to pay sales tax and high rent prices.
Will rent and sales tax go up to the point where Los Angeles County tenants aren’t able to afford to live in LA?Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist and founding member of The Doors who had a dramatic impact on rock 'n' roll, has died. He was 74.
Manzarek died Monday at the RoMed Clinic in Rosenheim, Germany, surrounded by his family, said publicist Heidi Robinson-Fitzgerald. Robinson-Fitzgerald said his manager, Tom Vitorino, confirmed Manzarek died around 3:30 p.m. EDT, after being stricken by bile duct cancer.
Manzarek founded The Doors after meeting then-poet Jim Morrison in California. The band went on to become one of the most successful rock 'n' roll acts to emerge from the 1960s and continues to resonate with fans decades after Morrison's death brought an effective end to the band.
The Chicago native continued to remain active in music after Morrison's 1971 death. He briefly tried to hold the band together by serving as vocalist, but eventually the group fell apart. He played in other bands over the years, produced other acts, became an author and worked on films.
The Doors were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Manzarek is among the most notable keyboard players in rock history. His lead-instrument work with the band at a time when the guitar often dominated added a distinct end-times flavour that matched Morrison's often out there imagery and persona.
The group is best known for hits like "L.A.Woman," "Break On Through to the Other Side," "The End" and "Light My Fire" and came to symbolize the decadence of Los Angeles as the counterculture grew in the U.S.
Morrison and Manzarek met at UCLA film school and ran into each other in Venice a few months after graduation, Manzarek recounted in a 1967 interview with Billboard.
Outwardly the two seemed so
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Ball could miss the rest of the preseason with a minor ankle sprain. Despite the legitimacy of Ball’s injury, it didn’t stop the internet from clowning on Ball for avoiding another matchup with former Kentucky rival and current Sacramento Kings point guard, De’Aaron Fox. Why would Ball duck Fox, you ask? Well, first of all, he probably isn’t, but let’s not let facts get in the way of a good story.
Fox torched Ball in Lonzo’s final game for UCLA in the Sweet 16 round of March Madness to the tune of 39 points, four assists, and three rebounds on 13-of-20 shooting. Ball put up an underwhelming 10 points, eight assists, and three rebounds on 4-of-10 shooting, and we’ve officially got a rivalry, folks.
From there, LaVar Ball and Fox’s dad traded shots in the media, and while in Vegas for summer league, Ball sat out the Lakers’ game vs. the Kings with a groin injury.Ten months after the killing of noted rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, we are none the wiser about his killers. Ashish Khetan visits Pune and Mumbai to reconstruct a near-perfect murder and a ‘spirited’ police investigation hits an absurd, irrational low.
The Maharashtra Police is notorious for messing up critical crime investigations. Its supposedly premier agency—ATS or the Anti-Terror Squad—manufactured bogus evidence in the Malegaon bomb blasts, the 7/11 serial train explosions and the German Bakery terror case. They have also failed to solve RTI activist Satish Shetty’s murder and the rape and killing of three minor girls in Bhandara—both of which cases are now with the CBI. But nothing prepares you for the investigation techniques—eventually all in vain, alas!—deployed by the Pune Police to solve the Dabholkar murder (this case too was transferred to the CBI in May this year by the Bombay High Court).
Dabholkar, a medical doctor-turned-social activist, devoted his whole life to promoting a scientific temperament and critical thinking, and campaigning against witchcraft, superstition and blind faith. On his death, Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan was constrained to compare the murder to Gandhi’s assassination: “The forces of intolerance that killed Gandhi have also killed Dabholkar.” But if the killing of Dabholkar meant a huge loss for the secular, liberal space in the country, the investigation that followed into his murder is an affront to his legacy and everything that he stood for. Appallingly, to solve his murder, the Pune Police resorted to supernatural mumbo-jumbo and irrational faith, the very societal ill that Dabholkar fought against so valiantly, a fight that perhaps took his life.
Photograph by AFP, From Outlook 14 July 2014
Dabholkar was gunned down on August 20, 2013. And since their investigation was not yielding anything, the then Pune police commissioner Gulabrao Pol took the help of self-proclaimed spiritualists to communicate with Dabholkar’s spirit and ask it for leads! These are acts that could well qualify as an offence as per the anti-superstition ordinance promulgated by the state government within just a week of Dabholkar’s death and which became the Maharashtra Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and other Inhuman, Evil and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Act after it was passed by both houses of the state legislature in December 2013.
Just two or three months earlier, in September or October, Pol had even set up a ‘crack team’ trained in marshalling the spirits of the dead to invoke Dabholkar’s. Retired assistant commissioner of police Ranjit Pandurang Abhyankar (decorated with the President’s police medal), ex-police constable and now self-styled godman Manish Thakur, along with senior Crime Branch police inspectors and constables formed part of this team. They were given ample police resources, be it vehicles or secret service funds.
Thakur’s task was to conduct a seance to summon Dabholkar’s soul. He would light a candle, place a vessel of water and lie on a bed in an anteroom to the commissioner’s office. What followed would make a worthy sequel to Aamir Khan’s supernatural thriller Talaash.
Within minutes, Thakur’s body would start shaking violently. It was an indication that Dabholkar’s soul had now entered his body. Thakur’s own soul, meanwhile, would travel for the time being to the water-filled vessel. (His own soul, in fact, was not his own either, he told me. It was of a Shiv Sena rioter he had shot dead in Jogeshwari during the 1992-93 Bombay riots. Thakur took voluntary retirement in 2014). Pol would then question Dabholkar’s soul about his movements a day before the killing, the men he suspected to be behind his killing and the profile of those who shot him. Assisting the assembled in this task were 10-12 other spirits—both good and evil—who were always at his command during the ‘investigation’. Senior Crime Branch officers would then act on the ‘information’ thus generated, pick up ‘suspects’ and interrogate them. They would eventually have to let them off in the absence of any prima facie evidence of their involvement. Pol commissioned many such seances in 2013.
Both Thakur and ex-ACP Abhyankar need little encouragement to share the outcomes of their ‘questioning sessions’ with the souls of Dabholkar and others, and the follow-up investigations the police duly carried out on their basis. “For two months,” Abhyankar told me, “Pol sahib deputed us one senior inspector, two constables, one driver and a vehicle. We worked day and night and picked up suspects from Mumbai and Pune on the basis of the inputs given by the spirits. But detentions were not converted into arrests. Pol sahib was worried what the police would tell the court, there was no concrete evidence.”
When I met Dabholkar’s soul, I spoke to him in English. The man once proficient in English now couldn’t understand it.
When I met Gulabrao Pol at his luxurious 100-acre farmhouse on the outskirts of Kolhapur city where he has been living since his voluntary retirement in March, he conceded Thakur would summon Dabholkar’s ‘soul’ in his presence and he would interact with it. “My first introduction to Thakur was through Mr Abhyankar (sic),” Pol told me. Abhyankar and he went back a long way, he said; “he was my sub-inspector during my first posting as acp in Pune.” And Thakur had helped Abhyankar solve some ‘tough’ cases of train robberies while he was the deputy superintendent (DySP) in the Railway Police, a fact Abhyankar himself confirmed. “Dada (an honorific Abhyankar uses for Thakur) helped me in solving cases of train robbery with the help of spirits,” he told me as he introduced me to Thakur at his residence in Premnagar Society, Pune. Abhyankar was awarded the President’s police medal in 2009 for distinguished service as DySP, Railway Police, a feat Abhyankar now credits to Thakur’s supernatural powers. Abhyankar retired from the force in 2012.
Pol confirmed that he put a substantial amount of manpower and logistics to Thakur and his team. “Sab kuchh diya unko, gaadi diya, paisa diya, kahin bhi jao, inquiry karo, kuchh information mile to local police ko bolo, kuchh problem ho to mujhe bolo. (I gave them everything, vehicles, money, freedom to go anywhere, make any inquiry. I asked them to share info with local cops and inform me if there was a problem). I would talk to the superintendent of police of the district concerned or commissioner of police or deputy commissioner.”
Eerily, Pol also recounted some of the ‘conversations’ he had with Dabholkar’s soul. It revealed, for instance, that he (Dabholkar) had visited the state secretariat (mantrayala) in Mumbai a day before he was killed, and that two persons were following him. One of them bumped into him as he was entering the mantralaya building. And Dabholkar’s spirit told him all this, I asked Pol. Yes, he confirmed. The two men then followed him to Dadar and got into the same bus as him. Had Dabholkar really gone to the mantralaya on the said day? “Yes,” Pol said. “That he came by bus was also right. He didn’t get off anywhere en route (to Pune). The man who was chasing him got off at a bus stop.”
Circa 2009 Dabholkar with others in Pune, vowing to hand over reins to youth
However, assistant commissioner of police (Crime Branch), Rajendra Bhamare, who was the investigating officer before the case went to the CBI, refuted that Dabholkar had visited mantralaya. Pol’s faith in the theory remains unshaken only because it originates from Thakur.
Sufficiently intrigued at this point, I asked Thakur if he could set up a seance session between me and Dabholkar. I am invited to his safehouse near the railway station in Daund city, a one-and-a-half-hour drive away from Pune city. There were two people with him when I reached, but their problems were seemingly resolved after an incantation in Marathi and a blessing by hand. After they left, Thakur obliged me with what I had come for.
The home was furnished with expensive modern gadgets, a testament to his flourishing business. I was led to a room, where he lit a candle, and placed a vessel of water. He then proceeded to lie down on the bed, draped in a white sheet. I was instructed to hold a small stone, round and black, while he set about the business of summoning Dabholkar’s soul. Shortly after, he started shaking violently. He calmed down, however, in less than a minute. Rising up from the bed, he told me, in Marathi, that he was Dr Dabholkar.
Dr Dabholkar’s ‘soul’ repeated to me what it had ‘told’ the others before. That two men were following him as he entered mantralaya. He also named a few of the ‘suspects’, most of whom had already been interrogated at length by the Pune police and released for lack of evidence.
Not very conversant in Marathi, I decided to pose a few questions to Dr Dabholkar in English. However, though the man was proficient in English, Dr Dabholkar’s soul could barely understand what I was saying. In fact, he even avoided speaking to me in Hindi and preferred to stick to his mother-tongue, Marathi. He did tell me the name of his son and daughter, and a few details of his life, nothing that a Wikipedia search would not throw up. You had to be blindly superstitious or utterly stupid to believe what you were seeing.
The pity is that an officer of the rank of a police commissioner chose to rely on Thakur’s ‘method’ to investigate Dabholkar’s murder, wasting critical time and crucial resources in the process. A senior inspector in the Crime Branch, who was part of the probe, told me that he and his team loathed the fact that they were made to act on Thakur’s instructions, and whose continued presence there became a cause of much resentment.
However, Thakur isn’t the only act in the bizarre sequence of events. Around 10 am on August 20, three hours after Dabholkar’s murder, the Thane police had arrested two arms dealers—Manish Nagori and Vilas Khandelwal—in a completely unconnected case (though officially they were shown as being arrested on August 24). Both were known arms dealers and had been under observation for some time, their cellphones under interception. The duo were taken in police custody by several agencies, including the ATS and booked in a range of cases over the next five months. It was the turn of the Pune Crime Branch in the last week of January, as it booked them in the Dabholkar case on the basis of a match between the lead recovered from Dabholkar’s body and a gun recovered from Nagori and his aide Khandelwal.
I asked Pol and Bhamare if they knew the killers since the gun had been found. They didn’t. The only explanation Pol could offer was that the arrests were effected on the basis of a ballistic report by the state forensic science laboratory. “Under the Evidence Act, you cannot ignore an expert report,” he told me. Both Nagori and Khandelwal walked out on bail in April. When we asked the present police commissioner Satish Mathur about it, “We have neither filed a chargesheet against them nor have we filed a discharge application. It is over to the CBI now.”
Meanwhile, almost a whole year has been lost. Crucial leads have gone cold. The killers have had enough time to cover their tracks. Dabholkar’s murder is a grievous assault on all those who believe in reason and tolerance, an attack on those who have faith in democratic and persuasive methods while battling for larger ideas. It is imperative that Dabholkar’s killers are brought to book so that the conspiracy of hate and violence is uncovered. Fixing the accountability of people like Pol would be a good place to begin with.
***
Dramatis Personae
Gulabrao Pol
Awarded the President’s police medal for meritorious service and another medal for distinguished service, Pol, 58, took voluntary retirement after he was unceremoniously removed as the Pune police Commissioner in March this year.
Ranjit Pandurang Abhyankar
Joining as a sub-inspector in 1975, he retired as ACP in 2012. He is also a recipient of the President’s medal for distinguished service as DySP, Railway Police. According to a police press release, he was also part of the team that cracked down on the activities of the Balu Andhekar gang and Pramod Malvadkar from 1977 to 1986.
Manish Thakur
An ex-police constable, he took voluntary retirement in 2004 and now practises as a godman in Daund. A state-level hockey player before he joined service, Thakur claims to have killed a Shiv Sena rioter during the 1992-93 Bombay riots.
(Journalist Ashish Khetan stood for the 2014 election as a candidate for the Aam Aadmi Party.)It’s complicated.
A year ago, as many in the world awaited Donald Trump’s swearing-in with great anxiety, reports that President Obama planned to spend a bit more time tutoring his successor sparked fleeting hopes that the pair might forge an unlikely friendship.
Months later, Trump was accusing Obama of wiretapping him, but it seems German chancellor Angela Merkel held out hope that America’s inexperienced new president would be receptive to an ally offering to guide him through the confusing world of international diplomacy. By all accounts, her efforts did not go well.
A New York Times report on how Trump has changed U.S. foreign policy sheds new light on Merkel’s overtures to Trump. In January a Merkel spokesperson said that during a phone call with the president, Merkel had “explained” the international community’s obligations toward refugees under the Geneva Convention. In a call around this time, the chancellor also tried to give Trump a lesson on Ukraine’s history and strategic importance. According to the Times, “German officials were alarmed by Mr. Trump’s lack of knowledge, but they got even more rattled when White House aides called to complain afterward that Ms. Merkel had been condescending toward the new president.”
The Germans tried to proceed more delicately when Merkel visited the White House in March. According to Politico, in an effort to express her concerns about Russia while accommodating Trump’s preferred learning style, she came equipped with a map of the Soviet Union from 1982, and an overlay showing that Russian president Vladimir Putin is active in many former-Soviet nations.
“Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Belarus, and Ukraine — he is either trying to get those countries back into his realm or, if he’s not able to, he at least makes sure those countries are totally unattractive to the West,” said an official privy to the German presentation.
Shortly after the meeting, a senior German official told the Times of London that Trump also tried to pursue a bilateral trade deal with Germany. “Ten times Trump asked [Merkel] if he could negotiate a trade deal with Germany. Every time she replied, ‘You can’t do a trade deal with Germany, only the E.U.,’” the official said. “On the eleventh refusal, Trump finally got the message, ‘Oh, we’ll do a deal with Europe then.’”
Now the Times reports that Merkel tried to be delicate to avoid humiliating Trump again.
Rather than exposing Mr. Trump’s ignorance, Ms. Merkel said the United States could, of course, negotiate a bilateral agreement, but that it would have to be with Germany and the other 27 members of the union because Brussels conducted such negotiations on behalf of its members.
“So it could be bilateral?” Mr. Trump asked Ms. Merkel, according to several people in the room. The chancellor nodded.
“That’s great,” Mr. Trump replied before turning to his commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, and telling him, “Wilbur, we’ll negotiate a bilateral trade deal with Europe.”
German officials were reportedly relieved at how Merkel handled the situation, while White House officials still found it “humiliating.”
Presumably, the feeling was mutual. At the same meeting Merkel’s would-be diplomacy student refused to shake her hand, claiming later that he couldn’t hear requests from her or photographers.New Delhi: The United Nations (UN) aviation watchdog has expressed grave concerns on India’s air safety, placing it among the 13 worst-performing nations on this count, according to excerpts of an audit report.
The International Civil Aviation Organization (Icao), of which India is a member, completed an audit of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) in December and found it wanting in its ability to oversee safety issues.
“Icao has identified a significant safety concern with respect of the ability of this state (India) to properly oversee its airlines (air operators) under is jurisdiction," it said in its latest report, parts of which Mint has reviewed.
The organization has clubbed India with Angola, Congo, Djibouti, Eritrea, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Lesotho, Malawi, and Sao Tome and Principe.
A DGCA spokesman dismissed the concerns as “procedural issues".
“We have taken corrective action, which has been accepted by Icao," the spokesman said. “This will be implemented by June 2013. Then we will invite Icao’s team to verify the action taken."
In its report, which is yet to be made public, Icao has also questioned India’s oversight on all aircraft operations, including charters and business jets.
“Icao has identified a significant safety concern with respect to the ability of this state (India) to properly oversee aircraft under its jurisdiction," the global agency has said.
This is not the first time Icao has raised such red flags. In its earlier audit in 2006, the organization had warned about air safety oversight in India, after which the US aviation regulator threatened to downgrade India’s safety ranking, a move that would have stopped Indian carriers such as Air India Ltd and Jet Airways (India) Ltd from adding additional flights to the US and forcing extra ramp checks on aircraft at US airports. The matter was taken up by the two governments and resolved.
India has a patchy air safety record in recent years. Nearly 300 people have lost their lives between Icao’s 2006 audit and the latest one completed in December. It conducts these audits every six years.
As many as 158 people died in India’s worst air crash in a decade in Mangalore in 2010 when an Air India Express flight IX-812 overshot a hilltop runway, charring people to death, including women and children, because rescue did not reach them in time.
The record of charter aircraft has been worse. Arunachal Pradesh chief minister Dorjee Khandu was killed with four others after when a Eurocopter B8 Pawan Hans helicopter crashed in bad weather in May 2011.
Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy died when his state government-owned Bell 430 helicopter crashed in a dense forest while flying to a village in Chitoor district in September 2009.
Ten people, including seven on board a medical ambulance aircraft of Air Charter Services India Pvt. Ltd, were killed when the flight to Delhi from Patna crashed into the roof of the two houses near the national capital in 2011.
The findings of the audit are alarming, according to Denzil Keelor, a former chief of the Indian Air Force and a former aviation regulator.
“It’s a very damaging statement," Keelor said, adding that DGCA has failed in its primary obligation to provide safe passenger travel. “Icao has made this remark because they (DGCA) have not been able to justify that they have been able to do their job," he said.
Keelor said the main reason for this is that DGCA is being run by bureaucrats and not experts such as pilots.
“The government is not serious about flight safety. Many DGCA officers are completely compromised. The first thing they do is ground the pilot (in case of an accident)," Keelor said. “You have to prevent accidents and incidents, and not cure them."
India is expected to be the fastest growing aviation market till 2031, Boeing Co. said in September.
The government had six years to make up for gaps found in the 2006 audit, but it was busy giving permission to private airlines to import aircraft and not ensuring there were enough people to watch over their upkeep, said Mohan Ranganathan, a member of the civil aviation safety advisory committee that was set up by the government after the Mangalore crash.
“The rapid deterioration in safety in the past one year is of serious concern," Ranganathan said. “Several aircraft were written off (scrapped), it did not wake them up. Several lives were lost, it didn’t wake them up. Maybe this international shame may wake them before more lives are lost."
**********
A matter of safety
•Nearly 300 people have lost their lives in air accidents in India between Icao’s 2006 safety audit of India and December 2012
•As many as 158 people died in the 2010 Air India Express IX-812 crash in Mangalore
•One plane each of Jet Airways, Air Deccan and Kingfisher Airlines has been written off in accidents since 2006
•Two state chief ministers—Andhra Pradesh’s Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy and Dorjee Khandu of Arunachal Pradesh—have died in helicopter crashes since the 2006 audit, among many other smaller crashes
•Icao says it has concerns over India’s ability to oversee the safety of airlines and aircraft under its jurisdiction
•India has been red-flagged on safety and clubbed by Icao with 13 nations—Angola, Congo, Djibouti, Eritrea, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Lesotho, Malawi, and Sao Tome and Principe
•None of India’s neighbours—Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka or the Maldives—has been red-flagged
Source : Icao, civil aviation safety advisory committeePhoto: Markus Fischer/Paul Scherrer Institute
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Terahertz waves, a frequency band squeezed in between the far infrared and the very short-wave radio frequency region of the electromagnetic spectrum, are not only difficult to create but also difficult to detect. So making a good imager for them is quite a difficult task. Still, in 2012 researchers reported an experimental 1000-pixel CMOS terahertz camera.
The SwissFEL laser team led by Christoph Hauri at the Paul Scherrer Institute near Zurich has now shown that you can use a common megapixel CCD device, as found in electronic cameras or in smartphones, to capture images produced by terahertz waves.
In research published today in Nature Communications, the team describes how with a silicon CCD of 1360 x 1024 pixels they obtained images of THz beams with a resolution that is 25 times better than currently available bolometer-based terahertz imaging systems, and at a fraction of the cost. Microbolometer imagers are two dimensional arrays of metal-and-insulator pixels. The pixels heat up in response to terahertz radiation and change their resistances. However, these arrays are not only slower than CCDs but their pixels are several times larger (24 micrometers instead of 4.65 µm), so microbolomters have worse resolution.
In common CCDs individual photons of visible light liberate individual electrons, a phenomenon known as the internal photoelectric effect. These electrons, have sufficient energy to cross silicon’s band gap, and end up stored in a potential well, from which they can be read out. Terahertz photons, with their longer wavelengths, carry much less energy and the dislodged electrons simply don't make it across the band gap.
"We used kind of an experimental trick, the mode of CCD operation we use is different from the mode of operation at optical frequencies," says Mostafa Shalaby, the lead author of the Nature Communications paper and member of the SwissFEL Laser Group at PSI. It was previously known that low frequency radiation, when intense enough, could lead to dramatic changes in the semiconductor band structure. (For the intense light source they turned to a new and uniquely powerful source the SwissFEL team developed.) Long terahertz wavelengths force electrons to tunnel through the bandgap and the charge carriers start multiplying, leading to huge sensitivity, explains Shalaby.
Although materials with a band gap corresponding to the energy of terahertz photons don't exist, it is clear that any reduction of the band gap would increase the sensitivity. Using a photoactive layer with a smaller band gap would most likely improve the sensitivity of the imaging device, but "it is really hard for us to convince big companies with mass production to fabricate something for us custom," says Carlo Vicario of SwissFEL.
The researchers obtained images by exposing the CCD directly to the terahertz beam. Improving the CCD’s sensitivity, the subject of their immediate research plans, will require much less powerful terahertz lasers, says Vicario. The researchers found that by using 2 to 5 percent of their laser power they could still obtain visible images.
There are a wide range of other improvements possible as well. "If you use CMOS instead of CCD you have a much higher sensitivity,” says Shalaby. “Also with structured metal or metamaterials on top of the substrate one can enhance the sensitivity of the imager." With the first results of this proof of principle the researchers have filed for a patent, and they say they’ve attracted interest from industry, including a CCD manufacturer.Overview
Copper is a simple imperative language statically typed with type inference and genericity.
Simple Example
const Integer = Int32 struct Point attr x : Integer attr y : Integer method initialize (x: Integer, y: Integer) self x = x self y = y return self end method translate (dx: Integer, dy: Integer) self x += dx self y += dy end end function main var pt : Point pt initialize (3, 5) pt translate (1, 0) end
Literals and Symbols
Copper 3.0 changes the way it resolves literals and introduce symbols.
Copper has many kind of integers (signed/unsigned, 8/16/32/64 bits) and strings (8 or 16 bits). Before 3.0, integer literals were just 32 bit signed integers with automatic conversion when needed and there were two different syntaxes for 8 and 16 bit character strings.
Now the type of literal depends on the expected type where the expression is evaluated. For instance in a function call argument:
function f (x: Int32)... function g (x: Unsigned8)... f (12) // 12 is a 32 bit signed integer g (12) // 12 is a 8 bit unsigned integer function MessageBoxA (msg: *[]Unsigned8) // ASCII string function MessageBoxW (msg: *[]Unsigned16) // UTF-16 string MessageBoxA ("hello world") // The string is encoded with 8 bit characters MessageBoxW ("hello world") // The string is encoded with 16 bit characters
It becomes more interesting with symbols.
Symbols are just identifiers to constants starting with a quote, but they are resolved in the namespace of the expected type. The typical use is the enumeration values:
enum MouseButton 'left // 0'middle // 1 'right // 2 end
enum Alignment 'left // 0 'right // 1 'center // 2 'justify // 3 end
var button : MouseButton var align : Alignment button == 'right // 'right is evaluated to 2 align == 'right // 'right is evaluated to 1
As symbols are defined in the namespace of the type, it's possible to define another enumeration with same symbols:Now, depending on the expected type, the compiler resolves the symbol diffently
It greatly reduces the number of identifiers in the global namespace and reduces the length of identifiers: no need of prefixes or uppercase, no need to specify the type explicitely (except where no type is expected). The source code is less verbose.
Symbols are not limited to enumerations, they can be used in structures and sub-types as well.
stype LineNumber : Int32 'first = 0 'last = -1 // special value... struct LinkList attr first : *Item attr last : *Item 'empty = { nil, nil } // An empty link list...
Actually, the combination of sub-types and literals+symbols makes the character type useless in the language: Copper 3 does not have any builtin character type, it is defined in the library. See How the character type is defined.
Multiple Return Values
function sort (x, y) if x > y return y, x else return x, y end end function main var min, max = sort (51, 15) end
Returning multiple values is often useful to return an error code and a value:
var error, file = open (...)
This way you don't need to use a special value to say that there is an error and retrieving the error in a second call forcing the callee to store a state.
Another advantage is to swap values, no need to use a temporary variable:
x, y = y, x
OOP Style
The language is not object oriented but it provides some features to facilitate object oriented designs.
Type inheritance.
Contextual functions (methods).
Create kind-of objects by embedding everything needed inside a type definition.
struct Point attr x : Int32 attr y : Int32 static new (x, y) var pt = Point allocate // Allocate a point on the heap pt x = x pt y = y return pt end method resize (factor) self x += scale (self x, factor) self y += scale (self y, factor) end function scale (value, factor) return value * factor end end function test (x, y, f) var pt = Point new (x, y) pt resize (f) end
It creates a new function available from the Point meta-type.
function available from the meta-type. It creates a resize (self, x, y) function that applies only when the first argument is a pointer to a Point.
function that applies only when the first argument is a pointer to a. It creates a scale regular function this is visible only inside the Point structure so it does not need to have a long name with a prefix.
Block Closures
A block closure is an additional argument passed to a function. The function can evaluate this block using the yield statement.
// Iterates between start and limit function range (start: Integer, limit: Integer) var i = start var n = limit while i <= n yield i // Call the block with i as parameter i ++ end end function main var sum = Integer 0 // Call the range function with start, limit and the block range (1, 10) do x sum += x end return sum end
Block closures provides a better abstraction: they allow to enumerate sequence's elements without knowing the implementation. It also reduces the code: an enumeration is done with one operation instead of the three usual steps (initialization, test end of iteration, advance to next element). Closures are very efficient, they are implemented as inline functions, there is no overhead at execution.
This system is very simple and flexible:
Very concise syntax range (1, 10) do x... end
Not limited to a single variable dictionary eachKeyAndValue do key, value list eachIndexAndValue do index, value
It is not limited to iterators: function readFile (name) var file = fopen (name, "r") if file notNil yield handle file fclose end end function main var filename = String "dummy.txt" readFile (filename) do file // Use file here end end
An object can have multiple iterators file eachLine do line file eachChar do char
Genericity
A limited genericity is implemented.
Optional Argument Types
The type is optional when declaring the arguments of a function.
function max (x, y) if x > y return x else return y end end
This function will work for any type of x and y as long as x > y is valid (the operators can be overloaded).
Parametric Structures
Structures can have parameters:
struct Vector (T) attr items : *[] T // Pointer to an array of T attr size : Size... end
Passing Types as Arguments
Types can be passed as regular arguments.
function new (T) var obj = malloc (T size) : *T return obj end function test var point = new (Point) end
As types are intended for the compiler only, they are removed from the signature when exported Types are not real values as in some true object oriented languages such as Smalltalk or Ruby.
Variadic arguments
Functions can have a variable number of arguments.
function sum(...) var sum = Integer 0 each_extra do x sum += x end return sum end
Passing variadic arguments to another functions is really easy, the three dots represent a tuple:
function sum_plus_3(...) return sum(1,..., 2) end
Variadic functions without type is very useful:
function in (x,...) each_extra do value if x == value return true end end return false end
This function works with any type. Code will be generated for each different number and size of arguments.
The in function is a very interesting case as LLVM can optimize it very smartly:
if x in (1, 2, 5)
will first first translated by Copper with a function like this:
function in (x:Int32, a1: Int32, a2: Int32, a3: Int32) if x == a1 return true end if x == a2 return true end if x == a3 return true end return false end
and it will be then fully inlined and optimized by LLVM to something like this:
if bit_test (0b100110, x)
i.e. testing the bit number x of 0b100110 which is done with a single machine instruction.
Order of Definitions Is Not Significant
No need of forward declarations, you can group definitions logically, not in an order forced by the limitations of the compiler. Even imports can be located anywhere in the source file.
You can write for instance your program in a top down approach: write main first, then sub-function, then sub-sub-functions,...Congrats are in order! Janet Maslin’s annual summer reading list for the New York Times has, at long last, achieved peak caucasity. Maslin’s book selections for summer 2015 all have one glaring fact in common: each author is—wait for it... wait for it—white.
Here is the SRL breakdown, going back to 2012, according to tipster E.A. Shaw:
2012: 90.4% 20/21 (Exception: Mindy Kaling) 2013: 93.7% 15/16 (Exception: Kevin Kwan with “Crazy Rich Asians”) 2014: 88% 15/17 (Alarmingly diverse! Exceptions: Mariano Rivera and Laline Paul) 2015: 100% 17/17 (Summer Color Forecast: Whiteout Conditions!)
Maslin’s list is pretty unforgivable because there are a number of great books being released this summer by writers of color. Here are a few we’d suggest:
In the Country: Stories by Mia Alvar (June 16)
The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson (June 30)
Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari (June 16)
Flood of Fire by Amitov Ghosh (August 4)
Loving Day by Mat Johnson (May 26)
And, for those lucky enough to get an advance copy of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, Between the World and Me (September 8)
See, that wasn’t so hard Janet.
[Image via Shutterstock]
Gawker Review of Books is a new hub for book, art, and film coverage. Find us on Twitter.In promotion of Doctor Who’s eighth season premiere last year, the show went on a world tour that took Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman and a life size TARDIS replica as far afield as the US, Mexico and Brazil. The only Asian stop on this tour was not China or Japan as one might think, but South Korea, a country with the most rabid Whovians in the Far East, and an Anglophile obsession with BBC fare like Sherlock and The Hour.
The TARDIS and its crew stopped by in Seoul last August, but just a a few months before in the satellite city of Anyang, one enterprising Whovian opened the country’s only Doctor Who theme bar.
The TARDIS Pub & Grill, opened in spring 2014.
The TARDIS Beer Pub & Grill is perhaps the only thing worth seeing in Anyang, a city not particularly known for anything, let alone sci-fi fandom. Open from evening onwards, the pub is in some ways typical of a Korean hof, open plan bars with tables
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carbon dioxide per year, its current rate, with no growth whatsoever, it will still consume the entire carbon budget for the whole of humanity by itself by 2050.
C. Undrinkable Water, Poisoned Soils, Toxic Food
If the air is bad, the water is far worse. In a few decades of breakneck industrialization, the Chinese have managed to severely and irreversibly pollute most of the nation’s fresh water supplies with dire implications for public health. China’s fresh water sources are contaminated by pesticides, industrial chemicals, heavy metals and myriad other toxics. China’s largest rivers resemble vast open cesspools and for much of their length the banks are strewn with every imaginable kind of trash, and numberless outlet pipes spewing multiple toxics, dead fish, dead pigs and pigswill. Gushing pollutants turn long stretches of rivers bright red or purple or milky white or inky black. Sewage is routinely dumped mostly untreated in the nation’s rivers, the same rivers many cities take their drinking water from, imperiling the health of hundreds of millions. The government has built wastewater treatment facilities all over the country but most remain unused. (34)
These days China’s state sector has all the superficial trappings of a market economy.
China’s rivers suffer huge spills of all kinds of toxic chemicals – benzene, xanthogenate, analine – every year. In north China, the Yellow River “is a catastrophe” and the 300-odd rivers that drain the North China Plain “are open sewers if they are not completely dry” in the words of Ma Jun, China’s leading authority on the country’s water crisis. (35) According to a government report, the Yangtze River, the world’s third longest, is seriously and irreversibly polluted. Long stretches are said to be in “critical condition,” in places, too dangerous even to touch. Aquatic life has all but collapsed. Pollution and shipping wiped out China’s legendary Yangtze Baiji dolphin while even common carp “are gasping for survival.” (36) The 500-mile-long reservoir filling up behind the huge Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze qualifies as the world’s biggest cesspool. In some areas groundwater is being irreversibly polluted as textile dyeing mills and other factories, looking to avoid fines for dumping their effluents into rivers, instead drill and pump them into the earth. Some “use high-pressure pumps to discharge huge volumes of their wastewater directly underground.” According to one scientist, “deliberate, malicious waste discharge by factories has already become endemic.” (37)
The China Geological Survey reported in 2013 that 90 percent of the country’s groundwater is polluted, and 60 percent of it is “severely” polluted. A survey of 11 cities across China in 2012 indicated that 64 percent of water sources were severely polluted and 33 percent moderately polluted. Only 3 percent of sources could be graded as clean. (38) It’s difficult to overstate the dire implications of these practices: In China, groundwater is not only tapped for drinking water throughout rural China as well as in many cities, but over much of the country, especially the parched northern plains, this is the main source of water for farming.
Mass Production of “Cancer Villages”
China’s rivers have received many major toxic industrial chemical spills over the years. In September 2004, Jim Yardley of The New York Times reported on the situation in the Huai River basin, upstream from Shanghai, after a huge chemical spill created an 82-mile-long band of water that killed nearly every living thing and was too polluted even to touch. And the Huai, Yardley pointed out, was supposed to have been a government “success story.” (39) In April 2014, a major leak of benzene poisoned the drinking water for millions in Gansu Province.
Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, the government promoted the development of market-oriented “township and village industries” to promote growth and employment. These industries, the darlings of the World Bank and Western market-enthusiast academics, became notorious polluters. Foreign-invested special economic zone industries are also major polluters. (40) In the 1990s and 2000s, in response to growing anti-pollution protests in the cities, the government pushed dirty industries out of the cities and into the countryside and rural towns. This brilliant move resulted in horrific contamination of whole rural regions and the mass production of “cancer villages” where extraordinary numbers of inhabitants are dying from intestinal, liver and other cancers caused by ingesting toxic water and food.
Nongovernmental organizations count at least 459 villages spread across every province except far-western Qinghai and Tibet. In one village, 80 percent of the population is said to have died from pollution-induced cancers since 1991. (41) There are villages where almost every child is lead-poisoned. (42) Dumping of toxic chemicals and heavy metals extends even to remote corners of China. In neo-tropical Yunnan Province, investigators have found “rampant chromium dumping” polluting rice paddies and drinking water.
The Damage Done
The problem with water pollution, unlike air pollution, is that it doesn’t disappear once the dumping stops. Heavy metals and other contaminants don’t easily break down or wash away. They can be very long-lived and can’t really be “cleaned up.” (43) Once groundwater is polluted, there’s just no possible remediation. This means that extensive areas of China’s farmland, especially in the north, are effectively doomed. (44) This is taking a huge toll on the health of Chinese people as well as non-human life forms and poses a mortal threat to the entire society. Elizabeth Economy, author of The Rivers Run Black (2007), writes that “Less well documented [than air pollution] but potentially even more devastating is the health impact of China’s polluted water. Today, fully 190 million Chinese are sick from drinking contaminated water. All along China’s major rivers, villages report skyrocketing rates of diarrheal diseases, cancer, tumors, leukemia, and stunted growth.” (45)
The Bad Earth and Toxic Foods
China’s farmlands are extensively polluted with synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, heavy metals, sewage sludge and innumerable industrial toxics. Much of this comes from polluted irrigation water. In places, even industrial wastewater has been used to irrigate farms when local wells have dried up or are themselves too polluted to use. In December 2013, the Ministry of Land and Resources reported that 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres – roughly the area of Belgium) of China’s farmland is too polluted to grow crops on and researchers said that “as much as 70 percent” of China’s farmland could be contaminated to some degree. (46) In April 2014, the government reported that almost 20 percent of the country’s arable land, 10 percent of its woodlands and 10 percent of its grassland soils were seriously polluted with heavy metals, such as cadmium, mercury, arsenic, lead, chromium, zinc and nickel plus inorganic compounds including DDT. The survey, carried out between 2006 and 2010, but suppressed for four years as a state secret out of fear of public outrage, summed up the nation’s farmland situation as “grim”(yanjun). (47)
Shocking as this is for a nation that must try to feed 20 percent of the world’s population on 7 percent of the world’s arable land, environmentalists suspect the published figures understate the true extent of soil contamination. (48) In November 2014, the government conceded that 40 percent of the nation’s farmland is degraded from acidification, pollution and erosion, and the government “is growing increasingly concerned about its food supply after years of rapid industrialization resulted in widespread pollution of waterways and farmland.” (49)
Life in the Communist Party is not so different from life in the mafia.
In May 2013, the Food and Drug Administration of Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, reported that 40 percent of the rice tested at restaurants that spring was contaminated with cadmium, a highly toxic heavy metal than can cause bone disease, cancer and other illnesses. Since extensive national testing has not yet been done for this or other contaminants, there is concern that such pollution is widespread. Fish (and fishermen) have also been found to have high levels of cadmium, mercury and lead. (50)
To add further insult to consumers, deliberate food adulteration, contamination and fakery is rife in China. In 2008, public anger erupted after the government reported that tens of thousands of children were at risk of kidney stones and other organ damage from milk powder mixed with melamine, a chemical used to deceive protein tests. At least six infants died from illnesses linked to the tainted powder, which sickened more than 300,000 children.
Despite repeated government crackdowns, food contamination is severe and growing in China. As domestic food grows increasingly unsafe, alarmed middle-class Chinese strip supermarkets of imported food and Chinese tourists clear out the shelves of baby formula from New Zealand to Holland to pack and take home in their suitcases. Public alarm is also driving up food imports, which in turn is driving up world food prices. (51) For the first time in its history, China now imports more grain than it produces. This is bad news not only for China’s basic food security but also for natural resources around the world as China’s demand for soybeans, corn, wheat and other grains is leveling forests from Africa to the Amazon.
What’s Going on Here?
Why is it that the same government that has lifted the living standards of more people – millions – faster than any other nation in history, that has built the world’s largest high-speed rail network, the largest airports, longest bridges, skyscrapers by the hundreds and whole cities practically overnight, can’t guarantee safe drinking water or food or medicines or breathable air to its citizens? Why can’t it enforce its own environmental regulations, or its own building codes? Why can’t it stop its own local governments from squandering money building unneeded housing, airports and rail lines? Why is it that the same ruthless police state that so proficiently crushes dissent and censors the internet can’t stop producers, even state-owned companies, from making lead-paint-coated toys, poisoned milk and baby formula, and toxic meat and dumplings, and can’t suppress corruption in its own officials? The answer to all these questions is to be found in the nature, contradictions and tendencies of China’s hybrid bureaucratic collectivist-capitalist economic system.
II. A Political Economy
China’s rulers preside over the largest and most dynamic economy in the world, a powerhouse of international trade whose state-owned conglomerates count among the largest companies in the world. They profit immensely from their state-owned enterprises’ (SOEs) market returns. But they’re not capitalists, at least not with respect to the state-owned economy. Communist Party members don’t own individual SOEs or shares in state companies like private investors. They collectively own the state, which owns most of the economy. They’re bureaucratic collectivists who run a largely state-planned economy that also produces extensively for the market. But producing for the market is not the same thing as capitalism. (52)
Three of the top 10 2014 Fortune Global 500 corporations are Chinese. But they’re not owned by Chinese capitalists. They’re owned by the Chinese government. James McGregor notes, “Of the sixty-nine companies from mainland China in the Fortune Global 500 in 2012, only seven were not SOEs … [and all of these seven] companies have received significant government assistance and most count government entities among their shareholders.” Thirty-five years after the introduction of market reforms, China’s government still owns and controls the commanding heights of the economy: banking, large-scale mining and manufacturing, heavy industry, metallurgy, shipping, energy generation, petroleum and petrochemicals, heavy construction and equipment, atomic energy, aerospace, telecommunications, vehicles (often in partnership with Western companies), aircraft manufacture, airlines, railways, biotechnology, military production and more. Plus all the land and natural resources: There is no private property in China.
“Families benefited from their control of state companies, amassing private wealth as they embraced the market economy.”
In key industries SOEs own and control between 75 and 100 percent of assets including 96.2 percent of telecom, 91.6 percent of power generation, 76.6 percent of petroleum and petrochemicals, 76.2 percent of airlines, 74 percent of autos, and so on. China’s banks are 100 percent state-owned (though there are some private equity firms). (53) In the words of James McGregor, “SOEs monopolize or dominate all significant sectors of the economy and control the entire financial system. Party leaders deploy the SOEs to build and bolster the economy – and undergird the Party’s monopoly political control. The private sector provides a lubricant for growth and the opportunity for people to become rich as long as they support the Party.” (54) SOEs together with local government-owned urban collective and township and village industries currently account for 50 percent of China’s current non-farm GDP. Foreign-invested joint ventures account for about 30 percent of non-farm GDP (though Chinese partners of larger joint ventures, like auto assembly, are mostly SOEs). China’s indigenous private sector accounts for about 20 percent of non-farm GDP. (55)
SOEs resemble capitalist corporations but they’re not driven by the same motor of market competition; they don’t face the same incentives and penalties as capitalist firms, at least not to the same extent, and they’re not run like capitalist companies. (56) These days China’s state sector has all the superficial trappings of a market economy: corporations, CEOs, IPOs, stock markets and so on. The Ministry of Petroleum is now called China National Petroleum Corporation. Baoshan Iron and Steel now calls itself Baosteel Group Corp. and so on. But SOEs aren’t “corporations.”
Dozens of Chinese SOEs have held IPO listings on the New York Stock Exchange and China’s own toy stock markets in Shenzhen and Shanghai. But the government won’t allow its companies to be bought and sold. It will only permit a minority of shares, not more than 25 percent, and only non-voting shares at that, to be traded on the market. As one expert put it “the Chinese government is the only shareholder that counts.” (57) Lots of SOEs produce some or most of their output for the market. State Grid produces power for, besides China (where it has a monopoly), Singapore and Australia, and is developing facilities in the Philippines and Portugal. But State Grid does not answer to shareholders or boards. China’s SOEs are not run by boards of directors and elected CEOs. They don’t have boards of directors. And their CEOs and senior management are all appointed by the Communist Party. All Chinese state “corporations” have Communist Party secretaries who without exception outrank the enterprise CEOs. (58)
To be sure, China has a vast capitalist market economy side-by-side with the state sector. Thousands of real, foreign corporations operate in China today: Apple, Toyota, Audi, GM, Samsung, Procter & Gamble, Walmart, even the Avon lady. And China has plenty of homegrown entrepreneurs and privately owned businesses. China is said to have more than a million US-dollar millionaires and at least 89 billionaires. The private sector includes sizeable companies like Baidu (the internet search giant that dominates the China market since Google left), Tencent (instant messaging), Jack Ma’s Alibaba, real estate developers like Dalian Wanda Group and China Vanka, food processors like Wahaha Corp., insurance companies, and others. But these are not the core of the economy. China’s biggest private company by valuation, Alibaba, doesn’t produce anything at all; like eBay it just connects sellers with buyers. Most of China’s private businesses are small, on average less than half the size of SOEs, and the vast majority are even smaller. They include thousands of small coal mines, thousands of local construction companies, some small steel mills, textile and garment industries, shoemakers, retail shops and supermarkets, restaurants, self-employed truckers, family businesses and the like.
“Get Rich and You’ll Get Audited”
The Communist Party keeps its domestic capitalists on a short leash. Successful entrepreneurs soon find they need a state “partner,” or the government sets up its own competitors to suppress them, or they suffer forced buyouts. Those who cross the Party disappear and their property is seized, and worse. (59) Those whose names appear on Forbes’ list of the world’s wealthiest citizens or the Hong Kong Hunrun Rich List sometimes vanish without a trace. Chinese people call these the “pig-killing lists.” Middle-class Chinese speculate on apartments and suburban villas but the land they sit on is state-owned. Indeed, even title to the apartments and villas they’ve bought is never really secure because these can easily be seized by the state on a whim, with no recourse.
It’s been estimated that in the last three decades more than 60 million Chinese farmers and urban residents have been summarily evicted from their homes and farms to make way for government development projects of all sorts across the country. More than a million and a half farmers and townsfolk were evicted to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. Several million residents of Beijing were evicted to shabby satellite towns while their ancient Beijing homes, some dating back to the Ming dynasty, were leveled to make way for shopping malls, apartment towers and Olympic sports stadiums. (60) In such a system, arbitrary political power and generalized insecurity condition every aspect of life, even within the ruling Party itself – especially within the ruling Party.
A. Beijing’s Game of Thrones
China’s ruling class is the nomenklatura, the upper ranks of the 86-million-member Chinese Communist Party. Since the victory of the revolution in 1949, China has been run by the party-army-bureaucratic aristocracy, the leaders of which reside behind the walls of the Zhongnanhai complex adjacent to the Forbidden City. (61) In the 1950s, they nationalized the economy, divided up government administrative and economic management posts among themselves and centralized all surplus extraction. Today, this state-owned economy is run by their children and will soon be run by their grandchildren.
Since Mao’s death in 1976, the inner circle of the ruling “red families” have been headed up by the so-called “Eight Immortals”: Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun (the CCP’s leading economic planner), Wang Zhen, Li Xiannian (PRC president), Peng Zhen (NPC Congress chair), Song Renqiong (party personnel chief), Yang Shangkun (PRC president), and Bo Yibo (vice premier and last of the eight to die at 98 in 2007). (62) As the elders retired and died off they entrusted the reins of power to their children, the “princeling” (taizi dang) sons and daughters of the first generation of communist rulers. Since the bad old days when Mao and his Gang of Four dispatched their rivals to rot in dungeons, or shot Lin Biao’s plane out of the sky to prevent his escape to Moscow, the Communist Party has made every effort to present a public façade of leadership unity and discipline and portray its internal workings as “regularized” with “collective leadership,” “10-year rotations” of “presidents” and “prime ministers,” “mandatory retirement of senior officials at 65” and so on. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A study released in February 2015 declared that living in China’s cities is “as deadly as smoking.”
Today, as in Mao’s day, CCP internal political machinations resemble nothing so much as The Godfather or “Game of Thrones.” And how could it be otherwise? In the absence of the rule of law, without elections to choose government representatives, without inner-party democracy, without constitutional procedures to regularize succession to office, without an independent judiciary, justice department, attorney generals and police to systematically prosecute and punish corrupt politicians, in such a system, no one owns their office, position or job on the basis of merit, professional qualification, fixed-year terms or enforceable contracts. Every cadre’s personal and political security depends, above all, on the strength of his/her guanxi: his connections and relationships with networks of allies, their patrons above, their supporters below and especially to families, clans and factions.
From the days of Mao’s purges of “capitalist roaders” Lin Biao, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, to Deng Xiaoping’s own purge of the Maoist Gang of Four, to Jiang Zemin’s purge of “counterrevolutionaries” Zhao Ziyang, Bao Tong et al. in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen uprising, to current President Xi Jinping’s show trials of “corrupt” rival Bo Xilai (son of Bo Yibo) and his persecution of powerful opponents in the oil faction and secret police led by Zhou Yongkang, the Chinese Communist Party’s internal political dramas differ little from the treacherous, fratricidal power struggles of the Corleones, Barzinis and Straccis of The Godfather or the bloody feudal wars of the Starks, Tullys and Boltons for supremacy in Westeros. As in “Game of Thrones,” China’s communists are embroiled in nonstop faction building, never-ending intrigue and infighting, and treacherous factional struggles while the paramount leader du jour‘s claim to the red throne in Zhongnanhai is never completely secure. (63)
President Xi Jinping came into office in 2012 on a campaign vowing to “swat tigers and flies alike.” Xi had been brought in to replace the disgraced Shanghai Mayor Chen Liangyu on the strength of his anticorruption campaigns in Zhejian Province where he once told an anti-graft conference: “Rein in your spouses, children, relatives and friends and staff, and vow not to use power for personal gain.” (64) But Xi is just as corrupt as all the rest, and just as thuggish.
Xi once remarked that as a young man he liked to watch The Godfather. Yu Jie, an exiled author of numerous critical books on China, titled his latest book, Godfather of China Xi Jinping (still awaiting publication as of March 2015). Yu told The New York Times that the film was Xi’s political study guide: “The Communist Party is China’s biggest mafia, and the party boss Xi Jinping is the godfather of China.” As if to confirm Yu’s thesis, when he tried to publish the book in Hong Kong, one publisher was arrested in Shenzhen and disappeared. A second prospective publisher received a threatening phone call from Beijing telling him that the book “absolutely cannot be published” and if he publishes it, “your personal safety and the safety of your family cannot be guaranteed” so he immediately dropped the project.
Life in the Communist Party is not so different from life in the mafia: It’s a constant, treacherous and highly dangerous nonstop factional struggle between crime family-based groupings in struggle with one another over top offices and treasure. The key to safety is building unshakable vertical and horizontal networks of support and protection – of guanxi. And the key to solidifying those networks is sharing the loot from corruption. As political scientist Minxin Pei put it: “If your patrons do not protect you, you’re toast … Corruption is the glue that keeps the party stuck together.” (65)
B. Grabbing the Brass Ring: Gangster Capitalism and the Necessity of Corruption
China’s economy mirrors its politics. China’s communist party-state has grown immensely wealthy over the past three decades from rivers of income flowing in from huge state monopolies like Sinopec (China Petroleum), State Grid, Bank of China, China Telecom, from taxing export foreign exchange earnings, and more. But the question is, how is this loot shared out among the ruling class of China, the “gang” of 86 million Communist Party members? In capitalist economies, this is entirely formalized and regularized. One’s wealth is based on property, cash in the bank, stock ownership and such – all secured by the rule of law, enforceable contracts, an impersonal state, independent judiciary and the police. But China has none of this. Cadres don’t privately own SOEs; they don’t own shares in SOEs.
Yet we know from multiple sources including trials of corrupt officials, revelations about secret offshore bank accounts, records of foreign property purchases, and especially from recent headline exposés in The New York Times and Bloomberg News on the wealth of China’s leading “princelings” including former and current heads of state, that China’s Communist Party cadres have gotten gloriously rich by way of market reforms. (66) The New York Times calculated that former Premier Wen Jiabao was worth at least $2.7 billion when he retired in 2012, all secreted under the names of close relatives. (67) As Xi Jinping climbed the party ranks, his extended family got rich in minerals, real estate and mobile-phone equipment. Today, his family is worth at least $376 million, again, with virtually all of it listed in the names of his close relatives rather than his own.
Markets and the Mother of All Moral Hazards
When Deng Xiaoping rejected Maoism and told the Chinese that now it was OK, even “glorious to get rich,” he faced an immediate problem: To get marketization rolling, he urged the cadres to promote private businesses and joint-ventures with foreign investors, to “jump into the sea of commerce” as he said in his famous “southern tour” of Shenzhen in 1992. Deng’s market reforms thus presented the personally penniless but functionally all-powerful CCP cadres with the mother of all moral hazards. China’s reintroduction of capitalism presented the cadres with a once-in-an-epoch opportunity to grab the brass ring, to get rich, really rich, and fast. The party-state owned all land, resources and industries, and controlled the banks and pension funds, foreign trade and currency exchange, courts, police and everything else. The problem was that the only ways to profit from this were all illegal: bribery, smuggling, influence peddling, embezzling money from state industries, profiting from guandao (reselling state-owned raw materials and commodities on the free market at huge markups), asset stripping, currency manipulation, money laundering and so on.
Risky, but how could they resist? Far from resisting, they led the way in what exiled economist He Qinglian called “the marketization of power.” (68) Besides, since there was no independent judicial system, it was left to the party officials to police themselves. The very people who stood to gain the most from the coming market boom were supposed to refrain from self-dealing. Even so, the breadth and brazenness of corruption grew slowly at first. Looking back to the 1980s, Bao Tong, a senior party official arrested and imprisoned as a “counterrevolutionary” during the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown told Bloomberg News in December 2013: “A bottle of Moutai, two cartons of Chunghwa cigarettes – corruption was no more than that at the beginning…. Now an enterprise worth 10 billion yuan can be purchased with 1 billion. This would have been appalling to people back then.” (69)
“It Doesn’t Matter Who Owns the Money; It Only Matters Who Gets to Use It”
Today, the buffet of benefits available to the upper ranks includes extravagant state-provided housing, posh offices, fleets of limousines, access to state-owned vacation villas, travel and plenty of pocket change to spend on fine French wines, Rolexes, Louis Vuitton handbags and the rest. At the top, princelings are often heads of giant conglomerates, which themselves own dozens or even hundreds of individual SOEs. Presumably this gives them access to multiple income streams and ample opportunities to plunder the government’s ever-growing treasure. Princeling Bo Xilai didn’t send his son Guagua to Harrow, Oxford and Harvard, and buy him Porsches, Ferraris and fancy apartments in Oxford and Cambridge, Massachusetts, on his official salary.
Even China’s leaders complain that China’s “governments at all levels” had turned the state’s banks into “ATMs for officials and official businessmen.” (70) As one SOE boss put it: “It doesn’t matter who owns the money; it only matters who gets to use it.” (71) As individuals, they loot according to their rank, positions and guanxi. And of course, who gets to use exactly what is shrouded in secrecy. Financial Times Beijing bureau chief Richard McGregor quotes a businessman jailed on corruption charges who said: “Every official has three lives. Their public life, their private life, and their secret life.” (72)
In the boom years of the 1990s and 2000s in China’s ruling class, taking their cue from New York banksters who were becoming their partners and backers, corruption flourished on a previously unimagined scale. They siphoned huge sums from state banks, SOEs and ministries. They looted pension funds and state charities. They’ve profited from illegal arms sales and smuggling. They made vast fortunes in real estate evicting millions of farmers and selling their land to developers. They made more fortunes taking cuts from listing Chinese companies on the New York Stock Exchange. In all this, the “princeling” children and grandchildren of the “Eight Immortals” have led the way.
“The anticorruption push is more of a Stalinist purge than a genuine attempt to clean up the government.”
In the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun and the other aging revolutionary generation leaders entrusted their children to run the new market-oriented state conglomerates like CITIC, China Poly Group (arms, African oil, etc.). Deng’s daughter Deng Rong and her brother Deng Zhifang were among the first to go into real estate in the 1990s. As Bloomberg reported in its investigative report on the 103 children and grandchildren of the Eight Immortals, “Families benefited from their control of state companies, amassing private wealth as they embraced the market economy. Forty-three of the 103 ran their own business or became executives in private firms … The third generation – grandchildren of the Eight Immortals and their spouses, many of whom are in their 30s and 40s – have parlayed family connections and overseas education into jobs in the private sector.” Others took over state-sector conglomerates and SOEs.
Twenty-six of the heirs of just these eight revolutionary leaders ran or held top positions in big SOEs: “Three children alone – General Wang’s son, Wang Jun, Deng’s son-in-law, He Ping; and Chen Yuan, the son of Mao’s economic tsar – headed or still run state-owned companies with combined assets of about $1.6 trillion in 2011. (73) Deng’s son-in-law Wu Jianchang got himself appointed head of numerous metals companies and then became, conveniently, minister of metallurgy. Deng’s grandson Zhuo Su got himself appointed head of a company that bought into an Australian iron ore business. Wang Jun, the revolutionary general’s son, set up a huge conglomerate, Poly Group, with Deng Xiaoping’s son-in-law He Ping, another general. Chen Yun installed his son Chen Yuan as head of the giant state-owned China Development Bank with assets of more than $1 trillion. His sister, Chen Xiaodan, worked at Morgan Stanley in New York, set up her own private equity firm, and worked with her father’s China Development Bank to support Chinese firms investing abroad in Europe and elsewhere.
Wang Zhi, General Wang’s third son, “borrowed” 300,000 yuan from his employer, the Ministry of Electronics, to set up his own company building personal computers, eventually partnering with Bill Gates to develop a Chinese version of Windows software. As Yang Dali of the University of Chicago put it, “The entire country was in business – the Party, the military, the courts, the prosecutor’s office, the police…. Insiders could get rich very quickly.” And “[w]hen the top is corrupt, this is how it will be all the way down,” said Dai Qing, China’s leading environmental activist who herself grew up in the Zhongnanhai compound with the princelings after being adopted by a famous general. (74) Bloomberg reports that, when he was lying in a hospital bed in 1990, hardline Maoist Gen. Wang Zhen (1908-1993) told a visitor that he felt betrayed by his own children. Decades after he had risked his life fighting for an egalitarian utopia, his children were only interested in getting rich: “Turtle eggs,” he said to the visiting well-wisher, using a slang term for bastards. “I don’t recognize them as my sons.” (75)
Getting the Loot Out of China
International banking connections also have been key to the princelings’ strategy of getting their loot out of China. Over the years, it has been estimated that princelings and other high cadres, cronies and capitalists have funneled $1-4 trillion in unreported assets out of the country since 2000. Credit Suisse, PricewaterhouseCoopers and UBS – Western banks with notorious experience in sheltering US and other tax evaders – set up secret companies and accounts for at least 21,000 Chinese in Caribbean tax havens including for Wen Yunsong, Wen Jiabao’s son. High cadres, their relatives and other rich guys fly suitcases of money to North America, Australia, Caribbean havens and other friendly destinations. (76)
In February 2014, it was reported that more than 45,000 (!) Chinese millionaires had queued up in Vancouver, British Columbia, to get investor residence visas in return for five-year, interest-free loans to the Canadian government. In the US, 80 percent of the government’s EB-5 investor program visas are going to wealthy ex-mainland Chinese; in Australia, it’s nine out of 10. At least 18 of the Eight Immortals’ descendants own or run entities registered in the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Liberia and other secret offshore tax havens. (77) Bo Yibo’s wife Gu Kailai, convicted in 2012 of murdering her British business partner, controlled a web of businesses from Beijing to the Caribbean worth at least $126 million and stashed many of her assets with her sister in places like the British Virgin Islands, according to Bloomberg. (78) So it goes.
C. Implications, Tendencies, Consequences
This structural arrangement of bureaucratic/gangster capitalist power and property has given China’s economy a radically different pattern and trajectory of economic development from normal capitalism anywhere in the West. We can specify at least the following broad systemic tendencies in this hybrid economic system:
1. Priority to the state-owned economy: Shocked and riveted by the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and especially the communist debacle in the USSR, Deng Xiaoping and his successors have been determined to avoid such a fate by maintaining state control over the commanding heights of the economy, avoiding substantial privatization and limiting the internal market, as noted above. That’s why the maximand of China’s SOEs is not profit maximization. Their maximand is the security, wealth and power of the Chinese Communist Party and that’s not the same thing. The Bank of China, China Development Bank, the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China and other huge state banks sit at the apex of China’s economy and count among the Global Fortune 500 largest companies. But unlike Citibank or HSBC, their job isn’t to make money. Their job is to lose money – or more precisely, to disburse it.
It’s often said that in the transition to capitalism China’s market reformers “abandoned central planning.” That’s an exaggeration. They reduced the scope of indicative planning but they did not abandon planning the state sector; they monetized it. Instead of issuing physical output targets à la Stalin and Mao, they direct most of the state economy by writing checks: by ordering state banks to disburse funds to support the production goals of the state plans (though they still set physical targets for some items – kilometers of rails, kilometers of roads, tons of wheat and cotton etc., as noted above). In the 1990s, the government leased out, sold off or closed down thousands of small unprofitable SOEs producing consumer goods including wood and leather products, furniture, building materials, garments, food products and the like. Dispensing with these, the government concentrated on restructuring, modernizing, expanding and diversifying the state’s SOEs. (79)
The government also expanded the state sector by establishing entirely new industries: consumer appliances, solar and wind power, biotech, high-speed trains, passenger aircraft, IT and others. But instead of assigning production targets for quantities of Geely cars, Suntech solar panels or China National Railways (CNR) high-speed trains, they allocate funds via state banks to support state-owned industries like CNR and to establish and support state-private joint ventures like Suntech and Geely. Since the 1990s, China’s SOEs, and the entire state industrial sector, have grown enormously. Whereas in the 1970s, China’s SOEs counted for almost nothing in the world economy, today, China’s “national champions” Sinopec, China National Petroleum and State Grid Corporation rank among the 10 largest companies by revenue in the 2014 Fortune 500.
Prioritizing the state sector means that the government often finds it rational to subvert its own market reforms to protect state interests: So when the head of a major state-owned conglomerate was removed for embracing market economics too enthusiastically, a Beijing University expert on China’s state-enterprises commented: “There’s a system in place, not just one person. The party’s appointee draws his position from patronage … and the task is to engage with state leaders and safeguard government assets, not to maximize profits.” (80) This is why the government enforces SOE monopolies regardless of efficiency, why it limits Western investor ownership share in joint ventures, why it bars Western firms from investing in key industries, and why it directs its huge sovereign wealth fund mainly to invest in the resource extraction industries China needs to fuel its national economic development even though global resource prices and resource industry profits have both been falling since 2008. (81) This is all in the collective interest of China’s state-based ruling class.
Yet at the same time, individually, princelings and well-placed cadres are simultaneously conniving, like the gangsters they are, to privatize pieces of the state-owned economy and to sell them at huge discounts to themselves, their relatives and partners, usually via private investment banks that have their real owners concealed behind multiple layers of paper and shell companies. Cadres also funnel money out
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. A modern church was built over the old one in 1931, abolishing much of its archeological significance. The only monuments left are a marble door-frame decorated with a carved Estrangelo (Syriac) inscription, and two niches, which date back to the 13th or 14th century.
visit it yearly in the spring, when many people also go out to its whereabouts on holiday. It is about 6 m below street level. A modern church was built over the old one in 1931, abolishing much of its archeological significance. The only monuments left are a marble door-frame decorated with a carved Estrangelo (Syriac) inscription, and two niches, which date back to the 13th or 14th century. Mar Matte: This famous monastery is situated about 20 km (12 mi) east of Mosul on the top of a high mountain (Mount Maqloub). It was built by Mar Matte, a monk who fled with several other monks in 362 AD from the Monastery of Zuknin near the City of Amid (Diyarbakir) in the southern part of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and the north of Iraq during the reign of Emperor Julian the Apostate (361–363 AD). It has a precious library containing Syrianic scriptures.
Monastery of Mar Behnam: Also called Deir Al-Jubb (The Cistern Monastery) and built in the 12th or 13th century, it lies in the Nineveh Plain near Nimrud about 32 km (20 mi) southwest of Mosul. The monastery, a great fort-like building, rises next to the tomb of Mar Behnam, a prince who was killed by the Sassanians, perhaps during the 4th century AD. A legend made him a son of an Assyrian king.
St. Elijah's Monastery (Dair Mar Elia): Dating from the 6th century, it was the oldest Christian Monastery in Iraq, until its destruction by IS in January 2016.[120][121]
Other Christian historical buildings:
The Roman Catholic Church (built by the Dominican Fathers in Nineveh Street in 1893)
Mar Michael
Mar Elias
Mar Oraha
Rabban Hormizd Monastery, the monastery of Notre-Dame des Semences, near the Assyrian town of Alqosh
Other sites [ edit ]
Bash Tapia Castle: A ruined castle rising high over the Tigris, which was one of the few remnants of Mosul's old walls until it was blown up by IS in 2015.
Qara Serai (The Black Palace): The remnants of the 13th-century palace of Sultan Badruddin Lu'lu'.
Arts [ edit ]
Painting [ edit ]
The so-called Mosul School of Painting refers to a style of miniature painting that developed in northern Iraq in the late 12th to early 13th century under the patronage of the Zangid dynasty (1127–1222). In technique and style the Mosul school was similar to the painting of the Seljuq Turks, who controlled Iraq at that time, but the Mosul artists had a sharper sense of realism based on the subject matter and degree of detail in the painting rather than on representation in three dimensions, which did not occur. Most of the Mosul iconography was Seljuq—for example, the use of figures seated cross-legged in a frontal position. Certain symbolic elements however, such as the crescent and serpents, were derived from the classical Mesopotamian repertory.
Most Mosul paintings were illustrations of manuscripts—mainly scientific works, animal books, and lyric poetry. A frontispiece painting, now held in the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, dating from a late 12th century copy of Galen's medical treatise, the Kitab al-diriyak ("Book of Antidotes"), is a good example of the earlier work of the Mosul school. It depicts four figures surrounding a central, seated figure who holds a crescent-shaped halo. The painting is in a variety of whole hues; reds, blues, greens, and gold. The Küfic lettering is blue. The total effect is best described as majestic.
Another mid-13th century frontispiece held in the Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, to another copy of the same text suggests the quality of later Mosul painting. There is realism in its depiction of the preparation of a ruler's meal and of horsemen engaged in various activities, and the painting is as many hued as that of the early Mosul school, yet it is somehow less spirited. The composition is more elaborate but less successful. By this time the Baghdad school, which combined the styles of the Syrian and early Mosul schools, had begun to dominate. With the invasion of the Mongols in the mid-13th century the Mosul school came to an end, but its achievements were influential in both the Mamluk and the Mongol schools of miniature painting.
Metalwork [ edit ]
From the 13th-century metal craftsmen centred in Mosul influenced the metalwork of the Islamic world, from North Africa to eastern Iran. Under the active patronage of the Zangid dynasty, the Mosul School developed an extraordinarily refined technique of inlay—particularly in silver—far overshadowing the earlier work of the Sāmānids in Persia and the Būyids in Iraq.
Mosul craftsmen used both gold and silver for inlay on bronze and brass. After delicate engraving had prepared the surface of the piece, strips of gold and silver were worked so carefully that not the slightest irregularity appeared in the whole of the elaborate design. The technique was carried by Mosul metalworkers to Aleppo, Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, and Persia; similar pieces from those centres are called Mosul bronzes.
Among the most famous surviving Mosul pieces is a brass ewer inlaid with silver from 1232, and now in the British Museum, by the artist Shujā’ ibn Mana. The ewer features representational as well as abstract design, depicting battle scenes, animals and musicians within medallions. Mosul metalworkers also created pieces for Eastern Christians. A candlestick of this variety from 1238 and housed in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, attributed to Dà’ūd ibn Salamah of Mosul, is bronze with silver inlay. It displays the familiar medallions but is also engraved with scenes showing Christ as a child. Rows of standing figures, probably saints, decorate the base. The background is decorated with typically Islamic vine scrolls and intricate arabesques, giving the piece a unique look.
Education [ edit ]
As per IS policy, even primary schools are gender segregated, putting a strain on educational resources.[107] Previously the city's largest university, the University of Mosul was closed in 2014.[122]
On January 15, 2017, 30 schools reopened in the east of the city, allowing 16,000 children to start classes again. Some of them had no education at all since IS took over Mosul in June 2014.[123]
Sport [ edit ]
The city has one football team capable of competing in the top-flight of Iraqi football – Mosul FC.
Notable people [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]King Philip's War (sometimes called the First Indian War, Metacom's War, Metacomet's War, Pometacomet's Rebellion, or Metacom's Rebellion)[2] was an armed conflict in 1675–78 between Indian inhabitants of New England and New England colonists and their Indian allies. The war is named for Metacomet, the Wampanoag chief who adopted the name Philip because of the friendly relations between his father Massasoit and the Mayflower Pilgrims.[3] The war continued in the most northern reaches of New England until the signing of the Treaty of Casco Bay in April 1678.[4]
Massasoit had maintained a long-standing alliance with the colonists. Metacom (c. 1638–1676) was his younger son, and he became tribal chief in 1662 after Massasoit's death. Metacom, however, did not maintain his father's alliance between the Wampanoags and the colonists. The colonists insisted that the peace agreement in 1671 should include the surrender of Indian guns; then three Wampanoags were hanged for murder in Plymouth Colony in 1675 which increased the tensions. Colonial militia and Indian raiding parties spread over Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Maine over the next six months. The Narragansetts remained neutral, but several individual Narragansetts participated in raids of colonial strongholds and militia, so colonial leaders deemed the Narragansetts to be in violation of peace treaties. They assembled the largest colonial army that New England had yet mustered, consisting of 1,000 militia and 150 Indian allies, and Governor Josiah Winslow marshaled them to attack the Narragansetts in November 1675. They attacked and burned Indian villages throughout Rhode Island territory, culminating with the attack on the Narragansetts' main fort called the Great Swamp Fight. An estimated 150 Narragansetts were killed, many of them women and children, and the Indian coalition was then taken over by Narragansett sachem Canonchet. They pushed back the colonial frontier in Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Rhode Island colonies, burning towns as they went, including Providence in March 1676. However, the colonial militia overwhelmed the Indian coalition and, by the end of the war, the Wampanoags and their Narragansett allies were almost completely destroyed.[5] Metacom fled to Mount Hope where he was finally killed by the militia.
The war was the greatest calamity to occur in seventeenth-century New England and is considered by many to be the deadliest war in the history of American colonization.[6] In the space of little more than a year, 12 of the region's towns were destroyed and many more were damaged, the economy of Plymouth and Rhode Island Colonies was all but ruined and their population was decimated, losing one-tenth of all men available for military service.[7]:656[8] More than half of New England's towns were attacked by Indians.[9]
King Philip's War began the development of an independent American identity. The New England colonists faced their enemies without support from any outside government or military, and this gave them a group identity separate and distinct from Britain.[10]
Historical context [ edit ]
The Pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower and founded Plymouth Plantation expended great effort forging friendship and peace with the Indians around Cape Cod. They traveled long distances to make peace with Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoag tribe, and Governor William Bradford made a gift of his prized red horse coat upon seeing that the chief admired it. Yet over the next 50 years, frictions and misunderstandings multiplied as wave after wave of Puritans and non-religious "strangers" (fortune-seekers not motivated by religion) kept arriving, often oblivious to the fragile peace carefully woven since the earliest arrivals. By 1675, the early efforts at friendship failed.
King Philip's War joined a list of uprisings and conflicts between various Indian tribes and the French, Dutch, and English colonial settlements of Canada, New York, and New England. These include the Powhatan wars of 1610–14, 1622–32, and 1644–46[11] in Virginia, the Pequot War of 1637 in Connecticut, the Dutch-Indian war of 1643 along the Hudson River,[12] and the Iroquois Beaver Wars of 1650.[13]
Throughout the Northeast, the Indians had suffered severe population losses as a result of epidemics of smallpox, spotted fever, typhoid, and measles starting in about 1618, two years before the Pilgrims established Plymouth Colony.[14] Plymouth Colony was established in 1620 with significant early help from local Indians, particularly Squanto and Massasoit. Subsequent colonists founded Salem, Boston, and many small towns around Massachusetts Bay between 1628 and 1640, during a time of increased English immigration, as well as towns such as Windsor, Connecticut (est. 1633), Newbury, Massachusetts (est. 1635), Hartford, Connecticut (est. 1636), Springfield, Massachusetts (est. 1636), Northampton, Massachusetts (est. 1654), and Providence, Rhode Island (est. 1636). The colonists progressively expanded throughout the territories of the several Algonquian-speaking tribes in the region. Prior to King Philip's War, tensions fluctuated between Indian tribes and the colonists, but relations were generally peaceful.[6]
The Rhode Island, Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven colonies each developed separate relations with the Wampanoags, Nipmucks, Narragansetts, Mohegans, Pequots, and other tribes of New England, whose territories historically had differing boundaries. Many of the neighboring tribes had been traditional competitors and enemies. As the colonial population increased, the New Englanders expanded their settlements along the region's coastal plain and up the Connecticut River valley. By 1675, they had established a few small towns in the interior between Boston and the Connecticut River settlements.
The Wampanoag tribe under Metacomet's leadership had entered into an agreement with the Plymouth Colony and believed that they could rely on the colony for protection. However, in the decades preceding the war, it became clear to them that the treaty did not mean that the Colonists were not allowed to settle in new territories.[6]
Failure of diplomacy [ edit ]
Metacomet became sachem of the Pokanoket and Grand Sachem of the Wampanoag Confederacy in 1662 after the death of his older brother Grand Sachem Wamsutta (called "Alexander" by the colonists), who had succeeded their father Massasoit (d. 1661) as chief. Metacomet was well known to the colonists before his ascension as paramount chief to the Wampanoags, but he distrusted the colonists.
The Plymouth colonists had passed laws making it illegal to have commerce with the Wampanoags.[citation needed] They learned that Wamsutta had sold a parcel of land to Roger Williams, so Governor Josiah Winslow had Wamsutta arrested, even though Wampanoags who lived outside of colonist jurisdiction were not accountable to Plymouth Colony laws. Metacomet began negotiating with the other Algonquian tribes against the Plymouth Colony soon after the death of his father and his brother.[15]
Population [ edit ]
The population of New England colonists totaled about 80,000 people. They lived in 110 towns, of which 64 were in the Massachusetts Bay colony, which then included the southwestern portion of Maine. The towns had about 16,000 men of military age who were almost all part of the militia, as universal training was prevalent in all colonial New England towns. Many towns had built strong garrison houses for defense, and others had stockades enclosing most of the houses. All of these were strengthened as the war progressed. Some poorly populated towns were abandoned if they did not have enough men to defend them.
Each town had local militias based on all eligible men who had to supply their own arms. Only those who were too old, too young, disabled, or clergy were excused from military service. The militias were usually only minimally trained and initially did relatively poorly against the warring Indians, until more effective training and tactics could be devised. Joint forces of militia volunteers and volunteer Indian allies were found to be the most effective. The officers were usually elected by popular vote of the militia members.[citation needed] The Indian allies of the colonists numbered about 1,000 from the Mohegans and Praying Indians, with about 200 warriors.[16]
By 1676, the regional Indian population had decreased to about 10,000 (exact numbers are unavailable), largely because of epidemics. These included about 4,000 Narragansetts of western Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut, 2,400 Nipmucks of central and western Massachusetts, and 2,400 combined in the Massachusett and Pawtucket tribes living around Massachusetts Bay and extending northwest to Maine. The Wampanoags and Pokanokets of Plymouth and eastern Rhode Island are thought to have numbered fewer than 1,000. About one in four were considered to be warriors. By then, the Indians had almost universally adopted steel knives, tomahawks, and flintlock muskets as their weapons. The various tribes had no common government. They had distinct cultures and often warred among themselves,[17] although they all spoke related languages from the Algonquian family.
The trial [ edit ]
John Sassamon was an Indian convert to Christianity, commonly referred to as a "praying Indian." He played a key role as a "cultural mediator," negotiating with both colonists and Indian while belonging to neither party. He was an early graduate of Harvard College and served as a translator and adviser to Metacomet. He reported to the governor of Plymouth Colony that Metacomet planned to gather allies for Indian attacks on widely dispersed colonial settlements.[19]:221
Metacomet was brought before a public court, where court officials admitted that they had no proof but warned that they would confiscate Wampanoag land and guns if they had any further reports that he was conspiring to start a war. Not long after, Sassamon's body was found in the ice-covered Assawompset Pond, and Plymouth Colony officials arrested three Wampanoags on the testimony of an Indian witness, including one of Metacomet's counselors. A jury that included six Indian elders convicted the men of Sassamon's murder, and they were executed by hanging on June 8, 1675 (O.S.) at Plymouth.
Southern theater, 1675 [ edit ]
Raid on Swansea [ edit ]
A band of Pokanokets attacked several isolated homesteads in the small Plymouth colony settlement of Swansea on June 20, 1675.[20] They laid siege to the town, then destroyed it five days later and killed several more people. On June 27, 1675, a full eclipse of the moon occurred in the New England area,[21] and various tribes in New England thought it a good omen for attacking the colonists.[22] Officials from the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies responded quickly to the attacks on Swansea; on June 28, they sent a punitive military expedition that destroyed the Wampanoag town at Mount Hope in Bristol, Rhode Island.
The war quickly spread and soon involved the Podunk and Nipmuck tribes. During the summer of 1675, the Indians attacked at Middleborough and Dartmouth, Massachusetts (July 8), Mendon, Massachusetts (July 14), Brookfield, Massachusetts (August 2), and Lancaster, Massachusetts (August 9). In early September, they attacked Deerfield, Hadley, and Northfield, Massachusetts.
Siege of Brookfield [ edit ]
Wheeler's Surprise and the ensuing Siege of Brookfield were fought in August 1675 between Nipmuc Indians under Muttawmp and the colonists of Massachusetts Bay under the command of Thomas Wheeler and Captain Edward Hutchinson.[23] The battle consisted of an initial ambush on August 2, 1675 by the Nipmucs against Wheeler's unsuspecting party. Eight men from Wheeler's company died during the ambush: Zechariah Phillips of Boston, Timothy Farlow of Billerica, Edward Coleborn of Chelmsford, Samuel Smedly of Concord, Shadrach Hapgood of Sudbury, Sergeant Eyres, Sergeant Prichard, and Corporal Coy of Brookfield.[24] Following the ambush was an attack on Brookfield, Massachusetts, and the consequent besieging of the remains of the colonial force. The Nipmuc forces harried the settlers for two days, until they were driven off by a newly arrived force of colonial soldiers under the command of Major Simon Willard.[25] The siege took place at Ayers' Garrison in West Brookfield, but the location of the initial ambush was a subject of extensive controversy among historians in the late nineteenth century.[26]
The New England Confederation comprised the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Plymouth Colony, New Haven Colony, and Connecticut Colony; they declared war on the Indians on September 9, 1675. The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations tried to remain neutral, but much of the war was fought on Rhode Island soil; Providence and Warwick suffered extensive damage from the Indians.
The next colonial expedition was to recover crops from abandoned fields along the Connecticut River for the coming winter and included almost 100 farmers and militia, plus teamsters to drive the wagons.
Battle of Bloody Brook [ edit ]
The Battle of Bloody Brook was fought on September 12, 1675 between militia from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and a band of Indians led by Nipmuc sachem Muttawmp. The Indians ambushed colonists escorting a train of wagons carrying the harvest from Deerfield to Hadley. They killed at least 40 militia men and 17 teamsters out of a company that included 79 militia.[27]
Attack on Springfield [ edit ]
The Indians next attacked Springfield, Massachusetts on October 5, 1675, the Connecticut River's largest settlement at the time. They burned to the ground nearly all of Springfield's buildings, including the town's grist mill. Most of the Springfielders who escaped unharmed took cover at the house of Miles Morgan, a resident who had constructed one of the settlement's few fortified blockhouses.[28] An Indian servant who worked for Morgan managed to escape and alerted the Massachusetts Bay troops under the command of Major Samuel Appleton, who broke through to Springfield and drove off the attackers.
Morgan's sons were famous Indian fighters in the territory. His son Peletiah was killed by Indians in 1675. Springfielders later honored Miles Morgan with a large statue in Court Square.[28]
The Great Swamp Fight [ edit ]
On November 2, Plymouth Colony governor Josiah Winslow led a combined force of colonial militia against the Narragansett tribe. The Narragansetts had not been directly involved in the war, but they had sheltered many of the Wampanoag fighters, women, and children. Some of their warriors had participated in several Indian attacks. The colonists distrusted the tribe and did not understand the various alliances. As the colonial forces went through Rhode Island, they found and burned several Indian towns which had been abandoned by the Narragansetts, who had retreated to a massive fort in a frozen swamp. The cold weather in December froze the swamp so that it was relatively easy to traverse. The colonial force found the Narragansett fort on December 19, 1675 near present-day South Kingstown, Rhode Island; they attacked in a combined force of Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Connecticut militia numbering about 1,000 men, including about 150 Pequots and Mohican Indian allies. The fierce battle that followed is known as the Great Swamp Fight. It is believed that the militia killed about 600 Narragansetts. They burned the fort (occupying over 5 acres (20,000 m2) of land) and destroyed most of the tribe's winter stores.
Most of the Narragansett warriors escaped into the frozen swamp. The colonists lost many of their officers in this assault; about 70 of their men were killed and nearly 150 more wounded. The rest of the colonial assembled forces returned to their homes, lacking supplies for an extended campaign. The nearby towns in Rhode Island provided care for the wounded until they could return to their homes.[29]
Mohawk intervention [ edit ]
In December 1675, Metacomet established a winter camp in Schaghticoke, New York.[30] His reason for moving into New York has been attributed to a desire to enlist Mohawk aid in the conflict.[31] Though New York was a non-belligerent, Governor Edmund Andros was nonetheless concerned at the arrival of the Wampanoag sachem.[30] Either with Andros' sanction, or of their own accord, the Mohawk - traditional rivals of the Algonquian people - launched a surprise assault against a 500-warrior band under Metacomet's command the following February.[30][31] The "ruthless" coup de main resulted in the death of between 70 and as many as 460 of the Wampanoag.[32][30] His forces crippled, Metacomet withdrew to New England, pursued "relentlessly" by Mohawk forces who attacked Algonquian settlements and ambushed their supply parties.[30][33][32]
Over the next several months, fear of Mohawk attack led some Wampanoag to surrender to the colonists, and one historian described the decision of the Mohawk to engage Metacomet's forces as "the blow that lost the war for Philip".[31][30]
Indian campaign [ edit ]
Indians attacked and destroyed more settlements throughout the winter of 1675–76 in their effort to annihilate the colonists. Attacks were made at Andover, Bridgewater, Chelmsford, Groton, Lancaster, Marlborough, Medfield, Medford, Portland, Providence, Rehoboth, Scituate, Seekonk, Simsbury, Sudbury, Suffield, Warwick, Weymouth, and Wrentham, including modern-day Norfolk and Plainville. The famous account written and published by Mary Rowlandson after the war gives a colonial captive's perspective on the conflict.[34]
Southern theater, 1676 [ edit ]
Lancaster raid [ edit ]
The Lancaster raid in February 1676 was an Indian attack on the community of Lancaster, Massachusetts. Philip led a force of 1,500 Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Narragansett Indians in a dawn attack on the isolated village, which then included all or part of the neighboring modern communities of Bolton and Clinton. They attacked five fortified houses. The house of the Rev. Joseph Rowlandson was set on fire, and most of its occupants were slaughtered—more than 30 people. Rowlandson's wife Mary was taken prisoner, and afterward wrote a best-selling captivity narrative of her experiences. Many of the community's other houses were destroyed before the Indians retreated northward.
Plymouth Plantation Campaign [ edit ]
The spring of 1676 marked the high point for the combined tribes when they attacked Plymouth Plantation on March 12. The town withstood the assault, but the Indians had demonstrated their ability to penetrate deep into colonial territory. They attacked three more settlements; Longmeadow (near Springfield), Marlborough, and Simsbury were attacked two weeks later. They killed Captain Pierce[35] and a company of Massachusetts soldiers between Pawtucket and the Blackstone's settlement. Several colonial men were tortured and buried at Nine Men's Misery in Cumberland as part of the Indians' ritual torture of enemies. They also burned the settlement of Providence to the ground on March 29. At the same time, a small band of Indians infiltrated and burned part of Springfield while the militia was away.
Colonists defending their settlement (non-contemporary depiction)
The settlements within the modern-day state of Rhode Island became a literal island colony for a time as the settlements at Providence and Warwick were sacked and burned, and the residents were driven to Newport and Portsmouth on Rhode Island. The Connecticut River towns had thousands of acres of cultivated crop land known as the bread basket of New England, but they had to limit their plantings and work in large armed groups for self-protection.[36]:20 Towns such as Springfield, Hatfield, Hadley, and Northampton, Massachusetts fortified themselves, reinforced their militias, and held their ground, though attacked several times. The small towns of Northfield, Deerfield, and several others were abandoned as the surviving settlers retreated to the larger towns. The towns of the Connecticut colony were largely unharmed in the war, although more than 100 Connecticut militia died in their support of the other colonies.
Attack on Sudbury [ edit ]
The Attack on Sudbury was fought in Sudbury, Massachusetts on April 21, 1676. The town was surprised by Indian raiders at dawn, but security precautions limited the damage to unoccupied homesteads. Reinforcements that arrived from nearby towns were drawn into ambushes by the Indians; Captain Samuel Wadsworth lost his life and half of a 60-man militia in such an ambush. Afterwards, Indians made their way through much of Sudbury, but they were held off by John Grout and a handful of men until colonial reinforcements arrived to help in the defense.
Battle of Turner's Falls [ edit ]
On May 18, 1676, Captain William Turner of the Massachusetts Militia and a group of about 150 militia volunteers (mostly minimally trained farmers) attacked an Indian fishing camp at Peskeopscut on the Connecticut River, now called Turners Falls, Massachusetts. The colonists killed 100–200 Indians in retaliation for earlier Indian attacks against Deerfield and other settlements and for the colonial losses in the Battle of Bloody Brook. Turner and nearly 40 of the militia were killed during the return from the falls.[37]
The colonists defeated an attack at Hadley on June 12, 1676 with the help of their Mohegan allies, scattering most of the Indian survivors into New Hampshire and farther north. Later that month, a force of 250 Indians was routed near Marlborough, Massachusetts. Combined forces of colonial volunteers and their Indian allies continued to attack, kill, capture, or disperse bands of Narragansetts, Nipmucs, and Wampanoags as they tried to plant crops or return to their traditional locations. The colonists granted amnesty to those who surrendered or who were captured and showed that they had not participated in the conflict. Captives who had participated in attacks on the many settlements were hanged, enslaved, or put to indentured servitude, depending upon the colony involved.
Battle of Mount Hope [ edit ]
Metacomet's allies began to desert him, and more than 400 had surrendered to the colonists by early July. Metacomet took refuge in the Assowamset Swamp below Providence, and the colonists formed raiding parties of militia and Indian allies. Metacomet was killed by one of these teams when he was tracked down by Captain Benjamin Church and Captain Josiah Standish of the Plymouth Colony militia at Mount Hope in Bristol, Rhode Island. He was shot and killed by an Indian named John Alderman on August 12, 1676.[7]:647 Metacomet's corpse was beheaded, then drawn and quartered, a traditional treatment of criminals in this time period. His head was displayed in Plymouth for a generation.[38]
Captain Church and his soldiers captured Pocasset war chief Anawan on August 28, 1676 at Anawan Rock in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. He was an old man at the time, and a chief captain of Metacomet. His capture marked the final event in King Philip's War, as he was also beheaded.
Northern Theater (Maine and Acadia) [ edit ]
French interests in Maine originated in the fur trade and the sale of fish, both to France. The French colonies in North America were primarily interested in trade and not in creating large cities. Instead, they preferred to convert the Indian population to Catholicism, or else to limit their contact with the Indians to trade. As English presence increased on the southern coast of Maine, the French Jesuits paid many of the area's tribes for the scalps of Protestant or English settlers, especially the Abenaki. The Jesuits in charge of coordinating with the tribes were located in a small mission town near Norridgewock, Maine and led by Jesuit Father Sébastien Rale. Two other mission towns were established, one based around Castine, Maine (established by Baron de St. Castin) and one on the St. Francis River between New Brunswick and Maine.
The more permanent English settlers moved northward from the colony of Massachusetts Bay, most of them Puritans who were unhappy with the political climate in Massachusetts Bay. Constant friction over many issues became the reason for many Abenaki raids in southern Maine, specifically over the issue of fishing rights for cod. Up until 1675, however, fighting had been limited to minor skirmishes that were more about the destruction of supplies than murder.
What is thought to have been the first action in Maine came when a 25-man militia gathered at Falmouth, Maine in 1675 and sailed to an Indian village, thought to be a part of the Abenaki, with a single sloop towing shallops. The Indians drove them off and took the shallops from them. Later that month, the tribe crossed the Saco River in the captured shallops and attacked the settlement of Winter Harbor. Little damage was caused, and similar raids were conducted against Wells and Falmouth later that year. The ultimate cause leading to war was the ruling by the Massachusetts General Court in 1676 making it illegal to sell firearms, powder, or rounds to the area's tribes. New England tribes had grown dependent on the musket for hunting, and the English colonists' remaining Indian allies switched to the French side. The French encouraged them to raid the English settlements, due to the tension in Europe at the time.[39]
Much of the northern fighting was centered around raids meant to destroy property and infrastructure rather than to kill people. The lack of population on both sides meant that large battles were out of the question initially. For the majority of the war, ship combat mostly involved muskets, and the infantry relied more on melee fighting than guns. Later in the war, reinforcements from southern New England introduced modern and well-equipped ships and infantry, turning the tide permanently. This was also the first time that Colonial Rangers were used, acting as guides and scouts for the main party of militia. Much of the fighting was also conducted on the coast in small boats and ships.
Richard Waldron and Charles Frost led the English colonial forces in the northern region, while Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin instructed the tribal chiefs in the Wabanaki Confederacy. Three major campaigns (one each year) were launched by the Indians in 1675, 1676, and 1677, most of which led to a massive colonial response. Waldron sent forces so far north that he attacked the Mi'kmaq in Acadia.
Throughout the campaigns, a Wabanaki leader named Mugg Hegone repeatedly attacked towns such as Black Point (Scarborough), Wells, and Damariscove, building an Indian navy out of the approximately 40 sloops and a dozen 30-ton ships previously armed by militia. Many of Maine's towns were burned, and most of the population left. Maine's fishing industry was completely destroyed by the Wabanaki flotilla. Records from Salem, Maine reported 20 ketches stolen and destroyed in one raid. Mugg Hegone was killed on his third raid on Black Point. With their leader gone, most of the Indian flotilla broke up and was hunted down by New York privateers and Royal Navy vessels.[40]
Colonial responses to raids generally failed in both their objectives and accomplishments. Few Indians were lost, and only two French Jesuits were reported killed. The colonists were much more successful in the later campaigns when they had the advantage in weapons. Their most successful ventures were a surprise attack near Dover, New Hampshire, in which more than 150 Indians were captured, and in the defense of Pemaquid, Maine from the Indian flotilla. One of the most notorious raids was in August 1679 when Indians attacked a settlement at the Sheepscot River near Merrymeeting Bay in Maine. Sir William Phips rescued local settlers by bringing them on board his vessel, abandoning his cargo of lumber. He was financially ruined when the Indians destroyed the shipyard and his intended cargo, although he was recognized as a hero in Boston.[41]
By the end of the war, the Northern Campaigns saw approximately 400 settlers die, Maine's fishing economy gone, and the Indians maintaining power in eastern and northern Maine. There is not an accurate account of the number of Indians who died, but it is thought to be between 100 and 300.[40] The official fighting ended in the northern theater with the Treaty of Casco (1678). Skirmishes continued until Father Rale's War, after which the French left Maine.
Aftermath [ edit ]
Southern New England [ edit ]
The war in southern New England largely ended with Metacomet's death. More than 1,000 colonists and 3,000 Indians had died.[1] More than half of all New England towns were attacked by Indian warriors, and many were completely destroyed.[9] Several Indians were enslaved and transported to Bermuda, including Metacomet's son, and numerous Bermudians today claim ancestry from the Indians exiles. Members of the sachem's extended family were placed among colonists in Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut. Other survivors joined western and northern tribes and refugee communities as captives or tribal members. Some of the Indian refugees returned to southern New England.[42] The Narragansetts, Wampanoags, Podunks, Nipmucks, and several smaller bands were virtually eliminated as organized bands, and even the Mohegans were greatly weakened.
The Colony of Rhode Island was devastated by the war, as its principal city Providence was destroyed. Nevertheless, the Rhode Island legislature issued a formal rebuke to Connecticut Governor John Winthrop on October 26, scarcely six months after the burning of the city—although Winthrop had died. The "official letter" places blame squarely on the United Colonies of New England for causing the war by provoking the Narragansetts.[43]
Sir Edmund Andros had been appointed governor of New York in 1674 by the Duke of York, who claimed that his authority extended as far north as Maine's northern boundary. He negotiated a treaty with some of the northern Indian bands in Maine on April 12, 1678. Metacomet's Pennacook allies had made a separate peace with the colonists as the result of early battles that are sometimes identified as part of King Philip's War. The tribe nevertheless lost members and eventually its identity as the result of the war.[44]
Plymouth Colony [ edit ]
Plymouth Colony lost close to eight percent of its adult male population and a smaller percentage of women and children to Indian warfare or other causes associated with the war.[19]:332 Indian losses were much greater, with about 2,000 men killed or who died of injuries in the war, more than 3,000 dying of sickness or starvation, and another 1,000 Indians sold into slavery and transported to other areas, such as the British-controlled islands in the Caribbean. About 2,000 Indians escaped to other tribes to the north or west; they joined continued
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dreadfully, with the league's then-No. 1-ranked defense shredded by the Lakers and short-handed Clippers in both ends of a Hollywood back-to-back, will be remembered with great fondness because of the Grizzlies' response. Perhaps you've heard the stat by now, but it bears repeating that NBA teams had won 662 consecutive regular-season games with a lead of 19 points or more entering the fourth quarter before Memphis' stunning rally from 19 down Friday night in Oakland to move to 2-0 for the season against the mighty Warriors. Winning a more Grizz-esque grindfest over visiting Utah, with some promising minutes from Chandler Parsons, only made the weekend sweeter.
7. Toronto Raptors
2016-17 record: 24-13
Previous ranking: 5
The Raptors lost their final game of 2016 in Phoenix on the second night of a back-to-back and frankly look like they haven't recovered. Toronto just absorbed an absolute shredding in San Antonio, found a way to lose its ninth successive regular-season meeting to the turmoil-drenched Bulls and capped its most frustrating week of the season by surrendering 129 points at home to unstoppable Raps nemesis James Harden and his Rockets pals. Boston's four-game winning streak, meanwhile, means that the Raptors are no longer alone with the Cavaliers on the list of the Eastern Conference residents on a 50-wins-or-better pace.
8. Atlanta Hawks
2016-17 record: 21-16
Previous ranking: 11
Four games into the 2017 portion of its schedule, Atlanta has only suffered one loss: Kyle Korver. Korver's stunning departure via trade to Cleveland leaves Paul Millsap as the last remaining starter from a 60-win team in 2014-15, but these guys are suddenly playing their best ball of the season amid management's decision to disassemble things. The highlights of a season-high-tying win streak that has reached six games: Dennis Schroder's quarterbacking, Tim Hardaway Jr.'s growing impact and Dwight Howard's high efficiency. The question now, of course, is how the winning impacts Atlanta's plans with Millsap. And as if the Hawks were short on drama: What sort of reception awaits Al Horford on his return to town Friday night?
9. LA Clippers
2016-17 record: 26-14
Previous ranking: 15
Chris Paul just joined Gary Payton, Jason Kidd and John Stockton as the only players in league history to rank in the top 10 in career assists and the top 15 in career steals. What this means most, of course, is that Paul is back in the Clippers' lineup after an eight-game run in which he was only able to play once thanks to a hamstring problem. Skepticism abounds in the wake of Doc Rivers' recent vow that both he and his players will endeavor to cut down on the techs they rack up, but credit the Clips for mustering consecutive double-digit wins (over Phoenix and Memphis) in their final two games without CP3... and in the wake of six-game losing streak.
10. Utah Jazz
2016-17 record: 23-16
Previous ranking: 9
The Jazz didn't place a single player in the top 10 in the first batch of Western Conference All-Star voting returns. Utah hasn't had an actual All-Star, of course, since Deron Williams back in 2010, but the fact neither Gordon Hayward nor Rudy Gobert are even in the fan conversation at the minute is rather disappointing. Sunday night's loss in Memphis, for the record, was Utah's first this season with both Hayward and George Hill in the lineup. The Jazz are 8-1 when Hayward and Hill are in uniform, 3-3 with Hill only, 12-11 with Hayward only and 0-1 without both.
11. Indiana Pacers
2016-17 record: 20-18
Previous ranking: 14
Remember when Paul George, right before Christmas, publicly shared how frustrating and, well, un-fun this season has been? The Pacers have responded to PG-13's laments with a flurry of gaudy offensive performances and a season-high five straight wins since, sending Indy overseas with some real momentum for the first time since preseason prognosticators were touting this team as the East's sleeper. They'll next be seen Thursday in London against the reeling Nuggets and their porous D. In other words: If the Pacers don't savor every moment of a trip we can only dream of taking, rest assured that it'll be the Committee (of One) doing the ranting.
12. Oklahoma City Thunder
2016-17 record: 22-16
Previous ranking: 8
Didn't take long for the well-chronicled concerns about the Thunder's January schedule to prove justified. They began the new year with three frustrating road losses and will end up traveling more than 12,000 miles by month's end; road dates still loom against the Clippers (Jan. 16), Warriors (Jan. 18), Jazz (Jan. 23), Cavs (Jan. 29) and Spurs (Jan. 31). Here are some more numbers, meanwhile, that aren't going in Westbrook's favor: He's now 0-for-6 on potential go-ahead shots from 3-point range in the final 10 seconds of the fourth quarter and overtime after that two-point loss in Houston in his latest duel with Harden.
13. Washington Wizards
2016-17 record: 18-18
Previous ranking: 13
Forget what we wrote here last week. Let the ledger show that, for the Wizards, Christmas actually arrived on Jan. 8. The Wiz pulled into Milwaukee this weekend with all of three road wins this season -- fewer than any team in the league apart from the 1-17 Nets -- but found a way to capitalize on Sunday's absence of a flu-ridden Greek Freak to overturn a double-digit deficit and nudge themselves back into a tie for eighth in the East with those same Bucks. Wall was just recognized as the Eastern Conference Player of the Month and, in the part we got right in this comment cyberspace last time out, he's starting to get help more consistently.
14. Milwaukee Bucks
2016-17 record: 18-18
Previous ranking: 12
Do the Bucks merit two All-Stars? For all of our constant (and justifiable) slobbering over Giannis Antetokounmpo, let's not forget that Jabari Parker has a better field-goal percentage than all but three of the other 29 players (James, Kevin Durant and Antetokounmpo) averaging 20+ PPG, sports a higher PER than Carmelo Anthony, George, Kristaps Porzingis, Millsap and Horford and his hiked his success rate from 3-point range to better than 40 percent after shooting in the mid-20s in each of his first two seasons. The Bucks, though, have dropped two in a row after coming back from deficits of 15 and 16 to escape with the W in their previous two outings against visiting OKC and in New York.
15. Charlotte Hornets
2016-17 record: 20-18
Previous ranking: 10
Confession time: I did not want to put the Hornets in the No. 10 slot last Monday. The Clippers' six-game losing streak necessitated moving someone new into the league's upper third and Charlotte, at the time, looked like the closest thing to promotion-worthy. But that's actually a touchy word for Steve Clifford's team at the minute... close. Going to Detroit on the second night of a back-to-back after dealing with Westbrook on your home floor isn't the easiest assignment, but Charlotte's 115-114 loss to the Pistons was particularly galling, given Detroit's recent funk and the fact that the Hornets are now a potentially costly 0-5 in games decided by three points or less.
16. Chicago Bulls
2016-17 record: 19-18
Previous ranking: 21
For all the (figurative) ink spilled in recent weeks about Fred Hoiberg, Rajon Rondo and the Bulls' miserable 6-11 mark in December, Jimmy Butler deserves double the press props for the way he's started 2017. There was the 52-point eruption against Charlotte, 14 points in the fourth quarter to take down Cleveland and then 42 more points to enable the Bulls to torture Toronto for the ninth consecutive regular-season encounter. Ready for a number to blow your mind? According to the inimitable Micah Adams, Butler's Player Efficiency Rating in his three January outings in the fourth quarter and over: 75. We repeat: Seventy-five!
17. Detroit Pistons
2016-17 record: 18-21
Previous ranking: 18
Could it be that Marco Belinelli's ruled-out potential game-winner on the Pistons' floor will be remembered as the turning point in their season? Detroit escaped that scrap with Charlotte by a solitary point despite Belinelli's inventive near-heroics, had to wait an extra day to open a five-game Western Conference swing in Portland because of extreme weather and then outlasted the Blazers on Sunday night in double overtime by just one point again. The Pistons' sudden good fortune after a nightmarish December is such that, even after they were forced to push their game in Portland back by 24 hours, they'll still face only one back-to-back (Golden State/Utah on Thursday/Friday) on this whole trip.
18. New York Knicks
2016-17 record: 17-20
Previous ranking: 16
We frankly wanted to drop the Knicks a lot farther than we did last week in the wake of a four-game skid, but the league's 10-to-20 middle third is as underwhelming as we can remember, which gave them some insulation. The Knicks' funk, however, has reached the depths of 3-10, with Anthony (shoulder) and Porzingis (heel) trying to play through injuries to keep their early season momentum alive. New York did manage to avenge its home defeat to Milwaukee by rallying from 13 points down entering the fourth quarter on the Bucks' floor two nights later... after the Knicks had lost 109 consecutive games when trailing by at least 13 points entering the final period.
19. Portland Trail Blazers
2016-17 record: 16-23
Previous ranking: 20
Take our advice and tune in Wednesday night when the defending champions visit Portland. Especially now that Damian Lillard is back after a five-game absence. Lillard scored 40 points in the teams' first meeting this season. Something tells me you haven't forgotten that Irving scored 55 points on the Blazers' floor in the teams' previous regular-season meeting before that. Our guess here, furthermore, is that ESPN's cameras and crew aren't assigned to be there by accident.
20. Sacramento Kings
2016-17 record: 15-22
Previous ranking: 17
The Kings' hold on the eighth seed in the West didn't last long at all. An indefensible home loss to the injury-ravaged Heat, followed by two more home L's -- to the Clippers in Paul's return and one of the fall-from-ahead variety to the Warriors in Golden State's first game following its Memphis debacle -- puts them at a worrisome 0-3 in the midst of a crucial seven-game run at the new Golden 1 Center that, remember, will be followed by a merciless eight-game road trip from Jan. 20-31. You can't help but wonder where Sacramento will be in the standings at month's end with Cleveland and Oklahoma City still to come on this homestand before they even start traveling.
21. Denver Nuggets
2016-17 record: 14-23
Previous ranking: 19
Mike Malone publicly and privately apologized to his veterans for calling out his team for a lack of leadership in a recent loss to Sacramento that dropped Malone to 0-4 against his previous employers since parting ways with the Kings in December 2014. Malone's issues with the Nuggets' defense, by contrast, are unlikely to be recanted after a five-game stretch in which they've allowed 124, 127, 120, 127 and 121 points. The momentum generated by a recent 5-2 stretch and the solid December numbers that came from Nikola Jokic (17.0 PPG and 8.9 RPG on crazy 67.5-percent shooting last month) apparently didn't make the trip with the Nuggets into 2017.
22. New Orleans Pelicans
2016-17 record: 14-24
Previous ranking: 22
The Pelicans shouldn't let themselves get hugely discouraged by last week's results. It was an 0-3 week, true, but road losses to the Cavs and Celtics -- sandwiched around a home loss to the team (Atlanta) sporting the league's second-longest active win streak -- can be rationalized. The Pels, though, are going to have to start winning some road games if they hope to become the first team in the league since Chicago in 2004-05 to start a season 0-8 and still make the playoffs. New Orleans' total of four road wins to date is tied for the West's lowest current total, which injects some undeniable urgency into its first two games this week at New York and Brooklyn.
23. Phoenix Suns
2016-17 record: 12-26
Previous ranking: 26
The Suns will relocate to Mexico City for the week coming off a couple much-needed wins for morale and a spirited fight back from 22 points down against the mighty Cavs to give LeBron James & Co. more than a scare in their first game of the season in a faraway time zone. Eric Bledsoe fans, meanwhile, will be pleased to learn that A) we've got a fun little TrueHoop Conversations podcast coming with him this week that delves deep into the whole "Beldsoe" jersey scandal and B) Bled has joined Westbrook, Harden, Antetokounmpo and King James on the short list of players averaging at least 20 points, 5 rebounds and 5 assists this season.
24. Dallas Mavericks
2016-17 record: 11-26
Previous ranking: 24
The Mavericks return to Mexico City this week for the first time in nearly 20 years, dating to a narrow loss to Houston in December 1997 that was covered first-hand by a much sleeker version of the Committee in our Dallas Morning News days. That was the last Mavericks team, incidentally, to know how it feels to fall 15 games under.500 like the current squad; those Mavs finished 20-62 to set up a draft that netted both Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash via draft-night deals. A ray of positivity: Harrison Barnes (20.6) trails only Durant (25.9) in terms of scoring average this season for players who changed teams over the summer.
25. Philadelphia 76ers
2016-17 record: 10-25
Previous ranking: 28
Robert Covington hushed the home fans who've been giving him a rough ride lately with the game-winning bucket to beat Minnesota by a deuce and seal the second win in the Sixers' current 3-1 boomlet. The rest of the news in Philly, rather predictably, centers around Joel Embiid, who recently became the first Sixers rookie to post 100+ points and 25+ rebounds over a four-game stretch since Allen Iverson in November 1996. The Sixers are quietly 7-7 when Embiid scores at least 20 points... and have not-so-quietly matched last season's win total already thanks to Sunday's matinee triumph in Brooklyn.
26. Minnesota Timberwolves
2016-17 record: 11-26
Previous ranking: 23
We're running out of things to say to console our dear friend Mardy Fish, who's best known for rising all the way to No. 7 in the brutally competitive world of men's tennis but who's known to the Committee as the biggest Wolves fan we've ever met. What can we possibly offer in the form of comfort or rationalization at this point when 'Sota seems determined to lose in the same agonizing fashion over and over and over? It happened again Saturday night at home to Utah when the Wolves, just a few days removed from a similarly agonizing loss in Philly, went without a field goal for the final 4:41 to drop to an unfathomable 0-10 in games decided by four points or less.
27. Los Angeles Lakers
2016-17 record: 15-26
Previous ranking: 29
Leave it to Julius Randle to do what Westbrook and Harden weren't able to manage: Randle assembled a triple-double against the Grizzlies last week to bring Memphis' league-leading run of 177 consecutive regular-season games without surrendering one to a halt. Randle thus passed both Kobe Bryant and Jerry West on the list of most triple-doubles by a Laker at the age of 22 or younger; Randle is up to three... second only in franchise history to Magic Johnson's 31 by that stage. Rookie swingman Brandon Ingram, meanwhile, just matched his career high of 17 points in each of the Lakers' last two games, contributing to much-needed wins over Miami and Orlando that account for L.A.'s first winning streak since it went from 4-4 to 6-4.
28. Orlando Magic
2016-17 record: 16-23
Previous ranking: 25
The Magic's January schedule isn't quite as demanding as Oklahoma City's, but it's close. Eleven of this month's 16 games are on the road, which has to be daunting even if you buy into the notion that Orlando -- 9-9 away from the Amway Center and 7-13 on its home floor leading into a 16-point drubbing by the Lakers -- is a better team on its travels. We'll see if folks in the Magic Kingdom are still saying that after this six-game trip against Western Conference opposition. Following Sunday night's defeat at Staples Center, Frank Vogel's squad will be off for two nights in L.A. (dangerous) before taking on the Clippers. "It's a critical time in our season," Vogel says.
29. Miami Heat
2016-17 record: 11-28
Previous ranking: 27
The return of Hassan Whiteside for Sunday's matinee in L.A. against the Clippers, after the double-double machine missed four games with an eye issue, allowed the Heat to play as close to full strength as they can get right now. The Whiteside/Goran Dragic tag team has been stripped of second-year swingman Justise Winslow for the rest of the season due to shoulder surgery, just bade farewell again to Josh McRoberts (whose out indefinitely with further foot trouble) and, as we all know, can't expect to see Chris Bosh in a Miami uniform ever again. The Heat's current 1-8 nosedive has dropped them below the Sixers in the standings... if South Beach-ers can bear to look.
30. Brooklyn Nets
2016-17 record: 8-28
Previous ranking: 30
The Nets have been almost respectable at home, but their familiar issues with second-half fades popped up again Sunday in a battle of basement-dwellers in the Atlantic Division that wound up sending Brooklyn to a sixth straight defeat despite an 11-point lead at the half. Brook Lopez leads all NBA centers in 3-pointers, with a 63-51 lead over Memphis' Marc Gasol, but we're hearing that the Nets would be willing to part with him before the Feb. 23 trade deadline if a team out there is willing to surrender two first-round picks. Next up for the team with the league's worst record: Atlanta import Kenny Atkinson coaches against the Hawks for the first time.An Aedes aegypti mosquito that can transmit the Zika virus.
There has been 67 cases of the Zika virus in New Zealand since 2002, Ministry of Health figures show.
One man is in hospital after nine New Zealanders were diagnosed with the virus in 2016 after travelling travelling overseas.
The most widespread outbreak of Zika virus in history began in April 2015 in Brazil. According to Ministry figures, there were nine cases of the virus in New Zealand in 2015. This figure is provisional.
The 47-year-old man was admitted to Waikato Hospital with symptoms indicative of Guillain-Barre, a condition linked to the virus, which can cause paralysis. Most patients make a full recovery.
The man travelled to Tonga and arrived back in New Zealand on January 15.
* The Zika Virus: What you need to know
A Waikato spokesperson said the man was in a stable condition in a ward on Friday afternoon.
READ MORE:
* Zika fears an Olympic concern
* Ministry extends travel advice
* Zika virus outbreak raises Pacific, Americas travel concerns for pregnant women
* Six cases of Zika virus in Australia in 2015 as pregnant women warned not to travel
A 29-year-old Waikato woman was also infected and arrived in New Zealand from Samoa on January 17.
Four of the infected had been in Tonga, four in Samoa and it is not known where the other was infected.
Four of them were female. In two of those cases, the potential for pregnancy has been ruled out.
Further tests are underway for the two remaining women.
The Ministry of Health has extended its Pacific travel advice around the Zika virus to include Tonga as well as Samoa as an area of active transmission.
In the past four months, hundreds of Brazilian babies have been born with microcephaly - or abnormally small heads - believed to be linked to Zika.
At least four Zika deaths had been confirmed overseas, and dozens of others were suspected of being a result of the virus.
The eight New Zealands who have been confirmed as having the virus this year arrived in New Zealand from December 28, 2015 to January 21 this year.
The first recorded case in New Zealand was in 2002 and numbers have fluctuated since then.
THE NUMBERS
- 2002 – 1
- 2003/2013 – none
- 2014 – 57
- 2015 – 9 (provisional)
THIS YEAR'S CASES
- A 50-year-old woman from Auckland arrived with the virus on 21 January after visiting Tonga. On the same day, an Auckland man, 63, arrived with the virus from Samoa.
- A Wellington woman, 41, arrived on 19 January from Samoa with the virus
- A Waikato woman, 29, caught the virus in Samoa, and came back to New Zealand with it on 17 January.
- A 12-year-old Auckland girl arrived from Tonga with the virus on 15 January. On the same day, a 47-year-old Waikato man also had it on his return from Tonga
- An Otago man, 49, arrived with it on 14 January. The country he was visiting was not recorded.
- Another Auckland man, 23, arrived from Tonga on 12 January carrying the virus.
- A Wellington man, 57, arrived on 28 December with the virus from Samoa.The fire chief of Arlington, New York, said he’s “very disappointed” with a recent decision to remove U.S. flags from the district’s fire trucks.
Fire Chief Tory Gallante was directed to have the flags removed from the backs of the trucks during Monday’s meeting of the Board of Fire Commissioners, the Poughkeepsie Journal first reported.
Arlington Fire Commissioner Chairman Jim Beretta said the board felt the flags were a “liability during normal operations for our people” and a possible distraction to other motorists, the Journal reported.
Mr. Beretta said the board didn’t take an official vote on the matter Monday, but “a direction was given to remove the newly affixed physical flags.”
“The board has the authority to provide direction to the chief based on a board majority,” he told the Journal.
Union President Joseph Tarquinio told the paper he’s disappointed in the board’s direction, but “if we had to take them down, they had to be taken down the right way. At the time when the country needs unity, to do something like this … it’s next to flag-burning in my mind.”
Mr. Gallante said he’s received dozens of messages from people across the country who are outraged at the board’s direction.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.(This version of the Sept. 20 story corrects to say that Weiner was defeated and did not drop out of the 2013 mayoral election in last paragraph)
Former U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner exits U.S. Federal Court, after pleading guilty to one count of sending obscene messages to a minor, ending an investigation into a "sexting" scandal that played a role in last year's U.S. presidential election, in New York City, U.S., May 19, 2017. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
By Brendan Pierson
(Reuters) - U.S. prosecutors on Wednesday sought a prison sentence of 21 to 27 months for former U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner, who admitted to sending sexually explicit messages to a teenage girl in a “sexting” scandal that played a role in last year’s U.S. presidential election.
“Weiner, a grown man, a father, and a former lawmaker, willfully and knowingly asked a 15-year-old girl to display her body and engage in sexually explicit conduct for him online,” prosecutors said in a filing in Manhattan federal court. “Such conduct warrants a meaningful sentence of incarceration.”
A lawyer for Weiner, who is scheduled to be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Denise Cote next Monday, could not immediately be reached for comment.
In a court filing last week, Weiner’s lawyers asked that he be sentenced to probation with no prison time, saying he acted out of the “depths of an uncontrolled sickness” for which he was now being treated.
Weiner, 53, pleaded guilty in May to transferring obscene material to a minor.
The investigation into Weiner’s exchanges with the teenage girl roiled the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign in its final days, when authorities found emails on Weiner’s laptop from his wife Huma Abedin, an aid to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Abedin has filed for divorce.
The discovery of the emails prompted James Comey, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to announce in late October that the agency was reopening its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while serving as U.S. secretary of state.
Clinton has said the announcement contributed to her upset loss to Republican Donald Trump, who had accused her of endangering national security by using the private server.
Comey testified before Congress in May that the emails found on Weiner’s computer included classified information.
Trump fired Comey in May amid the FBI’s probe into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to defeat Clinton, a claim the president has denied.
Weiner served parts of New York City for 12 years in the U.S. House of Representatives before resigning in 2011, when it emerged that he had exchanged sexually explicit messages with adult women.
Weiner and Abedin’s son, now 5 years old, was born several months later.
In 2013, Weiner ran for New York City mayor, but was defeated in the Democratic primary after more lewd messages became public.Key Features
1) Temperature Regulating: You feel warmer when it's cool and cooler when it's warm. 2) Moisture Wicking: Silk pulls moisture away from your skin + holds up to 30% of its weight before it loses its temperature regulating properties. 3) Great Fit: We have iterated on the fit over 9 times because we wanted it perfect. It now is. 4) Versatile: Købens are great for work or going out with friends. Basically, wear them anywhere. 5) Made in the USA: The jeans are manufactured in Los Angeles and our denim is from North Carolina.
Questions? You can email me at [email protected]. Follow us on Twitter or Instagram or like us on Facebook.
Our Story
In 2009, I was on the hunt for clothes--comfortable, quality clothes that fit my lifestyle. Specifically, I wanted jeans--jeans that I could wear professionally and casually. They didn't exist.
So, I decided to make my own. With my background working at Lands' End and J.Crew, I knew what I wanted and knew I could create it. I lined my favorite pair of jeans with silk - BOOM!
The Test
The next day, I was on a flight from Hong Kong to Dallas. During the flight, the air conditioning went out. I was asleep when it happened and I woke up sweating. Then, I realized something: even though my body was damp and sweaty, my legs were dry. But how?
It turns out silk has all of these really cool properties. Silk is like a double-edged sword (where both sides are good): it can regulate temperature and wick away moisture.
Stumbling into that experience was borderline magical. I modified the jeans into a product that I loved. Then, I spent all of 2013 wearing one pair of silk-lined jeans to see if they would last. They did.
They're amazing jeans, they're insanely comfortable and they're built to last.
How They Work
Køben pairs the durability and the styling of dark, raw denim with functional silk to make the perfect pant.
Where they are made
We use the best fabrics that we could find and partnered with a manufacturer to create our jeans here in the States. Go USA!
Silk Color Options - Check out the update about colors: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/74042813/silk-lined-jeans/posts/863316
Sizing Charts
BUSINESS ON THE OUTSIDE
PARTY ON THE INSIDE
BACKER REWARDS
KOBEN.CO #buinessOnTheOutsidePartyOnTheInside(CNN) -- Nigeria's president has backed down on his decision to suspend the national soccer team, according to the African country's football federation.
The announcement came just before Monday's deadline set by world governing body FIFA, which had threatened to expel Nigeria completely if the ruling was not overturned and also withhold $8 million due for participating at the World Cup.
Nigerian leader Goodluck Jonathan was so angry with the Super Eagles' poor performance in South Africa that he decided to suspend the national team at all levels for two years.
"The President and Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, on Monday graciously rescinded last Wednesday's decision to withdraw Nigerian national football teams from FIFA/CAF football competitions," the federation said in a statement.
"The decision was made known at the presidential villa on Monday evening as President Jonathan hearkened to the passionate appeals of top officials of the National Sports Commission, the Nigeria Football Federation, other concerned organs of government and well-meaning Nigerians on the matter."
Nigerian leader's 'Obama moment'
Nine members of the NFF's executive committee had earlier been dismissed, including president Sani Lulu and vice-president Amanze Uchegbulam, the UK Press Association reported on Monday.
After hearing of Jonathan's June 30 decision, FIFA wrote to the NFF on Friday warning it of the possible ramifications if the Monday deadline was not met.
Two-time African champions Nigeria finished bottom of Group B at the World Cup after one draw and two defeats.
The Super Eagles brought in former Sweden coach Lars Lagerback after finishing third at the Africa Cup of Nations in January, but he was unable to lift the team's fortunes in matches against Argentina, Greece and South Korea.Image copyright Reuters Image caption Some civilians who fled Raqqa are being housed in makeshift camps
The UN has urged US-led coalition forces to suspend their assault on Raqqa, the capital of so-called Islamic State in Syria, to permit evacuations.
Up to 25,000 civilians are thought to be trapped in the city which, according to the coalition, has been hit by 250 air strikes in the past week alone.
Hundreds of civilians have been killed since the assault started in June, Amnesty International estimates.
IS is accused by the UN and others of using civilians as human shields.
But the number of civilian casualties caused by coalition air strikes appears to have mounted steadily, with dozens killed this week, Syrian opposition sources say.
However, Lt Gen Stephen Townsend, commander of the coalition, said in Baghdad on Tuesday that he had not seen "hard information that says that civilian casualties have increased in Raqqa to some significant degree".
In addition to the air strikes, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance is shelling targets in the city from the ground.
The SDF is believed to have captured more than half the city.
'Worst place on Earth'
"I cannot think of a worse place on Earth now," Jan Egeland, the UN humanitarian adviser on Syria, said in Geneva.
"People that come out cannot risk [being killed by] air raids," he said.
"Now is the time to think of possibilities, pauses or otherwise that might facilitate the escape of civilians."
Any humanitarian pause, he said, would not involve IS which was doing its "absolute best to use [civilians] as human shields".
The UN had no contact with the group, he added. "Inside Raqqa city, on both sides, conditions are very bleak and it is very hard to assist in all areas."
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Raqqa is being bombarded from the air and ground
Survivors and witnesses told Amnesty International they faced IS booby traps and snipers targeting anyone trying to flee, as well as a constant barrage of artillery strikes and air strikes, according to the organisation's report.
Civilians in villages and camps south of the River Euphrates had also come under bombardment from Russian-backed Syrian government forces, Amnesty said.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC had access to wives of IS fighters held outside Raqqa.
"Things will only get more dangerous as the battle reaches its final stages in the city centre," the organisation said.
"More can and must be done to preserve the lives of civilians trapped in the conflict and to facilitate their safe passage away from the battleground."
In Baghdad, Lt Gen Townsend said it was "probably logical to assume that there has been some increase in the civilian casualties" because coalition operations had intensified.
US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis, who was visiting troops, said: "We're not the perfect guys. We can make a mistake, and in this kind of warfare, tragedy will happen. But we are the good guys, and the innocent people on the battlefield know the difference."An adviser to Donald Trump criticized United States policy toward Russia in a July trip to Moscow, the Huffington Post reported Tuesday. The trip came the week before the Trump campaign reportedly worked to soften language in the Republican party platform regarding U.S. support for Ukraine against Russian aggression.
“Washington and other Western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change,” Trump adviser Carter Page said in a speech at a graduate school in Moscow in July, according to Huffington Post.
He also called for the U.S. to lift sanctions on Russia that were put in place after the annexation of Crimea.
Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, who has advised pro-Russian Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych, has denied that the campaign tried to change the platform, and there’s no evidene that Page was involved.
This all comes as Trump has praised Russian Leader Vladimir Putin, suggested he won’t support NATO allies, said he would look into recognizing the Russian annexation of Crimea, and called for a better relationship with Russia.
Page has investments in the Russian energy giant Gazprom, and consults businesses looking to work with Russian entities, according to the Huffington Post. And he told Bloomberg News in March that U.S. sanctions on Russia have hurt his business.
“So many people who I know and have worked with have been so adversely affected by the sanctions policy,” Page told Bloomberg in March. “There’s a lot of excitement in terms of the possibilities for creating a better situation.”
In his July speech in Moscow, Page said that if the U.S. were to lift sanctions on Russia, American companies could begin to work with Russian entities in the oil business, according to the Huffington Post.
Trump has denied that he has any business investments in Russia, but he has yet to address whether Russian businesses entities are invested in his projects.New York Red Bulls II will have a new face joining them for their match against the Charlotte Independence.
Once a Metro has learned that Ronald Zubar will in fact play for the reserve team tonight, Aug. 12, against the Independence. He is expected to play 30 minutes.The game is set for 7:30 pm at Red Bull Arena.
It will be the first competitive action for the Frenchman since June 28, when he started and played the first half of the match against New York City FC. Since signing in January, Zubar has appeared in three matches for the Red Bulls, all starts, only playing 190 competitive minutes in MLS.
Hamstring issues have plagued the central defender, who joined the Red Bulls from AC Ajaccio in Corsica. Zubar started the first game of the season against Sporting Kansas City, and after going down injured would not see game action until June 20. He played 68 minutes that day against the Vancouver Whitecaps. Eight days later he started the first half against NYCFC and has been down again ever since.
In his absence Matt Miazga and Damien Perinelle have manned the central defense for the Red Bulls.Image copyright Ronny roy Image caption Mohammedan Sporting was the first Indian club to win the Calcutta League
One of India's oldest football teams, Mohammedan Sporting, is facing the threat of closure because of financial problems. Ronojoy Sen recounts the history of an iconic club.
On 29 August 1936 the Scottish Daily Express ran a story headlined: "Indian Juggler - New Style".
The newspaper's reporter was in raptures about an Indian player who had turned out for Celtic FC and "hypnotised" the crowd with his skills.
The footballer in question was Salim, a member of Calcutta's Mohammedan Sporting Club, which that year had won the Calcutta First Division Football League for the third time in a row.
In 1934, Mohammedan Sporting was the first Indian club to win the Calcutta League - which began in 1898 and is the oldest in Asia.
Eighty years later, on 20 October 2014, the club, plagued by financial troubles, decided to disband its senior team. The present is a long way from the club's glory days.
Mohammedan Sporting came into existence in 1891, more than a decade before the Muslim League party was formed to voice the interests of the
|
Him. Convictional Christians make up the final third of the 75 percent—or about a quarter of all Americans.
The Church is not dying. It is just being more clearly defined.
Interestingly, since 1972 and according to the General Social Survey, the percentage of the final type of Christian in the U.S. population has remained generally stable. On the other hand, mainline Protestantism has declined, but other areas within evangelicalism have grown slightly to offset that loss.
As I see it, the numbers of people who those of us in the church would say are actually committed Christians—those who are practicing a vibrant faith—are not dying off. The Church is not dying. It is just being more clearly defined.
The "Nones" category is growing quickly, but the change is coming by way of Cultural and Congregational Christians who no longer feel the societal pressure to be "Christian." They feel comfortable freeing themselves from a label that was not true of them in the first place. Convictional Christians are not leaving the faith; the "squishy middle," as I like to call it, is simply being flattened.
So for those who really don't have any skin in the game, shedding the label makes sense.
As Christians find themselves more and more on the margins in American society, people are beginning to count the cost. While it used to serve Americans well to carry the label "Christian" in most circumstances (think about running for public office, for instance), it can actually be polarizing or considered intolerant now. So for those who really don't have any skin in the game, shedding the label makes sense.
As the trend continues, we will see the "Nones" continue to grow and the church lose more of its traditional cultural influence. Christians will likely lose the culture wars, leading to difficult times ahead for us. But we do not need to lose hope. This is not cause for despair. It is a time to regroup and re-engage.
Christianity may be losing its top-down political and cultural influence, but Jesus spoke of His followers making an impact in a very different manner. He taught that God's kingdom was subversive and underground. He used examples like yeast, which changes things from the inside, and mustard seeds, which are small and must be planted in order to grow up and out.
As the distinctions between Christians and an ever-growing post-Christian culture emerge, we will have to set aside any nominal belief systems and become active agents of God's Kingdom. The answer is not found in waging cultural wars incessantly, or in making a theological shift to the left to pacify a culture offended by the gospel. The answer is in all of God's people, changed by the power of the gospel and propelled by love, moving into the mission field as agents of gospel transformation.
This is no time to panic or exaggerate the situation. As I said in Lost and Found, in the midst of a hysterical panic about 94 percent of evangelical young adults leaving church, "Crises sell books but usually don't fix problems." (And, it is nowhere near 94 percent.)
Yes, we need a serious dose of what I write in Christianity Today a few years ago: Curing Christians Stats Abuse.
Facts are our friends, and the facts do point to a cultural change. And, in the midst of that cultural change we do see that American looks more like a mission field. However, what we need is a mobilized—rather than demoralized—mission force.
Bad stats and hyperbole do just that—demoralize God's people.
Today, we need a mobilized mission force in the midst of this mission field. So, it's time to time to work for the sake of the gospel, and to live for the cause of the gospel, not run around proclaiming the sky is falling.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Trump : 'I just don't want a poor person' running the US economy
President Donald Trump has said he wouldn't want a "poor person" holding a top economic post in the White House.
Mr Trump said his wealthy appointees, such as Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross (net worth: $2.5bn £2bn), had "brilliant business minds".
"That's what we need," he said at an Iowa rally. "And I love all people, rich or poor.
"But in those particular positions, I just don't want a poor person. Does that make sense?"
For many Americans, the answer is, basically, yes.
The president "should have worded that better", said Michael Washington 42, of Brooklyn, an assistant manager at a messenger service in New York.
Image caption Michael Washington of Brooklyn
Mr Washington said he disliked the implication that poor people are stupid.
But, he added, "it makes sense to hire someone rich because they're business-minded. I would agree with that".
American attitudes toward the poor have shown signs of improving.
About two-thirds of Americans think the poor are hard-working, up from half in 1985, according to a 2016 survey conducted for the Los Angeles Times.
Image copyright Getty Images
And about 55% of Americans believe the poor and non-poor have job skills that are "pretty much the same", up from 44% in 1985.
Caitlin Quigley, 27, who works at a charity in New York, said Mr Trump's conflation of wealth with talent rankled.
"Just because a person's rich doesn't say anything about their capabilities or qualifications or how they'd help us and represent us," she said.
Image caption Caitlin Quigley of New York
But Mr Trump's belief that success and talent can be measured in dollars has a long tradition in American life, particularly among conservatives, said historian Nancy Isenberg, a professor at Louisiana State University and the author of White Trash: The 400-year Untold History of Class in America.
"The truth is that this is something that Americans are quite comfortable with," she said. "We talk about equality but we're quite comfortable with class hierarchy."
Up by your bootstraps
Even with evidence that social mobility is falling, the up-from-your-bootstraps belief that wealth is a sign of merit holds strong in the US.
In a 2014 survey by Pew Research Center, about 57% of Americans disagreed with the idea that success is determined by outside forces.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Fact-checking Trump's US economy boasts
That was a higher percentage than in almost any other country of 44 included (in the UK that percentage was 55%).
In the same survey, nearly three-quarters of Americans said it is important to work hard to get ahead in life (that percentage was 60% in the UK).
Mr Trump has "an obscure way of saying things", but he also has a point, said George Paragon, 46, of Yonkers, who works in human services.
Image caption George Paragon of Yonkers
"We wouldn't want a shoemaker to fly a plane," he said.
Empathy gap?
Susana Navas, 64, of the Bronx, a financial supervisor, said she sees risks in plucking policymakers from the ranks of the mega-rich.
"They don't know much about the people's economy," she said. "They know about being rich."
Studies suggest that the rich pay less attention to others and have less empathy.
They've also been found to be more likely to ascribe identity and status to inherent traits.
Image caption Susana Navas of the Bronx
Indeed, Professor Isenberg said the president's proposals - which include tax cuts for the rich and a reduction of health assistance for the poor - are more telling about his attitudes to poverty than Wednesday's remarks.
"The healthcare bill has a lot more to say about his disregard for the poor and indifference than this comment," she said.Zion Kitiseni says Porirua isn't a safe place for transgender people like herself.
Zion Kitiseni longs to wear dresses, but says most days she has to choose clothes she can run or fight in.
The 17-year-old took to Facebook on Thursday night with a plea to Porirua mayor Nick Leggett to help create a day for Porirua's LGBTI community.
The gesture was needed because her home city was not safe for transgender people, she said. "Being punched in the back of the head when you're walking is normal here.
"I'm just always happy when it's not something more than a punch."
READ MORE:
* Bathroom battle 'tip of the iceberg' according to advocate
* Gender-neutral bathrooms for Wellington colleges
* Rainbow world of sexuality and gender
She is planning to move to Auckland where she felt she would be more accepted, but until then wanted something to show Porirua that transpeople were harmless.
Kitiseni said there were many transgender people in Porirua, but they were living in fear.
"Most trans in Porirua won't come out of their houses and I want a day where we can come out and be safe...[and] see people in colours supporting us.
"We don't have to kill ourselves to make people happy. We've been hiding so long, we've had no sunshine on our faces."
Kitiseni said that in a city famed for its Pasifika flavour, she wanted to celebrate something some Pasifika people frowned upon.
"Islanders often have issues with transpeople because of their church teaching."
She left her own church after her pastor delivered a sermon on gay people going to hell.
"I was just sitting there in church feeling he was talking about me."
Kitiseni said she hadn't always been an angel, but she wanted to be able to walk around the city without being harassed.
"It's because I've grown up here and people know that I used to be a male. They drive by and yell things at me…'Kill yourself', that's my name."
She was overwhelmed by the support she got to her call for help on Facebook.
"The mayor said every day should be a safe day for us, but it isn't like that so I just want one special day."
Leggett refused to be drawn on whether a parade was something the council would support, but said his office was always open if Kitiseni wanted to talk to him.Saturday, November 1st saw the Skill Gaming Policy from the Lab coming into full effect. Notice of the enforcement was given in a blog post issued by the Lab on Monday, September 29th, which in part read:
As our FAQs explained, applicants to the program who submitted their applications prior to the September 1 deadline have been permitted to continue their skill gaming activity while their applications are reviewed.
Beginning November 1, 2014, the enforcement of our Policy will apply to all Residents, including those with pending Skill Gaming applications that await Linden Lab review and approval. As of that date, any objects or regions found in violation of our Policy will be taken down. We strongly encourage all applicants to submit any outstanding materials for our review as soon as possible so that their applications may be processed before the deadline.
At that time, there had already been a delay in the introduction of the new policy (from August 1st through until September 1st) to allow additional time for applications and applications processing.
The end of October saw further additions to the list of Approved Participants, such that some 94 regions have been reclassified at Skill Gaming regions, each of them offering a mix of games from a pool of 56 games from five approved Skill Gaming Creators. Please refer to the Approved Participants list for an idea of the spread of actual Skill Gaming Operators.
However, the enforcement deadline has brought with it one casuality, although hopefully only temporarily.
Capital Exchange (CapEx) is a fictional stock market simulation game, and although it does not offer any opportunity for direct real-world investment or profit, it does operate on what amounts to a “pay to play basis” through the trading of L$-valued “securities” in the SL-based companies listed with the exchange. As such, it falls under the remit of the Skill Gaming Policy.
Capital Exchange’s application to become a Skill Gaming activity lodged with Linden Lab since just after the new policy was originally announced July 2014, including a reasoned legal opinion from their legal counsel outlining why CapEx is a game of skill under federal and New York State laws. However, at the time the deadline was reached, they had not received formal approval as a Skilled Gaming Operator from the Lab, which has forced CapEx to suspend market activities activity until further notice.
The suspension was announced via statement from CapEx’s CEO Skip Oceanlane published on the CapEx website and via in-world note card givers at the CapEx headquarters. This announcement reads in part:
On July 16, 2014, I filled out the first form for the Skill Gaming Application for Capital Exchange Stock Market Simulation Game. From that point until today, there have been numerous correspondences between me, my law firm, and Linden Lab. As of today we still do not have an official determination, positive or negative, on our application.
I was hoping that because much of the delay has been on the part of Linden Lab, that we would be allowed to operate past the November 1, 2014 deadline set forth in a recent post by Linden Lab. Unfortunately I was informed by Rowan Linden that we cannot. So therefore effective immediately, I am suspending all trading at Capital Exchange until our application is approved or denied by Linden Lab.
As a result of this move, as the blog post goes on to state, all trading, including person-to-person transfers (unless they were authorised before the trading halt), payment of dividends is suspended, as is any other activity carried out through Capital Exchange which would violate the Lab’s Skill Gaming policy. However, all other aspects of CapEx, such as posting to the forums (including company news etc.), continues. The announcement also notes that CapEx ATMs will still be in operation for those wishing to deposit / withdraw L$, as the Lab has not indicated that doing so would be violating the new policy.
Please refer to the CapEx blog post for detailed information on the suspension and planned steps, and to the CapEx website for further updates on the situation.
It is not currently clear if other gaming operators within Second Life have been similarly hit by the deadline being reached prior to their application being approved or turned down. It is also not clear whether the deadline for enforcement was set as a result of external pressure to comply with legal requirements, or as a result of an arbitrary decision on the part of the Lab.
If it is the latter, it is hard to fathom why the Lab opted for a blanket enforcement of the policy, rather than allowing further dispensation for those operators / creators who have submitted applications, particularly where the delays in approval appears to lie with the Lab’s own handling of applications (as seems to be the case with CapEx).
Related Links
With thanks to Nalates Urriah for the pointer to the CapEx blog post.
AdvertisementsThis topic is not easy to talk about for neurotypical (NT) spouses of an adult with Asperger’s Syndrome/ autism (ASD). Their intimate life with their loved one in marriage is private. If the relationship also contains heartbreaking secrets and deprivation, then it is harder to mention it to anyone else.
The reality of an NT-AS relationship is that there will be many idiosyncrasies. This also applies to the part of the relationship that includes sex and romance: very often there is no sexual relationship at all; or the NT-partner feels as if she is the Mom of the partner, who behaves like an immature child in an adult’s body; or the female with Asperger’s in the relationship can become asexual, as soon as a child is born; or the middle-aged male-partner with Asperger’s (ASD) and a good academic career can’t understand why it is wrong to expose his private parts in public areas, if he feels like it. These are some of the confusing scenarios which arise regularly in NT/ASD marriages.
Involuntary Celibacy
Many NT-AS marriages seem to quickly become celibate. In her research on sex in NT-AS relationships Maxine Aston found that fifty per cent of the couples reported, that there was no sexual activity within their relationship.
”In fact, there was no affection or tactile expression whatsoever. That is quite high when one takes into account that some of the respondents had not been together for more than two years”, Aston says, explaining: “ it is often the male client with AS who has withdrawn totally from the physical side of the relationship.” (1.)
But there are also problems in relationships with two neurotypical partners, right? Certainly so. But that is not what this article is about. This article is about the particular challenges that exist when one partner has an autism disorder (ASD / High functioning autism, Hfa) and the other partner is normally (NT) developed, i.e. the NT partner does not have a developmental disorder. This article focuses on the situation for the normally (NT) functioning spouse.
Successful relationships
To identify the “idiosyncrasies” at first we must take a look at what characterizes a successful relationship. It is self-evident that all people are different. All people cannot be put into one general category. But some characteristics are said to be typical of every successful relationship:
Communication and emotional reciprocity are often fundamental to whether a relationship works or not. They are the key ingredients to maintain a relationship in a workable and functional state. (2.)
In a successful relationship there is the expectation of regular expressions of love and affection. (3.)
Typical children and adults enjoy frequent expressions of affection, know how to express affection to communicate reciprocial feelings of adoration and when to repair someone’s feelings by expressions of affection. (3.)
Communication, mind-reading, social interaction and empathy are major ingredients required for the formation and maintenance of a relationship. (1.)
Both partners enjoy giving and receiving physical embraces.
Both partners enjoy giving and receiving verbal and non-verbal expressions of tenderness.
Both partners enjoy and appreciate having shared interests.
Both partners have a normally, mature developed Theory of Mind. It is the ability to put yourself in the other’s place and take the other’s perspective; the ability to sense the other’s feelings, thoughts and motives and to know that the other person can have very different feelings, thoughts, motivations and needs than oneself. Theory of Mind also includes insight into your own motivations, feelings and thoughts. (1, 2, 3, 4, 6)
Both partners have the ability and willingness to resolve conflicts, listen to the other’s point of view, negotiate and comply with compromises and agreements. Motivation and ability for reconciliation is an important part.
Mutual loyalty, including an ability to intuitively know and respect the boundaries of privacy between two spouses in a relationship, and what can be said and done in the presence of outsiders.
Both partners practice the adult responsibility to maintain and nourish the relationship; joint responsibility for the practical chores in the household.
Deficits in relationships and marriages with an AS-partner
Good and less good moments appear in all relationships. Every marriage has its problems. But NT-AS relationships suffer further as a result of neurologically and biologically caused deficits on all the points mentioned above, in addition to other marriage stressors. These deficits are caused by the Asperger’s (ASD) partner’s failure to reach certain cognitive, emotional, physical milestones. Therefore, Asperger’s Syndrome is called a Relationship Disorder. Asperger’s Syndrome seriously affects the sexual intimacy and life in the relationship and often causes great emotional pain for the neurotypical (NT) partner.
The functional disorders that are a result of the autism, characterize precisely the core areas which are most important for a person’s healthy and safe sexual development, especially the development of an intimate physical, emotional and social contact with other people.
Lennart Pedersen in Autisme og Sexualitet (6.)
The neurotypical spouse is adversely affected as a result of these deficits:
Empathy disorder
Emotional immaturity and deficiencies in Theory of Mind
Deficiencies in the ability to express and receive emotions and affection
Lack of understanding of the connection between an intimate, mutual atmosphere of tenderness and cohesion and the sexual intercourse
Deficiencies in the ability and desire for mutual communication, shared interests and shared social experiences
Sensory disorders that may cause the AS-partner’s reluctance to physical touch, smell, taste, etc.
Deficits in the ability to understand non-verbal communication, which represent 75-90 percent of all communication – and probably even more when it comes to the intimate and sexual “language” including flirtation and the fore-play
Extreme preoccupation with own needs and obsessions and limited ability to see the needs of others.
Lack of intimacy
The sexual side of a person is an aspect of ‘who’ they are, Maxine Aston states and continues:
Romance is often the very thing that can be lacking from the sexual side of the relationship and this can, in time, have a detrimental effect upon the quality, ore willingness of either partner to participate in making love. Often it is not realised by the AS partner that sexual acts may need to be precipitated by emotional closeness and that a lack of this can result in their partner’s reluctance to make love. Consequently, love making becomes non-existent. (1.)
Immaturity
“One of the characteristics of Asperger’s syndrome can be emotional and social immaturity”, Psychologist and Asperger expert Tony Attwood reports. He describes how adults with Asperger’s Syndrome can have sexual behavior similar to a teenager’s level and states that “Having a relationship with a person with Asperger’s syndrome can affect the partner’s mental health.” (3.)
Many NT wives report that their AS-partner’s immaturity makes it impossible for them to have a sexual relationship. A 38-year-old neuro typical wife writes:
“He reads about sex in books intended for the education of young children. He is like a child who needs me as a Mom. So sex is simply an impossibility, I would feel like a sleaze.”
Relationship Disorder
On the ability to be one half of a marriage Attwood writes:
From early childhood, people with Asperger’s syndrome are less likely to recognize and understand thoughts, beliefs, desires and intentions of other people in order to make sense of their behaviour. They are developmentally delayed in Theory of Mind abilities (Baron-Cohen 1995). This will adversely affect the development of the important relationship skills of empathy, trust, and the ability to repair someone’s emotions and share thoughts and responsibilities (Attwood 2004). (3.)
We also recognize problems with empathy, limited conflict resolution skills, an inclination to criticize and rarely compliment, and a tendency to show little interest in their friend’s experiences and emotions. (3.)
The technical part of the sexual relationships is mentioned in an article published by AANE.org, a network for people affected by Asperger’s Syndrome and autism:
Some individuals with AS can be very robotic or technically perfect in bed without paying attention to their partner’s need for an emotional connection and foreplay before intercourse. Some individuals with AS also don’t enjoy sex due to their sensory issues and/or low sex drive. (7.)
Similarly, Attwood writes:
The sexual script of the person with Asperger’s syndrome can be described by their partner as rigid, repetitive and unimaginative with a relative lack of sexual desire. (3.)
Despairing NT-husband
A neuro-typical husband describes the life with his AS-wife:
She is completely uninterested in intimacy and physical sex. I can only describe her with the word asexual. Her passivity makes me feel like a criminal, if I try to reach her and touch her. She did not reveal that trait before our son was born. It took me several years to find out there is something called Asperger’s Syndrome. It turned out that she knew about her diagnosis before we got married, but she concealed it for me. Because of my son I am afraid to get divorced. I am afraid the authorities will not figure out her masking and role-playing, and even if they do, they don’t care.
Sensory issues
Sensory issues is an area that can be very problematic for an AS individual and may constitute a serious problem in the intimate and sexual relationship. The partner with AS can be hypersensitive to physical contact, body odor, taste and other sensory stimuli. Many neuro typical spouses recount their unhappiness when their partner does not want to kiss or be caressed, and they then suffer the AS-partner’s rejection of physical and emotional intimacy. (1, 3, 4, 5)
Information from aspires-relationships.com describes the problem:
Tactile defensiveness or other sensory issues of the AS partner may be so extreme that shared adult sleeping arrangements are not possible. Except for procreation, sex may be a non-starter for the AS spouse. On the other hand, sexual demands may be so high as to drive the other partner to distraction, leaving him or her little time for rest or respite. (8.)
A man with Asperger’s syndrome states on his blog:
Likewise, most people with Asperger’s have some aversion to being touched. I’m not that bad, but others are much worse. I know there are spouse who can’t stand to touch their spouse, to hug or hold them. When they have sex, it’s genitals only touching, because anything else is just too much. (9.)
“You must have known”
A standard remark to NT-spouses and NT-partners is: You must have known it before you got married / moved in together!
But it doesn’t work that way. Tony Attwood explains in his book “Asperger Syndrome” that an adult with AS / Hfa typically exhibits overwhelming skills in wooing in the infatuation period. The loved one, who has no insight into the complexity of Asperger’s Syndrome and Hfa, has no chance of realizing that the apparent social skills in romance and relationship forming are not an intuitively naturally behavior for the aspie, but are a learned response from copying and memorizing other people’s behavior.
The person with Asperger’s Syndrome may have developed a superficial expertize in romance and dating from careful observation, and by mimicking actors and using the script from television programmes and films. (4.)
Some partners have explained that they never saw the real person before they were married, and after their wedding day, the person abandoned the persona that was previously so attractive. (4.)
Several neurotypical wives report unanimously that their AS partner stopped showing interest in sexual activity quite soon after the wedding. NT husbands are reporting similar short time frames, although sometimes their AS-wife first switched the “persona” when a child was born.
Taboos
A neurotypical wife reports the shock she got when the family was about to move to another house after twenty years at the same place.
All those years, my husband, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, was unwilling to have intimacy and sexual intercourse. But when I packed our things for moving out, I found tucked away in the attic a mountain of porn magazines and some of it was a punishable offense. I was so scared.
Tony Attwood describes how some individuals with AS end up on the wrong side of the law, for example, in connection with an extreme sexual obsession or stalking and violation of another person’s boundaries.
We recognize that problems with sexual conduct and experiences can result in accusation of a person with Asperger’s syndrome for sexual misconduct. The charges are often inappropriate sexual behavior rather than sexually abusive or violent behavior. (4, from the Danish translation)
A secret, special interest for pornography, stalking and intimidation towards other people are mentioned among behaviours which can lead to indictment of an individual with Asperger’s Syndrome. Attwood calls for sex education, also for adults with Asperger’s Syndrome to be given treatment programs designed for sexual offenders with appropriate modifications. (4.)
NT-spouses and partners overlooked
It is important to keep in mind that the majority of adults with Asperger / Hfa have never been formally diagnosed. It can take several years before the NT spouse finds out ‘the name of the dysfunction’. Immediately, the NT spouse feels relieved: So it’s not my fault! It is his/her autism disorder!
Then the NT spouse begins to order literature about Asperger’s autism from libraries and the Internet, hoping to find some way to a better marriage. Articles and books on Asperger’s syndrome and ASD are available in large quantities. But when it comes to the heart, two realities become clear. Firstly, most of the professional literature is only about children and adolescents with AS /ASD. Secondly, focus is mainly on the person who has the autistic developmental disorder. The neurotypical spouses and partners are virtually non-existent in the universe of the professionals.
Here are some neurotypical spouses’ reactions to this:
It is strange that the professional literature only cares about how the aspie can get a good sex life. Where is the NT partner? Are the writers also on the Autism Spectrum?
Do they think problems caused by autism spectrum disorder disappear on the eighteenth birthday?
When I search on the topic Asperger and Sex, it is mostly about how to teach young people not to masturbate in public areas. But I live with a middle-aged husband who is said to be highly intelligent and who hasn’t learned it and doesn’t recognize any problem. I suffer the consequences.
I read a mountain of relationship books on NT-AS relationships. I’ve had enough of endless ‘to-do-lists’ telling me what I am expected to do – or not do – in the bed and outside the bed, so my autistic AS-partner can feel good all the time. It’s sick. These lists are nothing but a job description for a sex-worker.
Lifelong disorder
ASD, including Asperger’s is a lifelong incurable condition that no therapist or popular best-seller can conjure away. The neurotypical partner in an NT-AS relationship has to live with it, mark one’s boundaries – or give up. Every single NT husband and NT wife in a relationship with someone with AS/ASD has essential, personal reasons for the choices made. Love can be one of those reasons.
Read also: The Burden on NT Spouses and Children, OTRS
Read also: 15 tips for NT Spouses
Read also: NT-AS Relationship Table
References:
(1) Asperger Syndrome in the Bedroom, Maxine Aston (2012)
(2) Asperger Syndrome in the Counselling Room, Maxine Aston
(3) Relationship Problems of Adults with Asperger’s Syndrome, a foreword by Tony Attwood. http://www.mindsandhearts.net/images/newsletter/April2012/The_Relationship_Problems_of_Adults_with_Aspergers_Syndrome.pdf
(4) The complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome, by Tony Attwood
(5) Mark Hutten: Hutten: Asperger Adults and Fulfilling Relationships, http://www.myaspergerschild.com/2011/02/aspergers-adults-and-fulfilling.html
(6) Autisme og Sexualitet; (Danish) by Lennart Pedersen; contribution to the book “Sex kærlighed og autisme,” Sex og Sundhed, 2010
(7) http://www.aane.org/asperger_resources/articles/adults/marriage_14_strategies.html
(8) http://www.aspires-relationships.com/as_grows_up_as_in_the_families.htm
(9) http://sexwithinmarriage.com/2013/08/aspergers-syndrome-and-marriage/
25.03.2015
© Copyright www.aspergerpartner.comBEAUMONT, Texas --A high school math teacher is facing an assault charge after video surfaced of her hitting a student at least five times in class.
CBS affiliate KFDM reported Mary A. Hastings, a 63-year-old geometry teacher at Ozen High School, was arrested and has been placed on paid leave.
The cellphone video, recorded by a classmate, shows Hastings swiping papers off the student's desk then slapping him five times.
Hastings, who appears exasperated, scolds the student for being a disruption. She hit the student while saying, "...because you're stopping him from graduating you idiot [expletive]."
The student who recorded the footage told KFDM the incident happened Friday morning. It was unclear exactly what provoked Hastings to strike the student.
"BISD does not condone employees abusing any child and will not tolerate such conduct," Beaumont Independent School District spokeswoman Nakisha Burns said in a statement. "The teacher was immediately removed from the classroom and placed on administrative leave pending action on her contract."
Hastings was booked into the Jefferson County jail on a misdemeanor count of assault. She posted $2,500 bond and was later released on a $2,500 bond.
She has taught in the district for three years, according to KFDM.By Annie Thériault —-
Thirty-nine years ago this Sunday, on May 31, 1970, an undersea earthquake off the coast of Casma and Chimbote, north of Lima, triggered one of the most cataclysmic avalanches in recorded history – wiping out the entire highland town of Yungay and most of its 25,000 inhabitants.
Yungay 1970
Around 3:23 PM, local time, while most were tuned in to the Italy-Brazil FIFA World Cup Match, a magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck the Peruvian departments of Ancash and La Libertad. The quake’s epicenter was located in the Pacific Ocean, where the Nazca Plate is subducted by the South American Plate, and recorded a magnitude of 8.0 on the Richter scale, with an intensity of up to 8 on the Mercalli scale.
Lasting 45 seconds, the earthquake crumbled adobe homes, bridges, roads and schools across 83,000 square kilometers, an area larger than Belgium and the Netherlands combined. Registered as one of the worst earthquakes ever to be experienced in South America, damages and casualties were reported as far as Tumbes, Iquitos and Pisco, as well as in some parts of Ecuador and Brazil.
In Yungay, a small highland town in the picturesque Callejon de Huaylas, founded by Domingo Santo Tomás in 1540, the earthquake triggered an even greater calamity.
The quake destabilized the glacier on the north face of Mount Huascarán, causing 10 million cubic meters of rock, ice and snow to break away and tear down its slope at more than 193 kilometers, or 120 miles, per hour.
As it thundered down toward Yungay, and the town of Ranrahirca on the other side of the ridge, the wave of debris picked up more glacial deposits and began to spit out mud, dust, and boulders. By the time it reached the valley – barely three minutes later – the 914 meters-, or 3,000 feet-wide wave was estimated to have consisted of about 80 million cubic meters of ice, mud, and rocks.
Within moments, what was Yungay and its 25,000 inhabitants – many of whom had rushed into the church to pray after the earthquake struck – were buried and crushed by the landslide. The smaller village of Ranrahirca was buried as well, the second time in a decade, but it is the image of lone surviving palm trees in the Yungay cemetery that is burned into Peru’s memory.
“We were on our way from Yungay to Caraz when the earthquake struck,” survivor Mateo Casaverde recalls.
“When we stepped out of the car, the earthquake was almost over. Then we heard a deep, low rumble, something distinct from the noise an earthquake makes, but not too different. It came from the Huascarán. Then we saw, half-way between Yungay and the mountain, a giant cloud of dust. Part of the Huascarán was coming toward us. It was approximately 3:24. Where we were, the only place that offered us relative security, was the cemetery, built upon an artificial hill, like a pre-Incan tomb. We ran approximately 100 meters before we got to the cemetery. Once I reached the top, I turned to see Yungay. I could clearly see a giant wave of gray mud, about 60 meters high. Moments later, the landslide hit the cemetery, about five meters below our feet. The sky went dark because of all the dust, mostly from all of the destroyed homes. We turned to look, and Yungay, as well as its thousands of inhabitants, had completely disappeared.”
The reported death toll from what came to be known as Peru’s Great Earthquake totaled more than 74,000 people. About 25,600 were declared missing, over 143,000 were injured and more than one million left homeless. The city of Huaraz was rubble, the valley buried in mud, and coastal towns such as Casma were also shaken to the ground.
In Yungay, only some 350 people survived, including the few who were able to climb to the town’s elevated step-like cemetery. Built between 1892 and 1903, the cemetery was designed by Swiss architect Arnoldo Ruska, who also died as a result of the landslide.
Among the survivors were 300 children, who had been taken to the circus at the local stadium, set on higher ground and on the outskirts of the town.
“The clown led the children to safety like the Pied Piper,” Henri Gómez, a local tourist guide told the Peruvian Times. “As soon as the earthquake struck, he led them from his tent to higher ground.”
Today, Yungay is a national cemetery, and the Huascarán’s victims are still vividly remembered.
Because the Peruvian government has forbidden excavation in the area, crosses and tombs mark the spots where homes once stood, engraved with the names of those never found.
To this day, a crushed intercity bus, four of the original palm trees that once crowned the city’s main plaza and remnants of the cathedral still stand.
And, though life goes on and a new Yungay has since been rebuilt – a few kilometers away from the original city – Peru does not want to forget. In 2000, in memory of the victims of the deadliest seismic disaster in the history of Latin America, the government declared May 31 “Natural Disaster Education and Reflection Day.”A Chinese billionaire who has contributed $2 million to the Clinton Foundation and attended a fundraiser at Hillary Clinton’s home in 2013 has been kicked out of China’s National People’s Congress on accusations of bribing his way into office.
The New York Times reports that Wang Wenliang is one of 45 lawmakers from China’s Liaoning province who attained positions in the National People’s Congress by paying for votes.
Xinhua, China’s official news agency, first reported the news.
Wenliang, who is a Chinese citizen with legal permanent resident status in the U.S. controls a vast construction empire with interests across the globe, including here.
One of his companies, Rilin Enterprises, donated $2 million to the Clinton Foundation in 2013. That
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Garudas, which are guarding a distinctly bell shaped rooftop ornament, known in Buddhist architecture as a “stupa,” which serves as the base of the flagpole.
Buddhist Temple Architecture
At first, the Buddhist temple was merely a place of pilgrimage, that housed a shrine, a holy man, or sacred relics. But when the function of the temple evolved to community and monastic based, so did the architecture. In order to accommodate human occupants, the temple soon had to provide individual sleeping quarters and communal living quarters known as a “vihara.” (monastery) In addition, it had to create an inner sanctum reserved for the high priests, known as a “garbhagriha” (Sanskrit for “womb room,”) as well as a library to store important temple documents and study the sacred texts, (a sutra library) and a gathering place for general worship, known as a “chaitya.” (prayer hall) Along with the “stupa,” a bell shaped sculpture that generally indicates a sacred site, these are the primary structures associated with the Buddhist temple-monastery complex.
The Vihara
Buddhist monastery design, though it changed according to the times and the local customs, generally adheres to the same basic formula: an open courtyard, around which were monastic cells, with a surrounding ambulatory path and vertical columns.
At 140 New Montgomery, Pflueger utilized the idea of monastic cells around an open courtyard, with a central hallway, around which were the individual offices. This unique F-shape ensured each office had a window and an unobstructed view, maximizing available light and natural air flow.
In order to accommodate the growing number of Pacific Bell System employees, he also created a communal dining hall and library, as well as a general assembly room and executive boardroom which he modeled after the traditional prayer hall, and “womb room” of sacred Buddhist architecture.
The “Chaitya” or Prayer Hall
Located on the uppermost floor of 140 New Montgomery is the assembly room, which functions as a general meeting hall, and is based on the Buddhist temple “chaitya.”
In Buddhist architecture a “chaitya”is a large prayer hall with a shrine at one end. The Assembly Room at 140 New Montgomery, has a large open floorplan with a curtained stage at one end, which is flanked by beautiful wood carvings that depict the most important scene in the Buddha’s life: his enlightenment beneath the Bodhi tree.
In the Lalitavistara Sutra, when Siddhartha arrives at the “seat of awakening,” the gods transform the area so that it resembles a divine realm, making it a suitable environment for the fulfillment of the epic destiny that awaited the Boddhisattva. The term Lalitavistara has been translated as “The Play in Full,” because it was believed that the Buddha’s life, his “sacred biography,” was a theatrical performance played out on the world stage, designed to uplift mankind.
In the Assembly Room, the carvings on either side of the stage depict Siddhartha beneath the Bodhi Tree wrestling with the demon of desire, Mara, who is represented as a giant serpent. The demon Mara did everything in his considerable powers to lead Siddhartha astray. First he threatened him with a legion of fierce demons, and when that didn’t work, he tried to seduce him with beautiful women, but Siddhartha remained steadfast, and Mara was defeated.
Now, the “stage was set,” so to speak, for the big event, the grand finale, Siddhartha’s enlightenment, which is a gradual process that slowly unfolds throughout the night until he is “awakened” at dawn, becoming the Buddha. The carvings flanking the stage in the Assembly Room depict two elephants kneeling at his feet, in acknowledgement of his newly acquired divine status. Above the stage is a phoenix, the ancient symbol of resurrection, as well as the symbol of the City of San Francisco.
The Sutra Library
An essential feature in any Buddhist temple monastery was a library for the sacred texts ad chronicles of the temple’s activities. Similarly, Timothy Pflueger had to create a study space for the workers of the Bell System, as well as a repository for all the paperwork and files generated by the company.
The “Garbhagriha” or Inner Sanctum
In temple architecture, a “garbhagriha” is a shrine that is within, but separate from, the temple complex. Often compared to a “sanctum sanctorum,” only the highest level initiates are allowed to enter this room. The Sanskrit term means “the deep interior of the house,” from the Sanskrit words “garbha” for womb, and “griha” for house. Generally speaking, the garbhagriha is a windowless, dimly lit inner chamber that is designed to focus the mind.
The Executive Board Room at 140 New Montgomery, which no longer exists after recent renovations, was located on the 18th floor. It featured wall to wall, floor to ceiling oak paneling, a large marble fireplace, heavily draped windows, and a concealed door that led to a secret staircase.
The fireplace was framed by a sculpted marble relief of a male and female figure sitting along the edge, with a globe in between them, holding two poles, as if they are holding up the mural above them.
Above the fireplace is a mural painted by renowned artist, Arthur Frank Mathews, and commissioned by Timothy Pflueger, that depicts an expansive mountain top view with what appears to be the ruins of a bell tower in the background.
Arthur Mathews had his own highly personal and profound reasons for depicting the ruins of a bell tower. Following the Great Earthquake of 1906, Mathews had climbed the bell tower at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute to survey the destruction being wrought by the fires. In the distance, he could see his wife’s parents house burning, and ran off to save them, leaving his studio and all his artwork behind. By the time he returned, the Art Institute had been utterly destroyed, leaving nothing but the ruins of the tower that Mathews had just been in.
The new art institute was built in 1926, immediately following the construction of 140 New Montgomery Street. It was designed based on Spanish-Colonial architecture, and is most well known for its distinctive Mission-like bell tower, which is purported to be haunted with the unrealized dreams of frustrated artists. Directly below the Bell Tower is a mural by Diego Rivera that depicts Timothy Pflueger (green hat) and Arthur Brown, the architects of both bell towers in question.
The Buddha and the Architect
Its not hard to imagine why Timothy Pflueger would be inspired by the story of Siddhartha’s journey to enlightenment, as in many ways the life story of the architect parallels the life story of the Bodhisattva.
Siddhartha, (much like San Francisco’s namesake St. Francis de Assisi) was a wealthy prince who led a sheltered life, until one day he left the confines of his palace walls, and was shocked by the disease, poverty and death he saw all around him. He then renounced his privileged life and decided to devote himself to solving the problem of human suffering. He became a disciple, and studied under many teachers. After a period of strict asceticism, Siddhartha decided to turn his attention to more material concerns. He got a good job working for a wealthy merchant, and learned well his trade. Pretty soon, he was an affluent member of society, and had anything he could want for. It is then that discontent set in, and he began his quest for enlightenment.
Timothy Pflueger was not a wealthy prince. He grew up in a large working class family in the Mission District, and took his first job when he was just 11 years old. When Timothy was 13, his whole world was turned upside down in the Great Earthquake of 1906. He graduated from school in a mass ceremony in Golden Gate Park, and immediately began work as a draftsman for a local architectural firm, joining the massive rebuilding effort that was going on all around him.
Like Siddhartha, the walls of Timothy’s palace had come crumbling down in the earthquake and subsequent fires, exposing him to death, loss and suffering on an unprecedented scale. Like Siddhartha, Timothy would leave his former “privileged” life behind, and become a disciple, studying under many teachers.
The Great Earthquake, more than any other event, crystallized for Timothy Pflueger that he had not only a challenging and laborious job ahead of him, but a higher calling; to build a bigger and better San Francisco than the one that came before. After being so rudely awakened that sad April morning, he decided to devote his life to not only rebuilding his devastated city one brick at a time, but also to creating buildings that served to edify the community, and elevate it’s consciousness for generations to come.
“When we build, let us think we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such a work that our descendants will thank us for it, and let us think, as we lay stone upon stone, that a time is to come when these stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, “See! This our fathers did for us!” – John Ruskin
Timothy Pflueger would go on to become Senior Partner of the same firm that hired him at 14 years old, President of the elite architectural organization that trained him, co-founder of the Museum of Modern Art, and go down in history as one of the most accomplished and creative architects to emerge from the Bay Area. 140 New Montgomery, his first skyscraper and most ambitious project, stands as testimony to his genius, and nearly 100 years later, though it’s copper guts have been long since stripped out, it is still calling people to wake up, look up, and pay attention to higher things.
As a well known Buddhist dictum has it: “He who is low-born may develop and improve himself like the Lotus growing out of the mire.”
SPECIAL REFERENCES
“Time and Tim Remembered” By Milton and John Pflueger
“A 26 Story History of San Francisco” by Alexis C Madrigal
“Art Deco San Francisco: The Architecture of Timothy Pflueger” by Theresa Poletti
The Buddhist Sutras
“Following in the Buddha’s Footsteps”
“Skyscrapers from A-Z”
“Phone Company Building” Art and Architecture SF
“The Telephone is the Instrument of the Devil”by Marika Ehrenkrona
Engineering and Technology: Telephone Operators
Hugh Ferriss: Delineator of Gotham
“The Architecture of “Metropolis” by Jan Wollner
Telephone Map of US Bell System in 1910:
Social Studies Fact Cards, “California Mission Life: Mission Bells”
“James Hilton and Shangri-La” by Rasoul Sorkhabi
“Shangri La: A Practical Guide to the Himalayan Dream” by Michael Buckley
Edison’s Spirit Phone – History Channel Video
SPECIAL THANKS
This article could not be possible without the hard work of countless others who came before me, leaving crumbs and signposts for me to follow on my own path to enlightenment. I have an inestimable gratitude for architect John Pflueger, nephew of Timothy Pflueger, and senior partner of the Pflueger architecture firm, for his uniquely personal insights and professional opinions, and architectural historian Laura Ackley, for her unflagging enthusiasm and unwavering support. An extra special thanks to the countless contributors at FoundSF, SF Cityguides and Art and Architecture SF for providing such well written, extensive and invaluable resources, as always.A Museum Devoted To Pizza Is Coming To Chicago Next Month
By Anthony Todd in Food on Mar 29, 2016 3:49PM
Fasanos. Photo by Jennifer Olvera/Chicagoist.
Updated March 31: You can now see the museum without a ticket.
Chicago is a city that cares about pizza, so it's only logical that Chicago would be the perfect place for an entire museum devoted to our favorite food. Accordingly, The U.S. Pizza Museum will debut it's first real physical exhibit on April 3.
The "museum" has existed in online form up to this point, displaying various pieces of pizza history and memorabilia, including menus, signs, dishes and even a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pizza party comic book. At Chop Shop, on April 3, the museum moves into the physical realm, at least for a day. This coincides with the Chicago Pizza Summit, which we covered back in February.
The second floor of Chop Shop will be filled with awesome memorabilia, including:
Vintage pizza advertisements, toys, buttons, and records from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s will be displayed alongside more recent artifacts like pizza boxes and menus, including selections from local institutions like Lou Malnati’s and the recently closed Burt’s Place.
Unfortunately, tickets for the summit are currently sold out. But there's still a couple ways you might get into the Pizza Summit. First, sign up for a newsletter to be the first to find out if more tickets will be released. Next, check out all the rest of the 30 Days of Pizza Events. Every time you RSVP for one (and there are five free events left between now and the summit), you are entered for a chance to win two tickets for the Summit.
If we were more devious, we'd suggest you call Chop Shop and beg them to keep the exhibit around for a few weeks, but that would be wrong, so we won't. In the meantime, check out the museum's website.Earlier this month, environmentalists were aghast when the feds shot down a last-ditch effort to prevent Florida Power & Light from storing radioactive waste beneath Miami's underground water supply. More than 1,500 people have now signed a petition demanding that lawmakers take action.
But there's actually another ongoing legal fight that could still prevent FPL from storing the waste from two planned new reactors at Turkey Point in the Boulder Zone, an area 3,000 feet underground.
Two environmental groups, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) and the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), filed a legal complaint back in 2010, objecting to FPL's proposal. Multiple government studies have warned that waste injected into the Boulder Zone could leak upward into the Floridan and Biscayne Aquifers. FPL, however, contends the Boulder Zone is "sealed" and cannot leak into sources of water that humans use.
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Despite FPL's repeated attempts to kill SACE's petition, the complaint still stands seven years later — and this coming May, SACE and the NPCA will finally get a legal hearing where FPL will be forced to reckon with environmentalists' concerns.
"Their experts are trying to say these contaminants will not migrate into the aquifer," Sara Barczak, SACE's director for high-risk energy sources, tells New Times. "Our experts are saying there has already been migration, and it's likely there will be more migration if the new reactors are built."
Roughly seven years ago, FPL first pitched the idea of a Turkey Point expansion to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the federal agency tasked with approving new nuclear-reactor construction sites. As part of that plan, FPL said it would store any new wastewater from the reactors, numbers six and seven, inside the Boulder Zone. SACE immediately interjected because environmentalists say the wastewater and radioactive material include carcinogens such as cesium, strontium 90, and tritium.
This year, the group Citizens Allied for Safe Energy (CASE) filed a complaint challenging FPL's radioactive-waste plan for Turkey Point. The NRC shot down that filing this month on procedural grounds, claiming CASE had simply filed its petition too late in FPL's application process.
But SACE and the NPCA filed on time, so their fight rages on.
"In 2010, we pulled together experts, got together with the National Parks Conservation Association on a number of contentions, including nuclear waste issues," Barczak says. "Over time, not all our contentions were accepted, but our petition essentially addresses the same concern that CASE raised. Ours does not focus specifically on radioactive contaminants but instead focuses on other constituent contaminants. But the good news is, from an advocate’s point of view, we're still in the game."
Wastewater, largely in the form of raw sewage, has been injected into the Boulder Zone since the 1960s. Environmentalists have long opposed the practice, claiming the waste could leak into Miami's drinking water supply. Radioactive waste dumping, which FPL is proposing, represents a new step in the anti-dumping fight. This month, Miami's Urban Paradise Guild started a Change.org petition to try to persuade lawmakers to make Boulder Zone dumping illegal. More than 1,500 people have signed.
Caroline McLaughlin, the NCPA's Biscayne program manager, said her group joined SACE to fight FPL because of the unique threat Turkey Point poses to national parks in South Florida.
"You couldn’t find a worse place to put a nuclear power plant," McLaughlin says. "It's at ground zero for sea-level rise." So, she says, the NCPA has long opposed expanding anything at Turkey Point.
The federal government has not yet given the groups a hard date for their hearing with FPL, but Barczak and McLaughlin hope that after the meeting, the NRC will force FPL to come up with a new waste-storage plan.
"The best possible outcome is that they’re going to have to go back and revise their Environmental Impact Statement to addresses the potential impacts of this," McLaughlin says. "We need a statement that guarantees there will not be significant impacts to the drinking water supply. We won’t accept anything less than that."
In the meantime, Barczak and SACE, which fights for clean energy in multiple states in the South, notes that the type of reactor FPL wants to build at Turkey Point — the Westinghouse AP1000 — has been called "dangerous" and overly expensive by climate activists. Barczak and SACE also say FPL's expansion plan at Turkey Point is likely running billions of dollars over budget, making it less and less likely that the new reactors ever get built.
But if they do, Barczak warns that the pressure for FPL to recoup its building costs could easily discourage the company from investing in more clean-energy initiatives such as solar and wind power.
As long as FPL says it wants to build new reactors, SACE and the NPCA say they're demanding the utility company figure out some other way to store its waste from Turkey Point.
"Their track record at the original facility is terrible, and they've threatened and impacted our national parks," Barczak says. "I don’t see them taking the high road to alleviate that situation, so why would we trust them to do the right thing with new reactors?"
Here are the latest documents from SACE and the NCPA's fight with FPL:In 2011, the New York Times profiled David Yerushalmi, an anti-Muslim extremist and the go-to lawyer for the movement at large.
Yerushalmi, who's advocated for the criminalization of Islam, developed a campaign to push states to adopt legislation that would expressly prohibit judges from consulting sharia, Islam’s legal framework.
Nine states followed suit by 2015, tweaking the language to cover “application of foreign or religious law in state courts” in order to dodge obvious constitutional issues.
But for Yerushalmi, the goal was never legislation:
If this thing passed in every state without any friction, it would have not served its purpose. The purpose was heuristic — to get people asking this question, ‘What is Shariah?’
Fortunately for Yerushalmi and other anti-Muslim propagandists, when people ask ‘What is shariah?’ they ask Google.
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A recent Observer investigation by Carole Cadwalladr revealed how searches about Jews on Google would immediately steer users toward Holocaust denial content and neo-Nazi sites like Stormfront, which appeared for a time as the top result for “did the Holocaust happen?”
A similar problem exists when using Google Search to find information on Muslims and sharia but it's arguably worse.
Worse because, as we'll see, factual content about Islam and sharia in basic searches often gets choked off by anti-Muslim propaganda. Particularly once the search is narrowed (down from Yerushalmi's heuristic) we encounter a near total Search Engine Optimization (SEO) dominance of anti-Muslim sources and fake news sites.
First, a simple search for “What is sharia” returns the following:
The top pop-out definition is a result from Google’s “Knowledge Graph,” or semantic search. Launched in 2012, Google’s Knowledge Graph serves up quick facts, outside the list of links, “connected” to the user’s query. Based on millions of searches and a growing database of such facts—70 billion at year's end—Google thinks it’s most useful to present as a first result a basic dictionary definition of sharia.
Overall here, the results are pretty good. We do get a CounterJihad.com link and a very high ranking for BillionBibles.com. This low-budget but inflammatory site features a list of violent punishments contained in sharia, adorned with an image of an amputated hand and a Koran, and links out to other pages labeled “Stop Islam” and “Spread of Islam.” BillionBibles.com appears in numerous searches relating to Islam and sharia. The site provides very little value.
But should a user be located in a state where an anti-sharia bill is making progress in the state house, a natural next question might be about sharia's "compatibility" with US laws, the constitution in particular (in fact, the alleged incompatibility of Islam generally with the US and western civilization is a perhaps the defining argument of anti-Muslim thinkers and propagandists of varying stripes). In this case, Google tells a different story:
On this search, the top result is what's called a Featured Snippet which is pulled not from Google's Knowledge Graph but a third-party website. This still gives a user the sense of a Google-preferred — and therefore reasonably authoritative — result.
In the above example, the fake news site ClashDaily.com gets top billing. The next result is a PDF from Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy (CSP), where Yerushalmi is general counsel. Gaffney, who has accused everyone from the National Rifle Association to the Obama administration of being infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood, is a notorious anti-Muslim bigot. Looking down to the eleventh result we find the even more conspiratorial WorldNetDaily (WND), ground-zero of the racist birther lie.
Replacing "sharia" with "Islam" we get a similar crop of propaganda and fake news:
The top result is from the American Thinker, a far-right and often incredibly racist site. For hate groups we get CSP again and a story featuring Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, the anti-LGBT Family Research Council's in-house Islamophobe. Some of these groups are part of the well-funded anti-Muslim propaganda network, including anti-Muslim extremist and Breitbart contributor David Horowitz whose "Discover The Networks" site also often appears in Google's "People also ask" results, with very benign sounding entries:
While all the results above are certainly relevant to the search, they contain inflammatory content meant to convey a threatening conspiracy of "creeping Jihad" and reliably demonize Muslims. This is a message that continues to find fertile ground in the United States where the threat of terrorism has so consumed the national imagination. As two former Obama administration foreign policy staffers wrote in the New York Times this past weekend:
Whatever the explanation, our intense focus on terrorism has helped spawn a veritable counterterrorism industrial complex, made up of new government agencies, private firms and an army of well-funded experts, who keep the issue atop the national agenda. As a result, without much empirical rationale, concern about terrorism is rising: Today, 80 percent of Americans reportedly consider terrorism a “critical threat,” compared with less than 60 percent citing North Korea, which may soon be able to strike the United States territory with a nuclear missile.
The success of the anti-Muslim extremist propaganda arm of this industrial complex can be measured in part by Google Search. Since early 2015, Snopes, the site dedicated to debunking internet rumors, has debunked a major rumor involving sharia on average about once every other month.
"One of the most striking things about the stories about Muslims and sharia law and Islam in general is how persistent the misinformation is," said Brooke Binkowski, an editor at Snopes. "The same exact stories get circulated with different names and slightly different details, every few months. If you look at some of the stories we've done you can probably see some of the updates to them, indicating how often they resurface. They are nasty and pernicious."
Following the uproar surrounding Cadwalladr's reporting, Google did tweak its algorithm to sink Stormfront in Holocaust-related searches, but it appears not to have stayed that way. The SPLC has also highlighted the radicalization of Dylann Roof as an extreme consequence of allowing hate groups to so easily manipulate Search and surface their propaganda. The threat of dedicated extremists and propagandists to warp public opinion and individuals susceptible to their messages is real.
In statements, Google repeats that it "was built on providing people with high-quality and authoritative results for their search queries." In the case of sharia and Islam, the company is simply not keeping up.Comedy Central iOS App: Learnings on the bleeding edge
Aurelie Gaudry Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 27, 2016
Invest in the rewrite
There is no word more terrifying in the world of software engineering than “rewrite.” So, you can imagine the delight in the eyes of management when our tech team made a case to do just that.
But like pictures, emojis are sometimes worth a thousand words…
Mobile development moves fast. Every fall, developers face a new version of their operating system and new tools. It becomes more challenging to bring your ancient code base up to speed. Development teams find themselves fighting with deprecations rather than experimenting with new features.
Some of the outdated vendor code we support sits on top of Restkit and XML feeds. Some of it relies on NSURLConnection, a class deprecated in favor of NSURLSession in iOS 7. If you plan ahead and your app supports a good level of abstraction, you can mitigate issues like these. But that isn’t always the case.
We set a goal to build a scalable mobile app architecture that would suit our future needs. We took a hard look at our current catalog of legacy apps. We asked ourselves what works, what doesn’t and what works well enough to improve and reuse.
Like a lot of legacy software, feature upon feature had compounded. With that comes ever-increasing technical debt. Our front-end software was approaching critical mass. Our feeds architecture was suffering as well.
These major factors, combined with a new, modern and flexible API solidified our stance. We got the green light from stakeholders to start over. We worked with in-house API developers and product managers to create something future proof. Something to suit our our own technological, production and business needs.
To Swift or Not to Swift?
A week or so ago, an amusing thread on the Swift Evolution mailing list caught my eye. It pled in its subject line “Seriously! Freeze Swift For Two Years After Release 3.0!”
We started our project with Swift 1.1. Currently, Swift 2.3 and 3.0 (aka “The Grand Renaming”) are in beta.
Each release has been painful. The language changes out underneath us often. Debugging and refactoring have become more difficult. And compiling times have increased due to the removal of native method currying.
But on the positive side, Swift reduces the number of files in a project. It is concise. Its type-system and generics prevent us from writing a lot of code. It is also a great partner for Functional Reactive Programming. The standard Swift library already provides much of what you need for it.
And, we can all agree that Swift is far easier on the eyes than its verbose predecessor, Objective-C.
Experiment with Modern Concepts & Frameworks
Most iOS applications use the MVC architectural pattern. Our requirements took us down a path that led to MVVM (Model View ViewModel).
We also introduced Functional Reactive Programming into our code. For the most part, we used it within our data layer. And we employed Promises, a concept used in concurrent programming languages such as Scala.
Two libraries that were indispensable are PromiseKit and ReactiveCocoa.
PromiseKit is an implementation and collection of helper functions. It brings the concept of Promises to iOS and clarifies the intent of complex code. It makes it easy to manage sequential and/or parallel execution of units of work with a clean syntax. It is thread-safe and comes with nice utilities for concurrency management.
ReactiveCocoa is an implementation of Functional Reactive Programming for iOS. We used it for bindings between data and UI. And also for its streamlined abstraction of the underlying iOS eventing mechanisms. We chose ReactiveCocoa over RxSwift because team members had prior experience with it. Also, RxSwift was too new at the time.
When working with closures and adding listeners, memory management issues can occur with PromiseKit. We also found that PromiseKit can make a mess of the debug chain at times.
These concepts can have a bit of a steep learning curve but are well worth the investment in the long run.
Don’t depend too much on others
Every time we downloaded a new version of Xcode and attempted to build the app, we ran into issues. These were almost always beyond our control. The Swift Migrator tool works pretty well but more often than not, we would see an error like this:
You are only going to be able to move as Swiftly as the libraries you have chosen to integrate into your own codebase.
Libraries, such as PromiseKit and ReactiveCocoa have great communities built around them. Their teams resolved issues during Swift betas with quick updates. But this isn’t going to be the case with every third party you choose or your business chooses for you. If the decision is up to you, ask yourself if you need it
Also, you should limit the total number of libraries you include. We found a high number of dependencies to be a culprit in app startup times on older devices. Apple recommended that you only include up to six external dependencies.
Use the tools that work for you
Visual layout in Xcode’s Interface Builder and Storyboards continues to improve. Novice programmers can create simple, yet impressive applications and adaptive layouts with ease. That doesn’t mean it’s the right solution for everyone, though.
Storyboards can slow down iOS development. They take a toll on Xcode and are prone to merge conflicts. They can also entangle your flow, view and business logic in one location. This doesn’t scale well.
We set out to create an application where as much of the UI as possible is data driven and dynamic. Storyboards were not the right solution to achieve this. We used a library called PureLayout. We constructed our views and modules into reusable, dynamic puzzle pieces of code.
Know Apple’s Best Practices
Business requirements and other restrictions sometimes get in the way of doing things right. But you should be aware of Apple’s Best practices and follow them as often as possible.
Limit backwards compatibility. Apple’s rule of thumbs is to take the current shipping version and take the current version one back. Currently, that would be 9.3 to 8.4 and in the fall when they release iOS 10, you should only go back to 9.3.
Treat warnings as errors and fix all warnings before you ship. This has been available in Xcode for Objective-C and will be available for Swift as of Xcode 8.
Profile early and then profile often. The earlier you find a problem, the less time you will spend untangling it. Always profile with release builds on the device rather than the simulator. And profile on the oldest and slowest devices that your app will support.
Migrate to Asset Catalogs. Make sure you include image sizes for all the resolutions you want to support. Scaling 3x images down on an older device can create memory spikes. You still have to load the large image to scale it down. Apple gave a convincing pitch for using Asset Catalogs this year at WWDC. (Watch the “Improving Existing Apps with Modern Best Practices” session).
Move to TLS. Up until now, Apple has given developers the option to turn off App Transport Security. They are starting to enforce this. By the end of 2016, they will ask developers to provide explanations for any exceptions in their app.
Follow Your Own Best Practices
We built an app that we consider to be our best work to date. And we also came out of it with a slew of our own best practices that we will continue to follow moving forward.
Use the highest level abstractions available to you. Manage asynchrony with an abstraction such as Promises. Manage events, binding and streams with an abstraction like ReactiveCocoa. Break out core functionality, such as your data layer. Create a separation of function and responsibilities. Maintain the least state possible and make every view stateless in effect.
Be dynamic. Data feeds drive the majority of our app. This allows our producers more flexibility and control than ever before.
Follow Gitflow. Tag your release and lock the pod versions in your pod file before release. Take part in architectural design sessions before starting non-trivial tasks. Engage in a focused code review afterwards.
Adopt solid deployment tactics. Watch Crashlytics like a hawk and consider potential problems with care. Any crashes in your QA cycle have the potential to blow up when the app is in market. Verify over-installing the app to be sure to save user preferences when needed.
And of course, test.
Test and automate so you can innovate
MVVM lends itself well to a testable architecture. It’s easy to mock and stub objects. You can represent views in automated UI tests. And ViewModels individual methods for manipulation and presentation are also easy to test.
Our data and networking layer is currently under a large amount of test coverage. This ensures that data retrieval and parsing is stable and safe.
We created a suite of Python integration tests for backend services schema validation. We also created a basic automation suite which captures services for playback. Next, we will include a screenshot comparison of current builds and a last good known. And then use DVR replay to remove live data from the equation.
As we extract sections of the app, to make into reusable libraries and pods, we are creating more unit tests. The goal is to achieve high coverage for these components.
Finally, we are working on a CTO-to-Dev-Ops-friendly way to display our testing results. Then, we can rest assured that all is well and start playing around with iMessage extensions. And other fun things coming down the iOS pipeline.
Check out the brand new CC iOS App now on the Apple app store!Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption Children in adversity build up strong relationships with their pets
Children who are facing adversity, such as illness or parents splitting up, are more likely to confide in their pet than brothers or sisters, according to research.
Matt Cassels at Cambridge University says far too little attention has been paid to the significant role of pets in young people's emotions.
"They may feel that their pets are not judging them," said Mr Cassels.
His research is based on a 10-year study of 100 families in the UK.
Mr Cassels, a postgraduate psychiatry researcher, says that the place of pets in the lives of young people has not been adequately recognised and the scale of its importance has been under estimated.
Emotional support
Family break-ups mean that in the United States children are more likely to live with a pet than their natural father, says the research.
According to US data, about two thirds of children live with their father, while about four in five of families with school-age children have a pet.
Mr Cassels examined data from a longitudinal study carried out by the Centre for Family Research at Cambridge University, which tracked children from the age of two.
The information on pet ownership was based on when children were aged 12.
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption Children in the US are more likely to live with a pet than their father, say researchers
"The data on pet relationships stood out, as it had never occurred to me to consider looking at pet relationships, although I had studied children's other relationships," says Mr Cassels.
He suggests that people have associated pets with children's play and have not approached it in terms of a relationship.
Mr Cassels says the research shows that children facing emotional difficulties, such as "bereavement, divorce, instability and illness" place a particular importance on their pets.
"These children not only turn to their pets for support when faced with adversity, they do so even more than they turn to their siblings.
"This is even though they know their pets don't actually understand what they are saying," he adds.
Pets are best
The research suggests that children were also likely to have a stronger relationship with their pets than their peers.
Such relationships, particularly when it was girls with pet dogs, encouraged more social behaviour, such as "helping, sharing, and co-operating".
There was a therapeutic side to this relationship, he suggested, with the pets playing the role of the listener and being more "empathetic" for children than writing problems into a diary.
The study, he said, showed that it was "valid to talk about child pet relationships in the same way we talk about sibling relationships".
Furthermore, it was not an example of anthropomorphism, where human characteristics are attributed to animals, says Mr Cassels, a Canadian studying at Cambridge on a scholarship funded by the Gates Foundation.
Despite pets being so common in families with children, Mr Cassels says there has been a lack of evaluation for "how important they are to us".AFFORDABLE PERFECTION: Sennheiser's HD 419
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is not the object of an observation of this type, which can nevertheless reveal, on an experimental level, a series of very useful signs about the specificity of the human being. But the experience of metaphysical knowledge, of the awareness of self and of its reflexive nature, that of the moral conscience, that of liberty, or still yet the aesthetic and religious experience, are within the competence of philosophical analysis and reflection, while theology extracts from it the final meaning according to the Creator's designs."
MESS/ORIGIN LIFE:EVOLUTION/ACAD VIS 961023 (660)
The Full Text of John Paul II's comments on evolution online at New Advent, a Roman Catholic web page. (Note that my comments below are keyed to the original official Vatican press release shown above, not this apparently complete translation of the Pope's remarks, which were delivered in French.)
I will address just a few key quotes of John Paul II that were mentioned in the above October 23rd, 1996 Vatican Information Service press release, (article N.182).
To begin with, in the second paragraph, two sources of "truth" are mentioned, one being the conclusions of modern science, and the other being Revelation of truth from scripture or the church. The Pope stated that
"We know in effect that the truth cannot contradict the truth."
(This is a quote from PROVIDENTISSIMUS DEUS, Paragraph 23).
What the Pope has done, as you will see, is elevate Darwinian evolutionary theory to that of undeniable scientific fact, or truth. He then draws the conclusion that since evolution is indeed the truth, the Catholic Church's interpretation of the biblical account of Genesis cannot contradict this now proven and accepted fact of evolution, and so church teachings must consequently be re-evaluated and amended. The Catholic church has faced this sort of predicament before.
The Pope probably sees parallels between Darwin's theory and the astronomical discoveries of Galileo. In 1632, as a result of his scientific observations, Galileo published a book in which he defended the Copernican theory of a sun-centered solar system. Galileo's "Dialogue on the Great World Systems" was swiftly condemned by Pope Urban VIII, because the church believed and taught that the earth was the center of the universe. Galileo was made to recant his heretical opinions and his book was banned by the church for two-hundred years. It is a classic example of church dogma suppressing scientific truth.
Here is a Catholic view of The Galileo Affair online at EWTN.
Recently (1979) the Pontifical Academy of Sciences reconsidered the Galileo matter, with Pope John Paul II then acknowledging that the church erred in it's condemning the factual astronomical discoveries of Galileo. So the Pope probably saw a similar fiasco brewing between biblical creationism and evolutionary science. While the astronomical sciences have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the earth does indeed revolve around the Sun, the case for evolutionary science has never been proven to be anything but hypothesis, which is to say it is nothing more than speculation. The cases are really quite different, but apparently that is not the opinion of John Paul II.
In the 5th paragraph of the Vatican press release, the Pope points out-
"the need for a correct interpretation of the inspired word, of a rigorous hermeneutics. It is fitting to set forth well the limits of the meaning proper to scripture, rejecting undue interpretations which make it say what it does not have the intention of saying."
The Pope is saying that he is abandoning what he feels is an untenable and "undue" interpretation of the Bible, namely that God created the entire universe, to include man, in a mere 6 days, and he is adopting instead the process of Darwinian evolution which proposes man evolved over millions of years from the apes.
Note with care what is stated in the 6th paragraph of the Vatican press release. Pope John Paul II says-
" new knowledge leads us to recognize in the theory of evolution more than a hypothesis."
Either evolution is theory (hypothesis) or it is fact, there is no middle ground with respect to the origin of man. Either God created man directly from the dust of the earth or He didn't. It is just that simple. The Pope in the above sentence has just declared evolution to be a fact, and in the process he dismissed the biblical account of Genesis as fable.
In the 6th paragraph of the above Vatican press release, an encyclical from Pope Pius XII, HUMANI GENERIS, is summarized and appealed to for support by John Paul II -
"Humani Generis'," he stated, "considered the doctrine of 'evolutionism' as a serious hypothesis, worthy of a more deeply studied investigation and reflection on a par with the opposite hypothesis." (He is commenting on paragraph 36 of the encyclical)
In this summary of Humani Generis, John Paul II has just reduced the biblical six day creation (the opposite hypothesis) to mere theory, and elevated evolutionary science to be on a par with it as an equal possibility to be considered! And that is indeed a correct assessment of what Pius XII said in his encyclical.
Continuing, in the 8th paragraph of the Vatican press release, John Paul II now quotes the encyclical HUMANI GENERIS (see paragraph 36) -
"if the origin of the human body is sought in living matter which existed before it, the spiritual soul is directly created by God."
So, as Pius XII explains it, if man did evolve, the same is not true of the soul. That, he claims, God created directly and put into man. Man himself though, is presumed to have evolved from "pre-existing living matter", rather than being created by God in one day from the dust of the earth. What Pius XII meant by that is that man evolved from the apes in accord with Darwinian theory!
What a predicament!! What an embarrassment for Christianity! At a time when the Protestant church in America is fighting to re-introduce the teaching of creationism into the public schools, Pope John Paul II stuns the world and declares Darwin was right after all, and man has descended from the apes! He is dismissing Genesis as fable and actually accepting Darwin's Origin of the Species as fact! Absolutely amazing!
1 Tim 6:20 O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called:
1 Tim 6:21 Which some professing have erred concerning the faith.
Should you wish to do some further investigating, here are the documents that are referred to by the Pope in his remarks. They are available online at -
HUMANI GENERIS - The Encyclical of Pope Pius XII Concerning Some False Opinions Threatening to Undermine the Foundations of Catholic Doctrine, August 12, 1950.
GAUDIUM ET SPES - The Pastoral Constitution On the Church in the Modern World, Promulgated by His Holiness, Pope Paul VI on December 7, 1965.
PROVIDENTISSIMUS DEUS - Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on the Study of Holy Scripture, November 18, 1893. (See paragraph #23 in particular)
In addition, here is a tract called Adam, Eve and Evolution online at Catholic Answers, that further explains the Catholic acceptance of Darwinian evolution. Take special note of the 11th paragraph:
Concerning human evolution, the Church has a more definite teaching. It allows for the possibility that man's body developed from previous biological forms (under God's guidance), but it insists on the special creation of his soul.
The complete article is available from Time Magazine.
The Great Translation Debate
Something of a debate is swirling around what the Pope actually said, or meant to say.
The contested passage is quoted here-
Today, almost half a century after the publication of the encyclical, new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.
The debate is whether or not the Pope said "the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis" or "the theory of evolution as more than one hypothesis". The original French text of the crucial sentence is presented at the New Advent site listed near the top for those who understand it. Some Catholics are scrambling to interpret the Pope's remarks to say that he was merely acknowledging multiple theories of evolution, hence the "more than one hypothesis". However, in context, the Pope is quite clear in his endorsement of evolution as fact. Let me repeat his statement with my notations-
Today, almost half a century after the publication of the encyclical, new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution [singular theory] as more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory [of evolution, singular theory] has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory [of evolution, singular theory].
The context of the paragraph clearly proposes that various fields of scientific knowledge are converging in support of Darwinian evolution as the mechanism of creation, and the Pope recognizes this convergence of scientific evidence to significantly favor evolution, such that he at least, no longer considers evolution to be just a hypothesis, but rather he accepts it to be fact.
See also-
Evolution: What the Pope Said by James Aiken, at Nazareth Resource Library.
It would seem that Catholics would rather debate this among themselves, leaving the issue unresolved, rather than ask the Pope for clarification on the issue. Perhaps they feel it is better if he simply remains silent rather than explain and potentially exacerbate the problem by removing all doubt about what he really meant to say.
:
Pope Benedict XVI:
"... My predecessors Pope Pius XII and Pope John Paul II noted that there is no opposition between faith’s understanding of creation and the evidence of the empirical sciences...."
Source: ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI TO MEMBERS OF THE PONTIFICAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES ON THE OCCASION OF THEIR PLENARY ASSEMBLY, Clementine Hall, Friday, 31 October 2008.
Evolution appears to be a reality favored by many scientific proofs.
... Currently, I see in Germany, but also in the United States, a somewhat fierce debate raging between so-called "creationism" and evolutionism, presented as though they were mutually exclusive alternatives: those who believe in the Creator would not be able to conceive of evolution, and those who instead support evolution would have to exclude God. This antithesis is absurd because, on the one hand, there are so many scientific proofs in favour of evolution which appears to be a reality we can see and which enriches our knowledge of life and being as such. But on the other, the doctrine of evolution does not answer every query, especially the great philosophical question: where does everything come from? And how did everything start which ultimately led to man? I believe this is of the utmost importance....
Source: MEETING OF THE HOLY FATHER BENEDICT XVI WITH THE CLERGY OF THE DIOCESES OF BELLUNO-FELTRE AND TREVISO, Church of St Justin Martyr, Auronzo di Cadore, Tuesday, 24 July 2007.
Apparently most Roman Catholic schools have taught evolution pretty much as fact since Pope Pius XII's encyclical HUMANI GENERIS in 1950. I even have a Catholic acquaintance who confirms that he was taught evolution as fact by Jesuits while in a Catholic school, so to most Catholics the Pope's remarks probably come as no great surprise.
So can the Catholic accept evolution? Is it compatible with the Bible? Could the Pope be right about evolution? Please continue on to my article Did God create the world through Evolution?GENEVA/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States won a long-running trade dispute with China on Friday when the World Trade Organization found Beijing had broken global rules by imposing anti-dumping duties on U.S. chicken broiler parts.
The U.S. complaint, first raised in September 2011, was widely seen as one of a string of tit-for-tat disputes between the world’s largest economies, and followed a U.S. ban on imports of Chinese cooked chicken.
The ruling could be a boost to U.S. poultry exporters. The U.S. complaint cited damage done to exporters like Pilgrim’s Pride (PPC.O), Tyson Foods Inc (TSN.N) and Keystone Foods, a brand held by Brazil’s Marfrig Alimentos SA (MRFG3.SA).
An official with the U.S. Trade Representative’s office estimated that the United States has lost about $1 billion in broiler product sales since the duties were imposed by China in 2010.
Since 2010 the Chinese Ministry of Commerce has had anti-dumping duties on Tyson, Keystone and Pilgrim’s Pride ranging from 43.1 percent to 80.5 percent, and a “weighted average” duty of 64.5 percent on imports from 32 additional U.S. companies.
“China’s prohibitive duties on broiler products were followed by a steep decline in exports to China - and now we look forward to seeing China’s market for broiler products restored,” U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said at a press conference.
The United States had been the largest exporter of broiler products to China, but the duties cut its exports by some 80 percent. U.S. chicken exports to China in 2012 were 95,000 tonnes valued at $113.5 million.
China has 60 days to appeal. We’re going to press China to re-open the market,” a USTR official said in a technical briefing on the case.
China and the United States have had a series of trade spats at the Geneva-based WTO.
Beijing first said it might impose the chicken duties in September 2009, just weeks after U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision to slap an emergency 35 percent tariff on Chinese-made tires to stop a market-disrupting surge.
China challenged the tire tariff at the WTO, and lost. Within a week of the United States saying it wanted to litigate the broiler dispute, China slapped anti-dumping duties on more than $3 billion worth of U.S. cars. Those duties are now the subject of a separate WTO complaint by the United States.
U.S. Trade Representative Michel Froman said he hoped the latest win would “discourage further violations” of the WTO rule book.
“This decision sends a clear message that the Obama Administration can fight and win for American farmers, businesses, and workers in the global trading system,” Froman said.
China had justified its duties on chickens by saying U.S. imports were unfairly subsidized and dumped on the Chinese market, causing material injury to China’s domestic industry.
But the United States challenged the “opaqueness” of how China conducted its anti-dumping case, including the calculations it used to conclude whether or not U.S. chicken was being sold at a fair price in China.
The trade group’s panel found that China’s basis for finding dumping was “flatly inconsistent with WTO rules,” the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council said in a statement.
“The WTO agrees with the U.S. argument that China had arbitrarily calculated costs, and from there allowed itself to impose anti-dumping duties,” the USTR official said.
China’s Ministry of Commerce did not immediately comment on the WTO ruling.It's episode 6 of the third season of Out For Delivery, the world's favorite delivery guy podcast on the Eldorado Studio Network. The holidays are in full swing and the boys are on the clock until the end. Sweet leaf!! This week, the crew talks about the progression of Chuck's cough and more outdoor vacuuming. Revealed: Col. Brian dresses up his dogs, Dr. Stu gets caught in a lie, computer guy hacks up an egg and everyone is delivering in the dark. The boys take a call from Sparky the Mailman about how to deal with scabs during Christmas.
Follow the show on Twitter @EldoradoPod, email the boys at [email protected], call/text the hotline at 570-591-1249, check us out on reddit as well. You can subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or your favorite podcast app, or visit the website at www.eldoradostudio.net for shows, stuff you can buy and other information. Thanks for your support! The show is getting bigger each week and we appreciate you all. Work safe and we'll see you next week.
©eldoradostudio.netSusanne Atanus, who is vying for the GOP nomination in the Ninth Congressional District of Illinois, has blamed natural disasters, dementia and autism on gay marriage.
Atanus made her remarks Monday during a meeting with the editorial board of the Daily Herald.
“God is angry,” Atanus said. “We are provoking him with abortions and same-sex marriage and civil unions. Same-sex activity is going to increase AIDS. If it's in our military, it will weaken our military. We need to respect God.”
Illinois GOP officials responded by asking Atanus to withdraw from the race.
“The offensive statements by Susanne Atanus have no place in the modern political debate, and she has no place on the ballot as a Republican,” Jack Dorgan, chairman of the Illinois Republican Party, said in a written statement issued Thursday. “Her candidacy is neither supported nor endorsed by the leaders of our party, and she should withdraw from the race immediately.”
“Atanus is not in any way affiliated with any of our efforts in the Chicago GOP,” Adam Robinson, chairman of the Chicago Republican Party, told the Herald. “Nor have we ever supported, endorsed, or assisted her in any way at any time.”
Atanus stood by her remarks on Thursday: “I am a Christian. I care a lot about the world and I care a lot about my obedience to serve God the right way. I can't turn my eye and look the other way when I know that abortions, gay rights and civil unions are making God very angry.”An Uber customer in Toronto, Canada, was charged more than $14,000 for a five-mile, 21-minute ride that was supposed to cost under $20, according to Slate. The company has stated that it has since issued a full refund to the passenger.
“There was an error here and it has been resolved,” an Uber spokesperson told Slate of the $18,518.50 Canadian dollar fare. “We have provided a full refund to this rider and apologized to him for this experience. We have safeguards in place to help prevent something like this from happening, and we are working to understand how this occurred.”
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A friend of the overcharged customer tweeted on Saturday about disputing the price.
“My friend was charged 18K for a 20 Min ride (!), and they are sticking to it. What in the world??? This is insane!” Emily Kennard wrote alongisde a screenshot of the receipt for the ride. “He disputed and they aren’t backing down.”
Write to Megan McCluskey at [email protected] by M. Jeeves
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“COMPARED with last year, applications are up 14%,” says Mark Stanek, the principal of Ethical Culture Fieldston, a private school in New York. All through the application season he and his board of governors had been on tenterhooks, waiting to see if financial turmoil would cut the number of parents prepared to pay $32,000-34,000 a year to educate a child. Requests for financial help from families already at Fieldston had been rising fast, and the school had scraped together $3m—on top of the $8m it spends on financial aid in a normal year—in the hope of tiding as many over as possible. Nothing is certain until pupils turn up in the autumn. Some parents could get cold feet and sacrifice their deposits. Yet so far the school is more popular than ever.
Across America the picture is patchier, but there is little sign of a recession-induced meltdown in private schooling. Catholic parochial schools and some in rural areas are finding the going harder—but this is merely the acceleration of existing trends. Private schools in big cities with rich residents, and those with famous names and a history of sending graduates to the Ivy League, seem to be doing rather well. “Some parents weighing up their options may be worried about what recession will do to public-school budgets,” says Myra McGovern of the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), which represents around 1,400 of the country's 30,000-odd private schools. “And some may think that if other people are struggling, that will mean their children are more likely to get in.”
In Britain the story is similar. “Requests for financial help do seem to be up,” says David Lyscom of the Independent Schools Council (ISC), which represents 1,280 private schools, including most of the long-established ones. “In the long run we may see some smaller schools merge in order to gain economies of scale. But pupil numbers are steady and head teachers are saying parental interest remains high.”
At first sight, private schools' seeming immunity to recession is odd. Fees have risen faster than earnings in both countries for many years and have doubled in real terms (ie, after adjusting for consumer-price inflation) in the past quarter-century. The average price of a year at an ISC secondary day school is more than £12,000 ($20,000). The parents of 12th-graders at an NAIS establishment can expect to pay something similar. Many of the professionals who used to be natural customers have been priced out.
So schools have become more reliant on parents who work in financial services, an industry which has taken a beating. The recession has made it harder for parents to raise cash from sources other than earnings. Falling house prices mean less equity to raid. Anyway, there is a mortgage drought. Low interest rates make it harder to fill the gap from investments, either parents' or grandparents'. At least stockmarkets have been rising in recent months.
But any notion that fees will decline in line with ability to pay is wishful thinking. Few private schools are intending even to freeze fees. Their precise plans are hard to divine, because in recent years antitrust regulators in both countries have made schools wary of publicising planned fee increases until all have set fees and told parents. (Signalling them sooner, competition authorities believe, could facilitate collusion.) But a straw poll suggests that many will raise fees this autumn by 2-4%.
That is because, despite some parents' pleas for financial help, schools are under little pressure to cut fees. In both America and Britain income inequality is high by rich-world standards, especially at the top end, so there are people who can pay for the most illustrious schools with little or no pain. Further down the income scale, parents with children already at school do all they can to keep them there, even if it hurts financially. And despite the incumbents' high and rising prices, schooling is an industry in which it is remarkably hard for new entrants to establish themselves. Reputation—in particular, a name for providing a way into leading universities—is what counts. By definition, a newcomer cannot offer that.
Past experience bears out the resilience of private schools in hard times. It has taken several years for previous recessions to affect demand. Eventually, some whose confidence has been bruised by recession decide not to buy in at all. Some, but not many. Britain's most recent recession, in 1991-92, dented total enrolments in ISC schools by only 2.4%. The trough did not come until 1996, by which time the recession was a distant memory, and numbers recovered soon after. The most famous and expensive institutions rode out the bad times best. The 250 confusingly named “public” schools in the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference saw rolls fall only in one year, and by a mere 0.5%.
No one knows how many children are privately educated worldwide: many private schools are invisible to officialdom; some are in slums. James Tooley, a professor of education at Newcastle University, has found many children at fee-charging schools in Africa, China and Latin America. The elite institutions of popular imagination are far from representative of private education more generally.
Yet in a few places such schools exert an influence out of all proportion to their share of pupils. In Britain only 7% of children are educated privately at any one time. Yet according to the Sutton Trust, an education charity, two-thirds of leading judges and barristers, half of well-known journalists, the chief executives of half the companies in the FTSE 100 index and a third of MPs attended private schools.
A private education is widely seen as the way to move up a class or three. When Jade Goody, a 27-year-old Briton who travelled from unpromising origins to stardom via reality television, found out earlier this year that her ovarian cancer was terminal, she sold the spectacle of her final days to the highest bidder, for her sons' sake. “If I earn enough money while I'm sick there will be enough for them to go to private school until they are 18,” she explained.
In America around 11% of children are privately educated, a figure that is greatly boosted by the country's strict separation of church and state. Although no school has the history of, say, the King's School, Canterbury, or Wells Cathedral School (two English public schools both well over 1,000 years old), institutions such as New York's Ivy Preparatory School League (of which Fieldston is a member) or Phillips Exeter in New Hampshire, which has an endowment of more than $1m per student, have similarly gilded reputations.
Illustration by M. Jeeves
But it is not only history or money that gives these schools their privileged place. In both America and Britain the gap in performance between state and private education is wide. (Canada has “public schools” along English lines, but its state schools do very well in international comparisons, making it harder for private ones to shine.) The cities where the rich live have particularly poor state schools—in some inner London boroughs, a quarter of children or more are privately educated. Above all, America and Britain are home to the world's most prestigious universities. The first university from another country in the Times Higher Education ranking comes in at number 16; in the Shanghai Jiaotong ranking, at number 19.
The main commodity that elite schools in the two countries are selling is an edge in university admissions—a commodity that matters as it does nowhere else. In America, private schools offer knowledge of the ins and outs of selective universities' admission methods, and carefully cultivated relationships with their admissions tutors. In England more than two-fifths of the students at Oxford and Cambridge were privately schooled; each year, the two universities admit more boys from Eton than from the country's entire pool of lads poor enough to get free school meals.
That the schools know this is their main purpose is clear from the prominence of the university destinations of alumni in prospectuses and on websites. Parents know it too. Last year, for the first time anyone could remember, Dalton, another member of the Ivy Preparatory School League, failed to send a single student to Harvard. It made headlines. “The school took its eye off what it's supposed to be about,” a parent told reporters.
When challenged by parents, head teachers can readily say what the ever-rising fees are spent on. Between two-thirds and three-quarters goes on staff pay, which has been rising faster than consumer prices. Increasing amounts go on financial aid for poorer pupils. And schools meet little resistance from customers because a private education is painful to abandon part way through. Children who are pulled out often end up at the state schools no one else wanted, because the others are full. As long as fees do not go up unbearably in any one year, parents, like frogs in slowly boiled water, stay rather than jump.
Nor can new competitors easily creep in and undercut incumbents. In big cities, where people want private education most, property is scarce and dear, and local officials are obstructive. “Planning departments put all sorts of obstacles in your way,” says Robert Whelan of Civitas, a think-tank that runs three rare low-cost “New Model Schools” in London. (Fees, at just over £5,000, are little more than half the average for private day schools in the capital.) “They seem to care more about their traffic plans than anything else.”
As for kitting out a school to compete at the luxury end of the market, the expense puts off all but a few. Claremont Preparatory School is a rarity: a new school in Manhattan. Housed in a former bank building, it has an indoor swimming pool and basketball court, a rooftop adventure playground overlooked by the stock exchange, a ballroom-sized auditorium on the former trading floor, and much more. After four years, it is in the black on running costs, but the upfront investment was huge. “It cost $28m just to open the doors,” says a spokeswoman for the school. “Michael Koffler [the owner] will make a profit, but no time soon.”
In 2001 MORI, a British pollster, asked parents with children at private schools why they had made their choice. Eight in ten said reputation had been very important. That is understandable, because the quality of education cannot be checked until after it is consumed. But it further entrenches incumbents—as does the need for schools to show parents a track record of admission to elite universities. “We will only recommend schools that have at least a decade of history behind them,” says Amanda Uhry, the owner of Manhattan Private School Advisors, a company that helps parents choose schools and get their children in.*
With such high barriers to entry, it is unsurprising that most purveyors of elite education are old, and many are charities. But far from charitable status keeping fees down, some think it is one reason they have soared. Anders Hultin, a founder and former chief executive of Kunskapsskolan, a for-profit company that runs 32 schools in Sweden and is trying to break into the English market, ascribes the success of his home country's “voucher” reforms in the 1990s to allowing such schools to be run for profit. The share of Swedish children educated privately but at the state's expense grew from negligible to around 12% in just 15 years. “Without the profit motive, private schools just become choosier about whom they admit, rather than expanding or opening new schools,” he says. “I sometimes think non-profit schools should be banned.”
Every now and then a company or charity promises to blow the schools market wide open by charging around the same as the state spends on each child, but to better effect. Such promises rarely come to much. Not only is the private competition well set, but the fact that state schooling is free at the point of use makes cheap-to-middling schools hard to sell. Parents might grumble at what the state provides, but unless it is worth almost nothing, most will balk at paying all over again out of taxed income. More efficient, they will think, to top-up with private tutoring. This is the norm in Japan, say, where state schools are generally good enough for parents not to turn their backs on, but university admissions are increasingly competitive.
When cheap private schools do succeed, it is often because they find parents who think state education is valueless: fans of Montessori or Steiner, or people who refuse to send their children to godless institutions. Such schools may even spend less than the state, and some British Islamic schools much less. The New Model Schools squat in church halls and the like while seeking permanent homes, yet have long waiting lists. Parents are mostly of modest means, but desperate. “They care passionately about education and are not happy with the poorly performing state schools that would be their only alternative,” says Mr Whelan.
Even for those with higher incomes, the existence of a free competitor reduces demand. Last year MTM Consulting, a British education-research company, asked rich families that did not use private schools: why not? Many said they could not afford it, or it was not worth it. Many choose instead to buy a house near a nice state school. The cost can be recouped by selling once the children are grown.
Illustration by M. Jeeves
If a school were to attract these people by cutting frills and squeezing fees it might not please the customers it already has. In MORI's poll, price came low among parents' reasons for choosing a school. Small classes, individual attention and fancy facilities—all unavoidably expensive—were at the top. For some, elite education is a “Veblen good”, named after the economist who noticed that a high price was part of the value of luxury goods. “If things don't turn out the way parents hope, they want to know they have done everything possible for their child,” says the headmaster of one venerable English day institution, when asked what exactly his school offers that is worth £16,000 a year.
Indeed, for the most prestigious schools at least, the puzzle is not why they are so expensive, but why they are so cheap. The existence of companies like Manhattan Private School Advisors—which charges parents $18,500, non-refundable, to help them apply for school places—suggests that some schools' fees are well below the market-clearing rate. Other signs are colossal waiting lists, onerous application procedures and the expectation that children are already at a high standard. Though the last is billed as ensuring that only pupils who can benefit are admitted, it can also be read as a requirement that customers do much of the schools' job in advance.
So why aren't fees even higher? Sheer embarrassment may be one reason. Non-profit (or charitable) status is hard to defend with a straight face if fees are outrageously out of line. A more likely explanation, though, is that schools' quality would decline if they simply sold places to the highest bidders. Part of what they offer is the chance to learn with clever classmates, and if fees were too high the pool of brainy potential pupils would become too shallow. Schools with stellar reputations have some room before their fees pass the point at which too few clever children apply.
The recession will no doubt cause some pain to some private schools: the less prestigious, the badly managed and those that have relied on high returns from big endowments. If bonuses never return, or income inequality falls markedly for some other reason, even the elite could find the going harder. Pricing by ability to pay, already normal at American universities, may become more common, and could be given a shove by schools with a lot of parents struggling to find the fees. A dramatic change to the free competition would also have a big effect. The one part of the United Kingdom where private education is almost unknown is Northern Ireland, which kept academically selective state grammar schools when a Labour government abolished them almost everywhere else (although they are now under threat).
In truth, the future of elite schools in both countries depends less on the government, or even the global economy, than on the elite universities that are the main reason that they have flourished. That America's have travelled much further down the road to price differentiation than Britain's can be seen as a reflection of differences in university admissions.
Admissions officers at selective American universities put enormous effort into creating “balanced” classes—by which they primarily mean a mix of races and parental incomes. So in the game of selling past pupils' university offers to prospective parents, prestigious schools can attract full-price customers by offering a scattering of scholarships to the poor and non-white, non-Asian children whom universities are likely to favour.
