decoded_text
stringlengths 4.18k
47.6k
|
|---|
Philippe Reines" <[email protected]> wrote: > John, > > With all due respect, and reluctantly to do this in front of HRC except > for wanting to defend myself against being labeled as a cancer - but the > conclusion that it is ME that has to stop "this" is really unfair. This > has happened too much over the last six weeks to chalk it up to the press > guessing correctly. They don't even get facts correctly. Cnn guessed Andrea > Mitchell? Come on. That flies in the face of common sense. > > Not to mention I'm following up on a topic last night where you yourself > felt it enough of a problem to have warned the Secretary her people yap. I > didn't whip you up. You took that into consideration when discussing a 24 > hour delay. That never should have been a factor. > > Lastly, if you think I'm the only one on this chain bothered by this - > and not because I whipped them up - then I have a bridge to nowhere to sell > you. When I had dinner with Jim Margolis weeks ago, he broached with me > that he is shocked by what he's reading, is sure it's close, and fears HRC > is looking at him and the rest of them funny. I think that's a problem when > her team is looking funny at each other. > > And for anyone to be justifiably upset to not be read in earlier on our > current challenge, and then wonder why it's difficult to speak freely about > something so sensitive in large in expanded settings, is a lack of > self-awareness. This topic's a unique doozy, but it's not the last delicate > one. That someone yapped about the lamest 10% of our conversations is > better than the most sensitive 10% is besides the point. But either way > we're going to have to agree to disagree on whether 10% is just the price > of doing business. > > Again, with all due respect, your reaction to me is unfair in that's > it's stronger than any admonition anyone else has received who is actually > doing something wrong. > > I agree though that being at each others' throats will get us nowhere, > and if you want me to keep it to myself, ok, done. But it's the underlying > problem that's going to be the problem, not me stating the obvious. > > With that, I'm going to sit queitly in the corner until Cheryl calls me > to admonish me for sending this reply and digging myself into an even > deeper hole with you than I already was. > > For those keeping score, that will be two more admonishment than the > culprit(s) have received. > > Philippe > > > *From: *John Podesta > *Sent: *Monday, March 9, 2015 4:51 PM > *To: *Philippe Reines > *Cc: *Cheryl Mills; H > *Subject: *Re: Leaks > > Philippe, > You got to stop this. The press is trading in rumors that can easily > originate in their own newsrooms. If someone wanted to leak juicy tidbits, > they have a lot more to work with than our press planning. If we are going > to be at each others throats before we start, we are going nowhere. > John > On Mar 9, 2015 1:13 PM, "Philippe Reines" <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Ok, this has gone too far. The email below is from Craig to Nick to me >> where someone knows an interview with Andrea was on the table. Seperately, >> Andrea just sent Nick this: "we are hearing news conference tomorrow?" >> >> The Andrea part especially should only have been known to 10-12 people, >> 3 of whom are John, Cheryl & me. >> >> >> >> From: Nick Merrill <[email protected]> >> Sent: Monday, March 9, 2015 4:04 PM >> To: Craig Minassian >> Cc: Matt Mckenna - gmail; Philippe Reines >> Subject: Re: CNN >> >> + PIR >> >> This is nuts. >> >> On 3/9/15, 3:59 PM, "Craig Minassian" <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> >This is just for you Nick but our favorite CNN source says that Brianna >> >(who is filling in for Erin this week) and Dan have been speculating that >> >HRC lined up an interview with Andrea Mitchell about emails. >> > >> >Now she obviously shouldn't be telling me this so please don't burn the >> >source or Madre may pay the price. >> > >> >Sent from my iPhone >> >>Marie Henein, the lawyer who successfully represented former CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi, is rejecting any accusations that she has betrayed women by taking on the high-profile sexual assault case, insisting that justice was served in the trial.
"I'm thrilled with the result," said Henein in an exclusive interview with CBC's chief correspondent Peter Mansbridge on The National.
"Obviously I think it is the correct result. It was a principled result in a case where people were agitating, I think perhaps not being as measured as we would like."
Henein spoke publicly for the first time since her client was acquitted by an Ontario Court of Justice judge on four counts of sexual assault and one count of choking to overcome resistance.
Henein would not go into the details of the case as it is still within the 30-day appeals period.
Ghomeshi had pleaded not guilty to all the charges, which were related to assaults alleged to have taken place against three women from 2002 to 2003. Ghomeshi's acquittal sparked protests and triggered outrage among many, including women's groups that felt the complainants were the ones put on trial.
Much of that outrage was expressed through social media, and public figures including politicians from all levels of government expressed their thoughts. Many upset with the acquittal embedded #IBelieveSurvivors in their tweets.
"Hashtag I believe is not a legal principle, nor should it ever be," said Henein.