In Britain, by contrast, attempts to offer scholarships to poor children tend to be characterised as “robbing” state schools of their brightest students. And the discussion of diversity in university admissions centres neither on race nor on riches, but on where students went to school. That means any direct attempt to increase diversity in universities poses a direct threat to private schools' main selling point.
To see how serious that threat could be, consider Laura Spence. In 2000 Ms Spence, a clever state-school pupil, was rejected by Magdalen College, Oxford, where she had applied to study medicine. Never mind that the college had 22 applicants for five places, or that it took other state-school pupils: Gordon Brown, now prime minister, then chancellor of the exchequer, called her rejection an “absolute scandal”. It kicked off years of political sabre-rattling.
Before the Spence affair, the number of 17-year-olds in private schools—ie, pupils starting A-levels, the exams used for university entrance—was 89% of the number of 16-year-olds. Since 2002 that ratio has fallen to 85%, as some parents shied away from displaying their child's private education to universities. A small change? Maybe. But a few intemperate words from one powerful politician had almost twice the impact of Britain's last big recession on demand for private schooling.| image_size =
| alt =
| caption = O'Keefe in at the 2016 [[Conservative Political Action Conference]].
| birth_name = James Edward O'Keefe III
| birth_date = {{Birth date and age|1984|06|28}}
}}
'''James Edward O'Keefe III''' (born June 28, 1984) is an American conservative<ref>{{cite news|last1=Weigel|first1=David|title=Two local Democratic operatives lose jobs after video sting on voter fraud|url=http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-video-sting-democratic-operatives-james-okeefe-20161019-story.html|accessdate=October 19, 2016|work=chicagotribune.com|date=October 19, 2016}}</ref><ref>{{cite news|last1=Cassidy|first1=John|title=Debate Preview: Trump Looks Set to Rant to the Bitter End|url=http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/debate-preview-trump-looks-set-to-rant-to-the-bitter-end|accessdate=October 19, 2016|work=The New Yorker|date=October 19, 2016}}</ref> political [[activism|activist]]. He has produced secretly recorded undercover audio and video encounters, some selectively edited to imply its subjects said things they did not, with figures and workers in academic, governmental and social service organizations, purportedly showing abusive or alleged illegal behavior by representatives of those organizations. He gained national attention for his video recordings of workers at [[Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now|
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3 weeks of familiarisation training on a rugby-specific passing skill (total of 12 sessions). Changes in performance and variability were calculated over these sessions. Familiarisation was undertaken at 1130 h each time, and required 2 previous nights of greater than 7 h sleep to be performed (i.e. clearly non-sleep deprived). Following familiarisation the players were asked to keep a sleep log to record the number of hours slept per night. This was reported at 0900 h on Monday to Friday.
On days of testing the subjects consumed the same breakfast which consisted of a bowl of cereal with fruit, yoghurt and milk in a portion of voluntary choice and two poached eggs on one piece of buttered toast consumed between 0700 h and 0800 h. Water was available ad libitum. On the night previous to testing food was not strictly controlled but all subjects reported consuming a dinner of at least red meat and 3 vegetables and a latter evening protein milkshake.
Ten professional rugby backs (mean ± SD, age; 20 ± 0.5 years) that were in good health and injury-free volunteered for this trial. Subject bodyweights were 90 ± 4 kg and heights 1.81 ± 0.02 m (mean ± SD). Bodyweights showed no significant changes over the course of this trial. A within-treatment design was used with each subject acting as their own control to improve reliability and the sensitivity of measurements. Subjects all reported a low and infrequent history of both previous caffeine use (in any form) and each had used creatine previously, usually in a classic loading protocol. The athletes were all very low and infrequent social consumers of alcohol. A university ethics committee approved the study procedures and each subject signed an informed consent form before participation.
A significant main treatment effect [F(4, 90) = 4.855, p = 0.001] was identified for salivary testosterone (Figure ), trending towards higher values after the 100 mg creatine dose (p = 0.067) than the placebo condition. There were no significant effects of sleep state [F(1, 90) = 1.602, p = 0.209], nor any interactions [F(4, 90) = 1.014, p = 0.405], on salivary testosterone. For salivary cortisol (Figure ), significant results were noted for the main effects of treatment [F(4, 90) = 8.415, p < 0.001] and sleep state [F(1, 90) = 31.31, p < 0.001], but there were no interactions [F(4, 90) = 0.691, p = 0.6]. Cortisol was significantly higher with the 5 mg caffeine dose (p = 0.001) than the placebo treatment.
On the non-dominant passing side (Figure ), significant main effects were identified for the treatment conditions [F(4, 90) = 14.871, p < 0.001], sleep state [F(1, 90) = 18.228, p < 0.001], and their interactions [F(4, 90) = 6.026, p < 0.001]. As with the dominant passing side, all of the caffeine and creatine doses produce a significant enhancement in skill performance from the placebo (p < 0.001) and, in the placebo condition, greater performance accuracy was noted in the non-sleep deprived (vs. sleep deprived) trial (p < 0.001).
Repeated analyses revealed significant main effects for treatment condition [F(4, 90) = 19.303, p < 0.001], sleep state [F(1, 90) = 19.472, p < 0.001] and their interactions [F(4, 90) = 7.978, p < 0.001] on the dominant passing side (Figure ). All of the caffeine and creatine doses produce a significant enhancement in skill performance when compared to placebo administration (p < 0.001). In the placebo condition, passing skill performance was found to be superior in the non-sleep deprived than the sleep deprived trial (p < 0.001).
Placebo administration on non-sleep deprived days did not produce a significantly different performance result to that seen in the last familiarisation trial [F(1, 36) = 0.00, p = 1.0], but a significant main effect was identified for passing side skill execution, this being consistently higher on the dominant side than the non-dominant side [F(1, 36) = 22.737, p < 0.001]. No significant interactions were identified for these variables [F(1, 36) = 0.00, p = 1.0].
A significant main effect for skill performance was identified over time [F(5, 108) = 38.44, p < 0.001]. Skill execution on both sides improved significantly (p < 0.001) across the first 5 sessions (Table ) and then was unchanged between session 5 and 12. Variability within an individual on non-sleep deprived days was less than 5% and, between individuals in the group, was less than 15% and no significant differences were seen. A significant main effect was also identified for passing side [F(1, 108) = 53.85, p < 0.001] with dominant side skill execution found to be superior to the non-dominant side across all trials (p = 0.013). No interactions between passing side and time were found [F(5, 108) = 1.899, p = 0.1].
Discussion
Acute sleep deprivation is a common occurrence in the general population [23] including elite athletes. Such deprivation has been shown to affect some, but not all, physical and skill executions [15,20-22]. However, quantifying an effect in a team sport can be difficult. The repeated passing skill test we described herein is simple to perform, has sport-specific relevance and appears to be highly reliable across repeat testing. It is not however a one off, high-level performance task, rather a repeat of 20 fairly simple tasks, alternating passing sides. While we don't claim it to be in any way, yet, a valid performance measure it did reveal some interesting differences across acute sleep deprivation and across caffeine and creatine treatments.
In line with observations in other skill and psychomotor testing acute sleep deprivation reduced the accuracy over repeated trials. There was a general trend to a drop-off in accuracy latter in the repeats (second 10 of the 20 repeats). Whether this is a greater susceptibility to mental fatigue or not remains an interesting question, as does whether single skill repeats separated by more recovery time or by a similar physical activity with no real skill requirement would show a deficit in performance or not. In non-sport related psychomotor trials there is little evidence that a single episode of sleep deprivation produces significant deficit in a single task [15]; however across repeat tasks it is perceived that much greater effort is needed to maintain concentration [24].
Acute sleep deprivation has little effect on weightlifting performance [20], but can influence mood negatively [24] which may be a driving feature in mental performance changes. Caffeine, for example, has been shown to improve both mood and mental function following sleep deprivation [25]. It is not known how much mood and other cognitive function, particularly motivation on repeat skill tasks, interact. At the doses and administration time of caffeine use in this study we saw no evidence of an effect in non-sleep deprived subjects; however, there was a clear amelioration of skill performance deficit from the sleep-deprived trials with placebo administration. The psychostimulant effects of caffeine appear to be related to the pre and post synaptic brakes that adenosine imposes on dopaminergic neurotransmission by acting on different adenosine receptor heteromers [26], although numerous mechanisms are likely to be involved.
We did not see a dose related effect with caffeine supplementation, with 1 mg/kg and 5 mg/kg producing similar effects, nor did we see high individual variance (i.e. responders and non-responders). The absorption of caffeine in plasma following consumption has been estimated at between 30 and 90 min with half life of several hours [16], so the time between consumption and testing (90 min) in this study may have been too long to see all effects of differing caffeine dose, or any effect on non-sleep deprived performance. Nonetheless, at 90 min there was still clear evidence of a reduction in the effect of sleep deprivation on the skill measured and no evidence this was different between the 1 and 5 mg/kg dose.
Subjectively, a number of the subjects reported feeling slightly nauseous and anxious following the 5, but not 1, mg/kg administration of caffeine suggesting in other ways there were dose differences. Effective doses of caffeine (and their dose response nature) remain contentious in literature [1,5,6,27] possibly reflecting larger inter-subject variability in responses and different sensitivities of various physical and behavioural expressions. The subjects in this study were not regular caffeine users so arguably may have been more sensitive to lower doses than would be seen in more regular consumers. Certainly in the study herein 1 mg/kg was as effective as 5 mg/kg and from a practical perspective runs less risk of undesirable dose related side effects.
Chronic creatine supplementation has been shown to address certain aspects of sleep deprivation linked and other pathophysiology linked cognitive deficits [8,9,11,13,14,19], although very low dose chronic supplementation does not appear to improve function in non-sleep deprived healthy subjects [28]. Sleep deprivation is associated with a reduction in brain stores of phosphocreatine [10] and certainly in some disease states depletion of high energy phosphate stores has been measured, associated with cognitive deficit, and alleviated to some extent by creatine supplementation [13,14,29]. Interestingly, if there is an energy deficit associated with sleep deprivation then it seems logical to contend that repeat trials would be more susceptible than one off tasks. Our results and indeed other work on sleep deprivation do fit this pattern. If such depletion occurs and is acute, it also stands to reason that acute supplementation (as opposed to longer protocols) would address any associated deficit (given that brain uptake is not a time limiting factor). Little, if any, attention has been given to acute dosing with creatine, mainly because it is assumed that its effects come from a gradual build up of stores over time. We demonstrate here that an acute dose of creatine can ameliorate sleep deprived deficits in repeat skill performance trials. Again this possibly reflects the repeat nature of the trials and may not be observable in an acute one off mental skill performance.
Further in contrast to caffeine administration, the creatine dose of 100 mg/kg appeared to elicit a trend towards greater effect in skill performance than 50 mg/kg dosing, thereby suggesting potentially a dose dependent response. As in the case of caffeine we observed no individual variability suggestive of responders and non-responders or differential dose susceptibility, and no adverse effects were reported to us by the subjects. Clearly at the level of muscle function there does appear to be a division into responders and non-responders to longer term supplementation with different creatine protocols [4]. It is possible that this would be similar with longer term supplementation aimed at skill improvement, or alternatively brain-related creatine stores may operate slightly differently to muscle.
Acute sleep deprivation has been demonstrated in some studies to have small disruptive effects on basal hormonal concentrations [30,31]. Although salivary cortisol appeared to be elevated with sleep deprivation, this result did not reach statistical significance. Interestingly the higher dose of caffeine was associated with significant elevation in pre-trial cortisol, but not testosterone. High doses of caffeine have previously been demonstrated to acutely increase cortisol and, to a lesser extent, testosterone [20,32]. Whether such elevations have any significance in outcome is unknown. Cortisol is associated with arousal but also with anxiety [33]. Unfortunately we did not concurrently measure salivary alpha amylase in this study, which may also be a useful marker with respect to system arousal [34]. Testosterone was unaffected by sleep deprivation and by all treatments except the high dose of creatine, where there was a trend towards higher concentrations. We do not have useful speculation as to why this increase was seen, although it was across all subjects. Still, the increase was relatively small in magnitude and we doubt at this stage that it has any real physical or behavioural consequence. As we used saliva measures we cannot rule out some local oral cavity artefact effect of creatine. Free testosterone levels have, however, been linked to intra-individual variance in short timeframe muscular power [35], and long-term creatine supplementation has been reported as influencing testosterone metabolite pathways [36], so the observation is perhaps worthy of some follow-up.
Little has been published on acute creatine use as it has primarily been regarded as a longer term supplement to muscular function gain. In terms of brain and behavioural function it would appear it have some acute effects of value. It is also possible that the observed effects of caffeine and creatine reported in this and other studies are potentially summative and thus, would seem a logical progression for research.A Royal Navy patrol ship is heading to her affiliate region for a five-day stay.
HMS Tyne, a Portsmouth-based 80-metre River Class Patrol Ship, will sail into North Shields today (Wednesday) at 5pm.
My ship’s company and I are delighted to be sailing HMS Tyne into our affiliated town and to be playing a key part in the Mouth of The Tyne Festival Lieutenant Commander Charles Barrow
Berthing at Western Quay, the offshore patrol vessel is visiting in support of the 11th annual Mouth of the Tyne Festival.
This year’s Festival features a full programme of live music, free street entertainment, dance and uniquely, an opportunity to look around one of the Royal Navy’s patrol ships, HMS Tyne.
The Festival concerts which occur on all three days of the weekend – Friday, Saturday and Sunday – and are expected to draw a large number of visitors, including members of the ship’s company, to see headline acts such as The Specials, Paul Heaton & Jacqui Abbot, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, The James Taylor Quartet and The Christians.
The ship’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Charles Barrow will host a number of invited guests on board during the visit. The ship will also host tours for Cadets from local Sea Cadet Units and pupils from Christ Church School.
The highlight of HMS Tyne’s visit is on Saturday, July 11, when the ship opens her gangway to visitors from 10am until 4pm with last entry at 3pm.
Lieutenant Commander Barrow said: “My ship’s company and I are delighted to be sailing HMS Tyne into our affiliated town and to be playing a key part in the Mouth of The Tyne Festival.
“We are looking forward to welcoming visitors on board on Saturday and to giving them a unique insight into life in the Royal Navy, as well as the varied range of career opportunities that are available.”
A small number of the ship’s company will accompany Lieutenant Commander Barrow to Tynemouth Priory Castle on Saturday, July 11, to meet The Chairman of North Tyneside Councillor Gary Bell and other guests attending Saturday evening’s ‘The Specials’ concert.
Members of HMS Tyne’s ship’s company have also been invited to enjoy a summer picnic and a Music Concert hosted by the Mayor of North Tyneside Councillor Norma Redfearn on Sunday, July 12.
HMS Tyne sails on Monday, July 13, at approximately 10am.While you may not know the name "Melvyn Kaufman," if you've walked or worked around Midtown or downtown, you probably know some of the buildings he developed—because many make sure they give something back to the public. For instance, at 777 Third Avenue, there's the Big Red Swing by Theodore Ceraldi, which is a big red swing for people to sit on. And on 77 Water Street's roof, there's the model of the World War I biplane that sits on a runway to amuse others. These and many others were the brainchild of Kaufman, who died on March 18 at age 87.
The architecture critic Paul Goldberger once called Kaufman "the man who has made a virtual mission out of making the New York skyscraper entertaining" and NY Times has an obituary that is riveting to anyone interested in commercial architecture as well as the place that public space occupies in NYC:
Mr. Kaufman had a lifelong fascination with office buildings as public spaces with which tenants and passers-by could engage. If one was going to erect a leviathan, his design philosophy seemed to go, at least make it leviathan with levity. He deplored lobbies, the sine qua non of office buildings since the dawn of recorded history. “Marble and travertine mausoleums are bad for the living and terrific for the dead,” Mr. Kaufman told The Times in 1971. Many of his buildings did away with traditional lobbies, employing set-back entrances from which wide public spaces extended to the street. These spaces were no mere plazas, but fields on which some of the buildings’ most conspicuous design elements were played out.
Next to 767 Third Avenue, there's a huge, three-story-high chessboard: "the board is visible to tenants in the rear, as well as to passers-by on East 48th Street. On it, games — often re-creations of historic matches — are played out in slow sequence, with pieces moved weekly by a worker in a cherry picker." As for 77 Water's biplane, "He put it there, parked on a 'runway' that lights up at night, he said, to spare tenants in surrounding office towers from having to look down upon water tanks and air-conditioning systems."
Kaufman was also behind 17 State Street, a curving, reflective glass building near the Staten Island Ferry terminal (Goldberg wrote of it, "The building is a kind of high-tech version of a lighthouse, standing almost at the edge of the sea"). And the City Review says his "wildest midtown building is 747 Third Avenue, which has undulating sidewalks, shown below, a plastic phone booth, a wooden platform entrance, a statue of a naked woman between the revolving doors and exposed ductwork in the lobby." (The undulating sidewalks are scheduled to be replaced with a flat, normal plaza.) The City Review also noted, "Melvyn Kaufman, the feisty, irascible, and delightful philosopher-developer of the two brothers, believed vehemently that buildings should do something for the public."After what felt like an eternity, the Bundesliga gods have smiled upon us and have given us a Friday match-up between defending champions Bayern München and 10th place Hamburger SV. Last season, this did not go super well for HSV, with the Bavarians putting up an 8 spot on them.
Bayern, of course have been tearing up the league with a masterful defense featuring the likes of the ever versatile David Alaba and Jerome Boateng (both capable of shifting to outside back, or dropping in as the lone CB) protecting Manuel Neuer only conceding 8 times. I won’t bore you with praise for the excellent-passing Bayern midfield marshalled by Xabi Alonso, Thiago and Arturo Vidal, or the lethal duo of Lewandowski and Müller who have thrived on the masterful wing play of Douglas Costa and Kingsley Coman.
On to HSV. Hamburg were perfectly average, ranking close to 10th in most metrics, with their tendency to tackle and foul the lone standout measure (3rd and 2nd in the league). The only other note of significance is that they have already had 5 games where they allowed 20+ deep completions (per Statsbomb) – the 4th worst mark behind the mess that Hannover and Hoffenheim’s defenses have been.
They are also challenged offensively, due to poor possession (49% overall), especially in the opponent half, registering just 8 passes 4 shots in 17 games in what soccer statistician Michael Caley has dubbed the “danger zone – which is zones 1-3, the close and central areas of the box”
This is never more evident than in the case of their leading scorer –Pierre-Michel Lasogga, whose rugged physical play has terrorized defenders (just ask Wolfsburg’s Dante, or Havard Nortveidt of Gladbach) and has resulted in scoring 6 goals – (2 penalties, 1 excellent header from a corner, 1 tap-in, a cheeky finish against Stuttgart and the aforementioned goal from pressing the Gladbach defense) while creating at least 3 others.
Their standout player in midfield has been the ever underappreciated former Schalke and Tottenham player “Lucky” Lewis Holtby (ranked 32 among all players according to Whoscored.com). The former German international looks to have finally found a home in Hamburg, orchestrating HSV’s midfield, evidenced by his 25 key passes that put him ahead of Yunus Malli, Max Arnold or Marco Reus. So, while Holtby has been outstanding, it is never a great sign for any team, when their attacking midfielders Nicolai Müller, free kick taker and deflection master Michael Gregoritsch and Ivo Ilicevic have (as exemplified wonderfuly in this video) combined for 8 goals and 5 assists in 17 games- otherwise known as a “decent half” for the Lewa-Thomas Müller duo.
The defense, which has conceded 13 goals in the last two meetings against Bayern, after giving up 5 in the August season opener, has been decent since, allowing 18 goals in 16 matches. The veteran center-back duo of Johann Djorou (ranked 12th among defenders on Squawka) and Emir Spahic who could not deal with Bayern’s pace in their first meeting have recovered, while left back Matthias Ostrzolek, the patient zero of the Douglas Costa epidemic that overtook the Bundesliga and European soccer is still in recovery, ranking just 67th out of 80 qualified defenders. Rene Adler’s 13th ranking is perfectly in line with HSV’s Hinrunde of mediocrity.
The Lewandowski show saves Bayern
GAME RECAP
57,000 came to Volksparkstadion in the hopes of avoiding an embarrassing beatdown a la last season and HSV looked ready to please those fans with a favorable result.
Hamburg were without veteran security guard beater defender Emir Spahic, who was nursing an abdominal injury, Cleber was his replacement. HSV – started 4-2-3-1, with Hunt, Ilicevic and Nico Müller behind Lasogga.
There were two surprises for Bayern’s XI: the inclusion of Holger Badstuber, who has missed almost 200 games in 5 years, must have been a welcome sight for FCB fans, while Kingsley Coman got the nod ahead of Arjen Robben, with Pep Guardiola preferring Thiago to Arturo Vidal. FCB -went with a 4-1-4-1, that often changed to a 3-4-1-2, or a 3-5-2, with Philipp Lahm playing a CDM role behind Alonso and Boateng pushing out to the right, with Badstuber in the middle and Alaba on the left.
11 minutes in, Aaron Hunt had the first notable moment, a long-range effort that forced a comfortable save from Neuer.
Bayern had 69% of the ball after the first 15 minutes, but it was Douglas Costa who left Matthias Ostrzolek in the dust with his first touch on 19 minutes, the left back was only able to bring him down for a yellow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NfmD5AJs1o
21minutes- Diekmeier, he of 147 games without scoring, almost opened his account after a brilliant run that culminated in a shot just off the mark.
32 minutes -Gojko Kacar tackled Kingsley Coman approximately 10 minutes after the ball was gone for a super cynical yellow.
36 minutes – after a brilliant long ball by Xabi Alonso, keeper Rene Adler brought down Thomas Müller after he had fired his shot wide and Robert Lewandowski made no mistake from the penalty spot. The Polish striker had passed Ailton on the all time Bundesliga scoring list with his 107th goal.
At halftime
4 yellows for HSV – while Bayern had 77% possession and 89% accuracy in a heated first half, that saw mild-mannered Philip Lahm pick up his 2nd yellow card of the season for a nasty foul.
Alonso taking a corner (thanks to Attila Bógyi of http://wegotgame.blog.hu/ for the picture)
In the second half it was Coman, the liveliest of the Bavarians,that continued tormenting HSV as he had switched sides with Costa, as Hamburg could not deal with his speed.
53 minutes in, as if Lasogga and Hamburg just wanted to prove me right, scoring from a free kick, which later is credited to Aaron Hunt Xabi Alonso as an own goal for 1-1. Not sure, what Xabi Alonso was doing, other than holding on to the HSV forward’s jersey for dear life. Hamburg were growing stronger and Boateng’s had to be substituted for Javi Martinez in what looked like a potentially serious muscle injury. Aaron Hunt and Nico Müller were desperate to prove my pre-match prediction wrong, as both of them had 2 key passes.
In the 61st minute Lewandowski just stayed onside, as he redirected a Thomas Müller shot to make it 2-1. Bayern were looking to finish off the game, as David Alaba cracked the post on 66 minutes, beating Adler with a dipping shot. Vidal came on for Müller in the 68th minute, but it was Douglas Costa that was not able to finish, after the umpteenth run by Coman on the right side, as the Brazilian’s effort ended up going back to the Frenchman. Hamburg goalkeeper Rene Adler made a great reflex save with his head (!) on Thiago’s shot, after Vidal’s first contribution to the match.Arjen Robben also got into the action replacing Douglas Costa, who aside from that magical touch looked rusty and hesitant with the ball.
HSV brought on Latvian striker Artjoms Rudnevs for Lasogga for the last 15 minutes.Rudnevs’ pace was causing some trouble for the Bayern backline, and HSV got a big chance with a 83rd minute free kick that Gregoritsch was unable to take advantage of, as the Austrian blasted the ball into the wall twice.
In the end, Bayern had a few nervous moments, but Gregoritsch’s 92nd minute free kick sailed past Neuer and the champions, thanks to the magic of Lewandowski were able to hang on for a 2-1 victory.
Despite outshooting HSV 20 to 8 and winning the possession battle 66 to 34, Coman and Lewandowski were the only two outstanding players for the Bavarians, as HSV were somewhat unlucky not to hang on to one of the points. Bayern fans can leave this game with a few mixed feelings, as Badstuber’s strong comeback (winning 9 aerial challenges) was mitigated by what looked like a serious injury to Boateng. Lewandowski is now on 17 goals, just 1 behind Aubameyang, but Thomas Müller has had better games. Kingsley Coman was a constant menace on the wings, but Douglas Costa appeared indecisive. Xabi Alonso, who had an excellent game with 96 touches and 4 key passes (including the great long ball to Thomas Müller for the 1st goal) was at fault for the Hamburg equalizer. In the end, it’s these kind of games that prove Bayern are a class above the league, as I’m not sure a lesser side would have been able to get all 3 points.
AdvertisementsInternet users should consider disabling Java in their browsers because of an exploit that can allow remote attackers to execute code on a vulnerable system, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) recommended late Thursday.
Security researchers reported this week that cybercriminals were using a zero-day vulnerability in Java to attack computer systems. Attackers were using the vulnerability to stealthily install malware on the computers of users who visit compromised websites, researchers said.
The US-CERT security warning said the agency is "unaware of a practical solution to this problem."
Instead, US-CERT recommended Internet users disable Java in browsers. US-CERT is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The problem can allow an untrusted Java applet to escalate its privileges, without requiring code signing. Oracle Java 7 update 10 and earlier are affected, US-CERT said.
"This vulnerability is being attacked in the wild, and is reported to be incorporated into exploit kits," US-CERT added. "Exploit code for this vulnerability is also publicly available."
Two spokeswomen for Oracle, the company that distributes Java, weren't immediately available for comment.
Sorin Mustaca, a security expert for security vendor Avira wrote a blog post Friday on how to deactivate Java in browsers.In May 1918, with America embroiled in the First World War, Iowa Gov. William Lloyd Harding dealt a blow against Germany. His Babel Proclamation — that was its title; you cannot make this stuff up — decreed: “Conversation in public places, on trains and over the telephone should be in the English language.” The proscription included church services, funerals and pretty much everything else.
Iowa’s immigrant communities that spoke Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and French objected to this censorship of languages of America’s wartime allies. Harding, however, said speaking any foreign language was an “opportunity [for] the enemy to scatter propaganda.” Conversations on street corners and over telephone party lines — Iowa telephone operators did the metadata-gathering that today’s National Security Agency does — resulted in arrests. Harding was ridiculed but Germany lost the war, so there.
The war validated Randolph Bourne’s axiom that “war is the health of the state,” but it killed Bourne, who died in December 1918 from the influenza epidemic it unleashed. Today, as another war is enlarging government’s intrusiveness and energizing debate about intrusiveness, it is timely to remember that war is not the only, or even primary, cause of this.
Or, more precisely, actual war is not the only cause. Ersatz “wars” — domestic wars on various real or imagined vices — also wound the defense of limited government. So argue David B. Kopel and Trevor Burrus in their essay “Sex, Drugs, Alcohol, Gambling and Guns: The Synergistic Constitutional Effects.”
Kopel and Burrus, both associated with Washington’s libertarian Cato Institute, cite the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act, which taxed dealings involving opium or coca leaves, as an early example of morals legislation passed using Congress’s enumerated taxing power as a pretext. In 1919, the Supreme Court held that the law “may not be declared unconstitutional because its effect may be to accomplish another purpose as well as the raising of revenue.”
Its “effect”? The effect of suppressing the drug business obviously was its purpose. Nevertheless, the court held that even if “motives” other than raising revenue really explained Congress’s exercise of its enumerated power, the law still could not be invalidated “because of the supposed motives which induced it.”
“Supposed”? The court’s refusal to reach a reasonable conclusion about the pretext Congress used in this case for trespassing on territory reserved to the states enabled the federal government to begin slipping its constitutional leash. In 1922, Chief Justice William Howard Taft warned that Congress could seize control of “the great number of subjects” reserved to the states by the 10th Amendment by imposing a “so-called tax” on any behavior it disapproved of: “To give such magic to the word ‘tax’ would be to break down all constitutional limitation of the powers of Congress and completely wipe out the sovereignty of the states.”
So, a 1934 law imposed a $200 tax on the making and transfer of certain guns. Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone complacently said that any act of Congress “which, on its face, purports to be an exercise of the taxing power” should be treated as such, without judicial inquiring into any “hidden motives” Congress had. “Hidden”?
Congress responded to this “abdication of judicial scrutiny” (Kopel’s and Burrus’s correct characterization) with the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, another supposed tax law actually designed not to raise revenue but to legislate morality by changing behavior. The 1951 Revenue Act taxed “persons engaged in the business of accepting wagers” and required them “to register with the Collector of Internal Revenue.” The IRS was becoming the enforcer of laws to make Americans better behaved, as judged by their betters in the federal government.
There have been equally spurious uses of Congress’s enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce. In 1903, the court upheld, as a valid exercise of that power, a law suppressing lotteries by banning the interstate transportation of lottery tickets. Dissenting, Chief Justice Melville Fuller argued that the power to regulate persons and property in order to promote “the public health” and “good order” belongs to the states.
Seven years later, the Constitution’s commerce clause was the rationale for the Mann Act banning the transportation of females for the purpose of “prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” Including, it turned out, noncommercial, consensual sex involving no unhappy victim.
Today, Congress exercises police powers never granted by the Constitution. Conservatives who favor federal “wars” on drugs, gambling and other behaviors should understand the damage they have done to the constitutional underpinnings of limited government.
Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.The three Democratic presidential contenders engaged in heated exchanges on health care, gun control, former president Bill Clinton and other issues in Charleston, S.C. on Jan. 17. Here are the key moments from the two-hour debate in three minutes. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)
The three Democratic presidential contenders engaged in heated exchanges on health care, gun control, former president Bill Clinton and other issues in Charleston, S.C. on Jan. 17. Here are the key moments from the two-hour debate in three minutes. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton went on the attack repeatedly against Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) at Sunday’s Democratic presidential primary debate in South Carolina, hitting him on guns and health care and casting him as overly hostile to President Obama.
It was the clearest sign yet of how big a threat Clinton and her team see in Sanders, who is rising in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire. Sanders depicted Clinton as an ally of big banks and he vigorously defended his positions on guns -- which Clinton said was too conservative -- and health care -- which she argued was confusing and threatened Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
There were also clear style contrasts: From the outset, Clinton pitched herself as experienced and prepared to assume the presidency. Sanders described himself as the leader of a political revolution.
The third candidate on the stage in Charleston, S.C., former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, seemed like an afterthought in the debate. Lagging far behind in the polls, he struggled to insert himself into what functioned largely as a one-on-one showdown between the two leading candidates.
Clinton accused Sanders of harshly criticizing Obama as she aligned herself closely with the president.
At a debate in Charleston, S.C., Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley sparred over their respective records on gun control on Jan. 17. (NBC/YouTube)
Disparaging comments from Sanders “don’t just affect me; I can take that,” Clinton said, “but he’s criticized President Obama for taking donations from Wall Street and President Obama has led out country out of the great recession.” She praised Obama for signing the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform bill.
Sanders said he backed Obama in 2008 and 2012, but acknowledged, “we have some differences of opinion.”
Clinton appeared prepared to try to discourage Obama’s supporters from voting for Sanders by ticking off a long list of examples of how Sanders has distanced himself from Obama.
Clinton also forcefully criticized Sanders over his single-payer health-care proposal. She defended the Affordable Care Act and said it would be counterproductive to thrust the country into another contentious debate over health-care policy.
“We finally have a path to universal health-care. We have accomplished so much already,” said Clinton. She later added: “Let’s make it work.”
Sanders said it was “absolutely inaccurate” to describe his plan, the details of which were released hours ahead of the debate, as tearing up the current health-care law, which Sanders said he “helped write.”
[Sanders shares details of health-care plan that would raise income taxes]
The two-hour debate was sponsored by NBC News, YouTube, the Congressional Black Caucus Institute and the South Carolina Democratic Party. As the event began, Sanders and Clinton quickly traded blows over guns, continuing a heated back-and-forth that has dominated the campaign trail in recent weeks.
“I think Secretary Clinton knows that what she says is very disingenuous,” Sanders said in response to Clinton’s charges that he has not advocated for gun control laws forcefully enough.
Clinton said Sanders flipped his position on Saturday by opposing a law he once supported granting immunity to gun companies.
The three Democratic presidential candidates held their latest debate Sunday night amid a tightening and increasingly contentious race between Clinton and Sanders.
With the Feb. 1 caucuses in Iowa nearing, polls show that Clinton’s once-comfortable lead in that state has vanished and Sanders is running neck-and-neck with her. In New Hampshire, which votes second, Sanders appears to have a slight lead.
Under the new dynamic, Clinton headed into the debate facing heavy pressure to regain her footing, with some allies growing nervous about a repeat of 2008, when now-President Obama surged ahead of her. Sanders was also under pressure to offer more specifics on some of his policy proposals, as the self-described democratic socialist has come under heavier scrutiny.
Sunday evening, Sanders released new details about his proposed single-payer health-care plan, which he said will require across-the-board income tax hikes. The plan, which has come under criticism by Clinton, was expected to be a central focus in the debate.
The plan would cost about $1.38 trillion a year, according to the “Medicare for all” document he released. Sanders proposes to pay for his plan through a combination of premiums paid by employers and households, new income tax rates and
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visit of 30 people to their original villages in their homeland. Today around 60 Meskhetians from Azerbaijan study in Georgia. Each month all heads and representatives of the community of Meskhetian Turks in Azerbaijan have a monthly meeting to discuss the local problems and find solutions. The main support for publishing the monthly ‘Veten’ newspaper and community expenses comes from Turkey and rich Meskhetians who live abroad.
In Azerbaijan, Gulli still grieves.
“A homeland is a homeland, who would not want to return?”
Portraits of Meskhetian TurksPressure is rising on Apple, Google and other technology companies to allow law enforcement and intelligence agencies access to encrypted phones and other devices.
In the wake of the coordinated terrorist attacks on Paris, CIA Director John Brennan, Sen. Dianne Feinstein Dianne Emiel FeinsteinHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Ocasio-Cortez adviser says Sunrise confrontation with 'old-timer' Feinstein'sad' Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid MORE (D-Calif.) and other critics are amplifying their arguments against Silicon Valley.
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The rise of commercial encryption technology, they say, risks shielding terrorists from surveillance — raising the bar for law enforcement to thwart future attacks.
“We in many respects have gone blind as a result of the commercialization and the selling of devices that cannot be accessed either by the manufacturer or, more importantly, by us in law enforcement, even equipped with the search warrants and judicial authority,” New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton said Sunday on “Face the Nation.”
Some lawmakers have revived calls for congressionally mandated access to devices.
“In the Senate Armed Services, we’re going to have hearings on it and we’re going to have legislation,” Sen. John McCain John Sidney McCainGOP lobbyists worry Trump lags in K Street fundraising Mark Kelly kicks off Senate bid: ‘A mission to lift up hardworking Arizonans’ Gabbard hits back at Meghan McCain after fight over Assad MORE (R-Ariz.), who chairs the committee, told reporters on Tuesday, calling the status quo “unacceptable.”
The terrorists who more than 120 people in Paris last Friday were able to plan their strikes under the noses of French and Belgian authorities. Senior European counterterrorism officials, speaking anonymously, told The New York Times that they believed the attackers used some form of encrypted device to communicate.
Brennan called the attacks a “wake-up call,” while Feinstein, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who represents Silicon Valley, said in an interview Monday with MSNBC that it’s a “big problem” if tech firms “create a product that allows evil monsters to communicate in this way.”
Apple, Google and other corporations have stood firm against pressure to either decrypt data or install a back door for law enforcement.
Representatives for several companies declined to speak to The Hill for this story, reflecting the sensitivity of the issue.
But sources in the technology sector generally took a dim view on suggestions that the Paris attacks would cause tech companies to shift their positions.
They said that the companies have too much at stake to bend on allowing law enforcement access to their customers’ data and that many hope the debate will eventually cool.
“It’s all about PR,” said Darren Hayes, director of cybersecurity at Pace University.
Tech companies have taken a stronger stance on the issue since whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the U.S. government’s massive surveillance programs, in which tech companies under court order provided data to the National Security Agency.
To many tech companies, the revelations were an embarrassment that also endangered their bottom lines.
“I want to be absolutely clear that we have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services,” Apple CEO Tim Cook says in an open letter on the company’s site. “We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will.”
Tech companies have insisted that building in any kind of guaranteed access for the government would breach consumer privacy and build weaknesses into the technology that would allow criminals to hack into devices just as easily as law enforcement.
Apple, the world’s most valuable company, has also complained that routinely helping law enforcement to decrypt data would be an unduly onerous tax on its resources.
“This burden increases as the number of government requests increases,” it argued in a recent legal brief.
Law enforcement sources argue that Snowden’s revelations led terrorists and criminals to go dark and move to encrypted devices, intensifying the need for companies to cooperate with police.
“There’s no doubt that the disclosures overall created a situation in which we lost coverage of terrorists,” Matthew Olsen, who until last year served as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said at a Yahoo News conference the day before the Paris attacks.
“Specifically, we saw people that we were targeting with NSA surveillance … go to different service providers. We saw them go to uses of encryption. They’re reading the newspapers and seeing what we can do.”
The White House has sided with technology companies, saying last month it would not pursue legislation requiring firms to give law enforcement access to encrypted data.
FBI Director James Comey, along with some lawmakers, has shifted his tactics in recent months, appealing directly to Silicon Valley instead of asking Congress to mandate a solution.
“There shouldn’t be venom” between law enforcement and Silicon Valley, he said during a House Intelligence Committee hearing in September. “We should all care about the same thing.”
“Apple does not want to say they’re the chosen device of terrorists. But they also don’t want to say there’re wide-open platforms that they can get into. We can solve this,” Rep. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
But in September, House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff Adam Bennett SchiffTech takes heat as anti-vaxers go viral Demands grow for a public Mueller report Bharara: It would seem 'odd and unusual' if Mueller report isn't made public MORE (D-Calif.) said he had met with top officials from Facebook, Google and Twitter, who unanimously told him they were uninterested in developing such a solution.
Some believe that if the attacks on Paris don’t change the dynamic, nothing will.
“There can be pressure brought when there’s enough impetus, and if it’s not this, I don’t know what it would be,” said Morgan Wright, a cybersecurity consultant who has worked with tech companies including Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent.
Jay Kaplan, the CEO of security firm Synack, predicted Paris will shift the discussion.
“You’re absolutely going to see the conversation be restarted that had ended with the public outcry that privacy is more important [than security],” Kaplan said. “I think events like this cause an instant mentality shift.”Suha Arafat, wife of the late Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, appeared to accuse Hamas on Wednesday of perpetrating “genocide” in the Gaza Strip, and denounced the terror group for Islamizing the coastal enclave and holding its inhabitants “hostage.”
In an interview with the Italian La Republicca in honor of the tenth anniversary of her husband’s death, Suha Arafat called on Palestinians to resume negotiations with Israel and renounce violence. She also addressed the allegations that Arafat was poisoned and expressed the hope that the French authorities would get to the bottom of the matter, but insisted she could not cast blame on Israel or Palestinian suspects.
“Hamas has taken people hostage. When I see what is happening in Gaza … It’s a genocide. A generation that is growing up in violence, with no education, with no hope but emigration,” she said. (Ironically, Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas accused israel of committing genocide in Gaza, in an inflammatory address to the UN General Assembly in September.)
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Suha Arafat called for resumed peace talks with Israel, as “the armed struggle will not lead to anything.”
“I hope that Hamas will finally understand and work towards peace negotiations,” she added.
She also said she hoped Italy would follow in Sweden’s footsteps and recognize the state of Palestine, and maintained that the existence of the state of Israel need not be questioned.
“It’s easy to make war, difficult to stop. The armed struggle today will not lead to anything. We will only end up crushed. The forces are unequal. We have to continue negotiations, proving, if anything, that it is Israel that does not want peace,” she said.
While criticizing Hamas for its terror activity, Arafat cautiously defended her husband’s role in launching attacks against Israel, saying “history will tell whether Arafat was right to declare the intifada.”
She hailed her late husband for unifying the Palestinians, and for his negotiations with Israel. “Many say that my husband was an obstacle to peace, but we saw, after his death, what happened to peace.”
Suha also condemned Hamas for canceling the Gaza Strip’s 10-year commemoration of Arafat’s death, saying its leaders “had no right” to do so, and decried their stifling religious leadership. Hamas forced the cancellation earlier this week during a row with Fatah.
“Arafat turned Palestine into a secular country, people went to the beach in Gaza. He never imagined that it would become Islamic,” she added.
The widow of the Fatah leader refrained from blaming Israel for Arafat’s death. “Many wanted to get rid of him. I cannot blame anyone, neither Israel nor anyone in his close circle,” she said.
Suha Arafat filed legal action in July 2012 asking French authorities to look into claims that her husband was poisoned by polonium. The following month, French prosecutors opened a murder inquiry.
Last year, a report by Swiss scientists maintained that Arafat’s remains and burial soil contained elevated levels of polonium-210, a rare and lethal substance. The scientists concluded that the results “moderately support the proposition that the death was the consequence of poisoning with polonium-210.” But French scientists who had been looking into Arafat’s death concluded he died of a “generalized infection.” A Russian forensic institute also said that the Palestinian leader died of natural causes.
In the far-reaching interview on Wednesday, Suha Arafat said she would not return to the Gaza Strip or West Bank because she would feel like a guest there, and maintained that she had loved the Palestinian leader, but given the chance to do it over, may not have married him.
“I loved him and he loved me very much. But if I went back I’m not sure I’d do it [again],” she said, explaining that she was the source of many rumors and accusations.
Almost two years ago, Arafat had said she regretted her marriage to the PLO head. “We were married for 22 years and it felt like 50,” she said at the time. Arafat added that she had repeatedly tried to leave her husband but was denied her freedom.
“I tried to divorce Arafat more than 100 times and he didn’t let me,” she said.Seminal San Francisco punk band Flipper have announced that they’re reuniting for a series of shows this fall fronted by the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow, as KQED reports. The band last reunited in 2005, touring and releasing several albums, but a new back injury in late 2009 following a serious back-breaking car accident in 1994 made playing and touring regularly difficult for singer Bruce “Loose” Calderwood. A promoter in Italy reached out to the band about playing severals shows there in November, but Calderwood’s back issues prevented things from moving forward, until drummer Stephen DePace came up with an idea when he saw Yow join Chrome at a show early this month. “Then I saw David Yow with Chrome, and I was like, ‘Maybe I could ask him to do it?'” DePace says. “He was really into it; he said he was honored to be asked.” According to DePace, Flipper will tour Italy in November with Yow, and they might play some shows in San Francisco and Los Angeles with the same lineup around the same time. Read the band’s official statement about Yow replacing Calderwood below:
Bruce Loose is retired from Flipper! He has suffered from a broken back since 1994. It has gotten to the point now where Bruce finds it impossible to continue with performing and touring.
We want to thank Bruce for being part of what was a hell of a run from 1979 to now!
With all the ups and downs and craziness that is all part of the punk rock package we managed to make “music history” with this band. For that and all the fun we had, we are eternally grateful.
Bruce is moving on to do solo projects and Ted Falconi along with Steve DePace are going to carry on with long time 5th Flipper, Bruno DeSmartass on bass and we will be performing 3 shows in Italy with David Yow, formerly of Scratch Acid and the Jesus Lizard.Jefferson County sent more criminal defendants to death row between 2010 and 2015 than almost every other county in the nation.
That's according to a report released last week by Harvard Law's Fair Punishment Project. The report also states that all five of those sentenced to death in Jefferson County during that period were black.
Those numbers landed Alabama's most populous county on the short list of 16 outliers in the group's report "Too Broken to Fix."
"These outlier death penalty counties are defined by a pattern of bad defense lawyering, prosecutorial misconduct and overzealousness, and a legacy of racial bias that calls into question constitutionality of the death penalty," Rob Smith, one of the report's researchers, stated in a press release.
It's a report that Jefferson County's District Attorney Brandon Falls believes is flawed and doesn't address the underlying facts of the cases to explain why the defendants were sentenced to death.
"Educated minds can disagree about the effectiveness and appropriateness of the death penalty," Falls stated in an email to AL.com. "The role of the District Attorney's Office is to protect the citizens of Jefferson County by enforcing the law as set out by the Alabama Legislature, the Alabama appellate courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court, and to do so ethically and without bias toward any individual. This responsibility is and always will be the highest priority of my office."
The first part of the report was issued in August and included a look at eight counties, including Mobile County. The second half of the report with the other eight, including Jefferson County, was released last week.
Nationwide, the report states, juries in 2015 returned 49 death sentences, which is the fewest number since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. That came from 33 counties in 14 states, according to the report. Thirty one states still have the death penalty.
But 16 counties were "outliers," imposing five or more death sentences between 2010 and 2015, the report states. Among these "outliers", two were in Alabama (Jefferson and Mobile) and four in Florida.
Meanwhile Alabama's reputation as being an outlier state when it comes to the death penalty also grew last week.
Florida and Alabama were the only two states that permitted a split jury to recommend death, the report noted. But that changed Friday when the Florida Supreme Court ruled that non-unanimous jury death recommendations are unconstitutional.
That now leaves Alabama as the only state to allow a jury to recommend the death penalty for a defendant on a non-unanimous vote - at least 10 of 12 jurors have to vote for death.
Alabama also finds itself alone in allowing judges to override jury recommendations of life without parole and single-handedly increase the sentence to death. Florida's override law was declared unconstitutional early this year. Delaware had been the only other state to allow judicial override (although judges there didn't use it) but that state's supreme court in August also declared override unconstitutional.
Of the remaining 10 counties in the report's top 16, five are in Southern California, two in Texas, and one each in Louisiana, Nevada, and Arizona.
The report also found that:
Ten of the 16 counties had at least one person released from death row since 1976. -- The 10 counties account for more than 10 percent of all death row exonerations nationwide.
Jefferson had three men taken off death row in that period -
Jefferson County imposes about 1.47 death sentences per 100 homicides.
All five of the cases in Jefferson County between 2010 and 2015 had non-unanimous jury recommendations on what the defendants' sentences should be. Two had their jury recommendations for life without parole overridden to death by a judge. And a third - 33 percent - of the cases had defendants with intellectual disability, severe mental illness, or brain damage.
"The study does not address the facts of any of those cases, but those facts are worth noting for a better perspective of why they received that sentence," Falls said.
The report doesn't also consider the sheer volume of homicide cases in Jefferson County.
Falls notes that during that six-year period of 2010 to 2015 the report studied, there were 180 capital murder cases and 205 Murder cases charged in Jefferson County.
The report doesn't name the defendants in the five cases it reviewed for its report, but according to project officials the five death sentences imposed between 2010 and 2015 in Jefferson County are:
Jeffery Tyrone Riggs
Justin White
Anthony Lane
Dontae Callen
Marcus Benn
Study: Mobile, Jefferson counties 'outliers' with death penalty This week's report focuses on eight of those "outlier" counties, including Mobile. The second half of the report, which will provide details on Jefferson County, is to be released in September.
The report also reviewed 18 capital murder cases that were decided on direct appeal from Jefferson County - including both Birmingham and Bessemer divisions - from 2006 to 2015.
Of those 18 cases, 89 percent involved black defendants. And six of the cases involved defendants with serious mental illnesses, brain damage, or intellectual impairment, including the case of former death row inmate Esaw Jackson, who was resentenced to life without parole in 2012 for the 2006 shooting deaths of two. The judge found Jackson had an IQ score of 56 and could not be executed.
Fifty-six percent of the 400 cases it looked at in the 16 counties nationwide in the study involved defendants with significant mental impairments or other forms of mitigation, such as the defendant's young age.
"It has become clear that a significant proportion of individuals we are sending to death row suffer from serious mental impairments, or are so young in age, that they appear to be nearly indistinguishable from the categories of people whom the Supreme Court has said we shouldn't be executing due to their diminished culpability," said Carol S. Steiker, Professor of Law at Harvard.The federal government has not moved to defend Adani, instead calling on Labor in Queensland to vouch for the proponents of the project. The federal government has not moved to defend Adani, instead calling on Labor in Queensland to vouch for the proponents of the project. Company documents suggest Gautam Adani does not ultimately control many of the companies associated with his company's Australian coal developments. Instead his eldest brother, Vinod Shantilal Adani, holds pivotal positions. Vinod has been named in an Indian criminal investigation into the alleged siphoning of $1 billion from Indian shareholders in three Adani companies into offshore accounts. A web of companies that appear to be linked to Adani's coal developments in Australia extends from the low tax regime of Singapore to the tax haven of the Cayman Islands.
Complicating matters is conflicting paperwork, with Indian documents suggesting Adani Enterprises divested its stake in Abbot Point port for $235 million in 2013 to a private Singapore entity for which Vinod is the sole director. Indian billionaire Gautam Adani. Credit:Glenn Hunt But records held by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, and annual reports for Adani's registered Australian companies, continue to name a publicly listed Indian company, Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone, as the ultimate shareholder for the port. After the revelations, Greens senator for Queensland Larissa Waters is demanding the government investigate "whether all relevant disclosures have been made to Australian regulators". Senator Waters said on Monday: "The federal government needs to urgently investigate who controls the Abbot Point coal terminal and Carmichael coalmine."
"We're talking about the biggest coalmine and the biggest coal port that Australia has ever seen. It's reckless for the government to allow these enormous projects to proceed without even knowing who controls them." She said Environment Minister Greg Hunt would have to approve a change of proponent under national environment law. Mr Hunt said on Monday the opening up of the Galilee Basin was originally a Queensland Labor proposal. "The federal Environment Department has written to Queensland officials seeking advice on how the state government wishes to proceed," he said. "It's now up to Queensland Labor, if they form government, to determine the suitability of all proponents and confirm their proposal for Abbot Point."
Environmental advocates are calling for a moratorium on the expansion of Abbot Point and want a full-scale inquiry into Adani's financial affairs. "A full and proper investigation into the legitimacy of Adani's operations and who owns Abbot Point is clearly needed and the possibility of a royal commission should not be ruled out," 350.org Australia CEO Blair Palese said. Greenpeace reef campaigner Shani Tager said: "The only sensible response to these revelations is a comprehensive investigation into the Adani Group's suitability to operate in Queensland." An Adani spokesman said on Monday that the ownership structure of its lease at Abbot Point had not changed. "Adani again notes that the ownership structure of another component of its mine, rail and port projects- the lease of its terminal at Abbot Point- has not changed, as was communicated to Fairfax on January 21 and again on January 22," he said.
"It is unfortunate that, in selectively quoting Adani's responses of several weeks ago to the story published at the weekend, an impression has been created that a response stating that the ownership structure has not changed as claimed might mean something other than the ownership structure has not changed as claimed. "Adani also notes once more that the unchanged ownership of the lease is consistent with its stated position advised to every relevant regulatory authority in Queensland, Australia, and India." Follow us on Twitter @BusinessDayWe've got four weeks left in the regular season and, once again, we're looking at something comparable to a photo finish for playoff spots. More than half the league remains legitimately alive in their hopes of playing in the postseason. Less than a handful of teams have proven to be truly dominant thus far. What does this all mean? Basically, that it's time to start predicting who is going to be around when the dust clears, an exercise otherwise known as separating the contenders from the pretenders.
Since there are so many squads vying for postseason spots, it's critical to operate under the same set of rules that helped focus this project last year. So this space will be devoted to teams that: 1) have a record of at least.500; 2) are within at least one game of claiming a playoff spot; and 3) aren't alone in first place in the division. Those factors alone mean that a mere 14 teams will be the focus of this analysis.
That criteria keeps us from wasting time talking about teams that already are locks for the playoffs (that would be Dallas and New England). It also means little attention will be paid to all those middling 5-7 squads that are hoping to turn their seasons around with a late run. There's already plenty to predict within the group that's assembled in this space. In fact, it's best to start figuring these squads out right now.
Let's take a look at each conference, with the teams in question presented in alphabetical order:
AFC
Baltimore Ravens (7-5, tied for first in AFC North): The Ravens would win the tiebreaker over the Steelers for divisional supremacy if the season ended today. That actually is the best news Baltimore might get over the next few weeks. The Ravens play three of their last four games on the road, including an upcoming Monday night game against New England in Foxborough and a Christmas Day trip to Pittsburgh. The Ravens have been as tough as any team in the league under head coach John Harbaugh. Still, it's hard to see them surviving that stretch without losing ground in the AFC North race. As usual, they're playing serious defense in that town, as the Ravens rank first in the NFL in total yard allowed (296.1 per game) and second in points yielded (17.2). The problem is an offense that has been inconsistent and unable to run the ball effectively. That will be Baltimore's undoing in the long run. FINAL VERDICT: PRETENDER.
Denver Broncos (8-4, third in AFC West): The Broncos are starting to realize they can't always rely on their defense to carry the day. In fact, even that unit has started to show its share of warts this season, particularly when it comes to stopping the run (Denver ranks 28th in the league in that department). The Broncos might be able to overcome that deficiency with more help on offense. Unfortunately, that hasn't been the case. This is a team that has the 27th-best offense in the NFL and it's hard to see the numbers improving any time soon. Denver simply has too many issues along its offensive line and in its backfield. Now for the really bad news: The Broncos' final four games come against teams with a combined winning percentage of.729 (Tennessee, New England, Kansas City and Oakland). If Denver is good enough to win two of those, that should be enough to get them in. FINAL VERDICT: CONTENDER.
Houston Texans (6-6, tied for first in AFC South): This was supposed to be the year when we saw a different version of the Houston Texans. They spent big money on a quarterback (Brock Osweiler), signed a speedy running back (Lamar Miller) and added dynamic skill players on offense in an attempt to balance out a team that relied heavily on its defense the past two years. Well, J.J. Watt landed on injured reserve. It also doesn't help that Osweiler has failed to live up to expectations (14 touchdown passes and 13 interceptions this season) and this team seems to implode whenever it faces a quality opponent. The only reason to still like the Texans right now is the division they play in, the underwhelming AFC South. Last year, they were good enough to win the crown because they had more talent. That won't be the case this year, as they're riding a three-game losing streak that doesn't seem likely to end in Indianapolis this Sunday. FINAL VERDICT: PRETENDER.
Indianapolis Colts (6-6, tied for first in AFC South): The Colts picked the right time to get hot. They've won three of their last four games and they've got a critical home game this week against Houston. The winner of that contest takes control of the AFC South, which explains why the Colts sounded so confident after their 41-10 win over the Jets on Monday night. The major reason to like Indianapolis: Andrew Luck is playing like Andrew Luck again after an erratic, injury-plagued season in 2015. He's thrown 23 touchdown passes against eight interceptions this year and, like his teammates, he'll be eager to see Houston for a second time. Remember, the Colts blew a 14-point lead in losing to the Texans earlier this year. If they can avenge that loss, the road gets easier after that. They'll play road games at Minnesota and Oakland before facing Jacksonville at home in the season finale. FINAL VERDICT: CONTENDER.
Kansas City Chiefs (9-3, second in AFC West): The Chiefs have a huge Thursday night home game against the first-place Raiders. It wouldn't be surprising to see Kansas City win that contest and run away with the AFC West. One of the most underrated statistics in the league is the Chiefs having won 19 of their last 22 regular-season games. This is a group that simply finds a way to win, regardless of what it's facing. What makes the Chiefs especially scary is that they're likely to become healthier down the stretch. They've dealt with injuries to key defensive players (including cornerback Marcus Peters, defensive end Jaye Howard and outside linebackers Justin Houston and Dee Ford), while their biggest star has been sidelined nearly the entire year with knee problems (running back Jamaal Charles). The good news in Kansas City is the Chiefs still control their own destiny. Along with Oakland this week, they'll get Denver at home down the stretch. FINAL VERDICT: CONTENDER.
Miami Dolphins (7-5, second in AFC East): The Dolphins came crashing back to Earth last Sunday, as their six-game winning streak ended with a 38-6 rout delivered by the Ravens. Before that point, Miami was turning into one of the more intriguing stories of this season. After it, the skeptics had plenty of ammunition to use when arguing whether this team really has grown up enough over the last few weeks. This much we can say: We all knew this final month was going to be the critical to a Dolphins squad that has only one win over a team currently above.500 all year. The Fins still have two more road games left (including one against a Buffalo team still hoping to force its way into the playoffs) and their remaining home games will come against Arizona and New England (neither of which will be easy, unless the Patriots are resting starters). There's still plenty to like about Miami, including the promise of first-year head coach Adam Gase, the maturation of quarterback Ryan Tannehill and the surprising success of running back Jay Ajayi. It's just that these Dolphins might not have enough juice to hold off other teams pursuing the same wild-card spot they covet. FINAL VERDICT: PRETENDER.
Pittsburgh Steelers (7-5, tied for first in AFC North): The Steelers quietly have won three straight games and it wouldn't be surprising to see them finish the season with four more victories. They have a couple road games coming up (at Buffalo and Cincinnati), but they'll finish the season with Baltimore and Cleveland at home. That Ravens game may very well end up being the deciding factor in who wins the AFC North. Let's also remember that Pittsburgh just earned a huge win over the Giants -- another team that had been playing with a ton of momentum lately -- and that the Steelers tend to show up more consistently at this time of year. Look, Pittsburgh has found ways to overcome suspensions (to Le'Veon Bell and Martavis Bryant) and injuries (Ben Roethlisberger) and an offense that hasn't been nearly as explosive as it was in 2015. But head coach Mike Tomlin is a master at keeping his team focused when it matters most. He'll do it again in crunch time this year. FINAL VERDICT: CONTENDER.
Tennessee Titans (6-6, tied for first in AFC South): It's really tempting to pick the Titans to win this division. They're watching quarterback Marcus Mariota mature into a confident leader and their running game is as devastating as any in the league (with DeMarco Murray enjoying a serious bounceback year after a disappointing campaign in Philadelphia last season). In many ways, this team is built for playing its best ball in December and January. The only problem is that Tennessee has to beat Denver or Kansas City over the next two weeks just to have a shot at avoiding an eight-loss season. It's hard to see that happening. FINAL VERDICT: PRETENDER.
NFC
Atlanta Falcons (7-5, tied for first in NFC South): The Falcons should be 8-4 right now, as they had the Chiefs beaten last Sunday until Kansas City safety Eric Berry returned an interception of an attempted two-point conversion for the go-ahead score late in that 29-28 loss. That was a crushing home defeat for Atlanta. If the Falcons want to feel better, all they have to do is look at the remaining games left on their schedule. Atlanta won't see a team that currently has a winning record over the next four weeks, and that includes two upcoming games against the Rams (4-8) and 49ers (1-11). That's a great way to get healthy, particularly when you have an offense as potent as this team's. Even with all the problems the Falcons have on defense -- they have the league's worst pass D -- the only team that can really exploit those down the stretch is New Orleans in the season finale. By that point, the Falcons could have the NFC South locked up. FINAL VERDICT: CONTENDER.
Green Bay Packers (6-6, tied for second in NFC North): It's been a long season for the Packers, of that there can be no question. This is a team that entered this year with lofty expectations and a strong belief that the issues that plagued the Pack in 2015 -- including key injuries and inconsistent offense -- would be a thing of a past. What we've learned thus far is that this year's Packers look a lot like last year's version, except with a worse running game and a more suspect defense. Those problems normally would be enough to write off most teams. Fortunately for Green Bay, most teams don't have a future Hall of Fame quarterback in Aaron Rodgers. He has had his own share of struggles this year, but he also hasn't missed the playoffs since 2008, which was his first year as a starter. He has too much talent and pride to go out without a fight. The problem is Green Bay might have to win out to feel good about securing a spot, a task that seems all the more difficult when considering Seattle's coming to town this weekend. FINAL VERDICT: PRETENDER.
Minnesota Vikings (6-6, tied for second in NFC North): There's been so much to love about the Vikings all season. They lost quarterback Teddy Bridgewater before the campaign even began and found Sam Bradford in a trade. They watched running back Adrian Peterson go down with a knee injury in Week 2 and continued to scuffle their way to a 5-0 start. Even with other losses -- including the unexpected resignation of offensive coordinator Norv Turner at midseason -- they've never lost that fighting spirit. However, it's just hard to believe they have anything left to mount a serious run. They still play tough defense, as the Cowboys learned in a 17-15 win last Thursday night. It's just that a beat-up offensive line and a limited running game only can take this team so far. Remember, Minnesota's lost six of its last seven. FINAL VERDICT: PRETENDER.
New York Giants (8-4, second in NFC East): The Giants had been riding a six-game winning streak before Pittsburgh snapped it last Sunday. Now for even worse news: New York's final four games come against teams with playoff aspirations, including Dallas this week and Detroit the following Sunday. The Giants have more than enough sizzle to their offense, with Eli Manning and Odell Beckham Jr. being as dynamic a passing combination as you'll find in the league. The real question is whether they're built to win games in December. Their defense has been staunch all season (currently ranked eighth in points allowed), but they also have the league's second-worst running game. That could be problematic down the stretch. Thankfully for the Giants, they've stacked enough wins already this year to be in a good spot. FINAL VERDICT: CONTENDER.
Tampa Bay Buccaneers (7-5, tied for first in NFC South): The Buccaneers are peaking at the right time, as they would be in the playoffs if the season ended today. Tampa Bay's success has plenty to do with strong defense and the growth of quarterback Jameis Winston. He's thrown 15 touchdown passes and just four interceptions over his last eight games (six of which the Bucs have won). Tampa Bay also has displayed some impressive mental toughness over their last three wins. They beat the Chiefs in Kansas City, held the Seahawks to five points and then traveled to San Diego to beat a dangerous Chargers team this past Sunday. Victories like those make it easy to want to believe in the Bucs, but there's a critical Sunday night game awaiting them in Dallas on Dec. 18. The Bucs can afford to lose that contest if they can handle New Orleans (twice) and Carolina in the season finale. If they can beat the Chiefs and Seahawks, they can deal with that task. FINAL VERDICT: CONTENDER.
Washington Redskins (6-5-1, third in NFC East): The Redskins have proven they have plenty of offense this season. What's killing them -- especially lately -- is a defense that has a penchant for falling apart at the worst possible time. Fortunately for Washington, that won't be as big a problem down the stretch. The Redskins finish the season with the Eagles, Panthers, Bears and Giants. Of that group, only New York has a winning record and an offense that can generate big numbers. However, it's apparent that the 'Skins are trending toward being on the outside looking in. They no longer control their own destiny in the NFC playoff picture -- Tampa Bay surged ahead of them in the race for the second wild-card spot this past weekend -- and their margin for error is too slim for a team so inconsistent. FINAL VERDICT: PRETENDER.
Follow Jeffri Chadiha on Twitter @jeffrichadiha.Even as President Barack Obama was delivering his speech on political change in the Arab world, with a call for the "universal" rights of women to be respected, close US ally Saudi Arabia – one of the most patriarchal societies on earth – was getting ready to jail a young woman for having the temerity to get behind the wheel of a car.
Manal al-Sharif, a women's rights activist, uploaded to YouTube a video of herself driving in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province last week. The video was part of an online campaign encouraging Saudi women to take a page out of the Arab uprisings playbooks, and to defy oppression by driving on June 17 of this year. Over the weekend, Ms. Sharif was arrested and is currently being held on charges she disturbed "public order."
The video she uploaded has since been taken down (though some of the shocking footage is used in this Al Jazeera story), as has the Facebook group she started, though a similar page was recently restored by emulators.
The de facto ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia has long been the front line for Saudi Arabia's small group of women's rights activists. During the first Gulf War in 1990, the presence of US women soldiers driving Humvees in Saudi Arabia inspired a group of wealthy Saudi Arabian woman to hold a driving protest, with 14 cars convoying around the capital Riyadh – with male relative minders – for half an hour before being shut down by the religious police.
That group, who argued they should have the freedom to go the store or drive to work by themselves, were cheered as whores and worse by the
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“We are now uniquely positioned to win market share and expand our leadership position in markets around the world,” Lewis said in a statement on Thursday.
The Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank did not immediately return calls seeking further comment.
NEW CHALLENGES
The transaction creates new challenges for Bank of America, whose shares fell 66 percent last year as the worsening economy led to soaring loan losses, including from Countrywide Financial Corp, which Bank of America bought in July.
Lewis must stem defections even as he prepares to cut at least 30,000 jobs overall to help save $7 billion a year by 2012.
And while Bank of America and Merrill together raised $25 billion of capital from the U.S. Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, many analysts have said they may need more. Bank of America in October halved its dividend, and some analysts said another cut might be needed.
Lewis faces a radically changed banking landscape that also includes Wells Fargo & Co’s (WFC.N) $12.7 billion acquisition on Wednesday of Charlotte-based rival Wachovia Corp.
John Thain, who became Merrill’s chief executive after losses in mortgage-related investments led to the October 2007 ouster of Stanley O’Neal, agreed to run the merged company’s global banking, securities and wealth management businesses.
If he stays, Thain will be a prime candidate to eventually replace Lewis, who is 61 and became chief executive in 2001.
Other potential candidates include Barbara Desoer, who runs the mortgage operations including the former Countrywide, and Brian Moynihan, whom Thain displaced as head of investment banking but was named general counsel, reporting to Lewis.
Before buying Merrill, Lewis had spent close to $110 billion to buy FleetBoston Financial Corp, credit card issuer MBNA Corp, LaSalle Bank Corp, the U.S. Trust wealth business, and Countrywide.
And despite the industry turmoil, the bank has so far survived, and is widely considered to be too large to be allowed to fail. Lewis was last month named Banker of the Year for the second time by the trade newspaper American Banker. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel; editing by Mohammad Zargham)Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) middleweight Alan Belcher wants to teach Rousimar Palhares a lesson for what he did to Mike Pierce at the UFC Fight Night 29 event earlier this week in Brazil (see it again here).
But it can't be inside the Octagon.
That's because "Toquinho" was bounced from the promotion for violating the UFC Code of Conduct when he exhibited "unsportsmanlike conduct" by holding his submission over the gritty wrestler much longer than he needed to.
"Talent" don't play dat.
Belcher -- who laughed off the idea of getting heel hooked, knows a thing or two about rolling with Palhares. He spent some time on the ground exchanging submission holds with the former 185-pounder at UFC on FOX 3, before pounding him out late in the opening frame (details).
Palhares claims he was half-dead at the time.
But there is a way to prove he truly is the superior grappler and that's by accepting Belcher's latest challenge, a straight-up jiu-jitsu match under the Metamoris banner. And don't worry, the rules have been changed to avoid another Brendan Schaub fiasco.
I'd love to rematch toquino in @MetamorisPro and teach him a lesson. @RalekGracie @RenerGracie rt to make it happen — alan belcher (@alanbelcherufc) October 11, 2013
There you have it.
How about it, fight fans, is it time to call on one of the unlikeliest of heroes -- who is ready to surprise you -- in order to teach "Toquinho" a lesson? Or will Belcher find out firsthand what it's like to walk a painful mile in Mike Pierce's shoes?
Opinions, please.IS GETTING rich worth it? Or are we stuck on a treadmill, going nowhere?
The biggest Australian study of income came out this week. It found strong growth on income and wealth among all kinds of households, as this chart of rising incomes shows.
But the survey also shows Australia is still a land of poverty and deprivation. The interesting thing is how they go looking for deprivation.
The survey asked thousands of Australians whether dozens of items were essential.
The one thing the most people (99.7 per cent) agreed was essential was medical treatment; the thing the least people (44 per cent) agreed on was a week’s holiday away from home each year. Okay, fine.
But in the middle were some weird results. Fifty-nine per cent said it was essential to have comprehensive car insurance. Hmm. Fifty-five per cent said it was essential to have a car and 79 per cent said a washing machine was essential.
The researchers then used the things a majority of people agreed were essential to measure deprivation. If you don’t have them and couldn’t afford them you are counted as deprived.
In most of the world a car, insurance and your own washing machine would be considered luxuries. They were in Australia, not so long ago. Now, apparently, they are the minimum price of entry to society.
This seems to be the way society goes. It grows richer and richer, but constantly raises expectations so that it gains no lasting dividend from being so much richer. Instead it just gets anguish about missing out.
We are a lucky group of people, and sometimes we forget that. An average Australian is in the richest five per cent of the world for income. Even an Australian in the bottom 10 per cent of the income distribution is still in the top 17 per cent of the world. Why are we still so disgruntled?
Living in a rich country is great. It comes with low crime, nice infrastructure, good health and government services. But the silver lining comes with a cloud.
As society gets richer our cut-off for what counts as poverty and deprivation rises. A lifestyle that would make someone a king in another part of the world makes them miserable here. Our relative poverty line is $23,000 a year, after tax. Relative Poverty stays more or less steady even though absolute poverty — having more than a certain amount — has fallen.
We see lots of evidence that rising wealth in rich countries doesn’t lift happiness. America has been doing happiness surveys since 1946 and they show basically no improvement. Even though in that time the average American has doubled their wealth several times.
A BIT OF FRIENDLY COMPETITION?
Getting richer in a country that is getting richer isn’t a good way to get happier. One reason might be that keeping up with the Joneses is stressful. These days you only need to look at Facebook to see your friend’s new car, new motorbike or tropical holiday and feel like you are missing out.
But are the Joneses even happy? We sometimes imagine the incredibly rich must be also incredibly happy, but somehow we know it can’t really be true.
Research from America suggests earning above $75,000 a year doesn’t lead to any increase in happiness (although it does lead people to give more rosy assessments when asked to evaluate their life).
If other people getting richer is not making them happier, and it could be indirectly making us less happy, what are we even doing?!
The solution has to be a society that spends its money on the right things.
Research says we enjoy our money more if we spend it on experiences and time saving. We should do the same thing as a society.
Not just bigger houses and faster cars, but infrastructure to cut down on commuting times, better medical treatment and cheap housing that gives people — if they want to — the chance to get off the treadmill of getting ever richer.
Jason Murphy is an economist. He publishes the blog Thomas The Thinkengine. Follow Jason on Twitter @JasemurphySoledad, Panel Discuss Gay Parenting
One gay couple's journey to have a baby may affect the way some Americans view the definition of "traditional" families. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation hosted a screening of the new CNN documentary In America: Gary and Tony Have a Baby at the Paley Center in Beverly Hills Wednesday.
The documentary profiles Tony Brown and Gary Spino, New York activists who decided to become parents, using an egg donor and surrogate mother.
CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien, who oversaw the documentary project, said she knew she had to tell the story of families with LGBT parents, whose stories often fly under the radar.
"My job is to do the story as authentically as possible," said O'Brien, who led a panel discussion following the documentary's screening. The panel consisted of gay fathers who discussed their experiences as surrogate or adoptive parents as well as the fact that the issue of gay parenting rarely makes waves when issues like "don't ask, don't tell" and gay marriage get big headlines.
Stuart Miller, CEO of Growing Generations, a large surrogacy company, believes surrogacy is not considered as often by many couples because society does not process a gay couple's desire to raise a child from birth. As someone who deals with surrogates professionally, Miller thinks lack of information leads to a lot of misinformation about options for gay couples, such as the ease of finding an available baby to adopt, both domestically and internationally.
Miller and many of the other panelists believe the myth of a remorseful surrogate mother who wants to keep the baby deters other gay men from pursuing the process. Most of the men on the panel not only remain in contact with their surrogate mothers but have a healthy relationship with them.
"The wonderful part of our story is we're still friends," said documentary subject Brown. "What does it take to write a postcard to the person who gave you family?"
Sometimes surrogacy experiences can give parents more children to love than they could ever expect.
"Finally, on our fifth attempt, we got pregnant with triplets," said television producer Todd Holland, known for his work on Malcolm in the Middle. Holland's partner, actor Scotch Ellis Loring, was also on the panel.
One of the fathers on the panel, GLAAD president Jarrett Barrios, chose to adopt older children with his partner after fostering them. Although problems may arise with children being "legally free" to be adopted, Barrios advocates foster care and adoption as a solution for gay couples to have children.
Barrios was the only father who has older children, and he admits there are challenges for two dads.
"When my son gets made fun of on the baseball diamond, there are no laws to fix it," Barrios said. "It was his own teammates."
Even though his son no longer plays baseball, Barrios says he works on strategies with his children to address intolerance. "I have to remember that they have to 'come out' to friends too," Barrios said.
Living in a New York environment, Brown does not worry about his son dealing with intolerance as much and won't let such possibilities ruin his happiness.
"Right now we're still in the honeymoon phase," Brown said. "The instinct to parent is universal... it's just love." He and his husband, though not legally married, are both legally fathers of their baby, which is explained further in the documentary.
"Marriage encompasses so much of real equality," Brown said.
Gary and Tony Have a Baby premieres June 24 at 8 p.m. Eastern.
Spino and Brown's story is the newest installment in the CNN series In America, which profiles the experiences of groups in America who do not always have a voice in the media. The series observed black and Latinos in lengthy documentaries but made its newest installment shorter to get a more personal look at the gay experience.Hundreds of thousands of people in Las Vegas might have to find another way to watch Sunday's Super Bowl between the Panthers and Broncos.
According to the Las Vegas Sun, an ongoing cable rights dispute between Nexstar Broadcasting Group — which owns local CBS affiliate KLAS-TV — and Cox Communications could mean Super Bowl 50 will be blacked out for more than 350,000 of the cable provider's customers.
MORE: Athlete cameos in Super Bowl commercials | Watt defends Newton's dancing
The two sides have not been able to agree on a rate increase, though negotiations have been ongoing for five months. Cox, which is the largest television provider in the city, affects 48 percent of Las Vegas.
“We’ve offered Nexstar an increase, and they’re essentially looking at us and saying, ‘That’s not what we want,’” Cox spokesman Juergen Barbusca said, via the Sun.
According to Barbusca, Nexstar wants three times what Cox is paying now to carry KLAS programming, something KLAS general manager and vice president Lisa Howfield denied.
“They’re making mischaracterizations about our company, and that’s a problem,” Howfield said.
Until the two sides reach an agreement, the channel that is supposed to air the Super Bowl will remain a dead channel, much to the chagrin of football fans in Las Vegas.What’s it like to be denounced by the Islamic State? “To be honest, I think it’s an honor,” said American imam Suhaib Webb -- who was called a murtadd, or apostate, in the latest issue of Dabiq, the ISIS propaganda magazine. “To be denounced by a group that is so theologically anemic is a pretty good thing in my book.”
It's an unconventional reaction since many would be scared of being on ISIS's hit list; but Webb, who leads CenterDC, is an unconventional Muslim leader. He's a strawberry blonde, blue-eyed, former hip-hop DJ who was born into a Protestant family in Oklahoma, and who came to Islam as a 19-year-old through friends in the hip-hop world. An alumnus of both the University of Central Oklahoma and Al-Azhar University, a prestigious Sunni institution in Cairo, he was named William Webb at birth, but changed his name when one of his religious teachers gave him the name Suhaib, which means “of reddish hair or complexion” in Arabic.
Webb, who is well-known for speaking candidly and publicly about matters related to American Muslims, was always well-known as a white imam, which is unusual, but his profile has risen considerably lately because of social media -- namely his aptitude with Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook Live. It’s important for mainstream Muslim voices to populate the internet, he says, because the online sphere is filled with radical ones. His unique mix of classical theology and plainspoken charisma encapsulates modern Muslim America. It's not just ISIS that has taken notice -- so have thousands of young Muslims who follow him on social media.
A “Mainstream” Imam
Before his current residence in Washington, D.C., Webb was an imam at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center from 2012 to 2015. While he was there, the Boston Marathon bombing took place, and the fact that the bombers self-radicalized on the internet made him realize how important it was to spread his message of mainstream, peaceful Islam online.
That's why he goes the extra mile to reach young people where they can be found: their smartphones.
Webb joined Snapchat in September 2015 (@imamsuhaibwebb) at the urging of his students and younger colleagues, despite what he described as a generational antipathy toward the platform. He was already on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at the time, plus posting content to a "virtual mosque."
“I’m a Gen X-er, and we like millennials as much as we like alimony or the IRS,” cracked Webb, who spoke to Huffington Post from Las Vegas, which was a pit stop on his whirlwind tour of ten West Coast cities with the charity Islamic Relief, which is raising money for Syrian refugees. “I initially refused to join, but I caved when I realized its potential to reach kids who might not normally hear my message.”
He now has 30,000 followers who view his “snapchat sermons,” “snap-was” (snapchat fatwas, or discourse on a legal issue), and “snap-seer” (snapchat tafseer, or explication of Quran verses).
Suhaib Webb Webb's Snapchat avatar: out with a dab.
He snaps at all hours of the day -- from airports, cabs and beaches -- and likes the immediacy of the platform and the fact that he generally gets positive and constructive feedback there. He also uses it to dispel myths that Snapchat users sometimes message him directly. For instance, he’s been asked whether mosques secretly conduct military training for Muslims… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
“As crazy as these questions sound, I would much rather answer them than have people walk around believing them,” said Webb. “Human interactions dismiss fear.”
Webb is not the only Muslim leader on snapchat: @imammarc, @malm2014 and @abdulnasirj are other notable users. But Webb has the most followers and posts new content most frequently.
“Imam Webb is one of the best voices reaching out to Muslim youth today,” said Ibrahim Hooper of the Council for American-Islamic Relations. “Overseas extremist groups try to recruit kids online, so that’s where the biggest challenge lies -- not in mosques, but the internet. The more we can amplify mainstream Muslim-American voices like Webb’s -- and folks like Imam Omar Suleiman and the scholar Hamza Yusuf -- the better for everyone.”
Some of Webb’s more contemplative snap stories bring to mind the world’s most famous Muslim on Snapchat: DJ Khaled -- he even makes reference to like “keys to success” -- but Webb denies following him.
Beyond Snaps
But it would be wrong to credit Webb’s influence solely to Snapchat, although that's his most novel medium. Webb also addresses modern Muslim life, like whether it’s appropriate to take hajj selfies on a pilgrimage to Mecca. (His answer is yes, if you have good intentions.)
As part of CenterDC, a faith based community space in Washington, D.C., Webb hosted an interfaith iftar at St. Stephen’s Church to educate non-Muslims about Ramadan. And last month, he hosted a traveling “town hall” discussion called “To prom or not to prom,” in which Muslim teens debated whether prom is haram, or forbidden, because of its proximity to alcohol and sex.
Webb believes such practical discussions will be crucial to defining Muslim identity in America. American Islam, perhaps because of its youth, is still fuzzy as a concept, unlike, say Indonesian Islam, which is well “branded” as diverse and tolerant.
“Muslims in general are not a monolith, and American Muslims are a microcosm of the larger world,” said Webb. “We have a beautiful ethnic mix. If you think about what the future of America is going to look like, we look like that.”
Suhaib Webb A Snapchat from June 9, when Webb described personal battles that are analogues to Badr and Uhud, battles fought by the Prophet Muhammed in the 7th century.
Progress and Privilege
“The challenge for American Islam today,” said Webb, “is that we’re so preoccupied with jihadists, at one extreme, and Islamophobia, on the other, that our regular social agenda is overlooked.”
Few people are aware of Islam’s progressive social stances, said Webb, like on abortion, which Islamic law permits up to 120 days. Islam also discourages the sale of water because water is a universal right -- an opinion shared by most environmentalists today.
“Islam also has a lot to contribute in discussions of privilege, which is a huge issue in America. Just look at what Malcolm X found in its texts,” he said. “Islam’s intellectual capacity to contribute to complex issues like this is now threatened.”
Not all of Webb’s stances are accepted within the Muslim community: In recent years, he revised his stance on gay marriage from vocal opposition to tacit acceptance. But he was criticized on both ends, first by liberal Americans and then by conservative Muslims.
Still, is it possible that Webb has more latitude than the average Muslim leader because he is a white American man? He’s a vocal spokesperson for a community that is, statistically, much browner and less privileged than he is. Webb is acutely aware of how his privilege gives him an elevated pedestal.
“My white privilege will never leave me,” said Webb, "but I try to disinvest from it as much as I can." He has taken his students to Black Lives Matter rallies, is well-read on social justice, and generally “woke” in conversation.
Webb shows no signs of slowing his work since the ISIS threat in its magazine. “I don’t think it’s an empty threat, but I don’t like to give those people a lot of credit,” he says. “If anything, it’s made me more determined.”
He's working on a host of projects, including one to propagate Islamic education through smartphones. He’s happy to adapt to whatever screen or message reaches the most people.COLUMBIA, Md. (March 10, 2017)—A bill that would give in-state tuition rates to AmeriCorp volunteers who've served all their hours in Maryland passed the House of Delegates, 86-50, on Thursday in a party line vote.
Republicans objected that residents could be bumped from admission to Maryland colleges to give in-state slots to non-residents.
Del. Herb McMillan, R-Anne Arundel, said the ratio of instate to out-of-state student's doesn't change under the bill so the availability of in-state slots would become more limited and force colleges to choose between an AmeriCorp worker or a legal resident.
"If you let an AmeriCorp student become an in-state student they can make up the difference with guess what, your kid," McMillan said.
1,800 AmeriCorps volunteers in Md.
The sponsor of HB224, Del. Brooke Lierman, D-Baltimore, said the state depends on the nearly 1,800 AmeriCorp volunteers in the state each year but that their numbers have declined. She said offering in-state tuition would help keep them in Maryland.
"Nonprofits in every single one of our districts, in every single county, depend on the work that AmeriCorp volunteers do," she said. "Unfortunately over the past several years the number of people applying to AmeriCorp has declined. This bill is an effort to help stem that decline and make sure there's an incentive to participating in AmeriCorp and bring people to Maryland. These are the people we want to keep in Maryland."
A legislative analysis indicates a revenue loss could occur with each AmeriCorp worker who pays the in-state tuition rate, but that the losses would be minimal.
The analysis also shows a $22,000 difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition at College Park.
Del. Pat McDonough R-Baltimore County, said the College Park Campus would see a loss in tuition revenue of over $22 million if 100 non-resident AmeriCorp students were enrolled.
Delegate Mark Fisher, R-Calvert, said he's received emails from residents opposing the legislation on fears their kids could get bumped by a non-resident.
Del. Matthew Morgan, R-St. Mary's, said the bill amounted to discrimination.
"If you going to allow it for one group it seems like you're discriminating against an other group," Morgan said.
The bill would waive the 12-month residency requirement for AmeriCorp volunteers whose length of service is normally 10 months. They would be required to obtain residency in the year the in-state tuition was granted.A photograph released by the official Saudi Press Agency shows Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud receiving President Barack Obama in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on April 20, 2016. EPA/SAUDI PRESS AGENCY
The Saudi government and its affiliates have spent millions of dollars on U.S. law, lobby and public relations firms to raise the country’s visibility in the United States and before the United Nations at a crucial time.
And some of Washington’s premier law and lobby firms — including Podesta Group, BGR Government Affairs, DLA Piper and Pillsbury Winthrop — have been tasked with the job, according to a review of Justice Department filings. Five lobby and PR firms were hired in 2015 alone, signaling a stepped-up focus on ties with Washington.
The firms have been coordinating meetings between Saudi officials and business leaders and U.S. media, and promoting foreign investment in the Saudi economy. Some have even been tasked with coming up with content for the embassy’s official Twitter and YouTube accounts.
The Saudi government, embassy and government-owned entities have been contracting with U.S. consulting firms for more than 30 years. The work ranges from years-long agreements for legislative advice to one-time PR outreach efforts during “VIP visits” of Saudi leaders to Washington and New York.
For 12 days last June, for example, consultants at the PR firm Edelman handled the visit of Abdulaziz Al-Harbi, CEO of International Trust Construction, during the executive’s trip to New York, setting up meetings with business, government and media leaders and earning $10,000 for their efforts.
In 2014, consultants at the PR firm Qorvis developed content for the Saudi Arabia embassy’s YouTube and Twitter pages, and ran the Twitter account for the Syrian Opposition Coalition.
“Saudi Arabia is consistently one of the bigger players when it comes to foreign influence in Washington,” said Josh Stewart, a spokesman for the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks money and influence in politics. “That spans both what you’d call the inside game, which is lobbying and government relations, and the outside game, which is PR and other things that tend to reach a broader audience than just lobbying.”
President Obama is scheduled to meet with Saudi King Salman in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, on Wednesday. The sit-down comes at a complicated time in relations between the United States and its longtime ally in the Middle East.
In an interview published in The Atlantic magazine this month, Obama criticized Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf for being “free riders.” The remarks follow years of increasingly strained relations between U.S. and Saudi leaders, who were especially unhappy about the U.S. nuclear deal with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional archenemy, which prompted many Saudi officials to question their country’s standing with the United States.
A new wrinkle has the potential to make the meeting even more uncomfortable. On Sunday, Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders expressed their support for a bipartisan bill that would allow family members of 9/11 victims other terrorist attacks to sue foreign governments, such as Saudi Arabia, for restitution. The bill was introduced in September by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) and has sewn a rift between Senate Democrats and the White House.
[Obama and many Republicans on same side on Saudi 9/11 bill]
The Saudi government has threatened to sell up to $750 billion in Treasury securities and other U.S. assets if the bill is passed. A White House spokesman on Monday hinted that Obama would veto the measure if Congress were to pass it.
It is unclear whether lobbyists and PR representatives for Saudi Arabia are actively aiming to influence members of Congress or the administration on that particular bill. Leaders at the firms either declined to comment or did not return requests for comment for this story.
But the country and its affiliates have contracted high-profile lobby shops to help burnish their image and protect their standing in Washington. And such work comes with generous fees.
“Having an array of people representing the country in Washington helps Saudi Arabia keep the focus on what a great ally it is in the Middle East, not on issues like what women are and aren’t allowed to do there,” said Viveca Novak, editorial and communications director at the government watchdog group Center for Responsive Politics. “Typically a country like this will hire Democrats and Republicans, to make sure it has a broad reach, and will include people who used to work for key committees or agencies — sometimes even former members of Congress.”
The lobby firm Podesta Group has an ongoing contract with the Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Saudi Royal Court, a government entity, for $140,000 monthly. Barring any changes to the fee schedule, the year-long work would earn the firm $1.68 million by the end of 2016. The firm’s founder Tony Podesta, a top Democratic lobbyist and major contributor to Hillary Clinton, is working personally on the matter, according to a March filing. Podesta president Kim Fritts, a longtime Republican consultant and adviser to Jeb Bush, is listed on the contract, which the firm would not elaborate on.
BGR Government Affairs, the lobby firm founded by Ed Rogers and former Mississippi governor and Republican National Committee Chair Haley Barbour, was hired by the Center for Studies and Media Affairs in 2015 to “provide public relations and media management services” for a $500,000 fee.
Rogers, the firm’s chairman, did not immediately return a request for comment. Rogers is a contributor to the Washington Post’s PostPartisan blog.
Prominent public relations and law firms have also been employed by entities linked to Saudi Arabia, mainly to advise its emissaries either based in Washington or who descend on the nation’s capital to visit.
The law firm DLA Piper was tapped in 2o15 by the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia for a nine-month contract to “assist the Embassy in strengthening the ability of the United States and Saudi Arabia to advance mutual national security interests.” The work is listed as receiving a $50,000 monthly retainer, or a combined $450,000.
Campaign fundraising firm Targeted Victory was hired in 2015 to work with the embassy’s prime contractor, Qorvis MLS Group, to promote the Royal Embassy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia including managing social media content for $40,000 a month; Targeted Victory provided analysis on feedback received from Zignal Labs, the analytics platform that is a Washington Post partner, for $15,000 a month.
Zac Moffatt, co-founder of Targeted Victory, was the digital director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. The filing does not specify the length of time for the contract, but separate filings by individual consultants at Qorvis say their work for Saudi Arabia spanned March 2015 to March 2016.
Image giant Edelman has been tapped four times since 2013 to represent various affiliates of the Saudi government for fees totaling about $239,000.
Most recently, in September 2015, the firm provided PR services for the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA) and its governor Abdullatif Al-Othman during his visit to Washington last September to “help furnish Saudi Arabia as an attractive destination for [foreign direct investment] and highlight the country’s economy as one transforming into one that is diversified.” The work earned the firm $16,500 in fees.
In 2013, Edelman consultants in Washington and New York worked for the Permanent Mission of Saudi Arabia To the United Nations to promote the interests of Saudi Arabia to the UN, earning about $190,000 to design a logo, tagline and brochures and develop a promotional video and book on the nation’s behalf.
The law firm Pillsbury Winthrop earned an estimated $135,000 in 2015 for providing “general public policy and legislative advice” to the Embassy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Ambassador to the U.S. Adel Al-Jubeir.
The firm previously earned up to $2.64 million between 2011 and the end of 2014 for providing legal counsel to King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy, a Saudi-based entity created by former king Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud to promote sustainable energy practices. The work included advising on the development of a commercial nuclear energy program.
Pillsbury declined to comment.
Marketing firm Interpublic was hired by SABIC Petrochemicals B.V., a majority Saudi government-owned company, in 2013 for marketing services, including issuing press releases, identifying business reporters and setting up meetings in New York City. The contract was for $140,400.Disappointed Obama supporter to Mitt: 'Obama at his worst is still preferable to you at your best.'
A disappointed Obama supporter to Romney:
by wdrath
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There are no circumstances under which this particular citizen could ever vote for you, Mr. Romney. You see, while there is some disappointment on my part about what President Obama and his administration have been able to achieve, to a large extent it's because he's been deliberately hampered in what he could do by the blatantly partisan and racist obstructionism by you and your co-conspirators in your party over the past four years.
There may be some disappointment in the actions of President Obama and his administration, as well. However, for this particular voter who may be a bit less enthused about voting for President Obama this time, President Obama at his worst is still preferable to you at your best.
Nice try attempting to erase the board and create the illusion that you are somehow a viable alternative to president Obama just because circumstances have made some of us somewhat less enthusiastic toward the political process, and toward President Obama in the process. Unfortunately for you, the slate that you're attempting to wipe clean is still too cloudy with all of the filthy vestiges of your blatantly dishonest, hypocritical campaign.
Sincerely,
A voter who will not allow you and your party to scam me into voting for you and your atrociously horrid policies and filth politics.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/31/1126466/-A-disappointed-Obama-supporter-to-Romney FRI AUG 31, 2012 AT 12:30 PM PDTA disappointed Obama supporter to Romney:by wdrath........................There are no circumstances under which this particular citizen could ever vote for you, Mr. Romney. You see, while there is some disappointment on my part about what President Obama and his administration have been able to achieve, to a large extent it's because he's been deliberately hampered in what he could do by the blatantly partisan and racist obstructionism by you and your co-conspirators in your party over the past four years.There may be some disappointment in the actions of President Obama and his administration, as well. However, for this particular voter who may be a bit less enthused about voting for President Obama this time, President Obama at his worst is still preferable to you at your best.Nice try attempting to erase the board and create the illusion that you are somehow a viable alternative to president Obama just because circumstances have made some of us somewhat less enthusiastic toward the political process, and toward President Obama in the process. Unfortunately for you, the slate that you're attempting to wipe clean is still too cloudy with all of the filthy vestiges of your blatantly dishonest, hypocritical campaign.Sincerely,A voter who will not allow you and your party to scam me into voting for you and your atrociously horrid policies and filth politics. 15 TweetImage copyright PA
Sterling has fallen to a three-year low against the euro after Theresa May outlined the timetable for starting Brexit negotiations.
It also hit its lowest level against the dollar since the beginning of July.
On Sunday, the prime minister said she would trigger Article 50, the clause needed to start the process, by the end of March 2017.
That means the UK is likely to leave the EU by mid-2019.
In early morning trade, the pound fell by about 1% against the euro to €1.1433, but it had recovered slightly by late evening.
However, the pound was still down almost 1% against the dollar. At one point it touched $1.2818, its lowest rate since 6 July when it hit $1.2797.
Volatility
Mrs May's announcement had "unsurprisingly, been bad news for the pound", said Connor Campbell, Spreadex financial analyst.
"Sterling has been spooked by May's promise to trigger the dreaded Article 50 by the end of March 2017."
However, the currency had been particularly unsettled by the prospect of the UK leaving the EU single market, he said.
"The PM, in a move to appease the more rabid members of the Tory party but one that is set to cause revolt from the backbenchers, has signalled that curbing immigration is the top Brexit priority even if it comes into conflict with Britain remaining in the single market," Mr Campbell added.
"Combine all this volatility together and the pound has been left at its worst price since the start of July."
Sixteen-month high
While the pound fell, share prices rose. At one point, the FTSE 100 share index was trading at 6,996.43, its highest level for 16 months, before falling back slightly to close 1.2% higher at 6,983.52.
"As a result of Prime Minister May's announcement... the pound has weakened significantly, which is actually seen as a good thing by the FTSE 100 as it's quite an export-heavy index," said Henry Croft, research analyst at Accendo Markets.
The FTSE fell sharply in the immediate aftermath of the referendum, but has subsequently recovered and is up nearly 10%, because listed international-facing firms have benefited from the fall in sterling.
After the pound fell sharply at first on Monday, it then recovered some ground after a closely watched survey of the manufacturing sector indicated it grew at the fastest pace for two years in September.
But in afternoon trading, it fell against the dollar again after a US survey showed that manufacturing there had also grown strongly.Not long after Micah Johnson mortally gunned down five Dallas-area police officers and wounded nine others in July, the social media mavens at the Dallas Police Department tweeted out a picture of a man they identified as a suspect in the shooting rampage. They also asked their social media following—at nearly two hundred thousand, one of the largest on Twitter for police departments—to assist in tracking the suspect down.
There was only one problem: they were after the wrong man. They were targeting Mark Hughes, the brother of one of the lead organizers of the Dallas protest that preceded the mayhem. The Oswald-esque photo they used of him smiling for the camera with an assault weapon at his side was nothing out of the ordinary for Texas, which adopted an open-carry law for firearms in 2015. Followers of the Dallas PD’s timeline caught the error minutes after the tweet went out. But the photo of Hughes, together with its incriminating caption (“This is one of our suspects. Please help us find him!”) remained up for seventeen hours after it was posted, even as Dallas cops questioned and released Hughes. Not surprisingly, the maligned Black Lives Matter protester reported that he received thousands of death threats during his day of unearned social media infamy. Several hours after the department’s error was exposed, a reporter from Mashable asked a Dallas PD information officer why the department had not yet deleted the offending tweet. “Because we’re keeping it on there,” came the hostile, nonsensical reply.
The Hughes episode highlights the predictable outcome of American cops’ recent lurch into the social-media-sphere. What started out as an earnest public appeal for leads in the aftermath of a massacre pivoted instantly, and without explanation, into another bald assertion of cop authority for its own sake: “Because we’re keeping it there.” The social media arm of the law stigmatized an innocent black man with the suspicion he
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year suggests that having sex counteracts the effect of stress on the brain of mice.
"Being smarter does not necessarily mean you'll have more sex. Smarter teens, in fact, tend to delay the initiation of their coital activities", according to the Atlantic website. "Sexual interaction could be helpful for buffering adult hippocampal neurogenesis or the production of new neurons in the hippocampus and recognition function against the suppressive actions of chronic stress."
Psychologist Tracey Shors also said that hard work is needed if these cells are to survive. "You can make new cells with exercise, Prozac and sex. If you do mental training, you'll keep alive more of the cells you produced. And if you do both, now you have the best of both worlds - you're making more cells and keeping more alive."
However, the researchers stressed that fake sex such as porn via computer may have the opposite effect. A team from the University of Texas claims that excessive porn viewing can result in permanent "anatomical and pathological" changes to the brain. On the other hand, researchers from the University of California argued by saying it "offered little, if any, convincing evidence to support their perspectives."Nation’s Largest Solar Highway Opens to Rest Stop Visitors
August 24th, 2012 by James Ayre
“With this project — the largest of its kind in the nation — we’re contributing to a strong future in clean, renewable energy resources for Oregon”
Generating energy alongside fields of corn and cabbage, “the Baldock Solar Station is a 1.75-megawatt solar array boasting nearly 7,000 solar panels across seven acres of the Baldock Safety Rest Area, located on Interstate 5 northbound near Wilsonville.”
Rest stop visitors to the station have access to a range of different displays about solar power in general and Oregon’s solar highway installations. The visitors are also able to walk along the large community garden bordering the site that was created by Master Gardeners from Oregon State University.
The project was built by and is operated on land owned by the Oregon Department of Transportation. It went online in January. The solar array’s total cost was around $10 million dollars, and it’s expected to produce around “1.97 million kilowatt-hours of energy each year — equivalent to 11 percent of ODOT’s need in PGE’s service territory.”
This station is the second joint highway solar project between PGE and ODOT and is helping PGE to meet the state’s Renewable Energy Standard, providing at 25 percent of its power from renewable energy sources by 2025.
Source: BusinessWire
About the Author James Ayre James Ayre's background is predominantly in geopolitics and history, but he has an obsessive interest in pretty much everything. After an early life spent in the Imperial Free City of Dortmund, James followed the river Ruhr to Cofbuokheim, where he attended the University of Astnide. And where he also briefly considered entering the coal mining business. He currently writes for a living, on a broad variety of subjects, ranging from science, to politics, to military history, to renewable energy.ORLANDO, Fla.—The latest official count of manatees shows there are more than 6,200 of the marine mammals in Florida—a record.
The Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said Thursday that almost 3,300 were counted on Florida’s east coast, and almost 3,000 manatees were counted on the state’s west coast.
(AP Photo/Alan Diaz)
A Manatee is seen at the Amazon Flooded Forest exhibit during a media tour ahead of the opening of River Safari at the Singapore Zoo on March 25, 2013 in Singapore.(Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
Wildlife officials say this year’s count is on par with last year’s count of more than 6,000 manatees.
The counts this year and last year are the only two times on record when Florida’s manatee population exceeded 6,000.
The annual count represents the minimal number of manatees in the state since many marine mammals go undetected.NEW DELHI: BJP is set to contest the forthcoming Gujarat assembly polls with 14 Congress rebel MLAs in the field, aiming to dampen Congress prospects on seats that the party has held. It hopes to add votes that have eluded the saffron party in an election where its rival is trying to build a larger coalition.BJP leaders expect the former Congress MLAs to throw their all in retaining their seats and pull in some more support that could help counter the Congress challenge. The decision of OBC leader Alpesh Thakor to join Congress is seen as an accretion to the party but not a major one as BJP feels the community vote has tilted towards the rival which has leaders like Bharatsinh Solanki in its ranks. On the other hand, the Thakor community is seen at odds with Patels who have had differences with BJP.BJP sources confirmed that 12 Congress rebels will be their official candidates in the forthcoming assembly polls whereas Shankersinh Vaghela and his son Mahendrasinh, who have floated a new political outfit, could contest in alliance with the saffron party though so far the veteran leader has indicated that he is keen on a separate outfit. “The Congress MLAs will add votes to the BJP kitty as most of them have their own following,” said a party leader. The saffron party is following the same formula it had applied in UP and Uttarakhand polls where it had fielded several leaders from Congress and BSP.BJP leaders pointed to 70 members of Patel Amanat Andolan Samiti, including aides of Hardik Patel Varun Patel, Reshma Patel, Mahesh Patel and Geeta Patel, announcing their decision to join BJP.The decision of OBC leader Alpesh Thakor to join Congress is seen as an accretion to the party but not a major one as BJP feels the community vote has tilted towards the rival.As Nokia plans to unveil two additions to Lumia Windows Phone line on Wednesday, we have learned of another device that the company is currently testing. According to sources familiar with Nokia's Windows Phones, the Finnish manufacturer is preparing a handset codenamed "Glory" that will include a 4-inch display.
The handset is designed as a successor to the low-end Lumia 610 "Tango" Windows Phone and will include Windows Phone 7.8 and low specifications such as a 800mhz processor and the typical 256MB of RAM found in super low-end Windows Phones. We understand that the handset could launch as early as the holiday season — but that the availability date has not been fully determined. We don't expect Nokia to unveil the Glory at its special Windows Phone event next week, where the company will unveil the Lumia 920 and Lumia 820 handsets.The Baikonur Cosmodrome is an international space center in the center of Kazakhstan, 370 km from the town of the same name, located in a place intended to deceive the attention of Western spies during the Cold War era. Russia is known for its seat-of-pants conquest of space, rivaling the United States in this regard. And after 50 years of space exploration, the Russians have accumulated a number of spacecraft and museums recovering quickly filled. There seems no other choice but to leave some abandoned. Here are two forgotten space shuttle OK-MT from the Buran program in a hangar at Baikonur.
UPDATED: Unfortunately the most recent photos of this particular soviet space shuttle Buran are here and here. RIP Buran. Maybe there is another secret Soviet shuttle out there somewhere, only waiting to be discovered by some intrepid explorer with a camera?
Via UrbexFrance.
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The audience was warned: "One must vomit art."
These were the words choreographer David St-Pierre used to describe his new work Suie (soot), in a pamphlet passed out before its premiere at Montreal's Place des Arts.
But as descriptive as those words may be, perhaps nothing could fully prepare the audience for what was ahead.
Now, the show's promoter is offering ticket-holders a rare opportunity - to go see something else.
After numerous complaints, Danse Danse is breaking with tradition and letting customers who already bought tickets exchange them for another production.
The problem, according to Danse Danse's executive and artistic director Pierre Des Marais, is one big miscommunication.
Subscribers pick which productions they'd like to see almost a year in advance, he says, when Suie was billed as a retelling of the story of Joan of Arc.
Instead, the audience was treated to 95 minutes of screeching music, dogs barking and a climactic scene where a man gets his hand stuck in a vending machine, according to critic Luc Boulanger from the newspaper La Presse.
"I'm stuck in a vending machine," he says repeatedly.
Image copyright Facebook Image caption In one scene, a dancer gets his hand stuck in a vending machine
It wasn't to everyone's taste, and the promoter received an "unusually large" number of complaints.
"They felt disappointed, or that they had been cheated," Mr Des Marais said.
In an open letter published in La Presse, critic Luc Boulanger asked if the show's choreographer Mr St-Pierre, who rose to fame in 2004 with his show The Pornography of the Soul, still made art, or if he was just "picking a wound in public?"
"Now, what does the'major artist' propose for his great return? This insignificant, puerile provocation," Mr Boulanger wrote.
Yet some found the experience edifying.
Writing for Le Devoir, critic Melanie Carpentier said the performance has merit for "stirring the brains, opening up a dialogue about what art should be, placing the viewer before his own discomfort, while inviting him to develop a new perspective on his expectations of the show".
Mr Des Marais said the premier was the first time he or anyone else from Danse Danse saw the production, and that he gives artists "total freedom" to create.
"We were never invited to see a run-through, and I do not think there was a run-through," he explained.
Mr St-Pierre is firing back at Danse Danse for making the art "beige" by pampering the audience.
"You must really despise artists and the audience. They are not fools. They are human, they can love, hate, yell that it was the worst scum, or even have screech their guts out... this is the greatest gift we can offer to the public," Mr St-Pierre wrote on Facebook.
Mr Des Marais says he's not censoring Mr St Pierre by allowing audiences to change tickets, he just thinks they should know what to expect.
"It's not about whether I like or don't like a show, we just took the step of letting our subscribers know what it was," said Mr Des Marais.Want to save the planet? Plant a tree.
Or maybe a lot of them. Or maybe don't cut down so many.
These are the implications of a new study, which found that the world's forests play an unexpectedly large role in climate change, vacuuming up the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) and storing the carbon in wood, according to research published online Thursday by the journal Science.
That, in turn, helps regulate CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere – and keeps the planet from overheating.
About one-quarter of the earth's land surface is covered by forest. But while scientists and schoolchildren have long known that trees absorb carbon dioxide, no one was sure how significant their role was, overall. Oceans, the atmosphere, and other terrestrial ecosystems also absorb carbon.
So how much is due to forests? Forests are incredibly diverse across different regions – tropical, boreal, temperate – and different conditions: growing fast, being cut back, dying off, or being replanted. Researchers have struggled to get a complete picture of how much impact forests alone had on climate. Until now.
Earth's forests, it turns out, play a dominant role in absorbing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, acting like a giant sponge and soaking up on average about 8.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year, the new study led by the US Forest Service shows – or about one-third of fossil fuel emissions annually during the 1990-2007 study period. In the end, about 2.4 billion tons of solid carbon were locked away in wood fiber each year over that period – a surprise to scientists.
“The new information suggests forests alone account for the most significant terrestrial carbon sink, and that non-forest lands collectively cannot be considered a major carbon absorption sink,” said Yude Pan, a US Forest Service scientist and a lead author of the study, in a statement. That finding could have big implications for national forest policies worldwide, implying that as forests go, so too does the planet.
Tropical forests are critical. Tropical forests untouched by deforestation absorb huge amounts of carbon, more than all other northern hemisphere forests combined, the study found. Yet scientists also discovered a surprisingly large amount of carbon (1.6 billion tons per year) was absorbed by re-growth of tropical forests recovering from deforestation and logging, which partly compensates for the large amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere from tropical slash-and-burn deforestation.
But with that see-saw battle going on in the tropics, the result was that overall, tropical forests' impact on atmospheric carbon dioxide was a wash - deforestation emitted about the same amount that was captured in forest growth.
"Our estimates suggest that, currently, the global established forests which are outside the [tropics] alone can account for the terrestrial carbon sink," the study found.
So where are the forests regrowing? It turns out Siberia's massive boreal forest has been growing back, filling in areas cut down for agriculture under the old Soviet Union. At the same time, beetle damage and drought have devastated Canada's boreal forests, causing it to slip into being a net emitter of carbon, as decaying wood releases carbon to the atmosphere.
Temperate forests in the US and Europe, on the other hand, have been regrowing across areas once cleared for agriculture. These temperate forests are helping to tip the balance in the right direction, absorbing about one-third of the total contribution by forests globally – about 800 million tons of carbon annually during the study period.
In the US, for instance, the fast regrowth of temperate forest land has increased its carbon uptake by nearly a third since 1990, the study found. China has seen a similar rate of increase, as massive tree-planting programs have accelerated the rate of CO2 absorption by that nation's forests.
But it’s too simplistic to rely on forests to continue removing carbon from the atmosphere, the study says, noting that forest carbon sequestration is reversible if drought, wildfire and insect damage increase. Further study is key, researchers say.
Breaking the data down by region, “we were able to explain – in much greater detail than before – what's happening with the earth's forests," says Richard Birdsey, a study co-author and program manager for climate change research at the US Forest Service.
"Before, we knew that carbon dioxide was being absorbed on the land, but we didn't know for sure just why,” says Dr. Birdsey. “The story is a lot clearer now."Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:
The latest numbers from market research firm IDC reveal that Mac sales experienced a slight year-over-year decline in the second quarter, dropping to 4.4 million from 4.8 million during the year-ago period. […] Overall PC sales totaled an estimated 62.4 million worldwide in the second quarter, a year-over-year decline of 4.5 percent, as the PC market continues to decline. Nevertheless, North American PC shipments increased for the first time in five quarters, reflecting the strength of the U.S. dollar and “relative market stability.”
Apple’s sales decline is an 8.3% reduction compared to the year-ago quarter. Given that the most recent Macintosh news — the discontinuation of the Thunderbolt Display notwithstanding — was a spec bump of the MacBook, this is completely unsurprising. MacRumors’ own buyers’ guide shows a “Don’t Buy” indicator below every Mac except the MacBook.
Of the current lineup, fully half of all Macs — the Mac Pro, the Retina MacBook Pro, and the MacBook Air — are the most stale that those products have ever been.1 I’m not counting the non-Retina MacBook Pro as part of the Mac lineup because Apple seems to be winding down their promotion of the product. For the record, though, it would be the most stale product in Apple’s lineup by far: it hasn’t been refreshed in 1492 days, or just over four years.
The Mac Pro hasn’t been substantially updated since the new cylindrical model launched in December of 2013. The pro Macintosh situation is so dire that some designers and developers, like Mike Rundle and Sebastiaan de With, have opted to deal with the moderate hassle of building a “hackintosh” in order to get the performance they need for their work. Critical products like the MacBook Air and Retina MacBook Pro are well over a year old, too.
I look at models like the iMac and the MacBook and I see investment in the Macintosh. They’re beautiful and capable machines. But then I gaze over the rest of the lineup, and I’m disheartened. My MacBook Air turns four next month and, while it’s still humming along nicely, I am interested in replacing it with something that has a high-resolution display and greater performance. I’m not sure I see enough value in replacing it with a computer that is over a year old, fresh out of the box.
— July 12, 2016GUYS!!! Only a few days left until the Superbowl! I’m so excited. Okay, I’ll admit, I’m watching the Superbowl mainly because of the food… OKAY, only because of the food, but at least I’m watching it. In my timezone, it’s starting after midnight so I need some kind of motivation to stay up!
I’ve gathered 4 vegan recipes for your Superbowl Feast! They are all straight from the blog. Click on the photos to get to the recipes. Cheers and have a great game day!
It’s easy to make larger portions of this Vegan Chili con TVP. The added cocoa, rice syrup, and cinnamon gives the Chili a nice sweet touch and takes it to a whole new level and the liquid smoke adds a nice smoky flavor. It almost cooks itself, so it’s a perfect food for a party!
These crowd-pleasing Cheesy Poppyseed Crackers are easily prepared! Served with some homemade Hummus they are an absolute delight!
Guacamole is such a classic for party food! Whip up some ripe avocados and enjoy the dip with some Tortilla Chips or Veggie Sticks.
These Crispy Potato Twisters are a healthy alternative to it’s fried counterpart! They are damn delicious with an Avocado-Coriander-Dip.
Affiliate Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission if you click a link and purchase something that I have recommended. While clicking these links won't cost you any extra money, they will help me keep this site up and running!Mark Steyn Slams McConnell & Ryan: Forget Multi-Tasking, They Can't Even 'Uni-Task'
Dem Blasts Health Care Bill: Says He Hasn't Read It But Seen 'Reviews'
Tucker Carlson debated director, actor and producer Rob Reiner, who recently formed an organization called the "Committee to Investigate Russia."
Reiner and actor Morgan Freeman collaborated to release a video calling on the public to understand that Russia has attacked the United States' democracy.
"How would you respond if President Trump took you seriously and sent the B-52s to St. Petersburg or blockaded the Gulf of Finland? Would you support that?" Carlson asked. "When does the bombing start, exactly."
Rob Reiner: "When we say we are at war, we are talking about a cyber war." #Tucker pic.twitter.com/mPRJPv12Wh — Fox News (@FoxNews) September 22, 2017
Reiner clarified that his group is not claiming that Russia attacked the United States in a conventional military sense, but has instead conducted a cyber war on our electoral process and elsewhere.
Carlson said that, either way, it is ironic that Reiner and fellow Hollywood liberals are suddenly on the side of 'hawks' like Bush speechwriter David Frum and author Max Boot, rather than aligned with anti-war factions.
"We're not advocating going to war... or a traditional war with Russia," he said. "We've been invaded in a certain way."
Reiner said that Americans cannot fathom cyber warfare the way they understand conventional wars like World War II and the Iraq War. He recalled sheltering under his school desk during fallout drills in the 1950s.
"A lot of this is deeply disingenuous," Carlson responded, reiterating that Reiner is suddenly taking the opposite tact that he and others in his group have in the past when it comes to warfare.
He asked Reiner to legitimize his claims against Russia while his group remains silent on the provable hacks and actions China has taken against the Department of Defense and other sensitive government agencies.
"You say nothing until Hillary Clinton loses, and then we're at war," Carlson said.
"The Chinese didn't try to affect an election," said Reiner, who starred in "All in the Family" in the 1970s and 80s.
Watch the full interview above.
Report: Former UN Ambassador Power Attempted to 'Unmask' Hundreds of Americans
Curt Schilling: ESPN & Disney Are Pushing an 'Intolerant' Liberal AgendaCoinbase is set to raise $10.5 million from Japanese investors
Bitcoin startup Coinbase which operates the bitcoin exchange GDAX and the Coinbase wallet is set to receive another investment, to the tune of $10.5 million from Japanese company Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. The investments will be coming from MUFG’s core banking unit and a MUFG venture-capital fund, bank officials said.
MUFG is a Japanese bank holding/financial services company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. MUFG holds assets of around $2.5 trillion and is one of the main companies of the Mitsubishi Group. It is Japan’s largest financial group and the world’s second largest bank holding company. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group is the second largest public company in Japan when measured by market capitalization.
This will be the company’s first foray into the world of bitcoin. According to the Wall Street Journal, Coinbase is going to receive the new round of investment from MUFG to ramp up operations in Asia.
Coinbase is by far the highest funded startup in the bitcoin space. Previously Coinbase had received $106 million in venture capital, and with this new round of funding it will bring them to a total of $116.5 million in overall investments.
“Partnering with leading global financial institutions is a key part of our strategy and we are thrilled to be working with BTMU,” said Mr. Ehrsam, the company’s co-founder and president to the WSJ.
MUFG senior manager Yuichiro Kawasaki said Coinbase has strong compliance systems to prevent wrongdoing and has received licenses to offer money transmission services in many U.S. states.
Coinbase has also been seeking better fintech regulations in the U.S. to establish in part, policies that encourage partnerships among banks and fintech firms, including partnerships that may result in fintech firms offering separate products to shared customers with banks.In 2007, the ICC came up with a tournament that went a long way towards repairing the damage a poor World Cup had inflicted. The rest is history
The win that changed cricket: India celebrate putting one over Pakistan in the first World T20 final © Getty Images
The day after the final of the 2007 World Cup, Malcolm Speed, the ICC chief executive, decided to say sorry. A press conference was called, in which Speed and David Richardson apologised for the match officials' mistake in forcing the players back onto the field in almost unplayable light. While Speed and Richardson addressed the cameras, a sponsors' backdrop collapsed onto them. "It was a fitting end to the event from hell," Speed later said.
There was, though, an upside to the calamitous World Cup in the Caribbean. The ICC envisaged that the first World T20 event, which took place six months later in South Africa, would be the antithesis to the overlong, over-sanitised and utterly joyless World Cup. They succeeded. For two heady weeks in South Africa, even the most ardent ICC bashers had nothing to complain about.
Like many revolutions, the rise of T20 cricket looks inevitable in hindsight. As cricket entered the new millennium, both the Test and 50-over formats seemed out of sync with a time-poor world.
Innovative cricket minds had been aware of the problem for some years. In the 1990s, both Cricket Max, an abbreviated form of the game, designed by Martin Crowe, and the Hong Kong Sixes, a five-overs-a-side game played by teams of six, emerged, and were a qualified success without taking off.
As cricket entered the new century, the English game seemed moribund: domestic attendances fell 17% in the five years to 2001. John Carr, the ECB's director of cricket operations, commissioned Stuart Robertson, then the ECB marketing manager, to undertake the biggest consumer survey in cricket history.
"We found 19 million people who were there for convincing," Robertson says. "The format that they were keen on and would come along to was the 20-over format." The challenge was how to get there: a majority of the 18 county chairmen were needed to support a T20 competition.
"T20? Why not ten-ten or five-five or one-one?" So asked Niranjan Shah, the BCCI honorary secretary, in the ICC board meeting in March 2006 when a World T20 competition was discussed. "India will never play T20"
Despite the strength of Robertson's research, this did not look likely, despite the support of ECB executives John Read, Terry Blake, Tim Lamb and Lord MacLaurin. As the ECB's desperation mounted on April 21, the morning of the vote, MacLaurin decided to "flatter the f***" out of the county chairmen, as Read later recalled. Minutes before the vote Bill Midgley, the 60-year-old Durham chairman, who had opposed T20, likened the situation to that 40 years ago, when there was staunch opposition to the creation of one-day cricket. Enough chairmen were convinced: the vote of the counties and MCC was won 11-7, with one abstention.
T20 cricket was born. All 48 games in the 2003 English domestic tournament were played to a conclusion. Over 18 exhilarating days, Robertson's target of an average attendance of 5000 was cleared; the average would have been considerably higher than 5300 if county grounds had greater capacity.
Other countries immediately realised that the format could both grow cricket's appeal and help the domestic game generate revenue. The Standard Bank Pro20 Series was immediately launched in South Africa, attracting average crowds of 9000 in its first season. Successful imitators soon popped up across the globe and, only 20 months after the first domestic T20, the first T20 international was played.
The scenes at Auckland Park, where New Zealand's players dressed up in 1980s kits and outfits, Hamish Marshall wore frizzy hair more at home in a 1970s disco, and Glenn McGrath did an impersonation of Trevor Chappell's notorious underarm, spoke of a format still not taken seriously. That all changed four months later, in the second T20 international, when England saw besting Australia over 20 overs as the first step to winning back the Ashes.
The development did not go unnoticed by the ICC, especially chief executive Speed and president Ehsan Mani. They were about to go out to tender on commercial rights for 2007-15 and believed that a T20 World Cup would add significant value to the deal, giving the ICC greater funds to award to Full Members and Associates alike.
"I saw it as a great way of promoting cricket in countries such as the USA, Canada and China. I felt that ICC could follow Fifa's lead, who had held a very successful football World Cup in the United States, and use it as a tool to develop cricket in these countries," Mani reflects. He and Speed were adamant that if they did not do so first, someone else would attempt to create a T20 World Cup. "There were entrepreneurs, broadcasters, sponsors and multinational businesses that would seek to claim the right to run the international version of T20 if the ICC did not stake its claim and actually hold the first event," Speed writes in Sticky Wicket: A Decade of Change in World Cricket.
The belief imbued Mani and Speed with a sense of urgency. At the start of 2006, they pushed to hold the first World T20 event in 2007. Ahead of the ICC board meeting in March, Speed prepared a paper arguing that there was "first-mover advantage" for the ICC in organising an international T20 tournament before anyone else could do so.
Not everyone was convinced. Some Full Member representatives feared that T20 could ultimately cannibalise ODIs, Test cricket or both, and was better left as a domestic event. Some simply did not believe that T20 was worth playing at all. The Pakistan Cricket Board's chairman Shahryar Khan "was a traditionalist who disliked the format," Mani reflects. Most problematic of all was the BCCI's stance.
Malcolm Speed and Ehsan Mani were quick to see the potential value of the World T20 as an event that could boost the value of the ICC's TV rights offering © AFP
"T20? Why not ten-ten or five-five or one-one?" So asked Niranjan Shah, the BCCI honorary secretary, in the ICC board meeting in March 2006 when a World T20 competition was discussed. "India will never play T20," Shah kept reiterating. Eventually India and the other subcontinental nations agreed to the creation of the World T20 from 2007, but only on the condition that participation in 2007 was not obligatory.
Only shrewd politicking from Mani and Speed ensured India competed in the first World T20. While discussions about the tournament's creation were taking place, the ICC was inviting countries to make submissions for hosting the 2011 and 2015 ICC World Cups. The bid submitted by the four Asian Test nations did not comply with ICC requirements, assuming they would be awarded the 2011 World Cup regardless, as they were the only bidders for the tournament. After being persuaded by Mani, David Morgan of the ECB then submitted a bid too.
Initially, Mani rejected the Asian bid on account of it being non-compliant. The Asian nations were shocked. At a private meeting after, Mani "told them I would consider giving them another opportunity to make a compliant submission on the condition that the BCCI and the other three Asian countries supported all ICC events and in particular agreed to participate in the inaugural T20 WC. The BCCI reluctantly agreed." (Morgan later withdrew the ECB's bid for the World Cup on the condition that England were guaranteed hosting rights for the 2019 tournament.)
India still went into the T20 tournament rather half-heartedly: leading players like Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Anil Kumble, VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid were not involved, and India's inaugural provincial T20 tournament, in 2006-07, was not televised.
****
But getting every Full Member to agree to compete was just the start: the ICC also had to find a window to hold the tournament in. Eventually a two-week span, between the end of the English season and the start of the southern hemisphere summer, was found: the tournament would take place in South Africa from 11 to 24 September 2007. So hectic was the schedule that both England and India did not have time to play any warm-up matches. The two Associate qualifiers, Kenya and Scotland, had not even come through T20 qualification; the 2007 ICC World Cricket League Division One, a 50-over tournament, doubled as the qualification event for the World T20.
When Steve Elworthy was appointed tournament director in January 2007, he had nine months to decide on the tournament's grounds, playing schedule, ticket prices, marketing, pitch-side entertainment and security provisions. "There were some real challenges in terms of time," he reflects. But the organisers of the World T20 had one great advantage: they had just witnessed the event from hell. Even before the World T20 begun, it was already winning the comparison by simple dint of being over four weeks shorter than the World Cup.
Much of the blame for the Caribbean debacle rested not directly with the ICC but with the Caribbean World Cup committee, which set the cheapest tickets for Super Eight games at $75 in their determination to maximise profits. In South Africa, the ICC took a more active role in running the event.
"One of the key learnings from the World Cup was ticket pricing for locals," Elworthy says. It drives the entire tournament. Ticket pricing is probably the most critical element to get right." He also sought to avoid the heavy-handed approach to spectators in the Caribbean, when musical instruments, alcohol, flags, and even bringing in local food or bottles of water had all been banned.
The World T20 felt like a throwback to the inaugural World Cup in 1975: a breezy tournament defined by pulsating cricket rather than off-field tumult
At the World T20, the cheapest tickets were just R20 for the group stages, and R40 for the Super Eights: well under a tenth of the prices in the West Indies. This pricing ensured healthy attendances at matches and - most important of all - an appealing spectacle for those watching on television. "Full stadiums are quite an advert for the sport. It's what you want," Elworthy says. His only regret is that prices might have been too cheap: there was a drop-off between ticket sales and attendances of almost 10%, the result, he reckons, of prices that left supporters relaxed about not using their tickets if it was not a particularly appetising day to watch cricket.
The shortest format also lent itself to innovative scheduling. Double headers were played, with one ticket for both matches, helping ensure healthy crowds for ostensibly less appetising matches. On occasions, three matches were played consecutively in one day, across Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg, the three grounds used. It only made the contrasts with the World Cup in the West Indies, when the hosts had an absurd nine-day break midway through the Super Eight stage, more salient.
****
From the moment Chris Gayle scythed the first delivery of the tournament for four, the sport was transformed. So intoxicating was the cricket that it did not matter that, with the event shoehorned in before the South African summer, some players prepared to bat with blankets.
Even before the classic India-Pakistan final, other events were being planned to capitalise on the popularity of T20. The IPL had been conceived for some time - Lalit Modi actually outlined his plans at an ICC Commercial Forum in 2006 - and was formally launched two days into the tournament, on September 13. The Champions League was also unveiled during the World T20.
All the while, the ICC was grappling how to deal with the Texan billionaire Allen Stanford, who wanted to arrange for regular matches between the Stanford Superstars (effectively West Indies by another name) and international teams. Speed envisaged using Stanford's money to bankroll cricket's development. Just before the World T20, Speed believed a deal was almost at hand. There would be an annual $20 million match between an international team and the Stanford Superstars over the next five years; if the international team won, they would keep $10 million, and the other $10 million would be disbursed among Full Members and Associate nations.
Former South Africa seamer Steve Elworthy pulled off a coup as tournament director for the first World T20 © Getty Images
On the day of the World T20 final in Johannesburg, Speed and a delegation from the ICC met Stanford at the Sandton Sun Hotel. Five people were due to attend,
|
uedraogo. (Additional reporting by Joe Penney in Ouagadougou and Makini Brice in Dakar; Writing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg; editing by Larry King)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.RIAA Trashes Its Legacy As A 1st Amendment Supporter By Cheering On Global Internet Censorship
from the crapping-on-your-legacy dept
It appears that many people don't remember this, but the RIAA used to be a major force in protecting free speech and the First Amendment. It had many good reasons to do so, after all, since free speech is very important to all of the artists that the RIAA's labels work with. Artistic expression -- especially in the musical realm -- has frequently come under attack by politicians and, for decades, the RIAA was actually a really important player in standing up for the First Amendment. See, for example, this 1992 article in the LA Times from then RIAA President Jason Berman, in which he lists out all the ways that the RIAA has been fighting censorship. Yes, these are all specific in protecting musicians, but they were some really important First Amendment arguments to be made in these areas:
In 1990, the RIAA kept lyric labeling legislation off the books in 22 states by implementing a state government relations program that became the RIAA's second-highest-funded program, dedicated a full-time RIAA executive, consumed more than 80% of the association's public relations efforts, mobilized grass-roots campaigns involving local retailers, artists, legislators and consumers and brought expert witnesses to testify before state legislatures.
Again in 1991, the efforts of the RIAA's state government relations program defeated similar legislation in more than a dozen states.
This year, the program has been broadened by recruiting local legislative councils in 14 states resulting in defeated measures in New York, West Virginia, Arizona, Illinois and Missouri while the battle continues in Massachusetts, Louisiana and Michigan.
Throughout all of this activity, we've been a key player in opposing a federal bill creating third-party liability for sexual violence alleged to have been caused by music and other forms of entertainment.
We are a founding member and the principal funder for Rock the Vote, the music industry grass-roots organization aimed at defeating censorship and promoting participation by young people in the democratic process.
We formed the Coalition Against Lyric Legislation, an organization comprising more than 60 groups rallying to fight freedom of expression.
In addition to our amicus brief on behalf of 2 Live Crew, which raised the key issues leading to their exoneration in the 11th Circuit appeal, we contributed to the cost of the defense in the case, and have also committed legal and financial assistance to retailers in Nebraska and Florida.
Finally, we are proud to stand with the Washington Music Industry Coalition to seek a judicial declaratory ruling that the recently enacted erotic music statute is unconstitutional and should be stricken from the books.
And that's just one article -- the first I found via a quick Google search. If you were interested in these issues in the 1980s, the RIAA was very involved in protecting the First Amendment.
So it's fairly ridiculous (if entirely expected) that the modern RIAA is destroying that historic legacy of protecting free speech by now cheering on global internet censorship. As we've discussed, Canada recently launched a horrific attack on free speech, by saying that it can issue injunctions blocking entire sites globally on mere accusations of infringement. Let's repeat that: the Canadian court is saying that, even before a trial has determined if there is actual infringement, it can order sites (in this case Google) to block entire websites (not just pages involved in the infringement) -- and that it can do so globally. As we pointed out, this precedent is horrifying. What will happen when China demands all stories about Tiananmen Square be blocked globally? Or what happens when Saudi Arabia or Iran demands that pages supporting democratic reforms or LGBTQ rights must be taken down globally?
And yet, rather than condemn an overly broad ruling that will lead to global censorship, the RIAA sullied its own historical legacy and cheered on this global censorship ruling, claiming that it was "a win."
Canadian Supreme Court decision “a win for fans, creators & the legitimate online marketplace,” more from @RIAA on landmark ruling pic.twitter.com/uQ4P7FZ2GS — RIAA (@RIAA) June 28, 2017
And, yes, it doesn't take a genius to figure out why the RIAA is so wishy-washy on free speech. Those earlier issues involved protecting musicians. Now, with the internet, it wants to stomp out free speech on the off chance that some of it might infringe copyrights and make RIAA members' business models somewhat trickier. But that's sad. A principled organization should stand up for what's right -- and not what's politically expedient. And, really, this ruling will almost certainly come back to bite the RIAA as well. Not only will it lead to new, helpful, innovative platforms facing global censorship, is it that hard to believe that some countries may try to censor RIAA-connected artists, using this ruling as precedent?
These days, the bosses at the RIAA have got so much "piracy-on-the brain" that they seem completely unable to (1) stick to a principled position on the First Amendment or (2) see how cheering on global censorship might come back to bite them as well.
Filed Under: censorship, copyright, first amendment, free speech, internet, legacy
Companies: equustek solutions, google, riaaShenmue 3 is happening, and it’s coming to PC. As a fan of the series, I can’t believe I’m typing those words. But there’s a very strong chance you don’t give a shit. The first two games were only ever released on Dreamcast and Xbox, and there hasn’t been a new entry in the series for 14 entire years. Why should you?
There’s every chance this new game, which is being funded on Kickstarter and by Sony, will be a disaster. A pale imitation, cynically fueled by nostalgia. But if its creator, Sega legend Yu Suzuki, manages to conjure up even a little bit of the magic of those first two games, it could be something special. I want to believe.
We don’t know much about Shenmue 3 yet, and all that exists is some (admittedly dodgy-looking) concept footage. So instead of speculating about what the game might be like, or what I want to see in it, I thought I’d look back and tell you why I love the series so much, and why its return could be a wonderful thing.
The story
See that guy up there? That’s Lan Di, and he killed your dad. Shenmue is a tale of revenge, following young Ryo Hazuki as he chases the shadowy organisation who murdered his father, Iwao. Lan Di, a Chinese martial arts expert with a sinister past, is their leader, and always seems to be one step ahead of him.
Ryo is so utterly driven in his quest for vengeance that he alienates his friends and family. Shenmue won’t win any awards for writing, and the voice acting is laughably bad, but you find yourself wanting to catch Lan Di as much as Ryo. It’s incredibly melodramatic, but that’s what makes it great. There’s not a drop of irony or cynicism in the game’s story: it tells it with absolute sincerity.
So far Ryo’s journey has taken him from his hometown of Yokosuka, Japan to the streets of Hong Kong and Guilin, China, where we’ll join him in Shenmue 3. He hasn’t caught up with Lan Di yet, but he was very close last time we saw him. Shenmue fans have been waiting over a decade to get their revenge. Will this finally be our chance? Not if the game’s a hit and Suzuki decides to make another sequel.
Live another life
When you play Shenmue, you aren’t just playing snippets from Ryo’s story: you’re playing his entire life. There’s a real-time clock running at all times. Months pass, seasons change, and you have to go to bed every night. But that’s only one part of its deep simulation, which was the game’s big selling point back in ‘99.
Yokosuka and Hong Kong are dizzyingly detailed, interactive worlds, letting you interact with almost anything. You can buy food from convenience stores, feed a kitten, talk to people you see on the street, play classic Sega coin-op games in the arcade like Space Harrier and After Burner. It’s still impressive, even though open worlds are now infinitely bigger and more complex.
That’s because, adjusted for inflation, the first Shenmue cost around $70 to develop. It’s seen by many as the game that killed the Dreamcast, and saw Sega leave hardware behind to focus on third-party publishing. But these lavish production values make for an insanely immersive setting, with loads to do. Anyone who played the original will remember being obsessed with collecting capsule toys from vending machines on the street. “Hey, Lan Di can wait. I wanna finish my Virtua Fighter set.”
Later in the game you get a job driving a forklift truck at the docks. You get up in the morning, catch the bus, do a day’s work loading crates, then go home at the end with some extra money in your pocket. You eat lunch, talk to your co-workers, and even enter forklift races when the boss isn’t looking. Shenmue is about living out the life of Ryo Hazuki, and it’s a world you can get completely lost in.
The atmosphere
This is a big part of why I love Shenmue. It’s one of the most understated games I’ve ever played, with a moody, sullen atmosphere that reflects the personality of its revenge-driven hero. Wandering Dobuita Street in the rain and snow, or at night, is about as atmospheric as games get. Its recreation of 1980s Japan makes you feel like you’ve been transported to another time and place.
Mostly, though, it’s just really sad. Ryo is an angry, confused young man, and the way he unknowingly upsets a girl who likes him, Nozomi, is heartbreaking. If you like your games with extra helpings of rain-soaked melancholy, the original Shenmue is the game for you. The switch to the sunnier, brighter Hong Kong in Shenmue 2 lost some of the first game’s distinct atmosphere, however. Shenmue 3 appears to have a more rural setting, so I wonder if they’ll be able to recapture it.
The music
Composer Ryuji Iuchi will be working on Shenmue 3, who wrote some of the original games’ music. This is excellent news, because the Shenmue soundtrack is one of the best ever. It perfectly captures the melodrama and melancholy of Ryo’s story. But rather bang on about it, I’ll just embed some of my favourite tracks.
I know, right? Beautiful stuff. Even if Shenmue 3 turns out to be rubbish, at least we’ll get another soundtrack like this out of it.
Fighting
And finally, fighting. Ryo is a young lad, but he knows how to handle himself. His father was a martial arts expert himself, and passed some of his knowledge on. The battle system is loosely based on the combat from Virtua Fighter. In fact, Shenmue originally began life as a Virtua Fighter spin-off RPG.
On his quest to find Lan Di, Ryo beats up a huge variety of people, from thugs to sailors and, at one point, an entire street gang. Scrolls and wise old martial arts dudes teach him new moves, and the more he practices, the better he gets. The combo-based combat system is a lot of fun, and hopefully it’ll return in a similar form for the new game. Battles are bursts of excitement between all the slow-paced exploration, which is an important part of Shenmue’s very distinct rhythm.
And let’s not forget that the term ‘QTE’ was invented by Shenmue. The first two games are full of them, but they got away with it, ‘cause that was before every game ever decided they were a good idea. I hate QTEs personally, but Shenmue 3 wouldn’t feel right without them, so I’ll let it slide. As he gets closer to Lan Di, expect Ryo to be beating the hell out of increasingly experienced opponents.
Final thoughts
Just ‘cause Shenmue was great a million years ago doesn’t mean it will be now. So even though I’m riding the Shenmue hype train, I’m still realistic and sensible enough to know that, possibly, it’ll just be rubbish. Whatever the case, I’m glad it’s happening—and doubly so that it’s coming to PC as well as PlayStation 4. I need to see Ryo finally come face to face with Lan Di. I’ve been waiting on that moment my entire adult life. Let’s hope it’s not a massive anti-climax.
Now, how about a game of Lucky Hit?Tony Blair has called for “serious statesmanship” in the talks with the European Union that will shape the future of the UK after Brexit.
The former prime minister warned “our nation is in peril” after the vote to leave the EU and the negotiations on the UK’s future relationship with the other countries would be of “extraordinary complexity”.
He urged the contenders in the Conservative leadership race to act with “genuine patriotic regard” to the country’s future as he accepted his own party was “effectively disabled”.
In an article in the Daily Telegraph, Blair said: “There is going to be a negotiation of extraordinary complexity where there are a thousand devils in every detail. Those we used to call ‘our European partners’ are, unsurprisingly, divided and uncertain themselves.”
He said some countries wanted a quick divorce, while others favoured a delay in commencing the article 50 process, which starts a two-year countdown to Brexit.
“This needs serious statesmanship,” he said. “So before any formal negotiation begins, we need to get a high level sense of where the boundaries are going to be, the things that might be compromised, the things that are red lines.
“The psychology of the other 27 countries is crucial to feel and shape: they could decide that other secessionist movements should be deterred and so be disinclined to flexibility; or they could decide that the British view – especially on immigration – reflects something strong across Europe and have a measured response which tries to accommodate that sentiment.”
In a stark assessment of the task, he added: “Our nation is in peril. To allow us to come safely through this we need to be adult in our politics, to proceed with calm, maturity and without bitterness; because our future as a nation in the world and as the UK itself is at stake.”
The former Labour leader said that Britain “should keep all our options open” but went on to insist that “is not an argument for another referendum”.
He warned that Ukip leader Nigel Farage’s performance in the European parliament could damage the country’s ability to secure a favourable deal.
In highly charged exchanges in the wake of the Brexit vote, Farage was booed and barracked by MEPs as he accused them of being “in denial” about the failure of their single currency and their attempt to create political union in Europe.
The Ukip leader said he had been laughed at when he arrived in Brussels 17 years ago with a message that Britain must leave. And he told MEPs: “You’re not laughing now.”
Blair said: “Don’t underestimate the damage having Nigel Farage address the European parliament in that way does to our interests. Remember who has to agree any new deal for Britain: the European parliament.”
With David Cameron set to leave the stage, the next leader of the Conservative party will have the task of negotiating Brexit.
“On the leave side, there are some who are triumphalist and some more inclined to reach out,” said Blair. “Those leave leaders now so powerful within the politics of our nation should demonstrate they are in ‘reach out’ mode fast.
“With the Labour party effectively disabled we need the Conservative party to conduct its leadership battle with genuine patriotic regard for our nation’s interest.”No matter how fascinating, the two sets of twins represent a sample of only two. But to Segal, the possibilities were dizzying, unique. In no other family she knew of were there so many kinds of twin pairings to analyze and compare: Jorge and Carlos, Jorge and William, Jorge and Wilber and so on. ‘‘It’s an experiment within an experiment,’’ she said, comparing it to one of those Russian dolls: Crack open one, and there would still be another, and another, and another.
The twins knew the research would require them to submit, over the course of a week in March, to several probing interviews, individually and in pairs, as well as hours holed up in a conference room filling out questionnaires. There would be questions about their homes, lives and education, as well as personality and intelligence tests. Segal told them that she was interested in writing a book about them (Montoya would later collaborate with her), and the young men were enthusiastic subjects.
William had only one condition for his participation: He insisted that Segal and Montoya visit the home in which he grew up in Santander. Without that, he thought, they could never really understand who he was. He did worry, however, that if he told Segal and Montoya how long it would take to get to Santander, they would never agree to go. So he dodged and evaded whenever the subject of travel time came up. It’s a four- or five-hour drive, William would say, and then add, almost as an afterthought, that when the road could get them no closer to their destination, they would get out and walk. For how long? A little while, William would say; it might be a little muddy. How muddy? Maybe, he would suggest, it would be easier if at that point Segal traveled by horse. Would she, by any chance, rather ride a horse? Segal, a woman in her early 60s who grew up in the Bronx, said no.
The Importance of Will
Around 9:30 a.m. on March 29, three cars pulled into La Paz, a dusty town whose few small streets offer sweeping views of the Andes. The group — Segal, Montoya, the two sets of twins, translators and assorted friends and family members — had already been on the road for six hours. They settled in for a traditional breakfast of bone broth and hot chocolate at a diner in town. Jorge and William sat next to each other along one side of a wooden table, while Carlos sat across the way. Wilber sat with Segal and Montoya. While everyone ate breakfast, Carlos took out his phone and called up a picture of him and Jorge. ‘‘I love my brother, even though I only show it when I’m drunk,’’ Carlos said. ‘‘See?’’ In the picture, Carlos was puckered up, giving Jorge a big kiss on the cheek.
William watched Carlos, feeling annoyed. Wilber, he had often thought, was the same way: He took William entirely for granted, showing his love only on very rare occasions — when, for example, he thought one of them could die. They served in the same platoon in the military, and when they entered a particularly dangerous zone, Wilber would say to him, white-faced: ‘‘May God be with you, my brother. I love you.’’ William knew Wilber loved him; but both Jorge and William wished that the brothers they grew up with had been more supportive, more expressive — the way William and Jorge now were with each other. They often called each other right before they fell asleep, just to say good night.
The four young men all knew one another well by then. Over the past six months, they had gone on outings and shared meals, talked about women, family, money, values. Even weeks in, each had stared, still unnerved and amazed, into the eyes of his identical brother. They had measured, assessed and inspected. They stood back to back, comparing height (those raised in the city were taller than those from the country); Carlos had crushed Wilber in a food-eating contest, William had vanquished them all when they arm-wrestled. In the stands at a soccer match, Carlos watched, in fascination, as William’s hand reached down his jeans to scratch his backside: Jorge did the same thing, Carlos told Wilber. Over dinner one night, Jorge noted that Carlos and Wilber both leaned in at the same odd angle toward their plates. Jorge felt comfortable gently correcting his identical twin’s grammar; Carlos took seriously such brotherly responsibilities as instructing Wilber in how to approach an attractive Bogotá woman at a bar or how to down a shot of tequila. The twins from Santander were amazed that neither of their city counterparts had ever fired a gun, which they quickly remedied on a visit to the country.
Carlos did feel immediately at ease with his newfound twin, he had to admit. Wilber did not try to tell him what to do when he talked about his love life, the way Jorge did; he just listened and supported him. Yes, they understood each other: their manly pride around women, their furious response to their brothers’ incessant teasing. But Carlos was also unnerved by Wilber’s Carlosness. His twin’s very existence refuted a concept dear to him: his sense of his own uniqueness. Having grown up so different from his other family members, he had come to pride himself on his individualism; now, as an identical twin, he was part of a rare subset of humans whose replicability was embarrassingly on display. Once, Wilber posted on Facebook a picture of himself back in Santander, bare-chested in a river, triumphantly holding two chickens he had just killed. With his hair wet and slicked down like Carlos’s, the campesino in the picture looked too much like Carlos for his comfort. ‘‘Take that thing down,’’ he told Wilber. ‘‘People will think it’s me.’’Dean: Fox News “racist”
Fox News’ handling of the Shirley Sherrod controversy “was absolutely racist,” former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean charged on Sunday.
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Dean, who's also a former Democratic National Committee chairman and hero of liberals, asserted Fox News failed to vet video footage of a speech misleadingly excerpted to make it appear that Sherrod was boasting of using her post as an Agriculture Department official to discriminate against a white farmer.
“I don’t think Newt Gingrich is a racist, and I don’t think you’re a racist,” Dean told Fox News host Chris Wallace, “but Fox News did something that was absolutely racist. They took a — they had an obligation to find out what was really in the clip. They had been pushing a theme of black racism with this phony Black Panther crap and this business and this Sotomayor and all this other stuff.”
When Wallace interrupted Dean to point out that Fox News did not air the excerpted Sherrod footage until after the Obama administration had fired her based on it, Dean shot back: “It was about to go on Glenn Beck, which is what the administration was afraid of.”
And Dean mildly rebuked the Obama administration, as well, saying, “We’ve got to stop being afraid of Glenn Beck (a Fox News host) and the racist fringe of the Republican Party. But Fox News was not blameless during this. You played it up.”
Dean dismissed Wallace’s point about timing, asserting “you didn’t do your job,” and charging that Fox News has helped the Republican Party foster racism by focusing on allegations of reverse racism.
“The tea party called out their racist fringe and I think the Republican Party’s got to stop appealing to its racist fringe. And Fox News is what did that. You put that on,” Dean said. “Continuing to cater to this theme of minority racism and stressing comments like this — some of which are taken out of context — does not help the country knit itself together.”
FOX News Senior Vice President of News Michael Clemente responded Sunday to Dean's assertions, firing back: "As we said this past week, some people, such as the failed candidate Dean, reflexively blame Fox for almost anything."
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this blog post incorrectly said that Fox News' website had posted the Breitbart clip before the administration fired Sherrod.Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart Has The Strangest Status Effects
By Spencer. November 20, 2014. 11:47pm
Noire from the Hyperdimension Neptunia series is getting a strategy RPG spinoff developed by Hexyz Force maker Sting. Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart has a new cast of characters that are parodies of famous video game series. Can you guess what Lid and Vio are supposed to represent?
Sting has a penchant for creating unique gameplay systems and players have to master the use of status effects in Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart. You can turn your enemies into zombies, pixelate foes, or transmute them into blocks of tofu. Maps have traps to dodge like laser beam squares and moving logs that change paths on the battlefield.
Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart also has a simulation mode where you can hang out with Noire. Sim Noire lets players decorate Noire’s room with furniture and accessories purchased with points earned in the game.Tuesday, October 16, 6:30 – 8:30 PM
ART, WOMEN, and CULTURE SALON, coordinated by Elle Schorr, meets at The Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach on the third Tuesday of each month from 6:30-8:30 pm, in Studio 101 in the two story building behind the garden. There is a $10 fee to attend.
Giannina Coppiano Dwin’s work is now on view in “Continuum”, the exhibition at Cultural Council of Palm Beach County of work by current and past students of FAU’s MFA program. Her work allows the interaction of time, expressing a desire to transform simple materials into symbols of life’s basic needs. It refers to intimate moments, little rituals, or metaphors that call into play formal aesthetics, nourishment, sensory experience, women’s bodies, and the impermanence of the human condition.
Dwin is a contemporary artist who lives and works in South Florida. She has been the recipient of grants and awards such as the prestigious South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for Visual and Media Artists funded in part by the National Endowment for the Art, the Women in the Visual Arts Award; as well as, several sponsorships and grants including research in Spain and Brazil. Her work has recently been seen in solo installations at the Project Space –Art and Culture Center in Hollywood, the contemporary wing of the Museo Municipal de Guayaquil, Ecuador; Ornare, Miami, as a collateral event during Art Basel; the Coral Springs Museum of Art, Coral Springs; Illegal Gallery, Florence, Italy. Selected group shows include venues such as the University Galleries, Boca Raton; Whitespace at the Mordes Collection, 18 Rabbit Gallery, Ft. Lauderdale, Duncan Gallery, St. Petersburg, Armory Art Center, Palm Beach; Cornell Museum, Delray Beach; Casa De Espanha, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She has completed a public art sculpture commissioned by the Broward County Cultural Council and the Broward County Main Library in Ft. Lauderdale.
Armory Art Center
1700 Parker Avenue
West Palm Beach, FL 33401
(561) 832-1776We recently noticed a problem where on mobile devices, touches to certain areas of the page were redirecting users to either the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.
After some digging around, we found that the only element that was isolated to the home page (where the error occurred) was the webutations badge. We removed this and viola, problem solved. We put it back on a test page (with nothing else on it) and bam! The error was back.
There is no doubt that this is the cause and the irony that a site who's function is to demonstrate the safety and security of a website to users is actually injecting malware is not lost on us. We have dug around on Google and can find nothing relating to this and after reaching out to webutation.net on their Google+ and Facebook pages have heard nothing. We feel this is important enough to create this post and wondered if anyone else has experienced this. Also - any suggestions on where to report this so others are aware?
Here is the badge code if anyone would like to try this on a page themselves. It only works on mobile devices & we changed our URL to google.com:
<div> <script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[ (function() { window.domain = 'google.com'; function async_load(){ var s = document.createElement('script'); s.type = 'text/javascript'; s.async = true; var p = ('https:' == document.location.protocol? 'https://' : 'http://'); s.src = p+'www.webutation.net/js/load_badge.js'; var x = document.getElementById('webutation-link'); x.parentNode.insertBefore(s, x); } if (window.attachEvent) window.attachEvent('onload', async_load); else window.addEventListener('load', async_load, false); })(); // ]]> </script> <a id="webutation-link" title="Webutation review of Google" href="http://www.webutation.net/go/review/google.com">Webutation</a></div>Supreme Court to Hear Gun Control Case This Week
This week offers the first real test of what I believe will be President Bush’s most important legacy. Long after President Bush has left office, and long after the Iraq war, his lasting impression will be that of his supreme court nominations of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sam Alito.
This week the supreme court will hear it’s first case on the second amendment in many years. The supreme court is going to hear the case about whether Washington D.C.’s handgun ban violates the second amendment.
But this case is even more important than just whether D.C. residents can carry handguns. This is the first case that the supreme court will hear in many years where there is no precedent set to draw upon. This case, according to this Washington Post article, will actually delve into whether the second amendment applies to individuals or just state militias.
“This may be one of the only cases in our lifetime when the Supreme Court is going to be interpreting the meaning of an important provision of the Constitution unencumbered by precedent,” said Randy E. Barnett, a constitutional scholar at the Georgetown University Law Center. “And that’s why there’s so much discussion on the original meaning of the Second Amendment.” The outcome could roil the 2008 political campaigns, send a national message about what kinds of gun control are constitutional and finally settle the question of whether the 27-word amendment, with its odd structure and antiquated punctuation, provides an individual right to gun ownership or simply pertains to militia service. “The case has been structured so that they have to confront the threshold question,” said Robert A. Levy, the wealthy libertarian lawyer from Family Lawyers Brisbane who has spent five years and his own money to bring District of Columbia v. Heller to the Supreme Court. “I think they have to come to grips with that.”
This case looks to have wide ranging implications and it is the first real test in my opinion of the reformed supreme court under President Bush. I have been of the belief, and I have written about it, that President Bush’s lasting, and very under-rated, legacy would be the two men that he was able to get appointed to the supreme court. This is their first test. lets hope they pass.
Advertisements2012 was also the nation's driest year since 1988.
Corn damaged by Midwest drought conditions in Brownsville, Ill. (Photo11: Eileen Blass, USA TODAY) Story Highlights 2012's average temperature for 2012 was 55.3 degrees
Record is 3.2 degrees higher than 20th-century average
Prior to 2012, 1988 was the warmest year on record
It's official: 2012 marked the warmest year on record for the USA, scientists from the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., announced Tuesday. The past year smashed the previous record for the warmest year, which was 1998.
The average temperature for 2012 was 55.3 degrees, 3.2 degrees above the 20th-century average, and 1 degree above 1998.
U.S. weather records date to 1895.
"We had the warmest spring on record, the warmest July on record, and the third-warmest summer on record," said Deke Arndt, chief of the climate monitoring branch of the climate center, late last year.
Every state had a warmer-than-average year. A total of 19 states, stretching from Utah to Massachusetts, had record warmth in 2012 and an additional 26 states had a Top 10 warm year.
"These records do not occur like this in an unchanging climate," said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. "And they are costing many billions of dollars."
"What was truly astonishing," added Weather Underground weather historian Christopher Burt, "was the ratio of heat records vs. cold records that were established over the course of the year." Burt says that in 2012, there were 362 all-time record-high temperatures set across the nation, and zero all-time record lows.
The climate center also reported that 2012 was the driest year for the nation since 1988. Two states, Nebraska and Wyoming, had their driest years on record. Eight additional states had annual precipitation totals ranking among the bottom 10.
The large area of dry conditions in 2012 resulted in a very large footprint of drought conditions, which peaked in July with about 61% of the continental U.S. in moderate-to-exceptional drought, according to the climate report. "The footprint of drought during 2012 roughly equaled the drought of the 1950s, which peaked at approximately 60%."
The U.S. Climate Extremes Index also showed that 2012 was the second-most extreme year on record for the nation. The index, which evaluates extremes in temperature and precipitation, as well as tropical storms and hurricanes that make landfall, was nearly twice the average value and second only to 1998.
The past year had 11 disasters that reached the $1 billion threshold in losses, including Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Isaac, and tornado outbreaks in the Great Plains, Texas and Southeast/Ohio Valley.
"A picture is emerging of a world with more extreme heat," said Andrew Dessler, a Texas A&M University climate scientist. "Not every year will be hot, but when heat waves do occur, the heat will be more extreme. People need to begin to prepare for that future."
Global data will be released next week by the climate center. Through November, the Earth was seeing its eighth-warmest year on record.
Contributing: The Associated Press
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/UGNDcDOneDrive Files On-Demand now available for Windows Insiders By Dona Sarkar / Software Engineer, Windows and Devices Group Share Share Skype
Hello Windows Insiders!
At Build 2017, Joe Belfiore announced that the new OneDrive Files On-Demand feature will be delivered with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. And today, we are excited to announce that OneDrive Files On-Demand is rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Fast ring who are on Build 16215. The updated OneDrive client will be rolling out over the next few days but can also be installed from here.
With Files On-Demand, you can access all your files in the cloud without having to download them and use storage space on your device. All your files—even online-only files—can be seen in File Explorer and work just like every other file on your device. You’ll be able to open online-only files from within any desktop or Windows Store apps using the Windows file picker. And you’re covered in both your home and professional life since it works with your personal and work OneDrive, as well as your SharePoint Online team sites.
After enabling Files On-Demand in OneDrive, your files will have these statuses in File Explorer:
Online-only files
Online-only files don’t take up space on your computer. You see a cloud icon for each online-only file in File Explorer, but the file doesn’t download to your device until you open it. You can only open online-only files when your device is connected to the internet. However, you online files will always be visible in File Explorer even if you are offline.
Locally available files
When you open an online-only file, it downloads to your device and becomes a locally available file. You can open a locally available file anytime, even without Internet access. If you need more space, you can change the file back to online-only. Just right-click the file and select “Free up space.”
Always available files
Only files that you mark as “Always keep on this device” have the green circle with the white check mark. These files will always be available even when you’re offline. They are downloaded to your device and take up space.
To read up on everything you need to know about OneDrive Files On-Demand, click here.
And here are a few things we recommend you try out!
Setup your personal MSA and Office 365 accounts with OneDrive Files On-Demand.
Right-click on a file or folder in OneDrive and select “Free up space” or “Always keep on this device”.
Double click an online-only file with a cloud on it. It will download on-demand.
Navigate into a folder in OneDrive that is full of pictures, and you can watch the thumbnails populate.
Access an online-only file through your favorite apps.
Mount a SharePoint Online team site.
Work with all your files as you normally do!
This has been the #1 requested feature for OneDrive on UserVoice, so we’re excited to get this out to Windows Insiders. Tell us what you think!
Updated June 28, 2018 8:06 amI hear expressions like “I don’t see race” or “I’m color-blind” a lot from people who want to ignore the issues of structural power imbalance or privilege in race issues. The same people are fond of equating racism to simple bigotry; by this standard, white bigotry against blacks and black bigotry against whites are equally “racist.” “Racism” is just a matter of individual attitude, not structural power or history, and the only thing needed to fix it is to get people’s heads in a better space.
Based on Barton Hinkle’s comparison of corporate and individual welfare (“How Walmart Made Liberals Turn Right,” Reason
|
David Johnson announced the charges Tuesday against deputy sheriffs Eugene Jones and Clifford Chiba and former Deputy Sheriff Scott Neu.
The three face felony and misdemeanor charges including "cruel and unusual punishment."
"These are serious crimes that damage the moral authority of law enforcment," Gascón said.
Inmates Say Deputies Forced Them to Fight "Gladiator Style"
Jail inmates held in San Francisco's Hall of Justice allege sheriff's deputies have forced them to fight "gladiator-style," San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi said. Mark Matthews reports. (Published Friday, March 27, 2015)
According to court documents, Neu forced county jail inmates Ricardo Palakiko-Garcia and Stanley Harris to fight each other March 5 on the seventh floor of the county jail at 850 Bryant Street.
Neu allegedly told Garcia and Harris that if they did not fight, he would handcuff them, use Mace or a Taser on them, beat them and send them to a different jail with fewer privileges, documents show.
The two inmates fought each other because they felt they had no choice, according to Gascón.
Chiba was allegedly present and failed to stop the fight, neglecting to protect Garcia and Harris from harm, records indicate. Chiba also gave advice to one of the inmates later about how to proceed in a subsequent round, according to the documents.
The next day, Neu and Jones forced the inmates to fight a second time, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors also said that between Oct. 3, 2014 and March 25, 2015, Neu ordered Harris to perform push-ups and dips and gamble in exchange for food and clothing.
Neu is charged with 17 counts, including issuing criminal threats against inmates, inflicting cruel and unusual punishment and "inhumanity" against the inmates in his care. If convicted of all counts, Neu could face a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
Jones is charged with similar allegations, including "willfully failing to perform an official duty." He could face up to five years in prison if convicted.
Chiba, the only one not charged with a felony, faces a misdemeanor charge of inflicting cruel and unusual punishment. He could face a year and six months in county jail.
Harry Stern, an attorney for the San Francisco Deputy Sheriff's Association, the deputies' union, has called the allegations "exaggerated'' and the fighting "little more than horseplay."
The San Francisco Chronicle first reported the the pending charges Monday, citing sources familiar with the investigation.
The deputies’ conduct had been under investigation by both local and federal authorities since the allegations emerged in March 2015, when San Francisco public defender Jeff Adachi described "gladiator style" fights under former Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi.
Mirkarimi was later voted out of office.
It's the second recent high-profile case involving jail guards charged with crimes against inmates.
Three Santa Clara County jail guards are currently in the midst of a preliminary hearing after they were accused of beating inmate Michael Tyree to death in August. The guards have pleaded not guilty to murder charges.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.BOXER, Barbara, (1940 - ) Senate Years of Service: 1993-2017
Party: Democrat
Courtesy U.S. Senate Historical Office BOXER, Barbara, a Senator and a Representative from California; born Barbara Levy in Brooklyn, Kings County, N.Y., November 11, 1940; attended public schools in Brooklyn; graduated, Wingate High School 1958; B.A., Brooklyn College 1962; stockbroker 1962-1965; newspaper editor 1972-1974; congressional aide 1974-1976; elected member, Board of Supervisors, Marin County, Calif. 1976-1982; delegate, California State Democratic convention 1983; elected as a Democrat to the Ninety-eighth and to the four succeeding Congresses (January 3, 1983-January 3, 1993); was not a candidate for reelection to the House of Representatives in 1992; elected to the United States Senate in 1992; reelected in 1998, 2004, and again in 2010, and served from January 3, 1993, to January 3, 2017; chair, Committee on Environment and Public Works (One Hundred Tenth to One Hundred Thirteenth Congresses), Select Committee on Ethics (One Hundred Tenth to One Hundred Thirteenth Congresses); was not a candidate for reelection to the Senate in 2016.'Peeping Tom' caught on camera repeatedly in Rio Rancho neighborhood Copyright by KRQE - All rights reserved Video
RIO RANCHO, N.M. (KRQE) - A surveillance camera caught a "Peeping Tom" in the act and when neighbors saw the video, this man looked familiar to several of them.
"Both of our daughter's windows, our teenage daughter's windows, are forward of the fence. It's something that we've never liked and now we know why," said Brad Cressin, whose camera caught the suspect.
Cressin's cameras caught the same man peering into his daughter's windows for six minutes, and then that same night the camera show he came back and stared for another four minutes.
"They didn't sleep in their rooms for several nights. They slept on the sofa. They didn't want to go in their rooms at night at all," said Cressin.
The videos and still photos of the suspect were shared on the Northern Meadows community Facebook page.
KRQE News 13 spoke with several other parents who say they recognize this man as the same person they caught peering into their teen's windows.
Parents say this means he's looked at least into two windows of teenage girls and the window of a teenage boy.
"I can confirm that there is an open and active investigation regarding window peeping," said Captain Ronald Vigil with the Rio Rancho Police Department.
Vigil also says instances of window peeping are relatively rare, and that the offense itself is considered a misdemeanor. It is possible the suspect would only face a fine.
Parents we spoke with hope the suspect spends time behind bars.
"People like this shouldn't be allowed in neighborhoods and around so many kids that are in this neighborhood," said a neighborhood parent who did not want to be identified.
If you recognize the suspect or have any information, you are asked to call the Rio Rancho Police Department at 505-891-5900.Catch the twist in the title?
If you do a person a favor, you would expect that person to like you more. However, the research shows something different. If you do someone a favor, you tend to like that person more as a result. The reason is that we justify our actions to ourselves by assuming that we did the person a favor because we like them.
This phenomenon is dubbed the Ben Franklin effect, who quipped:
He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.
According to legend, Franklin used this discovery to curry the favor of a rival Pennsylvania legislator by asking the legislator to lend him a rare book and then thanking him profusely. It worked. In Franklin’s words:
When we next met in the House, he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility; and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death.
Lest you think that there is no science behind this, Jecker and Landy verified the phenomenon in a study that challenged participants to an intellectual contest. The winners were subsequently either:
Asked to return their prize money by the researcher because he had been using his own money and was running short Asked by a secretary to return their prize money because it was from the department and budget was running low Allowed to keep their prize money (i.e. not approached).
Everyone was then surveyed to see how they liked the researcher. Consistent with the Franklin effect, group 1 rated him higher than group 3 showing that a personal request for a favor increases likeability. In addition, group 2 rated the researcher lower than group 3 suggesting that an impersonal request decreases likeability.
Even though I didn’t find any supporting experiments, I suspect that the reverse is also true. If we hurt someone, we’re likely to like them less and want to hurt them more. This would explain long-standing grudges like Hatfield vs. McCoy and even wartime atrocities. Once we start, we may not be able to stop and engage in behavior we would normally never allow.
This may all be counter-intuitive, but Franklin’s insight is worth a mint: get someone to do you a favor and they will like you more.
More from SAPVoice:
Mental Accounting Explains Why You Buy Things You Don’t Need
It’s Right to Be Wrong
Your Brain At Work
You Can’t Work at Work
Can You Learn To Multiply?
The Poison of PowerEfrem Zimbalist Jr., the son of famous musical parents who established his own lasting celebrity in two of television's most popular series, "77 Sunset Strip" and "The F.B.I.," died Friday at age 95.
Zimbalist died at his Solvang home in California's bucolic horse country, said family friend Judith Moose, who released a statement from his children Stephanie Zimbalist and Efrem Zimbalist III.
"We are heartbroken to announce the passing into peace of our beloved father, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., today at his Solvang ranch," the statement read. "He actively enjoyed his life to the last day, showering love on his extended family, playing golf and visiting with close friends."
Zimbalist's stunning good looks and cool, deductive manner made him the ideal star as the hip private detective ferreting out Hollywood miscreants in "77 Sunset Strip," which aired from 1958 to 1964. As soon as that show ended he segued seamlessly into "The F.B.I." which aired from 1965 to 1974.
At the end of each episode of the latter show, after Zimbalist and his fellow G-men had captured that week's mobsters, subversives, bank robbers or spies, the series would post photos from the FBI's real-life most-wanted list. Some of those pictures led to arrests, which helped give the show the complete seal of approval of the agency's real-life director, J. Edgar Hoover.
The son of violin virtuoso Efrem Zimbalist and acclaimed opera singer Alma Gluck, young Efrem initially appeared headed for a musical career. He studied violin for seven years under the tutelage of Jascha Heifetz's father, but eventually developed more interest in theater.
He became an actor and "77 Sunset Strip" made him a star.
His daughter Stephanie also took up acting -- and small-screen detective work, in the hit 1980s TV series "Remington Steele." Her father had a recurring role in that show as a con man.
After serving in World War II, Zimbalist made his stage debut in "The Rugged Path," starring Spencer Tracy, and appeared in other plays and a soap opera before being called to Hollywood. Warner Bros. signed him to a contract and cast him in minor film roles.
He also had a recurring role in the hit 1950s Western series "Maverick," playing con man Dandy Jim Buckley.
Then in 1958 "77 Sunset Strip" debuted, starring Zimbalist as a cultured former O.S.S. officer and language expert whose partner was Roger Smith, an Ivy League Ph.D.
The pair operated out of an office in the center of Hollywood's Sunset Strip where, aided by their sometime helper, Kookie, a jive-talking beatnik type who doubled as a parking lot attendant, they tracked down miscreants.
Kookie's character, played by Edd Byrnes, helped draw young viewers to the show, and his constant hair combing created the national catchphrase, "Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb."
The program brought Zimbalist an Emmy nomination in 1959, but after a few seasons he tired of the long hours and what he believed were the bad scripts.
"A job like this should pay off in one of two ways: satisfaction or money. The money is not great, and there is no satisfaction," he said.
When the show faltered in 1963, Jack Webb of "Dragnet" fame was hired for an overhaul. He fired the cast except for Zimbalist, whom he made a world-traveling investigator. The repair work failed, and the series ended the following year.
Zimbalist had better luck with "The F.B.I.," which endured for a decade as one of TV's most popular shows.
Perceiving that the series could provide the real FBI with an important P.R. boost, Hoover opened the bureau's files to the show's producers and even allowed background shots to be filmed in real FBI offices.
"He never came on the set, but I knew him," Zimbalist said. "A charming man, extremely Virginia formal and an extraordinary command of the language."
In 2009 the FBI honored Zimbalist with his own special agent's badge, making him an honorary G-man in recognition of the contributions his show and his character, Inspector Lewis Erskine, made to the agency's reputation.
"We could not have asked for a better character, or a better man, to play his role," FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said at the time.
During summer breaks between the two series, Warner Bros. cast Zimbalist in several feature films, including "Too Much Too Soon," "Home Before Dark," "The Crowded Sky," "The Chapman Report" and "Wait Until Dark." In the latter, he played the husband of Audrey Hepburn, a blind woman terrorized by thugs in a truly frightening film.
Zimbalist also appeared in "By Love Possessed," "Airport 1975," "Terror Out of the Sky" and "Hot Shots."
But he would always be best known as a TV star, ironic for an actor who told The Associated Press in 1993 that when Warner Bros. hired him he had no interest in doing television.
"They showed me in my contract where it said I had to," he recalled.
"I ended up with my life slanted toward television and I just accept that," he said. "I think you play the hand the way it's dealt, that's all."
In the 1990s, Zimbalist recorded the voice of Alfred the butler in the cartoon version of the "Batman" TV series. That role, he said, "has made me an idol in my little grandchildren's eyes."
Efrem Zimbalist Jr. was born in New York City on Nov. 30, 1918.
His mother, reasoning that living amid the musical elite was not the best upbringing for a boy, sent him to boarding schools where he could be toughened by others his age. But young Efrem was bashful and withdrawn in school. His only outlet was acting in campus plays.
"I walked onstage in a play at prep school, and with childish naivetΘ, told myself, `Wow, I'm an actor!"' he once recalled.
He was kicked out of Yale after two years over dismal grades, which he blamed on a playboy attitude.
Afraid to go home, he stayed with a friend in New York City for three months, working as a page at NBC headquarters, where he was dazzled by the famous radio stars. Unable to break into radio as an actor, he studied at the famed Neighborhood Playhouse.
During World War II he served in the infantry, receiving a Purple Heart for a shrapnel wound in his leg.
In 1945, Zimbalist married Emily McNair and they had a daughter, Nancy, and son, Efrem III.
After his wife died in 1950 he gave up acting for a time to teach at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where his father was an artist in residence. He returned to Hollywood five years later, marrying Loranda Stephanie Spalding in 1956, and she gave birth to their daughter Stephanie.
Zimbalist was preceded in death by his second wife and by his daughter Nancy.
In addition to his son and other daughter, Stephanie, he is survived by four grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.WASHINGTON, D.C.
Forget the attack ads up to this point. The GOP nomination race is about to get messy.
Newt Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne Ginther, was scheduled to expose details of the couple’s 1999 divorce in an interview with Nightline on ABC Thursday night.
In a preview of the interview on ABC’s website, Ginther says Gingrich wanted an "open marriage." This was at the same time he was carrying on his second extramarital affair at the time with his current wife, Callista Bisek.
"I said to him, ‘We’ve been married a long time.’ And he said, ‘Yes, but you want me all to yourself, Callista doesn’t care what I do,’" she tells the interviewer. "He was asking to have an open marriage and I refused."
"He wanted an open marriage," ABC’s Brian Ross said.
"Yeah, that I accept the fact that he has somebody else in his life," Ginther said.
"And you said," Ross asked.
"No," she said. "That is not a marriage."
Gingrich and Ginther began their relationship while Gingrich was married to his first wife Jackie Battley. He divorced her in 1980 while she was fighting cancer, and married Marianne a year later.
Then in the mid-1990s, Gingrich began an affair with Bisek, a Congressional staffer 23 years his junior.
Gingrich continued his affair with Bisek through the 1990s, all the while Gingrich was leading the charge to impeach then president Bill Clinton for having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.
Gingrich and Bisek married in 2000. In 2007, Gingrich became a Catholic.
Ginther has revealed details of their divorce before, most recently in an Esquire article last fall.
She reportedly wanted to set the record straight again as Gingrich is fighting to be the Republican nominee to take on President Barack Obama in November’s election.
On Thursday, Gingrich said in a television interview his divorce is a personal matter and ABC should not show the interview. He also said his two daughters have written ABC asking it to cancel the broadcast Thursday night.“WE CAN”T GET ANYTHING DONE BECAUSE NOBODY SHOWS UP FOR MEETINGS!!!”
Heard this before? Most if not all of my association clients struggle with attendance and/or quorum issues at some point.
Community associations, like other corporations require input from directors to take most actions. To make attendance and participation more convenient some not-for-profit corporations have resolved to engage interactive technology to meet… virtually. Community associations, however, have been slow to properly adopt these procedures despite having the legal authority to do so for almost three years.
Absent prohibitions in the condominium association’s Declaration or By-Laws Associations are permitted to conduct meetings through use interactive technology so long
as all persons participating in the meeting may communicate with each other. Participation in such meetings will constitute attendance for matters requiring a quorum. Unless prohibited by association Declaration or By-Laws, voting on matters may also be done using electronic means provided certain safe guards are followed.
Interested in how this came to be?
In 2010, the Illinois Not
for Profit Corporation Act (NFPCA) amended the definition of “delivery” to include not only transfer by person or post, but transmission by electronic means to the email address or fax number on the records of the corporation. 805 ILCS 105/101.80(g)
The Illinois Condominium Property Act allows (ICPA) allows notices to be delivered. 765 ILCS 605/18(b)(6). Therefore, notices may now be delivered via email or other electronic means provided that is the address on record for the corporation. These include notices of future board meetings.
Under the NFPCA, unless “specifically prohibited by the articles of incorporation or bylaws, a corporation may allow members entitled to vote to participate in and act
at any meeting through the use of a conference telephone or interactive technology, including but not limited to electronic transmission, Internet usage, or remote communication, by means of which all persons participating in the meeting can communicate with each other.” 805 ILCS 105/107.05
Wondering how this amendment affects a board meeting?
A board can host a “virtual” meeting provided that all of those attending had the ability to communicate with one another.
Furthermore, “participation in such meeting shall constitute attendance” which would allow boards more opportunity to have enough voting members to constitute a quorum even when physical presence in the meeting is impractical or impossible.
What about voting?
The NFPCA also allows voting by electronic means. Such action is effective “only if notice is delivered 5 days prior with respect to the subject matter thereof” 805 ILCS 105/107.10 (b) But again, notices may be delivered electronically as well.
Once notice has been given of the impending vote, unless otherwise provided, any In particular if you’re an online slots player and enthusiast then there’s no comparison really when it comes to payout percentages you’re much better off playing online. action taken at a meeting of members entitled to vote may be taken by ballot without a meeting in writing by mail, email, or any other electronic means which the members entitled to vote are given an opportunity to vote for or against the proposed action so long as the number of votes cast (either electronically or otherwise) constitutes a quorum. 805 ILCS 105/107.10 (a)
There are a couple of caveats that must be followed. When voting by electronic means, the voting must remain open for 5 days (in addition to the 5 days notice prior to voting). When the voting is regarding removal of directors, merger, consolidation, dissolution or sale, or lease or exchange of assets, however, the voting must remain open for 20 days from date of delivery.
Electronic voting may also be utilized in associations that operate under a direct ballot procedure. While proxies are not permitted under direct ballot procedure, voting can be done using an association-issued ballot either in person OR by “other means of delivery specified in the Declaration, By-Laws, or rule.” 765 ILCS 605/18(b)(9)(B) Those specifications in the Declaration or
By-Laws must be in place at least 120 days prior to beginning the election. Further, ballots must be delivered to unit owners at least 10 and not more than 30 days before the election. Any unit owner who submits a ballot by “other means” may request to cast in person, thereby voiding their previously cast ballot.
If you wish to discuss this topic further or are interested in introducing technology to make operation of your association more efficient, please do not hesitate to contact us!On February 19, 2004, Azerbaijani Army Lieutenant Ramil Safarov took an axe and bludgeoned to death Gurgen Margaryan, an officer in the Armenian army who was asleep at the Budapest military academy where they were attending English-language courses organised by NATO. After nearly decapitating Margaryan, Safarov stabbed his corpse repeatedly in the chest. Safarov was arrested and tried in Hungarian court. In 2006, he was sentenced to life in prison.
On August 31, 2012, Ramil Safarov was extradited to Azerbaijan, where he was greeted as a hero. As an adoring crowd cheered, Safarov walked the streets of the capital draped in an Azerbaijani flag, carrying a bouquet of roses. He was pardoned by President Ilham Aliyev, promoted to the rank of major and given a new apartment and money by the Azerbaijani Defence Ministry.
"I am glad to be back with the Azeri people," Safarov said. "It's as if I am born again. I never lost hope of returning to my motherland and believed that the time would come when the supreme commander would resolve this question."
Warning to the West
The small petrostate of Azerbaijan has made headlines in 2012. In May, it hosted Eurovision, the annual singing competition watched by hundreds of millions around the world. As Azerbaijan's government spent more than $700 million on promotion and infrastructure in an effort to put its best face forward, activists focused on alerting the world to Azerbaijan's atrocious record on human rights.
Azerbaijan criticised ahead of Eurovision
Eurovision was seen as an "opportunity to highlight Azerbaijan’s failings", with the understanding that Azerbaijan's international image was of great importance to the Aliyev administration.
The Safarov case makes clear that it is not. While during Eurovision the Azerbaijani government paid lip service to democracy - "Azerbaijan is not an authoritarian state - we want to prove this to the whole world" an Aliyev aide told the Guardian - they have since brazenly promoted a murderer as a national hero, despite Western condemnation and a possible violation of international law.
Azerbaijani officials portray Safarov's murder of Margaryan as a capsule version of the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, a region which Azerbaijan and Armenia have fought over for decades. The conflict led to the deaths of thousands on each side, a massive refugee crisis for Azerbaijan, and the occupation of the territory by Armenia. Safarov versus Margaryan stems from Nagorno-Karabakh and serves as its representation. Only in this version, Azerbaijan won.
"Safarov's moral superiority was apparent even when he was in prison. The Armenian's insults towards our people, touching upon our national feelings, forced him to take this step," said Mubariz Gurbanli, a leading member of the ruling New Azerbaijan party. Gurbanli refers to an alleged desecration of the Azerbaijani flag by Margaryan and presents Safarov's response of hacking him to death as moral and justified.
The Safarov case serves as a warning to the West that they should never underestimate the insularity of dictatorships. Dictators struggle to shield citizens from foreign influence, with the result that foreigners come to believe that their influence matters. But the desire to block out the outside world stems from paranoia more than respect and that paranoia plays out in domestic politics - politics that strengthen pride by encouraging enmity.
Azerbaijan does not care what the rest of the world thinks. No action of a foreign power - be it international media or international law - has the resonance of revenge.
When Safarov was released, Azerbaijani officials immediately proclaimed it was for the benefit of the nation. "His release will raise the moral and psychological mood of the society," parliament member Zahid Oruj predicted. He was right. Since August 31, Azerbaijanis have lauded Safarov as a hero, and one of the main ways they do so is through digital media.
Unlike most authoritarian states, Azerbaijan does not censor the internet. An open internet has proven valuable for Azerbaijani officials, as it allows them to monitor citizens and publicise the punishment of dissenters in the online forums they frequent, deterring sympathisers from further activism. The Safarov case shows that the open internet is also a useful venue for the spread of nationalism rooted in bigotry, vengeance and pain.
Popular on social media
Tens of thousands of Azerbaijanis have declared their support for Safarov online. His Facebook page has over 49,000 fans. Supporters praise him in poetry, thanking God and the Aliyev regime for his return.
Convicted axe murderer welcomed in Azerbaijan
A picture of him in his regalia as major has over 2,000 "likes". On the unofficial Facebook page of President Aliyev, which is followed by over 57,000 people, Safarov was made the cover photo, with a smiling Aliyev in the profile picture below.
On Twitter, jubilant Azerbaijanis tweeted their approval under the hashtag #Xo?G?ldinRamil - Welcome, Ramil.
These posts and tweets were not manufactured by the Aliyev regime. They are genuine expressions of gratitude to a man who murdered another man in his sleep.
In 2011, the government of Azerbaijan launched a propaganda campaign designed to deter citizens from using technologies that connect them with the outside world. The goal of this campaign was to strengthen nationalist sentiment while stigmatising the use of media that may further dissent.
Foreign television programmes were banned as an affront to the "national mentality", while domestic television programmes showed "family tragedies" after young people joined Facebook and Twitter.
In March 2011, the country's chief psychiatrist proclaimed that social media users suffer mental disorders. As a result, internet use in Azerbaijan has stagnated compared to its neighbours in the Caucasus.
The reaction to Safarov shows that such efforts may be misplaced. The government never needed to promote Safarov as a hero or denounce his detractors. Azerbaijani citizens are doing it on their own and social media is enabling their efforts, validating their veneration of a murderer through clicks and likes.
Not all Azerbaijanis agree with the adulation, but they are in the minority. With Safarov, Azerbaijan is having an online grassroots movement - a movement by Azerbaijanis and for Azerbaijanis, indifferent to international indignation.
Advocates of an open internet have long hoped that openness will augur democratic reform. But an open internet is of little benefit to activists living in a state that punishes them for using it. It is also of little consolation when the state is adept at capitalising on public agony.
The online embrace of Safarov reflects the heartache of Azerbaijan's history as well as the ways digital media can strengthen dictatorship. The people spread the cause and the government reaps the glory.
Sarah Kendzior is an anthropologist who recently received her PhD from Washington University in St Louis.And that was when I knew things looked grim for Atletico Madrid.
There were a couple poor passes in transition, and one particular defensive mishap, early on, where I knew that Diego Simeone’s outfit was out of it and was likely to lose.
And lose, they did; 3-0.
But before the final whistle blew, and Atletico supporters everywhere were left wondering what they had just witnessed, Karim Benzema, at the six-minute mark, had a point-blank shot that he couldn’t settle into the net and past Jan Oblak. The build-up to the chance, however, is where you could see that Atletico was going to have trouble coping with Zinedine Zidane’s game plan, coupled with their incredible technical prowess.
The video below illustrates a lot that was wrong with Atletico and great about Real in this match.
Zidane likely had a feeling that Atletico was going to be more aggressive and expansive, as they have undergone a tactical transformation this season, and knew that they had to exploit this.
In the video above, we see an Atleti outfit that failed to take advantage of good passing and movements that lead up to the edge of Real’s penalty area. Furthermore, when Atleti counter-pressed well and won the ball back, they yet again struggled to produce chances, especially with little to no space in the central areas.
In the same sequence of play when Real Madrid won the ball, Marcelo used his skill and speed of touch, to beat an Atleti counter-press that was taking form. The Brazilian’s technical ability is massive when playing out the back.
Another key aspect that led to Benzema’s early chance on goal was the way in which Zidane used Luka Modric and Casemiro to play close together in the build-up phases, with the Croatian drifting wide when the ball was switched.
It should also be noted that Atleti’s forwards didn’t track back as much as usual, highlighting Simeone’s desire to really focus more on troubling Real’s backline. This made it harder for Atleti to cause overloads down the flanks where Real Madrid work best.
Above, we see how Isco took advantage of a spaced out, four-man Atleti defensive box by attracting Filipe Luis inside and leaving Dani Carvajal to have more time to run behind.
The three-minute video showcases how, in theory, Simeone wanted to play more expansive and did it quite well in some counter-attacking and build up phases, but lacked the finishing to hurt Real Madrid and in turn left his side to transition into a defensive block that wasn’t as compact as times past.
So, when you’re constantly not taking advantage of chances and good transitions, you’re leaving a less-organized low-block to have to deal with world-class attacking talent like Real Madrid’s XI.
Atleti were looking to score a goal or two early on, and then become ultra-defensive to close out the game. They failed and were left chasing from the moment Cristiano Ronaldo scored his first goal in the 10th minute.
Anyway, read on as Eat Sleep Drink explains how Atleti’s poor execution in the attacking phases of their play was the biggest reason for their downfall.
Atletico’s failure in attacking phases (especially Koke) was their biggest issue
It wasn’t all bad for Atletico Madrid despite what other commoner media reports may say. From a tactical point of view, and if you pay attention to detail, there were moments where Atleti’s offensive and aggressive approach worked in some aspects.
Some of Atleti’s build ups and counter-pressing led to decent combinations that neared Real’s penalty area. However, a good final ball or moment of brilliance was lost on almost every single occasion.
Oh, and Koke’s performance was massively disappointing. The video below showcases just how poor Atleti were in attack.
Conclusion
Real Madrid moved the ball quickly, very quickly. They exploited an Atletico Madrid game plan that wanted to take them out of the match quickly. Simeone’s men wanted to score early, and do what they do best: defend well and not concede.
But, amid their good counter-pressing and decent build-ups, Atleti failed their coach in the attacking phases. They couldn’t produce quality chances or finish when the opportunities arrived.
Zidane got a great result. His side possessed the ball and forced a less-organized Atleti defense to rely on their backline to come up big in more 1v1 situations due to getting less help, especially on Ronaldo’s last two goals.
When you’re constantly giving up chances in your end, and with nothing to show for in your attacking phases, then, well, you’re going to struggle to play fire with fire against Real Madrid. If they were going to open up their defensive block, Atleti needed their attacking talent to finish and take Real’s confidence out early.
They didn’t.Coach Mike Zimmer explained today why the Vikings opted to stand by defensive coordinator George Edwards when he was arrested for a DWI in May when they did not with practice-squader Isame Faciane.
“Every situation is different,” he said. “And I really don’t care about being consistent. I care about being right. When this happened with George, George was given a lot of things to do, including a huge monetary commitment that he had to make. And he fulfilled all of his obligations.”
Edwards was charged with three misdemeanors, including fourth-degree DWI, after registering a blood-alcohol level over the 0.08 legal limit. As part of a plea deal, he pleaded guilty Aug. 30 to misdemeanor careless driving and was sentenced to one year of probation and fined $1,000.
This summer, Edwards attended a court-ordered chemical dependency class and a panel with victims through Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
In a statement, the Vikings said Edwards was “significantly disciplined” by the team after immediately notifying them of his May arrest. The NFL felt their punishment was sufficient and will not further discipline him.
Zimmer voiced support for Edwards, his defensive coordinator the past three years, but said “if he messes up again, his future will be [in doubt].”
As for Faciane, who was arrested last Wednesday hours after players were dismissed for their bye week, Zimmer said the practice-squad guard was released because he did not immediately handle his arrest acceptably.
“[With Faciane’s] situation, I told the players in the meeting the day they left to make sure they stay out of trouble and do the right things. I told them again on the field [as] they left. I had the coaches text them and remind them to stay out of trouble,” he said. “And then when this did happen, on the very same day he was told to call me twice and didn’t.”Two Israeli policemen died after Palestinian gunmen reportedly opened fire near al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem's Old City, before they too were killed in a gunfight.
Israeli police said the three gunmen reached one of the gates near the al-Aqsa compound, opened fire and fled towards al-Aqsa Mosque where they were shot dead by police officers on Friday.
Israeli police later ordered the closure of the compound, saying there would be no prayers at the site on Friday.
Al Jazeera's Harry Fawcett, reporting from Jerusalem, said the Palestinians reportedly shot at Israeli security forces near the Lion's Gate to the Old City.
"The three attackers were armed with two machine guns, a pistol and a knife, according to Israeli police," Fawcett reported.
"They were then pursued inside the al-Aqsa Mosque compound. In the courtyard of the compound, a final gun battle ensued between the gunmen and Israeli security forces.
"Management of al-Aqsa mosque said the bodies of two Palestinians were inside the courtyard of the compound," Fawcett reported.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by phone on Friday and condemned the shooting, Palestinian news agency Wafa said.
"The president expressed his strong rejection and condemnation of the incident that took place at al-Aqsa mosque, as well as his rejection of any violent incidents from any side, especially in places of worship," Wafa said.
Abbas called on Netanyahu to end the shutdown of the holy site. Netanyahu assured Abbas the long-standing status quo at the compound, which gives Muslims exclusive prayer rights, would be maintained, Wafa said.
'Tensions could rise'
The ancient, marble-and-stone compound houses the al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third-holiest site, and the 7th-century Dome of the Rock. Thousands pray there every Friday.
The western wall of the compound, also known as the Wailing Wall, is considered the holiest site in Judaism.
"It is the first time in years that the compound closes for prayers on Friday. Of course, this has the potential to increase tensions among the about 10,000 Palestinians who normally come here for worship," Fawcett said.
Following the incident, access to the Old City was restricted.
Dozens of Palestinian residents waited in the sun to be allowed into the Old City.
Um Nidal, who lives in Bab Huta - a neighbourhood in the Muslim quarter - told Al Jazeera that she has been waiting for more than three hours with her child, who is 16 months
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the other isn’t very responsible. So Sive has basically been taking care of his family — and their home — for years.
He said his then-upcoming trip to the U.S. would be a great learning opportunity — and a welcome respite.
“The United States trip will be like a vacation to me,” he said.
See a slideshow of Sive at TheWorld.org.
Lessons Learned Abroad
After Sive returned from the U.S., I sat down with him at his home — a three-room cement house in a low-income area outside Cape Town.
He showed me pictures from his trip on a computer screen — photos of the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, even his hotel room. It was the first time he had stayed in a hotel.
“I slept in a big bed, big soft bed, (with a) TV, everything,” he said.
Sive participated in workshops with other young African leaders, and he met all sorts of Americans — including some elderly African American men. They told the group about their childhoods and what it was like to be an African American during the civil rights era.
Sive said the trip transformed him. He now dreams of being a doctor or ending global warming — maybe both. And he wants to work with people from different cultures.
Difficult Homecoming
Just a few days after he got back from the United States, while still riding a high from the trip, Sive’s life took a sudden turn.
His mother’s health was getting worse. Doctors discovered she was anemic and had a wide range of other problems. Sive checked his mom into the hospital and visited her regularly.
Then, two weeks ago, he got a phone call. His mother had passed away.
I met up with Sive at a place he goes to cope with his stress. It’s a sandy ridge at the edge of his neighborhood, where garbage is tangled in clumps of wild grass. From a certain spot, he can glimpse the ocean.
Sive said he was probably the last person to see his mother alive, because other relatives rarely visited her in the hospital. He said her death meant he would never achieve one of his lifelong dreams.
“I always had a dream that I (would) be the one take my mom out of this suffering,” he said. “My latest dream is that I wanted to take my mom to the U.S.”
He said his mother’s death has made him even more determined to get a good education and achieve his dreams — and to get out of his impoverished community.
“I want to live a good life. I don’t want to live the life that my mom lived — to suffer," he said. "Right now, I just want to pass my exams.”
His high school was having midterms — and he had chosen not to defer them. But at the moment, he couldn’t study. He had to deal with the logistics of life and death.
In His Own Words: A Young South African on Family, School, and Managing at Home from PRI's The World on Vimeo.
Dealing With Change
Sive headed to a corner store. He walked along a gravel road, past rows of matching houses and children playing soccer.
With his mother gone, Sive said his 19-year-old brother should become the family head. But Sive said his brother isn’t very responsible, so Sive expects to be the one making decisions — if his brother doesn’t change.
At the store, Sive bought a loaf of bread. I asked how he and his brother are going to get by, financially.
“We don’t have money,” he said. “We are so broke.”
His mother had been getting a disability grant from the government — about $120 a month. Now that money will stop coming in. Money from her life insurance is going toward her funeral.
So, for now, Sive’s only income is a small child welfare grant and some cash he makes working at a bakery on Saturdays.
Back at the house, Sive’s brother was painting the living room. He said he wanted it to look good for when people came to pay their respects. Neighbors and friends were stopping by each night during the week.
Standing on his front step, Sive said all this cleaning and hosting was taking up a lot of his time — and so was another obligation.
“There are people that don’t know yet about my mom, so I have to go and tell people that my mom passed away,” he said.
He’d have to go around the township on foot – because none of the people he was contacting use email, and he didn’t have their phone numbers.
With so much to do, and so much change happening, Sive was incredibly stressed. He didn’t know when he’d have time to prepare for his exams.
Back inside, he picked up a brush and helped his brother paint.
A few hours later, people began showing up at his house. More than 40 packed into the tiny living room and spilled out onto the road. A preacher delivered a passionate sermon, and the crowd sang hymns.
A few days later, Sive would travel with his relatives — and his mother’s body — on a 12-hour journey to the family’s ancestral land. His mother would be buried there.
But on this night, after people paid their respects and headed home, once Sive was alone in the house, he grabbed his school notebook and checked his midterm exam schedule.
Then, he sat down on his sagging metal bed and began to study.One student was killed and one injured during a shooting inside their off-campus Michigan State University (MSU) apartment complex on Friday, police said.
Dominique James Nolff, a 20-year-old MSU student, died Saturday morning from “multiple gunshot wounds” at Sparrow Hospital, a statement from East Lansing Police Department said.
WILX Police at the scene of a Friday shooting near Michigan State University.
The shooting occurred about 8:45 p.m. on Friday in East Lansing, according to the East Lansing Police Department.
The second victim, a 20-year-old student, whose name has not been disclosed, suffered one gunshot wound and was treated and released from the hospital on Friday.
East Lansing Police Department’s Detective Bureau was “working diligently” on Saturday to locate the gunman, who is described as being in his 20s, the statement said.
Police said the shooting at the Cedar Village student residential area did "not appear to be a random act."
"Upon arrival two victims had suffered gunshot wounds while inside their apartment," the statement said.
"This is near but not on the MSU campus. There is no indication of immediate danger to the campus community," said MSU spokesman Kent Cassella on Friday.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the Nolff family and friends,” Michigan State University said in a statement Saturday. East Lansing Mayor Nathan Triplett responded in a tweet which read, “There are no words adequate to describe the tragedy of losing one so young to a senseless act of gun violence.”
Reuters contributed to this report.You might already have heard about Legend of Grimrock, the dungeon crawler from indie developer Almost Human. The team are currently polishing the game, which harks back to classics like Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder, and preparing for an impending launch on Windows, followed by a release on Mac OS X and iOS. After their swift introduction of an alternate control scheme to accommodate a disabled fan was lauded on the front page of popular social media website Reddit, we decided to find out a bit more about the game and the studio behind it.
The team aren’t new to the game’s industry; Almost Human Ltd. was founded in Finland by Petri Häkkinen, Antti Tiihonen, Olli Pelz, and Juho Salila. Petri and Antti hail from Remedy Entertainment, having worked on games like Max Payne 2 and Alan Wake, while Olli and Juho come from Futuremark Game Studios, where they worked on the benchmark software 3DMark and the innovative space shooter Shattered Horizon. Between them, they have over thirty years of experience.
“After working for many years on big projects at bigger companies, we felt that we wanted to work on our own games with a smaller team,” Olli told me. “Also, the development of digital distribution in recent years has opened new possibilities for tiny indie studios, and it was that change that gave us the confidence that we may actually have a chance to succeed. Compared to bigger studios, we can afford to concentrate on a more niche market and still make a living.”
“Our definite source of inspiration is the legendary Dungeon Master. In our opinion, it is perhaps the best game ever made, and we feel it has many wonderful gameplay elements that seem to lack in most modern games.”
He tells me that the team’s primary source of inspiration was Dungeon Master, even going as far as to say “in our opinion, it is perhaps the best game ever made”, and that the “grid-based movement enables mind-bending puzzles and tactical combat in a way that is very welcome to modern games”. We can’t say we disagree: certainly, games in this vein have been missing from the mainstream market for over a decade, despite the legendary status of many classics of the genre.
“We are not sure why this style of game has declined in popularity after the ’90s,” Olli admits, although he suggests that perhaps “the arrival of real 3D graphics made the grid-based games look old”. The impressive visual fidelity of Legend of Grimrock may put this hypothesis to rest, however; screenshots and video from the team show a gorgeous game which may just have what it takes to revive the genre.
Naturally, it’s Olli and Juho from Futuremark that are in charge of the visual aspects of the game, with their background at a studio well known for crafting computer-intensive, ultra-attractive graphics. Olli is in charge of rigging and animations, while Juho creates the monsters and environments; Petri is responsible for programming and the project’s core vision, while Antti works on level design, items, and sounds. It truly is a team effort, and the group have had to overcome many challenges in the game’s development
“We read and listen to all the posts and try to keep the community constantly up-to-date about the development. We try to answer as many posts as we can in-between working hard on the game.”
“The biggest challenges have been in merging the old-school gameplay with modern expectations. Most of the old gameplay mechanics had to be reinvented in order to match the expectations of the gamers of these days. On top of that, the GUI had to also be reinvented. We did a lot of iterations and testing to finally come up with a concept that works well and feels natural. These challenges have basically been present through the whole development of the game – and the guys are still polishing it as I write these words.”
“The interaction with the community has been one of the centre pillars in the development of the game,” I’m told after bringing up the game’s official blog. The team have kept the blog updated throughout Legend of Grimrock’s development, making regular updates as new content and features are added to the game. “As a developer, it is extremely motivating to get continuous feedback from such a dedicated and supportive community, and it ensures we keep going on the right track. You just can’t go wrong with this approach.”
Indeed, it’s thanks to the developer’s keen attention to the words of fans that they’ve achieved such fame on Reddit. One disabled gamer’s simple query about the dropping of the on-screen arrows from the game interface was soon escalated into a priority fix for the team, who introduced an alternate interface to account for the fan’s inconveniences.
“After hearing of the requests, we thought it was important to implement it, and it all came out really nice and quickly. That’s the advantage of a small team. We can make such decisions on the spot and implement them right away. And it also shows the important of keeping close interaction with the community. After all, they are the ones we are making the game for!”
Olli tells me that we “won’t have to wait too long to start your journey in the dungeons of Mount Grimrock”, with the game slated for a launch early this year. They’re hoping to see the game on Steam someday, they’re thinking about mobile platforms besides iOS, and they’re going to consider a Linux port, but most importantly, they’re getting ready for the PC launch.
“We put a lot of love and effort in making Legend of Grimrock and we hope it will sell well enough to enable us to make more games with the same kind of dedication. We hope that the game will prove that the old dungeon crawlers still have an audience, and that it will spark a new era of old-school dungeon crawling.”
You can find out more about Legend of Grimrock, and sign up to receive updates by email, on the game’s official development blog here. You can also read about the aforementioned Reddit post here.So I was reading this strange article by Christopher Hitchens (who else?) while I saw this photo.
The 1980 Summer Olympic Games were already mired by controversy even before they opened. The United States led the boycott of 64 other countries in protest of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. They instead participated in the Olympic Boycott Games or the “Liberty Bell Classic” in Philadelphia, which opened 3 days before the actual games. Fifteen other countries (mainly European) that participated did so under the Olympic Flag instead of their national flags. The Olympic Flag and Hymn were used at Medal Ceremonies when athletes from these countries won medals. The Soviet television alternately ignored and criticized this.
After setting a new world record on July 30th, Polish pole vaulter Wladyslaw Kozakiewicz made a rude gesture (bras d’honneur) to the hostile, jeering Moscow crowd. The crowd was rooting for Soviet jumper Konstantin Volkov. The image was seen around the world except ironically in the Soviet Union and its satellite states. To many, it signified Polish resentment of Russia’s control over Eastern Europe; in Poland, the gesture became immediately known as Kozakiewicz’s gesture. (gest Kozakiewicza).
After the Olympics, the Soviet ambassador to Poland demanded that Kozakiewicz be stripped of his medal over his “insult to the Soviet people”. The official response of the Polish government was that the gesture had been an involuntary muscle spasm caused by his exertion. Kozakiewicz for his part promptly defected to West Germany.The prodigal son has returned, and he’s bringing some Strange Weather with him. Bestselling author Joe Hill is set to follow up last year’s hit novel The Fireman with a collection of four bizarre and compelling new novellas, and EW can exclusively reveal the cover, below — along with a sneak peek inside.
Strange Weather tells stories involving shards of sharp crystals that inexplicably begin to fall from the sky, a parachuter suddenly marooned on a solid cloud, a mentally unhinged security guard, and a camera that erases memories (interestingly, Hill’s father Stephen King also released a collection of four short novels, one of which features a creepy camera, with Four Past Midnight).
Strange Weather hits shelves Oct. 24.
Excerpt from Strange Weather by Joe Hill
Snapshot
1.
Shelly Beukes stood at the bottom of the driveway, squinting up at our pink-sandstone ranch as if she had never seen it before. She wore a trench coat fit for Humphrey Bogart and carried a big cloth handbag printed with pineapples and tropical flowers. She could’ve been on her way to the supermarket, if there were one in walking distance, which there wasn’t. I had to look twice before I registered what was wrong with the picture: She had forgotten to put on her shoes, and her feet were filthy, almost black with grime.
I was in the garage, doing science—my father’s term for what I was up to anytime I decided to ruin a perfectly good vacuum cleaner or TV remote. I wrecked more than I built, although I had successfully wired an Atari joystick into a radio, so I could jump from station to station by pressing the Fire button—a fundamentally stupid trick that nevertheless impressed the judges of the eighth-grade science fair, where it earned me the blue ribbon for creativity.
On the morning Shelly turned up at the base of the driveway, I was working on my party gun. It looked like a death ray from a pulp-era science-fiction novel, a big horn of dented brass with the butt and trigger of a Luger (I had in fact soldered together a trumpet and a toy gun to create the body). When you pulled the trigger, though, it sounded an air horn, popped flashbulbs, and blew a storm of confetti and paper ribbons. I had an idea that if I could get the gun right, my dad and I could bring it to toy manufacturers, maybe license the idea to Spencer Gifts. Like most budding engineers, I honed my craft on a series of basically juvenile pranks. There isn’t a single dude at Google who didn’t at least fantasize about designing X-ray goggles to see through girls’ skirts.
I was aiming the barrel of the party gun into the street when I first spotted Shelly, right there in my sights. I was going to call to her, but then I saw her feet and the air snagged in my throat. I didn’t make a sound, just watched her for a bit. Her lips moved. She was whispering to herself. I put the party gun aside.
Almost from the first, I felt it was important not to do anything to alarm her. There was no obvious reason for caution—but a lot of our best thinking takes place well below the level of conscious cogitation and has nothing to do with rationality. The monkey brain absorbs a great deal of information from subtle cues that we aren’t even aware we’ve received.
So when I came down the slope of the driveway, I had my thumbs hooked in my pockets and wasn’t even looking directly at her. I squinted into the horizon as if watching the flight of a far-off airplane. I approached her the way you’d close in on a limping stray dog, one that might lick your hand with hopeful affection or might lunge, upper lip drawn back to show a mouthful of teeth. I didn’t speak until I was almost within arm’s reach of her.
“Oh, hi, Mrs. Beukes,” I said, pretending to notice her for the first time. “You okay?”
Her head swung toward me, and her plump face instantly settled into a look of pleasant benignity. “Well, I’ve got myself all mixed up! I walked all the way down here, but I don’t know why! This isn’t my day to clean!”
I twitched, could not have been more startled if she’d pulled open that trench coat and revealed she was naked. Once upon a time, she had kept house for my father, coming by every Friday morning to vacuum and dust. But she had retired after her triple bypass in 1982. It hadn’t been Shelly’s day to clean in six years.
Her cloth shoulder bag drooped open. I looked into it and saw a battered, grimy lawn gnome, several empty soda cans, and a single raggedy old sneaker.
“I’d better go home,” Shelly said suddenly, almost robotically. “The Afrikaner will be wondering where I got to.”
The Afrikaner was her husband, Lawrence Beukes, who had emigrated from Cape Town before I was born. At seventy, Larry Beukes was one of the most powerfully built men I knew, a former weight lifter with the sculpted arms and vein-threaded neck of a circus strongman. Being huge was his primary professional responsibility. He had made his money on a couple of gyms he’d opened in the seventies, just as the oiled, mind-boggling mass of Arnold Schwarzenegger was muscling its way into the public consciousness. Larry and Arnie had once both appeared in the same calendar. Larry was February and flexed in the snow, wearing nothing but a tight black hammock for his nuts. Arnie was June and stood glistening on the beach, a girl in a bikini perched on each gargantuan arm.
“I’ll walk you,” I said and took her arm.
I felt bad about her bare feet on the hot road. It was muggy, and the mosquitoes were out. After a while I noticed a red flush across her face and a dew of sweat in her old-lady whiskers, and I thought maybe she should take the trench coat off. Although I admit that by then the notion had crossed my mind that maybe she really was naked under there. Given her disorientation, I didn’t think it could be ruled out. I fought down my unease and asked if I could carry her coat. She gave her head a quick shake.
“I don’t want to be recognized.”
This was such a wonderfully daffy thing to say that for a moment I forgot the situation and responded as if Shelly were still herself.
“By who?” I asked.
She leaned toward me and in a voice that was practically a hiss said, “The Polaroid Man. That slick f—ing weasel in his convertible. He’s been taking pictures when the Afrikaner isn’t around. I don’t know how much he’s taken away with his camera, but he can’t have any more.” She gripped my wrist. Her body was still stout and big-bosomed, but her hand was as bony and clawlike as a fairy-tale crone’s.
“Don’t let him take a picture of you,” she said. “Don’t let him start taking things away.”When biologists synthesize DNA, they take pains not to create or spread a dangerous stretch of genetic code that could be used to create a toxin or, worse, an infectious disease. But one group of biohackers has demonstrated how DNA can carry a less expected threat—one designed to infect not humans nor animals but computers.
In new research they plan to present at the USENIX Security conference on Thursday, a group of researchers from the University of Washington has shown for the first time that it’s possible to encode malicious software into physical strands of DNA, so that when a gene sequencer analyzes it the resulting data becomes a program that corrupts gene-sequencing software and takes control of the underlying computer. While that attack is far from practical for any real spy or criminal, it's one the researchers argue could become more likely over time, as DNA sequencing becomes more commonplace, powerful, and performed by third-party services on sensitive computer systems. And, perhaps more to the point for the cybersecurity community, it also represents an impressive, sci-fi feat of sheer hacker ingenuity.
“We know that if an adversary has control over the data a computer is processing, it can potentially take over that computer,” says Tadayoshi Kohno, the University of Washington computer science professor who led the project, comparing the technique to traditional hacker attacks that package malicious code in web pages or an email attachment. “That means when you’re looking at the security of computational biology systems, you’re not only thinking about the network connectivity and the USB drive and the user at the keyboard but also the information stored in the DNA they’re sequencing. It’s about considering a different class of threat.”
A Sci-Fi Hack
For now, that threat remains more of a plot point in a Michael Crichton novel than one that should concern computational biologists. But as genetic sequencing is increasingly handled by centralized services—often run by university labs that own the expensive gene sequencing equipment—that DNA-borne malware trick becomes ever so slightly more realistic. Especially given that the DNA samples come from outside sources, which may be difficult to properly vet.
If hackers did pull off the trick, the researchers say they could potentially gain access to valuable intellectual property, or possibly taint genetic analysis like criminal DNA testing. Companies could even potentially place malicious code in the DNA of genetically modified products, as a way to protect trade secrets, the researchers suggest. "There are a lot of interesting—or threatening may be a better word—applications of this coming in the future," says Peter Ney, a researcher on the project.
Regardless of any practical reason for the research, however, the notion of building a computer attack—known as an "exploit"—with nothing but the information stored in a strand of DNA represented an epic hacker challenge for the University of Washington team. The researchers started by writing a well-known exploit called a "buffer overflow," designed to fill the space in a computer's memory meant for a certain piece of data and then spill out into another part of the memory to plant its own malicious commands.
But encoding that attack in actual DNA proved harder than they first imagined. DNA sequencers work by mixing DNA with chemicals that bind differently to DNA's basic units of code—the chemical bases A, T, G, and C—and each emit a different color of light, captured in a photo of the DNA molecules. To speed up the processing, the images of millions of bases are split up into thousands of chunks and analyzed in parallel. So all the data that comprised their attack had to fit into just a few hundred of those bases, to increase the likelihood it would remain intact throughout the sequencer's parallel processing.
When the researchers sent their carefully crafted attack to the DNA synthesis service Integrated DNA Technologies in the form of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs, they found that DNA has other physical restrictions too. For their DNA sample to remain stable, they had to maintain a certain ratio of Gs and Cs to As and Ts, because the natural stability of DNA depends on a regular proportion of A-T and G-C pairs. And while a buffer overflow often involves using the same strings of data repeatedly, doing so in this case caused the DNA strand to fold in on itself. All of that meant the group had to repeatedly rewrite their exploit code to find a form that could also survive as actual DNA, which the synthesis service would ultimately send them in a finger-sized plastic vial in the mail.
The result, finally, was a piece of attack software that could survive the translation from physical DNA to the digital format, known as FASTQ, that's used to store the DNA sequence. And when that FASTQ file is compressed with a common compression program known as fqzcomp—FASTQ files are often compressed because they can stretch to gigabytes of text—it hacks that compression software with its buffer overflow exploit, breaking out of the program and into the memory of the computer running the software to run its own arbitrary commands.
A Far-Off Threat
Even then, the attack was fully translated only about 37 percent of the time, since the sequencer's parallel processing often cut it short or—another hazard of writing code in a physical object—the program decoded it backward. (A strand of DNA can be sequenced in either direction, but code is meant to be read in only one. The researchers suggest in their paper that future, improved versions of the attack might be crafted as a palindrome.)
Despite that tortuous, unreliable process, the researchers admit, they also had to take some serious shortcuts in their proof-of-concept that verge on cheating. Rather than exploit an existing vulnerability in the fqzcomp program, as real-world hackers do, they modified the program's open-source code to insert their own flaw allowing the buffer overflow. But aside from writing that DNA attack code to exploit their artificially vulnerable version of fqzcomp, the researchers also performed a survey of common DNA sequencing software and found three actual buffer overflow vulnerabilities in common programs. "A lot of this software wasn't written with security in mind," Ney says. That shows, the researchers say, that a future hacker might be able to pull off the attack in a more realistic setting, particularly as more powerful gene sequencers start analyzing larger chunks of data that could better preserve an exploit's code.
Needless to say, any possible DNA-based hacking is years away. Illumina, the leading maker of gene-sequencing equipment, said as much in a statement responding to the University of Washington paper. "This is interesting research about potential long-term risks. We agree with the premise of the study that this does not pose an imminent threat and is not a typical cyber security capability," writes Jason Callahan, the company's chief information security officer "We are vigilant and routinely evaluate the safeguards in place for our software and instruments. We welcome any studies that create a dialogue around a broad future framework and guidelines to ensure security and privacy in DNA synthesis, sequencing, and processing."
But hacking aside, the use of DNA for handling computer information is slowly becoming a reality, says Seth Shipman, one member of a Harvard team that recently encoded a video in a DNA sample. (Shipman is married to WIRED senior writer Emily Dreyfuss.) That storage method, while mostly theoretical for now, could someday allow data to be kept for hundreds of years, thanks to DNA's ability to maintain its structure far longer than magnetic encoding in flash memory or on a hard drive. And if DNA-based computer storage is coming, DNA-based computer attacks may not be so farfetched, he says.
"I read this paper with a smile on my face, because I think it’s clever," Shipman says. "Is it something we should start screening for now? I doubt it." But he adds that, with an age of DNA-based data possibly on the horizon, the ability to plant malicious code in DNA is more than a hacker parlor trick.
"Somewhere down the line, when more information is stored in DNA and it’s being input and sequenced constantly," Shipman says, "we'll be glad we started thinking about these things."In 2007, the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) refused to stake a firm position on how fast and how high sea levels would rise. The IPCC claimed that, while there was widespread agreement on sea level rise due to thermal expansion of seawater, scientists did not yet know enough about how the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica would respond to climate disruption. The science has advanced considerably since 2007 and the majority of the new results (for example, this paper, this paper, and this consensus statement from earlier this year) have confirmed that the IPCC estimates were too low.
Two recent studies measuring different changes on the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves have added more evidence that sea levels are going to rise higher and faster than the IPCC estimates. One used highly accurate measurements of the changes in ice sheet thickness to estimate how much ice was exiting the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica via glaciers dumping ice into the ocean. The other used the GRACE gravity measurement satellites to estimate the total amount of mass being lost from Antarctica. Both found significant losses in ice, but GRACE found something more significant – a loss of ice mass from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, a mass of ice that was previously believed to be stable or even adding ice mass.
Laser altimetry bounces a laser off the surface of the earth to measure how far the surface is from the satellite, and as the satellite passes over the surface, changes in surface’s height can be tracked over months and years. The first study, published in the journal Nature, use laser altimetry to determine whether the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica were getting thicker or thinner, and the results revealed significant thinning of the ice sheets along their edges.
The Greenland data revealed that the majority of the ice cap’s edges showing significant thinning, with those areas feeding fast-flowing glaciers thinning the most. Only a few areas showed thickening, and most of those were in the interior and/or above 2000 m altitude. As the ice thins, the total mass of ice going into the ocean increases and sea level rises. However, the authors couldn’t estimate how much ice was being lost due to thinning because most of Greenland is thinning at a slow enough rate that it didn’t exceed the detection limit and so wasn’t considered significant. Even so, the fast moving glaciers thinned dramatically, and in three areas the thinning has penetrated deep into the ice sheet – at the outlet glaciers Jakobshavn Isbrae, Helheim, and Kangerdlugssuaq, where thinning is detectable 120, 95, and 100 km inland. Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier is one of the largest outlet glaciers, draining 6.5% of the Greenland ice cap. Helheim and Kangerdlugssuaq are known for having accellerated unexpectedly and retreated from the coast rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s.
The Nature study’s conclusions on Antarctica provide another independent confirmation of what scientists have known for a long time – the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is thinning dramatically. In addition, there are areas of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) that are thinning as well, although the bulk of the EAIS appeared to be relatively stable between 2003 and 2007. And the authors found that some parts of the WAIS were actually thickening, even as the outlet glaciers were thinning.
These results led the authors to conclude that air temperatures are less a factor in the loss of ice mass than changes in ocean temperature and currents. The areas that thinned the fastest were those where the outlet glaciers ground out into the ocean in areas where warm water can melt the bottoms of the glacier, speeding it up by reducing friction on the sea bottom. The authors say
This is an apparently widespread phenomenon that does not require climate warming sufficient to initiate ice-shelf surface melt. (emphasis mine)
Furthermore, the authors conclude that the thinning of the ice sheets at their edges is “more sensitive, pervasive, enduring, and important than previously realized.”
While the laser altimetry study had difficulties determining the mass lost to thinning and melt, the GRACE satellite measures mass directly, albeit over a much larger spatial area than a reflected laser beam. And according to the study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, not only has there been significant mass loss from the WAIS, the previously stable EAIS is apparently losing mass as well. If the EAIS were to melt significantly, it would add a massive amount of water to the oceans and dramatically increase sea level rise, especially since melting of the EAIS has not been included in the climate models.
Something to notice is that the two studies agree with each other qualitatively – the areas that are the reddest in the image above are the areas with the most thinning. They match the bluest areas in the figure at right, which have the greatest mass loss.
According to the GRACE study, the WAIS lost 132 ± 26 Gt of ice per year while the EAIS lost 57 ± 52 Gt per year over the period from 2002 to 2009. According to the paper, the large error in both regions is largely a result of limitations in the model of post-glacial rebound in Antarctica, but the larger EAIS error is a result of barometric pressure problems that occur over the EAIS but not over the WAIS. Regardless, the error is still smaller than the estimated loss of ice mass, and the combined total (190 ± 77 Gt per year) shows that the Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass.
Furthermore, the EAIS data from two areas where there’s been the most change show a potential breakpoint at around 2006, as seen below
If a breakpoint really did occur, then the ice loss from 2006-2009 would be greater than the average over the period of 2002-2009. Instead of 190 ± 77 Gt per year, the actual loss could be as high as 220 ± 89 Gt per year.
Taken in combination, these two papers support the conclusion that sea level rise is very likely to be greater than the IPCC estimated in 2007, and may in fact exceed recent estimates. Combined with another paper that suggests ice sheets and sea level are more tightly coupled to climate changes and carbon dioxide than previously believed, these papers should probably be read as a serious warning about the future of the world’s coastal areas.
Thanks to Dr. Pritchard and Dr. Chen, primary authors on the two papers discussed above, for providing review copies of their work.
Image Credits
Nature
Nature GeoscienceOnePlus smartphones have developed a bit of a cult following, thanks to a combination of design and affordability that few other Android handsets match. But OnePlus has also experienced some notable privacy and security issues, including a recent admission that it was collecting a sketchy amount of user data on its corporate servers. Now, a French security researcher has published evidence that nearly every OnePlus phone model comes pre-loaded with a factory testing app that essentially acts as a backdoor, potentially granting hackers full access to your device. Whoops!
The Hack
It turns out that every OnePlus model, except the original OnePlus One, has an application called "Engineer Mode" buried in its operating system. The app appears to be a development and factory testing tool, and can be used for things like GPS checks and hardware scans. These types of tools are common, but are generally disabled or removed before devices ship to consumers; otherwise their power and operating system privilege could be abused. In this case, while Engineer Mode isn't immediately accessible from the user interface, it doesn't take that much software probing to access it, and from there some simple commands could give an attacker root access to almost any OnePlus. The tool is a customized version of a Qualcomm app that contains the backdoor, protected with a hard-coded password.
"It's not good. In theory, this kind of app must be removed from the final release," says Robert Baptiste, the firmware analysis researcher who discovered the flaw. "But [that] adds another operation in the factory, which costs time and is always complicated. So sometimes—often—companies decide to keep this app. Security by obscurity is a common practice."
Unfortunately, OnePlus didn't obscure its Engineer Mode quite enough.
Who's Affected?
OnePlus has sold millions of smartphones, and most of them are currently threatened by Engineer Mode. One plus owners can go to Settings, then Show System apps to check whether Engineer Mode is installed, and then delete it.
The tool can give an attacker total power over a device, but it also has real limitations. Baptiste and others point out that attacks exploiting the app require physical access to a given unit. OnePlus noted the same in a statement Tuesday, saying that Engineer Mode won't grant full root privileges to third-party apps, ruling out more virulent remote attacks.
"EngineerMode is a diagnostic tool mainly used for factory production line functionality testing and after-sales support," OnePlus says. "Any sort of root access would still require physical access to your device. While we don't see this as a major security issue, we understand that users may still have concerns and therefore we will remove the adb root function from EngineerMode in an upcoming [software update]."
How Serious Is This?
Researchers emphasize that while the Engineer Mode flaws aren't an apocalyptic crisis, they still represent a major overlooked security lapse. And while OnePlus's upcoming fix should reassure users, some believe the episode hints at a larger potential problem with the company's security screening and device vetting processes.
"This isn't really a horrible situation, it will be an easy fix," says Tim Strazzere, a researcher with the mobile security group RedNaga. "This is, however, indicative of their security posture and quality control.
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not making Team Canada’s final roster and it’s to be expected. Similar to Spencer Watson, Merkley’s game is filled with a good balance of skill and energy but he was likely pushed out by the fact that there were some slightly better options available who could also play that style.
Now, moving onto who actually made the Canada’s roster and what they’ll bring to the team.
THE FORWARDS
Brayden Point (Tampa Bay Lightning) will be Canada’s go-to offensive forward as the oldest player on the team and one of the returnees from last season. He’s missed time in pre-tournament action due to injury but he’ll be good to go come Boxing Day when Canada untraditionally lines up against the Americans in their first round-robin game. He’s quick, he’s smart and his ability to control the offensive pace will be relied upon greatly.
Dylan Strome (Arizona Coyotes) is one of many Coyotes prospects who’ll be featured in prominent roles at the World Junior tournament. He’s proved that he’s as dangerous without Connor McDavid as he was with him and he’s established himself as one of the most dangerous prospects playing outside of the OHL. His skating has improved substantially over the past few years and it’s expected that with his high end vision, soft hands and ability to control the offence, that he will be a key player on Canada’s powerplay.
Mitch Marner (Toronto Maple Leafs) will be another key cog for Team Canada and because the team is going to need to rely on its younger entries, his success will dictate how successful the team becomes. He’s putting together an outstanding OHL campaign leading the league in points-per-game (2.32 pt/gm) and showing good confidence. He’s a player who makes linemates better around him and with him slated to play alongside close friend Dylan Strome, that duo is bound to do some damage.
John Quenneville (New Jersey Devils) will be one of the elders on this young team and with his two-way presence, it’s expected that he will play some big defensive minutes. He owns decent skill but won’t be a guy to carry the offence per se but his complementary style will likely see him land on the wings of two other skill forwards. He’s got good size and he can score and was lately taking reps with Dylan Strome and Mitch Marner at recent practice trying to find a linemate for the skilled duo.
Jake Virtanen (Vancouver Canucks) returns to join his peers after the Canucks felt his experience playing for Team Canada would be beneficial to his long-term development. One of only a few Canadians with NHL experience, Virtanen’s game is all about speed and grit. He’s physical and can fire the puck so expect to see him earn some reps alongside some of Canada’s top playmakers (Marner/Strome/Barzal) and draw important minutes on the powerplay.
Brendan Perlini (Arizona Coyotes) is another speedy winger with scoring potential. The 6-foot-3 sniper runs hot and cold so for him to justify his inclusion on Team Canada, he’s going to have to prove that he can find the back of the net or else, he could be replaced by another one of Canada’s many options. For now, it appears Perlini will lineup on the left side of Mathew Barzal and Jake Virtanen so he’s receiving opportunity to show his skills.
Mathew Barzal (New York Islanders) is a treat to watch in possession and will adopt one of Canada’s top playmaker roles. He’ll likely get pushed to second powerplay duty to start the tournament but he’s a candidate who could really surge up the depth charts and become one of Canada’s most lethal producers. Following this World Juniors tournament, it won’t be surprising for people to question how the Boston Bruins passed on drafting this offensive talent THREE times last June.
Lawson Crouse (Florida Panthers) is one of four returnees for Canada and he’s temporarily silenced many of his (annoying) critics with strong offensive numbers – albeit, while providing his usual stifling defensive presence. Look for Crouse to be rejuvenated as he draws onto a line with best friend and former minor hockey linemate Travis Konecny. Crouse is a prime candidate to wear a letter for Canada.
Travis Konecny (Philadelphia Flyers) inclusion on Team Canada speaks to how strong his development has been over the past two years. Pegged as a pure sniper in his OHL draft season, Travis Konecny has adapted his game and can now be considered one of the Ontario league’s top distributors, sitting second in league assists with 38 in 29 games. He’s a tenacious forechecker, proven big-game scorer and his versatility will be welcomed on a deep Canadian team. Unfortunately, it appears he’s on the outside looking in for powerplay duty but if he can get some extra man minutes, he’s primed for big things. Look for Konecny to score some big goals. He was Canada’s top player in their pre-tournament game versus the Czech Republic.
Mitchell Stephens (Tampa Bay Lightning) was one of the sneaky good selections at the 2015 NHL Draft and in due time, he’ll be looked at as one of the “steals” of that age group. Stephens is just returning from injury and that fact that he still cracked this roster speaks to what he brings to the table. He’s a spirited two-way pivot capable of playing top minutes in all situations. He’ll be featured on the top penalty kill units and won’t give the opponents an inch to operate. Don’t underestimate Stephen’s ability to fire the puck and score some important goals.
Rourke Chartier (San Jose Sharks) has been limited to only 10 games with the Kelowna Rockets this season and his upward battle to make this squad paid off with strong performances in pre-tournament play. After teammate Nick Merkley was a late cut, Chartier will be the lone representative from Kelowna. After breaking twine 48 times last season in the WHL, Chartier should draw time on Canada’s second powerplay and act as a trigger man.
Anthony Beauvillier (Florida Panthers) has been trending upwards for over a year as this undersized skilled two-way pivot just keeps getting better and better. The type of forward who “just gets it” and one that owns that “it factor”, Beauvillier will be an important team player for Canada as they look to create energy. He’s clipping along in the Q with 41 points in only 21 games, good enough for second in points-per-game (1.95).
Julien Gauthier (2016 NHL Draft) is the lone draft eligible skater on Team Canada and he’s a dandy. Gauthier is a big, powerful forward capable of creating with his size and touch on the puck. He’s a projected Top 10 selection for the 2016 draft and with a strong showing in Helsinki, easily could rise into Top 5 consideration. He’s a player that scouts will be dialed in on and it’s expected that he plays important offensive minutes – including powerplay time.
Projected Lines:
Quenneville-Strome-Marner
Perlini-Point -Virtanen
Crouse-Stephens-Konecny
Beauvillier- Barzal-Gauthier
Chartier
THE DEFENSEMEN
Thomas Chabot (Ottawa Senators) earned his spot on Team Canada outplaying several other top defenders after entering the camp as an underdog. The Senators first round selection is a safe puck moving defender who moves well and thinks the game quickly – both assets that will likely see him earn some time on Canada’s second powerplay unit. His 7 goals and 20 points in only 23 games with Saint John are impressive figures, ranking him 7th in league points-per-game (0.91) by blue liners.
Joe Hicketts (Detroit Red Wings) wasn’t even draft but was shrewdly plucked as a free agent signee by the Detroit Red Wings and the rest was history. Hicketts was a vital member to Canada’s gold medal winning team last year and he’ll be expected to bring that same success (and more) this season as the lone returnee on the blue line. A clever and smart distributor with a good point shot, the offence will run through him as the setup man. It appears that he will be paired with Chabot on one of the two powerplay units and at regular strength, playing his off-side on the right.
Hayden Fleury (Carolina Hurricanes) will be a minute-munching option for coach Dave Lowry as the team relies on Fleury’s calculated defensive approach. He owns good puck handling ability and hits his outlets well but in this tournament, it’s expected that the Canes prospect will provide the stabilizing presence while others (Dermott, Hicketts, sanheim and Chabot) take care of producing from the back end.
Travis Sanheim (Philadelphia Flyers) is a budding star in the Flyers prospect system as fans have been going “goo-goo” over him since he was drafted in the first round in 2014. After posting 65 impressive points as a sophomore with the Calgary Hitmen, Sanheim is at it again in his third campaign leading the Western league with 1.29 points-per-game as a defender. The rangy defender boasts a big shot and deceptively good hands and will be featured alongside Travis Dermott on Canada’s starting top powerplay unit. There’s potential for Sanheim to elevate his already lofty expectations.
Brandon Hickey (Calgary Flames) is the lone collegiate representative and first NCAA player to crack Team Canada since Jaden Schwartz in 2012. The Boston University defender is one of several left-handed rearguards who will switch and play his off-side because of Canada’s shortage of right-handed shots Adopts a defense-first mentality showing a good commitment to his responsibilities but his mobile, smooth transition game allows him to assist in generating offence as well.
Travis Dermott (Toronto Maple Leafs) will draw eyes from the Maple Leafs front office and then another million or so eyes from it’s large invested fan base as everyone wants to get-to-know Mr. Dermott. Playing in Erie, Dermott has had a largely successful role taking on the top defender role and performing well. He’s a calm, cool and collected defender who plays the game with a calculated approach. Mobile and poised in possession, Dermott owns the ability to deceptively create lanes and operates extremely well as the quarterback on the powerplay – a role that Hockey Canada will ultimately provide him with on the international stage.
Roland McKeown (Carolina Hurricanes) is the lone right-handed shooting defender on Team Canada and much like Fleury and Hickey, it is expected that McKeown provides a hard-to-play-against style of defending, while chipping in offensively as he can. He’s a strong defender who blends physicality and smart defensive reads well. Capable of moving the puck with smart passes or engaging into the rush with his skating ability, McKeown is probably one of Canada’s most versatile defenders.
Projected Pairings:
Chabot – Hicketts
Fleury – Sanheim
Dermott – Hickey
McKeown
THE GOALTENDERS
MacKenzie Blackwood (New Jersey Devils) was set to become Canada’s favourite to take the crease as the team’s starting puck stopper before a vicious slash ended up with an Ontario league suspension. With Blackwood slated to miss the first two games due to suspension, Hockey Canada was forced to name Samuel Montembeault as the team’s third goaltender. With Mason McDonald set to start round robin play as Canada’s front man, MacKenzie will need to return midway through to attempt taking back the crease – a mission that is expected to happen. He’s a big competitive goaltender capable of stealing games and his presence in the crease will be a great asset.
Mason McDonald (Calgary Flames) has been a highly touted goaltender for several years now and he will need to hold the fort against a strong American team to start the competition. He’s a battler between the pipes with good size and mobility, and despite underwhelming Quebec league numbers, Hockey Canada seems confident in his ability to lead the way as the team’s starter (if need be).
Samuel Montembeault (Florida Panthers) is expected to act as Canada’s insurance third string netminder and barring a complete meltdown of McDonald in the opening few games, he may be in tough to get into the crease in Helsinki. Montembeault flashes an extremely quick glove hand and his physical athleticism is extremely impressive. It wouldn’t be surprising to see Montembeault climb the depth charts in this short tournament if given the opportunity because he is an unfathomable goaltender in the crease showing sharp mental focus and emitting a calming presence – valuable attributes on the grand stage of the World Juniors.
The Stars to Watch:
Brayden Point
Mitch Marner
Dylan Strome
Jake Virtanen
Joe Hicketts
Travis Sanheim
Potential Breakout Players:
Travis Konecny
Mathew Barzal
Mitchell Stephens
Anthony Beauvillier
Travis Dermott
Brandon Hickey
Samuel Montembeault
Canada's World Junior Outlook
While Canada always enters the World Junior Championships as a perennial contender, it’s much more likely that Canada struggles versus their Group A competition. Starting without their top goaltender against an always-strong American squad, Canada will need to weather the storm early as they look to contain an offensive USA team while developing chemistry. In their second game, Denmark will give the Canadians a chance to gel and should be the “easiest” of its four round robin games but nothing is for certain in a short tournament. The Swiss always play the Canadians tough and that’s who they will need to defeat on December 29th in a must-win game. Losing against Denmark and/or Switzerland could create a disastrous event. Capping off round robin play, Canada will take on an experienced and extremely dangerous Sweden team that is loaded with returning talent, many with professional experience under their belt.
It won’t be an easy tournament for Canada with them in the toughest grouping but as always, they’ll have to step up when the quarterfinal matchups are determined.
Prediction:
Canada finishes 2nd in Group A
Follow @RossyYoungblood on Twitter for World Junior prospect analysisApple on Wednesday released its quarterly earnings for the second quarter of 2014, announcing a seven-for-one stock split coming in June, as well as a boost to share buybacks now capped at $90 billion.
After announcing earnings of $45.6 billion in revenue and $10 billion in profits, Apple announced a split granting each AAPL stock owner six shares for each share owned, while its board raised buyback authorization to $90 billion.Apple's 7-for-1 stock split will take place June 2, 2014, awarding each shareholder six additional shares of AAPL stock. Split-adjusted trading will begin on June 9."We are announcing a significant increase to our capital return program," said Apple CEO Tim Cook. "We're confident in Apple's future and see tremendous value in Apple's stock, so we're continuing to allocate the majority of our program to share repurchases. We're also happy to be increasing our dividend for the second time in less than two years."The substantial repurchase authorization represents a $30 billion bump from its initial $60 billion plan, though the company warns that this coming quarter may see a drop in revenue from $38 billion to $36 billion.In addition to the split, Apple's board approved an 8 percent increase its quarterly cash dividend up to $3.29 per share. That's up from the previous $3.05 per quarter.The news juiced after-hours action, with AAPL trading up $42.17, or 8.31 percent as of this writing.Master strategist behind the Howard government finds the going tough in the spotlight of Icac inquiry
For 30 years, the political stage has been awaiting the appearance of Arthur Sinodinos – the great hope of the Liberal party and a future treasurer.
On Thursday he stepped on to a stage of sorts at the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption. This spotlight was not what he, or the Liberal party, exactly had in mind.
The senator – as Commissioner Megan Latham called him – appeared relaxed as he wandered into the media room beforehand, then moved into the hearing room where he stood to the side.
You would hardly recognise him against the grey walls and wood veneer, the unassuming George Costanza lookalike of the Canberra policy world. The irony was excruciating for the man who rose to be John Howard’s chief of staff after a ministerial scandal claimed the scalp of his predecessor Graeme Morris.
Yet here was the master strategist of the Liberal tribe taking up a $200,000 directorship in a company, Australia Water Holdings, which is now being investigated by Icac for billing taxpayer-owned Sydney Water while it was carrying out water and sewage contracts around Sydney.
Worse still that his public humiliation has come about with no accusation of corruption.
At his long-awaited appearance on Thursday, Sinodinos confirmed that he was unaware of $74,000 donations from AWH to the NSW Liberal party while he was both AWH director/deputy chairman as well as treasurer of the state party. Doffing one hat for another, he knew nothing.
Sinodinos also confirmed that while contacting NSW minister Greg Pearce as AWH chairman, he had not mentioned the fact that he stood to make between $10m and $20m if the public-private partnership between AWH and Sydney Water went ahead.
“It never occurred to me that needed to be done,” he said flatly.
Geoffrey Watson SC began the day by laying out his experience, Sinodinos’s early days as an economic adviser to John Howard in the 1980s, his subsequent return to politics in 1995, when he followed Howard from opposition into power. By 1997, he won the unexpected promotion and stayed with Howard until 2006. Observers remember that when he resigned, it was a sign Howard’s days were numbered. Such was his stature.
Sinodinos went on to work for Goldman Sachs, JBWere and the National Australia Bank, because in his own words, he was “looking to build a business career”. He remained intimately involved in the NSW Liberal party executive as president. As it still is today, the NSW division of the party was wracked with factional fighting and in the grip of lobbyists. Sinodinos was sent in to clean it up. He is Abbott’s captain’s pick.
It became clear as Watson delved into Sinodinos’s involvement from his first introductions, to his agreement to take on the AWH directorship, to his rise to the chairman’s role, that the temporarily stood-aside federal assistant treasurer did not appear to be on top of his brief.
The characters rolled off Watson’s silver tongue. There was Liberal party fundraiser and AWH chief, Nick di Girolamo, who allegedly asked Sinodinos to approach state minister Greg Pearce and Barry O’Farrell. There was Paul Nicolaou, the head of the Liberal party fundraising arm the Millennium Forum who, the Icac was told, was getting a $5,000 a month lobbying fee. There was Michael Photios, a former NSW Liberal minister, up until recently on the Liberal state executive, who was also getting $5,000 a month for lobbying, the hearings were told. All this paid by a company which had, Watson said, trouble paying its tax and superannuation obligations.
The players were not just on the Liberal side. Eddie Obeid featured in the hearing for investing $3m in AWH – including at one stage a $400,000 loan of which Sinodinos was unaware. Though he did admit to knowing Obeid’s son Eddie Jr was employed by AWH Queensland.
Watson began wanting to know exactly what Sinodinos was doing for his $200,000 fee, given there were only nine board meetings a year and the company employed 10 people. By Watson’s calculation, Sinodinos had worked between 26 hours and 45 hours a year.
“Does that include travel time?” Arthur asked. “It takes an hour and a half to get to [the AWH office].”
Sinodinos explained there was also work done reading board notes and “bumping into people” in the street and at functions.
“We will add 90 seconds for a chat over a gin and tonic,” Watson quipped. “Did that salary seem a lot to you?”
“I thought it was reasonable,” Sinodinos said, agreeing he took his duty to the company seriously. “Oh good,” said Watson.
The questions were peppered. Did you ever ask to look at the books? Did you ever ask to look at the ledgers? The transaction summaries? Did you ever visit the excavation sites? Sinodinos said that he read the board notes and visited an excavation site once. Well before he came on board. The promotional tour to get you on board, asked Watson? An education and information tour, said Sinodinos.
Then Watson moved on to the dispute over costs charged to Sydney Water attributed to AWH, referred to by Sinodinos as “management and administration costs”. Previous evidence had heard limousines, nights out and of course the donations. Sinodinos said the costs had been incurred before he arrived. Did you ever try to get to the bottom of it, asked Watson? I participated in boardroom discussions, said Sinodinos.
Watson also pressed him on a meeting with former Sydney Water head Kerry Schott. Watson asserted Schott explicitly raised concerns about the ballooning costs.
“I don’t have a clear recollection,” the senator said. According to Sinodinos, the meeting was designed to get a better relationship with AWH, though he did not think it pertinent to mention it to his own board.
Mostly Sinodinos’s answers were short. Occasionally he elaborated, on one occasion, on the “art of politics”. On another, on the “complications and cross-currents” that he faced in negotiating around the dispute between AWH and Sydney Water. At times, Watson was becoming annoyed with his answers.
“Will you concentrate!” he yelled.
By the afternoon, Watson produced documents to show Di Girolamo had asked Sinodinos to contact O’Farrell and Pearce, to try to get a ministerial direction for Sydney Water to negotiate with AWH. Sinodinos said he contacted Pearce but not Barry O’Farrell.
“Why not?” asked Watson.
“Because I understand politics. It was not appropriate,” Sinodinos replied.
Sinodinos had been brought on board to clear the political pipes. By the end of the day, he said as much under examination by his own counsel Tony Bannon. What were you there for?
“I would hope in a business sense I was a door opener,” he said. He was the man to get into the doors of business and excite investors to the possibilities of AWH.
“I put in the effort that was commensurate with that.”
In one day, that legendary door-opening reputation was looking a little worse for wear.RSPCA raids show dog breeding properties at Longwood over cruelty concerns
Posted
More than 100 dogs have been rescued in raids on two properties linked to show dog breeding near Euroa in northern Victoria, the RSPCA has said.
RSPCA inspectors, veterinarians, nurses and animal attendants, along with Victoria Police, executed the warrants at Longwood on Tuesday.
The RSPCA said 119 small breed dogs were seized or surrendered, while six cats were also taken.
Four dead dogs were also removed from the property, it said.
"All of the animals were taken into care because of immediate and serious concerns for their welfare," the RSPCA said.
"The dogs, including Chihuahuas, Chinese crested and spaniels, were allegedly found to be living in small cages and squalid conditions, both inside and outside the residences."
The raid was one of several ongoing investigations into "large-scale animal cruelty involving dogs" in Victoria, the welfare organisation said.
"All of the seized and surrendered animals were transported to an RSPCA facility where they are receiving veterinary care," it said.
Thirteen notices to comply were given to the properties' owners for a number of dog, cats and birds not in immediate danger, but had issues relating to health, hygiene husbandry and food and water, according to the RSPCA.
Topics: animal-welfare, longwood-3665, vicPart of Microsoft Accelerator’s batch 3 of startups, DefinedCrowd is filling a niche in the big data and machine learning community, providing near-real-time feeds of rich language data, checked by actual well-informed humans all over the world.
The need comes from the Catch-22 that often arrests deep data analysis, in that you have to understand the data to analyze it, but you must analyze it to understand it. The vast landscape of the spoken and written word and its big data counterpart in natural language processing is especially troublesome in this way.
“In the artificial intelligence space, to develop virtual assistants like Cortana, or Apple’s Siri and things like that, you need large amounts of voice recordings, you need transcriptions of those voices, you need intents and empathy labeling of those voices,” said Daniela Braga, co-founder and chief scientist, in an interview with TechCrunch. “The crowd input provides the extra refinement of the data that basically no machine can do.”
DefinedCrowd sets up pipelines through which various kinds of language data are filtered, interpreted, and enriched, partly automatically and partly with a human touch.
“If you were to do a sentiment analysis learning model, and you want the machine to learn about a social media user making certain tweets — are they happy, or are they excited? The difference is very subtle,” said Amy Du, co-founder and CEO. “This is where the crowdsourcing technique comes in.”
After the grammar is standardized — slang like “u” is replaced by “you” and emoji are stripped out, for instance — users are asked to score a phrase or sentence on, say a 5-point scale of neutral to happy, or curious to sarcastic. A few users score the same phrase and their inputs are synthesized, and that data goes on to the next step.
Pipelines can have several steps and depending on how complex the data is, it can take a few days to get them in place — but once a workflow is established and native speakers chiming in regularly, the data can be turned around quickly enough for hourly updates. (Any network executive or social media manager can appreciate the occasional urgency of these things.)
The natural objection, especially when users earn money for their work (more than an Mechanical Turk user, but think minimum wage, not get rich quick), is that someone is going to game this thing. DefinedCrowd takes a labor-intensive approach to managing their crowd.
“We partner with universities internationally,” said Du. “We usually start with the linguistics department, establishing a relationship with a local language ambassador, someone we can actually trust. And from there they can expand the network by bringing in additional students from the region. We know every single person that works behind the scenes.”
Not as easy as taking all comers, but this has benefits as well.
“And we have that metadata. Think about virtual assistants, they need to have dialectal and gender and age balance for those agents,” pointed out Braga. “We’re in 30 countries right now, moving to 50 in July; we have 50-100 people steady in each country.”
Du worked in tech consulting for years, specializing in connecting major companies with crowdsourcing, and Braga started as a linguistics professor in Portugal and Spain, eventually working with Microsoft on NLP-related projects like Cortana. Their paths crossed in the Seattle area while working in an overlapping business space, and eventually just decided to throw in together.
The company’s time in the Microsoft Accelerator program has been helpful, the co-founders agreed (a representative from Microsoft was listening in, I should add) — as you might expect, Microsoft is a fairly well connected company, and the startup soon learned applications it might not have thought of on its own. And it doesn’t hurt to get meetings with Fortune 500 companies from all over the world looking for a way to supercharge their big data efforts.
DefinedCrowd showed their product publicly for the first time today at the Microsoft Accelerator demo day in downtown Seattle — along with seven other companies from the program’s third batch.Get the biggest Manchester United FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Louis Van Gaal wants to restore United’s mean killing machine.
The Reds boss has overseen 15 matches so far but of the seven victories he has engineered, only Queens Parks Rangers have been truly overpowered by United.
That September 4-0 romp at Old Trafford has been a one-off in a campaign of tight, hard-fought wins.
Against Hull a week last Saturday the Reds beat the Tigers 3-0 but with so little resistance from Steve Bruce’s poor outfit on the day van Gaal’s XI should have been rattling up an even bigger tally.
In United’s pomp under Sir Alex Ferguson they had a reputation for being merciless destructors of opponents and van Gaal himself has a history of creating big-hitting sides.
Ajax dominated Dutch football in his time there in the 1990s. At Barcelona his team registered such convincing results as 7-1 against Alaves and 4-0 away at Deportivo Coruna.
More recently, his Bayern Munich team in the 2009-10 campaign when they won the Bundesliga in his first season in charge, battered Borussia Dortmund away 5-1, trounced Bochum ion their travels 5-1 as well and annihilated Hannover in the Allianz Arena 7-0.
United’s support, however, are still waiting for those one-side slaughters.
Asked if it was a disappointment that teams are being let off the hook and not being killed off Van Gaal answered: “Yes. I cannot deny that.
“But this team is capable of doing that. At the end of (the process) I hope so. We have to dominate more. Against Hull City we dominated and that is why I was so pleased.
“But we could have scored more goals also. However, 3-0 is a very good result against a very defensive team. I would always like to play like that but that is not possible and I knew in advance.
“But that is what we are striving for.”
The United boss hasn’t been 100 per cent happy with any Reds matches he has been in charge of but admits even when his philosophy is fully digested and implemented by his squad it is doubtful he’ll ever oversee the perfect match.
“I cannot answer the question where we are at the moment because there are a lot of aspects that I want to improve,” he added.
“I am a perfectionist. It is always what we can improve. It is never 100 per cent all right. Never.
“Against Hull City I thought it was a rather good performance.
“I was very pleased. But against Stoke it was not so good. So within three days there was a big difference. And we are looking for consistency.
“The media are asking about momentum. I said already that we have to wait and see about the momentum.
“But (despite four wins on the bounce) I don’t there is momentum because when you have such a difference between two matches in three days you are not in a momentum.”
United’s consistency has been damaged by the horrendous injury pile up that has ripped through the senior squad.
It has also played its part in the Reds firepower not being on full blast.
Captain Wayne Rooney missed the Stoke match with a knee problem but is fit to face Southampton tonight.
However, Radamel Falcao is still not available to start as he inches his way back from the calf problem he’s had since late October.
Van Gaal’s policy has been to reintroduce injured first-teamers via the Under 21s.
But Rooney’s injury and James Wilson’s illness that forced him out of the Hull match has meant the Colombian hitman has had to be used on the bench in the Reds last two matches and the striker is set to be on the bench duty again tonight.
Asked if Falcao was becoming frustrated by having to wait for his first start since the beginning of October against Everton, Van Gaal revealed his ‘Iron Tulip’ reputation when he said: “I’m not interested. He has to follow my philosophy. Do you understand that? I’m here because of that.”
Fortunately the Reds do appear to be buying into the Dutchman’s methods.
And the United spirit is growing in the dressing room – a fact highlighted by the player’s Christmas party last week in Manchester inspired by skipper Rooney.
“It was fantastic,” Van Gaal said.
“Usually, I don’t use words like this, but I think it showed the cohesion in our group from both the players and staff. My wife and I enjoyed it very much.
“The squad is very important, and that’s why the timing of our Christmas party was fantastic - it showed the togetherness in the squad. I think we are in a good position.”With all the controversy and market disturbance of the Optoma UHD65 (the first 4K UHD projector under $2,500) we were anxious to get our hands on the laser version with its claimed higher contrast, wider color gamut, and significantly brighter light output. Even though some of us were able to see the UHZ65 at Infocomm 2017 and CEDIA 2017, it is almost impossible to make any real quality assessment at a trade show particularly in high ambient light conditions which these projectors are not designed for. During CEDIA we were fortunate enough to talk to the national sales manager and, with the help of our rep, we were able to have one for two days for our annual Fall Open House. Please understand that up until this projector was announced, 4K laser projectors have a cost upwards of over $25,000 and even the Epson 1080p laser with “4K Enhancement” (1/2 UHD pixels) costs about $8,000. That is not to say that the UHZ65 is in the same league as those projectors as far as features go. But as far as image quality goes I think it will surprise many how good it is.
Note that we did run into an anomaly with the video recording with color accuracy, the timing of the camera shutter speed and the sequential color nature of single chip DLP projectors somehow effected the the accuracy of the colors (mainly the blue) in the video version of this comparison (but not the stills in this article post). Despite trying several different shutter speeds and checking two different monitors (one looked OK the other had the purple) we had to go with what we got that night as the unit would have to be flown out the next day. Once we get our own UHZ65 we will track down the unique circumstances of the camera turning deep blues into purple. So, for the color portion of the comparison please refer to these images as they reflect more what our eyes see. For contrast and detail please refer to both as there are some scenes that are better in the video and some that are better here.
Here’s a quick comparison of their major specs:
VPL-VW365ES UHZ65 Image Type: 3 LCD (SXRD Reflective) Single Chip DLP Native Resolution: Native 4K (4096 x 2160) 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) Lumen Brightness: 1500 3000 Contrast Ratio: Not Given 2,000,000:1 Dimensions (WxDxH): 19 1/2″ x 7 11/16″ x 18 1/4″ 19.6” x 6” x 13” Weight: 31 lbs. 20.5 lbs. Typical Price: $7,999 $4,499
Color & Brightness
This is what we were most interested to see due to the laser light source. Laser light source has the capability (depending on the design) of producing a wider color gamut with deeper colors more closely approximating what our eyes see in real life. The Sony features what they refer to as “Triluminos” color which is very good compared to most projectors. The Epson LS10500 laser projector has one of the best color gamuts we have tested and comes very close or even matches (with the color filter engaged in the “Digital Cinema mode”) the DCI P3 current motion picture standards. So, how good is the UHZ65 color? We started with an abbreviated calibration (time limited) and started the comparisons.
One of the dramatic improvements in the UHZ65 over the UHD65 is the light output. When we previously compared the UHD65 to the VPL-VW365ES, in order to make the comparison even close, we had to put the UHD65 in its brightest lamp mode and the Sony in its lowest lamp mode. Not this time. The UHZ65 easily equals the brightest mode and can even go higher in some modes. We did not have time to calibrate in this first test. The other thing that is very different with the UHZ65 is that in the brightest color mode (not yet tested by us) it did not yield a greenish image like the UHD65 and 60 do. So potentially this new Optoma could be calibrated in its brightest color mode and potentially reach over 1,500- 1800 lumens with D65 calibration (manufacturer brightness ratings are not with calibrated D65 color accuracy). Stay tuned. In the mean time, this next image shows how bright the whites are in this image of a child. Notice the bright white window behind his face on both sides of the image and how the Optoma is clearly brighter and in fact measured 10 foot candles higher. The skin tone, however, is slightly darker but mostly just different than the Sony skin tone in this shot, both looked amazing.
This next image really surprised us. The yellows were always a great strength of Sony projectors and yet in this image the laser has greatly improved the Optoma yellows. Whereas the UHD65 had respectable yellows for a DLP projector, this laser version is outstanding. The yellows, greens and blue are very rich and saturated. Even against the Triluminos color of the Sony, the laser projector delivers compelling color – especially in this price range.
Contrast & Black Levels
This got really interesting for us. Even though the deep blacks were not visibly improved over the UHD65, the overall contrast was. Why? First, because you are dealing with a much higher light output and essentially the same black levels, the contrast naturally increases. Second, this like its little brother, the laser version features the “Pure Contrast Engine,” which is a form of dynamic light control. It does amazing things for the image. With this circuit engaged it comes close or exceeds many more expensive projectors with normal brightness level and near black images. In the case of the VPL-V
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2012-01-18 21::41:27] greqrg: I only have a casual understanding of it. [2012-01-18 21::42:01] greqrg: "This phenomenon gives rise to infinite shades of key-colors, which are lost in the modern standard version" is the gist of what I was getting at. [2012-01-18 21::42:15] colo: gotta go :P be back in about a half-hour :P [2012-01-18 21::42:30] Mr_Donk: So the notes being plaed at the highest and lowest ocatves never change the "voices" in between do descend? [2012-01-18 21::42:30] » colo left the chat room. [2012-01-18 21::43:48] factotvm: Here one of the Canons: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A41CITk85jk [2012-01-18 21::44:59] factotvm: And the Crab Cannon (nice illustration, too): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36ykl2tJwZM [2012-01-18 21::45:08] factotvm: *Canon. [2012-01-18 21::45:14] factotvm: Ahem, my ignorance is apparent :) [2012-01-18 21::45:35] Boriss: very cute :) [2012-01-18 21::45:49] Boriss: and it illustrates the point well [2012-01-18 21::46:05] greqrg: Mr_Donk: Here's a visual representation of the Shepard Tone from the wiki article: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Shepard_tone.jpg [2012-01-18 21::46:32] » commanda left the chat room. [2012-01-18 21::46:37] greqrg: You see as the top voicing ends, it gets picked up from where it started by the voice beneath it [2012-01-18 21::46:41] » Switch_Statement left the chat room. [2012-01-18 21::47:34] Mr_Donk: greqrg yeah I can kind of hear it now. [2012-01-18 21::47:37] greqrg: Nothing ever changes as a whole (the entire interval), but at a lower level (note by note) nothing really changes. [2012-01-18 21::47:45] greqrg: whoops-- [2012-01-18 21::48:03] greqrg: I meant note by note everything is constantly changing [2012-01-18 21::48:13] FoglyOgly: greqrg: So were the different temperaments just due to limitations of the instruments? [2012-01-18 21::48:14] waitwhat: hey is someone recording this [2012-01-18 21::48:19] waitwhat: er.. [2012-01-18 21::48:24] waitwhat: whats the word [2012-01-18 21::48:27] FoglyOgly: waitwhat: I'm logging the discussion, yes. [2012-01-18 21::48:34] waitwhat: ok cool...hi mom... [2012-01-18 21::48:44] Mr_Donk: go to bed son [2012-01-18 21::48:51] waitwhat: =o [2012-01-18 21::49:15] Mr_Donk: I'll come up to tuck you in ; * [2012-01-18 21::49:23] FoglyOgly: applauds Mr_Donk for his(her?) use of nontraditional gender roles. [2012-01-18 21::50:38] » Michael joined the chat room. [2012-01-18 21::50:46] » Graeme joined the chat room. [2012-01-18 21::50:47] » Michael is now known as MichaelsBurns. [2012-01-18 21::50:55] Graeme: Hello [2012-01-18 21::51:06] FoglyOgly: Hi there. [2012-01-18 21::51:15] Graeme: Are we still discussing GEB? [2012-01-18 21::51:16] greqrg: FoglyOgly: I'm not fully sure, at this point I would just be regurgitating wikipedia--but from my understanding you are correct. It was a "flaw" in early instruments, and since then instruments have "evolved" to compensate for this. [2012-01-18 21::51:31] Graeme: aha [2012-01-18 21::51:34] Graeme: we are [2012-01-18 21::51:54] FoglyOgly: greqrg: So people would compose in certain keys to suit certain instruments. [2012-01-18 21::52:09] Graeme: talking about the old tuning system? [2012-01-18 21::52:39] BurnoutPriest: Ah, I understand [2012-01-18 21::53:05] Graeme: certain keys would be dissonant on a piano would they not [2012-01-18 21::53:26] Graeme: in equal temperment [2012-01-18 21::53:32] greqrg: Oh yes, absolutely. But each key would even have it's own "feel" to it. Today you can play C minor or D minor, and they are the same, unless you play them relative to each other. Back then there would actually be a tiny difference in the range between note to note. [2012-01-18 21::53:54] greqrg: (that was in reply to FoglyOgly) [2012-01-18 21::55:13] » koolkalang left the chat room. [2012-01-18 21::55:45] Graeme: they still do have different feels due to the frequency resonating at the tonic, but they wouldn't have different intervallic feels [2012-01-18 21::56:02] » commanda joined the chat room. [2012-01-18 21::56:05] Graeme: i modern temperment [2012-01-18 21::56:08] Graeme: in* [2012-01-18 21::56:40] BurnoutPriest: Anyone have a suggestion for a more comprehensive music theory tutorial site than the one posted on the subreddit? [2012-01-18 21::57:26] greqrg: Right, the intervals are equal. And since pitch changes logarithmically with frequency, you can see why the intervals between the frets of a guitar become smaller as the pitch rises. [2012-01-18 21::57:58] Graeme: Burnout - you can try this site http://www.jacmuse.com/Default.htm [2012-01-18 21::58:10] greqrg: Or rather, pitch is *perceived* logarithmically with frequency. [2012-01-18 21::58:51] Graeme: did anybody listen to the continuously rising canon of bach? [2012-01-18 21::59:14] Strafe: So if i wanted to get Musical Offering from iTunes, which recording is recommended? [2012-01-18 21::59:15] FoglyOgly: Because the value in Hz of, say, a half-step, approaches zero as the pitch increases. [2012-01-18 21::59:29] BurnoutPriest: Thanks Graeme [2012-01-18 22::00:43] Graeme: gotta shrink your fingers to play a 62fret guitar [2012-01-18 22::02:47] Graeme: so was it early harpsichord that could only play in one one intensity of note until the piano-forte came along? [2012-01-18 22::04:12] » commanda left the chat room. [2012-01-18 22::05:23] Mr_Donk: bye peeps [2012-01-18 22::05:30] » kateyphi left the chat room. [2012-01-18 22::05:33] » Mr_Donk left the chat room. [2012-01-18 22::05:56] » kateyphi joined the chat room. [2012-01-18 22::06:59] deadling: graeme: harpsichord strings are plucked, instead of hammered... it's hard to pluck something louder or quieter [2012-01-18 22::08:24] Graeme: ah i see, and piano-fortes are hammered? were normal pianos are at the time aswell? [2012-01-18 22::08:51] greqrg: I was under the impression that the piano-forte *is* the modern piano. [2012-01-18 22::09:01] kateyphi: same [2012-01-18 22::09:11] greqrg: It's obviously been improved, but it's the same instrument. [2012-01-18 22::09:27] Graeme: they have a different body shape and less keys [2012-01-18 22::09:41] deadling: Wikipedia says: The word piano is a shortened form of pianoforte [2012-01-18 22::09:42] » acadavid joined the chat room. [2012-01-18 22::10:21] Graeme: so the piano is derived from the harpsichord? my world is upside down [2012-01-18 22::10:28] deadling: here's a pretty cool harpsichord 101: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71x4MSlpGUk [2012-01-18 22::10:43] deadling: you can tell the guy is a middleschool music teacher or something [2012-01-18 22::11:34] » Flowersofevil left the chat room. [2012-01-18 22::11:57] greqrg: To bring my tangent back to our central discussion, I'll share this fact that I just read on wikipedia: "J. S. Bach wrote The Well-Tempered Clavier to demonstrate the musical possibilities of well temperament, where in some keys the consonances are even more degraded than in equal temperament." [2012-01-18 22::12:45] greqrg: The Well Tempered Clavier is mentioned often throughout GEB. [2012-01-18 22::16:19] FoglyOgly: greqrg: Were the piano-fortes that Bach played in Prussia well-tempered or equal-tempered? [2012-01-18 22::18:10] FoglyOgly: Also, are there any modern recordings of these pieces that recreate the key-color faithfully? [2012-01-18 22::18:59] » acadavid left the chat room. [2012-01-18 22::19:00] » trueZSMJfans joined the chat room. [2012-01-18 22::21:33] » waitwhat left the chat room. [2012-01-18 22::22:38] greqrg: I'm really starting to step out of my expertise here, but I would guess they were equal-tempered. Equal-temperment gained a lot of popularity during the second of the 18th century, and became standard during the early 19th century. [2012-01-18 22::23:41] greqrg: Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach composed with equal-temperment often, which I believe is Bach's son mentioned in GEB? [2012-01-18 22::23:55] Graeme: try searching YouTube, I'm sure you can find some recordings using equal temperment [2012-01-18 22::26:43] FoglyOgly: greqrg: I believe so. [2012-01-18 22::27:38] FoglyOgly: Pianos are usually close to equal-tempered these days. Wikipedia says it's difficult to know what temperament a given composer used for a given composition. [2012-01-18 22::28:01] greqrg: Anyways, I have work in the morning and--as insteresting as this discussion is--I must leave to get some sleep. I'll definitely be reading the logs in the morning. Happy reading! [2012-01-18 22::28:11] » greqrg left the chat room. [2012-01-18 22::29:11] » factotvm left the chat room. [2012-01-18 22::29:17] Graeme: it would be interesting to hear some bach compositions in the original temperment [2012-01-18 22::30:22] deadling: I'd bet money I wouldn't notice the difference... not even a little [2012-01-18 22::30:46] FoglyOgly: I'd be willing to bet The Musical Offering was composed with well-temperament. [2012-01-18 22::31:01] » kateyphi left the chat room. [2012-01-18 22::31:20] Graeme: you should look up some quarter tone music...that is really quite bizarre [2012-01-18 22::31:33] Graeme: they add a note between every note on a keyboard [2012-01-18 22::33:04] deadling: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxrfoar3HfQ that is bizarre [2012-01-18 22::33:21] deadling: it sounds like what they have playing during nightmares in cartoons [2012-01-18 22::33:23] FoglyOgly: http://pianopedia.ptg.org/index.php?title=The_Bach_Temperament%3F [2012-01-18 22::36:27] FoglyOgly: So as you can see, there's a considerable amount of debate as to what temperament Bach used. [2012-01-18 22::37:16] » Grognor joined the chat room. [2012-01-18 22::39:27] » mkantor joined the chat room. [2012-01-18 22::39:34] » tictacaddict left the chat room. [2012-01-18 22::41:24] » Strafe left the chat room. [2012-01-18 22::44:08] FoglyOgly: Well, seems the discussion has died. I'm going to get off here, and I'll see you guys again on Friday. [2012-01-18 22::44:25] » You left the room.Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody
This has been the year of the revealing video. This week we saw that Governor Romney and many of his millionaire donors view almost half the country as parasitic dependents. That famous 47% includes many of our students.
Last summer's video of Stand For Children leader Jonah Edelman at a conservative gathering in Aspen revealed how his group had maneuvered to pass a law that they thought would make a strike in Chicago impossible.
Our schools are being starved of funding, at a time when taxes have never been lower, and the concentration of wealth has never been higher. The four hundred richest Americans saw their wealth grow by 13% in 2011, according to this report, but somehow it has become accepted wisdom that as far as public services like schools, "we are broke." A combination of austerity for public employees and privatization of public services is the preferred solution for the wealthy reformers. This is just my opinion, but it seems to me that wealthy people think the power of their money comes with special wisdom. The way some of them have behaved during and after the Chicago strike reveals this thinking.
Videos tell the tale again
A week ago, as the strike was in full swing, the cable business network Larry Kudlow Show focused on Chicago. Mr. Kudlow pulled no punches in his introduction:
We begin tonight with the biggest ripoff perpetrated on the American people. The Chicago Teacher's Union strike over outrageous demands by the union. Today in day two, thousands of teachers and their leftist supporters picketed. Three hundred and fifty thousand students out on the streets, police on alert and parents leaving work to care for them. Will Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Rhambo he's sometimes called, is he going to fold, give teachers their election year rewards or what?
Several things seem to have Mr. Kudlow worked up here. First, he is under several important misapprehensions. He cites the number of students who can read at the 4th grade as 15%. This appears to be derived from NAEP proficiency rates, which indicate students who are well above the norm. In fact, 62% of Chicago's fourth graders meet or exceed expectations on state reading tests.
He is also very worked up about the idea that Chicago teachers earn an average of $76,000. This also turns out not to be true. Teachers in Chicago earn an average of $56,720. Maybe this is still too much, because it is more than the average family income in the area.
The ever-calm Leonie Haimson shed some light on the situation, but her take was not welcome here on the business channel.
Venture capitalist and education "reformer" Bruce Rauner said this week to the George W. Bush Institute forum at the Art Institute of Chicago:
The critical issue is to separate the union from the teachers. They're not the same thing. The union basically is a bunch of politicians elected to do certain things -- get more pay, get more benefits, less work hours, more job security. That's what they're paid to do. They're not about the students. They're not about results. They're not about the taxpayers.
The good teachers know they'll do fine. They've got the confidence. I've talked to them. I know. It's the weak teachers. It's the lousy, ineffective, lazy teachers that -- unfortunately there are a number of those -- they're the ones that the union is protecting and that's where there's a conflict of interest between the good teachers and the union bosses.
Mr. Rauner expanded on these remarks in a TV appearance.
Watch September 19, 2012 - Mayor's Adviser Attacks CTU on PBS. See more from Chicago Tonight.
This is the first step in a long battle to take the schools back from the union bosses and put it into the control of parents and the taxpayers. Schools have been out of the parents' control for far too long, and the results are evident.
But his enthusiasm for parental control seemed to evaporate when the host pointed out how many parents had supported the strike. He said:
Many parents don't really understand what's going on inside their schools. As long as their child feels safe and their teacher is a pleasant person they think things are alright. The tragedy is that hundreds of thousands of children in the Chicago Public Schools are receiving an inadequate education, and their futures are being damaged because of it.
The Chicago teachers have won an important battle. They showed that once they were united behind strong leadership, with parent and community support, they can prevail. But the comments from Mr. Kudlow and Mr. Rauner make it clear that this fight over who will set the direction for our schools is far from over.
What do you think? What can we learn from these videos?A man passes by the LAX sign. (Photo: Michael Nelson, EPA)
LOS ANGELES -- Airlines resumed flights from Los Angeles International and other area airports Wednesday afternoon after technical problems at a Southern California control center prompted a temporary grounding of departing flights.
The Federal Aviation Administration said the order was due to technical problems at its Los Angeles control center.
Los Angeles airport spokeswoman Nancy Castles said about 10 inbound flights were diverted to other airports and more than 30 flights were delayed in taking off by as much as two hours.
Inbound flights that had entered already airspace controlled by the Los Angeles flight center when the order was issued were allowed to land at LAX.
"All departure flights are now released and will depart with an expected one hour delay,'' Castles said.
The "ground stop" order also covered nearby airports at Long Beach, Burbank and Santa Ana. Los Angeles International Airport spokeswoman Mary Grady said incoming planes were allowed to land during the period when takeoffs were halted.
"The FAA's Los Angeles Center air traffic control facility experienced technical issues and stopped accepting additional flights into the airspace managed by the facility for about an hour,'' FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said.
"Some flights were diverted and the agency issued a nationwide groundstop for flights heading into the airspace managed by the center. The agency is gradually restoring the system,'' he said.
Los Angeles International is the nation's third-busiest airport.
Twitter was abuzz with angry travelers stuck as a result of the order.
Mark Duell, vice president of operations for the flight tracking site FlightAware, said that the FAA's Los Angeles center controls the airspace over southern California and parts of Nevada and Arizona.
The glitch that led to the grounding of flights headed to the region is "very uncommon,'' he says.
"I can't remember it happening in the last five years,'' Duell said.
"They're getting back to operating,'' he added, "but it sounds like it's going to be a pretty rough afternoon there.''
Rebecca Bloomfield, spokeswoman for San Diego International Airport said the ground stops were due to "unspecified issues with the equipment'' at the FAA's Palmdale, Calif., control center.
The problem occurred at 1:55 p.m. PST, Bloomfield says.
Contributing: Charisse Jones, USA TODAY
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1kuQQ8JHistory is filled with numerous unsolved mysteries that modern humans need time to understand. In the movie called The Descent, a group of girls goes to explore a cave but gets trapped inside by inhuman creatures and twisted cave paths. But in reality, the story is different altogether. Two cavers have successfully found 15,000-year-old ice age cave networks beneath Montreal city located in Canada.
Luc Le Blanc and Daniel Caron went to explore the ancient cave network in October 2017. They first heard about the existence of the cave in 2014, got to know that it is 650 feet long. The original cave was explored in 1812 which is located under a city park and eventually became a famous tourist spot.
Although nearly 3,000 visitors go there, no one had passed the fissure until Le Blanc and Caron took the initiative to explore the rest of the cave by using their tools. Le Blanc, who has 40-years of experience in the field of adventure sports, told Newsweek that compared to the original cave the newly discovered channel is "bigger, higher, wider and more beautiful because it's remained pristine."
During the exploration process, the cavers discovered one direction circle, which is linked to the main cave entrance. There was another lead which was almost filled with water. Although the explorers used inflatable canoes and swam to move forward, they still failed to find the end of the cave tunnel. Le Blanc explained, "We stopped when our helmets were rubbing the ceiling."
This is not the first case of underground discoveries, though.
A book entitled Secrets Of The Underground Door To An Ancient World by German archaeologist Heinrich Kusch, had revealed that stone age men had created a huge underground tunnel from Scotland to Turkey, which was used as a communicative highway.
Beneath Paris, lies another example of centuries-old underground tunnel, which is filled with millions of skeletons. This is called the Catacombs of Paris. Even though this place is open to the visitors, most of this weird tunnel could not be explored.
In Turkey, there are 36 underground cities in Cappadocia, including a mysterious underground city of Derinkuyu. In 2014, a housing project team had accidentally discovered the entrance to these strange caves. These caves led them to long wide tunnels which finally helped to uncover the underground city of Cappadocia.Romney defines "middle income" as $200,000-$250,000 and less GOP slaps collective forehead [UPDATED]
Updated - 2:10 PM EDT: On Twitter, folks have been responding to Mitt under #middleincome:
[embedtweet id="246668000630038528"]
[embedtweet id="246637070892793856"]
And from a Romney supporter:
[embedtweet id="244827767173169152"]
12:22 PM EDT: According to a 2009 Tax Policy Center study of income distributions, earners making $180,000 and more are in the top 5 percent of the population.
Advertisement:
10:40 AM EDT: In an interview with "Good Morning America's" George Stephanopoulos, Mitt Romney was asked: "Is $100,000 middle income?" "Middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less," Romney replied.
“I said that there are five different studies that point out that we can get to a balanced budget without raising taxes on middle income people," he continued. "Let me tell you, George, the fundamentals of my tax policy are these. Number one, reduce tax burdens on middle-income people. So no one can say my plan is going to raise taxes on middle-income people, because principle number one is keep the burden down on middle-income taxpayers."
Obama has said in the past that he'll cut taxes for middle-class families making $250,000 and less per year, but the way Romney put it certainly doesn't help the narrative that he's out of touch with the middle class.
According to the Census Bureau, the current median household income in the U.S. is slightly over $50,000.
Here's the video, at the 5:15 mark:The NFL's golden anniversary of the Super Bowl will feature some Super Bowl halftime show performers who have taken the stage in the biggest game before. Beyoncé and Bruno Mars are both expected to join Coldplay for the halftime show at Super Bowl 50 in Santa Clara, California, on Feb. 7.
Read more: Super Bowl live stream | Super Bowl tv schedule | Super Bowl kickoff time | Super Bowl halftime show
Beyoncé was the performer of the halftime show at Super Bowl XLVII in 2013 and Bruno Mars was the headliner for Super Bowl XLVIII one year later in 2014. Coldplay has never before taken the stage at the Super Bowl.
The game itself will feature the Denver Broncos, in their eighth Super Bowl, and the Carolina Panthers, playing in their second Super Bowl.
During Super Bowl XLIX in Glendale, Arizona, in 2015, Katy Perry and Lenny Kravitz were the headliners and Perry rode a mechanical lion before dancing with sharks and beach balls.
Perry's 13-minute performance, which also featured an appearance from Missy Elliott, drew 118.5 million viewers, according to Nielsen ratings, making it the most-watched halftime show of all-time. The performance of Bruno Mars from one year earlier previously held the record with 115.3 million viewers.
The first 24 Super Bowls didn't feature pop acts, but Super Bowl XXV in 1991 broke the trend when New Kids on the Block performed in Tampa, Florida.
With kickoff scheduled for 6:30 p.m. ET, the halftime show is likely to begin sometime between 8-8:30 p.m.
* * *
Super Bowl 50: Watch Lady Gaga perform the national anthem
Be sure to subscribe to SB Nation's YouTube channel for highlight videos, features, analysis and moreTrading was mixed early on, but at roughly 11:18 a.m. ET word came from Washington news site Axios that the White House was prepared to fire Bannon, the chief strategist. The S&P, which was down 5 points, promptly rallied 7 points in a matter of minutes and another 5 points over the next hour. When The New York Times confirmed that Bannon was leaving at about 12:40 p.m. ET, the market moved up another 5 points.
In an interview with the American Prospect earlier in the week, Bannon had made a big point about stressing his battles with President Donald Trump's chief economic advisor, Gary Cohn, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, seemingly painting himself as a populist arrayed against the "globalists."
But the markets clearly preferred ex-Goldman executive Cohn for the stability he provides. How much? Stocks dropped on Thursday on erroneous reports that Cohn might leave the White House, and have rallied on confirmation that his arch nemesis Bannon is gone.
Floor traders, who are overwhelmingly Republican, cheered here at the New York Stock Exchange when it was reported that Bannon was out. (Though, some later said part of that cheering was due to the departure of a colleague.)
They want a concerted effort to raise the debt ceiling, pass a budget resolution and then move rapidly to tax cuts. Friday's gains is the market's way of saying investors believe tax cuts are still alive.
The S&P started moving down after 1 p.m. ET, shortly after Breitbart's Senior Editor Joel Pollack tweeted #WAR, implying Bannon and/or Breitbart may launch attacks against Cohn and Mnuchin.
The markets ending anywhere in the green would be a big victory for bulls and would reinforce the strategy that it is still safe to buy the dips.By George Friedman
I arrive in Azerbaijan as the country celebrates Victory Day, the day successor states of the former Soviet Union celebrate the defeat of Germany in World War II. No one knows how many Soviet citizens died in that war — perhaps 22 million. The number is staggering and represents both the incompetence and magnificence of Russia, which led the Soviets in war. Any understanding of Russia that speaks of one without the other is flawed.
As I write, fireworks are going off over the Caspian Sea. The pyrotechnics are long and elaborate, sounding like an artillery barrage. They are a reminder that Baku was perhaps the most important place in the Nazi-Soviet war. It produced almost all of the Soviet Union's petroleum. The Germans were desperate for it and wanted to deny it to Moscow. Germany's strategy after 1942, including the infamous battle of Stalingrad, turned on Baku's oil. In the end, the Germans threw an army against the high Caucasus guarding Baku. In response, an army raised in the Caucasus fought and defeated them. The Soviets won the war. They wouldn't have if the Germans had reached Baku. It is symbolic, at least to me, that these celebrations blend into the anniversary of the birth of Heydar Aliyev, the late president of Azerbaijan who endured the war and later forged the post-Soviet identity of his country. He would have been 91 on May 10.
Baku is strategic again today, partly because of oil. I've started the journey here partly by convenience and partly because Azerbaijan is key to any counter-Russian strategy that might emerge. My purpose on this trip is to get a sense of the degree to which individual European states feel threatened by Russia, and if they do, the level of effort and risk they are prepared to endure. For Europe does not exist as anything more than a geographic expression; it is the fears and efforts of the individual nation-states constituting it that will determine the course of this affair. Each nation is different, and each makes its own calculus of interest. My interest is to understand their thinking, not only about Russia but also about the European Union, the United States and ultimately themselves. Each is unique; it isn't possible to make a general statement about them.
Some question whether the Caucasus region and neighboring Turkey are geographically part of Europe. There are many academic ways to approach this question. My approach, however, is less sophisticated. Modern European history cannot be understood without understanding the Ottoman Empire and the fact that it conquered much of the southeastern part of the European peninsula. Russia conquered the three Caucasian states — Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan — and many of their institutions are Russian, hence European. If an organic European expression does exist, it can be argued to be Eurovision, the pan-continental music competition. The Azerbaijanis won it in 2011, which should settle any debate on their "Europeanness."
But more important, a strategy to block Russia is hard to imagine without including its southern flank. There is much talk of sanctions on Russia. But sanctions can be countered and always ignore a key truth: Russia has always been economically dysfunctional. It has created great empires and defeated Napoleon and Hitler in spite of that. Undermining Russia's economy may be possible, but that does not always undermine Russia's military power. That Soviet military power outlived the economically driven collapse of the Soviet Union confirms this point. And the issue at the moment is military.
The solution found for dealing with the Soviet Union during the Cold War was containment. The architect of this strategy was diplomat George Kennan, whose realist approach to geopolitics may have lost some adherents but not its relevance. A cordon sanitaire was constructed around the Soviet Union through a system of alliances. In the end, the Soviets were unable to expand and choked on their own inefficiency. There is a strange view abroad that the 21st century is dramatically different from all prior centuries and such thinking is obsolete. I have no idea why this should be so. The 21st century is simply another century, and there has been no transcendence of history. Containment was a core strategy and it seems likely that it will be adopted again — if countries like Azerbaijan are prepared to participate.
To understand Azerbaijan you must begin with two issues: oil and a unique approach to Islam. At the beginning of the 20th century, over half the world's oil production originated near Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Hence Hitler's strategy after 1942. Today, Azerbaijani energy production is massive, but it cannot substitute for Russia's production. Russian energy production, meanwhile, defines part of the strategic equation. Many European countries depend substantially on Russian energy, particularly natural gas. They have few alternatives. There is talk of U.S. energy being shipped to Europe, but building the infrastructure for that (even if there are supplies) will take many years before it can reduce Europe's dependence on Russia.
Withholding energy would be part of any Russian counter to Western pressure, even if Russia were to suffer itself. Any strategy against Russia must address the energy issue, begin with Azerbaijan, and be about more than production. Azerbaijan is not a major producer of gas compared to oil. On the other side of the Caspian Sea, however, Turkmenistan is. Its resources, coupled with Azerbaijan's, would provide a significant alternative to Russian energy. Turkmenistan has an interest in not selling through Russia and would be interested in a Trans-Caspian pipeline. That pipeline would have to pass through Azerbaijan, connecting onward to infrastructure in Turkey. Assuming Moscow had no effective counters, this would begin to provide a serious alternative to Russian energy and decrease Moscow's leverage. But this would all depend on Baku's willingness and ability to resist pressure from every direction.
Azerbaijan lies between Russia and Iran. Russia is the traditional occupier of Azerbaijan and its return is what Baku fears the most. Iran is partly an Azeri country. Nearly a quarter of its citizens, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are Azeri. But while both Azerbaijan and Iran are predominantly Shiite, Azerbaijan is a militantly secular state. Partly due to the Soviet experience and partly because of the unique evolution of Azeri identity since the 19th century, Azerbaijan separates the private practice of Islam from public life. I recall once attending a Jewish Passover feast in Baku that was presided over by an Orthodox rabbi, with security provided by the state. To be fair, Iran has a Jewish minority that has its own lawmaker in parliament. But any tolerance in Iran flows from theocratic dogma, whereas in Azerbaijan it is rooted in a constitution that is more explicitly secular than any in the European Union, save that of France.
This is just one obvious wedge between Azerbaijan and Iran, and Tehran has made efforts to influence the Azeri population. For the moment, relations are somewhat better but there is an insoluble tension that derives from geopolitical reality and the fact that any attack on Iran could come from Azerbaijan. Furthering this wedge are the close relations between Azerbaijan and Israel. The United States currently blocks most weapons sales to Azerbaijan. Israel — with U.S. approval — sells the needed weapons. This gives us a sense of the complexity of the relationship, recalling that complexity undermines alliances.
The complexity of alliances also defines Russia's reality. It occupies the high Caucasus overlooking the plains of Azerbaijan. Armenia is a Russian ally, bound by an agreement that permits Russian bases through 2044. Yerevan also plans to join the Moscow-led Customs Union, and Russian firms own a large swath of the Armenian economy. Armenia feels isolated. It remains hostile to Turkey for Ankara's unwillingness to acknowledge events of a century ago as genocide. Armenia also fought a war with Azerbaijan in the 1990s, shortly after independence, for a region called Nagorno-Karabakh that had been part of Azerbaijan — a region that it lost in the war and wants back. Armenia, caught between Turkey and an increasingly powerful Azerbaijan, regards Russia as a guarantor of its national security.
For Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh remains a critical issue. Azerbaijan holds that U.N
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that they really, truly don’t care about the environment.
Later this week, the House GOP will vote on a package of energy bills that should look familiar. The bills approve the Keystone XL pipeline, open up federal land to oil and gas drilling, limit EPA rulemaking and block coal plant climate rules, expedite exports of liquefied natural gas, bar new regulations on fracking, and more. Many of these proposals have individually drawn veto threats from the White House. This exercise serves as a reminder before the midterm elections, to erase any remaining doubt where Democrats stand on energy issues (a tactic both parties do all the time).
But it’s also a reminder that the GOP has no plans to adjust policies anytime soon to reflect the reality of what’s changed over the last six years.
It’s looking likely that the GOP’s 2016 energy platform will remain equally stale. Yesterday, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal—who wants to be a “leading thinker” for 2016—released an energy plan that approves Keystone XL, opening up federal lands to oil and gas, and blocking the EPA climate rule. His plan mentions the GOP’s favorite punching bag, Solyndra, and defends the people who deny climate change—which is a “religion for many on the Left.” Jindal, as well as Marco Rubio and many of the other Republicans possibly running in 2016, would like to see the U.S. do even less on climate change, not more.Samsung's Galaxy Note7 is touted by many reviewers as one of the best, if not the best, smartphones around today. Its most interesting features are waterproof design, curved screen and, for the first time in a Samsung smartphone, an iris scanner.
Now that the phone is out, iFixit tore it down to pieces, resulting in one of the most interesting gadget teardowns we've seen lately.
First, the Galaxy Note7 is relatively repairable, scoring 4 out of 10 by iFixit's standards. You cannot replace the curved screen, and it's hard to get inside of the phone due to the strong adhesive on the rear glass. But the battery, the charging port board and several other parts can be replaced, which is not common among top smartphones of today. The iPhone 6S, however, scored far better when it comes to repairability.
On the waterproofing front, it appears Samsung has achieved that IP68 rating by using lots of glue and rubber in strategic spots Not ideal if you want to open the device, but great for keeping water and dust out of it.
Image: ifixit
The most interesting part of the teardown, however, is the iris scanner, which consists of an IR blaster and a separate front camera (meaning that the Note7 actually has two front cameras; pretty cool for bragging rights) that captures the image of the user's irises. We assumed that that second camera was there, but it's still cool to see the technology behind Samsung's iris scanner in the electronic flesh.
Other highlights of the teardown include the device's 3,500mAh, 13.48 Wh battery — just slightly less powerful than the one in the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, the heat pipe-based cooling design we've seen in the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge, and a case that seems additionally strengthened, either for better structural integrity or for waterproofing purposes.This was a roller coaster afternoon for those who follow both Michigan and Stanford football. It began when a report from the Ann Arbor media indicated that Wolverines coach Jim Harbaugh had successfully lured respected Stanford sports performance director Shannon Turley to Michigan.
But a few hours later, the tide turned: Multiple sources have confirmed to ESPN.com that Turley is not headed to rejoin his former boss at Michigan. He will remain at Stanford.
This is excellent news for the Cardinal and a disappointing development for the Wolverines, to say the least. Turley's innovative strength and conditioning program has turned Stanford into a physical force while curbing the program's injury rate. Since Turley joined the Cardinal program, the team has seen an 87 percent decline in games missed due to injury. Stanford team doctors, coaches, and players have credited Turley's avant-garde focus on "functional strength" -- which includes integration of Pilates into the Cardinal's regular routine -- for much of the program's health and success.
In 2013, Turley's position became the first endowed sports performance directorship in collegiate athletics -- a surefire sign of his value to the Stanford program.
Turley is not the only Stanford assistant to have drawn reported interest from Harbaugh, who coached the Cardinal from 2007-10 and is currently assembling his new coaching staff in Ann Arbor. Fox Sports' Bruce Feldman has tweeted that Michigan is currently pursuing Stanford recruiting/defensive coordinator Lance Anderson.A Wiltshire policeman convicted of assaulting a woman in custody has been cleared on appeal.
Sgt Mark Andrews, of Wiltshire Police, was filmed dragging Pamela Somerville through Melksham police station in July 2008.
The officer was found guilty of causing her actual bodily harm and jailed for six months in September.
Sgt Andrews spent six days in prison, but was released on bail pending the appeal at Oxford Crown Court.
The appeal judge, Mr Justice Bean, said after the four-day hearing he was satisfied that Sgt Andrews did not intend to throw Ms Somerville into the cell and that injuries she suffered "were probably caused by her falling to the floor after letting go of the door frame".
'Unpredictable prisoner'
She had been arrested for failing to take a breath test but was never prosecuted.
After Sgt Andrews won his appeal, Wiltshire Police announced that an independent force would hold an internal conduct hearing into the officer's behaviour in early December.
Sgt Andrews told the appeal hearing that Ms Somerville, 59, was the most unpredictable prisoner he had ever come across and that she had been abusive to both him and his colleagues.
The court was shown CCTV footage in which he is seen throwing her on to the cell floor. A minute later she staggers to her feet, with injuries to her face and eye.
Sgt Andrews told the court: "I don't think I did anything wrong.
We are determined to learn any lessons that emerge from this case Assistant Chief Constable Patrick Geenty, Wiltshire Police
"She had been holding on to the cell door frame when she suddenly let go.
Insufficient evidence
"It was like pulling a cork out of a bottle."
Ms Somerville was arrested after she was found asleep in her car near her Colerne home and had been detained for failing to provide a sample for a breath test.
She denied any wrongdoing and the charges against her were later dropped due to insufficient evidence.
Sgt Andrews' barrister Jeremy Barton had put it to her at the appeal court that she had been so drunk on vodka the night the incident happened that she was an unreliable witness.
Mr Barton also suggested that she had refused to take a breath test because she knew how drunk she was.
Ms Somerville denied both of these claims.
Image caption Pamela Somerville, shown in a picture released by her family, suffered injuries to her face
Sgt Andrews was suspended on full pay following his conviction and had been expected to lose his job.
Following his conviction, Assistant Chief Constable Patrick Geenty said he was "a disgrace" to the force and added: "There is no place in Wiltshire Police for an officer like this."
Mr Geenty said at the time he fully supported the comments of the trial judge, Deputy District Judge Peter Greenfield, who said the officer had "presided over an atmosphere of bullying and intimidation upon Ms Somerville".
Following Sgt Andrews' conviction being quashed, Mr Geenty said due to the high-profile nature of the case the result of the conduct hearing into the officer's behaviour would be made public.
He said: "Sgt Andrews will remain suspended from duty until the conduct hearing and in accordance with national police regulations he will continue to receive full pay for as long as he remains a member of the force.
'Disciplinary hearing'
"Although this appeal hearing has concluded that no criminal offences had been committed we are determined to learn any lessons that emerge from this case and we welcome the fact that the Wiltshire Police Authority has commenced its own independent review of our custody practices."
In a statement a Wiltshire Police Authority (WPA) spokesman said: "I said at the time of the initial conviction that I thought this was an appalling but isolated incident.
"I now need to look carefully at the judgement as I looked carefully at the CCTV footage. It would not be appropriate for me to say more at this stage."
He said the disciplinary hearing will proceed as previously planned and an independent review into custody arrangements in Wiltshire was almost complete.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
Neighbours is in danger of being axed because talks between producers and Channel 5 have reportedly stalled.
The popular Australian soap which first aired in the UK in 1986, could be ditched after broadcasters failed to agree new terms.
It is currently shown on Channel 5 but TV insiders claim talks with makers FremantleMedia to renegotiate a deal have stalled.
If an agreement can’t be reached then Neighbours could move to another channel or there is a real risk it could disappear from British screens completely.
(Image: channel 5)
A source said: “The renegotiation of the Neighbours Channel 5 deal has become very fraught and is in jeopardy. Channel 5 really want to keep the show.
“But the failure to reach a deal is being blamed on Channel 5’s new American owners Viacom refusing to sign off on the figures and not understanding the cultural importance of the show in the UK.
“Neighbours has become a British TV favourite and it would be a sad day if it were to go.”
Neighbours has remained popular with UK viewers and is known for catapulting Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan to global fame.
The show, regarded as Australia’s greatest soap export, celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2015.
(Image: Rex Features)
The series follows the residents of Ramsay Street including Kylie and Jason’s characters iconic characters Charlene and Scott.
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It was first screened by the BBC and saw around 21 million viewers tuning in at its peak in 1990 but switched to Channel 5 nine years ago.
Channel 5 has declined to comment.In this Jan. 7, 2010 photo, an exhibit is laid out for installation at the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, N.C. Four college freshmen walked into a Greensboro, N.C., dime store on Monday, Jan. 1 1960, bought a few items, then sat down at the "whites only" lunch counter, and sparked a wave of civil rights protest that changed America. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton) (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)
Intellectual racism, in its cultural and pseudoscientific guises, is having a bit of a renaissance of late. At least, it's receiving more attention than at any time since the debut of "The Bell Curve," the 1994 book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray about race and IQ. Murray himself is back in the news, triggering protests as he tours college campuses. Andrew Sullivan, who published excerpts of Murray's work as editor of The New Republic, recently went out of his way to make a case against the persistence of racism and for black pathology at the end of a much-read piece about Hillary Clinton. Within the last year, white nationalist sites like VDARE, American Renaissance and Radix have become part of the political landscape.
I've written elsewhere about the trap of intellectualized racism, which cuts against the common assumption that racism is rooted in ignorance and provincialism, that it can only be crude and passe. Thus when Richard Spencer, the face of the alt-right, shows up in a natty suit, he is treated as an unusual curiosity. When Charles Murray shows up brandishing a Ph.D. and some regression tables, he is treated as a sober-minded scholar.
But it's not just journalists who make this sort of mistake. Academics do, too. In the February issue of the American Historical Review, one of the history profession's flagship journals, Raymond Wolters reviewed Ansley Erickson's new book, "Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits." Wolters seemed to have the right credentials to review Erickson's work on desegregation and busing in Nashville: emeritus professor at the University of Delaware, author of several books on race and education.
Oh, and also an active proponent of racist pseudoscience.
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The list of white nationalist publications Wolters has written for is extensive: American Renaissance, VDARE, the Occidental Quarterly, Taki's Mag, the National Policy Institute (Richard Spencer's organization). He credits John Derbyshire and Jared Taylor for influencing his transformation to a "race realist" (that is, "racist"). Taylor is the founder and editor of American Renaissance. A taste of his "race realist" analysis of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: "Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization – any kind of civilization – disappears." For his part, Derbyshire was booted as a contributor to National Review after publishing "The Talk: Nonblack Version," in which he advised his children not to "act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress" (but to cultivate an intelligent black friend as "an amulet against potentially career-destroying accusations of prejudice").
Derbyshire and Taylor have provided Wolters with an intellectual framework for his racist analysis, but he had settled on the underlying sentiment much earlier. His most famous work, published in 1984, was "The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation," which argued that desegregation was a failure and that the legacy Brown v. Board was mostly negative. In the book, he placed the blame for desegregation's failure not on white racism but "the ignorance and uncivilized behavior of many blacks." The book generated a good deal of controversy, though it also garnered some awards.
In 2015, Wolters described how he came to write about busing and to conclude that desegregation was a failure. The story was not one of intellectual discovery, but something much more personal, "a profound sense of grievance." His children had been attending a predominantly white school in Newark, Delaware, and a desegregation order meant that they would soon be going to a school "with sizeable numbers of black students from Wilmington." So they participated in the age-old tradition of white flight, enrolling their children in private schools to evade desegregation. Wolters explained that at the time he stuck mainly to cultural explanations for black inferiority; later he would turn to more biological ones.
This is not someone who should be reviewing books on desegregation for academic journals.
The surprising thing here is not that a college professor would advocate for racist ideas – well-credentialed people can have racist belief systems – but rather that a respected journal would solicit him to write a review. So why did one? When the editor of the AHR, Robert Schneider, apologized for the review, he explained that Wolters had all the markings of a legitimate scholar. He had a university webpage, a "long and solid" list of publications and had published in credible venues.
Indeed, he had. Perhaps even more surprising than the AHR's decision to publish Wolters is that he had been published in other leading journals, including a 2012 review in the Journal of American History of another book on race and education.
So why is Wolters getting so much attention now? Like the outlets he writes for, he is receiving renewed attention because of the rise of Trumpism, which elevated white nationalist groups like the alt-right to political prominence.
But there are some bigger lessons to draw here. First, we need to pay more attention to the institutions, organizations and publications that provide a veneer of respectability to people who promote racist pseudoscience and hold them accountable for that role. Second, at a time when universities are constantly portrayed as hotbeds of intolerant liberalism, especially in humanities and social science departments, people like Wolters remind us that such a view is ultimately a caricature, that universities often tolerate ideas that are not only deeply offensive but factually untrue.The British government issued new recommendations to its business community last week, warning citizens against doing business with individuals or entities in Israeli settlements.
“EU citizens and businesses should also be aware of the potential reputational implications of getting involved in economic and financial activities in settlements, as well as possible abuses of the rights of individuals,” reads the warning on the U.K. Trade and Investment site, in its “Overseas Business Risk Report” for Israel, which is part of a larger survey by the trade agency that makes recommendations regarding the risks of doing business in various parts of the world.
“The U.K. has a clear position on Israeli settlements: The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Golan Heights are territories which have been occupied by Israel since 1967. Settlements are illegal under international law, constitute an obstacle to peace and threaten to make a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict impossible. We will not recognise any changes to the pre-1967 borders, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties,” the warning reads.
A senior Foreign Ministry official in Jerusalem said the British Foreign Office had told the Israeli Embassy in London about the pending recommendations only a short time before they were posted on the UKTI website. The Israeli diplomats in London and the Foreign Ministry officials in Jerusalem made it clear to their British counterparts that Israel was disappointed by the new recommendation.
“We told them that we are currently holding talks with the Palestinians and thus issuing such a recommendation at this time will only do harm,” said a senior Foreign Ministry official. “There’s also something strange about the fact that no similar recommendations were issued regarding other regions in dispute, like the western Sahara, which is under Moroccan occupation, or Tibet.”
The British government site warns British businessmen that there are risks in doing business in the settlements, and the government will not “encourage or offer support to such activity.
“Financial transactions, investments, purchases, procurements as well as other economic activities (including in services like tourism) in Israeli settlements or benefiting Israeli settlements, entail legal and economic risks stemming from the fact that the Israeli settlements, according to international law, are built on occupied land and are not recognised as a legitimate part of Israel's territory,” the warning says.
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“This may result in disputed titles to the land, water, mineral or other natural resources which might be the subject of purchase or investment,” the warning continues. “Those contemplating any economic or financial involvement in settlements should seek appropriate legal advice.”
The recommendation also sympathetically acknowledges “the concerns of people who do not wish to purchase goods exported from Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”
However, the recommendation stresses, “The U.K. Government is deeply committed to promoting our trade and business ties with Israel and strongly opposes boycotts.”
The Spokesman at the British Embassy in Tel Aviv said the FCO has placed advice online to raise awareness of the key security and political risks which U.K. businesses may face when operating abroad, including in Israel and the Palestinian territories and this includes guidance on Israeli settlements.
"We are advising British businesses to bear in mind the British Government's view on the illegality of settlements under international law when considering their investments and activities in the region", the British embassy said. "This is voluntary guidance to British businesses on doing business in Israel and OPTs. Ultimately it will be the decision of an individual or company whether to operate in settlements in the Occupied Territories, but the British Government would neither encourage nor offer support to such activity."According to Fox News, legislators and investigators working with the House and Senate Intelligence Committees investigating allegations the Obama administration spied on Trump associates, claim intelligence agencies are stonewalling efforts to discover who leaked names and protected information to the media.
Fox News reported, “Multiple lawmakers and investigators for the panel told Fox News the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency – all agencies in position to aid the probe – are not cooperating.”
One House Intelligence committee source complained, “Our requests are simply not being answered. The agencies are not really helping at all and there is truly a massive web for us to try and wade through.”
A Senate Intelligence Committee source echoed, “Any information that will help find the wide extent on the unmasking and surveillance is purposely not being provided.”
But an FBI spokesperson said the FBO has no ulterior agenda, asserting, “The FBI will continue to work with the congressional oversight committees on their requests.” A CIA spokesperson simply stated that the NSA was the lead agency and Fox News should talk to them.
The NSA bluntly said:
Allegations that the National Security Agency is “withholding information” from congressional intelligence committees investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election are categorically untrue. NSA fully supports the committees' work. We have already made available significant information in response to their requests, and we look forward to continuing to work with them in the execution of their important responsibilities.
But Fox News claimed one source within the NSA responded, “A number of people saw a lot of very questionable stuff. [The Obama administration was] using national assets and intelligence for politics.”
The FBI’s chief, James Comey, and the NSA chief, Mike Rogers, both served under Barack Obama. They declined to appear at a private closed door House Intelligence Committee briefing in March after they gave public testimony to the committee regarding Russian meddling in the presidential election as well as the alleged mishandling of intelligence regarding President Trump and his associates.
On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that when President Trump was asked whether former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice had committed a crime, he responded, “Do I think? Yes, I think.” He added, "I think it's going to be the biggest story... It's such an important story for our country and the world. It is one of the big stories of our time."
One NSA source told Fox News:The detention of an illegal immigrant sparked a protest Wednesday outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs office in Phoenix that resulted in seven arrests as crowds blocked ICE buses on nearby streets.
Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, 36, arrived at the office for her routine check in, but instead of being released--under President Trump's illegal immigration crackdown-- she was detained.
Garcia de Rayos, 36, was considered a “low priority” for deportation under the Obama administration and had to check in with ICE officials every six months following a 2008 conviction for felony identity theft for having false papers, The Los Angeles Times reported.
She was joined Wednesday by her husband and son--both U.S. citizens-- and supporters, some of whom cried when she was taken in to custody, The Arizona Republic reported.
The family reportedly fears she could be deported to Mexico.
“Ms. Garcia de Rayos is currently being detained by ICE based on a removal order issued by the Department of Justice's Executive Office for Immigration Review which became final in May 2013,” and ICE statement read.
Happening now. 2 ICE vans just drove out of #Phoenix @ICEgov facility with PD escort. Presumably transporting Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos. pic.twitter.com/uBIxEYlHFl — Daniel Gonzalez (@azdangonzalez) February 9, 2017
News of her detainment spread quickly and protesters were seen attempting to block the ICE van Garcia de Rayos was believed to be inside. Some protesters chanted, "Shame on you."
Puente Arizona Director Carlos Garcia said the arrest was in direct result of Trump’s illegal immigration crackdown.
“We all knew something could be different this time with the new administration,” Garcia told the Los Angeles Times. “She went in with the lawyer and didn’t come out. That was pretty much all there was.”
Police posted on Twitter that they arrested about seven protesters, but added that the demonstration was mainly peaceful.
Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos in the van. Reflection is her son Angel, 16. pic.twitter.com/cZMjdUi67C — Daniel Gonzalez (@azdangonzalez) February 9, 2017
"Besides the few people engaged in criminal acts, most people out here are peaceful and exercising their rights properly," police said. "Everyone remains safe so far. Hoping for continued cooperation and no more criminal conduct."
By 1 a.m. Thursday, less than two dozen protesters stood in the dark outside the building talking quietly, with just a handful of police looking on.
The protesters said they initially succeeded in stopping the vehicles from leaving, but said they later left the grounds by another exit. They didn't know if Garcia de Rayos had still been aboard.
Trump’s Jan. 25 executive order expanded deportation priorities to any illegal immigrants who had been convicted of a crime, regardless of its severity. The Obama administration previously prioritized violent offenders.
Puente Arizona had filed a stay in Garcia de Rayos’ removal, but it was denied.
Click for more from Fox 10 Phoenix.But Did You Read the Book?
John Green Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 30, 2015
Cara Delevingne, Press Junketry, and Me
Earlier this week, an interview with the actor Cara Delevingne made the rounds online. In it, the anchors of “Good Day Sacramento” refer to her as “Carla” and then ask her whether she read the novel Paper Towns. (She stars in the film adaptation.)
The interview goes downhill from there, with the interviewers suggesting that she is tired, and that she is not adequately excited about the opportunity to be on Good Day Sacramento, which is the #1 morning show in literally all of Sacramento, and then they tell her to take a nap and cut the interview short.
I am friends with Cara, and the author of the book in question. I spent more than a month with her on tour in Europe and the U.S., and I watched as again and again, she was asked this question. Cara has read the book (multiple times), but the question is annoying — not least because her male costar, Nat Wolff, was almost always asked when he’d read the book, while Cara was almost always asked if she’d read it.
In the past two months, I’ve done something like 300 on-camera interviews. As you get asked the same questions again and again, you develop rote responses as a way of protecting yourself. The rote responses are true — the cast really was like a family; we really are all still friends — but in the repetition, the answers start to feel less and less honest.
For example, I was asked in most interviews how involved I was in the film, and I told the truth, which is that I did basically nothing and sat around all day eating Cheetos and telling everyone they were doing a good job. And then Nat would jump in and say, “John’s being modest. His understanding of the story and characters were vital to us.” But because we were reciting lines more than answering questions, the answer started to feel dishonest to me. At one point between interviews, I said to Nat, “I can’t remember if I even like Cheetos.” And he said, “That’s okay, man. I can’t remember if your understanding of the story was vital to us.”
Look, these are obviously the first worldiest of first world problems, but the whole process of commodifying personhood to sell movie tickets is inherently dehumanizing. The TV people want some part of you, and in exchange for it, they will put the name of your movie on TV. But in that process, you do lose something of your self. (For the record, I don’t get the feeling that the journalists asking the same questions over and over particularly savor the experience, either. But they need their sit-down interview, and we need our publicity, and so the wheel spins on.)
There are bigger problems in the world — in fact, almost every problem in the world is bigger — but if people are going to pay attention to these junket interviews and criticize Cara for responding flippantly to a stupid question, I think context might be helpful.
I was lucky to share most of my interviews with Nat, one of my closest and most trusted friends, and to learn from him how to deal with uncomfortable questions. (For instance, when asked is X a good kisser, or is X is a better kisser than Y, Nat gently explains that he doesn’t answer questions about kissing, because the women he works with should be talked about for their performances in the film not for their kissing.) But I never really got good at junketry. I just sort of gave up.
Like, there’s a line in the beginning of the novel: “Everyone gets a miracle.” The male narrator of the story believes his miracle is Margo Roth Spiegelman, the character Cara plays in the movie. Later in the book, the boy realizes that Margo is not a miracle, that she is just a person, and that his imagining her as a miracle has been terribly hurtful to them both. But still, I was asked over a hundred times, “Who’s your miracle?” At first, I tried to fight it, tried to argue that we must see people as people, that we must learn to imagine them complexly instead of idealizing them, that the romantic male gaze is limiting and destructive to women. That’s the whole point of the story to me.
But eventually, I just started to say, “My miracle is my wife.” (And then Nat would deadpan, “My miracle is also John’s wife. She’s great.”) In the end, rather than fight, I stuck to the script.
Cara, however, refuses to stick to the script. She refuses to indulge lazy questions and refuses to turn herself into an automaton to get through long days of junketry. I don’t find that behavior entitled or haughty. I find it admirable. Cara Delevingne doesn’t exist to feed your narrative or your news feed — and that’s precisely why she’s so fucking interesting.Apple (AAPL) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) on Monday unveiled a project to help China -- the world's largest producer and consumer of paper products -- protect as much as 1 million acres of forests.
The five-year project involves increasing China's responsibility managed forests, which provide fiber for pulp, paper and wood products.
"Apple's goal is to achieve a net-zero impact on the world's supply of sustainable virgin fiber and power all its operations worldwide on 100 percent renewable energy," the consumer technology company said in a news release.
Five things to know about Apple Watch
"This project is an unprecedented opportunity to drive responsible forestry in China and highlight an exciting new model of environmental leadership in addressing forest footprints," said Kerry Cesareo, senior director of forests for WWF's U.S. office, in a statement.
The world needs to "nearly double tree plantation areas by 2050 to meet the demand for wood products and nearly zero out the loss of forests," according to the WWF's Living Forests Report.
The announcement comes three weeks after Apple launched its first major solar project in China, with solar installations in Sichuan Province designed to produce more energy than needed to power all of Apple's 19 corporate offices and 22 retail stores in the country, including Hong Kong.
Apple already runs 87 percent of its global operations on renewable energy, and the solar project in China will bring it closer to its commitment of reaching 100 percent.
Much of the company's manufacturing is done in China, where Apple directly employs 8,000 people.
In an Environmental Responsibility Report released last month, Apple wrote: "We don't want to debate climate change. We want to stop it."Move over Richard Simmons. Johanna Rohrback has arrived, and she has a unique workout routine that is taking the Internet by storm.
Known as Prancercise, Rohrback’s workout is described as “a springy, rhythmic way of moving forward, similar to a horse's gait and is ideally induced by elation.” Various YouTube videos showcase Rohrback “prancing” at different speeds – including the Prancercise walk, trot and gallop.
According to her instruction, all you need are a couple of ankle weights and some music to get started. For the more intense Prancercise box, individuals can strap the ankle weights to their wrists and punch into the air while they prance.
Rohrback originally introduced her unconventional routine back in 1989, but the endeavor failed to take off. Looking to revive Prancercise, Rohrback published a book about the routine in Dec. 2012 titled Prancercise: The Art of Physical and Spiritual Excellence, along with the series of YouTube videos currently circulating the web. The book is described as “a recipe for fitness, health, and self-fulfillment!”College basketball has a transitory nature to it as players and coaches come and go onto other teams. This is nothing new for Marquette, who saw a number of players transfer in the off season.
Among those transfers was former Brigham Young University point guard Matt Carlino, who will be playing his final season of eligibility as a graduate student for new coach Steve Wojciechowki.
Carlino's road to Marquette was an interesting one to say the least. He originally committed to Tom Crean and Indiana in 2010, but later backed out and accepted a scholarship to attend UCLA. At UCLA, Carlino suffered a concussion and through seven games did not once get off the bench for the Bruins. By December, he announced his decision to transfer to BYU, where he placed himself in a accelerated academic program to complete his degree earlier than intended. Last season, he received his diploma from BYU and sought a change from three seasons in Provo, Utah.
The move to Marquette for Carlino was also a boom for Wojo, who knew that he would be losing out on the players that Buzz Williams signed before he made the move to Virginia Tech. Carlino was not the only transfer brought in by Woj, who also brought in Gabe Levin, who originally committed to Hofstra, and Wally Ellenson from Minnesota.
The addition of Carlino does bring seasoned guard play to the Golden Eagles that will help pick up the offense for this season. Last season at BYU, Carlino averaged 13.7 points a game for the Cougars and will most likely be an essential part for what could be an inexperienced Marquette offense. He will have to pick up where JaJuan Johnson and others may struggle with their development from last season.
It is a new era for Marquette under Wojciechowski, but it is also the final act in an interesting career for Matt Carlino, whose main task will be helping out where he can to ensure that the Wojo era for the Golden Eagles gets off on the right foot.Image copyright EPA
The US firm that supplied cladding used on London's Grenfell Tower says it has ended global sales of the product for use in high-rise blocks.
Arconic said it was discontinuing sales of Reynobond PE for tower blocks due to "issues" identified by the fire, which is feared to have killed at least 79.
The government said 75 buildings in 26 council areas had now failed fire safety tests - every one tested so far.
Theresa May said councils need to speed up tower block safety tests in England.
Communities and Local Government Secretary Sajid Javid said all hospitals and schools had also been asked to carry out "immediate checks".
He said the fact all tested samples had failed the so-called combustibility test underlined the "vital importance of submitting samples urgently".
"The testing facility can analyse 100 samples a day and runs around the clock. I am concerned at the speed at which samples are being submitted.
"I would urge all landlords to submit their samples immediately," Mr Javid told the House of Commons.
Image caption Four inquests were opened, including those of Khadija Saye, Isaac Paulos, and Mohamednur Tuccu
Four more Grenfell fire victims' inquests have been opened and adjourned, including that of a boy aged five.
The body of Isaac Paulos, who lived with his family on the 18th floor, was found on the 13th floor, Westminster Coroner's Court was told.
A preliminary cause of his death was given as "inhalation of fire fumes".
The inquests of Mary Ajaoi Augustus Mendy, 54, her daughter Khadija Saye, 24, and Mohamednur Tuccu, 44, were also opened.
Questions about the cladding used on Grenfell Tower, in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, were raised in the days after the fire.
Engineering and manufacturing company Arconic later confirmed Reynobond PE (polyethylene) - an aluminium composite material - was "used as one component in the overall cladding system" of the block.
The material has a plastic core, which it is feared may have helped accelerate the spread of the fire.
In a fresh statement, the firm said it had stopped sales of Reynobond PE for tall buildings, citing concerns about the "inconsistency of building codes across the world".
Following the Grenfell Tower fire, issues have arisen "regarding code compliance of cladding systems", it added.
Cladding from as many as 600 tower blocks across England is being tested for safety.
Housing minister Alok Sharma told the BBC Radio 4's Today Programme some councils were acting "very quickly".
Image copyright PA Image caption Cladding has been removed for testing in a number of areas, including Salford
Mr Sharma added: "People should not wait for the checks to come back from these (tests).
"They should act now, get the fire service in, check the buildings that they think may be affected, put in place mitigation measures, if required, or, as in the case of Camden, if they need to evacuate, that needs to happen."
Insulation and cladding taken from Grenfell Tower failed preliminary safety tests last week.
Despite the prime minister promising to rehouse all of the tower block's residents within three weeks, Mr Javid says this might not be possible.
"For example...some of the families have first asked for something in Kensington as close as possible to where they lived but then when they have been shown the home and they see the tower and what is left of it, they have changed their minds and quite understandably said, 'Look, we would like to have some other options,'" he said.
Mr Javid added the government was working at the residents' pace and promised they would be made offers of housing within the three week time period.
Staying put
Over the weekend, Camden Council moved to evacuate 650
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come in, who they’ve been playing in the offseason with. But obviously we try our best to give the players as good of a work-out regiment as we can when they leave. And then hopefully they’re playing on teams that will do as great a job they can to keep them healthy and also to make sure that they’re ready to come in for the preseason. So that’s always our goal with them. And we’re always talking with them in the offseason. We’ll be calling ’em, texts coming back and forth, email messages about if they had a nick or knock or something, we’ll hear about. And we want to know about it ‘cus we want to make sure no time is lost and they don’t come in with a lingering injury that will kind of carry through the season. We’d rather make sure that we get it taken care of as soon as possible.
Spencer experienced some injury issues during the W-League season.Bill Burr is firmly entrenched as one of the best stand-up comedians in the world. He is a mastermind at finding comedy in how men think, and why we act like we do. While being funny is surely his number one goal, what makes him great are that his insights cut on a much deeper level. Some try to pigeonhole Burr as the typical Neanderthal man, but it is that exact stereotype that Burr loves to play on, and ultimately rejects using “hilarious wisdom.”
Five minutes into watching the first episode of Burr’s Netflix show, F is for Family, it becomes clear his signature humor will easily slice through the animated comedy format. Truth be told, I am not a huge fan of many animated comedies. The situations can become too unrealistic and lose ties to any kind of reality. When I mention this criticism to friends, I am told that is the exact reason why they love animated comedies. To each their own. Either way, F is for Family does not fall into these traps.
The show is set around a lower middle class family living in the 1970’s. The humor is anything but outdated though. Much of the show’s humor is filtered through the lens of modern day society and technology. It pokes fun at a bygone era, while managing to hold on to just enough nostalgia to give the show its heart. Focusing on themes like work, family, and keeping up with the Joneses, F is for Family relates to a wide audience.
Season 1 gave viewers just a small window into the thoughts rattling around in Burr’s head. He has not even begun to flex his considerable comedic muscles. If Burr is not enough star power for you, Vince Vaughn is a producer, and Justin Long is the voice of the oldest son. The pieces are in place to make something really special here. I look forward to seeing if Burr and F is for Family can further capitalize on their considerable potential in Season 2.
By Michael Halpern
Email: [email protected] WikiFur, the furry encyclopedia.
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Amy the Squirrel is a squirrel character created by Eric W. Schwartz. She was featured in a number of Schwartz's early Amiga animations, and became an unofficial mascot in the Amiga community. Most of Eric's animations were produced with Movie Setter, an Amiga package not unlike Flash, but meant for stand-alone disk content. xanim and other players can play these files, and so Eric's animations can still be viewed on Mac, OS/2, Linux and Windows machines.
Amy enjoyed her initial popularity when several of Eric's animations were featured on Fred Fish disks - collections of hot shareware and freeware for the Amiga sold mail-order and traded at user groups - and multiple times in.info, a Commodore-centric magazine.
Amy predates most of Schwartz's other characters, including Sabrina. In the Sabrina Online web comic, Amy is Sabrina's roommate, and has a boyfriend Thomas Woolfe whom she eventually marries. They have a son, Timothy ("Timmy").
Amy has changed a bit over the years; in the early years (late 1980s to the mid 1990s), Amy was almost always drawn topless (though not in a naughty way), wearing nothing but a very short blue skirt. She was portrayed as mostly playful and mischievous.
Ever since the mid-90s, Amy isn't drawn topless very often anymore; she is also portrayed as being much more modest and mature. This character change is probably in part due to her getting married and having a child in Sabrina Online.Well it DOES matter what you think. If this is real, whoever literally risked their life to secretely film this in hopes that outsiders would see it and potentially help their situation by putting an end to these types of hateful institutions, wanted you to believe them. To just brush this under the rug as some type of conspiracy really does a disservice to that person, not to mention anyone who may be affected by people in that classroom going out and perpetuating these anti gay views.
Even if you think this could be fake, you must admit it is more likely to be real? There have been numerous videos of people infiltrating extremist schools / mosques and filming this exact type of hate speech. The only way you could prove this is 100% real is if one of those teachers came forward and admitted she was the one in the video and she did in fact say all of those things, and holds those beliefs. And given in the video she says its ok to lie to kufaar I doubt that will ever happen.Rafa Van Der Vaart was at Wembley for our Champions League win against another of his former clubs, Real Madrid.
The 3-1 win booked our place in the knockout stage of the competition – something Rafa helped us achieve back in 2010-11 – and for the Dutchman, the night was a reminder, just how much he’s loved here at Spurs as Wembley rose together to sing his name at half-time.
The piece adds that Rafa,a man for the big occasion, was devastating in the team that reached the quarter-finals of the Champions League in 2010-11 with one of the highlights being the opening goal in the famous 3-1 win against Inter Milan at the Lane and of course his four goals in three north London derbies against Arsenal.
Rafa scored 15 goals in 35 appearances in the Premier League and Champions League in his first season at Spurs, 2010-11 – a campaign he still looks back on as his best – before 11 in 33 in the Premier League in 2011-12.
Rafa spoke to the club pitchside at the Madrid about being back at Spurs and pitchside at Wembley
“It’s special to be back,” he smiled. “I still get goosebumps. It (his time at Spurs) was something special, I can’t find the words.
“Just being able to play at White Hart Lane was a privilege and to play in a team with so many good players and reach the quarter-finals of the Champions League, it was a special journey.
Rafa added “We had some great nights, some great games against Arsenal, great goals and especially the connection with the fans. I will never forget that.
“After so many years I come back but it still feels like I’m coming home.
“You come to the stadium, I still know a few people and they hug you like ‘you are family’ and all I can say is thanks for that.”
He was only with us for a short period but it was one hell of a ride and I think he’d have settled with us if it wasn’t for family reasons. His dedication and love for the club in that short space of time was amazing and was certainly one of the greatest to pull on the famous white shirt of Spurs.Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has accused Opposition Leader Tony Abbott of another "appalling error" of foreign policy judgment over his latest comments about the Syrian crisis.
Mr Abbott on Monday described the conflict as a civil war between "two pretty much equally unsavoury sides".
He added that the Syrian opposition included "quite a number of elements that are highly influenced by al-Qaeda".
The prime minister described Mr Abbott's comments as "stunning".
He reminded the opposition leader that 80 countries, including Australia and the United States, recognised the main opposition umbrella group, the Syrian National Coalition.
"If Mr Abbott is the prime minister on Sunday... is he going to send a direction to our ambassador in New York to de-recognise the Syrian National Coalition?" Mr Rudd told ABC radio on Tuesday.
"This would set off such a reaction in Australian international relations and our standing across the world.
"People wouldn't just scratch their head, they'd walk away in horror at this appalling error of foreign policy judgment."
Mr Rudd earlier seized on Mr Abbott's description of the Syrian conflict as a war between "baddies versus baddies".The ex-convict convinced the woman he was a detective, the charges say. He then kidnapped her and, after raping her repeatedly, scrubbed her entire body in bleach before freeing her and giving her bus fare, they say.
Gideon Charles Arrington II, 35, who previously had been convicted of armed robbery, was charged Thursday in Anoka County with felony sexual assault and kidnapping in the Nov. 23 abduction of a woman near Fridley City Hall.
The assault occurred just before two other late-November attacks on women near the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis, one of which also involved a suspect posing as a law enforcement officer. Authorities now say the rapes involving police impostors appear not to be related.
Using bleach to conceal a sexual assault is “highly unusual,” said Anoka County Sheriff’s Cmdr. Paul Sommer. “He had this planned pretty well.”
The university declined to comment after Arrington’s arrest. But Minneapolis police, who were privy to information gathered by Anoka County authorities, said in a statement from police spokeswoman Cyndi Barrington that the department “does not have any evidence that leads us to believe that the [sexual assault] that occurred in Minneapolis on Nov. 24, 2013, is related to the [sexual assault] that occurred in Fridley.”
Arrington, of Brooklyn Park, remains in the Anoka County jail in lieu of $1 million bail.
The 32-year-old victim told police she was getting into her vehicle near where she was assigned as a personal care attendant. She said that Arrington told her he was a detective and later stuck something in her back and said he would shoot her if she didn’t get into his vehicle.
The woman told authorities she was handcuffed, blindfolded and driven to an unknown location, where Arrington raped her at least twice over a few hours, threatening to kill her.
After each assault, the woman said Arrington “scrubbed her entire body with a bleach-type solution.” He also took her clothing and washed it.
According to court records, Arrington and the woman traveled in his Ford Explorer for about 10 minutes and stopped. He removed her blindfold, put $2 in her coat pocket and told her to walk to a bus stop.
“It was dark and very cold, and … she was very fearful and had no idea where she was,” the complaint continued. The woman flagged down a cab, and the driver called police.
During a hospital exam, semen was taken from the woman’s body. DNA analysis found a match in a convicted-felon national database. That led authorities to arrest Arrington.
In Minneapolis, a somewhat similar attack occurred the next day near the University of Minnesota. That suspect also was reported to be impersonating a law enforcement officer. Police say the student had been walking alone about 2:15 a.m. near 8th Street and 15th Avenue SE. She told police that the man warned her against walking alone and offered her a ride, then drove to a remote location and sexually assaulted her.
In 2009, Arrington was convicted of committing an aggravated robbery in Brooklyn Park and was imprisoned until August 2011, according to the Minnesota Department of Corrections. His supervised release expired on Dec. 19, 2012, a corrections spokeswoman said.
Arrington is scheduled to appear in court Jan. 10.
Staff writer Shannon Prather contributed to this report. [email protected] • 612-673-4482 [email protected] • 612-673-4419Get the biggest daily 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
BISCUIT makers Tunnock’s have dumped their iconic Scottish lion south of the border to rebrand their teacakes as British.
The image of the Lion Rampant is missing on a new advertising campaign, which also describes the marshmallow favourite as “Tunnock’s Great British Teacake”
Adverts have appeared on the London Underground with the slogan and one of the famous foil-wrapped teacakes on a silver cake stand.
Boyd Tunnock, the company’s managing director, admitted to changing the branding for the new campaign.
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Boyd said: “It was the idea of my son-in-law, Fergus Loudon, who is the sales manager and looks after advertising.
“You’ve got the Great British Bake Off and things like that these days.
“We could have said Scottish but you’re then promoting Scotland. We’re British.”
The 82-year-old, who campaigned for a No vote during the referendum, added: “The vote said we’re British. We’re Scottish, however we’re still in Britain.
“Down south, people wouldn’t know it as Scottish. We’ve had caramel wafers advertised on the London Underground but I think that was the first time for teacakes.”
He said there are no immediate plans to brand the teacakes British north of the border.
He added: “We probably wouldn’t. We’d just say teacakes.
“But we could probably call it the Great World Teacake as we sell them abroad as well, in places like Australia and Canada. And we’ve just started to sell them in Germany.”
The biscuit baron, who still turns up at work every day at 6am despite having officially retired at 65, insists he is very proud of the company’s Scottish heritage and added: “I’m still just 100 yards from where my great-grandfather was born.
“He was a coffin maker and knew the power of advertising way back in the 1850s.
“He had an advert as you came into Uddingston that said, ‘Why live a miserable life when for 30 bob you can be buried comfortably?’”
Tunnock’s, who also produce snowballs and caramel logs, have recently enjoyed record profits and are considering adding a fourth production line.
Sales soared in 2014 after giant dancing teacakes were featured in the spectacular opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, viewed by a billion people worldwide.
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Boyd, who is the grandson of founder Thomas Tunnock, said: “The Commonwealth Games did us a good turn because they took our brand.
“They asked if they could use it. We didn’t pay any money but we got a great lift from it. However, if your product is not right, you won’t sell it.”
The family-run firm, who were founded in 1890, have more than 500 members of staff. They produce more than 10million biscuits a week.
Latest accounts show the company recorded a seven per cent increase in sales for the year to February last year and saw profits jump 17 per cent to £7.9million.
Celebrity fans include Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin, who said: “You can’t choose between the caramel wafer and the teacake. They’re like Lennon and McCartney – you can’t separate them.”
Howard Donald, from Take That, was presented with a Tunnock’s Teacake birthday cake live on stage in Glasgow last year.
Meanwhile, Amy Macdonald said she would have dressed as a teacake if it had been the only way for her to perform at the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games.ANAHEIM -- Anaheim Ducks coach Bruce Boudreau said defenseman Cam Fowler is day-to-day after Fowler left practice Thursday with an apparent leg injury.
Fowler had to be helped off the ice and did not put weight on his leg and appeared to be a lot of pain but Boudreau said it wasn't severe.
"He's actually not bad right now," Boudreau said. "You always get nervous when you sort of think you hurt something. You never know how much it is. Right now it's day-to-day. The trainer didn't say it was too bad. I'm expecting him, maybe not in the lineup Saturday [for Anaheim's preseason finale], but for sure [for the season opener Oct.9 at] Pittsburgh."
Bodureau said they were likely taking precaution by not putting any weight on the leg. Fowler sprained his left MCL when hit by the Colorado Avalanche forward Patrick Bordeleau on March 14, 2014 and missed 12 games last season.
Fowler, 22, is entering his fifth season after being the 12th pick in the 2010 NHL Draft. He had six goals and 36 points in 70 games last season.HOUSTON – The FBI has released 2015 crime statistics that show Rice University had the highest crime rate in the state compared to other Texas colleges.
The report included statistics for colleges and universities of all sizes.
The smallest school on the list is Austin College with 1,301 students. The largest is Texas A&M University with 61,642 students.
In order to put all schools on an even playing field, KHOU 11 News researchers calculated crime rates per 10,000 students.
When ranking Houston schools, Rice University topped the list with 317 crimes reported per 10,000 students in 2015.
Texas Southern University had 251, Houston Baptist University had 153, University of Houston’s main campus had 127, and Texas A&M Galveston campus had 55 crimes reported per 10,000 students in 2015.
However, the numbers paint a different picture when examining how many violent crimes were committed on each campus.
TSU had the highest number of violent crimes in Houston with 13 reports last year. Houston Baptist University was in second place with 10 violent crimes in 2015. Only six violent crimes were reported at Rice University last year.
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“To characterize the campus as the most dangerous is inappropriate and inaccurate. Our biggest crime here is theft,” said Johnny Whitehead, the Chief of Police at Rice University. “Most of those are bicycle thefts.”
Whitehead said the police department constantly educates students about effective bike locks. The campus is also in the process of upgrading its surveillance system in hopes of bringing theft numbers down.
However, to fully understand crime statistics, TSU Professor Dr. Howard Henderson says the key is to have perspective.
“You have to examine it in the context of time,” said Dr. Henderson, with TSU’s Administration of Justice Department. “I would strongly suggest looking at 3-5 years before and 3-5 years after to get a good idea of what those numbers in 2015 actually represent.”
The TSU professor says it’s also relevant to know who the victims of crimes are, to examine neighborhood crime trends, and to look at student populations.
Henderson said looking at crime per 10,000 people is a helpful tool, but it’s not a true representation of campus crime.
“You have some campuses that don’t have that many students, so I think to give a better idea of how likely crime is to happen and represent all the campuses in the data set is to look at the likelihood out of 1,000,” said Henderson.
No matter how you crunch the numbers, campus leaders say it’s important to remember crime can happen anywhere.
“It’s kind of a double edged sword. The campus is safe and it feels safe, but we constantly remind our students: don’t let you guard down. We still need to be vigilant about safety both on and off campus,” said Whitehead.Mama owl terrorizes neighborhood, attacks residents Copyright by WFLA - All rights reserved Photo via residents of the Holly Lake subdivision [ + - ] Video
LUTZ, Fla. (WFLA) - Eyewitnesses call her a terror. She's only two feet tall, but her deep, dark eyes and razor sharp talons are enough to intimidate anyone and everyone she meets.
The newest resident in one Lutz community is not exactly making nice with the neighbors. In fact, residents claim she's downright dangerous. A barred owl is making her presence known and scaring families in the process. She's bold, brave and doesn't have one ounce of bashful in her.
"She is mean," said Robert Hudson, a worried father of two. "She came right at us. We've talked to people, and it's nesting season. We think she's protecting her babies," Robert said.
Copyright by WFLA - All rights reserved Photo via residents of the Holly Lake subdivision
Copyright by WFLA - All rights reserved Photo via residents of the Holly Lake subdivision
Indeed, Robert had a close encounter with the bird. As soon as he and his family got home one night, the owl swooped into their garage and tried to fly into their minivan. Inside the vehicle, his wife frantically worked to protect their 8-month-old daughter, Zara, and their 4-year-old son, Milo.
"It makes a very distinctive hoot, and it was hooting and being very aggressive," Robert said.
Robert's wife, Angela, was terrified when she heard the whooshing sound of wings flapping. "I could hear the animal in the garage. Rob was swatting away at it so I got back in to the van with the kids," Angela told News Channel 8. "My first thought was, 'I can't believe this is happening to us.'"
Their neighbor, Bambi Norris, described a similar experience. She was taking her 14-year-old daughter to the bus stop early one morning in a golf cart when the owl flew straight at them and dug its claws into Bambi's scalp.
"Knocked it off me, then it jumped on my daughter. We knocked it off her, then it got on the golf cart and began hooting aggressively at us," she said.
Then, there's another neighbor around the corner who relayed her scary encounter. "He just charged right at me, grabbed me by the hair. I ran into the garage. He chased me in the garage," local realtor Martha Julian said. "I carry an umbrella now wherever I go."
Because the barred owl is protected, neighbors cannot do much at this point. Residents maintain that they don't want to see the owl hurt, but they have to protect themselves against her aggression.
"We don't want the owl hurt but we want this to stop," another neighbor said. "It's got to stop."
They are watching out for each other and do not go out much after dark. Although owls are primarily nocturnal, the neighbors maintain they've seen this particular owl in the afternoon.
Bambi filed a report with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission documenting the attacks.› Press Release
› IBEX Briefing Visuals
NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, spacecraft has made it possible for scientists to construct the first comprehensive sky map of our solar system and its location in the Milky Way galaxy. The new view will change the way researchers view and study the interaction between our galaxy and sun.
The sky map was produced with data that two detectors on the spacecraft collected during six months of observations. The detectors measured and counted particles scientists refer to as energetic neutral atoms.
The energetic neutral atoms are created in an area of our solar system known as the interstellar boundary region. This region is where charged particles from the sun, called the solar wind, flow outward far beyond the orbits of the planets and collide with material between stars. The energetic neutral atoms travel inward toward the sun from interstellar space at velocities ranging from 100,000 mph to more than 2.4 million mph. This interstellar boundary emits no light that can be collected by conventional telescopes.
The new map reveals the region that separates the nearest reaches of our galaxy, called the local interstellar medium, from our heliosphere - a protective bubble that shields and protects our solar system from most of the dangerous cosmic radiation traveling through space.
"For the first time, we're sticking our heads out of the sun's atmosphere and beginning to really understand our place in the galaxy," said David J. McComas, IBEX principal investigator and assistant vice president of the Space Science and Engineering Division at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "The IBEX results are truly remarkable, with a narrow ribbon of bright details or emissions not resembling any of the current theoretical models of this region."
NASA released the sky map image Oct. 15 in conjunction with publication of the findings in the journal Science. The IBEX data were complemented and extended by information collected using an imaging instrument sensor on NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Cassini has been observing Saturn, its moons and rings since the spacecraft entered the planet's orbit in 2004.
The IBEX sky maps also put observations from NASA's Voyager spacecraft into context. The twin Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, traveled to the outer solar system to explore Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. In 2007, Voyager 2 followed Voyager 1 into the interstellar boundary. Both spacecraft are now in the midst of this region where the energetic neutral atoms originate. However, the IBEX results show a ribbon of bright emissions undetected by the two Voyagers.
"The Voyagers are providing ground truth, but they're missing the most exciting region," said Eric Christian, the IBEX deputy mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It's like having two weather stations that miss the big storm that runs between them."
The IBEX spacecraft was launched in October 2008. Its science objective was to discover the nature of the interactions between the solar wind and the interstellar medium at the edge of our solar system. The Southwest Research Institute developed and leads the mission with a team of national and international partners. The spacecraft is the latest in NASA's series of low-cost, rapidly developed Small Explorers Program. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center manages the program for the agency's Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA and the European and Italian Space Agencies. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., provides overall management for Cassini and the Voyagers for the Science Mission Directorate.
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› Press Release
› IBEX Briefing VisualsThe White House defended President Donald Trump’s retweets of anti-Muslim videos Wednesday morning by downplaying the inflammatory content posted by a fringe, far-right group in Britain.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told a group of reporters that the president’s goal was not to promote the anti-Muslim message attached to the videos.
“I think his goal is to promote strong borders and strong national security, and I think that is again something that is no secret to anyone that that’s a big focus of this president and a big focus of this administration,” she told reporters outside the White House.
Question on President Trump's retweets this morning: Does it matter if it's a fake video? Sarah Sanders: "I'm not talking about the nature of the video. I think you're focusing on the wrong thing. The threat is real, and that's what the President is talking about." pic.twitter.com/Nh2YyuLD01 — NBC News (@NBCNews) November 29, 2017
The videos, which appeared to show violence carried out by Muslims, were originally posted on Twitter by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First, a far-right group that’s known for its anti-Muslim stance.
The videos were posted were the headlines “Muslim Destroys a Statue of Virgin Mary!”, “Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!”, and “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!” After the president retweeted the videos, Fransen posted on Twitter: “DONALD TRUMP HIMSELF HAS RETWEETED THESE VIDEOS AND HAS AROUND 44 MILLION FOLLOWERS! GOD BLESS YOU TRUMP! GOD BLESS AMERICA!”
Sanders said she wasn’t sure how the president located the videos. Media outlets worked to verify the origins of the videos this morning, finding that two of them were released in 2013. One shows a man pushing a 9-year-old boy off a roof, days after Egypt’s military ousted Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, who was the country’s first freely elected president. Those connected with the incident in the video were later sentenced to death.
The second video shows a man breaking a blue and white statue of the Virgin Mary. The man is believed to be a supporter of Nusra Front, an al-Qaida offshoot in Syria.
The third video shows two teens fighting. However, according to Buzzfeed, a Dutch website published a debunking of the video, saying there were no migrants in the video. The site described Trump’s retweets as “fake news.”
Trump has not shied from anti-Muslim commentary. During his presidential campaign, he said on CNN, “I think Islam hates us.”
While in office, Trump has often promised supporters to stop “radical Islamic terrorism” and has pursued a travel ban for majority-Muslim countries. The president has said “this is not about religion – this is about terror and keeping our country safe.” But several federal judges, citing in part the president’s tweets, have disagreed, ruling against some versions of the ban.A substantial body of evidence links differences in brain size to differences in brain organization. We have hypothesized that the developmental aspect of this relation plays a role in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a neurodevelopmental disorder which involves abnormalities in brain growth. Children with ASD have abnormally large brains by the second year of life, and for several years thereafter their brain size can be multiple standard deviations above the norm. The greater conduction delays and cellular costs presumably associated with the longer long-distance connections in these larger brains is thought to influence developmental processes, giving rise to an altered brain organization with less communication between spatially distant regions. This has been supported by computational models and by findings linking greater intra-cranial volume, an index of maximum brain-size during development, to reduced inter-hemispheric connectivity in individuals with ASD. In this paper, we further assess this hypothesis via a whole-brain analysis of network efficiency. We utilize diffusion tractography to estimate the strength and length of the connections between all pairs of cortical regions. We compute the efficiency of communication between each network node and all others, and within local neighborhoods; we then assess the relation of these measures to intra-cranial volume, and the differences in these measures between adults with autism and typical controls. Intra-cranial volume is shown to be inversely related to efficiency for wide-spread regions of cortex. Moreover, the spatial patterns of reductions in efficiency in autism bear a striking resemblance to the regional relationships between efficiency and intra-cranial volume, particularly for local efficiency. The results thus provide further support for the hypothesized link between brain overgrowth in children with autism and the efficiency of the organization of the brain in adults with autism.
Introduction
Brains differ dramatically in both size and structure across species. These two dimensions of variation are not independent, but large brains are not big small brains. The organization of both gray- and white-matter varies with brain size, but not in a uniform manner. Larger brain size is associated with a greater white-matter to gray-matter ratio (Rilling and Insel, 1999b; Zhang and Sejnowski, 2000), but a reduced degree of long-distance connectivity (Ringo, 1991; Rilling and Insel, 1999a; Karbowski, 2003; Changizi, 2007), as well as with increased modular structure (Changizi and Shimojo, 2005), greater surface convolutedness (Jerison, 1982; Prothero and Sundsten, 1984; Hofman, 1985), and various other morphological and cellular aspects of neural organization. Scaling laws capture much of the variation in structure in terms of brain size (Jerison, 1982; Ringo, 1991; Karbowski, 2003; Changizi and Shimojo, 2005; Changizi, 2007). However, significant structural variability remains unaccounted for by these scaling laws.
The underpinnings of these scaling relationships are not well understood, but are thought to be related to a design principle originally postulated by Ramón y Cajal: that neural circuit design is under pressure to minimize cellular costs and conduction delays (Ramón y Cajal, 1995). Increased brain size provides increased computational power, but at hugely increased cost. Neural material is expensive to construct and to operate. The human brain makes up only about 2 percent of the total body weight, but its operation is responsible for approximately 15 percent of cardiac output, 20 percent of oxygen usage, and 25 percent of glucose usage (Magistretti, 1999). These metabolic costs are largely due to the cost of neural signaling, and maintaining the resting potentials needed for neural signaling. These costs increase with membrane surface area, which increases with the number and size of the axons. Larger brains have a larger number of axons, and the longest of these axons are both longer and slightly larger in diameter than are those of smaller brains; thus the total membrane surface area is increased. Axon diameter does not increase sufficiently with brain size, however, to compensate for the increased fiber lengths, so larger brains also have longer conduction delays (Olivares et al., 2001). These greater costs and conduction delays appear to be related to at least some of the aspects of organization that scale with brain size, e.g. the reduced degree of long-distance connectivity (Ringo, 1991; Rilling and Insel, 1999a; Karbowski, 2003; Changizi, 2007).
The focus on cross-species differences, where differences in brain size can be more than 1000-fold within classes, e.g., Mammalia, and 100-fold within orders, e.g., Primates, allows relationships between brain size and structure to be apparent despite differences in structure unrelated to brain size. But, it ignores potentially important differences in developmental brain growth trajectories. There are substantial inter-species differences in rate of brain growth, and developmental trajectories can even vary considerably between individuals, e.g., brain size may differ by as much as 50% in children of the same age (Giedd, 2008). Brain size differences between adults account for some of the differences in structure (Jäncke et al., 1997; Honey et al., 2009; Lewis et al., 2009); differences in brain growth trajectories likely account for additional structural variability.
Substantial neural reorganization occurs over development. Neural development is largely a combination of over-exuberance and competition-based elimination. Large numbers of transient projections are produced during cortical development (Rakic et al., 1986; LaMantia and Rakic, 1990), and which connections are retained is determined by their metabolic demands and their ability to compete for neurotrophins (Van Ooyen and Willshaw, 1999). Due to the lesser degree of myelination in the developing brain than in the mature brain, the differences in conduction delays and metabolic costs associated with differences in fiber length will be substantially greater (Chugani et al., 1987; Paus et al., 1999; Thatcher et al., 2008). Thus, to the extent that differences in brain size during development coincide with differences in brain size in mature individuals, normal developmental processes may underlie at least some portion of the scaling relationships seen across and within species; moreover, differences in brain size during development which do not coincide with differences in brain size in mature individuals may account for a portion of the structural variability that is not accounted for by scaling laws.
This conjecture is clearly relevant to developmental disorders showing abnormalities in brain growth trajectories. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is such a case. ASD is a disorder of neural developmental defined by impairments in reciprocal social interactions, impairments in verbal and non-verbal communication, and a restricted repertoire of activities and interests (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). The aetiology of ASD is unknown, but there is now consensus that brain size during development is increased. Infants who go on to a diagnosis of ASD show abnormally rapid brain growth during the first years of life (Lainhart et al., 1997; Redcay and Courchesne, 2005), and after the second or third year of life children with ASD show increased head size (Lainhart et al., 1997; Hazlett et al., 2005) and brain size (Piven et al., 1995; Courchesne et al., 2001; Hazlett et al., 2005). Early in development this size difference can be multiple standard deviations above the norm (Redcay and Courchesne, 2005).
Lewis and Elman (2008) have shown via computational modeling that the increased conduction delays presumably associated with the early brain overgrowth in ASD may lead to the later functional and structural long-range underconnectivity. Further, in adults with ASD, Lewis et al. (2012) have shown that callosal tract length adjusted for intra-cranial volume (ICV), an index of maximum brain-size during development (Whitwell et al., 2001; Aylward et al., 2002; Buckner et al., 2004), shows the typical inverse relation to relative corpus callosum size, and so the early brain overgrowth in autism appears to in fact account for some portion of the later observed long-range underconnectivity.
In the current paper we extended this work to assess the impact of the early brain overgrowth in ASD on overall brain organization. We performed a network analysis and assessed the relation between the network metrics and ICV. Network analysis methods have evolved over the past decade and a half, from straightforward applications of graph theory, which assess only network topology (Watts and Strogatz, 1998), to more sophisticated approaches which take account of the spatial aspects of connectivity to assess the
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(CD) is a chronic condition characterized by inflammation and atrophy of the small intestine. It affects roughly 1 in 100 people, and a strict, lifelong gluten-free diet is the only remedy. A new Tel Aviv University study finds a link between CD and a higher incidence of disordered eating behavior during adolescence and young adulthood. The researchers found that 19% of female teens and 7% of male teens with CD exhibited eating disorders, compared to 8% and 4% of adolescents who did not have CD. Disordered eating behaviors affect about 10% of adolescents and refer to a wide range of abnormal eating behaviors, including binge eating, dieting, skipping meals regularly, self-induced vomiting and obsessive calorie counting. These behaviors are most common among older, overweight female adolescents with CD. The study was led by Dr. Itay Tokatly-Latzer of TAU's Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Department of Pediatrics at Chaim Sheba Medical Center. It was overseen by Dr. Orit Pinhas-Hamiel and conducted by Dr. Daniel Stein, Dr. Batia Weiss and Prof. Liat Lerner-Geva, all of TAU's Sackler Faculty of Medicine. The results were published in Eating and Weight Disorders. "We discovered an increased occurrence of disordered eating behavior among adolescents with CD," Dr. Tokatly-Latzer says. "Caregivers of CD patients should be aware of the possibility of them having eating disorders. Early recognition of this can prevent the deterioration of these states into full-blown disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia. "These eating patterns can lead to a failure to meet nutritional and metabolic needs, which cause severe impairment to psychosocial functioning," Dr. Tokatly-Latzer continues. "Primary care physicians and gastroenterologists who encounter adolescents with CD should increase their awareness to the possibility of this population having disordered eating behavior. Once the suspicion is raised, they can refer them for psychological and nutritional treatment." The researchers conducted a web-mediated survey on 136 adolescents aged 12-18 with CD. The survey assessed the participants' rate of disordered eating behavior as well as their adherence to a gluten-free diet. The survey, conducted over the course of a year, included two self-rating questionnaires: the Eating Attitudes Test-26 and the gluten-free diet questionnaire. Only 32% of the participants reported a strict adherence to a gluten-free diet. "Eating disorders have a perplexing etiology that includes biological, sociological, psychological and environmental elements," Dr. Tokatly-Latzer explains. "Not only does the excessive preoccupation with food increase the likelihood of individuals with CD to develop eating disorders, but there is a major aspect that involves food limitation of any kind that probably triggers a predisposition for developing pathological eating tendencies. "This study should raise awareness for medical teams to the importance of closely monitoring adolescents with CD disease for disordered eating behavior, especially when they are female, overweight or older. Since individuals with disordered eating behavior are at increased risk of developing a clinical form of an eating disorder, early identification and intervention may improve therapeutic outcomes." White Blood Cells Related to Allergies and Asthma May Also Be Harnessed to Destroy Cancer Cells Eosinophil immune cells are capable of killing colon cancer cells, TAU researchers say A new Tel Aviv University study finds that eosinophils — white blood cells that may have played an evolutionary role in combating parasites, but which are today responsible for chronic asthma and modern allergies — may be used to eliminate malignant colon cancer cells. The research was led by Prof. Ariel Munitz of the Department of Microbiology and Clinical Immunology at TAU's Sackler School of Medicine and conducted by TAU doctoral student Hadar Reichman of Prof. Munitz's TAU laboratory, in collaboration with colleagues in Tel Aviv Medical Center's Gastroenterology Department. It was published in Cancer Immunology Research on January 21. "Eosinophils are white blood cells that secrete powerfully destructive proteins," Prof. Munitz says. "They may have played an evolutionary role in combatting parasites. But now that most people, particularly in the West, enjoy good hygiene and few parasites, the eosinophils have become destructive agents, causing allergies and asthma. "Our new research theorized that since eosinophils are capable of killing parasites and can cause damage in the lungs of asthma patients, they might play a role in cancer treatment and would be able to kill tumor cells." The largest eosinophil reservoir is situated in the digestive system, so the researchers initially decided to test their theories on colon cancer. In the first stage of research, they selected samples from tumors of 275 patients to determine the number of eosinophils in a tumor as compared with the stage and severity of the disease. "We found that the higher the number of eosinophils in the tumor, the less severe the disease, which represents a clear correlation," says Prof. Munitz. "We identified that the cancerous environment attracts these cells, which infiltrate the tumors and flourish there for a long time." The researchers subsequently tested their hypotheses in various mouse models of colorectal cancer. They discovered that eosinophils displayed potent anti-tumor activities and could directly kill tumor cells. "We also found that when eosinophils were activated by a protein called IFN-gamma, they induced an even greater tumor-killing response," says Prof. Munitz. "Following various extensive analyses, we concluded that eosinophils have unique and distinct activities in comparison with other cells present in the tumor. For example, eosinophils can kill tumors independently of known tumor-fighting cytotoxic T cells." The fact that eosinophils represent a distinct weapon in fighting tumor cells opens new avenues for treatment of cancer, either by encouraging eosinophils to unleash their robust anti-tumor response, or by combining treatments to harness the potent forces of both eosinophils and cytotoxic T cells. "We have discovered a new target for immunotherapy for cancer patients — the eosinophils," concludes Prof. Munitz. "We hope that our research will serve as a foundation for drug development in a number of different approaches." The study was supported by the Israel Cancer Research Foundation, the Israel Cancer Association and the Israel Science Foundation. New Yeast Model of Metabolic Disorders May Lead to Life-saving Therapies Unicellular organism mimics pathology and symptoms of congenital diseases, TAU researchers say There are hundreds of metabolic disorders — including phenylketonuria, tyrosinemia, maple syrup urine disease and homocystinuria. These disorders lead to congenital diseases that produce a critical enzyme deficiency that interferes with the body's metabolism. The pathologies and symptoms vary among the diseases, but all of them are usually fatal and have no known cure. Most metabolic disorders affect infants. The majority of these diseases currently lack effective treatments and patients must maintain a strict diet, avoiding certain food items that contain substances their bodies cannot break down. Often the proposed solutions, such as bone marrow transplants, are extremely expensive and only partially effective. A new Tel Aviv University study suggests that the role of yeast, the world's most basic eukaryotic unicellular organism, may pave the way for the development of novel, more effective therapies. The research was published in Nature Communications on January 8. "The same yeast that serves as a basis for the bread we eat and the beer we drink now also serves as an instrumental model of metabolic disorders," says Dr. Dana Laor of TAU's George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, the lead author of the study conducted in Prof. Ehud Gazit's TAU laboratory. "Three Nobel Prizes have been awarded to scientists engaging in research related to yeast in the last decade, and it's no wonder. Yeast grows quickly; it's affordable; and it's easily manipulated as a simple unicellular organism," Dr. Laor explains. "Now we, too, have harnessed its properties to gain insight into this devastating group of diseases." The research is based on previous studies conducted by Prof. Gazit and his colleagues that revealed the role of toxic metabolite accumulation in the pathology of metabolic disorders. "We have known for a while now that amyloids are linked to severe diseases of the central nervous system, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's," Prof. Gazit says. "Recent experiments conducted in our lab have shown that they characterize genetic metabolic disorders as well. In such disorders, the gene responsible for producing an enzyme, which modifies a particular metabolite, is impaired. "As a result, large quantities of that metabolite accumulate in the body and cause serious damage," he continues. "While each condition is separately considered as 'rare,' these disorders constitute a major proportion of pediatric genetic diseases." In the new study, Dr. Laor genetically manipulated yeast cells to produce a toxic accumulation of the metabolite adenine, devising the first in vivo yeast model of a congenital metabolic disease as a result. The innovative platform will allow scientists to screen thousands of drug-like small molecules to identify molecules that could lead to novel therapies, which can then be developed by Big Pharma. "Our pioneering research may help identify the molecular mechanisms involved in these diseases and thereby help to develop suitable drugs," says Dr. Laor. The researchers recently received an investment commitment from the Tel Aviv University Technology Innovation Momentum Fund, which invests in promising breakthrough technologies, to collaborate with the BLAVATNIK CENTER for Drug Discovery to establish an integrated drug discovery platform for metabolic disorders. The fund is run by Ramot, the Business Engagement Center of Tel Aviv University. The researchers also have a patent pending on their yeast model. "If you can successfully connect the pieces of the puzzle, then you can understand the biology behind a disease," Dr. Laor concludes. "It is critically important to understand the pathways leading to the toxicity caused by metabolite accumulations in order to develop the appropriate therapy. In this case, the lives of thousands of children may be saved and their quality of life significantly improved." Image caption: The budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, on solid medium (left) and magnified by light microscopy (right). Photo courtesy of Gazit lab. New Biomarker Links Cancer Progression to Genome Instability High level of specific protein in tumors indicates prognosis as well as optimal treatments, TAU researchers say Our DNA is under constant attack. The delicate molecule that contains our genetic information is extremely vulnerable to everything from environmental agents, such as radiation, to the chemicals in the air we breathe and the food we eat. Genome instability can lead to genetic disorders, chronic diseases and a predisposition to cancer. A new Tel Aviv University study identifies elevated levels of a protein called ubiquilin-4 as a new biomarker for genome instability. The study finds that ubiquilin-4 takes part in defending the genome from DNA damage, but too much ubiquilin-4 is harmful. When the amount of ubiquilin-4 rises in tumor cells, the cells become more prone to genome instability, accelerating the tumor's progression and making it resistant to commonly used cancer treatments. The study was led by Prof. Yossi Shiloh of the Department of Human Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry at TAU's Sackler School of Medicine, in close collaboration with Prof. Christian Reinhardt of University Hospital Cologne and University of Cologne. Research for the study was carried out in Tel Aviv by Dr. Ron Jachimowicz, now at the University Hospital of Cologne, and Dr. Yael Ziv and PhD student Bhavana Velpula, both of TAU. Dr. Dave Hoon of the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica, CA, also contributed to the research. It was published on January 3, 2019, in Cell. "This novel biomarker provides new, critical information about the tumor stage and grade, as well as the patient's chances of responding to treatment," says Prof. Shiloh. "Tumors with high levels of ubiquilin-4 may be more resistant to radiation and some chemotherapies than those with normal levels of this protein. But the good news is that they may also respond better to other types of cancer therapy. Obviously, this is vital information for clinicians and patients. "The importance of maintaining genome stability and integrity has been demonstrated through the study of rare genetic disorders," Prof. Shiloh continues. "But genome stability has now become a public health issue. There are so many proteins involved in responding to DNA damage, and behind every protein is a different gene. There are infinite ways in which a gene can mutate. Various combinations of these mutations may lead to chronic diseases and a predisposition to cancer, premature aging and other conditions. Genome stability is everyone's problem." According to the new research, the body's DNA damage response is key to maintaining genome stability in the face of the constant onslaught of damaging agents. The response is composed of a broad, fine-tuned signaling network involving a standing army of proteins fully dedicated to this mission, as well as reserve proteins recruited temporarily to help resolve genome integrity. In 1995, the Shiloh lab discovered the gene encoding of one of the major sentries at the gate of genome stability — the protein ataxia-telangiectasia mutated (ATM). The finding was met with great fanfare. It concluded a long effort to identify the gene mutated in a severe genome instability syndrome, ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T). But ATM also plays a critical role in the body's DNA damage response, mobilizing an extensive signaling network in response to tears in the long DNA molecule. It causes subtle chemical modifications in many proteins, which temporarily render them reserve proteins and recruits them away from their regular duties to carry out damage control. "We are constantly searching for new reserve proteins that respond to ATM's call," Prof. Shiloh says. "Our new study shows that, like many other proteins, ubiquilin-4 is modified by ATM, and for several hours it serves the ATM-governed system." The researchers, in collaboration with Prof. Dagmar Wieczorek of the Institute of Human Genetics at Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf, also discovered that the deficiency of ubiquilin-4 alone can lead to yet another rare genome instability syndrome. "We hope our findings will provide a new tool for tumor classification, prognosis and treatment design," Prof. Shiloh concludes. "The research highlights the broader implications of the importance of genome stability for our health." Heart Cell Defect Identified as Possible Cause of Heart Failure in Pregnancy TAU research has diagnostic and therapeutic implications Peripartum cardiomyopathy (PPCM) is a rare form of heart failure that affects women in their last month of pregnancy and up to five months after giving birth. PPCM can be difficult to detect because its symptoms — swelling in the feet and legs and shortness of breath — mimic many of those of third trimester pregnancy. The disease, which can be fatal, manifests itself as heart muscle dysfunction and heart failure, but its underlying cause has eluded researchers. Now, a new Tel Aviv University study reveals that one of the possible primary causes of PPCM is a functional heart cell defect. The findings may have diagnostic and therapeutic implications. The research was led jointly by Prof. Jonathan Leor and Dr. Nili Naftali-Shani, both of the Cardiovascular Research Institute at TAU's Sackler School of Medicine and Sheba Medical Center, in collaboration with Dr. Natali Molotski, Dr. Uri Amit, Li-at Zeltzer and Alina Levich, all of TAU and Sheba; Prof. Michael Arad and Dr. Rafael Kuperstein, Dr. Yael Nevo-Caspi, Haya Abbas and Prof. Gidi Paret of Sheba Medical Center; Dr. Irit Huber of the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology; and Dr. Lorenzo Monserrat of Coruña, Spain. It was published in the journal Circulation on December 3, 2018. "It was previously suggested that levels of STAT3, an essential protective protein involved in cellular response to stress, were abnormally low in the heart cells of PPCM patients. This triggered a biological process that ultimately sliced the lactation hormone prolactin, creating toxic products that cause the disease," Prof. Leor says. "But we found that levels of the STAT3 protein were in fact higher in the heart cells of women with PPCM than in those of healthy women. "We then discovered that a functional defect in the heart cells of patients with PPCM, characterized by an impaired release of growth factors that regulate blood vessel formation or factors that activate the immune system, was the underlying mechanism involved in the disease." The researchers say their discovery calls into question the medical justification for treating women with PPCM with bromocriptine, a drug used to treat symptoms of hyperprolactinemia (high levels of prolactin), which has serious adverse effects. Dr. Naftali-Shani harnessed a cutting-edge genetic engineering technique, which won the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology in 2012, to produce stem cells and beating heart cells from the skin cells of PPCM patients and healthy controls. "This is the first time that this technique was used to study the mechanism of PPCM," Dr. Naftali-Shani says. "Using these heart cells, we were able to find that the accepted theory was incorrect. The myocardial cells produced from the stem cells of the patients had functional defects that caused them to secrete inflammatory proteins and a protein that inhibits the formation of blood vessels in the muscle, even without stress. We hope that this discovery will pave the way for early diagnoses and new, effective prevention and treatments." Prof. Leor says, "Our future challenge will be to explore the exact molecular defect in heart cells of women with PPCM and to determine a new target for prevention and therapy." Breast Cancer Recruits Bone Marrow Cells to Increase Cancer Cell Proliferation Cancer-associated fibroblasts are derived from bone marrow cells called mesenchymal stromal cells, Tel Aviv University researchers say Tel Aviv University researchers have discovered that breast cancer tumors boost their growth by recruiting stromal cells that originate in bone marrow. While the recruitment of bone marrow-derived fibroblasts lowers the odds of surviving breast cancer, the study suggests that targeting these cells with new therapies could be an effective way of treating the disease. Research for the study was led by Prof. Neta Erez of the Department of Pathology at TAU's Sackler School of Medicine and conducted by Prof. Erez's former doctoral students Dr. Yael Raz and Dr. Noam Cohen. The study was published on November 23 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. Cancer cells within solid tumors are surrounded by other cell types that, though not cancerous themselves, boost tumor growth and metastasis. Breast cancer tumors, for example, contain large numbers of fibroblast cells that promote cancer cell proliferation, inflammation and the formation of new blood vessels, which then supply the growing tumor with nutrients and oxygen. Many of these cancer-associated fibroblasts derive from neighboring breast tissue, but others come from elsewhere in the body. The TAU researchers discovered that in mice with breast cancer, a significant number of cancer-associated fibroblasts derived from bone marrow cells called mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs). "We transplanted bone marrow in a transgenic mouse model of breast cancer to discover the origin of a unique subpopulation of cancer-associated fibroblasts," says Prof. Erez. "We found that the recruitment of bone marrow-derived fibroblasts is a crucial step in breast cancer progression. "We discovered that breast tumors are actually able to recruit MSCs from the bone marrow and then cause them to develop into fibroblasts," Prof. Erez continues. "These bone marrow-derived fibroblasts are different from other cancer-associated fibroblasts. For example, they lack a key cell-signaling protein called PDGFRα, a surface receptor. But bone marrow-derived fibroblasts are particularly effective at stimulating the formation of new blood vessels because they produce large amounts of a protein called 'clusterin.'" The researchers found that the tumors containing bone marrow-derived fibroblasts in mouse models were more vascularized and therefore grew faster than tumors that only contained breast tissue-derived fibroblasts. Prof. Erez and colleagues also found that human breast cancers contain fibroblasts lacking PDGFRα. This suggests that human tumors also recruit bone marrow-derived cells. Moreover, tumors containing lower levels of PDGFRα tended to be deadlier. "Our study shows that the recruitment of bone marrow-derived fibroblasts is important for promoting tumor growth, likely by enhancing blood vessel formation," Prof. Erez concludes. "Understanding the function of these cancer-associated fibroblasts could form the basis of developing novel therapeutic manipulations that co-target bone marrow-derived fibroblasts as well as the cancer cells themselves." Epigenetic Map May Pave Way for New Therapeutic Solutions to Hearing Loss Understanding the expression of and controlling the genes involved in hearing are milestone discoveries, TAU researchers say Epigenetics is the expression and control of genes. The epigenetics involved in the inner ear is a critical part of the mystery of hearing. A team led by Prof. Karen B. Avraham, Vice Dean of the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University, has now created the first map of "methylation" — one of the body's main epigenetic signals — that reflects the functioning of the inner ear in its entirety. Prof. Avraham collaborated on the study with TAU doctoral student Ofer Yizhar-Barnea and Prof. R. David Hawkins and other colleagues from the University of Washington and the Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Italy. Their research was published in a study in Scientific Reports on November 26. "Our analysis of the DNA methylation dynamics revealed a large number of new genes that are critical for the development of the inner ear and the onset of hearing itself," Prof. Avraham says. "Instead of looking at one gene at a time, we employed sophisticated genomic technologies to examine all the genes in one snapshot. This allowed us to have a genome-wide view of the regulatory dynamics of the inner ear as a whole." The life cycle of hearing Humans are born with a lifetime allowance of inner ear hair cells, the inner ear cells responsible for hearing. Once the cells die due to genetic mutations, excessive exposure to noise, ototoxic drugs or aging, they don't regenerate. Some 34 million children worldwide suffer from incapacitating hearing loss, according to the World Health Organization. Among the elderly, hearing loss is associated with a higher risk of dementia, and hearing aids and cochlear implants provide only partial solutions to an urgent medical issue facing young and old alike. "Epigenetic signals — among them methylation — don't allow the genes that could regenerate hair cells to be turned on," Prof. Avraham says. "If we can discover how these genes are controlled — how they're turned on and off — we may be able to modify these signals to allow regeneration to happen. "This would allow us to transform cells in the inner ear to become functional hair cells or create new ones to allow for proper hearing. We hope that our epigenetic maps of the inner ear will provide entry points into the development of therapeutics for hearing loss." The role of epigenetics Epigenetics does not change the genetic code, but how the code is read. Methylation is the direct addition of a chemical group (methyl, CH3) onto the C nucleotides in the DNA molecule and is considered one of the most basic epigenetic mechanisms. DNA methylation serves as the on/off switch for the genome. Prof. Howard Cedar of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a world authority on methylation who was not involved in the research, says, "While our genes provide the instructions for how to make the building blocks of the hearing system, understanding how these components are controlled to provide proper hearing requires additional epigenetic information. The research directed by Prof. Avraham and her colleagues provides, for the first time, insights into how this works and reveals important clues on how we may be able to prevent or correct a wide variety of hearing ailments." In the course of their research, the scientists discovered that inner ear cells follow a similar methylation pattern as the brain and neurons, suggesting they have a similar plasticity. This plasticity may allow for the introduction of regulatory elements to induce regeneration. The scientists validated their findings using state-of-the-art CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology. They found a critical regulatory element for a deafness gene, connexin 30. "The development of this work was constrained by our limited knowledge of epigenetic mechanisms involved in the inner ear," Prof. Avraham concludes. "Epigenetic modification of gene expression, possibly by reversing abnormal DNA methylation, may offer a way of awakening the very genes that block regeneration from occurring." The research was supported by the United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation, the Israel Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health–NIDCD and the UK Action on Hearing Loss. Drug Candidate May Recover Vocal Abilities Lost to ADNP Syndrome Protein snippet normalizes disrupted neural connectivity caused by genetic disorder, TAU researchers say Activity-dependent neuroprotective protein syndrome (ADNP syndrome) is a rare genetic condition that causes developmental delays, intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorder symptoms in thousands of children worldwide. There is no known remedy for the disorder. A new Tel Aviv University study finds that the drug candidate CP201, also known as NAP, may improve vocal communication abilities that are underdeveloped in ADNP patients. The research establishes that vocal impediments and disrupted neural connectivity in ADNP-deficient mice were normalized following daily injections and intranasal administrations of CP201. Research for the groundbreaking study was led by Prof. Illana Gozes, the Lily and Avraham Gildor Chair for the Investigation of Growth Factors and head of the Elton Laboratory for Molecular Neuroendocrinology at TAU's Sackler Faculty of Medicine, in collaboration with Prof. Anne McKinney of McGill University and her research group and Dr. Vlasta Korenková of the BIOCEV Institute of Biotechnology. TAU doctoral students Gal Hacohen-Kleiman, Shlomo Sragovich, Gidon Karmon, Iris Grigg and Dr. Metsada Pasmanik-Chor conducted the research for the study, which was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Giving ADNP children a voice ADNP syndrome is caused by truncating mutations of the ADNP protein, which is essential for brain formation. "Children with ADNP syndrome suffer from intellectual disability, delayed language acquisition and speech impediments," says Prof. Gozes, who discovered the ADNP gene nearly 20 years ago. "Many children are never able to speak at all. "We developed a mouse model of ADNP deficiency that offered a closer look at the ADNP-deficient brain. We discovered that vocal communication deficiencies are in fact connected to synaptic pathology, and that we could normalize this by injecting the mouse model with daily NAP treatments or administering intranasal doses to the mouse. Specific gene regulation substantially improved on most of the parameters that we tested, which is great news for the future of ADNP and autism research." Prof. Gozes' decades-long ADNP research led to the development of CP201, an important nerve-cell-protecting snippet of ADNP that enhances its activity. It increases nerve cell plasticity that improves memory and cognition through interaction with microtubule end-binding proteins. "We have seen CP201's positive effects in Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases," says Prof. Gozes. "We have now found that vocal communication impediments in ADNP-deficient mice were successfully normalized. The CP201 systemic injections or intranasal daily applications in nonsuckling mice affected global changes in brain plasticity, substantially improving developmental milestones." The new study was conducted over two years. The researchers used cognitive behavioral tests and gene expression analysis to assess the developmental milestones of 72 ADNP-deficient mice. They also applied ultrasonic vocalization analysis to some 28 ADNP-deficient mice and compared these with the results of 50 "normal" mice. A promising candidate for clinical trials Ramot, Tel Aviv University's technology transfer arm, licensed NAP (CP201) to Coronis Neuroscience for development. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has since granted CP201 Orphan Drug status for the treatment of ADNP syndrome in the United States. According to Prof. Gozes, the current study paves the way for a clinical trial. "NAP (CP201) has demonstrated brain target engagement and great potential for treating social, motor and vocal communication impediments in future intellectual disabilities/autism-oriented clinical trials," she says. Coronis Neurosciences has just completed a pre-IND (investigational new drug program) meeting with the FDA with positive outcomes and a road map to successful IND submission for CP201 in the ADNP syndrome. The IND program is the means by which a pharmaceutical company obtains permission to start human clinical trials. The study was supported by ERA-Net Neuron, the Israel Science Foundation, the Israel-U.S. Binational Science Foundation-National Science Foundation — U.S. (BSF-NSF), the AMN Fund, the Israeli Ministry of Science, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, BIOCEV, Drs. Ronith and Armand Stemmer and Arthur Gerbi (French Friends of Tel Aviv University), as well as Canadian Friends of Tel Aviv University (Anne and Alex Cohen), Spanish Friends of Tel Aviv University and the Eldee Foundation/Bloomfield Family of Montreal awards for student exchange (Tel Aviv University/McGill University). Scientists Use Patients’ Own Cells and Materials to Engineer Fully Personalized Tissue Implants of Any Kind Risk of an immune response to an organ implant virtually disappears, TAU researchers say In a new study, Tel Aviv University researchers reveal how they invented the first fully personalized tissue implant, engineered from a patient's own materials and cells. The new technology makes it possible to engineer any kind of tissue implant from one small fatty tissue biopsy. "We were able to create a personalized hydrogel from the materials of the biopsy, to differentiate fatty tissue cells into different cell types and to engineer cardiac, spinal cord, cortical and other tissue implants to treat different diseases," says Prof. Tal Dvir of TAU's Department of Biotechnology, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology and the Sagol Center for Regenerative Biotechnology, who led the research for the study. "Since both the cells and the material used derive from the patient, the implant does not provoke an immune response, ensuring proper regeneration of the defected organ," Prof. Dvir says. The research was conducted by Prof. Dvir's postdoctoral researcher Reuven Edri and doctoral students Nadav Noor and Idan Gal, in collaboration with Prof. Dan Peer and Prof. Irit Gat Viks of TAU's Department of Cell Research and Immunology and Prof. Lior Heller of Assaf HaRofeh Medical Center in Israel. It was recently published in Advanced Materials. Currently, in tissue engineering for regenerative medicine, cells are isolated from the patient and cultured in biomaterials to assemble into a functional tissue. These biomaterials are always either synthetic or natural, derived from plants or animals. After transplantation, they may induce an immune response that leads to rejection of the implanted tissue. Patients receiving engineered tissues or any other implants are treated with immuno-suppressors, which themselves endanger the health of the patient. "With our technology, we can engineer any tissue type, and after transplantation we can efficiently regenerate any diseased or injured organ — a heart after a heart attack, a brain after trauma or with Parkinson's disease, a spinal cord after injury," says Prof. Dvir. "In addition, we can engineer adipogenic (fatty tissue) implants for reconstructive surgeries or cosmetics. These implants will not be rejected by the body." The researchers extracted a small biopsy of fatty tissue from patients, then separated its cellular and a-cellular materials. While the cells were reprogrammed to become induced pluripotent stem cells — able to make cells from all three basic body layers, so they can potentially produce any cell or tissue the body needs to repair itself — the extracellular material was processed to become a personalized hydrogel. After combining the resulting stem cells and the hydrogel, the scientists successfully engineered the personalized tissue samples and tested the patients' immune responses to them. The researchers are currently engaged in regenerating an injured spinal cord and an infarcted heart with spinal cord and cardiac implants. They have also begun to investigate the potential of human dopaminergic implants to treat Parkinson's disease in animal models. The researchers plan to regenerate other organs, including intestines and eyes, using the patients' own materials and cells. "We believe that the technology of engineering fully personalized tissue implants of any type will allow us to regenerate any organ with a minimal risk of immune response," Prof. Dvir concludes. Neonatal Birthweights Increase in Direct Proportion to Number of Births Large for gestational age (LGA) weight infants signal risk of recurrence, TAU researchers say A new Tel Aviv University study finds that neonatal birthweights increase in direct proportion with the number of births of the mother in at least 30 percent of all cases. The study focuses on the risk of having large for gestational age (LGA) infants, babies who clock in at higher than the 90th percentile for weight. "We know that LGA babies are at risk for several neonatal complications, including jaundice, low sugar levels after birth and more," says Dr. Liran Hiersch of TAU's Sackler School of Medicine and Tel Aviv Medical Center, who, together with Dr. Eran Ashwal, also of Sackler and Tel Aviv Medical Center, led the research for the study, which was published last month in the Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics. "The results of the current study can help identify women who are at increased risk for LGA from the beginning of pregnancy and earlier. This, in turn, will help caregivers advise women and will help reduce the risk of LGA by controlling known risk factors such as weight gain during pregnancy," Dr. Hiersch continues. Infant birthweights were found to be in increasing order in 30 percent of cases, the study found, meaning that the third infant in a series of pregnancies weighed the most and the first baby weighed the least. "We did not use absolute birthweight but rather birthweight percentile, which is a more accurate way of assessing infant growth," Dr. Hiersch says. "In addition, we focused on the risk of having LGA infants in the third delivery, according to the presence of LGA in prior deliveries." The researchers conducted a large retrospective cohort study that included 4,615 women who had delivered three children at Israel's Rabin Medical Center over 20 years (1994-2013). To avoid potential data biases, they excluded women with obstetric complications that tended to affect neonatal birthweight. "Importantly, we found that a history of LGA is a major risk factor for recurrence of LGA," says Dr. Hiersch. "We can harness this information to provide better medical care to women in the initial stage of pregnancies and improve their chances of maintaining healthy pregnancies. Safer deliveries will likely increase. "The effect of prior pregnancies on future pregnancy outcome is fascinating. Most current data addressing this issue includes only women with past pregnancy complications. It does not specify if the said complication occurred only once or twice in the past. Since we found that there is a relationship, we plan to explore other pregnancy-related complications in the same manner in the future," concludes Dr. Hiersch. New Platform Based on Biology and Nanotechnology Carries mRNA Directly to Target Cells Combined platform provides safe, effective passage for therapies treating cancer and other diseases, TAU researchers say Delivering an effective therapeutic payload to specific target cells with few adverse effects is considered by many to be the holy grail of medical research. A new Tel Aviv University study explores a biological approach to directing nanocarriers loaded with protein "game changers" to specific cells. The groundbreaking method may prove useful in treating myriad malignancies, inflammatory diseases and rare genetic disorders. Prof. Dan Peer, director of the Laboratory of Precision Nanomedicine at the School of Molecular Cell Biology at TAU's Faculty of Life Sciences, led the research for the new study, which was conducted by TAU graduate student Nuphar Veiga and lab colleagues Meir Goldsmith, Yasmin Granot, Daniel Rosenblum, Niels Dammes, Ranit Kedmi and Srinivas Ramishetti. The research was published in Nature Communications. Over the past few years, lipid carriers encapsulating messenger RNAs (mRNAs) have been shown to be extremely useful in altering the protein expressions for a host of diseases. But directing this information to specific cells has remained a major challenge. "In our new research, we utilized mRNA-loaded carriers — nanovehicles carrying a set of genetic instructions via a biological platform called ASSET — to target the genetic instructions of an anti-inflammatory protein in immune cells," says Prof. Peer. "We were able to demonstrate that selective anti-inflammatory protein in the target cells resulted in reduced symptoms and disease severity in colitis. "This research is revolutionary. It paves the way for the introduction of an mRNA that could encode any protein lacking in cells, with direct applications for genetic, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases — not to mention cancer, in which certain genes overexpress themselves." ASSET (Anchored Secondary scFv Enabling Targeting) uses a biological approach to direct nanocarriers into specific cells to promote gene manipulation. "This study opens new avenues in cell-specific delivery of mRNA molecules and ultimately might introduce the specific anti-inflammatory (interleukin 10) mRNA as a novel therapeutic modality for inflammatory bowel diseases," says Ms. Veiga. "Targeted mRNA-based protein production has both therapeutic and research applications," she concludes. "Going forward, we intend to utilize targeted mRNA delivery for the investigation of novel therapeutics treating inflammation disorders, cancer and rare genetic diseases." Photo captions: Top right: Schematic illustration of the mechanism by which the lab's targeted nanoparticles modulate gene expression in the target cell. Credit: Nuphar Veiga. Middle left: Peer lab team. Left to right: Yasmin Granot, Dr. Meir Goldsmith, Niels Dammes, Nuphar Veiga, Prof. Dan Peer, Dr. Srinivas Ramishetti and Daniel Rosenblum. Credit: Anna Gutkin. Scientists Discover Biological Ultraviolet Protection "Timer" Wave-like process recruits skin protection systems to shield skin from sun exposure, TAU and Technion researchers say Scientists at Tel Aviv University have discovered a critical 48-hour cycle that is responsible for synchronizing the biological mechanisms that protect our skin from sun damage. The new study reveals a biological clock dubbed the "UV-protection timer" that both synchronizes the skin's response to ultraviolet rays and mediates a tradeoff between two skin defense systems: stress response and pigmentation. "Our discovery was prompted by the surprising finding that low-frequency UV exposure results in higher skin pigmentation," says Prof. Carmit Levy of the Department of Human Genetics and Biochemistry at TAU's Sackler Faculty of Medicine, who led
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aller: Houston Rockets from 7th to 10th
The Miami Heat will send their first-round pick to the 76ers, as long as it is not in the top 10 picks. BPI gives the Heat a 12 percent chance of having a top-10 pick.
The New Orleans Pelicans, Phoenix Suns and Oklahoma City Thunder are all vying for the 8th spot in the Western Conference playoffs, and the Thunder and Pelicans have a similar remaining strength of schedule while the Suns have the fifth-hardest remaining schedule in the conference.
NBA Basketball Power Index Rankings
Note: The NBA Basketball Power Index (BPI) is a measure of team strength developed by the ESPN Analytics team. BPI is meant to be the best predictor of a team's performance going forward for the rest of the season. BPI represents how many points above or below average a team is. BPI accounts for game-by-game efficiencies, strength of schedule, pace, number of days' rest, game location and preseason expectations. Ratings will be updated in this space weekly.Copyright International Ammunition Association, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.
Cartridge of the Month - Archive
For the current Cartridges of the Month visit us here: http://cartridgecollectors.org/?page=cartridge-of-the-month
Learning about cartridges can be done several ways.
You can look at drawings, which can be especially helpful when studying headstamp markings, or when precise technical measurements are needed.
You can handle cartridges, gaining an appreciation for the size, and the material used, and the physical appearance.
You can disassemble cartridges (if technically proficient and all appropriate safety precautions are followed) and gain further information on the type and amount of powder used, and the features of the bullet.
However, one of the most interesting ways to learn about cartridges is to view actual examples that have been professionally cut open to reveal the inner details. These are often called "sectioned" or "cutaway" cartridges, and are often produced as training aids, forensic samples, or as salesman samples.
A sectioned cartridge allows examination of the details of construction of the case and bullet, both the external appearance and normally hidden factors such as wall thickness, internal shapes, the appearance and amount of powder used, what type of primer is used and how the flash reaches the powder charge.
WARNING-
Disassembly or "sectioning" of ammunition requires considerable skill, a thorough understanding of the exact nature of the cartridge to be worked on, strict observance of all applicable safety precautions, along with patience and good judgment.
The IAA STRONGLY recommends that individuals not attempt to section or otherwise disassemble any ammunition. Leave that to the professionals. We recently heard of an individual attempting to section a cartridge which resulted in an accident which cost him several fingers and nearly his eyesight and life.
DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!
The IAA Journal often has photos of sectioned cartridges, but here you can see the details better in larger color images.
Each month we will add another Cartridge of the Month. In addition to a photos we will include some brief notes for identification of the cartridge and any special features. Each month's feature will open as a new page.
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Council tax in Manchester IS set to rise by 5pc from April - but some of the worst feared cuts to services will be avoided.
Town hall bosses say they have been able to dump some of their most drastic planned cuts thanks to a windfall from the council’s share in Manchester Airport.
Last month the M.E.N. reported that Manchester, in common with other councils, was likely to hike its household charge by more than originally expected this year and next under new government to tackle the social care crisis.
The rise is forecast to raise an extra £8.8m towards social care, but town hall bosses say it will go nowhere near closing the funding gap within the service.
Soaring demand for care, alongside a cut to the overall government grant which Manchester gets for vulnerable adults, means bosses have now radically scaled back their attempts to save cash within the service.
The council’s original goal of slashing a massive £27m from its social care budget over the next three years has been more than halved to £12m after senior figures concluded it would be unachievable.
That £12m will now be met through ‘efficiencies’ rather than cuts, it says.
Meanwhile - after extra cash from the council’s ownership of Manchester Airport was factored in - a string of other cuts have also been scaled back.
The number of job losses has been cut from 160 to 77, while a suggested £800,000 cut to youth and play services, £600,000 from slashing emergency grants to the vulnerable, £500,000 from speech therapy services for children, £500,000 from health visiting and nearly £500,000 from parks services have all been cancelled.
Plans to slash £500,000 from the school crossings budget - by scrapping virtually all remaining wardens - have also been scaled back to £220,000, meaning only the ‘safest’ crossings will now lose their patrols, according to the council.
Instead of axing virtually all wardens, the council plans to invest in better pedestrian crossings across the board. Nevertheless where that then results in a crossing getting a ‘green’ rating for safety, the lollipop patrol could still go.
The M.E.N. has asked for a list of all crossings and their ratings, but the council said it was in the process of being revised due to the new investment.
(Image: PA)
Meanwhile the town hall also intends to plough £2m extra a year into roads maintenance in acknowledgement that the state of the city’s highways is a sore point among both residents and councillors.
The reduced cuts - and extra investment - come after the council’s resources turned out to be healthier overall than it originally predicted in the autumn, when its worst case scenario warned of £75m in cuts over the next three years.
In total £15m of extra income has this year been secured through its airport share dividend, while cash has also been taken from its capital investment pot to prop up day-to-day services.
However Wythenshawe and Harpurhey markets both still remain under threat under the remaining cuts, which still total more than £30m.
The council also still plans to cut the number of bowling greens it maintains - although it says it will do so in consultation with players and clubs.
Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester council, said: “The last few years have been very challenging for the council as we have had to deal with continuing cuts at the same time as increasing pressures on services. This has been exacerbated by unfair government funding settlements which have hit big cities such as Manchester the hardest.
“But we remain determined to do all we can, working with Manchester people and other partners, to continue to protect the vulnerable and give everyone the opportunity to share in the success of the city’s growing economy.
“This budget process underlines this partnership approach as we attempt to strike the right balance which, inevitably, still involves some difficult decisions.”
Councillor John Flanagan, executive member for finance, added that the revised plan was the result of a ‘long and careful’ process of initial public consultation and councillor scrutiny.
“Between July and September last year Manchester people told us their priorities, which helped officers come up with their initial options in October.
“The consultation feedback on those options has in turn shaped the proposals. Now, as a final stage, we are putting these proposals to the public for their views.
“Manchester people have played a valuable role in shaping the budget so far. We’re grateful to them for their time so far and would welcome further input on the proposed budget.”
Manchester’s revised budget savings plans now stand at £31.75m.
The public can have their say on them here until February 10: www.manchester.gov.uk/budget.Guwahati: India lived up to their tag of favourites, walloping Nepal 3-0 to win the first ever South Asian Regional Badminton Tournament (team championship) here on Tuesday.
India who came into the final without losing a single match continued their good run with Aryaman Tandon drawing the first blood in the boys’ singles competition.
Taking on the Dipesh Dhami of Nepal, Aryaman was in his elements from the word go and picked up an easy 21-9, 21-15 victory to give the hosts the early initiative.
Local star Ashmita Chaliha continued the Indian juggernaut as she sailed to a 21-9, 21-6 win over Rashila Maharjan in the girls’ singles.
In the boys’ doubles match, the Indian pair of Arintap Dasgupta and Krishna Prasad had to stave off a tough challenge from the Nepali duo of Dipesh Dhami and Nabin Shrestha.
Nepal started off well, winning the first game 21-19. However, the Indians came back stronger and won the next two games 21-14, 21-11 to seal the deal.Barcelona (ACN).- The Greens' candidate to chair the European Commission in next May’s elections, Ska Keller, committed herself to working for Catalonia's right to self-determination. The German politician said on Monday in Barcelona that "the Greens defend radical democracy and in Catalonia there is a citizen demand in favour of a [self-determination] referendum". "For this reason I want to make the personal commitment that, if I am elected Commission President, I will support Catalonia in allowing a consultation vote on its political future and its relationship with Spain", promised the European Greens' top candidate. Keller, who has been a Member of the European Parliament since 2009, urged the Spanish Government to launch a negotiation process to make this vote possible.
On Monday, in the headquarters of the Catalan Green Socialist Party 'Iniciativa per Catalunya-Verds' (ICV), Ska Keller offered a press conference alongside ICV's main candidate in the next European Elections, Ernest Urtasun. In the next electoral call for the European Parliament, for the first time, parties have officially started presenting their candidates to chair the European Commission. In this vein, European Green parties, including ICV, elected German Ska Keller as their candidate. At Spanish level, Urtasun will be ICV's main candidate, running in coalition with the United Left 'Izquierda Unida' (IU).
Ska Keller supported Catalonia's right to self-determination and urged the Spanish Government to talk to make it happen. "If I am elected President of the European Commission I will act to make this dialogue happen and the referendum take place. People should be allowed to vote", she said.
Ernest Urtasun praised the "high value" of Keller's words. "Keller's commitment is the result of ICV's long work to seek for allies outside Catalonia that can speak out for Catalonia's right to self-determination", he emphasised. Now "an important European political family such as the Greens are also in favour of the [self-determination] consultation vote", said Urtasun.An international team of astronomers, including Queen’s University physicist Larry Widrow, have uncovered evidence of a nearby cosmic encounter. Their study indicates that the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies, the two galaxies closest to our own, collided about two to three billion years ago.
“The encounter forever changed the structure of the galaxies,” says Dr. Widrow, a professor of Physics, Engineering Physics and Astronomy at Queen’s. “The collision between the galaxies appears to have caused millions of stars to be ripped from the Triangulum disk to form a faint stream visible in the PAndAS data.”
Dr. Widrow, along with John Dubinsky of the University of Toronto, recreated this galactic encounter using a high performance computer and theoretical modeling. Their simulations illustrate how the strong gravitational field of Andromeda could have pulled stars away from the Triangulum disk creating a stream just as the team saw.
The Pan-Andromeda Archeological Survey (PAndAS), led by Alan McConnachie of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria BC, is using the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope to map the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies. This map, the largest of its kind, will allow astronomers to test the hypothesis that galaxies grow by “cannibalizing” other galaxies.
The findings from the first year of the survey are published this week in the journal Nature.
Galaxies are large collections of stars, often distributed in a disk-like pattern with spiral arms. Nearly 40 years ago, astronomers learned that galaxies are embedded in extended halos of dark matter.
“Our observations now show that stars also inhabit these outer halos,” says Dr. Widrow. “We believe that these stars are relics of small galaxies that were destroyed by the powerful tidal fields of a larger galaxy. Our observations also suggest that the Triangulum Galaxy is being ripped apart by Andromeda.”
Andromeda, and our own galaxy the Milky Way, are the two largest members of a small cluster of galaxies known as the Local Group. Triangulum, the third largest member of the Local Group, is about one-tenth the size of Andromeda.
“Within a few billion years Triangulum will be completely destroyed by Andromeda and its stars will be dispersed throughout the Andromeda halo,” says Dr. Widrow. “And a few billion years after that, Andromeda and the Milky Way will collide and merge together to form a giant elliptical galaxy.”
Dr. Widrow is funded by a Discovery Grant with the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).On July 10, all four 2AM members reunited to hold a V App broadcast entitled “Homecoming Day” in commemoration of their eighth anniversary since debut.
When Jeong Jinwoon introduces himself as the maknae, Jo Kwon notes, “Our maknae is 26,” highlighting just how much time has passed.
The members also catch up with one another and bring fans up to speed on how their individual activities have been going.
“What is it like doing solo activities after being in a four-member team,” Lee Changmin asks. Jo Kwon responds, “The loneliness and stuff like that hit me during my downtime especially since I have a lot more hoobaes now.”
Jeon Jinwoon chimes in, “It’s gotten even more crowded for me since my solo album features a band.”
Jo Kwon adds, “Singing 2AM songs on music shows alone is difficult.”
Source (1) (2)by Dan Allen, a high school Chemistry teacher in New Jersey, as well as a concerned father, organic farmer, and community garden organizer.
“The spent fuel stored in pools holds between 5 and 10 times more long-lived radioactivity than the reactor cores themselves hold. Because they were intended to be temporary, the pools do not have the same ‘defense in depth’ features that the NRC requires of reactors.” — Robert Alvarez (2012, http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/improving_spent-fuel_storage_at_nuclear_reactors)
“[T]he possibility of a terrorist attack…is speculative and simply too far removed from the natural or expected consequences of agency action…” — The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (2002) (quoted in http://www.princeton.edu/sgs/publications/sgs/pdf/11_1Alvarez.pdf)
“If the water were to drain entirely from a spent fuel pool, it could trigger a catastrophic radioactive fire that would spew toxins and render hundreds of thousands of square miles uninhabitable.” — Robert Alvarez (2011, http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/spent_nuclear_fuel_pools_in_the_us_reducing_the_deadly_risks_of_storage)
Summary: (grim satire) Ever consider destroying the US? This essay offers a quick, easy way to render much of the nation uninhabitable. (Spoiler alert: Just drain the cooling water from the lightly-secured, self-igniting spent-fuel pools of the nation’s 23 Fukushima-type nuclear reactors!) Includes reactor diagrams and maps to your conveniently-located targets!
References:
• Robert Alvarez (2012) “Improving Spent-Fuel Storage at Nuclear Reactors”, http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/improving_spent-fuel_storage_at_nuclear_reactors
• Robert Alvarez (2011) “Spent Nuclear Fuel Pools in the US: Reducing the Deadly Risks of Storage”, http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/spent_nuclear_fuel_pools_in_the_us_reducing_the_deadly_risks_of_storage
• Robert Alvarez (2003) “Reducing the Hazards from Stored Spent Power-Reactor Fuel in the United States”, http://www.princeton.edu/sgs/publications/sgs/pdf/11_1Alvarez.pdf
• Arnie Gunderson (2012) “Can Spent Fuel Pools Catch Fire?” (video) http://www.fairewinds.com/content/can-spent-fuel-pools-catch-fire
• Arnie Gunderson (2012) “More Lessons from Fukushima Daiichi” (video), http://www.fairewinds.com/content/more-lessons-fukushima-daiichi-accident-containment-failures-and-loss-ultimate-heat-sink
• Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists report (2003), “The NRC’s Dirty Little Secret: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is still unwilling to respond to serious security problems.”, http://www.thebulletin.org/files/NRCsDirtyLittleSecretHirschLockbaumLymanMay2003.pdf
• Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) (2011) “Hazards of Boiling Water Reactors in the United States”, http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/bwrfact.htm
• National Resources Defense Council’s interactive fallout map: http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/fallout/
• General nuclear info and activism: http://www.nirs.org/, http://www.fairewinds.com/, http://www.beyondnuclear.org/
WHEREFORE DESTRUCTION?
OK, so you’ve opened this ‘destroy the US’ link, huh? … Bold move.
But since you’ve come this far, I’m assuming two things about you: (1) You don’t mind being on an FBI watch list, and (2) you’re at least curious as to how one might ‘quickly and rapidly’ destroy a huge, armed-to-the-teeth industrial nation. Heck, maybe you’re even toying with the idea.
But before we get to the ‘how’, I want to ask you to think briefly about the ‘why’ and ‘what’ of your incipient plans of destruction. Namely, I’d just like you to clarify (if only for yourself) some of the reasons you might be considering such a bold project, as well as just what you’ll be destroying should you succeed.
We wouldn’t want to stumble forward blindly here, now would we?
As for your reasons, well, I suppose we could take our pick, huh? Maybe you object to the various US military and ‘nation building’ escapades in certain foreign countries you hold dear. Or maybe you object to what you perceive as unfair economic arm-twisting and ‘resource grabs’ in various smaller republics of your liking. Or maybe you simply wish to blunt or nullify some economic or military competition from the US in favor of your more preferred foreign governments or corporations. Or maybe you’re just nuts.
Hey, lots of reasons!
… And just what will you be destroying with this plan should this plan be successful? Wow, lots of stuff! It’s a really big country with a lot of people, and you could really polish off a huge chunk of it if you follow the directions here. And the cool part is that it’s not just the people here and now that you could destroy — no, it’d be messed up for centuries. And, of course, there are a lot of other living things here too, and I bet a good bit of them would get trashed as well. Bonus points!
And as you’ll see, it’s actually really easy to do!
BUT C’MON, ISN’T SLOW DESTRUCTION ENOUGH?
OK, so I’m glad we got the ‘why’ and ‘what’ parts of your destruction plans straight. It’s important to think things through at least a little bit — especially when one’s dealing with the destruction of entire countries.
But before we get to the ‘how’ and maybe actually implement your quick and easy plan of rapid destruction, you should probably be aware that the US is, in fact, already engineering its own destruction on several fronts. Granted, it’s occurring in a perhaps overly drawn-out manner at the moment — but, wow, it sure seems to be gaining momentum!
And how, you say? Did someone mention ‘unlivable climate’ or ‘nation-sized radiation exclusion zone’? Ha ha ha. That’s right, the US is well on its way to being a nation of uninhabitable, radioactive sand dunes, acidified-sea to shining acidified-sea. A combination of (1) accelerating climate change (driven by record global CO2 emissions and mounting exponential positive feedbacks from the earth system) and (2) deteriorating nuclear plant stability (due to aging plant infrastructure, dangerously crowded on-plant stockpiling of spent-fuel, climate destabilization, increased profit-driven short-cutting of already-insufficient safety regulations, and an emerging economic collapse) are daily increasing the odds of uninhabitability even a few decades hence.
Now, that’s a big claim, so if you’d like to research this a bit, check out the links in this essay: http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-12-10/extirpation-nation-how-much-of-the-us-will-be-habitable-in-50-years.
The problem, of course, is that this self-immolation/irradiation may take decades. And for a Type-A personality like yourself, that’s way too long! You want the USA destroyed … and you want it now!!
Ha ha ha! But hold on there, tiger. First we have a wee bit of research to do…
PICKING THE RIGHT TARGET
Seeing as you might get just one shot at this, you’ll want to make sure you do it right. And that means picking the right targets. And that’s a tall order, since the requirements are a bit daunting. The targets must be: (1) easily accessible, (2) lightly guarded, and (3) capable of wreaking great destruction with only minimal prodding on your part. In other words, we need soft targets that will do most of the dirty destructive work for us.
Luckily, the US has many such targets: the twenty-three Mark I Boiling Water Nuclear Reactors – known more commonly as “the kind that blew up in Fukushima.” See Figure 1 (below) for what they look like on the inside before they blow up. (Google the gory pictures of the Fukushima reactors to see what these beauties look like after they blow up. Spoiler alert: Sort of more opened-up, crumpled, twisted, and smoking.)
Figure 1. The Mark 1 Boiling Water Nuclear Reactor. There are 23 of these in the US. Of interest here is the actively-cooled spent-fuel pool, located on the 4th floor, directly under the large orange crane. In the US, these pools contain 5 to 10 times the radioactive cesium present in the core itself (the elongated red vessel in the middle). Should the (sometimes steel-lined) five-foot thick cement walls of these spent-fuel pools be breached and the cooling water drain, the ensuing self-igniting fire would release enough radiation to render hundreds of square miles uninhabitable. (Source: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/teachers/03.pdf)
Now let’s just quickly outline some of the key reasons the Mark I reactors make ideal targets for quickly destroying the United States:
1. There are lots of them.. The US has 23 Mark I reactors and 6 more of the similarly-designed Mark II models. That’s a good 31 country-destroyin’ dirty bombs! And if each can render hundreds of square miles uninhabitable (as Brookhaven National Laboratory warns), well… that’ll do! See the map below for their names and locations.
Figure 2. Locations of the 23 Mark I Nuclear Reactors in the US. Note their convenient placement near major population centers. Also note that, like the identical Fukushima Mark I reactors, several locations feature multiple plants. Double and triple the fun! See www.mapquest.com for convenient driving directions.
2. They’re accessible & lightly guarded. These potential dirty bombs aren’t buried deep within heavily-secured military bases, hidden in the middle of vast scorching deserts, concealed deep within mountains, or perched high-up on inaccessible mesas. Nope, they’re located right where millions of people live — and on accessible, recreational bodies of water, no less! If boats can pull right up close to them in full daylight (see Figure 3 below), I‘m pretty sure you could figure something out.
Figure 3: Can you say ‘soft-target’? A protest boat sailing delightfully close to the Indian Point, NY nuclear reactor. Source: http://www.treehugger.com/culture/anti-nuclear-protest-uses-bikes-boats-and-a-mock-evacuation-of-nyc-photos.html
And to top it off, the security is, ahem, not exactly of Navy Seal caliber. As Helen Caldicott writes, “The security guards at nuclear power plants complain of low morale, inadequate training, exhaustion from excessive overtime, and poor pay. They are often expected to work seventy-two hours a week, and not infrequently they go to sleep on the job. They state that they would not be prepared to die to save the reactor, considering their poor compensation and the treatment they routinely receive from management.” (from Nuclear Power is Not the Answer, 2006; Paraphrased from this 2003 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists report: http://www.thebulletin.org/files/NRCsDirtyLittleSecretHirschLockbaumLymanMay2003.pdf)
In other words, these reactors put the ‘soft’ in ‘soft target.’ Pillow soft. Marshmallow soft. Nuclear reactor soft.
3. They’re easily compromised, self-igniting and incredibly potent. All you need to do is crack the 5-foot thick (sometimes steel-lined) concrete floor of the spent fuel pool to drain the cooling water (See plant diagram in Figure 1). Without the cooling water, the now-unshielded and un-cooled spent-fuel rods will heat up rather quickly, which both (1) makes it impossible to get anywhere near the radiation-spewing spent fuel rods to repair the damage, and (2) results in the ignition of their zirconium alloy coating. (See Alvarez and Gunderson references above). The ensuing firefighter-inaccessible fire will volatilize most of the radioactive cesium and render a large swath of land uninhabitable for centuries.
… Easy-peasy!
A FEW EXTRA DETAILS …
Now, I realize I glossed over a few details in the last little section there, so let me flesh it out a little for you – just so you know I’m not pullin’ yer leg.
Like how exactly do we drain this fuel pool? You can do this ‘accidentally’ by simply picking up and dropping (via that orange crane in Figure 1) one of the very massive spent-fuel racks into the bottom of the pool. You can also do it ‘purposely’ with a well-placed, modestly-sized explosion. Got an airplane? Got an anti-tank missile? Got some plastic explosive and access to the plant as an ‘employee’? That’ll do! Note that those egghead GE designers from the 1960s are really helping us out here, as these spent-fuel pools are perched conveniently on the 4th floor (?!) and roofed by “buildings no more secure than car dealerships.” (Alvarez, 2011)
A quick look at the busted-open version of a Mark I reactor (a la Fukushima) shows the tin-can nature of the spent-fuel pool covering. (See Figure 4, below.)
Figure 4: Destroyer-of-worlds … in a can! The Mark I reactor cores have some hefty (although still-insufficient) armor. The even-more-dangerous spent fuel pools do not. Indeed, Mark I spent fuel storage pools are “housed in building no more secure than car dealerships.” (Alvarez, 2011). Photo source: http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/21/japan.nuclear.reactors/index.html
And why would the rods heat up outside the core and become inaccessible once the cooling water drained? Well, the spent-fuel elements you get after fission of the uranium fuel are not happy campers. They continue to ‘self-destruct’ for years after removal from the core, spitting out both heat and nasty radiation particles in the process. Hence the need for the radiation-shielding/heat-dispersing cooling pool. Lowering of the water level in the spent fuel pool causes problems on several fronts:
(1) First, since the water shields plant workers from these nasty radiation particles, absence of the water makes it impossible for workers to access the compromised fuel pool to repair them. Alvarez writes, “Once the pool water level is below the top of the fuel … lethal doses [of gamma radiation in the reactor building, even out of direct sight of the pool] would be incurred within about an hour. Given such dose rates, the NRC staff assumed that further ad hoc interventions would not be possible.” Simply put, these deadly pools become inaccessible to repair if sufficiently compromised – at the exact time when only fixing them can avert a widespread, catastrophic release of radiation. (An ironic slow-clapping for the nuclear industry would be appropriate at this point.)
(2) Secondly, decay heat from the spent-fuel will boil off any remaining water and ignite their thin zirconium-alloy covering in air. The mounting temperatures from the decay heat and the zirconium fire will then liberate the deadly radioactive cesium within the rods. Alvarez writes, “Particularly worrisome are the large amounts of cesium-137 in spent-fuel pools, because nearly all of this dangerous isotope would be released into the environment in a fire, according to the NRC.” (Alvarez, 2012)
Figure 5: Our hero, the overloaded spent fuel pool. If it could talk, it would surely say this: “Die, you motherf*%#ers!”
It’s also important to note the huge quantities and densities of spent fuel currently being stored in these spent fuel pools. Due to absence of any suitable long-term place to put the stuff (and an inexplicable refusal to transfer it short-term to dry-cask storage), reactors have simply stockpiled spent fuel in these tenuous pools for the past fifty years – at ever-increasing densities.
In true nuclear-industry style, the pools were designed for only very temporary storage of very little, widely-spaced spent fuel — but are now used as permanent repositories for very large amounts of densely-packed spent fuel. In fact, the way-over-specs density of the spent fuel in these pools is one of the contributing factors to their overheating: convective cooling of the dry rods becomes utterly ineffective when they’re packed so tightly. And at this point there are from 5 to 10 times as much cesium stockpiled in the spent fuel pools as in the reactor cores themselves. Yowza!
So here’s an analogy for you: If these spent fuel pools were guns, they’d be fully loaded semi-automatics. Hair triggers. Safeties off. Pointed right at the US public.
… Step right up.
And as for spreading this cesium around, well, that’s what they make wind for! Alvarez quotes a 2004 National Academy of Science report to Congress: “A loss-of-pool-coolant event resulting from damage or collapse of the pool could have severe consequences. … [A] terrorist attack that partially or completely drained a spent fuel pool could lead to a propagating zirconium cladding fire and release large quantities of radioactive materials to the environment. … Such fires would create thermal plumes that could potentially transport radioactive aerosols hundreds of miles downwind under appropriate atmospheric conditions.”
Here’s a cute interactive fallout map from the Natural Resources Defense Council: http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/fallout/. Oh, the possibilities!!
YOU WANNA HEAR SOMETHING FUNNY?
So there, I’ve laid it all out for you. … You’re welcome.
But I know, I know — Instead of thanking me, you’re thinking, “Great! Now that you just clued them into the soft targets we can hit to destroy the US, they’ll do something to fix it — they’ll beef up security; or better yet, they’ll move the spent-fuel to dry cask storage and shut down the reactors, like Germany is doing.”
But here’s the funny part: They won’t.
They already know these spent-fuel pools are slam-dunk terrorist targets. They already know they’re ticking time bombs, at the fickle mercy of mounting climate destabilization and economic collapse. They already know they can destroy the nation. And they even know that you know.
… And they don’t care.
That’s right, they don’t care. You see, the plant owners and operators, the nuclear intelligensia, the (cough) ‘watchdog’ Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and our elected (cough) ‘leaders’ have known for decades that the pools are over-loaded, lacking even rudimentary safety controls, and ridiculously vulnerable to plant accident natural disaster, and terrorist attacks. They’ve been warned by scores of engineers, stacks of peer-reviewed reports, decades of protesters, and their own repressed consciences.
And still they do nothing. They just sit and watch year after year as the fragile pools get crammed ever denser with combustible, ultra-toxic spent-fuel. As they cycle endlessly between industry and regulatory positions. As they schmooze each other at meetings. As they collect their ample paychecks. As they numb their consciences with ludicrous smoke-and-mirrors statistical safety analyses. As they offer endless prayer-like reaffirmations to each other in the form of meaningless charts and numbers vomited up into the coffee-infused air of padded conference rooms.
While they do nothing.
Nothing at all.
… So me clueing you into these nice delectable soft targets won’t prompt them to make these deadly targets any less soft.
Chernobyl didn’t.
9/11 didn’t.
Warnings from Robert Alvarez, Helen Caldicott, Arnie Gunderson, David Lochbaum, and scores of physicians, nuclear engineers, and concerned citizens didn’t.
Fukushima didn’t.
The brimming basketful of nuclear plant near-misses in the past few years didn’t.
And this essay won’t.
So you can proceed with your wicked plans just as if they were blissfully unaware of the huge dirty bombs they tend.
Yea, you can sail, drive, walk, or fly right up to one of these things tomorrow and blast away.
And you know what? They probably won’t even blink an eye.
Nope. Before the first hot particle reaches the first toddler’s mouth, they’ll just shift into economic and public relations damage control mode.
They’ll do the TEPCO shuffle. The Chernobyl two-step.
Even as the plumes of death rise from reactors all over the country.
Even as the cesium worms its way into our children’s heart tissue.
Even as our children die.
Even as our tumors grow.
They will still admit no wrong.
And the bastards will deny, deny, deny, deny, deny, deny, and fucking deny.
And they will actively conceal the ongoing apocalypse.
And they will blame everyone else but themselves.
And we, the public, will wring our hands.
And we will duct-tape our windows.
And we will watch all the action on our televisions.
And we will cower in dumb silence, just as we did before.
And we will bury our dead.
And we will stream into the refugee camps.
And we will nurture the tumors growing within us.
And we will wonder how it ever could have happened.
And we will even deny to ourselves that we or anybody ever could have conceived of such a tragedy.
And we will forget that it all could have been prevented.
So easily prevented!
And so we will curse our bad luck.
And we will forget that we did nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Not. One. Damn. Thing.
As we wasted chance after chance after chance to raise our voices.
As the spent-fuel time bombs ticked down to zero.
Until … surprise! Oh my! What horrible, horrible bad luck we do have!!
… So there it is.
We’ve made our toxic bed, and at some point either some ‘terrorist’ or mega-storm or extended power outage or armed conflict or simply the inevitable ravages of entropy is going to step in and require that we sleep in it.
So do what you will.
Because if you succeed — if we continue to fail in our basic biological charge to protect our children — it is because we deserved it.
… God, what a horrible thing to say!
But it will be true.
By our outrageous silence,
by our mute tolerance of suicidal greed,
by our inexcusable inaction in the face of a reckless and readily-preventable danger,
we will have deserved it.
_________________
If anybody is willing and able to shoulder the burden of creating and moderating a forum, I’d appreciate the effort. I am not interested, and I don’t have the time, but I’ll work with somebody who will take on the lion’s share of the task.The Moto X (2015) should be right around the corner, as Motorola has been making it a habit to release its flagship phones sometime between August and September. As you can expect, the rumor mill is going full speed and is not stopping anytime soon. More images and details have emerged today, coming from Peruvian Facebook page ‘Perú Android’.
The Facebook page is very active and claims to have gotten these images and details from an anonymous source. Perú Android is clear to say they can’t really confirm the information’s validity 100%, but the evidence does look enticing. For starters, the leak tells us the phone should come with a 2K display and a 21 MP rear-facing camera.
This is not necessarily huge news, but it’s what the images showcase that has us scratching our heads. These photos suggest the phone will come with an integrated front-facing flash, solving your low-light selfie woes (which we touched on just yesterday). In addition, the rumored fingerprint reader may have a rather unique placement. Instead of putting it in the back, this source claims
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on one of her films. "Many of them were newly-religious," she said. "They talked about returning to our modest roots, dressing like our mothers from past generations."
The infamous "Taliban mother" who was accused of abusing her seven children also talked to Zuria. "On one occasion she wasn't allowed to speak. She communicated by making sounds. It was surreal. There sits a grown woman making sounds like a dolphin."
This quickly spreading phenomenon upsets the haredi community even more than the rest of the public, because of the basic haredi perception which rules out any changes in clothing, language or lifestyle. According to tradition, the Israelites survived the slavery in Egypt because they "did not alter the way they dress" therefore the dress code cannot be changed even today.
"We can accept young girls who returned to their faith as long as they accept the rules and speak Yiddish," said the businessman. "What worked for our fathers for hundreds of years still works today, and no newly-religious person can change that."
Covered even at home
This anger rapidly turned into real actions of protest against the cult. Thousands of fliers signed by rabbis were posted on the streets.
A Neturei Karta delegation approached haredi rabbis and presented them with findings regarding the "Taliban women." They said these women refused to have sexual intercourse with their husbands or take off their head covers even when they walk around the house or in the mikveh. They were even rumored to forbid contact between brothers and sisters.
The rabbis were convinced. Religious neighborhoods all over Israel were filled with harsh letters condemning the cult. "You must beware not to dress in odd and peculiar clothing (including veils), especially if the husband is against it, because it's also against halacha. All the more so these changes should not be applied in cases of young girls", they wrote.
The same rabbis who once praised the veils, now realize the situation has gotten out of hand. Recently signatures of 13 more rabbis from Beit Shemesh were added to a petition protesting the new dress code.
However, this is more than just another haredi dispute. As this phenomenon
is exposed, including the fact that dozens of young girls are forced to cover their bodies from head to toe when leaving the house by their mothers, it is time for the State and welfare authorities to take a closer look at what is really going on with "Taliban women."
Yehuda Shohat contributed to the reportBorrowers are treated like 'deadbeat parents and tax cheats.' Drew Angerer/Getty Images Borrowers who default on their student loans are pursued aggressively by the Department of Education and private debt collectors, facing garnished wages, withheld IRS tax returns, and decreased Social Security payments, Reuters reported.
"We treat struggling student-loan borrowers the same as deadbeat parents and tax cheats," Seth Frotman, a senior member of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), told Reuters. "Even gambling addicts have more protections."
Since 2015, $3 billion in garnished wages and $4.8 billion in seized tax refunds and Social Security benefits have been collected from defaulted borrowers, according to Reuters.
Many of the 8 million borrowers currently in default on their loans are among the most financially vulnerable in society — and state and federal regulators allege that loan servicers intentionally point them away from affordable repayment plans, Reuters reported.
The CFPB filed a lawsuit in early 2017 against Navient, the largest student-loan servicer in the US, claiming it added $4 billion in student loan debt by failing to offer income-based repayment plans to distressed borrowers. Instead, Navient repeatedly pushed borrowers toward forbearance, which is less costly for the company, but potentially more expensive for the borrower in the long run.
Several state attorneys general have since filed similar suits.July 12th is the last day for Jilly's, the seedy strip club housed in the Broadview Hotel. The days were numbered for the business in the wake of the building being sold to Streetcar Developments in mid May. While the developer has yet to reveal its plans for the building, it was clear from the beginning that Jilly's was not a part of the site's future. The club will host a weeklong farewell party starting this Saturday. Aside from cheap drinks, it's unclear what the nature of the celebrations will be, but I'll let you use your imagination.
In other important news related to the building, next week's city council meeting will see an official heritage designation considered for the site. 704 Queen Street East is already included on the city's list of heritage properties, but it lacks the higher level of protection that comes with a formal heritage title. While it seems that Streetcar is keen to preserve the unique historical character of the building, one suspects that council will grant the designation. The Broadview Hotel might be in desperate need of repairs, but it's an important building to this city, and could play a huge role in a fully revitalized Riverside.
Photo by Dale RoddickSurf Training Products
Skateboards To Help Your Surfing
Lets face it, you can't surf all the time, but you can still improve your surfing with these skateboards that ride like surfboards. Each one of these boards brings a different approach to making a skateboard with characteristics that make it like a particular surfboard. So figure out what you want to improve in your surfing and go get yourself one.
To compile this list SurfScience reached out to the top manufacturers of skateboards. All boards were ridden on loan by the entire SurfScience team, so all review notes take into account a range of skill levels.
Apex 37 by Original Skateboards
Rides Like: Performance Fish or Micro Shortboard
Works On: Timing, generating speed with your hips
Best Ridden: Parking lots and parking structures
Price: $219
Notable Feature: Spring-Loaded Truck System
Most skateboards ride best when your weight is on your front foot. The unique truck design of the Apex 37 allows you to ride with weight on your back foot, like you do when surfing. That may not seem like a big deal, but when hopping between boards it was always funny to watch a tester get on the Apex and take a fall from riding it improperly.
This board can be ridden very loose without the wheels biting on the deck which will allow you to make tight arches. The spring loaded trucks kick back after you have laid into them which is good for generating speed on flat land, but can get hairy once you get above 15mph.
Carveboard by CarveUSA
Rides Like: Shortboard or Gun
Works On: Bottom turns, releasing speed from turns
Best Ridden: Big hills at least 3 or 4 lanes wide
Price: $359
Notable Feature: Air Filled & Adjustable Tires
There is nothing else like the original Carveboard. There is a reason the ads show professional surfers riding them and that is because the pros will do ads for a few free boards.
This board has tires, not wheels. They are rubber and air filled which allows you to adjust the pressure to increase the speed the board will ride at. You will want to make sure you start at a low pressure though, because the board can easily achieve speeds of 35 to 40 mile an hour while continuing to ride as smooth as morning glass.
The most surprising thing we found with the Carveboard was that it really is usable by riders of all skills. The tires are set wide apart and so beginners will not run into many circumstances where the board shoots out from under them as they first try to stand on it.
Surfstik by CarveUSA
Rides Like: High Performance Surfboard
Works On: Generating speed, timing
Best Ridden: Rolling terrain or flat roads with slanted driveways
Price: $215
Notable Feature: Cone Shaped/ Hollow Wheels
Sometimes you don't have a hill but you want to carve. That is when the Carveboard's little brother, the Surfstik comes in handy. It was designed with the same concept but in a smaller package. It offers the same benefits in terms or duplicating the movement of a performance surfboard but allows the rider to use the board in a variety of situations. mainly at speeds of less than 20mph which is required for the bigger Carveboard to really come alive.
Looking at the design the wheels are set far apart and the trucks are wider than the board. This increases the stability of the board and will allow even beginner skateboarders to hop on for the first time with ease. Due to the placement of the wheels though, it is impossible to make pivotal turns by stepping on the back of the board, this forces you to work on your carving abilities in every situation.
The downside to this board is that it is a surfing trainer, not a skateboard, and so it is not the board for you if you are looking to skate around for transportation. The wheels are set wider than the deck and so you run the risk of clipping your foot and due to the looseness of the truck system, it is somewhat difficult to push for a long distance. The Surfstik is made for carving and offers the best package for training for those that are seriously interested in a board for that.
Ceviche by Loaded Skateboards
Rides Like: Retro Fish
Works On: Staying centered over the board
Best Ridden: Inclines, bowls & concrete waves
Price: $300
Notable Feature: Recipe for Ceviche on the deck
Ceviche is food dish made with fish and so this board, that rides like a fish surfboard, fits the name. It is similar to it's sibling the Dervish but has a few features that make it stand out. The main difference is the shorter body and kick tail. These allow the board to turn on a tighter radius and open up a new world of tricks.
Our riders picked the Ceviche as the favorite for any bowl and inverted conditions. The ability to turn quickly and pivot really allow the board to stand out. The kick tail was also a nice safety net for those riders that are used to having a pivotal turn in their arsenal, but since surfboards don't have big kick tails, we tried to stay off of it during the tests.
Much like when riding a retro fish, you will end up keeping most of your weight above the board and you will want to stay low during turns to keep the board under you. Since this board is short, it is also a good trainer for those of you with a bull-like wide legged stance. It will force you to bring your feet together, which is necessary for you to excel at surfing.
Dancer by Loaded Skateboards
Rides Like: Longboard or Noserider
Works On: Foot movement
Best Ridden: Slight hills and wide roads
Price: $400
Notable Feature: 55" Deck!
Dancing on a longboard is a lot of fun. If you don't believe me, Google "Longboarding Sun Dried Tomatoes" and you will see what I am talking about.
The Dancer was the big surprise of the test. The board is huge and looking at it you would think it would have a hard time turning, but it actually turns really well. Being big the Dancer has a lot of glide, much like riding a heavy surfboard, once you get speed going the board will carry for a long time.
The exciting part of riding the Dancer was the ability to walk the deck. It is not quite the same as walking on a longboard surfboard but it does allow you to practice moving your feet while also controlling a moving board. It is great for spins, quick trips to the front and back as well as mid turn cross steps.
Keep in mind though, the board is really big at 55" tall. That's bigger than a lot of you groms. So it's not super convenient to take around and might not be the best board for you if you are only going to have one board. That is unless you are really into dancing and walking the nose. If however, you have a few skateboards, this one is a great board to add to the taller end of your quiver.
We had the Dancer on loan from Loaded, but there is no way we are giving it back. It is too much fun. If you can grab a hold of one, I think you will agree, it adds a whole new element to longboarding skate sessions. But beware, this board will get you pumped on walking the deck, and might cause some shortboarders to undergo life changing events.
Dervish by Loaded Skateboards
Rides Like: Hybrid Thruster Works On: Balance, generating speed Best Ridden: Anywhere Price: $325 Notable Feature: Drop-Thru Truck System You've probably seen the "Whirling Dervish" video on YouTube, and if not.. stop reading this and go watch it! The Dervish scored highest overall and was picked by the SurfScience team as the best all around board. It is designed to be a standard carving board but is easily used for downhill and sliding situations as well. It is fairly compact and easy to carry around to class or the store. The Dervish ended up being a good go to board in new situations. We tested the boards in a variety of circumstances, from hills and parking structures to storm drains and carving bowls and the Dervish was a safe bet in any of them. If you can only buy one skateboard and are looking for something that you can use in many different circumstances like improving your surfing and cruising to class, the Dervish is worth taking a look at.1. Farewell, European farmers
"The EU proposed a possible package on mechanical devices in Chapter 84 and electrical appliances in Chapter 85 for which both parties share offensive interests. While the US showed an interest, it hastened to point out that it would need to consult with its industry regarding some of the products and that progress on motor vehicle-related parts would only be possible if the EU showed progress in the discussion on agricultural tariffs."
2. Approval of GM food
TTIP uses the euphemism of'modern agricultural technology' to refer to genetically modified (GM) food, and the US is demanding that all producers of GM food have automatic access to the regulatory procedures of the EU. Not only this, but the European Commission will be required to provide GM producers with full details of what they need to do to get their products approved:"Where a Party requires a product of modern agricultural technology to be approved or authorized prior to its importation, use or sale in its territory, the Party shall allow any person to submit an application for approval at any time.
Where a Party requires a product of modern agricultural technology to be approved or authorized prior to its importation or sale in its territory, each Party shall make publicly available:
(a) a description of the processes it applies to accept, consider, and decide applications for approval or authorization;
(b) the competent authorities responsible for receiving and deciding applications for approval or authorization."
3. Business chill on future regulation
One of the key aims of TTIP is to prevent the introduction of any new social, public health or environmental regulations that might represent a burden on business.
"When developing a regulation, a regulatory authority of a Party shall evaluate any information provided in comments by the other Party or a person of the other Party regarding the potential trade effects of the regulation that it receives during the comment period and... provide its views on substantive issues raised."
"The TTIP negotiations will never survive this leak. The only way that the European Commission has managed to keep the negotiations going so far is through complete secrecy as to the actual details of the deal under negotiation. Now we can see the details for ourselves, and they are truly shocking. This is surely the beginning of the end for this much hated deal."
The massive leak of secret TTIP negotiating papers due out tomorrow (2 May) will reveal the true extent of the danger posed by the controversial EU-US deal, and early signs are that it will be even worse than already suspected. For the first time, we will be able to see in black and white exactly what the US negotiators are demanding of the EU, and what the European Commission is prepared to sacrifice in order to seal the deal. Here is a sneak preview of just three sections made available this evening - the texts in italics are from the leaked papers.Any export gains for EU car manufacturers will come at a massive cost to European agriculture, with the European Commission sacrificing the small-scale farmers of Europe in order to force open US markets for major European corporations. Here is the deal:The leaked documents confirm that TTIP threatens the 'precautionary principle' that stands at the centre of all EU regulation. More than this, the US is now demanding that corporations receive prior warning of any new rules or standards to be introduced, and the EU will have to justify its decision to introduce any new rules in future:In addition to the above three issues, the leaked documents show that the USA has no interest in the EU's much vaunted 'investment court system' - a major blow to the European Commission, which will be unable to ratify TTIP without this element.John Hilary, Executive Director of War on Want, commented:Just when you thought you had seen it all, along comes this sucker to prove us all wrong. From Megan Macmanus and Stephen Tramontana comes their latest horror/comedy Killer Piñata, and there isn’t really much to say, so I’ll let the trailer do all the talking, check out the mayhem below.
From the Press Release:
LC Films and Angry Mule Productions have teamed up for the most ridiculous film release of 2017, KILLER PIÑATA!
…utterly retarded – BrutalAsHell.com
… so-stupid-it’s-smart – HorrorNews.net
Just over the top enough to be awesome – Random Amazon Customer
A possessed piñata, seeking to avenge the savagery that humanity has inflicted on his kind, picks off a group of friends, one by one, in an unending night of terror.
KILLER PIÑATA! was written by Megan Macmanus and Stephen Tramontana, from a story by Nick Weeks and is directed by Stephen Tramontana.
Special Edition BluRay will feature Deleted/Alternate scenes, commentary, and bloopers. Also pre-order the BluRay (or VHS edition) and get a free limited edition poster (while supplies last) only at LCFilmsOnline.com. The film will also be available on DVD and Vimeo On Demand with a wider VOD release coming early 2017.
What do you make of this one? If it is something for you, you’ll be able to find this one when it’s released this January 18, 2017.Getty Images
The Jaguars have lost a starter on their defensive line for the rest of the season.
The team announced Tuesday that nose tackle Roy Miller tore his right Achilles in last Sunday’s loss to the Raiders. Miller will have surgery and be placed on injured reserve.
Miller started all six games for the Jaguars this season and 50 games overall for the Jaguars since joining the team in 2013. He had 10 tackles this season and had 94 tackles and five sacks during his three previous seasons with the team.
While Miller was the starter, the Jaguars have used a variety of defensive linemen this season and he played on just over 36 percent of the snaps through the first six games. Sen’Derrick Marks, Abry Jones and rookie Sheldon Day are still on hand to play with Malik Jackson on the interior of the Jacksonville line.Scott Morrison to appear before inquiry into children in immigration detention
The immigration minister, Scott Morrison, will give evidence at the national inquiry into children in immigration detention on Friday 22 August at a public hearing in Canberra, the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has confirmed to Guardian Australia.
Morrison will likely give evidence under oath and is expected to be questioned by counsel assisting the inquiry and the AHRC president, professor Gillian Triggs.
Paris Aristotle, chair of the minister’s council on asylum seekers and detention, will also give evidence.
Morrison has recently made public comments discrediting the observations of Triggs during the inquiry, describing her observations of the rising levels of child self-harm and attempted self-harm as “quite sensational”.
Triggs has made a number of visits to detention centres on Christmas Island with an expert delegation of medical professionals who contributed to the observations. The government’s own statistics – obtained by Guardian Australia in a leaked report – show the rate of self-harm in detention soared six times between the introduction of mandatory offshore resettlement last July and January this year.
The minister also responded to a damning submission to the inquiry written by a group of Save the Children workers on Nauru, which documented in forensic detail the “systematic violation” of child asylum seekers rights.
“The minister notes the allegations made in the anonymous submission. The subject matter raised in these allegations is very serious,” a spokeswoman for the minister said.
“The [immigration] department is working with Save the Children and the government of Nauru to determine the veracity of these anonymous claims and to what extent they are credible or relate to current practice.”
Guardian Australia understands the minister’s office had already been briefed on a number of the cases documented in the submission, which include allegations of sexual, physical and verbal assault against children.
“The department has also asked Save the Children if any such concerns have been raised by any of their staff and to provide a response to the government on the allegations made,” Morrison’s spokeswoman said.
Morrison argued that the submission addressed “matters that are outside the terms of reference of the AHRC inquiry” as they related to events on Nauru, a claim that is disputed by the AHRC which does not have extra-jurisdictional powers on Nauru.
The decision to transfer asylum seekers to offshore detention on Nauru is made by the Australian government, who fund all contractors inside the detention centre, which is also staffed with Australian immigration officials as well as Nauruans.
At the third public hearing of the national inquiry, the commission heard shocking evidence from a detention centre worker on Nauru, and of doctors working on Christmas Island.
The inquiry also heard from Dr Peter Young, the former chief psychiatrist working in immigration detention, who said the immigration department asked him to withdraw figures from his reporting on the high rates of mental health issues faced by children in detention.
Young later became the most senior official to condemn Australia’s detention regime in an exclusive interview with Guardian Australia, where he described the process as akin to torture.
“If we take the definition of torture to be the deliberate harming of people in order to coerce them into a desired outcome, I think it does fulfil that definition,” Young said.Flipping a newly discovered molecular switch in white fat cells enabled mice to eat a high-calorie diet without becoming obese or developing the inflammation that causes insulin resistance, report Harvard scientists from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
The researchers say the results, to be published in the Sept. 28 issue of the journal Cell, provide the first known molecular link between thermogenesis (burning calories to produce heat) and the development of inflammation in fat cells.
These two processes had been previously thought to be controlled separately. Thermogenesis plays an important role in metabolism and maintaining healthy weight. Inflammation triggers insulin resistance, a precursor of diabetes.
The researchers, led by Bruce Spiegelman, found that the protein TRPV4, a switch molecule, is highly expressed in white fat cells, which store excess calories and become engorged in obese individuals.
Spiegelman is the Stanley J. Korsmeyer Professor of Cell Biology and Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
For this study, the investigators bred mice lacking TRPV4 or administered a drug to deactivate it. In the absence of TRPV4, white cells turned on a set of genes that consume energy to produce heat, rather than storing the energy as excess fat. This “thermogenic” process normally occurs in brown or beige fat (commonly called “good fat”), which is found mostly in small animals and human infants to protect against cold.
When the TRPV4-deficient mice were put on a high-calorie diet for several weeks, they did not become obese, and their level of fat cell inflammation and insulin resistance was lowered.
“We have identified a target that, when inhibited, can activate beige adipose tissue and suppress inflammation,” said Spiegelman. “This role of TRPV4 as a mediator for both the thermogenic and pro-inflammatory programs in adipocytes, or fat cells, could offer an attractive target for treating obesity and related metabolic diseases.”
The first author of the report is a research fellow Li Ye in the Spiegelman lab.
The research was supported in part by National Institutes of Health.Matthew Wong MAT ’13 knew his nine-month term as a Fulbright English teaching assistant in Taiwan would reap rewards throughout his life, but he never thought he’d be using the lessons he learned so quickly.
Just weeks after he returned to Los Angeles from Taipei, he landed a job teaching history at Arcadia High School, demonstrating how USC students who land Fulbright awards come back with new perspectives as well as new skills and valuable experience.
Wong, who earned his Master of Arts in Teaching from the USC Rossier School of Education two years ago, found that his experience teaching English through the Fulbright program made him a great match for Arcadia High’s “sheltered” social studies classes. These classes are specially designed to teach U.S. and world history to the school’s 175 English learners. Most come from China and speak Chinese as their first language, according to the school’s Accountability Report Card.
This is where Wong’s recent stint teaching within the Chinese school system comes in handy. In Taiwan, Wong co-taught middle school classes with five local teachers who helped him navigate and adapt to their style of teaching, a skill he can use to help his new students acclimate to U.S. schools.
In Taiwan, learning is centered on lectures from the teacher. Students never doubt or question information they receive from their teachers. Sonia Chan
“In Taiwan, learning is centered on lectures from the teacher. Students never doubt or question information they receive from their teachers,” said Sonia Chan, who coordinates the English teaching assistant program for Fulbright Taiwan. “This changes when teaching assistants like Matthew join the classroom. The students can start to learn as a group, sharing opinions, discussing the questions and finishing projects together.”
Making adjustments
Wong and his co-teachers had to make adjustments and take risks to make the more interactive approach work.
“At the start, the students were very respectful and polite, but also very quiet in class. They rarely spoke up or answered questions, even if they knew the answers,” Wong said.
Wong quickly bonded with his co-teacher, Jay Chen MAT-TESOL ’09, over their shared Trojan Family connection, though their paths had not crossed before Wong was assigned to Chen’s classroom in Taipei.
Together, they worked to find teaching activities that bridged the cultural and language gaps, creating a more active learning environment. Chen translated concepts into Chinese when needed, explaining the cultural differences to the students to spur their participation.
“In the beginning, the students were like guests in the classroom watching a show because they could barely understand Matt,” Chen said.
Acting as an ambassador between the two different teaching styles, Chen encouraged the students to share their opinions and speak up in class in English, even if they made errors or misspoke.
It was very challenging, but it really opened my eyes to new approaches to teaching. Matthew Wong
“It was very challenging, but it really opened my eyes to new approaches to teaching,” Wong said. “In particular, I learned a lot about language acquisition. That is, how to help students learn a new language, using music or having them read along to increase comprehension.”
Top-down teaching
With his students at Arcadia High, Wong is mindful of their past experiences in non-U.S. school systems and their significant cultural differences. He hopes to help his new students bridge the gap from the top-down classroom instruction they are accustomed to, and the more open and participatory discussions they can expect in U.S. classrooms.
“As a new teacher, I have to honestly say that it’s challenging every day,” Wong said. “The good news is that I know I am learning as I undergo this new experience.”
Wong, whose studies at USC Rossier were made possible by several scholarships, including the Hortencia M. Torres Endowed Scholarship, is the son of immigrant parents who didn’t graduate from college.
He wants to use his education to empower his students to engage in political processes and get involved in civic life — no surprise as his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Davis, is in political science and Asian-American studies. Colleagues in Taiwan believe he’ll be successful: Chan and Chen said Wong’s enthusiasm and commitment to teaching made a difference to his students.
“So many times, Matt sacrificed his lunch time to help those students who were originally left behind,” Chen said. “At first, they had difficulties reading a paragraph from the textbook. However, due to Matt’s effort, they dared to speak English freely in class no matter how difficult the questions were.
“He taught them that if they don’t give up on themselves, they could succeed.”
For his part, Wong is doing exactly what he wants to do. “All I’ve ever wanted to do is teach,” he said. “It’s so rewarding.”
More stories about: Alumni, Education, GlobalizationThis week, Treasure Hunter is on hand to help you foil another of Sliske’s insidious plots. This event and promotion will run from 7th April until 23:59 on Monday 11th April. Read on for the finer details, intrepid adventurer!
This event and promotion is for free-to-play, RuneScape members, and Ironmen.
What’s going on?
Sliske is scheming again – he’s manipulating Janus, an ex-ZMI mage, to try and weaken the barrier between this world and the shadow realm. Large and small rifts are tearing open across the land.
Close them to earn Runecrafting or Summoning XP, and reputation which can be traded for cosmetic wings. Small rifts offer more XP than the large one but are harder to find. Both kinds of rift give the same amount of reputation. Note – free-to-play players can only receive Runecrafting XP.
How do I close rifts?
You will be given a daily amount of fatigue which allows you to close rifts that you uncover in Gielinor. You can check how much fatigue you have left while you are at a rift but remember, once runs you can no longer close rifts for that remainder of that day. However, Treasure Hunter offers a chance to even the score…
Treasure Hunter – Rift Sunderers
From 7th April until 11th April, Treasure Hunter is offering a consumable called Rift Sunderers. Acquiring and using Rift Sunderers will teleport you to either the large rift or small rifts and allows you to keep closing them beyond the limit of your daily fatigue. They also will provide 50 times the XP from any rifts you close while using them.
Use your keys, get those Rift Sunderers and maximise your XP and reputation gains. This will push you closer to following cosmetic unlockables:
Earn 2000 Summoning reputation to unlock the Dryad Wings
Earn 2000 Runecrafting reputation to unlock the Runic Essence Wings
Both sets of wings are unlocked once their reputation amount has been reached.
Where are the rifts located?
Even though the event ends on the 11th, the large rift is located north east of Draynor and will remain open until 18th April, but you will only be able to use Rift Sunderers on it. Rift Sunderers will also remain until the 18th to let you get the most out of them. The smaller rifts are more temporary and will erupt all over Gielinor for shorter amounts of time until the 11th. Keep your eyes peeled!
The RuneScape Team
What is Treasure Hunter?
Treasure Hunter is playable from within RuneScape, allowing players to use Keys to claim in-game items as prizes. These range from useful resources to rare weapons and exclusive gear.
Playing Treasure Hunter is simple - click the treasure chest icon that pops up when you log in. If you've not played before, just follow the on-screen guide.
Everyone gets at least one Key per day, and RuneScape members get two. You can earn more Keys while playing the game, or stock up by redeeming Bonds.
If you'd like more, you can also buy Keys on the website, or by clicking 'Buy Keys' within the Treasure Hunter interface in-game.I am a big fan of tomato bisque soup. I love the heartiness and warmth, and the way it fills your tummy and leaves you feeling satisfied. I find that few other soups leave you feeling like you’ve eaten a complete meal. I have tasted many restaurant and store bought variations of this soup, and there is a delicate balance between the acidity of the tomatoes and the richness of the cream which is difficult to master.
I had never had a recipe better than the Yard House Organic Tomato Bisque. I loved it so much that I wanted to be able to recreate it at home. This recipe rivals, if not surpasses the flavor of theirs. As an added bonus, it freezes fantastically, and once thawed and reheated, it tastes every bit as delicious as it did when it was fresh. This soup is very filling and very rich. Once plated, if you add a few basil leaves on top for presentation, it looks beautiful as well. This dish is perfect if you’re having guests over for dinner or just need a comforting meal for yourself. Buon Appetitio!
Makes 4-6 servings
Ingredients:
7 Celery stalks diced
3/4 Medium onion diced
4 Garlic cloves minced
1 Medium red pepper diced
1/2 Stick (1/4 C) of butter
1/4 C White wine
1 28 oz Can of fire roasted crushed tomatoes
1 14.5 oz Can fire roasted diced tomatoes
1 TB tomato paste
1 1/2 C Heavy whipping cream
1-2 TB of fresh basil leaves cut in ribbons
1 tsp Sugar
2 tsp Kosher salt
Black pepper to taste
Directions:
Melt butter in a large (≥ 6 qt.) stock pot. Add celery, onion, garlic, red pepper and wine. Cook on medium/high heat for 5-7 minutes or until vegetables begin to tenderize. Add all the tomatoes and 1 tsp of kosher salt. Bring to a boil. Lower heat to medium/low, cover pot and simmer for approximately 40 minutes. Remove from heat and puree using an immersion blender. Be very careful not to splatter hot liquid on yourself. If you do not have an immersion blender, you can use a food processor or regular blender, but you need to allow the soup to cool for at least 15-20 minutes prior to transferring it to be blended. Once fully pureed, bring soup back to a low/medium heat. Add sugar, 1 tsp salt, pepper and basil and stir. Slowly add cream, stir to combine. Serve warm with crusty bread.