"On a personal level if somebody wants to express their support [to a complainant], that's their choice," she added. "When a politician weighs in, that's a little more concerning to me because you're a person who's engaged and should be more knowledgeable about what you're going on."
Ghomeshi chose not to testify during the trial, which is his right.
Mansbridge asked Henein how she feels when women say that she has betrayed them.
"I respect their right to say it. I don't respect their opinion or agree with it," she said.
Henein said she doesn't believe the same things are said about male lawyers and that when men have opposing opinions, one isn't accused of betraying his gender.
"You're viewed as people who disagree," she said. Henein said to characterize her role in such a way that implies she is against women is "a fundamental misconception of what we do in the justice system."
"I mean female judges adjudicate all sorts of cases, including sexual assault cases. They are not traitors to the gender when they acquit and they're not supporters of the gender when they convict. They're doing their job. As am I."
Defendant's right not to testify crucial, she says
She told Mansbridge she took the case despite its high profile nature, not because of it.
"This one is like any other one. There's nothing unusual about it for me. It would be one of many cases in this office of this nature," she said.
The high profile aspect of the case "would influence it for me not to take it," she said.
Many critics believed the judge's ruling revealed a significant flaw in the legal system involving sexual assault cases.
Mansbridge said some argue the system isn't fair, since the accused is under no obligation to testify, meaning the defendant's credibility doesn't face the same scrutiny as the complainants.
Criminal lawyer Marie Henein defends her role representing Jian Ghomeshi in his recent assault trial. 1:38
But Henein said the defendant's right not to take the witness box is integral to the presumption of innocence in requiring the state to prove its case.
"The legal system is premised on our fundamental belief that if you are going to a accuse me of a crime you will have to prove it, " she said.
Henein said a sexual assault case shouldn't be treated any differently than any other crime "in the sense that the presumption of innocence is set aside or reasonable doubt is thrown out the window."
Henein cited other sexual assault cases that have resulted in wrongful convictions.
"That doesn't mean that everybody is lying. It means that we know as a matter of human nature, some people tell the truth, some people don't," Henein said.
"I think justice was served. I think it is pretty significant that in one of the highest profile cases, in one of the cases where everybody had an opinion... that you knew, that you could walk into court and that there would be an impartial person that would decide on the evidence that is heard."Bishop Hill has yet another amusing entry on the post facto revisionism going on over at the oxymorinically named Skeptical Science blog run by John Cook. Add to that, Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. also has an entry where he says he’s given up trying to have a dialog on science with that very website.
While this may be humorous, maybe even satisfying to some, it really illustrates the sad polarization that we have today over climate science. The polarization is so intense, that it almost precludes any rational communications.
Of course we skeptics can argue that we’ve been treated badly, and we’d be right. AGW proponents tend to argue that we are simply too stupid to communicate with, and that they have the moral high ground, and thus the means justify the ends. Here for example is a response to a commenter by Grant Foster, aka Tamino:
I’m not sure why you need to be so rude, and I should probably leave and never come back … [edit] [Response: I’m not sure why you need to be so stupid. Please leave and never come back.]
In some cases, like above, we can’t even get a word in. Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. seems to have the same problem over at Skeptical Science, he writes:
I have been commenting for the last several days on Skeptical Science in their post SkS Responses to Pielke Sr. Questions While there have a few constructive interactions, many of the comments are not only not constructive, but demeaning. I also spend considerable time repeating myself in answering their questions. I am disappointed as I was hoping that Skeptical Science was a weblog where a diversity of views can be discussed constructively. However, the moderators on that weblog failed to adequately police the comments.
After reading myself at SkS how grubbily Dr. Pielke has been treated in the dialog there, is it any wonder he’s chosen not to try anymore?
At Bishop Hill, he’s pointing out a timeline regarding Cook’s revisionism of posts and moderator response to posts. Again we see the same sort of problems.
But, hasn’t it always been that way since the very beginning of the issue? The combination of perceived moral high ground mixed with the educated liberal mindset, combined with a dash of anonymity, in my opinion, leads AGW proponents to revert to tribal mannerisms in dealing with others whom they perceive as inferior in intellect and creed.
On the plus side, this very behavior, which seems to be omnipresent in AGW proponent circles, (though skeptics have a few bad examples too) is part of the reason why skeptics are winning the war of public opinion.
Reading both of these posts is instructive:
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/09/21/final-comments-on-my-interaction-with-skeptical-science/
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/9/21/the-cook-timeline.html
================================================
Note to commenters, on some other blogs the Skeptical Science website is referred to as SS.com with the obvious violations of Godwins Law immediately applied. Such responses will be snipped here in this thread should they occur. We don’t need to demonize our opponents, as they are doing a fine job all by themselves through their own words an actions.