Nutrition facts per serving (6 servings)
Calories: 370
Fat: 31.4 g
Cholesterol: 20 mg
Potassium: 129.3 mg
Carbs: 20 g
Fiber: 4.2 g
Sugars: 11.1 g
Protein: 3.5 g
Vitamin A: 53%
Vitamin C: 61%
Calcium: 6%
Iron: 8%Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio) have come up with an energy-efficiency bill that they think has a real chance of passing the U.S. Senate. And then the U.S. House. In this Congress. Really!
From Politico:
The legislation, known as the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act, focuses on improving energy efficiency in commercial buildings, the manufacturing sector and the federal government. Among other things, the bill strengthens building codes to make new homes and buildings more efficient, creates a new Energy Department program called SupplySTAR to improve the efficiency of companies’ supply chains and requires the federal government — the country’s largest energy user — to adopt strategies to conserve the electricity used for computers.
It’s a scaled-back version of a bill they introduced last year. To preempt conservative objections, it drops a provision that would have expanded a Department of Energy loan program. After Solyndra, “Department of Energy loan program” is not a phrase Republicans are warm to.
A bipartisan duo — Reps. David McKinley (R-W.Va.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) — will be pushing a similar bill in the House.
More from Politico:
“As we see a divided Congress, it’s nice to see something that we can agree on. I think this bill is one of them,” Portman told POLITICO in a joint interview with Shaheen ahead of the bill’s official release. “We’re optimistic that we can make progress in the Senate in the short run and get it through the House in the next year and then get it signed into law.” The bill’s success is far from certain, but the senators say they’ve taken every precaution to prevent the measure from going down in flames. Over the course of months-long negotiations, the senators have won the buy-in of more than 200 organizations, from the Union of Concerned Scientists to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce … [to] the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Alliance to Save Energy and the National Association of Manufacturers.
According to a press release from Shaheen and Portman, “A study [PDF] by experts at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy found that last year’s version would have saved consumers $4 billion [a year] by 2020 and helped businesses add 80,000 jobs to the economy.”
It’s not a price on carbon, but hey, it’s a start.Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab Biometrics Center have been developing an iris recognition solution for the past several years that can successfully identify subjects from up to 40 feet away, according to a report by Discovery News.
The iris recognition technology is able to capture images from a live photographic or video feed and then compares them to a database to find a potential match.
Using light in the near-infrared wavelength band, the system’s high-resolution cameras capture images of the iris from a distance of up to 40 feet away.
Additionally, the biometric technology can capture images through reflections in a mirror.
The iris recognition device could have significant applications in law enforcement, as it could be used to identify suspects at long range in a range of lighting conditions.
CMU researchers recently posted a video in which it tested the system in a typical traffic stop scenario.
Using the long-range iris scanner, the researchers were able to successfully identify the driver of a vehicle by capturing an image of the eye via the side-view mirror.
Article Topics
authentication | biometrics | biometrics research | iris recognition | long-distanceCalifornia has declared a state of emergency over a methane leak
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Dawson: You didn’t. I’d love to play with Chet. Do you remember Chet?
Holmes : From Micronesia? I remember him.
Dawson: Chet was awesome.
Holmes: What are the benefits to having him in your alliance?
Dawson: He can’t do anything! He doesn’t have a physical game, social game. He can’t even get his own water. Talk about someone I don’t have to worry about scheming behind my back.
Holmes: So you’re willing to sacrifice someone who does stuff around camp for someone you can lead around?
Dawson: (Expletive deleted) yeah. I don’t need (expletive deleted) done around camp. All those people go home.
By the way, we're not done yet. We're not even close. We're barely even scratching the surface on Dawson as a potential minor Survivor legend.
Check out these other things that she was saying (or people were saying about her) during her pre-game interviews.
So anyway, that's Dawson. This is the person who is going to go up against MLB bad boy Jeff Kent. I mean, come on, even if they were only going to have one scene where they interact with one another, that's funny.
Oh yeah, and I suppose I better mention Dawson's all time most memorable Survivor quote. This one comes from a secret scene, so hopefully you'll forgive me for breaking my rules a little. But you'll understand why when you read the transcript.
Jonathan (working on a clam): I'd feel much more comfortable with this if we had a little water to rinse this off with, just in case any of that poop sac opened up. It's like a cheese. Processed cheese poop.
Dawson: I love cheese. Any soft cheese I will fuck for.
Jeff: You'll do what for?
Carter: She'll fuck for soft cheese.
Dawson: Soft cheese only. I will not fuck for hard cheese.
This totally should have been the title of an episode
By the way, have you figured out yet that I can't make up my mind if this is a Dawson entry or if it's a Jeff Kent entry?
Well to hell with it. Let's make it about both of them.
Full speed ahead!
So Jeff shows up on Kalabaw, and he immediately starts making that evil squinty face and he starts saying villain things
Like this.
We need to get rid of Jonathan Penner. There is no way a celebrity should win this game.
Yeah! Power to the people! Let's make sure a celebrity is not gonna win this and take over our storyline.
Oh wait.
Dawson gives him the same look that she would give to hard cheese
We're seriously like five minutes into the game. And the least likely person to ever be able to identify a professional baseball player has already identified him.
Just like that, Jeff Hogeboom's cover has already been blown.
Back at camp, Jeff is going on and on about how he is a rancher, and about how he sells motorcycles for a living. He still doesn't realize that anyone has identified him yet.
"Hey, I'm just a guy from Texas. I'm just a guy who loves Survivor."
"I only applied to the show on a dare from my buddy."
Why exactly is Jeff trying so hard to hide his identity? Well aside from the obvious aspect of "everyone and their mother knows that Jeff Kent is an asshole", there's this other reason. Which Dawson helpfully explains to us when she sits down for her first confessional.
"I used to spend time with a guy who was REALLY into baseball. And I know who Jeff Kent is."
."
"But there's been no mention of him being a former professional athlete..."
"... who's made probably thirty million dollars in his career."
"I don't think the other tribe members know, and I think Jeff likes it that way."
"But I will tell him that I know."
"As soon as it becomes valuable to me."
And so there you go. Dawson's explanation why Jeff Kent would never win Survivor if the other players actually knew who he was. Although I should probably point out that she wasn't close when it came to how much money he actually made in his playing career. Jeff Kent didn't make thirty million dollars. Jeff Kent made closer to NINETY million dollars. See below.
And so now, with all the info out on the table, the cat and mouse game between Dawson and MLB's bad boy is ready to begin.
I'm gonna eat him!
Through the first few episodes of Philippines, Dawson and Jeff Kent kind of stay away from one another. Partly because Dawson has no need to call out Jeff for who he is yet, but mostly because there is no need for ANYONE on Kalabaw to turn against anyone else at this point. Since the tribe wins immunity each of the first four episodes, they never really have to turn on each other the way that the Matsings do. They also don't have anyone as batshit crazy on their tribe as Abi over on Tandang, so they never have to deal with THAT bullshit, and they hardly have any drama.
Most of the first four episodes on Kalabaw is Jeff sitting around, doing the narrator thing
While they do stuff like play checkers
And Jonathan Penner spends most of the time ditching his teammates to go look for the idol
While bending over directly in front of the camera
Like this
I swear, if you like Jonathan Penner's ass, this season is your Gone With the Wind
Eventually Penner finds the idol, and this will have major ramifications on what happens with Dawson and Jeff Kent later down the road
Okay, so things are going along quite swimmingly at Kalabaw.
They keep winning immunities
They keep winning rewards
And even though Jeff was at one time aligned with Dawson, because they all wanted to get rid of the returning guy...
Eventually Jeff realizes that Penner has the idol. And once that happens, that sort of changes the alliance situation.
Now Jeff changes his strategy and he aligns with Penner. And now he and Penner and Carter become the three Kalabaw power players.
Penner fesses up that yes, he does have the idol
"And I showed my ass to the camera like nine different times. So have some pity on me, man."
So Penner and Major League Baseball's bad boy make a pact to be friends for a while
Of course, Jeff Kent being Jeff Kent...
You might not want to believe him when he shakes your hand about something.
P.S. You think Michaela came up with that whole amazing "me vs. we" quote in Survivor: Game Changers? Well she didn't. See below.
"This is a me game. This isn't a we game."
"I gave Jonathan a four finger handshake, I didn't give him a manly handshake."
Jeff demonstrates how you give someone a lying handshake
"In my book, unless it's a manly handshake, it's not gonna count."
And that, my friends, is how Jeff Kent adds yet another item to his lifetime tally of asshole accomplishments.
2012: Inventor of the evil handshake
Okay, so the game is chugging along. Jeff has now aligned with Penner. And even though it was a four fingered lying handshake at first, eventually he relents and gives Penner a real manly handshake a couple of days later,
Not really because he likes Penner, or because he trusts him. It's mostly because Jeff can't stand dealing with any of these young kids on the tribe. They are annoying, and none of them appear to know their ass from a hole in the ground.
"Penner isn't that bad. At least the guy's tryin'."
"Everyone else here is just a kid. They can't carry a professional conversation."
And yes, you know what that means.
Cue Dawson.
Here's Dawson attempting to make a fire
That's about as good as she gets
"Is this fire, officially?" she announces to no one in particular. "Am I done making it?"
No answer. So she just yells louder.
"JEFF, IS THIS A FIRE?"
Jeff is pretty much done talking to anyone but Penner at this point
So with Kent aligned with Penner (because he's the only grownup), and with their third member being Carter (because there is literally nobody else), this is how the tribe officially splits into two now.
It's basically the three guys
Against the three girls
And don't think Miss Soft Cheese isn't aware of this.
Thoughts on Jeff Kent's betrayal, Dawson?
"At first, there was a five non-returnee alliance, and now it's three versus three."
And right now, those guys are out there talking about US!"
So four episodes pass. Kalabaw is split into guys against girls. But they never have to go to Tribal because they keep winning immunity.
But then, alas. Episode five. The detonator.
This is where it will all come to a head between Jeff Kent and Dawson.
Because episode five is where Jeff Probst says to drop your buffs
It looks like Malcolm and Denise will be joining new tribes
This is going to throw a wrench into the whole three versus three thing.
Denise winds up joining Kalabaw. And just like that, it looks like the women have the numbers. Now there are four of them.
And for the woman who often gets hit in the head, this news is spectacular.
Yay!
Dawson is so happy about the fact that she is about to beat Jeff Kent in the game of Survivor, she doesn't even seem to mind when, during the next challenge...
Abi just blatantly grabs her boob
Prompting Dawson to just laugh and grab Abi by the hair in response.
This is great little moment if you never noticed it before
By the way, little insider tip here for people who might want to go on Survivor in the future.
Don't ever grab Abi by the hair
Ever
'Cause that's how bitches get cut
R.I.P. Dawson 1983-2012
Okay. So Dawson is in with the girls, and the girls now have the numbers on the tribe. Life is looking good if you like winning Survivor, and you want to beat Jeff Kent, and you like fornicating for soft cheese.
But then...
Unfortunately...
Tragedy
On day twelve of the game, Dawson's wee little friend Dana was medevaced from the game. She got sick, and her body started shutting down on her, and all of a sudden it looked like the girls might not have a 4-3 numbers advantage on Kalabaw after all.
Dana goes down with an illness
Probst makes an emergency visit to their camp
And, of course, a heartbroken Dawson is there to comment on how sad this whole turn of events makes her.
I mean, yeah, sure, her friend Dana is sick. But on the plus side of the ledger...
"Jeff Probst is in my camp! Yay!"
The grieving widow
"I wanted to jump on him!"
And now we are treated to one of the most potentially awkward/unintentionally hilarious medevacs in Survivor history. In fact, I would probably rank this one second in weirdness, number two behind Bruce.
OMG I cannot believe you just said number two about Bruce!
Dawson getting moist over the fact that Jeff Probst is in her camp to medevac someone
Jeff Probst about to get humped
And, of course, we cap off Dana's heartwrenching medevac moment with this.
Oh look kids, there's Jonathan Penner's ginormous ass.
Okay, from here on out, it is going to be downhill for anyone who hates hard cheese. Which means, sorry Dawson, your time in the game is about to be up.
Because Dawson struggles in the immunity challenge with the puzzle, and it costs Kalabaw immunity
Tandang wins!
Revenge!
And it looks like the girls might not have control of the tribe after all as they are headed to their first Tribal Council
And this is where we get the hilarious scene that everyone remembers when it comes to Dawson vs. Jeff Kent.
It's Day 13 at Kalabaw, and it's time for Dawson's last stand
The girls know that they are in danger tonight, because they need Denise, but she doesn't actually have any loyalty to them
It looks like it is going to be either Dawson or Katie
And this is why you have to love an oddball like Dawson.
Because when she is on the outs, and her name is up on the chopping block tonight, what does she do?
Does she go talk to all the guys on the tribe, and try to save herself?
Of course not
Since Dawson is a lovable eccentric weirdo who is never going to do what you predict she will do, she decides to go down via this route instead.
By trolling Jeff Kent
You guessed it. Here comes the scene that I loved so much the first time I actually saw it in the episode.
Say hello to your worst nightmare, baseball's bad boy
Okay, so the Kalabaws are just sitting around in their shelter in the hours leading up to the first vote. They're all just hanging around, talking about nothing.
And that's where Dawson goes on her amazing passive-aggressive assault
"You know, I was thinking that maybe I should date an athlete."
"Oh really? What do you consider an athlete?"
"Um, football."
"Basketball."
"Um.... um...."
"And then I guess at the end maybe baseball."
Jeff has to just sit there and listen as she goes on to bash baseball players
"It's too much standing around."
"It's, like, a whole bunch of grown guys, just like, doing nothing."
"It's not really a sport for men. I've found that men tend to play other sports."
She actually even gets the bad boy of baseball to break out laughing at one point
The devil
The editors then put in one of my favorite confessionals of the season. Where Dawson talks about how fun it is to fuck with one of the most notorious villains in all of professional sports.
"I know Jeff Kent played baseball."
"So I enjoy getting into his mind."
"And making him...."
"Uncomfortable."
"It's a lot to fun to make him squirm."
"And it's a lot of fun to..."
"I don't know, I feel like I've kind of got a little mouse that doesn't know that it's in a corner."
"And I'm, like, playing with it."
"And, um....."
"I'm gonna snap on it!"
This picture is literally the happiest anyone has ever been after talking to Jeff Kent
...and that's why baseball players have to wear the extra small condoms.
I love that, deep down, you know that Jeff Kent, notorious hot head, was trying his best not to snap and do this.
"... and that's reason thirty-seven why football is better than baseball."
Okay, this entry is long enough. So let's jump to the ending.
I mean, it's not like Dawson doesn't have at least one MORE iconic moment that everyone remembers about her.
So we get to Tribal Council
And Dawson is voted out of the game
Partly because she's in the minority, and partly because she just makes Jeff Kent nervous
At this point, he probably suspects that she might be on to him
And so what does Dawson do when she is voted out of her beloved Kalabaw tribe?
No, she doesn't immediately ask for a piece of soft cheese
And no, she doesn't immediately out Jeff Kent and tell everyone who he is
No, at this point Dawson's top priority in Survivor is...
Mounting Jeff Probst
So she walks up before him. And she presents her torch.
And she waits for those four magical words.
No, not those ones. I mean these ones.
"The tribe has spoken."
And then she does that one iconic thing that everyone remembers.
She kisses him
And with that, we have officially seen the end of a Survivor original.
I mean, my ass.
P.S. One thing I think most people don't remember about Dawson is the fact that, even after she was voted out of the game, she was still going on about Jeff Kent in her final words.
Behold. Her list of all the things that Jeff owes her now since she didn't unmask him tonight at Tribal Council. This is classic Dawson.
"If Jeff wins, he owes me soooooooooo big."
"I want a motorcycle, a helmet, a sidecar..."
"...and a pink gun."
"That's what I want from Jeff Kent."
P.P.S. From a reader named Bailey W. Vogt:
"Jeff Kent looks like the contractor that is tearing down your twelve year old's childhood treehouse."
P.P.P.S. In her postgame interviews, Dawson claimed that she actually outed Jeff Kent during the game, and that they had a long conversation once about his life as a professional baseball player. Meanwhile, in his interviews, Jeff claimed that Dawson was insane, and that a conversation like that never came up. And that he had no idea she even knew he was a professional athlete. I guess it's up to you to decide which one of them is lying about this.
P.P.P.P.S. One of the things I noticed about Jeff from my screenshots is the fact that, in the words of my brother, "he has a very punchable face." This is one of our slang phrases for a guy who has beady little eyes and who always has a cocky little smile, and who would have made a perfect 1980's movie villain. And since my all time favorite movie is The Karate Kid, you know what that means. Here's Jeff Kent if he had been a member of the Cobra Kai!
What do we study here?
THE WAY OF THE KENT, SIR!
And what is that way?
STRIKE FIRST. NO RETURNEES. ONLY TALK STRATEGY WITH GROWNUPS, SIR!
P.P.P.P.P.S. Here's something fun I noticed about Dawson. There are some scenes where it is clear she has a hard time standing still. She basically just bounces around nervously while people are talking to her. I don't know if she is a super excitable person, or if she just has a lot of random energy inside her, or what, but it's fun to look for it when you rewatch the season. Here is a gif my friend Daniel Rona made for me with some of her highlights.
You better relax, bro.
P.P.P.P.P.P.S. From reader Russ Bartlett:
"Dawson's master strategy going into the season was to wear colorful shoes so people would underestimate her(???), and she said post-show that she would tell people to ~rendezvous~ with her at specific points on the beach later in the day for discrete strategy talk, and then never actually show up just to fuck with them. I wish we'd seen more of her."
P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. This doesn't have anything to do with this entry, but as I was grabbing screenshots from Philippines I came across maybe my favorite Abi-Maria resting "fuck you" face of them all. This is from the beginning of episode four, when the Kalabaws and the Tandangs are looking over to see who Matsing voted out last night. Guess who is the one player who doesn't have a look of complete empathy on her face.
P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. And finally... remember how Max Dawson went on Worlds Apart, and how he tried to do little tributes to players and moments from the show that had inspired him? Well I hope you didn't miss my favorite one. :)
Dawson's return
** Thanks to Cory Gage for the Brad Culpepper/Klingon picture **Xapo Warns of Phishing Attacks Against Its Users
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Xapo today warned its users its security team has discovered a series of phishing attacks against users. Using similar tactics bad actors use to steal bank account passwords, the attackers are sending emails that initially appear to be from Xapo. They then direct customers to a malicious site that requests and records sensitive security information.
Also read: Bitcoin Cash Developers Have Decided on the Algorithm Upgrade for Upcoming Hard Fork
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In an email to all users, Xapo said some had already fallen victim to the attacks. “Phishing” refers to attempts to trick users into thinking they’re receiving an official email from a service provider, or accessing their real account. All users need to show caution at all times when online, and look for key but subtle hints that they’re dealing with a scammer.
Xapo’s Tips to Avoid Becoming a Phishing Attack Victim
Xapo’s advice is useful for all services, not just their own. The key is to always be wary of all emails from a service you use, even the genuine ones. Never access a service by clicking on a link or button in an email, always go directly from a browser or mobile app.
1. Never enter your 6 digit SMS code on a website. The only safe place to enter it is your Xapo Mobile App.
2. Look for the secure HTTPS certificate in your address bar. (it’s usually represented by a green “lock” icon” next to the address)
3. Make sure you are at https://account.xapo.com/ when logging into Xapo and asked for your credentials.
4. If you are using the Xapo Web App please bookmark the correct URL and make sure to always log in from there.
5. Be suspicious of any email claiming to be from Xapo, especially those providing a link for you to log in and failing in this process.
6. Keep in mind that Xapo will never ask for your credentials in an email.
Xapo also provided the following images with the scam address, so everyone can see the difference:
What Is Phishing and How Does it Work?
The most common style of phishing attack involves copying exactly the design and user interface of a well-known site. You’ve probably seen hundreds of these that look like well-known banks, or brands like Google. It’s very simple to copy a site, but less easy to make it look 100 percent like the real one.
The URL, or web address, is often the key. If it’s even one character different from the one you know, leave immediately.
Xapo is a “custodial wallet” — that means it stores customers’ private keys (and thus bitcoins) on its own servers. While easier for newcomers to use, centralized storage like that is more vulnerable to hacks and scams. Anyone with your login credentials will be able to access your funds.
Xapo mitigates this risk by allowing two-factor authentication on its accounts. As always, it’s a wise idea to use it.
Are you a Xapo customer? Have you ever almost been fooled by a phishing attack? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Images via Xapo, Wikimedia Commons
Flip Share Pin 16 SharesDonald Trump believes that because he attended a military high school, he has an understanding of what it is like to be in the military, despite deferring the Vietnam War draft for medical reasons.
“My number was so incredible and it was a very high draft number. Anyway so I never had to do that, but I felt that I was in the military in the true sense because I dealt with those people,” Trump told Michael D’Antonio, the author of the forthcoming book “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success,” according to a preview in the New York Times.
Trump attended the New York Military Academy from eighth grade through the end of high school where he participated in military drills and encountered some instructors who had served in the military, according to the Times.
He told D’Antonio that at the academy, he got “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.”
The forthcoming book also includes comments from Trump’s ex-wives revealing more about his character. Ivana Trump, his first wife, said that the real estate mogul “wants to be noticed.” His second wife, Marla Maples, called him a “little boy that still wants attention.”The top lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee have set the parameters for their investigation into Russia's interference in the U.S. election, which will include potential contacts between President Trump's campaign and Moscow, as well as U.S. intelligence leaks.
Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and ranking member Adam Schiff Adam Bennett SchiffTech takes heat as anti-vaxers go viral Demands grow for a public Mueller report Bharara: It would seem 'odd and unusual' if Mueller report isn't made public MORE (D-Calif.) released a summary of the investigation's goals Wednesday evening.
The main questions they'll focus on are:
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"What Russian cyber activity and other active measures were directed against the United States and its allies?
"Did the Russian active measures include links between Russia and individuals associated with political campaigns or any other U.S. Persons?
"What was the U.S. Government’s response to these Russian active measures and what do we need to do to protect ourselves and our allies in the future?
"What possible leaks of classified information took place related to the Intelligence Community Assessment of these matters?"
The intelligence community agrees that Russia was behind a hacking effort that hit the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE's campaign chairman.
A report from the director of national intelligence found that Russian President Vladimir Putin developed a clear preference for Trump over Clinton, and the Kremlin aimed to undermine U.S. democracy and Clinton's candidacy.
Both the House and Senate Intelligence committees are investigating the issues surrounding Russia's meddling.
"This investigation is a national security necessity and anything less than a full accounting of all the facts will be insufficient to protect the country and meet the expectations of the American people,” Schiff said in a joint press release with Nunes announcing the goals of the investigation.
"On a bipartisan basis, we will fully investigate all the evidence we collect and follow that evidence wherever it leads,” Nunes said in the same release.
On Monday, Nunes made clear that the investigation would probe leaks from the intelligence community that led to former national security adviser Michael Flynn's resignation. Anonymous officials told news outlets that he had addressed the issue of sanctions with the Russian ambassador on a call in December and had misled top White House officials, including Vice President Pence, about the conversation.
But Trump and Nunes have both said that the threat of leaks is a bigger risk than Flynn's alleged overreach.
"We can't run a government like this,” Nunes said.
Nunes went on to say he had seen no evidence validating allegations that the Trump campaign had regular contact with Russian officials, a claim Schiff called "premature" later that day.
"We haven't obtained any of the evidence yet, so it's premature for us to be saying we've reached any conclusion about the issue of collusion," he said, noting that the investigation had neither gathered evidence nor formally called witnesses.
"The most that we've had are private conversations, the chair and I, with intelligence officials. That's not a substitute for an investigation."Amara McLaughlin, CP24.com
A 33-year-old Toronto man who allegedly left his three-year-old daughter unattended in his car while he was at the mall on Thursday has been charged, York Regional Police say.
A security officer at Vaughan Mills Mall noticed the girl in the car shortly after 3:30 p.m. because the car was parked in an expectant mother’s spot.
The car was running and its doors were locked, investigators alleged.
“The girl did not appear to be in distress,” a news release said, but security footage revealed she had been left alone for more than 40 minutes.
The father faces two charges for leaving his daughter unattended and engaging in prohibited activity on the premises of the mall.
Under the Child and Family Services Act, any child under the age of 10 who is left unattended is considered to be at risk.
The man was allowed to leave the parking lot with his child, according to police.
The Children’s Aid Society was notified.By MARGARET EBRAHIM, Associated Press Writer Fri Feb 3, 7:16 PM ET
WASHINGTON - An intense debate erupted during the Ford administration over the president's powers to eavesdrop without warrants to gather foreign intelligence, according to newly disclosed government documents. George H.W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld andare cited in the documents.
The roughly 200 pages of historic records obtained by The Associated Press reflect a remarkably similar dispute between the White House and Congress fully three decades before President Bush's acknowledgment he authorized wiretaps without warrants of some Americans in terrorism investigations.
"Yogi Bera was right: It's deja vu all over again," said Tom Blanton, executive director for the National Security Archives, a private research group that compiles collections of sensitive government documents. "It's the same debate."
Senate Judiciary Committee hearings begin Monday over Bush's authority to approve such wiretaps by the ultra-secretive National Security Agency without a judge's approval. A focus of the hearings is to determine whether the Bush administration's eavesdropping program violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law with origins during Ford's presidency.
"We strongly believe it is unwise for the president to concede any lack of constitutional power to authorize electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes," wrote Robert Ingersoll, then-deputy secretary of state, in a 1976 memorandum to President Ford about the proposed bill on electronic surveillance.
George H.W. Bush, then director of the CIA, wanted to ensure "no unnecessary diminution of collection of important foreign intelligence" under the proposal to require judges to approve terror wiretaps, according to a March 1976 memorandum he wrote to the Justice Department. Bush also complained that some major communications companies were unwilling to install government wiretaps without a judge's approval. Such a refusal "seriously affects the capabilities of the intelligence community," Bush wrote.
In another document, Jack Marsh, a White House adviser, outlined options for Ford over the wiretap legislation. Marsh alerted Ford to objections by Bush as CIA director and by Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft over the scope of a provision to require judicial oversight of wiretaps. At the time, Rumsfeld was defense secretary, Kissinger was secretary of state and Scowcroft was the White House national security adviser.
Some experts weren't surprised the cast of characters in this national debate remained largely unchanged over 30 years.
"People don't change their stripes," said Kenneth C. Bass a former senior Justice Department lawyer who oversaw such wiretap requests during the Carter administration.
The National Security Archives separately obtained many of the same documents as the AP and intended to publish them on its Web site Saturday.
The documents include one startling similarity to Washington's current atmosphere over disclosures of classified information by the media. Notes from a 1975 meeting between Cheney, then White House chief of staff, then-Attorney General Edward Levi and others cite the "problem" of a New York Times article by Seymour Hersh about U.S. submarines spying inside Soviet waters. Participants considered a formal FBI investigation of Hersh and the Times and searching Hersh's apartment "to go after (his) papers," the document said.
"I was surprised," Hersh said in a telephone interview Friday. "I was surprised that they didn't know I had a house and a mortgage."
One option outlined at the 1975 meeting was to "ignore the Hersh story and hope it doesn't happen again." Participants worried about "will we get hit with violating the First Amendment to the Constitution?"
CIA Director Porter Goss told lawmakers this week that recent disclosures about sensitive programs were severely damaging, and he urged prosecutors to impanel a grand jury to determine "who is leaking this information." The National Security Agency earlier asked the Justice Department to open a formal leaks investigation over press reports of its terrorism wiretaps.
___
Associated Press writer Ted Bridis contributed to this report.OTTAWA — Battling Islamic extremism represents the “greatest struggle of our generation,” Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird told a joint House of Commons committee Tuesday as the government revealed some Canadian troops are already inside Iraq.
Mr. Baird and Defence Minister Rob Nicholson appeared before a parliamentary committee to explain the government’s decision to send dozens of military advisers to Iraq, announced last week by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The appearance was billed as an attempt to ensure transparency and openness.
Mr. Nicholson told MPs the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) poses “a real and growing threat to civilization itself.”
“What we are facing here is one of the most barbaric terrorist groups the world has ever known,” Mr. Baird said. “Their world view is a direct challenge to the values of Western civilization.”
Canada and its allies cannot afford to ignore ISIS, the ministers added, which is why the government is providing humanitarian aid, helping transport military supplies and now deploying military advisers to help fight the militants.
“I ask that as we consider whether or how to act, we also consider what happens if we don’t act,” Mr. Baird said. “It might seem convenient to brush options off as leading to mission creep in the future. But the hard reality is that inaction is not an option.”
Much will depend on U.S. President Barack Obama’s long-awaited strategy for combating ISIS, which will reportedly be to systematically wear down the terrorist group’s capabilities and shrink the territory they’ve captured.
Mr. Obama will outline his strategy in a speech Wednesday night. The White House said Tuesday the President has told congressional leaders he has the authority he needs to take action.
In Ottawa, the ministers would not provide specific details about what Canadian forces will be doing in Iraq. That includes exactly how many Canadian troops will be on the ground in Iraq, when they will arrive and, perhaps most importantly, the exact goal of the mission and how far the government is willing to go to fight Islamic militants there.
Mr. Nicholson said the government would not follow up the deployment with “boots on the ground” — meaning a regular army presence.
“We’re not engaging in combat activity and our role is very specific and very clear,” he said, noting the current deployment is slated to run 30 days, after which it will be re-assessed. A handful of Canadian soldiers are already on the ground as an advance team.
Mr. Nicholson confirmed the troops to be deployed are from the Petawawa-based Canadian Special Operations Regiment and that they will be sent to northern Iraq to provide advice to Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic militants.
While Mr. Obama has said his plan is to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic militants, a task that could take up to three years, Mr. Nicholson offered only a vague answer on Canada’s objective and how it will measure success.
“We’ll want to see if we’re making a difference,” Mr. Nicholson said. “This is a very tragic situation, and we believe that we have to do our part to assist in averting any more tragedy of this type.”
New Democrats expressed frustration over the lack of detail, and raised the spectre of Canada unwittingly falling headlong into another long, complicated conflict on the other side of the world.
“You have to understand why Canadians are a little concerned about what road we’re going down here and where this is leading us,” NDP defence critic Jack Harris told the ministers.
NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar said it isn’t clear what Canadian troops will be bringing to the table, as the Kurds they will be working with already have a capable military.
“It’s very strange to me because they know how to fight,” said Mr. Dewar. The MP recently returned from a trip to Iraq with Mr. Baird and Liberal foreign affairs critic Marc Garneau, and he said none of the Iraqi officials they met asked for Canada to put boots on the ground.
Mr. Garneau, however, said the Liberals support a limited deployment of Canadian troops to help provide advice to Iraqi forces, and that he understood why the government was reluctant to provide more information given potential security risks.
Postmedia News, with files from The Canadian Press and Associated PressCOLUMBUS, Ohio — A Catholic diocese in Ohio says a parish priest under investigation for “questionable” communications with a minor and possible misuse of church funds killed himself.
The Catholic Diocese of Columbus said in a statement Thursday that the Rev. James Csaszar killed himself Wednesday in Chicago. Csaszar was pastor of Church of the Resurrection in the Columbus suburb of New Albany.
The diocese’s statement says Csaszar was placed on administrative leave last month when officials learned of “excessive and questionable” text and phone communications with a minor and possible misuse of funds while pastor at St. Rose of Lima Parish in New Lexington.
The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation began looking into Csaszar after the diocese learned of the allegations and contacted police in New Lexington, roughly 55 miles southeast of Columbus.The State of Palestine flag flies for the first time at the UN headquarters in new York. (AP)
Jerusalem - Israeli ministers have frozen a plan to allow for the construction of thousands of Palestinian homes in a West Bank city, a statement said Thursday, a move that followed Israeli settlers' objections.
Israel's security cabinet took the decision in a meeting Wednesday, the statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said, despite ministers having previously approved the project.
The plan is for Qalqilya, said to be the most densely populated Palestinian city in the West Bank with more than 40,000 residents and surrounded by Israel's separation wall on three sides.
It is located in the northern West Bank, near the Israeli cities of Kfar Saba and Raanana.
Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman and military officials favour the plan as part of a so-called "carrot-and-stick" policy to reward Palestinian cities Israeli security forces view as calm in recent years.
Lieberman has disputed reports that it would allow for up to 14,000 housing units, saying it would be a maximum of 6,100.
The plan would extend the city to allow for the new homes into the part of the West Bank known as Area C, under complete Israeli control.
Some 60 percent of the West Bank is part of Area C and Palestinians face near impossible odds in gaining construction permits there.
Israeli settlement building has meanwhile continued in Area C, though settler leaders argue it has advanced too slowly and harshly criticised the Qalqilya plan.
Under Wednesday's decision, Israel's full cabinet will hold another discussion on the issue, though with a broader scope.
"The cabinet will discuss a global construction policy and Area C planning in 10 days," the statement from Netanyahu's office said.
Israel's current government is seen as the most right-wing in the country's history, with key ministers opposing the creation of a Palestinian state and advocating settlement construction.Brazil slaves' families gain land titles BRAZIL
Residents of Rio de Janeiro's Quilombo Sacopa celebrate their culture by sharing feijoada, a
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supposed to feel at age 30 as a running back,” Foster added. “You hear all the geniuses that say that’s what’s supposed to happen at 30, but I feel like if you take care of your body and you train like I train, you should be able to do good things.”MIAMI - A plan to extend the Dolphin Expressway died in a 3-2 vote in its first public hearing Tuesday, with the specter of having to move Miami-Dade County's urban development boundary to get it done.
Residents of the county's dense western suburbia lined up to plead for the extension.
"My average morning commute takes over an hour and a half, and sometimes two," Patricia Shannon Davis told the county's Governmental Operations Committee.
The plan by the Miami-Dade Expressway Authority was to extend the highway as an alternate commuting route that would take it past the UDB, the imaginary line drawn to stop developments into the fragile Everglades.
"I think you really need to consider the importance of holding that line," said one woman who showed up to the hearing to publicly oppose the extension plan.
Other speakers echoed familiar arguments for holding the UDB in place, including the possibility of urban sprawl, possible contamination of South Florida's drinking water supply and well-fields, and loss of environmental and recreational areas.
Though Tuesday's committee debate was specifically about the plan to extend the Dolphin Expressway, the county's master plan would have to be changed to do so.
"We're not talking about homes. We're talking about relieving the people that are there now. We're talking about an escape route," said Miami-Dade County Commissioner Joe Martinez, who represents some of the neighborhoods affected. "This is to alleviate traffic. Can homes come in the future? Possibly. Nobody knows."
Martinez was on the losing end of the committee vote, which is the end of the line for the plan.
Copyright 2017 by WPLG Local10.com - All rights reserved.The Project Gutenberg EBook of Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Heart of Darkness
Author: Joseph Conrad
Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #526]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEART OF DARKNESS ***
Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger
[Note: See also etext #219 which is a different version of this eBook]
HEART OF DARKNESS
By Joseph Conrad
I
The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.
The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.
The Director of Companies was our captain and our host. We four affectionately watched his back as he stood in the bows looking to seaward. On the whole river there was nothing that looked half so nautical. He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness personified. It was difficult to realize his work was not out there in the luminous estuary, but behind him, within the brooding gloom.
Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea. Besides holding our hearts together through long periods of separation, it had the effect of making us tolerant of each other's yarns—and even convictions. The Lawyer—the best of old fellows—had, because of his many years and many virtues, the only cushion on deck, and was lying on the only rug. The Accountant had brought out already a box of dominoes, and was toying architecturally with the bones. Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzen-mast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled an idol. The Director, satisfied the anchor had good hold, made his way aft and sat down amongst us. We exchanged a few words lazily. Afterwards there was silence on board the yacht. For some reason or other we did not begin that game of dominoes. We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring. The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more somber every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun.
And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.
Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the serenity became less brilliant but more profound. The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the august light of abiding memories. And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes, "followed the sea" with reverence and affection, than to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled—the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen's Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests—and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith—the adventurers and the settlers; kings' ships and the ships of men on 'Change; captains, admirals, the dark "interlopers" of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned "generals" of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth!... The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.
The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear along the shore. The Chapman lighthouse, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway—a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.
"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."
He was the only man of us who still "followed the sea." The worst that could be said of him was that he did not represent his class. He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them—the ship; and so is their country—the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny. For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing. The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.
His remark did not seem at all surprising. It was just like Marlow. It was accepted in silence. No one took the trouble to grunt even; and presently he said, very slow—
"I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day.... Light came out of this river since—you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine—what d'ye call 'em?—trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north; run overland across the Gauls in a hurry; put in charge of one of these craft the legionaries,—a wonderful lot of handy men they must have been too—used to build, apparently by the hundred, in a month or two, if we may believe what we read. Imagine him here—the very end of the world, a sea the color of lead, a sky the color of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina—and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages,—precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay—cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death,—death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been dying like flies here. Oh yes—he did it. Did it very well, too, no doubt, and without thinking much about it either, except afterwards to brag of what he had gone through in his time, perhaps. They were men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps he was cheered by keeping his eye on a chance of promotion to the fleet at Ravenna by-and-by, if he had good friends in Rome and survived the awful climate. Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga—perhaps too much dice, you know—coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him,—all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate."
He paused.
"Mind," he began again, lifting one arm from the elbow, the palm of the hand outwards, so that, with his legs folded before him, he had the pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes and without a lotus-flower—"Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this. What saves us is efficiency—the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to...."
He broke off. Flames glided in the river, small green flames, red flames, white flames, pursuing, overtaking, joining, crossing each other—then separating slowly or hastily. The traffic of the great city went on in the deepening night upon the sleepless river. We looked on, waiting patiently—there was nothing else to do till the end of the flood; but it was only after a long silence, when he said, in a hesitating voice, "I suppose you fellows remember I did once turn fresh-water sailor for a bit," that we knew we were fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear about one of Marlow's inconclusive experiences.
"I don't want to bother you much with what happened to me personally," he began, showing in this remark the weakness of many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their audience would best like to hear; "yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap. It was the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me—and into my thoughts. It was somber enough too—and pitiful—not extraordinary in any way—not very clear either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light.
"I had then, as you remember, just returned to London after a lot of Indian Ocean, Pacific, China Seas—a regular dose of the East—six years or so, and I was loafing about, hindering you fellows in your work and invading your homes, just as though I had got a heavenly mission to civilize you. It was very fine for a time, but after a bit I did get tired of resting. Then I began to look for a ship—I should think the hardest work on earth. But the ships wouldn't even look at me. And I got tired of that game too.
"Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, 'When I grow up I will go there.' The North Pole was one of these places, I remember. Well, I haven't been there yet, and shall not try now. The glamour's off. Other places were scattered about the Equator, and in every sort of latitude all over the two hemispheres. I have been in some of them, and... well, we won't talk about that. But there was one yet—the biggest, the most blank, so to speak—that I had a hankering after.
"True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would a bird—a silly little bird. Then I remembered there was a big concern, a Company for trade on that river. Dash it all! I thought to myself, they can't trade without using some kind of craft on that lot of fresh water—steamboats! Why shouldn't I try to get charge of one? I went on along Fleet Street, but could not shake off the idea. The snake had charmed me.
"You understand it was a Continental concern, that Trading society; but I have a lot of relations living on the Continent, because it's cheap and not so nasty as it looks, they say.
"I am sorry to own I began to worry them. This was already a fresh departure for me. I was not used to get things that way, you know. I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go. I wouldn't have believed it of myself; but, then—you see—I felt somehow I must get there by hook or by crook. So I worried them. The men said 'My dear fellow,' and did nothing. Then—would you believe it?—I tried the women. I, Charlie Marlow, set the women to work—to get a job. Heavens! Well, you see, the notion drove me. I had an aunt, a dear enthusiastic soul. She wrote: 'It will be delightful. I am ready to do anything, anything for you. It is a glorious idea. I know the wife of a very high personage in the Administration, and also a man who has lots of influence with,' &c., &c. She was determined to make no end of fuss to get me appointed skipper of a river steamboat, if such was my fancy.
"I got my appointment—of course; and I got it very quick. It appears the Company had received news that one of their captains had been killed in a scuffle with the natives. This was my chance, and it made me the more anxious to go. It was only months and months afterwards, when I made the attempt to recover what was left of the body, that I heard the original quarrel arose from a misunderstanding about some hens. Yes, two black hens. Fresleven—that was the fellow's name, a Dane—thought himself wronged somehow in the bargain, so he went ashore and started to hammer the chief of the village with a stick. Oh, it didn't surprise me in the least to hear this, and at the same time to be told that Fresleven was the gentlest, quietest creature that ever walked on two legs. No doubt he was; but he had been a couple of years already out there engaged in the noble cause, you know, and he probably felt the need at last of asserting his self-respect in some way. Therefore he whacked the old nigger mercilessly, while a big crowd of his people watched him, thunderstruck, till some man,—I was told the chief's son,—in desperation at hearing the old chap yell, made a tentative jab with a spear at the white man—and of course it went quite easy between the shoulder-blades. Then the whole population cleared into the forest, expecting all kinds of calamities to happen, while, on the other hand, the steamer Fresleven commanded left also in a bad panic, in charge of the engineer, I believe. Afterwards nobody seemed to trouble much about Fresleven's remains, till I got out and stepped into his shoes. I couldn't let it rest, though; but when an opportunity offered at last to meet my predecessor, the grass growing through his ribs was tall enough to hide his bones. They were all there. The supernatural being had not been touched after he fell. And the village was deserted, the huts gaped black, rotting, all askew within the fallen enclosures. A calamity had come to it, sure enough. The people had vanished. Mad terror had scattered them, men, women, and children, through the bush, and they had never returned. What became of the hens I don't know either. I should think the cause of progress got them, anyhow. However, through this glorious affair I got my appointment, before I had fairly begun to hope for it.
"I flew around like mad to get ready, and before forty-eight hours I was crossing the Channel to show myself to my employers, and sign the contract. In a very few hours I arrived in a city that always makes me think of a whited sepulcher. Prejudice no doubt. I had no difficulty in finding the Company's offices. It was the biggest thing in the town, and everybody I met was full of it. They were going to run an over-sea empire, and make no end of coin by trade.
"A narrow and deserted street in deep shadow, high houses, innumerable windows with venetian blinds, a dead silence, grass sprouting between the stones, imposing carriage archways right and left, immense double doors standing ponderously ajar. I slipped through one of these cracks, went up a swept and ungarnished staircase, as arid as a desert, and opened the first door I came to. Two women, one fat and the other slim, sat on straw-bottomed chairs, knitting black wool. The slim one got up and walked straight at me—still knitting with downcast eyes—and only just as I began to think of getting out of her way, as you would for a somnambulist, stood still, and looked up. Her dress was as plain as an umbrella-cover, and she turned round without a word and preceded me into a waiting-room. I gave my name, and looked about. Deal table in the middle, plain chairs all round the walls, on one end a large shining map, marked with all the colors of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red—good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn't going into any of these. I was going into the yellow. Dead in the center. And the river was there—fascinating—deadly—like a snake. Ough! A door opened, a white-haired secretarial head, but wearing a compassionate expression, appeared, and a skinny forefinger beckoned me into the sanctuary. Its light was dim, and a heavy writing-desk squatted in the middle. From behind that structure came out an impression of pale plumpness in a frock-coat. The great man himself. He was five feet six, I should judge, and had his grip on the handle-end of ever so many millions. He shook hands, I fancy, murmured vaguely, was satisfied with my French. Bon voyage.
"In about forty-five seconds I found myself again in the waiting-room with the compassionate secretary, who, full of desolation and sympathy, made me sign some document. I believe I undertook amongst other things not to disclose any trade secrets. Well, I am not going to.
"I began to feel slightly uneasy. You know I am not used to such ceremonies, and there was something ominous in the atmosphere. It was just as though I had been let into some conspiracy—I don't know—something not quite right; and I was glad to get out. In the outer room the two women knitted black wool feverishly. People were arriving, and the younger one was walking back and forth introducing them. The old one sat on her chair. Her flat cloth slippers were propped up on a foot-warmer, and a cat reposed on her lap. She wore a starched white affair on her head, had a wart on one cheek, and silver-rimmed spectacles hung on the tip of her nose. She glanced at me above the glasses. The swift and indifferent placidity of that look troubled me. Two youths with foolish and cheery countenances were being piloted over, and she threw at them the same quick glance of unconcerned wisdom. She seemed to know all about them and about me too. An eerie feeling came over me. She seemed uncanny and fateful. Often far away there I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown, the other scrutinizing the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes. Ave! Old knitter of black wool. Morituri te salutant. Not many of those she looked at ever saw her again—not half, by a long way.
"There was yet a visit to the doctor. 'A simple formality,' assured me the secretary, with an air of taking an immense part in all my sorrows. Accordingly a young chap wearing his hat over the left eyebrow, some clerk I suppose,—there must have been clerks in the business, though the house was as still as a house in a city of the dead,—came from somewhere up-stairs, and led me forth. He was shabby and careless, with ink-stains on the sleeves of his jacket, and his cravat was large and billowy, under a chin shaped like the toe of an old boot. It was a little too early for the doctor, so I proposed a drink, and thereupon he developed a vein of joviality. As we sat over our vermouths he glorified the Company's business, and by-and-by I expressed casually my surprise at him not going out there. He became very cool and collected all at once. 'I am not such a fool as I look, quoth Plato to his disciples,' he said sententiously, emptied his glass with great resolution, and we rose.
"The old doctor felt my pulse, evidently thinking of something else the while. 'Good, good for there,' he mumbled, and then with a certain eagerness asked me whether I would let him measure my head. Rather surprised, I said Yes, when he produced a thing like calipers and got the dimensions back and front and every way, taking notes carefully. He was an unshaven little man in a threadbare coat like a gaberdine, with his feet in slippers, and I thought him a harmless fool. 'I always ask leave, in the interests of science, to measure the crania of those going out there,' he said. 'And when they come back, too?' I asked. 'Oh, I never see them,' he remarked; 'and, moreover, the changes take place inside, you know.' He smiled, as if at some quiet joke. 'So you are going out there. Famous. Interesting too.' He gave me a searching glance, and made another note. 'Ever any madness in your family?' he asked, in a matter-of-fact tone. I felt very annoyed. 'Is that question in the interests of science too?' 'It would be,' he said, without taking notice of my irritation, 'interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot, but...' 'Are you an alienist?' I interrupted. 'Every doctor should be—a little,' answered that original, imperturbably. 'I have a little theory which you Messieurs who go out there must help me to prove. This is my share in the advantages my country shall reap from the possession of such a magnificent dependency. The mere wealth I leave to others. Pardon my questions, but you are the first Englishman coming under my observation....' I hastened to assure him I was not in the least typical. 'If I were,' said I, 'I wouldn't be talking like this with you.' 'What you say is rather profound, and probably erroneous,' he said, with a laugh. 'Avoid irritation more than exposure to the sun. Adieu. How do you English say, eh? Good-by. Ah! Good-by. Adieu. In the tropics one must before everything keep calm.'... He lifted a warning forefinger.... 'Du calme, du calme. Adieu.'
"One thing more remained to do—say good-by to my excellent aunt. I found her triumphant. I had a cup of tea—the last decent cup of tea for many days—and in a room that most soothingly looked just as you would expect a lady's drawing-room to look, we had a long quiet chat by the fireside. In the course of these confidences it became quite plain to me I had been represented to the wife of the high dignitary, and goodness knows to how many more people besides, as an exceptional and gifted creature—a piece of good fortune for the Company—a man you don't get hold of every day. Good heavens! and I was going to take charge of a two-penny-halfpenny river-steamboat with a penny whistle attached! It appeared, however, I was also one of the Workers, with a capital—you know. Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time, and the excellent woman, living right in the rush of all that humbug, got carried off her feet. She talked about 'weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,' till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit.
"'You forget, dear Charlie, that the laborer is worthy of his hire,' she said, brightly. It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.
"After this I got embraced, told to wear flannel, be sure to write often, and so on—and I left. In the street—I don't know why—a queer feeling came to me that I was an impostor. Odd thing that I, who used to clear out for any part of the world at twenty-four hours' notice, with less thought than most men give to the crossing of a street, had a moment—I won't say of hesitation, but of startled pause, before this commonplace affair. The best way I can explain it to you is by saying that, for a second or two, I felt as though, instead of going to the center of a continent, I were about to set off for the center of the earth.
"I left in a French steamer, and she called in every blamed port they have out there, for, as far as I could see, the sole purpose of landing soldiers and custom-house officers. I watched the coast. Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you—smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, 'Come and find out.' This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam. Here and there grayish-whitish specks showed up, clustered inside the white surf, with a flag flying above them perhaps. Settlements some centuries old, and still no bigger than pin-heads on the untouched expanse of their background. We pounded along, stopped, landed soldiers; went on, landed custom-house clerks to levy toll in what looked like a God-forsaken wilderness, with a tin shed and a flag-pole lost in it; landed more soldiers—to take care of the custom-house clerks, presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf; but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care. They were just flung out there, and on we went. Every day the coast looked the same, as though we had not moved; but we passed various places—trading places—with names like Gran' Bassam Little Popo, names that seemed to belong to some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister backcloth. The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the uniform somberness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion. The voice of the surf heard now and then was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother. It was something natural, that had its reason, that had a meaning. Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the white of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks—these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement, that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at. For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away. Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long eight-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the eight-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives—he called them enemies!—hidden out of sight somewhere.
"We gave her her letters (I heard the men in that lonely ship were dying of fever at the rate of three a day) and went on. We called at some more places with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb; all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair. Nowhere did we stop long enough to get a particularized impression, but the general sense of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me. It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares.
"It was upward of thirty days before I saw the mouth of the big river. We anchored off the seat of the government. But my work would not begin till some two hundred miles farther on. So as soon as I could I made a start for a place thirty miles higher up.
"I had my passage on a little sea-going steamer. Her captain was a Swede, and knowing me for a seaman, invited me on the bridge. He was a young man, lean, fair, and morose, with lanky hair and a shuffling gait. As we left the miserable little wharf, he tossed his head contemptuously at the shore. 'Been living there?' he asked. I said, 'Yes.' 'Fine lot these government chaps—are they not?' he went on, speaking English with great precision and considerable bitterness. 'It is funny what some people will do for a few francs a month. I wonder what becomes of that kind when it goes up country?' I said to him I expected to see that soon. 'So-o-o!' he exclaimed. He shuffled athwart, keeping one eye ahead vigilantly. 'Don't be too sure,' he continued. 'The other day I took up a man who hanged himself on the road. He was a Swede, too.'
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But we got to take X-23 out to our roof and had an absolute blast, as you can probably tell from the sheer number of artsy photos that we took of this beauty. She’s definitely one of the more photogenic characters in the line!
Purchase At: KotoUS | AmiAmi
[Thanks to Kotobukiya for providing Plastikitty with this review sample]Cost of average San Francisco rent actually fell (a little) last month
In this file photo, a for lease sign is posted in front of home for rent on April 21, 2015 in San Francisco, California. In this file photo, a for lease sign is posted in front of home for rent on April 21, 2015 in San Francisco, California. Photo: Justin Sullivan, Getty Images Photo: Justin Sullivan, Getty Images Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Cost of average San Francisco rent actually fell (a little) last month 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
There is finally some good news for San Francisco renters. It seems that after an eight-month holding pattern the rental prices have finally fallen.
According to apartment rental startup Zumper, rent in San Francisco for a one-bedroom apartment fell to $3,500, a 4.6% drop from the highest rental price of $3,670, this past October. On the flip side, our neighboring city Oakland saw an alarming 19% rise in rent for a one-bedroom at $2,190, making it the 5th most expensive city in America.
If you are one of the many who fled the city by the bay for Oakland in hopes of cheaper rent, you are not alone.
"East Bay migration is definitely a compelling argument – the fact that Oakland rents continue to outpace San Francisco in percentage terms shows there's a healthy appetite for property there. Once rents hit a certain percentage of income, people just will refuse to pay and look for alternate options, perhaps with a commute," said Devin O'Brien, head of strategic marketing at Zumper.
With Oakland's recent surge in rental prices they are now the highest city to rent in the East Bay, beating San Jose. San Francisco still remains the most expensive city to rent a one-bedroom apartment with New York and Boston following close behind.
When looking at two-bedroom apartments, Oakland -along with Miami - hold the title of eighth-most expensive city to rent, at $2,550. While San Francisco, after a decline of 3.4% in price, still takes the lead over New York for the number one place to rent a two-bedroom apartment at $4,830.
Although these slight decreases in rental prices comes as a pleasant surprise to most, there still won't be much of a relief felt among Bay Area renters. However, with San Francisco condo prices lowering as well the city just might be on the verge of a housing bubble, according to Zillow analysts.
So what has caused San Francisco to be the number one place to rent in America for the last few years? According to economists, job growth in the Bay Area has accounted for 40 percent of new employment in California, which in turn has caused an influx of transplants and fewer places to live.
With a lack of new housing and restrictive land use policies for construction, the Bay Area has created the recipe for one of the most expensive housing markets in the world. Leaving San Francisco and now Oakland looking for new ways to build affordable housing and enforce renter protection laws.Manny Ramirez has retired from Major League Baseball.
MLB made the announcement on Friday afternoon. The league said it notified Ramirez of an "issue" with him regarding the MLB's Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program, and rather than undergo the process, Ramirez opted to retire.
Ramirez, 38, got off to a slow start for Tampa Bay this season, going 1-for-17 in five games.
Ramirez, who's made more than $200 million in his career, signed a one-year, $2 million deal with Tampa Bay this offseason.
According to The New York Times, Manny tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug during spring training and was recently informed of the positive result. The slugger would have faced a 100-game suspension. He was also suspended in 2009 for 50 games for testing postive for hCG, a female fertility drug typically used to mask steroid use.
"We are obviously surprised and disappointed by this news," the Rays announced on Friday. "We will have no further comment on this matter, and our fans and organization will carry on."
In 19 Major League seasons, Ramirez batted.312 with 555 home runs and 1,831 RBIs. He was a surefire Hall of Famer before that suspension in 2009, and the suspicious circumstances of his retirement will likely add to the case against him.
Ramirez played the most games (1,083) and hit the most homers (274) for Boston, where he spent eight years. He was expected to return to Fenway Park next week with the Rays for just the second time since he was traded away at the 2008 trade deadline.
He won two World Series with the Red Sox, and in 111 postseason games, he owns a.285 batting average to go with 29 home runs and 78 RBIs.Dozens of seniors filled City Council chambers Tuesday to oppose a $29.9-million affordable housing project for creative industry workers planned for downtown Glendale, but the showing wasn't enough to prevent approval of the final design and a city housing loan for the so-called "Glendale Arts Colony."
The project design was approved by a 3-2 vote from the City Council, while a roughly $6-million city housing loan got the green light on a 4-3 vote by the Housing Authority, which consists of the five-member council and two additional appointed members.
The project at 140 N. Louise St. is a joint venture between the city, the YMCA — which owns the property — and a private developer. While it's been reviewed by the council several times before, the final vote faced the most opposition to date.
YMCA officials had originally wanted to build senior housing on the property, however, their counterparts at the city reoriented the 70-unit project toward artist housing. Glendale officials aim to reinvigorate the downtown and Arts & Entertainment area, and want to see residents who would support nightlife activity.
In addition, there's sufficient senior housing in the area — about 400 units within two blocks of the YMCA — officials have said.
Councilmen Zareh Sinanyan and Ara Najarian led the opposition to the project because they didn't want to limit the housing to artists or people in the creative workforce because the need for senior affordable housing in Glendale is so great and the possibility of the city building more affordable developments in the future is so slim.
"It is going to be a cold day when I open this project up to an unemployed actor in Santa Monica," said Najarian, adding that he believed seniors and people with disabilities within the Glendale community will be frozen out because "they're not creating films, videos or architecture and I have a problem with that."
City officials said, however, that seniors and people with disabilities would not be blocked outright from the project. Other council members added that the council as a group has created preferences for affordable housing developments in the past. On Wednesday, the city is set to hold a groundbreaking ceremony for Veterans Village, a 44-unit affordable housing project that will give preference to veterans.
"We prioritize groups of people all the time," said Councilwoman Laura Friedman after the meeting. "This is a population that will help the downtown. We can do something different and create something exciting."
But, during the meeting, Sinanyan emphasized that he opposed the 222,598-square-foot development because there is statistical proof of the need for senior housing, but there isn't similar information backing the need for housing for individuals in the creative workforce.
The demand for artist housing in Glendale was based on anecdotal evidence, said City Manager Scott Ochoa, adding that if not enough artists apply to live at the development, spots will open up to the general low-income community.
He added that the definition of an artist was still in the works and will have to come back for council approval. According to a city report, the target residents are those "who express themselves through a medium — those that create, curate, teach or propagate imaginative works using a wide range of artistic mediums."
The development, which will replace two apartment complexes owned by the YMCA, one with 22 units and the other with four, is set to include one, two and three-bedroom units and 8.450 square feet of community space, such as an art gallery and digital media lab. The YMCA's main gymnasium is slated to remain, as well as its nearby 84-unit hotel for men.
Rent at the Glendale Arts Colony is set to range from $480 to $961 per month for one-bedroom units to $666 to $1,332 per month for three-bedrooms units, which are slightly higher than originally reported by the city last year when the council approved an exclusive negotiating agreement with the project's developer.
Income for potential residents may range from $17,940 for the lowest income for one-person to $59,460 for the maximum for a six-person household, according to a city report.
City officials expect the modern building, featuring gray, yellow and white coloring and multiple balconies, may help spark activity in the area and serve as a catalyst for future development in the Arts & Entertainment District, according to a city report.
Glendale's downtown and Arts & Entertainment District is in the midst of a development boom, with numerous market-rate apartment complexes in the development stages aimed at young professionals seeking urban luxury living.
The Arts Colony developer, Meta Housing Corp., expects to pay for the project by using the city housing loan and about $20 million from a state program that allows affordable housing developers to sell tax credits to private firms.
The remaining costs may be covered by a private lender and deferred developer fees. Officials don't expect to complete construction until 2016.The usual case against the minimum wage has three components:
Minimum wages reduce employment among unskilled workers. Therefore minimum wages are bad for unskilled workers. Therefore minimum wages are bad policy.
The problems with this case are that
Minimum wages might not reduce employment very much. Even if they do, that doesn’t make them bad for unskilled workers. Therefore we cannot conclude (via this route) that minimum wages are bad policy.
Minimum wages are bad policy, though — but for entirely different reasons.
I’ll get to those reasons shortly, but first let’s examine the traditional argument a little more closely. I’ll number my paragraphs to make it easier for commenters to respond.
1. A variety of researchers have reached a variety of conclusions about the employment effects of the minimum wage. Among the most careful and thoughtful of those researchers are David Neumark and William Wascher, who in their recent book on the subject, conclude that minimum wages “reduce employment opportunities for less-skilled workers and tend to reduce their earnings; they are not an effective means of reducing poverty; and they appear to have adverse longer-term effects on wages and earnings, in part by reducing the acquisition of human capital.”
2. Thus, in particular, when Paul Krugman tells you that “there just isn’t any evidence that raising the minimum wage near current levels would reduce employment”, he is, not for the first time (and not even for the first time this week) being dishonest — though this time is a little different, since he’s now relying more on his readers’ ignorance than their stupidity.
3. That having been said, Bob Murphy has just made a good prima facie case for a substantial effect on teen unemployment by observing that of the 19 states with higher-than-federal minimum wages, six are among the top-ten for teen unemployment, while only one is among the bottom ten. I calculate the probability that this could have happened by chance at just a hair under 1%. Of course, one can imagine explanations other than “minimum wages cause unemployment” (maybe unemployment causes states to raise their minimum wages?) but it’s hard to imagine one more plausible than the obvious.
4. Sometimes, unsophisticated observers will point out that the last time the minimum wage went up, the local McDonald’s was not observed to lay off any workers. This of course ignores the question of how rapidly McDonald’s will hire new workers, and the even more important questions of how many McDonald’s there will be in the long run, and how they’ll eventually adjust their production methods so fewer workers are needed.
5. All of that having been said, there are honest and competent researchers who have gotten results different from Neumark and Wachsler’s, so I don’t think we can say we know that minimum wages substantially affect employment (though I know where I’d place my bets).
6. And anyway: Even if minimum wages do substantially reduce employment among teenagers and/or other unskilled workers, it does not follow that teenagers and unskilled workers should oppose the minimum wage. If the minimum wage kills jobs, it kills minimum wage jobs, which is to say that it kills jobs nobody wants very much anyway. To put this another way: If you’re currently making $8.50 an hour, and if a $9 minimum wage comes packaged with a 10% chance you’ll lose your job, that’s a gamble you might happily accept. The upside is an extra 50 cents an hour, and the downside is unemployment — which isn’t much worse than working this lousy job.
7. If you want to know whether the minimum wage is bad for unskilled workers, then, the right thought experiment is to imagine yourself as a slightly-below-minimum wage worker who is well-informed about how the minimum wage affects your employment prospects, and ask yourself whether you’d still welcome an increase. I don’t know what the outcome of that thought experiment would be.
8. Therefore, the argument at the top of this blog post is not a good argument against the minimum wage.
9. But minimum wages are still bad policy, for another reason. Namely: If we’re going to transfer income to low-wage workers, it’s both fundamentally unfair and politically unwise to put the entire burden of that transfer on a relatively small segment of the population (namely the owners and customers of businesses that employ a lot of low-wage workers). The right thing, given that we’re going to make this transfer, is to fund it as broadly as possible — say through an increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit, which comes out of general tax revenues.
10. I used the phrase “fundamentally unfair and politically unwise”. I’ll expand on both points, starting with fairness. When we collectively want a whole lot of 18-year olds to form an army, do we put the entire burden of that desire on people who happen to be 18 years old, by conscripting them at zero wage? Or do we think it’s fairer for those of us who enjoy the protections of that army to bear the cost through the tax system? When we collectively want to convert farmland to parkland, do we put the entire burden of that desire on people who happen to own farms, by taking their land without compensation? Or do we think it’s fairer for potential park-goers to pay for that land through the tax system? When we collectively want to raise the wages of unskilled workers, should we put the entire burden of that desire on those who happen to employ unskilled workers? Or is it fairer for those who have collectively made this decision to share the burden?
12. Here’s, to me, the main point: The owner of your local McDonald’s employs, say, 6 low-skilled workers, who are (at least slightly) better off because he’s there to employ them. What have you done for low-skilled workers lately? Let’s suppose your best answer is “nothing”. Then, if we’re going to try to do something additional for low-wage workers, shouldn’t it be your turn, rather than the McDonald guy’s turn, to make a contribution?
13. An analogy: Some people voluntarily go out on Sundays and pick up trash in the park. If we collectively decide that we need more trash pickup, do we turn to the people who have been doing this by choice and demand that they do more? Or do we decide that maybe the rest of us should pitch in as well (either by getting out there ourselves or paying others to)? Some people voluntarily pay wages to unskilled workers. If we collectively decide that we need more wages paid to unskilled workers, should we turn to the people who have been paying wages by choice and demand that they pay more? Or should we decide that maybe the rest of us should pitch in as well (say via the Earned Income Tax Credit)?
14. Fairness tells me that the cost of a widely-supported program should not be dumped on a small segment of society, and moreover that it especially should not be dumped on that small segment of society that has already helped to alleviate the perceived problem (i.e. those who have already been providing jobs for unskilled workers) — just as the burden of increased park cleanup should not fall on a small segment of society and especially not on those who have been contributing to cleanup all along. Political wisdom tells me the same thing. It’s very easy to support programs that other people will have to pay for. But voters, like everyone else, should bear the costs of their own decisions. Letting people vote for expensive programs that “somebody else” will finance is a good recipe for getting people to vote irresponsibly.The UN’s human rights committee has called on the Irish government to reform its restrictive abortion legislation, after ruling that it subjected a woman to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and violated her human rights.
The landmark ruling, which is expected to set an international precedent, calls on Ireland to introduce “accessible procedures for pregnancy termination” to prevent similar violations in the future. The judgment marks the first time that an international human rights committee has recognised that by criminalising abortion, a state has violated a woman’s human rights.
More Irish women seeking help for British abortions, says charity Read more
A panel of UN human rights committee experts found that Ireland’s prohibition and criminalisation of abortion services subjected Amanda Mellet to severe emotional and mental pain and suffering in 2011, when she was told she could not have an abortion in Ireland even though doctors had discovered that the foetus had congenital defects that meant it would die in the womb or shortly after birth.
Ruling on Mellet’s complaint, the committee concluded that Ireland’s abortion laws, which are among the most restrictive in the world, meant that she had to chose “between continuing her non-viable pregnancy or travelling to another country while carrying a dying foetus, at personal expense, and separated from the support of her family, and to return while not fully recovered”. This violated her right to freedom from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
Ireland has signed the international covenant on civil and political rights (ICCPR), which is part of the international bill of human rights. As such, it is obliged to compensate Mellet and to prevent similar violations from occurring in the future, the ruling states.
Ireland “should amend its law on voluntary termination of pregnancy, including if necessary its constitution, to ensure compliance with the covenant, including effective, timely and accessible procedures for pregnancy termination in Ireland”, the ruling stated.
Lawyers said the judgment could help trigger reform in other countries with restrictive abortion laws. “The decision is so significant that lawyers who are working with women who have been denied access to abortion across the world will be very encouraged and will be using it in their work to seek justice for their clients and legal change in countries where access to abortion services is criminalised,” Leah Hoctor, the regional director for Europe at the Center for Reproductive Rights, who filed the complaint to the UN human rights committee on Mellet’s behalf, said.
Prohibited from accessing a termination in Ireland, Mellet chose to travel to the UK and returned 12 hours after the procedure because she could not afford to stay longer. She had to pay for private treatment, and the round trip cost €3,000. Her foetus’s ashes were unexpectedly delivered three weeks later by courier.
“Many of the negative experiences she went through could have been avoided if [she] had not been prohibited from terminating her pregnancy in the familiar environment of her own country and under the care of health professionals whom she knew and trusted,” the committee wrote in its findings.
Mellett welcomed the ruling, and said in a statement: “The Human Rights Committee has made it clear that to redress the violations that I suffered, the Irish Government must ensure that other women do not live through similar violations of their rights. This cannot happen until until abortion is decriminalised and legislation is adopted to enable women to access services in Ireland.
“I hope the day will soon come when women in Ireland will be able to access the health services they need in our own country, where we can be with our loved ones, with our own medical team, and where we have our own familiar bed to go home and cry in. Subjecting women to so much additional pain and trauma simply must not continue.”
As well as confronting the shame and stigma associated with the criminalisation of abortion, Mellet’s suffering was made worse by the difficulties she faced in getting information about how to access an abortion, the committee said. Ireland’s Abortion Information Act allows healthcare providers to give patients information about the circumstances when abortion services can be available in Ireland or abroad, but the law prohibits them from saying anything that could be interpreted as promoting abortion.
The ruling said Ireland needed to take measures to ensure that healthcare providers are able to supply full information on safe abortion services “without fearing being subjected to criminal sanctions”, the committee said.
Abortion is permitted in Ireland only when there is a risk to the life of a pregnant woman. In every other circumstance it is a serious crime. Since 1983, the Irish constitution has placed the “right to life of the unborn” on an equal footing with the right to life of the pregnant woman.
Ireland’s health minister, Simon Harris, said he had read the committee’s report and found “the experience this woman had deeply upsetting. I have met with families who have been through the trauma of knowing their baby will not survive and I have been very moved by hearing of their experiences. I want to see this issue addressed”.
Hoctor said: “When a woman is denied the right to make decisions about her pregnancy, her health and wellbeing are jeopardised. In recognising that by outlawing abortion Ireland violated the human rights of Amanda Mellet and caused her intense anguish and distress, the committee has issued a landmark ruling confirming that Ireland’s abortion laws are cruel and inhumane, and violate women’s human rights.
“The Irish government must now comply with this ruling, redress the harm Ms Mellet suffered and reform its laws to ensure other women do not continue to face similar violations.”
Colm O’Gorman, the executive director of Amnesty International Ireland, said: “The Irish government must act promptly. Ireland’s constitution is no excuse. It must be changed to allow the reforms required by this ruling.”The premier flight of Elite Airways to Halifax, previously scheduled to depart Portland International Jetport Friday at 10 a.m., was postponed at the last minute.
Due to a computer breakdown with the reservation system, the flight start date has been delayed two weeks, until July 13, an Elite Airways spokesperson confirmed Thursday.
“This is the worse case scenario,” said spokesperson Rebecca Ayers. “You never want to delay a start date.”
The 80-minute flight aboard the 50-person aircraft was to take passengers and media over to Nova Scotia’s capital and return on Sunday. The ribbon cutting ceremony at Halifax Stanfield International Airport has been dashed. The new route, the first international flight to leave from Portland in years, is being closely watched. Once up and running, Elite plans to fly between the two cities twice a week, with an extension service to Florida.
“We are working closely with the airport in Halifax and looking to resolve the issue as soon as possible. We will move the date up if we can,” said Ayers.
“We will be contacting all passengers who booked flights, offering refunds or rebooking them for other dates,” she said.Showing reviews 1-20 of 34 | Next
Tons of Value for the Electronics Hobbyist I deliberated long and hard before deciding to purchase this pricey product given the availability of some attractive budget digital oscilloscopes for only a hundred dollars or so more. However, in the end I went with the AD2 for the following reasons:
• Electronics is and will remain just a hobby for me. It is, however, a vast domain. Given that the AD2 is more than just a USB oscilloscope, as a mixed signal multi-function test and measurement instrument it will allow me to explore and dip my toes into many different aspects of this domain. Granted, should I decide to specialize and drill down more deeply into any given area may require additional investment in equipment in the future.
• The internal FPGA architecture of the AD2 allows for the simultaneous use of its various test-bench features in real time with minimal impact on performance.
• The general specs are amazingly good for its entry level price point to the world of digital oscilloscopes and other test equipment.
• Most of the analog and digital circuits I will likely be building in the foreseeable future fall within the ±25V, 700mA/500mW (channel/total) input and output ranges of the AD2.
• The free Waveforms software user interface looked phenomenal as it should be with such a USB-based product.
• There are a wide variety of online resources and user community forums available for the AD2.
• Very positive independent online test-bench reviews of the performance of the oscilloscope and wave generator functions.
• The compact design, quality and solid build.
• A 30% Cyber Monday discount sealed the deal.
If you find yourself seriously considering the AD2 for any of the above reasons I highly recommend you also consider the BNC Adapter Board and oscilloscope probes (Digilent SKU: 410-361, 460-004) which significantly expand the analog bandwidth of the oscilloscope function from 9MHz to 30MHz and the bandwidth of the waveform generator from 9MHz to 12MHz. According to Digilent, this is the optimal setup that allows maximal AD2 spectral performance. The flywire kit included with the AD2 is a cheap, easy-to-use probing solution. However, the kit reduces the bandwidth of the scope and is susceptible to inducing noise and crosstalk from adjacent circuits.
I also recommend adding an external 5V, 2.5A switching power supply (Digilent SKU: 300-031) and breadboard adapter (Digilent SKU: 410-361). Adding the external power supply increases the maximum output to 700mA/2.1W (per channel). The breadboard adapter comes with a half-sized solderless breadboard which when attached provides a prototyping surface directly secured and connected to the AD2.
After using the AD2 for slightly over a month, I can report the following.
Learning curve: never having had the opportunity to work with real oscilloscopes and other test equipment (apart from a DMM), I found the online tutorials and QuickStart videos on the Digilent website very helpful in getting up and running with the AD2. The ability to download and run the Waveforms software and its associated Help file on a demo basis prior to purchase also gives you a real opportunity to explore and experience the features, functions and operational capabilities of the AD2. The reference manual only provides limited technical information, so learning how to use the AD2 is mostly a DIY exploration project and falling back on the online tutorials, videos and forums when stuck. These resources provide a readily accessible on-line electronics learning “university” including formalized lectures, lab exercises and project-based learning modules.
Utility & User-friendliness:
- The free Waveforms software is easy to download and is available directly from Digilent.
- After a few initial frustrating failed attempts, setting up and calibrating the AD2 was relatively straightforward with online tutorials and videos available for assistance. But you must pay very careful attention during the measurement input process not to accidentally miss any polarity signs, decimal points or voltage measurement units that will lead to input error warning messages forcing a restart of the process.
- The layout of the Waveforms software user interface really highlights and facilitates the fully integrated operation of the 13 different functions of the AD2.
- The software works with the FPGA to control all the functional blocks of the AD2, including setting parameters, acquiring data, and transferring and storing data. It greatly facilitates the acquisition and transfer of data in a variety of formats including text, CSV, audio and images between all AD2 functions and external sources.
- Navigating the drop-down menus requires a little patience at first but with practice becomes routine.
- The waveform generator function is easy to use and can be used to drive the other functions of the AD2 as well as provide a variety of pre-set and customizable signals for external circuit and component testing.
- The built-in math functions for measurement and data crunching plus the ability to write scripts to customize the operation of various measurement functions makes the AD2 an extremely powerful analysis tool.
Impact on my ability to understand the functioning of electronic circuits and components: the AD2 provides a window to see “inside” what’s going on with electronic components and circuits in real time. As such it helps electronic theory to come “alive” in front of your eyes. It has and is continuing to take my understanding of electronics to new levels.
Bottom Line: best suited for those looking for a versatile diagnostic tool that will help them to improve their understanding of and quantitatively explore the world of electronics at an undergraduate college or university level. It isn’t cheap, but the AD2 delivers a lot of value for the money in a small package. However, for those who are already fairly knowledgeable and technically inclined (and prepared to invest a little more), some budget oscilloscopes and other test equipment may be a better option, especially if working with more complex or powerful circuits. As for me, the AD2 will be helping me to unravel electronic “mysteries” for many years to come.
Excellent buy. High potential to electronics teaching-learning Analog Discovery II has been an excellent tool for class demonstrations and project development. I recommend your purchase to students, professors and researchers.
Easy to the point Delivery (from Taiwan to the Netherlands) was no problem (although I was really scared for Fedex :P). Im a total newb on electronics, but I got it working in no time and solved the problem where I needed it for. The tool WaveForms looks and feels awesome and is intuitive. Thank you sooo much for this product! I will also recommend it to my collegues, so be prepared for orders :).
RE: Logic Analyzer part is pretty much unusable WaveForms v3.7.12 adds data compression which lets you capture low and high speed signals together.
https://forum.digilentinc.com/topic/9043-capturing-both-uart-and-spi-data-on-analog-discovery-2/?do=findComment&comment=27866
For deep logic analyzer buffer see the Digital Discovery.
Logic Analyzer part is pretty much unusable The reason i bought AD2 was to have a high speed analyzer capable of capturing both Analog and Digital signals.
I have not completely tested the Analog part but the Digital signal Logic analyzer for sure is unusable.
It cannot capture low speed and high speed signals together.
Refer to this link in the discussion forum for more details.
https://forum.digilentinc.com/topic/9043-capturing-both-uart-and-spi-data-on-analog-discovery-2/#comment-27505
Do not buy this product if you are looking for a good logic analyzer. May be its good on the analog side!!
Outstanding Hardware and Software I have had my Analog Discovery 2 for about a week and am very pleased. I usually struggle to find products that have Linux support!. Being able to use different functions (e.g. siggen and scope) simultaneously is quite convenient.
Great device, needs arm64 software package Really capable device, for the money. Add a little linux computer and a touchscreen, put them all in a box and you have a decent oscilloscope. I recommend it to students in my instrumentation course as it has everything you need when learning. The one thing I'd really like to see is an arm64 package, or better still open-sourcing the linux code. The Odroid C2 would run this device really well if I could compile the waveforms software on it.
Versatile Bench Instrument I just purchased the AD Ver 2 after having Ver 1 for several years. The performance has been very good except maybe when you are trying to generate and/or view very low voltages. But what you get for the price is truly remarkable. I also have the BDC breakout board that proves very helpful when trying to connect to more standard connectors (e.g., BNC). Wish they made a wire cable that only connected to the scope, wavegen and power pins. All those extra wires just get in the way.
Where have you been all my carrer When I read the description I thought it sounded good but then I started using it and realized it's awesome. Besides teh Scope, pattern generator and logic analyzer, I really love the protocols. Sometimes I need to interface with a chip on my board and I would normally have to program an Arduino to allow me to talk to a SPI or I2C device. Now I just plug in this thing and I can quickly try out a few commands or write a small script to do it.
I must say the scripting environment can be improved. I would also like to see the Python API with official I2C support. You could argue that I might dock a star for these gripes but they are so small compared to what I can do with the tool.
I've bought my dad one of these and I might buy myself a second just so that I don't have to keep taking it home.
This is really worth the money.
Excellent device Works great! Good for play
Love it. So flexible. Would be amazing with 4 analog in and out This does everything you need (analog in/out and digital in/out).
If this had 4 analog in and 4 analog out it would be totally amazing -- Could have a 4 channel scope and could do things like 3-phase (or 4) waveform generation (instead of having to PWM digital outputs)
Amazing Tool I am an Electrical Engineering student and can say hands down this is the most versatile and useful tool I own. If the Analog Discovery II had just the network analyzer it would still be worth the money. I am one of few students at my school that can test the frequency response of the circuits I create from home. The network analyzer is very useful when creating filter circuits, especially when the filters are tunable and I need to dial them in. Additionally, every time I implement circuits that communicate via SPI, I2C, or UART I have a known good tool to interface with the suspect circuits allowing me to more easily identify where errors may be occurring. Furthermore, because you can send and receive with common hardware protocols it is easy to quickly spin up a debug interface via UART. Additionally, the logic analyzer is great and has a programming interface so you can write a custom protocol analyzer when reverse engineering communications or decoding more obscure protocols. Lastly, it is small and USB powered so I just have it in my electronics tool bag and can analyses and inspect most things I run into without having to take a circuit to a well-equipped workbench. If you get the Analog Discovery II I would recommend also getting the expansion circuit that has the four BNC connectors so you can use probes with the oscope and function generator. Thank you so much for creating this tool and having a software interface that is so easy to work with.
Great for a home setup. I teach electrical engineering. We are looking at using the Analog Discovery 2 for student use in several of the classes. I have been playing with this thing for several weeks and am very impressed with all it can do.
Really Cool It's all the things stated above. In my lab courses I'm so used to everything being much bigger. Although these don't have the same capabilities as the bigger, clunkier, more expensive machines, these are really cool especially for a learner like me.
Decent scope, waveform generator and logic analyzer in one. This is a decent scope and logic analyzer, and the price is right.
What is good:
* You get a scope, logic analyzer, signal generator, low amp variable power supply. That is a lot, and the price is good.
* The software is pretty good, but takes a little clicking around to learn.
Some minor gripes:
* On the MAC, the FTDI driver from diligent is a "blocker", that sometimes interferes with the OSX one, so you have to reboot before you can use your other FTDI items. This cost me a day to try to get the Analog Discovery 2 to work.
* The scope or logic analyzer are not quite fast enough for 20 MHz signals, which is what my AVR chips run at. Frequencies of 5 MHz (may be 10 MHz) are OK.
* If you are not careful, there is cross talk on the inputs, so your scope signal is not so clean. With a bit of attention it gets better.
Best USB oscilloscope I've seen I've played with the Analog Discovery 2 for a couple of days now, and it seems to be an excellent combination of a good-quality oscilloscope, dual function generator, and programmable dual power supply. The hardware is the best I've seen in a USB oscilloscope, with very clean signals and low-jitter triggering. The 14-bit 100Msample/sec resolution makes a huge difference.
The Waveforms 2015 software seems good, but I wish it had a written user's manual, as some of the functionality is a bit mysterious, and the API reference manual is no help in figuring out the GUI.
More details on my blog at https://gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com/2016/12/11/fet-miller-plateau-with-analog-discovery-2/
https://gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com/2016/12/12/fet-i-vs-v-with-analog-discovery-2/
https://gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com/2016/12/13/loudspeaker-impedance-with-analog-discovery-2/
Don't search anymore I am a second year electrical engineering student and got this item recommended by a friend while I was looking for an oscilloscope.
If you are reading this review and you too are looking for a oscilloscope, don't search anymore. This is the EE swiss knife you need.
Absolutely incredible product So I am a junior year electrical engineering student, so I'm not an industry veteran or anything like that. But I do enjoy building all kinds of projects and am passionate about circuits and design.
One of my instructors recommended the Analog Discovery for our lab assignments, and I opted not to buy one (trying to save money.) My lab partner had one, so we used his. On the first lab assignment, after seeing all the things it could do I decided to buy
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last few months.
The teen is suspected of being the leader of a group of hackers who call themselves “Crackas with Attitude” or CWA. Friends and associates of “Cracka,” the suspect’s online moniker, told Motherboard Thursday there would be repercussions for the arrest.
“(It) doesn't mean we'll stop hacking them,” a hacker named IncursioSubter, reportedly part of CWA, told Motherboard on Friday. “Give us time, you'll see. :)”
Matthew Dean contributed to this reportFBI Director James Comey is facing growing Republican calls to launch a perjury probe into whether Hillary Clinton lied under oath about her email use when she testified last year before the House Benghazi committee – even as the Justice Department closes the case on the former secretary of state’s private server.
House Overnight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz first urged such a probe during Thursday’s hearing with Comey before his committee. He wants the agency to investigate whether Clinton lied when she told lawmakers “there was nothing marked classified on my emails” – a claim Comey repeatedly contradicted this week.
Comey told Chaffetz a referral from Congress would be needed for an investigation.
“You’ll have one in the next few hours,” Chaffetz said.
When FoxNews.com contacted Chaffetz’s office on Friday, a referral had not yet been sent.
But Chaffetz is vowing to kick-start the process, and his Republican colleagues are voicing support.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Fox News a day earlier that Clinton “made statements that [were] directly contradicted by what Mr. Comey’s investigation covered.”
“There are a number of things that she said that are just false based on the investigation Mr. Comey conducted relative to her testimony under oath to us last October,” Jordan said, adding he thinks it would be “appropriate” to look into perjury claims but the decision is ultimately up to Chaffetz and Rep. Trey Gowdy, who chairs the Benghazi committee.
It was during an exchange with Gowdy that Comey on Thursday countered several statements Clinton had made, both in public and before the Benghazi committee.
Notably, he said her statement that nothing she sent or received was marked classified was not true. To the contrary, Comey confirmed the FBI's investigation found at least three emails with classified markings on Clinton's server.
The State Department says human error was responsible for those markings. In a statement after Thursday’s hearing, Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon claimed Comey’s testimony “clearly knocked down a number of false Republican talking points and reconciled apparent contradictions between his previous remarks and Hillary Clinton's public statements.”
Yet the stepped-up calls to dig deeper into Clinton’s statements signal the investigations concerning Clinton’s conduct in office are not over – even as lawmakers on Friday approved a final report on the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
The two-year inquiry, among many other details, had revealed she used a private email server for government business, setting off intense scrutiny that continues to dog Clinton's presidential campaign. The 7-4 vote to approve the 800-page report was split along party lines, reflecting partisanship that emerged after the panel's creation in May 2014 and escalated in this election year. Democrats have submitted their own report on the attacks, which killed four Americans, including U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens.
Gowdy, R-S.C., echoing Chaffetz, also said lawmakers may seek a federal investigation into whether Clinton lied to the committee in testimony last year.
"Our committee has an obligation" to report any untruthful testimony to the FBI, Gowdy said.
Asked if he was referring to Clinton, Gowdy said, "She's one of 100 witnesses."
Under oath, Clinton testified last October that she never sent or received emails marked as classified when she served as secretary of state. She also said she only used one mobile device for emails and turned over all of her work-related emails to the State Department, claims Comey also contradicted on Thursday.
Separately, the State Department is reopening its internal investigation of possible mishandling of classified information by Clinton and top aides. The internal review was suspended in April to avoid interfering with the FBI inquiry.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi dismissed the latest GOP move as purely political.
"So let's get this straight: This is going to be an investigation of the decision that is an investigation of the emails that was part of the investigation of Benghazi," she told reporters.
Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the senior Democrat on both the Benghazi and Oversight panels, said an FBI referral was "unwarranted," since Comey said only three emails out of more than 30,000 sent or received by Clinton contained classified markings.
Comey said Thursday that his team found no evidence that Clinton lied under oath to the FBI or broke the law by discussing classified information in an unclassified setting.
Under an onslaught of Republican criticism, Comey vigorously defended the government's decision and rejected GOP accusations that the presidential candidate was given special treatment.
To criminally charge Clinton based on the facts his agency's yearlong probe had found would have been unwarranted and mere "celebrity-hunting," Comey said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.Trainers,
Back in December, we collectively walked past the equivalent distance of Earth to Pluto and now, we’re on a journey past the edge of the solar system! As of May 11, the Pokémon GO community has traveled more than 15.8 billion kilometers, and more adventures still await…
Pokémon GO was developed for people to easily experience classic Pokémon gameplay on their mobile device and catch Pokémon in the real world. As a result, every day, people around the globe go outside, explore the world around them, make some new memories, and get some exercise along the way. We’d love to honor the memories created so far, and our collective journey yet to come, with the Pokémon GO Adventure Week celebration from 1:00 P.M. PDT on May 18 to 1:00 P.M. PDT on May 25, 2017.
To help you stock up for your upcoming adventure, more items will be awarded from every PokéStop you visit, and Poké Balls will be 50% off in the in-game shop. Your Buddy Pokémon is also in the adventuring spirit and will find Candies four times as fast for the duration of the celebration. Whether you’re exploring your neighborhood or an exotic new location, make sure to watch for Rock-type Pokémon such as Omanyte, Kabuto, and their Evolutions. Keep an eye out—maybe you’ll even spot Aerodactyl!
Last but not least, you'll notice an all-new avatar item has been added to your wardrobe—the Expedition Hat! Once Adventure Week begins, grab your new hat and head out on your journey.
We’re excited to see where Pokémon GO takes you this week. Document your journey with the Pokémon GO AR camera, post your photos on social media using #PokemonGO, and we’ll share some of our favorites on the new Pokémon GO Instagram channel! As you embark on your adventures, remember to always be alert and aware of your surroundings when playing Pokémon GO and be respectful of the communities and locations in which you play.
—The Pokémon GO teamA man works inside a network room at a company in Bangkok on Thursday. (Reuters photo)
Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha said the cabinet meeting minutes on the single gateway might be incomplete and said he would "deal with" the person who wrote them.
"We need to look into the details because sometimes when meeting minutes are written, not all information is there. I'll deal with the person who wrote them," he told reporters on Thursday.
It is unclear whom he meant to deal with or whether he was serious, but the responsibility of writing cabinet meeting minutes lies with the Secretariat of the Cabinet led by Ampon Kittiampon, who has served in this capacity for five years.
Gen Prayut was responding to the four cabinet meeting minutes netizens dug up to counter authorities' claim that the initiative was only being studied.
The minutes said the PM had ordered the Information and Communication Technology Ministry and related agencies to "set up" the single gateway without delay.
Gen Prayut explained on Thursday his cabinet ministers had confirmed what had been discussed was to find ways which were legitimate and did not violate human rights to regulate internet use.
"Why don't you [reporters] look at that part. If a method violates human rights or laws, it can't be implemented. It's as simple as that."
He also reasserted nothing had been done about the single gateway and he had not ordered anything. "Stop asking me about this. I'm sick of it. Why keep digging old stories?
"But let me ask you this. Do we have problems today? Students can watch porn and they are our country's future. What should we do?
"So stop complaining. When I try to fix something for a group, another group whines. Where should the government stand?"
Asked whether the government has other plans apart from the single gateway, Gen Prayut said it was being studied and models used in other countries would be considered.
"The problem with us is we like to compare things that foreign countries have with ours. We can't do that because Thais and foreigners think differently.
"We can't take anything for granted. They are much more advanced than we are. We are stuck...stuck with old ideas and understanding. They prevent us from moving forward. Whenever we move ahead, we're brought backwards."
The Prayut government has made clear on numerous occasions it wants to control the flow of information. It cited different reasons, from helping internet service providers cut costs and protecting children from evil websites to protecting the monarchy. Some officials even dangled lower internet fees as a by-product if it is implemented.
But the response from online crowds was overwhelmingly negative, especially after some netizens found at least four cabinet meeting minutes indicated the project was not being studied; it was being expedited.
Some active netizens, especially gamers, staged a virtual sit-in aimed at crippling government websites in protest. Since a cabinet resolution is considered a law, they are not satisfied with the "under study" verbal explanation and demand it be officially scrapped by a new cabinet resolution to that effect.Madecassoside (MA), a pentacyclic triterpene isolated from Centella asitica (L.), is used as a therapeutic agent in wound healing and also as an anti-inflammatory and anti-aging agent. However, the involvement of MA in skin-pigmentation has not been reported. This study was conducted to investigate the effects of MA on ultraviolet (UV)-induced melanogenesis and mechanisms in a co-culture system of keratinocytes and melanocytes. MA significantly inhibited UVR-induced melanin synthesis and melanosome transfer in the co-culture system. These effects were further demonstrated by the MA-induced inhibition of protease-activated receptor-2 expression and its signaling pathway, cyclooxygenase-2, prostaglandin E2 and prostaglandin F2 alpha in keratinocytes. The clinical efficacy of MA was confirmed on artificially tanned human skin. MA significantly reduced UV-induced melanin index at 8 weeks after topical application. Overall, the study demonstrated significant benefits of MA use in the inhibition of hyperpigmentation caused by UV irradiation.Odisha Sun Times Bureau
Bhubaneswar, May 4:
Country’s no 1 smart city Bhubaneswar has emerged as the fastest moving city in the east zone with a population of over 10 lakh in the Swachh Survekshan-2017– sanitation rankings of cities/towns of India– commissioned by the Ministry of Urban Development.
Bhubaneswar Mayor Ananta Narayan Jena received a memento and a citation in this regard from Minister of Urban Development, M. Venkaiah Naidu at a function in New Delhi where the latter announced the results of the survey.
Similarly, Rourkela was adjudged as the fastest moving city in the east zone with a population of 2-10 lakh.
While Bhubaneswar has been placed at the 94th spot in the survey, Rourkela has grabbed the 168th place.
Among other cities/towns of Odisha, Berhampur is at 187th rank, Balasore at 190, Puri at 194, Cuttack at 204, Baripada at 261, Sambalpur at 322 and Bhadrak at 349th position.
While Indore topped the list as the cleanest city of India, the second spot was occupied by Bhopal and Visakhapatnam was placed at 3rd position.
Quality Council of India, which conducted the survey during January-February this year, deployed 421 assessors for on the site inspection of cleanliness in 434 cities and towns and another 55 for real time monitoring of progress of survey and field inspections. Field inspectors used geo-tagged devices for collecting evidence in real time of their inspection at 17,500 locations.
Swachh Survekshan-2017 aimed at capturing the outcomes on ground of the ongoing efforts to make urban areas Open Defecation Free and to improve door-to-door collection, processing and disposal of Municipal Solid Waste.
Of the total score of 2,000, 900 marks were assigned for performance in respect of ODF and solid waste management, 600 marks for Citizen Feedback and 500 marks for Independent Observation.Great Grandmaster Su Kong was born in Fukien in 1849. He came to the world with a genetic condition hyperthrihos that covered him with hair from head to toe. His confused parents abandoned the infant in a forest near the Fukien Temple. A passing monk rescued the newborn and presented him to the Shaolin Masters. The Masters found it impossible to find a family willing to adopt such a child, so they decided to raise him themselves. They named him Su Kong T’ai Djin.
From childhood on, Su Kong T’ai Djin studied the Shaolin art with exceptional dedication. The Fukien Masters responded to his enthusiasm with a rare variance from Shaolin tradition. In the temple it was customary for a student to choose one system in which to study, but he was no ordinary student! He knew that because of his appearance, he could not live a normal life outside of the temple. He chose then to devote all his time to the study of martial arts. He was allowed to study with all the masters at the temple. Over the years he accumulated a tremendous amount of knowledge and material from the various Shaolin masters and eventually earned the title “Su Kong” or Grandmaster. Instead of assigning Su Kong’s training to a single Master, as was the practice, each of the Fukien Masters contributed to Su Kong’s martial education. Su Kong was therefore able to complete every branch of Shaolin training, learning and mastering hundreds of forms and disciplines. It was an unparallel achievement. [Usually the 10 Grandmasters of the temple each learnt 1/10th of the Shaolin art]. Su Kong was a contemporary of Tai Chi masters Yang Lu Chan, Yang Jian Hou & Yang Pan Hou.
Su Kong’s knowledge and strong character led to his appointment as the Grandmaster of Fukien. More than once, his exceptional martial skills were needed to fulfill the responsibilities of his position. For example, he once arranged a meeting with 12 Shaolin Masters, representatives of the Shaolin Temples of China. When Grandmaster Su entered the room for the meeting, all the Masters bowed. Instead of returning the bow, Grandmaster Su picked up a knife and threw it up the rafters. An assassin tumbled down from his hiding place, the knife embedded in his heart. Grandmaster Su had heard 13 men breathing where there were only supposed to be 12! Su Kong Tai Djin was know to fight with the bears in the forest for practice.
The Fukien Shaolin monks took it upon themselves to protect the Fukienese coast from the raids of Japanese pirates. They were tremendously effective, earning the love and respect of the common people. When word reached the Ch’ing Kwang Hsu Emperor in Peking, at the beginning of the 20th century, trouble brewed. Kwang Hsu saw the Fukien monks as potential rebels with widespread popular support. He secretly dispatched imperial troops, armed with cannons on a mission to destroy the Fukien Temple. He even sent a renegade Shaolin Master, Chi Tao Su, the White Eyebrow Monk, to strengthen the attacking force.
A sympathetic official warned the monks of the impending attack. The Fukien Masters chose a surprising, ingenious solution. They evacuated the Temple, removed all of its valuable artwork and books, and set fire to the temple themselves. They hoped to rebuild the Temple in more favorable times. More favorable times have not yet come.
Grandmaster Su and his disciples retreated into the Fukienese mountains to continue their training. Studying with Su were Lui Su Pong, Gi Shiao Fu, Qui Gwong and I Chang Ming, the man who would become the second of the three Grandmasters of our lineage. Su Kong died in 1928 at the age of 79.Bloody handprints smeared the glass doors to Usdan, the clue to Mysterium attendees that they had arrived at the scene of their conference on Oct. 8. Red footprints led them to the sign-in table and the schedule, which boasted a cohort of award-winning mystery writers and those in publishing—including Wesleyan alumni.
Hosted by Amy Bloom ’75, the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing at Wesleyan, the day-long event opened with a keynote with Laura Lippman—a New York Times bestselling author of detective fiction including the Tess Monaghan series—and brought alumni, parents, as well as mystery writers and readers to campus for panel discussions, book signings, master classes and networking.
“A great mystery is a frigate,” said Bloom, introducing the conference and Lippman. “It takes you away. Great ones do it with extraordinary vision, extraordinary language. A mystery is the only literary form that lulls, compels, intrigues and gratifies you.” She praised Lippman for her capacity to illuminate characters—and to follow the thread of the story in a way that “never seems formulaic.”
Lippman described her writing process as beginning with a character, a situation, and a secret. “In a crime novel, anything can happen on page one. The options narrow as the story goes along.” The question she asks herself is, “Who will Tess Monaghan be at the end of the novel?”
Later, different panels discussed “cozy mysteries”—a genre most likely to feature a main character not a professional investigator and ensconsed in a community—as well as “noir novels”—those in which the good are not likely to find redemption, nor are the guilty to be punished. Additionally, publishers, publicists and writers gathered for a panel highlighting the process of getting one’s manuscript onto bookshelves and into peoples’ hands.
Gabriel Cohen ’92 and Peter Blauner ’82 commented on their friendship—since frosh year in the same dorm; their similar path to detective fiction—initially through journalism; and the fact that each one was recognized by the Edgar Awards. Blauner researched his book, Slow Motion Riot, by serving as a probation officer for six months. Cohen, also, noted that a memoir by a detective was key to his development in the genre. “I was not influenced by Raymond Chandler,” he said, “but instead, by a memoir by real homicide detective, which made me think about how seeing dead bodies every day would affect me.”Let’s focus today on the most successful of all D-Day’s assault divisions: the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division.
FORMATION & TRAINING
The 3rd Canadian Infantry Division traces its origin to World War I, where the first of this name fought at the battles of Flanders, Ypres, and many more …
Disbanded after the war, it was raised again in 1940 in the wake of the German offensive in France and the Low Countries. Despite delays in its formation, it was transferred to the UK by mid-1941, where it trained in anti-invasion measures for as long as Britain remained under the threat of a German landing. In July 1943, 3rd CID, under general Rodney Keller, was selected as one of the Allied “assault divisions” for the planned invasion of France, as 1st CID had been dispatched on the Italian front & and the 2nd CID had been badly mauled in the Dieppe raid (1942) and was still in the process of being rebuilt.
For the next year, the division trained relentlessly for its mission. Although inexperienced, 3rd CID distinguished itself in several exercises and was regarded as solid by its superiors. Besides, being an all volunteers outfit, 3rd CID was noted for its high moral and eagerness to fight. As such, it was visited and reviewed by many VIPs, from generals Eisenhower and Crerar, to even the Canadian PM Mackenzie King. “Most are a pain in the ass“, as one Canadian officer commented, and received a cold welcome, but one VIP did manage to win the rough Canadians’ affection: King George himself, “a charming and courteous man“.
(Credit: canadiansoldiers.com)
JUNO BEACH
Then came D-Day, on June 6th, 1944. 3rd CID’s mission was to storm Juno Beach, then move inland to cut the Caen-Bayeux road, and seize Carpiquet Airfield.
Despite heavy resistance, the toughest after that at Omaha, 3rd CID managed to secure the beach and advance inland. Its spearhead even reached the “Oak Line”, delimiting its final objectives. But due to a traffic jam on the beach and the much more modest advance of the British divisions on its flanks, 3rd CID was ordered to halt. Unable to support its most advanced units, which were in sight of Carpiquet airfield and asking for reinforcement to seize it immediately, Keller had to order them back to the secondary (“Elm”) line. Carpiquet airfield, within the Canadians’ grasp on D-Day, would only be taken, now rendered useless, one month later, after two days of intense fightings with 12. SS-Panzer.
Although it didn’t seize Carpiquet that day, and even had to fall back from the Caen-Bayeux road, 3rd CID was the only “assault division” on D-Day to reach all its objective by nightfall, and had advanced further inland than anyone else, despite facing one of the strongest resistance in its path.
(Credit: canadiansoldiers.com)
THERE WILL BE (BAD) BLOOD
The Canadians soon made the acquaintance with what will become its personal Nemesis in Normandy: 12. SS-Panzerdivision. From June 7th to the end of the Normandy campaign, the Canadians will repeatedly find Kurt Meyer’s teenage soldiers standing in their way. Soon, bad blood between the two arose: only a few days into the invasion, the unwritten rule on both side was ‘no quarter asked nor given’.
3rd CID thereafter fought as part as II Canadian Corps in most major battles of the “Caen meatgrinder”: securing Carpiquet airfield, operation Charnwood, crossing the Orne river, seizing Verrières Ridge, clearing the ruins of Caen house by house, closing the Falaise pocket, …
During the campaign, Canadian mechanics from the ‘Kangaroo’ workshop came up with the idea of using Priest SPG with their gun removed as personnel carrier, inventing what could be described as the first modern APC. Those conversions were first used during Operation Totalize, in August 1944, with great success. The same way, many Stuart light tanks were “jalopied”, as was common in Italy, to give commanders & scouts a light yet sturdy carrier.
AFTER NORMANDY
3rd CID would not take part in the dash to the Rhine, being used instead to clear the German pockets still holding onto major harbours all along the Channel: Boulogne & Calais in France, then at the battle of the Scheldt in the Netherlands, in such poor conditions that the division earned its “Water Rats” nickname there, from no less than Montgomery himself.
ONE-MAN ARMY
Thereafter, it participated in Operation Veritable, the clearing of the Western bank of the Rhine, and then in the assault crossing over that major river. From then, the division advanced toward the North Sea and entered German soil, ending the war near Emden.
No tale about the 3rd CID would be really complete without mentioning the division (if not the whole WW2 Canadian armed forces)’s most distinguished hero, and probably the most badass warrior to have soldiered through WW2: Léo Major.
Born in a French-Canadian family from Montréal, Major enlisted at 19, embarking for England with 3rd CID’s French-speaking Régiment de la Chaudière. There, he specialized in reconnaissance and sniping, joining the elite group of sneaky “sniper-scouts”.
D-Day came, and with it started the incredible list of feats of arms & badass bravado which would turn him into a legend. Storming Juno Beach, he rushed ahead with a few comrades to destroy a fortified MG-nest with Bangalores. That afternoon, on patrol with another scout, he neutralized the crew of a command SdKfz 251/3, captured the vehicles with all its communication codes and brought it back to his battalion commander. That was only his first day in Normandy.
One week later, still scouting, he discovered a platoon of SS with a Panzer hiding in a barn, planning an ambush. He promptly dispatched the entire platoon, including the tank! His rampage almost ended on June 24th, when he was wounded by a phosphorus grenade, losing an eye. When told that his wound would have him discharged, Major refused, claiming that being a sniper, he only needed one eye to sight his rifle.
During the battle of the Scheldt, he went alone looking for a lost patrol, only to discover that they had all been captured by the German local garrison. Under a downpour, and pissed off, he decided to make them pay for being drenched: running around, sniping officers, scaring some just by screaming at them, he managed to have all 93 remaining Germans surrender. Offered the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) by Montgomery himself for that action, he declined it on the basis that the British commander was “militarily incompetent” and thus in no position to be giving out awards.
On February 27th, 1945, Major was seriously wounded again, by a mine this time, while helping the regiment’s padre recovering bodies. Suffering from major back injuries, he was to be discharged again. And again, he refused, fleeing from the hospital and taking shelter with a Dutch family who tended to his wound for a month. Only then did he got back to his regiment.
If that wasn’t enough, it is only then that Major truly entered the legend. Two weeks after this return, he once again volunteered for a night patrol on the outskirt of Zwolle, which was to be bombarded and assaulted the next morning. But the death of his teammate, early in the patrol, triggered Major’s “berserk mode”. Discarding his original mission, he rushed into Zwolle alone, screaming, throwing grenades, firing bursts and disappearing, and going back and forth to his lines to deliver batches of prisoners and resupply his ammo, then heading back to the city. At one point during the night, he stormed the Gestapo HQ (or a night club for SS officers, depending on the version) and engaged in a gunfight with its occupiers, killing several and forcing the others to flee. When the sun rose on Zwolle, the German garrison, believing to be under attack by a whole brigade or division, had evacuated the city. Léo Major had in one night captured around 100 prisoners and freed the city all by himself, preventing a bombardment and an assault in the process. For this, he was offered a DCM for the second time, which he accepted.
Léo Major had developed a strange ethos regarding his German enemies after he learned about his battalion commander keeping tracks of his kills for publicity: he decided from that day that he would only wound his targets (usually by shooting them in the shoulders) in order to be able to capture them alive … as long as they weren’t SS or officers. Those he apparently never brought back as prisoners …
WW2 ended, but not Major’s saga. Gone back to civilian life after the war, he was asked by the Canadian government to volunteer again for Korea, to encourage enlistment for this war. And so he did, once again being a sniper-scout, this time with the Vandoo. During the Battle of Little Gibraltar, or Hill 355, in November 1951, Léo Major, leading his platoon of sniper-scouts, managed to retake Hill 227 from at least one battalion of Chineses. Entrenched in their enemies’ formed positions, they then proceeded to defend it against all attempts from two Chinese divisions to retake it, Major calling artillery support always closer to their own position, in order to break every counter-attack. For this, he was awarded his second (or third) DCM.
THE 3RD CANADIAN INFANTRY DIVISION INGAME
3rd CID is very strong in Phase A, with plenty of infantry in armored personnel carriers, giving it a resilience unknown to other divisions’ infantry. True to its “assault division” role, it also pushes many infantry support vehicles, such as the tiny Wasp (Universal Carrier fitted with a heavy flamethrower) or Priest DD set in assault gun mode, or guns forward.
One of the first Western nation to put on emphasis on sniping and deep recon, Canada also gets the opportunity to field sneaky 2-man Sniper Scouts.
Yet, this infantry-heavy doctrine comes at the price of few tanks & anti-tank guns in early game. But for a few Ram II command tanks and 6-pdr AT guns, the Canadians are better keeping away from enemy armors.
Only in Phase B do some Sherman III from the attached 2nd Canadian Armored Brigade show up, as well as Sexton SPG (another Canadian successful tinkering) but it is hardly enough to keep up with the enemy’s armor build-up. At least the division’s economy will allow to field them in numbers …
Relief comes in Phase C, with the opening of the Cat Hunting Season and delivery of the best AT guns the British Commonwealth has to offer: Sherman Firefly & Achilles, both armed with the powerful 17-pdr AT guns.
Note: Although all Canadian vehicles were IRL (and are ingame) duly marked with maple leaf tactical symbols, it is seldom known (at least outside of The Great White North) that Canada’s maple leaf flag was only adopted in 1965. Therefore, Canada’s flag ingame, as it was during the battle of Normandy, will be the one below.The Arrest of Vice-President Aaron Burr in Alabama
(The following story has been transcribed exactly as written (including spelling errors) from Albert J. Picketts History of Alabama)
During a cold night in February 1807, two young men, Nicholas Perkins, a lawyer, and Thomas Malone, clerk of the court were sitting in their cabin, in the village of Wakefield, Washington county, Alabama. (Mississippi Territory) Before them was a backgammon board, and they were absorbed in the playing of that game. The hour was ten o’clock. The distant tramp of horses arrested their attention.
Washington County, Alabama
Vice-President Aaron Burr
Two travellers presently rode up to the door, one of who inquired for the tavern. It was pointed out to him, and then he asked the road to Colonel Hinson’s. Perkins informed him that the route lay over difficult paths, the place was seven miles distant, and a dangerous creek intervened. The fire, being replenished with pine, now threw a light in the face of the traveller who propounded these questions.
He was dressed like a plain farmer
His countenance appeared to Perkins exceedingly interesting. His eyes sparkled like diamonds, while he sat upon his splendid horse, caparisoned with a fine saddle and new holsters. His dress was that of a plain farmer, but beneath his coarse pantaloons protruded a pair of exquisitely shaped boots.
His striking features with the strange mixture of his apparel, aroused the suspicions of Perkins, and, no sooner had the two travelers ridden from the door, than he said to Malone, with the most earnest gesticulation, “That is Aaron Burr. I have read a description of him in the proclamation. I cannot be mistaken. Let us follow him to Hinson’s, and take measures for his arrest.” Malone declined to accompany him, remonstrating, at the same time, upon the folly of pursuing a traveler, at such a late hour of the night, and upon the basis of the merest conjecture. Perkins now rushed to the cabin of Theodore Brightwell, the sheriff, and awoke him. Presently these men were seen riding off with a rapid pace. The night was bitter cold, and the pine trees of the forest sadly moaned.
They followed his trail
The travelers strangely made their way to the residence of Hinson, where they arrived about half past eleven o’clock. The moon had just risen, and enabled the lady of the house, whose husband was absent, to see that they were travelers, by their saddle-bags and tin cups, as she timidly peeped through a small window. She made no answer to their “halloo,” but quietly closed the window. The strangers alighted and went into the kitchen, where a cheerful fire was yet burning.
Perkins and the sheriff soon came in sight of the house. The former, recollecting that he had already been seen at Wakefield, thought it politic to remain in the woods, until Brightwell could go in the house, make the necessary discoveries, and return to him. Mrs. Hinson was a relative of the sheriff, and, recognizing his voice, felt relieved by his appearance from the fears she had felt in consequence of the strangers having come at such a late hour of the night.
Brightwell repaired to the kitchen and discovered one of these men sitting by the fire, with his head down, while a handkerchief partially concealed his face. His companion had gone to the stable to assist a negro in taking care of the horses. It was not long before they went into the main building, where the hostess had hastily prepared supper. While the elder traveler was eating, he engaged her in a sprightly conversation, in which he often thanked her for her kindness. At the same time, he cast the keenest glances at the sheriff, who stood before the fire, evidently with the endeavor to read his thoughts and intentions.
The Arrest
After he had finished his supper, he arose from the table, bowed to the lady, walked back to the kitchen and took his seat by the fire. Mrs. Hinson then turned to his companion, and said, ”Have I not, sir, the honor of entertaining Colonel Burr, the gentleman who has just walked out?” He gave her no answer, but rose from the table, much embarrassed, and also repaired to the kitchen. Her question had been prompted by Brightwell. In the morning, after breakfast, the elder traveler sought an interview with the lady, took occasion again to thank her for the hospitable attentions, regretted the absence of her husband, inquired the route to Pensacola, and rode off with his companion.
Perkins remained at his post in the woods, shivering with cold, and wondering why Brightwell did not return to him. His patience at length became exhausted, and, believing the person he was pursuing to be really Burr, he mounted his horse, and rode rapidly to the house of Joseph Bates, Sr., at Nannahubba Bluff. Procuring from that gentleman a negro and a canoe, he paddled down the river, and arrived at Fort Stoddart at the breaking of day.
Gen. Edmund P. Gaines
Rushing into the fort, and acquainting Captain Edward P. Gaines with his suspicions, the latter made instant preparations to take the road. After a hasty breakfast, about the rising of the sun, Gaines, placing himself at the head of a file of mounted soldiers, rode off with Perkins. About nine o’clock that morning they met the two mysterious travelers, on the descent of a hill, near a wolf pen, at the distance of two miles from the residence of Hinson. The following conversation immediately ensued :
GAINES-I presume, sir, I have the honor of addressing Colonel Burr.
STRANGER-I’m a traveler in the country, and do not recognize your right to ask such a question.
GAINES-I arrest you at the instance of the Federal Government.
STRANGER-By what authority do you arrest a traveler upon the highway, on his own private business?
GAINES-I am an officer of the army. I hold in my hands the proclamations of the President and the Governor, directing your arrest.
STRANGER—You are a young man, and may not be aware of the responsibilities which result from arresting travelers.
GAINES-I am aware of the responsibilities, but I know my duty.
The stranger now became exceedingly animated, and with much eloquence and force denounced these proclamations as documents which had emanated in malevolent feeling, without any just foundation, and endeavored again to frighten the young officer from discharging his duty, by ingeniously animadverting upon the great liabilities which he was about to assume. But Gaines sternly replied, “My mind is made up. You must accompany me to Fort Stoddart, where you shall be treated with all the respect due the ex-Vice-president of the United States, so long as you make no attempt to escape from me.”
He was apparently surprised
The stranger for a moment gazed at him with earnestness, apparently surprised at the unusual firmness which the young officer exhibited. He then assented by a gentle motion of his head, wheeled his horse around, and took the road to the fort, riding by the side of the captain. His traveling companion rode back toward Wakefield with Brightwell, the sheriff who was in company with the two travelers when they were met by Gaines.
The party reached the fort in the evening, and Colonel Burr, being conducted to his room, took his dinner alone. Late in the night, he heard a groan in an adjoining room. He arose from a table, at which he was reading, opened the door, entered the room, and approached the bedside of Geo. S. Gaines, the brother of the commandant, who was sick. He was kind to the sufferer, felt of his pulse, said he had traveled much and knew something of medicine, and offered his services. They now entered into an agreeable conversation. Burr asked the Choctaw factor many questions about the Indians and their commerce.
She was the daughter of Judge Harry Toulmin
The next day he appeared at the dinner table, and was
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That is 10 points of damage to you and you must sacrifice a creature. Sound dirty? It is! In EDH we love to search our libraries. Fetchlands and land searching spells are key ingredients to our deck’s ability to mana fix and ramp. This rings true for expensive cards like [card]Polluted Delta[/card]/[card]Three Visits[/card] or budget options like [card]Evolving Wilds[/card]/[card]Rampant Growth[/card]. Then there is always those pesky tutor cards… [card]Demonic Tutor[/card], [card]Tooth and Nail[/card], [card]Rune-Scarred Demon[/card], etc. that are prominent to obtain the card we need, when we need it. In Commander, we search our library all-the-time, its what we do. The fact that this bad-ass demon-dude punishes an opponent for searching their library by making him/her sacrifice a creature AND lose 10 life is astounding!
Oh crud, I was focusing on Ob Nixi’s first ability so long that I almost forgot about his second ability. Whenever a creature dies he gets a +1/+1 counter? Really? No way!
FOR ME… If Ob Nixilis, Unshackled is on my side of the table – I really, really dig this guy. IF my opponents have summoned Ob Nixilis? Son-of-a-#&%*! At the very minimum I will be running Ob Nixi in my Chainer, Dementia Master EDH deck. The main reason is because he fits my sacrifice theme. The second reason is because I can bring Ob Nixilis from my graveyard to the battlefield in response to an opponents “search your library effect” using Chainer’s ability. I am also contemplating this guy in my Kaalia of the Vast EDH deck, however, the competition is extremely tight at the six drop position. Still though, most players need to tutor for a way to deal with Kaalia, so this guy may prove to be a game clincher.
#2 – [card]Reclamation Sage[/card]
This is not going to be a glamourous inclusion on my top 10 list, but when a card should become an EDH staple, you know we have to give it some props. Let’s face it, most EDH players do not play enough artifact and enchantment hate. If you are playing green, there is no reason you should not have a [card]Krosan Grip[/card], [card]Naturalize[/card], or [card]Deglamer[/card] to take care of troublesome artifacts or enchantments. While it’s not “fun” to include answers, it is important. That is why I like removal on a stick. Cards like [card]Harmonic Sliver[/card] and [card]Acidic Slime[/card] are personal favorites that allow me to run enchantment/artifact hate AND have a dude on the battlefield.
If you are playing Green, [card]Reclamation Sage[/card] is your new auto-include. It’s splashable, cheap to cast, recurrable, searchable, and tops off with the “may” terminology so you don’t have to blow something up. Decks running recursion, [card]Sun Titan[/card] or flicker effects (yes, looking at you [card]Roon of the Hidden Realm[/card]) are going to go nuts with the sage. Did I mention that the Sage is an ELF? Pointy-eared green mages have got to be ecstatic!
FOR ME… easy include in all of my EDH decks with Green and my son’s Prosh deck. This is also an easy addition to my 1v1 competitive deck – Uril & Friends. If you have read my Uril, the Miststalker Primer or watched my Uril Deck Tech Video on CMDR Decks you know that [card]Harmonic Sliver[/card] is an absolute all-star. I will be obtaining a game day promo of [card]Reclamation Sage[/card] and either run it alongside the Sliver or replace it altogether.
#1 – [card]Perilous Vault[/card]
Many, many moons ago, when I was introduced to Magic the Gathering™ I opened my very first pack of cards, a 60 card starter deck of 5th Edition. Among my three rares was (and still is) one of my favorite cards of all time [card]Nevinyrral’s Disk[/card]. There was just something about the art and the ability of destroying everything that makes me nostalgic for the Disk to this day. Today, my original, black speckled white bordered favorite has been retired to my trade binder (after being signed and altered by Mark Tedin), but I picked up a good handful of these disks and use them in my various EDH decks.
But as all destroy effects can tell you, the keyword “indestructible” has become noticeably more common at the kitchen table these days. Perhaps the most noticeable of the cards resilient to destroy effects are that of the Theros gods or Indestructible Enchantment Creatures. Players are starting to realize and making the shift towards cards that are able to tuck, exile, or force sacrifice as simply being able to “destroy” a troublesome permanent has gotten harder to do.
With this, I introduce you to the #1 Card in my M15 review: [card]Perilous Vault[/card]. The fact that this board wipe exiles all non-land permanents is oober-crazy and will turn the tide of several EDH games for years to come. As with Disk and Stone, casting and activating the vault will usually be a two step process (playing it on one turn and then popping it on or after the next turn) but nine {9} colorless mana is not out of the question in an EDH Commander game.
So let’s solidify Perilous Vault as my #1 pick with one last thought. Perilous Vault is so powerful, it can exile the rest of my Top 10 M15 list when activated. A list that includes a nasty enchantment, two indestructible creatures and two troublesome planeswalkers… pretty darn impressive.
FOR ME…
Please visit again soon. I am already working on my Magic M15 set review due out in July 2014!
On to the next!
—wallyd
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TumblrHere’s unexpected good news. A new poll [PDF] in South Carolina shows a tightening in the governor’s race. Democrat Vincent Sheheen has closed in on Palin/tea bagger favorite Nikki Haley, 41 percent to 45 percent — 13 percent undecided.
Haley has been seen as a rising star on the fringe right because of her association with Sarah Palin, whose endorsement helped her in the GOP primary.
Sheheen’s surge comes on the heels of word that conservatives in this fire-engine-red red state were organizing against Haley:
A small group of prominent S.C. Republicans have formed a committee to demand answers from gubernatorial Republican nominee Nikki Haley about allegations of extramarital affairs made by two S.C. men, her qualifications for a high-paying job with the Lexington Medical Foundation and her disclosure she worked part-time for an engineering firm, Wilbur Smith, shortly before the June primary… “There are questions that are on the minds of many conservatives and that we have a right to ask and expect to get answers on,” said Cyndi Mosteller, co-chair of the new group and former first vice chair of the state GOP. Mosteller said the committee will not endorse a gubernatorial candidate. “Our goal is to ask questions for the sake of us, for Republican principles and for the people of South Carolina. If we can be a part of getting answers and having an informed electorate, that is our goal,” added Mosteller who questioned Haley’s character in a recent newspaper editorial.
In a more multicultural state, the fact that Haley’s family is from India — she was born Nimrata Randhawa — wouldn’t matter. But among ultra-conservative voters in South Carolina, it does, and, yes, the rumors of adultery fuel that bigotry.
In light of the rumors, it doesn’t help Haley that South Carolina’s Christian right establishment is still smarting from the betrayal of the current governor, Mark Sanford — a white Christian involved in the C Street fundamentalist cult on Capitol Hill, who nonetheless cheated on his wife, the mother of his four sons, by euphemistically “hiking on the Appalachian Trail” with a woman in Argentina.
Sheheen has benefited from a surprise endorsement by the decidedly GOP-leaning South Carolina Chamber of Commerce and from the fraying within Haley’s Republican base. The good news is he appears to be a smart, capable, common-sense centrist Democrat, who would be a credit to South Carolina.
Check out Vincent Sheheen’s campaign website.We, the Operators of this Website, provide it as a public service to our users.
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If you have questions regarding this privacy policy, please contact us.Since its inception in 2004, Telltale Games has continued to release narrative-driven adventure games focused on choice and consequence. Before you even begin playing, however, you're asked to make one of the most important choices - which version to play. With upwards of nine unique ports available for many of its games, this is no small task. Telltale Games has a troubling history of releasing games with serious bugs and performance problems, and picking the wrong platform can lead to a subpar experience. Now, with the arrival of Batman - The Telltale Series, we might finally have reached the point where the best choice is not to play at all until the developer comprehensively addresses some serious issues.
It started with reports on the PC version - it was launched in a problematic state with many users unable to play the game at all, leading to frustration from the community. It was patched quickly, but many users are still left unsatisfied, leaving us to look towards the consoles, where there are many different releases to choose from. Batman is available on PS4, PS3, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. We've tested the game on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 at this point and the results are worse than expected based on our experiences with the company's prior releases.
The primary issues centre on poor image quality and often terrible performance. On PlayStation 4, Telltale has opted for a 900p presentation, while the Xbox One version operates at 720p. We've seen this split before, typically in high performance titles such as Star Wars Battlefront, but it's surprising to see this in a title with considerably lower visual aspirations. Strictly speaking, the actual resolution is lower. The game is letterboxed, effectively lowering the resolution to 1600x766 on PS4 and 1280x614 on Xbox One. With these results, Telltale has set a new record for the lowest resolution in a shipping game on PlayStation 4 to date, and it would be true of Xbox One as well if not for Ark: Survival Evolved, which is ever so slightly lower.
We take a look at the performance and image quality issues in this video and it's not good.
The situation is made worse by the lack of effective anti-aliasing on PlayStation 4. Edges are jagged and aliased to a degree we do not often see on consoles - this is not a clean looking game. While Xbox One renders at an even lower resolution, the version on Microsoft's console does at least appear to use some sort of post-process anti-aliasing, resulting in a softer but cleaner presentation. Still, the results are remarkably poor when considering that previous Telltale adventures delivered a full 1080p on console.
The most serious issue here is frame-rate - despite the low resolution in use, performance is remarkably low and inconsistent throughout the experience. Both versions operate with an uncapped frame-rate and a double buffer v-sync configuration. You can expect results anywhere from 60 frames per second all the way down to 15 and this can happen within a single scene, resulting in a remarkably choppy experience.
To an extent, it's not a game-breaker. Telltale titles are not action games and the unstable frame-rate has little impact on the feel of the game as such, but that doesn't mean this isn't a problem. This type of experience is designed to tell a story and a smooth presentation is key in achieving this. Most people wouldn't tolerate such issues while watching a film at a local theatre and they shouldn't tolerate it here either. When each pan of the camera is plagued with judder and action scenes are compromised by often drastic change in frame-rate, the experience loses much of its lustre.
By comparison, Tales from the Borderlands manages to turn in a solid 60 frames per second experience on PlayStation 4, even at 1080p.
What's frustrating here is that Batman is the first game to make use of an updated version of the Telltale Tool, the engine and toolset used to create their games. We noticed the inclusion of more advanced post-processing, shadow maps, improved animation, higher quality models, and more detailed texture work but it ultimately winds up looking remarkably similar to past experiences. While something like Tales from the Borderlands may be lacking these features, it does offer a generally stable 1080p 60 frames per second experience on console.
Of course, as noted above, one of the issues with Telltale's approach to multiplatform development lies in its inconsistency on different platforms. Sure, The Wolf Among Us was great on the PC, but if you were playing on a PS Vita, your experience would be filled with severe slowdown, loading, and hitching around every corner. You could generally count on finding a decent port, but this time it seems that we have a distinct lack of options.
That's not even touching on the save game issues many have faced in the past. These games are based on the choices you make and one would expect the save system to work as expected but many of us have lost save data when moving from one episode to the next, with no way to restore our progress. Telltale has yet to address this in the affected games, and there's been little feedback from the developer on addressing key concerns like this. Bottom line: when there are communication issues like this, it casts doubt on the extent to which we can expect to see a troubled release like Batman see the genuine improvements the title desperately needs.
In the past, Telltale was a smaller studio working on a tight schedule and a limited budget, but its success has allowed the studio to grow rapidly while working on some of the hottest franchises in the entertainment business. With this success, we would hope to see growth and improvement happen on the backend. Will Marvel be happy if Telltale's next series, based on one of its properties, suffers from these issues? We think not, but hopefully highlighting these issues now will result in a renewed approach to QA going forward. As things stand, we put our concerns to Telltale two days ago and have yet to receive a response. Should we receive a reply, we'll update this piece.Gucci Mane's Snapchat has been constant source of news and entertainment since the Atlanta rapper was released from prison in May. Today, Guwop took to the social media platform to announce a long list of upcoming collaborations, including Lil Wayne, E-40, and, most surprisingly, Outkast. A rep for André 3000 told The FADER that there’s “no Outkast news to report” at this time.
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The Atlanta group's last project together was the 2006 soundtrack for the film Idlewild, and their last studio album as Outkast was the double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. Though Andre 3000 and Big Boi toured together as Outkast in 2014, both members of the group have denied claims of a return album in recent years. Watch Gucci Mane discuss his upcoming collaborations below.
Representatives for Gucci Mane and Big Boi were not immediately available for comment.
This post was updated on September 6 at 11:06 a.m. to reflect comment from André 3000.Former Uber driver and Vugo cofounder James bellefeuille has launched a Vugo bitcoin tipping service for Uber drivers, to enable customers to tip the drivers using bitcoin, instead of cash.
Uber, American international transportation Network Company currently valued at US$ 50 billion by the Wall Street Journal and many Venture Capital Firms worldwide, has always had unresolved issues with its drivers – tipping.
The billion dollar network has never enabled its drivers to accept tips through its app, which became a significant disadvantage for its drivers. Especially now, that most of Uber’s customers and user base are those seeking for a better quality and higher standard taxi service.
This month, Vugo, rideshare advertising network has released a new feature – a bitcon tipping system for Uber drivers.
According to CNET, over 3,000 Uber drivers already have installed Vugo’s tablet, which is placed at the backseat of the cars. Apart from advertisements, customers will now see a tip your driver button, which allows users to tip the drivers using bitcoin.
Vugo co-founder James Bellefeuille told CNET news, “Creating a way for Uber drivers to accept tips electronically seemed like a natural expansion.”
Tips usually come in at relatively small amounts, in the range of a few dollars to a hundred dollars at best. Using traditional financial platforms or online mobile payment systems like Paypal is highly inefficient, because of its high transaction / conversion fees and their tendency to freeze payments at their will.
The bitcoin tipping system may be crucial to Uber drivers, especially now that Uber has decreased fares in 48 cities across the United States. The updated fares have decreased average earnings per hour of Uber drivers, from US$36 to US$19.
“Uber is trying to change the culture around tipping service professionals. The biggest reason why tipping is important is because your driver is delivering a service,” explained Bellefeuille.A teenage girl in China has offered up her virginity in exchange for an iPhone 4, Chinese news site Biznewschina reports. The young girl recently took to Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service similar to Twitter, to seek out someone willing to buy her an Apple iPhone 4 in exchange for sex. According to the report, the girl’s dream is to own an iPhone 4 but her father refused to purchase one for her. The girl posted a photo of herself on the website alongside some personal information, and offered to sell her virginity to anyone who buys her the new Apple smartphone. Some people responded by telling her that an iPhone is not worth the trade, while others joked that she should wait for Apple to release the iPhone 5 in September. It is also possible that someone has gained unauthorized access to her account and is playing a prank on her. If genuine, this is the second story we’ve reported this month about a teenager willing to go to extremes for an Apple device. Earlier this year, a Chinese boy sold his kidney for 22,000 yuan ($3,400) on the black market in order to purchase an iPad 2.
ReadAustralian corporate chief suggests a “dictator” to resolve political crisis
By Patrick Kelly
5 July 2016
Prominent businessman Gerry Harvey has bewailed the outcome of last Saturday’s election in Australia and suggested the formation of a dictatorship in order to resolve the political crisis and impose anti-working class economic “reform” measures.
Which parties will form the next government remains unclear. There was a significant shift against the Liberal-National Coalition government of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, but the Australian Labor Party failed to capitalise, recording its second lowest primary vote since World War II. A record number of votes were cast for various right-wing populist and “independent” candidates, who benefitted from growing hostility toward the political establishment. With ballots still being tallied, the most likely outcome appears to be a hung parliament as neither major party appears able to secure a parliamentary majority, as well as a splintered Senate or upper house.
Harvey, the founder and chairman of transnational retail company Harvey Norman, is Australia’s 19th wealthiest individual, with a reported personal fortune of $2 billion.
In an interview with the Murdoch-owned Daily Telegraph tabloid, he complained that Australian politics had been in a “state of constant turmoil” since 2007, when Liberal Prime Minister John Howard lost office. Harvey continued: “The whole world now, with what’s happening in England, Europe and America—there’s a great deal of dissatisfaction with mainstream politics and the people are showing their frustration.”
The election outcome in Australia reflects international processes that have found expression in the presidential primaries in the United States and the recent referendum in Britain on membership of the European Union. Mass popular alienation with the political establishment in both countries has been expressed in a distorted fashion in the vote for Donald Trump in the US and the “Leave” campaign in the United Kingdom.
Harvey’s response is significant. Declaring that Australia was “living beyond its means,” he concluded: “Neither side [Labor or Liberal] can do anything about it, because the minute they do they’re hammered. The only cure we’ve got is to have a dictator like in China or something like that. Our democracy at the moment is not working.”
These remarks express the growing hostility within ruling circles—not just in Australia—toward democratic forms of rule.
The uncertain election outcome has brought to the surface of political life the simmering frustration and anger within the ultra-wealthy. Harvey’s cry that “democracy is not working” has been echoed since Saturday’s election in numerous media commentaries that have bemoaned Australia’s “ungovernability.”
The parliamentary impasse is an expression of the Labor and Liberal parties’ inability to win office by honestly admitting their intention to advance the agenda that has been worked out behind closed doors by the representatives of finance capital. Detailed plans have been drafted to maintain the “international competitiveness” of Australian capitalism by dismantling the country’s public healthcare and education systems, destroying other social services, eliminating various welfare entitlements and driving down workers’ wages. The obstacle is the bitter opposition of ordinary people.
This opposition currently remains politically inchoate and confined within the parameters of electoral politics, but it has nevertheless provoked fury in ruling circles.
The head of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, John Brogden, described the election result as “the worst possible outcome for Australia.” Tony Shepherd, former head of the Business Council of Australia, today wrote an op-ed in the Australian Financial Review declaring that “the notion of serious economic reform in Australia is now seen as political suicide.”
In other words, democracy is the problem. While Harvey bluntly advocates dictatorship, the entire ruling elite agrees on the need to prepare new forms of authoritarian rule. Post-election political discussion within corporate circles now centres on how the election result can be effectively subverted, by somehow forming a government able to push through the various “reform” measures rejected by the population.
One option being canvassed is a Labor-Liberal “grand coalition.”
In today’s Australian Financial Review, Warwick McKibbin, a former member of the Reserve Bank board and current “senior fellow” at the Brookings Institution in Washington, urged Turnbull and Labor leader Bill Shorten to form a “unity government.” McKibbin declared: “This is a particularly dangerous time in the world economy for Australia to be held hostage by populist and negative policy positions.”
In other words, the sentiments of ordinary people must be suppressed and not permitted to find any political expression. Instead, McKibbin continued, a Labor-Liberal government ought to implement policies that both parties agree are “in the national interest,” beginning with “budget repair,” i.e., huge cuts to social spending.
The US-based credit ratings agencies have weighed into the political crisis. Moody’s Investors Service senior vice-president Marie Diron said yesterday that Australia’s AAA rating would be threatened if a new government retreated from any of the major parties’ spending cuts. A spokesman for Fitch similarly declared that a downgrade would follow any “political gridlock that leads to a sustained widening of the deficit.”
Shorten, having previously pledged his determination to do whatever is necessary to maintain Australian capitalism’s credit rating, is now attempting to reassure the financial oligarchy. He has repeatedly expressed his intention to be “constructive” and “make parliament work” by collaborating with people from “all political persuasions,” including Liberal and National party parliamentarians.
Amid bitter infighting and recriminations within the Liberal-National Coalition—and an array of rival agendas promoted by the Green, right-wing populist, and “independent” parliamentarians—it remains unclear whether Shorten’s pitch for a “workable” parliament is viable in any sense. New elections may soon be triggered in a bid to engineer the government demanded by finance capital.
The Obama administration is undoubtedly monitoring the political crisis closely. Washington directly intervened in 2010, using its network of informants and assets in the Labor and trade union factional apparatus to remove Kevin Rudd from office and install a prime minister more closely aligned to its provocative confrontation of China in the Asia-Pacific. Six years on, US imperialism is preparing to wage war against the rising Asian power. The spectre of one of its chief regional allies being left without a government in these circumstances will be causing alarm in Washington.
Harvey’s comments are a warning to workers in Australia and internationally. The turn to more authoritarian forms of rule to impose policies that are inimical to the interests of the majority of the population is being accompanied by a build-up of the repressive state apparatus. Police-state measures put in place over the past 15 years under the guise of the “war on terror” will be used to try to suppress resistance to the agenda of war and austerity.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.DALLAS, Texas — A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by the family of Ahmed “Clock Boy” Mohamed Friday accusing the Irving Independent School District and the City of Irving of religious discrimination.
The lawsuit filed last year alleged Mohamed’s civil rights were violated when he was arrested in 2015 after taking a homemade digital clock-in-a-box to his high school where it was mistaken by a teacher for a “hoax bomb,” Breitbart Texas reported.
Ultimately, no charges were filed against the teen once the situation sorted itself out, although Mohamed served three days of suspension before his family withdrew him from the Irving Independent School District and relocated to Qatar after accepting a full scholarship to attend a Qatar Foundation school.
The federal complaint also claimed a history of anti-Muslim sentiment in Irving and that the then 14-year-old teen was discriminated against based on race and religion. On Friday, the judge ruled there was no evidence of either.
Previously, Breitbart Texas reported that the teen’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, sued for $15 million in damages and demanded apologies from Irving Independent School District and City officials.
Last October, the Thompson & Horton, LLP, attorneys for Irving ISD and high school Principal Daniel Cummings filed motions to dismiss this federal lawsuit, citing that the plaintiff’s father failed to state a claim on which relief could be granted.
Breitbart Texas reported:
One of the points attorneys argued in the school district’s motion to dismiss summary was that public schools have a “substantial interest” in “maintaining discipline in the classroom and on school grounds.” The document stated: “The device was disturbing enough that a teacher directed him to keep the device in his backpack — an instruction that A.M. promptly disobeyed in his English class.”
Breitbart Texas obtained a statement from Thompson & Horton, LLP, in which they responded to the dismissal:
We are pleased with the decision reached by Judge Sam Lindsay. The court recognized the challenging situations faced by the individuals who serve our communities in public schools. Schools and principals must make decisions every day regarding student safety. The opinion confirms that there was no suggestion of discriminatory intent by any school district employee. As the court explained, “Principals are responsible for the safety of students and others on campus and, as part of that responsibility, often have to make decisions quickly and with little information…. A principal’s fate is not so hapless that, on the one hand, by not taking action he is faced with the gruesome prospect of death or serious injury of persons had the device actually been a bomb and exploded; and, on the other hand, he is faced with a federal lawsuit for denial of a student’s constitutional rights because the device turned out not to be a bomb.”
In January, a Texas district judge threw out a defamation lawsuit filed by the Mohamed patriarch on behalf of his son against a handful of media organizations and public figures.
Follow Merrill Hope, a member of the original Breitbart Texas team, on Twitter.Henry Wallace – Denounced in 1948 – time has proven otherwise.
– Henry Wallace Political Talk – Inflation – Henry Wallace For President Campaign – Sept. 27, 1948 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection.
Continuing our revisit of the Henry Wallace 1948 Presidential campaign, here is one of a series of Monday evening talks Wallace gave leading up to election night in 1948.
It’s interesting to note just how Henry Wallace was derided and denounced as a Communist/Socialist/Anarchist. But that how, in retrospect, many of the issues he discusses are issues we’re facing in 2015 – and that the socialist/crackpot denunciation mantra is being bandied about by mainstream media at Bernie Sanders, in much the same fashion as was with Henry Wallace.
This talk
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are designed to get you into the game. And I mean that literally. Most of the rewards of this Kickstarter campaign hard-code you into Hollywood Mogul 4.
Hard-code means that you'll become a permanent part of the game and cannot be removed. Even if the game databases are edited by players your contribution cannot be removed.
- The AUTHOR Reward
The Author Reward allows you to create a Source Database record. For example, you can choose to write a Graphic Novel record, or a Comic Book record, etc. They will remain hard-coded into Hollywood Mogul 4. The list of Source Databases is here: www.hollywood-mogul.com/source.htm
If you back this project through an author reward you will have the opportunity to send me:
A Title
Your name, as Author
The Storyline
The genre, from this list: www.hollywood-mogul.com/genres.htm
The story attributes as described here: www.hollywood-mogul.com/storyattributes.htm
In the game it will look something like this:
I will create a "form" for you to contribute your source record to make it easier to do. You will have months and months to work out the details so don't panic thinking you have to do all this when you make your pledge. So think about it... if you could write a story... any story... what would it be?
- Author Reward Special Situation
In the spring of each game year, Hollywood gathers to honor its own. If you create an Original Screenplay record you can contribute the information as described above. But also, you can contribute a digital head-shot of yourself. In the event that your screenplay record is nominated for Best Screenplay, your digital image will be displayed at the annual Hollywood Mogul Awards. You might even win a "Mogie."
- All Author Rewards
With all of the Author Rewards, your name will appear in the Opening Credits each time a player has chosen your contribution and made it into a movie. For example, if you've written a Novel record the Opening Credits will display: Based on the Novel "<Your Title>" By <Your Name>. It might look like this:
- TV PILOT WRITER Reward
If you pledge this project through the TV Pilot Writer Reward you will have the opportunity to send me:
A title for the TV Show
Your name, for the "Created By" credit
The storyline
The role requirements
The story attributes
A digital image of you in the event that an annual TV Awards is included
- The Writing Rewards And Translations
Please understand that I can only guarantee your Writing reward contributions for English-language versions of Hollywood Mogul. Hollywood Mogul is currently played in more than 50 countries, and I plan to have it translated into as many languages as funding will allow. It may not be financially possible to include all of the Writing awards for each translated Source database. But I'll do my best to ensure your contributions stay in the translated versions of the game.
Franchises
The big thing in movies right now is Franchises of comic books, and video games. If you select the Franchise Reward you can create a franchise in these categories:
Comic Books
Graphic Novels
Novels
Games (table-top RPGs, computer games, card collection, etc)
Friends With Franchises
Probably the easiest way to create a Franchise is to link up with your friends who have the same Author Reward as you and together all of you create a single franchise with each individual contributing one or more parts of the Franchise's whole.
Remember you will have months and months to work out all the details so don't think you all have to agree on a Comic Book superhero today.
- The Talent Rewards
If you don't want to write, you can choose to become part of the Talent database instead. If you pledge through any of the Talent Rewards, you will have the opportunity to send me:
Your name
Your bio
Your digital image for display in the Talent Database, as well as for display at the game's annual Hollywood Mogul Awards ceremony
Your game attributes
In the game it will look something like this:
Each Talent type has attributes that effect game play. Of course, your name will appear in the Opening Credits each time a player has hired you for their movie.
For producers and directors, their names appear at the beginning and at the end of the credits, a two-fer...
- The Talent Rewards And Translations
All of the Talent Rewards will appear in all translations of Hollywood Mogul 4, though lengthy bios may not. Also, what might be considered a "funny" bio in English, may not translate well.
Real Movie Star Talent Database
It is illegal for me to include real movie stars in Hollywood Mogul. But there's nothing stopping you from doing it for your own game. Hollywood Mogul 4 will be very extendable and easily customized, you'll be able to change almost every aspect of the game. It's a pretty sure bet that by the time the game is released one or more Real Movie Star Talent Databases will be available for you to download.
All player-created content is free, of course. And remember, if you back Hollywood Mogul 4 you are hard-coded into the game. That means if you choose a Talent Reward you'll be in all the real movie star talent databases that get created.
Where Will The Money Go?
I'm a one-man operation, so all of the money raised through Kickstarter will be used in the production of Hollywood Mogul 4. That includes purchasing artwork, graphic elements, and all other development costs.
Stretch Goals
$180,000 - Expansion Pack 3
$240,000 - Expansion Pack 4
Taking Delivery
I believe it will take me 15 to 18 months to finish the game, though there will be working beta versions throughout almost the entire process for you to play. Please note that Hollywood Mogul 4 will only be delivered via the Internet, and that you must be online to activate the software. After you've activated, you do not need to be online to play.
No Multi-Player
People have asked me about an online multi-player version of Hollywood Mogul. There isn't any way to make it work, in my opinion. In a given game month I may have just a few things to do, then I want to move on to the next game month. But you may be in the middle of casting twelve movies. I'd have to sit and wait for you to finish. No... online multi-player Hollywood Mogul doesn't sound like fun to me. Besides, the whole point of a turn-based strategy game is to think, and ponder, and fuss, and plan. I don't want you to be rushed into a decision. You can hot seat with friends at the same computer, but that's different. That's much more social.
Development Forums
Many of the reward tiers give you access to the special forums that will be created during the development of the game. There you will have your say as you try to convince me and the other backers that a new genre must be added to the game, or that it is imperative that I include a financial report on this or that. There will be many polls to help with game element decision-making and lots of early creation of additional images and real movie star talent databases.
Before pledging this project, please read the submission rules below.
Submission Rules
I reserve the right to require you to change any Title, Storyline, attribute, biography, or message if I consider it in whole or in part to be vulgar or inappropriate. This is a family game, despite the unbelievable amount of gratuitous nudity that some of you will add to your movies with unfettered joy.
Thank You
I invite you to help me make Hollywood Mogul 4 a reality. Thanks for taking the time to consider my project. And good luck at the box office!Updated: November 6, 2013, 3:28 pm.
Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) had not called Democrat Terry McAuliffe after losing the Virginia gubernatorial race and had no plans to do so as of late Wednesday morning, according to a report in The Washington Post.
Cuccinelli has already publicly conceded he lost the race.
At a press conference later on Wednesday McAuliffe said he had still not heard from Cuccinelli.
“I have not had the opportunity yet to speak to the attorney general,” McAuliffe said.
The fact that Cuccinelli has not called underscores how bitter the Virginia gubernatorial race was for both candidates. Much of the advertising by both Cuccinelli and McAuliffe’s campaign was negative. And despite public polling ahead of Election Day showing McAuliffe with a wide lead over Cuccinelli, the now governor-elect only narrowly defeated Cuccinelli.If you regularly search for undervalued companies then it probably hasn’t escaped your notice that the US and UK markets are trading at much higher valuations than they were a few years ago. That makes it harder to find bargains – but not impossible.
But rather than work harder, the lazy among us may wonder whether there is an easier way. Well there is. Even though the US market is expensive, there are other markets in the world that are not. I recently added a few Australian shares to my portfolio, and a few other bloggers have noted that it is easier to find cheap investments there than in the US. I also hold a fund targeted at Korea and some emerging markets positions.
So where are the best places to look? Well unfortunately for you, there isn’t a perfect way to evaluate which markets are cheap. Foreign countries pose additional risk for investors, mainly because of political factors but also we are not as familiar with foreign customs or ways of life. For example by living in the UK I am exposed to the publics general sentiment which tells me that big companies e.g. Tesco are not highly thought of. If a US investor read through the Tesco annual report however, they would have no idea there was a considerably negative public sentiment towards them.
That is a relatively minor insight, a major oversight may be an Englishman investing in a US mortgage company in 2007, completely oblivious to the lax lending rules that were widespread in the country.
My point is that sometimes markets are cheap, but they are cheap for a good reason. We must be extra vigilant when investing abroad.
Keeping that in mind, we can start to look for cheap foreign markets. The simplest way to find cheap markets is to look at the P/E ratios of major indices. In that vein, here are the PE’s throughout the world, ranking cheapest to most expensive [source: Bloomberg]
Russia 6.9 China 10.0 Hong Kong 11.0 Norway 13.0 Turkey 13.5 Singapore 13.9 New Zealand 15.6 South Korea 16.1 Brazil 16.6 Malaysia 16.9 Sweden 17.1 Thailand 17.8 Israel 17.9 US 18.1 India 18.1 Taiwan 18.2 Germany 18.3 Colombia 18.4 Switzerland 19.0 UK 19.5 Australia 19.6 Africa 20.0 Japan 20.2 Portugal 20.2 Canada 20.6 Holland 21.4 Spain 23.2 France 25.7 Mexico 26.2
It isn’t a perfect measure, but it’s a start and highlights a few places where it is good to start getting further information. Here are some of my brief thoughts on the cheapest markets.
Russia
This jumps out as being remarkably cheap at a P/E of only 6.9. You may think this is because of the current political situation with the Ukraine, but actually the Russian index isn’t trading at a level much lower than it has been over the last few years.
In fact it has already rebounded from the early 2014 drop which was likely caused by this crisis. So what’s the real reason it is so cheap? Firstly it is heavily dependent on natural resources – gas and oil, which are at the mercy of international supply and demand to set prices. Two companies in this area, Gazprom & Lukoil make up around 30% of the index.
Secondly there is corruption in the country and a government that is not averse to raiding corporations and essentially stealing their assets from shareholders. This is made worse by the fact that many companies are majority owned by the state as well.
China
Despite growing at twice the rate of the west, the market is pessimistic about China and Hong Kong, perhaps unfairly. Much has been talked about an asset bubble in China and the shadow banking economy that will “inevitably” lead to a financial crisis. Here is an explanation of China’s growing shadow banking sector. And here is a prediction of its demise by Mr Gloom himself, Marc Faber (I wouldn’t take anything he says too seriously, having called for stock market crashes for the last few years running and being wrong).
Investing in individual companies in China for a private investor is virtually impossible due to foreign ownership rules, so if you are interested you are stuck with either a tracker or a fund. I’m not a great fan of funds but I will say that the trackers for China aren’t great, and it isn’t hard to find funds that have consistently beat their benchmarks in this area of the world. I have some money in an emerging markets fund that invests a lot in China. I don’t include it in my portfolio returns or reports as its a separate long term holding (though it is disclosed on the portfolio page).
Hong Kong is a bit more open to private investors and you wont have a problem buying stocks listed there. But remember that China has higher instances of fraud than the west, and Hong Kong is not immune to this although has stricter regulation than a lot of the reverse US mergers that have given Chinese companies a bad name. So always do thorough due diligence and diversify.
Related posts:
Investing Sidekick Founder of Investing Sidekick. Works as a research analyst and is an avid value investor, always searching for undervalued shares.
If you found this post useful, please subscribe to receive new posts for free by email.Or subscribe to the RSS feedOn “Time Traveller in Suspense” and “Rules for the PAT Prior to Ascension”
July 1, 2012
Hi George,
Firstly thank you for your latest post “Rules for the PAT…”, they are a good reminder and a thank you to all the PAT members for their contributions because collectively they put into words what I most of the time cannot.
That said, I would like to add to Bill’s post as lately I have been thinking about how the masses will process the shear magnitude of the coming revelations. If I were to stand in their shoes and see what it would feel like when the the truth is revealed. In short it can’t be put into words.
The quotes below from Bill’s post display the basic condition of the human mindset.
“Quite astoundingly, they also believe that Humans are the most advanced form of intelligent life that has ever existed.”
“In a nutshell, they believe that their government truly has their best interests at heart and wouldn’t intentionally do anything to harm them.”
We are well aware that the PTB want the masses to believe that there is other life in the universe, only it’s malevolent life that wants to do us harm. It’s all good people, the Government has your back! Hollywood has told you so.
Now can you imagine being one of these slumbering people finding out today what has been going on. I don’t think you would be able to comprehend the depth of the sickening hole in their stomach all the while trembling so uncontrollably that all that comes from their mouth is little squeaks like a petrified mouse. The overwhelming feeling of being betrayed and indescribably alone. Helpless.
Could you imagine finding out officially for the first time that not only are ETs real and have been visiting our planet for eons, but that some were already here before us, they are malevolent and they are far more intelligent than Hollywood has led you to believe. Thousands of times more intelligent and tens on thousands more technologically advanced. You realise that we have no chance. We were created as slaves. (In order not to create any more unnecessary editorial work for George I want to state that I am fully aware that had we been left to evolve unmolested, we would have not only been more technologically advanced but more spiritually advanced also. This line is based on the current awareness of the masses).
You find out that the government that you thought had your best interests at heart has actually been working with these malevolent ETs. Not only are the military and police not going to fight the malevolent ETs, they have been unwittingly doing their bidding. You find out that the very food you eat, the water you drink, the air you breathe, the medicine you take has been methodically poisoned by big business, the government and the ruling ETs. Secret societies. The Powers That Be. You have been microwaved and bombarded from the full spectrum of the EM field in order to make you sick, in order to make you die, and in order to make you sleep. To never remember who you really are while your still alive. You realise that every facet of your daily life has been infected. No exception.
You find out that 9/11, the London bombings and in fact all wars and terrorist attacks were instigated, carried out and profited from by the Government, Big Business and the Malevolent Extra Terrestrials. On top of that from your point of view you find out that the Human minions of the PTB have been worshipping demons and the devil. They, including the Vatican have been religiously involved in ritual sacrifice. The demons have been feeding off your energy and the Government has been helping them! Everything you thought you knew has been turned upside down.
So now what?
You turn to God, to Jesus, Allah. But where are they? Nowhere to be seen. You are alone. Betrayed. God why have you forsaken me? The Government you trusted have deceived you. Every corporate brand that you trusted has deceived you! ETs are real, demons are real and they are out to get you and your family and the richest, the most powerful of this world are helping them. Always have been since ancient times.
OK I think I’ve made my point and remember that we have found this out in small doses over a period of time. I’ve had a couple glasses of red so apologies for the dramatics and any grammatical errors. I don’t think a timeline that would incorporate this blatant disclosure would actually materialise as there would be no benefit scaring the masses to the point of paralysis without showing a way out assuming they even found out what was going on in the first place. It actually highlights why there needs to be an ID split with ascended masters holding the hands of the people in an environment of constructive interference before the truth is revealed. The shock would be too great and counter productive otherwise.
…..and if you are hearing this for the first time – the PAT has your back!
Warm regards
Alex Golowyn – Perth, Australia
…….
Dear Alex,
thank you very much for this very realistic and consistent presentation of the shock wave that will engulf humanity when the real revelations start and the scope of deceit on the earth becomes officially known. This is also the main reason for me to favour a clean ID split of the two earths before the revelations can begin under much more favourable conditions in the 4th dimension on the balanced planet A/B and in the absence of all dark entities and off-world aliens that have enslaved humanity for so long time.
Given the current slumber of the masses, there is no other alternative. That is why we had to wait for so long as to make this irreversible split of the two timelines energetically possible.
With love and light
George
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July 2, 2012
George:
Bill’s latest message published on the PAT website caused me the greatest laughs I have had for a while.. I really can relate to his message big time, hahah! I have had similar thoughts for many years and I loved to see that I am not the only person in this world who thinks the same.
For many years I have laughed at my Terran friends when they are so proud of their Volvos and flight tickets in the first class and their ipods and Ipads, hah.. Well they have no knowledge of any better, so It’s not their fault, but still makes me laugh when so many of these people work their ass in the Orion companies and then are so proud to have their bizarre looking automobiles and ancient tools of communication.. I consider even this laptop (brand new, with almost best hardware and software in the market) as very slow functioning, ancient piece of synthetic Orion technology, which will be as useful in the Higher Dimensions as piece of old plastic bag in the garbage bin in the corner of my room…
Thank you Bill, and thank you PAT, for all the great insights and your very resonating messages lately published in the PAT website.
Yours
Janne
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July 1, 2012
Dear George,
I love these last two posts…simple truths. There really is nothing left to do for the PAT and yes, most activities drag you down into the lower vibes and pretty soon it’s all confusing again and you’re wondering why the hell you got out of bed or out of your comfy chair or out of the shower. hahah. But the upside is that it feels SO good to return to these states of just being once you’ve experienced the chaos that describes most earthly activities.
Way to go Bill on your Time Travelling post! I love it:) You succinctly and simply described the state of things here. I was just thinking to myself how much manipulation exists here… how people tell each other half truths constantly to get what they want and how most of the things they do for each other is based on some requirement that you must meet or else they retract their kindness and quickly! I’m just happy that I’ve found a way to only work 2 weeks a month and provide for myself.
I’m on vacation now, visiting with my sister and I was able to put two new tires on her car and pay for a week of Bikram yoga for her. Feels really good to be back into the place of manifesting easily. I am much more comfortable like this, obviously. Yet, the whole process of taking her car in and waiting on the tires really sucked and I told her that from now on, I just can’t be in places like that for any reason. She understands finally. And, judging by how close we still are and the fact that she has gained weight recently, I feel that she is on the path to ascension. She allowed me to talk about it for over an hour the other night and she didn’t object to anything! First time for that. Positive signs. Things moving quickly.
The other day I took a nap and when I woke up, I looked at my phone and was like, “why the hell are these people in here?” And I deleted like 12 numbers on the spot! haha. It’s like during that nap I was upgraded and had an aversion to even more humans upon waking! Talk about fast! I’m allergic to these peeps! Well, I’m doing a whole lot of nothing lately except fun stuff. But even some things I thought would be fun are proving to be miserable.
Last night I went to see a movie and the crowd was overwhelming…people spilling out of the theater and for some reason they all looked like people from the reality show, “Jersey Shore”. I swear everyone was short to medium height and the women had long dark hair and spiral curls, lots of makeup, heels, and flashy clothes. What the hell? I really think that show has a huge influence over young Americans for some weird ass reason. I couldn’t believe how much everyone looked alike. It was freaking me out. I thought maybe I am in a sea of baby souls…I don’t know. Here I am tall (5″9) with strawberry blond hair, blue eyes, tad bit of makeup and comfortable clothes, and I swear no one else looked like me…not even a little. I really just felt like I wanted to be around more people who looked like me. No one was glowing… no one really stood out to me, energetically.
Also I’ve been feeling so BIG lately. And I don’t mean fat. I’m very proportionate body wise. I mean that with all the short people around me and my expanding energy field, I feel like a giant. Except instead of making me feel great, it makes me feel clumsy or self conscious. I feel like everyone is tiny…tiny hearts, bodies, and minds…and I’m just this expanded thing that no one can contain. Which is true, and should make me happy…I think it will just take some time to get used to. Well that’s all for now.
Love,
Kari
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July 1, 2012
Ascension Dreams
Dear Georgi,
I am so glad that you wrote to me today, because I went to the site to download Dorie’s message and then I realized what has been happening to me during the last month and the last few days, especially since the Summer Solstice. While I have been working on the translations, I would fall into a stupor of some sorts and wake up an hour or two later. Sometimes I would have to go to bed to rest for a few hours or get four or five hours sleep.
They were doing this to me as a training exercise and I had very little recall, except for the fact that I would be doing four or five different things in the 5th dimension and not showing any fatigue or strain. It was so exciting, and then they would bring me back to what I was doing, and then I would have to eat or go to bed to recover. I realized that when I went out a few days ago that my mind-reading abilities were getting so sharp that I could read someone from a hundred feet away. It was also shown to me today about an hour ago! They also showed me that when the time came for the transition it would happen to me immediately, without any ‘rehearsal’ at any time. Well, that suits me just fine because I love surprises.
Secondly, when I asked the question that I sent you about ‘U-Menge,’ (U-set) I already knew the answer, because I had asked you YESTERDAY when I first came across the term in one of the translations; you transmitted the information telepathically, but I had to prove it to myself because I am always doing that, testing my own abilities that come naturally. So I am finished with that crap because I know what I can do.
The reasons why I am doing this translation, I figured it out a while ago, was that I could stay connected to you mentally, like a small child. There will be no need for that once we’re out of 3-D. So there is no need to rush to try to finish the translations because I can do it carefully and completely one or two pages at a time until the time comes to go. That is the only thing that I am doing because everything else has no meaning.
So we are really gaining in power to do the things that we are supposed to do and equipping ourselves and the rest of the PAT to do the things that come naturally, like so-and-so (I forgot his name) who said that “he was going to control all the animals on Earth.” That probably really is the case, and I’m glad that he spoke out. Best regards,
in Love and Light,
Henry
……..
Dear Henry,
thank you very much for this energetic update which is congruent with my experience and that of the rest of the PAT these last days. We are indeed in the void, in between the dimensions, and the only purpose of our stay here is to anchor the huge cosmic energies as much as we can.
I am glad that you mention the sharpening of our telepathic and intellectual perceptions in the last days which is a direct consequence of the new energies after the opening of the summer solstice portal June 21/22. We have entered the time of a heightened awareness, where crystal-clear judgments and discernment will be the main trumps, while the unduly revered feelings in the New Age scene will begin to play the second fiddle. This is by the way, an important evolutionary leap of the human species on the way to acquiring a new expanded transgalactic awareness, as will be the case in the 5th dimension.
I had a dream today (July 1), in the early morning – I was supervising the official start of the Olympic games on a small planet, I guess it was the earth, but it felt very strange and distant to me. In fact I knew that it was the start of the ID split and ascension of this planet and the Olympic games were only a camouflage thereof. The responsible people for the opening event of the Games were children or very young souls and I had to explain to them the whole multi-dimensional procedure behind it and when they should activate the official clock for the beginning of the event.
In order to explain this procedure to them I arranged some trans-dimensional travels with these young souls through ID portals to other solar systems and dimensions and explained to them practically the complex coordination and preparation behind the official activation of the Olympic clock.
When everything and everybody was ready, I gave them the signal to switch on the clock, but they failed, precisely the clock failed to respond to the signal I sent to those who were responsible for its activation. I was very puzzled and somewhat angry with these young souls. “I do not really understand it”- I said to myself, “These young souls are able to make time travels through the dimensions with the help of higher forces, but are not capable of switching on a simple clock and now they have spoiled the beginning of this crucial event.”
Then I woke up and knew that this dream was part of the ongoing preparations and energetic adjustments for the ID split. The young souls I had to supervise were from the GF and they were in my dream no-good for the job…
With love and light
George
___________
July 2, 2012
Dear George,
I write to you from holidays in Spain. Initially I did not want to go, but I was forced to by family who made a huge scene. However, I think I’ve made the right choice now. I just experienced a number of notable events, so I even write them down right now, 6:25 in the morning to avoid forgetting.
First there was a curious dream sequence where I saw/was/interacted with a huge amount of different people. I then woke up and it was completely dark. A mysterious power loss in the apartment, which fixed itself after some walking around. My soul told me that this was important.
When I went back to sleep, I was in a very conscious experience and had the ability to fly. There was not a lot more for me to remember than flight, because I was in a much higher dimension, and the carbon brain does not comprehend such things. I flew down to earth and had huge awareness across the entire planet before the scene changed.
Again there was a chain of short meetings. This time all people I know personally “here”, at least in some way. Notable is a conversation with one of my best friends, about that we are in a dream, and some other stuff. There is more, like a girl I know singing a Led Zeppelin song.
Now comes the part which I find very important. Somewhere in this sequence of dreams there was a different type of experience. Near the end or perhaps at the end. I am in some kind of place, perhaps a boat, but I am not sure. I am thinking again about my flight from an earlier part of this story. In hindsight, perhaps this means I found what I came for?
A small addition between the events: After this there was a confrontation with the entity you called “astral terrorist St. Germaine”. I am not fully aware of the back story, whether this dark entity impersonates the real Germaine, or if it simply is a dark entity. Anyway, the story continues:
While thinking about flying there is another person. I believe a male, but now I am not so sure. This entity made a comment which I found to be ironic or sarcastic. It was something like “the only way to fly is as described by St. Germaine”.
This was either 1. the typical new age person saying something stupid or 2. a fellow PAT member making fun of such a new age ignorance. I am not entirely sure but tend to option 2.
After a very short time of walking I approach a staircase going down, and look at it. I don’t use the staircase. Then, I feel very strong destructive interference and realize that this staircase is somehow related to this entity “St. Germaine”. I can see how astral terrorist is an appropriate name, because he really tried to destroy me with a fear attack. But I did not let this happen. By realizing that I can never be destroyed and that I have huge power, I called upon an enormous amount of energy to protect myself and to neutralize this dark entity. And this is where I woke up. My soul tells me, that I have done extremely well, and of course I am very happy about this.
Love & Light
Daniël
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July 1, 2012
George,
Well June has come and gone and I really am not that disappointed like I was after 11/11/111. I know that all will happen in time and I still believe that time will be soon. This is the first weekend in a long time that I have felt functional. Seems the heavy waves that hit us around the solstice have subsided for now and probably to reappear in some form around the full moon. It is time for independence day celebrations in the US and it never seemed more ridiculous.
I have been having many dream lately I think about ascension. I dreamed that I was in my old college dormitory after my graduation packing up my few belongings. My roommate was there but he was so slow that I became frustrated with him I started packing his belonging myself to hurry the process and announced to him that we had to return home now.
Another dream was that my wife was pregnant and obviously ready to deliver. I said to her you know I think a lot of our recent problems have been because you are pregnant and when you deliver I think we will be much better.
I have so enjoyed your recent posts. Yes you are so correct about the fluffy websites and not many men at least straight men even bother to review them or at least post to them. I read one of them once who speculated that most people ascending were middle aged women. Because few men ever posted to their web site, they speculated that about 90% of all light workers were women. Many articles were about how men had abused the world and how the divine feminine would take revenge on men and change the world.
Of course men have abused the world because they have been the ones in positions of power, but the Hillary Clintons and Nancy Pelosis of the world who risen to power act more masculine and power hungry than even the men. Its just a crazy missed up society, actually a disgrace that we have not progressed any further, no matter if men or women are in power as long as the system stays the same, it won’t matter.
Jerry
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On the Orion Financial System in “Neoplatonism and Christianity -Serial 1”
July 1, 2012
Dear George,
I have been reading your website, and do always since my first discovery of it a couple of month ago. I have learned much.
This past Tuesday, I returned to the mountains of Western North Carolina from a visit to my mom. She had a successful medical procedure. The trip was only to be for about 5 days and ended up being a nightmare of two weeks in the very horrific 3-D reality! No details, just so very glad to be home!
I was so frustrated when I returned that I did not leave the house for 3 days. No we are in the midst of a record breaking heat wave, even here in the mountains. On the day before I went out, I was trying to communicate with HS and Source. I did this all day and into the night. Didn’t hear anything. The next day when I went out, HS began rising up in me and confirming things to me. I had come completely to the place of being fed up with the 3-D state and everything that is going on (on the planet) and my words were “I’m Done”! I had even told my mom that, (I’m done) before I left. (This was regarding efforts to have relationship with my brother & his wife, as well as some other areas.)
In my thoughts I had kept saying that I don’t know what to do and that I need direction; but as I was driving this past Friday I said aloud ‘I know exactly what I have to do’ and overwhelming peace engulfed me.
I had read your posting on ‘Neoplatonism & Christianity – Series 1’ and was so excited that you and others clearly see what is happening in the USA as well as globally. Talking about the financial situations of this nation (et al), the truths you wrote were so right on. I had been seeing this, in the happening, all through the years of my career. Slowly, and subtly, there wasn’t any more career choices to be made that didn’t have to do with money. There isn’t a GNP any more. Every job is either a service or having to do with ‘creating’, ‘moving’, ‘hiding’ ‘playing with’, or ‘making people think’ they have money. Almost every product in the USA comes from somewhere else. We don’t make anything anymore. That’s why there are no jobs. That’s why people over here don’t have any money. That’s why the service people and ‘shakers & movers’ are only there for the ‘silver spoon’ folks. That’s why this country is falling apart.
Now, I’m no Harvard grad, but why can others NOT see such a blatant truth?! This brings me to your other posting on “The Know & Know Not in Current New Age Movement”.
One of your postings from today was a PAT member recalling conversations with LWs about Obama, and their rejection of her thoughts. While I agree that Obama was not solely responsible for the current conditions in the USA, he sure as hell has done all in his power to make them worse. Again, not being a Harvard grad, I can SEE this.
When I first moved to WNC, my friends got involved with some (wealthy) new agers. They started sharing all of the new stuff they were learning with me. I am one who does not swallow everything, hook-line-and sinker, so I pondered everything cautiously. HS enabled me to take what was good and accurate, and discard the rest. As I met some of those LW, I found that their lives were not any more ‘together’ than anyone else. Also, most, if not all, of them were pro-obama. WHAT???? How can anyone claim to be enlightened and have clarity of spirit and NOT see what this man is?
I have concluded that most of the new agers
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‘There have been so many deaths, yet the message doesn’t seem to be getting through.
‘We did lots of interviews, posted leaflets around our area and gave talks in schools.
‘Apart from campaigning, I am at a loss to know what can be done. Parents just simply have to be aware that these cords can kill.’
It is a message that RoSPA, along with the trade organisation representing manufacturers and sellers of blinds, the British Blind and Shutter Association and others have been trying to hammer home with the joint Make It Safe campaign, with thousands of leaflets and safety devices handed out nationwide.
Home danger: There has been 12 deaths in the past two years where children under four have been strangled by cords of venetian blinds
As it stands, European safety standards regulations require that all looped blind cords come with some kind of safety device to address the issue of loose cords.
This can be a cleat attached to the wall, so the cords can be safely tucked away, or a break connector that, as its name suggests, causes the cord to break when a weight pulls on it.
The problem with cleats is that they can easily go unused.
From early next year, the European safety standard will be bolstered to ensure all blinds come fitted with break connectors.
But there is still a question mark over whether this will provide an adequate solution.
As Joy Edwards asks, who determines what weight is applied before the break cord mechanism is triggered? Leah was a small child, much lighter than Luis. Would her death have been prevented?
Michael Corley of RoSPA says that officials will monitor the situation closely.
‘It’s simply not acceptable for a product that’s so widely available to be so potentially dangerous,’ he says.
Whatever changes come, it is clear there remains a danger in the form of the millions of existing blinds with looped cords hanging in homes around the country.
‘There are at least 200 million fitted and we don’t know what proportion of those are safe,’ says Mr Corley.
‘These accidents are eminently preventable, so I would say look around your house — it only takes five minutes.’
This plea is echoed by Dr Joe Brierley, a consultant in paediatric intensive care at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital.
‘As an intensive care doctor I have looked after children who have died from this very problem,’ he says. ‘It’s devastating for the families involved.’
‘Toddlers love to explore. They go looking in nooks and crannies and because they’re so small they will put their head through a loop — then, as they try to get out, the loop strangles them.
‘Often the parent won’t hear any noise because the cord is squashing the voice box. Death can happen very, very quickly — within minutes. It is very sad.’
Campaign: Harrison Joyce's parents threw their blinds in the bin the day their son died and launched a campaign for 'Harrison's Law', hoping to ban the sale of looped cords on curtains and blinds in the UK
Look around a paediatrician’s house, he says, and it would be unusual to find blinds or curtains with loose cords for the very reason that they are all too familiar with the dangers.
‘When you see a family go through something like this it is awful,’ says Dr Brierley.
‘The most important thing is to prevent this — parents just need to take a little moment to look around, and not just in their own homes.
‘With Christmas approaching, children might be going to stay with grandparents. Check their windows, too.’
In Lichfield, Staffordshire, businessman Scott Joyce and his partner Rachel Lawlor wish with all their hearts they had known the danger hanging at their window.
They threw their blinds in the bin on the day their son Harrison, three, died in February 2010.
Rachel, 39, had popped upstairs for just a few moments to check her computer, leaving Harrison sleeping on the sofa in the living room. She was alerted by the cries of her eldest son Brandon, now 15.
‘He was 12 at the time,’ says Scott, 40. ‘It made him grow up very quickly. Our lives were ruined — it just destroys the family.
‘Everybody says their child is special, but Harrison was a super special boy, a little footballer, brilliant brother, older than his age. That loss is what we now have to live with.’
Solace for this family, as with the Edwardses and the Warners, has come from trying to make a difference, trying to ensure no other family suffers as they have.
Harrison’s death was followed by the death of another toddler, Lillian Bagnall-Lambe, aged 16 months, in Stafford, just five days later.
The two infant deaths led to Andrew Haigh, coroner for South Staffordshire, urging the Government to look again at existing safety measures.
‘The frequency of deaths of this kind is more of a problem than we would anticipate or expect,’ he said.
‘Is there any way to more strictly enforce the existing British standard as to what should happen with blind cords? If not, the next step is to ban looped blind cords.’
There are other alternatives, such as blinds that work using a spring operation or a battery- operated motor.
Scott Joyce believes a ban is the only solution. In the wake of his son’s death, he and Rachel set up a charity called Harrison’s Law, campaigning against the sale of loop corded blinds in the UK.
‘These deaths are going to keep happening until these blinds are banned,’ says Scott.
‘We have always said that we want cords gone all together and that is the only way to stop the problem.’When James Craig took on the job as Detroit Police chief last year, the city was facing the prospect of bankruptcy, the political structure had collapsed, an emergency manager was in place, police precincts were closed to the public after 4 p.m. and the department was in need of a serious shakeup.
Craig came in, reopened the precincts to the public, thinned out what he saw as a bloated executive staff, put more cops on the street and drastically reduced the number of officers on the mayor’s security detail.
Nearly one year after taking office, crime is down, including carjackings, homicide solution rates have improved and police are responding quicker to emergency calls.
Not to say that all is fine. Not everyone in the police department agrees with Craig's changes. And carjackings, shootings and crime in general remain far too pervasive
“As much as I tell you that I’m comfortable in telling you crime is down that doesn’t mean that we have fixed it. I’m saying the work continues,” he tells Deadline Detroit.
Craig, a Detroit native, started his career as a Detroit cop. He went on to the Los Angeles Police Department, where he rose to the rank of captain. He then became police chief in Portland, Maine, and later Cincinnati, his last stop before coming here.
In a recent interview at police headquarters, Craig sat down with Deadline Detroit’s Allan Lengel and talked about a number of subjects, including leadership at the department, gun ownership for citizens, Kevyn Orr and Mike Duggan, the pervasiveness of marijuana, his high-profile raids and criticism he got when he drove off after a man approached his car at a traffic light.
The following interview was condensed and the questions were edited for clarity.
DD: Are there similarities when you talk about crime here in Detroit and you talk about crime in places like Cincinnati?
Craig: There are more unique things here. I’ve said publicly in recent weeks, Detroiters have been somewhat desensitized by violent crime. Detroit, you talk about desensitized to violence, but also the fact that we see instances of seniors being victimized. That’s kind of odd. I ‘m not saying other cities don’t have seniors who are victims. But here, when you talk about a senior who takes a stroll to a gas station everyday, his quality of life is taking that daily walk to go get his scratch off, and he’s confronted by two armed suspects, who declare that they are going to rob him and instead of taking his wallet they shoot him.
When there’s a carjacking in other places it really rings a bell. It has been common here. It’s almost as if people have come to accept it.
DD: What was your impression when you first came here?
Craig: I got here July 2013. You’ve got a police department that wasn’t responding to calls for service; 58 minute average response time; 11 percent clearance rate for homicides, morale was at the low of the low. Police officers lost 10 percent of their pay. The uniform police officers were forced on 12- hour shifts while their supervisors and officers in special operations units remained on 8. And that created a division. Police stations closed at 4 o’clock. Service delivery to the neighborhoods in my view was non-existent. It just wasn’t important.
DD: Did that blow you away?
Craig: It blew me away. I was shocked. Instead of having officers in the field, we had, even my office, when I got here we had people performing clerical functions. In my view those are people that need to be in the field. Or even the former mayor’s security detail, was hovering around 23 sworn officers. And I make a comparison because when I look at a place like Los Angeles that has 4 million people. the mayor only had a security detail of 6.
Kwame Kilpatrick
DD: How many officers are on the mayor’s detail now?
Craig: I ended up reducing the former mayor’s detail down to six police officers because, to me, I felt that that was not an efficient way of using sworn police officers. I remember as a LAPD captain in LA when I was working at the (BET Awards Ceremony) and the mayor of Detroit comes up, and then Kwame, was the mayor. I must have counted 5 to 10 Detroit police officers. I thought it was odd. Then the mayor of LA rolls up sometime after and he’s got one or two LAPD officers, I’m thinking, something is wrong with this picture. So coming here, certainly that was on my radar.
DD: What year was that?
Craig: Maybe 2008, 2007.
DD: What other problems did you see in the department?
Craig: It was not uncommon in some districts, there would be anywhere between 40 to 60 runs held between shifts. So you’ve got to wonder. People didn’t get service. In fact police didn’t show up. I’m not blaming the police officers. Police officers wanted to do police work. Clearly there was an absence of leadership, a total absence of leadership.
DD: You come here and you obviously see a culture that needs to be changed. Did you get a lot of pushback when you’ve tried?
Craig: Ironically, I didn’t. From the police officers and sergeant ranks, they were supportive of change. They recognized that something was wrong here. There was no interest in doing what needed to be done to serve the neighborhoods. They wanted to be police officers. Certainly it’s no secret the organization was top heavy. So I went quickly about the business of eliminating some of the top ranking positions. I think we eliminated by way of example, nine commander positions. We eliminated some deputy chiefs.
DD: Did they serve a function?
Craig: In my view, what I saw you had commanders or executive officers who had meaningless positions and so I eliminated them. I didn’t fire anybody. Some opted to retire. Some operated from the status quo. I needed to change and look for individuals who would embrace this new DPD.
DD: Do you feel like you’ve made a dent?
No doubt. When I look back. It’s hard for me to assess the dramatic change. For me this is normal.
For one, for example. We’re now sitting on a homicide clearance rate that’s comparable to other large cities like LA. We’re now sitting probably high 80s, low 90s. And really I would tell you there’s no magic to it. The community, coming in the door, when I got here, had no confidence in the Detroit Police Department and the reason why is because..If they can’t call us for help they’re not going to communicate with us. They’re not going to share information about crimes in their neighborhoods with us.
And that’s part of what was going on here. Confidence is returning, people are talking to us.
DD: Were there other reasons for the low clearance rate?
Craig: Some of it was just lazy investigative work. So when we took a look and bumped up to like 40 percent; it was still embarrassing. I set a soft goal of reducing overall crime by five percent reduction and we ended the year with a 10 percent reduction in overall crime. I was excited to be able to see a decline, but we still had too many murders.
DD: Did that get you angry to see 11 percent clearance rate?
Craig: I wouldn’t use the word angry. I would just say shocked. Appalled. But again, not blaming the police officers or the line folks who do the work here. They had no leadership. It was like nobody cared.
DD: Do you feel your mass raids, that have been highly publicized, have had an impact? Some people have applauded you and others have been skeptical, saying it’s more show than substance.
Craig: Yeah, some feel it’s staged, Hollywoodish. I would say absolutely not. We’ve gone in, we’ve made arrests. What’s more important to me is when I look at the community’s perception, impression of what going on today. There’s not a day that goes by that people don’t approach me and say “I appreciate the job that not only you but the police department is doing.’ We feel like a difference is being made. We feel there’s a change.
DD: You were hired by Keyn Orr. Do you deal with the mayor right now or do deal directly with Kevyn Orr?
Craig: Both. With the new mayor, I attend weekly cabinet meetings and we communicate on a variety of issues. For example, if there’s an officer-involved shooting, I’ll call the mayor.
DD: How would you describe your relationship with the mayor?
Craig: I would describe it as positive.
DD: Do you expect to stay here after Kevyn Orr leaves?
Craig: I welcome the opportunity to continue on. I’m certainly enthusiastic, not only about the work that’s been done, just from the public safety side of the house, but the things that we see happening city wide, when you talk about blight, we talk about the strategies that the mayor is using to hold people accountable. He’s driving the city in the direction that I think’s good for Detroit. Holding people accountable. Not embracing the status quo.
Some of the same things certainly I saw coming in the door in the police department where there was totally an absence of accountability. So my fights with the early management team was getting that team to understand accountability. Being responsible, being responsive. And those things were clearly not part of the regular conversation here.
DD: Let me ask you in terms of drug sales. Has the problem improved at all in the city?
Craig: What you see with drugs in Detroit is no different than any other large urban city. Crack is really not as prevalent in Detroit now. I can’t speak about what it was before. Crack still exists but the drug of choice, frankly, in Detroit has been marijuana. And marijuana has driven a lot of crime.
DD: You see places like Colorado where the sale and use has been legalized. Would it help for marijuana to be legal here?
Craig: I’m not for pro-legalizing marijuana. I know there’s individuals who believe if you legalize marijuana that crime all of sudden would disappear. I don’t buy it. And I don’t embrace it. I think if they legalized it there would still be a black market for marijuana sales. There would still be crime associated with it and so I just don’t see that as the answer.
DD: Over many years there were turf wars and crack corners. Is that happening like that with marijuana?
Craig: I don’t think it is to the degree of crack. But I don’t have the body of Detroit knowledge on how neighborhoods were divided up for drug sales. Although, yes we do have gangs in Detroit, not organized to the degree you see in a Los Angeles.
DD: What kind of gangs are we seeing here?
Craig: Street, loosely organized street, cowardly gang members, and emphasis on cowards.
DD: Selling drugs?
Craig: Some sell drugs. Some commit robberies, carjackings. They engage in a variety of different criminal enterprises. Then again, I don’t find them as structured as what you see in Los Angeles. I’ve launched a gang intelligence unit to address it.
DD: In terms of the media, as in many places,it isn’t always kind. Some in the media gave you a hard time about the carjacking incident where you drove off.
Craig: Yeah. They did. It was unfair. As I’ve said repeatedly, it wasn’t a carjacking incident. I’m not calling it that. Now, clearly as I’ve said in the past and I’m consistent with this: A person runs up to the side of my car, I don’t see a weapon, so should I assume that this person was going to carjack me? Possibly. I mean is it odd that someone would run toward your car stopped at a light? It’s odd. If the person came up with a gun, beating on my door, that’s clear. So if this police chief would have reacted to a person running, who I didn’t see with a weapon, what would the story have been then?
See what’s interesting about the media here which is very different in other places; Folks will take something like that and run with it. He didn’t even make contact with my car. So I made an evasive move. I’m off duty.”
DD: I think some people said, “Well, he’s the chief, he should have pulled out his gun instead of taking off."
Craig: Done what? To an unarmed person running up to my car. Really?
I’m just saying to you. Do you think, what if for the sake of argument, that this person was running to my car to ask for directions and I pulled my gun out? Would that have been a felonious assault? Would that have been proper, for the police chief? For anybody? It would not have been. For the media to continue to call it an attempt, to call it a carjacking, borders on irresponsibility.
DD: Did that bother you?
Craig: It doesn’t necessarily bother me so much. All I ask, can we be fair?
DD: And you felt it was unfair?
Craig: I’m not whining about it. You brought up the question. I know it’s a sexy story. If I had seen a gun or a weapon, my response would have been different. I don’t know what more I could have done.
DD: Benny Napoleon, when he ran for mayor, said he was going to reduce most crimes by 50 percent. Was that realistic?
Craig: It’s realistic if you have a plan to do it. I mean it could be. I mean, what’s the plan?
DD: That’s kind of a high number, 50 percent?
Craig: Well, 50 percent is high. I have seen and been part of double-digit reductions. For example, year to date, we’re sitting on a 35 percent reduction in robbery, as compared to last year. Carjackings, the first time, the steepest reduction since the beginning of the year: 22 percent. Here’s another fun fact. So, first quarter of the year, the month of March, we saw 10 homicides. That was the lowest number of recorded homicides during a month since 2001. I think the other low month I think was January. We are seeing is a slight uptick in aggravated assaults. And the reason why we’re seeing an uptick, 3 percent, because of domestic violence incidents.
I was trying to figure out, why are we seeing an increase in domestic violence incidents as compared to last year. And then it hit me. When I got here, 40 to 60 calls were being held. It’s reasonable to believe that we didn’t go to calls for service. If we’re holding that number of calls, how many calls went unanswered? What I’m saying is, we go to calls now and when we go there we report crime. There’s been a history here of underreporting.
This year we set an overall goal of 10 percent reduction of crime. Year to date, right now, we’re sitting on 20 percent, that includes both violent and property crime.
DD: You’ve been an advocate of lawful citizens having guns and a lot of people have applauded you and some criticized you for that. Obviously you think it’s a good thing?
Craig: I think it’s good for people to protect themselves, their families and when necessary, protect someone from an imminent threat to their lives or facing great bodily injury. I’m not an advocate of violence. I do not promote vigilantism, I promoted life, I promote nonviolence, and I do promote law abiding citizens who are eligible to get a concealed weapons license, who are trained and who are responsible when faced with an imminent threat to their life. It’s the law that they can protect themselves.
DD: To play devil’s advocate, some people may say, well some of those lawful citizens might drink one night, get in an argument with their spouse and may do something foolish.
Craig: And those things could happen. Let’s change the conversation. When I get that kind of criticism, I say let’s turn that around for a minute. Let’s talk about how we keep guns out of the hands of criminals. Let’s talk about how we keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill. Now I don’t have all the answers. How many law abiding citizens wander out committing mass shootings? How many law-abiding citizens are out committing armed carjackings, robberies, shootings? How many are doing that? I say that none are. I say that it's criminals and when you talk about these horrific instances that we read about across the nation, it generally involve the mentally ill.
Cover of the NRA magazine
DD: You were on the cover of the NRA magazine. People often have strong opinions about the NRA. What was the reaction you got for being on the cover?
Craig: If I were to do my own poll, people who have come to me, 99.5 percent are favorable. People approached me, other law enforcement colleagues would approach me, and say: “We appreciate your comment. “ My comments were focused on self defense.
DD: If you had one wish for this department what would it be?
Craig: I would want Detroit Police officers to be compensated on par with their colleagues in other major cities. Again, I’ve said publicly, Kevyn Orr did not bring this fiscal crisis to Detroit. Kevyin Orr is fixing it, giving the hand he‘s dealt. It was the greedy, dirty corrupt, status-quo politicians that destroyed this city. Certainly I’m talking about past administrations, I’m going back before Bing. They didn’t invest in this police agency, they didn’t invest in public safety, they didn’t care about it. It’s evident. I mean when you look at the dilapidated vehicles. The blessing for us, our friends in Detroit corporate world donated 100 new police vehicles and that was great.
DD: Do you feel comfortable getting gas here in Detroit?
Craig: I would be aware of my surroundings. As much as I tell you that I’m comfortable in telling you crime is down, that doesn’t mean that we have fixed it. I’m saying the work continues. We started a lighthouse project out in the neighborhoods and there’s gas stations that I would feel very comfortable going to. But I would certainly, day or night, if I was going to gas station and there was a lot of loitering activity, a place that appeared to be unsafe, I certainly would be concerned.
DD: Is there something gas station owners can do?
Craig: You know every time there’s an incident associated with, say a gas station, the first question that I have is: “Have we gone by and had a conversation with management? Was the place dirty?”
You might think why is that important? Well, it’s important because when you talk about the broken windows theory, that if you allow the small things to occur, it draws in larger issues like carjackings, robberies, shootings. Just pick a location where there’s been a number of incidents and I will tell you there are other small things that pre-existed those more serious events.
DD: How many officers do you have?
Craig: Currently we’re sitting on 2,300. We just graduated a class of 21 or 22. We’re set to start a class of 50 sometime this month.
DD: How many do you feel you really need?
Craig: I get asked that question often. One of the things that I’m in the process of doing and have done since I’ve gotten here is make sure, with fewer officers, we’re operating in a more effective and efficient way than we were, say over a year ago when we had more officers.
I’m not suggesting we’re at that magic number. We’re making a very thorough evaluation of every single full-duty, sworn officer where they work, what jobs they’re performing, because I’ve got to believe we still have room for improvement. And while right now our average response time is hovering between 10 and 11 minutes, we set a goal for 2014 of five minutes, which is a stretch goal. I would admit that. I think the national average for response time to emergencies, nationally is 11 minutes. That said, I’m still pushing.
DD: What’s your opinion of your first year?
Craig: Excited. I certainly regard the men and women who do this job here in Detroit, the police officers, are some of the best in the nation. They were craving for leadership. Leadership was absent and so with right leadership they’re responding. The fact when you look at some of our high profile homicide cases, the tragic murder involving the CVS security guard, that murder was solved within days, which is a very different response than in the past. There’s a commitment.
All in all, I’m excited about a number of things that we’re doing in terms of serving this community. I’m excited that people come to me daily and say they appreciate the job you’re doing, appreciate the job the department is doing. We feel a change. I hear people saying, “Hey, I want to move back to the city.”Who are the ‘skeptics’? There’s celebrity woo-hunters, like Simon Singh (journalist, physicist), Ben Goldacre (journalist, almost fully qualified psychiatrist) and Brian Cox (TV presenter, physicist). As successful media players, they have a public profile, readers, fans. But their reputation is critically fed by a substantial subgroup of skeptic supporters – groupies? – who follow them around in cyberspace and in the real world. Who are these unsung skeptics?
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(should this be all Greek to you, then shut up, Bignose – he means Geek!)
The O.E.D. explains a geek as one “extremely devoted to and knowledgeable about computers or related technology. […] self-designation, not necessarily depreciative” and “obsessively devoted to a particular pursuit”. ‘Science geek’ has not yet earned an entry even in the Urban Dictionary, but give it time: this is a sub-group now (as in much skeptic newspeak, meanings shift – ‘science’ here no longer means science as we knew it but a vague, quasi-Newtonian-post-Darwinist dogma). The word once meant a foolish/offensive/worthless person, which by extension became ‘dupe’ – someone who is easily misled, a fool.
It is worth noting then that the unelected king of the skeptic movement is one James Randi, a conjurer who has often pointed out that making dupes of people is his profession and his pleasure. It’s just his followers, the self-designated geeks, assume he doesn’t mean them….
A tag cloud created from skeptic twitter biogs: the interest focus, distilled into 30 words, of a wide network of twitter-linked skeptics who share in active efforts to discredit and ridicule the work of complementary practitioners everywhere, by fair means and foul.
Foul? Depends on your point of view: Ben Goldacre prefers to call it “the simple, enduring pleasure of baiting morons”. Like the growing trend to orchestrated mail deluges. One ombudsman-judged mass campaign that was made public was declared officially ‘vexatious’. And how about pretending to be a homeopathy student, stealing postings from a confidential practitioners’ forum, or passing university teaching material to blogger skeptics for ridicule and mis-representation in public? A simple pleasure?
Because there is now a small army of such bandwaggoners, UK skepticism has become more than just a harmless hobby for Mr. Dawkins and friends. There’s almost 6000 people on the so-called badscience forums, more elsewhere. Many engage in the ‘pleasure’ of ‘moron baiting’ activism. Almost all self-define as ‘geeks’.
That tag cloud reflects the aspirational more than the actual – so here, synthesised from the wealth of skeptic online self-expression, is a fine portrait of the would-be hero of rationalism: Average Skeptic Geek.
A bloke, of course (there are girl skeptics. But few). He’s ‘into’ rock music and treasures his vintage Led Zep t-shirt. His science comes from New Scientist. He works at a glass-clad company HQ outside Reading, in IT. He’s 26: still young enough to have all the answers – or trust that someone else does and it’ll only be a question of time until he too has acquired the knowledge t-shirt.
Meantime he’s happy to copy what Simon (Singh) Says. “200 studies show that homeopathy has no effect beyond placebo”. Has he read the studies, can he assess the methodologies? No (Even Simon hasn’t read them critically, actually – too risky; he might find out he got it wrong) – he isn’t a medic but a software guy. He likes things in black and white, and his science is rooted in the simple ‘truths’ of the school syllabus, expanded by knowledge-lite ingested from celebrity-fronted TV shows.
Thanks to youth and luck he’s never been seriously ill so has little experience of just how ‘evidence based’ our health service is (not), and his insight into drugs effects is strictly recreational. He applauds the skeptic bloggers who dissect interminably anything they consider ‘woo’, spends hours online in skeptic pursuits. His activities, his consumption, his books by Dawkins, Singh et al, feed a deep need: to feel himself anchored in a reassuringly mechanical universe in which all the cogs click along explicably, and all gaps will fill ‘logically’ in the course of guaranteed progress. Of course he is ‘an atheist’.
His fandom embraces the ‘skeptic’ comedians who make this world view seem so right, so obvious, and easy laughs make him feel at one with the virtual community of bods who seem to have the truth on ‘life’ and the ‘universe’. He doesn’t consider the ‘everything’ too much, that limitless expanse of uncertainty.
Uncertainty is the geek’s great fear. That’s why he lashes out at people who offer a different viewpoint. He has no hope of explaining everything from within the safety of the mechanistic paradigm. So the fearful inexplicable morphs into ‘woo’ – cue the ‘enduring pleasure of moron baiting’. Skeptic forums, skeptic pub meets: occupational therapy for the geeks? Aw, bless ’em.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Jan. 15, 2016, 1:27 PM GMT / Updated Jan. 15, 2016, 1:28 PM GMT By Andy Eckardt
MAINZ, Germany — A spate of Hundreds of sex assaults allegedly committed mostly by North African men on New Year's Eve in Cologne has sparked an "explosion in sales" of pepper spray and non-lethal guns, German officials and an industry chief said.
Authorities are investigating more than 670 criminal complains — almost 350 of them sexual offenses — after hundreds of women were groped and robbed by groups of men outside the main railway station in the western city.
"We saw a huge spike of sales numbers after January," said Ingo Meinhard, head of the German association for gunsmiths and weapons dealers.
The association expected purchases of "so-called deterrents and defensive small arms" to at least double in 2016 following the Cologne attacks, Meinhard told NBC News.
“CS gas spray, stun guns and pepper spray are especially in great demand,” he added.
Related: Many Germans' Views on Foreigners Change After Sex Assaults
Two weeks after the mass incidents on New Year's Eve, the number of criminal complaints reached 676 on Friday — including 347 sexual offenses, Cologne prosecutor Ulrich Bremer said. Five suspects are in investigative custody.
In addition to defensive sprays, Cologne police said it had already received more than 300 applications from adults wanting to carry imitation handguns and so-called gas pistols.
This was compared to 408 licenses for these weapons issued during all of 2015, police spokeswoman Daniela Lindemann said.
Germany's strict gun laws mean that only hunters and professional marksmen are allowed to obtain licenses for lethal arms and would-be buyers are subject to background checks.
Related:Politician Sends Busload of Refugees to Germany's Merkel
Cologne prosecutors are now offering a reward of 10,000 euros ($11,000) for information leading to the arrest or identification of those who committed the sexual assaults and robberies on New Year’s Eve.
According to police, most of the suspects are North African men.
More than 1.1 million migrants and refugees arrived in Germany last year — including many who fled the civil war in Syria.By
In a recent article that he wrote himself for the Chicago Sun-Times, former White Sox pitcher Jim Parque has come clean about his use of performance-enhancing drugs in 2003 when he was attempting to come back from shoulder injuries. Most of us have suspected Parque as PED user (HGH) since the Mitchell Report came out, and today’s article confirms those suspicions.
My visceral reaction while reading the article also confirms, at least to me, that every former PED user should do the exact same thing that Parque has done.
I am not going to fill this post with excerpts or try to over-summarize the article. Â Parque wrote it himself and I believe it is important enough to warrant being consumed fully in his own words. Â However, before I link you there and then move on with my reactions, I will pull out the following quote because it is the most compelling statement that Parque makes:
“As long as it is not hurting others” is the quandary I struggled with when I decided to take HGH. Who am I responsible to, the game or my family? Even though the game gave me a lot, my family means everything to me, and I must put them first. Were they going to starve if I stopped playing? No, but I did not want to sacrifice our lifestyle or put them in a situation in which ”the unknown” was dictating our future. Did I hurt people? Did I disgrace baseball? Yes, but I was trying to preserve a financial future, keep my family’s lifestyle intact and keep a lifelong journey alive.
Follow the link to read Jim Parque’s HGH admission at the Chicago Sun-Times in its entirety.  The following article by Joe Cowley also provides a little bit of the backstory behind Parque’s decision to come forward about this HGH use.
And here is what I would like to say to Jim Parque: kudos to you man.
While I think Parque comes off as even more defensive and apologetic than he needs to be, his article is undeniably genuine and absolutely should be a lesson for the multitudes of other baseball players who faced similar situations and made similar decisions.
I have long been frustrated with the performance-enhancing drug problem in baseball, and have discussed these frustrations a lot here at MSF. Â Clearly one of the reasons is that spectacular feats like the Summer of Big Mac and Sammy, and Barry Bonds’ records, among many others, now seem tainted and dirty. Â But more profound than even the disgust at not knowing what numbers and feats to trust is the consistent disappointment of learning that the athletes I adored, and whose every move I followed, could turn out to be liars and cheats.
I am someone who is still in that somewhat awkward mid- to late-20s transition phase where you go from innocent, idealistic kid to the more realistic and perhaps even jaded perspective of a man. Â Only over the last few years have I truly been able to let go of my old notions of baseball, and the sports world as a whole, as this idyllic place where everything is “pure” and the laws of human nature that govern the rest of life do not apply. Â And this applies to much more than just performance-enhancing drug use to include the myriad examples of legal troubles and other character issues we see on an almost daily basis.
To use a book/movie reference, if the world was Middle Earth I always perceived the sports world to be The Shire. Â I’d imagine that’s not uncommon for someone like me to have such a perception, someone who grows up the son of a college football coach living a fun and carefree life in which the players that you watch and idolize on Saturday are your baby-sitters, and pick you up from school sometimes when Mom or Dad can’t, and treat you like a king in the locker room, and on and on.Â
This leads me to the most prominent reason why baseball’s sordid recent history of lying, cheating drug use has disappointed me so much. Â I was innocent enough, and foolish enough, to define my consistent and unyielding fandom with blind faith. Â And now that this blind faith has been violated, repeatedly, it’s disappointing. Â But I have not stopped loving baseball, or stopped trying to give the players the benefit of the doubt in every situation; yet, I feel completely taken advantage of because those same players whose livelihood I support by being a yearly, daily, hourly, passionate fan have not respected me enough to “man up” (to use Parque’s phrase) and just be honest.
And that is why I think Jim Parque’s admission of HGH use in today’s Sun-Times should serve as a lesson to every baseball player, past and present, who has succumbed to the pressure of fans, their family, and their own dreams and ambitions.
The truth is that baseball and the sports world
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on Election Day help people get out the word, get out the comic book, get out — you know, get out the protection. You can’t win anymore by 51 percent. You’ve got to win by 56. I’m not an Obama supporter, but I do believe that every single vote should count.
Six, we call it date a voter. As our sponsor Jesse Jackson said, arrive with five. But, you know — and what we say is, like bowling and love, don’t vote alone. The reason is, you have to protect each other. And when you go in in a group, it’s a lot easier to have the courage to stand up to the vote thieves when they’re challenging you.
And then, of course, last one is, make the democracy demand, which is that if there is games with the vote, the election doesn’t end then on November 4th. It’s Wednesday that counts as much as Tuesday. We have to change the culture of America, where we stop shrugging our shoulders, like after 2000, 2004, and say we’re going to count the votes right now.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Greg Palast, I want to thank you for being with us. Greg Palast and Robert Kennedy, Jr. have come out with a new comic book, Steal Back Your Vote. “Hold it! Who said you could vote?” is on the front page, but they say you can, and they have ways to do it. Thanks very much for being with us. Look forward to your piece in Rolling Stone next week.MIAMI — It was three months into Barack Obama's presidency, and the administration -- under pressure to do something about alleged abuses in Bush-era interrogation policies -- turned to a Florida senator to deliver a sensitive message to Spain:
Don't indict former President George W. Bush's legal brain trust for alleged torture in the treatment of war on terror detainees, warned Mel Martinez on one of his frequent trips to Madrid. Doing so would chill U.S.-Spanish relations.
Rather than a resolution, though, a senior Spanish diplomat gave the former GOP chairman and housing secretary a lesson in Spain's separation of powers. "The independence of the judiciary and the process must be respected,'' then-acting Foreign Minister Angel Lossada replied on April 15, 2009. Then for emphasis, "Lossada reiterated to Martinez that the executive branch of government could not close any judicial investigation and urged that this case not affect the overall relationship.''
The case is still open, on the desk of a Spanish magistrate, awaiting a reply from the Obama administration on whether it will pursue a probe of its own.
But the episode, revealed in a raft of WikiLeaks cables, was part of a secret concerted U.S. effort to stop a crusading Spanish judge from investigating a torture complaint against former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five other senior Bush lawyers.
It also reveals a covert troubleshooting role played by Martinez. Now a banker, he won't discuss it.
ACCUSATION
The cause for alarm at the U.S. Embassy was what a U.S. diplomat called a "well documented'' 12-inch-tall dossier compiled by a Spanish human rights group. In the name of five Guantánamo captives with ties to Spain, it accused the Bush legal insiders of laying the foundation for abuse of detainees in the months following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Of particular concern was that a swashbuckling Spanish magistrate, Baltasar Garzón, might get the probe under Spain's system, which gave judges extraordinary investigative powers.
Garzón had earlier made headlines by swearing out arrest warrants for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet while he was getting medical attention in London, and Osama bin Laden. U.S. ambassador Eduardo Aguirre Jr. cast him as a publicity hound with an ``anti-American streak'' in one confidential cable.
If those efforts are any guide, a Spanish prosecution of the so-called Bush Six seems unlikely. Britain never turned Pinochet over to Spain for a war crimes trial, and bin Laden is still at large.
Rather, indictments would undermine U.S. diplomatic credibility on human rights and likely ground the six Bush lawyers in the United States, for fear of arrest overseas.
Another, April 1, 2009, cable shows the U.S. Embassy's political officer and legal advisor discussing Garzón with his boss, chief prosecutor Javier Zaragoza, who expresses his displeasure with the case. Separately, a third U.S. diplomat told a senior Spanish Justice Ministry official ``for international judicial cooperation'' that the U.S. government considered the potential for a prosecution ``a very serious matter.''
'DRAMATIC'
Civil rights attorney Michael Ratner, whose Center for Constitutional Rights has championed Guantánamo detainee rights, called the cables taken together ``quite dramatic.''
"The U.S. prides itself on our own independent judiciary,'' Ratner said. ``But here you have the hypocrisy of the U.S. government trying to influence an independent judicial system to bend its laws and own rules.''
"And it's the Obama administration doing it to protect Bush people,'' he said.
NOT SPEAKING
Martinez, a former trial lawyer, said through two spokeswomen at JP Morgan Chase, where he's Florida chairman, that he would not comment.
Nor would Bush's political appointee, Ambassador Aguirre, who is now a Houston-based consultant and like Martinez came from Cuba as a teen through the Pedro Pan movement.
International prosecutions aren't unprecedented. Bush's father had U.S. forces invade Panama in 1989 to capture Manuel Noriega, then prosecuted him for allowing Colombian drug runners to ship cocaine through his country to the United States.
Last year, a Miami judge gave Chuckie Taylor, a U.S. citizen, a 97-year sentence for torturing hundreds of Liberians as commander of his president-father's security unit from 1999-2003.
But by the time Spain's Association for the Dignity of Prisoners filed the torture complaint that U.S. diplomatic circles found so troubling, the Obama White House was resisting calls to set up a Truth Commission or assign a special prosecutor to examine the legal framework that set up Guantánamo and permitted ``enhanced interrogation techniques'' that included waterboarding high-value detainees.
``Generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards,'' Obama said on Feb. 9, 2009.
SECRET MEMO
In January 2002, Gonzales, as White House counsel, wrote a secret memo declaring portions of the Geneva Conventions ``quaint'' and ``obsolete'' after 9/11, such as limits on questioning prisoners and giving commissary privileges. Critics said he dismissed international law and laid the legal foundation for abuses.
As a senator, Obama opposed his nomination for attorney general in 2005. Martinez by contrast devoted his first Senate floor speech, Feb. 3, 2005, to defend Gonzales, making history as the first senator to address the chamber in Spanish. ``El Juez Gonzales es uno de nosotros,'' he said, addressing his remarks to Hispanic America, ``Judge Gonzalez is one of us.''
By the time Martinez was campaigning against charging Gonzales, Spain's Supreme Court had already in 2005 overturned the conviction of a terror suspect the media had dubbed ``The Spanish Taliban'' on grounds his Guantánamo interrogations were tainted by conditions the court called ``impossible to explain, much less to justify.''
The American Civil Liberties Union unearthed, through the Freedom of Information Act, Gonzales' ``quaint'' memo as well as Justice Department opinions by Bush lawyers John Yoo, now a Berkeley law professor, and Jay Bybee, now a federal judge in California, that authorized the CIA to use the near drowning technique called waterboarding that is widely condemned as torture.
Others named in the Spanish suit include former Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel, then chief of staff, David Addington; then-Defense Department General Counsel William ``Jim'' Haynes and Doug Feith, a Pentagon undersecretary who handled policy issues for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Garzón, the activist judge, has been suspended for allegedly overstepping his authority in another crimes against humanity case, this one on home turf: The execution or disappearance of more than 100,000 civilians during the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco.
But by then it was assigned to Judge Eloy Velasco, a Garzón colleague who has three times asked the U.S. government to say whether it envisions a similar investigation at home, which would supersede his efforts.
``They've never answered. From the record of this case they've ignored that it even existed,'' said Katherine Gallagher, a staff attorney at the New York Center for Constitutional Rights who is now collaborating with Spanish lawyers seeking Guantánamo prosecutions.
Her boss, Ratner, says news of the meddling may cause blow-back to the U.S. political effort.
``Now that it's been brought out that there were efforts to compromise the Spanish judiciary they're going to have to show their independence,'' he said.
Still unclear is how Martinez, a former trial lawyer, joined the effort to derail the investigation. Gonzales told The Miami Herald ``I had no knowledge'' about the activities of Martinez. Yoo said the same in an e-mail reply.
Neither would discuss the investigation itself.
Moreover, Gonzales argued it would be wrong to assume that Martinez, who quit the Senate four months later, was acting on behalf of any administration -- even though the cable describes the future banker as delivering the message to the foreign minister in tandem with Charge d'Affaires Arnold Chacon.
``Sen. Martinez may have been simply expressing an opinion or view,'' said Gonzales, who like the ambassador calls Martinez ``a friend.''
But a former Bush-era State Department official said, on condition of anonymity, that Martinez got a briefing from the Embassy each time he visited Madrid, either on a congressionally funded trip or as head of an influential Miami-based nonprofit, the United States-Spain Council.
KING CARLOS
Given his pedigree as a Bush insider and 2006-2007 Republican Party chairman, Martinez had greater access than most senators in Madrid. He would invariably offer, said the official, ``Is there a message you'd like me to deliver?''
If he agreed with the message, he'd convey it -- in visits that at one point took him to the palace to greet King Juan Carlos.
"Mel was loyal to President Bush and loyal to the people who were loyal to President Bush,'' said the former Bush-era diplomat. "He didn't look at whether it's the Bush administration or the Obama administration. He asked himself, `Is it the right thing to do?' ''A MAN found dead in a remote bothy is thought to have been an adventurer who hoped to spend a year living alone in the Scottish wilderness.
David Austin, 29, from Derby, was found dead in a hut by a railway worker a mile south of one of Scotland’s most remote stations, Rannoch in Highland Perthshire, on Hogmanay.
His body is believed to have been lying there for several weeks when it was discovered, and a post-mortem examination found there were no suspicious circumstances behind his death.
Mr Austin is thought to have told family in November that he was heading to the Highlands to live out his dream of surviving in the wilderness.
He planned to live rough on a year-long adventure, using techniques like those used by adventurer and TV presenter Bear Grylls, despite being urged to reconsider by family and friends.
He is understood to have attended several courses in outdoor survival and bushcraft skills over the past couple of years with a view to realising a long-held dream of living alone in the wild.
Mr Austin is thought to not even have taken a mobile phone with him.
A number of personal possessions including a knife and a daily journal were found next to his body. It is believed he may have died of hypothermia.
After leaving Derby, Mr Austin is thought to have travelled to Glasgow and then on to Corrour – which is the UK’s highest mainline station – on the West Highland line.
He is then believed to have spent his 29th birthday on 3 December alone outdoors, in the first heavy snowfall of the season.
A hostel employee at the Loch Ossian SYHA hostel on Rannoch Moor, said: “He didn’t stay here. He told me he’d been camping in the woods on the north side of the loch that weekend, then he just mosied over to have a look at the hostel.”
Mary McArthur, one of only four permanent residents in the Rannoch station area, said: “The story we heard was that he had taken a year out from work and was going to live off the land.
“And he was supposed to have walked down the line towards Rannoch station so perhaps he decided to take shelter in the bothy.
“But what happened after that, who knows? We heard he was well equipped and knew what he was doing.
“We heard there were no suspicious circumstances but weren’t sure if it was hypothermia, or a health complaint.
“At the end of the day, it’s someone’s son and a sad way to go in the middle of nowhere all alone.”
His body was found in a remote bothy used by track inspection workers.
A British Transport Police spokesman confirmed the man had been identified as a 29-year-old man from the east Midlands, and that there appeared to be no suspicious circumstances.
A Crown Office spokesman confirmed the procurator fiscal in Perth had recently received a report from BTP but was unable to provide any further details.
Rannoch is an isolated north-west section of Highland Perthshire between the A9 to the east and the A82 to the west, featuring the famous West Highland Railway line that crosses more than 23 miles of moorland.
Survival school instructor Ian Moran, who teaches extreme survival and bushcraft skills, said that it was extremely unlikely anybody could survive a Highland winter outdoors by living off the land.
He said: “It would be a tall order for even the most professional person who calls himself a survivalist.
“Maybe centuries ago, when Scotland was covered in woodland and teeming with wildlife, but not now.”There’s nothing like a little preseason football to remind local NFL beat writers their coverage is no longer necessary.
Before Thursday’s Detroit Lions preseason opener against the New York Jets, MLive Media Group beat reporter Kyle Meinke tweeted news that would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so damned expensive.
Cost for using an ethernet cable at Lions games last yr: $0. Cost for using an ethernet cable at Lions games this yr: $150 … per game — Kyle Meinke (@kmeinke) August 13, 2015
Meinke noted that the cables themselves are free, but to use them to get internet access would cost the reporters in attendance an insane $150 per game.
Factoring in eight home contests and two preseason games, that’s $1500 per reporter for direct internet access in the Ford Field press box, when last season—and presumably every season since the internet in press boxes has existed—the wires and the access they bring were free.
Meinke noted that media were still able to connect via wifi in the Ford Field press box for free, but if anyone has ever worked a game with more than 100 scribes filing stories and photographers stealing all the bandwidth to upload photos, on top of all the wireless interference in the stadium from thousands of fans using their mobile devices, it’s insanely frustrating to cover an event without a solid internet connection.
When the wi-fi breaks every Sunday, yes, they do. https://t.co/u2QAELUYUH — Kyle Meinke (@kmeinke) August 13, 2015
Even all the basic structural concerns of using a wireless system in a space as vast as a stadium press box makes using wifi-only a strange move for a communications staff suddenly charged with troubleshooting internet issues for media instead of working on covering the game.
In short, bad internet makes everyone angry. Angry media will find a way to take out that out on your team. The Lions should have anticipated this.
They also should have anticipated the beat writers would revolt, or at the very least pool their money together and purchase one Ethernet access point to share, then take photos of all of them huddled around a single cord filing stories to shame the Lions into changing their policy.
Thankfully for all involved, it didn’t get to that.
Lions said they were providing free ethernet to first row "as a courtesy" to media. And with spotty wi-fi at Ford Field, we do appreciate it — Kyle Meinke (@kmeinke) August 13, 2015
Without looking at a press row seating chart, the fact the Lions provided free Ethernet to just the first row is also interesting.
In most press boxes, the prominent beat writers get the best seats, which means not only the front row, but the best angle of the field as well (unless you’re a beat writer in Washington where every press box angle sucks, but that’s another story for another day).
The rest of the first row is usually reserved for the second and third scribes from each major local outlet—your once-a-week columnists and the like—as well as national scribes who come in from big shops just on game days. Top opposing-team media usually get first row seating as well, shuttled to one side of the press box or another.
Depending on how popular your team is at the time, the second row could have a bit of overflow from both the local and national groups, and certainly from the opposing-team media, but it’s mostly filled out by online publications and small daily and woebegone weekly papers that still get credentialed for some reason. Oh, and radio guys.
If you ever hear those “let’s go to Detroit for an update from Jim” updates on national radio, Jim is almost always in the second row, and Jim is almost always super loud in the press box when Jim is doing those reports.
The third row is usually reserved for game day staff and random luminaries who aren’t working, but didn’t want to buy a ticket and still need a seat. They usually aren’t using the internet.
It’s the whole attitude of “we don’t need you” that’s the real issue here. Truth be told, NFL teams don’t need the local media at games anymore, which is part of the reason they can (try to) pull this kind of stuff.
With television rights holders paying billions of dollars to put games on the air, it’s in their best interest to cover all the teams in the league. With the NFL and its teams hiring talented journalists away from local media outlets to work on league and team-run websites, a team like the Lions can provide far more access than the media covering them will ever be afforded, making independent local media a competitor to coverage, not a conduit.
To this wired-internet issue specifically, it sort of makes sense why the Lions would be going wifi-only in today’s age of technology—I don’t even have a working laptop anymore, instead going with a tablet-and-keyboard combination—but springing a charge like $150 on media at the first home game is a clear misstep for a team that traditionally needs local media on its good side.
Having worked on the game day communications side for years, I know how much it costs to run a game operation, and I understand why teams have gone away from providing, say, free meals to media, instead charging those in attendance a nominal fee for a pre-game meal.
Teams don’t pay for media to travel to a game, so the courtesy of providing a meal was always just that; a courtesy. The company a writer works for often provides travel expenses, and a meal—be it in the press box, the concession stand or the local fast food joint two blocks from the stadium—should be included in any per diem.
This wasn’t that. This wasn’t a team tired of paying for water bottles to give the media. This was a team standing next to a water cooler and trying to charge $150 per swig.
What the Lions may not have factored: to a beat writer on deadline, good internet is a more life-sustaining commodity than water.Hassan Hassan, an associate fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and South Africa Program, a nonresident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, is co-author of "ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror." He is on Twitter.
As calls increase for airstrikes to destroy the Islamic State’s capacity to extract and transport oil, it should be remembered that even before it laid its hands on lucrative oilfields in eastern Syria, ISIS controlled Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq; Fallujah; and Tal Afar. The calls for airstrikes that target oil extraction overstate the group’s reliance on oil revenue.
Oil's role in the group's rise is exaggerated, but civilians depend on it for income. Without it, they are driven to ISIS as a matter of survival.
Indeed, increasing the rate and scope of airstrikes might be counterproductive.The bombings, especially in eastern Syria, are disrupting the livelihoods of many of those who had relied on trade, transportation and oil-related economic activities before ISIS controlled their areas. After the collapse of the government in eastern Syria, hundreds of families relied on extracting and refining oil to run their heavy vehicles, to pump water to irrigate their distant lands, to generate electricity or to sell the refined oil in the black market to make meager profits to sustain their families.
Airstrikes disrupted this wartime economy and many families, who continued to buy oil from its new owners, ISIS, increasingly found it difficult to find alternative means to survive. This pushed some families to send their sons to join ISIS as the only way to generate a monthly income, according to several individuals living under ISIS. The same trend was seen in Palmyra.
Meanwhile, though some have disputed a report by The Financial Times that estimated ISIS was earning $1.5 million a day from oil, a U.S. raid in May that killed a key ISIS operative involved in oil and gas activities found that the group was making more than that.
A cost-benefit analysis must consider how the airstrikes are affecting civilians and their relationship to ISIS. The tendency to suggest that cutting the group’s finances will lead to its demise ignores the group’s early successes and risks raising false expectations.
Join Opinion on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/roomfordebate.Only 18,000 jobs were created in June, according to the Labor Department. Jobs report clouds debt talks
An unexpectedly weak jobs report Friday hardened the already deep divide between Democrats and Republicans over the debt limit ahead of a critical negotiating session this weekend.
Republicans pointed to the rise in the unemployment rate to 9.2 percent as a reason Democrats should abandon their demand for increased tax revenue as part of any plan to raise the debt limit and reduce the deficit. Democrats responded that Washington needs to focus more on stimulating job growth and less on making cuts to Social Security, Medicare or government spending in general that would weaken the fragile economy.
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The reaction offered a snapshot of the competing pressures that complicate the effort to break a budget impasse. To secure a deficit-reduction deal anywhere close to the $4 trillion target set by President Barack Obama, Republicans would need to sign off on revenue increases and Democrats would need to accept some entitlement cuts.
But after the release of surprisingly grim jobs numbers, neither party appeared any more willing to compromise.
“After hearing this morning’s jobs report, I’m sure the American people are still asking the question: where are the jobs?” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement. “The ‘stimulus’ spending binge, excessive government regulations, and our overwhelming debt continue to hold back job creators around our country. Tax hikes on families and job creators would only make things worse.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) emerged from an hour-long meeting with Obama to say once again that her members would not back entitlement benefit cuts and that any deficit-reduction deal must not “do harm.”
“Whatever cuts we need to make, we have to do so in a way that does not harm our economic growth,” Pelosi said.
“We have to understand the impact of all of these actions,” she said. “That’s why, all this slash-and-burn, take-no-prisoners, cut-cut-cut … in order to reduce the deficit, it does just the opposite because it lowers revenue coming into the Treasury.”
The political maneuvering followed a Labor Department report showing the economy added just 18,000 jobs last month, raising serious concerns about a stalled recovery that could scramble the nascent budget talks and further threaten the president’s reelection prospects.
Obama acknowledged Friday that the U.S. economy has “a long way to go” and urged Congress to take action “right now” to spark growth after another disappointing monthly jobs report.
“The sooner we get this done, the sooner that the markets know that the debt limit ceiling will have been raised and that we have a serious plan to deal with our debt and deficit, the sooner that we give our businesses the certainty that will need in order to make additional investments to grow and hire,” Obama said after the Labor Department released data showing that the unemployment rate had climbed from its 9.1 percent rate in May and far fewer jobs were created than analysts had projected.NEW YORK — Several teams will be missing key players when the NFL season kicks off this weekend.
Most notable among the 26 players suspended by the league are All-Pro running back Le’Veon Bell, who will sit out Pittsburgh’s first two games, and veteran tight end Antonio Gates of San Diego, out for four games.
Bell had his suspension for violating the substance abuse policy (DUI and drug possession arrest in August 2014) reduced from three games. His teammate, wide receiver Martavis Bryant, is banned for four weeks, also for substance abuse.
WATCH: How will the Broncos defense fare against the Baltimore Ravens?
Gates, one of the most prolific players at his position in league history, is docked four games under the performance enhancers policy.
“In my 12 years in the NFL, I have taken tremendous pride in upholding the integrity of the NFL shield and all that it entails,” Gates said when his suspension was announced in July. He indicated he was unaware of what caused the positive test. “I have always believed that ignorance is no excuse when it comes to these issues, and I take full responsibility for my actions.”
Also out are three standout defensive linemen: the Cowboys’ Greg Hardy (personal conduct, four games), the Jets’ Sheldon Richardson (substance abuse, four games) and the Bills’ Marcell Dareus (substance abuse, one game). Richardson could face another suspension, as well. He pleaded not guilty Monday to resisting arrest and traffic charges stemming from his arrest in July in Missouri.
WATCH: Should Roger Goodell give up some of his power?
Three players have suspensions that could last the entire season. Cleveland WR Josh Gordon (substance abuse, indefinite), Miami DE-LB Dion Jordan (substance abuse, season), and Arizona LB Daryl Washington (substance abuse, indefinite).
Other likely starters who won’t be available include Green Bay DT Letroy Guion (substance abuse, three games) and DE Datone Jones (substance abuse, one game); Dallas LB Rolando McClain (substance abuse, four games); Kansas City CB Sean Smith (substance abuse, three games); and Denver safety T.J. Ward (personal conduct, one game).
BRONCOS MAILBAG: Was Montee Ball the biggest NFL draft mistake for John Elway?
Bell’s absence could be particularly damaging for Pittsburgh, which lost a wild-card playoff game to Baltimore in January when Bell was injured. Although the Steelers have a dynamic passing game with Ben Roethlisberger throwing to Antonio Brown, Bell is, well, a bell cow for the offense. Add in the loss of the emerging Bryant and it figures to put a major crimp in Pittsburgh’s offense in games with the Patriots and 49ers.
Hardy’s case has been the most fluid of any of the suspended players. Then with Carolina, he was on the commissioner’s exempt list, unable to play but paid his full salary of $13 million, for 15 games. An arbitrator reduced his original suspension of 10 games to four games upon appeal.
Hardy had been convicted in a domestic violence trial in North Carolina last year, but the conviction was thrown out when his accuser could not be located to testify.
Dallas signed him in the offseason to a one-year, $13.1 million deal loaded with incentives. The Cowboys envision Hardy as the pass-rushing piece to solidify their defense.Sir John hurt by article
Both the Club and I have received a number of complaints today regarding an article in the Reading Chronicle, and I personally share our supporters’ dismay.
In my opinion the nature of the article, and in particular the image manufactured for the front page, completely misrepresents the vast majority of our fans, and their experiences supporting the team both at Madejski Stadium and on the road.
The article itself is an unwarranted and sensationalised attack which undermines everything our club tries to represent. To paint a full picture, last season there was only one Reading fan arrested at Madejski Stadium, and only ten arrests out of nearly half a million home and away fans through the turnstiles, all for minor offences. Those Home Office figures speak for themselves.
I have spent more than a quarter of my life building up this football club on and off the pitch, so I personally take a series of gross misrepresentations in this edition as insults to our club’s good name. No club is perfect, but I and every member of staff work tirelessly to make Madejski Stadium a great place to bring your family and friends and I know Thames Valley Police also take great pride in our exemplary record.
When the Club was named Family Club of the Year by the Football League, it was one of the finest moments of my time here, and remains just as important to me as everything we have achieved on the pitch.
The newspaper also contains a comment relating to the Hillsborough tragedy that has deeply offended many of us in the football family.
With all that in mind, we have decided to suspend our relationship with this particular publication. We have a duty to protect the club’s reputation, and particularly to protect our supporters’ reputation. This is not a decision we take lightly because we value the freedom of the press and have enjoyed excellent relationships with our local media in the past, but we are sure our supporters will agree that we cannot allow the fans’ good name to be besmirched in this way.
So many people have spoken to me today about this article – both supporters and my colleagues here at the club – hurt and disappointed by what they had read. As custodians for Reading Football Club, the right course of action was clear to us all.
Sir John Madejski OBE, DL
ChairmanThe liquor store close by our house has something they call the “beer cave.” It’s an entire refrigerated room dedicated to housing their selection of craft beers. In this cave, over the course of the last handful of years, there has been a marked shift. Walls and shelves of amber bottles have given way to rows of boldly colored aluminum cans. Perhaps you’ve noticed it, too. The number of craft beers in cans has approximately doubled since 2012. And, according to the Brewer’s Association, while about 2% of craft beer was canned in 2011, 2014 data indicated now more than 10% of craft beer is canned.
This means that, while bottles are still more common, cans are making serious headway. So, I wondered, what was behind the shift towards cans? Luckily, I had someone in the know who I could ask: Some of my good friends own a mid-sized craft brewery here in Minnesota, called Bent Paddle, and when they launched three years ago they chose to can their beer right from the start.
The almighty beer cave. Photo by Emily Virkre
The answer, it turns out, is remarkably straightforward. My friends at Bent Paddle, the Craft Brewer’s Association, and the “about us” webpage of Oskar Blues—credited with being the first craft brewery to use cans—all say precisely the same thing. Like, exactly the same thing. As in, if this were college it would be an honor code violation. Which made me wonder if there was some kind of conspiracy or brainwashing involved. It turns out, though, craft breweries that adopt cans are swayed by a distinct set of advantages cans have over bottles. Here they are:
Quality
The quality of beer can be affected by several things, including exposure to light and to air. Cans are more airtight and block out all light. This reduces the risk of degradation and makes the beer more stable, which is especially important to craft beers since most are not pasteurized.
Sustainability
While glass is recyclable, aluminum cans are even more so. In fact, they are pretty damn close to 100% recyclable. As more of us in manufacturing businesses think more deeply about what our environmental impact is, things like recyclability are compelling factors. A recycled beer can can be back on the shelves within 60 days! Because cans are lighter, they’re also more efficient to ship, which is better for the environment and for breweries’ bottom lines.
Photo by Emily Vikre
Feasibility
There have been innovations in both cans themselves and canning lines that have allowed for greater adoption by smaller breweries. Cans now have linings that prevent the beer from picking up a tinny taste. And, canning lines cost a lot less than they did just a few years ago, so more small and medium-sized breweries can afford them.
Bring-with-a-bility
As my friend at Bent Paddle explained, “We always say at Bent Paddle that we like to bring our beer where we like to play—and often times bottles are not the ideal companion.” As canoers, hikers, golf players, and beach goers have decided they want to bring their beer with them for their activities, cans are the more portable option.
Photo by Emily Virkre
These things are all likely true. Or, at the very least, if they’re continually repeated they will become true, just as common usage can change the definition of a word in the Oxford English Dictionary, or make incorrect grammar correct.
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But, let me tell you what else I think: Cans are coming back into vogue because, in about 2008, hipsters decided they liked PBR. It was outside of the mainstream and retro. And it came in cans. That cool, metallic feeling on your lips reminds you of college, of the 1980s, and of an imaginary past when brands were more authentic. Looking outside of the mainstream, Oskar Blue (which, by the way, with great prescience had been canning since 2002, but the brand’s growth began to skyrocket in 2009), was the perfect combination of the PBR-ish look with craft beer taste. Cans became more good. And not just good, but desirable, as people began to give real consideration to claims of cans' potential superiority.
Our perceptions shift the market and the market shifts our perceptions, and with these powers combined, cans will probably continue to see growth. Plus, you can crush a can on your forehead. Can’t do that with a glass bottle.
Fiveandspice, a.k.a. Emily Vikre, is a writer, self-described "food policy wonk," and co-founder of Vikre Distillery. She lives in Duluth, Minnesota. You can read more of her writing here.
Do you prefer beer in cans or bottles? Let us know in the comments below!OVERVIEW
Title Boxing has been producing boxing and MMA training equipment for almost 2 decades, they have one of the easiest to navigate online stores along with a retail store in Kansas. They have become one of the better known brands in combat sports and you can almost bet on seeing ‘Title Boxing’ on at least one bag in every gym you walk into. I was in the market for a good quality Muay Thai bag to use at home, after looking at several brands and options, I went with Title Boxing’s Leather Thai Heavy Bag.
Full Title Boxing Leather Thai Heavy Bag Review
Ordering
I ordered this Title Boxing Leather Thai Heavy Bag through Title Boxing, checkout was a snap, and if you are a first time customer you can sign up for the mailing list and receive a discount on your purchase. Chains and swivel are included, and the shipping rate from Title for a filled heavy bag (in the Continental US) is a great price at $39. You can buy the unfilled bag, but you’ll miss out on a 2” poly rubber interior liner if you order one and fill it yourself.
The package arrived in 3-4 business days from several states away in 2-layer packaging that kept the leather bag in great shape during the shipping process. Upon taking the bag out of the packaging, you see the difference between a professional quality bag and your run-of-the-mill training bag from the local sporting goods store. From the thick, triple-stitched patches for the hanging rings, to the metal ring reinforced laces that attach the top; this bag lets you know it is ready for punishment. There is a D-ring attached to the bottom of the bag for securing it to the floor as well.
Actual Use
After hanging the bag and putting a few founds in, I noticed the filling was tight and uniform from top to bottom, the same consistency from punching high to kicking low, the 2” poly rubber liner ensures that you get a consistent hitting surface from all angles and heights on the bag, and even after several months of use, there is still no settling or inconsistencies in the shape of this bag; the Title Leather Thai Bag measures right at 14” by 72-73” tall.
The bag feels light for 100 pounds, probably due to even weight distribution. The Title Leather Thai Heavy Bag is forgiving enough for use with bag gloves and still dense enough to give your shins a good tingle when really working your kicks. It takes elbows and knees well, just use cautious of your elbows on the sewn on Title Boxing patch. I have not been cut from this, but it does protrude out and it’s thick vinyl with kind of a sharp edge.
There really isn’t a break in period for this bag, the way it hits on day one is the same as day 100 from my experience, and that is not a bad thing. The interior liner and filling are top notch, with a lot of other punching bags you feel a need to modify the filling after a few uses, or you wonder who put a brick in it right where your shin lands. Not the Title Leather Thai bag. This thing is a brute, Title does not cut any corners in making these bags, and after a month I realized that purchasing a professional high quality bag was definitely worth the research and cost.
Title has been known to offer these at a lower price or throw a good sale up every now and then, so if you’re not in a hurry you may be able to get a lower price on this bag, but I can tell you it is worth the retail price of $299.99. If you are outfitting your gym or just putting a bag in your garage, this is a great bag for all users and it could be a solid upgrade to
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LTR Boot is rated 4.2 out of 5 by 130.
Rated 3 out of 5 by CassieP287 from Great quality, maybe too great? The quality of these shoes are amazing! They are re geniuine leather, and are super nice but maybe more for someone who lives where it snows 24/7 because it’s so big and sturdy. Like snow boots. I liked them. But not enough to keep.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Hollyrenee38 from Very cute and warm! I love these boots. Very roomy and very warm. Oh and they look great!!!
Rated 5 out of 5 by Arun from Classic snow boot I bought the 1964 LTRs as a gift for my wife, and she loves them. She has not really used them yet, but that is mostly because the temps outside are still in the high 20s and it hasn't snowed much so far. She says these would be almost too warm for the weather right now. She loves the style, and says the fit is great. I will have to wait till she uses them on a daily basis to judge comfort, warmth, water resistance etc.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Kaybean from Totally OBSESSED with these boots! I am totally OBSESSED with these boots. Not only are they warm but they are so cute I get so many compliments on them. I’m honestly buying another pair :)
Rated 5 out of 5 by MickyJ from Definitely buy these! These are my 3rd pair of Sorels and they are my FAVORITE pair! These boots are so incredibly comfortable and warm. These boots are true to size.
Rated 5 out of 5 by maleta from BEST snow/winter boot I love these boots! I am a solid 6.5 in all shoes, but in these I ordered a 6 and I am glad I did. Definitely go down a 1/2 size. I can still wear with wool socks and they fit. These boots keep my feet warm for long periods of time in Chicago winters. The height is perfect- not too tall but still keep your ankles and lower calves warm. They are easy to walk in, comfortable, and the leather makes them look super nice. They hold up very well. Buy these boots for the winters!!!
Rated 5 out of 5 by mkroenke from Perfect for winters that never end! Ordered these for a MN winter that would never end this year! LOVE them! They fit true to size, are a beautiful grey, took me through drifts of snow, kept me warm in the ice rinks & are an all around perfect winter boot. They are constructed like my old pair of Sorels & look like they’ll last me many, many more snowy winters!
Rated 3 out of 5 by bluemeadows from Oddly HUGE I have owned I think eight pairs of Sorel boots, and I've always been a size 7.5. I ordered these in my normal size, and they are comically large on me. Here is a photo of me wearing the Slimboot in 7.5 with the CVS in the same size next to it. I would consider exchanging for a different size, but I'm not even 100% sure whether one size down would be small enough, and I am bummed that I have to pay return shipping each time I try, so I am giving up on these.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Fumbling17 from Great boots! Great pair of boots! Warm and enough room for a nice pair of warm socks. Definitely recommend these.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Little from Best money I have ever spent I love everything about these boots. They seem big but they fit perfect. Very comfy and very warm. I bought these on sale and loved them!
Rated 5 out of 5 by ahicks from Amazing boot! These are great! The color is beautiful. I've gotten so many compliments on them already and I've only had them a week. I've worn them in the rain, snow, and to a museum for a whole day. They were still comfortable and my feet don't sweat. They have a nice liner that keeps your feet warm but they're not bulky or too "wintery" so I can wear them in the spring and fall too.
Rated 4 out of 5 by Kelsey45213 from Nice but small These boots were very cute and well made. I ordered a 8.5 and typically wear an 8 and it was very difficult to slip my foot into.
Rated 2 out of 5 by nichole109 from My feet froze! I've had these boots for a couple of years and I haven't put them to the test until this weekend. I would normally just wear them to the ski mountain and home. This time I was in -8F weather, with wool socks and my feet froze within an hour. My feet were past the point of numb and in so much pain that I had to go inside and miss half of my event. Because of this, I'm extremely disappointed in these boots, I would not recommend them and I will be looking for another pair.
Rated 5 out of 5 by ssrena19 from Love! I love these boots!! They look great on and keep you warm! They are just a tad big, but perfect to wear with thick socks! They are great quality and would definitely recommend!
Rated 1 out of 5 by emily281 from Cute but really slippery! I'm so disappointed in these boots! They're really cute and super warm, but the traction is TERRIBLE. I wore them in the subway, and I was slipping and sliding all over the wet tile. I haven't stepped on ice while wearing these yet but given how poorly they performed in the subway I don't have high hopes. I'm really hoping that with time the soles will wear in such a way that this won't be a problem, but I'm really disappointed that I will need to waddle around like a penguin to avoid falling if I wear these while commuting.
Rated 4 out of 5 by slbenj90 from Great for winter weather Shoes fit great and are perfect for snow/slush/etc. Shoes are very sturdy and strong, only con is that they make my feet feel a bit claustrophobic and encourage sweat.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Sowmya from Love them! They are incredibly stylish and I've gotten a ton of compliments on them. I wore them for the first time when it rained and they are definitely water proof. I've only worn them once so far and got blisters so I would recommend wearing them with thick socks.
Rated 4 out of 5 by Julie15 from Love this boot! What a great boot! I bought these boots for a November camping trip. They kept my feet warm and dry, and I was comfortable walking in them all day long! Were true to size- I followed the provided sizing chart on the website. Easy to clean too! I plan to wear these in the snow as well.
Rated 2 out of 5 by Kyrsten from Too Big I usually wear a size 8, but often size down in leather boots so I ordered a 7.5. When I first got them I was concerned they were too tight, but decided to keep them and see how they felt. At first I was pretty happy with them, but after wearing them for a while and breaking them in they are too big. There is about an inch of extra room at the toe and the foot is just loose in general. They are also far colder than they are advertised to be. They're rated to -25 degrees Fahrenheit, but I begin to loose feeling and circulation in my feet even when the temperatures are in the mid teens. They also have terrible traction. If the snow is at all slick they perform about the same as my converse...which is poorly. I will say that they are very waterproof though, your feet will sweat and may feel damp, but the snow and rain are kept out.
Rated 5 out of 5 by JessPaprocki from warm & cozy This is my second pair of the 1964 style boots and they are my absolute favorite! They run slightly large, but I order true to size so I can wear thicker socks with them.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Vickyd675 from Order the smaller size Love these boots cant wait to wear them in the snow. I ordered these because when I was in Alaska visiting family I ended up borrowing my sister in law boots and fell in love with them. They were perfect for hiking in the snowy conditions, they kept my feet warm and dry. Her's where a size 8 and fit me. I ordered a 7.5 and they fit perfectly. Order a size smaller then what you expect they do run big. I first ordered a 8 and returned them for a 7.5. I should of listened to the other reviews and I was on the fence about what size to order.
Rated 4 out of 5 by Michela from Great snow boot Fits well and keeps feet very warm!
Rated 5 out of 5 by annasinpajamas from LOVE - Cute, Warm, and Comfy I purchased these the weekend before a music festival... in the middle of the Rocky Mountains... in February. Brr. These were not only comfortable the entire time, but they stood up to prolonged exposure in 1 degree weather. They do run slightly large. I got a 7 when I'm typically a 7.5, but you're probably going to be wearing thick socks anyway. They really stretch out, so don't panic if it's tough to get your foot in at first.
Rated 4 out of 5 by Brittney18 from Cute but too small... I really liked the look of these boots but they were too small on my size 11 feet! I really wanted to like them, but I will be returning them. Several years ago I purchased the original Cate the Great boots and I love them and they are actually a little big. I was hoping these would fit the same but unfortunately they don't. Still very cute, but I would suggest ordering up, especially if you are on the cusp or have wider feet.
Rated 3 out of 5 by Avocado from One Heavy Shoe This boot took my breath away when I saw it online. When I received the boot and held it in my hands, I thought we were meant to be together forever. I followed the instructions about sizing down. I am normally a size 7 in EVERYTHING (heels, boots, flats, etc.). So I went with a 6. The 6 was way too small but I think a 6.5 would have been perfect. Now let's talk about the fit of the boot. It is one bulky boot. You can't just throw these on for style points b/c they start getting HEAVY after a few minutes. They are definitely made for heavy snow. If you are looking for a snow boot and don't mind a little junk in the trunk, this boot may be for you. Like I said it is really breathtaking. Unfortunately, the boots have gone back and hopefully, someone will love them just as they are.
Rated 5 out of 5 by SJoyful from Comfort, warmth and style. The three most important things for me were knocked out the park with these boots! Comfort, warmth and style. I read that these could run a little on the big side, so i ordered a 71/2 (my feet usually fit 8 in sneakers and 7 1/2 in flats or heels) and the smaller size worked perfectly for me, just enough room for my thick wool socks and snug enough to not feel like i had to waddle like a duck. We played out in the snow for hours and my feet stayed warm and dry! I would not recommend driving with these boots on though, as they did dig into my calf a little too much. But hey, over all I know these will last me forever, super quality product!!
Rated 3 out of 5 by DanaD from Decent Boot Purchased this boot because my other Sorel boots (GLACY™ EXPLORER BOOT) are awkward to wear everyday and resemble snowboard boots. I was hoping these would be a bit easier to wear on a daily basis but they are pretty heavy duty too. Another reviewer mentioned the rubbing on the back of her leg where the plastic and leather meet and this is absolutely true. I currently have a sore on my leg. Hopefully once the leather softens up it won't be as bad.
Rated 5 out of 5 by kelly123 from Love these boots I read alot of reviews before purchasing these boots to determine which size to get. I am always, always a 7.5. I was nervous because a lot of reviews say size up a half size. So, I finally did. I bought them in an 8, and when I first got them, they were very tight in the toes. I was worried I should've gone up a full size!!! I ended up just wearing them and they definitely broke in! I promise you they will break in! My feet aren't narrow, but aren't wide either, they're normal, and the toe box was so tight at first. But it definitely stretched out, and after constantly wearing these boots for about 2 months, I could've probably gone with a 7.5! Hope this is helpful! They're also super waterproof and warm! AND CUTE!
Rated 5 out of 5 by Sofie04 from Best purchase of the season I read so many reviews before purchasing the 1964 Premium boots, which led me to follow through with the purchase. These boots do not disappoint; they're so comfortable & super warm! I work in Chicago and, needless to say, the winters are harsh! I no longer have to worry about being cold and my feet stay warm for hours in the cold. If you struggle with the cold, do yourself a favor & buy yourself a pair of Sorel!
Rated 5 out of 5 by Jes13 from Great boots! I thought I was just buying warm winter boots. I get so many compliments on how cute they are I wear them a lot more than I ever thought I would. Love them, cute & comfy!
Rated 5 out of 5 by Jessy11 from Great boot! This boot came just in time for one of the biggest snow years in wa. Was perfect for the 14" of snow and ice! They were pretty stiff when I first put them on, but broke in pretty easily just wearing them around the house. I got my regular size and they do fit a little large, but I like that since I can wear a thick sock if I want. My feet were pretty warm overall and certainly stayed dry, but I'm not sure they would be in negative themps without some serious socks. All and all I'm very happy with this boot and can tell I will have them for years to come!
Rated 2 out of 5 by murphouse from Ripped after a year After weighing the many options for winter boot, I chose Sorel because they last. Unfortunately after one season of light use, the rubber on the heals of both boots has ripped, exposing the fabric underneath. The felt definitely kept my feet warm last season, and they were comfortable - but now they're useless as my feet will get wet if I wear them in snow. Another small complaint is that the felt would always pull out of the boot when I took my foot out, which was annoying. I wanted something I could somewhat easily slip on and off.
Rated 3 out of 5 by MicheleH from size 8 a little large We love Sorel! But the size 8 WOMEN’S 1964 PREMIUM™ LTR BOOTS I bought for my daughter for Christmas run a little large/wide. The boot seems to be rubbing up and down on her heel.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Sar8 from Warm boots that hold up in snow. Go down half a size Sorel's are the only boots that keep my feet warm for hours outdoors, even in freezing temps. These have great treads so you won't slip on ice. The ankle tends to be a little stiff, and takes a little breaking in, so if you're getting them for a trip where you'll be hiking/walking a lot, make sure you can walk around in them for a couple weekend beforehand. I always size down one half size and I'm still able to wear them with either thick or thin socks. (I am normally always an 8 in every other shoe, but in these and other similar Sorel styles I'm a 7.5.)
Rated 5 out of 5 by visualvitaliti from Midwest Winters? Definitive Must Have I have had this pair of boots since 2012. I live in MN and the winters can either be pretty chill or really rough weather wise. Any calm weather doesn't last long here we tend to be on the extremes. That being said these boots are definitely worth the purchase. They have an insert so size accordingly although for me my size is 7.5 and my boots fit perfectly never had an issue unless I wear very very thick socks which are not necessary since the insert does its job in keeping your feet warm. I have never fallen on ice or slipped with these on. Movement is a bit weird sometimes like when driving since these are very sturdy but it's something you get used to, and they certainly have some weight to them but the quality is by far what makes these a must have if you live somewhere with harsh or unpredictable winters.
Rated 5 out of 5 by ToastyInBoston from Tested in Boston Snowstorm - A Success! Bought these last week, and ordered them overnight. I wore them right out of the box, and they fit like a glove! (I recommend checking the size chart they've provided; it's darn accurate). It snowed all morning, almost 3 feet and snow plows haven't come out yet, but I trudged through the heavy snow and have yet to slip!! And I didn't feel like I had lead feet either. They're also genuinely waterproof and warm even when covered in snow. Perfect blend of function and aesthetic! I'm glad I chose these over the typical choice of boot for most New Englanders... as they're cheaper and cuter anyways!
Rated 4 out of 5 by Iscah from Good Minnesotan Boot I order this by mail a couple of weeks ago. Very stylish and retro boot, but more bulky than I wanted, as I was looking for a more slender everyday boot like The Joan of Arc. However, everyone has those boots or similar and I wanted something a little more unique. Well, I spend the week trying on other boots in person, with the intent of returning these. Then it snowed 6+ inches and temps have gone to -15. These boots are awesome!!! They are true snow boots and perform as such. They have the wool inserts like when we were kids, which just slips out and can be hung to dry. The quality of the leather is wonderful. The bonus is everyday I've worn them I've got compliments on how cute they are. I couldn't find these in any store, so they're not as common as some of Sorels other boots. I think size runs pretty true. I typically where a 9 in shoe and 10 in boots to accommodate socks. I got the 10 and they are perfect. Only drawback, and maybe it's just me but it does run a bit on my back right heal where the lower rubber part of the boot meets the leather and it breaks in my stride. Expect a true, bulky winter boot and you won't be disappointed. These are keepers.
Rated 4 out of 5 by Seilkie from Good but slightly dissapointed I brought these boots to head to North Dakota in sub zero temperatures. I depended on them, as I was camping in the snow, and they were my only pair. They fit snug, so i am glad I bought the right size, as many reviews say they run large. I think the felt insole may stretch out overtime. My real complaint is, the thread on the insole came undone, and pulled completely out, separating the base from the rest of the liner. If I didnt carry a needle and thread with me everywhere, I would have been totally screwed, and either frozen my feet off, or had to leave this very important trip. I know not everything can be perfect, and it is just a shoe. But they were brand new, and when something falls apart in the first few days, when you are depending on it, its a little disappointing. The heel also rubbed me raw, through insole and thick sock, maybe something that will wear in overtime?.. All in all this shoe is very cute and very warm. The leather is nice, and it seems made well so far (other than the fluke insole mishap) It did the trick, and I would recommend their warmth over bean boots, as the insole keeps your foot insulated, where I find other boots don't in really cold weather.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Audge135 from Snow Boots for Trip to the Northeast I was a bit skeptical on what size to order. Half the reviews say they run large, half say they are true to size. I wear a 9 in running shoes (because of my high arch), an 8.5 in most other shoes, and an 8 in chacos. I ordered an 8.5 (knowing they might be too big) with the mindset that I can always wear thicker socks or double up on socks. I hate when shoes are snug on my toes. These boots were slightly large in the toe box, but I am in love!!! I put on a thick pair of socks, and they are perfect!! I'm afraid the 8 would have fit almost too close to my toes. I used the measurements on the size chart to choose my 8.5. I am incredibly happy with my purchase! I already ordered my brother a pair in black (a half size smaller than he wears - he has flat feet). I hope you enjoy these as much as we are.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Edie2 from perfect for deep snow and warmth these keep my toes toasty and dry in cold temps and wet snow! order at least half size up just to give yourself plenty of room for thick socks
Rated 5 out of 5 by MI1316 from Great choice These boots are perfect for Michigan winters. They are very comfortable and very warm. I couldn't be happier!
Rated 5 out of 5 by Winterboots from Ordered Half Size Down Love love love these boots. I love the way they looked online, in the box, and on my feet! I normally wear a 9 however after reading other reviews I decided to order an 8.5, they fit perfectly!
Rated 4 out of 5 by KamiP from Good For Heavy Snow These boots are amazing and I cannot wait to wear them to the mountain. They seem durable and are easy to clean. My only negative would be that they are very heavy and bulky and you are unable to tell this from the pictures shown. I own the Fancy boots and I expected them to be similar in size however, they are far bigger on the bottom. I bought these in hopes to wear them on rainy days in town as well but they are a bit too bulky for that. Please start providing product on model photos.
Rated 5 out of 5 by natmont from Blizzards, here I come These boots are great! Not sure why everyone is saying these boots run super large. I'm normally a 5.5 in all shoes, except boots where I sometimes like to go for a 6 for some extra room. I got a 5.5 and they fit great. I found these boots definitely fall within my normal size range. Make sure you use their size chart though, that was a big help in my decision making. Overall, I love these boot and I'm excited to wear them. They've got the perfect blend of function and fashion -- they're cute, but I know they'll deliver on what I need in a snow boot.
Rated 3 out of 5 by Ashleyguz from Super cute but order a size down! I am a solid size 7 with a pretty wide foot and these are huge. They fit a bit better when I tighten the laces as much as I can and wear a thick sock. Even doing that I wish I had ordered at least a half size down (6 1/2) but still could have gone a full size down (6). I will probably have to wear two pair of thick socks but they are great quality and very warm!
Rated 1 out of 5 by Cmitch from Sizing is awful Because I have made sorel purchases in the past and their products run large, I ordered both an 8 and 7.5. I wear an 8 consistently but even the 7.5 was huge!! I have no idea how far down in size I need to go so I'm done. Pass on this purchase.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Claire57 from Absolutely Love! These boots save my feet when it's freezing outside, whether that be with snow or rain. The leather is gorgeous and I love the color, and the wool inside keeps my feet warm. That being said, they do run big so as to allow for extra thick socks, and with extra thick socks and snug boots come sweaty feet, so be sure to put some GoldBond on those suckers and you'll be good to go!
Rated 4 out of 5 by jmwett from Love these boots! I attempted getting the right sorel boots 3 times before landing on these babies in a size 8 (a half size smaller than my usual 8.5). First I read the reviews online on sizing and decided to try on in store. I initially bought the Caribou Boot in a size 9. They felt fine in the store but I think the lining smashed down when I was actually walking around in them because they quickly became WAY too large. I took them back and tried on the 7.5 Caribou in the store and those felt good, but I decided I liked the 1964 Premium LTR Boot more, so I ordered those online (they didn't sell them in the store). When the 7.5 1964 LTRs came in, they were too small- I imagine it's because the lining is different than the Caribou that I tried on in store. SO, I finally sent back for an 8 in the 1964's and I LOVE them! Totally worth the hard work-- I just wish it was easier to find the right size initially. The quality looks so nice and they are very fashionable and much lighter than the Caribou (though still a legit winter boot). Winter is over so I guess I'll have to really test them out next year...
Rated 5 out of 5 by MeluhkneeB from These kept my feet so warm! I wasn't sure what to expect with these boots. I've never needed snow boots before, but I bought them because I was visiting Maine. I can't believe how warm and dry my feet stayed. I was walking around in the snow all day when it was only 9 degree outside without any problems. Plus, because they have boot liners I didn't even have to break them in. I have none of the "breaking in my boots" problems that I typically have. I can't recommend these enough!Blood Bowl 2 – Leagues Mechanics
The league system is one of the big improvement of this new episode of Blood Bowl. We wanted it more flexible and deeper.
The league system is one of the big improvement of this new episode of Blood Bowl. We wanted it more flexible and deeper. First, the leagues system operates around three entities, from the largest to the smallest:
• The league: A set of competitions
• The Competition: A set of rounds with a winner/loser at the end.
• The Round: A game day for all the teams engaged in the competition.
The League
We start by creating a league which will contain everything. A league is a large association of teams who want to play together.
In a league, you can create as many competitions as you want (Think of NFL for comparison).
The Competition
Within the league, you can add Competitions.
Competition is the basic element you need to build the Championship or the Cup of your dreams.
There are 3 kind of Competition:
• Knockout ( Single elimination): the loser of each bracket is immediately eliminated from winning the championship. It’s is the only type of competition which has overtimes.
• Round robin: each contestant meets all other contestants in turn.
• Ladder: players are listed as if on the rungs of a ladder. The objective for a player is to reach the highest rung of the ladder. A ladder can potentially go on indefinitely.
The different competitions can have a free access or require a ticket to enter.
The ticket is the basic tool to create the link between competitions. It also provides some flexibility in the management.
It can be offered as a reward for a Competition (ex: The winner of a championship can be invited to the World Cup) or directly sent by an administrator (someone left the competition, you can invite someone else to replace him).
A ticket gives the access to a Competition only for one Team.
The Round
A Round is a day of competition. Most of the time, it will be a match for all competing teams (it does not apply to the Ladder format).
Except for Round Robin competitions, you can change the structure of a round, from case to case, and choose between:
• Single Match
• Two-legged tie
• Best of 3
• Best of 5
So with all these tools you’ll be able to create exotic Format and even build structures close to the major world sporting events!
Ex: UEFA Champions League (starting from the group stage) with 8 Round Robin competitions for eight qualifying groups and 1 Single Elimination competition for the finals. The first 2 of each group receives a ticket to reach the Finals (You can also do a third draft for the lower level of the competition). All the rounds of the Finals can be set as two-legged games while the final remains a single match.
Of course the game leagues are not the only option to play online. There is also a friendly match system where you can play against a friend by arranging a match. Friendly matches have no impact on your Blood Bowl 2 experience (xp, injury, etc.).
–
Camille “Jolly Roger”
Communication & Community ManagerEcma International, the organization in charge of managing the ECMASCript standard, has published the most recent version of the JavaScript language.
ECMAScript 2016, or JavaScript 2016, is the first release in the organization's new release schedule that it announced in 2015, when it promised to provide yearly updates to the JS standard instead of updates years apart.
The organization also changed the standard's name last year. On the old naming scheme, this would have been JavaScript Seventh Edition or ES7.
Because there's now less time to add new features, ECMAScript 2016 features a smaller number of features when compared to the mammoth, ground-breaking, and awaited ECMAScript 2015 (ES6) release.
Support for async functions, which Microsoft has already started to add to Edge, has been deferred to next year's release.
Instead, JavaScript developers will finally get a "raise to the power" operator, which was mysteriously left out of the standard for twenty years. The operator is **, and you can use it like this:
code #Raise y to the power of 8
x=y**8
Coupled with the possibility of searching data much easier inside an array (Array.prototype.includes function), these are basically all the new ECMAScript 2016 features.
From now on, expect smaller changelogs from the ECMAScript team, since this was the plan set out last year. Fewer breaking changes means more time to migrate code, instead of having to rewrite entire applications, as developers did when ES6 came out last year.
The upcoming Chrome 52 release will feature full ECMAScript 2016 support, while Firefox added ES2016 features across dfferent versions.
In other JavaScript news...
Microsoft has open-sourced the code editor used for the VS Code service, the Web version of Visual Studio. The project, called the Monaco Editor, is available on GitHub.
A few days ago, Microsoft also announced a few performance tweaks regarding the Chakra JavaScript engine used in its new Edge browser.
The npm JavaScript package registry has just surpassed the 300,000 total package mark.
JavaScript climbed two spots in the TIOBE Index of programming languages and is now ranked seventh, after being ranked ninth a year ago.Monkeys To Provide Simian Security In New Delhi
Concerned that visitors and athletes could be bothered by rhesus macaques and other small monkeys that roam through New Delhi, authorities have brought about 10 langurs — larger, often terrestrial monkeys — to the site of the Commonwealth Games this month. Human handlers will control the langurs, which are said to be good at chasing smaller monkeys away.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
To India now, where throngs of visitors are expected to attend this Sunday's opening of the Commonwealth Games. Hosting the Olympic-style contest for countries associated with the former British Empire costs billions of dollars, and much of that money goes towards security, including boots on the ground, equipment and monkeys.
From New Delhi, Elliot Hannon reports.
ELLIOT HANNON: As New Delhi readies itself for the games, security is tight. But even with a hundred thousand officers on the city's streets, there's one threat they haven't been able to solve: the city's monkey problem.
In New Delhi, some 5,000 Rhesus macaques monkeys live side by side with residents, and that can cause problems. So the government decided on a short-term fix during the games, says Davinder Prashad, who's in charge of the city's monkey management effort.
Mr. DAVINDER PRASHAD: (Through Translator) The monkeys are a hazard because they can bite or attack people. To avoid these situations and to keep the participants and audience safe, we have deployed langur monkeys.
(Soundbite of langur monkeys)
HANNON: Hired teams of larger, more menacing long tailed langur monkeys have been sent to problem areas.
Outside of the boxing stadium, a team of four langurs stand ready to scare off potential primate mischief-makers. To make sure these hired guns don't run wild, human handlers keep them on leashes. Monkeys in New Delhi have long been a problem. They are considered holy by Hindus, and worshippers at the city's temples have taken to feeding them. Efforts to control the population haven't produced lasting results. But the langurs are a quick fix, says Prashad.
Mr. PRASHAD: (Through Translator) It is very effective. We tried it in the past and the monkeys are scared of langurs, so they won't go near places where they spot one.
HANNON: At the moment, the langur security detail's shift is nine to five. But, Prashad says, like the rest of the city, once the games begin, they'll be expected to work overtime.
For NPR News, I'm Elliot Hannon in New Delhi.
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Five men were killed and at least 20 other people were wounded in shootings across Chicago over the four-day Christmas holiday weekend.
The weekend’s latest fatal shooting happened on Christmas Day in the Chatham neighborhood on the South Side. Albert Abu, 57, was standing outside at 12:14 a.m. Monday on the sidewalk in the 8100 block of South Wabash when two males walked up and opened fire, according to Chicago Police and the Cook County medical examiner’s office. Abu, who lived on the same block, suffered gunshot wounds to the head and chest and was taken to St. Bernard Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 12:28 a.m.
About 6:15 p.m. Sunday, 37-year-old Corey Haggard was fatally shot when he attempted to rob a concealed carry permit holder outside a store in the South Loop, police and the medical examiner’s office said. The 31-year-old victim was walking out of a store in the 1200 block of South Jefferson when the attempted robber pulled out a gun and demanded money. After the suspect stole his property, the victim shot the man in the chest. The man – identified as Haggard, who lived in the Lawndale neighborhood – was taken to Stroger Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 11:37 p.m. Monday.
A man was gunned down at 5:31 p.m. Saturday in the Roseland neighborhood on the Far South Side. A witness said 19-year-old Janaria T. Moore was standing in the 11200 block of South Michigan when someone got out of a dark-colored SUV and fired shots before taking off in an unknown direction, police and the medical examiner’s office said. Moore suffered a gunshot wound to his back and was pronounced dead at the scene at 5:42 p.m.
About three hours earlier, a 21-year-old man was killed and a 25-year-old man was wounded in an Austin neighborhood shooting on the West Side. The men were sitting on a back porch at 2:34 p.m. in the 5200 block of West Ferdinand when another male walked up, fired shots and ran off in an unknown direction, authorities said. The younger man suffered multiple gunshot wounds to the head and body and was pronounced dead at the scene at 3:12 p.m. His identity has not been released. The older man was shot in the ankle and taken in good condition to Stroger Hospital.
The weekend’s first fatal shooting happened about 4:45 a.m. Saturday and left a man dead and a woman wounded on the South Side. Jerry Minard, 24, and the 18-year-old woman were in a vehicle heading south in the 5900 block of South Western when a van pulled alongside them in traffic and someone inside fired shots, authorities said. Minard was struck in the head and taken to Stroger Hospital, where he died at 1:42 p.m. Sunday. The woman was shot in the right leg and also taken to Stroger, where her condition was stabilized.
The weekend’s latest nonfatal shooting happened about 5 p.m. Christmas
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officials seized the Horners' 2008 Jeep Grand Cherokee and 2003 Ford F150 in August 2013, after they suspected that Jeana Horner's son, who was borrowing the vehicles, used them to transport marijuana. Jack and Jeana Horner, who did not know about the drugs and did not face any criminal charges, spent more than nine months trying to get their vehicles back.
The Horners exemplify an ongoing problem with civil forfeiture in Marion County, said Sam Gedge, an attorney for a national nonprofit group that is now suing city and law enforcement officials in Indianapolis.
The lawsuit, which was filed today by the Institute for Justice on behalf of the Horners and four other plaintiffs, aims to invalidate a state statute that allows police and prosecutors to deduct law enforcement costs from forfeited funds as a type of reimbursement. Any remainder goes to the Common School Fund, which is used to build schools. But Gedge said the statute violates the Indiana Constitution, which says that all, not some, forfeited funds must be deposited into the school fund.
A 2014 IndyStar review of cases found that asset forfeiture laws crafted to fight organized crime, such as drug cartels and money laundering groups, sometimes snare people facing minor drug possession charges, or no charges at all. People like the Horners are forced to engage in sometimes lengthy legal battles to get back their homes, cars and savings.
"What happened was wrong. That shouldn't happen to anybody," said Jeana Horner, of Greenfield. "They took our vehicles and wouldn't even tell us that they had them, and they kept them from us. We got no answers."
The lawsuit, filed in Marion Superior Court, names Marion County Prosecutor Terry Curry, Mayor Joe Hogsett, Public Safety Director David Wantz, Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department Chief Troy Riggs, the prosecutor's office and the city of Indianapolis as defendants.
A spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office said the agency has no comment because Curry has not had the opportunity to review the complaint. The other defendants named in the suit, as well as Ted Nolting, IMPD's legal adviser and an attorney for the city's Office of Corporation Counsel, have not returned calls and emails seeking comment.
The state law in question is interpreted differently by each county. Some meticulously account for the investigative costs and send the remaining dollars to the school fund. Many do not put money into the school fund. In Marion County, forfeited funds are divided between the law enforcement agency and the prosecutor's office, according to court records.
According to memorandums of agreement between the agencies, the prosecutor's office gets 30 percent of forfeited funds. The remaining 70 percent goes to IMPD or to the Metro Drug Task Force, a group of officers from Marion and neighboring counties, depending on which law enforcement body is involved in an investigation.
Such a scenario, the complaint says, "gravely misconstrued" what should be considered law enforcement costs.
Indianapolis law enforcement officials say asset forfeiture is a tool that allows them to target criminal organizations, and forfeited funds are a small portion of their budgets but are an important source of revenue to train officers and purchase vehicles and equipment. The Metro Drug Task Force in Indianapolis, for instance, is funded almost entirely by forfeited dollars. In an earlier interview with IndyStar, Curry said his agency uses the money to pay for the salaries and benefits of deputy prosecutors who specialize in forfeiture cases.
Officials also say forfeited funds do not fully cover their investigative costs.
According to the complaint, Marion County law enforcement agencies received an average of $888,112 in forfeited funds annually from 2003 to 2010. That number reached about $1.5 million in 2011, the complaint says.
The Virginia-based Institute for Justice considers the practice policing for profit, which "creates a dangerous incentive for police and prosecutors to seize people's property," Gedge said.
The lawsuit names four other plaintiffs who are challenging the practice.
In the Horners' case, Jeana said she and her husband did not know why their vehicles were taken until after a civil forfeiture lawsuit was filed against them. For several months, her husband, who has pulmonary fibrosis and is disabled, had to ask family members to drive him around to several doctors' appointments. Eventually, the couple bought a car for $2,500.
Jeana Horner said her son hired a lawyer for $10,000 to handle the civil case. The following year, in 2014, the court ruled in the Horners' favor, but it took three weeks before they got their vehicles back, and one had been drained of its oil, Jeana Horner said.
The Class D felony possession charge against her son, who was on a work release program when he was charged, was eventually dropped, court records show.
In Indiana, law enforcement can seize people's property without having to charge or convict someone. State law requires law enforcement officials to show that the property, more likely than not, was used to commit a crime.
In other states, such as Montana and New Mexico, a person must be convicted of a crime before his or her property is taken.
The Institute for Justice recently filed a similar lawsuit in New Mexico. The group claims that despite recent legislation outlawing civil forfeiture in the state, law enforcement agencies continue to seize property without a conviction.
Call IndyStar reporter Kristine Guerra at (317) 444-6209. Follow her on Twitter: @kristine_guerra.
Read or Share this story: http://indy.st/1Tcv6BIThe 2nd semifinal of the ICC Cricket World Cup 2011 was played between the arch-rivals India and Pakistan at Punjab Cricket Association Stadium, Mohali on 30 March 2011. India won the match by 29 runs and qualified for the 2011 Cricket World Cup Final. India won the Toss and elected to bat first and made 260 runs in 50 overs for 9 wickets. Pakistan, though with a good start, failed to make up to the score with just 231 runs in 49.5 overs resulting in the victory of India over Pakistan[2] and leading their way towards the final of the ICC Cricket World Cup 2011 against Sri Lanka where they beat Sri Lanka and won the World Cup.
The match holds utmost historical significance because of the hype created around the match since both the teams made their way towards the semifinal. The match was even equated to war[3] and it experienced the presence of celebrities, diplomats and Prime Ministers from both of the nations alongside the huge crowd at the stadium. Three people including a Pakistani actor all belonging to Pakistan died out of shock after Pakistan lost the match.[4][5] This match has been perceived by Pakistani former cricketers and fans as a great let down from Pakistan due to their weak fielding and batting despite good talent shown previously from the Pakistani captain and players in the 2011 ICC cup. The match drew high television ratings – in India it had an estimated 11.74% TV rating for the whole match,[6][7] although its audience was beaten by the India v Sri Lanka final with 135 million.[8]
Rivalry background [ edit ]
India and Pakistan have been the traditional arch rivals since the Partition of India in various fronts. The countries have fought three wars against each other. The same battlefield rivalry always reflected on the Cricket Stadium throughout the history since the first international cricket match between the two countries in 1952.This dispute has affected both diplomatic and political relations, and the same animosity can be felt on the field. A match between the two countries is often equated with war. Often a political or diplomatic tension has a fallout on the cricket relations between the two countries including suspension of cricket tours to the other country.
Match [ edit ]
Initially Pre-match rain in Mohali threatened the India-Pak semi final however things became clear after the Meteorological Department assured the non-possibility of the rain during the match.[9] India won the Toss and elected to bat first and made 260 runs in 50 overs for 9 wickets. Sachin Tendulkar scored 85 runs, But he was dropped 4 times by Pakistani fielders, and one LBW decision was overturned when he was on 23. He was awarded the Man of the Match. Pakistan on the other hand though with a good start failed to maintain consistency and were restricted to just 231 runs in 49.5 overs. India won the match and confirmed their place in the Finals.
Effects [ edit ]
Tickets for the semi-final match had been sold out in Mohali for days and many businesses and offices in both countries were closed during the play.[10] Governments in almost all the states and provinces of both the nations declared official Holidays on 30 March in view of this match.[10] Thousands of screens were installed in public places across both the nations, and television stores experienced increased sales of television sets in order to watch this and other games at the 2011 World Cup.[citation needed]
Cricket Diplomacy has been the positive perception from both the countries to strengthen the relationships between the two nations in the time of chaos after the 2008 Mumbai attacks which further deteriorated the already existing tussle between the two countries. Prime Minister of India Manmohan Singh used this opportunity and invited his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani to watch the match with him at Mohali. Subsequently, Gilani accepted the offer and agreed to watch the match with Singh.[11][12] Victory Venkatesh, Aamir Khan, Priety Zinta, Vivek Oberoi were among the numerous celebrities present in the stadium during the match along with the massive cheering crowd.[13] After the victory, celebrations erupted throughout India and fans across the country cheered throughout the night.[14][15]
See also [ edit ]Taylor police say Thursday night's shooter at the Taylor Sportsplex was a family friend who had taken a liking to Emma Watson Nowling, a bright-eyed 7-year-old. But they're now trying to solve the mystery why 57-year-old Timothy Nelson Obeshaw targeted her and her mother before shooting and killing himself.
Police say Obeshaw was seen earlier that evening hugging Emma during soccer practice. Shortly after 8 p.m. Obeshaw approached Emma and Sharon Elizabeth Watson as the two were leaving, and he shot into their vehicle.
"He struck the child first and then opened fire on the mother, and then turned and shot and killed himself," Taylor Police Chief Mary Sclabassi said.
Police found a 9mm gun legally registered to Obeshaw next to his body. Obeshaw was also a CPL holder.
Emma and her mother were rushed to the hospital. Emma died late Thursday night at Children's Hospital. Watson remains in serious but stable condition at a local hospital.
Outside the Taylor police station Friday, Emma's soccer coach, Mario Scicluna, struggled to process the news.
"Nothing makes sense of why someone would take an innocent life like that," he said.
Taylor police say Obeshaw lived with Emma, Watson, and Emma's father for the past year or so in Belleville. He had recently moved to a home in Taylor, where police say he lived with at least one other person.
Witnesses and family members told police Obeshaw had displayed signs of mental instability lately, and that he believed someone was out to get him.
"We found evidence that Obeshaw believed that someone was trying to control him through mind control," Sclabassi said. "Obviously if the persons close to this individual had perhaps taken the steps to make sure he got the help that he needed, he may not have been in the position to obtain the firearm that he had yesterday," she added.
Sclabassi said there are no official records or diagnosis that showed Obeshaw sought treatment.
In September 2015, Obeshaw legally registered the handgun in his name in Belleville.
Police are still working to determine a motive in the shootings.
Arrangements are being made for donations for the family of Emma Nowling.New Black Boy Doll Company Celebrates ‘Brown Boyhood’
By Roger Stitt
Jennifer Pierre is the founder of a new company called Melanites. According to The Grio, the name is a reference to the pigment that gives skin its color: melanin. Melanites is a toy company whose primary goal is to produce dolls for boys with skin tones that cross the racial spectrum.
Pierre did not think it was right that when she went into the toy store she saw shelves of dolls for girls and most of them were white. “We’re a toy company, but we’re trying to become a whole brand that celebrates brown boyhood,” Pierre said. “I want it to be normal for a kid to go into the aisle and see themselves on the shelf.”
Of course, even in today’s PC world, boys might not go for the concept of dolls, so Pierre plans to package the 18-inch figures as “action pals.” While she is certainly aware of the gender bias, Pierre hopes to slowly erase the lines between boys’ and girls’ toys. “Parents are tired of the pink aisle and the blue aisle. They want something they can give to their sons to teach them empathy, or to inspire them.”
In addition to the figures, Pierre wants to create an entire storyline that goes with each character. The characters will have jobs like astronauts, doctors, and lawyers. Pierre is worried that boys of color don’t see a lot of positive male role models who are business, science, or medical professionals. She wants them to get used to seeing these roles as normal for people who have their skin tones.
The dolls produced by Melanites will look like African Americans, American Indians, and those with biracial skin tones. In addition to the skin, the hair is authentic as well. While no dolls other than prototypes have been produced, Pierre is raising money for her venture. The goal is to raise $35,000 so that the dolls can be prepared and ready for Christmas.
SourceYou might credit the legendary Scottish male virility of past time to single malt whiskey, or the sometimes brutal weather, or the fact that haggis is the national dish, but a Dutch researcher is proposing another answer:
Chuck Burton / AP "Men wearing a kilt experience a strong sense of freedom and masculinity," says a researcher. Here Tim Propst, of Lincoln County, N.C., throws a hammer during the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games in Linville, N.C. in July 2012.
It was the kilts.
Kilts, worn as they were meant to be worn, without underwear, lets our laddies swing freely in the breeze, creating, according to researcher Erwin Kompanje, the “ideal physiological scrotal environment.” Exposed to the bracing Highland coolness, testicles will make robust sperm.
The modern man’s “scrotal environment” is pretty confined these days, what with underwear and pants that hold our testicles close to the body and its 98.6-degree heat, Kompanje, a senior researcher in the department of intensive care at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, told NBCNews.com. But as he pointed out in a paper published online in the Scottish Medical Journal, “adequate spermatogenesis requires a temperature about 3 degrees [Celsius] lower than normal body temperature.” (That would translate to about 93 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to the normal body temperature of 98.6 Farenheit.)
Testicular temperature is regulated by the cremaster muscle – the muscle that covers the testicles -- that raises and lowers the scrotum in response to heat and cold. “The cremaster reflex only works, and has any sense, when the scrotum is hanging free,” Kompanje said. “In tight trousers it cannot work. In a naked man, or a man wearing a kilt, it can and will.”
Kompanje stresses that he’s only proposing a hypothesis based partly on his own fascination with things Scottish – he sometimes wears a kilt for special ceremonial occasions – and anecdotal evidence that kilt-wearing is good for sperm, and scientific evidence that sperm production wilts under high scrotal temperatures.
“I searched the scientific literature, and I found nothing on the subject,” he said. “Then I searched on sperm quality and found many scientific papers related to high scrotal temperature and tight clothing. So as 1+1=2, I formed the hypothesis that wearing a skirt-like garment (as a kilt) without underwear would help to improve sperm quality.”
There’s been a lot of debate in science about whether modern western men have poorer sperm quality and fewer sperm overall than they did 50 or 100 years ago. Environmental toxins, stress, smoking, diet, have all been implicated in the decline.
Temperature is often blamed, too, which is why doctors advise men not to put laptop computers on their laps. When doctors in Germany experimented with a “nocturnal scrotal cooling” device – crotch air conditioning – in men with fertility problems, they found “a significant increase in sperm concentration and total sperm count…after 8 weeks” according to a 2005 journal article.
So Kompanje may well be correct when he proposes kilt wearing as a possible solution to dropping sperm quality.
This raises the question, however, of whether a man wearing a kilt will get any opportunities to send his swimmers into the pool.
Kompanje isn’t worried. “I found literature, and I have experienced this myself, that women like to see a man wearing a kilt. It can be very masculine and sexy.”
“Wearing a kilt has strong psychological benefits,” he writes in his journal article. “A kilt will get you noticed no matter where you are. Research indicates that men wearing a kilt experience a strong sense of freedom and masculinity…The kilt gives a man a sensuous awareness of his own body and how it will be seen by others.”
Kompanje acknowledges there’s no proof testicles will be happier under kilts, so he proposes a controlled trial with regular scrotum temperature taking and sperm quality monitoring of some men wearing pants and others wearing kilts. One incentive to volunteer might be what Kompanje argues is the “positive attention from sexual admirers” associated with kilts.
Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young Ph.D., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com), now on sale.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption David Cameron: "I'm pleased that Britain has played its part"
Donor nations meeting in London have pledged more than $10bn to help Syrians affected by the five-year conflict, UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced.
He said the money (£6.8bn) would provide millions in Syria with "life-saving" food, medical care and shelter.
More jobs and schooling would be provided for refugees in neighbouring countries, he said.
In Syria, tens of thousands of people are reported to be fleeing intense fighting near Aleppo.
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said an estimated 70,000 Syrians were heading towards its borders amid a Syrian government offensive, backed by Russian air strikes.
In war-ravaged Damascus suburbs
Who is to blame for breakdown of talks?
The offensive prompted the suspension of fledgling UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva.
While the conference has been a financial success, the prospects for ending the war in Syria look bleaker than ever, the BBC's diplomatic correspondent James Robbins says.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Rami Ruhayem reports from Damascus on the Syrian children displaced within their own country
Mr Cameron said at the end of the day-long conference that $6bn had been pledged for 2016 alone, and a further $5bn over the coming years until 2020.
He said Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon - which are housing most of the 4.6 million refugees - had also pledged to ensure all refugee children will have access to education.
"The international union is backing them with the resources which will allow them to ensure there is no lost generation," he said, adding that one million children currently not in school would have access to education by the end of the next school year.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The horrifying statistics that define Syria
The neighbouring countries had also, he said, made a "courageous commitment" to open their economies to provide more jobs - helped by $40bn of loans and the opening of European markets that would create one million new jobs in the region.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon hailed the gathering of 60 countries as a "great success".
"Never has the international community raised so much money on a single day for a single crisis," he said.
The European Union has pledged $3.3bn (€3bn; £2.3bn) this year and intends to "maintain this level of financing" for 2017 and beyond.
The UK pledged an extra $1.7bn until 2020, Germany committed to $2.6bn until 2018, France said it would give $1bn and the US pledged an extra $925m for 2016.
Australia, Belgium, Italy, Poland, Japan, the UAE, Austria, Switzerland, Estonia, Denmark and Finland, along with the World Bank and the European Investment Bank, were among those who also committed funds.
The conference, attended by 30 world leaders, had been hoping to raise $9bn - a total made up of a UN appeal for $7.7bn and about $1.3bn requested by regional host governments.
Part of the reason for the record request is the underfunding of previous appeals. Only 43% of the $2.9bn pledged to the UN's 2015 appeal has so far been funded.
Hours before the conference began, peace talks between the Syrian regime and opposition were suspended, amid rebel anger over the continuing Russian bombing around Aleppo.
The talks, which opened just two days ago, are expected to resume on 25 February. UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura admitted there had been a lack of progress but said that the negotiations had not failed.
Ban Ki-moon, speaking in London, said that the Syrian people needed "not just food for today, but hope for tomorrow" and urged both sides to "get back to the table, not to secure more gains on the battlefield."
A number of countries criticised Russia for conducting air strikes to help the Syrian army advance.
UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond told the BBC the strikes had "increased in intensity dramatically over the last few days... we've got to press the Russians to do something that will actually support this political process, not torpedo it".
What is the Syria conflict?
Image copyright AP
Why is there a war in Syria?
Anti-government protests developed into a civil war that, four years on, has ground to a stalemate, with the Assad government, the so-called Islamic State group, an array of Syrian rebels and Kurdish fighters all holding territory.
Who is fighting whom?
Government forces concentrated in Damascus and the centre and west of Syria are fighting the jihadists of Islamic State and al-Nusra Front, as well as less numerous so-called "moderate" rebel groups, who are strongest in the north and east. These groups are also battling each other.
How has the world reacted?
Iran, Russia and Lebanon's Hezbollah movement are propping up the Alawite-led Assad government, while Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar back the more moderate Sunni-dominated opposition, along with the US, UK and France. Hezbollah and Iran are believed to have troops and officers on the ground, while a Western-led coalition and Russia are carrying out air strikes.There is a new proposal to send arms to Ukraine:
The U.S. Pentagon and State Department have devised plans to supply Ukraine with antitank missiles and other weaponry and are seeking White House approval, U.S. officials said, as Kiev battles Russia-backed separatists and ties between Moscow and Washington fray. American military officials and diplomats say the arms, which they characterized as defensive, are meant to deter aggressive actions by Moscow, which the U.S. and others say has provided tanks and other sophisticated armaments as well as military advisers to rebels fighting the Kiev government.
Arming Ukraine remains a bad, foolish idea for all the reasons I have given before. Advocates of sending weapons say that it will serve as a deterrent, but it will almost certainly be perceived as a provocation by Moscow and could easily serve as a pretext for more aggressive behavior from Russia and its proxies. Ukraine will not be made more secure by doing this, and the U.S. has no obligation to help defend Ukraine in any case, but the bigger problem with the proposal is that it has nothing to do with promoting U.S. or allied security. Some of our most important European allies, including Germany and France, understand this, and have opposed the same idea in the past.
Sending more weapons into Ukraine risks reigniting and escalating the conflict at the same time that it deepens U.S. involvement in it. It would antagonize Russia while further entangling the U.S. in a conflict in which we have no vital interests. If Russia responds in kind or with an even more aggressive response, the U.S. can’t credibly threaten to counter them because Ukraine will always matter far more to them than it does to us. The White House should reject the latest misguided proposal to send arms to Ukraine.
P.S. Leonid Bershidsky spells out why sending weapons to Ukraine is also unnecessary:
Two years after both sides have largely kept to existing demarcation lines (minor encroachments aside), it is militarily unnecessary to provide Ukraine with lethal weapons unless the U.S. wants to encourage it to try to reclaim the “people’s republics.” That would be a mistake. Though Russia doesn’t have enough resources to take over and hold Ukraine while still staying on the lookout for other military threats, it has plenty of money, firepower and determination to defend the separatist statelets.Top Arbitration Lawyer Says Corporate Sovereignty System Needs 'Complete Overhaul'
from the weapons-of-legal-destruction dept
A few months back we wrote about the free trade supporter Cato Institute arguing that corporate sovereignty provisions should be dropped from trade agreements, for a variety of cogent reasons. You wouldn't expect one of the top arbitration lawyers that actually uses the system to go quite so far, but this is pretty close: A prominent international lawyer has launched a scathing critique of the international arbitration system that deals with investor-State disputes, calling for its "complete overhaul".
...
Delivering the keynote address to the Eighth Annual Juris Investment Treaty Arbitration Conference held in Washington, D.C. in late March, George Kahale III -- who has been lead counsel in several of the world’s largest international arbitration cases, including a pending claim against Venezuela -- also listed the top ten of what he viewed were the most troubling aspects of investor-State arbitration. His ten points are all good, and well-worth reading, but the first is particularly important. It helps to explain why corporate sovereignty has become such a big issue recently -- and why some nations are starting to withdraw from such schemes: many governments are jumping on to the bandwagon of investment treaties -- which Kahale described as "weapons of legal destruction" -- often without scrutinising the serious implications and significance of the obligations contained therein.
Governments also often overlook the changing nature of investment treaties -- which are expanding in breadth and ambiguity -- in favour of investors with the corresponding effect that more and more types of State acts, gestures or Statements are becoming liable to challenge and compensation by foreign investors, said Kahale. It's the fact that investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) chapters are like a ticking trade time-bomb, just waiting to explode at some unknown future date, that makes them so dangerous. A country can't predict which apparently innocuous change to its laws or regulations will trigger a multi-million -- or even multi-billion -- dollar ISDS claim against it. Since awards must be met from the public purse, that means there could be a huge unexpected shortfall in the national budget. That lack of certainty -- and lack of financial control -- is no way to run a country, and is yet another reason why all nations, even the largest, would be wise to refuse to include corporate sovereignty provisions in their trade agreements.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+
Filed Under: arbitration, corporate sovereignty, george kahale, investor state dispute settlement, isds, trade agreementsAlyssa Mastromonaco and Pete Rouse, right, to join HeadCount. | provided by Alyssa Mastromonaco Post-Obama: Working with The Dead
Their briefing books, filled with intricate details about President Barack Obama’s presidency, were adorned with the Grateful Dead logo.
Alyssa Mastromonaco, who managed nearly every aspect of Obama’s political rise, decorated her White House office with two framed photos of the psychedelic jam band.
Story Continued Below
Pete Rouse, Obama’s former chief of staff, still sneaks away to New York to catch a concert.
( Also on POLITICO: Obama goes rogue on Gitmo)
Now that they’ve left the White House, Rouse and Mastromonaco — two of Obama’s closest confidants — are becoming more deeply embedded in the rock ’n’ roll community. They both are gearing up to join the board of HeadCount, a voter registration group with close ties to the Grateful Dead and the rock ’n’ roll community.
Any number of corporations would shell out six-figure sums to have a close adviser to the president sit on their board. But Rouse, who recently joined a law firm as a policy adviser, and Mastromonaco, who is helping Obama set up his library, aren’t jumping at just any offer. In separate interviews, Rouse said he is being “very careful” about joining boards of directors, adding he has no plans to join other ones. Mastromonaco said she will focus on Headcount and her alma mater.
“You kind of get flooded with inquiries when you leave, so I’ve decided that these are my two for the foreseeable future,” she said in an interview. “Headcount and the University of Wisconsin.”
( Also on POLITICO: Dems give big to Senate Majority PAC)
HeadCount is a 10-year-old nonprofit group that deploys volunteers to concert venues across the country to register people to vote. The group is nonpartisan and seeks to register as many voters as it can, regardless of party. It says it has registered 300,000 people since 2004. Its focus extends across musical genres: This summer, volunteers will register voters on the Jay-Z and Beyoncé On the Run Tour.
There’s a healthy contingent of D.C. players on its board of directors: Republican strategist Gordon Hensley, Greenberg Traurig’s Diane Blagman and filmmaker Nicole Boxer, who is also the daughter of Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).
Bob Weir, the former front man of the Grateful Dead, also sits on the board, and personally lobbied Mastromonaco and Rouse to join the organization. Over a dinner at The Hamilton — just a couple of blocks from the White House — Weir formally asked the pair to join the board.
“Alyssa and Pete have deep experience in mobilizing young voters,” Weir said in an email. “That’s our job here.”
( Also on POLITICO: GOP's Obamacare fears come true)
Mastromonaco and Rouse — who have both been with Obama since his days in the Senate — are notoriously private. But both agreed to interviews about their impending move — and their longtime love affair with live music.
Mastromonaco estimates that she’s been to more than 40 Phish shows. When she was in high school, a good report card allowed her to go to Albany, New York, to see the Grateful Dead. Every New Year’s Day for the past few decades, she’s listened to “Box of Rain,” a Grateful Dead staple.
When the living members of the Grateful Dead performed at the Verizon Center in 2009, Mastromonaco sat near the stage with David Axelrod, another Dead fan. Rouse has become friendly with Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks, members of the Allman Brothers Band. Mastromonaco said she “immediately” said yes to Weir’s offer.
( WATCH: What you don't know about Obama)
“The thing I love about [HeadCount] is it gives people the information to make their own decisions,” Mastromonaco said. “But it shows them how to be activists for the things that they care about. It doesn’t tell them what to do, it just tells them how to do it. I think that’s cool. When we get out there, and you have campaigns out there, and Democrats out there registering people to vote, I just think it kind of turns people off. Because they kind of assume that you only care about them voting [for your candidate]. This, to me, is just something that’s so wholesome because it’s nonstop, for 10 years, this is what they’ve been doing, and they want people to vote and show them how to vote.”
Rouse said, “I’m a Democrat, but what I appreciate about HeadCount is that it doesn’t care how you register, but rather just that you do register and participate. The summer concert season provides a great opportunity to deliver this message, and the idea that people are on site to register voters in real time appeals to me.”
“From a small ‘d’ perspective,” he added, “the goal is to get more people energized and involved. HeadCount has confidence in the power of ideas, and they are not here to tell young people how to vote, but just that it is important for their self-interest to vote.”SAN DIEGO (CBS 8) — Cheetahs exotic dancers said they were in Federal Court Thursday to send a strong message to the City of San Diego and police that their human rights were violated, no matter their profession.
"They asked me to remove my clothes so they can take pics of my tattoos," said "Mallory."
"It's ridiculous," said dancer former dancer "Renee." "They thought it was OK for them to treat us that way."
The two women - two of 30 women, including mothers, who are former and current dancers at Cheetahs Gentleman's Strip Club - say they were treated like common criminals during a raid by San Diego Police.
"They were held against their will not free to leave, documented like gang enforcement treats gang members," said attorney Dan Gilleon.
Gilleon said what happened in 2013 and March 2014 at the totally nude entertainment club turned heads for different reasons.
All was caught on surveillance camera, in Cheetahs locker room in Kearny Mesa and made national headlines. Gilleon said the women were illegally detained while their tattoos were photographed during a VICE raid.
"They wouldn't let us leave and held us against their will and a lot of them needed to be with their children," said "Mallory."
"We document things that help with our investigation and help us identify people because tattoos, for example, have cleared people," said San Diego Police Lt. Scott Wahl.
They believe it was retaliation after the city's long history of trying to shut down the club due to violations of "no fondling, no groping" laws, according to the city attorney.
Gilleon said the raid disregarded the 4th amendment, which prohibits illegal searches and seizures and claims the City is hiding behind its municipal code and dancing around the amendment.
"This about telling the City of San Diego, that you cannot violate women's rights because you don't think they will fight back," Gilleon said.
These women says it's about justice and won't settle for less.
"It's not about the money," said "Mallory." "I make plenty of money at work. I want them to stop doing what they're doing."
No settlement was reached Thursday.
A spokesperson for the city said they are barred from discussing what happens in the settlement conference.
Both sides are due back in court in May.Today a new force has risen: “The Dark DAO”. If you don’t know yet what this is all about, read this and this.
Now that it has turned out that The DAO was also a huge multi-million bug bounty program — here is a quick update for those who want a visual of what happened to the network in the first hours after the draining started.
Useful information
Creator of the malicious DAO: 0x4a574510c7014e4ae985403536074abe582adfc8
Start of the drain: 2016–06–17 03:34:48 UTC, block 1718497
The malicious child DAO aka “The Dark DAO”:0x304a554a310c7e546dfe434669c62820b7d83490
Malicious token holders aka “Dark token holders”.
These are the accounts that control the malicious DAO:
0xc0ee9db1a9e07ca63e4ff0d5fb6f86bf68d47b89 0xf835a0247b0063c04ef22006ebe57c5f11977cc4
These are the accounts that control the malicious DAO: 0xc0ee9db1a9e07ca63e4ff0d5fb6f86bf68d47b89 0xf835a0247b0063c04ef22006ebe57c5f11977cc4 Curator of the malicious DAO and creator of the malicious proposal: 0xb656b2a9c3b2416437a811e07466ca712f5a5b5a
The malicious proposal from which the attack was launched:
#59, aka “lonely, so lonely”, 2016–06–08 05:38:01 UTC, before the recursion call bug went public on 2016–06–10
#59, aka “lonely, so lonely”, 2016–06–08 05:38:01 UTC, before the recursion call bug went public on 2016–06–10 Voted Yes (same as the malicious token holdes):
0xc0ee9db1a9e07ca63e4ff0d5fb6f86bf68d47b89
0xf835a0247b0063c04ef22006ebe57c5f11977cc4
0xc0ee9db1a9e07ca63e4ff0d5fb6f86bf68d47b89 0xf835a0247b0063c04ef22006ebe57c5f11977cc4 Voted No:
0xca8e11c876180c9f2115fa61fe2a1a3a6f66ebaf
0x347c28ef5487b37a8e03040653a739f19b986b2d
0xca8e11c876180c9f2115fa61fe2a1a3a6f66ebaf 0x347c28ef5487b37a8e03040653a739f19b986b2d Recipient as stated in the malicious proposal (
|
yourself against potential financial disaster. While finance experts vary in their estimates of how much you need to save, they all agree that having that cushion is a necessity. Based on the numbers, however, it seems that far too many Americans don't have adequate protection.
Related: Best Online Savings Account
11. How many Americans have less than $100 in emergency savings?
Almost half of Americans would not be able to cover an unexpected expense of $500 or less. Almost a quarter would not be able to cover even $100. An estimated 22.9% of men and 22.7% of women say they don't have at least a Benjamin in their emergency fund.
12. How many Americans have less than $500 saved?
Having $500 in the bank for emergencies can give you a sense of financial security but for 41% of adults, it's still a pipe dream.
13. What percentage of Americans have a three-month emergency fund?
Saving three months' worth of expenses is a lofty goal. In a survey when Americans were asked if they have a 3 to 5 month emergency fund, just 17% said they do.
14. How many have six months' worth of expenses saved?
Twenty-three percent of adults surveyed acknowledge having an emergency fund that could last them at least six months.
15. Who's more likely to have an emergency fund?
Age, income and race play a part in determining how Americans save for emergencies. For example, 36% of retirees have a 6-month emergency account compared to 16% of 18 to 29-year-olds. Ten percent of college grads lack any savings versus 36% of those with a high school diploma or less.
PLANNING FOR RETIREMENT
With Social Security payouts expected to decrease to about 75% of their current limit over the next several decades, planning for a secure retirement has become more important than ever. Unfortunately, study after study shows that millions of workers are lagging behind on their savings goals.
16. How many Americans aren't saving for retirement?
The sooner you start saving for retirement, the better - but that's something 36% of adults haven't gotten around to yet. More than a quarter of adults aged 50 to 64 aren't saving anything for their golden years.
Related: Best Roth IRA
17. How much do savers expect to need when they retire?
How much cash you'll need in retirement will vary based on your current income and expenses. Among middle-class workers, $250,000 is the median amount they're aiming to save.
18. How much are they saving each month?
Building up a quarter of a million dollars in savings takes time, and many adults may fall short. On average, workers aged 30 to 49 are saving $200 a month for retirement while those aged 50 to 59 are adding a mere $78 to their accounts.
19. What's the average 401(k) balance?
At the end of 2013, the average 401(k) balance was a healthy $101,650. The median balance, however, was just $31,396, which means that half of the workers participating in their employer's retirement had that much or more while the other half had less.
20. How much are people contributing to their 401(k)?
While 93% of middle-class workers are participating to a 401(k) plan, 67% of them are only saving enough to qualify for the company match. The median contribution amount for those between 30 and 59 years of age is 7% of their salary.
21. What's the median net worth in America?
Among seniors aged 55 to 64, the median net worth is around $165,000. By comparison, those in the 35 to 44 range boast a net worth of about $50,000. The 18 to 34-year-old millennial set fare the worst, with a net worth of $11,000.
22. How worried are Americans about their financial future?
Being prepared for retirement is a top financial concern for Americans; 59% say that running out of money is their number one fear.
23. How many Americans say they'll never retire?
Working past retirement age has unfortunately become a reality for many seniors. In 2013, 7% of employees said they plan to stay on the job indefinitely. That's a big jump from the 2% who made the same claim in 2011.
CONCLUSION
Saving money should be a priority for everyone but as evidenced by the statistics we found, it's not necessarily a cakewalk. Sometimes it's as simple as cutting out that daily latte but for other Americans, their financial reality presents some much bigger obstacles.
For more helpful tips to get started on that savings paths, check out these articles:
Sources and Referencesspikes the ball after a touchdown run against the San Francisco Andrew Luck spikes the ball after a touchdown run against the San Francisco 49ers. (Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images)
In 2012, the San Francisco 49ers got to within four points of a Super Bowl victory with an offense that was equal parts modern and smash-mouth. By marrying option and pistol plays to power/counter/trap blocking concepts that have been bedeviling NFL defenses since Vince Lombardi was drawing them up, head coach Jim Harbaugh and offensive coordinator Greg Roman put together a plan that could just as easily beat opponents into submission as it could win with schematic advantage.
While the 2013 49ers' offense has been locked in a bit of a quagmire so far, those ideas -- which Harbaugh and Roman refined during their time at Stanford -- are thriving in Indianapolis, where new Colts offensive coordinator Pep Hamilton has drawn up many of the same ideas he learned as Stanford's offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach (and Roman's replacement) in 2011 and 2012. And since he had Andrew Luck for that first season, it's easy enough for Luck to take what he's learned in the NFL and weld it to those older lessons.
In Luck's first NFL season, then-offensive coordinator Bruce Arians preferred a higher risk/reward system that allowed for big plays and the occasional big mistake. Luck attempted 101 passes in which the primary target was 20 or more yards downfield in 2012, most in the NFL. He also faced more "pressure plays" -- 268 -- than any other quarterback.
Through four games under Hamilton, things are somewhat different. Luck has attempted just 18 passes of 20 or more yards in the air -- Ben Roethlisberger leads the league with 27. However, he's faced pressure on 63 of his 150 dropbacks, which is actually a higher percentage (42.0) than last year's 38.1 percent. That's a product of Indy's relatively weak offensive line, but one thing that's working better than last season is the Colts' running game.
Pep Hamilton has the Colts' offense running at full power. (MCT via Getty Images) Pep Hamilton has the Colts' offense running at full power. (MCT via Getty Images)
The Colts rank second, behind only the Philadelphia Eagles, in Football Outsiders' opponent-adjusted metrics when it comes to overall rushing efficiency -- they ranked 18th last year. Indianapolis ranked 28th in FO's Adjusted Line Yards metric (overall run-blocking efficiency) in 2012, and they're second behind the Green Bay Packers this season. This despite a running back rotation that has been patchwork at best. Vick Ballard is out for the season with a torn right ACL, Ahmad Bradshaw is currently doubtful for the Colts' Week 5 matchup with the Seattle Seahawks due to a neck injury, and the recently-acquired Trent Richardson is still getting the hang of things. Still, this run game rolls along, and it was never more present than when the Colts beat the San Francisco 49ers, 27-7 on Sept. 22. They put up 184 total rushing yards on San Francsico's stout defense, and that's the way this team wants to play over the long term.
"Absolutely," Colts head coach Chuck Pagano said after that win. "Every game is going to be different, and we are built and wired the right way to be able to pound it when we need to pound it. And if we need to throw it, obviously we have the best in the business under center that can throw it and spread the ball around. We have playmakers all over the place. The way those backs ran. The way that the offensive line blocked, the tight ends, the fullbacks, it was truly a heavyweight fight. I am really proud of our guys.”
BURKE: Colts continue to rise in Week 4 Power Rankings
Richardson, Bradshaw, and Luck all scored rushing touchdowns in this game, and Luck's six-yard touchdown scamper in the fourth quarter was set up to a degree by Bradshaw's eight-yard run to the San Francisco five-yard line two plays before. This was a great example of a power offense lulling a defense to sleep with certain concepts, and then flipping the script.
The Colts went heavy with an extra offensive lineman (guard Joe Reitz) to the left, and at the snap, Luck handed off to Bradshaw, who bulled through a gap opened by Reitz, left tackle Anthony Castonzo, and tight end Dominique Jones. The 49ers loaded their defense to that side, and the Colts indulged defensive coordinator Vic Fangio by blasting through. The key block, however, came from right guard Jeff Linkenbach, who pulled all the way over to left end to seal the inside for Bradshaw. These multi-gap guard pulls have been a staple at Stanford for a long time -- current Pittsburgh Steelers guard David DeCastro ran them for the Cardinal as well as anyone you'll ever see. Linkenbach operated it to perfection here.
So, for Luck's touchdown run two plays later, the Colts put their extra lineman on the right side, with fullback Stanley Havili replacing Jones as the satellite blocker. You'll see this with the Cardinal and definitely with the 49ers, who love to roll fullback Bruce Miller all over the formation. This was pure gap power, and the addition of Bradshaw and Havili as potential rushing threats sent the 49ers' linebackers to all the wrong spots at the snap. Linebacker Michael Wilhoite came up in a blitz look to the right A-gap, and linebacker NaVorro Bowman was a step late to deal with Luck because he was spying Bradshaw and insuring that the middle of the defense was covered against a power run game that had announced its presence with authority.
“Anytime you have success running the ball -- lead schemes, power schemes, zone schemes, gap schemes, whatever it is, and everybody is loading the box and keying in on the two backs, it was a brilliant call by Pep and great execution," Luck said after the game. "We’ve talked about execution and preparation. If you take care of the cents, the dollars will come. All we talk about is process and doing the little things. We talk about execution. A great call again by Pep and great execution by our quarterback.”
Luck told me on Wednesday that it also helps his play-action game.
"It's great to have the run game get going -- it's not where everybody wants it to be yet, but we'll still work to try to get to that point," he said. "It does help the passing game when you can tire the big [defensive] guys out, and work play action off of it and have a mix. Pep's done a great job of bringing that vision, and Coach Pagano's vision is the same thing -- you've got to be able to run the ball, and the defense has to be able to stop the run. Pep's instilled that, and we've all bought in, and it's fun to be a part of it."
The primary difference between the Colts' version of the "Stanford offense" and what the 49ers run is that the Colts ask so much more of Luck than the 49ers ask of Colin Kaepernick, and Luck is able to deliver. That's less a knock on Kaepernick and more an affirmation of the fact that Luck is able to handle more than your average young quarterback. And when the Colts do run play-action, one of their favorite concepts is to line speedy young receiver T.Y. Hilton outside veteran Reggie Wayne in the slot. At the snap, you'll see Hilton take the top off and work at least one safety, while Wayne owns the middle of the field behind linebackers that have been frozen by the fakes. This first-quarter play last Sunday against the Jacksonville Jaguars provides a blueprint.
Hilton motions from outside the numbers to just inside Wayne in a stack look. At the snap, Hilton drives from one seam to another, grabbing strong safety Johnathan Cyprien on his way. Free safety Josh Evans starts to double up on Hilton, and recovers to Wayne a bit too late. Because of the delayed fake to Richardson, Jacksonville commits all three linebackers -- Geno Hayes, Paul Posluszny, and Russell Allen -- to the short middle. Allen actually bails out of a blitz look to curl/flat coverage responsibility because the Jags have been trained (perhaps overtrained) to respect Indy's backs, who are both extending to short routes. Luck has the velocity and timing to line it up perfectly with Wayne, and that's exactly what he does. Add in tight end Coby Fleener's route on the other side, and you can see why this concept is effective at every level. If you run a lot of Cover-2 as the Jags do, the Colts will beat you to death with this stuff.
Seattle head coach Pete Carroll runs a more multi-faceted defense, but he's more than aware of this new Colts offense and the challenges it presents.
"There's not much resemblance in the running game -- in the throwing game, there is some," Carroll said Wednesday, when I asked him how similar the Colts and 49ers offenses are. They're more basic -- the 49ers do a lot of wacky stuff with these interesting styles of runs. These guys are more standardized in what they're doing -- they're trying to come downhill with the power play that they run. But there's more reliance on the drop-back passing game."
And that goes back to Luck as the fulcrum of the offense.
"I didn't study him as much last year; just watched him more," Carroll said. "Judging now from what they're asking of him, he's doing everything. They have as much confidence in him as you can have. Of course, Pep goes way back with him, and he's known him for a long time, so he didn't have to be convinced. He's running a lot of the game at the line of scrimmage, he's got a number of plays he can call to fit the defense, and that's because he's so smart and has such a command of the system. I don't really know that they did that last year, but they certainly are now."AutoMapper is an object-object mapper. Object-object mapping works by transforming an input object of one type into an output object of a different type. It has a large amount of settings which sometimes are really hard to setup. In my projects, I needed to auto-map simple objects which don’t have collection properties, only a big tree of custom property types- TestCase object which has a property of type TestStep and so on. Also, there are rare cases in which the AutoMapper is not working. So, I created ReducedAutoMapper, which is only 150 lines of code but it runs 180% faster that AutoMapper.
Reduced AutoMapper Explained
The main goal of the object-object mappers is to map object A to object B.
Original Object Type- Not Serializable
Destination Object- Serializable (identical properties, only serialization attributes added)
The first step in the object-object mapper is to register the relations between the Original and Destination objects.
In order to accomplish the task, the class contains mappingTypes Dictionary which stores the relations between the original and destination types. Through the generic method CreateMap, the types are added to the dictionary.
Sample Registration
How the main AutoMapping Algorithm Works?
In its core, the ReducedAutoMapper heavily uses Reflection to get the information related to the auto-mapped objects.
First it gets the properties of the source object.
Next it iterates through them. If a property with the same name it is not present in the destination object, it is skipped. If there is and it is not our custom class (it is a System class like- string, int, DateTime), its value is set to the original’s property one.
If the type of the property is a custom type and it is not present in the dictionary, it is not auto-mapped.
Otherwise in order the new value of the destination object to be calculated, we use reflection to call recursively the generic Map method.
There is an optimization if the values of the inner property types are already calculated. When a registered destination type is calculated, its value is placed in the alreadyInitializedObjects collection and the method Map is not called recursively afterwards.
If you need to auto-map collection of objects you can use the third method of the ReducedAutoMapper class- MapList.
Compare AutoMapper with ReducedAutoMapper
I created a simple console application where I initialized a really large objects with more than 1000 properties. The number of the created objects is 100000.
Above you can find the first source class- FirstObject. Below you can find the other two.
SecondObject
ThirdObject
The code below tests the ReducedAutoMapper with 100000 objects.
Results
The code below tests the AutoMapper with 100000 objects.
Results
As you can see from the results above, the ReducedAutoMapper performed >180% better than AutoMapper.Correction appended: Oct. 29, 2013
You thought Somali pirates got dealt a bad hand by being blasted with Britney Spears’ “Oops! … I Did It Again”? Here are five other songs that have been used to torture people. (Royalties, anyone?)
1. “I Love You” by Barney the Dinosaur
There is no official data on how many American parents have already lost their minds owing to an overdose of this cuddly monster, but American interrogators would surely know the figures, since “I Love You” is cited as one of the most “overused” songs in their arsenal. A U.S. operative told Newsweek in 2003 that he was forced to listen to the song for 45 minutes during training. “I never want to go through that again,” he laconically stated.
2. “Panama” by Van Halen
International law prevented a Navy SEAL team from hunting down Manuel Noriega in December 1989, after the Panamanian dictator took refuge in the Vatican embassy. However, it didn’t prevent the Americans from blasting the papal emissaries with some good old rock ’n’ roll. After several days of being blasted by Van Halen, the Clash and The Howard Stern Show at deafening levels, representatives of the Holy See eventually handed over Noriega.
3. “The Real Slim Shady” by Eminem
It is hard to fathom the horror of hearing Em’s nasal voice declaring “May I have your attention please?” for a hundredth time straight, but that was Benyam Mohammad’s experience while detained at a secret U.S. prison in Kabul. He told Human Rights Watch that interrogators played Eminem and Dr. Dre continuously for 20 days, while depriving them of food and water. “Plenty lost their minds,” he said. “I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off.”
4. “Copacabana” by Barry Manilow
Road spikes and boom gates did nothing to deter teenage hoodlums from congregating along the seaside promenade in the Sydney suburb of Brighton Le Sands, where they would abuse residents and generally cause mayhem. Then shop owner and city-council member Gary Green came up with a plan: pink lights and Barry Manilow. “Pink light … makes the skin look blotchy and shows up spots,” Green told the Australian media outlet ABC. “I don’t know why but Barry Manilow popped into my head … Maybe it’s because Brighton is the Copacabana of south Sydney?” The pubescent nuisance was driven away. What happened to the sanity of other Brighton residents’ is, however, unknown.
5. “Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen
Detainees at Guantánamo have said that the Springsteen hit has been played for years on end as a wake-up call at the compound — a weird choice, one would think, considering the song’s highly U.S.-critical lyrics. The same goes for Rage Against the Machine’s anti-American banger “Killing in the Name Of,” which has also reportedly been played at Gitmo. The band’s guitarist Tom Morello is one of many musicians who have endorsed a demand that the government disclose the titles of all songs used as a method of punishment and who have protested such use.
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the shop owner and city-council member. He is Gary Green, not Martin Corben.Canadian Motor Speedway is a motorsports park to be built in Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada. The development is located on an 821 acres (332 hectares) adjacent to the Queen Elizabeth Way highway. It consists of a 1.2 kilometer (¾ mile) progressive bank oval and 3.2 kilometer (2 mile) road course. With 65,000 seats and 40 suites, Canadian Motor Speedway will be the largest speedway in Canada and the second-largest sporting venue, in terms of seating capacity, in the country (behind only Montreal's Olympic Stadium). Its location provides it with a large market area, being 6.4 kilometers (4 miles) from the Canada/USA border with Buffalo, N.Y. and 17 kilometers (11 miles) from Niagara Falls.
It is a hybrid development with aspects making it unique from other racetracks. It will have the two race courses as well as, Research and Development, Light Industrial and Commercial areas on the site. A specific objective is to develop relevance for motorsports through the initiatives of the Research and Development area, which concentrates on advancing fuels, materials and power train technologies, while augmenting environmental sustainability through a bio diversity initiative.
Further benefits from the development include providing a strong employment base, with a projected 730 operational jobs for the Speedway, R&D, Light Industrial and Commercial zones and 1,200 construction jobs over 21 months for the speedway and road course. Events will draw patrons from areas outside of the Niagara region to increase the number of tourists to the area. The result is a proposed new dollar economic impact of $400 million annually.
Daily activities will include R&D testing, road course track days (for car and motorcycle clubs), driver experience sessions on the oval, corporate team-building seminars/track time, charity fundraiser events, motocross and kart practice sessions, and snowmobile sessions in season. The Speedway will feature 10 summer weekend Special Events, under a permit from the Town of Fort Erie.
Design [ edit ]
Canadian Motor Speedway features many unique aspects for the racetrack layout and the total development. The design team will be led by 4-time NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion Jeff Gordon.[1]
The development is made up of three core areas, the oval and road course, centrally located, the research and development area to the south and east of the site, and the Commercial area to the north. The major parking and camping areas are located to the immediate west and southwest of the development.
One of the central design/development parameters is the 250 acre (101 hectare) environmental element. A master planned biodiversity park will be employed to enhance sustainability and passive connectivity throughout the site. The current environmental features of the site are being increased with the remediation of the Miller's Creek corridor and the implementation of filter beds in constrained areas.
Speedway [ edit ]
Centering the layout will be a 1.2 km (¾ mile) oval with progressive banking.[2] It will feature the latest innovations in design and safety. The oval will have 60,000 grandstand seats, 5,000 club seats and 80 suites along its start/finish straight for spectators. The speedway has been pre-approved to expand to as many as 100,000 grandstand seats. Inside the oval will house the race garages, medical center and media center. The versatility of the infield will allow for a multitude of non-racing events including ice hockey, various winter sports, as well as concerts and other popular entertainment events.
Road course [ edit ]
A multi-configuration road course is planned. The 3.2 km (2 mile) FIM/FIA track will incorporate the oval through tunnels in and out under the back straight of the oval. This design will be unique in providing a "stadium section" for the road course that will utilize the permanent seating of the oval. The elevations of the site will allow the spectators in the oval grandstand to see the oval section as well as the back section of the road course. A second configuration will separate from the oval, and use only the back section of the road course to allow the oval and back road course to be used independently. A 2nd paddock area will be built along the longest straight to accommodate the back course. The road course paddock area will also be the location of light industrial buildings for race teams and motorsport related shops.
A CIK international grade karting facility is planned to allow regional and International karting at the facility.
Research and development [ edit ]
A Research and Development campus, in collaboration with McMaster University's Faculty of Engineering, Niagara College, and other education partners is to be constructed on the southern portion of the site. R&D activities performed will be related to the motorsport and automotive industries, such as prototype testing, design and development. This R&D Centre / Innovation Park portion of the development is limited to 80 acres (32 hectares) by the Special Policy Area Zoning By-law. On July 7, 2014, a Memorandum of Understanding with Niagara College was signed to also explore the potential for CMS to host classes, co-op students and post-graduate placements in automotive power programs as well as hospitality, renewable technologies, innovation, media, business, and more.[3]
Commercial [ edit ]
A 74-acre (30 hectare) commercial and retail area has been approved to the north of the site and will be a part of the second phase.[4]
Carbon neutral [ edit ]
The biodiversity plan, ties in with the theme of establishing a beneficial co-existence between the project and the environment. The development will employ proper forest management practices, to enhance the forest ecosystem, and increase the tree cover on the site by 80 acres (32 hectares). Canadian Motor Speedway will use grass parking areas to reduce the overall environmental impact and footprint, while enhancing the water quality systems that exist on the site. Canadian Motor Speedway will undertake initiatives to design, construct and operate the facility as the first carbon neutral track in the world.[2]
Development process [ edit ]
The Canadian Motor Speedway was conceptualized in 2005. Site selection and investment began in 2007. Previous attempts at a speedway in Niagara, were made by other individuals and failed primarily due to lack of resources, a workable business plan, and a flawed development strategy. A complete review of the business model coupled by the formulation of alliances with Jeff Gordon Inc., and other development partners resulted in an opportunity that would meet investor expectations while creating significant value for local communities in the area. Following 14 months of comprehensive studies, that included 22 reports, the planning submission for a special policy area was made to the Town of Fort Erie and Region of Niagara in February/March 2009.[5]
A public open house hosted by Canadian Motor Speedway was held on June 4, 2009, to introduce the project to the public. The first presentation to Fort Erie Town council came on September 8, 2009, with the report from town staff of the application to amend the Fort Erie Official Plan and Zoning By-law.[6] Requests for recommendation reports on the Official Plan Amendment and Regional Official Plan Amendment were made on November 23, 2009,[7] and November 25, 2009 respectively. On December 7, 2009 following a 6+ hour council meeting that had 59 delegations the Town of Fort Erie Council voted unanimously to approve the Official Plan Amendment.[5] On December 9, 2009 the Region of Niagara council also voted unanimously to approve the Regional Official Plan Amendment.[8] The by-laws to enact the amendments were passed on December 14 by the Town of Fort Erie and February 11, 2010 by the Region of Niagara.
On September 7, 2010 the planning staff of the Town of Fort Erie submitted a recommendation report No. CDS-048-10 to council to approve the re-zoning application, of Canadian Motor Speedway.[9] The report was accepted and Fort Erie Town council voted unanimously to approve the re-zoning By-law No. 106-10 for the property for Canadian Motor Speedway after the third reading on September 13, 2010.[10][11] The 821 acre (332 hectare) site of the Canadian Motor Speedway is considered a Special Policy Area for the use of motorsport related activities.
Appeals against the development were taken to the Ontario Municipal Board for hearing in June 2012.[12] A decision was rendered on November 5, 2012 to approve the development and allow it to proceed, with certain holding provisions, to the next stage in the development process.
On October 9, 2013, construction began for the initial re-development of Miller Creek - a significant environmental enhancement on the site. The speedway is now expected to be completed by 2017.[13]
In the July 28, 2014 issue of Maclean's Magazine, an article about Canadian Motor Speedway appeared in the Economy section.[14]
On September 11, 2014, Jeff Gordon was in Toronto for the 'Chase Across North America' Sprint Cup Championship media tour and spoke of Canadian Motor Speedway.[15][1]
July 5, 2016 update:[16] Failed land purchase adds more delays to speedway project. Developers now claim they will have a building permit by 2017. No completion date for the project has been offered lately by the developers, but Fort Erie mayor Wayne Redekop recently told Buffalo radio station WBFO, that the speedway could be open by either late 2018 or "the first quarter of 2019."
As of April 2018, development remained stalled. Developers refuse to build the speedway unless an exit ramp is constructed for it off the Queen Elizabeth Way, a proposal the Ontario government at the time opposed (it was deposed in the 2018 elections).[17]
See also [ edit ]Here we go again. Whenever there’s a crisis anywhere in the world, you can count on America’s pundit class to demand action—usually of the military variety. Don’t just stand there, bomb something! After more than two decades of unchallenged American hegemony, Washington keyboards seem almost programmed to call for intervention halfway around the globe.
So it is with Iraq today, where the government has lost effective control of the Sunni Arab majority areas of the country. ISIS, the feared Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, has served as a vanguard uniting disaffected Iraqi Sunni Arabs into a fighting force effective enough to defeat larger and better-armed Iraqi government armed forces in certain areas. Chattering-class members from across the political spectrum see U.S. vital interests threatened, and are demanding that President Obama fire up the fighter-bombers.
Eleven years after the invasion that precipitated the present morass, how should we think about all this? Should we listen to the very same people who called for the war in 2003, with disastrous results, and are now insisting on action?
The escalating civil war in Iraq, and the increasingly likely de facto partition of the country, should be assessed from first principles. The United States spent enormous amounts of treasure and considerable blood trying to turn Iraq into a functioning multi-ethnic democracy; this effort failed. The costs are sunk. Our analysis must begin from the present: We are being asked to pay new costs and bear new burdens. For what and with what hope of success?
A small but increasing number of U.S. scholars, policymakers and politicians are beginning to subscribe to a new view of U.S. grand strategy, which in a recent book I have called Restraint. We believe that the United States needs to restore discipline to its foreign policy—set priorities more rigorously and calculate both costs and chances of success with a more skeptical eye.
The term grand strategy gets bandied about in various forms; I define it as protecting U.S. territorial integrity, sovereignty and safety and the power position needed to secure them in an uncertain world.
So where does Iraq fit in? ISIS is full of bad guys—no question. But a divided Iraq at worst might threaten U.S. safety by providing a “safe haven” for terrorists who might plot against the United States. The world is, unfortunately, full of bad guys and safe havens. The United States now watches them in Pakistan, Yemen and across Africa with various intelligence means, and occasionally raids them, solo or in the company of friends. More importantly, the United States has hardened itself against terrorist threats. This combination of defensive measures, surveillance and the occasional raid buys a lot of safety. America need not throw in with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a power-hungry Shiite supremacist bent mainly on serving the interests of his own faction, to keep its people secure. Maliki’s heavy-handed employment of surveillance, incarceration, and violence has driven Sunni Arab fence sitters into the arms of ISIS fanatics; he’s part of the problem, not the solution.
That ought to make us cautious about meddling in Iraq’s internal politics. Restraint strategists are alert to the costs of intervening in the internal politics of other countries and the low odds of success inherent to doing so.
In the first place, though the timing and the causes are murky, identity politics have surged across much of the world, a phenomenon that probably antedates the end of the Cold War. Here’s how it works: Political entrepreneurs organize followers around appeals to national, ethnic and religious identities. This kind of politics makes compromise hard. Politically mobilized identities are deeply mistrustful and fearful of neighboring groups. And they are especially resistant to outsiders who come to visit with guns and explain to them how they should live. The United States has paid a high price for its efforts to reengineer the politics of others, efforts that have usually failed. Still, a little well-timed meddling could be useful. Identity politics does open the door for the United States practice a version of “divide-and-conquer” politics, but this only works if America patiently holds back, avoids making itself the problem and waits for opportunities. Mobilized identities may seem homogeneous, but they often contain deep divisions as well. That’s an opening.
Consider Iraq. Sunnis and Shia may dislike one another, and dislike U.S. tutelage. But left to their own devices, these groups easily fall out even among themselves. Part of the hagiography of the Iraq “surge” is that the United States somehow played a magical tune that caused the Sunni “Awakening,” and brought many Iraqi Sunnis to the U.S. side. Smart diplomats and commanders actually took advantage of extant divisions. Iraqi Sunnis turned on their foreign jihadi allies, who somehow thought that Islam would overcome local loyalties and permit them to run the show. What’s the relevance to today? For those thinking of active participation on the side of the Shiite regime in Baghdad, a smarter strategy is to wait for the Sunni population’s alliance of convenience with the jihadis to fall apart.
Restraint strategists believe that local politicians are strategic actors who intelligently pursue their own interests with the resources they possess. One resource is “the lie.” During and after the surge, the United States argued that the Maliki regime needed to take many steps to reconcile with the Sunni Arabs. Maliki was happy to assure us that these things would happen. If that is what we want to hear, that is what he will tell us. The Pentagon was required by Congress to issue quarterly reports on “progress” in Iraq. The political and economic sections of these reports, which ceased publication with the departure of the last U.S. troops in December 2011, make for dismal reading. They consistently report little if any progress. Why would Maliki, who depends on the Shiite majority for his electoral success, offer anything to the Sunni Arabs? It was entirely rational for him to talk the talk of reconciliation. But given the intense identity politics of Iraq, he wasn’t about to walk the walk: His best strategy was to “cheap ride” on the Americans. Let them fight the Sunnis, reconcile with the Sunnis, build up the Iraqi Army and rebuild infrastructure while he consolidates power in his own base.
Some, including me, believed there was a chance that after the United States left, Maliki would stop cheap riding on U.S. power and throw some bones to the Sunni Arabs in the hopes of consolidating the quiescence U.S. military and political efforts helped to achieve. No such luck. I suspect, but cannot prove, that Maliki believed that if things deteriorated either the Americans or the Iranians would come to the rescue. This is looking like a good bet. Be that as it may, those who presently argue that Maliki must demonstrate a real effort to unify the disparate groups in his country seem hopelessly naive. Maliki will say whatever he has to say to get outside assistance. He won’t deliver. Moreover, given his past pattern of misbehavior, such statements, even if accompanied by some small symbolic concessions, will lack credibility with Sunni Arabs.
Finally, restraint strategists have a certain respect for military power. We admire a drone, a smart weapon or an airplane as much as anyone. Footage of single strikes is strangely comforting—a single weapon is seen to hit a single target, yielding a white flash that one hopes took the right bad guy out of the fight. But taken together, we still think war is war: not a scalpel but a battle axe. And once you start swinging that axe, there may be unintended consequences. If the United States were to go so far as to help the Baghdad forces retake Mosul and other cities by providing air support, the Sunni Arabs who live there are not likely to think more kindly of us. If the United States provides such air support, and intelligence support, the Iraqi military will never grow up. The combination will be deadly to U.S. interests. All Sunni Arabs will know that we are the pillar of Shiite hegemony in Iraq. If one is interested in the safety of American citizens, this is not a particularly smart role to assume.
An ISIS statelet straddling Iraq and Syria might provide haven for Islamic terrorists who ultimately decide that attacks on Western targets are in their interests, though there is little sign presently that this is ISIS’s program. But “ISISstan” will not be a great base, or a safe one. It has no international airport or seaport. Its neighbors
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SoC, and plenty of other bits and pieces to go around, the specs are certainly enough to make it into a flagship phone. Of course, the real question is whether it really is. After all, while specs provide the foundation, what makes a phone bad, good, or great has to do with the entire phone, not just the spec sheet. At any rate, I've attached this spec sheet below to give an idea of what to expect from the phone.
Oppo Find 7a OnePlus One SoC MSM8974ABv3 2.3 GHz
Snapdragon 801 MSM8974ACv3 2.45 GHz Snapdragon 801 RAM/NAND 2 GB LPDDR3, 16GB NAND + microSD 3GB LPDDR3, 16/64GB NAND Display 5.5” 1080p IPS LCD (JDI) 5.5” 1080p IPS LCD (JDI) Network 2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Qualcomm MDM9x25 UE Category 4 LTE) 2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Qualcomm MDM9x25 UE Category 4 LTE) Dimensions 152.6 x 75 x 9.2 mm, 170 grams 152.9 x 75.9 x 8.9 mm, 162 grams Camera 13MP (4128 x 3096) Rear Facing, 1/3.06" CMOS size (Sony IMX214), F/2.0, 5MP FFC w/ F/2.0 aperture 13MP (4128 x 3096) Rear Facing, 1/3.06" CMOS size (Sony IMX214), F/2.0, 5MP FFC w/ F/2.0 aperture Battery 2800 mAh (10.64 Whr) 3100 mAh (11.78 Whr) OS Android 4.3 with ColorOS Android 4.4.4 with CyanogenMod 11S Connectivity 802.11a/b/g/n/ac + BT 4.0, USB2.0, GPS/GNSS, DLNA, NFC 802.11a/b/g/n/ac + BT 4.0, USB2.0, GPS/GNSS, DLNA, NFC SIM Size MicroSIM MicroSIM
Needless to say, the OnePlus One is a close cousin of the Find 7a, and its specs are top notch. There's a great foundation, so we'll move on with some initial hardware impressions.
Of course, the first part to look at is industrial and material design, along with any other immediate observations about the phone. From the front, the phone is almost a pure expanse of black glass. There are outlines for the capacitive keys, but these are quite faint most of the time. The contrast of the silver plastic ring only emphasizes this, and the lack of logos helps to make the design stand out by virtue of its minimalism. Picking it up, the feel of the sandstone black finish is incredibly unique and unlike anything I've ever felt. The finish has been described as soft sandpaper, and that's a description I'd agree with. It makes the phone feel much grippier than one might expect. The back cover is also strong, with no real give and no flex. Other than a few logos, the only significant design elements on the back are the camera, dual LED flash, and a hole for the microphone. The front of the phone has surprisingly great attention to detail as well. The silver plastic piece on the front of the phone makes the finger smoothly roll off of the display when swiping around, and the imperceptible feel of the earpiece helps to contribute to the sense that this is a single, well-built phone.
On the sides, the minimalistic theme continues. There's only a power button on the right side, a headphone jack and microphone port on the top, and a volume rocker on the left side. The SIM tray is also on the left side, and on the bottom of the phone we see two speakers, a USB port, and a microphone hole. In general, the feel of the power and volume buttons are great, with no slack and a clean, if subdued click upon activation.
Needless to say, OnePlus has done a fantastic job. However, there are a few issues to talk about. First, the size is definitely too much to handle. If the LG G3 was at the very edge between a phone and phablet, the OnePlus One firmly steps into phablet territory. At some point a line in the sand has to be drawn, and it only makes sense to do so here. The angular corners of the OnePlus One combined with its larger footprint makes for a phone that is almost impossible to comfortably use with one hand. I can't help but feel that this would've been a far more impressive phone if shrunk to a 5" display size, as in my experience it takes two hands to comfortably use this phone. The other issue is much more subtle though. For some reason or another, the glass lens covering the display of the phone feels as if it has noticeably higher friction than other phones I've used. It almost feels as if the oleophobic treatment of the glass is either missing or thinner than most. Of course, overall the phone is great from a basic design perspective. The size seems to be a matter of OnePlus' start-up position and the need to share parts with the Find 7a, although the feel of the glass is unlikely to be an issue for most.The FCC will vote next week to make the white space portion of the television broadcast spectrum publicly available for use in wireless networks. If approved, it could enable a new generation of "Wi-Fi on steroids" devices capable of transmitting data through walls and over much greater distances than current wireless technologies.
Broadcast television networks and organizations that rely on wireless microphones have opposed the use of the broadcast spectrum white space, citing fears that data transmitted in that range will interfere with their signals. The FCC has developed a framework designed to prevent any disruption of existing service, though, and is now set to move forward.
The FCC has worked with the concerned parties and come up with a plan that ensures that devices using the white space spectrum will not interfere with adjacent broadcasts. The FCC has mapped TV channels and major wireless microphone usage (such as the Broadway theater district in New York City, or major sports arenas), and will require that wireless devices using the white space be configured to avoid the frequencies in use in a given area. Devices could be built to be location-aware, and automatically configure themselves based on information in the database.
The pros seem to heavily outweigh the cons for opening up the spectrum white space for use by wireless networks. The "super Wi-Fi" possible in the broadcast white space has a range of several miles, rather than the length of a football field, and it is capable of traveling through obstructions like walls. With a range like that, and speeds rivaling cable modem broadband, it is easy to see how this could open up a whole new realm of wireless technologies and fundamentally change how and where wireless is used.
Of course, there are two sides to the "Wi-Fi on steroids" story. Businesses and consumers today are still struggling to understand and implement effective wireless network security. If you can drive down the street and find random unprotected wireless networks with the current range limitations, imagine how many unsecured wireless networks you could detect if the signal could travel farther and go through walls. With a wireless network that extends beyond walls and covers a greater range, security will be even more critical.
For now, the white space spectrum is not yet available, and the devices and technology needed to tak advantage of it don't yet exist in the mainstream. All that could change, though, when the FCC meets next week, and "super Wi-Fi" enabled devices could begin emerging by early next year.The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on Monday retroactively reported to Congress that five additional "major incidents" of data breaches have occurred since Oct. 30. FDIC also is launching "a new initiative to enhance security."
The incidents involved the breach of taxpayers' personally identifiable information, The Washington Post has learned. In each case, employees with legitimate access to the information were leaving the agency when they inadvertently downloaded the data along with personal files. The individuals involved provided affidavits saying the data was not shared.
FDIC considers these to be low-risk cases, but they each meet the threshold of 10,000 records inappropriately exposed. They are being retroactively reported now because the cases were closed before an FDIC Office of Inspector General decision in February to define "major incident" as one that involves at least 10,000 records.
The new initiative, according to a FDIC document, includes the use of computer software "to force encryption of portable devices" for many purposes. FDIC also will hire a contractor "to conduct an end-to-end assessment of the FDIC IT security and privacy programs, and to provide actionable steps to mitigate any program gaps identified." A management software program will be implemented to allow the FDIC to locate misplaced, sensitive data, "recall it, and destroy it as appropriate, regardless of where the data are located."
Last month, The Post reported that the personal information of 44,000 FDIC customers was breached by an employee leaving the agency. In that case, an internal memo from Lawrence Gross Jr., FDIC's chief information and privacy officer, said the data was placed on a personal storage device by an employee "inadvertently and without malicious intent."
That apparently was the case with the five incidents now being revealed and a similar October incident reported in April by the Federal Times.
The new security measures come in addition to a series of other steps taken by FDIC. They include a prohibition on the use of mobile media devices by most FDIC employees. "As of early April, if an FDIC employee connects removable media to his or her computer, it is blocked," says the agency document.
Also, "monitoring of printed materials has been implemented in high-risk areas," the document says, and in certain cases software can restrict the printing of sensitive information.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
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READ PART TWO
(Memphis) Latoya Shields says she had to sit down when she heard the news, "During the whole relationship, I only knew of four children."
When a prosecutor told her that the father of her child had 20 other children she said her knees buckled, "At that time, three years ago, my child was the 21st child. Yeah, that would be overwhelming for anybody."
She says after spending almost 8 years with Terry Turnage, she had no idea what he what he had been up to.
WREG tried to find out by going to Shelby County Juvenile Court.
Turnage had filed a petition there to lower his child support payments for 15 different women.
Turnage never showed up to the hearing.
Shields says Turnage hasn't really shown up in his daughter's life, "She calls him and it`s a 'hi' and 'bye','see you later' type of situation."
Sheilds says Turnage doesnt typically pay child support either, but when he has, the monthly checks have been $6 to $9.
The money is likely split among all 15 women.
Regardless of all the money owed, Shields says it comes down to a daughter who just wants a relationship with her dad.
Shields says Turnage has been court-ordered to pay her $259 a month in child support, but she has yet to see that kind of money.
WREG tried to track down Turnage with no luck.
One of his family members says he didn't show up to court because he is in the hospital.
Related: Desmond Hatchett May Have 30 ChildrenIn his column this week at The Root, MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson made his latest launch into hyperbole as he claimed that the Trump administration "wants to return America" to the days of "white grievance, violence and discrimination" against blacks, referring to the Philadelphia transit strike of 1944 in which white workers opposed the promotion of blacks to better jobs.
Johnson also coined the term "White Pride Week" to mock recent decisions by the administration on race-based college admissions and immigration policy changes.
The MSNBC contributor's article from Monday, August 7, titled, "Hey, Jeff Sessions: Remember When 6,000 White Americans Went on Strike to Keep Black People from Getting Promoted?" began by referring to the Trump administration's habit of designating theme weeks to draw attention to selected issues. He then snidely added: "And to kick off August, the administration launched 'White Pride' Week to highlight the plight of the oppressed white American male. "
In parentheses, he then cracked: "Actually, I'm not sure if that was the official title, but it was pretty close."
He then clarified that the targets of his mockery were recent decisions by the administration to act against race-based college admissions, and to change immigration policy:
<<< Please support MRC's NewsBusters team with a tax-deductible contribution today. >>>
With Attorney General Jeff Sessions announcing that the Justice Department would start suing colleges for discriminating against white guys, and Trump's senior policy advisor Stephen Miller announcing cuts in immigration from nonwhite countries, the dog whistles were so loud, "the Hound" could hear it with one ear missing.
Johnson then claimed to see "overtly hostile action" against blacks as he added: "This overtly hostile action from the federal government against black education, employment and lives is the perfect run-up to today's critical racial anniversary."
Instead of making a rational, thoughtful case in favor of raced-based admissions like, say, arguing that it promotes racial integration by pushing students out of natural social bubbles to curtail self-segregation, the MSNBC contributor ventured into hyperbole.
Most of the article was devoted to recalling the infamous 1944 Philadelphia transit workers strike in which white workers went on strike for several days to protest the decision to give black workers the same rights to be promoted to better jobs as white workers. The strike -- which hindered war production by shutting down the city -- only ended after the Roosevelt administration intervened and pressured the strikers to return to work.
After recounting this story of actual racism and blatant discrimination against blacks, Johnson ended his column by suggesting that the Trump administration wishes to take America back to those more oppressive times:Texas fisherman: Facebook removed photo of huge hammerhead shark for violating site rules
Corpus Christi resident Eric Ozolins caught this massive 13-foot-long greater hammerhead shark on the weekend of June 4, 2016. Corpus Christi resident Eric Ozolins caught this massive 13-foot-long greater hammerhead shark on the weekend of June 4, 2016. Photo: Courtesy/Eric Ozolins Photo: Courtesy/Eric Ozolins Image 1 of / 82 Caption Close Texas fisherman: Facebook removed photo of huge hammerhead shark for violating site rules 1 / 82 Back to Gallery
Corpus Christi fisherman Eric Ozolins posted some amazing photos last weekend of a giant hammerhead shark he caught on Facebook, but the social media site reportedly removed the photos Wednesday for violating terms and policy.
“Facebook had removed my recent post and hammerhead photos due to going against 'terms and policy'.” Ozolins said on Facebook. “Wow. There was not a single thing against any terms etc. Not that I am worried about it, I'm just amazed (or rather appalled) by how they can gain influence from uneducated tree-huggers and break their own rules to remove something rather innocent despite all the other horrendous stuff they fail to remove on their actual system.”
RELATED: Corpus Christi man catches massive 13-foot-long hammerhead shark off the coast of Padre Island
A Facebook representative told mySA.com the post was removed because it was believed to depict poaching, a criminal act. Under Facebook's community standards, users cannot post photos that depict criminal activity or celebrate criminal activity.
Another reason the post was removed: Hammerhead sharks are an endangered species, the Facebook representative said.
Based on information provided by Facebook, the site will remove content that promotes violent and graphic content, hate speech, nudity, self-injury, criminal activity, sexual violence and exploitation, and direct threats, among several other violations.
But Ozolins isn’t letting the recent removal of his photos from crushing his spirit, but he’s warning others of what could happen if you post photos of shark catches online.
“Oh well, so is life... Just a warning to anyone out there who actually posts a photo of a shark, they are coming after you!” Ozolins said.
RELATED: San Antonio-area man catches huge bull shark on Texas coast, wins $20,000 at Sharkathon
Ozolins posted photos of the catch on Sunday. The creature measured 13 feet long, and had a girth of 80 inches.
He studied fishing at Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi.
Padre Island National Seashore education coordinator William “Buzz” Botts said Ozolins is a great shark fisherman.
Hammerhead sharks commonly show up in gulf waters and near the shore, according to previous mySA.com reports.
It is also possible Facebook deemed the photos to be “graphic,” but that’s all speculation without a direct explanation from the social media site. It’s also possible someone found the photos offensive and reported them to Facebook, prompting their removal.
In 2014, Texas cheerleader Kendall Jones had several of her hunting photos removed by Facebook administrators. The reason being, according to Mashable, is the photos were “graphic images shared for sadistic effect or to celebrate or glorify violence.”
"We remove reported content that promotes poaching of endangered species, the sale of animals for organized fight or content that includes extreme acts of animal abuse," a Facebook spokesperson told the publication.
RELATED: New video released of 'biggest shark ever filmed'
Facebook also came under fire this week for removing a meme of convicted rapist Brock Turner, which said “MY NAME IS BROCK IM A RAPIST.” The content was reportedly removed “in error.”
“This content was removed in error, and we are currently working to restore it. Our team processes millions of reports each week, and we sometimes get things wrong. We’re very sorry about this mistake,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to Gizmodo.
[email protected]
Twitter: @tylerlwhiteMove over LiDAR, because Oryx is using nano-sized electro-optic antennas to sense objects at distances as great as 150 meters away
Petah Tikva-based Oryx Vision announced a $17 million Series A funding round Wednesday led by Bessemer Venture Partners for a new kind of object-detection technology aimed at the blooming self-driving car market. The round also included participation from Trucks VC and Maniv Mobility.
“Our technology enables us to design a system with a noise floor which is 100K-1M times lower than conventional LiDAR,” Rani Wellingstein, Oryx co-founder and CEO, tells Geektime. “It means that we are not bound to complex mechanical or optical designs for steering our beam, but rather we have the ability to illuminate the entire field of view and still detect and identify objects which are 3-4 times farther than any other LiDAR can detect.”
The company boasts a depth-sensing mechanism they say requires 50x less energy than LiDAR, the most common sensor system being installed in autonomous vehicles for the purpose of object detection.
“Autonomous vehicles need much more powerful depth sensing capabilities than what was originally thought; existing technologies simply cannot deliver them,” said Wellingstein. “We have taken a completely different approach to artificial depth sensing and managed to create a solution that will truly enable autonomous driving.”
“It’s more or less an enhanced form of radar,” explains Wellingstein. “Our system is, like LiDAR, an active system which uses lasers to illuminate the scene, but that’s where the resemblance ends. We’re building a Coherent Optical Radar System,” as in their system illuminates the entire environment to be analyzed (optically) and analyzes those surroundings simultaneously (coherently).
“For the sake of simplifying it, it’s like the difference between a situation where a driver picking you up from the airport was given an amorphous description of what you look like (traditional LiDAR) to one in which he’s watching a live video stream of you coming through the arrivals.”
Originally founded by VP of R&D David Ben-Bassat in 2009, they had only received $300,000 from angel investors up until this point. Wellingstein joined the company last year.
Moving forward from this round, they are looking to use their unprecedented investment to hire new computer scientists, electrical engineers and physicists.
There are a growing number of companies working to develop the technology that will form the backbone of the autonomous vehicle revolution. Israeli startup Innoviz raised $9 million in August for its LiDAR product. Ford has gotten into the game, co-investing with Baidu this past summer in LiDAR-producing startup Velodyne. Driven by self-driving cars, the LiDAR market could be worth a good $3.22 billion by 2022, but that figure likely doesn’t anticipate alternatives to the technology. While Innoviz and Velodyne bet on the future being in LiDAR, Oryx is trying to leapfrog that tech.
Wellingstein says that LiDAR sensors are “limited” performance-wise to 60 meters in ideal conditions and merely 30 meters in “broad day light” while radar is limited in resolution. Because of limited range in object recognition, Wellingstein asserts, Google self-driving cars are limited in speed (25 mph according to Google) and only function in already highly-mapped areas.
“In Oryx’s case, in addition to providing range, we provide speed, reflectivity and the equivalent of temperature for each pixel, in a single frame (whereas depth-sensors such as LiDAR provide range and reflectivity and require several frames to generate speed).”
Treating light like radio
Their most interesting pitch, which needs some further explanation, is that they treat “light waves like radio waves.” They use nano-antennas to detect long light waves rather than other light-detecting technologies like cameras and LiDARs. When light’s discrete, smallest elements (photons) are absorbed by a camera, it generates an electrical signal. Oryx’s antennas on the other hand act differently.
“Oryx Vision sensors are based on antennas,” Wellingstein explained. “For us, light is not a photonic flux – it is an electro-magnetic wave. Thus, Oryx designed antennas (tiny antennas, but still – antennas) that absorb the light and transduce it to electrical signals. The antenna approach allows us to utilize features that cannot be easily implemented with photo-electric detectors like choosing our wavelength and the ability to mix signals.”
They can choose which frequency to operate in depending on the size of the antennas. The antennas they currently use work at 10 micrometers (µm) wavelength, which Wellingstein says, “Is several orders of magnitude farther away from visible light than the 0.9-1.4µm LiDAR use and allows Oryx to function in changing weather conditions or any power limitations.
At this point, the company has already shown off their product to a number of potential partners, but have not entered (or at least announced) into any big sales or partnership agreements yet. Wellingstein says that should change soon.
“We’re in continuous discussions with OEMs, Tier-1s and technology players. We’ve demonstrated our technology to a selected list of auto manufacturers and technology players, and will single out design partners in the coming quarter.”Lydia Cuomo, who was attacked at gunpoint by an off-duty police officer last year, is headed to Albany to talk to lawmakers about changing the meaning of the word "rape." (Credit: CBS 2)
— A Bronx school teacher, attacked at gunpoint by an off-duty police officer last year, wants the state to change its rape laws.
Allowing her name to be used for the first time, Lydia Cuomo, 26, is headed to Albany to talk to lawmakers about changing the meaning of the word “rape.”
Lydia Cuomo — no relation to Gov. Andrew Cuomo — wants forced anal and oral sex to be classified as rape under the law.
“Right is right,” Lydia Cuomo told CBS 2’s Jessica Schneider. “And he raped me at the end of the day, and he’s not being called a rapist. He is a rapist, and you need to call rape, rape.”
Cuomo said those two acts right now fall under the umbrella words of “sexual assault” and she said that is erroneous because it makes it sound like the attack wasn’t so bad.This article is about the manga series. For other uses, see Devilman (disambiguation)
Devilman (Japanese: デビルマン, Hepburn: Debiruman) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Go Nagai, which originally started as an anime adaptation of the concept of Nagai's previous manga series, Demon Lord Dante. This 39-episode anime series was developed by Toei Animation in 1972, while Nagai began the Devilman as a manga in Kodansha's Weekly Shōnen Magazine, barely a month before the anime series started. The series has since spawned numerous OVAs, manga, novels, and films.
Devilman and other characters from the series have shown up in cameo appearances numerous times in Go Nagai's other works. The most notable is Tomoharu Katsumata's 1973 feature film Mazinger Z vs. Devilman, which features Devilman teaming up with Nagai's titular robot to fight Dr. Hell.
Plot [ edit ]
Akira Fudo is a timid teenage boy who lives with Miki Makimura and her family after his parents died on a trip to the Arctic. One day, Akira's best friend, Ryo Asuka, asks for help when his archaeologist father died after uncovering a mask during an excavation of ancient Mayan ruins, confirming the existence of ancient apex predators that assimilate other lifeforms to evolve: demons. The mask is revealed to be a fossilized demon skull that shows the wearer the world as it was many millennia ago when demons roam the Earth. Ryo's plan is to prevent the revival of demons: "To fight a demon, one must become a demon."
Ryo believes that people like Akira with a pure heart may be able to harness a demon's powers without being consumed and Akira agrees to help after they encounter demons in Ryo's house. Ryo takes his friend to a nightclub in his father’s basement then picks a fight and draws blood to attract demonic attention. Demons begin to possess the clubbers and threaten Ryo and Akira, until a powerful demon known as Amon – the Lord of War, also called the Beast of Hell – consumes Akira. But Akira manages to retain his sense of self while possessing some Amon's personality traits and power as he becomes known as Devilman. Throughout the series, Devilman has many battles with the demon hordes, encountering foes such as Amon's harpy-like lover Sirène, the water demon Geruma, and a large turtle-demon Jinmen who incorporates the souls of his victims into his shell.
Eventually, the demons start a world war with humanity which causes mass panic and paranoia across the planet with mankind turning on itself. Akira starts to gather other Devilmen like him to fight the demons, only to be betrayed by Ryo afte he exposes him to the public. Ryo’s betrayel results in Miki's parents being arrested by the government while she and her brother are violently murdered by a paranoid mob which Akira slaughters in retribution. It was then that Ryo reveals himself as the reincarnation of the fallen angel Satan, having unconsciously orchestrated his true plan while exploiting humanity's flaws and fell in love with Akira as he arranged his transition into Devilman. With no one left to protect, Akira ends his friendship with Satan as they eventually settle things in an epic battle lasting twenty years after humanity is extinct.
During the final battle, Satan reveals to Akira that the demons were unintentionally created by God and that he defied the order to kill them out of deeming that they have a right to live. Satan convinced the demons to enter a state of hibernation in the ice to conserve their strength for the final battle with God, awakening to find Earth ravaged by humanity which he resolved to exterminate first. It was then that Satan realizes his actions made him and the demons were no better than God, learning too late that he already killed Akira when asking for his forgiveness. The series ends with the Devilman army defeated, which Satan weeping for the loss off his dearest love as an army of angels appear in the distance to wipe out the remains of Satan's army.
Production [ edit ]
Devilman evolved from Go Nagai's previous manga, Demon Lord Dante, after Toei Animation approached Nagai about turning Dante into a television series. The producers wanted certain elements toned down, and a more human-like anti-hero created. Devilman was born as a result of this.[4] Go Nagai worked on the anime's scenario along with renowned screenwriter and science-fiction novelist Masaki Tsuji, who wrote the scripts for 35 of the TV series' 39 episodes.[citation needed] Along with the television series, Devilman was also produced as a serialized manga in Shōnen Magazine beginning in 1972.[5] Go Nagai designed the manga to be more horror-like and mature than the anime version.[4]
Nagai designed Devilman as an anti-war work; the fusion of humans and demons is an analogy for the draft, and Miki's violent death parallels the death of peace. "There is no justice in war, any war," wrote Nagai, "nor is there any justification for human beings killing one another. Devilman carries a message of warning, as we step toward a bright future."[4]
Media [ edit ]
Manga [ edit ]
The manga was originally published by Kodansha from June 11, 1972 ( ) to June 24, 1973 (1973-06-24) in Shōnen Magazine.[5] The series has been published in tankōbon format several times, most of them by Kodansha. Starting with the 1987 publishing, most Kodansha editions include Shin Devilman, which originally was not meant to be included in the canon of the original series, as a part of the volumes.[6] The manga has been translated into English in a series of five bilingual manga volumes published by Kodansha.[7]
The manga has also been published along with Cutie Honey in the magazine Gekkan Kanzenban Devilman x Cutie Honey (月刊完全版デビルマン×キューティーハニー, gekkan kanzenban debiruman x kyūteī hanī) published by JIVE during 2004[8] in order to take advantage of the release of the live-action films of both series.
Shin Devilman (新デビルマン, Shin Debiruman) was originally published in Kodansha's Shōnen Magazine Special in May 25, 1979 ( ), January 25, 1980 ( ), September 15, 1980 ( ), March 6, 1981 ( ) and May 8, 1981 ( ). All chapters were drawn by Go Nagai, but the first chapter was written in collaboration with Masaki Tsuji, while chapters two and three were written by Hiroshi Koenji.[9] The rest of the chapters were done by Nagai. The manga is sometimes known as Devilman 2 and Neo Devilman.[6]
A one-shot, which is not originally part of Shin Devilman, but that has always been compiled along with the series in tankōbon, was published in the magazine Variety by Kadokawa Shoten.[9] This 16-page story does not have any text and it presents the moments of Akira after the death of Miki in the original series, but before the battle with Satan, as he buries the remains of Miki and encounters Ryo.
Seven Seas Entertainment announced the publication of the original manga for 2018. [10]
Anime [ edit ]
The anime television series was 39 episodes long and ran from July 8, 1972 ( ) to April 7, 1973 (1973-04-07) on NET (now TV Asahi).[11] Outside Japan, the TV series was broadcast in Italy in 1983 and enjoyed great popularity there.[citation needed] A DVD box set of the series was released in Japan on September 21, 2002.[12] The TV series has been licensed for the first time in North America by Discotek Media who released the series on DVD in 2014.[13]
Original video animations [ edit ]
Devilman: The Birth (デビルマン 誕生編, Debiruman Tanjō Hen) was released in November 1, 1987 ( ) by King Records.[14] It was followed by Devilman: Demon Bird Sirène (デビルマン 妖鳥シレーヌ編, Debiruman Yōchō Shirēnu Hen), released in February 25, 1990 ( ) by Bandai Visual.[15] Kazuo Komatsubara, an animation director on the original TV series, was the character designer for the OVAs, which were animated by his Oh Production.
Both were directed by Umanosuke Iida (credited under his birth name, Tsutomu Iida) and were closely developed in conjunction with Nagai himself. The OVAs' plot revolves around Akira's transformation into Devilman up until his battle with Sirène. Besides a few minor alterations, the OVAs are faithful to the original manga. Both OVAs were released on Laserdisc and on a single DVD by Bandai Visual in March 28, 2003 ( ).[16] The two OVAs were also the only Devilman anime to have been commercially released in the United States (by Manga Entertainment) prior to 2014. The DVD release included only the English-dubbed version (the original Japanese version was previously released on VHS in 1995 by L.A. Hero and Dark Image Entertainment).
In 2000, Amon: Apocalypse of Devilman was released as a pay-per-view event in Japan and was later released on video and DVD. It covers the period between the humans becoming aware of demons and the semi-final battle between Devilman and Amon. The battle between Devilman and Satan does not occur in this OVA.
In 2015, Cyborg 009 VS Devilman was released. The 3-episode OVA features Devilman battling the cast of Shotaro Ishinomori's Cyborg 009.[17]
A 10-episode original net animation adaptation produced by Science Saru and directed by Masaaki Yuasa, titled Devilman Crybaby,[1] was released worldwide on January 5, 2018 exclusively on Netflix.[18]
Films [ edit ]
Mazinger Z Vs. Devilman is a crossover animated film between Devilman and Mazinger Z produced by Toei and released in July 18, 1973 ( ). The movie features alternative versions of the events from both series, and is therefore not canonical to either one.
In October 9, 2004 ( ), a live-action tokusatsu film directed by Hiroyuki Nasu was theatrically released in Japan.[19] The film starred Hisato Izaki as Devilman, Yūsuke Izaki as Ryo Asuka and Ayana Sakai as Miki Makimura. The cast also included AV Idol Maria Yumeno.[19][20]
Music [ edit ]
A large number of soundtrack albums have been released since the beginning of the original series.
Title Format Company Standard number Release date Devilman Flexi disc Asahi Sonorama APM-4016 July 10, 1972 ( ) Devilman EP record Columbia SCS-502 August 10, 1972 ( ) TV Original BGM Collection: Devilman LP album Columbia CX-7088 March 1983 ( ) TV Original BGM Collection: Devilman CD Columbia 28CC-2295 May 21, 1988 ( ) TV Animation Drama Series: Devilman CD Columbia COCC-12398 March 1, 1995 ( ) Animex 1200 Series 71: Devilman CD Columbia COCC-72071 September 22, 2004 ( ) Original Soundtrack Devilman Tanjo Hen Ongakushu LP album King Records K20G-7359 1987 ( ) Original Soundtrack Devilman Tanjo Hen Ongakushu CD King Records K30X-7094 November 1987 ( ) Visual Sound Series Devilman Shin Mokushiroku CD King Records K32X-7055 1987 ( ) Devilman Tanjo Hen / Yocho Sirène Hen CD King Records KICA-10 March 21, 1990 ( ) Devilman Densetsu ~ The Legends of DEVILMAN CD Pony Canyon FSCA-10054 October 21, 1998 ( ) Nagai Go Hero Densetsu Onkyo Geki Devilman Armageddon Hen CD First Smile Entertainment FSCA-10209 February 20, 2002 ( ) Devilman Densetsu + 3 ~ The Legends of DEVILMAN CD BeeSmile BSCH-30011 March 10, 2004 ( ) Eternal Edition Dynamic Pro Films Files No.11 & 12: Devilman CD Columbia COCX-32285/6 July 23, 2003 ( ) Devilman no Uta (21st century ver.) CD single TEAM Entertainment KDSD-95 February 22, 2006 ( ) Hikari no Naka de CD single Sonic Groove AVCD-16051 September 23, 2004 ( ) Devilman Original Soundtrack CD avex trax AVCD-17543 October 6, 2004 ( )
In other media [ edit ]
Three novels have been released. The first one Shin Devilman (真・デビルマン, Shin Debiruman) was written by Go Nagai's brother Yasutaka Nagai with illustrations by Go. It was originally published in 1981 by Asahi Sonorama in four books.[21] It is not related to the manga Shin Devilman, from which some chapters were also written by Yasutaka. With the release of the first OVA, in 1987 a single volume novel based on it was released by Kodansha titled Shin Video Shosetsu – Devilman: Tanjo Hen (新ビデオ小説 デビルマン 誕生編, shin bideo shousetsu debiruman tanjou hen). It was also written by Yasutaka Nagai, but it had illustrations by the OVA's main designer, Kazuo Komatsubara
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FiNow about his new Syfy show Defiance, Farscape executive producer and co-creator Rockne S O’Bannon revealed that he hasn’t forgotten about the anarchic space opera, which ran from 1999 to 2003 on the Sci-Fi Channel in the US and on BBC 2 in the UK.
“[The ship] has not completely sailed,” said O’Bannon. “I don’t know that it would necessarily come back as a series. There were other factors that helped us back then, because the ratio of the Australian dollar to the American dollar helped us a great deal to make the show as rich looking as it was.
“That obviously is not available to us at a moment. But I’m in touch with [co-creator] Brian Henson, the fellow executive producer and champion of the show, regularly and we’re always talking about where else we could next present that world.
“A feature [film] is something we’ve talked about. That’s not out of the question. Obviously Firefly found new life in features as Serenity, so it can happen. We continue to talk about it. I would love to go and revisit that world.”
Defiance is airing 15 April 2013 on Syfy. Pick up Farscape: The Definitive Collection on Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk, priced £79.49.Another property on the Chom Tawan development in Phuket. Credit:www.tawanproperties.com The plight of the buyers, many of whom have been living in the homes since they were completed seven years ago, illustrates the risks foreigners face buying real estate in Thailand, one of the most popular destinations for retiring Australians. Mr Davies and other buyers, including five Australian families, believed they were covering all bases before paying for what were promised to be effectively 90-year leasehold titles for the homes, including hiring lawyers to do due diligence on the property. "We never for one moment thought there would be a problem," says Mr Davies, who is married to a Thai. Two years ago buyers awoke to find notices pinned to their doors declaring that a Thai manufacturer had not been paid for supplying appliances to the development.
Napawan Asia Limited, the developer of the Chom Tawan residential estate, owes millions to the Industrial Commercial Bank of China. Credit:www.tawanproperties.com "We were shocked. We started investigating what had happened but it only got worse, much worse," Mr Davies told Fairfax Media. The developer, Napawan Asia Limited, had promised that buyers who paid upfront for their houses would receive titles reflecting their freehold/leasehold ownership once the development was registered with Phuket's land department. "The company kept telling us everything is going nicely. It's happening, don't worry. But it went on and on," Mr Davies said. Catherine Gathani, a buyer from Hong Kong, said she was aware when finalising the contract for her home there was a mortgage on the land but Napawan Asia told her "this would be paid down as the buyers' stage payments were made, so that by the time the project was complete the mortgage would be fully paid".
She said buyers only discovered several years later the company had not repaid the original mortgage and that it had given the titles of the buildings to the bank as part of a debt restructuring or remortgaging arrangement. Andrew Street, the British developer behind Napawan Asia, admits the company was "over-extended commercially at the commencement of the global financial crisis", which he says had a significant impact on Phuket. Mr Street, who has returned to live in Britain, told Fairfax Media "I have remained and still intend to deliver all that the buyers require". "Within weeks of this date there will be firm plans to bring this debt restructuring to a conclusion," he said. "All parties are involved in producing an agreement to achieve the buyers' requirements relating to ownership... we are at the final negotiations of all matters with the bank, buyers and suppliers to conclude this matter." But Mr Davies said attempts over recent months for a settlement between ICBC, the buyers and Napawan Asia have collapsed in acrimony.
Under one proposal discussed by ICBC in October, the buyers would be forced to pay almost $200,000 more than their original purchase price in exchange for the bank releasing the mortgage. The development builder is also owed several million dollars, complicating any settlement. Mr Davies described the proposal as a "bridge too far" for the buyers. "Many of the investors are retirees who face losing most or all of their life's savings. It is an appalling situation to be in," he said. "We fear that one day soon we will all gets knocks our doors and be told to leave our homes." Mr Street, who bought a $1 million house in the English Midlands in August 2013 after leaving Phuket, said "certain people" have tried to personalise the issue and derail any settlement amid a myriad of legal claims and counter-claims.
"It is not in the interest of all parties concerned for me to return to Thailand whilst in the final steps of the debt workout," he said. As the auction deadline nears, buyers desperate to keep their houses have asked Thailand's military rulers to intervene in the case and have taken urgent legal action to try to head off the sale of their houses. Mr Davies said the buyers he is speaking for have not given up hope of keeping their homes "but our position looks dire". He said the buyers decided to speak publicly about their plight to warn others who may be considering investing in Thai real estate.The purpose of a sprint planning meeting is to produce a sprint backlog. This sprint backlog is the forecasted work that will be completed during the sprint. The way I’ve run sprint planning meetings has evolved over the last 4 months. It was really rough at the start, but it’s getting better and I want to share what I’ve learned. This is the script that I’ve been using recently as the introduction to my sprint planning meetings. I’ve added comments around it explaining why I say the things I’m saying because following a script is good, but understanding a script is better.
The Introduction
“Hello everyone, thank you for coming to the sprint planning meeting.”
Since my team is 1/3 remote, I also announce who is on the phone to those in the room and who’s in the room to those on the phone.
“This is a 3 hour meeting with the goal of discussing the issues in the prioritized product backlog and agreeing on the contents of the sprint backlog that we will be tackling in our 2 week sprint.”
I start by mentioning the duration of the meeting so that everyone understands how long they’re expected to concentrate on the meeting (so they can pace themselves).
The next thing I mention is that the backlog is prioritized. The purpose of this is to lead everyone down from the top of the product backlog as the stories that deliver the highest value are positioned higher in the list. While we want to accept items in that order, we’re open to discussing bringing in items lower in the list if it makes sense to group them with previously accepted issues that share commonality.
I then mention that we’re accepting a sprint backlog and the duration of the sprint. While this doesn’t change, it helps me transition into the next piece of information.
“The theme of this sprint is X”
It’s important to apply a theme to the sprint, and if you’re going to do so, communicate it to the team. You want to apply a theme to the sprint as it can get the team thinking about a whole area and help identify any holes in stories that you wouldn’t necessarily get if the sprint backlog is just a grab bag of potpourri without any commonalities. If the team keeps the theme in mind while performing their work, they will be able to have a better understanding of their progress through this backlog.
“We are missing X days from this sprint. X-w from Kevin, X-y from Leigh, and X-z from Akshay. Is there anyone taking any vacation in the next 2 weeks outside what I’ve just mentioned.”
My scrum team has their HR reports split between myself and another team lead in the department (look, I know that agile says the scrum master shouldn’t have any authority over his team, but I have bigger fish to fry right now), we don’t have a good system for tracking each other’s report’s vacation time outside a shared outlook calendar. I’ve found a couple surprise vacation days this way, so I suggest you use it.
“Our team velocity is between X and Y pro-rated to full team sprints. Since we’re at Z% manpower, we should accept X-w to Y-w story points.”
The team needs to be supplied with an appropriate estimate of how many story points they should accept into the sprint. I get the manpower-based story point values by calculating (# of days in the sprint x number of team members – vacation days) / (# of days in the sprint x number of team members) x Velocity. Right now I’m determining the velocity range based off of the highest and lowest values in the last 4 sprints. I plan to do some more complex calculations as I get more data under my belt, but discussions of determining velocity is a whole post in and of itself.
Introduction overtime: Overflow
There is often overflow in my sprints. There is really 2 kinds of overflow: Good overflow and Bad overflow. Good overflow is work that has been pulled into the sprint once we’ve completed the sprint backlog before the end of the sprint itself that hasn’t been completed. Bad overflow is work that was committed as part of the sprint backlog that didn’t get completed for whatever reason. As your team matures and grows more confident, the amount of both Good and Bad overflow should shrink immensely for the same reason: Your team gets better at estimating their work. You should expect a decent amount of this during the storming and norming phases. That being said, regardless of how the overflow got there, you still need to deal with it before you even start on the product backlog. I could write a lot more about the cause and best practices for overflow, but that is a whole post in and of itself.
“Alright, we’ve got the following items overflowing from the previous sprint. They will need to be the first items we look at, followed by the sprint backlog.”
At this point, the expectation is set that completing these items is the most important thing we need to do. We review the story like any other story in the sprint backlog, except that we keep a mental note of how much of the work has already been completed, and remove it from our count of how many story points are in the growing sprint backlog. We don’t lower the number of story points on these partially-completed items because they should be counted in the sprint in which they’re completed in order to give a more accurate velocity when averaged over many sprints.Congratulations Justin Moore and Outlaws Like Me, you’re officially off the hot seat. Because right here, right now, I am unilaterally declaring that Florida Georgia Line’s new album Anything Goes is the worst album ever released in the history of country music. Ever. Including Florida Georgia Line’s first album Here’s To The Good Times, including anything else you can muster from the mainstream, including a 4-track recording made by a head trauma victim in a walk-in closet with a Casiotone keyboard and an out-of-tune banjo. Anything Goes can slay all comers when it comes to its heretofore unattainable degree of peerless suckitude.
In a word, this album is bullshit. Never before has such a refined collection of strident clichés been concentrated in one insidious mass. Never before have the lyrics to an album evidenced such narrowcasted pseudo-mindless incoherent drivel. Never before have such disparate and diseased influences been married so haphazardly in a profound vacuum of taste, and never have all of these atrocities been platooned together to be proffered to the public without someone, anyone with any bit of conscience and in a position of power putting a stop to this poisoning of the listening public.
Not to get all old man on your ass, but most of the time I don’t even understand what the hell these dudes are saying. Brian Kelley and Tyler Hubbard have their own language, partial to the most grammatically-challenged and stupefying vocabulary lurking in the dankest sewers of the English dialect, but not residing firmly in any specific one of them so no truly proper translation can be obtained. It’s like Pig Latin for douchewads—understood by them and them only. And only with the perfect deficiency of brain cells will their concoction of Ebonics, metrosexual douche speak, and stagnant gene pool rural jargon become anything resembling coherent to the human ear.
Forget the already ultra-concentrated and extremely-narrow breadth of modern mainstream country music’s laundry list songwriting legacy, Florida Georgia Line has devised a way to inexplicably make it even more attenuated and terrible. “Girl, alcoholic beverage, truck, river or lake”— that’s pretty much the alpha and omega of the Anything Goes building blocks. Most of these songs have more songwriters than they do basic lyrical themes, with an average of four cooks per diarrhetic serving, and one song that boasts five songwriters and still struggles to pen anything that comes close to a complete sentence or a comprehensible thought.
Shiny objects and fire also seem to excite and distract Florida Georgia Line and fill them with a profound sense of wonder, and so soliloquies to these things also show up occasionally, as does the word “good.” They really like that word.
“Got on my smell good.
Got a bottle of feel good.
Shined up my wheels good.
You’re looking real good.”
That verse pretty much sums up this entire album. And no, these are not lyrics to the song that is actually titled “Good Good.” Needless to say, any moments involving depth, sorrow, self-reflection, doubt, or evolved thinking in any capacity have been unceremoniously scrubbed from this project entirely, save for one song, “Dirt,” which only works to anger the blood even more because it proves that these morons are capable of so much more. A song like “Sippin’ On Fire” tries to cobble together some semblance of a love story, but bogs down like all these songs do in focusing on the material objects and consumables inadvertently on hand in situations instead of the honest sentiments being felt between two people. Women and “love” are compared to alcoholic beverages and other material objects, and vice versa more times than I care to count on this album, as if they are interchangeable in stature in the human experience.
Another song that would have been decent if only Florida Georgia Line didn’t figure out how to screw it up is “Bumpin’ The Night.” Despite the title alluding to the listener being in store for yet another demonstration of shallowness, the song displays a compositional depth that is both surprising and enriching, even though what passes for steel guitar is so transmogrified by the EDM production, it’s hardly noticeable. There’s nothing wrong with fun, feel good songs themselves. But in such a void of anything striking even close to variety, an otherwise decent song like “Bumpin’ The Night” suffers demonstrably amongst its peers.
And talk about going to the cliché well too many times, there’s a song on this album called “Angel” that I kid you not is built around the often sarcastically-used pick up line “Did it hurt when you fell from the sky?” Any woman who hears this line coming from any man has my personal blessing to immediately spray them in the face with mace and knee them in the nuts. The idea that these knuckleheads think that this line is “sweet” just speaks to the depravity of self-awareness they suffer from in an irrevocable degree.
There really is a toxic concentration of bad songs on Anything Goes, and it is all punctuated on the final track “Every Night” where the hyper-everything that riddles this album somehow gets heightened even more as Florida Georgia Line explain they don’t need the weekend because every night for them is a wild, raging good time. This personifies the diabolical sameness of this album, where it’s just a contiguous string of carefree party references and virtually nothing else, almost throwing caution to the wind and daring fate to make a mockery of this project over the long perspective of time, if they’re not openly cashing out on the franchise in the face of the obvious dying of a trend.
I would call it country rap, but even that would give this album more definition than it truly carries. I would call it pop, but even that world would not stand for such vacuousness. And once again the listener is left steadfastly perplexed at what Brian Kelley (the short-haired one) actually does in this band beyond singing one verse of “Dirt” and a few random backup lines so heavily Auto-tuned you can’t tell for sure it’s him.
Everybody knows where Florida Georgia Line is going to lead. Scott Borchetta must know it. Their producer Joey Moi, formerly of Nickelback must know it. Their manager Kevin Zaruk, also formerly of Nickelback, apparently knows it, and admitted as much in a recent Billboard interview. “It’s bizarre because I know so many people who say they can’t stand them but listen to Nickelback and go to their shows. This is a band that sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in merchandise, and to this day, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a person with a Nickelback T-shirt on walking the streets anywhere in the world. I don’t know what it is, but for whatever reason it became cool to hate Nickelback, and once that trend took off, it exploded. What I’ve definitely talked to [FGL’s] Brian [Kelley] and Tyler [Hubbard] about is that whenever anybody becomes successful in any business, there’s people that get jealous.”
This is the problem. Florida Georgia Line and their fans will read a review like this, and truly believe that jealousy and nothing else is at the heart of the criticism, and will point to their “success” as proof of this. But Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, George Strait, and so many more were wildly successful in their time too, and also faced criticism, but never to the degree of criticism Florida Georgia Line is faced with. The music of these legends withstood the test of time, while artists like Nickelback, Billy Ray Cyrus, New Kids On The Block, and MC Hammer were also wildly successful in their time, but now their music is nowhere to be seen besides as a novelty, or listened to as irony or nostalgia.
READ: Florida Georgia Line’s “Sun Daze” (a semi-rant)
It is Florida Georgia Line’s destiny to go down as a laughing stock, to be the next Nickelback, where their fans hide their T-shirts and shun them, tearing them down just as vehemently and quickly as they artificially propped them up. Their sophomore album and a song like “Dirt” was their one opportunity to change that destiny and be known for something more. But instead they super concentrated what makes them bad as either a last cash-grabbing hurrah, or as a misguided miscalculation that their polarizing nature is due to the insecurities of others instead of a true concern about substance and sustainability. Point to current attendance numbers and call the haters jealous all you want. All one has to do is point to Nickelback as an example of why this doesn’t work in the long term.
Florida Georgia Line and Anything Goes are an embarrassment to country music.
Two Guns Way Down!Finding could bring about change of practice in NHS with ‘potential to save many lives’, says charity
Every man with suspected prostate cancer should have an MRI scan, which is twice as likely to identify the presence of dangerous tumours as the invasive biopsy used currently, say doctors.
A major trial, which could influence a change of practice in the NHS, will amount to “the biggest leap forward in prostate cancer diagnosis in decades, with the potential to save many lives”, Prostate Cancer UK said.
Researchers publishing in the Lancet medical journal have shown that an MRI picks up 93% of aggressive cancers, compared with 48% for a biopsy. The biopsy, which removes a sample of tissue for lab testing, often misses the tumour altogether.
The Prostate MRI Imaging Study (Promis), led by researchers at University College London (UCL), also showed that more than a quarter (27%) of all men with suspected cancer could avoid a biopsy altogether.
MRI scans were shown to be better at ruling out cancer, as well as identifying tumours that are not dangerous because they are slow growing and do not need to be treated. In the trial, the number wrongly diagnosed with a cancer that needed treatment was reduced by 5%.
“Prostate cancer has aggressive and harmless forms. Our current biopsy test can be inaccurate because the tissue samples are taken at random,” said the lead author, Dr Hashim Ahmed from UCL. “This means it cannot confirm whether a cancer is aggressive or not and can miss aggressive cancers that are actually there.
“Because of this some men with no cancer or harmless cancers are sometimes given the wrong diagnosis and are then treated even though this offers no survival benefit and can often cause side effects. On top of these errors in diagnosis, the current biopsy test can cause side effects such as bleeding, pain and serious infections.”
Some men suffer a life-threatening sepsis – a bloodstream infection – as a result of the standard transrectal ultrasound-guided (TRUS) biopsy.
This is the second breakthrough in prostate cancer treatment in two months. In December, UCL published a study showing that a laser-activated drug derived from bacteria at the bottom of the sea can kill prostate cancer cells without the sometimes devastating side-effects of surgery, which can leave men incontinent or impotent.
The introduction of the scan, called a multi-parametric MRI (mpMRI), into routine NHS practice is already on its way. The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice), which produces guidelines for doctors on the most appropriate treatment for patients, has already launched an early review of prostate cancer diagnosis looking at the evidence from a previous trial in men with prostate cancer that has spread, and has been awaiting the results of this one.
Some hospitals are already offering MRI before any biopsy, but it will take time before it is universal. MRI machines are now in high demand for other kinds of cancer diagnosis and there will have to be special training for the radiologists who interpret the scans, which takes a high level of expertise.
Prostate Cancer UK, which helped fund the research, is now working for the introduction of MRI scans into prostate cancer units. “The current diagnostic process for prostate cancer is notoriously imperfect, so any developments which offer improvements must be adopted as a matter of priority,” said Angela Culhane, its chief executive.
“That’s why we have already been working with a range of clinical experts and professional bodies to pinpoint the potential barriers to the widespread rollout of mpMRI before biopsy and start the work of addressing them ahead of time. Now the results are formally published, we will continue to use this insight to support health professionals and commissioners to make the necessary resource and practice changes without delay. Whilst it’s clear that the rollout of mpMRI before biopsy can’t just happen overnight, it’s critical that urgent action is taken to make it available to men.”A woman who had falsely complained of rape a 100 times will be tried for perjury by a Delhi court, which noted that it would be "failing in its duty" if she was not prosecuted for "giving false evidence".
Stating that the woman--a young model--should be prosecuted for "lying to the court", additional sessions judge Virender Bhat said that she had admitted to having previously filing a false complaint against a senior citizen. The court noted that "she has also admitted that during the year 2010 to 2012, she has made about a 100 calls to the helpline 100", which she later admitted were to register false complaints.
Last year, the woman had also called the police helpline and said she was about to commit suicide because a man had raped her. However, when the police officials reached the spot, she was not there.
The court's decision came while hearing a rape complaint filed by the woman against her brother-in-law, who was acquitted after the court found her testimony to be not "credible".
During cross-examination, the woman said she had an affair with the accused prior to her marriage with his brother. She had, later, filed a criminal case under the Domestic Violence Act against her in laws, including her sisterin-law and her husband, but this complaint made no mention of the alleged rape by her brother-in-law.
While noting that rape conviction can be secured on “the victim’s statement alone,” the judge said this was not a fit case to condemn the alleged rapist as the woman was not “a sterling witness” because there were material and relevant discrepancies in her complaint and deposition before the court.
Senior lawyers, concerned about the mis-use of anti-dowry and crimes-against-women laws, hail this decision as a good one which will deter others from misusing the criminal justice system for their own benefit.
Senior council Meenakshi Arora told Hindustan Times, “People suffer serious consequences because of false complaints, so this is a logical conclusion of filing one. It will work as a deterrent and educate people that there are recourses they can take to combat malicious prosecutions.”
However, the underlying cause of many false complaints remains unaddressed, Arora adds.
"The actual problem is lack of adequate laws to meet with alimony and maintenance. Because of the lack of remedial measures, wives are often told to file false complaint to get their minimum dues. If there was a legislation that would quickly take care of division of matrimonial assets, we will probably see a fall in the number of false complaints filed."
First Published: Nov 18, 2014 13:18 ISTAustralia may overturn its opposition to joining the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank after the UK opted to sign up to the institution against the wishes of Washington.
The rethink by one of America’s key allies — alongside Japan and South Korea — that has not yet applied to join the $50bn bank before the March 31 deadline will further irk Washington, which is already angered by the UK ‘s move to become the AIIB’s maiden G7 member.
“I note that the UK has indicated an intention to sign up for the negotiations, the New Zealanders before Christmas signed up for the negotiations, the Singaporeans likewise, the Indians likewise,” said Tony Abbott, Australia’s prime minister.
“We’re looking very carefully at this and we’ll make a decision in the next week or so,” he told The Australian newspaper.
The Obama administration is concerned that China is building a new generation of international development banks that could rival Washington-based institutions. It says it is not opposed to the AIIB but US officials fear it could become an instrument of Chinese foreign policy if Beijing ends up having veto power over the bank’s decisions.
Canberra initially decided not to join following a cabinet debate that exposed tensions between economic ministries keen to sign up and a more sceptical foreign ministry.
The UK’s move last week to join the AIIB has reopened the debate over whether Australia’s national interests lie with bolstering economic ties with China or deferring to the concerns expressed by its key military ally, the US.
“The UK joining the bank has given a good pretext for the government to rethink its original decision,” said Kerry Brown, director of the China Studies Centre at Sydney university. “There is a feeling it acted as a bit of a poodle of the US and it should take a more independent stance.”
The issue is politically fraught for Australia. Canberra must balance its rapidly growing economic relationship with China, which is its biggest trading partner, against its military alliance and close friendship with the US.
Julie Bishop, Australia’s foreign minister, said on Monday that Canberra remained concerned that China has a 49 per cent shareholding in the bank, while the largest partners in other existing multilateral organisations retained a shareholding of 20 per cent.
“We want to ensure that anything that we invest in is meeting the very high standards of the kind of multilateral institutions that Australia has supported in the past,” she said.
Ms Bishop told the Financial Times in a recent interview that Australia did not have to choose between China and the US as partners in the Asia-Pacific region.
“It is not a zero-sum game,” she said. “We balance many relationships in our region and beyond.”
South Korea’s government has remained tight-lipped on the subject of joining the AIIB, despite heavy domestic media speculation on the subject. Last week the Maeil Economic Daily, a leading business newspaper, reported that Seoul had won Washington’s blessing for South Korean entry to the AIIB, provided China’s proportion of the bank’s capital was reduced.
Seoul’s finance ministry responded to that report with a terse statement saying simply that “nothing has been decided”. But it is engaged in ongoing talks with both China and the US regarding joining the bank, one senior ministry official said.
“At the moment we need to consider all our options,” he said, citing considerations including investment opportunities for South Korean companies. But the US government had made clear, he said, that “at the moment they don’t want Korea to join the AIIB — they think that it is not clear on governance and safeguards”.
These concerns were shared by Seoul, a second ministry official said, saying that South Korea would need more assurances on governance if it were to join up.
“So far China hasn’t showed what kind of benefits there would be from joining,” said Kim Tae-hyo, a Sungkyunkwan University professor who was foreign affairs adviser to former president Lee Myung-bak.
China’s assistant foreign minister Liu Jianchao, in the middle of a four-day trip to Seoul, told reporters on Monday that he had “explained the progress” on setting up the AIIB to his South Korean counterpart, Lee Kyung-soo. “I expressed hope again that South Korea will become a member of the bank,” he said.
Mr Liu spoke shortly before the arrival of Daniel Russel, the US assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, who arrived from Washington on Monday for a 24-hour visit to Seoul.
Japan has indicated that it is unlikely to join the AIIB and, like the US, was taken aback when the UK signed up. Traditionally, Japan has always appointed the head of the Manila-based Asian Development Bank, so its influence is directly weakened by China’s creation of an alternative.
Japan questions the AIIB’s governance, given the large share of the capital coming from China, and has also raised doubts about the financial liability for members if the AIIB makes unsustainable loans.
“We are cautious about participating,” said Fumio Kishida, foreign minister, at a briefing last week.18 “To the angel of the church in Thyatira write:
These are the words of the Son of God, whose eyes are like blazing fire and whose feet are like burnished bronze. 19 I know your deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance, and that you are now doing more than you did at first.
20 Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols. 21 I have given her time to repent of her immorality, but she is unwilling. 22 So I will cast her on a bed of suffering, and I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely, unless they repent of her ways. 23 I will strike her children dead. Then all the churches will know that I am he who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your deeds.
24 Now I say to the rest of you in Thyatira, to you who do not hold to her teaching and have not learned Satan’s so-called deep secrets, ‘I will not impose any other burden on you, 25 except to hold on to what you have until I come.’
26 To the one who is victorious and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations— 27 that one ‘will rule them with an iron scepter and will dash them to pieces like pottery’—just as I have received authority from my Father. 28 I will also give that one the morning star. 29 Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.Today, Lawfare is launching a detailed, annotated set of links laying out the known facts about L’Affaire Russe. We will keep this resource page updated as new facts, stories, documents, and statements emerge. Here, however, we want to consider a higher-altitude, more speculative question: What does it all mean? What possible explanations might make sense of the bewildering facts that have been reported? Are we dealing with Fake News or a Manchurian President—or something in between?
In this post, we start with an overview of the facts known today, and we then put forth seven different theories of the Russia Connection case that might account for those facts. We present these in ascending order of potential menace, from the most innocent to the most alarming. In doing so, we attempt to narrow the field of discussion—or at least provide a disciplined framework for assessing the possibilities—and give readers guidance as to what to watch for as investigations on both the legislative and executive sides move forward.
We’ve confined our overview of the facts to those most directly related to Russia’s interference in the election and the possible links between Trump associates and the Russian government. There are plenty of details we’ve left out—notably statements by Trump associates and the president himself that have had the effect of kicking up dust and confusing the public conversation about L’Affaire Russe.
The Known Facts
From July 2015 through at least June 2016, two groups of hackers now known to have been acting under the direction of the Kremlin maintained access to the networks of the Democratic National Committee. Beginning in July 2016, just before the Democratic convention, several outlets—DC Leaks, WikiLeaks and the likely-GRU-crafted online persona Guccifer 2.0—began disclosing the hacked information by means that intelligence officials deemed “consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.” Throughout the rest of the presidential campaign, Donald Trump routinely cited the information provided by WikiLeaks and expressed his enthusiasm for Julian Assange’s work, at one point declaring, “I love WikiLeaks!” Notoriously, in one instance, Trump even seemed to encourage the Russian government to engage in further hacking against Hillary Clinton’s computers systems in an effort to locate her missing emails. That one statement aside, however, he generally cast doubt on Russia’s involvement in the hacking and the leaking of the documents obtained from the DNC
Trump’s skepticism stood in sharp contrast to the intelligence community’s confidence on the question of Russian involvement. In their declassified report on the matter, the CIA, NSA, and FBI expressed “high confidence” that President Vladimir Putin had ordered an “influence campaign” to “undermine public faith in the U.S. electoral process” and “harm [Hillary Clinton’s] electability and potential presidency”; the CIA and FBI expressed high confidence, and the NSA moderate confidence, that the Kremlin aimed specifically to boost Donald Trump’s campaign.
Trump’s reluctance to concede Russian interference in the U.S. election eventually gave way in the face of overwhelming evidence and the Intelligence Community’s unanimous opinion to the contrary. On January 11, 2017, Trump finally admitted for the first time that he believes Russia was behind the hacks. The same day, however, in response to BuzzFeed’s release of a dossier of alleged kompromat compiled by former British intelligence official Christopher Steele, Trump emphasized "I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA" and accused U.S. intelligence agencies of allowing "fake news to 'leak' into the public." Regarding allegations of links between his associates and Russia, he has remained openly hostile, going so far as to label the news media the “enemy of the American people” and excoriating leaks of classified information regarding alleged communications between his team and Russian officials as a "witch hunt." During an interview to mark the hundredth day of his presidency, Trump returned to his skepticism on Russian involvement, declaring, “I’ll go along with Russia. Could have been China, could have been hundreds of different groups.”
Testifying before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on March 20, FBI Director James Comey confirmed that since July 2016 the Bureau has been conducting a still-ongoing investigation into “the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts.” During Comey’s testimony alongside NSA Director Admiral Michael Rogers, the official @POTUS account posted a series of tweets seemingly aimed at playing down the importance of the investigation and even the fact of the Kremlin’s interference.
The leaked dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele alleged a range of potentially explosive connections between Trump associates and the Kremlin. Though much of the information in the dossier has not yet been corroborated by the intelligence community, details about some of the communications described in the dossier have checked out, according to some news reports, and it’s noteworthy that both President Obama and then-President-elect Trump were briefed on its contents by high-ranking intelligence officials—indicating a degree of confidence in at least some of the report’s conclusions by the intelligence community. More recently, CNN reported that the contents of the dossier were among the evidence presented by the FBI before the FISA Court to successfully obtain a warrant monitoring Carter Page’s communications.
Trump’s refusal to say anything negative about Putin during the campaign only fueled speculation that the Steele allegations had some basis in fact—or that there was something untoward in the relationship. Long before the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump voiced personal admiration for Vladimir Putin, often contrasting him with Barack Obama, whom he saw as weak. In 2014, he tweeted that “Putin has become a big hero in Russia” and added, "I believe Putin will continue to re-build the Russian Empire. He has zero respect for Obama or the U.S.!" On multiple occasions, he described meeting Putin and “hav[ing] a relationship with him,” though he later denied having any such ties.
Then there’s the small matter of Trump’s assorted business dealings with Russia and Russians over the years, the extent of which remain unknown, and his family’s loose links to and unexplained meetings with various Russian oligarchs and officials. This latter category includes son-in-law Jared Kushner’s mysterious December meeting with then-incoming national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak in Trump Tower and subsequent meeting with Sergey Gorkov, chief of Vnesheconombank, a Russia-owned bank on the U.S. sanctions list since shortly after Putin's annexation of Crimea.
Trump has also surrounded himself with advisors and confidantes who are unusually closely connected with and sympathetic to the Kremlin and associated entities. Most notably, there’s ex-national security adviser Flynn, who was forced to resign 24 days after taking office over revelations that his multiple phone calls with Ambassador Kislyak may have included the subject of sanctions imposed by the Obama administration against Russia, contrary to his representations to Vice President
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we will burn you.’” An accused witch facing a mob in the Highlands in 2012. She survived the attack and is now in hiding. Photo by Vlad Sokhin. "By the time I got to the settlement," Father Gibbs said, "she’d been freed by her husband and the police. I went to the hospital, but she’d already been sent home.” Both he and Monica were shocked that the police intervened. They thought it might have had something to do with a very recent civil disturbance in Hagen, one in which some clanspeople beat a police officer to death after a traffic accident. Tensions were high, and the police were more likely to flex their muscle. “The problem," Father Gibbs continued, "was that she had named two more people under torture. She named two more women who were known to have 100-kina debts with the deceased boy’s family." This case wasn’t resolved, they knew. They had not escaped its gravity. Within days or weeks or months, they’d likely have to scramble to save a life related to this boy’s death. We got up to go. Monica told Father Gibbs that she’d see him sometime soon. I was relieved. Relieved that this woman, Margaret, had not been killed. But there was a truer, more selfish relief effervescing under that one: I was relieved that I did not have to stand up to unanimous violence and act as intercessor. I did not have to do what Monica does every day. After that, I asked to be taken to Warakum and the Kerebug dump. Monica refused to leave the van. Our driver John did likewise. Warakum was dirt trails, corrugated shacks, scaly dogs and nothing green. I sensed that I was being watched by many eyes. I walked over to Kerebug. There, swineherds tended to their pigs as they rooted through the plastic bags, sodden cartons and discarded tires. Clouds seemed to be wrapping themselves around the mountainside like bandages around a head. The graveyard where Kepari Leniata’s body lay in an unmarked grave was across the street from Kerebug. Most plots had small cement structures built over them, to deter theft and evil spirits. Some young men with machetes and homemade guns were settling down for the night; they were paid to guard the corpses left out in the open. It was something of a miracle that Kepari Leniata was buried at all. Her body had decayed in the Mount Hagen morgue for nine months before one private citizen finally took the initiative to have her interred. The government had yet to even issue a certificate of death. At the time of this writing, they are still holding inquiries into her murder. The Western Highlands Police and the offices of the State Solicitor, Public Prosecutor, Solicitor General, Court Clerk and Coroner, as well as the Mount Hagen General Hospital morgue’s officer-in-charge have been summoned to provide evidence. They’ve attested that they have none. No family members or community leaders have come forward on behalf of the deceased. The people I stopped in Warakum told me that they didn’t know anything about Kepari Leniata’s murder or the murders that came before and after hers. They stared at me, or they laughed, or they answered derisively in creole. To them, I was an interloper, someone outside the circular, self-perpetuating system of their belief. It was pointless to talk to me. I was reminded of something Father Gibbs, Monica, John and Marciana—practically everyone else I met in PNG—had told me: Sorcery works. Sorcery works in that it will harm you if you believe it can harm you. In much the same way, a witch hunt works, insofar as its perpetrators believe in what they are doing. So long as the perpetrators believe in their scapegoat’s guilt, they aren’t killing one among them—they are coming together to solve a problem, experiencing the closeness born of complicity. Was Kepari Leniata a witch? She clearly cast some kind of spell over her community. Quickly, I got back into the police van. A misty rain began to swirl. People were streaming around the highway, hurrying for shelter ahead of night. A little ways outside of Hagen, a group of villagers had strung a downed power line across the highway. They were massed around it, blocking the road, demanding a toll. Monica told me to lie on the floor underneath the bench seat. I stayed that way for a while, smelling the smoky, loamy, strangely Scotch-like aroma of damp fires smoldering amid the mountains.
V.One litre of the milk costs £29 and 25 litres are needed for cheese
If you're going to splash out £700 on a kilogramme of cheese, you want it to be very special.
And these dairy farmers in Serbia are certainly offering an usual experience for their pricey cheese, named Pule.
Retailing at €1,000 (£734) per kilogram (2.2lbs), the cheese is made with donkey’s milk and can only be found at Zasavica Nature Reserve, in Serbia.
One litre of the donkey's milk costs €40 (£29) and each kilogram of cheese needs around 25 litres of milk
The cheese is made with donkey’s milk and can only be found at Zasavica Nature Reserve, in Serbia
Manager Slobodan Simic creates the cheese from 140 donkeys at the reserve, with only around 12 producing milk at any time.
He said: ‘What is particularly exclusive is that in the whole world only we were able to make and produce donkey cheese.’
Donkey's milk is believed to have medicinal benefits because it is similar in composition to that of humans.
It also contains an anti-allergenic, is low in fat and has 60 times more vitamin C than cow's milk.
Slobodan Simic creates the cheese from 140 donkeys, with only around 12 producing milk at any time
The main reason for why the cheese is so expensive however is because it is very rare and its production results in very high costs.
One litre of donkey's milk costs €40 (£29) and each kilogram of cheese needs around 25 litres of milk.
Slobodan said: ‘This is the most expensive cheese in the world, costing 1,000 euros a kilogram, and it is on all the world first lists by price and by rarity.
‘So, the one thing is that it is the most expensive, and the other one is that it is produced only here, on the Zasavica farm.’Please select your country: United States Argentina Australia Austria Belarus Belgium Brazil Brunei Bulgaria Canada Chile China Colombia Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Czechoslovakia (1945-1992) Denmark East Germany (1949-1990) Estonia Finland France Georgia Germany Greece Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Ireland Israel Italy Japan Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Macau Macedonia Malaysia Malta Mexico The Netherlands New Zealand North Korea Norway Philippines Poland Portugal Romania Russia Saudi Arabia Serbia Singapore Slovakia Slovenia South Korea Spain Sweden Switzerland Taiwan Thailand Turkey Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom Uruguay Vietnam U.S.S.R. (1922-1991) Yugoslavia (1945-1992) Africa » Cameroon Africa » South Africa Worldwide Other
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is set in the futuristic Neo Kobe City, a city of madness and decadence. The year is 2047 (or 2042, according to the original Japanese version). Mankind is facing its gravest crisis. A mysterious bio-roid life form has appeared. Its true nature and purpose are unknown. Is it some country's secret weapon, or an alien from another world? They appear in the winter, killing people and taking their place in society. They wear artificial skin and can sweat and even bleed. They are called "Snatchers" because they "snatch" their victims before they take their place.A new police force, specifically trained to fight the Snatchers, has been formed. They are JUNKERs (which is deciphered as "Japanese Undercover Neuro-Kinetic Elimination Rangers" in the English version). Every time you encounter someone, a difficult question must be asked — is it a person or a snatcher?The player takes control of Gillian Seed, one of the JUNKERs. The gameplay largely follows the structure of a Japanese-style adventure. The player uses a menu-driven interface to execute commands, which include moving between locations and interacting with the environment. Typically, every room contains objects that can be examined, leading to text descriptions and comments. Conversations occupy a large portion of the gameplay, with various topics available and a wealth of information about the game's world and characters. A few parts contain light puzzle-solving elements, though as a rule the game is almost completely devoid of puzzles.During key moments of the narrative, the player will be prompted to participate in intense shooting sequences. The goal is usually to kill all the enemies that pop out on the screen before they are able to kill Gillian. Some of such sequences are timed, i.e. the player is required to quickly shoot before another events is triggered, leading to the protagonist's death.
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Alternate Titles
"Snatcher: CD ROMantic" -- TurboGrafx CD title
"スナッチャー" -- Japanese spelling
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Trivia
English translation differences
The Lucifer Alpha Incident ("The Catastrophe") was moved from 1991 to 1996.
The Sega CD game is taking place in Neo Kobe, 2047 — instead of 2042.
JUNKER's meaning was changed from "Judgement Uninfected Naked Kind and Execute Ranger" to "Japanese Undercover Neuro-Kinetic Elimination Ranger".
Gaudi, JUNKER's database computer, was renamed to Jordan — an ill-advised change, since Kojima later paid homage to Snatcher in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots by naming Otacon's computer cluster "Gaudi".
in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots by naming Otacon's computer cluster "Gaudi". Alpha-Bill, Neo Kobe's network computer, became Alpha-One because it was thought it could have been mistaken with German pop band Alphaville (both pronunciations being the same in Japanese).
Likewise, Joy Division, the black market store, was changed to Plato's Cavern out of possible copyright infringement with the famous English rock band.
Catherine Gibson, Jean-Jacques Gibson's orphaned daughter, was a 14-year-old teenager in the Japanese versions. She is 18 and has a rather husky voice in the English port.
English version Konami references
Some dates, names and characters in the Sega CD English translation were modified from the original PC-88, MSX2 and PC Engine versions (which were the only ones directly supervised by Hideo Kojima ):While the original Japanese version ofhad many popular culture references, they were largely replaced by characters from Konami games and other allusions to that company.One of the places Gillian and Metal Gear have to investigate is a nightclub in Neo Kobe called "Outer Heaven", named for the fortress of the villains in the firstIt was a slow song, in the style of a plaintive Roy Orbison ballad. The band started to record it; but the producer wasn’t feeling it. He advised the band to pick up the tempo, and to add a hooky instrumental bit at the beginning. Fortunately, the band listened to the grownup in the room. John Lennon grabbed his harmonica. Ringo kicked up the tempo. “Please Please Me,” The Beatles’ first #1 single (in the UK) was born – and a bond between the band and George Martin was forged. What would have happened if the lads insisted on doing it their way?
See Related Post: “Inventing Recording Artistry with George Martin and the Beatles”
Not long before, when Martin was interviewing and critiquing the band – which had been rejected by pretty much every other record label – he asked, at the end of the meeting, if they had anything else to say. George Harrison (the quiet one?) chimed in: “Well, for a start, I don’t like your tie.” What if Martin were put off rather than won over by their “tremendous charisma”?
(He went on to say, “When you are with them, you are all the better for being with them and when they leave you feel a loss. I fell in love with them. It’s as simple as that.”)
By 1965, The Beatles’ were the biggest band in the world. EMI, Martin’s employer, was minting money; but it offered him only a small bonus. He then did something unprecedented, establishing his own production company to work not as a hired hand but an independent entrepreneur. The Beatles insisted he continue to produce their records, so EMI really had no choice. Martin effectively re-defined the producer’s role, and business model, there and then.
What if he didn’t roll those dice? He was, after all, a proper English gentleman – aware of his “place.” The 13 albums and 22 singles Martin produced with The Beatles add up to a little less than 10 hours of music. Where would we be without those 10 brief hours?
Its like your PhD in the Beatles. The first four "classes" are ready. PGlmcmFtZSBzcmM9Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmZhY2Vib29rLmNvbS9wbHVnaW5zL3ZpZGVvLnBocD9ocmVmPWh0dHBzJTNBJTJGJTJGd3d3LmZhY2Vib29rLmNvbSUyRmN1bHR1cmVzb25hciUyRnZpZGVvcyUyRjExMzkzMjMzOTI4NjgxNTklMkYmc2hvd190ZXh0PTAmd2lkdGg9NTYwIiB3aWR0aD0iMzAwIiBoZWlnaHQ9IjI0MCIgc3R5bGU9ImJvcmRlcjpub25lO292ZXJmbG93OmhpZGRlbiIgc2Nyb2xsaW5nPSJubyIgZnJhbWVib3JkZXI9IjAiIGFsbG93VHJhbnNwYXJlbmN5PSJ0cnVlIiBhbGxvd0Z1bGxTY3JlZW49InRydWUiPjwvaWZyYW1lPg== "Deconstructing the Beatles" 4 Film Collection shop.culturesonar.com Shop Now
We all read a lot of hugely-justified praise for Sir George on the occasion of his passing. But we’d like to focus on these few individual moments when different choices would have likely changed our musical universe.
We’d also like to pause and admire his character. From a fan’s distance, at least, he remained ever dignified and elegant. Although acutely aware of his profound contribution to the band’s success, he always gave credit first to the Beatles’ songwriting, musicianship and talent. But there is absolutely no denying he was an artist in his own right.
The NY Times obit includes a lovely quote which seems a fitting way to remember Sir George:
“When I joined EMI, the criterion by which recordings were judged was their faithfulness to the original. If you made a recording that was so good that you couldn’t tell the difference between the recording and the actual performance, that was the acme. And I questioned that. I thought, OK, we’re all taking photographs of an existing event. But we don’t have to make a photograph; we can paint.”
What a wonderful choice he made.
– Al Cattabiani
Photo Credit: George Martin, Geoff Emerick and Ringo Starr courtesy of Larry Ellis/Daily Express/Getty Images
Other Posts You Might LikeSen. Al Franken Alan (Al) Stuart FrankenVirginia can be better than this Harris off to best start among Dems in race, say strategists, donors Virginia scandals pit Democrats against themselves and their message MORE (D-Minn.) pressed Energy Secretary Rick Perry on the science behind climate change in a testy exchange during a committee hearing Thursday.
Perry was testifying concerning the Trump administration's budget proposal for the Department of Energy when Franken questioned him about his previous statements on climate change.
Perry had said at his confirmation hearing that he believed that the climate is changing, but on Monday he said that he did not believe that carbon dioxide is the primary cause for warming temperatures.
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“I think there are some other naturally occurring events, the warming and the cooling of our ocean waters and some other activities that occur,” Perry explained Thursday.
“I also said in the next breath that man’s impact does in fact have an impact on the climate,” he continued. “What’s wrong with being a skeptic about something that we’re talking about that’s going to have a massive impact on the American economy?”
Franken quoted from studies that he said illustrate humanity's impact on climate change, something accepted by the vast majority of government and private sector scientists.
“If you say that this is caused by the warming of the oceans, the reason the oceans are warming is because water absorbs the heat, that’s why the sea level is rising,” Franken said, referencing private-sector scientists who believe climate change is completely the result of human activity.
“There is no peer-reviewed study that doesn’t say this is happening.”
Perry shot back: “Global warming was 100 percent due to human activity? I don’t believe that. 100 percent? Every bit of that global warming? I don’t buy it.”
Perry added, “to stand up and say that 100 percent of global warming is because of human activity, I think on its face, is just indefensible.”
Franken and other Democrats slammed Trump’s budget request for the Energy Department on Thursday, including its proposed 5.4 percent overall budget reduction and its deep cuts to energy research funding.
Franken described the Department of Energy’s budget as “anti-innovation,” accusing it of gutting spending on renewable energy research.
“You seem to be a defense counsel for someone charged with murder, and you seem to be saying ‘I know he’s guilty but I’m going to give him a robust defense,’” Franken said.Learn the ins and outs of After Effects
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PhilOne of the most interesting free agent signings that the Colts have made this offseason is the decision to bring in Margus Hunt.
A former second round project player for the Bengals, Hunt never really put things together during his four years in Cincinnati. During his tenure there he played in 44 games and recorded 29 tackles and 1.5 sacks. He did manage to block three kicks last year, however, so he had an impact on special teams.
To get a better understanding of the player the Colts are getting in Margus Hunt, we reached out to those who covered him during his time with the Bengals. Cincy Jungle’s Rebecca Toback was kind enough to answer some questions for us about Hunt. Our questions are in bold and then Rebecca’s answers follow.
1. How was Margus Hunt during his tenure with the Bengals?
Hunt was a project when he came to Cincinnati and he's still a project now on the way out. He's never lived up to his second round billing and was a big disappointment in every area other than kick blocking. He was an unreliable pass rusher and I saw he blamed the Bengals' depth for why he never made an impact with the team... I thought that was pretty funny. “It was hard to kind of get a foot in the door,” Hunt says of his time with the Bengals, via Colts.com. “They were kind of set in the way with the defensive line they had going on. I was competing and getting as much playing time as I could and being able to be kind of in a role where if my name was called upon I was able to do my thing and help the defense out and not have a drop off in productivity primarily.” I think it's somewhat of a cop out if he's claiming depth kept him from making an impact, because he had so many opportunities to earn his chance, and he simply was unable to do that. Maybe a change of scenery is what he needs. He has the size and strength to succeed, but, he's yet to prove he can use his size to his advantage... Other than with blocked kicks. He's good in that regard. As I'm sure you've learned by now, he was a former discus, hammer throw and shot put World Champion. He went to SMU to join the track and field team... But that team got shut down while he was there and then he joined the football team instead. So, he's only been playing football for about seven years. Because of that, there's always been a hope that in each year that passes he'd learn more and become a better football player. But, he's still yet to reach the potential the Bengals saw in him when they drafted him in the second round back in 2013.
2. Why was he not re-signed?
The Bengals need to find a more reliable backup to take over his role, someone who can contribute as a pass rusher and actually get to the quarterback. I think the Bengals were done working on a four-year project that failed to pan out.
3. What are his strengths and weaknesses?
Strengths: Great at blocking kicks and he can generate some pressure on the quarterback, though, it's rarely ever converted to sacks. You guys might think he's good because the last preseason game against the Colts has been his annual best game of the year. I asked the rest of our writers if anyone had some thoughts to share with you on his strengths, and blocking kicks was essentially it. Weaknesses: He's yet to figure out how to use his size and strength to his advantage. He can't shed blocks. He was probably best in 2016, which could be attributed to playing in a contract year, but, hopefully, was due to all of the work from the prior three seasons finally kicking in. Still, it really wasn't enough to warrant him staying in Cincinnati, even as a backup.
4. Do you think this is a good fit and a good signing for the Colts?
If he's in Indianapolis purely as a depth player who's going to push for a roster spot, I think the signing makes sense. I just wouldn't expect to get much of an impact from him... And if you do, it'll be a happy surprise. If he saves you a few points on blocked field goals, you'll probably be happy, too. If the Bengals paid $2 million for Hunt this year, a lot of fans would be very, very unhappy. But, I know his contract does have an option for the Colts to opt out after one year, so, it's pretty low risk and you can hope for a big reward. Here's more on him from one of my writers with arguments for and against re-signing him from the Bengals' perspective: http://www.cincyjungle.com/2017/1/8/14189746/reviewing-whether-bengals-should-re-sign-margus-hunt-nfl-2017
That’s some terrific information on Margus Hunt, and hopefully at least his special teams impact will make the signing worth it for the Colts. Thanks again to Rebecca for taking the time to answer our questions, and be sure to check out Cincy Jungle for all things Bengals!Image caption There are fears that many children are not getting enough exercise.
For the first time government health experts are issuing advice to parents on exercise for children under five.
They say the amount of time babies and toddlers spend strapped in buggies or car seats should be cut down.
Instead, toddlers should be allowed to move around or be physically active for at least three hours a day.
The new guidance reflects growing concern over children who do not exercise enough, which can be linked to obesity and brain development.
Chief Medical Officers for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have come together to issue the new guidance.
It is the first time they have combined to issue UK-wide advice on exercise among the under-fives.
From birth
Their recommendations include encouraging babies to move about and be active from birth, for example on activity mats or swimming.
They say that all under-fives should spend as little time as possible being restrained or sitting still except when they are sleeping.
This matters to your child now, to their development through childhood and adolescence and to their disease profile in middle age and later life Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer for England
And once a child can walk, they should be physically active and moving around for at least three hours a day.
Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer for England, said all young children should be encouraged to be active.
"For children that are not yet walking, there is considerable international evidence that letting children crawl, play or roll around on the floor is essential during early years.
"Play that allows under-fives to move about is critical and three hours a day is essential.
"I think there are parents who are not aware how important it is for their children to be physically active for a minimum of three hours.
"Other parents are very busy and may not see how important it is to get that prioritisation and balance right.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Professor Dame Sally Davies: ''It is important to get at least three hours of unfettered physical activity a day for these children''
"So what I'm saying is this matters to your child now, to their development through childhood and adolescence and to their disease profile in middle age and later life."
According to the Department of Health, recent studies suggest that only about 30% of children in England between the age of two and 15 get the recommended amount of exercise.
'Huff and puff'
Most UK pre-school children currently spend between two and two-and-a-half hours a day being active.
'Active play' is described as something like using a climbing frame or riding a bike, running or chasing games, swimming or skipping - anything that makes a child 'huff and puff'.
For babies the advice is to let children crawl and roll on a mat, encouraging them to reach out and grab toys or taking them for a baby swimming lesson.
If a toddler spends too much time sitting passively in front of a TV then problems will be stored up for the future Professor Terence Stephenson, Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health
But the charity and campaign group The Children's Society says many parents need help in order to ensure their children get enough exercise.
Elaine Hindal, director of the Children's Society Campaign for Childhood, says: "Parents, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, need access to good quality low-cost play facilities, childcare and support from health visitors.
"Guidance is a step in the right direction, but real practical support for parents and families is badly needed.
"We are concerned that the government's welfare reforms and spending cuts will lead to parents being denied the opportunity to provide toddlers with necessary physical exercise."
But the guidance was welcomed by Professor Terence Stephenson, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, who said: "The early years shape every child's future.
"Physical activity is important from an early age - if a toddler spends too much time sitting passively in front of a TV then problems will be stored up for the future.
"These guidelines offer an excellent first step and an active childhood helps to lay the foundations for an adulthood with less risk of health problems such as obesity, heart disease and diabetes."Cascadian reformers are hoping to spread the use of Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) from its regional foothold in Benton County, Oregon, to elect executives and legislatures across the region. State law in both Washington and Oregon dictates electoral methods for non-charter, a.k.a. “code,” counties and cities. But charter counties and cities in Oregon have a large amount of autonomy, and in Washington some autonomy, to amend their charters and improve local electoral methods. However, outdated voting equipment unable to process ranked ballots can be a roadblock to adopting RCV.
Voting equipment is typically purchased and managed at the county level, and some Northwest counties already have equipment that can tally ranked ballots, or could with a small upgrade—these places are ripe for RCV advocacy. For counties with outdated equipment, the easiest course of action is to simply choose ranked-choice-ready equipment when they are purchasing new equipment anyway. Or, they could ask a neighboring county with ranked-choice-ready equipment to tally their ranked ballots for them.
Adopting RCV election methods and acquiring RCV-ready equipment are like the proverbial chicken-and-egg: counties may not choose RCV-ready equipment if no elections in their jurisdiction use RCV elections, but voters might be reluctant to switch to RCV elections if their voting equipment cannot count ranked ballots. This article, a complement to our review of the legal barriers to ranked-choice voting in Oregon and Washington, identifies places in these two states where adopting RCV would be easy and timely both in terms of required equipment upgrade (if any) and policy changes.
First, we briefly review Oregon and Washington state law limitations on cities and counties wishing to adopt RCV.
on cities and counties wishing to adopt RCV. Next, we describe voting equipment options and costs and the current equipment in Oregon and Washington.
and the current equipment in Oregon and Washington. Then we identify advocacy priorities in Oregon and in Washington.
in Oregon and in Washington. Finally, we include an appendix detailing equipment currently in use in each county in Oregon and Washington and how it stacks up on ranked-choice-readiness.
Sightline supports other electoral reforms in addition to RCV, including Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) to elect state legislators and Score Runoff Voting (SRV) for executive races. This report only covers RCV-readiness because existing equipment could already count an MMP ballot, and we could not find any existing systems or software packages that can count SRV ballots.
In summary, we see the following categories of counties as high priorities for RCV advocacy:
1. Counties using Clear Ballot voting equipment
Six Oregon charter counties (Hood River, Jackson, Josephine, Lane, Multnomah, and Washington) and five non-charter counties (Coos, Deschutes, Harney, Klamath, and Linn) use Clear Ballot voting equipment. So do two Washington charter counties (King and Pierce). Clear Ballot seems to be a system of choice for counties replacing their equipment—of the 22 Oregon and Washington counties that have purchased new equipment in the past three years, 13 have chosen Clear Ballot.
Clear Ballot hardware can handle RCV ballots, but unfortunately, its software cannot. However, Clear Ballot appears eager to write an RCV software module, if a client requested it. If even one Clear Ballot county, or possibly a city within one of the counties, adopted RCV and asked Clear Ballot to write a software update module, all thirteen would quickly become ranked-choice-capable. King County, Washington, in particular could be a target for advocates because it is a large charter county with a charter review process coming up; if it adopted RCV, it could negotiate with Clear Ballot to write the software module.
2. Counties that are already ranked-choice-ready
“Ranked-choice-ready” (RCV-ready) equipment can internally count ranked-choice ballots for either Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) or Single Transferable Vote (STV). Two Oregon non-charter counties (Clackamas and Marion) and five Washington non-charter counties (Chelan, Douglas, Island, Kittitas, Skagit) have RCV-ready equipment. Unfortunately, elections in code counties are governed by state law, so none of these non-charter counties could adopt RCV itself, but advocates could urge charter cities within Clackamas and Marion counties—for example, Lake Oswego and Salem—to adopt ranked-choice election methods with no equipment barriers. None of the Washington counties contains any charter cities, so there are no local reform opportunities there (although the RCV-ready counties could help other counties count ballots and could help count statewide elections, as we discuss more below).
3. Counties that are already ranked-choice-capable
“Ranked-choice-capable” (RCV-capable) equipment can tally ranked-choice ballots with additional software support, either by adding a software module available from the manufacturer or by using third-party software. Two Oregon charter counties (Benton and Clatsop) and four Oregon non-charter counties (Columbia, Lincoln, Polk, and Tillamook) are RCV-capable. All six of them use the same equipment from ES&S, and one of them, Benton County, is already planning to acquire third-party software to implement the countywide RCV initiative voters approved last year. Once the county purchases this software, any charter city within Benton, such as Corvallis, could adopt RCV for municipal elections and have immediate access to RCV-ready equipment.
Advocates could encourage the other five Oregon counties with the same equipment as Benton to purchase the software in bulk along with Benton and potentially negotiate a better deal with the manufacturer. Then the counties, and all charter cities within these six RCV-capable Oregon counties, would be ready to tally ranked ballots.
Two Washington charter counties (Snohomish and Whatcom) and one Washington non-charter county (Franklin) are RCV-capable, via a software upgrade available from the manufacturer, Dominion. There are no charter cities in Franklin. Advocates could encourage Snohomish and Whatcom counties and any charter cities within them, such as Bellingham and Everett, to adopt RCV and prompt the county to purchase the necessary software upgrade.
4. Counties already planning to replace their equipment
Approximately 17 Oregon counties and 26 Washington counties have equipment close to or more than a decade old and nearing the end of its useful life, so they may soon be turning over equipment. Advocates could urge them to choose ranked-choice-ready equipment and not lock themselves into another decade of inflexibility.
Douglas and Yamhill counties in Oregon have indicated plans to replace equipment in the near future. Though these non-charter counties cannot themselves adopt RCV, charter cities within them, such as Sutherlin and McMinnville, could. If charter cities adopted RCV, then ranked-choice capability would be a requirement of the county’s new system. Or, if advocates convinced the counties to purchase RCV-ready equipment, these cities would be ripe for election reform.
Clallam, Clark, Whatcom, and San Juan, charter counties in Washington, have indicated to us that they plan to purchase new voting equipment in the next three to five years. If they adopted RCV, then ranked-choice capability would need to be a requirement of the new system. Or, if advocates convinced them to purchase RCV-ready equipment, they would be ripe for election reform.
Oregon state law limitations on city and county adoption of ranked-choice voting
In Oregon, the constitution specifically allows ranked-choice voting and proportional representation. The constitution also gives charter cities and towns total authority over the “structural and organizational arrangements” of local government. Indeed, the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations ranks Oregon number one in the United States for county home rule authority and number six for city home rule authority. Oregon has nine home rule (charter) counties and more than one hundred charter cities—all of these could amend their charters to adopt ranked-choice voting.
Oregon’s 27 non-charter, a.k.a. “code,” counties and more than 100 code cities are governed by state law. State law requires primaries and may require plurality voting. The only way for code counties and cities to adopt ranked-choice voting would be for the state legislature to change the law and instead require code cities and counties to use ranked-choice voting, which is unfortunately unlikely. However, charter cities within code counties could amend their charters and use RCV.
Washington state law limitations on city and county adoption of ranked-choice voting
In Washington, unfortunately, state law limits cities’ and counties’ RCV options. As in Oregon, code counties and cities must follow state law governing elections, so they could only adopt RCV if the legislature changed the law. Only nonpartisan charter counties—King, Whatcom, and San Juan—may choose to adopt single-winner RCV, a.k.a. Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). Partisan charter counties—Clallam, Snohomish, Pierce, and Clark—could choose to adopt IRV if they also made their races non-partisan. Otherwise, state top-two law applies, and there is no point in ranking just two candidates.
At the municipal level, charter cities may only adopt single-winner IRV if they retain primary elections. Top-two does not apply to cities and towns, but state law does require cities and towns to hold primaries, so a charter city could adopt a top-three or top-four primary with IRV in the general election. State law also likely prohibits any local Washington jurisdiction from adopting multi-winner RCV, a.k.a. Single Transferable Vote (STV), because it requires cities and counties to number positions with the same name or district and deal with them as “separate offices for all election purposes.”
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held by the Democratic Party in the city. In the last election before adoption of choice voting, Democrats won 99.5% of the seats on the Board of Alderman with only 66.5% of the vote. Under ranked choice voting in 1941, Democrats won 65.5% of the seats with 64% of the vote, a much fairer result. However, ranked choice voting enabled representation of minor parties, including members of the Communist Party. During the Cold War, the Democratic Party took advantage of fears of communism to make a successful push for repeal of ranked choice voting. That repeal successfully prevented the election of communists to the city council, along with members of all other minor parties, but it also brought back an era of unrepresentative elections to New York City. A Fair Representation Voting Plan for the California State Assembly While much of the current dissatisfaction with American politics stems from the effects of winner-take-all congressional elections, similar problems exist in the states. Fortunately, fair representation voting systems can improve elections at all levels of government. Our fair representation voting plan for the California State Assembly would reshape the state's politics by combining assembly districts into multi-seat "super districts," similar to those proposed in Monopoly Politics for the election of the U.S. House. The adoption of such a system would give California voters more choices, more competitive elections, and help promote fair representation of political and ethnic minorities. A plan overview is available here.
A comparison of current and proposed districts can be found here.
As an example, analysis of a hypothetical Bay-Area super district and its impact on Assembly elections is available here.Regional Transport Offices (RTOs) of Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad have pulled up 14 autorickshaws of app-based aggregator service Ola for advertising a rate lower than that fixed by the district transport authority (DTA). The autorickshaws — 12 from Pune and two from Pimpri Chinchwad — were advertising the rate of Rs 29 for a distance of 4 km. Ola’s foray into the autorickshaw segment had been stiffly opposed by the Rickshaw Panchayat, which claimed that app-based taxi services were not allowed under the Motor Vehicles Act. Pune has also seen cases of violence against drivers of Ola cabs and autorickshaws.
Advertising
Recently, many autorickshaws have been advertising the special rate offered by the company. Similarly, hoardings highlighting Rs 29/4 km rate have also appeared in various parts of the city. The scale of advertising and the rates offered have ruffled the feathers of existing players.
In Pune, the district transport authority (DTA) fixes the fare of autorickshaws, as per a set formula. Currently, autorickshaws which ply by meter charge Rs 18 per km as the initial fare.
On Thursday, Pune Regional Transport Officer Sanjay Raut issued a press statement on the action taken against Ola autorickshaws. In the release, Raut said the autorickshaws that were impounded were advertising Ola rates, which is illegal. “We have also asked the company to take down their billboards,” stated the release. Shrikant Acharya, advisor to the Aam Aadmi Autorickshaw Chalak Sanghathana, said they had complained to the Pune RTO about the advertisements in March.
Advertising
“During the meeting, the RTO had said they were sending out decoy passengers to take further action,” he said, adding that the action taken by RTO was a welcome move. Attempts to reach Ola were not successful.Why do so many Americans continue to support Donald Trump with such fervor?
Hillary Clinton now leads Donald Trump in presidential polls by double-digits, but Trump’s hardiest supporters have not only stood by him, many have actually increased their commitment. It seems clear that in a little less than a month’s time, tens of millions of Americans will cast a vote for a man who overtly seeks to overthrow basic institutions that preserve the American ideal such as a free press, freedom of religion, universal suffrage, the right of the accused to legal counsel, and the right of habeas corpus. This is over-and-above his loudly proclaimed bigotry, sexism, boasts of sexual assault, ableism, history of racial and anti-Muslim bias, and other execrable personal characteristics that would have completely destroyed the electoral prospects of past presidential candidates.
Trump is a uniquely odious candidate who is quite likely going to lose, but more than 40% of Americans plan to vote for him. The science of group conflict might help us understand why.
In a powerful 2003 article in the journal American Psychologist, Roy Eidelson and Judy Eidelson foreshadowed Trump’s popularity. Drawing on a close reading of both history and social science literature, they identified five beliefs that — if successfully inculcated in people by a leader — motivate people to initiate group conflict. Trump’s campaign rhetoric deftly mobilizes all five.
Confidence in one’s superiority : Trump constantly broadcasts a message that he and his followers are superior to other Americans, whereas those who oppose him are “stupid” and deserve to be punched in the face. His own followers’ violent acts are excused as emanating from “tremendous love and passion for the country.”
: Trump constantly broadcasts a message that he and his followers are superior to other Americans, whereas those who oppose him are “stupid” and deserve to be punched in the face. His own followers’ violent acts are excused as emanating from “tremendous love and passion for the country.” Claims of unjust treatment : Trump is obsessed with the concept of fairness, but only when it goes his way. Given his presumed superiority, it naturally follows that the only way he and his supporters could fail is if injustice occurs.
: Trump is obsessed with the concept of fairness, but only when it goes his way. Given his presumed superiority, it naturally follows that the only way he and his supporters could fail is if injustice occurs. Fears of vulnerability : Accordingly, Trump has overtly stated that he believes the presidential election will be rigged. His supporters believe him. In one recent poll, only 16 percent of North Carolina Trump supporters agreed that if Clinton wins it would be because she got more votes.
: Accordingly, Trump has overtly stated that he believes the presidential election will be rigged. His supporters believe him. In one recent poll, only 16 percent of North Carolina Trump supporters agreed that if Clinton wins it would be because she got more votes. Distrust of the other : Trump and his supporters routinely claim that the media, government, educational institutions, and other established entities are overtly undermining Trump, his supporters, and their values. To many Trump supporters, merely being published or broadcast by a major news outlet is evidence that a fact is not credible, given the certainty they have that media professionals are conspiring against Trump.
: Trump and his supporters routinely claim that the media, government, educational institutions, and other established entities are overtly undermining Trump, his supporters, and their values. To many Trump supporters, merely being published or broadcast by a major news outlet is evidence that a fact is not credible, given the certainty they have that media professionals are conspiring against Trump. A sense of helplessness: When Trump allows that it’s possible that he might lose the election because of fraud, conspiracy, or disloyalty, he taps into his followers’ sense of helplessness. No matter how superior he and his followers truly are, no matter how unjustly they are treated, there is little that they can do in the face of a nation-wide plot against him. Accordingly, many of Trump’s most ardent supporters will see the impending rejection of their candidate not as a corrective experience to lead them to reconsider their beliefs, but as further evidence that they are helpless in the face of a larger, untrustworthy outgroup.
By ably nurturing these five beliefs, Trump has gained power far beyond the level most could have dreamed prior to the present election cycle.
It seems clear that, if and when Trump loses, he won’t be going anywhere. He has a constituency, stoked by effective rhetorics shown to propel people to group conflict, one some of his supporters are already preparing for. And, since he has convinced so many of his supporters that he alone can bring the changes they desire, it is a surety that he will use their mandate for his own future purposes.Before you continue reading this rumour post, ask yourself something: what could be the absolutely most awesome thing Square Enix could do whilst releasing a HD bundle of all the already released games? If you came anywhere even close to what they might actually be doing, usually you'd be wrong.
According to a source who apparently revealed the existence of Castlevania: Lord of Shadows II before it was practically officially confirmed, Kingdom Hearts Remembrance (or HD Remix) is the bundling together of Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts II, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days and Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep in a single collection, to be available on PlayStation 3, Wii U and Vita.
But pick up your chin, dear reader, because there's more. Not only will these fantastic titles be available in one collection, but 358/2 Days will be re-rendered in the engine for Birth By Sleep and new quests will be added throughout the series to tie things up more effectively.
And all this is supposed to be announced next week at E3, presumably at either the PlayStation or Nintendo conference. File this one in the "that's how you do a HD collection guys" column and hope that at least some of this turns out to be true. Will it? We only have to wait five days to find out.Have you ever wondered where to place your buttons at the end of your form? How you design your button is one thing, but where you place it can also affect form submissions.
There are three types of forms you need to consider: multi-page, multi-section, and single page form. The type of form you’re using will determine where you should place your submit button.
Multi-Page Forms
On multi-page forms, you’ll have more than one button. You’ll have a ‘back’ button that takes users to their previous page. And you’ll also have a ‘continue’ button that takes users to the next page.
Because these buttons behave like pagination, they should follow pagination conventions. Continue button goes on the right while the Back button goes on the left. This maps to the direction users want to go when they paginate.
Multi-Section Forms
Multi-section forms are long and consist of many fields grouped together. Aligning your button to the left can make users think that the action only applies to fields in that section. Aligning your button to the right gives users the impression that the button is an action that applies to the entire form.
Single Page Form
The fields on single page forms are almost always left aligned. Aligning your button to the left on single page forms allow users to find and click the button easier.
Users will scan the fields from left to right going down the form. A left aligned button is directly in their visual path when they get to the bottom of the form. It flows with the user’s scanning pattern so they can click it quickly without having to look for it.
Final Thoughts
Where you place your form buttons is important to consider. The submit button is responsible for receiving user information. If it’s not placed in a location where users expect, you could lose out on form submissions. Know what type of form you’re using and place your buttons where users expect it.
Books
ToolkitsIn case you haven't seen the review scores for Call of Duty infinite warfare. It is earning 8's, 9's and 10's across the board which is a gross miscarriage of "games journalism" as it is providing false and inaccurate info. Reviewers are calling it a "unique experience", "compelling" and "invigorating". Which is the complete opposite of what the game contains.
This is not a joke, these are SKINS that alternate the strength of a weapon, rather than weapon attachments, it's the skins themselves. This provides massive unfair game play advantages, it also makes the game even more inaccessible for new comers as within a few months time people will already have the high end skins while new comers get smashed.
There are higher tier skins which offer more damage but for some reason are locked behind a premium pay wall. This makes no sense, if you insert weapon stats onto skins, wouldn't it make sense to have all of them be accessible in one way or another? While i get that content drops are fine, i personally think this is disgusting as its gating players from getting full access to the game.
This could just be a server structure related problem but this should not be acceptable, the game is being played on a PC server which should be accessible to everyone, but for some reason they've split the pc playerbase in a stupid way that makes it harder for users to play together.
Now this part is unconfirmed but was posted earlier on the sub reddit (Credit to /u/GamingFreak732 for this). But it seems like the Modern Warfare remake was made heavily with the PS4 in mind. There is optimisation issues all across the board with the remake.
This is disgusting that all these issues are coming up right now yet for some reason reviewers are failing to notify people of these errors and are refusing to disclose them. This can not be allowed to continue and must be pointed out. Failure to report these issues in reviews should be in some way be allowed to be reported or have some form of penalty applied. It's bias in its purest form and promotes ill informed reviews.
Edit: fixed grammar.
Edit 2: Some people are asking "why make this post? its nothing new" Here's the thing, every time this happens with EA and corruption, people throw a huge fit but with activision its considered nothing new. The idea is to get it out there to people who cant see past reviewers to open their eyes to how god damn bias these people are.
Edit 3: Fixed up the word Premium because i cant spell for crap.
Edit 4: Guess i gotta address this point too: This is not a cry about pay 2 win, not at fucking all. I dont know how people are thinking that. The post is to highlight that reviewers are leaving out major factors when it comes to people who want to purchase the game.“Frank is such a strange creation that I hardly know how to describe it. Wordless, timeless, placeless, full of unprecedented characters and experiences, it exists on its own bizarre terms. It offers vivid tableaus of tenderness and bloodshed, cruelty and sacrifice, love and betrayal, terror and bliss; and it offers them like candies from another planet.” —Francis Ford Coppola
As probably the only cartoonist who’s had an introduction written by the esteemed director, Jim Woodring might receive a MacArthur “genius” grant if only there were a category for Hallucinogenic Cosmos Imagining.
Of his entirely peculiar body of work, the most seamless components are the graphic novels Weathercraft, The Congress of the Animals, and Fran. The latter two books are each other’s prequels and sequels, as the characters experience an infinite loop of domestic bliss and alienation, bland normality, and the disintegration of anything approaching coherent reality.
However, the mind-bending uniqueness of Woodring’s oeuvre should not obscure the elements of classical literature that lurk within. Look closely and you’ll see the Hero’s Journey, the skeletal underpinnings of almost every grand myth from The Odyssey to The Lord of the Rings. As the tales of a naïf wandering through a phantasmagorical landscape, the books channel a diverse array of works, from Dante’s Inferno and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But just when you least expect it––that is, just when Woodring has begun to create narrative expectations––our protagonists are tossed in a disorienting direction, which may lead to the evaporation of their concepts of self (anatta, in Buddhist terminology).
There’s Frank, a vaguely Disney-inflected, rodent-like creature. He is a wide-eyed innocent nonetheless capable of despicable acts without batting an eye. A perennial blank slate, he is the main perspective character.
There’s Manhog, who personifies every base desire and craven impulse, which makes it all the more disconcerting when he shows occasional glimpses of insight and civility.
There’s Whim, a lithe, cadaverous Lord of Darkness whose personal ad might read: “Wanted: Plaything of any species for experiments likely to result in your demise.”
And there’s Fran. I’ll avoid ruining surprises by saying only that she’s not who she appears to be.
So, why visit this land of ethically challenged miscreants? Because, like any significant work of art, Woodring’s world is a revealing mirror of the weirdness that we’ve come to accept as normal. In this case it is a funhouse mirror, but nonetheless the kind that causes an uneasy second glance over the shoulder as we momentarily recognize that yes, it is our own eyes looking back at us.
Woodring breaks the mold with his art, too. Scintillating, wavy parallel lines of varying thickness give the illusion of shading, even though his textures are all black and white (no halftone). Reminiscent of quill pen calligraphy or steel plate engravings, his imaginative backgrounds of lush gardens, claustrophobic interiors, and vaguely Islamic-inspired architecture appear to have been created the old-fashioned way, hand to paper. He expertly manipulates time via panel sequencing and maximizes drama with scale variation.
In the most compelling sequences, we float and emerge from one dream-like space to another, confronting bodies that melt, sprout extra features, and morph into bizarre hybrid species. We orbit a sphere of florid paisley shapes that blossom and engulf menacingly.
The Buddha instructed that eight worldly winds affect all lives sooner or later: pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and ill repute, gain and loss. This is the tune that we dance to, usually without even realizing we’re in the dance, and it was the Buddha’s perspective that waking up is liberation. Frank and his posse are even more clueless than the rest of us about the events that whipsaw them about, and under our voyeuristic gaze, they play out their assigned tragicomic roles with gusto.
Woodring invites us to grapple with the Big Stuff. In his cosmology our most basic assumptions about cause and effect are questionable. And yet, our primal desires for comfort and connection peer out of this vertiginous realm. The scope of his vision is startling despite, or perhaps because of, its concealment within the “triviality” of the comics medium. As Coppola concludes, Woodring’s work “is one man’s puzzling gift to a puzzling world… You may proceed with caution or not, as you like.”
If it takes madness to wake us up, then bring it on. The Woodring Asylum is open.
Your work is so spatially convincing and adventurous even in 2-D that 3-D must have felt like a natural fit.
JW: Yes, it sure did. In fact, I defy anyone to find any other cartoons that lend themselves better to 3-D than these. It's beyond serendipitous.
Did you find yourself modifying the storyline or drawing style now that you had access to 3-D?
JW: The images in the book were drawn long before there was even the glimmer of a notion that they might be converted into 3-D. They are drawings I made over the past ten years or so to work out scenes and situations for my comics. That they work so well for 3-D is a happy coincidence.
You’ve previously mentioned that you used to see “apparitions” that fueled your art, but that these have tapered off. Have you had any recent visitations, and if not, do you miss their creative force? Was the drawing of Frank in the Third Dimension graced by any inspirational hallucinations?
JW: I haven't had a bona fide hallucination in about three years. They didn't do me any particular good. They weren't inspiring or revelatory, other than being yet more evidence that we live in a flabbergasting situation.
Until I got used to it, I had a tough time reconciling your color work to your black-and-white. While the imagery is clearly the work of one artist, the Technicolor eye candy of the multicolored strips is so different from the old engraving look of black and white. I guess my reaction was, jeez, with this kind of linear skill, why does he need the bells and whistles of color? Do you have a preference for a certain look based on storyline, or does your choice depend on something else entirely (mood, lunar phase, etc.)?
JW: One of the compensations for the rigors of doing what I do is the ability to act on a whim, so if I think it would be fun to do a story in color I just do it without thinking about it very much. I slightly prefer working in pen and ink. It's an ongoing education.
Speaking of your black-and-white art, do you use any computer programs to achieve it? It looks totally handmade, but I’m in awe of the gradual line-width variation that you put in the wavy parallel lines, which allows you to achieve the look of shading and rounded contours. I can’t see how you’d be able to predict so accurately the overall tonal values while you’re doing it line-by-line. Did you ever study engraving or etching?
JW: No, I don't use the computer in the production of my comics at all. They are all drawn with a dip pen and India ink on Bristol. Working out the tones simply takes planning and the willingness to do it over if necessary. The book I'm working on now required redrawing six pages of a previous story line by line. It was excruciating work, but I had to do it to make a philosophical point. And no, I didn't study etching or engraving, I didn't go to art school at all.
There are few other quality wordless comics out there. Shaun Tan’s The Arrival immediately comes to mind. Funny, I always assumed that you didn’t use words because you were uncomfortable in that mode of expression, but then I see how eloquently you express yourself in interviews, and your explanation that you avoid dialogue because you want your work to be timeless and universal makes perfect sense. If I’m craving relief from language and all its potential distortions, can you recommend other comics artists that convey the whole shebang in image?
JW: There aren't that many that I'm aware of. Lynd Ward, of course.
So many teens feel alone and alienated, but if they’re lucky, they stumble upon their ‘tribe.’ I loved your story about going to the Surrealists exhibition and feeling, “My god, I do belong in this world after all!” I had a Salvador Dalí book in high school––remember the one that looked like a big, rococo, metallic candy box? I carried that thing around like a talisman looking for converts. With a distinctive body of work spanning decades, how do you feel your work has influenced the art and comics world?
JW: Undoubtedly Dalí affected me more strongly and for a longer time than any other artist. I wrote him letters, I dreamed about meeting him. In fact, I still have a recurring dream that I am hanging out with him and desperately scheming to get him to do a little drawing just for me. He never does.
Boris Artzybasheff and R. Crumb hit me almost as hard as Dalí. Artzybasheff's work always seemed freighted with inner meaning. That's what I wanted. As for my work's place in the field, who knows?
Now for the fan-nerd questions. The ‘kernel’ of Whim sometimes pops out and assumes the form of the hallucinogenic plant, Salvia divinorum. When he appears to be distorting the Unifactor (the alternate universe in which the action takes place), is that what’s actually happening, or is Whim just causing mind-melting hallucinations in the other characters?
JW: Whim is the wormlike creature. The devil-body is something he concocts out of biscuit. When he dives into the Salvia divinorum plant, he makes the plant his vehicle.
When Manhog has his transcendent experience in Weathercraft and stands on the threshold of Nirvana––I love how the entrance to “no-self” is a mirror without a reflection––he reluctantly turns back after seeing a compelling vision in the sky. He’s a grumpy bodhisattva, rather pissed at his new moral imperative to protect the defenseless. Many of us have performed compassionate acts with an element of resentment about the personal cost of not taking the easy way out. Was this a situation that you personally relate to or witnessed in your life?