Advertisements
Share this: Print
Email
Twitter
Facebook
Pinterest
LinkedIn
RedditTax Breaks for Big-Box Stores Can Drain Money From Schools
Paying attention to how much nearby corporate retailers pay in property taxes may not be a priority for most school district leaders, but some policymakers think that could change soon.
Across the country, retailers—in particular big-box stores—are pushing back on how local governments assess the value of their properties with the goal of lowering their tax bills. Using a tactic known as “dark store theory,” retailers and their legal teams are increasingly arguing that the massive stores they operate ought to be appraised as if they were vacant or “dark.” When they succeed, the annual property taxes that retailers pay—which help fund public schools in most local communities—can drop precipitously.
The retailers, most of them corporate giants such as Target, Lowe’s, and Home Depot, contend the large buildings their stores occupy—typically more than 100,000 square feet—are difficult to sell because they are customized to a particular retailer. They argue their stores, even brand new and bustling with business, shouldn’t be assessed at the “best and highest use”—which is how most assessors determine how much tax they owe—but at a rate similar to the resale value of box store properties that may be shuttered. It’s an argument that some assessors find absurd and an abuse of the tax code.
So far, the strategy has worked, particularly in the courts, and has led to lowering the taxes of big-box companies by hundreds of millions of dollars, according to interviews with assessors and lawmakers in several states who have analyzed the effects.
The trend is most pronounced in the upper Midwest, where hundreds of lawsuits and appeals have been launched in Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin. But as the strategy spreads, it’s triggering a legislative backlash led chiefly by Republicans who see the dark store theory as a troubling tax loophole.
“If you have any big-box retailers in your school district, this is definitely something to watch,” said Brian Woods, the superintendent of the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas, where Lowe’s, the home improvement retailer, is suing the county appraiser over its tax bill.
Texas’ state comptroller, Glenn Hegar, recently sounded the alarm over the dark store tactic, writing in an editorial published in the Austin American-Statesman that it’s akin to “corporate welfare of a particularly ugly kind.”
Hegar, a Republican, estimated that the proliferation of dark store loopholes could cost the Lone Star State’s local governments $2.6 billion annually within five years, including nearly $1.2 billion in lost property taxes for schools. He warned that it also could “rip another $703 million a year away” from the funding program which provides most state aid for Texas’ public schools.
Lost Revenue vs. Staying in Business
Local governments depend on property tax revenues to help finance schools, fire and police, parks, libraries, and roads. That’s why assessors worry about the potentially sweeping impact the tax loophole could have on essential community services.
When big-box retailers prevail in lowering their assessments, it can shift more of the tax burden to homeowners and to smaller, local businesses which may not have the legal firepower to push back on how their stores are appraised. Of course, schools depend on revenue generated from homeowners and local business owners as well, so the entire school finance ecosystem could see some form of impact, district officials said.
“This really is an issue about these stores paying their fair share of taxes,” said Donna VanderVries, an attorney and appraiser who is the equalization director for Muskegon County, Michigan. “We are charged with uniform and equitable assessment. To carve out a special niche for these stores goes against that responsibility to the public.”
In Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin, millions of dollars in revenue have already been lost to dark store arguments, according to studies conducted by associations that represent city and county governments in those states. Those costs stem from expensive court battles, losing out on future tax revenue when retailers successfully appeal, and in some cases, reimbursing retailers for higher property taxes paid in previous years.
VanderVries said the impact is also long-term. Once a property is assessed, she said, its value is essentially locked in and usually doesn’t change much.
But the retailers and their lawyers have argued publicly that reducing their property tax burden helps keep stores open in the long run, which is better for communities and local economies.
Steve Paul, an Indianapolis-based lawyer who has represented several retailers including Target, Home Depot and Lowe’s, said big-box merchants have valid reasons for seeking the property tax relief. Competition from online sales is one, along with the loss of major retailers such as Macy’s, Sears, Kmart, and J.C. Penney shutting down hundreds of stores in recent years—corporate merchants that often anchor shopping malls.
“This is a difficult issue as it could mean a significant revenue loss for one of the parties,” Paul said. “But you have to ask yourself if you want to drive businesses out of the area because taxes are too high. Then you’re going have a lot of ‘dark’ stores in the community, with much less or even no tax revenue really coming in.”
The Impact on Schools
Officials in the Howard-Suamico school district, which serves the villages of Howard and Suamico near Green Bay, Wis., have been watching one dark store case unfold with concern.
Menards, a Wisconsin-based home improvement retailer, is suing the village of Howard over how it appraised one of its properties.