JW: That episode is one of the few that has a pointed point that I grasp entirely. The same purity of spirit that brings him to the door of nirvikalpa samadhi obliges him to go and deal with the problem he has unleashed on the Unifactor. He becomes hyperaltruistic. He isn't exactly grumpy, but he's deadly serious. No, it doesn't correspond directly to anything in my life. Not intentionally anyway.
There’s a social network meme making the rounds. It’s George Orwell saying, “I told you so.” It appears that Whim is multiplying before our eyes like Mickey’s broom in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Your work has always included pointed sociopolitical commentary. The self-serving buffoonery we’ve got going on, now masquerading as responsible grownup behavior, seems like a mutant outgrowth of the Unifactor. Any thoughts on where this phenomenon might lead in your future work?
JW: Actually I think of my stories as devoid of sociopolitical commentary. I certainly don't have politics in mind when I write them. They are about individuals interacting with and reacting to primal forces, intelligence abroad in the world. Now that I think of it, these stories deal entirely with questions and situations that bedevil me in real life. So really by extension, it's all about you.My entire family
The home I live in
My Watchers/Supporters
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Thank you so much!The ponies surely are celebrating in some particular way. Maybe by eating the fruits and vegetables provided in the cornucopia. :3-- These are the ones that help me the most whenever times are rough and they really do make a difference in my life as well.-- I think it's quite obvious, but none of my art would ever of been possible without a home.-- Without all of you... I don't know where I would be with my artwork. All of you are very important to me and I always know when to give back. I also am going to be holdinga contest where everyone wins once I reach 5,000 watchers, so keep your heads up for that.-- I am eternally grateful for how much I am improving on my artwork. Each and every single deviation that I put out. I always think of thingsthat I could add or change. If you look over the past year or so, my artwork has change quite a lot.-- It took quite awhile to get the PERFECT hardware for a much more consistent art pace, but I am finally there and so happy with the hardware I currently have.If I were to do an estimate of everything inside this tower chassis, it would be about $2,000- $3,000. I also always wanted to be a PC enthusiast and my dream has finally come true.Daniel Williams
Presidential hopeful Ron Paul will soon put the smackdown on the Federal Reserve -- in a video game, that is.
The Road to REVOLution is a "side-scrolling platformer action/adventure game, reminiscent of console classics like Super Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog," video game developer Daniel Williams explained.
The goal of the game is for Paul to become president of the United States and shut down the Federal Reserve. In the game, you play as Paul, who has to hop through all 50 states to collect gold and delegates.
Daniel Williams
Delegates earn Paul the title of president, while gold coins unlock branches of the Federal Reserve. Expect proper "baddies," as there are 13 boss fights in the game. Williams told CBS News one of the "baddies" will be influential British economist John Maynard Keynes.
So how does one make a Ron Paul video game? Williams posted his plans on crowd-funding site Kickstarter. He's building the game in HTML5, and hopefully will convert it into apps for iOS and Android, he said.
Williams asked for $5,000 to pay for costs related to developing the game. The idea of Paul as a video game hero must be popular because Williams hit his goal within three days and has now exceeded $9,000 in contributions. While Williams says there's no official timeline for the game's development, he hopes to deliver the beta to in mid-June, with an official release in July.
This story originally appeared on CBSNews.com.People are smelling their dogs’ paws — and it turns out they smell like corn chips. Here’s why your pet’s paws smell funny.
So many people have asked the question “Why do dog feet smell like Fritos?” that it deserves a decent answer.
Of course, my immediate response is always, “Have you forgotten to take your medication again?” Seriously, who goes around smelling their pup’s feet? I might do some crazy things, but I certainly don’t make it a habit to sniff my dog’s feet!
Natural Bacteria
That “corn chips smell” is usually caused by bacteria that are completely natural yet give off a kind of yeasty odor, particularly the bacteria Proteus or Pseudomonas.
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Many people who have dogs say they actually ENJOY this smell, so you can relax.
However, if your dog’s foot odor seems particularly stinky, something else may be at play here…
Let’s Talk About: Sweat
Dogs sweat through their foot pads. Just as people’s feet sweat — and more often than not have an odor — so do canine paws. The sweat becomes trapped in the coat between the foot pads and can become, shall we say, malodorous.
Trimming the fur between the foot pads is important for keeping the stench down. Without trimming, the sweat goes into the fur and permeates there. Spread those pads apart.
This is best done by putting your thumb between them. Using pet hair clippers, carefully trim the fur from around the pads. This will eliminate the buildup of all sweat and stink coming from the pads.
After trimming, bathe your dog. Use pet shampoo on each foot, lathering it up and then rinsing it completely. Shampoo all 4 paws well to remove sweat and debris. This should get rid of the bad dog paw odor.
Corn in Dog Food?
Some people swear that the dog Fritos odor comes from cheap dog food. They say that if the main ingredient in your dog’s brand is corn, you should switch brands to possibly decrease your pet’s foot odor.
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Will this work? Not really.
BUT, a higher-quality diet should come with the added benefit of improving your pet’s overall health, so what’s the harm in upgrading foods? (Also: Be sure to stay on top of dog food recalls.)
Here’s Meghann with her dog-paw observations:
Celebrate Your Dog’s Natural Smell
So why do dog feet smell like Fritos?
The short answer: It’s probably just your dog’s natural odor.
As with humans, regular and proper hygiene will certainly help keep the stink down. Since no one has invented Odor Eaters for pets yet (perhaps this is another project for Allen Simon), the ball is in your court.
If it seems like a big deal to you, then consider scrubbing and clipping around those grubby little paw pads regularly. Otherwise, celebrate everything that makes your pet special — including dog paws that smell like Fritos.
C’mon, look at this guy’s smile!Kendrick Perkins was on KG’s Area 21 on Monday night, along with a few other members of the Boston Celtics team that won an NBA title in 2008. They dished on a number of topics, including their championship run, Ray Allen’s absence, and eventually, the relationship between Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant.
Perk’s comments:
“Believe it or not, though, I was trying to figure out a way to make them talk again. I felt like the outside world was putting a beef there that really wasn’t too serious, you know what I mean? I think the night that Russ actually broke the record, I had text KD the next day. He was talking about something, and he sent me a text and was like ‘Hey, man. Me and Russ had a nice conversation.”‘
First of all — if Perk put out an audio book, I’d probably buy it. He’s an awful storyteller, but something about him, man. It just gets me.
He continued.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if KD make a little run… I wouldn’t be surprised if he go back to Oklahoma, because in my opinion I don’t think Russ goin’ nowhere.”
Well that’s….interesting.
It’s impossible to know how much validity there is in Perk’s comments, but he is a guy that seems to have a good relationship with both Westbrook and Durant. I wouldn’t expect the two men to start sending Christmas cards, but we couldn’t expect the silence to last forever. Seeing as how that story line dominated the NBA at times this season, we really shouldn’t want it to last forever. If it’s all said and done, I’m all for it.
As far as Durant returning to Oklahoma City is concerned, I wouldn’t hold my breath. That ship has sailed, and if crazier things have happened, I haven’t thought of a good example yet. Not happening.
The full clip:For many the greatest satisfaction in their climbing comes from that elusive feeling of moving smoothly and lightly across difficult terrain. But when searching for improvement, it is all too easy to focus on the task of increasing strength and fitness and hope that good technique will somehow happen unprompted given sufficient mileage.
Climbing movement is really important. Our delicate fingers and slender forearms can only take the majority of our body weight for a very short period, so if we are not moving as efficiently as possible, all the time, our prospects of climbing success are dramatically limited.
But changing the way you move on rock is no small matter. In the next three sections I'll attempt to explain how you learnt to climb the way you do, becoming aware of the way you move, and how to change your movement.
The author trying new shapes at Carrock Fell
Part 1: Know Thyself
To improve your climbing technique, firstly you must understand how you learn movement, and secondly analyse how you move at the moment, so that you can modify your technique to achieve your climbing goals and reduce the risk of injury.
I learnt all this the hard way, after my appalling wall-bred, static strength-based style contributed to shoulder injuries that prevented me from climbing more than once weekly for 4 years. It took this period of enforced down-time (including double shoulder surgery) for me to figure it out, save yourself the trouble and read on to find out how to get better, without needing get fitter!
Beginners Mind - how you learn to move
The science: To make any movement, information must be sent from your brain to the nerves that operate your muscles. This information travels along neural pathways. All the time we are conducting complex movements involving many muscles and numerous pathways are being travelled simultaneously, from sitting upright to operating a mouse.
These movements that now seem natural had to be learned, the neural pathways had to be 'discovered' and travelled regularly by your brain signals before you were confident and relaxed whilst performing them.
Creatures Of Habit -how your movement develops
Initially these neural pathways are like a rarely travelled footpath - overgrown, hard to find and bramble-ridden. With increased traffic they broaden into a large path, then a track. If enough traffic passes through, the (Brain) Council will tarmac the track, and given years of heavy use, it'll become a five-lane super-highway.
Our habits employ neural superhighways – those movements we make all the time because they feel easy and familiar. We often do them without even realising it. Some of the many common climbing bad habits include: repeated repositioning of the foot on every hold; flagging on one side regularly, and avoiding it on the other; or crimping holds only because it feels more secure than open-handing them.
The more developed the pathway is, the less mental effort - 'brain bandwidth' - it takes to use it. That's why after the initial mental overload, the complex task of driving a car gradually becomes less demanding, and soon you begin to find room to think about other things, as your driving technique becomes a 'habit'.
Stress, either mental (e.g. fear of falling, social/performance anxiety) or physical (the unrelenting pump) interferes with your ability to use neural pathways. Our brains have a very limited bandwidth for conscious thought. If this is inundated with stress alarms, your brain automatically opts for the most well travelled neural pathways (habits) for movement, because they require less bandwidth to perform.
Fascinating, I hear you say.
But wait! What this means for the climber under stress is they revert to using the 'habitual' moves they've repeated the most before – often those front-on, over-gripping, foot bashing moves you've done every time you got stressed since starting the sport. Sound familiar?
Part 2: Repetition and Feedback
So movement is reinforced through repetition – to make those graceful moves work for you, you must repeat them numerous times, and gradually stress-proof them by progressively taking them from the security of a top rope or crash-matted bouldering room into increasingly demanding environments; pumpier, riskier and higher pressure. Thoroughly developed neural pathways can be operated at a subconscious level by the brain, so you can focus on the other issues troubling you mid-climb without your technique suffering. It often looks unexpected when a top competition climber falls, because their movement does not degenerate as they become exhausted, their arms may be screaming and their eyes popping out, but the subconscious is still wombling away pulling smooth moves out the bag – moves they have rehearsed countless times.
The Bad News
Unfortunately it's not just your best moves that get reinforced, it's every move, every time you do it. Damn! When you're seconding, cold and rushing to get to the belay, you're reinforcing those neural pathways
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gonna trade and it was good for me. I realized I was short one mana and wouldn't be able to pump my Nexus to not die. That was playing for Top 8, but I won the next game. I have some crazy bad mistakes."
Nassif is one of the all-time greats of the game, and is much more keenly aware of those mistakes he makes than most other players would be. He also explained that when he wins, he is just happy and feels no need to go tell anyone else that he just played great Magic.
"When you lose you need to vent. That's how I roll, anyway. It's not as bad now but when I used to play Magic all the time, when I made one mistake that cost me a match in a Pro Tour, I wouldn't get over it until the next Pro Tour. I would just think about it for the two months or three months in between Pro Tours. It's not as bad now; I'll just dwell on it for a few days now.... Maybe a week."Frivolous abuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is nothing new. We've seen fake poets, manufacturers,purveyors of anatomically impossible boobs, sociopathic revenge-pornsters, and legbreakers for totalitarian governments make false claims of copyright violations in an effort to censor online criticism.
So why should we be surprised that a computer game designer would abuse a DMCA takedown request to silence a negative review?
The designers and developers are Digital Homicide Studios and Imminent Uprising. They're pushing a game called The Slaughtering Grounds. Its premise is simple: there are zombies, and you must shoot them, repeatedly.
The negative review was courtesy of Jim Sterling, a game reviewer who has, as one apparently must, a YouTube channel. Mr. Sterling did not like the game, and recorded a fairly brutal video review. Digital Homicide Studios reacted by leaping headlong into a shame spiral, first releasing its own angry video review of Sterling's video review, which consisted of Sterling's video review with mean captions. Sterling reviewed that. Then, because we live in an era where everything has to be shoved up its own ass, Digital Homicide issued a unsettling ranty review of the review of the review, posting angry text over audio of Sterling's latest.
At this point it's clear that the folks at Digital Homicide do not have a full grip of their emotions and nobody is there to slap them and get them to step back from the precipice. Sure enough, they filed a DMCA notice with YouTube claiming that Sterling's original review violated their copyright. They defense of this action was... odd:
The DMCA filed is not to censor review’s [sic], there are countless negative review videos posted(including multiple sterling videos) and only one in particular with a DMCA filed on it. The reason is we have a legitimate claim, we can prove a violation of our copyright(fair use is not blanket immunity) and damages.
Hmm. Not very illuminating. So I wrote to Digital Homicide Studios and to one of its executives, James Romine. Mr. Romine wrote back, directing me to a blog post that would answer all my questions, and saying that they are "currently looking for a copyright attorney." I had time to read that post once before somebody — presumably Mr. Romine — memory-holed it. Fortunately someone on Steam had a quick trigger-finger and copied their justification:
Let’s get to the heart of it, right from the start. Here are some examples I would like to propose as a basis for an unbiased point of view from the reader. I read 10 pages of a 100 page book
I watch 10 minutes of a 100 minute movie
I listen to 18 seconds of a 180 second song
I use 10% of the features of a product After doing this I label any of the above “WORST (insert object) OF 2014 CONTENDER!” The next sentence I describe said object as an “Absolute Failure“. Lets evaluate what the impact of this statement is by looking at the definition of absolute: not qualified or diminished in anyway; Total. Again with this in mind lets examine what is being said here. After watching, reading, playing 10% of a product I label it as an “Absolute or Total” failure. In labeling a product as an Absolute or total failure, I would need to evaluate all aspects of what i’m describing or this could be considered unfair or unreasonable. This brings us to the Fair Use Doctrine. Criticism and parodies are highly protected by the fair use doctrine. However, when using criticism one must be fair and reasonable to be protected by it’s articles. While negative criticism could be deemed reasonable is the manner in which the criticism presented fair? Herein lies our DMCA complaint and our case we will be presenting in court. With the above in mind, we will be presenting a violation of our copyright based on the following: In the sole instance of Jim Sterling’s “Squirty Play” video, we find the usage of the terms “WORST GAME OF 2014 CONTENDER!” and “Absolute Failure” to describe the entirety of our product while not actually evaluating it in its entirety unfair and unreasonable use of our copyright material. While the reader may disagree with our claim, we believe the unbiased perspective of a court will agree there has been a violation of our copyright and for this reason we will be pursuing an attorney and proceeding with our complaint. Digital Homicide Studios Also, do not misinterpret this as an act of censoring criticism in general. If Jim Sterling had labeled our product “Absolute Failure” while doing a full evaluation of our product, this might be considered a fair and reasonable use of criticism regardless of how we feel about it personally. This claim is not about censoring “negative” criticism, this claim is about executing criticism in a fair and reasonable manner."
Let me be clear: this is utter bollocks. Perhaps you could argue that this is what the Fair Use doctrine should be, but it is not.
Criticism, satire, and parody are at the heart of fair use. The "fair" in Fair Use refers to the idea that it is fundamentally fair to allow someone to make partial use of my copyrighted for for purposes of criticism, satire, and parody. It does not, as Digital Homicide Studios seems to think, involve an inquiry into whether the criticism or parody or satire is "fair" from a literary point of view. Nor could it. Judges are ill-equipped to decide when a satire or criticism is "fair" or "unfair" in a lit-crit-the-critic sense, and such an inquiry involves an unacceptable value judgment about the user's free expression. Moreover, such a rule is completely useless in practice: critics, satirists, and others would have no idea whether Fair Use will ultimately protect them or not, because it will depend upon a subjective post-hoc determination of whether the critic or satirist was "fair" or not.
You can see a good example of this point in Michael Savage v. Council on American-Islamic Relations. Seven years ago I wrote about how Savage — an excitable radio-host and opinion-pornster — sued CAIR for quoting him in order to illustrate anti-Islamic sentiment in America.
The United States District Court for the Northern District of California granted judgment on the pleadings to CAIR on Savage's copyright claim, finding that their Fair Use defense was established by the pleadings themselves. In doing so the court pointed out that the relevant Fair Use inquiry is not the motive of the critic, but the critical nature of the usage. The Court rejected Savage's argument that CAIR's use was not Fair Use because CAIR's motive was to raise funds by pointing to Savage's bigotry:
Plaintiff argues that the fair use defense is inapplicable to defendants' usage of, and comment on, segments of the copyrighted audio work because defendants' “infringement was not done for genuine criticism or comment,” but instead misrepresented plaintiff's views with the intention to raise funds for their own political purposes as “a foreign agent for international terror” under the guise of a non-profit, civil rights group. Plaintiff's Opposition at 5-7; see SAC at ¶¶ 24, 28-30, 32. Plaintiff asserts that these alleged motives behind the usage and comment are fatal to defendants' fair use defense because fair use presupposes good faith and fair dealing..... Plaintiff tries to conflate “motive” with the purpose and character of the use, which is not permitted by the case law. Rather, even assuming the truth of plaintiff's allegations about motive, it is the manner of use, not the motivation behind it, which must be analyzed: “what use was made,” rather than “who is the user.” Savage v. Council on Am.-Islamic Relations, Inc., No. C 07-6076 SI, 2008 WL 2951281, at *4-6 (N.D. Cal. July 25, 2008)
Similarly, courts have typically rejected artists' claims that a review or parody wasn't protected by fair use because it had errors of transcription or it took materials out of the context of the whole work:
Furthermore, as a judicial body, we consider it highly undesirable to hinge a legal determination solely on the relative truth or accuracy of statements made in the context of debate on a highly volatile social issue. See New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 278-83, 84 S.Ct. 710, 725-28, 11 L.Ed.2d 686 (1964). Nor do we think it wise to give much legal relevance to whether the allegedly infringing work may be labeled “scholarly” or “dogmatic,” for the dogma of one individual may be the original scholarship of another. Only where the distortions were so deliberate, and so misrepresentative of the original work that no reasonable person could find them to be the product of mere carelessness would we incline toward rejecting a fair use claim. The errors in Rachel Weeping do not cross that threshold. Maxtone-Graham v. Burtchaell, 803 F.2d 1253, 1261 (2d Cir. 1986)
In short, Digital Homicide Studios' legal theory doesn't find support in the actual law.
Sterling has filed a DMCA counter-notice asserting that his use is covered by Fair Use. It will be interesting to see what Digital Homicide Studios does from here. Can they find an attorney addled enough to sue over their meritless claim? This is America, so they probably can. But they should consider this: they've given Sterling's criticism vastly more attention than it otherwise would have enjoyed, and they've associated themselves in the minds of the gaming community not with killing zombies but with censorious tantrums. They need a grown-up, stat.
Last 5 posts by Ken WhiteHere you can read the german version of the interview.
ZEIT ONLINE: Mr. Rattner, President Donald Trump complains about the fact that few Chevrolets can be seen driving on German streets. Should we be buying more American cars?
Steven Rattner: A lot of what Trump is saying shows that he doesn't understand the main problems of the U.S. car industry. General Motors tried to introduce Chevrolet into Europe, but didn't succeed. Europeans just didn’t want to buy those cars.
Steven Rattner He is an American financier who served as lead adviser to the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry in 2009 for the Obama administration.
Trump doesn't even know how many German cars are actually exported from the United States today, because they are also produced here. And General Motors has a lot of factories in Europe, where it produces Opel vehicles and other brands. Trump doesn't understand how interconnected and globalized the car industry is. It would be a major setback for the industry if the U.S. were to close its borders or impose tariffs on imported cars and car parts. We can only hope that Trump will learn over time and be less radical and more practical.
ZEIT ONLINE: What strategy is Trump following with his threat to impose a border tax for imported cars?
Rattner: Maybe there is no strategy behind it at all. It's just his way of making deals. He starts negotiations by demanding something utterly extreme. In the end, he hopes to get more than everyone expected. Take Mexico, for example: He wants to talk to the president of Mexico about renegotiating the NAFTA agreement. And he is taking such an extreme position that he may wind up forcing Mexico to agree to something that it normally wouldn't accept – out of fear of the U.S. and Trump. That’s the way he did business and he is now doing the same in politics.
ZEIT ONLINE: Could his approach prove successful?
Rattner: Who knows? We've never had a businessman as president before. In the 1980s, we had a problem with Japanese car imports – there were far too many of them. The Reagan administration reacted with lots of threats directed at Japan. The result was that Japan started to build more automobile plants in the United States. Reagan succeeded and created more jobs in the U.S.
But we are no longer in the '80s. Globalization has moved on. Today, Germany for example, is already producing a lot of cars in America. For Germany, the United States is a low-wage country. When Volkswagen built its major plant in the U.S. and hired its first workers in 2011, they got paid $14.50 an hour (excluding benefits), less than Volkswagen pays in Germany. What worked in the '80s, however, is no longer effective in 2017.
ZEIT ONLINE: Trump is not only tackling the car industry. His mantra is "buy American, hire American." Can he really bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.?
Rattner: Definitely not. Perhaps he can bring back a few jobs, but there won't be a dramatic movement. Most of what happened in recent weeks were PR stunts by Trump. General Motors and Fiat Chrysler outlined their investment plans a long time ago. Trump’s threats didn't change that. Car companies do not decide to spend a billion dollars in a couple of weeks. But Trump claims they did and he seems to be getting credit for it.
ZEIT ONLINE: Is there any way to resuscitate the manufacturing industry in the United States?
Rattner: I am generally pessimistic about manufacturing jobs in the U.S. It is just much cheaper to produce in Mexico. If you produce cars or machines in the U.S., the only outcome is that they will be more expensive. The main problem with the American labor market is not the amount of jobs, but the quality of jobs. With an unemployment rate of 4.7 percent, we are at near full employment. America needs high-paying jobs, but you won't find those in manufacturing. In the past 10 to 15 years, we managed to save some of those jobs by cutting wages. That's why so many people are so unhappy.NEW YORK ― A government ethics watchdog filed a federal lawsuit on Monday against President Donald Trump, claiming that he is violating the Constitution by enriching himself off of foreign governments through his global business ties.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is represented in the lawsuit by a number of prominent law professors, a leading progressive Supreme Court lawyer and ethics experts who have worked for both Democratic and Republican presidents.
The suit was filed in federal court in Manhattan, where the Trump Organization, Trump’s business empire, is headquartered. The suit alleges that Trump “violated the Constitution during the opening moments of his presidency and is poised to do so continually thereafter for the duration of his administration.”
CREW’s legal argument rests on Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution ― the once-obscure Foreign Emoluments Clause, which since Trump’s election has gained enormous attention for how it appears to cover the president’s business dealings.
The clause states that “no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” It has never been interpreted by the Supreme Court.
Read the lawsuit below.
The watchdog argues that the text and history of the provision point to the prevention of corruption and self-dealing by federal officials who might be able to profit from ― and thus be influenced by ― foreign governments.
The lawsuit asks a federal court to declare that Trump is covered by the clause, and seeks an injunction to prevent its violation. The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams, an appointee of President Barack Obama.
Ethics watchdogs and public policy experts have called the conflict of interest posed by Trump’s complex, opaque global business entanglements “unprecedented.”
The lawsuit points to some of these arrangements around the globe to make its case, including Trump’s interests in luxury golf resorts in Scotland and Dubai, residential towers in Turkey and two real estate projects in Indonesia.
The president also holds at least an estimated $1 billion in debt, much of it to foreign entities. Trump owes over $300 million in loans to Germany’s Deutsche Bank and “hundreds of millions” to the state-controlled Bank of China, which also leases office space in Trump Tower.
CREW claims that the president’s “acceptance of any... payments” from these foreign entities violates the Constitution.
According to a pool report from the White House, Trump on Monday called the lawsuit “without merit.”
Breaking with longstanding presidential tradition, Trump has refused to release his tax returns. However, the lawsuit could arguably allow CREW to get judicial access to the tax returns in order show the extent to which Trump is indebted to both foreign and domestic lenders.
An early barrier for CREW’s legal effort will be showing that the group itself has suffered direct harm from Trump’s alleged violations. The lawsuit filed Monday notes that Trump’s labyrinthine business arrangements have put a drain on the group’s resources and prevented it from doing other watchdog work in the public interest.
But some legal scholars contend that CREW’s injury isn’t particularized enough, and that an inquiry into whether the president is being enriched by a foreign government is a political question that only Congress can remediate ― either by refusing consent to the president’s dealings or, in the case of a violation, by impeachment. If Abrams agrees with either argument, the lawsuit would be dismissed.
Trump’s son Eric, the executive vice president of the Trump Organization, called the planned lawsuit “purely harassment for political gain.”
“Frankly, I find it very, very sad,” Eric Trump told The New York Times on Sunday.
Noah Bookbinder, CREW’s executive director, said the group had hoped for a resolution before the situation turned to lawsuits.
“We did not want to get to this point. It was our hope that President Trump would take the necessary steps to avoid violating the Constitution before he took office,” Bookbinder said in a statement. “He did not. His constitutional violations are immediate and serious, so we were forced to take legal action.”
Carlo Allegri / Reuters Then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks to the media on the golf course at his Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeen, Scotland, June 25, 2016.
Trump has insisted that as president, he is exempt from having conflicts of interest. Congress could technically exempt the president and vice president from conflict-of-interest laws ― due to the presumption that no leader would bring such conflicts to the Oval Office in the first place.
A little over a week before taking the oath of office, Trump held a press conference to indicate that he would not sell his global hotel chain, would continue to accept reservations bankrolled by foreign leaders and would donate the profits from those bookings to the U.S. Treasury — a move that could net him a healthy tax break.
The lawsuit says the Constitution contains no exception to accommodate these maneuvers, and that in any event, Trump’s plan has no enforcement mechanism and does nothing about the underlying issue of “foreign influence and corruption.”
Trump promised at the conference that his eldest sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, along with a longtime Trump Organization employee, would assume “complete and total control” of his businesses.
But an investigation by ProPublica in the lead-up to the inauguration found no record of Trump actually resigning from his companies.
“The framers of our Constitution did everything they could to protect against corruption, especially foreign corruption,” Fordham law Professor Zephyr Teachout, one of the legal experts representing CREW, said in a statement. “President Trump’s insistence on taking payments from foreign governments is a blatant violation of a foundational clause in our Constitution, and a foundational principle of our country.”Vintage 101: Viva La Aether Revolution!
by Islandswamp // Jan 06, 2017 Tweet
vintage 101 Power Nine Challenge Mentor White Eldrazi aether revolt Fatal Push Renegade Rallier Whir of Invention
The Triumphant Return of the Spaghetti Hatebears
Early in the day of December 31st, long before the ball dropped for New Year's Eve, was the Magic Online Vintage Power Nine Challenge event. Attendance was much lower than in the past, but that is to be expected when an event like this happens on a major holiday. Regardless of the fact that there were fewer players in this particular tournament, there still was some interesting Vintage action. The Top Eight slots were filled to the brim with Gush-fueled Monastery Mentor decks, and the remaining slots went to Paradoxical Storm, White Eldrazi, and a U/W Landstill list with Emrakul, the Promised End. In the end, The Atog Lord reigned supreme with his Gush deck he calls "Mentor Silence."
While I think it's safe to say that The Atog Lord's winning Mentor deck is the star of the show, the fact that there was a small resurgence of White Eldrazi is also quite interesting. White Eldrazi was once one of the most widely-played and successful decks in the format, but it hasn't seen nearly as much play lately. There were only two White Eldrazi players in the entire event, but they had very strong showings with 6-0 and 5-1 records. Magic Online user wappla went undefeated in the Swiss portion of the event with his take on the Spaghetti Hatebears archetype.
For the most part wappla's White Eldrazi deck is pretty normal, but there are a few inclusions that I think are particularly noteworthy. First of all, there's a single Trinisphere in the deck. Usually the White Eldrazi lists just play Thorn of Amethyst and eschew Sphere of Resistance. To obtain a higher number of mana-taxing effects, White Eldrazi relies on Thalia, Guardian of Thraben. Thalia and Thorn allow the deck to be disruptive to opponents without impinging upon its own game plan as the vast majority of its cards are creatures anyway.
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Trinisphere has the potential to cause serious issues to the White Eldrazi deck as there aren't as many Sol Lands as a Workshop deck, but the upside is tremendous. No single mana taxing effect can do as much work as one Trinisphere can, and this deck does have a fairly high chance of being able to land one in the first few turns. Against Paradoxical Outcome or Gush, landing an early Three-Ball could easily steal a game.
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This is the first time I've seen anyone play a main-deck Kataki, War's Wage in such a deck. I think Kataki is probably a really good one-of though, as it's great against Workshops and it's probably fantastic against the Paradoxical decks as well. A low-land combo deck will have to build up enough mana to play spells through Thalia, and Kataki makes that very difficult.
Recruiter of the Guard also seems like a great singleton as well. It finds the proper hatebear when needed, helps assemble the Displacer/Priest combo, and it can be blinked for value with Eldrazi Displacer.
The next big innovation is found in the sideboard. Like many successful decks these days, this deck has answers to the Paradoxical Outcome decks in the form of Null Rod. There are too many mana artifacts in White Eldrazi to make main-deck Null Rods viable, but they're good enough at what they do to warrant inclusion in the sideboard. Note that even though this deck has "white" in the name, it's not able to support Stony Silence. Although in effect Silence and Rod are functionally identical, Stony Silence's status as an enchantment makes it far more difficult for an opponent to remove.
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Paradoxical Outcome is a card that is as degenerate as it is fragile. It must be taken seriously, but it relies heavily on a greedy, artifact-based mana base. These decks are enough of a threat that they've made Null Rod effects far more relevant than they were before Kaladesh. In fact, some of the best-performing decks are taking advantage of either Null Rod or Stony Silence, and the deck that won the entire event showcases this nicely.
The Silence of the Mentors
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This Monastery Mentor deck represents a new design philosophy for Gush Mentor. While it may look very similar to Gush/Mentor of days past it has evolved to deal with the metagame in several ways.
The mana base is smaller than previous incarnations with only sixteen lands and on-color Moxen. There's no Sol Ring or Mana Crypt either. There are also slightly more lands than some people have used in the past with sixteen total lands. In the past I have seen people run fifteen lands but utilize all the Moxen in addition to Sol Ring. The streamlined mana base is a tremendous boon when playing mirror matches (or pseudo-mirrors).
The lowered number of artifact mana sources makes it so the deck can make better use of Stony Silence. The anti-artifact enchantment is great against combo decks, most Workshops decks, and it's even great against some types of blue decks as well.
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There are two copies of Wasteland and a Strip Mine in the deck as well. This is an important innovation in my opinion. The land destruction effects are obviously good in conjunction with the mana denial aspect of Stony Silence, but it also helps in other ways. The lower number of mana artifacts could normally be a problem when playing against decks like Workshops or White Eldrazi, but Wasteland can help in both of those matchups. Sometimes Waste and Strip can steal a game one from Dredge, and that's never a bad thing.
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The Atog Lord's deck also has two main deck copies of Mindbreak Trap and a third copy in the sideboard. Mindbreak is a phenomenal card against the combo decks of the format, but it has utility elsewhere as well. If you're able to bait your opponent into building up three cards on the stack, you can get a massive blowout with Mindbreak Trap. Sometimes your opponents will be forced to dig for a particular sideboard card with cantrips. Then, when they finally find the card they need, Mindbreak Trap ruins their day.
Mentor in 2017
The Atog Lord's Mentor build has my vote for the current best deck in the format. It may not stay that way for long, but right now I think it has great answers to nearly every archetype in the format. Several other people played similar lists in the Power Nine event and did well and the deck has had several strong finishes in Daily Events too. I'm interested to see where things go from here!
If you'd like to read more about Mentor Silence or the Power Nine Event, there are threads on The Mana Drain for both.
Aether Revolt Spoilers!
Since the last time we met there have been several cards from Aether Revolt spoiled and I'm quite excited about them. I won't list every card that has been spoiled, but I think it's worth discussing a few of them that could see play in Vintage. The first one is a blue card, so we know there's always a chance it could do something in the format!
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Whir of Invention is pretty interesting. It has a powerful effect that is similar to Vintage-playable cards, it's an instant, and it has a cost-reduction ability. Cost-reduction abilities can make a card somewhat hard to judge. For instance, it took a while before people realized how insane Treasure Cruise was. I can also think of three cards that have similar effects, and two of those have seen extensive play in the format.
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The first card that I saw people comparing Whir of Invention to was Tinker. Both are three-mana blue cards that let you tutor an artifact directly onto the battlefield, but that's where the similarities stop. Tinker lets you cheat on mana and Whir does not. With Tinker I can pay three mana and turn a Mox Sapphire into a Blightsteel Colossus if I want to. The only time that Tinker and Whir of Invention are even remotely similar in overall mana cost is when you're searching out a Black Lotus or other free spell. If you want to get a Time Vault to complete a combo, you'll be paying three with Tinker and five mana with Whir of Invention.
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So, for five mana you can search up your Vault and take all the turns. How likely are you to be able to "improvise" the cost down to just three mana? I'm not sure of the exact answer, but I suspect it won't be often. The most common type of artifacts found in a Vintage deck are mana producers, so they either already reduce the cost by tapping them for mana or they make more than one mana in some cases. Sure, there will be some times where you can tap a Sensei's Divining Top or whatever to reduce the cost of Whir of Invention, but it won't be very often. So, does this mean that there's no point in playing Whir of Invention? I don't think so.
Transmute Artifact isn't exactly a Vintage all-star, but it definitely has seen play before. There are all-in Time Vault combo decks that would want as many ways to tutor for a Vault or Key as possible. Those decks have often used Transmute Artifact as their second copy of Tinker. If we compare Whir of Invention to Transmute Artifact it starts to seem like a much better card.
Transmute is a sorcery and Whir is an instant so that's a point for Whir of Invention. Transmute Artifact reduces the cost of the card a bit, but only in relation to the card you're sacrificing. If you sacrifice a Mox Sapphire to get a Time Vault you're paying four blue mana (one from the sacrificed Sapphire). That same play with Whir of Invention costs a bit more at five mana, but at least you can do it during your opponent's end step. As I mentioned before, the chances of using the cost-reduction clause of Whir of Invention isn't that likely to be relevant, but if you can tap at least one artifact it's at least as efficient as Transmute Artifact
Cards like Transmute Artifact (and Tinker for that matter) are card-disadvantage as they cost two cards to function. You don't have to sacrifice a card for Whir of Invention and that's a huge plus. If your Whir of Invention is countered or if the card you tutor for is destroyed, you're not out any extra cards. Transmute Artifact requires an artifact to be sacrificed upon resolution (not as an additional cost like Tinker though). If the card you tutor for with Transmute is destroyed after resolving, you're getting two-for-one'ed and that can be a real problem in a close game. Depending on the game state you may be able to bait out a Force of Will and end step Whir of Invention, leaving yourself open to cast another bomb on your own turn.
My Verdict
I think that any deck that wanted a second copy of Tinker bad enough to play Transmute Artifact will choose to play Whir of Invention instead. I think that Whir is pretty much a strict upgrade in most practical applications. The thing is there aren't that many decks right now that want a second Tinker. Many contemporary combo decks would rather run Paradoxical Outcome and simply draw cards until they find Time Vault instead of using Whir of Invention.
Even though I don't expect this card to be huge I will be keeping an eye on it. Whir of Invention has an effect that is very powerful and cards like this can sometimes be the missing piece for a currently nonexistent combo deck.
Fatal Fury
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If you don't like a creature, give it a little shove.
One mana removal is good. This card will see play in Vintage and probably other formats too. I've heard some people mention that it doesn't kill every creature the way Swords to Plowshares does, and while that's true it misses the point. People will still play Lightning Bolt even though it can't kill a lot of important threats. Fatal Push will kill a very large portion of problematic creatures including Lodestone Golem, Thought-Knot Seer, Monastery Mentor, and much more.
The card does have a small caveat regarding the size of creature it can kill. Normally Fatal Push will only kill a creature with mana cost two or less. To make it kill something at four mana or less you need to meet the Revolt keyword requirement. A card you control must leave the battlefield this turn for Fatal Push to kill a four-drop. This means that if you crack a fetch you can use this. If you Wasteland something it turns this on. The wording also doesn't mention the graveyard; you only need a card to leave the battlefield. That means that casting Gush or Paradoxical Outcome also turns this spell on. If someone exiles or bounces one of your cards this also works. I have yet to test with the spell, but I can't imagine it's very hard to achieve what revolt requires.
Before this card if you wanted to kill something for one black mana (or less) you'd have to use Snuff Out, Dismember, or Disfigure. Of those three only Snuff Out and Dismember are Vintage-playable. Both cards are very good, but they have their own drawbacks. Both of those spells cost four life to play for one or less mana, and they can't kill just any creature. I think that Fatal Push provides a real option to replace those spells in decks that would want to do so.
My Verdict
I think Fatal Push will join the ranks of Dismember and Snuff Out and be considered a tier one black spot removal. The amount of play this card will see depends entirely on the viability of the decks that would choose to use it. For example, if Grixis Pyromancer made a comeback this would be a great main-deck removal spell to use. Granted, it is vulnerable to Mental Misstep, unlike Snuff Out and Dismember, but it also doesn't chew up a fifth of your life total with each use. I've had matches with Grixis Pyromancer where I was using either Dismember or Snuff Out to take out my Workshop opponent's creatures but still died because my removal spells did a number on my life total.
Renegades of Funk
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Renegade Rallier is a lot of value for a three mana 3/2 creature. Right away it reminds me of Eternal Witness, a card that is very playable in other formats. The kicker is that while you're limited to the recursion of permanents that cost two mana or less (as opposed to Witness that can grab any card), the card you get goes directly onto the battlefield. Also there is a conditionality associated with the ability. Renegade Rallier is yet another card that uses the new keyword "Revolt," so you'll need to make sure a card you control leaves the battlefield if you want to get the trigger.
Revolt may be the easiest ability to trigger in Vintage since Delve. Between fetchlands, cards like Gush, and things like Black Lotus or Lotus Petal, the average Vintage deck is full of ways to achieve a "leaves the battlefield" trigger. Revolt also happens to play well with a card like Renegade Rallier and it's recursion ability. A simple value play might be to crack a fetch, play the Renegade, return the fetchland, and get another land out. Or you could really be mean and Wasteland an opponent's land, play this, and hit yet another land. If you're really lucky you might be able to play a Black Lotus, sacrifice it to power this out, then get your lotus back immediately (possibly playing a second card that turn).
If Renegade Rallier does find a home in Vintage I imagine it would be in a deck similar to this Junk Hatebears list.
Junk Hatebears decks have a ton of good targets for Renegade Rallier to return to play. Most of the creatures are cheap enough to get back, and these decks can support a small number of three drops. Plus there should be enough ways to trigger Revolt between the fetch lands, Strip Mine, and Wastelands. You could also use Qasali Pridemage to trigger Revolt, and conveniently enough get your Pridemage back immediately to destroy another target.
My Verdict
I think Renegade Rallier is definitely a viable option for the disruptive aggro decks that can support the color requirements. I don't think it's a four-of kind of card, but I can see running one or two. If you've built your list with it in mind you could even try to maximize the Ralliers effectiveness, perhaps by including more copies of Wasteland. The body you get for three mana isn't terrible either, although that's not the primary reason to play this.
The main issue with this card is that the type of decks that it would go in really aren't that popular. Hatebears decks seem to be less popular these days, and White Eldrazi has become the premier Thalia, Guardian of Thraben deck in Vintage. Still, some people really like playing this kind of deck so I wouldn't be surprised to see my opponent cast one of these against me in the near future.
My Impressions of Aether Revolt
From the few cards that I've included in this article and the spoilers that I've looked at I can say
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are some of the reasons why people fail to prevent ecological collapse. Their resources appear at first to be inexhaustible; a long-term trend of depletion is concealed by short-term fluctuations; small numbers of powerful people advance their interests by damaging those of everyone else; short-term profits trump long-term survival. The same, in all cases, can be said of the collapse of financial systems. Is this how human beings are destined to behave? If we cannot act until stocks – of either kind – start sliding towards oblivion, we’re knackered.
But one of the benefits of modernity is our ability to spot trends and predict results. If fish in a depleted ecosystem grow by 5% a year and the catch expands by 10% a year, the fishery will collapse. If the global economy keeps growing at 3% a year (or 1700% a century) it too will hit the wall.
I’m not going to suggest, as some scoundrel who shares a name with me did on these pages last year(9), that we should welcome a recession. But the financial crisis provides us with an opportunity to rethink this trajectory; an opportunity which is not available during periods of economic success. Governments restructuring their economies should read Herman Daly’s book Steady-State Economics(10).
As usual I haven’t left enough space to discuss this, so the details will have to wait for another column. Or you can read the summary published by the Sustainable Development Commission(11). But what Daly suggests is that nations which are already rich should replace growth (“more of the same stuff”) with development (“the same amount of better stuff”). A steady state economy has a constant stock of capital maintained by a rate of throughput no higher than the ecosystem can absorb. The use of resources is capped and the right to exploit them is auctioned. Poverty is addressed through the redistribution of wealth. The banks can lend only as much money as they possess.
Alternatively, we can persist in the magical thinking whose results have just come crashing home. The financial crisis shows what happens when we try to make the facts fit our desires. Now we must learn to live in the real world.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Richard Black, 10th October 2008. Nature loss ‘dwarfs bank crisis’. BBC Online. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7662565.stm
2. Gordon Brown, 20th June 2007. Speech to Mansion House. http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/2014.htm
3. Gordon Brown, 16th June 2004. Speech to Mansion House. http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/1534.htm
4. Oxford English Dictionary, 1989. Second Edition.
5. Niklas Magnusson, 10th October 2008. Iceland Premier Tells Nation to Go Fishing After Banks Implode.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=azZ189JG.1S8&refer=home
6. Jared Diamond, 2005. Collapse: how societies choose to survive or fail. Allen Lane, London.
7. Page 114.
8. Page 160.
9. George Monbiot, 9th October 2007. Bring on the Recession. The Guardian.
https://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/10/09/bring-on-the-recession/
10. Herman E. Daly, 1991. Steady-State Economics – 2nd Edition. Island Press, Washington DC.
11. Herman E. Daly, 24th April 2008. A Steady-State Economy. Sustainable Development Commission. http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications/downloads/Herman_Daly_thinkpiece.pdfBecause of Johnson's involvement as a civil attorney, the district attorney's office has recused itself. A special prosecutor, Trey Bunch, has been appointed.
Randy Taub, an attorney for Hicks, who is the true owner of Palma and Castro's homes on Pine Street, said his client played no role in the fraud scheme and didn't know any of the people involved.
Hicks had been renting the two houses, Taub said, but at some point his tenants stopped paying rent and he got behind on his mortgage. Later, squatters moved in and damaged the homes, making it harder for Hicks to repair the houses and get paying tenants. Hicks filed for bankruptcy, but his mortgage lender didn't foreclose for years, Taub said. That's what allowed the families to get settled in houses they didn't actually own.
"He's not the criminal here," Taub said. "It's an unfortunate circumstance. Because of the lender's inaction, you've got a guy out here who is victimizing people."
There is no attorney listed in court records for B&B Acquisition, Brooks or Brownlee. Efforts to reach them were unsuccessful.
Even though they're not the legal owners, the Palmas said they paid property taxes — around $500 — for the past two years.
Having the dream of a home snatched from them is only the latest challenge for the Palmas. Last year, one of Palma's sons, Emanuel, and his wife had a baby. The little girl, Delilah, was born with encephalocele, a severe birth defect affecting her head.Is your family doctor a wealthy tax cheat?
I don't think mine is. She strikes me as a dedicated, overworked person who is by no means overpaid. But Bill Morneau, our federal Finance Minister, is here to set you straight.
His new proposals for small-business tax reform – which will hit a wide range of professionals – are couched in the rhetoric of class warfare. He refers to law-abiding, tax-compliant people (not all of whom drive Lexuses) as "the richest Canadians," who exploit "unfair tax advantages" and "fancy accounting schemes." In contrast with the middle class families that the Trudeau government is working day and night for, they don't pay their "fair share."
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Bill Morneau: Tax changes are about levelling the playing field
André Picard: Ottawa's new tax measures unfairly target many doctors
A lot of media like this story line. "Feds propose changes to close tax loopholes for wealthy," said one obliging headline.
My dentist (Jack Slome, known him for 30 years, great guy) sees it differently. "It's extremely dramatic and very devastating," he says. "Everybody thinks I can take what I want from my company, but it doesn't work that way."
The Finance Department released its new proposals in the dead of summer, July 18. They are massive. "It will be very profound, and it will affect almost every profitable private business in Canada," Greg Wiebe, the managing partner in KPMG's tax division, told The Globe and Mail. "Tax Planning Bomb Shell," one prominent tax lawyer announced on his website.
Calgary accountant Kim Moody calls the proposals "the most pervasive and complex policy changes in the last 50 years." Yet the consultation period is just 75 days, ending in early October. Skeptics believe the government isn't really interested in consulting at all. Mr. Morneau has affirmed that impression with a series of populist tweets. "When the rules meant to help businesses grow, are being used for personal gain – we all lose," said one.
In other words, the government is using the words "tax loopholes" to describe the existing law.
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Doctors, especially, have good reason to be angry. For years, Ontario and other provincial governments have been vigorously encouraging them to incorporate, even giving them tax tips on how to use the rules to their advantage. Incorporation was sold as a trade-off for forgone fee increases. And now the feds have yanked the rug out. Younger, lower-income doctors who are burdened with giant student loans will be particularly hard hit.
What's unfair here is not the "loopholes" in the system – it's the federal government's abrupt plan to claw back benefits that doctors understood to be a legitimate part of their compensation.
Incorporation allows doctors and other professionals to accumulate retirement savings, and to "sprinkle" income by employing other family members. Unlike salaried employees, they get no vacation, sick time or retirement benefits. It also allows them to save up capital to reinvest in their business. No doubt some of them are tax cheats. But most are not.
Whether they should be taxed differently from salaried employees is a subject of legitimate debate. What's not in doubt is that the number of incorporated companies has soared in recent years. This is partly because provincial governments have encouraged it and partly because personal income-tax rates are now so high that the benefits of incorporation are irresistible. The top marginal personal-tax rate is now above 50 per cent in most provinces, while the small-business-tax rate is about a third of that.
As for whether all this is good for the middle class – that's debatable, too. Plenty of these folks think they're the middle class. And they're right. Many critics believe the changes will discourage entrepreneurial activity.
What's not in doubt is that people are mad as hornets. "The more they find out, the angrier they get," Mr. Moody says. MPs – many of them Liberal – are being besieged by enraged constituents, and a new alliance of business groups and professionals has been formed to fight the changes.
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The government is hoping that the furor will quickly pass and that the public will dismiss the howls of anguish as just more griping from the small-business lobby. The trouble is that plenty of the afflicted are good Liberals and party donors. They aren't likely to sit down and shut up.
"It's very discouraging," my dentist says. "We've worked hard for what we've got. Now basically they're saying, 'You've got too much money and we're going to take it away from you.'"NBA's Ty Lawson Allegedly Violates Probation... Warrant Requested
NBA's Ty Lawson Allegedly Violates Probation... Warrant Requested
EXCLUSIVE
Ty Lawson has some serious explaining to do... because officials in Denver believe the Sacramento Kings star violated his probation and are gunning for a warrant, TMZ Sports has learned.
Lawson is currently on probation stemming from his 2015 drunk driving case in Denver -- but the Denver Probation Dept. has filed a complaint seeking to revoke his probation citing a potential violation.
Officials would not say what the alleged violation is... but confirmed to TMZ Sports that a bench warrant has been requested so they can bring Lawson to court for a hearing on the matter.
We're told a judge has not signed off on the warrant at this point.
Some of the requirements of Lawson's probation -- which was scheduled to end on March 22 -- included monitored sobriety, 48 hours of community service, 52 hours of therapy and no marijuana use.
We reached out to Lawson's camp -- so far, no word back.Star witness in George Zimmerman trial tweeted about court case, getting high, drink driving and showed off her 'court nails'
The credibility of the state's star witness is expected to be called into question following a number of tweets she posted in which she talked about the death of Trayvon Martin, getting high, drink driving and her 'court nails'.
Rachel Jeantel took to the stand today at the George Zimmerman trial in Florida to testify about the phone conversation she had with her Trayvon moments before he was shot dead.
She denied the pair were boyfriend and girlfriend as they were previously described. Defense attorney Don West used the cross-examination to call her out on lies she had told before.
The 19-year-old Miami woman used her Twitter account to occasionally comment on the case saying things like, '16 months later, wowww I need a drink' and tweeted a picture of her 'court nails'.
The posts have since been deleted but the picture remained on her Facebook page.
Social media: The 19-year-old Miami woman used her Twitter account to occasionally comment on the case saying things like, '16 months later, wowww I need a drink'
Peach polish: She posted a picture on Facebook of her 'court nails' on Sunday as she seemed to prepare for her testimony
Postings: The teen is one of the prosecution's most important witnesses but they have already experienced problems with her prior evidence
According to the Smoking Gun, one deleted tweet linked to a sexually suggestive series of photos, while another included a link to a photo of liquor bottles with the caption: 'Wat [sic] will happen I mix everything uhmmmm.'
She cried in court today as she recounted the last conversation she had with Trayvon.
The 19-year-old told the court she asked the teen what the man looked like and he said he looked creepy, 'a creepy a** cracker'.
She said Trayvon told her he was going to go home but the man was still following him, saying 'Oh sh**, the n**** is still behind me'.
'I just told him to run,' Rachel told the court, adding that her friend was breathing heavily.
The pair then got cut off and when she called him back he told her he was back at his father's fiancee's house and he thought he had lost the man.
The teen is one of the prosecution's most important witnesses but they have already experienced problems with her prior evidence.
Alcohol: Her credibility may be called into question following a number of tweets she posted in which she talked about the death of Trayvon Martin, getting high, drink driving and her 'court nails'
Testimony: Rachel said Trayvon told her he was going to try to lose the man and go home, but Zimmerman kept following him
Earlier this year, government lawyers were forced acknowledge she lied under oath when she claimed the reason she did not attend Martin’s funeral was due to being sick in hospital.
She admitted today she did not want to go because she didn't want to see his parents. 'I felt guilty...I was the last person that talked to their son', she said.
Friend: Rachel was the last person to talk to Trayvon Martin
When this lie was disclosed in an earlier court hearing back in March, she tweeted a number of things apparently related to the discovery.
'Jus got home n hear wat was going and I’m angry', she wrote, and'remember who cause the funeral to happen keep it 100% Mr. a** hoe...Damn they p*ssed me off… and I’m sick too "HELL NAW".'
On February 26, the one-year anniversary of Trayvon's death, she tweeted '#RIP Tray', followed by'Omg people calling n praying n sh*t lol I need a drink smoke and a pray my head killing me right now cannot wait when this day end'.
Two days earlier, she referred to getting high, drinking, smoking and drink driving: 'Lol we going to hell for smoke on Sunday I need some more drink,' one tweet said, then: 'I hope I dont hit no one tonight lord plz watch my driving'.
The picture of her 'court nails' was posted on Sunday and other tweets hinted towards preparations she was making for her appearance.
On June 16, a list of seven items she posted included the notations '3.get ready for count [sic]', '4.deal with the bull come with it', '5.try to have a natural life' and '7. I’m going need a lot of drinks for dis summer oh lord',
On her Facebook page, Jeantel is stated as having attended Miami Norland Senior High School and has'studied criminal justice at Miami University'.Arkansas Senate candidate Tom Cotton raised $1.24 million in the fourth quarter, outdoing incumbent Senator Mark Pryor, who raised $1.1 million, according to Politico. Pryor, a Democrat who’s considered one of the weakest Senate incumbents in this fall’s midterms still has much a much bigger war chest, totaling $4.2 million. Cotton, a freshman congressman, currently has $2.2 million on hand. Politico’s Emily Schultheis writes, ”It’s a good sign for a challenger to be outraising his incumbent opponent, so Cotton could make up the gap this year if he keeps raising money at the rate he’s going now” (which I guess assumes some kind of geometric rate of increase for Cotton’s fundraising).
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The University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato has moved the Cotton–Pryor race to “Lean R,” from “Toss Up.” Two other pick-up opportunities for Republicans this fall, the North Carolina Senate race where Democrat Kay Hagan is defending her seat, and Louisiana, where Mary Landrieu is running for reelection, have been moved to “Toss Up.”
The most recent polling in the Arkansas race suggests Cotton has a small lead: He was tied. 44–44, in a mid-December survey by liberal firm Public Policy Polling, but led Pryor by seven points, 48–41, in a survey a week earlier by Kellyanne Conway’s Republican polling firm.The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming was a select committee of the United States House of Representatives. It was established March 8, 2007 through adoption of a resolution by a 269–150 vote of the full House.[1][2]
The committee existed from 2007 to 2011, and was not renewed when the Republicans gained control of the House for the 112th Congress.[3]
In 2019, the new Democratic majority established a successor committee, the United States House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.
History [ edit ]
Representative Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, was chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. He is pictured here presiding over the committee at a hearing on June 15, 2010.
Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced plans to create the select committee on January 18, 2007, soon after Democrats took control of the House following the 2006 elections.
The creation of the committee was criticized by House Republicans, who argued "that the committee was unnecessary or that its budget could be used better by the ethics committee."[4] The proposal to create the committee also encountered some skepticism from House Democrats, particularly Chairman John Dingell of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee (which has primary jurisdiction over environmental and climate change issues) and Chairman Charles Rangel of the Ways and Means Committee (which has jurisdiction on any tax legislation aimed at affecting industry behavior).[5] Ultimately, Pelosi was able to reach a compromise with Dingell, wherein the committee was to be advisory in nature, without the legislative authority granted to standing committees.[6] Joe Barton, the ranking Republican member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, continued to object to the committee's existence, calling it a "platform for some members to grandstand."[2]
The committee held 80 hearings and briefings, on topics ranging from climate science to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent oil spill.[7]
The committee played a role in the creation of the 2007 energy act and the 2009 stimulus act (which included US$90 billion in spending on green energy and energy efficiency).[7] Most prominently, the committee played a major role in shaping the 2009 climate bill—the American Clean Energy and Security Act or "Waxman-Markey"—which was passed by the House but never became law due to the Senate's refusal to take up the bill.[7]
After Republicans won control of the House in the 2010 election, the new Republican majority in the House (led by the new speaker, John Boehner of Ohio) decided to kill the committee, resulting in criticism from environmentalists and climate researchers.[7][8]
Jurisdiction [ edit ]
The Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming conducted hearings on energy independence and climate change issues. The committee lacked the authority to draft legislation,[9] but worked with the House standing committees with jurisdiction over climate change issues and developed recommendations on legislative proposals. Speaker Pelosi indicated she would have liked committees with jurisdiction over energy, environment and technology policy to report legislation on these issues to the full House by July 4, 2007.[10]
Members, 111th Congress [ edit ]
The select committee was reestablished for the 111th Congress pursuant to H.Res. 5. On January 14, 2009, Speaker Nancy Pelosi reappointed Ed Markey of Massachusetts and James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin as Chairman and Ranking Member, respectively, of the committee.[11]
See also [ edit ]Wednesday, February 11, 2015 marked the official opening of team registrations for the 2015 RFL of SL season. In a change from previous years, all teams registering to participate in the 2015 are required to have both a Captain and a Co-captain. An e-mail address is also required in order to complete registrations.
Team Captains who successfully register their team prior to March 7th, 2015, will receive a special “Early Bird” Registration Trophy and Plaque.
Should anyone need assistance in completing their registration should contact the RFL of SL 2015 Teams Ambassador, Veruca Tammas, in-world.
Note that a separate Convio registration is also required, details of which, I believe, will be made available in due course.
About Relay For Life of Second Life
Relay For Life of Second Life is an annual activity that takes place in Second Life in July each year. Volunteers form or join teams to have fun while fundraising and raising awareness from mid-March through mid-July. In July teams build campsites and walk a track, just like a Real World Relay. Since 2005, Relay For Life of Second Life has raised over $2.25 million USD for the American Cancer Society. In 2013, Relay For Life of Second Life has raised over $390,000 for the American Cancer Society. Relay For Life has become an international movement in RL and SL. In 2011 participants from over 80 countries took part in Relay For Life of Second Life.
About the American Cancer Society
For more than 100 years, the American Cancer Society (ACS) has worked relentlessly to save lives and create a world with less cancer and more birthdays. Together with millions of supporters worldwide, ACS helps people stay well, helps people get well, find cures, and deal with their journey against cancer.
Related Links
AdvertisementsThe Tampa Bay Buccaneers are one of at least nine teams interested in Seattle Seahawks guard J.R. Sweezy, according to Rand Getlin. Rick Stroud confirmed that report.
Sweezy, a converted defensive end, has started all but two games over the past three seasons for the Seattle Seahawks. He's played almost exclusively at right guard, which makes him a curious fit for the Bucs: they need a left guard, and they're not moving Ali Marpet away from the right guard position. More than that, the Bucs like what Kevin Pamphile did at left guard in limited time last year and are unlikely to guarantee Sweezy a starting position.
All of that to say that the Bucs may be interested in Sweezy, but they're unlikely to sign him. He can find a guaranteed starting job elsewhere, and likely better money as well. The Bucs were linked to former Panthers guard Nate Chandler as well and it's clear that they want to add some depth and perhaps even a starter at left guard. But Sweezy seems like a poor fit.The European Commission backs the construction of Bulgaria's "Balkan" gas hub, which is projected to extract natural gas from the Black Sea.
This became clear after a meeting between Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov and EU Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy Miguel Arias Canete, who is on a two-day visit to Bulgaria on Thursday and Friday.
This represents the first time when such a high-level EU official expresses firm support for the construction of the hub.
Canete said that Bulgaria has the potential to be a key player in Europe's gas network and has the capacity to be leader in the construction of the Balkan gas hub due to its historical capacity and the exceptionally well-built gas transmission network.
According to him, the Bulgarian government has done everything possible for the construction of the gas interconnectors with neighbouring countries.
In his opinion, Bulgaria and the EU have worked tirelessly since last year for the construction of the interconnectors with Serbia, Greece and Turkey, which are key infrastructure projects for Europe and vital for the realisation of the Balkan gas hub.
The commissioner pointed that the gas hub will provide opportunity for different interconnectors, including Russian ones. Borisov also highlighted that the construction of the hub is not directed towards Russia.
Canete added that the Commission and Bulgaria are working together for the construction of the gas interconnectors with Greece and Romania and are seeking funding for the interconnector with Serbia through one of the financial instruments.
He was firm that Brussels will support each infrastructure project which complies with EU legislation.
In his words, the European Commission also appreciates the work done by Bulgarian Deputy Prime Minister Tomislav Donchev and Energy Minister Temenuzhka Petkova.
The commissioner noted that Bulgaria and the EU have managed to start and almost finalise all fourteen projects of common interest related to the energy sector.
Canete identified Bulgaria as leader in the security of supplies and added that the country has the potential to become one of the important gas hubs.
The commissioner described Bulgaria as a reliable partner and commended the country for managing to reduce its harmful emissions, enhance the level of energy security and efficiency and surpass the benchmarks.
In his words, Bulgaria is heading in the direction of full liberalisation of its energy market.
Canete added that the EU wants to continue working in close partnership with Bulgaria in order to prevent the repetition of gas crises as the ones which had occurred in 2005 and 2009.There are as many opinions about jobs and artificial intelligence as there are people who have them. A Vanguard global economist recently said AI will replace one in two jobs. A new survey of AI researchers said most believe AI will outperform people at rote work like translating, surgery, and transportation in 10 years. Fighting fire with fire, Google is offering a new AI job search. Marc Andreessen, founder at top venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, says humans have always been afraid the latest tech would take their jobs--and it's never happened. Meanwhile, some of the most automated factories in the country--like Tesla's gigafactory--can't hire fast enough because the demand for the product outpaces even well-automated labor.
Amazon is giving us the biggest real life case study about what happens when jobs--in this case, warehouse jobs--are replaced by robots. According to a recent article in The New York Times, Amazon has about 100,000 robots already. You can get a glimpse of what that looks like in this Youtube video of an Amazon fulfillment center:
As the company has increased its automation, it has retrained a number of workers, from warehouse bin packers and palletizers to robot operators. When it started adding robots to the warehouse workflow, Amazon had about 80,000 warehouse employees in the United States. Today, it has 125,000 warehouse team members and is hiring fast. At the beginning of the year, the company announced it would hire 100,000 more team members across its 70 fulfillment centers, and it's looking for a new second headquarters.
So much for automation replacing people.
Over the years, Amazon has come under plenty of fire for being a tough place to work but it's also got some great programs, particularly around retraining. Around 9000 employees have taken their Career Choice option, for example, which asks the employee to pay 5 percent while Amazon pays 95 percent of tuition to learn professional careers like computer-aided design, nursing, and even aircraft mechanics. (Is this related to Blue Origin hiring 300 new workers in Alabama? Probably not.)
Martin Ford, author of the book Rise of the Robots, takes all this positivity a bit more pessimistically. He told The New York Times recently, "My assumption is this technology will eventually displace a lot of people in those warehouses." His perspective is, "I would not say that overnight huge numbers of jobs disappear. Maybe the first indication is they don't get rid of those people but the pace of job creation slows down."Earlier this morning Microsoft outlined their new Windows Phone Preview for Developers. Remember the Enthusiast Program announced with Windows Phone 8 in the summer of 2012? This is basically it. If you’re a registered developer for the Windows Phone Store or a member of the Windows Phone App Studio Program you can download GDR3 starting today. That update is now live. Link below.
We’re in the process of downloading right now, so we can’t completely comment on the progress overall process. But so far after downloading the Preview for Developers app from Microsoft we’ve had no hiccups. Head to the Store and download the app, but first note these requirements from the app:
You must meet one of the following three requirements: (a) have an active Windows Phone Dev Center account; (b) have an active App Studio account; OR (c) be running a registered developer device (‘dev unlocked’ phone)
Updates will only include the Microsoft update, and not additional OEM drivers/firmware
To ensure the best experience, your device must be running the latest OS release (currently 8.0.10322.71) or greater to receive early updates via this program
You will be required to accept additional terms & conditions within the app prior to opt-in
You CANNOT REVERT to a prior OS version once you have taken an update via this program
Key features:
Access to latest pre-release Windows Phone updates
Ability to opt-out of pre-releases and only receive production Windows Phone updates
Ready to take the plunge? Head to the Windows Phone Store to download Preview for Developers from Microsoft. After downloading, head into the settings of your phone and go the phone update section and do a check. You should begin downloading GDR3, but not any other OEM features like those that will be found in Bittersweet shimmer. Don't forget to check to what's new in GDR3 and head to the GDR3 Forums to talk it out.
Enjoy!
Thanks for the tip JD!Most companies are primarily concerned with price when it comes to beverage and liquid product packaging, but what if designers were given free reign to tweak the standard designs so they’re more user-friendly? These 14 packaging design concepts solve annoyances like caps that are difficult to open, bottle shapes that force you to crane your neck to drink and the frustrating inability to reach those last drops of product in the bottom of a soap bottle.
Soft Hanging Soap and Shampoo Bottles
Soft bottles with suction cups to attach them to the shower walls eliminate all the clutter that various toiletries can create in the bathroom. These bottles are made from cornstarch vinyl, so they’re easy to squeeze, and making them transparent may help distinguish between different types of products stored inside.
Easy Drink
This simple change in the standard water bottle design seems so obvious, it’s amazing that it hasn’t been implemented already. Moving the mouth of the bottle from the top to a 45-degree angle makes it much easier to drink and re-fill. No more craning your neck to get those last drops.
Dumbbell Bottle
Since you’re probably carrying a water bottle or sports drink while working out anyway, why not make it do more? The Dumbbell sports drink bottle won’t exactly get you ripped at just.5kg (1.1 pounds), but you could always fill it with something heavier when the drink is gone.
EasyOpen Tab-Pull Bottle Cap
Sometimes you’re caught without a bottle opener, and using your teeth isn’t exactly a good idea unless you’re willing to part with them. What if bottle caps had little easy-pull tabs on them? The ‘EasyOpen’ concept would certainly do what the name suggests.
Aqua Jar Turns Bottles into Pitchers
The Aqua Jar by GH Lab extends the life of a plastic bottle by turning it into an easy-pour pitcher. It’s made from biodegradable and recyclable plastic, and fits the universal coil of any plastic bottle.
Eco Coke
“Same classic design, just greener,” says Andrew Kim, designer of the Eco Coke bottle. So what makes it different – and superior – to the current bottle design? Aside from being 100% plant-based, this bottle is also collapsible, making it easier to keep it on hand until a recycling bin is nearby. Since it has a smaller footprint, space for nearly two additional bottles is recovered within standard boxes.
Retap
While some people will reuse plastic bottles a few times, they’re awkward to clean, and can leach chemicals into the water over time. Glass is safer – and nicer-looking. Retap is a designer water bottle concept that’s easily refillable, without any sharp corners to make cleaning difficult.On May 21, the highest state court in Maryland, the State Court of Appeals, interpreted Maryland election law to mean that signatures on petitions are invalid if there is no exact match in the name on the voter registration record, and the name on the petition. As a result, the Libertarian Party and the Green Party do not have enough valid signatures on their petitions for 2012, and must now get more before the August 6 deadline. Here is the 36-page unanimous decision, which is called Maryland State Board of Elections v Libertarian Party of Maryland, 11-79. UPDATE: see this article.
The Court also construed the law to mean that if a voter signs the petition the first time using a nickname or other variant of the name that doesn’t match, that voter is not then free to re-sign another sheet of the petition with the precisely correct name.
Maryland requires 10,000 signatures for ballot access for new parties. The Libertarian Party is now deemed to have only 6,583 valid signatures, and the Green Party now has only 5,919 valid signatures.
The Court took pains to say that it is not deciding whether the strict standard is constitutional or not. It says it cannot decide that question because the case was not presented to it as a constitutional question. Reading between the lines, it is overwhelmingly likely that the Court decided this case in this hostile manner because the judges are not sympathetic to various referenda petitions being circulated. The judges probably believe that the Libertarian and Green Parties, and other minor parties, will be able to qualify despite the ruling, because the number of valid signatures they still need is a small number. The real impact of this decision will be to make it virtually impossible for referendum petitions to succeed, including one that would put same-sex marriage to a popular vote. Referendum petitions covering statewide issues need approximately 60,000 valid signatures.Interviewer Cenk Uygur: If you win, is Hillary Clinton liberal enough to be in your cabinet?
Senator Bernie Sanders: Oh stop. Stop getting me in trouble here! [Uyger laughs] There are other people that I would probably go to before Hillary—people like Elizabeth Warren, for example.
Uygur: Now, a lot of people in the—in the movement have decided that you are their leader, partly because you're running for president, but, you know, you look at some recent polls of millennials, ah, they have you as by far the most popular politician, but they actually have you as more popular as a person they'd like to meet above Beyoncé, okay? [Sanders belly-laughs] Now that's a hell of a thing, right?
Sanders: Yes!
Uyger: But! You have convinced them that Hillary Clinton is the establishment candidate. If you were to lose, and the Democratic Party comes to you and says, "Okay, now take this movement, that is full of energy and is against the establishment, and make sure they vote for the establishment candidate," what do you say?
Sanders: Well, you know, what I say— Number One, I'm not big into [air quotes] being a leader. You know, I much prefer to see a lot of leaders, a lot of grassroots activism. Number Two, what we do is together, as a nation, as a growing movement, is we say, "All right, if we don't win"—and, by the way, we are in this thing to win; please understand that—"what is the Democratic establishment gonna do for us?"
Uyger: Oh, that's interesting.
Sanders: All right, for example: Right now, you have a Democratic establishment which has written off half the states in this country, you know that?
Uyger: Mm-hmm.
Sanders: And they've given up on the slate in the South, the Rocky Mountain area—are they gonna create a 50-state party? Are they gonna welcome into the Democratic Party the working class of this country and young people, or is it gonna be a party of the upper middle class and the cocktail crowd and the heavy campaign contributors? Which to a significant degree it is right now. You know, I've talked to Democratic Party leaders and said, "You know what? Instead of going around and raising all kinds of money from wealthy people, why don'tcha meet in some football stadium and bring out fifty, a hundred thousand people; bring the damn Senate in there, Senate Democrats, and start talking to people—ask them what they want you to do. How about that?" Better? Radical? So, in other words, if I can't make it, and we're gonna try as hard as we can 'til the last vote is cast, we wanna completely revitalize the Democratic Party, and make it a party of the people, rather than just one of large campaign contributors.
Yesterday, Bernie Sanders sat down for an interview with The Young Turks, and once again proved my point that he's running against the Democrats as a Democrat. Following are just two clips from the interview; more are available here First up, Sanders responds to a question about whether he'd put Hillary Clinton in his cabinet:What I love (ahem) about this response is how it functions as two jabs in one: One at Clinton for not being good enough for his cabinet, and one at Obama for thinking she was good enough to serve incabinet.Next up, Sanders responds to a question about whether Sanders will ask his supporters to support Hillary Clinton if she's the nominee:A couple of quick thoughts:1. "I'm not big into being a leader" is a very curious thing for someone to say who is running to be President of the United States, a position often referred to as "leader of the free world," and further an executive position that requires an enormous amount of skilled leadership.2. After running a campaign centered on demonizing the Democratic establishment, and coronating Hillary Clinton as its evil queen—with either no understanding or no concern about how important the Democratic Party is to lots of marginalized people in red states—now Sanders wants to know what they'll doto make them feel welcome. That is fucking incredible.3. Sanders accuses the Democratic Party of having "written off half the states in this country," even though his campaign hasa strategy of writing off those precise states—and has done so on multiple I have certainly, over the years, made criticisms of the Democratic Party's failure to invest equitably across the nation, but I
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if asked,[63] later told Spielberg that he would only focus on directing one film in the series.[62] Trevorrow believed that different directors could bring different qualities to future films.[64] Bayona was once considered to direct Jurassic World, but he declined as he felt there was not enough time for production.[65] Filming took place from February to July 2017, in the United Kingdom and Hawaii.[61][66][67]
Former Jurassic World manager Claire Dearing and Velociraptor handler Owen Grady join a mission to rescue Isla Nublar's dinosaurs from a volcanic eruption by relocating them to a new island sanctuary. They discover that the mission is part of a scheme to sell the captured dinosaurs on the black market. The captured dinosaurs are brought to an estate in northern California, where several of the creatures are auctioned and subsequently shipped to their new owners. A new hybrid dinosaur, the Indoraptor, escapes and terrorizes people at the estate before being killed. The unsold dinosaurs are released from the estate and into the wilderness to save them from a gas leak. With the dinosaurs now dispersed, the world has entered a Neo-Jurassic Period where humans and dinosaurs must coexist. A subplot involving human cloning is introduced, and the development of exploiting the dinosaurs' abilities for militaristic applications and other uses is re-explored.
Jurassic World 3 (2021) [ edit ]
In September 2015, Trevorrow said that Bryce Dallas Howard's character would evolve the most over the course of the Jurassic World trilogy.[68] In October 2015, Frank Marshall confirmed plans for a sixth film in the series.[69] In November 2015, Universal Pictures chairman Donna Langley said that Trevorrow and Spielberg have a story idea for the sixth film.[70] In September 2016, Bayona further confirmed that Trevorrow has plans for a Jurassic World trilogy.[71] That month, Trevorrow was asked how much planning he had put into a new trilogy while he was filming Jurassic World in 2014: "I knew the end. I knew where I wanted it to go."[60] Trevorrow later said that planning the beginning, middle, and end of the trilogy ahead of time "is crucial to a franchise like this if you really want to bring people along with you and make sure they stay interested. It needs to be thought through on that level. It can't be arbitrary [...] the earlier Jurassic Park movies had pretty clear definitive endings. They were much more episodic."[72] In March 2017, Laura Dern commented, "As I said to the people who are making the new series, 'If you guys make a last one, you gotta let Ellie Sattler come back.'"[73]
In February 2018, it was announced that the film, titled Jurassic World 3,[74][75] would be released on June 11, 2021. It was also announced that Trevorrow would write the script with Emily Carmichael, based on a story by Trevorrow and Connolly; and that Trevorrow and Spielberg would serve as executive producers for the film, with Marshall and Crowley as producers.[76][77][78] On March 30, 2018, it was announced that Trevorrow would also direct the film,[79] at the request of Spielberg.[80] Trevorrow met Carmichael after seeing a short film of hers, and said, "I just knew immediately that I loved her brain."[81] Trevorrow was subsequently impressed with Carmichael's writing work on Pacific Rim Uprising and a remake of The Black Hole, leading him to choose her as a co-writer for Jurassic World 3.[81][82] Trevorrow and Carmichael were writing the script as of April 2018. At the time, Trevorrow said that Pratt and Howard would reprise their roles from the previous films, and that there were other characters in Fallen Kingdom who "you'll realize are major characters." Additionally, Trevorrow said that Jurassic World 3 would be a "science thriller," describing it as being the Jurassic World film that would most closely match the tone of Spielberg's original 1993 Jurassic Park film.[80] In May 2018, Trevorrow announced that the film would focus more on real dinosaurs as opposed to hybrids, which had prominent roles in the previous Jurassic World films.[83]
In June 2018, Trevorrow stated that the film would focus on the dinosaurs that went open source after being sold and spread around the world in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, allowing people other than Dr. Henry Wu to create their own dinosaurs.[84][85][86] Trevorrow stated that the film would be set around the world, and said that the idea of Henry Wu being the only person who knows how to create a dinosaur was far-fetched "after 30 years of this technology existing" within the films' universe.[85] Additionally, the film would focus on the dinosaurs that were freed at the end of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,[84][85][86] but it would not depict dinosaurs terrorizing cities and going to war against humans; Trevorrow considered such ideas unrealistic. Instead, Trevorrow was interested in a world where "a dinosaur might run out in front of your car on a foggy backroad, or invade your campground looking for food. A world where dinosaur interaction is unlikely but possible—the same way we watch out for bears or sharks."[87][88] Trevorrow said that the film would also be about Owen and Claire's responsibility to take care of Maisie, a cloned girl from the previous film.[84]
Certain scenes and ideas regarding the integration of dinosaurs into the world were ultimately removed from the Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom script to be saved for the third film.[85][86] Trevorrow said about the realism of the film's story, "I think any kind of global acceptance that [dinosaurs] are just around doesn't feel real to me because, even now when you think of animals, when was the last time you saw a tiger walking down the street? We know there are tigers. We know they're out there. But to me, it's very important that we keep this grounded in the context of our relationship with wild animals today."[89] Howard stated that she wanted the film to "blow your mind in terms of being like, 'Whoa, this is where this technology can go. This is what the world could really turn into if this technology fell into the wrong hands.' So basically seeing a world with dinosaurs everywhere."[90]
Live-action short film (2019) [ edit ]
A live-action short film, which will include Nasutoceratops and Allosaurus, will accompany the theatrical release of Universal's Hobbs & Shaw, scheduled for release in August 2019.[91]
Lego animated projects [ edit ]
Jurassic World / Lego Jurassic World 2-Pack, containing The Indominus Escape and Employee Safety Video. Cover of the home media release of2-Pack, containingand
Lego Jurassic World: The Indominus Escape (2016) [ edit ]
Over the course of five days from October 3, 2016 to October 7, 2016, an untitled five-part animated series based on Lego Jurassic World was released on the YouTube channels of Jurassic World and LEGO. In October 2016, the series was released as a 24-minute animated film entitled Lego Jurassic World: The Indominus Escape as part of a Jurassic World DVD bundle set, receiving shared billing alongside the 2015 film. The film marks the first time an animated film spin-off of Jurassic Park has been released.[92] The film is a prequel to Jurassic World, and features most of the primary adult characters on the island (with the exception of Barry and Zara) attempting to capture a hotdog-loving Indominus rex. Zachary Levi, Sendhil Ramamurthy and Fred Tatasciore joined Jake Johnson, Lauren Lapkus, Bryce Dallas Howard and BD Wong as voice actors. The film is directed by Michael D. Black.[93][94]
Lego Jurassic World: Employee Safety Video (2016) [ edit ]
With the home media release of The Indominus Escape, a short film was released, featuring BD Wong, David Gunning, Jake Johnson and Lauren Lapkus reprising their roles from The Indominus Escape. Like The Indominus Escape, the short is set before the events of Jurassic World.[95][92]
Lego Jurassic World: Rescue Blue/Escape the Indoraptor (2018) [ edit ]
In promotion of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Lego produced two short films titled Rescue Blue and Escape the Indoraptor, with a variant featured on YouTube where it was separated into four parts, and at the end of each part the audience was given the option to choose between two different outcomes.[96][97][98]
Lego Jurassic World: The Secret Exhibit (2018) [ edit ]
On November 29, 2018, NBC aired a new animated special, Lego Jurassic World: The Secret Exhibit, as a prequel to Jurassic World.[99][100] The special received low ratings with 1.8 million viewers.[100] It is scheduled for DVD release on January 19, 2019.[99]
Lego Jurassic World: Legend of Isla Nublar (2019) [ edit ]
In February 2019, Lego announced plans for a 13-episode animated miniseries titled Lego Jurassic World: Legend of Isla Nublar, scheduled for release later in the year. The series would be based on the Jurassic World films and would feature Owen and Claire,[101] who deal with various issues at the Jurassic World theme park, including tourists, escaped dinosaurs, ongoing expansion of the park, and unpredictable weather. In addition, the premise would involve a park saboteur, Dennis Nedry's nephew, searching Isla Nublar in search of a treasure, while wearing a dinosaur mech suit. The series is a prequel to Jurassic World, set three years prior and following the events of Lego Jurassic World: The Secret Exhibit. Lego would also produce a line of Lego toy sets as a tie-in to the series.[102]
Cast and crew [ edit ]
Principal cast [ edit ]
List indicator(s) This table shows the characters and the actors who have portrayed them throughout the franchise.
A dark grey cell indicates the character was not in the film, or that the character's presence in the film has not yet been announced.
A indicates an appearance through photographs and/or likeness.
A indicates a voice-only role.
Crew [ edit ]
Film reception [ edit ]
Box office performance [ edit ]
Film North America
release date Budget Box office gross Box office ranking Reference North America Other territories Worldwide All-time
North America All-time
worldwide Jurassic Park June 11, 1993 $63 million $402,453,882 $626,700,000 $1,029,153,882 #31 #30 [105] The Lost World: Jurassic Park May 23, 1997 $73 million $229,086,679 $389,552,320 $618,638,999 #143 #136 [106] Jurassic Park III July 18, 2001 $93 million $181,171,875 $187,608,934 $368,780,809 #237 #315 [107] Jurassic World June 12, 2015 $150 million $652,270,625 $1,019,442,583 $1,671,713,208 #6 #5 [108] Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom June 22, 2018 $170 million $417,719,760 $891,764,701 $1,309,484,461 #24 #12 [109] Total $549 million $1,882,702,821 $3,115,068,538 $4,997,771,359 [110]
Critical response [ edit ]
Awards [ edit ]
Award Category Film Jurassic Park The Lost World:
Jurassic Park Academy Award Sound Editing Won Academy Award Sound Mixing Won Academy Award Visual Effects Won Nominated Grammy Award Best Score Soundtrack Nominated Nominated
Comic books [ edit ]
Topps Comics [ edit ]
From June 1993 to August 1997 the now-defunct Topps Comics published comic adaptations of Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park, as well as several tie-in series.
IDW Comics [ edit ]
Beginning in June 2010, IDW Publishing began publishing Jurassic Park comics. They also acquired the rights to reprint the issues published by Topps in the 1990s, which they began to do in trade paperback format starting in November 2010. After a four-year hiatus, IDW announced a comic series based on Jurassic World that was to be released in 2017.[123]
This series has been collected in the following trade paperbacks:
Title Material collected No. of Pages ISBN Jurassic Park Jurassic Park #1–4 1-85286-502-4 The Lost World: Jurassic Park The Lost World: Jurassic Park #1–4 1-85286-885-6 Jurassic Park Vol. 1: Redemption Jurassic Park Redemption #1–5 120 pages 1-60010-850-4 Jurassic Park: The Devils in the Desert Jurassic Park: The Devils in the Desert #1–4 104 pages 1-60010-923-3 Jurassic Park: Dangerous Games Jurassic Park: Dangerous Games #1–5 112 pages 1-61377-002-2 Classic Jurassic Park Volume 1 Jurassic Park #1–4 104 pages 1-60010-760-5 Classic Jurassic Park Volume 2: Raptors' Revenge Juassic Park #0, Jurassic Park: Raptor #1–2, Jurassic Park: Raptors Attack #1–4 192 pages 1-60010-885-7 Classic Jurassic Park Volume 3: Amazon Adventure! Jurassic Park: Raptors Hijack #1–4, Jurassic Park: Annual #1 124 pages 1-61377-042-1 Classic Jurassic Park Volume 4: Return to Jurassic Park, Part 1 Return to Jurassic Park #1–4 128 pages 1-61377-117-7 Classic Jurassic Park Volume 5: Return to Jurassic Park, Part 2 Return to Jurassic Park #5–9 108 pages 978-1613775332 Classic Jurassic Park Volume 6: The Lost World The Lost World: Jurassic Park #1–4 104 pages 978-1613779156
Cancelled animated series [ edit ]
Escape from Jurassic Park (1993) [ edit ]
In June 1993, after the theatrical release of Jurassic Park, spokesmen for Amblin and MCA confirmed that an animated series based on the film was in development and awaiting Spielberg's final approval.[128] The series, titled Escape from Jurassic Park,[129] would have consisted of 23 episodes for its first season. The series would have centered on John Hammond's attempts to finish Jurassic Park and open it to the public, while InGen's corporate rival Biosyn is simultaneously planning to open their own dinosaur theme park in Brazil, which ultimately ends with their dinosaurs escaping into the jungles.[130][131][132]
If produced, it was believed that the project would be the most expensive animated series up to that time. Jeff Segal, president of Universal Cartoon Studios, said, "We are developing a TV series that we anticipate would be computer animated and very sophisticated. However, Spielberg has not had a chance yet to look at either the material or the format for the series."[128] Segal said Universal was considering the possibility of developing the series for prime time. Segal said about the series' storyline, "It would essentially pick up from the closing moments of the movie and it would continue the story in a very dramatic way. The intention would be to continue with the primary characters and also introduce new characters." Segal also said the series would be aimed specifically at the same target audience as the film, while hoping that it would also appeal to young children.[128]
Animation veteran and comic artist Will Meugniot (then working at Universal Cartoon Studios for various projects, including Exosquad) contacted artist William Stout to ask if he would be interested in designing the animated series. According to Stout, "This was not going to be a kiddy show (although kids of all ages, including myself, could enjoy it). They wanted the show to be a mature prime time series with top writers and state-of-the-art television animation augmented with quite a bit of CG animation." Universal Animation Studios wanted the show to have the look of a graphic novel.[133]
Stout was hired to work on the series and subsequently made a trailer to demonstrate how the series would look, and how it would combine traditional animation with computer animation. The series required Spielberg's final approval before it could go into production. However, Spielberg had grown tired of the massive promotion and merchandise revolving around the film, and never watched the trailer.[133] On July 13, 1993, Margaret Loesch, president of the Fox Children's Network, confirmed that discussions had been held with Spielberg about an animated version of the film. Loesch also said, "At least for now and in the foreseeable future, there will not be an animated Jurassic Park. That's Steven Spielberg's decision, and we respect that decision."[134]
Jurassic Park: Chaos Effect (1997) [ edit ]
Part three of the four-part comic adaptation of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, published by Topps Comics in July 1997, confirmed to readers that a cartoon series based on the film was in development.[135][136] In November 1997, it was reported that the cartoon would be accompanied by Jurassic Park: Chaos Effect, a series of dinosaur toys produced by Kenner and based on a premise that scientists had created dinosaur hybrids consisting of DNA from different creatures.[137][138] The new toys were based on the upcoming cartoon.[137] That month, it was also reported that the cartoon could be ready by March 1998, as a mid-season replacement.[137] The Chaos Effect toyline was released in June 1998,[138] but the animated series was never produced, for unknown reasons.[139]
Video games [ edit ]
When the first film was released in 1993, two different video game publishers were given the rights to publish games based on it, Sega and Ocean Software. Both produced several different games based on the film for several different game systems, including the NES and Sega Genesis. In 1994, Ocean Software produced a sequel to the first game in the series for the Game Boy and SNES systems. Universal Interactive also produced an interactive game for the ill-fated 3DO system.
For the second film in the franchise, DreamWorks Interactive released five games for the most popular systems at the time. The third film had the biggest marketing push, spawning seven video games for PC and Game Boy Advance. A number of lightgun arcade games were also released for all three films.
Trespasser [ edit ]
Trespasser is a "digital sequel" to the 1997 film The Lost World: Jurassic Park. The player assumes the role of Anne who is the sole survivor of a plane crash on InGen's "Site B" one year after the events of the film. It was released 1998 for PC.
Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis [ edit ]
Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis is a tycoon-style video game. The objective of the game is to fulfill Hammond's dream of building a five-star theme park with dinosaurs. It was released 2003 for the Xbox, PlayStation 2 and PC.
Jurassic Park: The Game [ edit ]
Jurassic Park: The Game is an episodic video game based on the Jurassic Park franchise, bridging the story of the first two films developed by Telltale Games in a deal with Universal.[140] It was released on November 15, 2011 to a mixed reception, with reviewers praising the story but criticizing the characters and gameplay.[clarification needed] The game takes place during and after the events of the original film, and follows a new group of survivors trying to escape Isla Nublar. The game features several creatures from the film, as well as new additions like Troodon and a Tylosaurus. The game is available on PC, Mac, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and iPad.
Lego Jurassic World [ edit ]
Lego Jurassic World is a 2015 Lego action-adventure video game developed by Traveller's Tales and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS, Wii U, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and Microsoft Windows. It followed the plots of the series' four films, including Jurassic Park, and was released on June 12, 2015.
Jurassic World Evolution [ edit ]
Jurassic World Evolution is a business simulation game developed and published by Frontier Developments, and released on June 12, 2018. The game tasks players with constructing and managing their own Jurassic World theme park. The game features the series' fictional Muertes Archipelago, including Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna.[141]
Theme park rides [ edit ]
On June 21, 1996, Universal Studios Hollywood opened Jurassic Park: The Ride. Universal Studios Japan later opened this attraction, and Universal's Islands of Adventure opened Jurassic Park River Adventure. The rides are heavily themed on the first three films. Another ride based on the series has also been opened at Universal Studios Singapore (Jurassic Park Rapids Adventure).
Legacy [ edit ]
In 2018, the first film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."[142]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
a b c As described in the novels. ^ As described in the films, Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park.High-end, health-food oriented Whole Foods Market is looking for a brewmaster. One of the grocery store’s newest locations in Houston is planning to open its own in-store brewery and has asked for applications for a head brewmaster. The grocery store already has bars with taps and growler fill stations inside many of its locations. Nichole Becerra, who oversees the company’s beer program, told Huffington Post that starting their own brewery “seemed like a natural evolution” for the company.
Trader Joes (and a few other grocery stores) sell beer under their own label, but the companies typically contract existing breweries to do brewing dirty work. No details yet on the scope of the Whole Foods brewery. Will they distribute beyond the Houston store? What styles will they brew? Will anyone buy it? Only time will tell.Ashburton man Mark Crotty is on a quest for legal cannabis to help him manage some of the symptoms he suffers from with Crohn's disease.
Cannabis has given Canterbury Crohn's sufferer Mark Crotty relief after suffering through almost three years of "constant, stabbing, radiating" pain.
Now he's fighting for access to medically prescribed cannabis. If approved, he believes this would make him the first Crohn's patient in New Zealand to get access.
The 26-year-old Ashburton man was diagnosed with the incurable inflammatory bowel disease in 2015. Five weeks ago he called it quits on almost all of his prescription medication and started self-medicating with cannabis daily.
JOSEPH JOHNSON/STUFF Mark Crotty says to some degree cannabis saved his life, having suffered from Crohn's for almost three years.
During some of the most severe bouts of the disease he took up to 40 tablets a day including: three types of painkillers, sleeping pills, anti-depressants, anti-nausea and anti-inflamminatory medication.
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JOSEPH JOHNSON/STUFF Mark Crotty has stopped taking the majority of these pills and is self-medicating with cannabis.
But he found little relief from the medicine and still suffered from intense abdominal pain, nausea, fatigue, weight loss and diarrhoea.
Crotty believes "you shouldn't have to be on your death bed to get access" and is backing the introduction of prescribed cannabis products.
So far he has the necessary letter from his GP supporting his application to the Ministry of Health, but he's still waiting on the crucial backing from a specialist. He is hoping to get the go-ahead by the end of the year.
Before his diagnoses he and wife Jess Crotty lived a "very comfortable" lifestyle. "I had a great job and a company car."
But all that rapidly changed. Kilograms quickly dropped off the healthy 80-kilogram man and within months he weighed a "frightening" 62kg.
His "crippling nausea" meant he vomited at least once a day. "At times I had to go to hospital because I couldn't stop vomiting."
When he wasn't being sick he made constant trips to the toilet.
On average he slept for 16 to 18 hours a day.
"I lived in bed, I'd wake up and felt like I could go straight back to sleep again.
"I wanted to go back to sleep so the pain would stop."
Despite his severe physical symptoms the toughest aspect is his mental health. "Crohn's is lonely," and depression has crept in.
"The hardest part for me is watching Jess suffer. I feel like a piece of s... because I can't provide for her."
The disease is debilitating both physically and mentally, Jess says.
"I can honestly say we are at the end of our tether. We have tried it the clinical way for over two years, and I have to say, he has gotten worse, not better," she says.
Coming off most of his medication last month was "horrible". Crotty had cold sweats, uncontrollable shaking, headaches, nausea and nightmares for several days.
Now using cannabis he "feels amazing" comparatively. He hasn't vomited once and he's also put on about 4kg – both huge achievements.
"To some degree cannabis probably saved my life, I was getting into a very dark place.
"I'm enjoying food again. I've probably had one too many chocolate biscuits."
He smokes about 2 grams of cannabis a day, not enough to get him high he says, just enough to eradicate the pain and give him an appetite
At this point he'll smoke it regardless, but he'd prefer to do it legally and safely.
The problem is the supply and quality of the drug is not consistent, Jess says.
"We can run into trouble when we run out... When Mark had no cannabis for three days, the symptoms got so severe he ended up in hospital."
Mark has spoken with about 30 other people in New Zealand with Crohn's, all of whom are using cannabis to some degree.
"The people who want to do this are already doing it. Making medically prescribed cannabis available would only make it safer," he says.
"Cannabis doesn't fix everything, but it should be a tool in the tool box if it improves a person's quality of life.
"I hope people gain the right to choose how they want to medicate."How does it work?
From left to right: Anant Goel; Nabanita De; Qinglin Chen and Mark Craft
Open source project
Debunking fake news is something of a speciality at The Observers. Read
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A group of enterprising students in the USA came up with a solution to Facebook’s problem with fake news by inventing a Google Chrome extension that can automatically indicate whether stories being shared on the social network have been verified or not.Qinglin Chen, Nabanita De, Anant Goel and Mark Craft created the ‘FiB’ extension (with the slogan “Let’s stop living a lie”) at a Princeton hackathon event on November 11 - 13, a marathon coding event where students have only 36 hours to create an original software or hardware project from scratch.“Before we went to the hackathon there was lots of news on the US election,” De told FRANCE 24's Observers. “People were commenting on who won and why, and lots of people were blaming Facebook for the fake news being shared, which led to voters supporting a certain candidate. That struck us and we thought that we should do something about it.”The group ended up winning the Google Moon Shot award for the most ambitious project at the hackathon, having decided to invent a solution before Facebook even admitted the problem existed.The FiB team explained that their extension works like an ad blocker, reading only whatever content is on your screen currently and ‘scraping’ this information in order to analyse whether it is verified or not.The algorithm works with two levels of checks: first, it checks the link against existing databases of malware and phishing sites such as Google’s Safe Browse, and then grants the article an initial ‘trust’ score. The second stage is to take keywords from the content of the article and see if they match up with other articles in Google and Bing, and another score of reliability is produced. The software then combines the two scores to decide whether the story or link is reliable or not, and a tag appears on the post saying either ‘verified’ or ‘not verified’. If the programme is unable to verify a link, it offers alternative content.The team are convinced of the importance of their project. “Fake news is a serious problem and can lead, maybe indirectly, to bad things,” says De. “If you look at the number of people using Facebook and the percentage of them that perhaps haven’t had much of an education, then it is very easy to target this audience with fake news. It becomes too easy for people trying to sell things.”Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, said the day after the US election results came out that the idea that Facebook could have influenced the presidential race was “a pretty crazy idea”. In a post on Facebook after the election, he said that only a small fraction of the content shared across the site was a hoax.But just a few days after that announcement, Facebook banned fake news sites from profiting from advertising on the social network, following Google’s decision to do the same.The rules of the hackathon meant that the team was obliged to release the extension online as an open source project, meaning that other hackers can use the code and tweak it or improve it themselves.The extension garnered a huge amount of attention in a very short space of time.“We tried to set up a counter to see how many people were downloading it but it kept crashing. The last time that it crashed, we had got up to 50,000 users within two days,” says Goel. “Currently we’re scaling it up so that more people can access our services.”What the team need now is money to back the project – and time, seeing as they’re all full-time students. They are looking at ways of developing the programme, possibly to other browsers or social media networks.They all have different opinions of what Facebook should do to tackle the spread of fake news.“If Facebook starts to verify things itself, that becomes a form of censorship,” says Goel. “Facebook needs to partner up with a software company working on a pro bono basis, which is able to judge links much better than Facebook can as a for-profit company.”“Users should be able to share whatever links they want,” says Craft, “but fake news shouldn’t be able to become trending news.”The team is confident that the propagation of fake news will soon be under control. They’ve already made a very good start.Well. The base of this has been on my computer since... Umm... Since I had the CS6 trial
(Like 6 months ago -_-' oops) I only picked it back up last week after trying to figure out how to draw clouds... Still not entirely happy with the body an proportions (keep in mind that this a VERY stylistic Latias) Please don't expect a Latios, if you say anything about it I swear that many tables will be flipped. This took about 1000000000000000000 hours (more like 15, but still)
I think later on I might patch up the top right hand corner with that off coloured cloud patch, but I'm lazy so that'll never really happen. Overall I do like this. My favourite thing is the wings, but a word of warning my friends... Stay away from the contrast layers and all the luminosity... I think I'm in love with is a biiiiit too much.The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has teamed up with NASA to harness the observational power of drones to improve weather forecasts.
On Aug. 26, the two agencies expect to launch NASA’s unmanned aircraft Global Hawk from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia and aim it straight into Tropical Storm Erika, said NOAA lead systems engineer, John Coffey, in an interview with Nextgov.
The craft will collect a continuous stream of data as it flies either above or in front of the storm.
This is the preliminary phase of NOAA’s four-year mission, called "Sensing Hazards with Operational Unmanned Technology," or SHOUT, which launched in 2014. As the aircraft soars over oceanic regions, it is expected to collect real-time data on moisture, wind speed and wind direction, which scientists will then feed into forecast models at the National Hurricane Center.
The observational data could lead to a drastic improvement in predicting such weather events as tropical storms, winter storms and major floods, according to a NASA press release.
Global Hawk joins a handful of manned planes already in the air collecting data, Coffey said. The difference is an unmanned aircraft can fly at higher altitudes and stay out for longer periods of time.
The plan is for Global Hawk to become a fully functional tool for weather forecast observation, according to NASA.
“It provides us with an observing tool that has the endurance of a satellite but provides finer resolution data and precision of an aircraft," Gary Wick, NOAA’s lead scientist for the mission, said in an agency release.
The project idea was born out of a 2005 paper written by NOAA’s chief science adviser, Alexander MacDonald, Coffey said.
“Since then, we've been fleshing that out, testing a number of different [unmanned aircraft systems] and a number of different domains to accomplish NOAA's missions,” he said.
The tests over the Atlantic Ocean basin are slated to continue until the end of September.Anti racist groups said the broadcaster was giving legitimacy to discredited “pseudo science” which was “irresponsible”.
The first programme, Race: Science's Last Taboo, will see Rageh Omaar, a presenter on the arabic news channel Al-Jazeera, question scientists about Nobel Prize winning James Watson's claims that black people are less intelligent than other races.
In the documentary Psychology professor Richard Lynn from the University of Ulster will say there is a global "league table", using evidence from IQ tests, to claim that intelligence is linked to race, with north-east Asians in the top tier and Australian aborigines at the bottom. He says on the programme that African IQs “don’t rise up to the same level as Europeans”.
British born psychology professor J Philippe Rushton is also interviewed on the programme.
He claims the differences between black and white and East Asian brains is due to general intelligence.
He believes that while women have smaller brain sizes as men, they are just as intelligent as men, but that black people have smaller brain sizes than white people but are not as intelligent as white people.
Promoting the season, Channel 4 has also altered photos of well-known figures such as Baroness Thatcher, the Beatles and US President Barack Obama to change their racial appearances.
The decision to air the programmes during Black History Month has also been criticised.
Ged Grebby, the head of Show Racism The Red Card said: "To broadcast something as controversial is this during Black History month is the absolute antithesis of why we have it. It's about the idea of combating racism, not giving racists a platform."
Paul Meszaros, from Hope not Hate, added: “This isn’t science, this is pseudoscience. It's about giving legitimacy to discredited theories, which is dressed up in language of science which people are more likely to believe.
“It's utterly irresponsible”, he said. “We have seen the rise of racist far-right fascist groups, and by airing programmes that say racism has a scientific basis, it becomes acceptable.”
Oona King, Channel 4's head of diversity and former Labour MP, said the programme shows conclusively "that you cannot link race to IQ".
Omaar also said in a clip of the show that views society found offensive "are not defeated by being ignored".
The show also comes in the wake of the Strictly Come Dancing race row and the decision to allow BNP leader Nick Griffin to appear on Question Time.
King – who was brought in following the Shilpa Shetty race row on Celebrity Big Brother- admitted she was "slightly nervous" at the outset as race issues can range from being "vaguely controversial to incendiary".
King was asked about Strictly host Bruce Forsyth's views that the nation should treat Anton Du Beke's "slip-up" of calling his dance partner Laila Rouass a "Paki" more light-heartedly.
The diversity boss said that when Forsyth was growing up, people believed that race was an indicator of intelligence.
She said: "What's surprising is how those views directly impact us today and how those views persist."
She continued: "Sweeping racist views and opinions under the carpet will not make those views go away."
"My view is that we need to open up the terms of the debate, not close it down. I think there's room for people questioning people's responses to the debate", she said.
Another show in the series called How Racist Are You? will take 30 British volunteers to show how everyone can be susceptible to bigotry, while Is It Better To Be Mixed Race? will challenge beliefs about racial purity.
Channel 4 is also planning a programme examining a trend for "deracialisation" surgery, through the stories of people who go to extreme lengths to make their bodies look more Western.
The season also puts race issues in a historical context with its show The Human Zoo: Science's Dirty Secret.
It looks at how, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, scientists were so fascinated by race that thousands of "exotic" people from around the world were being put on display in "zoos" as scientific demonstrations of racial difference.
It tells the story of Ota Benga, a Batwa pygmy from the Belgian Congo, who was first put on display at the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair and then the Bronx Zoo where he was labelled as the'missing link'.
The film also looks at how "pseudoscience" helped attempts to legitimise the horrors of Nazi Germany.
A Channel 4 spokesperson said: "This new season of programmes sets out to explode some of the myths about race and science and to cast light on the history and consequences of scientific racism.
"The Season debunks the myths about science and race – science has been misused to legitimise racist beliefs and practices – these programmes are the antidote
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Cup yachts. A four-inch-wide strip can support a family car. “Materials technology had to come of age before you could make this kind of aircraft,” says Mr. Durham. “Vectran, which is one of the materials we use, is similar to Kevlar.”
But what about structural failure? During the early Thirties, the U.S. navy, undeterred by the R101 disaster, continued with its airship programme, commissioning two helium-filled goliaths, USS Akron and USS Macon. Both suffered structural defects and both crashed in bad weather at sea, the former with great loss of life.
“Pre-war rigid airships were built around a metal structure, and when that structure failed it stayed failed,” says Mr Durham. “The stiffness of the Airlander hull is provided by the envelope itself — there is no interior skeleton — so instead of snapping under stress, it bends. Airlander could fold up by several tens of feet in a storm and retain its structural integrity.
“The other plus is that it can run on just one of its four engines. In the extremely unlikely event it lost all its engines, the effect would be rather less dramatic than on a Boeing 747 — it would simply glide down to earth.”
The U.K. government is backing Hybrid Air Vehicles with a £2.5-million grant, but the company is looking for a few wealthy investors to come on board.
“Eighty per cent of this aircraft is made by British companies and we are trying to stay as British as we can,” says Mr. Durham.
But why airships? He was a satellite man once.
“It’s a fascination with being out of the mainstream,” he says. “Look at the U.K. aerospace industry today. Predominantly, we make bits for other people’s aircraft. This is a British business that makes complete aircraft.”
In the churchyard of St. Mary, Cardington, the victims of His Majesty’s Airship R101 rest side by side. Inside the church, mounted in the nave, is a fire-damaged Royal Air Force Ensign, a miraculous survivor of her end. The era of the British airship appeared to die with that graceful but doomed lady of the sky. Yet only now may we be witnessing its true beginning.
The Daily TelegraphJose Mourinho has joked that the only thing stopping Eden Hazard from signing a new deal at Chelsea is the lack of a 'nice pen'.
Hazard's representatives and Blues officials have been locked in discussions for months over new five-year contract worth £200,000-per-week, but Mourinho isn't concerned about the wait.
He told GetWestLondon: 'I am buying a nice pen.
Jose Mourinho has joked that he must buy a 'nice pen' before Eden Hazard sings a new Chelsea deal
Hazard has been one of Chelsea's star men this season, scoring 13 goals in all competitions
Hazard looks set to sign a new five-year contract worth £200,000-per-week at Stamford Bridge
'I need a bit of time to go to Sloane Street and buy a proper pen. I just need time to buy the pen and after that I think there is not a long time to go!'
The Belgian winger has been in sensational form for Chelsea so far this season, scoring 13 goals in all competitions, and has shown no signs of wanting out of the Stamford Bridge club.
Asked if he should be concerned, Mourinho added: 'Why? What's the problem? He has a contract with Chelsea for two or three more years, why should we be in a hurry? Are you worried? I'm not worried.'
Mourinho's side face a Premier League clash against Everton on Wednesday night as the Blues look to take another step towards a first domestic title since the 2009-10 season.
Cesc Fabregas is expected to start after recovering from a hamstring strain, but Chelsea must do without star striker Diego Costa as he sits out the final game of a three-game ban.
Chelsea new boy Juan Cuadrado (centre) keeps the ball away from Hazard during training on TuesdayNew tool gives structural strength to 3-D printed works
September 18, 2012
Bedrich Benes, an associate professor of computer graphics at Purdue University, is working with Advanced Technology Labs of Adobe Inc. to develop a computer program that automatically strengthens objects created using 3-D printing. The innovation is needed because the printed fabrications are often fragile and fall apart or lose their shape, as evidenced by some of the failed or misshapen objects on display here. (Purdue University photo/Mark Simons)
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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Objects created using 3-D printing have a common flaw: They are fragile and often fall apart or lose their shape.
"I have an entire zoo of broken 3-D printed objects in my office," said Bedrich Benes, an associate professor of computer graphics at Purdue University.
The printed fabrications often fail at points of high stress.
"You can go online, create something using a 3-D printer and pay $300, only to find that it isn't strong enough to survive shipping and arrives in more than one piece," said Radomir Mech, senior research manager from Adobe's Advanced Technology Labs.
The 3-D printers create shapes layer-by-layer out of various materials, including metals and plastic polymers. Whereas industry has used 3-D printing in rapid prototyping for about 15 years, recent innovations have made the technology practical for broader applications, he said.
"Now 3-D printing is everywhere," Benes said. "Imagine you are a hobbyist and you have a vintage train model. Parts are no longer being manufactured, but their specifications can be downloaded from the Internet and you can generate them using a 3-D printer."
The recent rise in 3-D printing popularity has been fueled by a boom in computer graphics and a dramatic reduction of the cost of 3-D printers, Benes said.
Researchers at Purdue and Adobe's Advanced Technology Labs have jointly developed a program that automatically imparts strength to objects before they are printed.
"It runs a structural analysis, finds the problematic part and then automatically picks one of the three possible solutions," Benes said.
Findings were detailed in a paper presented during the SIGGRAPH 2012 conference in August. Former Purdue doctoral student Ondrej Stava created the software application, which automatically strengthens objects either by increasing the thickness of key structural elements or by adding struts. The tool also uses a third option, reducing the stress on structural elements by hollowing out overweight elements.
"We not only make the objects structurally better, but we also make them much more inexpensive," Mech said. "We have demonstrated a weight and cost savings of 80 percent."
The new tool automatically identifies "grip positions" where a person is likely to grasp the object. A "lightweight structural analysis solver" analyzes the object using a mesh-based simulation. It requires less computing power than traditional finite-element modeling tools, which are used in high-precision work such as designing jet engine turbine blades.
"The 3-D printing doesn't have to be so precise, so we developed our own structural analysis program that doesn't pay significant attention to really high precision," Benes said.
The paper was authored by Stava, now a computer scientist at Adobe, doctoral student Juraj Vanek; Benes; Mech; and Nathan Carr, a principal scientist at Adobe's Advanced Technology Labs.
Future research may focus on better understanding how structural strength is influenced by the layered nature of 3-D-printed objects. The researchers may also expand their algorithms to include printed models that have moving parts.
A video demonstrating the new program is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8bPXk5od4I&feature=plcp
Writer: Emil Venere, 765-494-4709, [email protected]
Source: Bedrich Benes, 765-496-2954, [email protected]
Note to Journalists: The research paper is available from Emil Venere, 765-494-4709, [email protected]
Stress Relief: Improving Structural Strength of 3-D Printable ObjectsThis article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com
A headless body, stretched out along the beach, appears through the smudged window of our ATV as we sail across the sand. There’s a windy lawlessness up here along the Chukchi Sea; I’m reassured by the rifle lashed to the lead ATV in the caravan. The archaeologist at the helm passes the decaying creature without pause. Anne Jensen has seen many headless walruses before—this one was likely already dead when it washed ashore and was relieved of its tusks. Jensen’s not worried about poachers; the rifle is for polar bears—the Arctic’s fiercest of predators. And Jensen seems entirely capable of staying calm and slamming a bullet into one.
We’re just south of Barrow, Alaska, heading to an archaeological site at a place called Walakpa Bay. It’s a grassy coastline that’s been occupied by semi-nomadic native Alaskans for at least 4,000 years. Their story, told in material remains, is scattered across the landscape we traverse at 60 kilometers per hour, past flocks of ducks and eroding bluffs. Most archaeologists mine the soil to better understand how the animals, landscape, and climate of the past may have shaped a culture. For three decades, Jensen has tried to find and tell the stories locked in frozen dirt here on Alaska’s North Slope, the home of the Iñupiat, as they are known today. But as much as Jensen wishes she could do just that, her most important work on this thawing, eroding land is simply trying to protect what’s left of Walakpa, and other vanishing sites, from a warming climate.
At the world’s edge, the Arctic coastline is on the front lines of climate change. As the length of time ice stays fastened to it has plummeted, the shoreline here has eroded faster than almost anywhere else in the world. Two years ago, villagers alerted Jensen to a storm that had wiped out about half of the Walakpa site. The rest could be erased soon, she says, when the storms whip up again. “It’s like a library’s on fire,” says Jensen, equal parts bitterness and Midwestern matter-of-factness. Jensen is the kind of person who would find the notion of books burning for any reason deeply unjust.
Saving Walakpa properly would require months of encampment, dedicated freezers, and soil engineers. There’s no money for all that. “But you gotta try,” she says. “We need to get this data now.” She’s known up here on Alaska’s North Slope for her thoroughness and respect for local traditions—and perhaps above all, her tenacity. Exhibit number one: this five-day mini excursion, a Hail Mary dig to document and preserve a few artifacts on a shoestring budget. The North Slope Borough government has chipped in a few support staff; an archaeologist from Maryland, a local anthropologist, and a PhD candidate from Ohio have volunteered their time; Jensen gave frequent-flier miles to a geoarchaeologist from Idaho to round out the five-scientist crew. She paid out of her pocket for quick and easy field meals—ramen cups.
Two days before leaving, Jensen rummaged through excavation equipment in a dusty garage. Tendrils of her dark hair, sometimes corralled in a ski cap, fell on the beige overalls she often wears. (They reflect the industrial culture that many Iñupiaq have embraced here on the North Slope.) “Okay, so we packed the toilet paper already,” she said. Though she’s tightly focused out in the field, here her small black eyes roved across shovels and buckets. Much of the gear was purchased a few years ago, back when the grant money flowed. Her phone frequently vibrated. (Her chronically ill daughter and a client—a telecom firm—were apparently competing with the remains of hundreds of generations of native Alaskans for her attention.) “Bungee cords are always good,” she said, and we tossed some into a plastic tub.
A sign on her office door quotes US president Teddy Roosevelt: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” Jensen has made a steady career on the edge of civilization with limited resources, studying archaeological sites before the sea devours them. Over the centuries, Walakpa’s inhabitants have, even more so, exemplified Roosevelt’s credo. They’ve learned the rhythms of the whales and the ice and the birds, and they’ve mastered the art of adaptation to a challenging life at sea and on the tundra. But as our ATV thrums along the hard sand and waves relentlessly crash against the shoreline, I wonder to myself: what does saving Walakpa even mean?
Raised in Ballston Spa, New York, Jensen first came to Barrow in 1983 with her husband, Glenn Sheehan, an archaeologist who no longer works in the field. The richness of high-latitude sites, she hoped, would yield novel archaeological data. An average dig in the lower 48, she likes to say, might yield “a banker’s box full of stone tools.” Permafrost sites, by contrast, allow scientists to “actually see what [inhabitants] were eating.” Alaska’s frozen soils preserve organic materials that provide a wealth of ecological and environmental data. Jensen has built her career in hopes of making new kinds of conclusions about the climate, animals, and hunting behaviors of indigenous peoples that once settled Alaska. Just by living, day-to-day, season-to-season, the ancient tribes Jensen studies “were doing environmental sampling back then for us, going back three, four thousand years.” The DNA she collects hints at population dynamics and migratory patterns. Stable isotopes from bones can provide clues to animals’ diets and their positions in the food web. “If we excavate one of these sites we could fill a 20-foot [six-meter] shipping container full of artifacts and samples. Which we’ve done, by the way,” she says.
Jensen and Sheehan have made a comfy home in Hut 170 on the rusty, old Naval Arctic Research Laboratory campus, known as NARL. New Yorker magazines and coffee-table books on archaeology abound, and outside Jensen tends buttercups and willow in what she calls North America’s “northernmost garden.” But what matters most to her is proximity to world-famous archaeological sites. Birnirk—a National Historic Landmark first excavated in 1936, with some of the first evidence of ancient northern Alaskans—is only a 10-minute drive away. Several kilometers farther up the beach lies Nuvuk, the deserted spit of land at one of the most northern tips of North America, where some of Barrow’s oldest Iñupiaq residents remember growing up. And Walakpa, to the south, may be the most important site in the region, says Dennis Stanford, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, whose excavations in the late 1960s and graduate dissertation on Walakpa published in 1976 put the site on the scientific map.
So it’s a heady place for Jensen to serve as de facto town archaeologist. Jensen is an archaeological contractor, her employer a science firm in Barrow that provides research studies and logistics to the local government and visiting scientists. Hers is an almost daily task of evaluating threats to artifacts—and human remains. The ancestors of Barrow’s residents, many in unmarked graves, are found everywhere in the region. That makes archaeology part of the social fiber. And Jensen has become the keeper of this thawing legacy. In 2005, a few dozen archaeologists and volunteers were finishing up a dig at Point Franklin, a coastal site south of Walakpa, when a massive search and rescue helicopter landed on the beach. “People dropped their shovels and their jaws,” recalls Sheehan. “There’s an emergency; we need an archaeologist!” a helicopter crew member called to Jensen. Twenty minutes away, in a village called Wainwright, holes for pilings were about to be drilled in an area where residents thought the unmarked grave of their stillborn child lay. Jensen examined the site for a few hours and declared it free of burials. Jensen knows from deep experience that Iñupiaq oral knowledge is often dead right. “I’d be upset too if someone told me that, but we were glad to allay their concerns,” she says.
Indigenous Alaskans have coped with eroding coasts for centuries or more. In 1852, locals told British captain Rochfort Maguire that erosion forced their grandparents to move Nuvuk more than two kilometers inland. So the community was concerned, though not entirely surprised, when in the 1990s human remains began to poke out of a bluff along the Nuvuk beach. The disintegrating coastline was claiming a graveyard that was once far inland. “The wishes of the community were to see [the bones] reinterred near where they were originally buried,” says Jana Harcharek, Director of Iñupiaq Education for the North Slope. Following careful procedures specified by village elders, a team of volunteers and students, led by Jensen since 1997, reinterred the bones. The team has subsequently found and reburied dozens more. “Anne has always been very consultative—she consults with elders and community members about how to proceed. She’s helped the community tremendously,” adds Harcharek.
While Jensen’s efforts at Nuvuk fostered goodwill, the site also proved scientifically valuable. Archaeologists had written off the site as “contact era”—too young to yield important data. Jensen’s work, however, revealed arrowheads of an early culture known as Ipiutak that existed in Alaska until roughly 400 CE. “We were completely surprised,” says Jensen during an afternoon visit to the windswept, empty site. By luck, she’d dug deeper than previous archaeologists—they hadn’t had exposed human remains to clue them in—and warming permafrost had helped, too. She called a bulldozer in to carefully remove top layers, subsequently allowing volunteers to reveal buried wooden Ipiutak structures that had tantalizing detail. But when Jensen applied to the US National Science Foundation to mount a full excavation, her grant application was—like most applications on the first try—denied. “I didn’t bother reapplying because by the time we would have reapplied and gotten funded the land wasn’t going to be there,” she says, pointing at the waves. The soil containing the wooden structures is now tens of meters out to sea.
Jensen nurtures her ties to the Iñupiaq community, and their knowledge has in turn informed her archaeology. She brings her staff, for example, to the early summer Nalukatuq celebrations, in which whaling crews share meat and throw each other in the air with sealskin blankets. That “may not sound like archaeology, but whaling has been the organizing focus of this culture since before most of the sites I work on were formed,” she wrote on her blog. “I really don’t see how one can expect to interpret these sites without a pretty good understanding of what whaling actually entails.” In 2012, she published a paper showing that modern whalers keep their whaling gear outside of their homes; it was an effort to challenge researchers who she felt focused too much on the interior of excavated dwellings, leading to inaccurate conclusions about Eskimo culture.
But a debate over which parts of a site to excavate is meaningless if the site disappears entirely. In 2013, after a summer storm slammed the coast, hunters reported seeing wooden structures protruding from a bluff at Walakpa. For Jensen, the site has special scientific value. Unlike other sites, such as Nuvuk where the occupation record includes gaps, archaeologists believe indigenous people continuously hunted, fished, and camped at Walakpa for millennia. That makes comparisons of flora, fauna, and human culture particularly telling. Its cultural significance is deep too, says Harcharek. “People continue to use it today. It’s a very important waterfowl hunting site in the spring and a regular camping spot.” (Ualiqpaa, as the site is called in the modern Iñupiaq language, means “western settlement entrance.”) Some of the last elders to live at Walakpa remembered complaining about the smell of ancient sea mammal oil in the sod houses. (Many in Barrow call the place Monument; a modest-sized concrete monument there commemorates American humorist Will Rogers and aviator Wiley Post who died when the airplane they were flying for a “happy-go-lucky aerial tour” crashed on the site in 1935.)
What had been a mostly stable site was suddenly at mortal risk. Jensen and a team of volunteers worked in the cold to rescue artifacts as the Arctic Ocean lapped right up to their screening buckets. A ground squirrel had burrowed under the excavation area, destabilizing it further; a polar bear wandered 200 meters in the distance. But the crew’s perseverance paid off. The midden they were excavating yielded clay pottery and tools made of baleen, bone, ivory, and myriad other animal parts.
But the following fall, after a storm, Jensen was crestfallen to find the area of Walakpa she had excavated completely gone. In a damage report she wrote following the storm, she mentioned that the exposed soil allowed looters to steal an ice pick, a bucket made of baleen, and possibly a couple of human skulls. Erosion, however, was the main enemy. “We need to find funds for a field season next year if we do not want to risk losing precious cultural heritage,” she wrote. The rest of Walakpa could disappear at any moment, but at least one archeologist in Northern Alaska wasn’t yet willing to concede defeat.
Funds for a field season have not been found. It is next year. Precious cultural heritage has been lost.
There will be no respite from the waves at Walakpa. There is no strong barrier in place to fully protect Barrow, population 4,400, let alone one to defend this tiny patch of beach that’s known only to the world as the place a pair of Yankees perished eight decades ago.
In lieu of an extended excavation, Jensen has arranged a four-day, five-scientist crew. And in the days before the dig her attention is, as ever, divided. She flies to Kotzebue, 500 kilometers to the south, to do a survey for the telecom company. Then a series of canceled flights keeps her stuck in Fairbanks for a day, her luggage lost by the airline. The dig gets rescheduled and rescheduled again. On the morning of the trip, the packing of the ATVs drags on, with delays for Jensen to send work emails and to collect blood-pressure medication for a member of the team. At Hut 170, she’s fussing over her toiletries. She’s almost out the door when Sheehan says, “And a kiss for your husband?” She stops, smiles, and they share a brief kiss. Outside we all board our vehicles. “Finally,” she declares, “we’re off.”
We arrive at Walakpa after about an hour, in the early afternoon. At the ocean’s edge, the land abruptly ends, forming a high bluff above the sand below. The bluff is cleaved down the middle; from the water, it looks like a 25-meter-wide club sandwich that’s been torn in half. Just last year the bluff, encrusted with artifacts, extended farther out toward the sea by about the length of a small school bus. All that’s there now is salty air.
As the crew unpacks the gear, Jensen lies on her stomach to peer down into the crack, assessing the soil layers that descend to about twice her height and stretch back 4,000 years in time. She lists the dangers to her team: tumbling into the crack, “half a ton of sod falling on you,” “impalement” on stakes, getting crushed by soil. “Nobody goes into the crack,” she declares. Too bad, says geomorphologist Owen Mason, who sees “good wood” of ancient houses in there. Standing in a safe area, Jensen examines the exposed strata. Top layers, still deeper than the researchers went in 1968, could shed light on the most recent occupations. The lower layers could offer clues about when the Paleo-Eskimos first began hunting here. And organic material throughout the strata could shed light on the plants and animals that constituted their world.
With just five days to work, the archaeological team must make a series of painful decisions. “Ideally you’d like to excavate by hand every last inch of everything,” Jensen admits. A full excavation, painstakingly sifting and sorting each level of the soil, is too time consuming, so Jensen opts to bag a bulk sample from each layer and to screen the rest. The team takes what’s called a column sample, digging straight down along the face of the exposed layers. It allows Jensen to preserve the relative position and stratigraphy of the soil and artifacts from each layer. The team debates how wide to make the column: wider means more chance to find items. But Jensen, informed by experience, knows the risks of ambition when time is short. “I’d rather have a narrow, but full, column sample,” she tells her colleagues. (The column sample also comes at a price: it exposes more layers to thawing and erosion.) They “straighten” the bluff face to remove a dangerous overhang, without screening or storing it. “I feel bad doing it, but there’s only so much time,” mutters Jensen.
The delays mount: while Mason carefully records the kinds of layers in the sample—sand, gravel, midden, and marine mammal fat chilled to the consistency of peanut butter—Jensen has to help the field assistants put up a tent, only to discover key metal pieces are missing. And then a local hunter comes by and stops to chat with Jensen. Finally, the scientists select the site for Column Sample 1, or CS1, which measures about the height of an average doorway and about 75 centimeters wide and deep. Excavation reveals wood chips, modified animal bones, and stone flakes. As they excavate, they map the objects’ positions. They document and put the bulk samples into bags that they’ll lug back to Barrow for future analysis. Jensen will later package and mail a quarter of each sample to Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, for the PhD candidate, Laura Crawford, to study. By 2 a.m., the sun has dimmed, though is still up. The team members work until their ability to delineate soil layers dims, too, and then collapse in their tents.
It’s after dinner the next day when Crawford discovers calamity: CS1’s face has collapsed, ruining their work. Later, she says her thoughts ran along the lines of: “Oh shit. What do we do now.” (She was also relieved no one was working at the time. “It could have been disastrous,” she adds.)
“We have to move more quickly,” Jensen tells the others, and then she administers more triage. The team abandons two test layers, just outside the site, that they had been excavating to provide soil comparisons. They begin a new column, CS2—only two-thirds the size of the first—next to CS1, and they dig it with a shovel, not a trowel, taking fewer bulk samples than planned. “Salvage archaeology,” Crawford says.
As the others rush to continue the dig, Jensen commutes back to town on an ATV twice during the week—she’s needed for other work. (“My day job, what are you going to do,” she says.) Before leaving, the group stakes heavy black fabric over the exposed layers to try to protect them from erosion and thawing. “If we don’t get a bad storm, it will be okay. If we do, hasta la pasta,” Jensen says to Mason. Sure enough, after a storm a month later, the half of the “sandwich” facing the ocean is washed away.
The group has long gone its separate ways, back to Idaho and Ohio and Hut 170. Labeled with black marker, the Walakpa bags sit in freezer storage back at NARL. One day soon these bags will be all that’s left of Monument, of Walakpa, of Ualiqpaa. “I’m glad we got the column samples when we did,” Jensen tells me by phone. Do I detect a hint of pride in her voice? Saving Walakpa, it seems, is less about land and more about human determination and dignity. Do what you can, I think to myself, with what you have, where you are.
Reporting for this article was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Read more coastal science stories at hakaimagazine.com.The city of Boston today will unveil three electric-vehicle charging stations near City Hall Plaza, providing exclusive downtown parking — complete with a power boost — for those who drive the environmentally friendly cars.
By putting the stations in a high-profile location, the city hopes to encourage drivers to abandon gasoline-powered vehicles and adopt the emerging electric option.
For the regular $1.25-an-hour price of feeding the parking meter at three designated spots on Cambridge Street, drivers will be able to juice up their gas-free vehicles there for no additional cost.
The charging stations look like boxy, modern parking meters with one significant difference: an 11-foot-long power cord coiled neatly at the front.
“The idea with these three charging stations is to get a sense of how they are used,’’ said Veneet K. Gupta, the director of policy and planning for the Boston Transportation Department. “In the long term, we want to explore a citywide program. But we want to do that so it’s timed with the market as more and more people are buying electric vehicles.’’
With a $7,500 federal tax rebate for buyers and other encouragement from the White House, automakers have begun aggressively pushing all-electric cars. While the popularity of hybrid cars, which run on a combination of gas and electricity and don’t need to be charged, has grown steadily in recent years, use of fully electric cars remains low.
But more are on the way. The Nissan Leaf is expected to be available here this fall and 2,000 have been ordered in the Boston area, City Hall officials say. General Motors also plans to introduce the Chevy Volt to New England this fall and has ambitions to sell 15,000.
“This is here, it’s happening now,’’ said Andy Chu, a vice president of Watertown-based A123 Systems Inc., which makes a new kind of lithium ion battery for electric vehicles. “It’s not just [research and development], it’s not some high-tech curiosity.’’
People who regularly see vehicles recharging on Cambridge Street will begin to see electric cars as “a very natural thing,’’ said Chu, whose company expects to manufacture enough batteries to power the equivalent of 30,000 electric vehicles.
Boston officials have been encouraging developers to include a minimum of five charging stations with all new buildings. One charging station has been in use at the Seaport Boston Hotel for more than a year, city officials said. Another five were included in a new building on Clarendon Street in the Back Bay and more are on the way.
Boston is not the only city to push the new technology. Mayor Edwin M. Lee of San Francisco issued an executive directive earlier this month to install more than 80 electric vehicle charging stations in his city over the next two years. That initiative will cost an estimated $500,000.
Boston’s plan for three public outlets is comparatively modest. Manufactured by Coulomb Technologies, the ChargePoint electric stations each cost roughly $4,500, city officials said.
The stations offer two power levels — 110/120 volt and 240 volt — to accommodate most electric vehicles. Electricity is expected to run $15 a month for all three units, Gupta said, and will vary with usage. The city will cover that expense.
But there will be another cost. Drivers of gas-powered vehicles will lose three prime parking places in the heart of Boston. A ticket for a gas-powered car parking in an electric-car space will run $55.
“This is something we discussed and we felt that the overall purpose of encouraging electric vehicles outweighed any issues about taking up three public spaces,’’ Gupta said. “There are lots of public garages, so it’s not like there are no spaces at all.’’
Andrew Ryan can be reached at [email protected].
© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Seat "A," with its faux-wood look and rounded back support, has won the hearts of Staten Island Ferry riders.
The option received the most votes during the Department of Transportation's ferry seat survey, which let riders choose from three potential seat designs for the next class of Staten Island Ferries.
A total of 1,900 commuters took part in the survey, according to the Department of Transportation (DOT). Sample seats were displayed in the Whitehall Terminal, with voting available online.
Seat A, more closely reminiscent of the wooden benches of the John F. Kennedy boat, received 44 percent of the tallied votes. It narrowly beat the option B, which was favored by 43 percent of voters. Seat C featured orange-painted aluminum -- the most contrasting of the three choices; it garnered 12 percent of the vote.
In an email, a DOT spokesman said that back support most important factor that influenced people's choice, followed closely by angle of seat.
While the final product will look somewhat different than the samples, option A will be featured on the two new Staten Island Ferry boats, currently being designed by the Elliot Bay Design Group, that will replace the three ships of the remaining Kennedy and Barberi classes.
The DOT spokesman said the department will be incorporating survey feedback to refine the design with the ferry contractor and that a big objective was to find riders' preferred back support and seat height.
During an interview with the Advance this summer, John Waterhouse, chief concept engineer at Elliot Bay Design Group, said that many people had requested simply replicating the exact benches of the Kennedy class. But wood-based seats aren't compliant with current marine fire regulations.
"They don't look like they're comfortable but they are," said Nicholas Zvegintzov, the chair of the Staten Island Ferry Riders Committee, on the Kennedy's seating. "The seat meets the back without any rounding at all and that turns out to be very comfortable."
Although Zvegintzov didn't like the color choice, he said he preferred the seat angle of option C over the curved back of option A.
"I only chose on the basis of angle because angle beats other characteristics," he said.Oxford University’s college system is in need of reform, the vice-Chancellor has said, as she bemoaned the “waste of resources” that the current set-up gives rise to.
Professor Louise Richardson said that “much of the success of Oxford University can be attributed to its devolved structure” but expressed concern about the “duplication” of bureaucracy.
She suggested that unless Oxford reforms its “sclerotic” administrative structure, the university faces “slow but definite decline”.
Attempts to centralise functions at Oxford have in the past been controversial as the autonomy of colleges is fiercely defended by dons.
Addressing academics and lecturers at her annual Oration, a special meeting of Congregation which takes place at start of each academic year, she that changes are necessary at a time of “ever increasing regulatory burdens” on universities.Sharks are in big trouble on the Great Barrier Reef and worldwide, according to an Australian-based team who have developed a world-first way to measure rates of decline in shark populations.
"There is mounting evidence of widespread, substantial, and ongoing declines in the abundance of shark populations worldwide, coincident with marked rises in global shark catches in the last half-century," say Mizue Hisano, Professor Sean Connolly and Dr William Robbins from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University.
"Overfishing of sharks is now recognized as a major global conservation concern, with increasing numbers of shark species added to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's list of threatened species," they say in the latest issue of the international science journal PLos ONE.
"Evaluating population trends for sharks is complicated," explains Professor Connolly. "The simplest approach of looking at trends in fisheries catches doesn't work well for sharks. First, many countries with coral reefs don't keep reliable records of catches or fishing effort. Second, around 75 per cent of the world shark catch consists of illegal and unreported finning. Third, sharks may be caught, discarded, and not reported when fishers are targeting other species."
"An alternative is to take estimates of shark growth, birth, and mortality rates, and use these to calculate population growth rates. Estimates of growth and birth rates are easy to get, but it is very hard to get good estimates of mortality in sharks and other large animals," he says.
To deal with this problem, the team developed several alternative models, which combined birth rates and growth rates for sharks with a variety of different methods for estimating mortality. They then used state-of-the art statistical methods to combine the uncertainty associated with each of these methods and arrive at a more robust long-term population prediction for two GBR shark species -- the grey reef shark and the whitetip reef shark.
As a further check on their results, the researchers used their population projections to see how well their models could explain differences in shark abundances on fished and unfished reefs, based on how long the unfished reefs had been protected.
The team found that results obtained by all methods of assessing shark populations were in close agreement that sharks are declining rapidly due to fishing.
"Our different approaches all painted a surprisingly consistent picture of the current state of population decline, but also of the potential recovery of these species if they are adequately protected," says Mizue Hisano, the study's lead author.
For the Great Barrier Reef shark populations, the close agreement between the different methods appears to justify management actions to substantially reduce the fishing mortality of reef sharks.
"More broadly, we believe that our study demonstrates that this approach may be applied to a broad range of exploited species for which direct estimates of mortality are ambiguous or lacking, leading to improved estimates of population growth."The vice chair of the Republican Party in Travis County, Texas wants to remove the newly-elected chairman of the chapter from his post over comments he tweeted Tuesday about the Clintons having sex and jailing members of the Bush family.
Robert Morrow won the position with 54 percent of the vote, according to the Texas Tribune. GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak, the local party’s vice chair, tweeted shortly after Morrow’s win that he was “exploring” options to remove him before he takes over that position in June:
I am exploring several options to remove Robert Morrow as Travis County GOP chairman. His election is a disaster & unacceptable. — Matt Mackowiak (@MattMackowiak) March
|
Software and Sublicensing Agreements. SCO needed ownership of
the copyrights to bring such claims, as Novell itself acknowledged by asserting
ownership of the copyrights precisely to foreclose SCOs contract claims against
IBM.
The evidence will show that (1) SCOs capacity to bring claims to enforce the
UNIX and UnixWare copyrights is an integral and necessary component of operating
the UNIX and UnixWare licensing businesses, (2) SCOs copyright claims against
IBM were premised on UNIX and UnixWare copyrights existing as of the execution
of the APA, and (3) such copyrights covered all of the technology in UNIX and
the majority of the technology in UnixWare.
Contrary to Novells prior argument, moreover, Amendment No. 2 does not compel
SCO to show that it was unable to operate its business without suing IBM in
particular, but even if it did, SCO easily meets the standard. If SCO were
unable to pursue or recover on those claims against IBM, SCO would be unable to
exercise the rights in the entire UNIX business, which includes the right to
pursue claims to protect misuse of the UNIX and UnixWare source code.
[ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: lnuss on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 05:59 PM EDT
I got on the web a bit ago, not yet expecting to hear anything, and I was
wonderfully surprised by the news! And, there were already a bit over 400
comments. I just looked again, less than a minute ago, and there were just about
600 comments. Wow! I bet that's a record (for Groklaw) of comments in a short
time period.
Not Red Dress Time yet, perhaps, but it's (figuratively) around the corner.
And ever so many thanks to all the reporters we've had at the various
trials/briefings/etc. over the years. And even greater thanks to PJ who has done
an almost unbelievable job keeping us all informed and explaining to us about
the various legal procedures/rules/etc.
SUPER!
---
Larry N. [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 06:02 PM EDT
That is of course unfair; it took seven years! [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: PolR on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 06:16 PM EDT
Dixit PJ: Linux didn't sign contracts with SCO. There is the UnitedLinux contract. The arbitration has not been resolved yet. [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 06:17 PM EDT
On the surface SCO seems to be plain crazy pursuing this litigation against
obvious odds. But what if that isnt the objective. What if microsoft is using
this to divert attention while it quietly pursues its more sinister plans:
bashing open source in europe. hedging open source projects in with patents to
block their development options (see sudo patent as an example), bullying
companies to sign patent protection agreements etc. If that is microsofts plan
then they will want this litigation to go on and on until the last possible
moment. Someone very big is underwriting this litigation. For example, even the
way that the trustee has swung in line with the litigation speaks of big
personal rewards. SCO isnt in a position to offer those rewards. the elephant in
the drawing room is. I think whether SCO loses is almost inconsequential to the
objectives behind the litigation (an unexpected bonus if they did win). i'm sure
the boies boys are being well remunerated by somebody for all their effort. [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 06:18 PM EDT
Authored by: eschasi on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 06:19 PM EDT
This inspired me to go back and look at a few items from Court Rules: Novell owns the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights! Novell has right to waive! I'm savoring such gems from Judge Kimballs decision as... the court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights. Therefore, SCO's First Claim for Relief for slander of title and Third Claim for specific performance are dismissed, as are the copyright ownership portions of SCO's Fifth Claim for Relief for unfair competition and Second Claim for Relief for breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. The court denies SCO's cross-motion for summary judgment on its own slander of title, breach of contract, and unfair competition claims, and on Novell's slander of title claim. And...Novell is entitled to a declaration of rights under its Fourth Claim for Relief that it was and is entitled, at its sole discretion, to direct SCO to waive its claims against IBM and Sequent, and SCO is obligated to recognize Novell's waiver of SCO's claims against IBM and Sequent... And who could forget PJ's pithy comment: That's Aaaaall, Folks! The court also ruled that "SCO is obligated to recognize Novell's waiver of SCO's claims against IBM and Sequent". That's the ball game. There are a couple of loose ends, but the big picture is, SCO lost. Oh, and it owes Novell a lot of money from the Microsoft and Sun licenses. It does my heart good to have all that stuff re-affirmed. Break out the chocolate and scotch, honey, I'm comin' home to celebrate. [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: seanlynch on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 06:19 PM EDT
Congratulations Novell
And thank you, everyone, at Groklaw [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 06:22 PM EDT
The UST needs to wake up from his stupor and recommend an end be put to this.
All of the converter Novell funds were used to fight Novell, and SCOX lost. Now
more money is going to be wasted fighting IBM? The same IBM which held off the
US Government?
Move to convert to Chapter 7 and shut this abomination down.
hpn
(yeah, I forgot my password, what are you going to do, take me out back and
shoot me? :) ) [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 06:25 PM EDT
PJ... A sincere thank you. I took some offense to the tone of the site and
stopped posting here during it's first few months. I have continued to be an
avid reader and as long as your site exists I will remain so. Your service in
providing factual data to the community and the world at large has been
invaluable. You cannot be thanked enough. If I wore one then my hat would be off
to you. This is a sweet victory. It's not over as appeals will loom but it is
vindication of your efforts and the smear put on the open source community by
those at SCO who attempted to blackmail (in the vernacular if not the legal
sense) the world at large.
Again I thank you.
[ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 06:25 PM EDT
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 06:26 PM EDT
From Businessweek...
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-30/novell-owns-unix-copyrights-jury-say
s-in-defeat-for-sco-group.html
"Still pending before U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart in Salt Lake City is
whether the copyrights should be transferred to SCO for the future and whether
Waltham, Massachusetts-based Novell breached the contract with SCO by not
allowing SCO to go after IBM, Jacobs said." [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 06:34 PM EDT
Here's one thing that remains, that will absolutely kill Cahn's dreams of continuing the IBM case. 2. The judge should decide SCO's breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing, Novell's claim for declaratory judgment regarding the waiver, and SCO's claim for specific performance. Footnote 1 indicates the parties dispute what is left to be tried by anybody on the good faith claim. Remember, these issues are still before the judge. When he rules that Novell has the rights as listed in the contract, regarding the waiver, SCO can no longer pursue the IBM case. Novell is going to get the court to say so. I don't know why Cahn thinks he can, has he not followed this litigation? He's an ex-judge. How can he be so blind? The IBM case is going nowhere. It's like he's been hit with an "Imperious Curse", and everything Yarro says he does. --Celtic_hackr [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 06:39 PM EDT
If you haven't actually taken the time to compare the Linux code base and Unix Sys V. Please be willing to consider spending the resources to do that. With those results in hand, you can put forth an official press release as an owner of the copyrights clearing stating whether or not Linux infringes. This would be a serious step in the direction of preventing a future would-be SCOG from ever attempting to use Unix in the same fashion again. It would also be a significant step in clearing the FUD about Linux. After all... the copyright owner is in the most official position to be able to Legally analyze and clear someone else of copyright infringement :) RAS [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 06:40 PM EDT
Question: How can SCO go after IBM? I mean sure they can plan to, or say a lot
of things but the fact is Novell has already told them to back off. Novell has
now confirmed their right to tell SCO to back off IBM or anyone else over Unix.
Thank PJ,
Brotherred [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 06:46 PM EDT
Truth is as the Tide, as the Sea, as the great Oceans of this Earth. Every
child, woman and man can escape the ebb and flow for some while, this is facile.
None can command the ebb and flow, this is impossible.
SCOG and the mysterious backers are as Canute. They have averted the ebb and
flow, and so they delude themselves that they may command the ebb and flow, they
cannot. SCOG will drown soon, before I suffer from most of the pains of old
age. The mysterious backers will drown later, perhaps before my children will
suffer from most the pains of old age, I hope.
The struggle will be life long, it will have to pass through the generations, it
is worthwhile beyond mesaurement, it is the duty of all us who aspire to be free
women and men, who begin to understand what it means to be free, it is our duty
for our children, and our childrens' children,...
[ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Tufty on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 06:51 PM EDT
Just went over to Yahoo for a quick look at the news and the headline is
"Tyra Banks stuns in simple red dress"
Timing!
---
Linux powered squirrel. [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: MacUser on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 06:53 PM EDT
Here is a cartoon to mark today's verdict. It's public domain; following the jury's lead, I have ruled that the copyrights do not go to me;) [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 06:56 PM EDT
Kumbaya anybody? - Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 07:11 PM EDT
Authored by: kh on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 06:56 PM EDT
Look you honour, TSCG have persevered with this case for years, even until they
drove the company into bankruptcy. They must know something. That proves they
must be right. This verdict is only a flesh wound. Come back here and I'll
bite your knee. [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: ak on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 07:04 PM EDT
It is now obvious (if it was not obvious before) that Edward N. Cahn is not
competent to act as a trustee in this case. It is time to replace him before he
creates even more damage.
[ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Alan(UK) on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 07:10 PM EDT
A wicked witch was brought in to run an ailing company that distributed a
version of GNU/Linux.
The company also had a UNIX business that it had purchased.
The wicked witch saw some similarities between Linux and UNIX and said that much
of Linux was copied from UNIX.
The wicked witch ignored everyone that tried to say that Linux code was either
original or copied legally from UNIX.
Despite being the head of a company specialising in both Linux and UNIX, the
wicked witch never revealed any significant details of the alleged infringment.
On the basis of the UNIX purchase agreement that said that all copyrights were
excluded from the sale, he demanded payment for the right to use Linux.
When told that the copyrights had not been transferred the wicked witch sued for
slander of title and lost.
Meanwhile the wicked witch had started lots of other court cases and bankrupted
the company.
The wicked witch lost the job of running the company...
...and the penguin and the GNU lived happily ever after.
---
Microsoft is nailing up its own coffin from the inside. [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: charlie Turner on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 07:14 PM EDT
Now what am I going to do with myself and my time after work each evening?????? [ Reply to This | # ]
Uh-oh!! - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 31 2010 @ 12:21 AM EDT Uh-oh!! - Authored by: PJ on Wednesday, March 31 2010 @ 01:33 PM EDT
- Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 31 2010 @ 12:21 AM EDT
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 07:15 PM EDT
Stupid layman's questions:
SCO stole Novell's share of the MS and Sun licenses. Given that ruling, which
the 10th Circuit upheld, why wouldn't Novell be entitled to withhold its end of
the bargain (the copyrights) until SCO upholds its end of the bargain (the
license fees)?
Isn't the conversion a breach of contract?
[ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Yossarian on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 07:15 PM EDT
On what grounds?
Either they can prove a jury misconduct (e.g. a jury
discussion the issues with family over the weekend) or serious
error by the judge (e.g. refusing to let them bring some
evidence/testimony). I don't think that either one will be
easy to prove. [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: eggplant37 on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 07:19 PM EDT
We are just dancing over here. I can't wait to get home from a friend's house so
I can hoist an absinthe to celebrate.
Cheers, all!
Linux Uber Alles!!! [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Guil Rarey on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 07:25 PM EDT
Does the jury verdict effectively moot the Court of Appeals opinion as a
practical matter, or does it still stand as binding precedent in the 10th
Circuit.
---
If the only way you can value something is with money, you have no idea what
it's worth. If you try to make money by making money, you won't. You might con
so [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: MikeA on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 07:40 PM EDT
I think you should put the jury verdict form on some t-shirts too. =) ---
---
'Unifying UNIX with Linux for Business' are trademarks or registered trademarks of Caldera International, Inc." [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: dkpatrick on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 08:08 PM EDT
SCO wants 'em assigned! '"Obviously, we're disappointed in the jury's decision," said SCO trial lawyer Stuart H. Singer. "We were confident in the case, but there's some important claims remaining to be decided by a judge. 'SCO will ask U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart to award the copyrights to SCO "even if we didn't have them before," he said. "It's a setback, but it's not over."'Huh? How does this work? ---
"Keep your friends close but your enemies closer!" -- Sun Tzu [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 08:10 PM EDT
Since Cahn rolled the dice and lost, can he be sued by the creditors for
draining the estate by continuing on an obvious path of self destruction? One
would hope that a trustee that enjoys gambling with other people's money would
be fired by the bankruptcy court. [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 08:13 PM EDT
then SCO tried with threats to sell something that is not theirs, that according
to them can be infringing.
how you defend yourself without money?, already know how good they are their
lawyers
in a "but for" without Novell, RedHat, IBM, etc., what would happen?
I was just imagining the plot of the new movie :)
[ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 08:29 PM EDT
Is it common for the jury not to have a transcript?
I have followed this case for years and read all the reports, but I would still
have a hard time remembering who said what on the stand.
Greg H [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 08:30 PM EDT
Not bothering with a clicky since it's a teaser for paid "content"
(what else did you long haired smellies expect).
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304739104575154253257189786.html?K
EYWORDS=+novell++sco
"Novell Wins Unix Case"
(We'll send them the AT&T "bible of the UNIX* trademark").
OneSpot was generating hits here from the deep pocket wannabees: Goog:
"wall street journal +sco +novell".
*UNIX® is a registered trademark of The Open Group [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: UncleJosh on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 08:43 PM EDT
we wash them off and use them in the next trial :-) :-) [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 08:44 PM EDT
IBM will win.
They want their quota of blood from SCO.
Cahn has NO choice.
MaUrEeN O GARaH's column is mindless trash. [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 08:49 PM EDT
At long last, SCO has had its day in court - and SCO has had a huge victory.
The court confirmed SCO's long held position that Novell did not transfer the
copyRIGHTS. So therefore it is clear that they transferred the copyLEFTS.
Everyone knows that linux is all copyLEFT.
Therefore SCO owns all of linux.
What a glorious day. [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: kh on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 08:56 PM EDT
I seem to remember that the Sun and MS licenses were ruled by Kimball to be
Unixware licenses not Unix licenses.
Since SCOXQ.BK now doesn't have the copyrights to Sys V does that mean that Sun
and MS only have rights to whatever SCO added to unixware not to basic Unix Sys
V code? [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 09:01 PM EDT
... for Chris Brown and MSS2 and everyone who did such a wonderful job of giving
us reports from the courtroom.
Absolutely fabulous, IMO. [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 09:12 PM EDT
The SCO Group argues their demand for the alleged "UNIX copyrights"
under schedule 1.1(g) of the amended APA:
"II. All of Seller's claims arising after the Closing Date against any
parties relating to any right, property or asset included in the
Business."
This is a lost cause under the jury's verdict, which has clearly stated that the
amended APA did not convey the alleged "UNIX copyrights" as a property
or asset in the Business acquired by the Santa Cruz Operation.
"III All of Seller's rights pertaining to UNIX and UnixWare under any
software development contracts, licenses and any other contracts to which Seller
is a party or by which it is bound and which pertain to the Business (to the
extent that such contracts are assignable), including without limitation:
A. Joint Development with third parties:
1. In-process development agreements
2. Past development agreements with on-going pricing discounts
3. Past development agreements without ongoing pricing discounts
4. Joint development agreements in which Seller didn't get full rights to
the code developed.
B. Third Party Software license agreements -- Those agreements in which Seller
pays per copy fees for technology/products which are shipped with or to be used
with UNIX System and/or UnixWare.
C. Joint marketing agreements -- Marketing programs with customers.
D. End user MLA agreements -- Agreements to allow end users to copy binary
products for internal use only. Associated with these agreements are support
requirements.
E. UNIX-only VAR agreements -- UNIX Master VARs
F. Support agreements - End user support agreements (i.e. TMAC, NALCOMIS)
G. Microsoft agreement (Xenix Agreement) - Xenix compatibility and per copy fee
agreement. Seller will agree to discuss with SCO Seller's interpretation of this
agreement.
H. Microsoft Agreement (Extra-Ordinary Discount) - Microsoft's additional
discount beyond 50%
I. Strategic Relationship Agreements (i.e. MTA, ECPA, MBA, etc.)
J. Out-sourced development (i.e. India) - Development agreements with third
parties Wipro and HCL) and Infix Development Center. IDC is a Seller
subsidiary.
K. Out-sourced Support Agreements
L. Software and Sublicensing Agreements - This includes the source codes and
sublicensing agreements that Seller has with its OEM, End User and Educational
customers. The total number of these agreements is approximately 30,000.
M. OEM Binary Licensing Agreements - OEM distribution of UnixWare with Seller's
agreement to include some OEM added value into future releases of
UnixWare."
The software and sublicensing agreements are included under this clause, but the
seller's "rights" are assigned, and not any "claims" that
might arise under the the agreements. The Santa Cruz Operation would be
empowered to rightfully receive payment of royalties and to audit the
performance of the licensee as would be expected of an agent, but the equitable
interest in the proceeds and any claims that might arise are not assigned to
S.C.O. [ Reply to This | # ]
Huh? - Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 11:21 PM EDT
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 09:15 PM EDT
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPzG7q3IW9I (Goodies pirate radio station, part
16)
Watch to the end - there's some good lessons in here. [ Reply to This | # ]
Appropriate video.... - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 31 2010 @ 01:43 AM EDT
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 09:18 PM EDT
Hurray!Hurray!
SCO is dead!
I hope every Linux Company sues them for defamation and slander.
<a href="http://mylinuxpage.com/">My Linux Page</a> [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 09:20 PM EDT
Something about that reads like the hammer shutting this case closed. The way it's the first question is answered, and all of the rest of the BS is skipped. Beautiful. Sums it up perfectly. And, I hesitate to put this part here, because I really want SCO to pursue this pipe dream to it's inevitable conclusion, but I feel like I need to say this to Judge Cahn. Please. Go ahead. Pursue the IBM litigation, please. Look at the comments, look into our (metaphorical) eyes, from the day this fiaSCO began seven long years ago until today -- have you ever seen any trace of fear? Please pursue the big question of Linux infringing on anything. My big concern has been that SCO will drive themselves out of business before the conclusion of the IBM case and then get to claim "We had valid claims, but the big money ran us out of business before we could have our day in court". Have your day in court. Present your "evidence". Put your experts up for cross examination. It's the day we've been waiting for. Keep listening to the SCO principals. Don't look at the history. Keep pushing to the end. We say "bring it on". I only hope that, at the end of it all, the veil is pierced (because somebody should pay for the seven plus years of needless litigation) and I hope, when that day of reckoning comes, the name of Cahn is not forgotten. [ Reply to This | # ]
Full on loving 46 - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 01 2010 @ 12:10 PM EDT
Authored by: kenryan on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 09:29 PM EDT
It amazes me that everything that's been going on, all that fuss and bother,
comes down to one little pen mark on a piece of paper, written by somebody who
has never heard of SCO, likely never heard of Linux, and likely could not
possibly care less other than to do his civic duty.
Power to the People!
:-)
---
ken
(speaking only for myself, IANAL) [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 09:32 PM EDT
Guys, docket 846 is the official jury verdict form. It has one checkbox checked on it (*Suitable for framing*). Docket 847 is fifty pages of official jury instructions: I believe I'm going to fire up the printer and do just exactly that. [ Reply to This | # ]
Suitable for framing - Authored by: zdvflyer on Wednesday, March 31 2010 @ 12:02 AM EDT
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 09:32 PM EDT
1. Cahn keeps going because he fears a legal harassment from the "SCO"
side more than IBM, Novell, Red Hat, remaining SCO shareholders and creditors
side. He also knows that the "SCO" side is so afraid that someone will
come up with more money.
2. Judge Stewart considers awarding specific performance just to return the
favor the CoA provided him, maybe even have them overturned in the Supreme
Court.
3. If SCO can't win in Utah, with a jury, with fine lawyering, and with Stewart
giving them pert'near anything that had a ghost's chance of grounds for appeal,
where are
they to draw inspiration for slogging on?
4. Jurors that don't have to worry about being sued by SCO, they can be a little
more decisive. Yay juries!
5. SCO's best chance was jury tampering. It's nice to see that our community
made this bug dangerously shallow. Three cheers for our reporters and the way
they comport themselves! Hip hip hurray, hip hip hurray, hip hip hurray!
And to my fellow Groklawers thanks for being awesome.
6. SCO finds a way to spin this as vindication.
7. I hope PJ gets some hugs out of this. I'd be hard pressed not to hug her if I
ever met her. [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Guil Rarey on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 09:36 PM EDT
Re: Settlements
Executive summary: Ain't happening.
Fuller explanation:
The marketing and strategic value of seeing these suits through to the end and a
final vindication on the undoubted merits vastly outweighs the cost of
litigation to both IBM and Novell, not to mention Red Hat.
You will not get a dime in nuisance money from anyone.
The only settlement terms likely available to you amount to abject surrender on
your part and participation in the pursuit of the people who sponsored this
attempted extortion racket in the first place.
Time to quit while you're behind.
---
If the only way you can value something is with money, you have no idea what
it's worth. If you try to make money by making money, you won't. You might con
so [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Zarkov on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 09:41 PM EDT
SCO will ask U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart to award the copyrights to SCO "even if we didn't have them before," he said. "It's a setback, but it's not over." Here's what he's referring to, the issues the parties agreed would be decided by the judge, not the jury. It's the next step. One of the issues is specific performance, meaning that SCO wants to argue that even if they didn't get the copyrights, they were entitled under the APA and Amendment 2 to ask for the copyrights if they needed. Like now, I gather. Here's the judge's order [PDF] on their various requests. But here's a question. If it's true, as Singer reportedly told the jury in his closing argument, that SCOsource is dead and can't be revived now, why do they need the copyrights? For what use? This has to be a last desperate plea to stay in the game surely? SCO need the copyrights to maintain its status to the IBM litigation. Without the copyrights all SCO can hope for is not to be eaten too quickly by IBM's counter-claims... Also, if Judge Stewart hands the copyrights over to SCO, they win on two fronts: They keep the litigation lottery alive, and at worst they have something to sell to some other troll who might have better luck than them... [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: bjnord on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 09:43 PM EDT
I wish we had had 847 (the jury instructions) before the trial started. (I know,
I know, they weren't done yet, and we wouldn't get them anyway.) They provide a
clear roadmap of what SCO had to prove -- as I read them, there were a lot of
"aha, so that's why they had <foo> testify about <bar>"
moments.
Long, but well worth reading. I'm still learning about the law after all these
years -- the main reason I've enjoyed Groklaw. [ Reply to This | # ]
Jury Instructions (847) are fascinating - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 31 2010 @ 01:04 AM EDT
Authored by: Lazarus on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 09:54 PM EDT
Play them off, keyboard cat!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eGQ5VFt7P4&feature=related
(I may try to make an SCO specific Keyboard Cat.)
---
I have no opinion on things I know nothing about.
This separates me from 90% of the human race, and 100% of politicians. [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 09:59 PM EDT
I hope the Bankruptcy Judge wakes up after hearing this bit of news.
I hope he realizes that the game is OVER. The litigation game is DONE.
I hope he moves SCO into Chapter 7.
Otherwise, the bankruptcy courts are a farce. [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Nice Kitty on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 10:00 PM EDT
As I wrote, perhaps a half-hour or so ago in some slightly-obscure NNTP
newsgroup:
*FINALLY*.
Oh wait... when/where SCO is concerned, "finally" is *never*
"finally" (as in "How long will SCO drag this
s#it out on appeal?").
Pamela Jones is probably doing backwards
somersaults ; - )
[ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: bugstomper on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 10:04 PM EDT
Comments here and even lawyers for both sides talked about Amendment 2 excluding
all copyrights except what SCO needed for their business. That's not what it
says. It excludes all copyrights except those that are required for SCO to
exercise their rights with respect to the acquisition.
This gives Singer a powerful argument to use. The jury decided that the APA plus
Amendment 2 did not transfer any copyrights. Naive logic would conclude that the
jury interpreted Amendment 2 as saying that copyrights would have transferred if
any of them were necessary for anything that was being acquired by SCO via that
APA, but in their opinion there were no such copyrights so none were excluded
from the exclusion.
But that would not be SCO logic. If Judge Stewart would only rule that Novell is
required to hand over all the copyrights, then that would make copyrights part
of the Acquisition. Naturally in order to exercise their rights with respect to
the acquisition of the copyrights, SCO would require the copyrights. Therefore
all the copyrights would be included in the set of copyrights included in the
exclusion phrase in the exclusion clause 1.1b.
This would not contradict the finding of the jury, because at the time the jury
found that copyrights were not transferred by the APA plus Amendment 2, they
really had not transferred. That will all change when Judge Stewart grants SCO's
request regarding specific performance, as that will change what is included in
"with respect to the acquisition". Since the APA and Amendment 2 were
written before the trial even began, Judge Stewart's decision by changing the
meaning of the word Acquisition as defined in the APA will have a retroactive
effect, erasing the jury decision as if it never happened. Slam dunk for SCO.
Don't worry, though. By making the jury decision as if it never happened, that
will open the door for Novell to take it back to the 10th Circuit on the grounds
that the appeals decision required the issue to be remanded to the District
Court to be decided by a jury. The 10th Circuit will have to send everything
back to Judge Stewart for a jury trial. Because everything will have been reset,
they will have to repeat the same trial with the same arguments with the same
results.
As everyone knows, changing the past like this is liable to create a time loop.
Luckily before the start of the loop Novell was able to get their petition for
cert to the Supreme Court. If it is granted, the Supreme Court will have the
power to break the loop. Otherwise we are doomed to read Groklaw articles about
the trial over and over and over and...
[ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Rollyk on Tuesday, March 30 2010 @ 10:47 PM EDT
Thank you Pamela Jones! PJ! Rules!
Your persistence has paid off, for us, the faithful silent crowd that has
followed you through the slights and slanders.
You have helped the "Open Source" community towards an even greater
victory.
Getting rid of abused "patent protection".
Wish there was a victory party!
---
pay now, or pay later, there's no free lunch. [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 31 2010 @ 12:43 AM EDT
It seems like for every step forward for Novell there is a
step back.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/20114
83078_msftnovell31.html
[ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 31 2010 @ 12:51 AM EDT
I'm sure he had a pleasant day. He deserved it and the hurrah [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 31 2010 @ 12:54 AM EDT
Doesn't the verdict make the appeal to the SC moot?
What happens to that now?
I know not really relevant but I am curious. [ Reply to This | # ]
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 31 2010 @ 01:05 AM EDT
So SCO gets double dibbs. If they don't get the copyrights, they get a second
chance to ask the judge just to give it to them. Nice strategy. I hope it
fails. SCO shouldn't get 2 shots at the copyrights, acutally 3 because the lost
|
the United States. Constructing a first-of-its kind nuclear design after a forty-year hiatus in new nuclear projects meant that predictions about cost and schedule were no more than guesses, according to utility expert David Schlissel, who warned the PSC of this at a 2008 hearing.
The two Vogtle reactors, known as Units 3 and 4, were to go on-line in 2016 and 2017 respectively, but are now at least five years behind schedule, delayed until 2021 and 2022 respectively. The result is that a $14.3 billion construction job has ballooned to $25.2 billion with no end in sight. (Georgia Power’s costs represent its 45.7 percent ownership of the plant, with the balance owned by three much smaller utilities.)
The delays came as the Georgia PSC’s own experts warned that Southern Company was allowing Westinghouse and previous prime contractors for Vogtle to operate without computerized planning tools that are standard for an incredibly complex project involving over 200,000 interconnected activities.
Over a period of years, PSC experts repeatedly testified before the commission that failing to use the industry-standard planning software was inherently not prudent, meaning costs that resulted from such a failure could be excluded from the rate base, and that the lack of proper planning meant confusion and waste at the enormous Vogtle construction site near the Savannah River, a few miles from the South Carolina border.
Southern Company and the Georgia Public Service Commission claim they didn’t learn that Westinghouse, Vogtle’s builder and designer, was near collapse until the end of March, when the company filed for bankruptcy, citing $9 billion in losses on Vogtle.
However, public interest watchdogs and other observers believe the PSC could have learned of Westinghouse’s dire financial condition had regulators conducted a traditional full-scale prudency hearing on the project instead of a brief prudency “review.”
In fact, while the PSC and Georgia Power negotiated an agreement on Vogtle late last year it was already public knowledge that parent company Toshiba was in serious fiscal straits. Toshiba’s troubles actually date back to at least July 2015 when the company admitted it had overstated its earnings by over $1.2 billion over a seven-year period. By the end of the year, the Japanese firm had slashed some 10,000 jobs in a desperate attempt to stay afloat.
“It’s been well understood for some time that Toshiba was not a stable company,” said Schlissel, the utility expert.
The truncated proceeding at which the Georgia Public Service Commission examined prudency late last year was quickly denounced by public interest groups as a hasty rubber stamp. The PSC took just four hours to approve $5.7 billion in spending on the two new Vogtle reactors – – and under terms critics say are a very poor bargain for Georgia Power’s customers.
“Unbelievably sloppy,” said Robert Baker, a former chairman of the PSC who represented the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy in the Vogtle case at the time of December 6th proceeding.
“It was not a prudency review. It wouldn’t have qualified as any kind of review. A pay phone license would have taken more time,” said Baker.
Under cross-examination by Baker during the hearing, PSC experts admitted that no financial audit of the project had been conducted in preparation for the hearing, and no memos or other documentation had been produced to justify a prudency finding for $3.5 billion spent on the plant as of the end of 2015 and a total cost, including future construction, of $5.7 billion.
Instead, the staff’s review consisted of collecting already available information and putting it into notebooks.
The hearing took place just as Toshiba announced it might have to write down billions on its Westinghouse unit due to overruns at Vogtle and a twin facility being built in South Carolina.
“If a full-on prudency review had taken place on Vogtle last year, there would have been no getting away from Westinghouse’s situation,” said Sara Barczak, a program director at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. “But it was only a settlement process. So eight months later, hundreds of millions have been spent that never should have been spent.”
That settlement process had already been completed by the time of the prudency review in early December, rendering the hearing itself largely meaningless, since by then the PSC and Georgia Power had signed a three-page stipulation on October 20, 2016 that gave the utility everything it wanted.
The stipulation shifted the burden of proof away from Georgia Power to anyone challenging the spending. And perhaps most startling, not only did the agreement bless the $3.5 billion spent on Vogtle through December 2015, it actually declared future spending prudent: “Capital costs incurred up to $5.680 billion will be presumed to be reasonable and prudent.”
“Pursuant to what authority may the Commission determine that forecasted costs are either prudent or reasonable prior to the completion of the plant?” Baker asked a panel PSC staff and company officials in December.
“We didn’t really address that,” replied Georgia Power Comptroller David Poroch.
Other recent PSC hearing testimony revealed that PSC staff and consultants had identified between $800 and $1 billion in costs that should not be declared prudent – but gave up those claims as a concession to make the stipulation happen.
A full-scale prudency hearing would have been consistent not only with standard operating procedure for state utility regulators nationally but with past practice in Georgia – indeed, foregoing a full-scale hearing for a utility project of this scale may be unprecedented.
The Vogtle 3 and 4 reactors are being built adjacent to Vogtle 1 and 2, the original two nuclear reactors. In marked contrast to Vogtle 3 and 4, Vogtle 1 and 2 were subjected to an exhaustive review befitting a project that cost $8.9 billion, which at the time was the “largest single investment ever constructed in the state of Georgia,” according to the PSC.
Vogtle 1 and 2 were only approved in late 1987 after 42 days of hearings over a six-month period. One series of proceedings determined prudency while a separate set established new rates for Southern Company’s customers. Altogether, the process generated 12,329 pages of transcript and 502 exhibits. The prudency segment included testimony from nine individual witnesses and thirteen panels of anywhere from two to six witnesses, according to the PSC.
When contrasted with that, the PSC’s recent four-hour version of prudency seems an undeniable example of “regulatory capture” by a company whose leadership often boasts to investors of its cordial working relationships with state regulators.
Far from bearing down on a project that has gone so far off track, Georgia commissioners seem to take offense at criticism of the Vogtle plant or Southern Company.
As Baker bored in on the PSC experts about the lack of evidence for prudency, an annoyed Commissioner Lauren “Bubba” McDonald interrupted, saying he didn’t “know why we need to go through and see what size shirt they wear and all of this in order to reach and look at what the document is in front of us.”
McDonald asked what the object of Baker’s questions was.
“The object, Commissioner McDonald,” Baker replied, “is to understand how the staff came to its conclusion to enter into this proposed stipulation, which is a seven billion dollar plus agreement that will burden or be the responsibility of Georgia ratepayers for the next 60 years.”
After two South Carolina utilities decided to scrap the V.C. Summer nuclear plant on July 31, Commissioner Tim Echols issued a series of tweets castigating critics of the plant, and stressing the differences between Summer and Vogtle.
“Our commissioners will look at total cost to complete soon. Hopefully, we can move forward and finish. It is VERY important,” Echols commented, adding, “We have strong partners on this project, and GA Power has negotiated masterfully. Toshiba must make good on commitments.”
Echols also tweeted;
And also:
“GA’s situation slightly different. Larger utility, Federal Loan Guarantee, and fully-supportive elected commission.”
There is certainly plenty of evidence for the latter. Georgia’s five elected commissioners have presented a largely united front supporting the plant from the beginning of the project’s construction history with little criticism.
They have largely ignored years of complaints by the independent monitors, the PSC’s on-site project watchdogs, who have faulted Southern Company for failing to provide a reliable cost-to-complete the project.
They have also pointed out on numerous occasions that Southern has never come up with an Integrated Project Schedule, a computerized planning tool. The IPS is an industry-standard program that tracks the project’s myriad engineering, procurement and construction operations and updates project cost and schedule to reflect actual progress.
The IPS is considered essential for such a complex, expensive job – the first nuclear project built in the United States in decades and one that employs a never-before-tested design and equipment, the Westinghouse AP-1000 reactor. PSC experts have said several times over the years that a failure to use an IPS is inherently imprudent.
Georgia Power has blamed Westinghouse for failing to develop an IPS as the project’s prime contractor and designer, but in fact, PSC experts have pointed out, it is ultimately Georgia Power’s responsibility to make sure such safeguards are in place.
In a series of emails to Climate Investigations Center, Commissioner Tim Echols said he opposed the prudency review idea but was outvoted.
“How can you review prudency when the reactors are not even working?” Echols commented.
But Echols also argued that the stipulation does provide safeguards for utility customers. He noted that the agreement delays the worst of the rate impact, and lowers Southern’s return on investment for the entire project if a December 31, 2020 completion date is missed.
“It was not perfect, but given the circumstances and the vote count, I felt like it was the best we could get,” Echols said.
Georgia Power says productivity has improved recently on the Vogtle site, but testimony at a June PSC hearing revealed that the net result of the past year’s construction activity has been to put the project yet another year behind.
With Westinghouse out of the picture, Southern Company’s Southern Nuclear subsidiary became the prime contractor, with Westinghouse agreeing to provide some support services. Southern Nuclear has never built a nuclear plant, or coordinated a project that currently involves 5,000 craft and other workers.
Under the terms of the Southern’s agreement with Toshiba, Toshiba is absolved from liability beyond the $3.7 billion it has promised, meaning Southern itself will now be responsible for all future cost and schedule snafus. Ultimately, with a compliant PSC, those obligations could wind up in the laps of Georgia consumers.For the first time, the Atlanta Braves and Cobb County have spelled out a detailed schedule for building the team’s planned new stadium near Cumberland Mall.
The schedule, included in a request for proposals (RFP) from general contractors interested in taking on the construction project, calls for site clearing to begin in mid-summer and stadium building to begin early next year.
Among key dates specified: Site clearing is to begin July 15 and be completed Oct. 13; grading is to begin Sept. 23 and be completed Dec. 23; and stadium construction is to begin Feb. 18, 2015, with substantial completion by Jan. 24, 2017, and final completion by Feb. 21, 2017, which is referred to in the document as the “soft opening.”
The ballpark is to be available for “a minimum of five weeks of opening activities in advance of the 2017 (Major League Baseball) season,” according to the 105-page document issued late last week by the Braves and Cobb.
The document asks prospective general contractors for proposed fees and other information. Bids are due to Cobb’s purchasing department by May 8. A selection committee, consisting of representatives from the county and the Braves, is scheduled to recommend a winning bidder to the Cobb County Board of Commissioners on May 27.
Minimum qualifications, according to the document, include having built at least three major sports facilities within the past 10 years, with at least one of the three a new MLB stadium. In the case of bids by joint-venture groups, at least one major member must have met those qualifications.
“The (Cobb) stadium will be unique, though many of its features will emulate those of similar and recently built MLB ballparks,” according to the document. “It will contain special features that are specifically tailored to the needs of (the Braves) and will be cohesive with the (planned adjacent mixed-use development).”
The general contractor will work for both Cobb and the Braves.
The RFP is confined to the stadium construction project and describes the mixed-use development as a separate process. The Braves envision a mix of shops, restaurants, bars, residences, offices and hotels.
The Braves are attempting to assemble a team of developers for that complex after one of two finalist groups pulled out of the process two weeks ago.David Wilson for the boston globe
Min Jin Lee’s second novel, “Pachinko,” begins with a line that can read like pure fatalism: “History has failed us, but no matter.” As the book unspools over four generations of a Korean family that migrates to Japan, it begins to feel more like a kind of determination to survive, even in a country and culture hostile to them.
“Most people don’t really want to hire Korean Japanese,” Lee said. “Men couldn’t become police officers or teachers or postal workers — ordinary middle-class jobs people aspired to have — let alone enter the white-collar world,” she added. Prejudice against Koreans is common in Japan, Lee said, but it’s a story that’s not well-known outside of Asia.
For Korean-born Lee, who moved to the United States at seven, it wasn’t an easy story to tell. “I had an entire manuscript in 2007,” she said, but upon moving to Japan and meeting Korean Japanese people, she realized she needed to rewrite the novel and include their voices. The key, Lee said, was women her grandmother’s age, people who were often illiterate, who “went to this other country where everyone thought you were garbage. You had to live in ghettos. You might have a pig living in your house. Sometimes you were making moonshine to make money.”
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She rewrote the book, naming it for the vertical pinball machine that many Americans think of as a children’s game. In Japan, it is a $230 billion industry, Lee explained, and one that’s dominated by ethnic Koreans, who found a niche in an economy that discriminated against them.
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“Pachinko, like all gambling, is rigged,” Lee said. “The house always wins. It’s a central metaphor of life. It’s rigged, but you keep playing.”
Lee will read 7 p.m. April 29 at La Rana Rossa, 154 Green St., Jamaica Plain.
Kate Tuttle, president of the National Book Critics Circle, can be reached at [email protected] 0.34.0 Released! 2014-12-22 - raevol
The OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.34.0! Grab it from our Downloads Page for all operating systems. This release features many bug fixes, improvements to installation and the launcher, and exciting updates to OpenCS. Our “1.0” release remains excitingly close!
Known Issues:
Crash when trying to view cell in render view in OpenCS on OSX
Crash when switching from full screen to windowed mode on D3D9
Changelog:
Implemented ClampMode in NiTexturingProperty, fixes some floating plant textures
Implemented INI-importer for the launcher
Implemented “encoding” option in the launcher
Disabled third-person zoom by default due to usability issues (can be re-enabled in settings file)
Fixed several launcher and installation issues
Fixed issue with BIK video/audio playback sync
Fixed NPCs ignoring player invisibility when engaged in combat
Fixed long class names being cut off in the UI
Fixed running while levitating draining fatigue
Fixed handling of disabled plugins
Fixed ToggleMenus not closing dialog windows
Fixed crash when calling getDistance on items in the player’s inventory
Fixed the Buglamp tooltip showing the item weight
Fixed slave crime reaction to PC picking up slave’s bracers
Fixed Dremora death animation
Fixed Mansilamat Vabdas’s floating corpse
Fixed bounty not being completely removed after the Larius Varro Tells A Little Story quest
Fixed silenced enemies attempting to cast spells
Fixed The Warlords quest
Fixed sneak attacks on hostiles causing a bounty
Fixed a crash caused by incorrect handling of getPcRank and similar defines
Fixed pause in Storm Atronach animation
Fixed a bug in TerrainGrid::getWorldBoundingBox
Fixed crash on exceptions while adding startup scripts
Fixed AiWander path finder hang when quickly changing cells
Fixed crash when playing OGG files
Fixed Dagoth Gares talking to the player even when he is not there
Fixed overflow exploit in bartering
Fixed a crash when maximizing the window with the race selection dialog open on D3D9
Fixed script command “Activate, player” not working
Fixed buttons only lighting on hover over their label
Fixed Slowfall effect being too weak
Fixed several skeleton/bone model and animation issues
Fixed script handling to treat the [ character as whitespace
Fixed a crash in character preview for non-existing meshes
Fixed abrupt transition when ash storms end
Fixed mouse movements being tracked during video playback
Fixed a crash on exit
Fixed being able to attack Almalexia during her final monologue
Fixed the frame time cap not being applied to Ogre’s ControllerManager
Fixed recalculation of Magicka to be less aggressive
Fixed Azura’s spirit fading away too fast
Fixed Magicka becoming negative
Fixed health so it drops to 0 if it goes below 1.
Fixed floating hairs in Westly’s Pluginless Head And Hair Replacer
Fixed some issues with mods that use conversation scripts to update the PC
Fixed graphical issues with Morrowind Grass Mod
Fixed issues with renaming profiles in the launcher
OpenCS: Implemented rendering cell markers
OpenCS: Implemented double-click functionality in tables
OpenCS: Implemented user settings dialog grouping, labeling, and tooltips
OpenCS: Implemented editing positions of references in the 3D scene
OpenCS: Implemented edit mode button on the scene toolbar
OpenCS: Implemented user setting for showing the status bar
OpenCS: Improved the layout of the user settings dialog
OpenCS: Fixed script compiler sometimes failing to find IDs
OpenCS: Fixed verifier not handling Windows-specific path issues when dealing with resources
OpenCS: Fixed display of combat/magic/stealth values
OpenCS: Fixed saving
OpenCS: Fixed exception caused by following the Creature column of a SoundGen record
OpenCS: Fixed MDL subrecord error
OpenCS: Fixed coordinate and rotation editing
OpenCS: Fixed several window and view handling issues
OpenCS: Fixed loading plugins with moved references, implementation of moved references still pending
OpenCS: Fixed a crash when closing cell render window on OSX
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Like this: Like Loading...NEW YORK – A team from the Israel Trauma Coalition, an association of Israeli agencies specializing in post-trauma resilience, will be arriving in the Boston suburb of Watertown next week to help develop “a recovery process” for the local school system.
Watertown, a village of some 32,000 residents, was the epicenter of the manhunt April 19 that killed one suspected Boston Marathon bomber and captured another. The manhunt forced the shuttering of much of the area, with residents told to stay indoors and businesses and schools closed for over a day as state and local police, together with federal forces, pursued the two suspects through the streets of Cambridge and Watertown.
“The events of a few weeks ago left us reeling and wanting to do whatever we could to help out,” wrote Barry Shrage — president of Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Boston Jewish federation which arranged the connection between Watertown and the ITC — in a letter to federation staff on Thursday. “Our partners in Israel, who are all too familiar with the fear and anxiety of the aftermath of terrorist attacks, reached out to us with support, making the collaboration with the ITC possible.”
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On Sunday, a team from the ITC will arrive in Boston and begin work with Watertown school district administrators, staff, community groups, and parents “to create a coordinated coping and recovery process that will be offered to the entire community,” Shrage said.
‘Our Israeli friends called. They were saying, “You came to us when we had trouble. How can we be there for you?” There was a feeling in Israel that, at this point, the American Jewish community needed help, and they wanted to be helpful. And I thought, that’s such a beautiful thing’
They will run sessions with local officials focused on key elements of post-disaster resilience: “what reactions parents should expect from their children, and how to respond to their questions; clinical training to student service staff to help them guide students through trauma recovery; how administrators can triage, plan and roll out trauma-based community events; methods of creating a safe environment at school and at home where children can express themselves,” according to a federation statement explaining the visit.
The team will also work directly with state and local mental health officials, together with the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health and Department of Public Health, as well as the Executive Office of Health and Human Services. They will deliver a workshop for mental health clinicians in Westborough, a town about 30 minutes out of Boston, focusing on techniques for working with populations impacted by disaster and “the importance of self-care and resilience for individuals and communities following a disaster,” according to the statement.
The team is also slated to hold a session in Boston next week that will include clergy and community leaders and will focus on the impact of terror on immigrant populations.
“The ITC training model empowers the local infrastructure to support a maximum number of those in need using existing local resources, contributing to the development of the community’s resilience, and setting up a support system that will remain in place long after the program has ended,” the federation said.
While the federation made a $100,000 contribution to The One Fund, the official fund established by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino to help victims of the marathon bombing, the Jewish community has been looking for more ways to be helpful, according to the federation’s Shrage.
Then “our Israeli friends called. They were saying, ‘You came to us when we had trouble.’ We were there when there were bomb attacks. We were in Sderot many times, [in Haifa] during the [Carmel forest] fire. And they said, ‘How can we be there for you?’ There was a feeling in Israel that, at this point, the American Jewish community needed help and they wanted to be helpful. And I thought, ‘that’s such a beautiful thing.’”
The Boston federation had received an offer of help from the Israel Trauma Coalition in the days immediately following the marathon bombing, but the Jewish community “couldn’t quite figure out where it all fit in.”
After the events in Watertown, said Shrage, “it made me think of what the kids in Sderot go through all the time, and other places where ITC had been effective.”
ITC’s help, Shrage said, “is a more personal way for Israel and the Jewish community to be helpful. We have some unfortunately special expertise” that can be brought to bear. The entire cost of the initiative, at roughly $75,000, is being covered by the federation.
The team is slated to remain in Boston for the week, but could extend its stay if additional towns or groups ask for its help. Already “a couple of other [bodies] have asked, and are talking about how to use them,” said Shrage.Navy Destroyer the U.S.S. John McCain (7th Fleet official photo)
U.S. Navy Destroyer the U.S.S. John McCain collided with a merchant vessel on Sunday in the Strait of Malacca, a shipping lane off the Malaysian coast.
The 7th Fleet’s official Twitter account announced the collision on Sunday evening.
#USSJohnSMcCain involved in collision with a merchant vessel while east of the Strait of Malacca. Updates to follow. https://t.co/6bHUovT8eI pic.twitter.com/EVcYjHwXah — 7th Fleet (@US7thFleet) August 20, 2017
The Commander of the 7th Fleet’s website said, “The guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain (DDG 56) was involved in a collision with the merchant vessel Alnic MC while underway east of Singapore and the Strait of Malacca on Aug. 21.”
Malaysia lies across the International Date Line, where it is already Monday.
The collision reportedly took place at 6:24 a.m. Japan Standard Time, while the ship was in transit to Singapore. The McCain took damage to the port side aft, i.e., the left rear hull.
Search and rescue operations are being conducted in concert with local authorities.
Seven U.S. sailors were killed in June when the USS Fitzgerald collided with a civilian freight vessel.Five people in Alberta — including a child — have died from influenza so far this season, and Alberta Health Services says there has been a "significant" increase in week-over-week reported hospitalizations.
Two people died in the Calgary area, and three deaths were reported in the Edmonton area.
AHS Senior Medical Officer of Health Dr. Gerry Predy, left, and Dr. Martin Lavoie,Acting Chief Medical Officer of Health, provided an update Thursday on the five flu-related deaths in Alberta this week. (Gareth Hampshire/CBC) Four of the five who died from lab-confirmed influenza had not been immunized, and the child who died had received one of two doses of the vaccine necessary for children under nine years of age who are being immunized for the first time.
"It's not unexpected," AHS senior medical officer of health Dr. Gerry Predy said Thursday. "Influenza, when it does hit, it does cause severe illness and unfortunately in some cases, death.
"In the last week, we've seen a number of hospitalized patients increased from 30 previously to 84, so that's more than doubling in the course of a week.
"One Albertan death is too many, and this week we have the unfortunate responsibility of confirming five. If that isn't enough to encourage immunization, the upswing in hospitalizations is yet further evidence of the very real severity of influenza."
Two of the five people who died from influenza were 65 or older. Two were under 18, and one was between 18 and 64. Three of the five died from the H1N1 strain of influenza.
More than two million doses of influenza vaccine were purchased for use in Alberta this season. Since Wednesday, slightly more than one million of these doses had been used.
The vaccine can't be used for children younger than six months. It is available for free to all Albertans over that age.
Whether you're healthy or not, you get direct protection from the vaccine and its the best way to protect yourself. - Dr. Martin Lavoie
Predy said although this year's flu season started later than last year, it's still in the early stages and it's not too late to get vaccinated.
"The influenza season... comes from the end of October to the end of April," Predy said. "But in that season, we get spikes and activity, what we call annual outbreaks, and this is the start of an annual outbreak. It happens every year. It's not unusual."
This year's dominant strain is H1N1, Predy said. The strain tends to affect adults, children and infants more often and more severely than the H3N2, he said, which can affect the elderly more severely.
The vaccine protects against both, said Dr. Martin Lavoie, acting chief medical officer of health.
"It's very important to remember that when influenza is around we have a number of most vulnerable people out there," Lavoie said.
"Whether you're healthy or not, you get direct protection from the vaccine and it's the best way to protect yourself. When you do that, you protect others around you by preventing the spread of the virus to other people who would be vulnerable."New Skin in the Game of Vitiligo Therapy
The immune system is tasked with protecting the body from invading pathogens. Yet, sometimes, immune cells themselves attack the tissues they are supposed to protect. One such autoimmune disease is vitiligo, where immune cells are thought to attack melanocytes—the pigment-producing cells in the skin. Individuals with vitiligo have depigmented areas in their skin, which is disfiguring and also increases the risk of skin damage. Now, Rashighi et al. suggest that blocking the chemokine CXCL10 may restore pigmentation in patients with vitiligo.
The authors examined gene expression in lesional skin from vitiligo patients and found an interferon-γ–specific signature, including differential expression of the chemokine CXCL10. They found that CXCL10 was up-regulated in vitiligo patients; its receptor CXCR3 was up-regulated in T cells from these patients as well. The authors then looked in a mouse model of vitiligo to determine the functional relevance of this observation. Mice with CXCR3-deficient T cells developed a much less severe form of vitiligo, as did mice lacking CXCL10 or treated with a CXCL10-neutralizing antibody. What’s more, this CXCL10-neutralizing antibody resulted in repigmentation in mice with already established vitiligo lesions. These data suggest that CXCL10 neutralization should be considered as a potential treatment for vitiligo.New episodes will premiere in 2017.
In 2014 Elisabeth Moss won her first Golden Globe for her portrayal of Detective Robin in the first season of “Top of the Lake.” Now the actress is reprising her award-winning role in the second season, which takes place four years after the events of the first. SundanceTV released the first image (above) which features Moss getting back to business.
The first season of Jane Campion’s critically acclaimed miniseries followed Sydney-based police detective Robin (Moss) returning to her hometown in New Zealand to investigate the disappearance of a local 12-year-old girl. Season 2 will take place in Sydney and center around the death of an unidentified girl whose body washes up on to Sydney’s Bondi Beach. The new season also includes the addition of Nicole Kidman and “Game of Thrones” actress Gwendoline Christie.
READ MORE: ‘The Bleeder’ Clip: Watch First Footage of Elisabeth Moss and Liev Schreiber’s Dramatic Boxing Film
“Top of the Lake’s” first season was nominated for a total of eight Emmys, taking home the Best Cinematography trophy.
Campion will once again direct the miniseries, along with new co-director Ariel Kleiman. Campion and Gerard Lee are co-writers.
“Top of the Lake” season 2 will premiere in 2017.
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BY DANIEL GAITAN | [email protected]
Vicki Olds is using her daughter’s death to familiarize the African-American community with the benefits of organ donation.
Working with Illinois-based procurement organization Gift of Hope, Olds hopes to dispel myths and misconceptions about the practice.
When Olds’ teenage daughter died in a drowning accident this June, she decided to honor her daughter’s wishes by donating her organs to people in serious need.
“The worst day of my life was the day my daughter passed,” said Olds, who lives in Hazel Crest, Ill. Soon after doctors pronounced the death of 18-year-old Domonique “Nikki” Smith, she met with Gift of Hope specialists.
“They made me feel very comfortable,” Olds told Life Matters Media. “It is a very hard decision to make, especially moments after they tell you that your daughter has passed. In less than an hour, we were having the conversation.” She knew Smith was an organ donor, because they discussed it when she got her driver’s license.
African-Americans Remain Cautious
However, many African-Americans are skeptical of organ donation and worry that “doctors will prematurely declare death to procure organs” for rich or white people, according to findings published in journal Clinical Transplantation in 2013. Last year, only 16 percent of all deceased donors were African-American.
Marion Shuck, Gift of Hope’s community affairs manager, told LMM that she believes the sadistic Tuskegee syphilis experiment on African-Americans between 1932 and 1972, along with historic disparities in health care access, have contributed to what she called widespread “mistrust of the system.”
To change minds, Shuck and Olds are working on the “Lasting Legacy” media campaign. It will use Olds’ experience, along with stories from other African-Americans, to show how organ donation benefits their community.
It is a very hard decision to make, especially moments after they tell you that your daughter has passed.
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, African-Americans make up the largest group of minorities in need of a transplant, partly because they have higher rates of diabetes and high blood pressure than whites. These conditions can increase risk of organ failure.
“It is crucially important to show such stories to the African-American community, which is disproportionately impacted by the ever increasing need for organ donations,” said Jack Lynch, director of community affairs, in a statement. “Those needs have increased more than ten-fold during my tenure at Gift of Hope.”
More than 5,000 Illinois residents are waiting for transplants; more than 30 percent are African-American.
Friend Given Smith’s Heart
Olds comes from a family of organ donors and said she did not believe her daughter would receive less care because she was a donor. As an evangelical Christian, she was taught that donation is a blessing.
“When you die, you bury the body and your soul goes to heaven,” Olds said. “I honestly believe my baby’s soul left her body in that pool. When her body came to the emergency room it was just that: her body.”
Within days of her death, Smith’s heart was given to Tanesha Basham, a close family friend and mother of three who was in dire need of a transplant. Another friend of the family received one of her kidneys.
“It’s hard to put into words how I feel,” said Olds, who has been a friend to Basham’s mother for more than three decades. “We are family; they are the siblings I’ve never had.”
Olds said she believes it was a “miracle of God” for Smith’s heart to be a match for both Basham and the recipient of her daughter’s kidney.
“We prayed and we prayed hard,” Olds said. “They said that it was a one-in-a-million chance that she was a 100 percent match. I cried tears of joy and knew it was nothing but God. It doesn’t happen unless it’s in God’s hands.”(Brooklyn Chowder Surfer) occasional underground lobster roll purveyor was sunk by unruly Airbnb guests over the weekend, according to online posts by the foodie, Ben Sargent. Sargent hosts the Cooking Channel's Hook, Line & Dinner and rose to prominence in part through his goofy lobster-roll-vending alter ego Dr. Klaw, an Ali G-like drug dealer caricature with a knack for setting up photo shoots with New York publications and, by all accounts, making and vending tasty lobster rolls. The Department of Health didn't approve of his unlicensed operation and shut him down in 2010.
Until last weekend, Sargent was also renting out a houseboat named Ziggy Stardust at Far Rockaway's Marina 59 on Jamaica Bay, once home to the bug-and-art-infused Boatel, a floating DIY hotel concocted by a group of artists to levels of fanfare on par with Dr. Klaw.
Sargent is in the process of reviving the Dr. Klaw shtick via an elaborate Kickstarter campaign seeking $45,000 to stage a "live action treasure hunt" consisting of Sargent driving up and down the coast on a motorcycle decked out to look like a lobster, seeking to "track down" Dr. Klaw and stage invite-only seafood parties. Regarding Saturday night's sinking of the Ziggy Stardust, Sargent wrote on his blog, "I’m very bummed to tell you that one of Dr. Klaw’s best hideaways is now sitting under 15’ of water due to a bad group of renters."
Sargent added, "I don’t know if the Ziggy can be saved," and said he's turning his attention from the lobster project to fixing the boat.
In a Kickstarter update, he blamed the wrecking on "one bad renter and a bunch of dishonest party folk" who "sunk her right to the bottom."
He continued:
I figure the next weeks will take me away from Kickstarter as I figure out what to do...Already, a bunch of friends have chipped in and loaned me scuba equipment and their support so I was just able to dive down and close all the windows which is really step one before figuring out pumps and the system to get her up and out of the water!
All I ask of you guys is that we shift gears a little...I feel like all you KLAW fans might be down to rally behind this. I can't promise lobster rolls just yet...But I promise we can get this fucking boat out of the water and it will be a place for all of you to rest your head!
I'll keep you posted as the progress continues, but if you guys can spread this around I'm confident we can a least hit the goal here and put this money into fixing up the Ziggy as a Klaw seafood destination that will blow your mind!!!
Natasha Quam was staying across the marina in another Airbnb houseboat overnight on Saturday. She said she didn't see or hear what happened, "But some old guys cleaning fish said it happened about 5 a.m. [They said] [t]here were three loud pops and it started going down."
Quam said she rents a houseboat in the marina with a friend every other weekend or so during the summer. "I have no idea how they got the Ziggy to sink," she said
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thinks it’s intimidating. Did you give this Mella the records?” Greenstone shrugged. “He had coin. The Silver Swords will be flying straight for him.” I took a pace forwards, and looked his dead in the eye. “I doesn’t matter. At Octars his father had ten-thousand hulls and twice the tactical brain, and he still lost a fifth of his fleet and his own head. “ Now Greenstone gave a low, rasping laugh. “Do you really think that a battle thirty years ago will help your fifty ships defeat four-thousand?” I stopped. “Kreeoa won’t send his entire fleet for the sake of a hundred deserter vessels.” “Won’t he? My sources say that he is a very angry young man, as the name suggests. In fact,” Greenstone moved across to the shop counter, “There’s a slave I think you would be very interested in.” “We don’t do slaves,” I snapped. “Of course not. I misspoke.” He opened the till and put the cash in. “A former slave. Quirus Lain, a Zionite, who fled from the Swords at Krees Whole about a year ago. He was the personal slave of old Teerow Kreeoa for about thirty years before Octars, and has been the same for Fury since then.” He looked at me earnestly. “You’ll find him with Ral of the House of N'thrak on Raw Ot Dne at the edge of the system. Speak to Quirus, Kala. Speak to him and go back to Kraznus. I have no wish to see you dead.” “I’ll think about it,” I said, then left the shop. Kala's Hunting danansan fiction 1 Comments - Read comments - Leave a comment
Kala's Hunting pt 2 March 10, 2013
by danansan Chapter 1 The last place we could put Reeowin was in New Age, which he had just conquered as part of the fleet of the Little King of Gretza-Leona or some such place. He had received a large payment in gold and slaves, and pressed several free captains into his service. Our intel had him taking the voidgate to Zeron, and presumably he Lonied from there to parts unknown. This was about four years before we departed, so he could have been anywhere in the galaxy by then. I decided that the best course of action was to pursue intel from a friendly port. So we Darked out of Kraznus to the black hole Lanneret. From there we arrived in Peace some hundred-an-twelve days later. Of course I talked to the Commander (of the Defence Force), expecting just a formalised wave through for our ships. But… something wasn’t right. I know… knew… Messeret Dalcoran well. Back when I was commanding the Tar Baby under Lyan Lariz in the ‘60s and ‘70s I drunk with him dozens of times in The Golden Treaty on Ceasefire. So I knew he was on edge. He wouldn’t let our ships in. I had to keep all forty-seven of them in formation at the edge of the system and take the White Heart in on his own. Dalcoran wouldn’t even give shore leave for the rest of the ships, so I had ten thousand pissed off Kraz to deal with as well. It was strange. Defence ships were everywhere, and there were far fewer traders than I expected. I was in the Peace at the height of the Bastard’s War, and even then things weren’t as on edge. I couldn’t think what was causing it. The only on-going conflicts since the end of that New Age business were the usual small fare between the littlest of the Little Kings. So I radioed Dalcoran again, and asked him to meet me for a drink in The Golden Treaty, for old times’ sake. I don’t know if you’ve all been to Peace, so I guess I should tell you, for context, that the orbit of the gas giant Armistice is the busiest thoroughfare in known space. You can’t land any but the smallest ships on the two moons, Truce and Ceasefire, so mostly you have to orbit your ship and shuttle back and forth. But everyone comes to Truce, everyone from Windstari and Ganite traders to the sons of Little Kings to Riv mercs, to see the legendary sights, or do business in the only real, safe international trading post on the Grid. Lyan once told me that during the Thirty Year Peace he saw one million vessels orbiting Armistice. That’s probably bullshit but even so, after the Bastard’s War, seeing a full hundred thousand hulls wasn’t particularly unusual. When we got to orbit there were less than four thousand ships there. That’s lunacy. That’s dead. Hell, when I took my shuttle down to Ceasefire I even got landing clearance in less than an hour. Dalcoran was waiting for me. He was sitting at a table in the far corner, nursing a pitcher of Ganite ale. I went to the bar and ordered a Breekinburg. The girl behind the bar was a Zionite, with beautiful white wings and a nice smile. “I didn’t know you drunk those,” said Dalcoran as I sat down opposite him, “They’re a little strong for my taste.” I sipped the cocktail. “I had one down in Zion space and know I’m hooked. And their strength is the attraction. Gives a real kick.” I put it down. “Doesn’t last long, of course.” There was an awkward moment silence. “How’s Vallara? And the kids?” “The kids are fine. Tilly’s working for the parliament now. I sent Vallara back to Praggis.” He stared into his beer and swirled it slowly. “There’s a war coming Kala,” he said slowly, like he was confessing a dirty secret. “That’s nothing new, Messeret. War’s always coming.” He shook his head. “I don’t mean – what is it you Kraz say? – Little Wars for Little Kings. I mean a big war, bigger than the Bastard or Breekinburg maybe. I’m not the only one who thinks it either. You saw the system, it’s empty.” He grabbed his pitcher and downed the whole thing. “They know it’ll start here. There’s at least ten Canthin fleets in striking distance of us right now.” “The Mella have attacked here before,” I told him, “You know, you’ve beaten them back every time.” “Aye, I know. I’m just afraid that soon some damn fool will be stupid enough to actually succeed.” He sighed, and gripped the empty pitcher. “Why are you here Kala?” he asked suddenly. “To start a war man,” I said. He laughed bitterly. “I’m looking for someone,” I told him, “Laaros Reeowin, a slaver. You know him?” Dalcoran thought for a moment. “I remember he fought at Octars… Flies with the Silver Swords doesn’t he?” “Not for seven years.” I finished my drink and stood up. “It was good to see you again, Messeret.” We shook hands. “I’ll tell Vallara hello when I visit her,” he said. I nodded, and left. Kala's Hunting danansan fiction 0 Comments - Read comments - Leave a comment
1 2 3 4... 83 April 17, 2016by rodenboughJune 04, 2014by pokelover218August 31, 2013by ferret21March 19, 2013by danansanMarch 10, 2013by danansanThe idea behind Bicycle City is that people can live, work, and play in a town where everything is accessible by just riding a bike (with parking is at the edge of the community.) Bicycle city was an idea conceived in the 90’s and was just recently started this past year after they received funding. The location for the first Bicycle city is Lexington County, SC, between mountains and a beach. The location is also only 12 miles away from the state capital so some of the necessary big city amenities will be within reach.
Bicycle city mentions that their idea of building a city without cars is not only good for the environment, but also good for people. They explain that vehical emissions are harmful for health. They also talk about how in big cities bicyclists and injured by cars and without this threat, biking to and from places will be much safer. People will also increase their endurance and burn calaires getting around the city and live an all around more healthy lifestyle. Children will be much safer in Bicycle City without the threat of speeding cars racing through the neighborhoods.
The cities of today have been designed for cars and malls rather than for the people. By retrofitting the buildings that exist it is possible to create a more sustainable community that is no longer dependent upon cars for transportation. Many other sustainable systems will be incorporated into Bicycle City such as green roofs, rainwater collection, and solar energy.
Read more about this project at: http://www.bicyclecity.com/Indian national football team break 21-year record to enter FIFA top 100
Abhijit Bharali FOLLOW FEATURED WRITER News 33.22K // 04 May 2017, 13:33 IST SHARE Share Options × Facebook Twitter Flipboard Reddit Google+ Email
India are now among the top 100 FIFA ranked nations
What’s the story?
The Indian national football team have reached a 21-year high in the FIFA rankings as they have broken into the top 100. In the rankings released for the month of May earlier today, the Blue Tigers find themselves positioned 100, one place above their April ranking of 101st.
This amounts to a significant achievement for Stephen Constantine’s team, who, despite not playing a single match in April, have jumped above Malawi to find themselves in unfamiliar territory.
The context
India ranked 101st in the FIFA rankings for April, a 72-place jump from being 173rd in March 2015. The Blue Tigers last hit the top 100 in February 1996, when they were ranked an all-time high of 94.
It seems inconceivable how without playing a single match, India jumped one place to reach the top 100. But, other teams’ results also matter and Madagascar’s helping hand was very much necessary for India to break into the top 100.
The heart of the matter
It was already established that should Malawi, ranked 100th in April, fail to win both their African Nations Championship qualifiers against Madagascar, they would drop down a few places. Malawi contrived to lose both legs against Madagascar by 1–0 scorelines, which has catapulted India into 100th position in the FIFA rankings for this month.
What’s next?
With no matches scheduled for the month of May for Constantine’s men, it remains to be seen whether they can hold on to their lofty ranking for another month. In June, the Blue Tigers take on Lebanon in a friendly on 7th June before resuming their qualifying campaign for the 2019 Asian Cup against the Kyrgyz Republic at home on 13th June.
With both Lebanon and Kyrgyz Republic ranked worse than India, wins in both matches would result in little change in points gained by the Blue Tigers. That said, Constantine’s charges have won 11 of their 13 most recent matches, hence they will look to continue their good run of form in June as well.
Author’s take
India’s top 100 finish in the FIFA rankings for May isn’t a cause for much celebration, but it is an important landmark in the progress of the team under Constantine in recent months. There has been a change in approach from the experienced Englishman which has resulted in plenty of young blood being given chances, and judging by results and the progress up the FIFA ladder, this is a good time to be an Indian football team fan.
AdvertisementOn his radio program yesterday, extremist anti-LGBTQ pastor Kevin Swanson reacted to Roy Moore’s loss in the Senate election in Alabama earlier this week by blaming it on the state’s love of pornography, which he also warned is turning children gay.
Swanson, who interviewed Moore on his program earlier this year, told his audience that Alabama was among the states where people spent the most time on the website Pornhub in 2016, which lead him to conclude that it was no coincidence that Moore lost because “that state probably has significant sexual problems, especially since Doug Jones is so in favor of sexual perversion, transgenderism and homosexuality. Evidently, the state of Alabama must have a problem with sexuality. It’s obvious.”
“Unless there is a spiritual awakening,” Swanson added, “I think these conservative states are going to become liberal in their moral values within another five, 10, or 20 years. If the fathers are doing pornography, the kids are going to turn into homosexuals. The fathers will hide their sin and the children will come out of the closet with it. By the way, the top porn search word in Alabama and Mississippi is ‘lesbian.’ So another indication that the father’s generation is dabbling in porn, the children’s generation will go head over heels for some of the most egregious sexual crimes that men ever engage in.”A non-Mormon friend asked me recently if Mormons did “shunning” in the way that the Amish or the Jehovah’s Witnesses do to those who have left the community. I told her they didn’t, but that it was complicated. It’s not a part of Mormon doctrine to “shun,” but there are a number of things that can feel like shunning. I think some can be prevented, and others perhaps cannot.
If a Mormon leaves the community, family members are encouraged by church leadership to continue to love and support the former member. Sometimes this “love” takes the form of reminders about what they are missing out on. Some family members send quotes from church talks to encourage a return of the prodigal, as they see it. Ward communities continue to send “visiting” and “home” teachers to the home of an inactive person.
While the intentions are probably good, the effects aren’t always. I know a number of former Mormons who have asked to have their name removed from the official records of the church solely for the purpose of escaping the well-intentioned ward members who continue to bother them about their attendance at church and who seem less interested in friendship and more interested in numbers of active members on the rolls. This ought to be handled by a simple request to not be contacted that should be respected. Unfortunately, it seems that the Mormon church, which is excellent at record-keeping, doesn’t have a box on records to place a permanent hold on anyone, so when leadership is changed (or new missionaries come into the area), the whole process starts all over again, and the “yes, I really mean no contact” conversations begin again.
Then there are the subtler forms of shunning that take place. Mormon families are tight-knit and encouraged to do church-related activities to hold the fabric of family together. This means that if you’re not interested in the church, you may be forced into a position of simply declining family activities for long stretches because there aren’t any that don’t focus on General Conference or temple service. And what about family conversation? If your family members’ lives center on their ward callings, you may find yourself listening to a lot of talk about church service you’re not interested in—or even find offensive. And uncomfortable silence when it comes to talking about your own life.
If you no longer have a valid temple recommend, family weddings will be a difficult time for you. You not only won’t be able to get into the temple to see the wedding itself, but you will also likely have some uncomfortable conversations about why you’re not “worthy,” which might be anything from a refusal to pay tithing to a doctrinal dispute. Asking your children to marry outside of the temple instead is a dicey business, since that means they will have to wait a year to be sealed in the temple in the United States, and the protection of a temple wedding will be postponed during that time.
If you’ve been disciplined by the church officially, either disfellowshipped or excommunicated, and still choose to attend, you are asked to never speak in church and to refrain from taking the Sacrament. The latter makes sense, but the former seems a way to muzzle dissenters that is akin to shunning. While church leaders are supposed to keep details from a church court private (and usually do), the results of the church court are often seen as institutional shunning and tacit permission for members to treat those as “less than.”
LGBTQIA Mormons face a kind of shunning, as well. In addition to the new policy of 2015 that labels those in a same-sex marriage as apostates and excludes their children from baptism and other activity in the church (the closest to shunning I can find that is mandated by the leadership), there is doctrinally little place for the non-heterosexual in the Mormon celestial kingdom. For LGBTQIA teens coming out now, there are still parents who think that being gay is a “lifestyle choice,” and may be “catching” from those who are open in their sexuality. This means that kids are encouraged to remain in the closet for far longer than is healthy in order to keep their social relationships intact, and this goes for adults, as well.
Then there are the questions about whether you are considered a good role model for the younger generation. Do your siblings keep their children away from you—and possibly your children? If you (and they) have chosen not to follow the Mormon health code and you drink, or smoke, or even just have coffee for breakfast, this may be reason enough to keep you away because your bad example could easily spread to their children.
Many Mormon parents also refuse to let their children play with non-Mormon children, or do more subtle things like refusing to allow sleepovers at non-Mormon houses or refuse to let kids go to birthday parties there. And what about dating when your kids become teenagers? If you live in a highly concentrated Mormon area, your teen may be refused dates because they aren’t deemed worthy to date Mormons who have certain rules about dating you don’t believe in, from waiting until age sixteen, to not going on any one-on-one dates til after a mission, to modesty rules and no R-rated movies.This is a guest post by Kate Murray, IT Specialist in the Library of Congress’s Digital Collections and Management Services.
The Library of Congress’ Sustainability of Digital Formats Web site (informally just known as “Formats”) details and analyzes the technical aspects of digital formats with a focus towards strategic planning regarding formats for digital content, especially collection policies. Launched in 2004, Formats provides in-depth descriptions of over 400 formats sorted into content categories: still image, sound, textual, moving image, Web archive, datasets, geospatial and generic formats with more to come. There are other publicly available format assessment tools in the community at large including the British Library Format Assessments (via DPC wiki) and Harvard Library’s Digital Preservation Format Assessments just to name a few (see the iPRES 2016 workshop on Sharing, Using and Re-using Format Assessments for more examples) but in part, what makes the LC Formats resource unique is the fact that we document relationships between formats (subtypes and the like), especially the way wrappers and encodings interact when used together – what we call a “combo pack.”
Formats is also well-known for what we consider when evaluating formats including the seven sustainability factors and the quality and functionality factors which vary depending on the content category.
What’s New
Not ones to rest on our laurels, we are excited to announce recent updates and improvements for Formats. First, it’s moved to a new URL from digitalpreservation.gov/formats to loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats. Each page has a page-level redirect to bring users to the correct site. Content at the old URL is no longer revised so be sure to update your bookmarks to get the most current information.
One of the new additions to Formats is the inclusion of the PRONOM Persistent Unique Identifier (PUID) and WIkidata Title ID information in order to help establish the correct relationships to other these format assessment resources. One example is the open source format identification tool Siegfried which includes both LC’s format document descriptions and PRONOM information in its results. It’s important to recognize that there’s not always a perfect match across resources for a variety of reasons –maybe the versions aren’t consistently described for example - but when there is a good match, we’ll include it. It’s more complicated than just looking for matching format extensions like.tif or.wav. There’s an intellectual research component to correctly pair like with like so it takes a bit of time. We’re working our way through the list of format document descriptions and adding as we can – it’s an ongoing project.
In addition, we’ve also added links to formats listed in the Recommended Formats Statement to better connect these related resources.
A reminder that all format document descriptions are available for download in XML, as individual pages or get the entire set in a zip file.
Formats continues to evolve to meet the Library’s and the digital preservation community’s changing needs. Stay tuned for announcements about the posting of new format descriptions – we have much more to come.On the heels of a strong launch, WGN America’s breakout original drama series Underground has been renewed for a second season with a 10-episode order for premiere in 2017. Production on the series from Sony TV and Tribune Studios is slated to begin this summer.
The Underground Railroad thriller has drawn 3 million total viewers on Wednesday nights season-to-date in Live+7 and was the No. 1 original scripted series on cable last Wednesday night across all key demos in Live+3. The series also ranks as the No. 1 most social cable drama on Wednesday nights.
“With enormous pride we are announcing a second season of Underground, a series that has resonated with so many passionate fans across the country,” said Matt Cherniss, President and General Manager of WGN America and Tribune Studios.
Underground, which has been well received by critics and received an extra shot of publicity last week when Underground Railroad leader Harriet Tubman was unveiled as the new face on the $20 bill, follows a courageous group of American heroes who attempt a daring flight to freedom in the greatest escape in history. Cast includes Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Aldis Hodge, Christopher Meloni, Alano Miller, Jessica de Gouw, Marc Blucas, Adina Porter, Mykelti Williamson, Amirah Vann, Johnny Ray Gill, Chris Chalk, Reed Diamond, Theodus Crane, James Lafferty, Renwick Scott and Jussie Smollett.
Misha Green, Joe Pokaski, John Legend, Akiva Goldsman, Tory Tunnell, Joby Harold, Mike Jackson, Ty Stiklorius and Anthony Hemingway executive produce.
The season two order for Underground comes on the heels of WGN America renewing its other freshman drama, Outsiders. The network’s sole returning series Salem comes back for a third season Halloween week.
Underground is outpacing WGN America’s 2015-2016 primetime average by +508% in Total Viewers, +864% among Adults 25-54 and +1005% among Adults 18-49 in Live +7 viewing. Its March premiere, including three encores that night, amassed 3.5 million total viewers and 1.5M adults 25-54 – the highest rated original scripted program in the network’s history.Ronald Martinez/Getty Images
Tony Romo suited up as an honorary member of the Dallas Mavericks for Tuesday night's game against the Denver Nuggets, but he never saw the court during the 109-91 loss at American Airlines Center.
However, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said he tried to talk NBA Commissioner Adam Silver into letting the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback find his way onto the hardwood.
"I told him what I was going to do and said, 'Fine me if you don't like it,'" he said, according to ESPN.com's Todd Archer.
Silver ultimately nixed the idea by telling Cuban the NBA wouldn't honor a contract if Romo signed with the Mavericks.
Although Romo wasn't allowed to log official playing time in the Mavericks' home finale, he did participate in pregame festivities and layup lines before the game officially got underway, as the team's official Twitter account documented:
He also addressed the Dallas faithful prior to tipoff.
"This is an honor I could never have dreamed of," Romo said, per Archer. "It's a little embarrassing, but I tell you what I'm very lucky. Thank you, Dallas. I love you."
Romo, 36, retired from the NFL on April 4 following 13 seasons with the Cowboys. He's now pursuing a new career with CBS Sports as its lead football announcer alongside Jim Nantz.
For more news, rumors and related stories about Tony Romo, the Dallas Mavericks and the NBA, check out the NBA and Mavericks streams on Bleacher Report's app.Britain’s main opposition Labour party may have to cancel its annual flagship conference next month because it cannot find a company to provide security. G4S, the firm which has secured the gathering for 20 years, was dropped by Labour under its Israel-criticizing leader Jeremy Corbyn two months ago because of its links to Israel. This week, Labour went back to G4S with a plea for help, British news outlets reported Thursday, but was rebuffed.
With no security firm to handle the conference, the UK Home Office and police could shut down the conference altogether, a dramatic move that would strike a significant blow to the party, as the annual conference is a centerpiece of the political calendar and is used to garner support for new policies and initiatives. Corbyn is in the midst of a leadership challenge, and the result is set to be announced on September 24, the day before the conference.
Labour dropped the British-Danish G4S multinational security firm over its relationship with Israel following a controversial vote last year by members of its National Executive Committee. It then sought to find a replacement for the September 25 Liverpool event, in vain.
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Unable to find an alternative security firm, the left-wing party went back to G4S earlier this week, only to be turned down.
Quite apart from any bitter feelings left over from the Israel-related boycott, the company told the Telegraph newspaper it refused to work with UK Labour in light a number of incidents in which members of the party cursed at and spat on G4S employees.
The security firm also noted that preparations for the conference can normally take up to a year, making the one month left before the event insufficient.
“Safety for delegates and our staff is our priority and at this late stage and with our teams committed elsewhere, we are not in a position to step in and provide security for the conference,” the company said in a statement.
Three other companies have declined the offer of a contract and one withdrew its bid after carrying out a risk assessment, according to a Telegraph report.
The police could secure the conference, but have said this is “not an option at the moment,” the Guardian reported.
G4S has faced criticism over its involvement in Israeli prisons where Palestinian security prisoners are held. The Israeli lawmaker Hilik Bar wrote in a letter to a UK Labour colleague complaining about reports that suggested the Labour boycott of G4S was over Israel.
Labour leader Corbyn, who in 2009 called Hezbollah and Hamas his “friends,” has called for sanctions against the Jewish state for what he regarded as its violations of international law. He has since regretted calling the terrorist groups his friends.
Britain’s Jewish community leaders have accused Corbyn of both encouraging anti-Semitic rhetoric with his policies on Israel and of whitewashing the hate speech problems they said this creates within Labour. The party has in recent months also faced a succession of scandals over anti-Semitism within its ranks.More than 130 people, mostly combatants, have been killed in three days fighting between jihadists close to the Islamic State group and rebels in southern Syria, a monitor said Wednesday.
The clashes pit the Khaled Ben al-Walid Army -- which pledged allegiance to IS last year -- against Islamist rebel groups including the influential Ahrar al-Sham faction, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
At least 132 people had been killed in the fighting that raged in Daraa province near the border with Jordan and the buffer zone before the Israel-occupied Golan Heights.
The Khaled Ben al-Walid Army sparked the clashes with an attack on rebels in the west of the southern province.
The pro-IS group has since seized three areas including Sahem al-Jolan near the border and a hill overlooking the rebel-held town of Nawa.
The Khaled Ben al-Walid Army “wants to extend its influence in the strategic triangle between Daraa (city), Jordan and the Golan,” Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.
Daraa province, the cradle of the 2011 uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, is mostly held by the rebels but pro-government forces and IS are also present.
The provincial capital of the same name is divided between army and rebel control.
Syria’s war has killed more than 310,000 people since it started nearly six years ago with the brutal repression of anti-regime protests.
It has since spiralled into a complex war involving international players and jihadists.
First Published: Feb 23, 2017 20:49 ISTThe March issue of Kadokawa Shoten's Newtype magazine is revealing on Saturday that director Hiroyuki Imaishi (Dead Leaves, Gurren Lagann, Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt) is starting a new animation project. The untitled project will be at his relatively new studio Trigger, and more information will be provided in the June issue on May 10.
[Via Akiba Jigoku!]
Update: The project is planned as a television series, and the planning meetings began three years ago about the time Imaishi was working on Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt. Hiromi Wakabayashi (Gurren Lagann production designer, Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt conceptual planner) created the finishing special effects on the drawing that Imaishi himself drew. Thanks to Vito Plahuta for the news tip. [Via duckroll]
Update 2: Newtype magazine does not say that scenario writer Mari Okada and musical composer Taku Iwasaki are involved in director Hiroyuki Imaishi and Trigger's new anime project. The magazine includes tributes to Imaishi and Trigger from various anime and manga industry members, and quotes Okada as an outsider who received a sneak peak at the new project's production materials.It was supposed to be an uplifting TV report about a Nigerian refugee who has managed to integrate into Croatian society. And who, after being granted asylum, has now opened a small restaurant in Zagreb offering African cuisine. But the TV report provoked an unexpected backlash. Mere hours after the piece aired on public broadcaster HRT, TV journalist Maja Sever received an anonymous death threat on Facebook.
"I opened the message and briefly wondered what kind of a person issues death threats to others like this. But I didn't think for too long and quickly made a screenshot of the message and then reported the person to the police," the well-known Croatian journalist recalls. The author of the threat, an individual claiming to be a Croatian living in Belgium, threatened to kill Sever for supposedly promoting "multiculturalism." Sever was also insulted. And this isn't the first time she's been subjected to such abuse, either. But she isn't scared: "I will make each and every threat public. The public must recognize what kind of pressure we journalists are under just for doing our jobs. I'm encouraging my colleagues to do the same. We should all take a stand against this. That's our duty!"
Increasingly brutal attacks
Threats against Croatian journalists aren't new. But social media platforms have made them more visible. And they seem to have helped make such incidents more common, and also more violent. The Croatian Journalists' Association (CJA) reports that 12 incidents were registered in 2017. Croatian journalists were targeted by death threats and subjected to attacks.
Journalist Natasa Bozic (pictured at top) is one of those who was threatened. In an interview during her weekly roundup on TV station N1 Zagreb, Bozic pondered whether Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic should revoke Slobodan Praljak's military decorations – Praljak was convicted of war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. "I was shocked and disgusted by the hateful comments spewed on social media platforms one or two hours after the interview. First, I just wanted to ignore the insults," Bozic remembers. "I realized that these weren't typical chauvinist insults but blatant death threats. Some stranger wrote that he wanted me decapitated!"
Sever received death threats online
An easy job for the police
The man who made this threat had published the message on his own Facebook profile page, using his real name. So the police were able to quickly arrest him. Now, he's awaiting trial. He could face up to five years in jail.
Yet many others like him feel safe to say whatever they want given their anonymity online. Sasa Lekovic, who heads the CJA, says this is a problem: "The police only catch those who don't hide their identity. That's why only a fraction of reported cases end up in court. And many trials only produce suspended sentences. This is disappointing and sends a clear signal that it's acceptable to attack journalists verbally and even physically."
Lekovic feels let down by the Croatian state. He thinks perpetrators must be brought to justice swiftly. And that working as a journalists in Croatia has become increasingly dangerous.
Press freedom in jeopardy
Reporters Without Borders has warned that press freedom in Croatia is in jeopardy. Its 2017 World Press Freedom Index indicates that Croatia has seen the most severe decline in press freedom out of all EU member states. In one year, Croatia dropped 11 places down to spot 74. Now, it ranks lower than countries like neighboring Serbia, which isn't even an EU member. In 2016, Croatia was downgraded from 54th to 63rd place.
Specifically, Reporters Without Borders criticizes the rhetoric of leading politicians attacking the media, and the national-conservative government exerting political pressure on the country's public service broadcaster. Reporters Without Borders deems this an attempt to influence the broadcaster's reporting. Moreover, Croatia has cut state funding to small, independent, nonprofit media outlets.
Exerting political influence on the media isn't a new phenomenon, however. The previous center-left government also attempted to do this by changing the public service broadcaster's leadership. Media critics in Croatia now quip that the country's public TV station has morphed into a kind of "YouTube channel for the ruling government."
Lekovic says working as a journalist in Croatia has become increasingly dangerous
Fearful journalists
Maja Sever says that this direct and indirect political meddling has an effect on the work of journalists: "Several months ago a parliamentarian and high-ranking member of the ruling HDZ party wrote on Facebook that he welcomes my TV show being axed because I supposedly hate everything Croatian. Comments just like that encourage others to take a similar stance."
The result is ever more hateful commentary on social media, censorship and even self-censorship. Some journalists are seriously worried about their careers; they fear for their lives and the well-being of their close relatives. "This fear isn't the result of some personal weakness – it's the result of a catastrophic state of affairs in an EU member state," Natasa Bozic stresses. "The state has failed to protect press freedom and freedom of speech, which are prerequisites for democracy and essential to societal progress."
But Bozic and her college Maja Sever have vowed to remain tenacious in their fight for press freedom. Each day, they have to deal with editors, politicians, and lobbyists trying to influence their work as journalists. Bozic says she will continue to make public each and every death threat against her. "Social media platforms are not some space where you can break laws without legal repercussions, where you can threaten others and sow hatred without facing consequences," she says. "People need to understand this. If we just sit back, this hatred might someday spill out onto our streets."The good news for Democrats: Both groups are leery of tax and social welfare policies that favor the wealthy over the struggling middle class.
The bad news: Reaching them won’t be easy. They get their information from their own sources like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other online outlets that are notoriously wrong.
A gift to capture Trump’s heart
Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was born into politics, the son of another Canadian leader, Pierre Trudeau.
So when he came to the White House to break the ice with President Trump, he knew just the gift to warm the new president’s heart: a picture of himself.
Image This picture was presented to President Trump by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada. It shows Mr. Trump honoring Mr. Trudeau’s father, Pierre, at a dinner in New York City in 1981. Credit White House Pool
“He gave me a picture of myself and your father, and what a great picture. I will keep that in a very special place,” Mr. Trump said, meaning, presumably, a picture of “his father.”
Democrats note Icahn’s potential conflicts of interest in regulatory role
Last year, the billionaire investor Carl C. Icahn waged an all-out battle with the Environmental Protection Agency, complaining that regulations were strangling the oil industry. Now, as Mr. Trump’s special adviser on overhauling regulation, Mr. Icahn has the ear of the president and a front-row seat as the administration rewrites regulation.
This has some Democratic senators worried. On Monday, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, and six other Senate Democrats will send a letter to the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, seeking responses to a series of questions related to Mr. Icahn’s official role. The senators will raise concerns that Mr. Icahn will work to change regulations to benefit his own investments. They are also seeking assurances that safeguards have been put in place to ensure that Mr. Icahn does not have access to information that is not public that could be used to make profitable trades.
The letter, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times, comes days before the Senate is expected to take up the nomination of Scott Pruitt, Mr. Trump’s candidate to head the E.P.A.A- A+
Hundreds of thousands of golfers quit the sport last year, and it might be because the average game takes nearly
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1970s, a co-op can be an excellent place to live for a college student looking to save money. For the 2011-2012 school year, a room in a co-op house will cost $4,680, or $585 a month. This amount includes rent, utilities and food.
The co-op sizes range from 20 to 50 students. I lived in one that had two large houses right next to one another and could accommodate 50 students. Room sizes range from triples to singles. Evening meals are served 5 nights a week, and in return for the low cost of living there, members are expected to do 3 to 5 hours of work a week. I partnered with another member and cooked one night a week for 3 hours to prepare enough food for a dinner for 50. Also, our house included two very large living rooms, a rec room downstairs with a pool table and a piano, and a dining area large enough to accommodate 50 people eating dinner.
While I had some great times at the co-op there can be downsides such as dealing with others who are not doing their chores, or sometimes living in a messy or noisy environment. Yet, the co-op I lived in truly felt like a home away from home, and it saved me a bundle.
Buy a home
A friend I went to school with emptied his savings, and his parents raided their savings to buy a condo close to campus. He lived there with his brother while they both attended U of M. They shared a bedroom and rented out the other bedroom to another student.
There are several benefits to this—what you are paying each month in a mortgage payment is hopefully giving you equity in the house, you can offset part of the mortgage payment through renting out part of the home, and it offers the student a more comfortable, quiet environment in which to live. In addition, the student gets to practice managing a home and working as a landlord if there are renters.
There are drawbacks though, such as maintaining the home and handling the repairs and other problems that occur with home ownership. There is also the risk that you will not be able to sell the home when the student finishes college or that you may lose equity in the home. However, you could certainly hold on to the home and rent it out after your child graduates in which case it may become an excellent property investment.
Buying a home worked out perfectly for my friend, though. He never left the college town and is still living in the home, years later.
If you or your child is going away to college, recognize that there are living arrangements outside of the traditional dorm or apartment. These alternative living arrangements are often much cheaper than the traditional route, yet still offer students a safe, comfortable place to live during the four years of college.
What other alternative college housing options would you recommend for college students?Floyd Mayweather has been videoed walking a large tiger around a hotel room on a leash in the latest leg of his 'Undefeated Tour' of the United Kingdom.
The champion boxer has been travelling up and down the country taking questions in a series of venues on his illustrious career.
Mayweather, who is reportedly close to agreeing a multi-million dollar cross-discipline fight with Conor McGregor, had previously been criticised by animal rights group, PETA, after he was alleged to have had a caged albino tiger at his 40th birthday party.
In an Instagram video posted online by one of Mayweather's entourage, 'Pretty Boy' struggles to keep the collared tiger under control in a busy hotel room.
Mayweather or McGregor? Get the best sign-up offers including McGregor to win at 40/1 >>Hewlett Packard Enterprise on Tuesday stepped up its efforts to develop a brand-new computer architecture by inviting open-source developers to collaborate on the futuristic device it calls "The Machine."
Originally announced in 2014, The Machine promises a number of radical innovations, including a core design focus on memory rather than processors. It will also use light instead of electricity to connect memory and processing power efficiently, HPE says.
A finished product won't be ready for years still, but HPE wants to get open-source developers involved early in making software for it. Toward that end, it has released four developer tools.
One is a new database engine that speeds applications by taking advantage of a large number of CPU cores and non-volatile memory (NVM). Another tool offers a fault-tolerant programming model for non-volatile memory, while yet another gives developers a way to explore The Machine's new architectural paradigm.
Finally, a DRAM-based performance emulation platform leverages features available in commodity hardware to emulate different latency and bandwidth characteristics of future byte-addressable NVM technologies.
Interested developers can visit The Machine community page for links to the corresponding projects on GitHub and start contributing. More tools are expected to be released in the coming months.
“By making software stacks for The Machine open source, we are enabling the developer community to gain early access to new programming methods and tools so they can improve upon existing applications and imagine future possibilities," said Bdale Garbee, HPE Fellow in the Office of the CTO at Hewlett Packard Labs.
Code contributions that get accepted into the main code base will appear in the first prototype of The Machine, which Hewlett Packard Labs hopes to unveil later this year, Garbee added.Southern Methodist University punished a student for tacking up fliers saying, “Why white women should date black men,” her response to racist materials that had been posted around campus urging white women not to date black men.
The institution deemed her fliers prejudiced, too, and indeed, they did contain potentially offensive statements that the student says were satirical. The incident raises questions about when and how a college should take stands on forms of expression.
Emily Walker, who will enter her senior year at SMU in the fall, was given a deferred suspension -- meaning she committed an offense so great that it would constitute a suspension, but officials chose not to enforce the punishment. In the past weeks, she has started publicly discussing her experience with the campus judicial system, claiming the university only seeks to protect its image.
In November, she created and posted her fliers, a reply to posters that had been hung anonymously around campus that month with the header “Why white women shouldn’t date black men.”
The original poster claimed black men were more likely to carry sexually transmitted diseases and abuse their partners.
Southern Methodist quickly condemned the initial fliers, and the president, R. Gerald Turner, released a statement then, telling those who “[commit] to living a life of denigrating others” should find another place to live.
University statements do not specify whether anyone was punished for those fliers.
“The entire community must recommit to discouraging and eliminating such unacceptable behavior. There will be many tense moments nationally over the next few months. During these moments, the SMU community must be able to discuss our differences with mutual respect surrounded by a supportive campus environment for everyone. Anything less is unworthy of who we are,” Turner’s statement said.
But Walker, who at the time worked as a student athletic trainer, often with teams composed largely of black students, felt compelled to show support in some way.
Walker wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed she had seen some football team members cry after the original posting.
“It is important to fight racism so the next generation grows up knowing what is right and what is wrong,” Walker said. “It’s a steep mountain to climb due to the prior generations not prioritizing successful integration of difference races within America.”
She printed fliers with information saying black men were less likely to commit mass shootings and that babies from parents of two different races were likely to be healthier.
Then she started into stereotypes -- what she called satire -- to raise questions about the original posters.
She wrote that black men could more likely to “sexually please” a woman. She included a world map that showed the average size of a penis by country, highlighting the fact that the number was higher in African nations.
“Once you go black,” she wrote on her flier, “you don’t go back.”
Though such platitudes are considered offensive, Walker told a local television station they were meant as satire.
Still, the university considered Walker’s fliers a violation of its nondiscrimination, affirmative action and equal opportunity policy.
Because officials determined Walker had infringed on that policy, she was also in violation of the student code of conduct, they said, and handed her the yearlong deferred suspension, beginning in late March.
Walker was also instructed to write a minimum 1,500-word reflection paper on how she could have more appropriately responded to the first flier.
A university spokesman, Kent Best, said in an emailed statement that federal privacy law prohibits the university from discussing Walker’s case.
“One hallmark of a great university is its willingness to recognize freedom of expression on difficult topics, yet every university struggles with the question of balance when it comes to allegations of harassing and discriminatory speech. At SMU, incidents are investigated under SMU’s nondiscrimination and Title IX harassment policies on a case-by-case basis,” Best said.
When Raven Battles, a Southern Methodist junior and president of the black student association, spoke with a few black men on campus, she said they believed Walker’s flier “hadn’t helped much.”
They felt that by including the sexual stereotypes about black men, it fetishized them, Battles said in an interview.
Over all, the fliers didn’t prompt a huge campus response, mostly because administrators addressed concerns so quickly, Battles said. She described the association’s relationship with the university as positive, saying that officials supported minority students' events and their safety.
In her email to Inside Higher Ed, Walker said she felt the incident created a “chilling effect” on her freedom of speech.
“I can’t open my mouth, because if I do, it’s worth being suspended,” Walker said.
As a private institution, Southern Methodist isn’t obligated to follow the same statutes that protect free speech at a public university. It can and did levy punishments based on its own policies.
But the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which handles discrimination complaints, has previously indicated that a single case of offensive expression wouldn’t constitute harassment that would be barred by federal law.
“In order to establish a hostile environment, conduct must be sufficiently severe, persistent or pervasive as to limit or deny the student's ability to participate in or benefit from the educational program,” the office wrote in a 2013 letter to the University of California, Berkeley.
The Education Department at the time was investigating a complaint filed against Berkeley that Jewish students were being discriminated against on campus.
Worrisome to Gary Pavela, an expert in higher education law, and the co-founder of Academic Integrity Seminar, is that the incident at Southern Methodist concerned a woman trying to protect minorities, he said. Pavela's organization tries to teach students the importance of social trust.
Pavela referenced both the 2013 OCR letter to Berkeley and a 1973 Supreme Court case, Papish v. University of Missouri Curators, that ruled a student was inappropriately expelled for distributing a student publication with a risqué cartoon.
The University of Missouri is a public institution.
“My reaction is that neither by OCR standards nor constitutional standards … this meets no definition of unlawful expression I’ve encountered,” Pavela said of Walker’s case.
Southern Methodist has been criticized before for race-related issues on campus. In 2015, two fraternities canceled an off-campus party that President Turner called “racially offensive.”
The “Ice Party” Facebook advertisement featured a black rapper gripping a chain in his mouth.
“It is simply unacceptable for any campus group or individual to employ images and language that promote negative stereotypes and are demeaning to the dignity of any member of our campus community,” Turner said in a statement at the time.For a long time, the Manis Mastodon site near Sequim, Washington was the elephant in the room of the Northwest Coast early period. The apparent bone point embedded in a mastodon rib was seemingly hard to explain by any non-cultural means, yet maddeningly short of definitive proof, and so was politely ignored. The point has always been a thorn in my side too, which is why I have posted on it three times, once over a year ago, and twice recently.
Maybe I am a bit obsessed with it because if I rise gently from my sofa in Blog World Headquarters, being careful not to spill fine single malt on my pyjamas, then through my window I can see Sequim in the extreme distance, seemingly mocking me.
So all the more cathartic that today, with the publication of a convincing re-analysis of the mastodon rib by Michael Waters et al. in the respected journal Science, we can say that the site is, indeed, evidence of humans hunting Mastodon on the Northwest Coast 13,800 years ago. That’s about eight hundred years pre-Clovis. Like I said before: it’s real. It’s old. It’s on the coast. Wow.
In common with many papers in this journal, it is very short: not much more than a single page. There is quite a lot of additional meat in the online supplementary information, which I have seen. Even so, I haven’t had time to digest the whole article, and my day job is being very demanding right now, so in addition to the general points I raised two weeks ago, here are some more points of interest.
1. The ancient DNA and protein analyses did not work well. Nonetheless they are able to establish (more or less) that the point itself is made of mastodon bone. From the x-ray above, there is no question it is penetrative and not some kind of pathology. The identification as “bone” (as opposed to tusk ivory) is referenced to “High-resolution x-ray computed tomography (CT) scanning (15) revealed that the osseous object embedded in the rib is dense bone shaped to a point (Fig. 1 and movies S1 and S2).” Identification as mastodon obviously rules out antler and the rutting elk theories. It would be nice to have tusk ivory completely and irrefutably ruled out by examination of cellular structure of the bone point, say.
2. The sort of eruptive effect seen on the external pictures of the rib is unexplained – perhaps displaced rib cortical bone? Close examination of the radiograph at the top of the post shows part of the rib surface bent down along the lower margin of the projectile, and perhaps part was forced upwards as well. The rim of the eruptive zone does seem very clean where it meets the rib though.
3. The projectile itself is very narrow. By the scale above, it is only about 4 mm in diameter. The author’s note that to even contact the rib, the projectile would have had to penetrate 25 to 30 cm of muscle, and connective tissue. That’s a foot of meat! And it doesn’t include the thick skin and hair. And yet, it still had enough grunt to penetrate the rib by over 2 cm. I’d be more skeptical of this if I hadn’t recently seen Nick’s experiments of thrusting antler points through about 40 cm of ballistics gel, occasionally penetrating into an underlying piece of lumber. One feature of those experiments to my eye was how tamely the shaft followed the point into the gel – and at Manis, presumably the bone projectile did not measure 32 cm X 0.4 cm: it must have thickened up, then met a shaft or foreshaft. All the same, for a long, straight bone point then dense mastodon long bone would presumably be just the ticket. While mentioned in the article in passing, it would be quite interesting to see comparison to the Clovis bone rods, one of the largest collections of which is also from Washington State. These early osseus artifacts are usually interpreted as hafting aids, though we hashed out their potential as bone points in this space a while back – see this quick picture from Lyman et al 1998.
In any case, comparison of the new image to the previous one shows the older one was actually quite misleading. The new CT scans include some 3-d images (and apparently an online rotational animation of the CT scan in three dimensions, but I haven’t seen those yet EDIT: see here). It takes a bit of effort to decode the one in the article (below) but I think it becomes clear that the bone point itself has a markedly narrow length:diameter ratio and is quite straight. Narrow is good if the goal is to pass between ribs, and/or to penetrate very deeply to reach vital organs. The pointy end is not that clear, but to my eye seems to be chisel shaped or beveled, though it might well be crushed or warped by the aforementioned linear foot of mastodon meat it just penetrated. In any case, I think it extremely unlikely that this is a random splinter of bone, it is far more likely to be the end of a projectile point. Waters is quoted in this Guardian article:
Waters placed the mastodon in an industrial-grade CT scanner at the University of Texas. “It’s more powerful than a hospital one. They’re taking slices every 0.06mm, half the thickness of a piece of paper,” he says. “The 3D rendering clearly showed that the object was sharpened to a tip. It was clearly the end of a bone projectile point.”
4. One surprise is that they assert the animal did not, as previously thought, survive for months after this wound: there is no sign of wound healing. This actually makes a tidier story of a single event “kill-butchery site”, for the authors also accept without comment at least some of the previous studies (e.g., D. Gilbow thesis) of the bones showing impact fractures, spiral fractures, cut marks, and a systematic pattern of disarticulation. Hunting in a wetland is, of course, quite characteristic of early American adaptations, and is also the pattern at the nearby, contemporaneous, Ayer Pond. Daniel Fisherhas been able to do remarkably fine-grained seasonality studies on mastodon tusks – which may have an almost-daily encoding of growth. It seems like a missed opportunity not to attempt this at Manis, thus establishing the season of death. It would also have been most welcome for the supplemental materials to illustrate (with photographs) the bone characteristics said to result from butchery. The compelling illustrative material from the Ayer Pond report sets a good example in this regard, allowing readers to clearly see the specimens in question and follow the argument closely. It’d be great to see the Manis skeleton as a whole receive that treatment.
5. It does raise the question of whether there were any trees or bluffs around to fire the projectile from, which entered the animals middle back from above at about a 60 degree angle. The authors suggest that perhaps it was a lance used in a thrusting motion, which I actually have some sympathy with – we made the suggestion at the SAA conference in Vancouver that some early NW Coast organic projectiles may have been killing lances for dispatching large fauna from boats, in caves, or other awkward places of inter-species rendezvous. Nick Waber is also including this general idea in his forthcoming thesis. An atl-atl dart launched at close range at a downed mastadon can’t be ruled out, however.
6. A suite of radiocarbon dates were run, showing definitively that the rib (found out of context) is exactly contemporaneous with the rest of the mastodon (found in situ). The table above shows the four new dates used, including the new one on the rib. A number of other dates were also run, all by Tom Stafford through the respected lab at Irvine (UCIAMS). One curious feature of the dates is that, judging by the lab numbers (e.g., 11350, 29113), which are issued sequentially at Irvine, and comparing them to lab numbers from projects I have worked on, then these new Manis radiocarbon dates were run in about 2005. This shows that the Manis reanalysis has been going on for quite some time.
7. The authors’ conclusions are apt, but strike a slightly sour note in some ways:
The absence of stone projectile points at Manis, Hebior, Schaefer, and Orcas Island and the presence of an osseous projectile point at Manis suggest that osseous projectile points may have been the pre- dominant hunting weapon during the pre-Clovis period. Bone and ivory points and other tools are common in the Upper Paleolithic of Siberia and in late Pleistocene sites in Beringia (22–24). They are durable and lethal hunting weapons that continued to be used during and after Clovis (16, 23, 25). The invention and spread of a new hunting weapon at 13 ka—the Clovis lithic point— may have accelerated the demise of or doomed the last megafaunal species.
As Dale Croes and David Rice commented in my earlier post, perhaps we really are dealing with a widespread pre-Clovis bone point tradition out here on the NW Coast, and elsewhere (though what about those pre-Clovis “Miller Points” and El Jobo points, etc.?). In particular, they note Alex Krieger’s “pre-projectile point hypothesis”, which Waters et al. do not mention. Speaking of authorship, it is most welcome to see Carl Gustafson as a co-author, considering his close connection to the site over the last 25 years. I’ve moaned about the Manis uncertainty at length but, you know, without Gustafson we probably wouldn’t have anything to talk about at all.
But as I was saying, the rather cavalier assertion that the invention of Clovis projectile points somehow hastened the extinction of Megafauna seems once again to place undue privilege, or undue burden, on a sort of “Clovis Exceptionalism” which I think is unhelpful in early period archaeology. In the Science news report (which is behind a paywall) Gary Haynes perpetuates the centrality of Clovis as an archaeological construct:
Haynes adds that the oldest Clovis sites are “only” 8 centuries younger than Manis. Thus the rib “may actually indicate the earliest beginning of the Clovis era, or an immediately proto-Clovis stage of human dispersal,” he says. “Proto-Clovis” peoples in small numbers may have filtered south from Beringia as early as 14,000 years ago, he says, although their impact was negligible until the arrival of Clovis technology. To Waters, such talk of “proto-Clovis” amounts to “grasping at straws.”
I mean, we don’t talk about Clovis as “pre-Folsom”, so I’m going to start a campaign to just outright banish the term “pre-Clovis” except strictly as a temporal marker – those folks were not trying to become Clovis, Clovis was an unknown cultural expression eight centuries in their future.
8. Speaking of Clovis Exceptionalism, I was very interested to see that one of the non-anonymous reviewers thanked in the article is Stuart Fiedel, who has been one of the most outspoken critics of any pre-Clovis occupation in the Americas. Either he is in agreement with this paper, or his critique of the paper was insufficient to modify the authors’ strong conclusions, or to prevent publication in this top journal. The paper thus seems almost “immunized” against certain genres of criticism.
Though really, with the equally convincing paper from earlier this year, also by Michael Waters et al., on the pre-Clovis Buttermilk Creek Complex (Friedkin Site) in Texas, it would be harder than ever to drive pre-Clovis advocates en masse over a cliff. And the fundamental insecurity at the heart of the “Clovis First” arguments was always that it only took one legitimate pre-Clovis site to pull aside that curtain. I think it’s fair to say that we now have a handful of solid pre-Clovis sites, including at least four (Paisley Cave, Monte Verde, Ayer Pond and Manis Mastodon) on the western margins of the Americas, of which two are only a few tens of kilometers apart right here in the Salish Sea. It’s a good time to be an archaeologist on the Northwest Coast.
Reference:
Michael R. Waters, Thomas W. Stafford Jr., H. Gregory McDonald, Carl Gustafson, Morten Rasmussen, Enrico Cappellini, Jesper V. Olsen, Damian Szklarczyk, Lars Juhl Jensen, M. Thomas P. Gilbert, Eske Willerslev 2011.
Pre-Clovis Mastodon Hunting 13,800 Years Ago at the Manis Site, Washington. Science 334 (21):351-353.Made in Wales and selling for just £4, the Pi Zero comes with any purchase of the £5.99 MagPi magazine
The latest version of British computer Raspberry Pi has become the first computer to be given away free with a magazine.
The Pi Zero is a fully fledged computer which measures just 6.5cm by 3cm. Made in Wales, it sells for just £4 in the UK and $5 in the US. Raspberry Pi is also giving the device away for free with the purchase of its £5.99 monthly magazine, MagPi.
Best reader Raspberry Pi projects – and some of the most pointless Read more
Like all computers made by Raspberry Pi, the machine runs Raspbian, a version of the Linux operating system built for the devices. It ships with a 1GHz processor and 512Mb of memory (the same amount that was included in the iPad 2 in 2011, and equivalent to a desktop computer in the early 2000s), and can run apps built for the operating system, such as coding tool Scratch and the game Minecraft.
Raspberry Pi says: “Of all the things we do at Raspberry Pi, driving down the cost of computer hardware remains one of the most important. Even in the developed world, a programmable computer is a luxury item for a lot of people, and every extra dollar that we ask someone to spend decreases the chance that they’ll choose to get involved.
“The original Raspberry Pi Model B and its successors put a programmable computer within reach of anyone with $20–35 to spend … At the start of this year, we began work on an even cheaper Raspberry Pi to help these people take the plunge.”
Although the Raspberry Pi is the best selling British computer ever, the company which manufactures it, Premier Farnell, still ran into financial trouble this summer, leading to the ousting of the chief executive Laurence Bian.
The Raspberry Pi foundation, which developed the computer, is a non-profit.The Miami Heat will go to extremes when it comes to the 2017-18 schedule released Monday by the NBA.
The Heat's first homestand will be their longest of the season, a six-game stretch that includes challenging games against the San Antonio Spurs, Boston Celtics and Minnesota Timberwolves.
From there, the Heat will immediately embark on their longest trip of the season, a six-game run that includes the test of the NBA champion Golden State Warriors on the second night of the Heat's first back-to-back games of the season.
For a team that went 11-30 over the first half of last season only to then go 30-11 over the remaining 41 games, a strong start figures to be essential for a roster largely kept intact by Heat President Pat Riley.
The Heat open their season Oct. 18 at the Amway Center against the Orlando Magic, as they did last season, then next play in their home opener Oct. 21 against the Indiana Pacers.
The Heat's previous earliest season opener had been on Oct. 26 in both 2010 and last year. The Heat's earliest regular-season home game previously had been Oct. 28, three times, including last year. The six games in October are a record over the Heat's 30 seasons.
With the NBA season moved up by a week, and with the league emphasizing increased rest, with no stretches of four games in five nights for any teams this season, the Heat will have only 13 back-to-back sets, two fewer than last season and four fewer than two seasons ago. Included in that total are consecutive home games on Dec. 22 and Dec. 23, against the Dallas Mavericks and New Orleans Pelicans, the first time that has happened since the lockout shortened 2011-12 season.
As is annually the case, the Heat will play each of the 15 Western Conference teams twice, on a home-and-home basis. That lone Warriors' visit of the season will be Dec. 3.
The Heat will play each 10 of their 14 Eastern Conference opponents four times, with two homes game and two road games. The exceptions are three-game series against the Cleveland Cavaliers and Toronto Raptors, who the Heat will only host once, as well as three-game series against the Boston Celtics and Milwaukee Bucks, who the Heat only visit once.
Staff writer Ira Winderman looks at 10 of the most intriguing games on the Miami Heat's 2017-18 schedule:
After failing to make the playoffs, the Heat are currently limited to four national appearances on ESPN, one on TNT and four on NBA TV, although there is flexibility built into those national assignments.
With the Ringling Bros. circus no longer operating, the Heat will not have the early-January western swing that had been a staple of their schedule. Instead, the Heat will have only one road game between Dec. 21 and Jan. 8. The Heat's western swings instead will be an early-season trip against the Denver Nuggets, Los Angeles Clippers, Warriors, Phoenix Suns and Utah Jazz, and then a mid-March trip against the Portland Trail Blazers, Sacramento Kings and Los Angeles Lakers.
The Heat will close their schedule with six of their final eight at home, but with a potentially taxing closing week against the visiting Oklahoma City Thunder and visiting Raptors on April 13, the closing night for the entire league. The Heat's five games in April are a franchise low for April.
Another favorable twist is the Heat have only one set of back-to-back games over their final 17 games, a quick trip of a game at home against the Hawks on April 3 and then at Atlanta on April 4.
The Heat will be off on Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, with a road game on Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Jan. 15 against the Chicago Bulls.
The Heat will play nine day games (games starting before 6 p.m.): Nov. 5 at the Clippers, No. 12 at the Detroit Pistons, Nov. 19 in Indiana, Nov. 26 at the Bulls, Dec. 9 against the Brooklyn Nets in Mexico City, Jan. 7 against the visiting Utah Jazz, Jan. 14 vs. the visiting Milwaukee Bucks, Jan. 15 at Chicago and March 25 in Indiana.Oma raha
Tämä tulee yllätyksenä: 60 000 mikrofonia lakkaa toimimasta
Mainos (Teksti jatkuu alla) Mainos päättyy
Langattomia mikrofoneja käytetään muun muassa kotikaraokelaitteissa, oppilaitoksissa, urheiluseuroissa, kirkoissa sekä konserttisaleissa ja teattereissa.Taajuusmuutos liittyy maailmanlaajuiseen radiotaajuuksien käyttöoikeuksien uusjakoon. Suomi siirtää muiden Euroopan maiden tapaan aikaisemmin langattomien mikrofonien käytössä olleen 800 megahertsin taajuusalueen langattoman laajakaistan 4G-verkkojen käyttöön.– Muutos astuu voimaan 1. tammikuuta 2014. Sitä on valmisteltu Viestintävirastossa useiden vuosien ajan, mutta uskon, että se tulee silti monille käyttäjille yllätyksenä, sanoo audiovisuaalisen tekniikan yritysten Avita ry:n toiminnanjohtajatiedotteessa.Liikenne- ja viestintäministeriön teettämän tutkimuksen mukaan Suomessa on lähes 60 000 langatonta mikrofonia, jotka toimivat 800-taajuusalueella. Selvityksen mukaan käyttäjistä yrityksiä on noin 36 prosenttia ja yksityisiä 23 prosenttia. Kolmannen ison ryhmän muodostavat oppilaitokset 21 prosentin osuudella.Ministeriön selvityksen mukaan langattomien mikrofonien vaihtaminen ja uudelleenvirittäminen maksaa suomalaisille käyttäjille yli 30 miljoonaa euroa. Laskelmassa on oletettu, että kalleimman hintaluokan laitteista noin 80-85 prosenttia viritetään uudelleen.Advertisement New Jersey family searching Maryland for lost dog Dog got out of car when family got into crash on I-95 Share Shares Copy Link Copy
A New Jersey family is searching Maryland for their lost dog, which got scared in a car accident on Interstate 95 in Baltimore and jumped out of the car.Mobile users tap here to watch video | UPDATE: Body of Labrador retriever found in BaltimoreJaclyn Tracey, of Hoboken, N.J., and her husband, Andrew, were all around Baltimore Tuesday morning, putting up posters about their missing yellow lab, Charlie. The couple was involved in a car crash Sunday afternoon on I-95 near the Fort McHenry Tunnel."He's our best friend, he's a great dog. We've had him for six years. Jaclyn raised him as a puppy and we had him when we got married as well," Andrew Tracey said.Jaclyn Tracey is seven months pregnant and, as a precaution, stayed in the hospital Sunday night. After getting out of the hospital, she and her husband have looked everywhere. They've even left articles of their clothing at Riverside Park near I-95, hoping the dog would get the scent and come there."The car started filling up with smoke so we opened the door and the dog jumped out of the car and he ran at least a mile down Interstate 95," Jaclyn Tracey said.Police said they saw Charlie exit the highway at South Monroe and Russell streets about 4 p.m. Sunday, the last time Charlie was seen.The whole family is involved in trying to find Charlie."Charlie's a wonderful, wonderful, dog. She's pregnant and she was so waiting for Charlie to meet this baby. We just want him returned. If anybody has him, please, please return him to my daughter," said Beth Holland, Jaclyn Tracey's mother."We got him when he was a small puppy (while we were) in college. I'm pregnant with my first child, and I was really looking forward to seeing Charlie and the baby together. He really is a part of our family, and we just want to get him back safe," Jaclyn Tracey said.If you have any information regarding Charlie's whereabouts, call the Traceys at 973-945-7072.Website helps find lost animals onlineMaryland SPCA director Tina Regester said lost animals that are brought to the shelter have a three-day hold time before they are made available for adoption. During that time, the animal is listed on its lost and found portal on the website www.mdspca.org/programs/lost-found.Regester said anyone who finds a pet can fill out a form on the site and include a photo -- it's not just for the SPCA. Regester said anyone who sees a missing animal can then contact the owner directly, and they don't have to bring that animal to the shelter.People who find lost animals can submit a found report, too, so owners can check it to try to find their missing pets. If they find them, they can contact the person who has their animal directly.Regester said the page also offers other useful tips to find lost animals.WBALTV.com editor Katie Lange contributed to this articleWe already knew that HTC was dedicating a lot of resources to help accelerate VR’s growth, but it looks like the company has taken a big step forward in this area today.
Taking to the stage at this week’s GSMA Mobile World Congress in Shanghai, HTC Vive has announced the Virtual Reality Venture Capital Alliance (VRVCA), which brings together 28 VR investment companies under one banner looking to help fund startup companies working in VR as well as augmented and mixed reality too. Along with HTC Vive itself, names include the likes of Immersion Ventures, The VR Fund, and Colopl VR Fund. The group’s president is Alvin Wang Graylin, the President of VR at HTC China itself.
According to the group’s official site there’s a staggering $10 billion in “deployable capital” between the investors, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all of this money will be distributed between companies that pitch. It just means that money could be used to invest in those startups.
VRVCA will be meeting six times a year – once every two months – at offices in both Beijing and San Francisco. Hopeful startups from around the world will be able to pitch their companies in the hope of gaining some much needed investment. The site states that anyone working on VR content, base technologies, tools, platforms, hardware, peripherals, accessories or other vertical applications can apply, and it’s already possible to submit a pitch deck. We’re not sure when the first meeting will get underway, however.
Essentially, this gives entrepreneurs a great chance to give their company the spotlight, and also brings interesting new ideas and groups straight to the doors of the investors that might be interested in them. Think of it as a VR version of Shark Tank (or Dragon’s Den for the UK audience); you’ll get to pitch to a wide range of investors and those interested will work something out with you. Anyone that does pitch will need to include details like a full team background, market opportunity, and plans for monetization.
The announcement seems like an expansion of HTC’s own Vive X accelerator concept, which was announced at the end of April 2016. This is a $100 million accelerator fund that companies can apply to get a piece of, with offices in Beijing, Taipei and San Francisco to help incubate growth.
That’s a lot more money that could potentially be injected into the VR, AR and MR ecosystems. Hopefully we’ll start seeing the benefits in the very near future.Rotational Motion
W HAT IS T ORQUE?
Torque is a measure of how much a force acting on an object causes that object to rotate. The object rotates about an axis, which we will call the pivot point, and will label 'O'. We will call the force 'F'. The distance from the pivot point to the point where the force acts is called the moment arm, and is denoted by
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a guy, and he hasn’t developed this sort of invulnerable super spy ability that the later Bond characters had. He’s still a human. His heart gets broken. He goes through all of the initial phases of hard, difficult, crazy things that kind of turn you into that man of steel. So there was a ton to go on there for just writing one song, and I think it seemed to work pretty well.
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Audioslave, “Cochise” (2002)
AVC: This was the song that introduced listeners to what was essentially billed as the supergroup. Was this one of the first songs Audioslave recorded?
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CC: I don’t remember. I really don’t remember the order in which we’d recorded, but I know we’d written the whole first album in a rehearsal space in L.A. in the course of about two weeks, which is really fast. [Laughs.] I think we wrote an entire song when we’d just met in the first 20 minutes of just standing around, which ended up being “Light My Way.” I think “Cochise” was an early song in terms of songwriting, and I think it was probably the epitome of what people had guessed that band would sound like. I think if you did the math on paper with Rage Against The Machine and then me screaming over it, it’s gonna be “Cochise.” That’s what you’re going to get, and that was probably the best version of that which we were doing at the time. It definitely had an impact. Even in the room as we were starting to write it, it felt good.
What I remember most about that was the video, because it was at the very tail end of record companies having a huge budget for videos because that was the easiest way to promote a band. It might have seemed expensive to pay for the video, but then you didn’t pay to get it played, so then suddenly your band has a TV special that everybody watches 15 times a day. It was a pretty dramatic moment. I mean, you can be in a room with anybody and write an album, but the first time you appear in public with them on a video shoot where the budget was close to a million dollars, and there’s like hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fireworks blowing up behind us—it was pretty surreal.
AVC: It’s been eight years since the band broke up. Is that experience something you see in a different light now that you’ve been removed from it for a prolonged period of time?
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CC: I think it’s not different. I think my experience as a member of the band and the songwriting processes and creating the actual albums was really great, and it felt really inspired. It was a challenge to write all the time because we did things at a pretty dramatic pace, but I think to me that was part of the artistic challenge. To me that was how I separated it in my mind from, for example, the Soundgarden experience. Every aspect of it was a different approach, and I didn’t want to go out of my way to change that approach because it was different. I wanted to contribute to continuing that approach, and I thought it worked great. I feel like we were extremely prolific, and we made three really great albums. In a sense I can’t view it in the way that I view Soundgarden in that Soundgarden was sort of my first love. It was the first I felt that as a musician if I wanted a band that was special, I was gonna have to make that.
It was never gonna be, “Show up and hire me,” and I found two other guys that were like-minded mostly through luck. We were very prolific, and I was very obsessive over it and to this day still am. I felt very controlling and very much had my hand in every aspect of it. With Audioslave I tried to allow for there to be a little more distance in different areas so that I wasn’t influencing it in ways that would make it sound like a Soundgarden record, and that seemed to work really well. Having said that, it’s just as important to me as anything. It’s a very important period of my life just as something like Temple Of The Dog would be. They’re very important characters in my life as friends and as collaborators. It’s something that I’m really proud of.
Soundgarden, “Burden In My Hand” (1996)
AVC: For a lot of people this was sort of the Soundgarden swan song. It’s still an anomalous part of the Soundgarden catalog. Was that something you felt while writing it—that it was a kind of oddity?
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CC: Well, it was something new for me. The writing was really me sitting in my basement with a guitar and trying to make sense of it; trying to make a rhythm and a tuning that was something like I’d never done before. It was sort of feeling like a crack in the door was opening, and it felt refreshed. It was new for me and for the album, but it wasn’t one of those things that wrote itself. I had to really work at it to squeeze out an arrangement that would make sense as a song but still incorporated a lot of different aspects of things I’d never really done as a songwriter before that. I was pretty happy with it. I think that “Burden In My Hand” is one of those songs that walks that edge between being sort of expressive but can be easily connected with in terms of its melody and its lyrics. It’s a structural song but still coloring out of the lines. That was one of the most challenging songs to do, really.
Soundgarden, “Black Hole Sun” (1994)
AVC: The song that most associate with Soundgarden, “Black Hole Sun,” is another oddity. Surrealistic nightmarish suburbia music video aside, it’s a weird fucking song. Given its still-constant rotation on the radio and synonymy with Soundgarden, do you see the song differently two decades later?
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CC: I think the one good thing that song did was that it singlehandedly got us over that hump of being lumped in with other bands. That was important to me because there was a period of time from when we formed in 1984 until the late 1980s where none of the other Seattle bands that you would cite as being hugely successful even existed yet. We were this band that was like King Of The Hill in our small world of post-punk indie Seattle bands. We were also a band who was very encouraged by everyone locally. They felt like we were the band that would be the future of rock and that we should be playing arenas one day, and what happened was that at some point with Sub Pop and a lot of other Seattle bands being great and making great music, by the ’90s we were kind of lumped in with a group, and that group was Seattle rock.
And that was great because if you’re gonna get lumped in with a group, that’s a great one to be a part of, and we were the first ones, so good for us. But we’d enjoyed this autonomy for a long time, and I also think that all of us, all the bands from Seattle, had a job to do, and at some point we needed to prove as individual bands that we had a right to be writing, recording, and performing on an international stage. I think the release of Superunknown did that for us, and I think having a sort of legitimate pop hit internationally definitely helped do that for us and particularly one that sat entirely outside of what anyone thought of as musical in their idea of genre. The way I feel is that that whole scenario did a whole bunch of different positive things for me and my band simultaneously.
Temple Of The Dog, “Hunger Strike” (1991)
AVC: You mentioned Temple Of The Dog earlier. For a lot of ’90s kids, this was their first experience not only with your music but Eddie Vedder’s as well. Obviously the album was incredibly personal, being rooted in the death of Andrew Wood from Mother Love Bone. Soundgarden was already fairly well known at this point, but you brought in Vedder, who hadn’t really broken the surface with Pearl Jam and Ten. What’s the story behind that collaboration?
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CC: I don’t really remember it. [Laughs.] I kind of remember the basics but singing on that album happened so quickly. The song itself, it really wasn’t much of a song. It was a verse with just a kind of repeating chorus. It was just where we needed one more song for the album, and I had that down, but I hadn’t played it for anybody yet because I didn’t feel it was a complete song. But I knew we had nine songs, and I thought 10 would be a nice, even round number. I just figured that this would be the 10th song that would wrap up the album, and it would just be what it was, verse for verse and then repeating chorus sort of like a coda for the album listening experience. In rehearsing it, and I think we only rehearsed for two days for that album, but I was singing both parts of the song. I sang the high verse part and then the low chorus part and then the high chorus part and so on.
Eddie and the rest of them were waiting for us to finish because they were about to have one of their first rehearsals as Pearl Jam, and he saw me sort of struggling with it, so he just walked up to the mic and started singing the low part, and I started singing the high part. I immediately got this idea that his voice sounded so rich in that low register that it would become more of a song if I sang the first verse, then the whole band kicks in, and then he sings that verse again, but in effect it becomes a different verse. It’s a different person. It’s a different voice and a different everything. And I think I had that idea right there on the spot; we did it that way, and suddenly it was a real song. I hate to use that term “real song” but to me it was like: Okay, in just a moment this has become an arrangement that changes everything.
I never thought about it as being singular or anything because there were a lot of really well written songs that lent themselves to the notion of a single, but once we played it for other people, that was the choice that was made. But my memory of us singing it together is I just went in and sang my part, he went in and sang his part, and it took probably 40 minutes, and that was it. That was back in the day where you had no record budget, and that album in particular was recorded and mixed in a total of 14 days, not in a row.
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Soundgarden, “Rusty Cage” (1991)
AVC: Not only is this one of the most recognizable guitar lead-ins from the 1990s, but it also holds the distinction of being covered by Johnny Cash. As an intro to Badmotorfinger it just works like a primer for the rest of the album. What did the writing entail for this one?
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CC: I vividly remember writing the lyrics. I was in one of those European bus vans, and we were on the road—I think in the UK—and I’d just been sitting there staring out the window for hours. I just started coming up with the lyrics in my head and was able to remember them. I didn’t write them down on anything, but I think the images were vivid enough that I remembered them. I came up with the guitar riff separately in Seattle when I was just sitting on a couch coming up with guitar parts. I really like the combination between those lyrics and that guitar riff and that guitar arrangement. To me it felt like it was something new. Like it was American in a sense, but the riffing and guitar playing was more like Black Sabbath. I remember referring to it as “Hillbilly Sabbath.” [Laughs.]
Matt Cameron, our drummer, went, “I’ve never heard anything like that before.” Now on the other hand, I didn’t have any idea that somebody would decide it’d be a great song for Johnny Cash to cover, but then I think it means my estimation was somewhat correct. [Laughs.] I just had the melody for the lyrics, and I knew that it worked over the parts. But I didn’t sing and play it. I demoed it, and at that time when I demoed it I would either use an 808 and program it, which took way too long, or I’d mic up a drum set and just play sort of rudimentary drums over it. I can’t remember which one I did, but I definitely wrote it and sang over the parts, but that wasn’t me doing it simultaneously. Now, once we made the record, and we’d recorded it and it was done and we were about to go on tour, I had to sit in a chair with a guitar and just drill playing the riff [emphasizing] really slow and singing over it while slowly but surely speeding up.
It took days to actually do it. The funny thing is that once I was able to do it, and we went on tour, at the end of the tour in support of Badmotorfinger, there was a show where my guitar crapped out at the beginning of “Rusty Cage,” and I remember thinking at the time really quickly, “Oh, well I’ll just sing it. It’ll be great. I can just sing the shit out of it without having to play the guitar.” I put the guitar down and started singing it, and this was the first time I noticed this phenomenon that your brain kind of connects all of those motions and gets used to them and kind of maximizes everything within them, and when suddenly I was singing without that anchor of the guitar riff, it wasn’t better. I wasn’t really singing it better. It kind of felt like I wasn’t singing it as well. Since then I’ve noticed that with other songs. Sometimes playing a song that has an intricate part on guitar and then singing over it, after having done it a lot, it becomes the best way for you to do it.CNBC's Rick Santelli called for a "Chicago Tea Party" Thursday, leading the charge for calls to revolt against the Obama Administration's mortgage bailout plan (see video below).
The clip has gone viral on the Internet, bringing with it loads of opinions, both pro and con.
You can share yours here.
And CNBC.com's The Heat is back for the occasion, asking "Should America Join Santelli's Tea Party?"
Santelli was back in action Friday (watch the video), and even the White House mentioned him directly in response to questions about the bailout — not once, not twice, but NINE times... and even invited Rick to the White House for coffee. Not tea, mind you.
Santelli responded to criticism from the White Houseon The Kudlow Report on Friday night.
And, in Santelli's Manifesto, he explains what led to the "Shout Heard 'Round the World."
Watch the original shout heard 'round the world in the following video clip. Then read below what others are saying about it.DIALOGURI
Directorul Serviciului de Ambulanță Județean Arad, dr. Maria Nicoară: „Nu e firesc să suni la 112 pentru o migrenă sau un simptom care nu-ți pune viața în pericol”
Serviciul de Ambulanță Județean Arad (SAJ) încorporează, pe lângă Statia Centrală de Ambulanță Arad, substațiile Chișineu Criș, Gurahonț, Ineu, Lipova, Sebiș, Săvârșin, Pecica, Șiria și Sântana. Dincolo de complexitatea unei munci extrem de dificile, imprevizibile și nedrept de prost plătite, medicii și asistenții de pe ambulanțele arădene se confruntă și cu un deficit de personal și de utilaje menit să le denatureze munca, aproape să le arunce în derizoriu eforturile pe care le fac zilnic, în scopul, clar și precis definit de profesie, de a salva vieți. Numeroase cazuri subsumându-se ideii „salvarea nu a apărut la timp” întregistrează presa locală în ultima vreme – cotidianul nostru a relatat, și el, câteva.
Despre aceste evidențe, despre cum s-a ajuns la această situație, am discutat cu Maria Nicoară, managerul general al SAJ Arad.
Sasha Romanov: Este adevărat că municipiul Arad este deservit doar de 3 ambulanțe? Nu am inventat noi acest număr – este o precizare a dispecerului de la ambulanță când un pacient a solicitat o intervenție.
Maria Nicoară: Haideți să o luam cu începutul. Și am să va răspund tranșant din prima frază: NU ESTE ADEVĂRAT CĂ MUNICIPIUL ARAD ESTE DESERVIT DE DOAR TREI AMBULANTE. Și am să va spun de ce: SAJ ARAD are în fiecare tură un MINIM, atenție MINIM, de o ambulanța de tip C deservită de medic, asistent și ambulanțier, TREI ambulante de tip B cu asistent și ambulanțier și un echipaj ACD, consult la domiciliu cu medic și ambulanțier. Spuneam că acesta este un minim necesar și garantat. În realitate, pe fiecare tură sunt mai multe echipaje care intervin prompt la solicitările arădenilor.
S. R.: Cum s-a ajuns în această situație? Mă refer la situații de genul celei relatate de noi ( „ Dacă vrei să ajungi de urgență la spital, cheamă un taxi. În Arad, salvarea ajunge la tine în 3 ore jumate ”) Cum se poate remedia?
Maria Nicoară:,,S-a ajuns în această situație”, ca să vă parafrazez, datorită faptului că s-au făcut angajări astfel incât s-a ajuns la minimul menționat: adică 5 echipaje pe tură. Pe viitor, intenția este de a crește numărul de echipaje pe tură mai precis 10 echipaje. Soluția ar fi suplimentarea numărului de posturi la Serviciile de Ambulanță la nivel național. Odată cu creșterea numărului de personal operativ, se intenționează, tot pe plan național, ca la nivelul serviciilor de ambulanță să se achiziționeze un număr considerabil de autosanitare noi.
S. R.: Există vreun act normativ sau ordin de ministru care să reglementeze numărul ambulanțelor pentru municipii sau județ?
Maria Nicoară: Nu există un normativ de alocare a ambulanțelor la nivel de municipii sau județ.
Sasha Romanov: Și totuși avem un caz concret, relatat chiar de site-ul nostru, când un pacient a așteptat ambulanța peste 3 ore. Cine prioritizează intervențiile?
Maria Nicoară: Nimeni nu a așteptat niciodată trei ore – dacă vorbim de o intervenție iminentă și de situații care pun viața cuiva în pericol. Însă dispeceratul, acolo unde sunt medici și care decid ce este o urgența și cât de… urgentă este urgența, sunt obligați să acorde primul ajutor persoanelor ce au pusă viața în pericol. Nu putem lăsa un copil cu febră mare și convulsii, la fel cum nici nu putem să nu intervenim în cazul accidentelor de circulație, de pildă. Prioritizarea intervențiilor se face în dispeceratul medical de către dispecerele de serviciu și medicul coordonator. E adevărat ca și SAJ ARAD are,,clienții casei”, mereu aceleași persoane care sună poate zilnic sau chiar de mai multe ori în aceeași zi, la numărul de urgențe 112. Și nu e firesc să suni pentru o migrenă sau un simptom care nu-ți pune viața în pericol, pentru asta sunt medicii de familie, cabinetele specializate și centrele de permanență. Chiar și așa, SAJ Arad să știți că ajunge în toate punctele de intervenție în timpii regulamentari. Există legislație specifică de dispecerizare a cazurilor, care prioritizează cazurile în funcție de cele relatate de către pacient/aparținător pe 112.
S. R.: Dotarea SAJ Arad este pe minim? Ce se întâmplă dacă mașinile au nevoie de intervenție în service?
Maria Nicoară: Dotarea SAJ ARAD nici vorbă să fie la minim posibil. Realizați că zilnic sunt, pe lângă ambulanțele care circulă non stop pe străzile județului și municipiului, ambulanțe care sunt în service pentru diferite intervenții tehnice, și ambulanțe de rezervă. Serviciul de ambulanță nu a simțit și nu simte că sunt câteva mașini în service pentru că întotdeauna ne organizăm așa încât activitatea noastră să nu fie periclitată nicio secundă.
S. R.: Care este regula de circulație cu avertizare sonoră în trafic a ambulanțelor? Sunt zone în municipiu (de exemplu zona Lacului – Pădurice- CJA) unde fonic este un coșmar mai ales în orele de vârf ale zilei.
Maria Nicoară: Legislația prevede obligativitatea utilizării atât pe timp de zi cât și pe timp de noapte a semnalelor acustice și luminoase în timpul deplasării în regim de urgență spre locul intervenției, adică spre pacient, sau spre spital. Vă imaginați câte accidente ar fi cu ambulanțe aflate în misiune în impact cu participanți în trafic indisciplinați? Pentru că doar așa ii pot numi pe cei care nu acordă prioritate ambulanțelor aflate în misiune.
Cum să știe un șofer că o ambulanță este în misiune dacă nu are pornite semnalele luminoase și acustice? Din păcate, tot mai mulți șoferi nu dau prioritate autospecialelor noastre – și atunci apar incidente neplăcute. Care medic sau asistent își poate lua responsabilitatea ca mașina salvării să oprească la fiecare semafor în timp ce pacientul este – poate – în stare critică?! Care șofer de ambulanță își permite luxul să nu pornească și semnalele de avertizare sonoră riscând astfel viața lui, a colegilor din ambulanță dar și a pacientului care și așa se găsește într-o situație dificilă?! Cât despre zona descrisă de dumneavoastră, care este una dintre cele mai aglomerate artere din Arad, folosirea semnalelor de avertizare se impune atunci când ai o urgență, viața acelui pacient poate că depinde de un fir de ață, iar aglomerația nu-ți permite să te strecori cu viteză mare prin trafic.
S. R.: Ce ar trebui să știe pacienții sau aparținătorii lor atunci când apelează serviciul de urgență 112 și solicită o ambulanță? Ce recomandați?
Maria Nicoară: Pacienții care sună la 112 și solicită o ambulanță trebuie să știe că medicul din dispecerat prioritizează urgențele pe baza simptomelor descrise de apelant iar echipajul pleacă din stație in conditiile in care nu se află intr-o altă misiune, înainte ca solicitantul să fi închis telefonul. Este important să sunăm la ambulanță atunci când sesizăm simptome ce pun viața în pericol. Le recomand apelanților care sună zilnic la ambulanță să mai viziteze și un medic de familie, cele mai multe lucruri putând fi rezolvate pe timpul zilei, fără a uita că prelungirea medicului de familie este centrul de permanență și abia apoi AMBULANȚA și UPU. Colegii mei, medici, asistenți și ambulanțieri sunt buni profesioniști și puteți avea toată încrederea în deciziile și profesionalismul lor.
Sasha Romanov, 10 octombrie 2016 6:54Looking for news you can trust?
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Ohio Gov. John Kasich doesn’t have much hope of racking up enough delegates to be elected the Republican presidential nominee by the party’s convention in Cleveland this summer. So far he’s only secured 25 delegates, per the New York Times, far behind Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, let alone front-runner Donald Trump.
But during an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, DC, on Friday afternoon, Kasich remained optimistic that he could become his party’s nominee—by winning a contested convention. “I don’t think anyone’s going to get that,” Kasich said when Fox News’ Sean Hannity asked him about the prospects for any candidate to gain enough delegates to win the nomination on a first-ballot vote. “Could you think of anything cooler than a [contested] convention?” Kasich said, adding that it would make for a fun civics lesson for viewers at home.
Before he sat down with Hannity, Kasich roamed the CPAC stage solo, speaking to the crowd. He kicked off his speech with remembrances of how, as a young man in 1976, he had worked to force a contested convention in order to put Ronald Reagan forward as the Republican nominee over incumbent President Gerald Ford. (Ford won the nomination but lost the presidency.) “The fact is, we got him on the ballot, and I was at the convention with Gov. Reagan, and I had at a very young age found myself in charge of five states for Gov. Reagan,” Kasich said.This timeline gives an overview of scientific racism throughout the world, placing the Eugenics Record Office within a broader historical framework extending from Enlightenment-Era Europe to present-day social thought.
1759: Botanist Carl Linnaeus publishes the 10th edition of Systema Naturae, which is the first to fully describe the four races of man.
1770: Dutch naturalist Petrus Camper begins developing his “facial angle” formula, basing his ideal angle on Grecian statues.
1795: Anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach names the five races of man.
Early 1800s: Franz Joseph Gall develops “cranioscopy,” which is later renamed phrenology by his disciple Johann Spurzheim.
1810: John Caspar Lavater publishes the foundational text Essays on Physiognomy.
1828: George Combe publishes The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects, linking phrenology and racial comparison.
1830s: Orson Fowler opens his Phrenological Cabinet in the heart of downtown Manhattan.
1832: Johann Gaspar Spurzheim invigorates the American phrenology movement with his series of lectures in Boston.
1839: Samuel George Morton introduces his theory of craniometry in Crania Americana.
1844: Scottish publisher Robert Chambers releases his Vestiges of the Natural History of Mankind, the most popular work of natural history prior to Darwin’s Origin of Species. Chambers argues that each race represents a different stage of human evolution with whites being the most evolved.
1852: American physician James W. Redfield writes Comparative Physiognomy, which equates each type of people with a specific animal.
1853: French thinker Arthur Comte Gobineau publishes An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Race, arguing for the primacy of the Aryan race.
1859: Charles Darwin release the first edition of On the Origin of Species.
1864: Herbert Spencer coins the phrase “survival of the fittest” in developing his theories of social Darwinism.
1865: French anthropologist Paul Broca develops his “table chromatique” for classifying skin color.
1866: Physician John Downs defines “Mongolian idiocy” which he argues is a regression to the “Oriental stage” of human development.
1869: Francis Galton publishes Hereditary Genius, outlining his theories or human breeding.
1876: Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso releases Criminal Man, which outlines his theory of criminal anthropology.
1877: Richard Dugdale publishes The Jukes, which links crime and heredity.
1882: The Chinese Exclusion Act is passed, excluding Chinese laborers from immigration for ten years.
1883: Galton coins the term eugenics.
1886: Chief of the New York City Detective Bureau Thomas F. Byrnes publishes Professional Criminals of America in which he collects the mug shots of notable criminals.
1892: The Chinese Exclusion Act is renewed for ten more years under the Geary Act.
1893: The World’s Columbian Exposition opens in Chicago with country pavilions organized according to scientific theories of race.
1889: Andrew Carnegie pens “The Gospel of Wealth,” justifying the extreme wealth of the robber barrons.
1900: Gregor Mendel’s theories of inheritance are “rediscovered.”
1902: The Chinese Exclusion Act is made permanent.
1904: Curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Institute Ales Hrdlicka publishes Broca’s “table chromatique” in the U.S.
1905: The German Society for Racial Hygiene is founded.
1905: Alfred Binet invents the IQ test for measuring intelligence.
1907: The Eugenics Education Society is founded in Britain.
1907: The first American compulsory sterilization law goes into effect in 1907 in Indiana with dozens of states following suit.
1910: Zoologist Charles Davenport founds the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory with a grant from Mrs. E.H. Harriman.
1911: The Joint-Congressional Dillingham Commission recommends reading and writing tests to slow “undesirable” immigration.
1911: Franz Boas publishes The Mind of Primitive Man arguing for the role of environmental factors in the apparent differences between races.
1912: The First International Conference of Eugenics is held in London, presided over by Charles Darwin’s son Leonard.
1913: Eugenicist Henry Goddard introduces the IQ test at Ellis Island.
1916: Madison Grant publishes The Passing of the Great Race, splitting Europe into three racial groups: Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterraneans.
1917: The Immigration Act of 1917 includes the Asiatic Barred Zone, which excludes nearly all immigrants from Asia.
1920: Lothrop Stoddard writes The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy.
1921: The Emergency Quota Act is signed into law, heavily restricting immigration from Eastern & Southern Europe.
1921: The Second International Congress of Eugenics is held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
1923: Carl Bringham publishes A Study of American Intelligence, which uses the IQ testing done by Robert Yerkes to support differences in intelligence between races.
1924: The Immigration Act of 1924 becomes law imposing a quota system that favored Northern & Western Europe and excluding immigration from all of Asia.
1924: U.S. Congressman from New York Emanuel Celler gives his first major speech on the House floor against the Immigration Act of 1924.
1927: The Supreme Court upholds compulsory sterilization in Buck v. Bell.
1932: The Third International Eugenics Conference is held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. ERO Director Charles B. Davenport presides.
1932: The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences is released with many of the anthropology articles written by Boasians, not Grantians.
1933: The Third Reich enacts the first German compulsory sterilization law.
1935: The Carnegie Institution of Washington orders an external scientific review of the ERO, and finds its records “unsatisfactory for the scientific study of human genetics.”
1937: Madison Grant dies.
1937: The Pioneer Fund is founded by Wickliffe Draper to support racial research. ERO superintendent Harry Laughlin serves as its first president.
1939: The Eugenics Record Office shuts down.
1943: Chinese Exclusion is repealed and a quota is given of 105 immigrants per year.
1952: The McCarran-Walter bill is passed, revising but not eliminating the quota system of immigration.
1965: The Hart-Celler Act repeals the immigration quota system and establishes a new system based on skills and family relation.
1994: Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray release The Bell Curve which argues for racial difference in IQ.
1998: The American Anthropological Association issues a statement on race, concluding that contemporary science makes clear that human populations are not “unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups.”
2003: North Carolina finally repeals its compulsory sterilization law.
2014: New York Times journalist Nicholas Wade argues for race-based science in A Troublesome Inheritance.Updated Kickstarter preview here!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1183318884/177265673?token=07972d14
Want to stay updated? Follow us on https://twitter.com/Team_geNe6 or Facebook!: https://www.facebook.com/FalseElegy/
In order to find his lost friend, a divine entity has to bind with a beautiful demon corrupted by sin. With their lives connected as one, the only way to survive is by withstanding heaven and hell together.
Since the dawn of man, Ascendants have been seen soaring in the skies. To the humans, they are ethereal, divine and immortal beings, guardians of earth and protectors of humankind. But even among the Ascendants, there are those who have Fallen.
Areon is an Ascendant who hunts the creatures born from sin, the Fallen. Together with his partner Eden, he purges the world little by little. Everything goes effortlessly until Areon is asked to participate in the Divinity project; a project to rehabilitate Fallen. Only the best Ascendants are chosen due to the dangers. During the project, a Divinity Link will be formed between the two until one Ascends, or one Falls.
At the selection, the beautiful Ark caught his attention. A Fallen that had been caught three weeks ago, but never approached due to her insanely corrupted personality. Areon, undaunted by her ferocity, forms a link with Ark. However, he did not realize that his powers will be irrelevant. What will be challenged are his wits, resolve, and mental fortitude. What awaits him is a bigger task than he could have ever imagined.
What is False Elegy?
False Elegy is an interactive visual novel, featuring psychological, mature, romance and action elements. We are aiming for a story of 250.000 words, including three different routes. Your choices will influence the events in this world, and determine which path the story will take. Each route will focus on one of the three main heroines, and their relationship with the protagonist.
The story is set in a fantasy setting. The locations used in False Elegy are heavily inspired by famous European cities and architecture:
A big part of the story will take place during the night. False Elegy will have backgrounds to accompany those parts:
Our stretch goals will always have a certain thought behind them. They're meant to either expand the False Elegy universe, or they're meant to add more depth to the False Elegy experience. We won't deviate into side stories that are out of character and do not add anything to the main story. What we will do is elaborate on the important events that happen before or after the main plotline. Every dollar above our initial goal will be used to improve or create new assets for the original story. That's a promise from the False Elegy team.
Our top priority is to add voice acting to the most important lines in False Elegy. One of the best things about the visual novel medium is sound. Having voices for the characters add an additional layer of depth to the experience. At $15,000 we're convinced that we'll have enough funds to hire professional voice actors.
This is a stretch goal that we of Team geNe6 secretly really hope to achieve. If we can reach another 5,000 dollars, we'll make a prequel that covers Ark's teenage years
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brs (+$3 at the door) This festival always sells out! Advance tickets suggested.
W/ Anna & Elizabeth, The Draptomaniacs, Katherine Fahey, Matt Muirhead, Elizabeth Downing, McKenzie Elizabeth Ditter, Hidden Eye Theater, Stevie Lynne Dissinger & The Atlantic Waves, Guest musicians more!!!!!!
Buy Tickets Here
Mother’s Presents: Anders Osborne and Cris Jacobs [Night 1]
8PM – 1:30AM
The 8×10
10 E Cross St, Baltimore
Mother’s Grille Presents: A Weekend with Anders Osborne and Cris Jacobsat The 8×10!!!! Limited VIP tickets are available, which includes admission to both shows, 15 minute early entry and a limited edition poster signed by each artist.
Buy Tickets Here
Save Your Soul w Lord Thomas (Hot Buttered – VA)
9PM – 2AM
Lithuanian Hall
851 Hollins St, Baltimore
One of Save Your Soul (and the East Coast’s) favorite Soul spinners Lord Thomas (aka Ryan Thomas) returns for a night of mod beats and floor-filling grooves! PLUS all the usual hits and floorfilling obscurities Save Your Soul is known for! Etta, Stevie, Marvin, Ray, Aretha, Nina, Smokey and Otis and so many more ALL on 100% vintage 45rpm vinyl! Huge & cheap Lithuanian beers, and potent Virtya shots and more! $5 (for members) | 21+ (anyone can be a member, just pay a $5 annual membership fee and you’re in the door!)
Teapots Exhibition Opening
6PM – 8PM
Baltimore Clayworks
5707 Smith Ave, Baltimore
Main Gallery: TEAPOTS VIII
Solo Gallery: Ceramic Sculpture Culture
Community Arts Gallery: Wood fired Teapots from Community
Project Space: Wood fired Student work from Towson, CCBC and Coppin
On View | January 7 – March 4, 2016
Baltimore Clayworks offers you some hospitality to fight the winter’s chill with our exhibition: Teapots VIII, juried by nationally recognized ceramic artist and educator, Sam Chung. Our juror, Sam Chung, has selected a vibrant array of artists for Teapots VIII. Perfect for collectors and students alike to explore vessels showcased in our gallery for daily domestic tasks or fancier ones for more elaborate rituals.
Karaoke Forever – First Friday Edition –
9PM – 2AM
The Crown
1910 N Charles St, Baltimore
Come sing yer lil’ heart out at The Crown. No Cover all night and tons of songs to choose from. 9pm – Free. The Crown : Red Room.
Alex Norris Chordless Quintet TWO SETS
8PM – 11PM
An die Musik
409 N Charles St, Baltimore
Alex Norris, Trumpet. Russel Kirk, Alto. Jason Rigby, Tenor. Jeff Reed, Bass. Eric Kennedy, Drums. Jazz Trumpeter, composer, and educator Alex Norris is a Maryland native, and a graduate of the Peabody Conservatory. For the last 20 years, he has performed, toured, and recorded all over the world in a multitude of settings as both a sideman and leader. He has appeared at An Die Musik over the last several years as a member of both local groups and international touring acts. Currently residing in New York, Alex maintains an active performing schedule. Simultaneously, he commutes here to Baltimore regularly, where he is a member of the Jazz faculty at the Peabody Conservatory. Ticket: $20 in advance/$23 at door/$10 full-time students with ID.
Jennifer Nicole Presents: The Juice Tv Live!
8PM – 9PM
Hotel RL Baltimore Inner Harbor by Red Lion
207 E Redwood St, Baltimore
Jen Nicole also known as “Jen with the Juice” is a media personality, entertainment blogger owner of www.jenwiththejuice.com. Jen with the Juice gives viewers the latest in entertainment, celebrity gossip and everyday news. The Juice TV, featured on the site, is an online talk show in which Jen invites a panel of guests on her show to candidly discuss different topics. Jen Nicole is also a co-host on Baltimore Flava Radio which highlights talented artists in the Baltimore area. You can catch episodes on www.baltimoreflavaradio.net.
Manners Manners, Quattracenta, Jordannah Elizabeth & Jumpcuts
9:30PM – 12:30AM
The Windup Space
12 W North Ave, Baltimore
Manners Manners https://www.facebook.com/mannersmannersmd/?fref=ts
Quattracenta https://quattracenta.bandcamp.com/releases
Jordannah Elizabeth https://jordannahe.bandcamp.com/
Jumpcuts https://jumpcuts.bandcamp.com/
Doors at 9 pm $8
First Friday Cooler Coup – Release Party for Union’s Rye Baby
7PM – 10PM
Atomic Books
3620 Falls Rd, Baltimore
To celebrate the limited release cans of Union Craft’s Rye Baby we’ll be featuring a number of Union beers on Happy Hour Special all night.
The tentative beer lineup: Rye Baby, Duckpin, Balt Alt, Anthem, Black Wing, and Double Duckpin.
We’ll also have some free Union giveaways – starting at 7pm! And, of course, we’ll have snacks from our friends at Golden West Cafe. What the hell is a “Cooler Coup”? You know how tap houses like to have “tap takeovers” where they highlight a particular brewery? Well, Eightbar is a bottleshop – so we have no taps. Instead, we have a Cooler Coup. Geddit?
Free Seminar – Dr. Justin Taylor “DIY Bio and Biosecurity”
7PM – 9PM
BUGSS Baltimore Under Ground Science Space
101 N Haven St, Ste 105, Baltimore
Join us for a seminar night with Dr. Justin Taylor “DIY Biology and Biosecurity”. Justin will talk about the rise of DIY bio and increased availability of molecular tools that allow research to be conducted outside of traditional laboratory settings and the implications of new technology such as CRISPR. He will also adress the risks and threats from accidents and individuals with nefarious intentions and how to mitigate those risks and threats. Dr. Taylor was selected as a fellow in the 2015 class in the Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Initiative. He received his Ph.D. in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology from University of Maryland, Baltimore and his bachelor degree in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from the University of Colorado.
Register Here
Art, Music, Conversation
7:30PM – 9PM
The Room – Mt. Vernon
800 Saint Paul St, Baltimore
Watch art create art as poets and fiction writers read their work, and are responded to in real time by a piano player and visual artist. Join us for inspiration, and good conversation about their work!
Ease into the New Year: Four Weeks of Gentle Yoga, Meditation & Essential Oils
7:30PM – 9:30PM
Baltimore Yoga Village (Hampden)
3000 Chestnut Ave, Baltimore
Please join Martha Rogers on Friday evenings in January for Gentle Yoga, Essential Oils & Candle-light Meditation. Does the approach of a new year fill you with excitement and expansive vision? Overwhelm & contraction? Do you oscillate between expansion and the contraction of unknowing on a regular basis? (Most of us do.) This workshop is an invitation to reconnect with the profound intelligence of your being, to nourish yourself during the depths of winter, and an opportunity to listen for the dreams & ideas that want to burst forth in the coming year. Martha Rogers is a local acupuncturist and founder of Full Moon Acupuncture. Her workshops share a synthesis of Yoga and Chinese Medicine in a light-hearted, interactive way. $80 for all four weeks or $25 in advance, $30 the day of for individual dates.
Buy Tickets Here
Saturday, January 7
Weekend Walk-Ins: Fake Food Factory
1PM – 4PM
American Visionary Art Museum
800 Key Hwy, Baltimore
Cost: $5 per participant (museum admission not included) • All ages welcome (under 16 must be accompanied by an adult) • Location: 2nd floor Classroom of AVAM’s Jim Rouse Visionary Center. Join us for a hands-on, drop-in, art-making workshop once a month in the AVAM classroom! Our Education staff will help you explore new creative territory and make a project inspired by one of our beloved visionary artists. Supplies and boundless inspiration provided! Please note: No advance registration or payment required, just drop-in on one of the above scheduled Saturdays to participate. Payment can be made by cash or credit at AVAM’s Front Desk, or at the Classroom when you arrive. Museum admission is not included in the cost of the workshop. Workshop will run while supplies last.
Girlfriend in a Coma – with NEW athens
9PM – 12AM
Ottobar
2549 N Howard St, Baltimore
Girlfriend in a Coma – Tribute to Morrissey and The Smiths
NEW athens – REM Covers
Buy Tickets Here
1 Year Anniversary Party
7PM – 10PM
Das Bier Haus
1542 Light Street, Baltimore
CAN YOU BELIEVE IT’S BEEN A YEAR!!! We sure can’t, But we are VERY excited to make this milestone. We will have more details to come soon so make sure to mark your calendar for 1/7/17 @7pm because we will be throwing one hell of a Party. Thank you All for making DBH great!!
Mother’s Presents: Anders Osborne and Cris Jacobs [Night 2]
8PM – 1:30AM
The 8×10
10 E Cross St, Baltimore
Mother’s Grille Presents: A Weekend with Anders Osborne and Cris Jacobs at The 8×10!!!! Limited VIP tickets are available, which includes entry to both shows, 15 minute early entry and a limited edition poster signed by each artist.
Buy Tickets Here
To The Moon – Album Release Party
8PM – 12AM
Christopher Schafer Clothier
1400 Aliceanna St, Baltimore
Come out and catch our first live set in quite a while as we celebrate the long-awaited release of our new LP, “Travel Music”! This record has been almost a year in the making and we are super excited to share it with everyone. Doors at 8 PM, and we’ll hit the stage at 10 PM. Admission is FREE, we’ll have CDs for sale, and we’ll be playing an hour set with lots of new music and a lightshow – and of course, we will be filming the show and event, so you’ll probably find yourself in our next music video! Plus photography exhibit by Jonathan Mount, the photographer that created our CD art. Bring your friends, your wife, your boyfriend, your parents – bring em’ all and we’ll see you there!
DJ Mills presents: Funky Divas Dance Party
10PM – 2AM
The Crown
1910 N Charles St, Baltimore
Funky Divas Dance Party. DJ Mills spinning classic 90s jams from the best R&B ladies
TLC, Aaliyah, Lil Kim, Janet, Missy and more. 10PM, Free. Blue Room.
Knuckle Saturday
10PM – 1AM
The Rockwell
702 S Broadway, Baltimore
DJing all your favorite Rock, Emo, and Pop hits from 10 PM until they kick us out!! Bring some friends and lets get 2017 going strong!
Photo Walk – Baltimore
2PM – 5PM
Thames St and South Broadway
Baltimore, Maryland
Open to all levels of photographic experience. Have you been photographing for years? Did you just get your first new camera for Christmas or Hanukkah? Come join us! The holidays will have ended, so please come join us for a photo walk through Baltimore’s Fell’s Point neighborhood (and beyond). Whether your main photographic interest is architecture, cityscapes, portrait, street, or travel style photography, Fell’s Point offers all of those opportunities and many more. Come early, stay late. Hang out the whole time, or for just a little while. Start your new year off by increasing your creativity and expanding your circle of friends, and by remembering what it’s like to get out and just have fun, again! I’m sure more than a few folks will be looking to grab drinks or dinner or coffee at some of the local establishments after the sun goes down, too. Bring your camera and your willingness to have a good time. We will meet at the Thames Street end of Broadway Square to kick off the event. From there, you can proceed with the group or take off on your own photo excursion. I will try to set up an album for participants to post their best images from the photo walk. Hope to see y’all there!
SOL-Mate Soul
6PM – 7PM
Hotel RL Baltimore Inner Harbor by Red Lion
207 E Redwood St, Baltimore
SOL-Mate Soul is a collaboration of spoken word and soul music artists. Featuring SOL, the spoken word artist; vocalists Zadia and K-Notes.
NOT ANOTHER BENEFIT!!!
8PM – 1AM
The Sidebar
218 E Lexington St, Baltimore
This is one of many benefits this month and hopefully this year for a number of great causes. No less or more important than any other, but we need your help too! Food Not Bombs needs funds to serve the community. The General Defense Committee needs your help to defend our spaces and upcoming events. The money raised at this event will spilt Half will provide supplies so food not bombs can keep food in the bellies of hungry people here in Baltimore. The other half to help provide the GDC with more resources to make our city safer in uncertain times.
Bands/ artist :Scum again (crusty pop champions), Bellicosas, Eze Jackson, Braincase, Son of nun, Majestic, and Bidet.
Summer in Winter: Showcase of Rarities
2PM – 9 PM
36 POP
850 36th Street, Baltimore
Transformational artist Summer Blake will be providing an unusual & extraordinary glimpse of the diverse spectrum of her work at 36pop on the 7th of January. Please come out to view and experience the essential nature of her creation, to engage in discussion and delight, and to partake of an entirely evanescent and yet transcendent boutique experience. All are welcome, and pieces will be priced upon demand and interest!
Nelly’s Echo (Album Release), Band of Us, Jocelyn Faro, Ebb&Nova
7PM – 12AM
Metro Gallery
1700 N Charles St, Baltimore
Nelly’s Echo returns with his soulful indie jam sounds on Saturday, Jan. 7 to release his New Album at Metro Gallery! $10 Adv. / $15 Door / 18+
Nelly’s Echo, Band Of Us, Jocelyn Faro, and Ebb & Nova.
Buy Tickets Here
Brooks Long, Dos Santos and Johnny Popcorn at The Windup Space!
8:30PM – 12AM
The Windup Space
12 W North Ave, Baltimore
A night of Pop, Cumbia and Soul from Philly, Chicago and Baltimore! Come on out and support three incredible live bands!
Anthony Frijia Live in the Basement
8PM – 11PM
The Basement at Ryleigh’s in Mt Vernon
1225 Cathedral Street, Baltimore
In his original work, singer-songwriter Anthony Frijia blends a variety of traditional styles including folk, rock, blues, hip-hop, and pop, focusing on socially and globally significant lyrics that seemingly float over top of his rhythmically-driven acoustic guitar. Coming from Fallston, Maryland, a not-so-suburb in the hills outside of Baltimore, it is his desire for the current moment, rather than the next, and a strong dislike for rushing around, that influences him most.
Open Mic
6PM – 9PM
Our House
1121 Hull St, Baltimore
Get in here and continue celebrating the New Year before your resolutions are shattered (or simply negate them here). Great fare at this subtle, eclectic,comfy & wonderful hidden jewel in Locust Point. If you don’t play don’t worry, come listen to the areas talented.
Folkal Point: John Shock and Paul Margolis
7:30PM – 9PM
An die Musik
409 N Charles St, Baltimore
A singer songwriter Folk/Americana music series. Beginning in January 2017 concerts will held the first Saturday evening of each month.
John Shock and Paul Margolis have been playing music together since 1987, and have been at the forefront of the Baltimore roots music scene with such seminal bands as Two Legs, The Polkats, and The Stone Hill All-Stars. They will be joined by long-time bandmate and co-writer Dan Naiman, as they play a mix of original music they have written over the last 29 years, along with a set of songs being performed publicly for the first time. Tickets: $9 in advance/$12 at door/$8 full-time students with ID.
First Saturdays w/ The Tommy McGee Band at Slainte
9PM – 12AM
Sláinte Irish Pub and Restaurant
1700 Thames St, Baltimore
The Tommy McGee plays the first Saturday of every month at this cool Irish Bar right on the water in Historic Fells Point in Baltimore MD.
Sunday, January 8
1st Annual Little Italy Meatball Fest
3PM – 6PM
The Little Italy Lodge
905 E Pratt St, Baltimore
Think YOU have the Best Balls on the Block? Prove it on Sunday, January 8th, 2017 in the 1st Annual Little Italy Meatball Fest, brought to you by Joe Benny’s! Enter your own recipe for a chance to win the coveted trophy and bragging rights for a year. (Must pre-enter at [email protected]) It’s also our first ever Meatball Eating Contest! Bring your appetite and your fan club to cheer you on! (Must pre-register at [email protected])
$10 Admission, $25 VIP (includes buffet), Cash Bar, Raffle for fabulous prizes! Proceeds go in part to benefit Pandola Learning Center. PURCHASE YOUR TICKETS SOON! Limited number of tickets are available. Buy tickets at: Joe Benny’s 313 S High Street.
Special Opera Night
5:30PM – 7:30PM
Sotto Sopra Restaurant
405 N Charles St, Baltimore
On Sunday, January 8th, Sotto Sopra has planned a special evening for you. Enjoy a taste of our Northern Italian cuisine from our ala carte menu along with live Opera Performances throughout the evening for a mere $10 cover charge per guest.. We are accepting open reservations for dinner and the show from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm. For too many years to mention, Sotto Sopra’ has been the venue for our successful, well attended monthly Opera Night along with a five course dinner but on this night, you can order off the menu. If you have never attended we hope you will sample the experience on this very special evening. Come in for fine Italian cuisine, the live Opera performances throughout dinner and a memorable evening with that special someone.. Since this is a very special evening, we will not be offering our Beat the Clock offerings. Call for reservations 410 625 0534.
Reggae Spin Cycle – January Edition!
3PM – 7PM
Waverly Brewing Company
1625 Union Ave, Baltimore
Escape the post-holiday blues by taking in the tunes at the January edition of Reggae Spin Cycle. Ska, rocksteady, reggae, roots and rub-a-dub served up with Waverly’s fine selection of brews! Come on down!
Sue Nami’s Birthday Drag Brunch Hotel Indigo Baltimore
11AM – 4PM
Hotel Indigo Baltimore Downtown
24 West Franklin Street, Baltimore
Join us on Sunday, January 8th and help Sue Nami Celebrate her XXth Birthday. XX because we don’t really know how old she is! Two shows & two Seatings 12:30 & 2:30. Call today to make your reservations to guarantee seating, otherwise, first come first serve. Table seating reserved for one show at a time. 443-961-3400
Coffee & Doughnuts for Cats & Dogs
11AM – 1PM
Mutt Mart
2904 Hamilton Ave, Baltimore
Put those New Year’s Resolutions on hold for this event, because calories don’t count when it’s for a great cause! Bring a $5 donation for Baltimore Pooch Camp, and Mutt Mart will serve you a delicious doughnut and bottomless cup of Zeke’s coffee.
Kimchi-Making POP UP Dinner
6PM – 8:30PM
Dovecote Cafe
2501 Madison Ave, Baltimore
ONLY 5 SPOTS LEFT!!! Want to learn to make authentic kimchi but don’t have anyone to show you how? Well now you do with a modern take on a traditional kimchi kimjang (collective kimchi making). Personal Chef B of Dinner on Demand Personal Chef Services brings you a night of learning and food with your own make and take jar of kimchi using her mother’s recipe. Chef B has been making kimchi since age 15 and is ready to share what she knows with you. After the lesson, join her for a dinner of steamed pork belly wraps and Korean street food dishes. A great way to spend an evening. With 10 out of 15 spots already taken you’ll need to get your tickets soon! Tickets are $65 and include all ingredients to make kimchi, your own handmade jar, and dinner of KBBQ and Korean street foods! BYOB.
Buy Tickets Here
TWO SETS B. Woody Upendo 6tet
8PM – 11PM
An die Musik
409 N Charles St, Baltimore
Trumpet, Brandon Woody
Trombone, Rocky Amer
Tenor Sax, Rodney James
Piano, Matt Malanowski
Bass, Cole Davis
Drums, Kweku Sumbry
Tickets: $15 in advance/$18 at door/$10 full-time students with ID
Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Series
4PM – 6:30PM
Yoga Tree Baltimore
911 W 36th St, Baltimore
8-week series with Gina L. Sager, MD, RYT January 8th – March 5th (no class 2/26)
Mindfulness is increasingly in the popular press, with benefits for almost every difficulty or diagnosis. In order to be whole or healed, we must embrace life as it is rather than resisting and wishing life away when it doesn’t go the way we planned. In our 8 weekly 2.5 hour classes, we practice working with breath, re-inhabiting the body through the practices of yoga and yoga nidra, and learning to work with the mind by practicing formal sitting meditation. There will be a didactic part of class as well as time for group practice and discussion.
Buy Tickets Here
Wring Out The Old To Create Space For The New: Yoga & Intention Setting
1PM – 3PM
Baltimore Yoga Village (Hampden)
3000 Chestnut Ave, Baltimore
Many of us make resolutions in the New Year. It is a wonderful time to start fresh and commit to bringing more love, health and well-being into our lives. However, we often find ourselves starting out strong and then becoming less dedicated after a month or two. According to a University of Scranton study, of the 45 percent of Americans who make New Year’s resolutions, only 8 percent see them through to the end. Join Courtney Lewis, RYT 200 to explore tools to help you shed what you no longer need, create space for new intentions and explore ways to make them sustainable. We will utilize journaling, meditation and a yoga practice focusing on twists (to “wring out” what no longer serves us). Feel free to bring a journal or notebook and some ideas of what you would like to manifest in 2017! $25 in advance, $30 day of.
Buy Tickets Here
Enjoy!
– Lindsey
AdvertisementsFor readers who really dive into a book, it can be difficult to accept that the characters within are mere constructs of ink on paper.
Perhaps you’ve heard Jane Austen’s wry omniscient voice narrating the events of your life for days after you turned the last page of Pride and Prejudice (guilty!). Perhaps you have to remind yourself that Hermione Granger isn’t real and can never offer you personalized study tips. These fictional people seem real ― don’t they?
A new study performed by The Guardian and researchers from Durham University suggests that they are, in a way. The study found that, for 19 percent of readers surveyed, “the voices of fictional characters stayed with them even when they weren’t reading.” This included readers having thoughts in the voice of specific characters, experiencing narration of their life by a character, or simply having their own thoughts influenced by the tone or perspective of a character.
To be clear, the study did have a small and limited frame of reference. The research was carried out at Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2014, and the nearly 1,500 respondents, nearly 400 of whom provided detailed responses, were drawn from a pool that might be more likely to be particularly passionate and imaginative readers. Perhaps the phenomenon of fictional people romping gaily through one’s consciousness is less common than this study suggests.
The results echo an earlier, smaller study from 2012, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which found that readers of fiction could come to identify so closely with a character that it could, at least temporarily, change their own beliefs and behaviors. In one experiment, subjects who read a first-person story about a student who votes in an upcoming election, despite obstacles, were significantly more likely to vote than subjects who read another story.
No wonder Fifty Shades of Grey can inspire thousands of women to demand more sexual dominance from their parters ― while reading, many fans of the book were likely feeling Anastasia’s excitement. No wonder millions of “Harry Potter” fans secretly longed for a letter from Hogwarts ― just reading the books was enough to feel bathed in Harry’s own feelings of long-awaited acceptance and joyous wonder.
So if you ever feel crazy because you find yourself carrying on a muttered conversation between yourself and Christian Grey (probably about the music of Moby), don’t. You definitely aren’t alone.View Larger Map
[4:40 p.m. update: Metrobus has issued several alerts about afternoon changes on the S Line because of traffic congested anticipated around 16th and M streets NW. The S9 begins service at 11th & I (Eye) streets. The S2 and S4 detour on P Street between 13th and 16th streets. The 42 detours on 13th Street. A9 buses begin service at 13th and H streets. Westbound 32/34/36 buses detour via Constitution Avenue between 15th and 23rd streets. Eastbound 32/34/36 buses detour via Constitution Avenue between 10th and 19th streets. The 80 detours on Constitution Avenue between 12th and 19th streets NW. The 16Y is departing from a temporary bus terminal at 19th and H streets NW.]
Commuters who travel north and west from downtown D.C. may want to consider making this an early day, so they don’t have to make it a late one.
President Obama is scheduled to attend a Democratic National Committee event at the Jefferson Hotel, 16th and M streets NW, shortly after 5 p.m. Tuesday. If he sticks to that schedule, many drivers and bus riders won’t be able to stick to theirs.
Commuters who travel north-south on 16th Street or west on M Street toward Georgetown and the Key Bridge are likely to be hard hit by even a temporary street blockage near the hotel, but recent history shows that the effects extend for many downtown blocks.
Metro is warning riders who take the S-Line buses on 16th Street (S1, S2, S4 and S9) to expect delays during the afternoon commute. Metro spokesman Dan Stessel offered a tip that could work for some transit riders: Take Metrorail’s Green Line to Columbia Heights, exit to Irving Street and walk one block west to 16th Street, then catch a bus there.
Residual impacts will be felt on all bus lines using K, I and H streets, Stessel said. “We expect bail out traffic will likely tie up 14th Street, Connecticut and Massachusetts.”
Aside from the S-Line, he said, other routes likely to be affected are the 3Y, 11Y, 16Y, 32, 36, 80, D6, P17, P19 and W13.
Bus riders should watch for Metro alerts via e-mail and text and by Twitter. They will announce detours as they are established by street-level supervisors, Stessel said. It is possible that S-Line buses will get shifted over to 14th Street below Massachusetts Avenue, though that decision will be made if or when 16th Street is closed or becomes gridlocked. “Anyone who has the option of using Metrorail to get out of downtown should consider that as an alternate tonight,” Stessel said.
Metro did not have advance word about the presidential visit, the same type of situation that led to a scramble by Metrobus officials Feb. 20 when an event at the St. Regis Ritz hotel at 16th and K streets NW jammed afternoon traffic.
Pedro Ribeiro, chief spokesman for D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) told Post reporter Peter Hermann Tuesday that District officials are aware of the president’s afternoon visit, but Ribeiro said they are not concerned about such short visits. “Those we can handle,” he said.
Gray had criticized the U.S. Secret Service earlier this month after a prolonged closure of 14th Street Northwest between Pennsylvania Avenue and G Street, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stayed the Willard Hotel for a conference. The Secret Service had that road shut down for three days, snarling rush-hour traffic.
Gray complained that the District got little notice of the closure and the Secret Service promised to work more closely with local officials. Gray even asked that dignitaries be put up in hotels away from downtown if their presence requires such an imposing security clampdown.
Ribeiro said that brief visits such as the one Tuesday afternoon result in street closures. He said that Paul A. Quander Jr., the D.C. deputy for public safety and justice, is scheduled to meet with the Secret Service on this issue next week.
RELATED: Behind the scenes at the White House20 Funniest Lines from the Roast of the Iron Sheik
Thursday night at Toronto’s Royal Cinema, the Dark Comedy Festival hosted the Roast of wrestling legend the Iron Sheik. Or as I call it, Night of a Thousand “Faggot” Utterances. (Stage full of men threatening to sodomize each other… nothing gay about that, right boys?)
In front of an audience of Toronto’s classiest neckbeards, the dais was filled with a talent pool more uneven than an inconsequential WWF match. The superstars of the night were the much-loved Gilbert Gottfried, and Comedy Central Roast writers Jesse Joyce and Tony Hinchcliffe. The guys-in-plain-tights-using-their-real-names in this analogy were Spencer “Spenny” Rice, who admitted to only writing material on a napkin at the bar next door before the show; and Brutus “the Barber” Beefcake, who, while not a comic, was still under-prepared material-wise and could have used a writer.
The only participant who fared worse was discarded 102.1 the Edge personality Todd Shapiro, who earned boos for boring the crowd. It was one of those performances that you keep telling yourself is intentionally weak (right??), but reaches a point where you no longer care because it’s just as much of a failure as a character piece. The silver lining came in the form of callbacks, as his very presence became a punchline for all who followed.
But there was no shortage of highlights. Here are the best lines of the night, from them and everyone in between:
20) Mike Lawrence on the Iron Sheik’s relationship with Hulk Hogan:
“I heard he ripped your asshole like it was a yellow t-shirt.”
19) Tyler Morrison, on why we should buy poutine for the Iron Sheik:
“Over [in the Middle East], all the kurds have been burnt.”
18) Tony Hinchcliffe, finding Spenny’s notes on the podium:
“Spenny, do you want these? Because the audience didn’t.”
17) Jesse Joyce, on Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake’s metal-plateed facial reconstruction:
“He can’t even get through airport security. Because he can’t afford a plane ticket.”
16) Brody Stevens
“The Iron Sheik is so old, he’s called the Iron-Deficient Sheik.”
15) Tony Hinchcliffe, on the Iron Sheik:
“He’s one of the nicest guys I know. He’d give you the shirt off his head.”
14) Tony Hinchcliffe, on the Iron Sheik:
“He was going to start his own Muslim wrestling circuit, but he couldn’t get his Shiite together.”
13) Jesse Joyce, to Tony Hinchcliffe:
“I’m glad you could take time off from telling racist jokes in Jeff Dunham’s lap.”
12) Audience heckler, during Spenny’s set:
“Bring back Todd!”
11) Tyler Morrison, to Gilbert Gottfried:
“You’re more washed up than the tsunami victims who cost you your Aflack endorsement.”
10) Tony Hinchcliffe, on Gilbert Gottfried:
“He’s like your mayor’s penis. He hasn’t been seen since the 90s.”
9) Jesse Joyce, on Kenny vs. Spenny:
“Usually when people watch a two-person competition, they only expect to see one loser.”
8) Gilbert Gottfried on the Iron Sheik’s steroid use:
“Explains why his testicles are smaller than Brody Stevens’ fan base.”
7) Jesse Joyce, on Brody Stevens’ potential for fame:
“The Iron Sheik has a better chance of renting a U-Haul in lower Manhattan.”
6) Jesse Joyce, to Brody Stevens:
“You’ve done more warm-up in tv studios than Rosie O’Donnell’s toaster oven.”
5) Jesse Joyce, to the Iron Sheik:
“You look so uncomfortable up here, you’d think you were sitting next to you on an airplane.”
4) Gilbert Gottfried on the Iron Sheik’s age:
“Nowadays when he climbs in the ring, he says ‘wait, what did I come in here for again?'”
3) Mike Lawrence to the Iron Sheik:
“The last time you fucked someone in the ass and made them humble, Chris Kanyon shot himself.”
2) Jesse Joyce on wrestling:
“Has all the redeeming qualities of child porn. Except in child porn, the fighting is real.”
1) Jesse Joyce, on the Iron Sheik’s English skills:
“Any time anyone’s tried to give him Rosetta Stones, he throws them at women and gay kids.”
Dead horses beaten throughout included Brutus’s para-sailing accident and facial reconstruction, and Gilbert Gottfried positioned as a child predator. The tone was edgy and evil, exactly what one expects from a roast. The only genuinely disturbing moment of the night: realizing that the only female comic on stage, Katharine Ferns, wasn’t there to perform but to anonymously deliver beer to the men all night. Really?
The Sheik himself, now in his 70s, paid little attention to those who were speaking unless explicitly baited into an expletive-riddled rant (he’s still got it!). He briefly stood behind the podium at the end of the night for his closing remarks, but delivered little in the way of retaliation. Why should he? He’s the Iron Sheik, dammit.Fixed some typos.
Original Editable version 2 of 2
I am a big fan of solid state disks. But not those fancy expensive SATA disks which are all the rage. I mean low end, dirt cheap SSDs. Compact flash and SD cards. If you have an old laptop, you can either buy a new hard drive for $80, or buy a CF card and CF-IDE adapter for $30. Sure, the hard drive has ten or twenty times the capacity. But flash is ten times as awesome.
Only problem is that quality control is all over the map. Some cheap flash cards will work for years. I've had one with an internal short, it started melting and bubbling the moment it was plugged in. Once, I had a card that worked great for a few months and then completely died. This is the story of that card and its recovery.
The superblock was gone. The backup superblocks were gone. The drive was in shambles, and fsck could not fix it. At this point, normal procedure is to DD the drive and do more aggressive work on the image.
DD could not read the drive. Oh, it would try for a while. Three gigabytes into the 8GB drive, DD would stop. The device jumped from /dev/sdc1 to /dev/sdd1. DD really was not built to handle such insanity.
There is an app called ddrescue meant to be like DD, but more thorough. It too was stymied by the disappearing device node. Instead of freezing, it would fill the remainder of the image with zeros. Hardly useful.
Basically, CF cards do not work like hard drives. If a hard drive hits a bad cluster, it will promptly return bad data. If a CF card has a bad chunk, it will lock up. DD needs a slight redesign for these conditions.
Here's my wrapper for DD: dd-decrepit.py. I might rewrite it as a shell script. Python seems overkill and I did not know about the timeout while I wrote the first version.
Dd-decrepit works by reading the drive in 1024KB chunks. If it takes more than a few seconds to read the block, the DD processes is killed and it tries again as two 512KB blocks. This recursion can continue down to a single kilobyte, if need be. There was some really funky stuff going on. Many instances a single 1024KB read would fail, but both 512KB reads would succeed.
It will also check periodically to make sure the device node has not vanished. If it has, it pauses and will ask you to reconnect the drive. Then it continues where it left off.
This worked flawlessly, but is very very slow. Imaging an 8GB parition took three hours. About
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Fig. 1 and Supplementary Movie 1; see Supplementary Data 1 for numbers of mice used and statistics for all figures). The percentage of males who mounted target males was significantly higher in Lmx1b−/− males than ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/− and Lmx1b+/+ males (Fig. 1a). Lmx1b−/− males mounted with a shorter latency (Fig. 1b), higher frequency (Fig. 1c) and longer duration (Fig. 1d). These results show that the absence of serotonergic neurons in the brain increased male–male mounting.
Figure 1: Male–male mounting and USV by mice lacking central serotonergic neurons. a–g, Numbers of mice used and statistical analysis are all included in Supplementary Data 1. a–d, A test male was presented in its home cage with an adult wild-type male and its behaviour was recorded for 30 min (all data shown as mean ± s.e.m.). Compared with Lmx1b+/+, Lmx1b+/− or ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b−/− males mounted males at a higher percentage (a), lower latency (b), higher frequency (c) and for a longer duration (d). e, Typical USV patterns emitted by males when presented with female or male intruders. The two left panels show USVs in 2 min, whereas the two right panels show parts of USV graphs at higher magnifications. f, Female intruders elicited USV from almost all ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b−/−, Lmx1b+/+, or Lmx1b+/− males. Male intruders elicited USVs more from Lmx1b−/− males than from ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/+ or Lmx1b+/− males. g, The number of USVs emitted by Lmx1b−/− males towards males is higher than those by ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/+ or Lmx1b+/− males, whereas ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/+, Lmx1b+/− and Lmx1b−/− males were similar in USVs towards females. *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
A sexually dimorphic behavioural response of males is to emit 30–110 kHz USVs when they encounter female mice or pheromones, which may function as love songs to facilitate female receptivity14. Lmx1b+/+, Lmx1b+/− and Lmx1b−/− males were similar in USV emission towards females (Fig. 1e–g). However, the percentage of Lmx1b−/− males emitting USV towards males was significantly higher than that of ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/+ or Lmx1b+/− males (Fig. 1f). Numbers of USV ‘syllables’ emitted towards females were similar among ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/+, Lmx1b+/− and Lmx1b−/− males (Fig. 1g). Lmx1b−/− males emitted more USV ‘syllables’ towards males than ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/−. The number of USV emissions by Lmx1b−/− males towards males was approximately 720 times higher than that of Lmx1b+/+ males (Fig. 1g).
Although Lmx1b−/− males still emitted more USVs towards females, the preference for females over males was significantly reduced: the ratio of USVs towards females over that for males was only 3 for Lmx1b−/− males, significantly reduced from 1,002 for ePet1-Cre males, 2,438 for Lmx1b+/+ males and 52 for Lmx1b+/−.
In the mating choice assay, an oestrous female C57 target mouse and a sexually naive male C57 target mouse were introduced into the home cage of a test male. Wild-type males preferred to mount female targets (Fig. 2a): a higher percentage of Lmx1b+/+ (or ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/−) males mounted female targets than male targets (Supplementary Movie 2). However, the percentage of Lmx1b−/− males mounting females was not significantly different from that mounting males. ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/− males mounted female targets with a shorter latency, higher frequency and longer duration than male targets (Fig. 2b, d, e), whereas Lmx1b−/− males mounted males and females with similar latencies, frequencies and durations (Supplementary Movies 2 and 3). Thus, elimination of serotonergic neurons led to a loss of sexual preference in mounting.
Figure 2: Lack of sexual preference by mice without central serotonergic neurons. a–f, Each test male was presented with a male and an oestrous female, and its mating choice was analysed for 15 min. a, More ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/− males mounted female than male targets. A similar percentage of Lmx1b−/− males mounted females and males. b, ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/− males mounted female targets faster than male targets. Mounting latencies of Lmx1b−/− males for females and males were similar. c, More than 40% of Lmx1b−/− males but none of the ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/+ or Lmx1b+/− males chose a male as their first mounting target. d, ePet1-Cre males mounted females significantly more often than males, as did Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/− males. Lmx1b−/− males mounted females as often as males (P > 0.05, t-test). e, ePet1-Cre males spent more time mounting females than males, as did Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/− males. Lmx1b−/− males did not show differences in mounting males or females. f, The mounting frequency ratio of Lmx1b−/− was different from that of ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/−. *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
Further analyses were carried out to detect a change in sexual preference separate from an increase in sexual drive: (1) in the mating choice assay, all ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/− males mounted females before males, whereas 46.2% of Lmx1b−/− mounted males first (Fig. 2c); (2) the mounting frequency ratio of Lmx1b−/− males in the mating choice assay (female mounting frequency − male mounting frequency)/(female + male mounting) (that is, (♀ − ♂/♂ + ♀)) was significantly different from ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/− males (Fig. 2f); and (3) when a test male was presented only with an oestrous female target, Lmx1b−/− males were not statistically significant different from wild-type and heterozygous males in male–female mounting (Supplementary Fig. 1).
We tested male mice for their preference of pheromones present in the genitals or the bedding. In the genital odour preference assay15, a slide with one half smeared with female genitals and the other half with male genitals was presented to a test male. The total time spent sniffing both halves of the slide was reduced in Lmx1b−/− males (Supplementary Fig. 2a). Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/− littermates spent significantly more time sniffing female than male genital odour, whereas Lmx1b−/− males spent equal time sniffing female and male genital odours (Fig. 3a). Lmx1b+/+, Lmx1b+/− and Lmx1b−/− were similar in the amount of time spent sniffing male genital odour. Female genital odour sniffing time was less in Lmx1b−/− males than in Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/− littermates (Fig. 3a). The genital odour preference ratio (♀ − ♂/♂ + ♀) of Lmx1b−/− males was significantly lower than those of Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/− males (Fig. 3b). Compared with Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/− males, a significantly higher percentage (62.5%) of Lmx1b−/− males spent more time sniffing male than female genital odour (Fig. 3c).
Figure 3: Loss of sexual preference for genital odour and bedding by males without central serotonergic neurons. a, Lmx1b+/+ males spent more time sniffing female than male genital odour, as did Lmx1b+/− males. Lmx1b−/− males spent a similar amount of time on female and male genital odour. Three groups were not significantly different in male genital odour sniffing time but Lmx1b−/− males spent less time sniffing female genital odour than the other two groups. b, Sniffing ratio of Lmx1b−/− males was significantly different from Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/− males (P < 0.05 for Lmx1b+/+ versus Lmx1b−/−, P < 0.05 for Lmx1b+/− versus Lmx1b−/−, P > 0.05 for Lmx1b+/+ versus Lmx1b+/−; one-way ANOVA). c, Compared with Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/−, a higher percentage of Lmx1b−/− males spent more time sniffing male than female genital odour. d, ePet1-Cre males spent more time above female bedding than male bedding, as did Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/− males. Lmx1b−/− males spent a similar amount of time above female and male bedding. Compared with ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/− and Lmx1b+/+, Lmx1b−/− males spent less time above female bedding but more time above male bedding. e, The bedding time ratio of Lmx1b−/− was different from ePet1-Cre and Lmx1b+/+. f, Compared with ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/−, a significantly higher percentage of Lmx1b−/− males spent more time above male bedding. *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
In the bedding preference assay16, the total time spent over male and female bedding was similar among ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/+, Lmx1b+/− and Lmx1b−/− males (Supplementary Fig. 2b). ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/− males spent significantly more time above female than male bedding whereas Lmx1b−/− males spent equal time above female and male beddings (Fig. 3d). Compared with ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/− males, Lmx1b−/− males spent more time above male bedding and less time above female bedding. The bedding preference ratio of Lmx1b−/− males was significantly lower than those of ePet1-Cre, Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b+/− males (Fig. 3e). The percentage of males who spent more time above male bedding was significantly higher in Lmx1b−/− males (58.8%) than those in ePet1-Cre (0%), Lmx1b+/+ (6.3%) or Lmx1b+/− (12.5%) males (Fig. 3f).
Thus, in both the genital odour and bedding assays, Lmx1b−/− males had lost preference for female pheromones over male pheromones: in the genital odour preference assay, Lmx1b−/− males showed decreased sniffing time for female genital odour; in the bedding preference assay, Lmx1b−/− males showed increased time spent over male bedding and decreased time over female bedding.
Multiple assays involving odour or pheromone sensing were carried out to test for possible changes in olfaction. In the sesame oil preference assay17, Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b−/− males were indistinguishable in spending significantly more time with sesame than air (Supplementary Fig. 3a). In the fox urine avoidance assay18, Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b−/− males were also similar (Supplementary Fig. 3b). Thus, Lmx1b−/− males were not defective in either innate attractive or avoidance response.
In the social approach assay19, Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b−/− males were similar in spending more time close to a strange male than the empty chamber (Supplementary Fig. 3c).
In the social recognition assay20, Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b−/− males spent a similar amount of time exploring the first intruder at initial presentation, displayed social habituation towards the familiar intruder over the next three presentations and displayed dishabituation when a new intruder was introduced (Fig. 4a).
Figure 4: Odour discrimination. a, Both Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b−/− males showed habituation and dishabituation in sniffing time. No statistical difference was found between Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b−/− males at any point. b, After seven training sessions with male and female urine, no significant difference was detected between Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b−/− males at any point. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
An operant conditioning assay was used to test whether Lmx1b−/− males could distinguish between male and female pheromones21. Two arms of a T maze were supplied with the odour of either female or male urine. Electroshock was applied in such a way that the test mice had to run or stay in the same arm depending on the urine. Over 3 days of training, Lmx1b+/+ and Lmx1b−/− males were similar in learning to avoid punishment (Fig. 4b). Thus, no olfactory defects for general odours or pheromones were detected in Lmx1b−/− males.
Results from Lmx1b−/− mice indicate a role for serotonergic neurons. To study the role of 5-HT, we used mice unable to synthesize 5-HT in the brain. 5-HT is synthesized in two steps: tryptophan is converted by a Tph into 5-HTP, which is converted into 5-HT by 5-hydroxytryptophan decarboxylase and aromatic l-amino-acid decarboxylase.
There are two Tph enzymes: Tph2 is required centrally and Tph1 peripherally. We have generated Tph2−/− mice (J.-Y.K. et al., manuscript in preparation), which were viable22,23,24. High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis showed that the 5-HT level was significantly reduced in the brains of Tph2−/− males (Supplementary Fig. 4a). Male–male mounting (Supplementary Movie 4) was significantly higher in Tph2−/− males than either Tph2+/+ or heterozygous Tph2+/− males: the percentage was significantly higher, duration longer, latency shorter and frequency higher (Supplementary Fig. 4b, c and Fig. 5a, b). In the bedding preference assay, both Tph2+/+ and Tph2+/− males preferred female over male bedding, whereas Tph2−/− males showed no preference (Fig. 5c). In the genital odour preference assay, both Tph2+/+ and Tph2+/− males preferred female over male genital odour, but Tph2−/− males showed no preference (Fig. 5d).
Figure 5: Brain chemistry and behaviours of Tph2 knockout males. a, b, Compared with Tph2+/+ and Tph2+/−, Tph2−/− males showed a shorter latency (a) and higher frequency in mounting males (b). c, Both Tph2+/+ and Tph2+/− males significantly preferred female over male bedding, whereas Tph2−/− males did not show a preference between male and female bedding. d, Both Tph2+/+ and Tph2+/− males significantly preferred female over male genital odour, whereas Tph2−/− males did not show a preference between male and female genital odour. *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
When presented with an oestrous female target, male–female mounting was not significantly changed in Tph2−/− males (Supplementary Fig. 5). In mating choice, Tph2−/− males had lost preference for females over males in percentage, latency, frequency and duration (Supplementary Fig. 6a, b, d, e). No control males mounted target males before females, whereas more than 40% of Tph2−/− males mounted males first (Supplementary Fig. 6c). The mounting frequency ratio of Tph2−/− males was significantly different from those of Tph2+/+ and Tph2+/− males (Supplementary Fig. 6f).
Lmx1b−/− and Tph2−/− mice lack 5-HT from embryogenesis. To study the role of 5-HT in adulthood, we took two complementary approaches: first, we depleted 5-HT from adult mice pharmacologically with pCPA25; then we attempted to rescue the phenotype of adult Tph2−/− mutants.
Adult C57BL/6J males were injected with either pCPA or saline for three consecutive days. 5-HT level was significantly reduced by pCPA (Supplementary Fig. 7). pCPA-treated males showed shorter latency, higher frequency and longer duration than control males in mounting target males (Supplementary Fig. 8a–d), and lost bedding preference (Supplementary Fig. 8e, f).
To test whether 5-HTP injection into adult mice could rescue the Tph2−/− phenotype, we examined first whether 5-HTP could rescue 5-HT synthesis in Tph2−/− males and found that 5-HT levels were restored 35 min after intraperitoneal injection of 5-HTP but not saline (Fig. 6a and Supplementary 9a, b).
Figure 6: 5-HTP rescue of chemical and behavioural deficits in Tph2 knockout mice. a, Levels of 5-HT and 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA) were analysed in Tph2+/+ and Tph2−/− males 35 min after injection of either 5-HTP (40 mg kg−1 body weight) or control saline. b, c, Male–male mounting in Tph2−/− mice was significantly rescued by 5-HTP: the latency was lengthened and frequency reduced. d, Bedding preference was monitored between 35 and 40 min after injection. 5-HTP could significantly restore the preference of female over male bedding by Tph2−/− males. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
5-HTP significantly reduced male–male mounting of Tph2−/− males: the percentage was decreased, latency increased, frequency decreased and duration shortened; all returning to wild-type levels (Fig. 6b, c and Supplementary Fig. 9c, d). 5-HTP rescued the loss of sexual preference in mounting latency, frequency and duration in the mating choice assay (Supplementary Fig. 10a–c) and the bedding preference of Tph2−/− males (Fig. 6d and Supplementary Fig. 9e).
When a test male was presented with a target female, Tph2−/− males were similar to wild-type and heterozygous males in mounting percentage, latency, frequency and duration (Supplementary Figs 5, 11). 5-HTP injection into Tph2−/− males did not affect male–female mounting (Supplementary Fig. 11), although 5-HTP injection into wild-type males reduced male–female mounting. Because 5-HTP injection in wild-type males increased the level of 5-HT beyond the wild-type level (Supplementary Fig. 9a, b), it indicated a dosage-sensitive effect of 5-HT: 5-HT at concentrations above the wild-type level inhibited male–female mounting, but 5-HT concentrations between the wild-type and Tph2−/− levels did not affect male–female mounting.
We conclude that central serotonergic signalling is crucial for male sexual preference in mice. This is the first time, to our knowledge, that a neurotransmitter in the brain has been demonstrated to be important in mammalian sexual preference. Previous studies in mammals have implicated 5-HT and dopamine in male sexual behaviours, but neither has been demonstrated to have any role in sexual preference: dopamine is thought to facilitate male sexual behaviours whereas 5-HT is thought to inhibit sexual behaviours7,8,9,10,11,26. Our studies have established a role for 5-HT in male sexual preference. Multiple results showed a loss in sexual preference beyond or separate from hypersexuality: (1) the ratio of male–male and male–female interactions was repeatedly measured to analyse sexual preference (Figs 2f, 3b, e, 5c, d, 6d and Supplementary Figs 6f, 8f, 9e, 10d); (2) Lmx1b−/− males showed increased USVs towards males but not towards females (Fig. 1g); (3) in mating choice, the latency, frequency and duration of Lmx1b−/− males to mount males, but not to mount females, was changed (Fig. 2a, b, d, e); (4) in bedding preference, Lmx1b−/− (Fig. 3d) and Tph2−/− males (Figs 5c, 6d) showed an increase in time spent over male bedding but a decrease in time over female bedding; (5) wild-type males always mounted females before males but a significant fraction of Lmx1b−/− or Tph2−/− males mounted males first (Fig. 2c and Supplementary Fig. 6c); (6) in the genital odour preference assay, both Lmx1b−/− (Fig. 3a) and Tph2−/− (Supplementary Fig. 5d) males showed a decrease in time on female genital odour, which could not be explained by hypersexuality; and (7) when presented with an oestrous target female, neither Lmx1b−/− males (Supplementary Fig. 1) nor Tph2−/− males (Supplementary Fig. 5) were different from wild-type males.
Increased sexual drive was observed in males lacking 5-HT when they were tested in the presence of live target males and females (Supplementary Fig. 6). This has been noted before in mice defective for Trpc2 and vomeronasal organ olfaction5,6. Trpc2−/− males have been previously reported to have lost male–female preference in mating choice5,6. Trpc2−/− males showed increased mounting of both males and females (figure 2c in ref. 6). The conclusion of a loss in sexual preference in Trpc2−/− males was inferred from a relative change: Trpc2−/− males showed a 2-fold preference for females over males whereas the wild-type showed a 10-fold preference. The phenotypes reported here for Lmx1b−/−, Tph2−/− males and pCPA-treated males were stronger than for Trpc2−/− males in mating choice: these males did not show significant preference for females (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 6).
At present, it is not known whether 5-HT regulates the vomeronasal organ pathway in pheromone sensing or acts further downstream in behavioural decisions. Differences have been noted between Trpc2 and Lmx1b in the brain: aggression was largely lost in Trpc2−/−, but not Lmx1b−/−, mice (data not shown). It is more likely that 5-HT regulates central decision-making than influencing peripheral olfaction. However, we cannot completely rule out the possibility that 5-HT regulates a specific innate olfactory pathway processing sexual information27. In mice, it will be interesting to identify specific subsets of serotonergic neurons and serotonergic receptors involved in sexual preference.
An unavoidable question raised by our findings is whether 5-HT has a role in sexual preference in other animals. In a positron emission tomography study of humans, the response of heterosexual men to the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) fluoxetine was found to be different from that of homosexual men28. SSRIs inhibited compulsive sexual behaviours in homosexual and bisexual men29. However, so far, none of these studies has investigated whether 5-HT has a role in sexual preference. Attempts have been made to map genetic loci affecting human sexuality30, although specific genes have not been identified. Our discovery of a role for serotonergic signalling in mouse sexual preference should stimulate further studies into the role of 5-HT in sexual interactions in particular and roles of neurotransmitters in mammalian social relationships in general.Doxycycline inhibits α-synuclein aggregation through the formation of off-pathway oligomers
To analyze the ability of doxycycline to interfere with the fibril assembly process of α-synuclein, we incubated 70 μM α-synuclein in the absence or in the presence of 100 μM doxycycline at 37 °C under orbital agitation. Self-association kinetics of α-synuclein was monitored as an increase in fluorescence emission of Thioflavin T (ThT) at 482 nm (λ exc 450 nm) upon binding of this probe to aggregates rich in cross-β structure22. In accordance to previous reports23, the aggregation kinetic of α-synuclein in the absence of doxycycline shows a lag phase of 18 h followed by an exponential growth to finally reach a plateau at 48 h (Fig. 1a). Conversely, in the presence of doxycycline the aggregation kinetic of α-synuclein is severely affected. According to the fluorescent probe, when doxycycline is added at the beginning of the incubation, the formation of aggregates with cross-β structure is dramatically diminished. However, once the exponential growth phase has been reached, addition of doxycycline has no observable effect on the aggregation kinetic of α-synuclein (Fig. 1a).
Figure 1: Effects of doxycycline on α-synuclein aggregation and seeding. (a) Fluorescence emission intensity of 25 μM thioflavin T in a solution containing 70 μM α-synuclein alone (empty circle), or with the addition of 100 μM doxycycline at 0 h (full circles), or after 16 h of incubation (inverted triangles) (doxycycline addition is indicated by an arrow). A solution containing 100 μM doxycycline alone (asterisk) is also shown as a control. (b) Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) of α-synuclein samples incubated at 37 °C under orbital agitation in the absence (top) or in the presence of doxycycline (bottom), and harvested after 16 h (left) or 96 h (right). The white bar corresponds to 200 nm at 220000X and 70000X magnification for observation of oligomers and fibrils respectively. (c) Fresh solutions of monomeric α-synuclein were seeded with oligomers preincubated in the absence (empty square) or in the presence of doxycycline (full square). The resulting solutions were incubated at 37 °C under orbital agitation and aggregation was assayed by ThT fluorescence emission. Unseeded aggregation kinetics are shown in (empty circle). Full size image
To evaluate the impact of doxycycline on the morphology of the species present along the aggregation pathway, we performed transmission electron microscopy (TEM) studies on samples of monomeric α-synuclein incubated with or without doxycycline and harvested at different times (Fig. 1b). After 16 h of incubation, we were able to detect oligomeric species in both conditions, which were morphologically undistinguishable by TEM. Nevertheless, only in the absence of doxycycline, oligomers evolved into fibrils, which were observed after 96 h incubation. This data suggests that doxycycline halt the assembly of α-synuclein oligomers into larger aggregates since only oligomers but not fibrils are still observed at this time. In fact, the absence of fibrils in the samples that contained doxycycline is consistent with the lack of cross-β observed using the ThT fluorescent probe (Fig. 1a).
To assess whether α-synuclein oligomers formed in the presence of doxycycline are on-pathway or off-pathway intermediates in the fibril formation process, we also carried out seeding experiments. For this, seeds were produced by incubating α-synuclein solution at 37 °C under orbital agitation for 16 h in the absence or presence of doxycycline. Then, an aliquot of the solution containing α-synuclein seeds was added to fresh solutions of monomeric α-synuclein and further incubated for 72 h (Fig. 1c). The addition of seeds formed in the absence of doxycycline accelerates the aggregation process and more species with cross-β structure are self-assembled from native α-synuclein as indicated by increased ThT fluorescence. In contrast, the oligomers formed in the presence of doxycycline are not able to further convert into amyloid fibrils. This indicates that oligomers formed in the presence of doxycycline did not function as template for the conversion of unpolymerized proteins into amyloid fibrils and we will further refer to them as off-pathway oligomers throughout the paper in contrast to the on-pathway oligomers formed in the absence of doxycycline.
Inhibition of α-synuclein fibrillation is mediated by binding of doxycycline to oligomeric species
The anti-amyloid activity of doxycycline prompted us to explore details of its binding to α-synuclein by NMR spectroscopy. To analyze this interaction we used 1H-15N NMR heteronuclear multiple quantum correlation (HMQC) spectra. The 1H-15N spectrum of a sample of uniformly 15N-labeled α-synuclein, reflecting the intrinsically disorder nature of the protein, is shown in Fig. 2a. Upon titration of 15N-enriched α-synuclein with increasing concentrations of doxycycline, the 1H-15N HMQC spectra retained the excellent resolution of the uncomplexed, monomeric protein. Notably, no broadening or chemical shift perturbations could be observed, even at high ligand:α-synuclein ratios (5:1), indicating that doxycycline is unable to interact with monomeric α-synuclein.
Figure 2: Analysis of doxycycline binding to α-synuclein by NMR. (a) Overlaid contour plots of 1H-15N SOFAST-HMQC spectra of 70 μM monomeric α-synuclein in the absence (black) or presence (red) of 350 μM doxycycline. (b) 1H NMR spectra of 200 μM doxycycline alone (black line) or upon the addition of 100 μM monomeric α-synuclein (red line). (c) 1H NMR spectra of 200 μM doxycycline in the absence (black line) or presence of 100 μM α-synuclein aged for 8 h (red line), 24 h (blue line) or 48 h (green line). In panels (b) and (c), the asterisk denotes isolated doxycycline 1H signals that broaden upon binding to higher order amyloidogenic structures of α-synuclein. In panel (c), the symbol # denotes isolated monomeric α-synuclein signals vanishing as a consequence of the progression of the aggregation process. NMR spectra were acquired at 15 °C (a) and 25 °C (b) and (c). Samples were dissolved in 20 mM HEPES supplemented with 150 mM NaCl and 10% D 2 O. Full size image
To assess further the nature of the α-synuclein species involved in the interaction with doxycycline, we conducted NMR experiments aimed at detecting directly the signals belonging to the anti-amyloid compound. High-ordered oligomeric or prefibrillar α-synuclein species are invisible to the NMR approach used here24,25, although certain oligomers retaining high flexibility at the C-terminal region could be even detected26. Hence, a potential interaction of the antibiotic with those species will not become evident by using an NMR strategy based on the detection of protein backbone resonances. On the contrary, the 1D 1H NMR spectrum of doxycycline shows well-resolved resonances in the 6.0–7.0 ppm region, which constitutes an excellent probe for exploring the binding features of the antibiotic to α-synuclein. As expected, addition of 0.5 equiv. of monomeric α-synuclein to doxycycline samples caused no perturbations in the 1D 1H NMR spectrum of the small ligand, confirming the lack of interaction of the compound with the monomeric form of the protein (Figure 2b,c). By contrast, a substantial broadening of doxycycline signals was observed when aliquots of aged α-synuclein samples (24–48 h) were added, indicating that doxycycline is able to bind to the larger molecular species formed during the aggregation event (Fig. 2c). Even though changes in the signals of doxycycline upon the addition of α-synuclein aged for 8 h were not so prominent we still observed a small decrease in signal intensities, specially in the set of resonances centered at c.a. 6.95 ppm. These small perturbations are likely attributed to the small number of oligomers present in the sample at short aggregation times. In order to confirm this hypothesis, we analyzed the spectra recorded for doxycycline alone or upon the addition of fresh or aged (16 h) α-synuclein samples (Supplementary Figure S1). Although no fibrils could be detected on these samples (see Fig. 1a,d), they were centrifuged to spin down and remove minor insoluble species that could have been formed under our experimental conditions. Even after this treatment, signal attenuation in doxycycline remained unaltered (see the set of peaks centered at 6.95 ppm and 6.35 ppm), suggesting an interaction landscape formed mostly by soluble oligomers or early protofibrils. A comparative analysis between the intensities of α-synuclein resonances located at the methyl and aromatic regions (only signals showing no overlapping with doxycycline resonances were considered), shows no differences between the spectra recorded at 0 and 16 h, indicating the absence of slow-tumbling, highly-ordered structures such as amyloid fibrils or large protofibrils27, in full agreement with ThT and TEM data. Since monomeric α-synuclein is not able to interact with doxycycline (Fig. 2a,b and Supplementary Figure S1a), we assume that the attenuation observed for the signals of the compound under the experimental conditions described above are reflective of an interaction process with low-order oligomeric or protofibrillar α-synuclein species retaining some degrees of molecular flexibility. Altogether, these evidences indicate that binding of doxycycline to α-synuclein proceeds initially via interactions with aggregated species formed during the early stages of the assembly process, a molecular event that might provide a central mechanistic basis for the inhibitory process of doxycycline on α-synuclein fibrillation.
Off-pathway oligomers present a different structural arrangement
In order to gain further insights on how doxycycline impacts on α-synuclein aggregation leading to the formation of off-pathway species, three complementary techniques were employed. These were small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), bis-ANS fluorescence, and Fourier Transformed Infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR). SAXS reports changes
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ing the US Jewish community, over a campaign in which it brands Jews living in Judea and Samaria as "a plague."
Americans for Peace Now (APN) is the sister organization of the Israel-based Peace Now, a mainly foreign-funded NGO which advocates for the ethnic-cleansing of Jewish communities in Judea-Samaria, also known as "the West Bank."
In a post on its official Facebook page, APN evokes the Passover story of the 10 plagues God visited on the Egyptians for enslaving the Jewish people - but whereas the Biblical account sees the plagues inflicted on the Egyptians to save the Israelites from oppression, the Peace Now version recasts the Jews themselves as a plague for living on land which leftist groups want Israel to cede to the Palestinian Authority.
The post includes two images illustrating the growth of the haredi Jewish town of Modiin Illit in Samaria (Shomron), located between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Underneath the pictures is a call for supporters to "Spill some wine for continued settlement building - Overcome Israel's #ModernDayPlagues", a reference to the practice of spilling a small portion of wine from one of the four cups drunk during the Passover "Seder" meal as the 10 plagues are recounted.
The post also includes the following caption:
"The holiday of Passover celebrates the redemption of a people from slavery- a story of redemption not only for Jews, but for many people who yearn for justice and freedom. Yet, there are still injustices to be overturned. A full glass of wine symbolizes complete joy, and during the Seder, we spill wine from our cup to remember the suffering of others that accompanied our redemption. Traditionally, we then recite the ten plagues; this year, we list ten modern plagues (starting with settlements) - those that we have yet to overcome."
APN's offensive Facebook post Screenshot
The shocking characterization of Jews living in Judea and Samaria as "a plague" provoked an angry response fron Jewish community leaders and activists in the region.
David Haivri, Shomron Advisor for International Affairs, dismissed APN as "a pathetic bunch of hate-mongers."
"They post an aerial photo of a hilltop that was barren and uninhabited ten years ago and now the site of a flourishing community. That they call a plague, and in their mind it is so because the residents are Jewish," he said.
Elie Peiprz, a spokesman for the Yesha Council, reacted with a Passover comparison of his own.
"The growth of Modiin Illit is indeed quite dramatic and should only be seen as a positive development," he said.
"But the comparison of development of Eretz Yisrael to a Biblical plague, demonstrates that the 'Rasha' is alive and well," he continued, referring to the "evil child" recounted in the Seder parable of the Four Sons.
Pieprz invited APN members "to visit Modiin Illit with the Yesha Council" as a way of bringing "them back into the fold, so that all Jews could merit the blessings of the holiday of Redemption."
"It has been more than 3000 years, yet many of us have still not shed the mentality of slavery," he lamented, while noting dryly that "even while slaves in Egypt, the Jews were always allowed to build houses."
Dani Dayan, a veteran advocate for Jewish rights in Judea and Samaria and former Yesha Council head, responded similarly.
"Peace Now and its American supporters prove once again they are the wicked son of the Haggadah. As the Haggadah says: 'Because he excludes himself from the group and rejects a fundamental principle, you must set his teeth on edge and say to him: “It is because of what Hashem did for me when I left Egypt!”'...if he had been there, he would not have been redeemed."
In the US, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) strongly condemned the post, and called on US Jews to react by "shunning" far-left groups like APN.
"Peace Now should be ashamed for their racist position that Jews cant live on 2% of our ancient homeland of Judea and Samaria," said ZOA President Mort Klein, referring to the tiny proportion of land in Judea-Samaria which is actually inhabited by Jews.
"To call this a 'plague' while ignoring the real Palestinian Arab 'plagues' of Abbas's merger with Hamas; promoting violence in their schools, media and sermons; naming schools, streets and sports teams after Jew-killers; paying pensions to families of suicide bombers and imprisoned terrorists; and their refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state; is such a frightening disgrace that Peace Now should be marginalized by the Jewish community as an extremist group of self-hating and frightened Jews."
Branding the remarks as "disgusting" and APN as "appeasers," he accused the leftist group of being motivated by "pure cowardice."
"These extremist left-wing Jews, who embrace these types of absurd positions, don't do this as a matter of principle, they do this as a matter of fear. Taking this position makes them feel more secure and safe by sending a message to our enemies: 'Don't hate us, don't kill us - we are with you, we're not like those other Jews!'"
APN has yet to respond to requests for comment.GameLine was a dialup game distribution service for the Atari 2600,[1] developed and operated by Control Video Corporation (CVC).[2] Subscribers could install the proprietary modem and storage cartridge in their home game console, accessing the GameLine service to download games over a telephone line. GameLine had an exclusive selection of games, and its pioneering business model eventually gave rise to America Online.
In the early 1980s, cable pioneer William von Meister was looking for a way to use his innovative modem transmission technology, which was previously acquired in ill-fated attempts of sending music to cable companies. Legal issues caused cable providers to step away from the service, leaving Von Meister with a delivery tool and no content.
He then converted his variable speed adaptive modem technology to download games from central servers to individual households. This allowed users to dial a system and, for a fee, download games to their GameLine modules. The game would typically work for 5-10 plays, after which the user would have to connect to GameLine again and pay for another download.[3]
The "Master Module" has 8 KB of RAM and a 1,200 Bps modem,[4] and physically resembles an oversized silver Atari cartridge. It has a phone jack on the side that was used to link the Master Module with the CVC computers. The module is able to transmit with pulse or tone dialing, allowing the unit to be versatile in the field.[5] The games available on the GameLine service were all from third-party gamemakers, the largest of which was Imagic. CVC tried, but failed to obtain licensing agreements from the largest game makers, such as Atari, Activision, Coleco, Mattel, and Parker Brothers.[6]Brazilian authorities present case that runs counter to US swimmer’s claims he was held up at gunpoint after night out in Rio de Janeiro
The American swimmer Ryan Lochte was on Thursday accused of making up a story of being robbed at gunpoint in Rio de Janeiro, in one of the most bizarre stories to have emerged from the Olympics.
Lochte, whose cool account of confronting armed thieves had gripped America and embarrassed Brazil, has been accused by Rio police of a complete fabrication. Indeed later on Thursday ABC reported that police would seek to indict the gold medallist and another US swimmer, James Feigen, over false reporting of a crime. The charges would not carry the threat of jail time under Brazilian law.
Instead of escaping the clutches of robbers, Lochte, along with fellow competitors Jack Conger, Gunnar Bentz and Feigen, is alleged to have had a minor altercation with a security guard after damaging property at a Rio petrol station.
At a press conference in the seaside district of Leblon, Fernando Veloso, the head of Rio’s civil police, said one of the swimmers had confessed that the story was a lie and blamed Lochte. Veloso said the swimmer told them that Lochte was drunk and stressed, and created the fake story that he then re-told on US television. He did not identify the swimmer. Veloso did not explain why Lochte had given the false story, but said the swimmers were accompanied by two women who had followed in a second car.
Police said no charges have been brought against the athletes yet since the case is still under investigation. But the officials appeared angry with Lochte and his team-mates for allegedly manufacturing the account. Lochte had said a man dressed as a police officer had placed a gun against his head and demanded money during a robbery at a gas station.
Veloso said none of these things happened and the swimmers were not confronted in a violent manner.
“The athletes should apologize for what they have done to the people of Rio,” he said. Such was the enthusiasm of Rio’s police to publicise the truth of the incident that the press conference was moved, fittingly, from a police station to the theatre across the street.
Ryan Lochte leaves Brazil shortly before judge orders him to stay in Rio Read more
There, police officially recounted what had slipped out over hours yesterday morning. Lochte and his team-mates were in a taxi in a neighbourhood close to the Olympic park while returning from a part early on Sunday morning. They tried to use a bathroom at a petrol station and ended up vandalising part of the property. The Brazilian news site O Globo reported the athletes forced a bathroom door open, damaged an advertising sign and urinated on the ground.
After getting back into the cab the athletes were confronted by a security guard who asked them to pay for the damage. Veloso said one of the athletes became angry with the guard and at that point the guard pulled a gun on him to “calm him.” He did not say which swimmer had the gun pointed at him and said that the athletes were never threatened. He also said there was no violence. Veloso did not blame the security guard for his actions, saying: “He was doing his job.”
The Brazilian news site O Globo quoted the unnamed owner of the station as complaining of “pure vandalism” saying the swimmers damaged his property after workers at the station asked them to use the bathroom instead of urinating on a wall.
Lochte returned home three days ago, ahead of an order from a judge to have his passport confiscated as the swimmers’ story started to fall apart. Conger and Bentz were removed from a flight to Houston on Wednesday and have been talking to police. Feigen is said to still be in Brazil but has not talked to the police.
The incident is an embarassment for US Olympic officials who have spent a great deal of time instructing their athletes to not offend their Brazilian hosts.
Before the Olympics began, the US’s Chief de Mission, Alan Ashley told The Guardian that the US Olympic committee had former Olympic stars address each US team before Rio, educating them on acceptable and unacceptable behavior while at the Games. They had put an extra emphasis on presenting a good image to the world in Rio where so many other delegations have complained about crime and a lack of preparedness. American officials desperately wanted their athletes to stand in contrast to those from other countries who were overly critical of Brazil. Instead, Lochte becomes the most visible foreigner showing a lack of respect for the host country – urinating, literally, on their wall, then concocting a lie by playing to everybody’s deepest fears about safety.
For clarity on the Ryan Lochte incident, just look to his reality TV show Read more
Lochte has always been a boisterous presence on the US team. He is a six-time gold medal winner, with 12 overall medals over four Olympics making him one of the most-decorated swimmers in American history. But since his four Olympics have always coincided with those of Michael Phelps, he has always been overshadowed by his teammate.
Lochte’s easy laugh and wild man image earned him countless endorsements from which he is said to have made millions of dollars.He is often mocked for his use of phrases like “bro” and “jeah” and the swimming media look forward to his press conferences, which are often a respite from the more serious Phelps and Katie Ledecky, the winner of four gold medals in Rio.
Three years ago Lochte had a reality show on the E! Network called What Would Ryan Lochte Do? The show was cancelled after an eight-week run in the spring of 2013. He arrived at these Olympics in full character with his hair dyed green.Greek voters are headed to the polls Sunday for a national referendum on whether to endorse an economic deal that’s no longer on the table.
Welcome to the bizarre world of the Greek economy and the perils of an out-of-control welfare state.
The socialist government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is pushing voters to say “no” — though that would cut Athens off from European Union funding and credit and plunge the economy into deeper chaos.
How did Greece get to this? Simple: Since the return of democracy in 1974, its government has spent vastly more than it took in, with bloated public payrolls and pensions — even as the private-sector workforce, which drives production, remained low. Plus, people get away with just not paying taxes.
For decades, this brought recurring crises — which Athens resolved by devaluing the currency to make it easy to repay its debts.
Joining the Euro removed that option — but Greece didn’t change its ways.
The pension system is the poster-child of the problem: Until recently, Greeks could retire after just 35 years and start collecting 80 percent of their final salary; many went into retirement in their mid-50s.
Today, Greece has only four working people for every three retirees, pensions consume more than half of all government revenue — and the population is rapidly aging.
“Austerity” programs of recent years raised retirement to 62 and cut pensions to 60 percent of income — but it’s not enough.
Since taking office early this year, Tsipras has talked of boosting retirement to age 67 —but only in 10 years’ time. He’s also resisted raising cash by other means. Greece promised to sell off 50 billion euros of state assets by the end of 2015, but has only sold 6 percent of its goal.
Bottom line: By promising to give citizens far more than it can deliver, Athens has accumulated debt so high, it’s literally unpayable. The only question is how it’s going to welch — via EU-negotiated loan forgiveness and restructuring, by total default or by exiting the Euro so it can go back to devaluation.
There’s a real lesson here for places like New York and New Jersey that refuse to address their own public-pensions woes or pare down their reliance on borrowing. Both states are a lot closer to Greece than they’d like to believe.Historic Super Typhoon Haiyan Assaults Philippines
Super Typhoon Haiyan — which is one of the strongest storms in world history based on maximum windspeed — is about to plow through the Central Philippines, producing a potentially deadly storm surge and dumping heavy rainfall that could cause widespread flooding. The densely populated city of Manila, home to 12 million, is in the storm’s path, although it is predicted to escape the worst of the winds and storm surge.
Enhanced satellite image of Super Typhoon Haiyan showing the telltale “donut” appearance of an intense tropical cyclone.
Click image to enlarge. Credit: U-Wisconsin-CIMSS via Twitter/@Ryan_Maue.
As of Thursday afternoon Eastern time, Haiyan, known in the Philippines as Super Typhoon Yolanda, had estimated maximum sustained winds of 195 mph with gusts above 220 mph, which puts the storm in extraordinarily rare territory. Since 1969, only three storms have had sustained winds close to this magnitude — Hurricane Camille in 1969, Super Typhoon Tip in 1979, and Hurricane Allen in 1980. No storm in the Atlantic has ever been stronger than Haiyan, accoring to The Weather Channel.
MORE: What Happened to the 2013 Atlantic Hurricane Season?
Haiyan is capable of causing catastrophic damage in the central Philippines and its outer bands are already starting to affect the island nation.
The U.S. Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center forecasts that Haiyan will cross the Central Philippines as a Category 4 or 5 Super Typhoon, and then re-emerge over open water, before making landfall in Vietnam as a Category 3 typhoon on November 10.
Ryan Maue, a meteorologist at WeatherBELL Analytics, said that Haiyan appears to be the strongest storm since Super Typhoon Tip in 1979. Maue said the storm has avoided the typical hiccups that other intense storms encounter, such as eyewall replacement cycles, during which a storm's inner core undergoes a reorganization. Such cycles can cause a Category 5 storm to weaken to a Category 3 or 4 storm, before re-strengthening. Instead of doing this, though, Haiyan has remained at peak strength for more than 24 hours, which is unusual, and even strengthened on Monday morning.
After hitting the Leyte province, the Philippines’ Department of Science and Technology expects the storm to traverse the central Philippines from Biliran to Busuanga before passing into the West Philippine Sea. The Department is warning coastal residents to expect storm surges “which may reach up to 7-meter (23 feet) wave height,” along with flooding and mudslides. The storm poses an especially grave danger to the capital of Leyte, the city of Tacloban, which has about 220,000 people and lies along or just to the north of the storm's path where the most intense winds and storm surge will come ashore.
MORE: A Comprehensive Look at Hurricane Sandy in a Climate Context
For the past 24 hours, the storm has remained at a strength close to the theoretical upper limit that cyclones can reach. Unlike in the tropical North Atlantic, there is no aircraft reconnaissance of tropical storms and typhoons in the Western Pacific, so the actual wind speeds and minimum central air pressure — two key parameters used to classify such storms — are being estimated using satellites.
Wide-angle satellite image showing Super Typhoon Haiyan approach the Philippines.
Click image to enlarge. Credit: Facebook/EUMETSAT.
Storm surge forecasts from the Philippines’ Project NOAH indicate a maximum storm tide (storm surge plus the tide level) of 16.4 feet at Ormoc in Leyte Province on November 8, with 14-16 foot storm tides occurring in the provinces of Palawan, Quezon, Biliran, and others. The storm tide forecast for Manila is 5 feet, but the city is so low-lying that flooding may still occur there.
Sea level rise from global warming is escalating the risk posed by storm surges across the globe, including in low-lying areas of the Philippines.
Aiding the storm’s development has been a plentiful supply of warm ocean waters, low atmospheric wind shear and plentiful amounts of warm, moist air surrounding the storm.
Chia-Ying Lee, a researcher at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, told Climate Central in an email that Haiyan’s moderate forward speed has prevented it from encountering the cooler ocean waters that its potent winds are stirring up from deep below the ocean's surface, which would have weakened the storm.
Lee said there have been 9 years that have had more than three super typhoons in the Western Pacific Ocean (equivalent to Category 4 and 5 hurricanes) for the period from 2002-2012. “So actually, having 3 or more super typhoons is quite common, at least in the last decade.”
Lee said that Haiyan is unique in that it reached Category 5 strength at a very southern latitude, although it did not set a record for this. “... In general, a storm’s movement has a northward component, (so) the longer it takes for the storm to reach Category 4 or 5, the further north it gets. For Haiyan, it went through a rapid intensification process and has not actually experienced any weakening stage, while lots of storms experienced ups and downs before reaching such a strong stage,” she said.
Stark contrast to quiet Atlantic season
The Western Pacific Ocean Basin has been far more active than the Atlantic Hurricane Season this year. Haiyan is the fourth Category 5 storm in the Western Pacific this year. There was also a Category 5 storm in the North Indian Ocean this year.
Based on an index, known as Accumulated Cyclone Energy or ACE, which incorporates the number, strength, and duration of all the tropical storms in a season, the Western Pacific has had a slightly below-average storm season, although it has been closing the gap recently.
Meanwhile, the Atlantic has not had a Category 5 storm since Hurricane Felix in 2007, according to Jeff Masters of Weather Underground, and the U.S. has not had a landfalling major hurricane of Category 3 or greater since 2005, a record span. The North Atlantic Hurricane Season had an ACE index that is just 29 percent of normal to date, with just 12 named storms, two of which have been hurricanes.
Even more so than Florida is in the U.S., the Philippines are a tropical storm magnet. Haiyan will be the fourth typhoon to hit the Philippines this year alone, but the storms normally hit the northern islands, rather than the central and southern regions that Haiyan is targeting.
Last year, Super Typhoon Bopha hit the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, killing close to 2,000, and Haiyan may be the strongest storm ever to strike the Philippines.
Relief supplies being distributed in Southern Leyte, Philippines.
Credit: Twitter/@govogingmercado.
Climate scientists continue to search for insight into how manmade global warming, which is increasing sea surface temperatures along with changing air temperatures and the amount of moisture in the air, may be altering tropical storm systems like Haiyan. The most recent report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) found that “it is virtually certain that the frequency and intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic has increased since the 1970s,” but that there is less evidence of changes being detected in other ocean basins.
Sparse historical data of Pacific storms has made it more difficult for scientists to detect long-term changes to storms in that region, but in the Atlantic at least, global warming is expected to increase the prevalance of the strongest storms, while making storms produce more rainfall. However, the total number of storms in the Atlantic is projected to decrease as the climate continues to warm. The same may or may not hold true in the Western Pacific.
Editor's Note: Web editor Brian Kahn contributed reporting to this article. This article has been updated to fix a reporting error. There was a Category 5 storm in the North Indian Ocean this year, not the Eastern Pacific, as originally stated.
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Strongest Storm on Earth En Route to Hong KongDavid Harbour, who today earned his first Emmy nomination for Stranger Things, was tasked on the series with the challenge of ascending to the position of a leading man — or at least, of a supporting actor who leaves an indelible mark on an acclaimed series with an all-around solid ensemble.
“I was so in love with the project and the script that I was quite intimidated going in,” he said. “It was something I’d never been asked to do, to really be the male protagonist of the show. I sort of knew that I had to go to work in a much deeper way, I felt, than I had in the past in movies and television. I’d done that work in theater before; in movies and television, I hadn’t really had that opportunity, so I knew I had to try to figure out his soul much more deeply. That was the biggest challenge going in, spending that time alone, sort of working on the role by myself.”
Along with the Duffer Brothers and Millie Bobby Brown, Harbour gave his take on where the show and his character are headed. “[Season 2] will surprise you, and I think you will also be very happy. It still contains that magic I think we have in the first season, which is that sort of Amblin Entertainment-esque, Steven Spielberg kind of ‘magic of the movies’ feel to it, but it’s also very different.”
He added: “In terms of Hopper, it plays to a lot of darker themes. Even though in Season 1 he certainly had his darkness, it plays to a lot of his struggles, and it sort of peels the onion back of how he struggles to deal with the pressures of feeling like you have saved a kid, and now who does that make you?”According to a report published today by the Georgia Voice, R&B star and felony-convicted domestic abuser Chris Brown failed to appear at an Atlanta Pride event because there were a handful of gay men present in the crowd of 4000 lesbians. Georgia Voice editor Darian Aaron writes:
Brown failed to show up at The Georgia Freight Depot nightclub as thousands of his fans waited to see the ‘Loyal’ singer at his scheduled Saturday appearance during Atlanta Black Gay Pride Weekend. The event, sponsored by Traxx Girls, a lesbian owned and operated entertainment company, was billed as the “biggest girl party in the country with over 4,000 women in attendance.” Brown, who was also in Atlanta to perform on his ‘One Hell of A Nite Tour’ at Aaron’s Amphitheatre at Lakewood, had been prominently displayed in the center of Traxx Girls flyers promoting the event, but when the time came for Brown to fulfill his contractual obligations he bailed along with the fee he was paid by Traxx Girls as a retainer. The reason: of the estimated 4,000 women in attendance, Brown refused to enter the building once he learned that a handful of gay men were present. Melissa Scott, party promoter and founder of Traxx Girls, tells Georgia Voice she’s “baffled” by the entire turn of events. “I think it’s unfortunate for mainstream artists to take people’s money with the complete prior knowledge of knowing what the event is and being very clear about what the event is about. I’m completely baffled. You know it’s gay pride. You knew you agreed when you sent the contract in and took the money.”
The Georgia Voice reports that it has confirmed the claims by examining the text messages exchanged between the event promoter and Brown’s handlers. Chart-topping rapper Fetty Wrap, who is touring with Brown, stepping in at the last minute as Brown’s replacement. Much more is at the link above.
RELATED: Brown was convicted of felony domestic abuse in 2009 for his assault on then-girlfriend Rihanna. In 2013 Brown was involved in an parking space incident with gay R&B star Frank Ocean, who claimed that Brown threatened to shoot him and that a member of Brown’s entourage called Ocean a “faggot.” Later in 2013 Brown was charged with felony assault after he and his bodyguard allegedly beat two male fans who had requested a photo. Before the melee began, Brown allegedly said, “I’m not into this gay shit, I’m into boxing.” Brown was then sentenced to anger management rehab and was sued by one of the victims. Brown lengthy criminal history has caused Canada and the United Kingdom to bar his entry for concert tours. Brown has also been known to issue homophobic tweets. And yet he was booked for a gay party?Quick Take: Spartacus: Blood and Sand, "Party Favors"
"Spartacus is merely the beast that you ride upon." Lucretia to Batiatus
Review: Spartacus: Blood and Sand, "Party Favors"
(S0110) I had this review somewhat drafted, but with the final scenes I had to stop and turn it all on its head. Let me say this: the many cries that Spartacus: Blood and Sand is a 300-derivative, T&A romp are hard to dispute. It is that. But really, it's a lot more at the same time. It's a gripping and blood-soaked epic of ancient times, where life and death mean little, and fortunes and dizzying rises to power and falls to disgrace are plotted by those in the shadows, or cast off to the will of the gods.
I'll say this, too: for all its gratuitousness and camp, this show is one of the best on television right now. It's flat out great storytelling. I'm guessing that most are too timid to call this fact out for what it is for fear of being labeled a perv or a low brow. So be it.
Speaking of fear: for fear of burying the lede (and as they say in the newspaper biz, if it bleeds it ledes), the scene in which Ilithyia orchestrates the death of Varro –with her body and her cunning and her will – is one of the most striking and effecting I've seen in a long time. It's a "power move" of epic proportions – even more so than Russell taking out Tyson recently on Survivor: Heroes and Villains, I dare say – one that Lucretia and Batiatus and poor pure hearted Spartacus could not have seen coming.
The craft in how this event plays out too is a stroke of brilliance. Ilithyia (Viva Blanca) is cast as a pawn stemming from the wild events of "Whore," in which Licinia (Brooke Harmon) is murdered by Ilithyia in a fit of rage after the Lucretia – in a well orchestrated move in her own right – positions Spartacus to make love to the cousin of rich Crassus right in front of Ilithyia's jealous eyes.
Victories had seemingly abounded for the House of Batiatus, as Lucretia (Lucy Lawless) pressed her advantage over Ilithyia in the wake of the latter's impetuous murder of Licinia.
The conflicts that have been swirling throughout the season came into sharp relief in this episode: Spartacus and Crixus (Manu Bennett) are selected to fight each other for an "exhibition" match to please Numerius, the son of the magistrate, who is coming of age and will have a toga-related ceremony that seems to be something akin to a Roman-style Bar Mitzvah. And Batiatus invites Colonius (Craig Walt Wrightson), a chief rival now down on his luck, so that he may cram his turn of fortune down the latter's throat.
And just as Batiatus and Lucretia are anxious to press their victories – letting them ride on the great wheel of chance, perhaps – so to Spartacus acts as cocky as we've ever seen him: gloating over "former" Champion of Capua Crixus (was I the only one thinking about the Champion of Philadelpia getting soft circa Rocky III during those scenes?), and even one-upping conniving Ashur (Nick Tarabay) over a board game in front of a wildly approving Batiatus.
The seeds of deceit and dark triumph both are set when Ilithyia finds herself alone – very alone if you can dig – with young Numerius. The latter, for all his starry-eyed wonder at the site of gladiators, is easily hoodwinked by Ilithyia… a fact we see tragically play out during the climactic exhibition fight.
Numerius, who has been given the power to order the gladiators around during his special Big Boy day, switches out Crixus for the unsuspecting Varro. Varro and Spartacus give a good show, giving the crowd the hint of blood and sword clash that they're looking for.
Then, the hammer drops. Most of us are probably familiar by now with the thumbs up / thumbs down gesture of Ancient Rome: up means life, down death. Numerius chooses death for Varro at the end of what is literally a light workout for the gladiators, simply due to Ilithyia's sweet advances.
The deception is complete, as old Darth Vader informed us Return of the Jedi.
As is often the case, things are not quite as clear as they seem. Lucretia has been put in her place, Batiatus has lost a gladiator who was fighting alongside his Champion in the arena (and his striving for political office seem all for naught as well!), high riding Spartacus has lost his only true friend, and Varro has lost his life, and with it the ability to truly reconcile with his wife and children.
To top it all, the magistrate says of his son: "He calls for bloodshed without hesitation. Such boldness will one day lead him to the Senate." This is ancient Roman life (and a hell of a drama to boot).
As Bob Dylan sings: things have changed.
More thoughts on "Party Favors":
I noticed for the first time that in the little disclaimer the show runs before each episode about "extreme sensuality" and brutality and such, it capitalizes the first letter in Intensity. Cute.
"They roar your name." – Varro to Spartacus
There's a return to a very 300-like sensibility in the opening gladiator scenes. The final slave/mutant-guy that Varro (Jai Courtney) and Spartacus (Andy Whitfield) take out is reminiscent of the stylized Persians who got after the Spartan lads in that flick. I can't help but notice, too, that Spartacus has very much embraced his Roman personae and the fame that comes with his ever more spectacular victories in the arena. Gone, for now at the least, are dreams of his slain wife and his Thracian people. So is Batiatus' (John Hannah) victory and return to prosperity complete?
There's a nice moment when Varro reunites with his wife, whom he believed to be dead. This reunion is far better than the last, when Varro cruelly called his wife "whore" (in the episode of the same name) for being raped and impregnated during his gambling-fueled enslavement.
Speaking of conniving Ashur: everyone sing together now, "someone's got a secret! Someone's got a secret!") That secret being: Crixus and Naevia (Lesley-Ann Brandt) having a bit of a liaison.
I much enjoyed the scene in which Batiatus and Spartacus "bro out" together. I mentioned last week that theirs is a complicated relationship. An odd friendship of sorts, a bond perhaps, now exists between master and slave, or aspiring noble and the Champion of Capua, dependingon how one looks upon it. It's perfectly clear of course that Lucretia thinks exactly this...
"Spartacus is merely the beast that you ride upon." Lucretia to Batiatus
There's so much to discuss in any episode of Spartacus that it should not go overlooked that the fight scenes are awfully well done. This episode in particular featured a swath of training scenes at the ludus, and it's particularly cool that the shield's edge is often used as a way to fend off an attack and even cause a striking blow at the opponent.
"He calls for bloodshed without hesitation. Such boldness will one day lead him to the Senate." – The Magistrate, of his son Numerius (Lliam Powell)
Video: Spartacus: Blood and Sand, "Party Favors"
Here's the audio to Bob Dylan's Things Have Changed:
Recap: Spartacus: Blood and Sand, "Party Favors"
Spartacus and Crixus are set up to fight in an exhibition match for Numerius' birthday - but Crixus is intent on blood.
From Around the Web: Spartacus: Blood and Sand, "Party Favors"
IGN - Spartacus: Blood and Sand continues to surprise me week after week. It's slowly crept up to the top of my list as a must watch show and one that I've found myself recommending to anyone who asks me what they should be watching.
Tubular - Alright, there are only three episodes left this season and the body count has gone insane. I didn't expect Varro to die, let alone get killed by Spartacus. Okay, I'm lying, I kind of expected that to happen eventually.
After Elton - Batty takes Spartacus aside as Crisco leaves and shows him the new statue he made of him. Well, not exactly a statue. It's a bust of his head on a column, with a certain extra appendage that we can't show you because we're a family site. Oh, those Romans.Switzerland has around 350,000 Muslims (Keystone)
Fribourg University is to be the first Swiss institution to offer a course to imams and Muslim community leaders on understanding how Swiss society works.
The vocational training is also open to non-Muslims with the purpose of fostering cross-cultural knowledge. It has largely been welcomed by the Islamic community.
The course will start in October and is organised by the university, the Group of Researchers on Islam in Switzerland (GRIS) and the Paris-based International Institute of Islamic Thought.
Stéphane Lathion, GRIS head and director of the "Islam, Muslims and Civil Society" course, said there are currently no practical studies on Islam and society in Switzerland.
"The idea is to offer some answers to the federal and cantonal authorities which in recent years have had to deal with problems linked to the Muslim community, such as people not keeping to the principles of Swiss democracy," he told swissinfo.
"So there's the problem of how to be sure that imams and community leaders know about Swiss society and on the other hand, Muslims themselves are calling for their leaders to be better trained about the Swiss situation."
Integration role
Lathion said that apart from their religious duties, many imams played a key role in integration.
"If someone comes from Turkey, Saudi Arabia or Tunisia, they don't know the Swiss context so the idea is to offer imams or community leaders the tools so they can work better in their daily role in Muslim communities," he explained.
With more than 350,000 members or 4.3 per cent of the population, Islam is the second-largest religion in Switzerland. Twelve per cent of Muslims have a Swiss passport.
The course will encompass modules on history of religion and European and Swiss society, as well as elements of Muslim theology adapted to the European context.
Vocational modules, which can be taken separately by health or social work professionals on job-related issues, will be a first in Europe, says Lathion.
Headscarves, for example, might be tackled in the health module where wearing the veil at hospital would be discussed.
More than 50 experts, including many from the Muslim community, will help teach
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17-year-old Jake Andrews.
Perhaps with the pain of his recent injury still fresh on his mind, Sandro leapt to his feet and ran back towards the tackler before violently shoving him to the ground. As his opponent tried to get to his feet, Sandro grabbed him by the collar and again furiously shoved the City youngster. Unsurprisingly, he was quickly shown a red card.
YouTube/OfficialQPR
Sandro reacted furiously to the tackle and stormed back to confront his opponent and shoving him hard
Andrews was sent tumbling to the floor by the force of Sandro's shove
Sandro's reaction bore strong similarities with Nemanja Matic's red card for Chelsea on Saturday
Sandro grabbed Andrews by the collar as he tried to pick himself up from the turf
The former Tottenham midfielder shoved Andrews with real force for a second time
The referee was quick to brandish the red card and Sandro trudged off the pitch
The incident came just two days after QPR captain Joey Barton had set a dreadful example to his squad by receiving his marching orders for a below-the-belt punch at Hull's Tom Huddlestone.
Spurs sold Sandro to QPR at the end of last season following a public falling-out with then boss Tim Sherwood.
Hailed as a key signing by Harry Redknapp, he has been limited to just nine appearances due to injury. Redknapp has since left the club due to health reasons with Chris Ramsey taking over the club's fight against the drop until the end of the season.
But Sandro will not feature in too many more QPR games unless he learns to control his temper. Matic, who will miss the Capital One Cup final after his own red card, is also finding that out the hard way.
Nemanja Matic (second right) was felled by a studs-up tackle by Ashley Barnes on Saturday
The Serbian could not contain his anger and rushed back to confront Burnley striker Barnes
Matic shoved Barnes after the tackle that Jose Mourinho described as potentially 'career-ending'
Barnes, who also got away with a nasty challenge on Branislav Ivanovic, was sent flying by Matic's shove
Matic is restrained by team-mate Kurt Zouma as he stands over the floored Barnes
The Chelsea midfielder's furious reaction earned him a red card from referee Martin AtkinsonGet ready Windham. Soon you'll be able to try a delicious signature Binga's Wingas buffalo chicken wing with Chernobyl sauce that will light your mouth on fire when a brand new Binga's Wingas opens.
In March of 2016, Ruggiero's at 106 Main street in Windham closed their doors. The pizza place and convenience store sat at the corner of River Road and Route 202 for years as names have come and gone.
Specials have appeared on their marquee, but recently a new message has shown up on the former Ruggiero's sign.
Corrie Lamkin
Judging by the giant dumpster outside, construction has begun and soon Binga's Wingas will have its third location to join Yarmouth and Portland's Binga's Stadium.
Expect Binga's famous Wings, homemade BBQ, and ice cold beer on draft. No word yet on a scheduled opening, but keep your eye out on the corner over the next few months as construction continues.News that a top State Department official discussed a “quid pro quo” in exchange for the FBI changing the classification of a Hillary Clinton email is shocking enough. But word that the coterie of State officials who controlled the release of the emails called itself “The Shadow Government” is mind-blowing.
The latest FBI dump of documents from the investigation into Clinton’s email follies includes a summary of one agent’s talks with Undersecretary Patrick Kennedy — who, the agent said, “pressured” him to “change the classified email to unclassified.”
Kennedy “asked his assistance in altering the email’s classification in exchange for a ‘quid pro quo,’ ” the summary says. “In exchange for marking the email unclassified, State would reciprocate by allowing the FBI to place more agents in countries where they were presently forbidden.”
That’s a promise to help alter US policy in order to make it seem like Clinton hadn’t casually endangered national security. That the FBI didn’t take the deal doesn’t make the potential trade any less odious.
And State is still covering: Its official comments call the allegations “inaccurate” and claim Kennedy was merely trying to “understand” the FBI’s decision. Who offers to change federal policy in order to “understand” something?
Plus, in a later interview with the FBI, Kennedy was asked if any of certain Clinton emails was classified — and answered, “We’ll see” while making eye contact with the agent he’d discussed the deal with.
Kennedy is hardly the only State official to try covering for Clinton. The whole department did its best to minimize the scandal — by repeatedly claiming it just couldn’t release most of Clinton’s emails until after Election Day, until court rulings forced it to cough them up.
The FBI also released the summary of an interview that revealed a cabal at State that oversaw the email release — a “powerful group of very high-ranking STATE officials that some referred to as ‘The 7th Floor Group’ or as ‘The Shadow Government.’ This group met every Wednesday afternoon to discuss... everything CLINTON-related to FOIA/Congressional inquiries.”
Imagine officials high in the George W. Bush administration calling themelves “the Shadow Government” as they oversaw a supposedly nonpartisan release of documents that could sink the White House hopes of its former boss.
Heck, State on its own somehow never officially noticed Clinton’s missing emails — regularly reporting “no records that comply” to subpoenas and Freedom of Information requests. Only the hacking of Clintonite Sidney Blumenthal’s emails, two years after she left office, began to expose the truth.
The FBI has flagged the “quid pro quo” exchange for further investigation. Don’t expect that probe to go far if the “shadow government” becomes the real thing after Nov. 8.The Digital Beehive uses Wi-Fi to broadcast a beehive’s weight, humidity, temperature, and battery voltage every minute to SparkFun’s data channel service called Phant. The raw data can be seen here but you can view some prettier graphs of the data here on analog.io (sign-in required).
On a visit to Portland, Oregon, last summer my friend mentioned he had always wanted to put a load cell under a beehive to measure the weight of the hive over time. He thought it was a great project for SparkFun and I immediately started thinking how it might be done. Fast forward through 9 months of testing and development and we’ve got live bee data!
First a disclaimer: This is a project that focuses on the technology and the lessons in the field, but I have only scratched the surface of beekeeping (apiculture). SparkFun is fortunate to have a handful of employees who are either beekeepers or related to beekeepers. They were nice enough to do the bee tending, I did the tech. Additionally, I am an engineer so data accuracy is important to me but the interpretation of that data should be left to research scientists. That said, check this out!
Please Just Step on the Scale…
A healthy hive can hit 400lbs (180kg), so we need to create a scale that can handle the hive’s maximum weight and also have the robustness to survive in the field.
There are a variety of 200kg bathroom and package scales available. The vast majority have a similar setup to the scale pictured above. There are four strain gauges (one in each corner) that are wired in a Wheatstone Bridge configuration to create a load cell. You can read more about load cells here.
This configuration of four gauges allows for low cost voltage measurement instruments to measure a very minute change in resistance. We’ll need to convert this voltage change to a digital reading. Scale manufacturers use specifically designed ICs to convert the analog voltage reading to digital, the HX711 is one such specialized instrument amplifier that is commonly used inside many consumer scales. So I whipped up a breakout board for the HX711 and started experimenting with this and other postal scales. What I found was discouraging.
Every load cell has creep. This means when you put a 12 pack of Coke on your scale it will read one reading and over the next 15 minutes the reading will change. A lot. For low end human or postal scales this is fine — no one stands on the scale for more than a few seconds, but I planned to leave the scale in place for months on end.
Here are a few lessons I learned about scales:
Don’t skimp on the quality of the scale. A higher quality scale will have less creep and have more durable construction in the field. I ended up using an $80 scale from Amazon Don’t build your own. While the quality and variance of scales was frustrating, it was far easier to buy and hack a scale then try to jump through the mechanical hoops of building my own scale to withstand forces of 200kg in addition to the rain/sleet/snow of Colorado. Calibration takes time. I’ll dive into this later but expect to throw lots of known weight on your scale for days at a time to get the calibration points you’ll need.
Getting Data to the Internet (of Things):
The HX711 is powered from 2.7 to 5V and uses a 2 wire digital interface (Clock and Data). Thanks to open source and the community there are a variety of libraries that allow an Arduino to talk to the HX711. There is a series of calibration points that needs to be recorded and remembered between power cycles, so I wrote a serial-based menu system that allowed me to read, calibrate, and tare (zero out) the scale from my Arduino.
With the scale mostly under control I moved on to getting the data from the field to a place where it could be stored and accessed easily. There are a handful of data storage services on the internet but SparkFun created an open source and super easy to use software called Phant. We run a free instance of Phant on data.sparkfun.com. If your microcontroller can concatenate a string like this:
https://data.sparkfun.com/input/[publicKey]?private_key=[privateKey]&brewTemp=34.2
Then you can push data (brewTemp of 34.2) to the internet. Try it out yourself by hitting this link then viewing the public stream.
I quickly created a data channel and threw some data at it but I still needed to get from the Arduino across the SparkFun parking lot to the internet. This used to be hard but with recent players like Particle and the ESP8266 the cost and complexity of Wi-Fi has dropped dramatically over the last year.
I chose the Spark Core because I had one from their Kickstarter but with the recent launch of the Particle Photon and the SparkFun Thing there are better and lower cost solutions now available.
Thanks again to the community (you guys rock!), there are some lovely libraries written for the Spark Core to get a variable onto data.sparkfun.com. With a few basic function calls I was moving weight data from my Core to Phant.
Adding humidity and temperature was cheap and easy so I added that to the system thanks to the I2C based HTU21D breakout sensor board. I covered the HTU21D board in PTFE tape. This teflon-based tape is commonly used to seal the threads on your garden hose or irrigation pipes. Teflon allows water vapor to pass back and forth while protecting the sensor in theory from pollen, bee feet, etc.
Because this system will be solar and battery powered I added a voltage divider to measure the voltage on the battery through the ADC on the Spark Core.
Here is the system all boxed up. I used a Spark Core with an external 2.4GHz antenna connected over U.FL to increase the transmission range. A 2.5W solar cell charges a 6 amp hour LiPo battery through our maximum power point solar charger. The LiPo battery will float between 3.6 and 4.2V and the system regulates this down to a clean 3.3V.
The purple board is a prototype of a product called OpenScale that combines an Arduino and HX711 load cell amplifier into one easy to use board. The Core sends a trigger character to OpenScale and OpenScale responds with the comma delimited weight, timestamp, and board temperature. The RJ45 cable pictured is not ethernet, rather it’s the cable that contains the 4-wires that run to the Wheatstone bridge in the load cell within the postal scale.
Here we have a Bee Box brand polystyrene beehive from Finland. I was told to use four small concrete blocks (the type with a void in the center) to elevate and thermally isolate the hive. On top of the four blocks are two pieces of untreated plywood sandwiched around the scale. On top of the second piece of plywood is the hive itself. Colorado can have greater than 120mph (193kph) winds so I added two 45 pound weightlifting plates and a 30 pound solid core cinder block. I could have probably done with less weight but the last thing I wanted was the hive to blow over.
The outdoor enclosure, electronics, and solar cell are mounted to a pole near the hive. A wire runs to the scale underneath and a wire runs into the hive which connects to the humidity and temperature sensor.
The 45 pound weightlifting plates were crucial to calibrating the scale. The HX711 returns a 24-bit reading such as 7,885,711. It is up to the user to make sense of this via calibration using a known weight. And because my scale went up to 440 lbs I couldn’t calibrate the scale with a pound or two, I needed a large known source of weight — hence the plates. In the comfort of my home I set the scale on a level, hard surface and took a zero reading. I then put 90 lbs on the scale and left it for a few days. Once the scale had a chance to creep to this new weight I calibrated the reading to 90 pounds. Removing one of the plates indicated 45 pounds on the scale. This allowed me to verify the scale was reading correctly.
Ok, so we’ve got weight, humidity, temperature, and battery voltage. We’ve got the variables pushing to the internet. Now we need some bees.
Installation
Pontus, our fearless beekeeper, installed roughly three pounds of bees on April 26 in the berm across from our building. It was a wonderfully wet spring and summer which meant great things for Colorado but made life hard for bees. Once the weather cleared up in July our bees started multiplying rapidly due to the massive bloom of thistle and other weeds in the area.
Data Analysis:
The point of all this is to get weight data! Here is the raw beehive data stream on data.sparkfun.com. This is great but it’s easier to pick out trends when the data is visualized. The folks at analog.io have made it super easy to link a SparkFun data stream and graph the various bits of data. Here’s beehive weight graphed over time:
Look at that! So pretty. We can see the bees leave at 6:20 every morning like clock work. The hive loses many pounds of bees in a few minutes only to have them slowly return over the day.
Here we can see weight, temperature, and humidity over a few days. Note: For the first few months the HTU21D humidity and temperature sensor was located in the outdoor enclosure, not in the hive. I wanted to make sure the sensor was working reliably before installing it in the hive. It was astonishing to see the bees depart in the morning at the precise time the ambient humidity dropped and temperature rose.
Installing the humidity and temperature sensor
I installed the sensor on July 16 during one of Pontus’ regular inspections of the hive. You can see the weight of the hive drop dramatically when we remove the 125 lbs of top weight and then re-add it a few minutes later.
During a Colorado summer the ambient temperature swings from the 50’s at night to the 90’s during the day. A delta of 50°F is shown in the data stream before July 16 with regularity. Bees are wonderful beasts. Once the sensor was installed we can see the internal temperature of the hive is pegged at 89° with a variance of 3°. This is astonishing! Outside mother nature is wreaking havoc but inside the hive the bees are doing a fabulous job of keeping things normal. I am excited to see how they do this winter.
Unfortunately (and you could probably tell this was coming) the sensor did not fare well. Three days later on the 19th of July the temperature and humidity data goes completely haywire and by July 20 the sensor stops reporting. I may have an electrical fault (the landscapers may have sliced the cable) but my guess is the bees have done something creative to the sensor. I will check on it during the next hive inspection.
We’ve been receiving data from the hive for awhile now. The weight data is often noisy and hard to decipher. For example, I’m not sure why the weight in July was so dramatic. But by connecting the dots of when the hive was inspected (June 19, July 1, July 17) and looking at the overall trend I estimate the hive weight to have increased 21 lbs. That’s approximately a half a pound a day increase! Each day honey, pollen, wax, and bees increase. If a honey bee worker weighs 120mg and if the growth of the hive was entirely in bees that would be the equivalent of adding 1,900 bees a day. Mother nature is amazing.
In Summary
The project was a wild success. I highly recommend finding a friend who can safely show you around a beehive. It was wonderful getting a chance to see the bees in action.
Although our humidity and temperature sensor failed, the overall weight and Wi-Fi technology continue to perform. I would need to gather data from many more hives across many more seasons but using data like this could help beekeepers to know which hives to check on and the overall health of their bees.Northern Ireland regeneration game hinges on having a sole, expert body to drive it BelfastTelegraph.co.uk The recent announcement by the Department for Communities that it is to hold on to its regeneration powers and not pass them to the local councils came as a surprise to many, and a great disappointment to the councils. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/news-analysis/northern-ireland-regeneration-game-hinges-on-having-a-sole-expert-body-to-drive-it-35303373.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/incoming/article35303684.ece/92297/AUTOCROP/h342/is%20-%20Phot%2012.jpg
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The recent announcement by the Department for Communities that it is to hold on to its regeneration powers and not pass them to the local councils came as a surprise to many, and a great disappointment to the councils.
The councils have been getting ready for some time to accept the additional powers, and to use them to drive forward the regeneration agenda, but are now left in a rather confused position, a bit like an army trying to fight a modern battle with small arms.
The question for us all is who is best placed to lead regeneration? Is it the central government department taking an overall strategic approach, with the council becoming more of a de facto lobby group trying to influence the regeneration focus, or would we be better served by councils with strong powers driving the local agenda?
This decision joins a long list of changes of mind by our Assembly on major regeneration and economic investment issues, and gives another indication of a devolved administration which lacks a coherent and consistent policy in this key area. If we look at the impact on Belfast, which is the key economic driver for the whole of Northern Ireland, we can see why this is a less than ideal situation.
Evidence from all around the world suggests that the best examples of positive urban economic development occur when you create the right organisational structure and give it appropriate powers to get on with the job.
If we look at the most successful cities in the UK recently such as Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh, they all reorganised to drive their respective regeneration and investment strategies through strong local leadership with appropriate powers. They sent out a clear message to the investment community and other key players that they could get things done and they built trust through their performance in handling opportunities.
Whilst I am sure that not absolutely everything these cities have done has received universal acclaim, most agree that their regeneration has been a success and has attracted investment and jobs which would not have happened otherwise.
Belfast City Council has demonstrated a strong desire to take on this role, and its executive has shown enough examples of its understanding of the key drivers of regeneration which the city needs, to be given the opportunity.
The council has a strong marketing vision which is bold and imaginative. In order to really deliver regeneration and associated economic activity, the council needs acquisition and land assembly powers, a sufficient budget and targeted financial incentive instruments.
The councillors have a key role to play in supporting their Executive and in resisting over-pushing their local pet interests at the expense of the overall good. The private sector has a key role but this will be better facilitated by engaging with a more powerful and engaged council.
An alternative model which has been used to drive redevelopment has been the Development Corporation. Corporations with land assembly powers were formerly used in the cities mentioned above, and a case can be made for the model. Recent evidence would suggest that council-led redevelopment units with appropriate powers offer a better model.
If we examine our record in delivering major projects in recent years, apart from a few notable exceptions, it is a depressing picture. In several cases, large amounts of money have been wasted in futile pre-planning activity for projects which did not go ahead. Some of the projects got caught up in the inter-party political wrangling which should have been sorted at the early concept stage. For others, the over complicated, badly managed procurement process resulted in abandoned projects and a resultant waste of large sums of public money.
There is little evidence to suggest that anything is going to change soon and, therefore, we need to find new, better ways to drive our economy forward. The proposed transfer of power to councils offered a new approach in an important particular area and it has now been taken off the table.
Looking at Belfast in particular, its success is important for all the towns and cities here and for the whole of Northern Ireland. The best result for Belfast will be delivered by a strong Regeneration Unit within the council administration, supported by an engaged and informed council. Potential investors are much more likely to do business with such a body and prefer a "one-stop shop" which can be decisive because it has the appropriate expertise and the requisite power.
As noted above, cities which have excelled have delivered this and have gained the reputation as places where things get done. Conversely, cities which have failed will generally be plagued with too much bureaucracy and a lack of joined-up government, something which we unfortunately can identify with only too well.
With the operational freedom which additional powers would give to Belfast Council comes the responsibility to use them wisely, and this requires ensuring you have the best expertise on board and the right delivery mechanisms, along with a mature due diligence which understands how to properly handle the type of risk which goes with the territory.
We certainly need new ideas, imagination and new investment if we want to avoid falling behind globally, and if we want to compete with other towns and cities in the UK and Ireland. I am aware that the former Department of Social Development, which is now the Department of Communities, did do some good regeneration work in recent years but we really need to dramatically up the regeneration game and it is time to quickly rethink where the powers should be allocated.
Denis Rooney is a director of the Regeneration Consultancy, Rooney Smith Associates
Belfast TelegraphFirst of two articles.
In 2004, Rick Segal, a father of four living in Rye, N.Y., found his stamina inexplicably failing him as he did his regular runs. He went to see his doctor, and learned he had a genetic disease that enlarges and weakens the heart. Segal was about to turn 50, but his heart was pumping at one-eighth of a normal heart’s effectiveness. He needed a transplant.
He got on a waiting list, and for the next five years, he was in and out of hospitals while his heart deteriorated further. He underwent multiple 12-hour operations. A defibrillator was installed in his chest. Then came mechanical pumps for both ventricles. “I got a belt from a police wholesale site to carry around these huge batteries,” he said. Because the heart pumps had an 18-month life span, an imminent transplant became his only option.
So he and his family played a risky card. “You are allowed to choose a 30-day period where you can be listed as ‘1A,’” he said, referring to the highest priority designation for transplant. During that month, Segal needed to be matched with a donor with blood type O who weighed at least 180 pounds. It didn’t help that he lived in New York, which ranked 49th of the 50 states in the percentage of people registered as organ donors.
On Monday, Feb. 9, 2009, the 29th day of his 1A status, he and his wife were driving on the Hutchinson River Parkway to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital to seek end-of life-counseling — “We had pretty much given up hope,” he said — when the phone rang. “They said: Go home, pack your bags. A heart has been found.” A 26-year-old intravenous drug user from Boston had overdosed. The next day his heart was pumping in Segal’s body.There have been great strides recently in determining the origins of stars in the Universe. Combined data from the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes has revealed the furthest known galaxy to date and was believed to have formed about 13.2 billion years ago when the Universe was still quite young. The research was led by Nicola Laporte from Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain and has been accepted for publication by Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters.
The galaxy, dubbed Abell2744 Y1, was spotted by scientists working on NASA’s Frontier Fields program. This program combines the data from Hubble and Spitzer to peer back to the earliest galaxies in the Universe. Frontier Fields is currently examining six galaxy clusters, chosen for a variety of factors including luminosity and lensing ability. Gravitational lensing occurs when distant light is magnified by galaxies and galaxy clusters. Though it is highly distorted, the astronomers can correct the signal and produce a good image. Once Hubble detects the faint visible light a candidate galaxy, Spitzer is used to verify the findings by analyzing the infrared light.
Abbell2744, which was seen when the Universe was a mere 650 million years old, is about thirty times smaller than the Milky Way though it likely had 10 times more stars. This is believed to be typical of the earliest galaxies, as the earliest stars lived fast and died young.
The galaxy’s distance is denoted by its redshift, which occurs when the wavelengths from the radiation are stretched due to the accelerating expansion of the Universe. As the source of light gets further away from the observer, the radiation appears to have a longer wavelength and appears more “red” on the electromagnetic spectrum. Thus, redshift is used to describe distance. Abell 2744 has a redshift of 8, which is the largest ever recorded. Though there are other candidate galaxies with a redshift of 11, they have not yet been confirmed. Prior to this discovery, the most distant known galaxy had a redshift of 7.51.
The Frontier Fields program is pushing the Hubble to look further into the past than it has ever done before, in hopes of learning more about the early Universe and to discover if the galaxies discovered by Hubble's Ultra Deep Field (which existed 400,000-800,000 years after the Big Bang) are standard for that time around the Universe. The announcement of Abell2744 is the first from this program. It is hoped that many discoveries of this nature will follow as the program progresses.
Any persistent ambiguity about the earliest galaxies may be resolved after the James Webb Space Telescope is launched in 2018. Its primary mirror will have about seven times more area than the Hubble’s primary mirror and will also collect infrared data. The telescope will orbit at a distance of 1.5 million km (930,000 miles) away from Earth, far beyond the moon, in order to cancel out interference.[TRANS] http://bit.ly/T2dQe6 SEOHYUN NOVEMBER CECI INTERVIEW
Q. I heard you'll be making a comeback in Korea soon.
SEOHYUN: After going to Indonesia next week for SMTOWN LIVE WORLD TOUR 3 in Jakarta, we are planning on going between Japanese 'Oh' promotions and preparing for a Korean album. This album is really different from our usual ones. It's like, challenging a person's limits. I'm looking forward to what the fans will think, and because it's still a secret amongst us (the members), I just feel nervous.
Q. I was curious about what busy Girls' Generation does when they're not active in Korea. Whew, you're busy as usual.
SEOHYUN: Recently, rather than official Girls' Generation [group] activities, there were a lot more individual ones. There were rarely any days where there was an entire day of no schedules. Because we have recording or dance practices here and there. Instead, if I have enough free time for about a quarter of the day, I exercise for 2~3 hours to stay in shape.
Q. Do you exercise to stay in shape, rather than trying to watch your figure?
SEOHYUN: It's said that, as you get older, the body of a person who does and doesn't exercise is very different. So you have to start now. Also, when you sweat, you get in a better mood, and it's a way for your body to react reliably, so you feel good about it.
Q. While watching MBC 'We Got Married', I thought that you were the type who looks forward/into the future. But, time is something that shorts out the more you conserve it.
SEOHYUN: Rather than there not being enough time, I think, 'It's really gone by quickly', more often. It's already been 5 years since we've debuted. I'm currently an MC on MBC 'Music Core', and, all of a sudden, there have become more junior singers who come to greet us in the waiting room. That is so unfamiliar. When I hear that they're 96ers, it made me think, 'Were people being born then, too?'. But, when I looked into it, my seniors who asked me for my age told me this. When you calculate it, the year I debuted was when I was 17. (laughs) It's times like this that makes me jump in front of time.
Q. Let's try filling in the blank: he time passing like this is '[I] honestly [feel] a little scary, a bit sad, don't feel anything, a bit excited, or whatever you want to write in'.
SEOHYUN: Number 4. As time goes on, I think a lot more fun opportunities are opening up. I don't have any regrets either. Because, even if I were to have made a wrong decision, I have gained or learned something from it.
Q. In a 2009 CeCi interview, Girls' Generation's Yoona also said she was surprised at all the juniors she's gained. Even though the time's passed, that unfamiliarity seems like it hasn't changed. Then, to you, what's something that doesn't change, unlike the passing time?
SEOHYUN: When comparing it from when I first debuted, the values and my personality, which I thought would never change, have changed a lot. My friends and (Girls' Generation) members have told me that I have become more brighter and enthusiastic. My sense of challenging things has gotten stronger, too. It's not 'I need live following the right path', but that I need to realize if this is the right path [for me], and I want to experience more different things. Of course, it's nothing wild. (laughs) And so the thing that doesn't change is that path, and the things that do are the experiences. Starting social life after being treated cutely as the youngest must have made me react by making me feel sure about things I should and shouldn't do. Like a test with only O/X answers. I now believe that I must greet life with a more open heart for a truly great life.
Q. Was there something that brought this enlightenment?
SEOHYUN: When I debuted, while my job was a singer, I was still a student. The feeling of having to be devoted as a student was large. When I turned 20, I started to feel the weight of having to do things on my own. (interviewer: For instance?) Time utilization. As a student, during math, you learn math, and follow your schedule repetitively, but now it's something that depends on my usage. If I sleep, it's time for sleep, and if I don't think about it, it just disappears. Instead, if I read a book, I have what I read left. (interviewer: You've gained a sense of responsibility for time.) Yes. At first, I used up my strength severely just trying to handle my schedule at first, so I couldn't use my time, aside from schedules, well. So, in turn, I would just flow along with how things were going, and I did not exist within that. Later on, I thought, 'What have I done aside from Girls' Generation's activities, is my body going to fall into the hands [of this work]?' And so I set detailed life goals, and felt that I should try to expand indirect experiences and knowledge through books. Because each and every one of these days will come together to make my life.
Q. Was there any big happening that made you think, 'I finally took on the challenge because my personality changed!'?
SEOHYUN: Though I'm a celebrity, I was embarrassed of showing my usual self to many people, but I've broken away from that a lot. I've learned that going to Lotte World or Kyungbook Palace with my friends is really fun. It's to the point where I ask foreign fans to take pictures for us. I also enjoy going to exhibitions and museums. It's something to be thankful for when people recognize me, and, when they don't, even that is funny. I'm going to wear school uniforms with my middle school friends to visit my school.
Q. Your life has become colorful. Is there anything you want to change? Should we try looking for those traits from your other members?
SEOHYUN: First of all, Hyoyeon unnie is optimistic about everything, and creates good atmospheres. Sooyoung unnie and Tiffany unnie's social skills are good, so they have a wide number of acquaintances. They are able to make people feel comfortable. Taeyeon unnie's natural singing skills. Also, I think it's a really great thing that she's a person that can be of support to others. Yoona unnie appears coy, but is natural and her unexpected side shines. Something that the unnies jokingly say is, “If someone as pretty as you also had a prim personality, it would have been no fun.” People say that Jessica unnie looks cold, but she's the type that acts indifferent upfront, but takes care of you unknowingly from behind. Sunny unnie always passes on a bright energy. And she's also mature. There's a large age difference between her and her older sisters, and, although she's the youngest, it's surprising how deep her thoughts are. It's to the point where we tease her, saying she's a 79er, not an 89er. I'm jealous of all of these traits of my unnies.
Q. Today's theme was 'An Interview With the Vampire'. To them, time is forever. If you look at it one way, that can be a scary thing. I'll give you 3 three tickets to stop time. It's a very expensive thing that you can use whenever you want.
SEOHYUN: I want to stop for a moment at the time of my debut. I want to feel what I did the very first time again, not just from what my mind remembers. So I can reflect on myself and give myself advice. I want to save the remaining two for my future.
Q. Lastly, time for TVXQ and Seohyun's interview! said they're curious as to what ideal type would make your heart flutter. They also gave me a tip that, because you're probably not going to answer in detail, to ask things in a calm, orderly fashion to dig deep. (Note: Seohyun's question to TVXQ was 'when do you really feel/realize you've been a singer for 10 years?' and, 'Curious as a fan! What do you do on days when you don't have schedules?')
SEOHYUN: Haha, then I'll give a long answer. First, I would like for them to be very considerate and optimistic, and enthusiastic. A person who's got manners and humorous, and one who makes the other person comfortable. Even if it's not great right now, it's important for them to have firm beliefs and works hard toward their dream. Physically, there isn't much I look for other than them being taller than me. Oh! Kind, clear eyes. I felt that it's true when people say eyes are the windows to a person's heart. I think you are able to see the time the person's lived based off their general impression. So I would like if they always had a smiling face. I don't think there would be a better match if it's a person I can learn from whenever we talk.
Q. Let's look for 3 of your own charms that can appeal to this loyal man.
SEOHYUN: My first pledge is a positive energy! I'm confident that it will be fun if we're together. Secondly, I will take care of myself well! My ironclad rule is, 'Manage/take care of [yourself] until you die'. I won't ever be disheveled, so I will be able to make their hearts beat and flutter forever. Lastly, my future isn't unsteady! I'm not the type to lean on a man, so I will be okay financially. I won't be tiresome either. I promise. (laughs)
Reply · Report PostUpdate, Aug. 16: A fundraiser to help the family of Terrence McCrary Jr. has
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him to return to the ring, PWInsider.com has learned.
Balor won the WWE Universal championship at Summerslam but suffered a labrum tear against Seth Rollins when he was powerbombed into the barricade. He relinquished the championship the next night and underwent surgery.
Dr. Jeffrey Dugas told WWE.com at the time that, "Finn’s injury was pretty severe, more severe than normal. A really high energy injury, it did more damage than a standard shoulder dislocation where you simply tear the labrum. The prognosis is excellent, however. We were able to fix it all and put it back where it came from. I’m anticipating him getting back at full speed."
At the time of the injury, the belief was Balor would be out 4-6 months.
With the Royal Rumble about to kick off the official build to Wrestlemania, obviously WWE wants Balor back in the mix. We will see how soon that happens.
If you enjoy PWInsider.com you can check out the AD-FREE PWInsider Elite section, which features exclusive audio updates, news, our critically acclaimed podcasts, interviews and more, right now for THREE DAYS free by clicking here!How To Learn Esperanto? September 29, 2007
Welcome.
Here I describe the way I used to learn Esperanto. If you, for example, just got interested in Esperanto, or you have wanted to learn it for a long time, you can just follow this process and this should give you great results. Here is what I did and what you can do too:
Go to ikurso.net and download Kurso de Esperanto. When you download it, the course is available in a bunch of languages and there is a good chance your native language will be included. The course teaches you Esperanto from absolute scratch and it uses music, stories and audio to enhance the learning experience. It has just 12 basic lessons which teach you the very basics of Esperanto. When you get the course, you should make a commitment to follow along for those 12 days and not once do more or less than one lesson a day. Sometimes it might get tough, you might get a bit depressed, but it really works and you’ll be able to use and understand basic Esperanto. Worked for me. Get the book 13 Oktobro 1582 in Esperanto, print it and read it. This book is free and you can download it just by clicking the link. The book has only about 37 pages and it’s written in beginner Esperanto by Luiz Portella. It consists of several easy-to-follow and interesting stories. If you don’t have a printer, you can read the book on the computer screen but that is not as comfortable. When reading the book, you might still find it a bit difficult in the beginning but still read it and just use the dictionary. Soon you’ll begin understanding. Me, personally, I have skipped this step since I did not know about the book and moved to step 3 but you can profit from it. This is another important step. Go to chats and talk in Esperanto. Get an IRC client. If you don’t have one, just go download mIRC and then connect to irc.freenode.net and join the room called Esperanto or sometimes the room called Komencantoj (that means beginners in Esperanto). Another few options are to use the Gxangalo Esperanto chatroom or the chat-room in Babilejo.org. At first, you may not be able to understand much but just follow along and try to speak. Soon you’ll get a lot. In fact, I did this step simultaneously with the first few steps and it worked like a charm. Later, though, IRC can become a little bit time-consuming so you may not want to spend too much time there especially when the room is not active. Go to lernu.net and register. You can then use lernu! to find new friends who speak Esperanto (you might do this in the beginning of your learning too), read books like Gerda Malaperis and use the lernu! word-lists to learn almost all the words needed for fluent Esperanto speaking. The last two are exactly what you should be doing. The book is interesting and even though the word-lists are a bit boring by themselves, you you should still go through them until you can get familiar with most words. I have done this after having had a bit of practice when my Esperanto was good enough (after about a month of learning). If you do the same, you should be at least an (Upper)-Intermediate speaker by the time you finish all this.
I did just that. I was quite eager to learn Esperanto back then, also, people differ, so I can’t promise the same results to you in the same time-frame. I’m just saying that this worked for me and so this works. It took me a month to learn the basic Esperanto so that I could understand basic talks, etc. and it took me another month to become more proficient. So, after 2-3 months I was able to talk in Esperanto without many problems. I even went to The International Congress in Esperanto and I was very surprised because I could attend seminars and understand virtually everything (and it was Esperanto actually spoken and not written!). That was only a year after I had started learning Esperanto and I hadn’t even learnt much more than for just those 2-3 firsts months.
Another thing I wanted to note, is that especially through the first step, i.e. when taking La Kurso de Esperanto, I used a lot of learning by rote and quite a few cheat-sheets. I would print Esperanto words on paper and go out with these little sheets. I would think about words and look at those sheets when I couldn’t remember some word. That was a bit unusual for me but I wanted to make sure I was really learning the basic words. And as I later saw, it worked really well.
However, even though I did all that, I was often discouraged. For example, even now I remember taking the 8th lesson of Esperanto in that course (they had gotten quite difficult by then) and getting furious about how hard Esperanto was. I thought I couldn’t really say or understand more than “Mi estas komencanto.” (“I am a beginner.”). Hell, I even remember googling for “Esperanto estas malfacila” or its English equivalent for “Esperanto is difficult” and searching for people who thought the same. From time to time, I kept feeling I was not learning much or that my Esperanto was still very bad. However, as I later found out, that is pretty normal. If you are following through, you will eventually learn Esperanto. I guess my main point here is – do not get discouraged!
Finally, is it worth it? Well, for me, it was. I have met quite a few really cool people who speak Esperanto and learned cool things from them. Things, that made a difference. Also, now I have the chance to use Esperanto to travel the world (there is a hospitality service organization “Pasporto de Servo” which you have probably heard of already). I can go to congresses to meet new people. I can just chat in Esperanto. I can participate in the meetings. I can also use Esperanto as a secret language to make notes for myself, etc. and others can’t read it (that only sounds a bit lame). Esperanto made me understand at least the basics of quite a bunch of other languages too. Most of all, I feel like I have contributed to this great idea of a world-language. Well, if it doesn’t become the world-language, I’ll at least be able to say “Well, I did my part”.
So, to conclude everything, learning Esperanto, just as any other thing that is worth doing, takes some time and persistence. It’s really easy, however, and does not take nearly as much practice as the other natural languages. In the end, if you don’t give in, you’ll learn it no matter what. If you are reading this, you do speak English, which is a lot more difficult, so Esperanto will be easy for you. I have used the process described above to learn Esperanto and so can you. Just go for it!
November 5, 2009 Update: I have made a very short introductory course of Esperanto on my site about languages. You might be interested.
AdvertisementsOlympia area has lots more than the capitol — from mystery mounds to a top-notch wildlife refuge.
OLYMPIA — When my husband and I bought tickets to an upcoming event in the Olympia area, we decided to make a weekend of it and explore an area where we hadn’t spent much time. As nature lovers, we always like to work in some outdoor activities whenever we travel — which got me thinking about how little I knew about the Puget Sound’s southern end.
It’s close to Seattle, yet just far away enough that I rarely think of it as a possibility. Bellingham, yes. Tacoma, sure. But Olympia was always just a slow spot in traffic as I was headed to points farther south.
When I started looking into South Sound recreation, my research yielded more options than I’d imagined.
On foot
If you go More information • Most recreation areas require a pass or a day-use fee. Bring a Discover Pass for state lands, including the Capitol State Forest and all state parks. • Bring a printed map to explore Capitol State Forest or Millersylvania State Park. Their interlocking trails can be confusing. • Olympia regional trail brochure: bit.ly/1PhetNU
Unlike the steep stair-climber slopes in the mountains around Seattle, the area around Olympia tends to feature rolling terrain and smaller hills. Plentiful parks make finding a hike easy, and the hikes’ accessibility makes them friendly to families and those with limited time or physical capabilities.
Take Mima Mounds Natural Area Preserve, a 635-acre park just south of Olympia, for example. The derivation of its namesake earthen humps is still uncertain despite much study and speculation; theories range from pocket gophers to windblown sediments to extraterrestrials. Trails give visitors various ways to explore these strange lumps in the Earth’s surface. A.5-mile paved trail is ADA-accessible, and easy loop hikes meander among the mounds, which are at their best when wildflowers bloom in April and May (dnr.wa.gov/MimaMounds).
Right next to Mima Mounds, the multiuse trails at Capitol State Forest are often populated with mountain bikers, horseback riders and ATV users in summer (capitolforest.com). But during the rainy season, hikers have the forest mostly to themselves. A 6.5-mile loop whose trailhead is practically across the street from Mima Mounds leads to pretty Mima Falls and connects to a collection of longer and sometimes steeper trails through the forest.
Combine hiking and paddling at Millersylvania State Park, a sprawling camping and recreation spot surrounding Deep Lake (parks.state.wa.us/546/Millersylvania). Interlocking loop trails go past wetlands, through meadows and into forests. Bring a map: When I was there, vandals had removed some of the signs at trail intersections, so getting lost was easier than it should have been. On my recent hike through the moss-draped old growth, I heard the hoots of a great horned owl above me and the low croaks of frogs below.
The park rents kayaks and stand-up paddleboards during the summer. Camping is also a possibility year-round: I saw a tent indicating at least one hardy camper was taking that option even as a rainstorm enveloped the park.
You don’t even have to leave the city to get a dose of nature. Some sections of trail in Olympia’s Priest Point Park, bordering Budd Inlet on the city’s northern edge, are surprisingly steep — and pretty (bit.ly/259Dk1W). Tumwater Falls Park is an oasis at what used to be the very southern tip of Puget Sound (until it became Capitol Lake), where short trails lead to nice views of the Deschutes River, the falls and the surrounding landscape (olytumfoundation.org/tumwater-falls-park).
By boat
The South Sound’s waters, shallower and often less turbulent — and less full of giant ships — than other parts of the Sound, are ideal for kayaking. During my recent visit, I stayed at the Inn at Mallard Cove, a meticulously kept bed-and-breakfast situated on the water (theinnatmallardcove.com). It’s very close to the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, which most people explore via a series of trails and boardwalks that also make a good hiking option (admission is $3 for up to four adults; Interstate 5 Exit 14; fws.gov/refuge/Billy_Frank_Jr_Nisqually). But for a look from a different angle, the inn’s owners, Linda and Don Malatesta, often guide their guests through the refuge on kayak tours.
After a short shore-hugging paddle through the South Sound’s protected waters, kayakers head right up into the refuge to see the Nisqually estuary from sea level. If they time it right, a rising tide will do some of the work for them. They paddle all year, except in bad weather (“Better a delay than a disaster,” Don, an unflappable former pilot, likes to say). Sometimes, they pass baby seals sunning themselves on the shore. Other trips are all about the birds; about 200 species have been spotted here.
If you have your own kayak or other watercraft, it’s easy to put in at the Nisqually Reach Nature Center, just to the northwest of the wildlife refuge (4949 D’Milluhr Dr. N.E., Olympia; nisquallyestuary.org). Although the nature center is open only Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, the put-in is on state property and open year-round to anyone with a Discover Pass. If you’re there when the nature center is open, take some time to read the displays and chat with volunteers about the Nisqually River, its estuary, and efforts to preserve and restore areas around them.
Another kayaking option is to rent a boat. Boston Harbor Marina, a short jaunt directly north of Olympia, sits among sheltered inlets and islands perfect for exploration (312 73rd Ave. N.E., Olympia; bostonharbormarina.com). Open year-round, the marina rents out watercraft including kayaks, stand-up paddleboards, canoes and rowboats. The marina’s post-paddle snacks include homemade clam chowder in winter and ice cream in summer.Greater Northeast Philadelphia Beer Festival
The 9th Annual Northeast Philly Beer Festival is Here!
Date: May 4th, 2019 | Time: 1:00PM – 5:00PM (12:00PM – 5:00PM for VIP)
Location: Cannstatter’s, 9130 Academy Road, Philadelphia, PA 19114
Come join us for a fun-filled Spring afternoon of craft beer tasting at the 9th Annual Northeast Philly Beer Festival on Saturday, May 4th. The festival will be held outdoors under tents at Canstatter’s – rain or shine! We will have endless varieties and flavors of the best craft brews on tap from the Northeast, including breweries from New Jersey, New York, Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Ales, lagers, porters, stouts, ciders, and so many more will be there for the tasting!
There will also be a wide variety of German and American food to buy throughout the day.
The afternoon will be broke into two different sessions:
VIP Session – ($45) Time – 12:00PM – 5:00PM
If you love beer, then you’ll love this option. Show the rest of Philly your inner beer enthusiast by starting your brew tasting an hour before everyone else with our VIP ticket. With this access, you will be able to taste some of the most rare and most highly desired beers that won’t be poured in our general session.
Your admission includes: (1) souvenir tasting glass.
Limited number of tickets available.
General Session – ($25 until Feb 4th |$30 until March 4th |$35 until April 4th | $40 until May 4th | $45 at the door) Time – 1:00PM – 5:00PM
Make sure to get your session ticket in advance to get our discounted price! Don’t miss out on being able to sample an incredible list of beers from any of the breweries present at the festival.
Your admission includes: (1) souvenir tasting glass.WWE Diva Charlotte Flair Nude Photos Leaked
WWE Diva Charlotte Flair has just had her nude photos leaked online.
As you can see in the nude photos below, it would have been far more aesthetically pleasing on the eye if Charlotte’s father wrestling legend Ric Flair had had his naked pictures released to the Web, for Charlotte has ridiculously lopsided titties and a nasty banged out looking cock cave.
Yes Charlotte Flair has clearly been involved in too many tag team, royal rumble, and survivor series matches inside the bedroom, for her dilapidated body is certainly looking worse for wear. Perhaps it is time for Charlotte to consider hanging up her labia and retiring to a Muslim’s poppy farm. For even though the physical aspects of farm life on a Muslim’s plantation is far more intense than working for the WWE, the only attention that will be paid to her battered breasts and piss flaps will be when we attach harnesses to them while hooking Charlotte up to a plow.If there’s a thing I could change about competitive gaming, particularly games that combine elements of strategy and chance (Imperial Assault, for example), it would be to imbue it with a culture of humility regarding losses.
We are not very good at recognizing that we can't control every aspect of the game. I can’t control what lists I play against. I can’t control what command cards I draw. I can’t control what I roll for dice results or what my opponent rolls. These are all elements that I can't directly influence. Sometimes these elements will help you and other times they will harm you. In either case, it is important to recognize that this will alter success in a competitive game.
However, we all know there's more to the game than that. The reason these games are compelling is because even though I subject myself to some random elements, there are many elements in my control, such as my list, my command cards, and my choices during the game. Primarily, this is what I’m most interested in and where I believe humility is the most important. I think we’d all like to believe that we are infallible, or at least have the potential to be infallible when playing a competitive game. When we lose, we face the fact that maybe our list wasn’t as efficient or our decisions weren’t as strategic as we thought. It’s an unpleasant truth, but one that I believe we should revel, instead of lament.
For myself, it is important to recognize that sometimes I will not have the cognitive tools to beat my opponent. Sometimes I will bring a list that isn’t very good. I will play command cards at the wrong times. I will make mistakes out of inexperience. While these moments may hurt my pride, these moments are also why I find the game interesting. For Imperial Assault to thrive, the optimal choices can’t be obvious. It can’t and shouldn’t be apparent what the best choice will be. If it were, everyone would make the optimal choice, the game would be formulaic, and many of us wouldn’t be playing it at all.
This is where my desire for humility has its roots - losing is not only part of competitive gaming, it's the best part. Losing gives us the gift of getting to learn. We get to reassess, study our mistakes, and consider what we can do to improve. Losing let's us know that there's progress to be made. The next game is a chance to test our new ideas. However, to enjoy that aspect, we need to get past our lost pride from losing and therefore have humility about our play.
Hence, I’d like to spend the rest of this post discussing the two losses I experienced at the Regional Championship. I debated discussing every game, but ultimately decided that there just wasn’t a lot to say about my wins. However, I made some mistakes during my losses that I believe have some value to that would like to win games in the future, including myself. Enjoy.
Loss 1
Prior to this tournament, I spent a significant amount of time conversing with one of our local players about the list I planned on bringing. Perhaps to his annoyance, he listened to me mull the pros and cons over a multi-week period. There probably wasn’t a strategy or command card that I hadn’t run by him over that time. He watched the list evolve and helped me establish what it would ultimately become. So, I suppose it was serendipitous that he and I would be matched up in the first round of the tournament. In addition to my lack of experience, I knew I was at a disadvantage as he literally knew everything about my list. Yet, I was still excited to show him that I had learned a lot from his advice.
I hadn't. I hadn't learned very much at all it turned out.
This game was played on Anchorhead Cantina (known as Anchorhead Bar in the glory days) (there's an image of the map below) and the mission was Line of Fire (bring the blue crates to the extraction point). I started in the red deployment zone and my opponent in the blue. My opponent was running Devious Scheme, so I started with initiative. Note how far my deployment zone is from the crates, as this is something I should have noticed myself when I deployed. My opponent played the following list (I left out Temporary Alliance so I could have an even amount of cards):Posted December 23, 2013 by beylix in Uncategorized. 31 Comments
I took a small vacation from work to research relocation possibilities. While I was home I also spent time on completing the announced configuration dialog update and for updating the Sound Menu. KMix is more responsive, playback changes being reflected by KMix. Thanks to the communication infrastructure established done during the Multimedia Sprint 2012 in Randa it was easy to keep KMix consistent. Additionally I refactored the code for future additions like showing album picture.
Media Player playback status is reflected by Sound Menu. Shows or.
or. Configuration dialog overhaul; Options are grouped in tabs and the apply button is responsive.
Configuration of the Sound Menu has been integrated in the configuration dialog as separate tab
Volume Overdrive up to 150% now officially supported for PulseAudio due to popular request.
Less CPU usage and latency for MPRIS2.
Sound Menu position optimized for all 4 panel positions (Bottom, Left, Top, Right)
The end of year 2013 is nearing. We will all see an exciting Year 2014 with Plasma 2 waiting in the wings.
See you all there,
Christian
Technical stuff
If you are interested in the source code changes, http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kmix.git&a=commit&h=0f7a603e1d327f76dbd6a62d08315b1956794d42 is the biggest commit, and it also contains references to features and bugs. For the technical interested: It is based on KConfigDialog and KConfigSkeleton [1], which is a very cool technology I discovered recently. If you do not know KConfigDialog and KConfigSkeleton, here is a short overview:
KConfigSkeleton + KConfigDialog
KConfigSkeleton links configuration entries from a property file with variables (e.g. a QString)
There are methods to copy from property file to configuration variables and vice versa
KConfigDialog can use a KConfigSkeleton, to prefill e.g. a related QCheckBox
KDE Techbase recommends KConfigXT. But KMix is a fine example without.
AdvertisementsChristus – Heri, Hodie, Semper
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever
Hebrews 13:8
I begin the topic of Jesus and the Inclusivity Gospel with this quote, which was the theme for the Jubilee Year 2000, instituted by Blessed Pope John Paul II. Why? Because somewhere along the way our idea of Jesus has morphed and changed, and this mentality has infiltrated the church on a global scale. No, not the big C Church, but the church – the body of believers. The Gospel for today’s Sunday Mass read:
“Jesus proposed another parable to the crowds, saying: “The kingdom of heaven may be likened to a man who sowed good seed in his field. While everyone was asleep his enemy came
and sowed weeds all through the wheat, and then went off. When the crop grew and bore fruit, the weeds appeared as well. The slaves of the householder came to him and said,
‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where have the weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ His slaves said to him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’ He replied,
‘No, if you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until harvest; then at harvest time I will say to the harvesters,
“First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles for burning; but gather the wheat into my barn.” ~Matt 13:24-30
After reading the Gospel, the priest began his homily on how the church needs to be inclusive. He said the early church dealt with this question, and came to the realization that we needed to be more like Jesus and welcome people. He went on to say that if we were to try to draw a line between good people and bad people, one would find a line drawn through every human heart, as we all have good and evil within us. He exhorted us to not judge anyone and encouraged us ignore the faults of our brothers and sister and to change if we have this mentality.
We are missing half of the picture here are we not?
This Gospel is quite clear that there are both weeds and wheat. They are not one thing. This is something the slaveholders are able to recognize. The weeds obviously do not look like wheat. Though the Master does not urge the complete uprooting of the weeds. This is to be done at the Final Judgement where the aforementioned separation occurs. In Matt hew 25:32, Jesus refers to it as the “separation of the sheep and the goats”. In either case, at the end of time, God will separate the good from the bad.
There is a difference. How do we tell? And does Jesus want us to tell?
Yes. Again, St. Matthew gives us the answer, “You will know them by their fruits”. I once heard it said that God does not ask us to judge, but simply to be a fruit inspector. If you’ve ever shopped for produce, you know what this looks like. Some do the look test, or the smell test. Some do the squeeze test. We all do it. No one wants a hard peach, or an overly ripe tomato. Jesus is the same way.
The all inclusive Gospel, which another term for it can be “Universalism”, implies an everyone gets to go to Heaven theology. Buddy Jesus won’t say anything harsh. He will not harass or bother you. The line “Jesus is a perfect gentleman and will not go where He is not invited” is a lie. Anyone who tells you this is wrong. Jesus is not a perfect gentleman. St. John tells us in the second chapter of his Gospel:
The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers at their business. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all, with the sheep and oxen, out of the temple; and he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; you shall not make my Father’s house a house of trade.” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for thy house will consume me.” John 2:13-17
Sounds like a real easy going dude. Let’s be honest here. If the Scriptures are not clear enough – the testimony of the great Saints are. Jesus will call you out. The silent whisper of a quiet, passive deity is non-existent. Jesus knocked Saul off of his horse and removed his sight. In Genesis, God kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden for disobeying him. Saint Francis of Assisi was compelled by supernatural grace to hug a leper against his will, and it changed him forever. Jesus takes the form of Bread, and in a stroke of Divine genius, is consumed by the people He loves the most, but who many times are indifferent, and some who even hate Him (ie. Occultists who seek to desecrate the Blessed Sacrament). If Jesus was seen in His true form, we would flee in fear for His goodness is too great. So He humbles Himself. How else could He get near to satanists in the most powerful way on earth? Jesus is the biggest intruder of all! Not everyone wants to get along with Him. This is not because he doesn’t love them – He does love them, so deeply. It’s because His love demands a change in them with which they are unwilling to comply. Jesus tells us again in Matthew 10:34 that He is not bringing peace, but a sword. This sword will divide people. All inclusive? Not really.
When Jesus calls sinners to Himself, like St. Mary Magdalene, He forgives their sins but then tells them what? He doesn’t give them a Get out of Hell Free Card, but He commands them to never sin again.
This, my friends, is what the Church has understood for 2000 years.
In the early Church, those who were not Baptized were not admitted into the main body of the church, but had to gather in what is called the Narthex, what we might call today the “front foyer” of the church. Here they would spend time and receive instruction (which took 7 years) before they were baptized and admitted into the Church. This was to ensure that they believed EVERYTHING that had been handed on from the Apostles.
There is always a need for distinction of the sheep from the wolves, of which the Magisterium of the Catholic Church is the sole teacher and interpreter.
This is why the Church can formally excommunicate members of the Church, or teachings thereof that are vehemently in opposition to her and to Jesus Christ. But the Church only formally declares these types of pronouncements after she has numerous calls for repentance and conversion of the wayward person. The Church formally declares an excommunication for the sake of the Body of Christ, the Church. The excommunication declares what a person or teaching has already declared by themselves. The keys of the kingdom of heaven were given by our Blessed Lord to our first Pope, Peter, and subsequently to each of his successors following that. He was thus able to bind and loose; to forgive or retain. This is a direct extension of that right.
EXTRA ECCLESIAM NULLA SALUS
There is no salvation outside of the Church. The Church as understood and taught this for 2000 years. Pope Pius IX tells us “We must hold as of the faith, that out of the Apostolic Roman Church there is no salvation; that she is the only ark of safety, and whosoever is not in her perishes in the deluge” The Church however understands her Lord and Bridegroom, whose Divine Mercy is endless and inexhaustible. Therefore, Pope Pius IX contines “We must also, on the other hand, recognize with certainty that those who are invincible in ignorance of the true religion are not guilty for this in the eyes of the Lord. And who would presume to mark out the limits of this ignorance according to the character and diversity of peoples, countries, minds and the rest?” He also continues in his encyclical Quanto conficiamur moerore that:
It is known to us and to you that those who are in invincible ignorance of our most holy religion, but who observe carefully the natural law, and the precepts graven by God upon the hearts of all men, and who being disposed to obey God lead an honest and upright life, may, aided by the light of divine grace, attain to eternal life; for God who sees clearly, searches and knows the heart, the disposition, the thoughts and intentions of each, in His supreme mercy and goodness by no means permits that anyone suffer eternal punishment, who has not of his own free will fallen into sin.
This is in no way a Universalist idea, but a matter of recognizing the great love of God who is able (not necessarily who will-we do not know) to offer eternal life to all who comply with natural law and their conscience without hearing the Gospel. Divine Mercy always has the upper hand. To hear a super cool story about someone who was saved at the very moment of her death click here.
In any case, The Church remains quite clear…
If you reject Jesus’ Bride, you hate Jesus.
I’m getting married in 3 weeks. I’m telling you right now, if you hate my bride, you can kiss our friendship goodbye. It’s a natural consequence. It makes rational sense. If you want to love me, love the person I love the most too.
Jesus calls us to be aware, but not to judge.
We cannot condemn anyone to hell. We can however exhort each other if we get on the wrong path to help each other avoid Hell. We can recognize heresy when we see it and not be part of something which is detrimental to our faith. This does not mean beating the other person over the head with their own sinfulness. We must take care of the log in our own eye as well. This being said, we are not called to be blind and ignorant. We are not called to hate the sinner but to hate the sin. If we are called to be like Jesus, we must be willing to turn over a few tables to defend the faith (maybe not literally), cut off that which causes us to sin in our lives, and encourage those who are engaging in acts that can cause the destruction of their soul to stop. This is not a movement of judgement, but a movement of love. We must take affirmative action to build up the faithful in truth and love. We must be able to tell the difference, and be able to distinguish the wolf from the sheep – for our own sake at least, as well as for others. Team Orthodoxy’s three virtues are Caritas, Veritas, and Humilitas (Charity, Truth, Humility). The point is that Truth is always the center, but it must be surrounded by love and humility. Without those virtues, Truth would bear no fruit. Always share the truth in love. And be one of the good sheep and always inspect your fruits and vegetables.
In the Immaculata,
ChrisSt. Louis' third Courtesy Diner will be open at Laclede Station Road at Heege Road in time for Thanksgiving, if things go according to plan.
The project's architect, Elmer Wind, said this Courtesy Diner will look almost exactly like the one built about 10 years ago on Hampton Avenue, just south of Highway 40.
The first Courtesy Diner is on Kingshighway near the old Southwest High School.
Wind said the newest will have more parking than the Hampton Avenue location. The property is split by Marlborough and Affton. The building is in Marlborough.
Wind said unlike almost any other place he's seen, Courtesy Diner becomes a little community gathering place.
"There's little places like that all over the county, like Spenser's Grill in Kirkwood, that's kind of got its own little community identity," he said.
"I feel happy to have worked on the project, because everybody loves them," Wind said."
He said the diner will be open as late as the municipal laws will allow.Wood is taking over from steel and concrete as the architectural wonder material of the 21st century, with architects praising its sustainability, quality and speed of construction. (+ slideshow).
New types of engineered timber that are considerably stronger and more stable than regular wood are allowing architects to build bigger and higher, with timber skyscrapers now a real prospect.