Howard assessed Menards’ 18.7-acre site at $12.45 million in 2016. According to court documents, the company argues that while it spent $10.6 million to buy the land and build the store, the site is worth only $5.8 million. In its suit filed last year, the retailer demanded that Howard provide a refund, with interest, and pay its legal fees.
Menards, like many of its peers, has been arguing in court that the property’s value should be judged by “comparable sales”—the prices that vacant big boxes command when they are sold in the area. The company says Howard’s assessment “was not uniform” with the assessments of other properties in the village and around the state.
If Menards prevails, the company’s annual tax payment to the Howard-Suamico school district would fall from roughly $103,000 to about $48,000, according to Matt Spets, the assistant superintendent for operations. And the district would owe Menards a refund of about $55,000 for the taxes it paid last year. That, Spets said, equates to an extra teacher salary annually for a district that serves 6,100 students in eight schools.
In the short term, Spets said the district could manage the lower revenue amount. In future years, however, Spets said the district would have to ask residents to pay higher taxes or cut its budget by a corresponding amount if more retailers succeed in lowering their taxes. But residents may not be inclined to raise their taxes for schools: Last April, voters rejected a referendum that would have helped fund building upgrades, student support services and personnel costs.
“It’s not an ideal situation,” said Spets who noted that rural school districts are the most vulnerable.
David vs. Goliath
A major hurdle for city, county, and school officials who want to fight back against the big-box retailers is cost. VanderVries, the assessor in Muskegon, Mich., said her department and peers in communities like hers may feel forced to settle with a powerful retailer when they appeal their property appraisal, because appraisers know their local governments don’t have the wherewithal to mount an expensive legal defense if the battle moves to the courts.
“You also just don’t want to get a reputation as being anti-business,” she said.
Paul, the lawyer who represents retailers, swats back at those arguments, saying that assessors and some lawmakers are inciting panic over the financial hit that cities and schools would take.
Jack L. Van Coevering, a lawyer in Grand Rapids, Mich., has represented municipalities in several cases pushing back on the dark store approach. He sees a clear connection to schools.
He provided Education Week with an analysis that showed a $2.8 million annual loss in revenue for Michigan school funding if Lowe’s was able to reduce its taxes at for all of its stores in the state.
“This impact is permanent and annual,” he said. “The tax loss would be repeated every year because in Michigan increases in the property tax base is capped at the rate of inflation. [The analysis shows that] schools are the primary local government unit at risk.”
Unlikely Adversaries
State lawmakers have stepped into the disputes, proposing bills to curb the use of the dark store theory in Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Texas. Many have stalled, but one measure passed in Indiana in 2015, only to be repealed a year later and replaced with one that some assessors felt had fewer teeth.
In San Antonio, Texas, at the Northside Independent School District, Superintendent Woods and the school board have discussed the issue in the past year as the Lowe’s case winds through the courts. There, the local assessor warned the superintendent of the potential financial implications as the county’s largest school system with over 105,000 students and hundreds of national retailers within its boundaries.
Lowe’s is suing the Bexar County Appraisal District to cut its property values for 10 stores in the San Antonio area where Northside is based, according to the San Antonio Express-News. The appraisal district estimates those values could drop from $80-$85 per square foot to $30 a square foot if Lowe’s prevails, the paper reported.
Earlier this year, a Republican state lawmaker, Rep. Drew Springer, proposed a bill to limit businesses’ ability to use the dark store argument that garnered bipartisan support, passing out of two committees. But the bill never made it to the House floor for a final vote, and a spokeswoman for Springer said this month that he didn’t have plans to refile it right away.
“It’s created a real challenge for Republican lawmakers, because you have those who prioritize being friendly to corporations, or ‘business friendly,’ now in conflict with others who see keeping individual homeowner property taxes lower as the more important goal,” Northside’s Woods said.
Indeed, the state comptroller’s office estimated that if the dark store argument is successfully used by stores across Texas, it will amount to an increase of $311 in property taxes annually for every home in the state.
The dark store controversy is currently most active in Michigan and Wisconsin, where a few bills to rein in the practice are in the works, which Republicans are largely pushing.
State Rep. David Maturen, a member of the Michigan legislature and a former assessor based in Brady Township, has filed a bill to require the Michigan Tax Tribunal to apply “standard appraisal procedures when reaching their findings of facts and conclusions of law in larger property tax cases” when hearing appeals. So far, it’s backed by a bipartisan group of 54 House members.
“I’m pushing this as a Republican on the grounds of it being an issue of fairness and equity and able to use my five decades in this line of work,” Maturen said. “I think my colleagues on both sides of the aisle know I am not making up stories when it comes to the serious impacts we are seeing.”
Maturen proposed a similar bill in 2016, and it passed the Michigan House by a vote of 97-11. But it never advanced from the Senate finance committee.