"This is the beginning of the timber age," said UK architect Andrew Waugh, whose firm Waugh Thistleton is behind a housing development in London that will use more timber than any other project in the world.
According to Waugh, building in wood is "super fast, super accurate, and also makes the most amazingly beautiful spaces." He said: "These are buildings that feel very good to be in, very robust and very solid."
The product making this new breed of "massive timber" structures possible is cross-laminated timber – an engineered wood consisting of laminated timber sections.
Usually referred to as CLT, the material is produced by layering three, five or seven timber sections of wood at right angles, then glueing them together. It can be prefabricated in a factory to any shape or dimension, and is much lighter than its steel and concrete counterparts.
"CLT is the future of construction. Timber is the new concrete," said Alex de Rijke, director of London-based firm dRMM, which has been working with the material for 10 years. Its CLT projects include a wooden house in Hackney, a trio of residential towers in Norway, and a staircase installation that pioneered the use of hardwood CLT.
"CLT has opportunities for significant advantages over steel, concrete or masonry construction in terms of environmental credentials, speed, weight, and structure as finish," said de Rijke.
"The 17th century was the age of stone," he said. "The 18th century was the peak of brick. The 19th century was the era of iron. The 20th century was the century of concrete. The 21st century will be the time for timber."
Several new buildings demonstrate the material's potential, including a Chicago pavilion with an expansive self-supporting roof and the high-rise apartment building that won this year's prestigious Finlandia Prize for Architecture. There are also timber skyscrapers planned for Sweden, Canada and Austria.
"Mass timber buildings are changing the scale of what is possible to be built in wood around the world," said Canadian architect Michael Green, who urged architects and engineers to swap steel and concrete for timber in his 2012 publication The Case For Tall Wood.
Green said that, while there has been
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the Brent Council, which manages a 1 billion pound budget and covers the 7th largest borough in the UK, a position he reached through entry into local civil service soon after graduation. David Parsons heads the Leicestershire Council which spends 400 million pounds annually Andrew Elliott entered business as a corporate executive and consultant both for McKinsey and his own consulting firm, with no sign of ever pursuing politics after graduation. No sign of David Tregiles appeared in a Google Search. Peter Batey went to work at an investment bank for 3 years and then acted as political private secretary to Prime Minister Heath for 4 years, before entering into business in China; he runs a small investment bank there. Lesley Riddoch went immediately into journalism, with 10 years with her own BBC radio shows, in addition to magazines and some TV shows. I did not clearly identify Alan Hughes. John Grogan held positions with city councils, running a private conference business, and working for the Labor party while repeatedly running for elected office until he succeeded in 1997, 15 years after his OUSU tenure, when he was elected a Member of Parliament from 1997-2010 for Labor. I was unable to clearly identify Pat Wall, although he may have become a McKinsey consultant, logistics executive, and entrepreneur. I was unable to track down James Dickinson. [Matthew Taylor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Taylor,_Baron_Taylor_of_Goss_Moor
86), after graduating in PPE, went to work for an MP. That MP died, with Taylor taking his seat in 1987, two years after his OUSU tenure, and remaining an MP until 2010, when he moved to the House of Lords.
For the Oxford Union, I started with the same year as for the OUSU, and worked my way down the list until I had an equal number of names, excluding non-British citizens (the Pakistan PM Benazir Bhutto, the South African Simon Walker who advised the PM for 2 years, and Robert Scoble, a successful Australian diplomat until his career was derailed by pedophilia). I was unable to find out what happened to 2, 3 seemed to have become successful lawyers or businesspeople without visible political activity, 1 became an author and political journalist, and 5 pursued politics. Of those pursuing politics, 2 were defeated and went on to hold lesser positions, 2 reached Parliament and Cabinet, and one reached the House of Lords through inheritance:
Michael Soole, a successful London lawyer. I was unable to locate Robert McDonagh. Victor van Amerongen went to work at the BBC and became a wealthy advertising entrepreneur without apparent further political entanglement. David Soskin went to Harvard Business school and seems to have successfully focused on business and entrepreneurship The fate of Andrew Bell eluded me. Colin Moynihan was a famous coxswain (winning an Olympic Gold), in 1981 went to work for an MP, was elected himself in 1983, and served until 1992, including as Minister of Sport. Richard Norton, heir to a baronial title, worked for the Conservative research wing, as an advisor on trade and energy, and as a local councillor, in addition serving for a time in the House of Lords. Victoria Schofield has been an author, primarily writing about South Asia including her friend Benazir Bhutto. Damien Green spent 15 years mostly working in news, but also in the Conservative party, losing in his first run for office, but being elected in 1997 and remaining in office to the present day, as well as becoming Minister of Immigration in 2010. Nicholas O’Shaugnessy became a professor of communications, and ran for Parliament but was defeated. Daniel Moylan ran for Parliament after working in the civil service and starting investment banking, but was defeated and went on to pursue financial and consulting/training business as well as serving on a council.
If we assume that half of the untraceable individuals attempted to pursue public office but failed, and that most of those without visible electoral efforts were focused on their business, academic, or media interests, we see a sizable fraction of those at this high level of ability and connections are able to reach office if they choose, perhaps 1 in 3. The expectation for another Oxford student with a strong political focus, but less demonstrated political savvy would be less, but as the earlier sections suggested, not vanishingly so.
From MP to PM
Since reaching Cabinet or 10 Downing Street is even more competitive than election as an MP (the contenders have mostly met the latter challenge already), we would expect the same predictors of success run even stronger. For instance, Oxbridge graduates make up 20% of Labor MPs and 38% of Conservative MPs, but made up 32% of Gordon Brown’s last Cabinet, and 69% of the recent coalition Cabinet. In other words, the Oxbridge advantage is more than one and a half times as great at this level (perhaps also reflecting in part the importance of education and intelligence in policymaking functions of Cabinet).
At the level of Prime Minister, 9 of the last 13 Prime Ministers since 1940 have been Oxford graduates, plus one from Edinburgh, Winston Churchill (military academy), John Major (correspondence course in banking), and Jim Callaghan (military background, rose via working-class unions in the Labour party). Looking back through the rest of the 20th century, there were 3 Prime Ministers who studied at Cambridge, 1 more at Oxford, 1 at Mason Science College, and 3 without university education. However, some of those without university education would likely have acquired it in the modern age, e.g. Lloyd George could ‘article’ or apprentice as a lawyer without attending law school as would be required today. At that time, completion of high school signaled similar relative status to a university education today.
The Oxford:Cambridge ratio is consistent with other data, such as the ratios of MPs from the two schools. As university education becomes ubiquitous in Parliament, it seems reasonable to project these trends forward for a few decades and predict that between one and two thirds of Prime Ministers will be derived from Oxbridge over that window, although regression toward the mean indicates that we should expect a lower Oxford share. With 21 Prime Ministers since 1901, Prime Ministerial tenure seems to be between half and a third of Commons tenure, giving a further boost to the odds of (at least for a time) reaching that office. Given a randomly selected former OU or OUSU president (who is already an MP), we might project as much as 1 in 100 chance of at some point serving as Prime Minister. For such a student still at Oxford, an “outside view” estimate could plausibly assign between 1 in 300 and 1 in 500 probability to eventual PM status.
What to make of political long-shots?
These estimates, for those with the relevant indicators, are vastly higher than the general prior for high political office, but they remain long-shots in any given case, far more so for higher offices. There is a special altruistic case for such risky prospects if they have high expected value in some currency that can buy important goods without severe diminishing returns, as the best interventions run out of room-for-more-funding and one must shift to less promising ones.
However, for higher-end political offices such as Prime Minister scales are so large that running out of “room-for-more political influence” is a real risk, particularly if one thinks that the most important causes today have only modest resources dedicated to them. To make a case for politics over alternatives one would need to explain just how political influence should be applied, and how scalable those opportunities are. But these are questions for another day.This article is over 3 years old
• Spain goalkeeper refused to comment on Real Madrid link • De Gea received special award from home town on Sunday
Manchester United’s David de Gea: we’ll see what happens with my future
David de Gea refused to comment on his Manchester United future after being presented with a special award by his home town in Spain on Sunday.
Football transfer rumours: Morgan Schneiderlin to Manchester United? Read more
The goalkeeper, 24, has been heavily linked with a move to Real Madrid this season following his impressive displays for Louis van Gaal’s side.
De Gea attended a ceremony at the historic Palace of Fuensalida in Toledo to receive the title adoptive son of Castilla-La Mancha on Sunday night but gave away no clues over where he may be playing next season.
“We’ll see what happens with my future,” De Gea said, according to Spanish newspaper AS. “I’m on vacation now and very happy for this recognition.”
De Gea’s current deal at Old Trafford expires at the end of next season but he is thought to be weighing up whether to remain in the Premier League or move back to Spain.
Van Gaal cast doubt on his goalkeeper’s future after their 1-1 draw with Arsenal earlier this month but appeared to harden his stance last week when asked whether Víctor Valdés could replace De Gea.
David De Gea (@D_DeGea) Gracias Castilla La Mancha por este reconocimiento! Thanks for this recognition! pic.twitter.com/VBkryNsDIy
“First we have to see if De Gea is leaving. Then we shall talk about the other things. I believe still that David de Gea will stay,” he said.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
Pauley Perrette, the actress best known for her role on the TV series “NCIS,” said she was attacked by a “VERY psychotic homeless man” near her Hollywood Hills home on Thursday, in an incident that she described on Twitter and in a subsequent interview.
The violent encounter occurred about 5 p.m. in the 6000 block of Cahuenga Terrace (map), and resulted in the arrest of a 45-year-old suspect, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
“I was walking across my street to a new guest house I bought to meet my architect” when she was “jumped” by the attacker, Perrette tweeted shortly before 1:30 a.m. Friday. He “grabbed me so forcefully, pinned my arm, punched me in the nose, forehead repeatedly telling me he was going to kill me,” she added.
“Then he showed me how he was going to kill me,” the tweet continued. “He kept repeating his name: ‘WILLIAM __, DON’T FORGET THAT!”
The 46-year-old actress wrote that she was “alone, terrified and trapped.”
“I prayed my heart out an (sic) then finally said, ‘William is a beautiful name,I have a little nephew named William,’” Perette wrote.
The man allegedly punched her again before telling her to “get the f— out of here,” after which she went into shock and collapsed on the sidewalk, she said.
According to Perrette’s written account of the incident, she then texted a nearby friend and drew a composite sketch of her assailant, who was “headed towards Hollywood Blvd with murder in his eyes.”
Her friend, a man named James, found the attacker and led responding police officers to him, the actress said.
David Merck, 45, was taken into custody on suspicion of felony battery, said LAPD Sgt. Bob Ward. The suspect, whose birthday was Thursday, was being held on $100,000 bail, according to Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department records.
"I've seen this guy's rap sheet; it's a long rap sheet," Ward told the Los Angeles Times, describing the man as a local transient. "He's self-medicating. Probably didn't even know who she is.... He's not going anywhere."
Perette, who portrays the forensic scientist Abby Sciuto on the CBS show "NCIS," ended her written description on a note of advocacy.
"We need full mental health care. We need housing and help for the homeless," the tweet said. "We need to support our cops. We need to not walk alone."
"I need to heal," she concluded. "I almost died tonight."
Reached by phone Friday morning, Perette said she was "OK" and "safe now."
She characterized the assault as a random act that was not connected to her status as a celebrity.
In light of her longtime support for the homeless, she said, the incident "was a really devastating irony for me."
"I'm glad to be alive," she added, "because I was very unsure that that would be my fate when it was happening."
Please enable Javascript to watch this video
Please enable Javascript to watch this videoRecordings of New Zealand yellowhammer accents enable scientists to hear how their British relatives might have sounded 150 years ago
A new study reveals that a type of native birdsong, now lost in Britain, can still be heard in New Zealand where the birds were introduced in the 19th century.
By comparing recordings of yellowhammer accents in both countries scientists were able to hear how the birds’ song might have sounded in the UK 150 years ago.
The study, published in Ecography, examined yellowhammer accents in the UK and New Zealand, where over 600 of the birds were introduced in the 1860’s and 70’s and later became pests. It found some dialects that likely existed in the UK appear to have gone extinct, yet they still exist in New Zealand – a phenomenon that also occurs in human languages.
The researchers say the decline in birdsong is likely to be linked to falling yellowhammer populations in the UK.
Bird species vanish from UK due to climate change and habitat loss Read more
The research was led by a Czech team, who encouraged volunteers to collect and submit recordings of singing yellowhammers using smartphones and cameras. Using these citizen science project recordings, the scientists compared the patterns of yellowhammer dialects in the native range of Great Britain, and in the invaded range of New Zealand.
The New Zealand birds had almost twice as many dialects as their British relatives, overturning the scientists’ expectations that the range of dialects would be greater in the mother country.
Lead author Pavel Pipek, of the Charles University in Prague, said: “It was fascinating to have this unique opportunity to study yellowhammer dialects from native and introduced populations and how they have evolved over 150 years.
“This phenomenon of lost birds’ dialect is an avian equivalent of what happens with human languages. For example, some English words, which are no longer spoken in Great Britain, are still in use in the former British colonies.”
Experts think the best explanation for their findings is that New Zealand yellowhammers have retained song structures which were originally from the UK. However, these dialects have subsequently been lost in the mother country, possibly due to the widespread decline in yellowhammers in the UK.
Why we should learn birdsong alongside French and German | Brian Briggs Read more
Dr Mark Eaton, RSPB principal conservation scientist and study co-author, said: “Yellowhammers are a delightful farmland bird with unmistakeable bright yellow heads. At one time they were a common sight, but sadly their numbers have declined so rapidly that nowadays they are difficult to find in many parts of the UK.
“It’s quite easy to identify the different [yellowhammer] dialects and it’s also been a great species to get recordings of calls on because they are quite a widespread species with a distinctive, pleasant song.
“It’s likely the decline in yellowhammers has led to some of their original dialects being lost, yet these have survived in the songs of the birds in New Zealand due to the abundant populations. This birdsong may therefore serve as a living archive of songs sung by yellowhammers in 19th century Britain.”Collection will include work by Banks's friend Ken MacLeod and will come out on his birthday in February
The final work by Iain Banks – a collection of poetry by the late author – will be released next February, his publisher has announced.
Banks died last June, two months after revealing he had terminal cancer. He would have been 60 on 16 February, and his publisher Little, Brown said it would mark the date next year by publishing a collection of poems by Banks and his friend and fellow science fiction author Ken MacLeod, who will edit it.
Banks spoke in his final interview about wishing to have a book of poetry published. He also revealed that the novel A Song of Stone was originally written as a poem, and pointed to the "bits here and there" he had already written. "Poems top and tail the story in Use of Weapons for example," he said.
"The poems are a part of the desperate urge to get things that were supposed to be long-term projects out the way. I'm going to see if I can get a book of poetry published before I kick the bucket. I've got about 50 I'm proud of.
"I've been trying to convince Ken MacLeod that he should come in with me on this as I've always loved Ken's poetry. That, and it gives me cover. It stops the book being what it really is, which is a bit of a vanity project.
"If Ken comes in it will look more respectable, but I don't think he's falling for it. We'll see if it happens; I just don't know. I think my poetry's great but then I would, wouldn't I? But whether any respectable publisher will think so, that's another matter. I'll self-publish if I have to; sometimes I have no shame."
Ken MacLeod said of the plan: "I'm delighted that Little, Brown is going to publish Iain's poems, which he wrote over many years. They show a wise and witty mind at work, rational and humane and in love with the world."
Banks's final novel, The Quarry, was published last June. "This is a novel that's perched at the dangerous edge of things, looking down. It's an urgent novel and an important one and, finally, it's all just so desperately sad," wrote Alex Preston in the Observer.Ladies and gentlemen, the truth is that mutants publicists are very real, and that they are among us. We must know who they are, and above all, what they can do! – (adapted from X-Men)
So in part one of this series I covered what music PR is and why you might need a music PR company to help your band, record label, music festival, new business start up…etc.
One of my key messages was – not everyone is going to need PR, which is a bit odd for a PR person to be saying, I know…but it’s true. Anyway, go back, read part one, get up to speed, and let’s kick off with part two on ‘How to choose a Music Publicist’.
I specialise in music PR, so this blog is mostly focused on working with bands on forthcoming releases etc or touring etc. However the basic principles can be applied to most PR situations, whether you are a small business looking to take your next step up or a huge company needing PR clout. I’ve worked in all areas and sectors from corporate business to event management and the fundamental principles never change. Adapt or die.
As always, please try to remember that there’s no guarantee a PR campaign will produce the results you are hoping they will, and the costs can sometimes be quite high, so you need to go into this experience with your eyes open. However, if executed with finesse and passion, a successful campaign will help you to raise your profile, in ways you never could on your own. Ok that’s the stern bit over, grab a coffee/cuppa tea, let’s get stuck into the dirty details and find out exactly why there’s a picture of Wolverine at the top of this blog.
How To Choose a Music PR Agency or Music Publicist
Reputation is key. Hiring a PR agency can be daunting, especially if you’ve never done it before, you don’t know exactly what to expect or you have heard horror stories. My advice, take a deep breath, apply some lateral thinking and do some research. When you take your car to a garage, you take it to somewhere you know and trust to do the job, or you rely on word of mouth and friends experiences, you don’t just blindly open the window, chuck hundreds of pounds/dollars out into the street and hope that your car will get fixed, so don’t do that with your band or with PR. And please remember in PR, Marketing, Advertising, we’re all experts at talking a good game, the real differential you are looking for is a company or freelance publicist who can talk it up and back it up with results. Don’t fall for the snake oil salesmen who don’t deliver.
This isn’t rocket science. Do your research. Ask your friends in bands. Find out who does the PR for your favourite bands (chances are these will be larger PR companies, possibly out of your pocket reach just now, however it will give you a starting point for research). Make a list of potential music PR companies who specialise in your particular area of music (or industry if you are a business).
Have a look at their client list. Then drop them a line and here’s the key…when you drop a publicist a line, include a link to your band facebook page or an area they can listen to music. You would think this is obvious but I can tell you, 50% of the email enquiries we receive at Hold Tight! PR have absolutely no links to music and give absolutely no clue to the style of music a band play. Publicists, reputable ones, will want to hear your music before they engage with you further. For example I won’t take on a band I don’t like. Just can’t do it. And on any given day of the week, our agency can get A LOT of enquiries to respond to, so to speed that process along, include your details, what you are looking for in a campaign, when your release date is, links to your music, any videos you have out, any gig info you can provide. There’s no such thing as too much information. There is however such a thing as OMG DUDE YOU CRASHED OUR SERVER BY SENDING US YOUR BAND HISTORY / BACK CATALOGUE AND ALL THE PICTURES OF YOUR BAND IN A 40GB ATTACHMENT. Don’t ever send attachments, just don’t do it – links are fine. Please stop breaking my emails 😦
So you go through all the above steps, you find an agency that loves your band and wants to work with you. YIPPEE. Now the real work begins. Don’t make the mistake of being so caught up in the process and forget that this is a business transaction that, if it goes wrong, could end up costing you a lot of money for very little return. Put your captain sensible pants on and start talking turkey.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions. A reputable PR company will have no hesitation in taking time out to answer your questions. I know personally that if a potential client asks me questions, I’m only too happy to answer them because it shows that the client has actually taken the time to think about their needs and expectations rather than have a manager or record label tell them, ‘You need PR, go and find PR, spend this much on PR etc.’
Ok, so now I’ve said all that, how exactly can you tell the nasty PR Wolves from the rather awesome and fantastic PR Wolverines? (see what I did there, I got there eventually, you have to have patience!). I’ll tell you now, it does not involve six packs or big pointy adamantium claws but rather a set of six fundamental questions you should ask if you want to have a happy and joyous and stress free PR campaign.
1. How will your campaign be measured?
Further down the line, a couple of months into your campaign, you have to be able to measure the success of the PR strategy that’s in place, so ask how the agency are going to monitor results and if they can suggest some key performance indicators (KPI’s) which they can give you. It might be as simple as social media audience increase/retention rate, website traffic activity or increasing your email list, to even working with you or your record label to monitor how sales have increased in the markets that the PR is aimed at versus territories that receive next to no PR spend. If a company can’t answer this, then really, what are you spending your money on? A publicist can never guarantee press or say I’ll get you x amount of features for x amount of money, they just can’t. So right off the bat saying ‘I’ll get you 10 features’ as a KPI is just bullshit. There’s no plainer way to say it. What a publicist can say is – by doing this amount of activity, across this type of media, we’d hope to see x% increase in your social media audience, we’d expect to see x% increase in hits to your website and we’ll be aiming to place x amount of features, based on knowledge we’ve gained from working similar campaigns. If they DO guarantee anything, then ask them if they can also tell you the lottery numbers because they clearly have powers that even Professor X may be envious of. (Yes…more X-Men references, stay alert, you never know where I’m going to drop these bad boys.)
2. Ask who will be working on your campaign.
If you work with a larger agency you might not be working with agency heads or senior publicists, but lower level junior PR’s and sometimes even interns, so make sure you scope out who your account team will be before you start. Find out who will be working your campaign, find out if they are passionate about your band. Ask what results have they achieved for bands before. Make sure you get contact details for your account team. Especially a mobile number, then promise me that 2 months into your campaign you’ll text them at a very late hour when you know they’ll be in bed and say, ‘Don’t switch on the news, and definitely don’t read the newspaper, I’ll explain everything in the morning, I need to go into hiding now.’ – this is one of the perks of being a client, giving your publicist a nervous breakdown on a regular basis. 😉 If it’s a freelance publicist you are working with, find out how many other clients they are working at the same time as your campaign, to ensure your campaign is given as much attention as possible.
3. Don’t forget to ask about contracts/schedules.
A reputable PR agency should issue you with a signed contract, outlining terms and conditions, alongside a schedule of work etc. This doesn’t always happen, but to keep you right, it’s advisable to have one. At Hold Tight! PR we issue all of our clients with contracts, discussed with them at the inception stage which are either locked into a certain campaign term or put into rolling contracts or retainers. Having a contract gives you as a client, the ability to hold your PR company to the terms of that contract and also if they aren’t performing, then to be able to leave under breach of contract. Be sure to get a signed copy to have on file for your records. This is just good business acumen and it doesn’t matter if you are an unsigned band or signed to a major label, it pays to be responsible and professional about your band right from the outset. Contracts and statements of work just keep everything out in the open, allowing no miscommunication or misunderstanding to take place. Be safe, always wear a contract! 😉
4. Find out about reporting and communication.
This is one of your key indicators for good PR delivery. Find out, right at the start, how often you can expect to receive reporting and how often will you hear from your account manager. As a rule of thumb you should at least be receiving a monthly report of activity and results, along with any KPI’s. During a campaign at our agency, we’ll usually be in touch with a band every day when the activity is heavy, and during quieter times at least a few times a week. Monthly formal reports, weekly informal reports and clippings should be standard and should all be agreed and scheduled in the above mentioned contract of works.
5. Take a moment to ask straight up front how they plan to work your campaign.
Ask the publicist how they plan to work your campaign. Ideally you are looking for a mix of activity across a range of media, not just an agency who will send out press releases and press kits and leave you hanging in the cold with no follow up. Profile raising and exposure are only a tiny part of the strategy. An agency or publicist that’s about comprehensive, integrated PR (not just publicity) will work with you to ensure that a media and social awareness plan, coupled with kick ass and timely communications will meet the terms you outline and the KPI’s they indicated at the start of the campaign.
Good publicists should be like Wolverine (yes another X-Men reference, sorry), ferocious, tenacious and incredibly hot (ok…made that last point up…just to see if you were still awake!).
Publicists working your campaign should be pitching every day to specific media for your campaign, working one on one with sites and journalists to bring quality content which benefits the band and benefits the site/magazine and DEFINTELY NOT just throwing out the same info to everyone and hoping something sticks. If a publicist doesn’t talk about or want to discuss customisation of your campaign, then look for another publicist. Or call me, I’m not hot but I do have hair like Wolverine in the morning, so that’s kind of the same thing.
6. Are they any good? Ask for references!
Don’t be afraid to ask for references. This is your hard earned money, so ask to speak to a band or seek out a client yourself and get in touch. A reputable PR company will be more than happy to provide you with references, point you in the direction of comments/quotes from previous campaigns or people they’ve worked with or even have case studies to hand.
Ok, we’re about done with this blog, it’s been long overdue and I hope it helps you along the path to finding your dream team. Remember, when you hire a PR team to work with you, they become an extension of your band or brand, not just hired help. They have to walk alongside you, share the vision and dream of your release, tour, video…whatever. Are they excited? Does this sound like ‘just another job’ to them? Are they ferocious like Wolverine? Look for passion, look for excitement, look for a team who want to propel you into the spangly stratosphere of awesomeness. Don’t settle for being just another band at just another PR company who paid some money once for a campaign and didn’t really know what to expect, so in the end got nothing. DON’T BE THAT BAND.
If you are looking for music PR – hit me up here. If you have any questions, either fire them in a comment below and I’ll respond or email me. If I can’t take you on for PR, I will try to recommend a good PR company who will fit your needs. If you want to check my credentials then here are some of my references and here’s my LinkedIn profile (with a myriad of testimonials) so you can see I sometimes do know what I’m talking about (if what I’m talking about is cats, X-Men, Star Trek, Between the Buried and Me or chocolate, I’m fluent in all those things.)
I love chatting to everyone so don’t be afraid to get in touch. Enjoy the blog, thanks for reading, it really does mean a lot to hear from you guys, I’ve had some amazing emails and I’ll be back, probably within the next week or two with part three in this series – WHEN YOU SHOULD ENGAGE A MUSIC PR AGENCY (how to schedule it in with your release schedule or tour plan).
Take care folks,
P.S Don’t forget to check out part one of the series – Does My Band Need Music PR?
AdvertisementsIt was supposed to be an expression of solidarity. And it was — for some.
As protests over the fatal police shootings of black men raged in Charlotte and elsewhere last week, students at the University of Vermont hoisted a Black Lives Matter flag at the center of campus, right next to, and at the same height, as the state flag and the American flag. The university and the Student Government Association sanctioned the display, saying it was designed to show support for those “struggling with the violence and search for justice in this country.”
Sophomore Akilah Ho-Young could hardly contain her excitement.
“I wanted to cry when I saw this,” Ho-Young said in a Sept. 22 Facebook post that included a picture of the Black Lives Matter flag flying outside the student center, alongside the American and state flags.
“My body filled with lots of joy to know that my predominantly white university is paying tribute to the deaths in the black community,” she said. “It’s the littlest thing that just means so much to me!”
The post went viral. The popular social justice writer Shaun King shared it, along with more than 14,000 others. Comments and tweets poured in from supporters who called it a brave display.
The #BlackLivesMatter flag that was casted on UVM's campus yesterday makes me proud to be a Catamount. — Cassidy Derda (@m1ss5cass) September 23, 2016
College and universities, take note. UVM has put us on notice. It's time for to "go for broke." #BlackLivesMatter https://t.co/Ys1XwJDUwJ — Matthew Cressler (@mjcressler) September 23, 2016
Critics accused the public university of endorsing a “racist” group and taking a side in a culture war.
This is just about as un-American as it gets in my book. The uber liberal University of Vermont has a flag po… https://t.co/Rsh6Xigl1D — Democracy In Motion (@DemocracyMotion) September 25, 2016
Imagine the outrage if they had put up the Rebel Flag or a White Lives Matter flag. https://t.co/xJJMln8X4X — Deplorable Vin (@Vinnie4T) September 24, 2016
Then, over the weekend, as debate roiled on social media, the flag went missing. Student leaders say it was stolen, and the university is investigating it as a theft.
The episode underscored the extent to which a movement and a symbol have come to stand for radically different things to different people.
And it illustrates how the debate over race relations and policing in America has penetrated the land, after a summer punctuated by several high-profile officer-involved shootings of black men, the assassination of six police officers by a black gunman in Dallas, and the mass demonstrations that have followed in cities around the country.
The phrase Black Lives Matter first received national attention in summer 2014 and, since then, has become part of conversations on race in America. Here's how the phrase became a movement. (Claritza Jimenez,Julio Negron/The Washington Post)
[Black Dallas police officer sues Black Lives Matter on behalf of ‘Christians, Jews and Caucasians,’ others]
The flag controversy in Vermont played out against a backdrop of protests, some of them violent, over the fatal police shootings of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte and Terence Crutcher in Tulsa.
When news about the flag spread, some critics immediately cited the demonstrations in Charlotte — where a civilian reportedly shot and killed a protester and some demonstrators destroyed property — as evidence that Black Lives Matter promoted violence and was itself a racist movement, although no connection between that shooting and the BLM movement has been alleged.
“This is why I’m ashamed to have gone to this school. This organization has proved time and time again they are a racist hate group,” said Chris Dietze,whose Facebook page indicates he graduated from UVM in 2013. “If they really cared about police brutality they’d be mad when someone of any color gets shot and killed by police who were unarmed.”
Some students appeared to share that view.
“Not at all surprised that UVM would condone this racist organization which promotes the murder of white people and police officers,” read a comment on the UVM Instagram account from Chris Kaufman, whose profile says he is a student from the class of 2018. “If only people were as outraged at the number of blacks killing other blacks each and every day.”
[Why SPLC says White Lives Matter is a hate group but Black Lives Matter is not]
Other commenters said the university should never have stepped into the fray.
“Schools and universities should remain politically free,” David Proemsy wrote on Facebook. “Universities should nurture all political views and expression. This appears to be oppressive to students with other viewpoints.”
The flagpole at the student center has historically flown flags that represent different groups on campus and allows university organizations to sponsor similar displays, university officials told NBC 5.
Helen Driesen, a 19-year-old political science major at the university, said she was coming home from a party early Sunday morning when she noticed the bare pole in front of the student center. She said she’d seen posts on social media from people in town, but not necessarily students, calling for the flag to be taken down.
“I was angry but I’m honestly not surprised,” Driesen told The Washington Post. “People have all kinds of misconceptions about this movement. They don’t understand the gravity of it and how extremely overdue it is.”
Student Government Association President Jason Maulucci said he never expected such an intense backlash. In an interview with The Post, Maulucci said university administrators had approved the proposal to raise the Black Lives Matter flag without issue. At first, Maulucci said, the response was “overwhelmingly positive.”
But as the display gained national attention, Maulucci said he started getting hate mail and threats from strangers online.
Then, at some point late Saturday or early Sunday, someone took the flag down. A picture of the crank on the flagpole suggested someone had pried it open, lowered the flag and stolen it, Maulucci said.
"When the #BlackLivesMatter flag was stolen last night, #UVM Student Life Director and his wife painted a new one and replaced it." pic.twitter.com/lqJGrAHO98 — Chris Campbell (@ChrisCampbel_) September 25, 2016
By Sunday afternoon, however, a new flag had been hoisted in its place, sewn together by Pat Brown, the university’s director of student life, according to Maulucci.
“It was upsetting that someone stole it, but I think it underscored the necessity for raising in the first place,” Maulucci said. “We’re proud of the fact that we’re contributing to that conversation. You can’t make progress unless you acknowledge that there’s a problem.”
It was not the first, and will not be the last, conflict of its kind.
[This attorney wore a Black Lives Matter pin to court — and went to jail for it]
In July, a police officer in Detroit was demoted for a post critical of Black Lives Matter. The same month, an Ohio judge ordered an attorney jailed for five hours for wearing a Black Lives Matter pin to court. And in May, a
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established as a homeland for the Jews and guarantees “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” That is why it is heartbreaking to see the Israeli cabinet approve a contentious bill that would officially define Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, reserving “national rights” only for Jews.
The Times is unable to separate the American story from the Israeli one. It seems to regard both societies as modern democracies that are struggling toward equal rights for all.
This is not for us just a theoretical concern. The systematic denial of full rights to minorities — principally African-Americans and disproportionately in the American South — well into the 1960s caused great harm to our own country, is not fully resolved yet and is a remaining stain on American democracy…. Having experienced the grievous legacies created when a government diminishes the rights of its people, we know this is not the path that Israel should take.
The Times is being entirely too deferential. Israel has been taking that path for a long time. In her recent book Citizen Strangers, Shira Robinson documented Israel’s discrimination and worse against its Palestinian citizens, including its refusal to allow hundreds of thousands to come back to their homes even as it welcomed Jews into the country. “[T]he structural contradictions that are at the foundation of the state will continue to haunt the state and all of its citizens until they’re resolved,” she says. The New York Times has failed to tell its readers about that book or about Goliath, Max Blumenthal’s expose of Israel’s racist political culture. And we’re not even talking about the stain of the near-50-year-old occupation and the massacres of children in Gaza.
As for that mild criticism from the State Department? “[W]e would expect [Israel] to continue Israel’s commitment to democratic principles.” The Israeli right wing is biting back, hard, saying Bug out! Of course, Israel interferes in our politics all the time, with the complicity of the New York Times. But raise a voice in displeasure, and they let you have it. Haaretz:Abba Poemen believed that the only time you could observe a person’s true character was when that person was tempted.
From the Sayings of the Desert Fathers
+++
There is obvious wisdom in the saying about Abba Poemen: it is not our strengths that best define us, but our weaknesses. In our culture, where virtual reality – both of the entertainment world and the political world – are defined by carefully managed personalities (not to be confused with “person”), it is hard for us to deal straightforwardly with our weaknesses. There is a tendency to think of our weaknesses as something lacking – “what I am not good at” – and to define our reality by our strengths – “my talents, my gifts.”
I have long observed that a person’s strengths are rarely the things that comprise the gate to the Kingdom of God. People rarely turn to God or the Church because of the success of a “strength.” Frequently, we come to God in desperation in the midst of failure where our own frailty and mortality are best revealed.
St. Paul heard from God, “My strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9).
I suspect that I am no different than others and that I prefer for people to see my strengths and talents and to cover my weaknesses as any other shameful thing. But it is a habit that hides from us the truth of ourselves. Not that we are defined by our weaknesses – but our weaknesses reveal the true character of who we are as we stand before God.
What would it mean for me to stand before God and say I have a talent for writing? Before Christ Who is the Word and Wisdom of God – what boasting would there be in a mediocre talent? In what way would such a talent, even a great talent reveal to us anything of who God is or who we are in Him?
And yet as we come to God in our weakness and in our failure, there we frequently find the door to our heart and the beginning of true prayer. Man’s proper existence before God is a state of constant repentance (not a cosmic guilt but a constant sense of our need of God and our emptiness before Him). What is there in our strength that ever brings us to repentance?
I have always found it troubling that many in our modern culture judge St. Paul rather harshly. He is caricatured as a misogynist, as judgmental, as very harsh. In truth, we know more about him than probably anyone in Scripture apart from Christ Himself. And we know much about his weakness – and only through his own testimony.
What humility is found in his words to the Corinthians (first letter)!
And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God (2:1-5).
I try to imagine a modern day evangelist describing himself in such terms. We value success and crave to hear stories of success.
Life goes on, and despite our championing of success and strength, our weaknesses are often revealed, accompanied by shame and embarassment. For some, such revelations are the destruction of all they valued. But of course, all that is revealed is true character. For others, such revelations are like a new birth, the beginning of true knowledge and the gate of paradise.
But who would accept an invitation to shame?
Christ did.
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Like this: Like Loading... RelatedThe UN appealed on Thursday for $111 million to fund its humanitarian operations in North Korea amid food shortages in the country.
UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik) — Around 70 percent of North Korea's population or 18 million people do not have consistent access to adequate food, according to the United Nations.
"DPR Korea is both a silent and underfunded humanitarian situation. Protracted and serious needs for millions of people are persistent and require sustained funding," UN Resident Coordinator Ghulam Isaczai said in a statement published on the UN official website.
The UN Resident Coordinator called on donors to "respond quickly and generously" to help aid agencies address the problem.
"Humanitarian needs must be kept separate from political issues to be able to ensure minimum living conditions for the most vulnerable, especially women, children and the elderly," Isaczai added.
In November 2014, the World Food Program humanitarian organization said that it had enough funds to continue operations in North Korea until the end of March 2015.
North Korea is isolated from the international community over its nuclear weapon program and reported human rights violations.The Explorer
Things to Know About Python Super [2 of 3]
by Michele Simionato
August 16, 2008
Summary
The series about the dark corners of the Python builtin super continues. In this installment I discuss an ugly design wart, unbound super objects.
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When working with super, virtually everybody uses the two-argument syntax super(type, object-or-type) which returns a bound super object (bound to the second argument, an instance or a subclass of the first argument). However, super also supports a single-argument syntax super(type) - fortunately very little used - which returns an unbound super object. Here I argue that unbounds super objects are a wart of the language and should be removed or deprecated (and Guido agrees).
The secrets of unbound super objects Let me begin by clarifying a misconception about bound super objects and unbound super objects. From the names, you may think that if super(C, c).meth returns a bound method then super(C).meth returns an unbound method: however, this is a wrong expectation. Consider for instance the following example: >>> class B1(object):... def f(self):... return 1... def __repr__(self):... return '<instance of %s>' % self.__class__.__name__... >>> class C1(B1): pass... The unbound super object super(C1) does not dispatch to the method of the superclass: >>> super(C1).f Traceback (most recent call last):... AttributeError:'super' object has no attribute 'f' i.e. super(C1) is not a shortcut for the bound super object super(C1, C1) which dispatches properly: >>> super(C1, C1).f <unbound method C1.f> Things are more tricky if you consider methods defined in super (remember that super is class which defines a few methods, such as __new__, __init__, __repr__, __getattribute__ and __get__ ) or special attributes inherited from object. In our example super(C1).__repr__ does not give an error, >>> print super(C1).__repr__() # same as repr(super(C1)) <super: <class 'C1'>, NULL> but it is not dispatching to the __repr__ method in the base class B1 : instead, it is retrieving the __repr__ method defined in super, i.e. it is giving something completely different. Very tricky. You cannot use unbound super object to dispatch to the the upper methods in the hierarchy. If you want to do that, you must use the two-argument syntax super(cls, cls), at least in recent versions of Python. We said before that Python 2.2 is buggy in this respect, i.e. super(cls, cls) returns a bound method instead of an unbound method: >> print super(C1, C1).__repr__ # buggy behavior in Python 2.2 <bound method C1.__repr__ of <class '__main__.C1'>> Unbound super objects must be turned into bound objects in order to make them to dispatch properly. That can be done via the descriptor protocol. For instance, I can convert super(C1) in a super object bound to c1 in this way: >>> c1 = C1() >>> boundsuper = super(C1).__get__(c1, C1) # this is the same as super(C1, c1) Now I can access the bound method c1.f in this way: >>> print boundsuper.f <bound method C1.f of <instance of C1>>
The unbound syntax is a mess Having established that the unbound syntax does not return unbound methods one might ask what its purpose is. The answer is that super(C) is intended to be used as an attribute in other classes. Then the descriptor magic will automatically convert the unbound syntax in the bound syntax. For instance: >>> class B(object):... a = 1 >>> class C(B):... pass >>> class D(C):... sup = super(C) >>> d = D() >>> d.sup.a 1 This works since d.sup.a calls super(C).__get__(d,D).a which is turned into super(C, d).a and retrieves B.a. There is a single use case for the single argument syntax of super that I am aware of, but I think it gives more troubles than advantages. The use case is the implementation of autosuper made by Guido on his essay about new-style classes. The idea there is to use the unbound super objects as private attributes. For instance, in our example, we could define the private attribute __sup in the class C as the unbound super object super(C) : >>> C._C__sup = super(C) With this definition inside the methods the syntax self.__sup.meth can be used as an alternative to super(C, self).meth. The advantage is that you avoid to repeat the name of the class in the calling syntax, since that name is hidden in the mangling mechanism of private names. The creation of the __sup attributes can be hidden in a metaclass and made automatic. So, all this seems to work: but actually this not the case. Things may wrong in various cases, for instance for classmethods, as in this example: def test__super(): "These tests work for Python 2.2+" class B(object): def __repr__(self): return '<instance of %s>' % self.__class__.__name__ def meth(cls): print "B.meth(%s)" % cls meth = classmethod(meth) # I want this example to work in older Python class C(B): def meth(cls): print "C.meth(%s)" % cls cls.__super.meth() meth = classmethod(meth) C._C__super = super(C) class D(C): pass D._D__super = super(D) d = D() try: d.meth() except AttributeError, e: print e else: raise RuntimeError('I was expecting an AttributeError!') The test will print a message'super' object has no attribute'meth'. The issue here is that self.__sup.meth works but cls.__sup.meth does not, unless the __sup descriptor is defined at the metaclass level. So, using a __super unbound super object is not a robust solution (notice that everything would work by substituting self.__super.meth() with super(C,self).meth() instead). In Python 3.0 all this has been resolved in a much better way. If it was me, I would just remove the single argument syntax of super, making it illegal. But this would probably break someone code, so I don't think it will ever happen in Python 2.X. I did ask on the Python 3000 mailing list about removing unbound super object (the title of the thread was let's get rid of unbound super) and this was Guido's reply: Thanks for proposing this -- I've been scratching my head wondering what the use of unbound super() would be. :-) I'm fine with killing it -- perhaps someone can do a bit of research to try and find out if there are any real-life uses (apart from various auto-super clones)? --- Guido van Rossum Unfortunaly as of now unbound super objects are still around in Python 3.0, but you should consider them morally deprecated.
Bugs of unbound super objects in earlier versions of Python The unbound form of super is pretty buggy in Python 2.2 and Python 2.3. For instance, it does not play well with pydoc. Here is what happens with Python 2.3.4 (see also bug report 729103): >>> class B(object): pass... >>> class C(B):... s=super(B)... >>> help(C) Traceback (most recent call last):...... lots of stuff here... File "/usr/lib/python2.3/pydoc.py", line 1198, in docother chop = maxlen - len(line) TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for -: 'type' and 'int' In Python 2.2 you get an AttributeError instead, but still help does not work. Moreover, an incompatibility between the unbound form of super and doctest in Python 2.2 and Python 2.3 was reported by Christian Tanzer (902628). If you run the following class C(object): pass C.s = super(C) if __name__ == '__main__': import doctest, __main__; doctest.testmod(__main__) you will get a TypeError: Tester.run__test__: values in dict must be strings, functions or classes; <super: <class 'C'>, NULL> Both issues are not directly related to super : they are bugs with the inspect and doctest modules not recognizing descriptors properly. Nevertheless, as usual, they are exposed by super which acts as a magnet for subtle bugs. Of course, there may be other bugs I am not aware of; if you know of other issues, just add a comment here.
Appendix In this appendix I give some test code for people wanting to understand the current implementation of super. Starting from Python 2.3+, super defines the following attributes: >> vars(super).keys() ['__thisclass__', '__new__', '__self_class__', '__self__', '__getattribute__', '__repr__', '__doc__', '__init__', '__get__'] In particular super objects have attributes __thisclass__ (the first argument passed to super ) __self__ (the second argument passed to super or None ) and __self_class__ (the class of __self__, __self__ or None ). You may check that the following assertions hold true: def test_super(): "These tests work for Python 2.3+" class B(object): pass class C(B): pass class D(C): pass d = D() # instance-bound syntax bsup = super(C, d) assert bsup.__thisclass__ is C assert bsup.__self__ is d assert bsup.__self_class__ is D # class-bound syntax Bsup = super(C, D) assert Bsup.__thisclass__ is C assert Bsup.__self__ is D assert Bsup.__self_class__ is D # unbound syntax usup = super(C) assert usup.__thisclass__ is C assert usup.__self__ is None assert usup.__self_class__ is None The tricky point is the __self_class__ attribute, which is the class of __self__ only if __self__ is an instance of __thisclass__, otherwise __self_class__ coincides with __self__. Python 2.2 was buggy because it failed to make that distinction, so it could not distinguish bound and unbound methods correctly.
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Michele Simionato started his career as a Theoretical Physicist, working in Italy, France and the U.S. He turned to programming in 2003; since then he has been working professionally as a Python developer and now he lives in Milan, Italy. Michele is well known in the Python community for his posts in the newsgroup(s), his articles and his Open Source libraries and recipes. His interests include object oriented programming, functional programming, and in general programming metodologies that enable us to manage the complexity of modern software developement.
This weblog entry is Copyright © 2008 Michele Simionato. All rights reserved.I have been refused entry clearance to the USA to chair the presentation of the Sam Adams Award to CIA torture whistleblower John Kiriakou and to speak at the World Beyond War conference in Washington DC. Like millions of British passport holders I have frequently visited the USA before and never been refused entry clearance under the visa waiver programme.
I shall apply for a visa via the State Department as suggested but I must be on a list to be refused under the ESTA system, and in any event it is most unlikely to be completed before the conference.
It is worth noting that despite the highly critical things I have published about Putin, about civil liberties in Russia and the annexation of the Crimea, I have never been refused entry to Russia. The only two countries that have ever refused me entry clearance are Uzbekistan and the USA. What does that tell you?
I have no criminal record, no connection to drugs or terrorism, have a return ticket, hotel booking and sufficient funds. I have a passport from a visa waiver country and have visited the USA frquently before during 38 years and never overstayed. The only possible grounds for this refusal of entry clearance are things I have written against neo-liberalism, attacks on civil liberties and neo-conservative foreign policy. People at the conference in Washington will now not be able to hear me speak.
Plainly ideas can be dangerous. So much for the land of the free!‘Sexy’ war story would have Said in a lather – for all the wrong reasons.
Australian federal MP Dennis Jensen has come under fire for revelations he used his parliamentary letterhead to seek publication of a racy novel that depicts Australia miraculously winning a fictional war against an Indonesia-China coalition.
Sky Warriors, which Jensen penned in 2002 and pitched to publishers in 2007, is a literary disgrace that appears to be a cross between 50 Shades of Grey and Australia’s obsession with being invaded by hostile Asian neighbours.
With a target audience that can only be narrowed down to Orientalist-erotica reading war-enthusiasts, the story features an evil, Australia-hating General Rajiv Rono and his young, constantly braless brown-breasted mistress. He is ultimately defeated by Daniel Jarman, an Australian man who also has a vibrant sexual romance with a very young Jakarta local.
The book contains the following choice bit of titillation;
Yasmine didn’t believe in wearing bras; in fact, she really didn’t need to wear them as her breasts were still as firm as they had been in her late teens. Rono massaged her small, soft brown breasts, luxuriating in the silky complexion of her skin. He moved his hand up her inner thigh. ‘Yes,’ she moaned. ‘Do it now, please, don’t wait any longer.
The steamy text has led other writers guessing at what else readers have to look forward to — perhaps the following?
The secrets of the ocean, Jarman reflected, were harder to understand than the mind of a woman, and Jarman would know, because he’d done sex with dozens of them. In fact, he’d only finished some sex minutes before he came to the ocean to look at it. He was thinking about this sex – the no clothes, the good breasts, the sex oils – when his mobile phone rang. It was the prime minister. “These decadent Australians,” he sneered, only he sneered it in Indonesian, because that is what he spoke. “They will feel the might of my displeasure, and when they do they will be crushed.” Nervous aides noticed that when General Rajiv Rono had said the last part about crushing, he had crushed a half empty packet of chips in his hand. “Fire missiles at Canberra,” the general had told him. “All of it. Parliament House, Old Parliament House, Questacon, fire tiny missiles at Cockington Green, too. I want the capital crippled.” And that’s what he would do.
Cockington Green is an attraction in Canberra which features displays of miniature buildings.
Jensen, who is also on the Australian Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on defence and foreign affairs, defended the Mills-and-Boons-esque writing, stating: “Basically, the reason for the racy section in the first place is my Dad is a journalist and also has written a couple of novels, and he was told by publishers that you needed to have at least one racy scene in the book, so that’s why I included it.”
He also defended trying (unsuccessfully) to publish Sky Warriors under a pseudonym, saying “I didn’t want to damage foreign relations between Indonesia, China and Australia.”
There is also evidence that Jensen, who is also interested in cars and aircrafts, originally tried to self-publish the book under his real name in online car-enthusiast chatrooms.
Although the Minister is downplaying the incident as a na├пve choice made during his first term, it isn’t exactly rocket science that publishing a cringe-worthy novel about war and sex with Asian nations is not an appropriate action from a Government figure.
Then again, Dr Dennis Jensen, a trained physicist with aspirations of becoming the Minister for Science,
doesn’t believe in climate change and thinks speeding is a “road safety revenue lie”.
Dr Jensen has since been dumped by his party in a pre-selection ballot taking place over the weekend and ahead of federal elections later this year. He blames the move on the leaking of his ‘risque read’.
If his political career ends, at least he can always go back to writing.
Mish Khan is Associate Editor at New Mandala and a third-year Asian studies/law student at the Australian National University.Posted by SWAT
I began inquiring around the pro community to get some of their thoughts regarding the recent McCree nerf. I can tell you that the general consensus is that the nerf was too much. Some points that were brought up were:
- His lack of mobility and self sustain when compared to other offensive heroes used to be offset by his ability to punish targets up close with FTH.
- Another interesting point was the new trend in tournament play, which was the implementation of a single hero maximum. This has made it possible to stack tanks leaving the opposing team with no options in dealing with them as Reaper is now the only tank buster and cannot be stacked.
- Some other points included the fact that at high level play, McCree no longer counters Genji, Reaper or Mei. In fact the only player he can now counter semi reliably is Tracer and that's if he catches her with his flashbang.
- Many suggested that a cooldown on FTH rather than a damage nerf would have solved the communities problems with him while not completely changing his playstyle.
Watching the tournaments over the weekend, it is obvious that McCree is no longer a viable pick. The top teams have decided to get away from him completely. Surefore from Cloud 9 who was known as a McCree main, did not play him at all, rather opting for 76 most of the time. REUNITED's Vallutaja, another pro that was known to play McCree almost exclusively, has also decided to retire the cowboy in favor of other offensive heroes. And finally, Taimou, a pro from EnVyUs, has also abandoned McCree completely and is convinced the "BA" should be removed from "BAMF".
I was able to contact Seagull who's played on some of the best pro Overwatch teams such as Luminosity. I asked him to share his and his team mates thoughts on the recent McCree nerf and I believe his response sums up McCree's current state:
"The McCree nerf has essentially made his right click useless, if someone is really really good with their left clicks it is possible to make him work but you'd be better off going with another hero."
Edits 5: Added a list of suggestions that might create a niche for McCree again.Edits 4: Added some structure to this long wall of text.Edits 2: any blue response to this thread would be very much appreciated. Some people have expressed that they would like to know how the developers think about the state of this hero after the recent patch.Edits 1: grammar + spelling. I still see some and might change them later.I meant to write this as a reply to someone else's post on when is McCree a viable pick... then it became an essay, so I'd like to make a separate thread on this.Before going further, I'd like to state that nerf on McCree was necessary and that I do not oppose the view that old McCree was a stronger pick than other heroes. Please read carefully what I have to say instead of dismissing the whole thing, because I have put in a considerable time into playing a lot of heroes in the offense category (Particularly McCree, Reaper, Pharah, and Soldier 76).As someone who's put in a considerable amount of time into trying to master McCree (I believe I am #106 in terms of total earned score with McCree. I have 55 hours+, over 3 kda, and more than 50% win rate with the cowboy), here's when I pick McCree post-nerf.Never.Unless I do not care about the outcome of the game and simply want to enjoy the joy of playing the character, McCree is not my first pick among the offensive heroes anymore; McCree does not excel in any particular thing right now (I do love playing other heroes as well, and my favorites so far are Pharah, Reaper, and Soldier).McCree is strong/weak against the following heroes:1. McCree can easily kill (with proper Left-click aim)...- Junkrat, Pharah (any squishy hero who cannot aim well)- Lucio, Mercy, Zenyatta, Symmetra, Torb (squishy supports)2. McCree is easily killed by...- Winston, Zarya, D.Va, Roadhog (Tanks)- Mei (Mei is Mei)- Sniper (unless you are protected by Reinhardt and Winston)3. McCree is neither weak nor strong against the rest of the heroes not mentioned here. Some examples are...- Reaper, Genji, Tracer (flankers)This is based on my experience of playing him for many hours, and I am sure most McCree players will agree with me on this.In today's "meta," most teams are composed of...- 1 or 2 healer- 1 or 2 tanks- 2 to 4 dps (tank buster, main dps, sniper, anti flanker)- 1 symmetra from defense depending on comp/mapBecause of the recent nerf on McCree, tank buster role is most often filled by Reaper. McCree's possible position in a game right now is a main dps or anti flanker. McCree's job as a main dps is to "snipe" fast moving squishies and supports at mid-range using his left-click button. His left-click does a damage from 70 to 35 as a function of the distance between him and his target. His lack of mobility means that he DOES NOT do the full 70 damage most of the times, and rather does about 40-55 damage when McCree is at a safe distance from the enemy group (this is evident from the fact that he often fails to 6 shot Torbjorn's turret).As a dps, your priority should always be to take out Mercy (then Lucio), and it usually takes 4 body shots to take down a healer from a safe distance. Therefore, McCree becomes a viable pick once your in-battle accuracy is about 50% or higher (I check my accuracy after every game, and this is my personal experience of what it takes for me to make significant impact as McCree: 50%+ accuracy). In other words, he is a hero with a very very high skill floor. (If you check stats on pro players, you will see that pro McCree players' average accuracy is about 47%-49%).McCree's viability also depends heavily on the enemy composition. In order for him to be useful enough to justify him, the enemy team has to run heroes that McCree can easily pick off when in LOS (line of sight). McCree's hit scan attack is great against Pharah, and you can see some professional teams do well with McCree post-nerf when one of the following is true:- McCree player is just way better than everyone else in the game- Enemy is running pharah, and pharah is the main mid-range dps- Enemy is running two supports."Perfect. So what seems to be the problem if there exists a situation (albeit few) that McCree can do relatively well in? I mean Zenyatta has no niche whatsoever, right? End of discussion!"Well, McCree as a mid-range dps is worse than Soldier 76 because McCree's damage falls off earlier than Soldier's damage. McCree's damage falls off at 18 meters and is reduced to 35 at 30 meters, whereas Soldier's damage fall off does not start until 35 meters. McCree's damage potential with 6 bullets is thus realistically about 300 (given you hit all 6 bullets at a safe distance). If you have 50% accuracy, you will deal about 150 damage (and not many players even have 50% accuracy). Soldier 76 has 420 damage potential per clip, and even if you have slightly less accuracy as Soldier 76, you would still deal more damage with him, leading to a higher probability of kills. Also note that most of the time, you will be given a very short window of time to take out an exposed enemy support. Thus, shooting all 6 bullets and rolling onto shoot 6 more is seldom an option. By then, the enemy support may safely retreat deep into the enemy backline.What about anti-flank role? McCree as an anti-flank is worse than Reaper post-nerf. An anti-flank role either guard the healer or watches the flanking route. Though McCree has flashbang, it is extremely hard to land the flashbang against Genji or Tracer once your MMR rises to a point such that you don't see Bastion potg as often. Good Tracers and Genjis will rarely fall for the flashbang at close range, and my personal experience told me that it's better to rely on my LMB than my flashbang because every second I waste trying to land flashbang brings me closer to my death. I usually try to aim at their head and shoot 6 bullets, roll back to dodge, then shoot 6 more to see who's the victor. I find this to be the most effective way to kill Tracer and Genji, but these are still very hard LMB shots to land against a fast moving object.But Genji and Tracer aren't the only flank heroes in the game. There are more heroes that can flank and do devastating damage to my team. As an anti-flanker, McCree's job should be to "effectively" stop any of these heroes and come back to help the team when necessary. If I am held by the flanker for a minute, then the game becomes 5v5 and there is no advantage anymore. Furthermore, an anti-flanker has to be very very good at 1v1 in most situations. Reaper, the king of flanking, would probably like to say otherwise (some reaper players say I eat McCree's lunch). McCree has a very hard time fighting Reaper 1v1. I am not going to say Reaper counters McCree now. I play both heroes equally well (maybe I play Reaper a bit better because I have 15% higher win rate with him), and my understanding is that it comes down to McCree's mechanics (how well he lands headshot) and who's more clever of the two.In other words, McCree is no longer good at anti-flanking because he can no longer 1v1 effectively against any of these heroes. The main reason is the reduced damage in fan the hammer. Flashbang now does not lead to the immediate death, and when flashbang is on cooldown, McCree is just a guy with a 6-bullet pistol. Tracer can roll back the time. Reaper can wraith-form, and Genji can even deflect the last 2-bullets -> dash+melee to surely kill McCree (which means it's never a good idea to flashbang Genji in front of him as he approaches you. He's waiting for you to flashbang).So which heroes can now take the anti-flanking role? Mei and Reaper. Reaper has 8 bullets, 50 more hp, and can deal 140 damage per bodyhit (and it can also crit). 140 damage is enough to two-shot both Genji and Tracer, and it's extremely easy to kill these two as Reaper if you can achieve 50% accuracy as McCree. Point, shoot, jump around to make it hard for them to shoot, and you can easily kill these pesky flankers faster than McCree and safer than McCree (because of your wraith form). It also helps that Reaper has 2 more ammo than McCree (which is huge in my own experience). I am not going to waste everyone's time to explain why Mei is a good anti-flanker.Furthermore, both Mei and Reaper shines when dealing with Tanks. I often see Winstons jumping at me, then a second later, try to run away because they miscalculate how much damage a Reaper with a good aim can do against Tanks (Tanks truly get full 140 damage body shot). McCree used to be on par with Reaper at melting Tanks, but since nerf, he does not have enough dps to survive against any of the tank heroes. Mei can freeze. To me, that's just as good as flashbang when it's against tanks.Let us look at heroes in the offense category to see what they can do when Winston, Zarya, or D.Va jumps on them.- As Pharah, I press shift the moment something jumps me, and I shoot downwards.- As Soldier 76, I immediately put my heal down, shoot, then dash away if I am not going to win the battle. Furthermore, as Soldier, I am never away from Reinhardt, Roadhog, and my team backline because I am safely dealing consistent damage as main dps.- As Reaper, I pull out my shotgun and melt whoever jumps me and always (about 90% of the time) come out victorious.- As Tracer, I run around, shoot, then rollback time, shoot some more, then go back for healthpack.- As Genji, I double jump, throw shuriken, try to kill, and dash away if I am in danger.- As McCree, I use fan-the-hammer, roll back, flash-bang and walk backwards as I aim for the head and shoot 1-2 times, fan-the-hammer, and die.As you can see, McCree has no way of escaping from Winston, D.Va, and Zarya. Running away is almost never an option (because it leads to death), and he has a very slim chance to defeat D.Va (her armor + 2nd life), Zarya (shield), and a very low chance to defeat Winston if you land 2 fan the hammers (some of them will get cancelled by his shield), flashbang, and maybe a punch or two (true story)."But McCree was never supposed to kill tanks. What's wrong with this?"I am going to talk about the dps of heroes in the offense category to try to convince you that offense heroes are very good at dealing damage, and they do enough damage (most of them) to kill tanks. I've ranked all 6 offense heroes based on their dps and thus their ability to kill a tank.1. Reaper (280 damage per second with a possibility of headshot)2. McCree (140 damage per second with a possibility of headshot or 270 damage per second without a possibility of headshot)3. Soldier (170 damage per second with a possibility of headshot. Damage capability of 425 per clip)4. Pharah (140 damage per shot (and per second) at long range without a possibility of headshot)5. Genji6. TracerIt looks like McCree and Soldier are very similar when it comes to their damage per second, right? This view of "dps" does not take into account ammos, as well as other skills. Let's be more realistic and consider what other offense heroes can do1. Reaper (1120 damage from his 8 round clip + possibility of headshot)2. Soldier (425 damage from 25 clips as well as 120 damage from his helix. 565 minimum damage + headshot bonus
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in case there’s anything not already on our radar.
Alright, that's all for now, but I'll be around! I hope you enjoy Cassiopeia on the PBE!"
Cassiopeia
Desperada Cassiopeia
Siren Cassiopeia
Mythic Cassiopeia
Xerath Voiceover
Other
Shurima Crest Icon". The icons included in the 8/26 update have been put in the shop, with the "level 1" version being named "".
[ Might be wise to ignore the pricing and other names, typically they are WIP ]
Balance Changes * Remember *: The PBE is a testing grounds for new, tentative, and sometimes radical changes. The changes you see below may be lacking context or other accompanying changes that didn't make it in - don't freak out! These are not official notes.
* Remember *: The PBE is a testing grounds for new, tentative, and sometimes radical changes. The changes you see below may be lacking context or other accompanying changes that didn't make it in - don't freak out! These areofficial notes.
Champions Cassiopeia
Cassiopeia has received a gameplay update! See above for more info.
Just in time forhas received a new "" skin in this PBE Update. Unfortunately for us though, it is currently bugs andHere'swith a Bugs & Feedback thread forRegardless of the note, here is a video preview of the skin. Be aware that we had to utilize dark magics to access it and the skin should be consideredOnce things get fixed up in the next update, I'll add a full set of screen shots!Before we take a look at the new Cassiopeia models and textures included in today's update, here'swith details on what's new forkit:Here's a screen shot of her new passive in-game, it's big enough tointo!Now for better look at her model and texture updates!has new voiceover lines. He really, really likes to talk aboutMiss out on previous updates from this PBE cycle? Check outfor a comprehensive list of the new content in this PBE cycle or catch up with the links below!The Rev. Daniel Berrigan, undaunted at 92 and full of the fire that makes him one of this nation’s most courageous voices for justice, stands in New York City’s Zuccotti Park. He is there, along with other clergy, to ask Trinity Church, which is the third-largest landowner in Manhattan, to drop charges against Occupy activists, including retired Episcopal Bishop George Packard, for occupying its empty lot on 6th Avenue and Canal Street on Dec. 17. The protesters, slated to go to court Monday, June 11, hoped to establish a new Liberty Square on the lot after being evicted by New York City police from Zuccotti in November. But Trinity had the demonstrators arrested. It chose to act like a real estate company, or the corporation it has become, rather than a church. And its steadfast refusal to drop the charges means that many of those arrested, including Packard, could spend as long as three months in jail.
“This is the only way to bring faith to the public and the public to the faith,” Berrigan said softly as we spoke before the demonstration in the park that was once the epicenter of Occupy Wall Street. “If faith does not touch the lives of others it has no point. Faith always starts with oneself. It means an overriding sense of responsibility for the universe, making sure that universe is left in good hands and the belief that things will finally turn out right if we remain faithful. But I underscore the word ‘faithful.’ This faith was embodied in the Occupy movement from the first day. The official churches remained slow. It is up to us to take the initiative and hope the churches catch up.”
There is one place, Berrigan says, where those who care about justice need to be — in the streets. The folly of electoral politics, the colossal waste of energy invested in the charade of the Wisconsin recall, which once again funneled hopes and passion back into a dead political system and a bankrupt Democratic Party, the failure by large numbers of citizens to carry out mass acts of civil disobedience, will only ensure that we remain hostages to corporate power.
Berrigan believes, as did Martin Luther King, that “the evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and the evils of racism.” And he has dedicated his life to fighting these evils. It is a life worth emulating.
Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, was ordained 70 years ago. He was a professor at Le Moyne College, Cornel University and Fordham University. His book of poems, “Time Without Number,” won the Lamont Poetry Prize. But it is as a religious radical that he gained national prominence, as well as numerous enemies within the Roman Catholic hierarchy. He and his brother Philip Berrigan, a Josephite priest and World War II combat veteran, along with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, led some of the first protests against the Vietnam War. In 1967 Philip Berrigan was arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience and was sentenced to six years in prison. Philip’s sentence spurred Daniel to greater activism. He traveled to Hanoi with the historian Howard Zinn to bring back three American prisoners of war. And then he and eight other Catholic priests concocted homemade napalm and on May 17, 1968, used it to burn 378 draft files in the parking lot of the Catonsville, Md., draft board.
“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children,” Berrigan wrote at the time of the destruction of draft files. “How many must die before our voices are heard, how many must be tortured, dislocated, starved, maddened? When, at what point, will you say no to this war?”
Berrigan was a fugitive for four months after being sentenced. He was apprehended by the FBI in the home of the writer William Stringfellow, whose decision to live and write out of Harlem in the 1950s and whose books “Dissenter in a Great Society” and “My People Is the Enemy” were instrumental in prompting me as a seminarian to live and work in Boston’s inner city, in the Roxbury neighborhood. Berrigan was sentenced to three years and released from the federal prison in Danbury, Conn., in 1972. But he did not stop. In 1980 he and Philip, along with six other protesters, illegally entered the General Electric nuclear missile facility in King of Prussia, Pa. They damaged nuclear warhead cones and poured blood onto documents. He was again sentenced and then paroled for time already served in prison. Philip, by the time he died in 2002, had spent more than a decade in prison for acts of civil disobedience. Philip Berrigan, Zinn said in eulogizing him, was “one of the great Americans of our time.”In a culture that lacks many authentic heroes, that continues to preach that military service is the highest good, Berrigan is a potent reminder of what we must seek to become. His is a life of constant agitation, constant defiance, constant disobedience to systems of power, a life of radical obedience to God. His embrace of what has been called “Christian anarchism,” because of its persistent alienation and hostility to all forms of power, is the most effective form of resistance. And it is the clearest expression of the Christian Gospel. Berrigan has been arrested numerous times — “I don’t waste time counting,” he told me — for also protesting American intervention in Central America and the first Gulf War, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has demonstrated against the death penalty, in support of LGBT rights and against abortion. And even in his 90s he is not finished.
“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal,” he said to me, quoting Emma Goldman. He added his brother Phil’s reminder that “if enough Christians follow the Gospel, they can bring any state to its knees.”
“Some people today argue that equanimity achieved through inner spiritual work is a necessary condition for sustaining one’s ethical and political commitments,” Berrigan writes. “But to the prophets of the Bible, this would have been an absolutely foreign language and a foreign view of the human. The notion that one has to achieve peace of mind before stretching out one’s hand to one’s neighbor is a distortion of our human experience, and ultimately a dodge of our responsibility. Life is a rollercoaster, and one had better buckle one’s belt and take the trip. This focus on equanimity is actually a narrow-minded, selfish approach to reality dressed up within the language of spirituality.”
“I know that the prophetic vision is not popular today in some spiritual circles,” he goes on. “But our task is not to be popular or to be seen as having an impact, but to speak the deepest truths that we know. We need to live our lives in accord with the deepest truths we know, even if doing so does not produce immediate results in the world.”
Berrigan says he is sustained by his “invisible witnesses”: those he loves, such as the Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and his brother Philip, who, although all deceased, give him the power and the strength to continue to resist.
“They are not absent,” he said in our conversation. “Their presence is not erased. Their presence is purer and stronger. And their presence is victory over death. It is love. And in their presence I find strength.”
“But what of the price of peace?” Berrigan writes in his book “No Bars to Manhood.” “I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their loved ones, in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans — that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. ‘Of course, let us have the peace,’ we cry, but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.’ “
Contrast Daniel Berrigan, who lives in a single room with a half dozen other retired priests in a parish house in lower Manhattan, with the imperious rector of Trinity Church, the Rev. Dr. James Cooper. Cooper earns $1.3 million a year, lives in a $5.5 million SoHo townhouse, receives a church allowance to maintain his Florida condo, dips into church funds to take his family on African safaris and oversees the church’s $1 billion in Manhattan real estate holdings from which the church receives as much as $30 million a year. He spent $5 million on a public relations campaign, nearly double the $2.7 million the church gave out in grants, in one year. Ten of the church’s 22-member vestry — its board of directors — have quit over Cooper’s authoritarianism and extravagance.
Cooper, like Berrigan, attended seminary and studied the Gospel, but he has modeled his life after Herod rather than Jesus. He has turned Trinity Church into a temple to greed. He is an appropriate priest for Wall Street. And on Monday, when activists appear in court because he and the other leaders of Trinity Church are determined to prosecute them, Cooper should consider removing the Christian cross from the sanctuary and replacing it with the true symbol he appears to worship — the dollar sign.
“All we have is one another to sustain us,” Berrigan told me. “Community is not magical. It means people are willing to be human beings together. And it means they are willing to pay the price for being human.”This article is from the archive of our partner.
In an effort to plant a talking point in the next Republican presidential debate prevent damage to the ozone layer, the Obama administration will order the phase-out of an over-the-counter asthma inhaler at the end of this year.
The Primatene Mist inhaler is the only one on the market that uses chlorflourocarbons (CFCs) as a propellant. Those compounds have been the target of an international phase-out campaign since 1987, when it became clear that they were helping destroy the ozone layer that protects the earth from direct exposure to solar radiation. Other inhalers use a different chemical to propel medicine to asthma sufferers, but those require prescriptions, and at a higher cost.
Some commentators are not pleased at this development. Mark Hemingway at The Weekly Standard says it most succinctly: "The Obama administration would rather make people with Asthma cough up money than let them make a surely inconsequential contribution to depleting the ozone layer." Hemingway points to the experiences of The Atlantic's Megan McArdle with non-CFC inhalers (as well as low-energy clothes dryers, fluorescent light bulbs and low-flow toilets) as evidence that mandated environmental improvements lead to unhappiness, or at least to inconvenience.The FIA is set to meet with manufacturers next month to decide the future of the FIA GT World Cup, following last month’s controversial event in Macau that was marred by accidents and limited green flag running time.
Laurens Vanthoor claimed victory in the time-restricted event, despite ending the race on his roof, following an airborne accident that ultimately curtailed the race, after less than five laps were completed in a 90-minute period.
Runners-up Porsche, which entered two Manthey Racing-prepared Porsche 911 GT3 Rs for Earl Bamber and Kevin Estre, have threatened not to return unless changes are made to the format.
“The Macau race for sure is a very special event with an interesting market and a good crowd and very good media attention,” Head of Porsche Motorsport Dr. Frank-Steffen Walliser told Sportscar365.
“It has a long history and city races are part of GT racing also. There’s nothing wrong with that.
“But if it’s granted a World Cup with FIA it should be clear it’s the main act and have enough time to do whatever is necessary. And running out of time in a FIA-granted World Cup is not appropriate.
“If you ask me, it’s not professional enough… It’s a little bit of a trap for the organizers.
“Incidents can happen in a race like this, that should be known. We’re not complaining about this. It’s a bit of a gamble, but the execution of the timetable was not appropriate.”
As usual, GT3 cars shared the bill with Formula 3, but next year will see the return of the FIA World Touring Car Championshi — as a replacement to the TCR International Series — likely creating an even more compact schedule, particularly on Sunday.
“Under these circumstances, we will not come back,” Walliser said. “If there is a change and they will optimize everything… We will sit down with the FIA in January to discuss this.
“This is between the FIA and the manufacturers and we will see the outcome and then make the decision.”
Some manufacturers have questioned whether the World Cup should even return to Macau, despite the event’s prestige and large fan and media presence.
“For a special event like the FIA GT World Cup, you need a special venue and a special circuit, and there is no doubt that Macau is such a place,” Head of Audi Sport customer racing Chris Reinke said.
“It is a circuit with its own DNA, which can only be compared to places like the Nürburgring [Nordschleife] or Bathurst.
“Of course, safety always has to come first, and we have to investigate how the accidents during this year’s race happened, but we certainly must avoid any knee-jerk reactions following this year’s race.
“Furthermore, Asia is an important market for us and the way in which our local importer [in Hong Kong] uses this event for promoting the brand also shows its significance.”
For Stephane Ratel, whose SRO Motorsports Group serves as the event coordinator on behalf of the FIA and Automobile Club of Macau, the Frenchman admits it’s a tricky situation.
“It’s a debate,” Ratel told Sportscar365. “Macau is challenging for powerful GT cars. It has proven and we had accidents this year.
“On the other hand, I don’t see another event like this. If you do a World Cup, it has an audience, it is a fantastic place and I will always support the idea of keeping it there.
“I don’t see another place where we could do it. Maybe the FIA will find a place. But I think Macau is the place in terms of making it an event.”
Porsche’s Walliser has also ruled out taking part in the World Cup next year if it again falls on the third weekend of November, Macau’s traditional date, which has clashed with the FIA World Endurance Championship season finale in Bahrain in recent years.
The German manufacturer will return to factory WEC GTE-Pro competition in 2017, with the same Manthey team that operated its World Cup entries this year.
“If WEC races in Bahrain [the same weekend] we cannot do both. It would not work,” Walliser said.
“That’s the second thing that has to be solved. Macau is known for 35 years on the same date. It’s not [a traditional date for] WEC for sure.
“Generating a new event is not so easy. In general, why not? But there’s also pros and cons and I will not clearly say this is the right way. We have to sit down and see how it will go.”
Rene de Boer contributed to this reportThese days, it’s all about the top knot, the man-bun, and the pompadour for men’s hairstyles. But if you’re studying in San Pedro College, you may not be allowed to do that.
In a series of photos released by the college’s Office of Student Affairs on Facebook, they illustrated the top knot, the man-bun, the pompadour, the short-back, and the undercut as the hairstyles not allowed for male students.
The post did not explain why these are not allowed, but encouraged students to visit the office of Student Affairs if they had any questions.
Below are the photos that were posted on Facebook:
The man bun
The pompadour
The short back and sides
The undercut
The top knot
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Caption You see Ivan, when you point on your peestol like me, you will always know where it is Save Cancel
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Last Online 6 hrs, 48 mins ago File Size Posted Size 0.461 MB Aug 13, 2017 @ 4:43pm 1680 x 1050 65 Unique Visitors 0 Current FavoritesWhether credit goes to Don Draper or not, there’s no denying the current popularity of aviator sunglasses. And while there is no shortage of brands to choose from, if you want the original, there’s only one choice: American Optical. The US military started issuing AO Aviator sunglasses to its pilots, sailors and soldiers way back in 1958 and the brand has been making them in the USA to the same spec ever since: bayonet temples, rectangular frames, sturdy welds and real glass lenses.
Want a testimonial? AO Original Pilots were the first sunglasses worn on the Moon, by astronauts Aldrin and Armstrong, and a pair resides in the Smithsonian — that’s astronauts L. Gordon Cooper Jr. (right) and Charles Conrad Jr. sporting a pair in the above photo. You may only ever wear yours to commute to the office but it’s nice to know they’ve been tested in the scorching UV rays of outer space. Better still, you can pick up a pair from Duluth Trading Company for little more than (military contract-inflated) 1969 pricing.
Buy Now: $53Most dogs don’t like having their nails cut. So, it’s hard to use a clipper to cut your dog’s nails. There are some dog nail clippers are designed for medium to large dogs. We recommend you to choose clippers made by Simply Pet with their non-slip cutters. They are the easiest and safest way to trim your dog’s nails. If you don’t choose the proper tools to cut your dog’s nails, he may get injuries. Check out this post to learn about the best dog nail clippers for thick nails.
The Best Professional Dog Nail Clippers
As a pet owner, it’s important to understand that your dog may get pain if you give him the wrong cutting. Nowadays, the best nail clippers offer a protective guard for more effective trimming. If you let your dog’s nails grow too long, they will dig into his paws. Therefore, it’s vital to keep the right length in order to avoid any harm. You should groom your dog regularly. You will get benefit from this. Now, look at the list of best professional dog nail clippers below.
Simply Pets Large Dog Nail Clippers
This product is designed with the safety kept in mind. They come with a protective guard. It helps to prevent you from over-trimming your dog’s nails. Also, they prevent your dog from getting injuries thanks to a safety lock. It comes with non-slip rubber handles. Thanks to an ergonomic design, it ensures to give comfort.
Actually, this is a lightweight clipper. Its blades are made of stainless steel for the durability. This clipper promises to give you smooth cutting. Furthermore, this unit offers a lifetime warranty. Overall, this machine is one of the best dog nail clippers for thick nails as well as smaller puppy nails.
Cutie Pet Supply Dog Nail Clippers
When it comes to Cutie Pet Supply Dog Nail Clipper, you will get a 100% satisfaction guarantee. In addition, you will get a free video for the guidelines as well. Its blades are made of stainless steel. So, they are sharper than usual ones.
As a result, this clipper gives owners a clean and safe cut. It comes with a safety guard that helps to protect your pet from the sharp blades. The handles are designed for easy use. This model is also one of the best dog nail clippers.
Shiny Pet Nail Clipper for Small Dogs
This dog nail clipper is designed especially for smaller dogs. It’s actually a scissor styled nail clipping machine. It comes with the recycled plastic handles. It’s designed with stainless steel blades for a clear cut.
The Shiny Pet Nail Clipper comes with an E-Book as a tutorial. So, you can get an effective performance of nail trim. Being said that, this model is for smaller dog or puppies. This product offers the owner a lifetime money back guarantee.
Petetpet Dog Nail Trimmers
This is a reputable accessories brand. This brand is available in many choices for both small and large dogs. Its blades are made from high carbon stainless steel. It doesn’t come with a safety guard. However, it can still offer a clean view. With this model, you can confidently cut your dog’s nails.
The clipper is designed with a filer and comb. They help to remove burs. Also, they ensure to give smoothness. Furthermore, this clipper provides you with a 6 months warranty. It’s made of the high-quality materials, so it can last for a long time.
In overall, this model is one of the best dog nail clippers. It’s a good consideration for your wallet.
Dremel 7300-PT 4.8V Dog Nail Grooming Tool
This tool is a good alternative to clippers. It’s known as a grinder. It’s available at 2 different speeds. Moreover, this tool comes with a 60 grift sanding drum. So, you can easily and safely use it on your dog nails.
This is a cordless model with a rechargeable battery. Moreover, it offers a 2 years warranty. Although this is a cheap Dremel, it can offer speeds of 6,500 & 13,000 RPM. It ensures to give you a good finish. Consider buying the Dremel. It won’t make you disappointed.
GoPets Nail Clippers
This model is available in 2 different colors: orange and black. This product is highly recommended for large dogs. Also, it’s ideal for medium-sized dogs. You can use it without any effort. It comes with a quick stop guard, so your dog won’t get injuries to his skin. Moreover, it provides owners with a lifetime warranty. It comes with non-slip handles. Its blades are made of stainless steel for the durability. It can be able to stay sharp for a long time.
Millers Forge Dog Nail Clipper
This is a good choice for doggies in the plier style. This option is great for all sizes of breeds. Many dog owners choose this product because of its durability. Its blades are made from stainless steel material, so you can get the idyllic outcome. Thanks to making use of red plastic, it ensures to provide you with an experience sound grip. In addition, the clipper comes with a lock that allows you to hold the machine firmly. Plus, it won’t crack your dog’s thick nails. This option is ideal for large breed dog.
Resco Original Deluxe Nail Clipper
This tool will give groomers immense support. It’s used for all sizes of the dog from small to large. You can use it even for pets up to 50+ pounds. It promises to give your dog style as well as comfort due to deluxe grips. Besides, it allows you to change blade thanks to patented blade replacement technology. It’s built with a durable construction since it’s made of stainless steel. It ensures to give you a smooth performance.
Pro Pet Works Dog Nail Clippers
You can consider choosing this dog nail clipper. This model is designed for your adoring pet. It comes with a nail guard that allows you to overcut your dog’s nails thanks to the built-in nail guard. Because of its ergonomic built handle, you can grip it properly. It also saves you from slipping. Therefore, it’s able to carry out this tool without having any difficulty. It is designed with stainless steel blades. They offer accuracy. Consider using this dog nail clipper for an easy and simple nail clipping task.
Large Dog Nail Clippers by Simply Pets Online
This clipper is made by 2 vets, so you can use it without any doubts. It promises to give owners better grooming. This is extremely a great choice for large dogs. It’s not difficult to use this safety dog clipper. It is designed with a safety lock, so you can avoid over trimming.
This model ensures to give dog owners a comfortable grip thanks to non-slip rubber handles. It’s a lightweight product, so it’s easy to use. In addition, there is a lifetime warranty. Especially, this model is available in lively modern colors. This unit can be able to stay sharp for a long time because of its high-quality stainless steel material. It allows you to use for both medium and large sized dogs.
How to Choose Dog Nail Clippers
It’s not simple to buy a set of nail clippers for your four-leg friend. It’s essential to shop around for the best products as mentioned above for the small amount extra. There is a wide range of choices. However, you need to keep in mind some important factors to consider as below:
Safety of Cutting Dogs Nails
Make sure you use a dog nail clipper dedicated to only dog nails. In fact, many dog owners quickly use any clippers on their dogs. All of the best dog nail clippers we listed above are very cheap. So, you only have to pay a very small price. Many dog nail clippers come with a safety guard that helps to prevent you from over-trimming your dog’s nails. This feature is really important for those who are new to cutting dog nails. If you want, you can also choose a clipper without a guard for a clearer vision.
Clipper or Dremel
For many dog owners, it’s a logical choice to purchase clippers for cutting their dog nails. Some others choose to use the Dremel to trim nails, especially professional dog groomers. With the Dremel, you can get more control than clippers. Also, they are great options for dogs with thick nails. However, the Dremel also have some drawbacks. First, they are more expensive than usual dog nail clippers. In addition, they require a battery as well as a cord included. If you want to use these models on regular basis, don’t forget to check the heat. Otherwise, they can be able to get very hot.
Blade quality
This is the most essential feature of any trimming machine. We advise you to choose high-quality clippers. You should look for ones made of stainless steel. They can stay sharp for a long time. If you choose ones with poor quality blades, they can cause pain as well as discomfort to your dog just after a few uses. That’s why it’s important to choose a sharp blade for a clean cut.
Comfort
If you want to handle strong and thick nails, you need a comfortable handle. We recommend highly rubberized or anti-slip handles. Moreover, consider looking for longer handles since they can offer more power. Then, you can easily trim your dog’s nails.
Safety features
Many clippers are designed with a safety guard or sensor. They ensure to give an injury free grooming. However, many owners don’t choose these clippers because these models may prevent them from the accurate trim.
Different Types of Clippers
There is no clipper that can work well for all dogs. Nail trimmers are divided into three main types: scissors, guillotine, and grinding tools.
Scissors
These clippers are designed with scissor shape. They offer you a large amount of mechanical power to trim your dog’s nails. There are a variety of different sizes. They are used for small, medium, and large dogs.
Guillotine
These clippers are safe for you and your dog. Also, they are easy to use. It’s spring loaded placed over the end of your dog nail. To use it, close the handles. Then, you can cut the nail.
Grinding tools
These clippers come with the batteries. They don’t cut your dog’s nails while they grind them. The thing you need to do is to use sandpaper to grind the nails. It’s easy to use this type with less risk of injury.
Conclusion
Cutting your dog’s nails at home is not easy for many pet owners. Most importantly, you need to choose the right nail clipping tool. There are a lot of products out there. Depend on your dog’s size, you can choose the best dog nail clippers for him. With the right tool, you can finish your task fast. Consult our reviews of the best devices on the market today to decide which one is the best for you & your dog.As you may have heard, new Hornets owner Tom Benson wants to change the team's name to something more New Orleans-y. Remember, the Hornets were originally based in Charlotte, so the team's name has no Nola connection.
The obvious thing would be to bring the Jazz name back to New Orleans, give the Hornets name back to Charlotte (there's already a fan group and an online petition for that), and rename the Utah franchise, which has always worn the name "Jazz" like an ill-fitting shirt.
Of course, that makes too much sense, and so the task falls to you, Fandom readers: Rename the Hornets. And while you're at it, design some new uniforms for them.
We've run these design contests before (for the NBA, the NHL, and MLB) and the results have always been (A) entertaining and (B) at least as good as what the official designs turn out to be. So fire up your digital design software -- or break out your pack of magic markers, as the case might be -- and help us turn the Hornets into a New Orleans-appropriate team.
The rules are simple:
• Your entry must include a team name, a primary team logo and home and road uniform designs. (If you like, you can also include secondary logos and alternate uniforms, but those aren't required.)
• Uniform and logo designs can be created in any digital or analog medium (Illustrator, Photoshop, crayon, whatever) and can be submitted in any standard digital format (JPG, PDF, tiff, etc.).
• Please include your name and email address somewhere on the image file, like this.
• Uni Watch's usual chromata non-grata policy (read: no purple designs, not now, not ever) has been suspended for this contest because purple is a big part of New Orleans culture. So feel... free... to submit... purple... designs. There, I said it.
• Email your entry here. If you have more than one concept, feel free to enter as many times as you like.
• Deadline: Friday, April 27, noon ET.
The winning entries will be showcased in a future Uni Watch column and will also be forwarded to Benson and to the NBA, where they'll no doubt receive careful consideration. OK? Get crackin'.
Paul Lukas wonders if the Hornets should just adopt their Mardi Gras uniform on a full-time basis. If you liked this column, you'll probably like his daily Uni Watch web site, plus you can follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Want to learn about his Uni Watch Membership Program, be added to his mailing list so you'll always know when a new column has been posted, or just ask him a question? Contact him here.During a Fox News segment on Hannity Friday night in which Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus talked about how much "the truth matters in this race," Sean Hannity pushed the falsehood that the economy has not created 4.5 million jobs during the Obama administration. In fact, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has noted, "private employers [have] added nearly 4.5 million jobs to their payrolls in the last 29 months." On the show, Hannity stated: "They went out in this whole convention and they all lied. We created 4.5 million jobs. That's not true what they said to the American people." In fact, as data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows, "private employers added over 4.6 million jobs to their payrolls in the last 30 months." Fox's Eric Bolling previously advanced the same false claim. Hannity also failed to note that Priebus' statement about "the truth" is in direct contradiction with what the Mitt Romney campaign has been accused of doing for weeks.
Speaking at an ABC News/Yahoo! News event at the Republican National Convention, Romney pollster Neil Newhouse said, "We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers." From NBCNews.com:
[Director of advertising Ashley] O'Connor said she thought their ad "Right Choice" attacking Obama on welfare reform has been the most effective so far, despite its being given "Four Pinnochios" by a Washington Post fact check. Newhouse brushed off the fact check as par for the course in political campaigns. "People are always going to get Pinocchios for this stuff," Newhouse said. "We stand behind those ads and behind the facts in those ads." Newhouse suggested the problem was with the fact-checkers, not the facts themselves: "Fact-checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs and you know what? We're not going let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers."
But on Hannity, Priebus stressed that "the good thing about our situation here in this race is that, you know, the truth matters in this race in that you can't outspin the truth."
In fact, "outspin[ing] the truth" is exactly what the Romney campaign has been accused of doing in such a fashion that it is now being called the "post-truth party."
Some examples:
Rolling Stone: Mitt Romney "has a casual relationship with truth and reality."
NY Times: Romney and Paul Ryan's convention speeches -- "peppered with statements that were incorrect or incomplete -- seemed to signal the arrival of a new kind of presidential campaign, one in which concerns about fact-checking have been largely set aside."
Wash. Post: "Quite simply, the Romney campaign isn't adhering to the minimum standards required for a real policy conversation. Even if you bend over backward to be generous to them -- as the Tax Policy Center did when they granted the Romney campaign a slew of essentially impossible premises in order to evaluate their tax plan -- you often find yourself forced into the same conclusion: This doesn't add up, this doesn't have enough details to be evaluated, or this isn't true."
Columbia Journalism Review: "Paul Ryan's speech last night at the Republican National Convention... continued the Romney campaign's pattern of disingenuous and misleading attacks on President Obama. While Obama and his allies have made many misleading claims of their own, the frequency and repetition of the Romney campaign's claims has been particularly striking."
Hannity frequently disregards employment facts to push a Republican narrative: He has falsely claimed that the U.S. economy is "losing 400,000 jobs a month," has pushed the "deeply misleading" myth that millions of jobs were lost under President Obama, falsely claimed that Obama was responsible for making black unemployment worse, and continues to insist that you "cannot make the case with a straight face that this economy has gotten better under this president."The market will be open from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Sundays through Oct. 26, rain or shine. View Full Caption Facebook/Belmont Cragin Farmers' Market
CHICAGO — Northwest Side residents looking for organic choices will have a new option when a new farmers market opens Sunday in Belmont Cragin.
Kelly Rauch, manager of the Belmont Cragin farmers market, began creating the market in October when she felt there weren't enough sustainable and organic options in the community and no one was doing anything to bring those options to the area.
"I'm invested pretty heavily [in the market]. I thought this would really be something to help the small businesses in the community," Rauch said.
The market will be held in the PNC
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problem."
Visit seattlepi.com for more Seattle Seahawks news. Contact sports reporter Stephen Cohen at [email protected] or @scohenPI.Libertarian vice presidential nominee Bill Weld suggested Friday evening that Democratmay be the most qualified person to be president.
"I'm not sure anybody is more qualified than Hillary Clinton to be president of the United States," Weld told MSNBC's Chuck Todd when asked ifis more qualified.
"That's not the end of the inquiry, though," Weld continued. "We were two-term governors and I think Gary is very, very solid," he said, describing the former New Mexico governor as insightful.
Weld argued Johnson would be a better president than Clinton because "he's got a very appealing policy mix." He defended his running mate during the appearance following Johnson's gaffe this week when he couldn't name a world leader he admires.
"I think his insight that it pays to have some restraint about military incursions for the purpose of regime change before we spill American blood on foreign soil and put boots on the ground in countries where we don't just like what the government in that country is doing, I think that's a valuable insight," Weld said.
Weld argued the pair could be a "refreshing change" from the Bush and Obama administrations.
But Weld dismissed any speculation that he planned to step aside for Clinton.
"I would have the interests of the United States always uppermost, but I do not think those interests are advanced by me saying, 'oh I renounce my candidacy,'" he said.They talk on Telegram and send viruses to their enemies. BuzzFeed News’ Sheera Frenkel looks at how ISIS members and sympathizers around the world use the internet to grow their global network.
SAN FRANCISCO — Abu Majad figured that when ISIS came for him, it would be with a knife on a dark street, or a bomb planted on his car. The 34-year-old had been living in southern Turkey since fleeing Syria nearly three years ago and knew that his outspoken stance against ISIS — online and in his hometown in northern Syria — had put him in the terrorist group’s crosshairs. What he wasn’t expecting was to wake up on the morning of March 29 to a virus planted by ISIS within a seemingly innocuous email attachment. “Everything about this looked like a real email, sent from the admin of my own website. It looked safe, but it was not. They were trying to get my login information, my passwords. They were trying to get things that could have put real lives in danger,” said Abu Majad, who asked that his nickname be used instead of his real name to protect himself and his remaining family in Syria from reprisal attacks by ISIS. “It was very clever. When I saw it I thought to myself, Shit, now they are professional hackers?” Cybersecurity experts and intelligence agencies who monitor ISIS say the malware is just one more sign that ISIS is growing more sophisticated in its use of the internet.
"When I saw it I thought to myself, Shit, now they are professional hackers?"
“I don’t think it is far-fetched to say that the internet is a major reason why ISIS is so successful, and so worrying, as far as global terror movements go,” said one U.S. intelligence officer, who spoke to BuzzFeed News in Washington, D.C., and asked not to be named as he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press. “They have always been ‘good’ at the internet, at the strategy of how they use it. Now they are smarter at the internet too.” Many of the world’s major intelligence agencies are trying to figure out just how ISIS uses the internet. As the jihadi group continues to attract supporters around the globe, the need for them to safely communicate online has grown. While the vast majority of the group’s fighters in Iraq and Syria are probably not using the internet for much more than sending photos to their family WhatsApp groups, U.S. intelligence believe a small unit within ISIS is leading the group’s cyber ambitions, which range from working with hackers to launch cyberattacks against their enemies, to publishing manuals that help their supporters mask their online communications and defend themselves from those hunting them. What Abu Majad found that March morning was an email that looked like it came from his own website, asking him to log in and verify his details. Within the email was something known as a “dropper” — malware that is used to plant other software onto a computer without the user’s knowledge. “They would have had access to everything if I had opened that link,” said Abu Majad, who has sensitive information on his computer about other activists who, like him, try to oppose ISIS rule in Syria by smuggling out photos and videos that document the difficulty of civilian life under ISIS rule. Abu Majad insists he did not click the link, but he also declined to explain how he knew it was malware. “I was used to seeing ISIS fighters in cafes who barely know how to sign on and check their email. I was not expecting them to be this sophisticated.” Dlshad Othman is a cybersecurity engineer with the ISC Project, which provides information security assistance to civil liberties groups, and also studies ISIS. He said he had recently seen malware used in attacks on Syrian and Kurdish journalists and sites that try to fight against ISIS propaganda online. “ISIS has been targeting sites that are outspoken against ISIS,” Othman said, giving as an example the group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, an activist group that tries to disseminate real information from within Raqqa, capital of ISIS’s self-declared caliphate. “They targeted people who are trying to reveal what ISIS is really doing in Syria, which they see as a threat to their recruitment and propaganda.” He showed BuzzFeed one of the emails he was analyzing, which also contained malware. Othman traced the email back to IP addresses in Turkey and Qatar, another indication, he said, that ISIS was getting help from its network outside of Iraq and Syria to carry out cyber attacks. “Malware, phishing campaigns, DDoS attacks are all things I have seen,” he said. “Now, these dropper attacks are new and are more sophisticated. What we see is the group growing and evolving their capabilities. What we are seeing is worrying.”
Here’s an example of a conversation on a private ISIS channel on the messaging app Telegram on a recent Sunday afternoon: “brother r u use VPN for site?” “no brother, that is shit. use tor.” “tor is creation of CIA. avoid tor.” “so use vpn?” “lol, no there is something else” These sorts of exchanges appear daily on Telegram, a Berlin-based messaging app that was founded by Nikolai and Pavel Durov, the founders of Russia’s largest social network, VK. In the fall of 2015, use of Telegram spiked among ISIS supporters, as Pavel Durov told a September 2015 panel at TechCrunch that “privacy, ultimately, and our right for privacy is more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism,” a statement some saw as his announcing that Telegram would not kick ISIS channels off their platform. While dozens of channels have been kicked off in the months since, ISIS supporters still appear to operate more freely on Telegram than they do on other apps. Among the beheading videos, Quranic verses, and general thoughts on the group’s self-declared caliphate is an endless barrage of advice on how to use the internet. Guides in French, Spanish, German, English, Arabic, and Turkish have made the rounds offering step-by-step instructions on how to minimize an electronic footprint by hiding a user’s location and personally identifiable information. The advice is meant to keep ISIS supporters safe, but for most it’s a confusing labyrinth of conflicting opinions. Like many ISIS supporters, also known as fanboys, a man who goes by the nickname Abu Jihad online jumps between a number of networks where ISIS news is broadcast, discussed, and shared. His current staples are Telegram and Twitter, though Twitter, he says, has become less and less ISIS-friendly as they have become more proactive about shutting down accounts associated with ISIS. He has, at various times, used WhatsApp and Kik, but has since discarded those messaging programs as being “not secure enough.” He also dropped Zello, an app that allows groups to send participants/members short audio messages, similar to a walkie-talkie, when he found it too crowded with ISIS supporters reading verses of the Qur'an. He’s heard of a new app called Alwari, allegedly created by ISIS supporters, but says he can’t figure out where to download it. “To be anonymous online is the most important thing so that we can safely help the jihad when the time comes,” Abu Jihad wrote BuzzFeed News in a private message on Telegram. He refused to give his real name or location. “The kuffars make it as hard as possible, but we always find a way to succeed,” he said, using a derogatory term for non-Muslims.
“There are rumours that our forums are infected,” said Abu Jihad. “But it is impossible for us to stay off of the internet.”
How to connect to other ISIS supporters is a near-obsession for Abu Jihad, who likely lives in a Western country given his English-language skills and waking hours. Like many others who chose the nom de guerre, which translates as “father of holy war,” or “father of the struggle,” he has never seen battle and currently only admires ISIS from the safety of his computer screen. At least once a week, Abu Jihad thinks he has spotted a CIA agent in the Telegram channels that he monitors. “The internet is full of American and Israeli spies,” Abu Jihad wrote BuzzFeed in a private message, before asking for more details on where BuzzFeed News is based and whether it had a political agenda. “It’s well-known that most journalists are spies.” U.S. intelligence agencies hint that they are active in ISIS channels. During an interview with BuzzFeed News on recent efforts by Twitter to kick thousands of ISIS-linked accounts off their site, one official in the Department of Defense joked, “It’s just a shame they also got so many of our honey traps in that web.” “Wherever ISIS is chatting, we try to have a presence,” said the official, who spoke on condition he not be named, as he wasn’t authorized to speak to press. But according to cybersecurity experts, the U.S. is doing more than just watching those channels. Speaking to reporters last month Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work said, “Right now it sucks to be ISIL.” "We are dropping cyber bombs. We have never done that before," he told reporters. "Just like we have an air campaign, I want to have a cyber campaign. I want to use all the space capabilities I have.” The comment was seen as a reference to malware that U.S. intelligence agencies would try to plant in ISIS forums that, if installed by ISIS followers, could track or even hijack a computer. In California this week, U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter told reporters: “We will blackout, fool, and disrupt ISIL networks until we destroy them.” “There are rumours that our forums are infected,” said Abu Jihad. “But it is impossible for us to stay off of the internet.”
Last month, Dar Al-Islam, an online magazine published by ISIS in French, released its ninth issue with a 16-page special section dedicated to online security, offering detailed instructions on using a number of programs to safely access ISIS channels and communicate with other ISIS supporters. It is hardly the group’s first guide to using the internet. But while previous instructions have been little more than translations of existing internet safety guides, the issue showed the group’s evolving understanding of online security. Whereas in the past they would simply mention the name of a program, and copy-paste a description, the French manual, and similar versions published on ISIS online forums, have detailed instructions on how to layer different programs, such as using a VPN to help hide location, while also sending encrypted emails that mask the content of a message. The Dar al-Islam issue touts Tails, an operating system popular among privacy advocates and made famous by Edward Snowden, as the preferred means of safely going online. Tor, another favorite for its ability to anonymize traffic by passing it through a number of randomly selected servers and encrypting traffic, was bashed in the magazine, which warned that “spies” were likely working within Tor to intercept traffic. (The assessment was unsurprising considering a recent admission by Matt Edman, a former developer for Tor, that he helped the FBI create malware to unmask users of the software.) Encryption, ranging from programs like Telegram and WhatsApp that have encryption built in to a description of how to use PGP to encrypt emails, features heavily in the magazine. A security expert who is only known online as “the grugq,” but whose blogs and tweets are widely read by cybersecurity experts, closely follows how ISIS communicates online. After reviewing the magazine, he told BuzzFeed News that he believed ISIS only had a limited understanding of how encryption works.
BuzzFeed News
“The author believes encryption is a solution to every problem,” the grugq said in an email to BuzzFeed News, noting that it eschewed other techniques, such as teaching users how to be anonymous online by never revealing or entering into public forms personal details such as real names, birth dates, or countries of origin. “The author is not clear on the real threats that jihadis actually face. The faith in crypto as a panacea to all the dangers faced by online jihadis demonstrates the shallowness of the author’s security understanding.” He said he believed their knowledge was “superficial and based, as usual, on privacy manuals.” “The main takeaway from this guide is that the author believes so strongly in encryption they think it will solve everything. It is the ignorant belief that 'going dark' is as simple as downloading TAILS. In the real world, nation state adversaries are not deterred by a little bit of crypto sprinkled here and there like OPSEC fairy dust,” he said. Thomas Rid, a professor in the department of war studies at King's College London and author of Rise of the Machines, a book that explores why people fear digital surveillance, said he was impressed with the level of detail in the manual, though he questioned the conclusions they drew about certain programs. For instance, the group distrusts TOR, an anonymizing network that sends users through a number of randomly selected servers to help hide their identity. Despite TOR’s popularity with activists around the world, ISIS distrusts it, due to reports that it had been breached, as well as suspicions that the CIA or NSA might be secretly controlling part of the network to spy on its users. “Generally the technical detail provided is impressive — not error-free, but remarkable for what after all is a general interest magazine for jihadis,” Rid wrote to BuzzFeed News in an email. But while some within the Department of Justice and FBI have touted the idea that encryption is dangerous, U.S. intelligence officials from the Department of Defense and military who study ISIS think that even if advice on encryption is inundating the ISIS forums, few are using it and fewer still are likely using it correctly. One military officer said that despite fears of some security officials over militant groups “going dark” by using encryption and hiding their activities online, the process of sending an encrypted email was complicated and prone to errors. “Even people who use these programs every day occasionally make mistakes. The processes described by ISIS are not intuitive. The more they use these programs the greater the chance someone slips up and uses them incorrectly and exposes themselves,” one U.S. military intelligence official told BuzzFeed News during a briefing in D.C. He spoke to BuzzFeed on the condition that he not be named as he wasn’t authorized to speak to press. “In a way, it’s best for us when they increase their presence online as much as possible. The more they do online the more of a digital footprint we have to follow.” Had ISIS only chatted more online prior to the attacks in Paris and Brussels, he added, intelligence agencies might have known enough to stop them.
Tap to play GIF Tap to play GIF BuzzFeed News
The attacks on Paris and Brussels ignited a global debate on encryption and terror. On the one hand are certain intelligence agencies and governments, who say they missed signs of the attacks because ISIS was using the “dark web” to communicate, sending encrypted messages that intel agencies couldn’t crack. On the other hand are cybersecurity activists and experts, who say there is little evidence that sophisticated techniques were used by the attackers to mask their communication. (Quite the opposite, they argue: The attackers lived in the same apartment and used the old-school method of multiple burner phones.) And then there is the media, whose coverage of the issue has received intense scrutiny, with reports of ISIS sending encrypted emails scrubbed from the web just days after their publication, and unnamed sources giving conflicting evidence of how the attackers communicated. Last month, Le Monde and the New York Times published articles based on French intelligence documents that recount the case of 29-year-old Reda Hame, a Parisian IT specialist who traveled to Syria to join ISIS but was instead put through a rapid training course and sent back to France to carry out an attack. The articles described how Hame, who was arrested last August by French police, provided details of his training, including how he was instructed to use TruCrypt, an encryption application, and how, before returning to France, he was given a USB drive containing the program. The reports appeared to hold the first time that a Western intelligence agency confirmed encryption being used by an ISIS operative. But as cybersecurity experts began looking over the details Hame provided, questions emerged over whether the method described in the article would really work, as it would require an entire disk to be encrypted and then uploaded — leaving behind a large digital footprint and room for human error each time it is uploaded. A subsequent story in the New York Times about the Paris attacks also left cybersecurity experts confused when a key paragraph read: “According to the police report and interviews with officials, none of the attackers’ emails or other electronic communications have been found, prompting the authorities to conclude that the group used encryption. What kind of encryption remains unknown.” The problem, the cybersecurity experts pointed out, was that encryption leaves traces of itself everywhere. When an encrypted email is sent, it still appears in inboxes and sent folders, it is just that the text is garbled. Unless you have a key to unlock that text, (or the technology that some intelligence agencies, including the U.S., have to break encrypted emails), all you can see is the garbled gibberish. Had the Paris attackers been sending encrypted emails to their handlers in Iraq and Syria, the garbled messages should have still been there. Because neither French nor Belgian investigators have released their findings on the attacks to the public, it’s impossible to say what evidence they might have into how the attacks were planed. Until they do, cybersecurity experts such as the grugq, who keeps a running list of various ISIS-linked attacks and whether or not reports have confirmed the use of encrypted communications to plan and carry out the attacks, continue to try to find clues in what is leaked to the press.
Google recently said that more than 50,000 people search for the phrase “join ISIS” every month. Jordanian officials say that in an average week, more than 100 Jordanians Google the phrase. The top results in Arabic offer step-by-step instructions as detailed as when to pack a bag and what to tell your parents, according to one Jordanian intelligence official. “What makes ISIS so dangerous is that if you were trying to join the organization tomorrow, and weren’t sure where to start, Google would have most of your answers,” said the official, who spoke to BuzzFeed News by phone on condition that his name not be used as ISIS has threatened to assassinate officials like him in Jordan. “Even if I shut down every mosque, every person who supported ISIS in Jordan, there would still be YouTube videos recruiting young men with gun fights that look like they came out of a Hollywood movie. There would still be Twitter where men tweet about how they are living in paradise with three wives and a house, and there would still be WhatsApp and Telegram and every other network for them to communicate personally with whoever they want.”
BuzzFeed NewsCelebrities are applauding Jennifer Aniston’s candid words on the tabloid scrutiny surrounding female stars.
In a powerful open letter published on The Huffington Post, Aniston addressed the ongoing media speculation about her personal life and appearance.
“The objectification and scrutiny we put women through is absurd and disturbing. The way I am portrayed by the media is simply a reflection of how we see and portray women in general, measured against some warped standard of beauty,” said Aniston.
The actress’s husband, Justin Theroux, shared a rare photo of his wife declaring her his “WCW” with a link to her essay.
#wcw Here's just one reason why. http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_57855586e4b03fc3ee4e626f #gogirl A photo posted by @justintheroux on Jul 13, 2016 at 5:25am PDT
Melissa McCarthy addressed the essay on Entertainment Tonight, saying she is “one hundred thousand billion percent” behind Aniston.
“Everybody needs to stop tearing down women,” said the “Ghostbusters” actress. “It’s always about the way we look ― saying, ‘He’s very interesting,’ ‘He’s a good writer,’ ‘She’s looking older than she was last time we saw her.’ It’s a ridiculous thing. I just hope it gets to the point where it’s embarrassing for people to have such a shallow thought.”
Celebs like Olivia Wilde, Nikki Reed and Fifth Harmony’s Lauren Jauregui took to Twitter to voice their support for Aniston’s words.
True words by Jennifer Aniston: "We use celebrity 'news' to perpetuate this dehumanizing view of females." https://t.co/2jZuXSldf0 — olivia wilde (@oliviawilde) July 13, 2016
Wowza! Everyone should take a second to read this incredibly powerful op-ed written by Jennifer Aniston for Huffing… https://t.co/SFawO7SmIJ — Nikki Reed (@NikkiReed_I_Am) July 13, 2016
Jennifer Aniston: "For the record, I am not pregnant. What I am is fed up." https://t.co/NUdm9TYyxi # via @HuffPostWomen YOU GO GIRL👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 — Lauren Jauregui (@LaurenJauregui) July 13, 2016
This kicks ass.
Jennifer Aniston: "For the record, I am not pregnant. What I am is fed up." https://t.co/PYlpuFwXrA via @HuffPostWomen — Jason Bateman (@batemanjason) July 13, 2016
Just when I thought I couldn't love her any more 👏🏼🙌🏼👊🏼https://t.co/toy6asqhII — Cheryl (@CherylOfficial) July 13, 2016
Controversial journalist Piers Morgan criticized Aniston’s essay, telling her to “dismount from that high horse.”
“It’s this: female stars like Jennifer Aniston deliberately perpetuate the myth of ‘perfection’ by posing for endless magazine covers which have been airbrushed so much that in some cases the celebrity is virtually unrecognisable,” Morgan wrote.
My new Jennifer Aniston column that C-list celebs are fulminating over: https://t.co/8Jje3KgE5D pic.twitter.com/ZhGGN2pRX2 — Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) July 13, 2016
Chrissy Teigen, who often spars with Morgan on Twitter, was quick to jump to Aniston’s defense.
@piersmorgan saw your piece on Jennifer Aniston. Why do you ALWAYS take the road of being the piece of shit asshole? — christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) July 13, 2016
@piersmorgan particularly with women and people of color. tell me it's just for clicks?? Please tell me you aren't TRULY this vile. — christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) July 13, 2016
The support for Aniston’s essay shows she is clearly not the only celeb who has felt the negative effects of tabloid scrutiny.The Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon were subcompact cars produced by Chrysler from December 1977 to 1990.[2] The Omni and Horizon were re-engineered variants of the European Chrysler Horizon, and were the first of many front-wheel drive Chrysler products to follow, including the Dodge Aries/Plymouth Reliant and the Dodge Caravan/Plymouth Voyager/Chrysler Town and Country.
History [ edit ]
The Dodge Omni and the Plymouth Horizon were front-wheel drive, five-door hatchbacks, introduced by the Dodge and Plymouth divisions of Chrysler in North America in January 1978. The Omni and Horizon were the first front-wheel drive cars produced by Chrysler, and among the first American front-wheel drive cars to sell in large numbers (previous front-wheel drive American cars such as the Cord 810, Cadillac Eldorado, and Oldsmobile Toronado were low-volume luxury cars).
Chrysler Horizon
The Omni and Horizon were loosely based on the Horizon, a subcompact car designed by Simca, the French division of Chrysler Europe, and built on the then-new L platform. It survived, in various guises, in Europe until 1987.
Born largely out of the need to replace the aging Simca 1100, the Horizon was essentially a shortened version of the larger Alpine, giving the vehicle an unusually wide track for its length. The Horizon, or Project C2 as it was known inside Simca during development, was intended to be a "world car" (designed for consumers on both sides of the Atlantic), but, in execution, the European and North American versions of the vehicle actually turned out to have very little in common.
When Chrysler exited the European car market (and sold assets to Peugeot, which subsequently sold the same car in Europe as the Talbot Horizon) in 1978, Chrysler retained the North American rights to the car, and began production at Belvidere.
Plymouth Horizon
Chrysler had previously avoided building a subcompact car, preferring to use branded imports like the Mitsubishi-made Dodge Colt instead. Presented as a significant domestic development, the models were initially priced starting at US$2,500. The Dodge Omni was Motor Trend magazine's Car of the Year for 1978, and the related Talbot Horizon was voted European Car of the Year in 1979.
The Omni and Horizon appeared at a critical time for Chrysler, when the company was on the brink of bankruptcy and sought government support to survive. In 1978, Chrysler had beaten out Ford and General Motors to the market with a domestically-produced front-wheel drive car to challenge the VW Rabbit.[3] However, the L-bodies miscarried at first, since 1978 was a year of strong sales for larger cars and demand for compacts and subcompacts noticeably shrank. These initial poor sales of the cars contributed to Chrysler's financial woes at the time, but when the company requested federal assistance, the Omni was an important piece of evidence that they were attempting to compete with imports and build small, fuel-efficient cars and might be worth saving. For the three years leading up to the introduction of Chrysler's K-cars, the Omni/Horizon was Chrysler's best selling model line.[4]
The Omni and Horizon had few interchangeable parts with their European siblings. Aside from the heavier-looking American body panels and bumpers, the OHV Simca engines were replaced with unique 1.7 L SOHC engines sourced from Volkswagen, while MacPherson strut front suspension took the place of the torsion bar arrangement found in the European Horizon. The Volkswagen engine used an enlarged Chrysler-designed cylinder head and intake manifold and produced 75 hp (56 kW) and 90 lb⋅ft (122 N⋅m). Originally, only the CARB-certified version with an air pump and 70 hp (52 kW) had been available.[5] In 1979 power climbed to 77 hp (57 kW), while by 1980 it dropped to 68 hp (51 kW) and 83 lb⋅ft (113 N⋅m) of torque in all fifty states.[6][4]
The climate controls were mounted to the left of the steering wheel rather than in the center stack like in most vehicles, meaning only the driver could adjust the interior temperature. Other Chrysler Corporation products (including the Dodge Charger and Chrysler Cordoba), as well as vehicles from other manufacturers came with instrument panels that placed the climate controls in this general location during the 1970s.
Shortly after their introduction, Consumer Reports tested the Omni and reported that it lost control in hard maneuvering. As front-wheel-drive cars were still considered a new idea in Detroit, the allegation received extensive mainstream coverage, including a piece in Time Magazine.[7] Other auto magazines reported no problems and said the test did not approximate real-world driving conditions.[6] Chrysler made modifications that included a steering damper and a lighter-weight steering wheel.
A special, partially equipped, model with extra high gas mileage also appeared, called the "Miser".[4] Chrysler's 2.2 L K-car engine appeared for the 1981 model year as an upmarket option to the Volkswagen engine, mated to a new four-speed manual with an overdrive fourth.[4] It produced 84 hp (63 kW) at first, rising to 93 hp (69 kW) and finally 96 hp (72 kW) by the end of production. The Volkswagen 1.7 was replaced by a Simca 1.6 L inline-four unit in 1983. This engine produced 62 hp (46 kW) and 86 lb⋅ft (117 N⋅m), and was only available with a manual transmission. The Omni/Horizon received a facelift for the 1984 model year.[2]
In 1985, Chrysler entered an agreement with American Motors Corporation (AMC) to produce Chrysler M platform rear-wheel drive cars, as well as Omnis and Horizons, in AMC's Kenosha, Wisconsin plant, because AMC could produce the cars for less money. The 2.2 L Chrysler inline-four cylinder was the only available engine from 1987 onwards. By this point, the L-bodies were consolidated into a single-trim "America" line in the interest of improved quality control and reduced costs. Despite the P-body Dodge Shadow and Plymouth Sundance effectively superseding the Omni/Horizon in 1987, the cars were kept in production for another three years since their tooling had been amortized and each one sold turned a profit.
Chrysler invested in a number of significant changes that ended up being used for only one year; the cars gained larger exterior rear-view mirrors (borrowed from the departed M-body sedans), a driver's side airbag and a mildly redesigned instrument panel, complete with HVAC controls moved to the center.
The Omni and the Horizon ended production in 1990, and were replaced by the Dodge Shadow/Plymouth Sundance, which were both introduced for 1987. It outlived the European version by three years; Peugeot had bought Chrysler's European division in 1978 and re-badged the Horizon (along with the rest of the British Chrysler and French Simca range) as Talbots, with production lasting until 1987.[8]
Variants [ edit ]
Several variants of the platform appeared later, including a three-door hatchback known as the Dodge 024/Plymouth TC3, and briefly a small car-like truck under the Dodge Rampage/Plymouth Scamp name.
The 024 and TC3 were marketed as sporty cars, although the 77–94 hp (57–70 kW) four-cylinder engines were not powerful and the coupés weighed more than the hatchbacks.[6] The TC3 was renamed the Plymouth Turismo, and the 024 the Dodge Charger in 1983. The last 1,000 Dodge Chargers were modified by Carroll Shelby into Shelby GLHSs.
Omni GLH [ edit ]
1984-1985 Dodge Omni GLH
The ultimate Dodge Omni was the modified Omni GLH. The original name, "Coyote", was rejected, and Carroll Shelby's choice, the initials GLH, which stood for "Goes Like Hell", were taken instead.[9][10] The 1984 model year was the first year of the GLH, which carried over most of the modifications that had been made the previous year to the Shelby Charger. 1985 was the debut of the GLH-T model with the Turbo I (K) engine option. This engine, at low boost (7.2 PSi) coupled with the car's very low weight (as low as 2,200 lb (1,000 kg)), earned this car its name. The car carried over into 1986 unchanged aside from the addition of a hatch-mounted third tail light, and production was then stopped.
1986 Shelby GLHS
The final 500 GLH-T cars (all black) were sold to Shelby, who used them as the basis for the 1986 Shelby GLHS ("Goes Like Hell Some more").[11] These cars were modified by Carroll Shelby in California and sold as Shelbys. With 175 horsepower (130 kW) and 175 lb⋅ft (237 N⋅m) of torque, the Shelby GLHS featured a modified 2.2 L engine with a Turbo II setup, which included a two piece blow-through intake (the GLH-T was a draw-through turbo design), a Shelby ECU, turbo boost raised to a conservative 12 psi, a T2 turbocharger compressor cover, and a front-mounted intercooler. The short block stayed the same between the GLH-T and GLHS. Further modifications included 205/50R15 Eagle GT Gatorback tires mounted on Shelby Centurian wheels, Koni adjustable struts and shocks, and stiffer springs. Different decals were also part of the package; silver pinstripes down the ground effects along with "Shelby" decals replaced the standard red GLH-T decals. A "Shelby" decal was added to the windshield and a large "GLHS" decal was placed on the driver side rear sail panel. All GLHS cars came with a numbered dashboard plaque, Mobil 1 valve cover plaque, Momo shift knob and Shelby leather-wrapped steering wheel. A black-yellow overlay sticker was placed at the bottom of the speedometer to read to 135 mph.
Production numbers [ edit ]
Year Sales 1978 81,611 1979 141,477 1980 138,155 1981 77,039 1982 71,864 1983 42,554 1984 71,355 1985 74,127 1986 73,580 1987 66,907 1988 59,867 1989 46,239 1990 16,733
Production stopped on February 2, 1990, with a total of 961,508 Omnis/Horizons assembled.Even though it’s often the butt of many jokes, premature ejaculation (PE) is no laughing matter. It’s the most common type of sexual dysfunction a man can have, with many experts estimating that up to 30 percent of men have PE. In my new book Overcoming Premature Ejaculation, I use the latest research to distinguish myth from reality and offer a new approach for managing a condition that has left many men, myself included, feeling like a sexual cripple.
There’s been a lot of disagreement and discussion in the medical community about how we should define PE. But the latest, most widely accepted definition—from the International Society for Sexual Medicine (ISSM)— says that PE is a male sexual dysfunction characterized by:
ejaculation that always or nearly always occurs prior to or within about one minute of vaginal penetration;
inability to delay ejaculation on all or nearly all vaginal penetrations;
and negative personal consequences, such as distress, bother, frustration and/or the avoidance of sexual intimacy.
To say that it’s tough to talk about PE is an understatement. Most guys don’t want to admit that they’ve got any kind of sexual problem, especially one as sensitive as ejaculating too soon. It doesn’t help that stereotypes about PE tend to label it as a problem limited to teenagers (just take a look at movies like "American Pie" or "Fast Times at Ridgemont High") or selfish jerks (Lorena Bobbitt famously claimed, after cutting off her husband’s penis, “He always has an orgasm and doesn’t wait for me”).
The truth is that PE can happen to anyone. It doesn’t matter how old you are, how much experience you have, or how much you know about sex. What was once believed to be an anxiety disorder is now thought to include not just psychological factors but biological origins as well. Most guys with PE have chronic PE—they’ve never known any other way.
Do you suffer from chronic PE?
1. Are you unable to control how long you last during sex?
2. Do you climax within a minute or less of starting intercourse?
3. Have you tried various methods to deal with PE, only to have your hopes dashed?
4. Are you dissatisfied with your sex life?
5. Do you often worry about pleasing your partner?
6. Does even foreplay often lead to “end of play?”
7. Do you avoid intimate situations because they could lead to premature ejaculation—so why even bother?
8. Has PE damaged your relationships with women?
If you answered “yes” to most of these questions, you could have chronic PE. And you’re not alone.
Although the stereotype of PE tends to be a teenager who can’t control himself, nothing could be further from the truth. Because lifelong PE is chronic, it’s a problem in young and old men alike. It’s true that your ejaculatory control does get a little better with age, but that’s because your body is getting older, not because your PE is improving. In fact many older men with PE face the double whammy of erectile dysfunction.
Researchers now believe there well may be a genetic basis for chronic PE, not unlike congenital heart problems and other conditions present at birth. Studies of twins show an increased risk of PE in families, and one Dutch study found that men with PE were likely to have at least one first-degree relative (such as a father or brother) with PE, too. This tells us it’s possible that PE is has a genetic basis and that your risk for it may be inherited, just as your risk for heart disease and some types of cancer.
In my book Overcoming Premature Ejaculation the program I recommend is biopsychosocial, or combination therapy, which combines behavioral, medical, and interpersonal approaches. That means there are:
1. Behavioral techniques - things you can do during sex. For years sex therapists have been advising men that PE can be cured with two techniques that focus on arousal-awareness and postponing climax
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Sound Shapes played just fine on PS3 since the day it was released. Ditto Flower and Guacamelee. And heck, I can actually play the Sly Cooper collection on the PlayStation TV by renting an outrageously priced streaming session from PlayStation Now. So why doesn't my cartridge work, eh Sony?
The answer is that for whatever reason, many games have to be patched to run on the PlayStation TV hardware, and though Sony's had nearly an entire year since the system came out in Japan, progress is slow. Killzone: Mercenary is one example of progress: it didn't work then, and has just recently been fixed. It looks and feels pretty damn good for a transplanted handheld game.
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Killzone: Mercenary actually looks pretty good, though less so upscaled to 1080p
But with many other titles, I wasn't so lucky. Velocity X2, a critically-acclaimed top-down shooter, was one of many titles that looked a bit jagged and rough around the edges. That happens when you scale up from the Vita's 5-inch, 720p resolution to a 42-inch 1080p TV. Did I mention that the PS Vita itself doesn't natively output 1080p? It's an issue for games and video content alike. Even a $35 Chromecast played back episodes of The Walking Dead sharper than my new PlayStation.
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And Borderlands 2, which is a PC game scaled down for PS Vita and then back up again on my PS TV, looked ridiculously ugly and often suffered from low framerates. This is all to say nothing of how older PSP games look blown up to the big screen.
Borderlands 2. Now imagine it with more jaggies
But you also shouldn't expect streaming PS3 or PS4 games to be much better. Our sister site Kotaku has already weighed in on the insane prices you'll pay to stream games via PlayStation Now, but you may also need to physically plug in a PS3 controller and/or hook up the PS TV with an ethernet cable if you want to avoid an unplayable amount of lag.
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PlayStation Now Is Still Way Too Expensive Right now, on your PlayStation 4, you can enjoy 90 days of the PS3 racing game F1 2013 for the low, … Read more Read
Streaming Lord of the Rings hack-n-slash Shadow of Mordor from my PS4 to another room in my house was a bit better — and arguably the coolest feature of the whole system — but it didn't look quite as good or run nearly as smoothly as it did when actually playing on the PS4. I struggled to train my bow on an orc long enough to fire a deadly arrow, and that's with both the benefit of bullet time and a rather expensive Wi-Fi router serving my two-bedroom house. Still, it's pretty cool turning on your living room PS4 from your bedroom and firing up the game.
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Nidhogg is legitimately fun on PS TV, and supports two controllers!
This is the point where you're probably expecting me to step back and say the PlayStation TV has loads of potential as soon as the software issues are worked out. And I would definitely like to believe so. The idea of carrying a palmsize game console to a party, whipping out a few controllers and having a blast with local multiplayer games like Nidhogg and Spelunky is hard to resist, and there are folks who might buy it for Minecraft alone. (Nidhogg and Minecraft just came to PS Vita today.)
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Minecraft. Again, imagine it with more jaggies if you have a 1080p TV
But realistically, the PS TV is now a niche of a niche, because the PlayStation Vita itself hasn't done insanely well, and if Sony couldn't manage to get some of its greatest hits and its crucial video apps ready in time for launch — a year after the PS TV's debut in Japan — it's hard to trust that they will do so now.
I tried Spelunky, by the way. Right now, it only supports one controller. One player per screen. I hope Sony patches it soon.
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My recommendation: if you want to play Vita games, buy a Vita. You can get a nice bundle for $200 — only $60 more than you'll pay for a PS TV and the proprietary Sony memory card you need to download any but the smallest games. Did I mention that's not included for $99?I feel called to a vocal ministry of teaching, which means that sometimes I feel led to share some aspect of Quaker tradition in meeting for worship. This morning, the doctrine of the Light pushed against my Spirit-prompt for a good while, but it never felt right to deliver it. As often is the case, I just kept thinking about it and now here it is.
One of the most distinctive features, and one of the most important features, of the Quaker way is the doctrine of the Light. The Light is that mystery within the human that makes it possible to commune directly with the Divine.
Some Quaker writer—I can’t remember who—describes three phases in the history of the Light among Friends, the Light, the Inward Light, and the Inner Light. I would characterize them this way:
the Light—the light AS Christ,
the Inward Light—the light OF Christ, and
the Inner Light—the light BEYOND Christ.
The Light—AS Christ
For George Fox, James Naylor, and many other early Friends, the Light was Christ—not just the light of Christ, but Christ himself. As Jesus says in John 8, “I am the light, and whosoever follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall walk in the light of life.”
For Fox the experience of the Light was a kind of mystical union with Christ, a putting on of the spirit of Christ, the “celestial body” of Christ, as one writer put it, so that one became Christ-like. As Fox put it, “I was in that state which Adam was in before the fall, a state in Christ Jesus that could not fall.”
This was close to blasphemy, and indeed, Naylor was famously tried, convicted, and punished for blasphemy, and Fox was accused three times, tried twice, and convicted once himself. The only reason Fox got off the second time was that Judge Fell, his close associate and then-husband of Fox’s future wife Margaret Fell, was the chief magistrate in the case. Fox and Fell put their heads together and found a loophole in the blasphemy law that got Fox off on a technicality. Fell was such a senior magistrate that his ruling was a more or less binding precedent, and the third time Fox was accused, the prosecutor didn’t even bring the case to trial, knowing he would lose. Nobody tried to accuse Fox again, legally, though his critics continued to accuse him of blasphemy in other public venues.
The Light—OF Christ
A lot of Friends were even nervous about this doctrine. After Fox and Naylor died, Friends put this interpretation aside. As the movement withdrew from the world into the quietist sectarianism of the early 18th century, the understanding of the Light underwent a doctrinal transformation. The Light became the Inward Light, the light OF Christ.
Now, Christ was understood to be outside the human, just as he was for other Christians, but his light shown into the human heart. Its function was to drive away the darkness, to reveal to us our sins, to warn us of sins we were about the commit through the light in the conscience, and to give us strength to overcome the temptation to sin. The Inward Light was a kind of wifi connection to the spirit of Christ, a conduit through which flowed the truth, life, and power of Christ into the human.
The Light—BEYOND Cbrist
This is how we understood the light for the next two hundred years, until Rufus Jones redefined Quakerism around the turn of the 20th century as a mystical religion and reinterpreted Fox’s phrase “that of God in everyone” to be a kind of divine spark on the model of neoplatonic philosophy and gnosticism. The Inward Light now became the Inner Light. The Inner Light was an aspect of the divine that dwelt inherently in the human, a kind of receptor that allowed the greater divine spirit to merge with the lesser spirit of the individual human in mystical experience.
In a sense, we had come full circle to Fox’s understanding of a radical indwelling of the divine in the human, but for Fox that indwelling was Christ and he was too practically-minded, rather than metaphysically minded, to fuss much about how that worked, or what might pre-exist in the human to make it possible. Jones was much clearer about that.
However, the universal, pre-existent, inherent divine spark that Jones gave us was now virtually independent of Christ. It existed before Jesus was born, it was inherent in all humans, and it was behind all mystical experience, regardless of the tradition of the mystic. So as the 20th century progressed, the Inner Light became increasingly detached from Christ in (liberal) Quaker understanding, and it also became less and less about sin, about revealing sin and strengthening us against it. Instead, more and more we understood the Inner Light as a vehicle for mystical experience, spiritual guidance, and continuing revelation without any explicit connection to Christ.
And that’s where we are today.
AdvertisementsN-Acetylserotonin (NAS), also known as normelatonin, is a naturally occurring chemical precursor and intermediate in the endogenous production of melatonin from serotonin.[1][2] It also has biological activity in its own right, including acting as a melatonin receptor agonist, an agonist of the TrkB, and having antioxidant effects.
Biological function [ edit ]
Like melatonin, NAS is an agonist at the melatonin receptors MT 1, MT 2, and MT 3, and may be considered to be a neurotransmitter.[3][4][5][6] In addition, NAS is distributed in some areas of the brain where serotonin and melatonin are not, suggesting that it may have unique central duties of its own instead of merely functioning as a precursor in the synthesis of melatonin.[3] NAS is known to have anti-depressant, neurotrophic and cognition-enhancing effects [7][8] and has been proposed to be a target for the treatment of aging-associated cognitive decline and depression [8]
TrkB receptor [ edit ]
NAS has been shown to act as a potent TrkB receptor agonist, while serotonin and melatonin do not.[3] Subchronic and chronic administration of NAS to adult mice induces proliferation of neural progenitor cells (NPC)s, blockage of TrkB abolished this effect suggesting that it is TrkB-dependent.[9] NAS was also found to significantly enhance NPC proliferation in sleep-deprived mice.[9] It is thought that the anti-depressant and neurotrophic effects of NAS are in part due to its role as a TrkB agonist.[7]
Antioxidant properties [ edit ]
NAS acts as a potent antioxidant, NAS effectiveness as an anti-oxidant has been found to be different depending on the experimental model used, it has been described as being between 5 and 20 times more effect than melatonin at protecting against oxidant damage.[10] NAS has been shown to protect against lipid peroxidation in microsomes and mitochondria.[11] NAS has also been reported to lower resting levels of ROS in peripheral blood lymphocytes and to exhibit anti-oxidant effects against t-butylated hydroperoxide- and diamide-induced ROS.[12] NAS has also been observed to inhibit nitric oxide synthase.[13]
Anti-inflammatory effects [ edit ]
NAS has been reported to have anti-inflammatory effects. NAS has been shown to inhibit LPS-stimulated production of the proinflammatory cytokine TNF-alpha in differentiated THP-1-derived human monocytes.[14]
Miscellaneous [ edit ]
NAS may play a role in the antidepressant effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs).[3] The SSRI fluoxetine and the MAO-A inhibitor clorgyline upregulate AANAT indirectly through serotonergic mechanisms and thereby increase NAS levels after chronic administration, and this correlates with the onset of their antidepressant effects.[3][15] Furthermore, light exposure inhibits the synthesis of NAS and reduces the antidepressant effects of MAOIs.[3] In addition, AANAT knockout mice display significantly greater immobility times versus control mice in animal models of depression.[3] These data support a potential role for NAS in mood regulation and in antidepressant-induced therapeutic benefits.
Through a currently unidentified mechanism, NAS may be the cause of the orthostatic hypotension seen with clinical treatment of MAOIs.[15][16] It reduces blood pressure in rodents, and pinealectomy (the pineal gland being a major site of NAS and melatonin synthesis) abolishes the hypotensive effects of clorgyline.[15][16]
Biochemistry [ edit ]
NAS is produced from serotonin by the enzyme aralkylamine N-acetyltransferase (AANAT) and is converted to melatonin by acetylserotonin O-methyltransferase (ASMT).
NAS is able to penetrate the blood–brain barrier, unlike serotonin.[17]
See also [ edit ]Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell says it's time to discuss allowing school officials to carry firearms on campus to help keep America's children safe.
Amy Hunter, wtop.com
WASHINGTON – Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell says it’s time to discuss allowing school officials to carry firearms on campus.
“If people were armed, not just a police officer, but other school officials that were trained and chose to have a weapon, certainly there would be an opportunity to stop an individual trying to get into the school,” McDonnell said on WTOP’s “Ask the Governor” show Tuesday.
“I know there is a knee-jerk reaction against that, but I think we should have a discussion about it.”
McDonnell became the most prominent national Republican figure to speak in favor of gun rights since the shooting massacre that left 27 people dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Friday.
In the days since, pro-gun camps have remained quiet on the topic — most notably the National Rifle Association — and several Republicans who formerly supported gun rights have come out in favor of increased gun control.
“If a person (like Sandy Hook’s principal) was armed and trained, could they have stopped the carnage?” McDonnell posed. “Perhaps.”
McDonnell’s comments on WTOP elicited a strong reaction from Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va. who says the governor’s comments “blame the victims.” (To hear Connolly’s full interview listen to the audio to the right.)
McDonnell said he is still stunned by Friday’s mass shooting and believes the immediate aftermath of such events is not the right time to make policy changes. However, a larger discussion about the related issues is appropriate.
“The key is don’t over-react. Don’t react when you’re emotional because your policies might not be right. The key is looking at what works,” he said.
Currently, laws in Virginia ban anyone from having a loaded gun while walking on school property. Residents with concealed carry permits may drive onto school property with their firearms loaded as long as they don’t exit the vehicle, says Philip Van Cleave with the Virginia Citizens Defense League.
Those who don’t have a concealed carry permit, or permit holders who will need to exit their vehicle, are required to unload the firearm and put it into a separate, closed container before driving onto school property.
Law enforcement officers are exempt from such regulations.
McDonnell says he has ordered an audit of school safety policies, is reviewing current procedures and has created a task force of school officials, police, safety experts and parents to review school safety.
Virginia employs unarmed school resource officers to help at its public schools, McDonnell says. The number of these officers and their efficacy is one of the elements the newly-created task force will look into.
“My hope is that we’re not at the point where when a little first- or second- grader comes into school, the first thing they see is a police officer with a gun,” he said. “But obviously, we’re going to do, first and foremost, what’s right for children and what’s right for public safety.”
Focusing solely on gun control is not a comprehensive solution to this problem, McDonnell said several times during his one-hour interview. The health of our culture as a whole, access to mental health care, personal responsibility and Christian charity play a role in curbing America’s violence, as well, he said.
“How are we going to be a more just and fair and compassionate society so people don’t act out like this?”
In Virginia, people who have been deemed mentally unstable by a judge are automatically disqualified from purchasing or carrying a firearm, McDonnell said. He does not support “prior restraint” laws that he says prohibit law-abiding citizens from exercising their civil rights, such as owning guns or high-capacity magazines.
“We punish people for violating the law after the fact,” he says. “We have our cherished 1st Amendment. We don’t generally favor prior restraint.”
Further, McDonnell does not believe that mandatory gun registration is an effective response to Friday’s tragedy.
“A lengthy system of registering firearms, I don’t know if that would work. It’s really hard on me to comment on the multiple suggestions that are coming out,” he said. “I can’t tell you whether gun registration would work. It might make people feel good and feel safe, but I’m interested in what will work.”
McDonnell talked about funding for mental health care in Virginia, the proposed budget amendments and transportation funding on Tuesday. Below is a live blog of the full interview.
Follow @WTOP on Twitter.
(Copyright 2012 by WTOP. All Rights Reserved.)Want to write about Espruino? Check out this page
What is Espruino?
Espruino is a small computer that anyone can use to control things around them. Its JavaScript interpreter gives you instant feedback so that you can experiment and develop whatever your level of experience. Even if you can’t program, you can still get started quickly with our Web-based graphical code editor!
You don't need any compilation or 'flashing' step, or any software on the host computer. You just write code, and as soon as you type a command it executes.
Open Source
On successful completion of the KickStarter, we will release all software and hardware source files with an Open Source Licence, so Espruino can easily be ported to other platforms, such as Arduino, Carambola, Raspberry Pi, and even the Sony Smartwatch!
Espruino is extremely flexible - check out some of our projects and tutorials
What makes it stand out from other boards?
Write code using the extremely popular JavaScript language
You can be writing code just a few minutes after unboxing
Uses much less power than Linux boards (like the Raspberry Pi), so will run for longer on batteries
Loads of IO pins, with multiple I2C, SPI, USART, and Analog Inputs and Outputs
It can be used as an IO board for your PC, Mac or Raspberry Pi - there's no need to program it first.
Event-based programming allows different bits of code to be used together much more easily.
You can debug by inspecting variables as the code is running.
Simply Copy + Paste different bits of code together to create your project.
Instant Feedback?
Yes! While you can program Espruino in a traditional (or graphical) way, you can also program it via an interactive console. This means that when you type a command and press enter it will be executed immediately.
Not only is it fun, but it's great for debugging your software (and hardware!), and even better for building up your project's functionality one step at a time.
You're not limited to just the interactive way of programming though - you can program whichever way you want to using the Web UI:
Compatibility
You can control an Espruino device from almost anything - Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Raspberry Pi, Android and even iOS. You can even add a Bluetooth module and program it wirelessly!
Why JavaScript?
We were looking for a language that:
Doesn't need compiling
Can be modified and added to while running
Has good support for Strings, Objects, Maps and Arrays
Has similar syntax to common languages like C, C++ (Arduino) and Java
Can easily be event-based
Is widely used, easy to learn and flexible
JavaScript is the obvious (and possibly the only) language that does all this. Almost every website on the internet depends on it, and many websites such as Codeacademy provide free tutorials and lessons. Millions of people use it every day.
We've tried to keep the API similar to Arduino's though - so if you've done any Arduino programming you should feel right at home. Even if you haven't, it means that a lot of what you learn with Espruino will be transferrable to other platforms.
Espruino compared to Arduino - Blinking Lights
Almost anyone who has used Arduino has tried the Blinking Lights example. Here's the code to blink one light on Espruino (left), or Arduino (right).
Espruino's event-based code clearly makes this easier. But what about the obvious next step: flashing two lights at different speeds?
This is where Espruino shines. Just copy your code again, change the variable name and the light you want to flash. In Arduino you have to re-write your code completely.
The more functions you add, the more obvious the difference gets!
The Hardware
The Espruino board itself has been designed to be extremely small and flexible and to allow you to use shields or add the components you want directly to your board. Why buy a bulky, expensive motor driver shield when you can just solder on a single chip that costs $1!
The surface mount prototype area allows you to add all kinds of devices such as motor/stepper drivers, accelerometers, even connections for.NET Gadgeteer modules. We’ll even suggest common components (along with their suppliers) and ways to connect them on our website.
It’s Open Hardware too - circuit diagrams and schematics will be available on our website - along with designs for 3D printed boxes.
I want to add my own functionality to Espruino. Can I do that?
Yes! Espruino is very powerful, and you may be able to do everything you want from within it. However if you want to write your own C code, Espruino will be Open Source so you'll have full access to do whatever you want.
Why a KickStarter?
If you’ve heard of Espruino before, you’ll know that an early version of our software has been online for a while. During that time we've received great feedback which we've used to develop the software further.
To unlock Espruino’s full potential, we want something that you can get out of the box and have running in just a few minutes. That’s not going to happen unless there are boards pre-installed with the Espruino Software - so that’s what we’re doing!
Hundreds of people have asked us if they can use Espruino's Source Code - and we've listened. That's why we'll make Espruino Open Source if this KickStarter completes successfully.
We need your help though. We can’t make the Espruino boards affordable in small quantities, so we need to make a big order. We also need to fund the development of the code. That's where KickStarter comes in!
What is the money for?
As you can see, we already have a fully working prototype. We need your support so that we can:
Make a large order and get the price down
Make the Source Code accessible and easy to use for its Open Source release
Produce more documentation, tutorials, example projects and videos
Improve our Chrome web app and the graphical code editor that comes with it
Make Espruino sustainable - so we can keep adding to it and supporting our users
Technical Specifications
Note: This board layout is not final, but the board you get will have the following specifications:
Less than half the size of a business card ( 54mm x 41mm )
STM32 32-bit 72MHz ARM Cortex M3 CPU
256KB of Flash memory, 48KB of RAM
Micro USB connector
Input Voltage Range of 3.6v to 15v
Battery connector (JST 2 Pin)
Built-in SD card connector
Red, Green and Blue LEDs
Pads to allow HC-05 Bluetooth modules to be added
Extremely low profile
0.1" Pin spacing
44 GPIO Pins, which can handle: 26 PWM Pins, 16 ADC Pins, 3 USARTs, 2 SPI, 2 I2C and 2 DACs
Prototype area which can be used in many different configurations, for example: Servo Headers, Up to 14x 500mA outputs, 2x.NET Gadgeteer connectors, or NRF24L01+ wireless transceiver modules
WiFi Support with the TI CC3000 WiFi module (not included)
Rewards
There's a large selection of different rewards now, so we've produced this table to help explain what you get at each level. If you've already pledged don't worry - you can still change your pledge and reward via KickStarter:
Because this KickStarter is in the UK, prices are in British Pounds, however you can pledge from any country. The exchange rates are roughly as follows:
£1 = $1.6 USD
£1 = €1.2 EUR
Manufacturing Plan
Before the KickStarter
We started work on Espruino over a year ago. Over the winter we tested the software on several different processors from the STM32F1, 2 and 4 families. From this we determined that the best fit for the Espruino board was the STM32F103RCT6.
We then designed the circuit board and had 10 prototype bare PCBs created locally in the UK by Newbury Electronics Ltd. We soldered all of the components on by hand at home and tested different configurations to ensure that the boards could be manufactured without problems and to test out different components.
After evaluating the cost of manufacturing and sourcing components in the UK we have decided to manufacture using the reputable Chinese manufacturing company, Seeed Studio. Over the last two months we have worked with Seeed to improve our design and, sourcing components from Seeed's Open Parts Library, to ensure we are not compromising on quality. This has enabled us to produce the design for the current version of the Espruino Board.
During the KickStarter Campaign
We now believe we have the final revision of the PCB and BOM and Seeed are currently producing two production prototypes which we should receive by early September. We will test these thoroughly once we receive them. Although we do not anticipate having to make any changes to the design, the timescales for our Rewards allow for us to make several more revisions- these would be produced through an accelerated process in the UK (2 days per revision) so this should not cause any significant delay.
We should therefore have finalised prototypes which meet our high standards by the end of the KickStarter campaign.
Mid-October
Once we have these we will order 10 early prototypes which we will use for our Impatient Developer Reward and to run a final set of tests. At latest these should be produced by mid-October so they can be sent out to meet the Reward deadline.
End of October
So by the end of October we will be in a position to place a bulk order with Seeed for all our other Rewards. The Espruino software will definitely be ready by then. At the time of launch it is fully functioning but we will be making it easier to use, more efficient and powerful as we develop more tutorials for our website during September and October.
December - January
The majority of the boards will then be produced by Seeed during the autumn. Seeed have a one month turn around so the boards should be ready for shipping by the end of November. We've put a predicted timescale of January for most Rewards, but we anticipate that you will receive your Rewards a lot earlier than that, almost certainly by Christmas! We just want to make sure that we have time to deal with any unexpected delays or problems, rather than ship anything that is not completely perfect!
Seeed Studio will ship the rewards directly to backers from their factory. They have years of experience of shipping worldwide so using them ensures that you get your rewards as quickly as possible and lets us focus on improving tools, tutorials and other documentation on our website ready for when your board arrives.
We'll be keeping all our backers informed of our progress via KickStarter's update system.
After we've met all our KickStarter obligations, we'll be selling Espruino boards via distributors. If you're interested in becoming a distributor yourself, please contact us.
£50,000 Stretch Goal - CC3000 WiFi (COMPLETE!)
You'll now be able to plug a CC3000 WiFi module right in to Espruino, and use it to get data from websites or even create your own Web Server!
£60,000 Stretch Goal - NPM Node.js module loading (COMPLETE!)Latest three installments of My Hero Academia served as a bit of a break for the animation staff before the final stretch of season 2, which will presumably be packed with some of the most intense moments in the entire series. That doesn’t mean there’s no interesting topics to talk about though! Let’s see how the show fared during these more laid back moments.
Episode 31
Storyboard: Seiji Mizushima
Episode Direction: Takuhiro Kadochi
Chief Animation Direction: Hitomi Odashima
Animation Direction: Makoto Koga
Key Animation: Makoto Koga, Rikiya Okano, Moeko Mitsuki, Yoshihisa Sato, SNIPES, Katsuyuki Tsubouchi, Atsushi Yoshida, Yoshie Sakata, Michiko Ishida, Haruka Sakai, Yumi Sudarehata, Tomomi Ikeda, Yoshimi Iwata, Erina Uemura, Yuri Hanazawa, Nao Miyazawa, Yukihiro Kobayashi, Shota Tsutsumi, Kosei Kudo, Shigenori Awai, Akiko Kawazoe
Production Assistance: Nomad
— This episode lived up to its title and was a simple aftermath of the Stain arc. A fitting moment to outsource the animation and move the main staff to more demanding content. Studio Nomad was tasked with an episode for the fifth time in the franchise and the result was as usual satisfactory yet unremarkable. Compared to their previous effort on episode 26, there were fewer off-model drawings thanks to Hitomi Odashima’s rock solid chief supervision.
— And while I’m on that topic, the second half of season 2 seems to be operating with sort of a rotation of chief animation directors: we have Umakoshi, followed by Odashima and then Komori. It’s definitely the result of tighter production schedule, but this model allows all of them to participate on their episodes to a bigger extent. As proof of that, Umakoshi and Komori worked as both chief and regular animation directors on their latest episodes and their own styles were very clearly reflected in them. Knowing Umakoshi though, I’m sure he will sneak into some other episodes regardless of the order as well.
— Toshio Kobayashi – an animator specialized in mecha and effects work – was credited for key animation under his usual pen name SNIPES. He had trouble finding a job after the production of Gundam Unicorn wrapped up and eventually asked for work on twitter when studio Manglobe went bankrupt. It’s rather weird to see him appear on Nomad’s episode, but I’m glad he’s getting to do some animation work nonetheless. He probably handled this short bit near the end.
— I probably made it sound like this episode was a lesser priority, but it clearly had its important moments from a storytelling point. None other than Seiji Mizushima was tasked to provide storyboards, and as you already know he’s a person who greatly influenced series director Nagasaki’s career in the past. The viral video of Stain was probably the key bit of this episode in the bigger picture, and the delivery was appropriately terrifying. Combined with the tease of new villains, I can see why a director of Mizushima’s calibre was asked to handle this episode.
Episode 32
Storyboard: Shinji Sato
Episode Direction: Ikuro Sato
Animation Direction: Yoshiyuki Kodaira, Takashi Murai, Minami Sakura
Animation Direction Cooperation: Norie Kanakubo
Mecha Animation Direction Cooperation: Takaaki Izumo
Key Animation: Yuki Ito, Saori Surugi, Naoto Uchida, Arisa Hoshina, Kari Higuchi, Tomomi Ishii, Kazue Motohiro, Aiko Oura, Makito Uehara, Nanami Tanaka, Haruka Saito, Yoko Kadokami, Satsuki Tamura, Misato Seki, Yukiko Busa, Yuko Dangi, Akiko Otsuka, Mariko Nishimura, Shotaro Tamemizu, Erika Okada, Yuka Shibata, Yoshino Matsumoto, Fujiko Aoyagi, Yuki Kon
— Anime original content! The nightmare of the most faithful manga fans! A simple mention of the word filler and an imaginary folder knife opens in their pocket. Interestingly enough, this doesn’t seem to be the case here as this episode was met with rather positive reception. Why was that? I’d like to stick to my own thesis: the power of kero.
— If you’ve been regularly reading the transcriptions of staff lists above each episodic coverage (which you likely don’t, since that’s a lot of names to pay attention to!), you’ve probably noticed something special about this episode. Yes, this was the first episode in the whole series without a chief animation director listed. I mentioned in my post about episode 27 how Umakoshi seems to trust Yoshiyuki Kodaira and Takashi Murai, and doesn’t correct much of their output. This episode once again proved my point. Joined by Minami Sakura, who had her animation directing debut a few weeks ago, this episode was all-around polished without a need of additional supervision.
— Another interesting thing in the credits, although less evident, was the overwhelming female to male ratio on the key animation list. This has been a trend throughout the second season, but never to this extent. 21 women and 3 men is quite the gap!
— There were two animation highlights worth a mention in this episode. First was the short one on one fight between Ochaco and Gunhead, possibly animated by Naoto Uchida who shared this clip on his twitter. He’s a young freelance animator who previously worked regularly on Mob Psycho 100. This was the seventh episode of HeroAca he worked on, so he’s quite the regular. The second noteworthy sequence was the final showdown between Selkie and Innsmouth, which featured some striking poses, including what seemed to be an attempt to imitate the famous Obari punch.
— Shinji Sato was faced with the challenge to draw the storyboards based on the script alone, rather than closely following original manga’s framing as everyone else has been doing. His work was handled by Ikuro Sato, a professional episode director who has been working in this field since 1989 and exclusively for BONES since 2003.
Episode 33
Storyboard: Kou Matsuo
Episode Direction: Takayuki Yamamoto
Chief Animation Direction: Takahiro Komori, Yoshihiko Umakoshi
Animation Direction: Atsuko Saito
Animation Direction Assistants: Emi Kouno, Ryo Haga
Key Animation: Kazuhiko Ishii, Junko Matsushita, Yumiko Nakamura, Ryosuke Kuwabara, Yuki Tomiyoshi, Chiho Fujiwara, Masaru Sano, Yagi Motoki, Emi Kouno, Yukako Futagami, Ryo Haga, Takenori Tsukuma, Shiori Nakasone, Shota Tsutsumi, Shigeru Uchihara, Shigehiro Sato, Kazuo Takeuchi, Takeshi Nishino, Hiroki Ikeshita, Hiroaki Hanawa, Setsuko Umino
Production Assistance: C2C
— Final installment of this three episode intermezzo was without a doubt the turning point of the show, revealing the origin of One for All alongside with whom I presume is the main villain. It doesn’t seem like this story will wrap up within the runtime of the second season by any stretch, which makes the impact of this episode even broader.
— The episode was outsourced to studio C2C. You might recognize from the recent WorldEnd TV anime, which they coproduced with Satelight. C2C has a long ongoing partnership with BONES, animating subcontracted episodes on their shows since Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood in 2009. The result of this partnership so far is 19 full episodes and half of the fourth Towa no Quon movie. And the relationship works both ways, as BONES acknowledged that they gladly funneled talented animators towards the previously mentioned WorldEnd whenever they had the chance. The studio has been recently praised within the industry for their up-and-coming animation talent. It’s been very satisfying to watch them grow over the years and gradually escape the bubble of average subcontracting studios; after all, C2C stands for Challenge to Challenge! Hopefully, they’ll be able to produce a full length TV anime alone in the future.
— Although the credits list two chief animation directors, it’s very clear who did the heavy lifting here. Komori’s style reflected on the majority of the episode and as usual his drawings of Deku were very easy to tell apart. Only the pre-opening part looked noticeably dodgy. Umakoshi stepped in to supervise the stylized drawings in the flashback.
— The part that caught my attention the most animation-wise was Deku’s fast maneuvering in the training field. Not only was the movement itself rather neat, but the synchronization with CG backgrounds enhanced the experience even further. One name I recognized as a potential suspect in the list of animators was Takeshi Nishino, a popular animator among the fans of Toei Animation’s shows. Just a wild guess, but perhaps it was his work.
— Kou Matsuo is by all means a regular storyboard artist on HeroAca at this point, and this episode played to his strengths. He’s possibly the most unique storyteller in the crew, so it was wise of Nagasaki to assign this episode to him. The clear highlight was the flashback sequence, which allowed staff to take artistic liberties based on Matsuo’s storyboard and deliver one of the most visually striking moments in the whole show. The grotesque overs
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their peoples’ grievances. Qaboos addressed the divisiveness of tribalism by incorporating the majlis tradition into modern Oman’s political structure.
Traditional Oman also boasted a powerful merchant class. Due to international trade expertise, such merchants had transitioned into modern technocrats and were easily co-opted by Qaboos for vital administrative roles in government, alongside tribal leaders to bolster tribal allegiance to the new Oman and its father.
From his ascension, it is clear that Qaboos was to be the father of the nation. In national governance, he was the most senior political administrator, dominating the SAF, foreign affairs, finances and even the majlis as an instrument to bridge tribalism with the nation state. Such absolute rule continues to penetrate Oman’s political and cultural aspects, defining nationalism as Qaboos. Post-Arab Spring, succession becomes precarious, for the aging Sultan heads a young populous that remembers no other father.
Succession: he’s not Qaboos
Praise by Omanis for their Sultan hides the fear of uncertainty in a post-Qaboos Oman. Akin to the unenviable position of Jordan, Oman is squeezed between the borders of conservative and restless states: Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
Oman requires stable rule, heretofore personified by the Sultan’s central authority. Oil-wealth saw Oman modernise at a comfortable pace and enjoy the illusion of certainty amid tumultuous periods in the Middle East. Childless, Qaboos has acknowledged naming his successor in a sealed envelope should Royal Council fail to appoint an heir upon his death. Here lies the Achilles’ heel of Qaboos’ success: there can be only one father.
Qaboos’ successor will inherit regional instability, border unrest with Yemen and the rise of proximate Iran. He will not inherit the relationship of trust, loyalty and admiration that Qaboos gained over four decades. He may be unable to rely on oil-wealth amid crushed prices. Qaboos has created a precarious legacy. His absolute power and restructuring of military and security forces into an influential political class means the next Sultan will have to address the curse of an authoritarian predecessor.
Will Omanis accept that an untested administrator continues personal rule? Can a father pass the mantle to an unrelated and barely symbolic son? Further, can the ‘son’ match Qaboos’ recent creation of 50,000 jobs in the military and security class, ensuring the loyalty of the sector that pre-empts the first signs of revolution?
Conclusion
Oman’s modern nationalism is ultimately the result of personal rule dominating all aspects of public administration. Pervasive portraits of the Sultan ensure that Omanis are reminded of their father daily, while Qaboos’ role as sheikh of the majlis system co-opts tribalism into a framework of nationalism united under one man. Throughout his rule, Qaboos has successfully contended with tribes and merchants as Oman’s political circle. The expansion of the SAF in response to Dhofar and later expansion of other security services created dominant elites loyal to His Majesty in return for privileges.
A successor may find that absolute rule is no longer a reality but that power will be shared among the most influential classes of tribe, merchants and military. Just as Egypt’s republics have been ruled through a presidential vassal by military pillars (with fatal consequences for those who shunned such masters, like Mubarak), Oman’s nationalism may yield to a class-based system of regime security.NewsAlert
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Russian satellite on mission to peer inside black holes
BY STEPHEN CLARK
SPACEFLIGHT NOW
Posted: July 18, 2011
Russia launched a long-delayed radio telescope Monday to help astronomers see deeper into supermassive black holes, obtain views of collapsed stars and better measure the influence of dark energy on the cosmos.
The Spektr-R radio observatory launched on a Zenit rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Credit: Roscosmos
It was the largest Russian-led space telescope to launch in two decades. The launch came a few months before Russia plans to send a probe to Mars in November on the country's first interplanetary mission since 1996. The 8,000-pound Spektr-R spacecraft blasted off at 0231 GMT Monday (10:31 p.m. EDT Sunday) on a Zenit 3F rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The 20-story rocket rumbled into a clear morning sky at Baikonur, disappearing from view as it shed its kerosene-fueled first stage above the stratosphere. Less than 10 minutes after launch, the two-stage Zenit, supplied by Ukraine, placed the Russian Freget upper stage into a parking orbit a few hundred miles high. The Fregat stage fired twice to propel the Spektr-R satellite into a higher orbit reaching as far as 210,000 miles from Earth, according to Roscosmos, the Russian space agency. The Fregat upper stage released the satellite at 0606 GMT (2:06 a.m. EDT), Roscosmos reported. The craft's flight path will naturally shift due to the influence of the moon's gravity over the course of the five-year mission. It will take Spektr-R up to nine days to go around the Earth in its egg-shaped orbit. Spektr-R will next extend two solar arrays and unfurl its flower-like dish receiver antenna to a diameter of 10 meters, or almost 33 feet. It is comprised of 27 carbon fiber petals that take up to two hours to fully deploy. The Spektr-R satellite is one element of an international network of observatories in a project called RadioAstron. When linked with ground-based telescopes across the globe, Spektr-R will facilitate unprecedented views into black holes that form the centers of galaxies.
Diagram of Spektr-R's orbit and a ground-based telescope, illustrating the concept of interferometry. Credit: Lebedev Physical Isntitute/Astro Space Center
The combination of ground and space telescopes is called interferometry, creating an artifical observatory comparable to a single dish larger than Earth. The broad size of the combined instrument means it can collect extremely faint radio signals unheard by any other sensor. The RadioAstron project's exceptional sensitivity could allow the connected telescopes to peer into black holes and resolve the event horizon, the point at which nothing -- not even light -- can escape a black hole's immense gravitational grasp. When tied together, RadioAstron's telescopes have a resolution of 7 microarcseconds. That's thousands of times better than the Hubble Space Telescope, which has a peak resolution between 0.05 and 0.1 arcseconds. An arcsecond is swath of the sky measuring less than three one-thousandths of a degree. But Hubble observes the universe in visible, ultraviolet and near-infrared light, while the RadioAstron mission will unveil the unseen cosmos emitting radio waves. One of the primary targets the RadioAstron team plans to study is M87, a nearby galaxy that features a jet of matter emanating from a supermassive black hole at its center. It is also a well-known source of radio waves. The M87 galaxy is the best opportunity for RadioAstron researchers to image the event horizon, which is large enough to swallow the entire solar system. Astronomers estimate M87's central black hole is 6.6 billion times as massive as the sun.
Artist's concept of the Spektr-R satellite in orbit. Credit: NPO Lavochkin
The RadioAstron project could potentially answer the question of whether the galaxy's core actually contains the mouth of a wormhole, a theorized shortcut through space and time, according to the Lebedev Physical Institute's Astro Space Center, a division of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Astro Space Center is coordinating the Spektr-R mission. The spacecraft was manufactured by NPO Lavochkin, a leading Russian satellite developer. Other scientific studies for the RadioAstron mission include pulsars -- the fast-spinning collapsed remnants of dead stars -- dark energy's role in the expansion of the universe, star formation, and interstellar plasma, according to the Astro Space Center. Before Spektr-R, radio telescope interferometers were limited to the size of Earth. But the Russian-led satellite mission was deployed in an orbit taking it nearly to the moon, adding a new observatory to the chain of ground-based facilities and expanding their collecting area into space. Russian scientists first drew up plans for the Spektr-R mission three decades ago, but the project was mired in economic muck during the fall of the Soviet Union and the early years of a new Russian government. After scrapping a complex spacecraft design riddled with technical problems and rising costs, Russian engineers settled on a more modest mission in the early 2000s.
Spektr-R's 33-foot reflector during a deployment test on the ground. Credit: NPO Lavochkin
The RadioAstron project includes major contributions from the United States, China, India, Australia, Japan, Germany, Spain, Italy, Finland, Hungary, the Netherlands, and the European Space Agency. The first "fringe search" science campaign involving Spektr-R is planned later this year once the satellite finishes testing in orbit. The 1,000-foot-diameter Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico will join the search, along with the smaller Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, a 330-foot-wide dish in Effelsberg, Germany, and up to a half-dozen more facilities around the world, according to the Astro Space Center's website. More radio telescopes on Earth could participate in future searches.SAN FRANCISCO — Authorities have charged two East Bay women with more than a dozen felonies in an extensive workers’ compensation fraud scheme that netted more than half a million dollars.
Adela Delores Belfrey, 52, a claims adjuster at AmTrust North America, and Catherine Gregoire, 52, an ex-employee of the same firm, were taken into custody Thursday, authorities said.
San Francisco District Attorney’s Office investigators arrested them on suspicion of carrying out a scheme to deposit about $528,000 of company funds into bank accounts controlled by Gregoire. She reportedly created multiple shell companies to facilitate the fraud, then submitted claims to Belfrey for approval.
Authorities allege that Gregoire paid nearly $135,000 in cash for a 2014 Mercedes G550 sport-utility vehicle with funds received illegally from AmTrust North America, a San Francisco firm that provides small businesses with liability insurance.
Investigators seized the vehicle this week, according to the District Attorney’s Office. Belfrey was arrested at her office in Pleasanton; Gregoire was arrested as she disembarked a plane from Los Angeles at Oakland International Airport.
Belfrey, of Oakland, and Gregoire, of Hercules, have been charged with insurance fraud, false and fraudulent claims, claims adjuster fraud, grand theft by false pretenses, forgery and money laundering. Belfrey also was charged with two counts of identity theft.
Belfrey is being held in custody on $325,000 bail and is expected to be arraigned on Tuesday. Officials did not say if Gregoire was still in custody.
Contact Chris De Benedetti at 510-293-2480. Follow him at Twitter.com/cdebenedetti.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Mike Wooldridge reports from Pakistan on Nawaz Sharif's comeback
Nawaz Sharif appears on course to secure a majority in Pakistan's parliament and form the next government after claiming victory in Saturday's election.
Unofficial results suggest his Pakistan Muslim League has won easily, though he has reportedly opened talks with independents to guarantee a majority.
EU observers report that incidents of violence did not deter voters.
Mr Sharif was congratulated by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Mr Sharif was quoted as saying he would be happy if Mr Singh came to his inauguration, but it is unclear when a formal invitation will be issued.
The two spoke on Sunday, Mr Sharif told an Indian reporter.
Nawaz Sharif has a record of delivering high-profile infrastructure projects. This time he is promising a bullet train between Karachi and Peshawar. Why Pakistan voted for Sharif
"We had a long chat on the phone and then he extended an invitation to me and I extended an invitation to him."
The election appears to have paved the way for the first transition from one elected government to another in a country prone to military takeovers.
Mr Sharif is set to become prime minister for the third time.
Former cricketer Imran Khan, whose Movement for Justice Party (PTI) is in a close fight for second place, has promised to provide genuine opposition.
Higher turnout
Analysts say Mr Sharif, 63, is in a far stronger position than the outgoing Pakistan People's Party (PPP) which led a weak coalition, often on the verge of collapse.
The PPP of late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was badly beaten in the election. It was one of several secular parties unable to campaign freely due to Taliban attacks.
Pakistani media say Mr Sharif's PML-N has so far captured at least 125 seats with the PTI and the PPP on around 30 each.
Analysts said the PML-N was likely to win around 130 seats and should be able to make up the required majority of 137 with support from independents and small parties.
Once it achieves a majority, Mr Sharif's party would be allocated most of 70 other parliamentary seats reserved for women and non-Muslim minorities.
An extraordinary vote of confidence in democracy Richard Howitt, EU observer mission
An election commission spokesman said turnout had been around 60%. In 2008 it was 44%.
EU election observers said 64 people died on polling day itself, and that violence had distorted the electoral process in those areas affected.
But the mission added that at 90% of the 600 polling stations monitored, the conduct of the election was satisfactory or good.
On the whole, it said, there was a strong commitment by candidates and parties to the democratic process.
"The turnout in defiance of the threats against the process was an extraordinary vote of confidence in democracy itself," European Parliament member Richard Howitt told a news conference in Islamabad.
'Towards democracy'
Nawaz Sharif Born in 1949 to family of a prominent Lahore industrialist
Served as Punjab's chief minister from 1985 to 1990 under military dictator Zia ul-Haq
Previous terms as prime minister 1990-1993 and 1997-1999
Deposed by Gen Musharraf and given a jail term
Went into exile in Saudi Arabia before returning in 2007
Seen as conservative and pro-business Profile: Nawaz Sharif
The Karachi stock exchange hit a record high on the expectation of a Sharif-led government. He is seen as favouring the free market and deregulation.
Ishaq Dar, a senator, has been chosen to serve as finance minister in the new administration. He held the same post in Mr Sharif's second government in 1998 and 1999 and again in 2008.
Mr Sharif - who was toppled in a military coup in 1999 and spent years in exile - held talks on Sunday on forming a government.
Imran Khan said the election would boost Pakistan's young democracy.
"We are now moving towards democracy. I congratulate the nation on the numbers in which they turned out to vote," he said.
But Mr Khan added that his party was collecting evidence of alleged vote-rigging.
Mr Khan has been bedridden after a fall at a campaign rally, but a doctor treating him told the BBC that the PTI leader would be walking again within two weeks, with the help of a temporary brace.
"He's virtually pain free, he's able to turn in bed independently," said Dr Aasim Yusuf, medical director of the Shaukat Khanum hospital in Lahore.
"He had no nerve or neurological damage in any case, so he's just recovering from his fractures. So we expect him to make a full recovery."
Dr Yusuf added Mr Khan was expected to progress quicker than normal because of his good health and fitness.
President Obama congratulated Pakistan on the election, welcoming the "historic, peaceful and transparent transfer of civilian power".
During his election campaign, Mr Sharif said he would end Pakistan's involvement in the US-led war on terror, without saying whether that included military operations against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
On Monday, he said Pakistan had "good relations" with the US, and that any concerns on either side needed to be addressed.
'Full support'
The Indian prime minister said he hoped for a "new course" in relations between India and Pakistan.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he hoped for co-operation to root out what he called terrorist sanctuaries.
Both Pakistan and Afghanistan are engaged in a long battle with Taliban Islamist militants.
The triangular relationship between Pakistan, Afghanistan and the US will be tested more than ever as Nato withdraws combat forces from Afghanistan by the end of next year, says the BBC's Mike Wooldridge in Islamabad.
Mr Sharif said Pakistan would extend its "full support" over the withdrawal to "see that everything goes well and smoothly".
At home, Nawaz Sharif's government will have to tackle severe power shortages that damage the economy and hold back job creation, our correspondent reports.
It also faces domestic insecurity. On Sunday a suicide car bomber in the south-western city of Quetta attacked the residence of Mushtaq Shukhera, police chief of Balochistan province, killing at least five people and injuring 60.
Balochistan suffers from separatist violence and sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack.Dr. Sekar Kathiresan of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute, in Boston, led one of two teams to identify a genetic mutation in the Amish community that protects against heart disease by keeping triglycerides in check, according to research published Wednesday. (Gretchen Ertl / New York Times News Service) 2570882
Dr. Sekar Kathiresan of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute, in Boston, led one of two teams to identify a genetic mutation in the Amish community that protects against heart disease by keeping triglycerides in check, according to research published Wednesday. (Gretchen Ertl / New York Times News Service) - Bulletin
A- A+
By Gina Kolata New York Times News Service
Two major studies by leading research groups published Wednesday independently identified mutations in a gene that protect against heart attacks by keeping levels of triglycerides — a kind of fat in the blood — very low for a lifetime.
The findings are expected to lead to a push to develop drugs that mimic the effect of the mutations, potentially offering the first new class of drugs to combat heart disease in decades, experts say. Statins, which reduce LDL cholesterol, another cause of heart disease, became blockbusters in the late 1980s. Since then there have been no major new drugs approved for lowering heart disease risk. But experts caution that drug development takes years and that there are no guarantees that new treatments will work as hoped.
Heart attacks are the leading killer in the United States, and about 720,000 Americans a year have them.
Although statins are effective in reducing heart attack risk, many users still have high levels of triglycerides and go on to have heart attacks. So the results of the new studies are good news, said Dr. Daniel Rader, the director of the Preventive Cardiovascular Medicine and Lipid Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research.
“We’ve been looking for something beyond statins,” Rader said. “After we have put people on high-dose statins, what else can we do? Essentially nothing.”
Widely needed drugs
Experts differ in their estimates of how many Americans might be candidates for a triglyceride-lowering drug. If the eligible group included all adults with triglyceride levels of 200 or more — the normal level is 150 or less — that would mean about 20 percent of adult Americans. If it were just those with the highest levels, above 500, then 2 percent to 3 percent of adults would qualify.
The discovery was hinted at in 2008 in a much smaller study of the Amish conducted by researchers from the University of Maryland’s medical school. One in 20 Amish people has a mutation that destroys a gene, APOC3, involved in triglyceride metabolism, as compared with one in 150 Americans generally. The scientists were intrigued but did not have enough data to nail down the gene’s role in heart attacks.
Sam, a 55-year-old Amish farmer who declined to have his last name published, saying he was uncomfortable about being conspicuous, has such a beneficial mutation. He recalls little heart disease in his family. On a cold day last fall, as an icy rain fell outside, he sat at a small wooden table in his daughter’s house and laid out a sheet of paper that showed he had a triglyceride level of 45. The average in the United States is 147.
“It’s nice that something came out that is positive,” he said.
Triglycerides have long puzzled researchers, although they are routinely measured along with cholesterol in blood tests and are often high in people with heart disease. Many experts were unconvinced they actually caused heart attacks. Clinical trials of drugs that lowered triglycerides by a small amount added to doubts about their role. The drugs had no effect on heart attack rates.
As for triglycerides themselves, “do they just keep bad company or are they independently doing something to risk?” asked Dr. Robert Hegele, a heart disease expert at Western University in London, Ontario, who was not involved in the new studies.
Those studies, published in The New England Journal of Medicine and funded by the National Institutes of Health and the European Union, provide “a very, very strong type of evidence,” Hegele said, that triglycerides are in fact a cause of heart attacks.
A major study
The work began several years ago when researchers at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT started searching through a data set drawn from 70 studies involving 200,000 people to see if there were tiny genetic changes near or in genes that seemed to lead to very high or very low amounts of triglycerides in the blood. They also asked whether people who happened to have a higher or lower triglyceride level also had a higher or lower incidence of heart attacks.
The researchers discovered that people with a genetic predisposition to higher triglyceride levels had more heart attacks and those with genetically lower triglyceride levels had fewer.
Their study, published last year in Nature Genetics, did not isolate individual genes, though. It just pointed to signposts on the long stretch of 30 million DNA letters that were near the genes. So the investigators began a hunt for the genes themselves.
To that end, they mapped the genes of 3,734 Americans, about 2,500 of whom were white and the balance African-American. The researchers reported the results of that effort Wednesday.
One gene, APOC3, stood out. The scientists found four mutations that destroyed the function of this gene. The Amish study had discovered that people with such a mutation could drink a big rich milkshake, loaded with fat, and their triglyceride levels did not budge. For everyone else, they spiked. The new studies show what that means for people’s health.
“Those who carry the gene mutations have a 40 percent reduction in triglyceride levels and a 40 percent lower risk of heart disease,” said Dr. Sekar Kathiresan of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute. He is the lead researcher on the gene project.
Now, he added, “there is a route to heart attacks that is independent of LDL,” the form of cholesterol associated with heart disease.
The other study, led by Dr. Anne Tybjaerg-Hansen of Copenhagen University Hospital, used data from 75,725 subjects to learn whether low triglyceride levels were linked to a reduced heart attack risk. They were. The researchers also asked whether people who had mutations destroying the APOC3 gene had fewer heart attacks. They did. Those with such mutations had a 44 percent reduction in triglycerides and a 36 percent lower heart attack risk.
The Danish data, Kathiresan said, “are eerily consistent with our data.”
Similar findings
“It is incredible how reproducible the finding is,” he added. Yet the two groups worked independently, with The New England Journal of Medicine coordinating publication of their studies.
For the University of Maryland scientists who conducted the 2008 Amish study, the new finding shows that their hypothesis about the gene was correct. Those with the mutation had less calcification of their arteries, an indication that they had less heart disease. But the Maryland group was not able to say if those people also had fewer deaths from heart disease. Toni Pollin, lead researcher for the study, explained: “To really find out if it is related to heart disease we’d need to follow people over time. And the Amish use hospitals a lot less than other people, so it is hard to document the cause of death.”
A small California company, Isis, also hit upon the gene when it was looking for ways to make triglyceride levels plunge in the small group of people with disorders leading to triglyceride levels so high they can be fatal. They made a drug that counteracts the gene and began testing it. It slashed triglyceride levels by 71 percent.
“It is the most important drug in our pipeline,” said Dr. Stanley Crooke, the chief executive of Isis. “Trust me, these data are really exciting.”
The company has no plans to test whether its drug prevents heart attacks in the general population. That sort of huge study, lasting years, would require the resources of a much larger company.
But heart researchers see the Isis drug as, at least, proof that it is possible to come up with drugs in what could be a new class of pharmaceuticals to protect against heart disease.
7062572In Roseville, Michigan, it's a crime to start your car and leave it running in your own driveway, according to the police.
Nick Taylor received a $128 ticket for leaving his car running in order to warm it up—even though that's something absolutely everyone in Michigan does during winter. (As a former Michigander, I speak from personal experience.)
Taylor posted a picture of the ticket on Facebook. The ticket describes Taylor's car as "unattended."
"Let's all take a moment to thank officer dipshit K. Keary for wasting the taxpayer's money and giving me a ticket for warming up my car in my own damn driveway," wrote Taylor.
Roseville Police Chief James Berlin told Fox-8 News that leaving the keys in the ignition was a "public safety issue."
But it's unavoidable. It's freezing cold in Michigan during the winter. According to Thrillist, Michigan actually has the second most miserable winter of all states in the country, surpassing even Alaska. (Only Minnesota was worse, in the editors' views.) There's no way to get around the a.m. pre-work/school ritual of heading out into the driveway, starting the car, and fleeing back inside the house momentarily.
Taylor should fight this. What right to the cops have to tell a man he can't try to warm up his car on his own property?Nose and Front-Wing
Ferrari tends to hide its race (and even test) specification parts at launch so any assessments of the front of the car should be taken with a pinch of salt.
The common thumb-tip nose remains and an S-duct has been integrated into the 2017 car. The Scuderia’s first attempt of the device copies the Mercedes solution used last year: a U-shaped inlet and plumbing direct air through the nose box, through the front bulkhead and out behind the antenna on top of the chassis.
At the moment the camera pods are fused with the nose with no mounting bodywork dictating the aerodynamics. Four overlapping fins – reminiscent of 2008 – sprout from the bulkhead to ease the transition of flow from the steep nose to the flat chassis top.
Bargeboards and Sidepods
The bargeboard area will be heavily exploited this year but Ferrari have kept their powder dry for the launch. Expect complex geometry when testing commences.
The sidepods are remarkably diverse to the opposition so far. A plethora of turning vanes are used to meet the regulatory diagonal leading edge and influence flow over the bodywork. The actual inlets are sat further back and sit perpendicular to the oncoming flow, with the trailing bodywork forming a tight Coke bottle shape at the rear. The main intakes are accompanied by three subsidiary inlets that direct air to the ERS cooler and some of the associated electronics.
The array of vanes and flow conditioners are designed to do a variety of things. The curled vane that stems from the sidepod shoulder forces the air down and along the undercut towards the back of the car. Closing off the top of the inlet is another horizontal vane that guides air into the aforementioned secondary intakes. Protruding into the front tyre wake is a huge rectangular board, shielding the undercut from turbulence. Two louvres are used to bleed off pressure built up on the inside face.
This careful management of flow around the inlets has allowed Ferrari to retain a smaller airbox. In a year where reducing drag could be extremely beneficial to overall lap-time, the Scuderia can now look elsewhere to improve straight-line speed. Blockage to the rear wing (and T-wing) is also reduced as a result.
Shark Fin and T-Wing
A shark fin and a T-wing – words you might not associate with F1 until now. The function of the shark fin is to ensure that airflow arrives cleanly at the lower rear-wing which now sits in a realm of dirty flow coming off the upstream bodywork.
The T-wing is a new feature for this year thanks to a small opening in the regulations as a result of the lower and slanted rear wing. It captures and kicks cleaner flow passing higher up the car upwards, enticing the flow coming off the rear-wing behind to rise. This helps the rear-wing to produce more downforce.
Rear-Wing
As with the front wing, the rear-wing lacks race-ready features: traditional horizontal louvres (rather than open at endplate’s leading edge) and a double mounting pylon arrangement almost look a bit dated before the season has even started. Further developments are to come here.
A monkey seat winglet has been installed on the rear crash structure but it is sat some distance from the exhaust exit. In recent years teams would use the combination of the hot exhaust gases and a winglet to connect the diffuser and rear-wing aerostructures, generating an upwash effect. Given that the wing is lower and the diffuser now taller, a monkey seat is not as beneficiary.KBMOD Podcast – Episode 47
Episode 47 of the KBMOD Podcast is here! We don’t have Brandon this week, as he was busy with work, whatever that is. We start with the best podcast intro ever and then move to talking about what we’ve been playing. Scott curses LA traffic, and we rip apart his defense of purchasing Battlefield Premium. The news is plenty this week with the frightening Amnesia trailer, Watch Dogs multiplayer aspects, Dark Souls porting challenges, the latest Diablo patch, and the return (again!) of the Black Mesa project. The roundtable focuses on Black Ops 2 this week, as numerous PC-specific announcements were made recently for the latest entry into the weary Call of Duty franchise. We end with your Twitter questions, and you find out what kind of furniture we’d be…if we were furniture. Enjoy!
KBMOD Podcast Direct Download
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KBMOD Podcast on iTunesAtomwaffen Division Exposed Anonymous 02/27/19 (Wed) 07:33:33 ecbebe No.12856375[Reply]
Hello after seeing posts over the past few weeks to Atomwaffen Division and "dude how can I join lmao?!" I feel it's necessary to make this thread. Pic related is my old uniform. I had been a member of the organization since 2015 and had seen everything from Jake's Suicide to Devon Murdering Jeremy and Andrew until basically when I left quietly about 2 weeks ago though I always lurked so it's not like they'd notice anyways and I haven't left their wire chats yet either but won't leak them out of respect for the few good members that remain but I'm getting ahead of myself.
I wish to share you a few facts about some of the shithead members of our famed organization!
>Khim:
Has casual sex a lot with older women and prostitutes and treats having sex with desperate women in their 60s and paying whores as something to brag about and possibly does drugs considering he hangs around a lot of known druggies and goes to their parties.
>Nythra:
His girlfriend is an older women who dominates him and is at her command (yeah he's into mommydom) he's also a skinny pale betafag too when you actually meet him IRL. He also acts like a child when you make fun of him too so he probably has anger issues. He also went to Ukraine to fuck prostitutes and brags about paying a whore as an accomplishment.
>Krokodil:
White Trash Skinhead who beats his wife and young daughter who's a toddler (and sometimes has sex in front of the daughter forcing the wife to suck his dick as his brags about this in chat), does drugs like meth and also cheats on his wife for a "mistress" and openly brags about being into BDSM and other degenerate sexual fetishes.
I know this isn't a lot but there aren't a lot of members in AWD anyways and this is the top contenders and Khim and Nythra are currently in charge of the group since Rape was forced out by them which resulted in guys leaving over that. There are other shitheads but they're more spergy edgelords than degenerates so not worth noting plus most of those ended up being kicked out/left due to their hatred of tPost too long. Click here to view the full text.My, how time flies. Seems just like yesterday that I was a 12 year old kid, going for long bike rides in Sherwood Forrest, the subdivision just around the corner from where I lived. Playing with William, Edward, and my little brother, climbing in the tree house, looking forward to Brent coming over to visit. Those were all good times and my only dread was finding out that we were having liver for supper.
By the time I was 22, I knew who I wanted to marry, was in the process of quitting college, going into debt, and thought that I would be a millionaire by the time I was 30 because I was so smart. Hey, it mighttake me until 35, but that was the top end. In reality, I was quite ignorant.
If I could go back in time, here are a few items I would tell my 22 year old self.
Stay in school. Don’t quit. Sure you’re bored now, but wait until you’re in a dead end job that you can’t stand but you’re afraid to lose. Getting finished with your degree will open up many more opportunities than you realize. I always wanted to go to law school, but without that sheepskin, I didn’t have a chance of even being considered. The lesson learned here is finish what you start by throwing yourself into it fully. Treat your college experience as if it were a job. Arrive on time, do your homework, study, and treat your learning process as if you were at a real job. Money doesn’t spoil, it keeps. Start investing early. How much stuff do you have to show for the money you made in high school and college? If I had invested half of what I made during those years in a plain old, broad based mutual fund, I would have well over $192,000 with no other investments made since then. I’m still kicking myself. Invest early.
Start your FREE search for over 500,000 pre-foreclosure and foreclosure homes at ReatlyTrac.
Don’t buy the first house you look at. Buy the cheapest house in the nicest neighborhood. No, I didn’t actually do this, but it was close. We were so excited to be approved for a mortgage, having just come out of Consumer Credit Counseling Services that we jumped at the first house we found that met our minimum requirements. I still love that house today, but I wish we had gotten a better inspection, had looked into building, or had found a way to buy a house that was closer to work and school. The lesson learned, don’t be desperate with a large purchase.
Establish the habit of living within a budget. Could anything be more important to insure you are living below your means? I tried on several occasions but I was never as faithful to this ideal as I should have been. Today, I make a salary high enough that a budget is a “yeah, we really ought to do that” kind of thing. My goal is to get that done. If I could do it over I would get myself in this habit at the earliest possible age. The lesson learned: budgeting is a freeing process, not a limiting one. If I had lived on a budget, I could have circumvented many painful events. Learn how to negotiate a better deal on everything. Having read several books on negotiation just a little too late, I’ve recognized how I was duped by many people, mostly used car sales people. I wrote a review on Secrets of Power Negotiating that you can readhere. Learning these skills would have saved me thousands. The lesson learned: prepare by educating yourself and always be willing to walk away. Keep your medical insurance in force at all times. Several years ago, I quit one job and took another that didn’t offer medical insurance until you had been there for 90 days. You guessed it, my wife had to have emergency surgery at 89 days. True story.89 days. Do you think the insurance company cared? I’ll let you guess. Thankfully, we were at St. Vincent’s Hospital and they had mercy on us. The business manager told me (after looking over my financial situation) that someone paid our bill. I still get choked up thinking about it all these years later. It took us years to pay off the doctor and anesthesia bills, though. If I had just kept my coverage in effect for a little while longer. The obvious lesson: keep that insurance in effect. It is cheaper than the medical bills. It’s quality of time at work, but quantity of time at home that matters. Your boss really doesn’t care whether you have a family or not. Trust me. Unless you work for family members who DO understand that you need to pick the kids up early, or that you DO need to spend some time with your spouse, you are just a replaceable cog in the machine. When people are trying to grow a business, your need for personal
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first TV feature, Duel, and his first theatrical release, The Sugarland Express, and blockbusters such as Jaws, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Jurassic Park, Steven's work has captivated audiences worldwide and continues to set the standard for filmmaking.
8 Unforgettable Movies, from 1 Visionary Director:
Duel
The Sugarland Express
Jaws
1941 (Theatrical and Extended Versions)
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
Always
Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park: The Lost World
Special Features:He didn’t make a big deal out of it.
He didn’t use this to a political advantage.
He apparently just let law enforcement do their job, and they did.
The news coming from the San Antonio Express-News today is that a man has been arrested, in connection to a case where he left death threats on the voicemail of Senator Ted Cruz, towards Cruz and his family.
While Cruz was not named in the case, it soon became clear that he was, in fact, the target.
The official allegedly targeted by James Amos Headley, 59, is not identified in court records, other than by the initials T.C., and prosecutors and the FBI won’t name him. The Express-News confirmed it is Cruz through other sources. “Pretty soon you’re gonna be runnin for your life, just hope your family is not with ya because I’m not gonna insult them, I’m gonna kill them, right after I shoot you right in front of them…” court documents quote Headley as saying in a July 11 voicemail left at the official’s office at the U.S. Capitol.
This is somebody twisted.
It is also somebody who thought he’d never have to worry about being tracked down.
Agents quietly arrested Headley last week on a federal felony charge of threatening to assault and murder a public official with intent to impede, intimidate, and interfere with the official and his duties. Headley remains in jail, and his court hearing this week was postponed until next week.
So what could possibly have been the motive behind such a hateful attack against not just Cruz, but his wife and two young daughters?
The San Antonio Express-News confirmed through law enforcement sources and others sources familiar with the matter that Headley, of Live Oak, supports President Donald Trump and was upset with Cruz’s stance on a number of issues that don’t align with Trump’s views.
So it’s not even partisan hate. Trump supporters are willing to threaten their own party members, out of loyalty to Trump.
Senator Cruz hasn’t commented on the case, and Capitol police have kept pretty mum about their actions in the case, as well.
This is coming shortly after the June Alexandria ballfield shooting, that left Majority House Whip Steve Scalise fighting for his life in a D.C. hospital.
Last week, someone left a threatening note near the office of Senator Dean Heller, in Las Vegas, Nevada, saying that if he voted to repeal Obamacare, he would die.
This is the latest news of people who don’t know how to deal with dissenting opinions in politics, and it’s ugly.
The criminal complaint affidavit said a staffer for the official retrieved the voicemail on July 13 and reported it to Capitol police, who traced the call to San Antonio. With the help of the FBI here, the agencies identified Headley as the suspect, the affidavit said. Headley admitted to the FBI that he was mowing the lawn, then came inside and watched the news. “Defendant told agents he was upset with T.C.’s position on different policies and decided to call and leave a message demonstrating an intent to impede and intimidate a U.S. Official,” the affidavit said. Headley also acknowledged having a Beretta pistol in the house, the affidavit said. And, to further show a judge that Headley has had access to other weapons, agents put in details in the affidavit from an incident in 2008. Headley’s wife told agents that, at that time, the couple argued, and Headley retrieved one of his rifles and put it next to him as he sat on the couch, the affidavit said.
Yikes!
During next week’s hearing probable cause will be determined, along with the possibility of bail.
Yeah, that shouldn’t happen.
If convicted, he’s looking at a potential 10-year sentence.
By the time he gets out, Trump will be long gone and maybe whatever vile psychosis he’s in the grips of will have let him go.By developing a symbiotic relationship with fungi, plants not only become more tolerant to diseases but can also help contribute to more sustainable agricultural practices. This is the conclusion of a new study from the University of Gothenburg.
Most crops can form symbiosis with fungi to gain key nutrients. The fungi in turn gain carbohydrates generated through the plant's photosynthesis.
This type of symbiosis is called arbuscular mycorrhizas and is of key importance to sustainable agriculture since it helps crops utilise better the phosphate in fertilisers.
'This symbiosis is very important since the leakage of phosphate from farm fields contributes to harmful eutrophication of rivers, lakes and seas,' says Cornelia Spetea Wiklund, professor at the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Gothenburg.
The Symbiosis Protects against Drought and Diseases
The fungal symbiosis also makes the plants more tolerant to certain diseases and environmental factors such as drought.
In order to learn how to better utilise the symbiosis in agriculture, the researchers have explored what causes the increased hardiness of plants. One mechanism involved seems to be that the fungi increase the plant's levels of several hormones in both its roots and shoots.
'Studies of the legume Medicago truncatula show that the synthesis and signalling of two important plant hormones increase in plants that form this symbiosis,' says Lisa Adolfsson, researcher at the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Gothenburg.
One of the hormones (ABA) makes the plant more drought tolerant, since it reduces the evaporation of water through the stomata of the leaves. The other hormone (jasmonate) helps increase the production of secondary substances that protect the plant against stress and diseases.
The Symbiosis Has Hormonal Effects in Plants
By measuring the levels of various substances in the shoots of the legume, which lives in symbiosis with fungi, and combining the results with large-scale genetic studies, the researchers have found that the levels of secondary substances (flavonoids and terpenoids) rise in the shoots as a result of the increased hormonal levels.
'This is an interesting finding that may explain the increased tolerance to various stressors and diseases,' says Spetea Wiklund.
So, the results show that symbiotic fungi influence the hormonal levels of crops.
'The legume Medicago truncatula is used as a model for other legumes. Consequently, the findings are applicable on commercially important crops such as soybeans,' says Adolffson.Same-sex marriage. Abortion. Playgrounds?
Next to some of the more hot-button cases that have come up before the Supreme Court in recent years, Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, which was decided Monday morning in favor of Trinity Lutheran Church, seems almost incidental. The case began in 2012, when a Lutheran preschool in Columbia, Missouri, was denied state funds to purchase used rubber tires to resurface its playground because it’s a religious institution.
But despite (indeed, because of) the relatively un-dramatic facts of the case, Trinity Lutheran v. Comer could potentially be one of the most significant SCOTUS decisions of the year, setting the tone for generations of legislation about the separation between church and state on the state level, and potentially paving the way for more radical education reform, like the use of state vouchers for religious schools.
The case started small — over the purchasing of tire rubber for a playground surface
Back in 2012, several nonprofit organizations, including Trinity Lutheran Church, in Columbia, Missouri, applied for state grants to purchase recycled tire rubber. In Trinity’s case, the rubber would be used to repave the playground of its early childhood education center. The nonprofits were ranked by Missouri’s Department of Natural Resources, and Trinity came fifth of 44 candidates. The top 14 candidates were slated for funding, but Trinity was judged ineligible based on the state constitution, which states, “no money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect or denomination of religion.”
The church sued Missouri’s director of natural resources, Sarah Parker Pauley, arguing that their ineligibility violated the federal First Amendment — they were denied free exercise of religion and freedom of speech — and the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under state law.
A federal district court for the Western District of Missouri dismissed the case, prompting Trinity to take the case to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. The church argued once again that Article 7, Section 1 of Missouri’s constitution infringed on their First Amendment free exercise of religion (dropping the free speech argument) in addition to 14th Amendment rights. The circuit court affirmed the district court’s dismissal.
Finally, Trinity appealed to the Supreme Court in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (Carol Comer is Pauley’s successor). In January 2016, the justices agreed to hear the case — only for conservative Justice Antonin Scalia to die a month later, leaving behind a split jury and an unfilled space for the remainder of that year. Since then, the case has been marked by a year of uncertainty, as the hearing was continually delayed — most likely due to the possibility of a four-four split in a divided court — while various interested parties filed amicus curiae briefs in support of one party or the other.
Finally, the Supreme Court, including recently confirmed Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch, started hearing oral arguments this spring. By then, the specifics of the Trinity Lutheran case were largely moot. On April 13, Missouri’s Republican Gov. Eric Greitens announced that Missouri would consider religious institutions for public funding, excoriating “government bureaucrats... under orders to deny grants to people of faith who wanted to do things like make community playgrounds for kids.” But both parties agreed that the case should proceed anyway, in part because there’s no way to guarantee that Greitens’s policy is permanent.
Trinity v. Comer has seen high-profile supporters on both sides — and not always along expected sectarian lines
Supporters of the church argued that Missouri’s law, as it stands, is unconstitutional because it denies equal protections and treatment to the church only on the grounds that it is a church. As the Christian-affiliated American Center for Law and Justice, wrote in an amicus brief in support of the church, “while government may not establish a church, it also may not categorically relegate religious institutions to second-class status.” Here, the organization interprets Missouri’s law as a violation of the 14th Amendment.
It’s not just Christian-affiliated organizations that supported the church, either; the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America filed another brief arguing that the Supreme Court’s decision could set a precedent depriving Jewish schools of necessary funds for, say, disaster preparedness or security, exposing “religious institutions to significant health, safety and security dangers.”
There’s also a case to be made that aid to certain religious organizations’ outreach programs is in the public good, and to threaten them is to deprive vulnerable individuals of much-needed services. This is particularly pertinent when it comes to, say, Catholic hospitals, which comprise one in every six hospitals in the US. At what point does “common good” end and special treatment begin, especially when it comes to programs for funding that are meant to be open to all based on neutral criteria? As Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer pointed out during arguments, should a church be denied access to, say, police or fire protection? How were the health hazards of letting children play in an unsafe playground significantly different?
Supporters pointed to other cases in which long-held state laws known as Blaine Amendments (initially enacted to counter the influx of immigrants by barring federal aid to Catholic organizations) have been used to threaten religious or religiously affiliated organizations that have partnered with the state to affect a public good. For example, in Florida, two Christian prison-ministry organizations that partnered with the state to provide services — the Prisoners of Christ and Lamb of God ministries, which catered to recently released felons — were three times more successful than the national average when it came to preventing recidivism. In 2016, the humanist group Center for Inquiry challenged the funding legally but were unsuccessful.
Perhaps even more convincingly, because Trinity Lutheran’s aims in this situation are entirely secular (i.e., paving a playground), their supporters argued that the case couldn’t be compared to, say, the precedent of Locke v. Davey (where money couldn’t be used to fund theological training).
On the other hand, supporters of the state pointed out that — despite the relatively benign goals of Trinity Lutheran’s playground-building — it opened the floodgates for taxpayer subsidizing of any “secular” part of a religious organization’s expenses that might be deemed to be for the common good. Secularist blogger Hemant Mehta at religion blog network Patheos gave the example of building a gym at the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University that was officially open to the public, but served to make the institution more attractive to potential students.
Plus, any precedent allowing state funds to flow to religious institutions could be used to legitimize discrimination on religious grounds. In LGBTQ-advocacy group Lambda Legal’s amicus brief, for example, the organization argued that “There should be no possibility that a child and her same-sex parents are fenced out of Trinity, left to gaze at a publicly funded playground they may not enter, as its use is reserved solely for children from preferred religious tradition as a place to play and pray. The fence belongs instead precisely where Article I, § 7 erects it: separating Church from State.”
Likewise, the National Education Association argued that, “While there is a long and honorable history of taxpayer funds being used to support faith-based institutions in their provision of secular social services, any such funding must be accompanied, in AJC’s view, by adequate church-state safeguards. Among other things, this means that public grants or contracts should not be used to fund “pervasively religious organizations” whose religious mission is inextricably intertwined with the provision of services.”
The state also had some perhaps less-expected defenders. For example, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Freedom has come out against Trinity Lutheran, arguing that safeguards are necessary to protect religion from government interference. In a statement to the press shortly after filing an amicus brief in defense of the state, Holly Hollman, the BJC’s general counsel, said, “Baptists and other religious dissenters in colonial America fought to ensure that the coercive power of the government was not used to force taxpayers to pay for churches. The result has been a rich flowering of religion and religious institutions, funded by voluntary gifts and offerings.”
The longer-term implications of the Supreme Court’s decision are, as yet, unclear. But as the Supreme Court’s attention turns toward more religious-exemption cases — they’ve just agreed to hear the appeal of a Christian baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex couple — it’s evident that the uneasy relationship between church and state in America won’t become any simpler anytime soon.Home Region Americas Shell pressing on with Arctic plans despite commissioners’ request May 14th, 2015 Donal Scully Americas, Offshore
San Francisco: Shell spokespeople on Wednesday brushed off Tuesday’s request from Seattle Port commissioners to delay assembling its Arctic drilling fleet in that city’s Terminal 5.
The day after the commissioners issued their surprise request at a meeting open to the public, Shell insisted its lease for the terminal is valid and pointed out that it has only a relatively brief window of opportunity to get its fleet of about 25 vessels up to Alaskan waters for exploratory drilling.
Shell is aiming to return to Arctic drilling for the first time in three years, but the mayor and the city of Seattle have said the use of their terminal as a base for drill rigs isn’t allowed under the port’s current land-use permit, which is for cargo operations.
Even as environmental protesters, including so-called kayaktivists, are gearing up to register their disapproval of Shell’s planned drilling in the Chukchi Sea, the oil company is pressing ahead.
The first of its two giant drilling platforms, the Polar Pioneer, is set to arrive in Seattle on Thursday. It should be a magnet for demonstrators despite the court restraining order Shell obtained last month against Greenpeace. The protesters have promised a “Festival of Resistance” for the weekend.
The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) approved the company’s plans for its Arctic campaign on Monday, a big boost for the Dutch oil giant. Even though it still has to get other permits from state and federal agencies, they’re believed to be formalities after BOEM’s nod.It’s a big day for the small city of Meridian, Mississippi, home to one of the nation’s most notorious school-to-prison pipeline systems. This morning the Department of Justice filed a consent decree with the Meridian Public School District to address its school discipline practices which not only were ushering kids into jail for the lightest of infractions–including wearing the wrong color socks or showing up to school without a belt on–but also singling out black students for the harshest treatment.
“Today, together with the school district and private plaintiffs in the case we are filing a proposed consent decree that addresses claims of racial discrimination in student discipline in Meridian County schools,” said Jocelyn Samuels, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. “As part of efforts to enforce a longstanding desegregation decree we investigated complaints that the district implemented a harsh and punitive discipline policy that resulted in the disproportionate suspension, expulsion and school-based arrest of black students in Meridian public schools.”
And even when controlling for other factors, racial disparities persisted, “even when students were at the same school, were of similar ages, and had similar disciplinary histories,” Samuels said. It had the effect of shoving youth out of school and into youth jails, and marking kids indelibly. The decree, pending approval by the court, will address exactly this pattern of practices that the DOJ documented in a multi-year investigation of the school district and the local school.This will be the first of a series of articles that chronicles the amount of obsessive attention to detail that went into engineering your gis. In this article, we will walk you through the painstaking process of preparing the fabric for cut-and-sew phase of production.
Receiving the hemp fabric
Our fabric is typically shipped to us in 160cm long rolls called bolts and are arranged on pallets.
The fabric comes in a raw unprocessed state typically referred to as " greige " fabric.
It has simply been woven from spools of hemp yarn, and has not been washed, dried, bleached, or dyed.
Washing the fabric
Industrial washing machines are used to wash the hefty rolls of fabric. This is the first step in ensuring that our gis do not shrink once you receive them and wash them.
Drying the fabric
As you can see, after the first two washes and dries we've eliminated a substantial amount of shrinkage.
Fabric width before preshrinking process 160cm Fabric width after preshrinking process 150cm Shrinkage (%) 6.25%
Dyeing and the finished product
The dye process involves a couple more wash and dry cycles to remove excess particles of dye and to prevent crocking and bleeding. Notice that we further eliminate shrinkage by 8%.
Dye type Reactive Fabric width before dyeing process 150cm Fabric width after dyeing process 138cm Shrinkage (%) 8%
All told, the fabric is washed and dried 3.5 times.
A wash rate of 3.5 is only used in high-end garments.
By the time the time you receive your gi, you will experience less than 1.5% shrinkage!
Before processing 160cm After processing 138cm Overall Shrinkage (%) 7.5%
Next up, we'll walk you through the cut-and-sew phase of production.UKIP leader's fury after member is banned by Barnardo's from caring for children
District nurse said charity told her it would'not be appropriate'
New scandal follows revelation of UKIP parents banned from fostering
Anger: UKIP leader Nigel Farage condemned 'another appalling case of discrimination' after a member was prevented from volunteering as a mentor for young adults by leading children's charity Barnardo's
A row over two UKIP members having their foster children removed took a new twist last night when another woman claimed she had been barred from looking after children because she was a party candidate.
Nigel Farage, UKIP leader, condemned ‘another appalling case of discrimination’ after former district nurse Anne Murgatroyd said she had been prevented from volunteering as a mentor for young adults by leading children’s charity Barnardo’s.
Ms Murgatroyd, a mother of three, claims she told the charity of her political affiliation and was told it would ‘not be appropriate’ for her to perform the role, which involves supporting children coming out of the care system, because UKIP ‘opposes multi-culturalism’.
The charity said there were other reasons for Ms Murgatroyd’s rejection but refused to disclose further details.
The claim came as two investigations were launched into a council’s ‘indefensible’ decision to remove three vulnerable children from their foster parents because of their support for UKIP.
Social workers at Rotherham Borough Council claimed the married couple’s affiliation with UKIP meant they supported ‘racist’ policies which made them unsuitable carers for the non-British children and there were concerns for their ‘cultural and ethical needs’.
But amid widespread condemnation of their actions yesterday, the Labour-run council began an internal review, and Education Secretary Michael Gove announced his own investigation.
Last night, Mr Farage said he had ‘no reason’ to doubt Ms Murgatroyd’s story.
He said: ‘I met this lady at our party conference. We knew about this story at the time but she chose not to publicise it. She has now decided to make it known, really in support of the couple in Rotherham. Because of all that, I believe her story is genuine.’
Separately, UKIP officials said Ms Murgatroyd informed them of her problems with Barnardo’s several months ago.
The latest claim emerged in a series of posts Ms Murgatroyd, who stood as a UKIP candidate for Leeds City Council in May’s elections, made on Twitter.
Response: The charity said there were other reasons for Ms Murgatroyd's rejection but refused to disclose further details
She wrote: ‘Barnardo’s would not allow me to be a volunteer befriender of young people leaving care when I told them I was standing for UKIP... Barnardo’s rationale for this was that “UKIP opposes multi-culturalism”.’
Responding to a Mail on Sunday reporter, she wrote: ‘I’d almost gone through their process and been accepted when I told them I’d be standing for UKIP in locals... They checked with managers, discussed it, couldn’t accept me due to issue of multi-culturalism.
‘Their rationale was that because UKIP opposes multi-culturalism it would not be appropriate for me to mentor young people coming out of the care system. My argument was that, yes, I do oppose forced marriage and female genital mutilation and family killings but that does not make me unsuitable to befriend young people.’
Anne Murgatroyd said the charity told her it would ‘not be appropriate’ for her to perform the role
Barnardo’s denied ‘blanket banning’ any applicant. It said: ‘The needs of the child must be paramount when making any decision about matching them with carers and the most important thing is to provide a loving and supportive environment.
People from all backgrounds work and volunteer for Barnardo’s but there are many factors to take into consideration when assessing suitability to work with children or young people. Cultural context is relevant, but so are family background, health, and any previous experience.’
The foster couple in Rotherham at the centre of a separate storm claimed Howard Woolfenden, the council’s former director of safeguarding children and families, had taken the decision to separate them from the children in their care without prior discussion.
They also denied claims their membership of UKIP affected their treatment of the children.
The wife said: ‘We were actively encouraging these children to speak their own language and to teach us their language. We enjoyed singing one of their folk songs in their native language.
‘These children have now been placed with families who are also white British. How are these people going to meet the cultural needs of these children?’
The Equality and Human Rights Commission said the decision may have breached the parents’ right to freedom of political opinion.
Mr Woolfenden was not available for comment.
In a statement, Rotherham council announced an immediate investigation and said: ‘Membership of a political party should not stop someone fostering children.’
Labour leader Ed Miliband called for an urgent probe.
Parents don't need to be perfect just loving
by Michael Gove, Education Secretary
Appeal: Education Secretary Michael Gove wants more parents from every background to come forward to adopt
I know how important it is to ensure you choose the right family to look after a child who has been in care. Because I was a child in care.
And I was brought up by the right family. Because I was adopted.
My mum and dad did an amazing job, providing me with love and security, enabling me to enjoy wonderful opportunities.
I can never adequately repay them. But one of the ways in which I’m trying is my work to reform our care system.
As Education Secretary I’m responsible for Government policy on child protection, children in care, adoption and fostering.
Just last week I laid out how big a job we face to get things right. If we needed any reminder of what we’re up against then yesterday’s reports from Rotherham powerfully demonstrate just how much change is needed, because children still don’t come first.
For years now, child protection has been crippled by politically correct attitudes that put the interests and ideologies of adults ahead of the needs of children.
On the one hand, we leave children with abusive and neglectful parents for too long, as the case of ‘Baby P’ Peter Connelly exemplifies. On the other hand, we don’t welcome and support people who want to adopt or foster effectively enough.
So neglected children are not rescued sufficiently early or placed in loving homes sufficiently quickly. A particular problem has been the way in which rules on ethnicity, race and culture have been applied.
When it comes to adoption the perfect has been the enemy of the good. Social workers have put the need to find a perfect ethnic or cultural ‘match’ for children in care ahead of the pressing need to find those children a loving home.
So children from black and minority ethnic backgrounds spend longer in care, and get adopted later, than others. We know that the earlier a child is adopted the better, so these PC attitudes, allegedly designed to help children, only end up harming them.
And that is why the decision by Rotherham council to take a child away from loving and successful foster parents for ‘cultural’ reasons – because they were members of UKIP – is so especially harmful.
It sends a signal to those who want to foster or adopt that they’re not wanted if their attitudes fall outside a tightly circumscribed and politically approved set of views.
That’s offensive to any idea of a genuinely liberal society and a tragedy at a time when we need more parents to foster and adopt.
And it’s why we are changing the law to stop ethnic and cultural considerations being put ahead of a child’s need for early adoption.
I want more parents from every background – gay or straight, black or white, Left or Right – to come forward to adopt because there are so many children whose lives will be transformed immeasurably for the better if they are enfolded in the loving arms of kind parents. It is also an immensely rewarding choice to make.
Adoption means taking a child not just into your home but into your heart. It is a relationship which is – in every sense – for good. And there is no more generous gift you can give a damaged, neglected or abused child than a fresh start.The Moment I Knew the Mets’ Young Pitchers Were Special
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There was one moment this season that showed me how special the New York Mets’ young arms are.
In mid-June of this season, I was sitting in the Atlanta Ritz-Carlton bar with fellow pitcher Dana Eveland talking baseball. We chose the Ritz not for any special reason, but because we were both living there at the time. Dana and I signed with the Atlanta Braves one day apart and got called up to the big leagues one day apart, so we instantly connected.
As we were hanging out, we both noticed Mets pitching coach Dan Warthen walk in. Dana and I both know and respect Dan very very much — I played for Dan in 2013 and Dana played for him in 2014 — so we invited him to sit and talk with us.
After a little small talk about the game we had just played, I asked him the question both Dana and I had been wondering for five days:
Why did all the other starters stand in the bullpen and watch that day’s starter throw, then follow him into the dugout before the game?
Dana and I both had noticed the ritual when we were playing the Mets at Citi Field a few days earlier. I personally loved it, as I’m a big proponent of watching other pitchers throw while picking their brains and hearing about their thought processes and routines. But I wanted to know from Dan what the idea behind it was.
Dan got a huge grin on his face the moment I asked him the question, so I expected to hear a cool story about how he had come up with the idea. What he said blew me away.
He looked me right in the eyes and said, “That was completely their idea.”
I knew exactly what Dan’s grin meant. Dan knew these kids were different — he knew these kids were special.
Young players just don’t do things like watch and study each other. Most of the time they are so wrapped up in themselves, or overwhelmed by being in “The Show,” that it takes them years to learn what it takes to excel. That’s why good veteran leadership is always talked about when developing young talent.
Young pitchers taking control of their own careers together like that is something that comes around once in a lifetime. And they are reaping the rewards on baseball’s biggest stage.
Congratulations to this Mets pitching staff for not just sitting back on your talent, but finding out how special you can actually be.US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has just made clear her position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership mega trade deal with Australia, New Zealand and other key Pacific rim nations - she won't sign it.
"My message to every worker across America is this: I will stop any trade deal that kills jobs or holds down wages, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership," the Democratic contender said in her latest campaign speech.
"I oppose it now, I will oppose it after the election, and I will oppose it as president."
Her only opponent, Republican Donald Trump, fiercely opposes the TPP.
That means the only chance for the 12-nation agreement to succeed is for the US Congress to ratify it during the so-called "lame duck" period between the presidential election on November 8 and the inauguration of the new president on January 20.
That's considered to be a possibility, but having both presidential candidates firmly opposed to the agreement doesn't help.
President Barack Obama's position is that the US must ratify it, or China will set the global trade agenda.
To take effect, the agreement has to be ratified by at least six countries that account for 85 per cent of the group's economic output, which makes the US and Japan essential.
The TPP is one of the world's largest trade liberalisation deals, covering 40 per cent of global trade and 800 million people.
The partner countries are New Zealand, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Viet Nam."Know you love her, but this stuff is like her Achilles heal," Neera Tanden told John Podesta about Cheryl Mills in an email exchange. | AP Photo Clinton adviser: ‘They wanted to get away with it’ on private email setup
As the story about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account broke last year, the head of a pro-Clinton think tank complained that a penchant for secrecy within Clinton’s inner circle only exacerbated the controversy, which would go on to dog her entire presidential campaign, according to a hacked email released Tuesday by WikiLeaks.
In the exchange, Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden complained to incoming Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta that Clinton lawyer and former State Department Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills had allowed the email situation to fester to the point where it became a liability to Clinton’s presidential bid.
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“This is a cheryl special. Know you love her, but this stuff is like her Achilles heal. [sic] Or kryptonite. she just can't say no to this shit. Why didn't they get this stuff out like 18 months ago? So crazy,” Tanden wrote.
“Unbelievable,” Podesta replies.
“I guess I know the answer. They wanted to get away with it,” Tanden said, urging that Clinton turn over the emails to the National Archives immediately.
At an earlier point in the exchange, Podesta appears to criticize Clinton lawyer David Kendall and Clinton communications adviser Philippe Reines for being too opaque about the email situation, although it’s unclear whether Podesta is faulting them for not being transparent with him or the public.
“Speaking of transparency, our friends Kendall, Cheryl and Phillipe sure weren't forthcoming on the facts here,” Podesta wrote.
Mills was told by the State Department in July 2014 that some emails from Clinton’s private account were turning up in searches of other State files for records requested by the House Benghazi Committee. A formal request went to Clinton and other former secretaries in August. Clinton did not turn over her archive until December 2014, limiting what she provided to material her lawyers concluded was likely to be work-related.I knew this woman by way of a friend that got her pregnant. This woman was a real psychotic. She got knocked up and she was planning to get married, with the man whom got her pregnant. She bought this mail order custom a gown that fit her. But, against the advice of other people she wanted to wait to have a spring wedding, which was months away. When that day of the wedding arrived her wedding dress did not fit due to her enlarged belly, and she had a full bridezilla meltdown.
As you can guess, the wedding was canceled.
I am of the opinion that any god that would allow such psychotic women to procreate is either evil, or an idiot. I am not sure which option would be worse.KOREAN HARDWARE MAKER Samsung reportedly will enter the augmented reality spectacles market later this year, with the firm's Galaxy Glass reportedly set for a September release.
That's according to The Korea Times, which has heard from an insider at the company that Samsung is aiming to unveil its Galaxy Glass eyewear at this year's IFA press conference in September. This isn't the first we've heard about Samsung planning to enter the eyewear market in 2014, with reports last October claiming that the firm would announce a rival to Google Glass at some point this year.
The Korea Times' sources claimed that Samsung's Galaxy Glass eyewear will feature functionality similar to that of Google Glass. It will reportedly link wirelessly to a smartphone device to display notifications and allow wearers to answer phone calls and listen to music through the glasses. Samsung's Galaxy Glass eyewear apparently will feature a built-in camera too, allowing wearers to take pictures surreptitiously.
It's still unclear whether the spectacles will only be compatible with Samsung mobile devices, like the firm's Galaxy Gear watch device.
The source said to the Korea Times, "The new smart glass to be introduced by Samsung is a new concept of wearable device that can lead to an exciting culture of communication. The smart glass will present our aim to lead the new market with proven capability. Wearable devices can't generate profits immediately. Steady releases of devices are showing our firm commitment as a leader in new markets."
Samsung has yet to comment on the speculation, and there's no word on pricing or availability yet. µAnime News Network's merchandise coverage sponsored by Tokyo Otaku Mode
From SuperGroupies comes the new Attack on Titan motif wallet and phone cases. The wallet is a large bi-fold featuring a map of the three walls and outside area in pleasant pastels for 7,800 yen (US$73).
The smartphone cases fit iPhone 5, 5s, SE, 6, and 6s for 4,800 yen (US$45 and are designed after five characters.
Eren Jaeger
Jean Kirstein
Levi Ackerman
Erwin Smith
Hange Zoë
All items are available for pre-order until November 27 through SuperGroupies. The wallet is scheduled to ship in early April and the phone cases at the end of January.
Attack on Titan is set for a second season in spring 2017. The first season aired from April-September 2013 with two compilation films in 2014 and 2015. Hajime Isayama's original manga, which launched in Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine in 2009, also inspired numerous spinoff manga, several novel series, a two-part live-action film project, a spinoff live-action television series, and an OVA. Two of the spinoff manga — Attack on Titan: No Regrets and Attack on Titan: Junior High — received their own anime adaptations.
Source: animate TimesAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below
In its 50-plus-year history, the Ford Mustang has been rendered in miniature with countless model versions, but now for the first time, the Mustang has been rendered in Lego bricks. As part of its Speed Champions series, Lego has introduced a Mustang set—as well as one featuring the Ford F-150 Raptor.
The Mustang kit comes with the car, a mechanic minifigure, and a lap-time sign. Total brick count is 185 pieces, with a retail price of $14.99. The F-150 Raptor sets is more involved; besides the truck, it also includes a car-hauler trailer, a Model A hot rod, a mechanic’s station, a drag-strip Christmas tree, an engine stand, and a minifiG. That’s 664 pieces, for $49.99.
On hand for the announcement of the new kits at the Detroit auto show were Ford president Joe Hinrichs and Lego lead designer Craig Callum. We’re pretty sure we know who has the better job.I like starting my machine learning classes with genetic algorithms (which we'll abbreviate "GA" sometimes). Genetic algorithms are probably the least practical of
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