Wisconsin had two bills aiming to curb the tax reduction loophole. One bill, being advanced by Rep. Rob Brooks and Sen. Roger Roth, both Republicans, would ban use of the “dark store argument” in challenging assessments. Another measure that Brooks is pushing would reverse a 2008 state supreme court decision won by Walgreens that said the value of leases should not be considered in assessments—which also determine tax rates.
“I believe that the bills will be approved,” Brooks said in a statement, adding the full Assembly body could vote on it in the fall.
The state’s largest business lobbying group, the Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, had representatives testify against both bills in June, saying the proposals essentially are “a back door for municipalities to implement a local income tax” and injected partisanship into the debate, contending the GOP proposals mirror “attempts by liberal policymakers in previous sessions.”
Although it’s still unclear how quickly schools may feel any implications from retailers getting their taxes lowered, folks on both sides of the issue remain vigilant as the courts and state legislatures ping pong over what to do. Paul, the lawyer who represents retailers, contends that merchants aren’t out to target education funding.
“No one wants to see school districts lose revenue,” Paul said. “But there is more than one way to skin a cat. This is an argument about what’s most equitable.”
Vol. 37, Issue 01, Pages 1, 18-19
Published in Print: August 23, 2017, as Tax Breaks for Big-Box Stores Can Drain Money From Schools
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
Back to TopThe Australian Labor Party may be in violation of U.S. election laws after it was discovered they were compensating “volunteers” sent to work for the Bernie Sanders campaign in America. Federal election law provides guidelines for use of foreign nationals in campaigning, which clearly state that any foreign national working on a campaign in America cannot be compensated, and that covered travel expenses cannot exceed $1,000. However, it appears the Labor Party in Australia is ignoring this law in a bid to ensure that Bernie Sanders is the next President of the United States of America.
The Washington Times reports that an undercover video taken by Project Veritas reveals that the Australian Labor Party may be in violation of American election laws. The video shows an undercover reporter speaking with Bernie Sanders campaign volunteers from Australia that reveal they are being compensated by the Australian Labor Party for their time campaigning for Bernie Sanders.
The video begins with the Australian Labor Party volunteers with the Bernie Sanders campaign violating U.S. election laws regarding the removal of campaign signs. The volunteers are seen and heard discussing the removal of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaign signage. One volunteer admits he has removed dozens of Trump signs, as well as replaced Hillary Clinton campaign materials with Sanders material. This is in violation of U.S. laws regarding the “placement and removal of political advertising,” in which it is deemed illegal to “remove, deface or knowingly destroy any political advertising which is placed or affixed to public or private property. Violation of this law can result in a civil penalty of up to $1,000 per incident.”
The removal of political signage is not the only law that the Australian Labor Party may have violated during their stint with the Bernie Sanders campaign. In fact, the volunteers presence in the campaign may have been entirely illegal, due to the fact that the Labor Party footed the bill for the volunteers while on site with the campaign. It was revealed in the undercover video that the round-trip airfare was covered by the Labor Party, along with housing and transportation expenses while in the States. Additionally, volunteers were paid a $60 a day stipend for food.
Bernie Sanders may be unaware that his Australian volunteers were being paid by the Australian Labor Party to work with his campaign in violation of US election law. [Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images] U.S. election laws, according to Project Veritas, allow for just $1,000 in expenses related to the campaign by a foreign party. It was noted that round-trip airfare to and from the United State would exceed the $1,000 limit, and that with each volunteer remaining in the U.S. for five weeks, the $60-per-day food stipend would exceed $2,000 alone. Therefore, with airfare, food, and housing, the Australian Labor Party volunteers well exceeded the $1,000 limit established in American law.
While many are “feelin’ the Bern,” others are questioning the Australian Labor Party’s involvement in the campaign. [Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images] Though the volunteers seem to be in clear violation of U.S. election laws, the Bernie Sanders campaign seemed ignorant to the fact that a violation was taking place. In fact, it was noted that when the Australian volunteers arrived, the Sanders campaign had little knowledge of what they were doing or how long they were staying. Each volunteer pointed out numerous times their travel was compensated by the Labor Party, not the Sanders campaign.
In fact, the volunteers admitted that the Sanders staff members that picked them up from the airport seemed completely unaware that the group was arriving until they phoned to let them know they had arrived.
“There wasn’t much coordination. We got picked up from the airport in Manchester by Thorpe, the director of operations, and he was like, ‘So, what are you guys doing here?’ And we were like, ‘We thought you knew what we were doing here.’ “
When one of Sanders campaign coordinators were confronted about the possible violation of election laws, she noted that the Sanders campaign had no idea the Australians were coming or that they were being paid. When asked if the Sanders campaign would report the violation, she had no comment.
What do you think about the Australian Labor party footing the bill for volunteers to work on the Bernie Sanders campaign?
[Photo by Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo]Here’s a complete and total list of every cinema in the United States and Canada where The Hobbit is going to screened in the 48fps HFR format. This is the way Peter Jackson intended for his film to be seen.
There is still no news on where the film will play in the HFR format in the UK, but watch this space – I’m on the case.
United States
Albany, NY
Crossgates Mall 18 + IMAX (Albany, NY 12203)
Clifton Park 10 (Clifton Park, NY 12065)
Colonie 13 (Albany, NY 12205)
Albuquerque, NM
Albuquerque Rio 24 + XD (Albuquerque, NM 87109)
Amarillo, TX
Amarillo Star Stadium 14 with Imax (Amarillo, TX 79106)
Anchorage, AK
Anchorage 16 + XD (Anchorage, AK 99503)
Tikahtnu Stadium 16 & IMAX & RPX (Anchorage, AK 99506)
Atlanta, GA
Atlantic Station Stadium 16 + IMAX (Atlanta, GA 30363)
Mall Of Georgia Stadium 20 + IMAX (Buford, GA 30518)
Discover Mills 18 (Lawrenceville, GA 30043)
Parkway Point 15 (Atlanta, GA 30339)
Hollywood Stadium 24 @ North I-85 (Chamblee, GA 30341)
Avenues Forsyth 12 & Imax (Cummings, GA 30041)
Augusta, GA
Augusta Exchange Stadium 20 + IMAX (Augusta, GA 30909)
Austin, TX
Tinseltown 20 + XD (Pflugerville, TX 78660)
Gateway Stadium 16 + IMAX (Austin, TX 78759)
Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar (Austin, TX 78704)
Alamo Drafthouse Slaughter Lane (Austin, TX 78759)
Trails 11 (Austin, TX 78726)
Bakersfield, CA
Bakersfield 14 (Bakersfield, CA 93307)
Baltimore, MD
Egyptian 24 + XD (Hanover, MD 21076)
White Marsh 16 with IMAX (Baltimore, MD 21236)
Columbia 14 with IMAX (Columbia, MD 21044)
BTC Annapolis Mall 11 (Annapolis, MD 21401)
Baton Rouge, LA
Perkins Rowe (Baton Rouge, LA 70810)
Boise, ID
Boise Stadium 21 + IMAX (Boise, ID 83709)
Majestic 18 (Meridian, ID 83642)
Boston, MA
Boston Common 19 with IMAX (Boston, MA 02111)
Showcase Revere 20 (Revere, MA 02151)
Liberty Tree 20 with IMAX (Danvers, MA 01923)
Showcase Randolph 16 with IMAX (Randolph, MA 02368)
Showcase Cin de Lux Legacy Place (Dedham, MA 02026)
Methuen 20 with IMAX (Methuen, MA 01844)
Framingham 16 (Framingham, MA 01701)
Blackstone Valley 14 (Millbury, MA 01527)
Fenway Stadium 13 & RPX (Boston, MA 02115)
Fox Run Stadium 15 & RPX (Newington, NH 03801)
Showcase Patriot Place (Foxborough, MA 02035)
Independence Mall 14 (Kingston, MA 02364)
Cinemagic Hooksett + IMAX (Hooksett, NH 03106)
Buffalo, NY
Transit Center Stadium 18 + IMAX (Williamsville, NY 14221)
Burlington, VT
Majestic 10 (Williston, VT 05495)
Champaign, IL
Springfield 12 (Springfield, IL 62707)
Charleston, SC
Charles Towne Sq 18 (Charleston, SC 29406)
Citadel Mall 16 (Charleston, SC 29407)
Charlotte, NC
Concord Mills 24 with IMAX (Concord, NC 28027)
Stonecrest At Piper Glen Stadium 22 with IMAX (Charlotte, NC 28277)
Chicago, IL
ShowPlace ICON (Chicago, IL 60605)
River East 21 (Chicago, IL 60611)
Barrington 30 with IMAX (South Barrington, IL 60010)
Village Crossing 18 with IMAX (Skokie, IL 60077)
Crestwood 18 (Crestwood, IL 60445)
City North Stadium 14 & RPX (Chicago, IL 60647)
Yorktown 18 with IMAX (Lombard, IL 60148)
Orland Park 14 (Orland Park, IL 60462)
Evanston 18 + XD (Evanston, IL 60201)
ShowPlace 16 Naperville with IMAX (Naperville, IL 60564)
Cinemark 14 (Joliet, IL 60431)
Gurnee 20 (Gurnee, IL 60031)
Cantera Stadium 17 & RPX (Warrenville, IL 60555)
Charlestowne 18 (St Charles, IL 60174)
Cincinnati, OH
Newport Levee 20 with IMAX (Newport, KY 41071)
Showcase Springdale 18 (Cincinnati, OH 45246)
Easton Town Center 30 with IMAX (Columbus, OH 43219)
Lennox Town Center 24 with IMAX (Columbus, OH 43212)
Marcus 16 (Pickerington, OH 43235)
Cleveland, OH
Valley View 24 + XD (Valley View, OH 44125)
Tinseltown 15 (North Canton, OH 44720)
Colorado Springs, CO
Carefree Circle 16 + IMAX (Colorado Springs, CO 80922)
Tinseltown 20 + XD (Colorado Springs, CO 80906)
Columbia, SC
Sandhill 16 (Columbia, SC 29229)
Corpus Christi, TX
Century 16 + IMAX (Corpus Christi, TX 78412)
Corpus Stadium 16 (Corpus Christi, TX 78416)
Dallas, TX
Northpark 15 with IMAX & ETX (Dallas, TX 75231)
Mesquite 30 with IMAX (Mesquite, TX 75149)
Parks Arlington 18 with IMAX (Arlington, TX 76015)
Firewheel 18 with IMAX (Garland, TX 75040)
Cinemark West Plano 20 + XD (Plano, TX 75093)
Stonebriar 24 with IMAX (Frisco, TX 75034)
Legacy 24 + XD (Plano, TX 75025)
Grapevine Mills 30 (Grapevine, TX 76051)
Cinemark 17 + IMAX (Dallas, TX 75234)
Tinseltown 17 (Grapevine, TX 76051)
Alliance Town Center 14 (Fort Worth, TX 76177)
Davenport, IA
Rave Davenport 53 18 + Imax (Davenport, IA 52807)
Dayton, OH
Fairfield Commons 20 (Beavercreek, OH 45431)
Denver, CO
Westminster 24 with IMAX (Westminster, CO 80020)
Highlands Ranch 24 with IMAX (Highlands Ranch, CO 80129)
Northfield 18 (Denver, CO 80238)
Century 16 (Boulder, CO 80302)
Century 16 Bel Mar + XD (Lakewood, CO 80226)
Colorado Center 9 + IMAX (Denver, CO 80222)
Continental 10 (Denver, CO 80237)
Des Moines, IA
W. Des Moines Jordan Creek + XD (West Des Moines, IA 50266)
Detroit, MI
MJR Marketplace Cinema 20 (Sterling Heights, MI 48314)
Livonia 20 with IMAX (Livonia, MI 48152)
Rave Ann Arbor 20 IMAX (Ypsilanti, MI 48197)
Emagine Novi 18 (Novi, MI 48377)
Emagine Canton 18 (Canton, MI 48187)
Southgate 20 (Southgate, MI 48195)
El Paso, TX
Tinseltown 20 + XD (El Paso, TX 79936)
Cinemark West + XD (El Paso, TX 79912)
Eugene, OR
Valley River 15 & Imax (Eugene, OR 97401)
Fresno, CA
Fresno Stadium 21 + IMAX (Fresno, CA 93720)
Ft. Myers, FL
Belltower 20 (Fort Myers, FL 33911)
Gaines |
fateful thought: She could simply make the whole thing up. It was midnight on one of Sager’s nights off when he was awakened by a call from Cooke. “I found the kid,” she told him. “His name is Tyrone.”
Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today
Mike Sager is a bestselling author and accomplished magazine writer. A former Washington Post staff writer and Rolling Stone contributing editor, he has been an Esquire writer-at-large for 19 years. He is the founder of TheSagerGroup, a boutique publishing house.On Tuesday, July 15, Jews and Arabs will fast, together. From Texas to Tel Aviv, Kalansuwa to Kuwait, in synagogues and mosques, community centers and public spaces, they will gather to learn, pray and talk to each other as part of Choose Life, a movement looking for a way past the violence, deaths and pain of the last month.
“The timing is right,” said Eliaz Cohen, one of the organizers of Choose Life. “It’s an opportunity for two nations to link back to their roots, to Ramadan and our [Jewish] fast.”
The idea was conceived after the kidnapping and murder of Gil-Ad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach and Naftali Fraenkel, and the subsequent kidnapping and murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir. A group of Jews and Arabs, activists from the West Bank who have long worked together, came up with the idea to forge a path of nonviolent protest through a joint fast.
Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up
The timing couldn’t have been better.
The 17th of Tammuz, a fast day that commemorates the breach of Jerusalem’s walls before the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70, falls out on Tuesday. It’s the start of a three-week mourning period leading up to Tisha B’Av, a more well-known fast day that marks the destruction of the temple.
Tuesday is also the 18th day of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, when Muslims fast from dawn till sunset each day for the entire month.
The joint fast “is not a sixties anti-war thing,” said Shaul Judelman, one of the Choose Life organizers. “It’s coming from a religious place, which is tricky when rockets are falling. But our future seems to be here together, and no one’s going anywhere.”
Their effort began on the Sunday after the kidnapping of the three boys, when the Palestinian and Jewish activists found themselves sitting in a field in between their villages and towns, talking for seven hours, said Cohen, who lives on Kibbutz Kfar Etzion in the West Bank.
“We heard from the Palestinians that they weren’t sleeping at night, that they found themselves looking at their children, and thinking about the three boys,” said Cohen. “We spoke about our hopes and dreams.”
In the days following the first kidnapping, the group held a joint prayer session, looking for opportunities to talk and share without allowing politics to invade the conversation. But when the bodies of the kidnapped teens were found, and Abu Khdeir was then murdered by Jewish extremists, the group wanted to find another way to mourn, and share their sense of grief.
“The Palestinians wanted to pay shiva calls and so did we,” said Cohen.
They send letters to the families, asking for permission to come as a joint group. Cohen knows Rachael Fraenkel, the mother of Naftali Fraenkel, and it made sense to start there.
“They waited for us, we were eight people, and we sat with them, among hundreds of people,” he said. “You could see what it did for the circles of people around us. It was total electricity, there were all kinds of Israelis and you could see the emotion, as people tried to catch every word that was said. It was emotion and confusion, like, what is this? What’s happening here?”
It was on their way home that that Ali Abu Awwad, a fellow West Bank resident and long-time activist, had the idea of creating a joint fast day.
“We felt we couldn’t breathe, and Ali said, enough of the talk, it’s time for action,” said Cohen.
The two men have known each other for many years. Cohen is a well-known poet and second-generation settler who came to peace activism through the leadership of the late Rabbi Menachem Froman, an Orthodox rabbi with close ties to Palestinian religious leaders. Abu Awwad is a Palestinian activist and pacifist who lives in Beit Ummar, northwest of Hebron.
“Engaging in a hunger strike is a huge statement,” said Abu Awwad. “You don’t make peace in rosy times, and you make peace with your enemies, so you have to find a way to raise your voice and get some recognition.”
He also noted that the joint fast isn’t based on hope or optimism but a belief that “the millions of people in this land have to find a way to manage.”
“Whether you’re right wing or left wing, no one is going to disappear tomorrow,” he said. “Everyone is trying to punish the other side for what he did, and make excuses for the crimes against one another. There is no other side, there is really only one side.”
The organizers began reaching out to other groups and organizations, looking for as many partners as possible. They told Hadassah Froman, Rabbi Froman’s widow, about the plan, said Cohen, and she said, “Wow, that’s what Menachem would have done.”
They brought in other leaders, including Orthodox rabbis Benny Lau, David Lau and Shmuel Eliyahu, the chief rabbi of Safed, and Masorti Rabbi Tamar Elad Appelbaum. They gained the support of powerful yeshivas in Otniel and Maale Gilboa, which wield tremendous influence in the Israeli Orthodox world, and among secular Israelis, like the Tel Aviv public relations firm that offered them free consulting services.
Once the organizers began spreading the word about the joint fast, word spread quickly, said Judelman, through the Facebook page, around the framework of community centers in Jerusalem and beyond, in synagogues, communities and mosques in the US, London, Paris, even Kuwait. Gatherings are taking place mostly during the late afternoon and evening, toward the end of the fast day.
“The timing was right,” said Cohen. “Everyone we talk to, whether on Facebook or in email or on the phone, is interested. We feel like this is the first time we can breathe after this horrible month, and now it’s happening.”
For now, said Cohen, it feels like something could actually emerge from the fast.
He thinks it’s due to the fact that it all began with kids.
“We’re all tied to children in one way or another, and it hurts us in the deepest place,” he said. “It brings us back to our diaphragms, to a place that twists and turns and brings people in. And now there’s the larger story of Gaza, and we’re in this loop. It’s something larger than us, and it feels like a massive earthquake. You feel very small, like there’s nothing you can do.”
The fast, said Cohen, is something small, an act that can be done anywhere, at home, or in public.
“It’s an amazing way to stop everything, and to think a little differently,” he said.
There is a full list of events at the Choose Life Facebook page, and the main gathering will take place at the Gush Etzion intersection at 7 pm Tuesday.Last week, the public relations problem du jour was a green bra; photos online showing Ms. Cyrus pulling away her tank top to flash her underwear.
Photo
Ms. Cyrus and the “Hannah Montana” series have been championed as one of the few entertainment sanctuaries for children, complicating matters. Last month, Ms. Cyrus was chosen favorite television actress at Nickelodeon’s “Kids’ Choice Awards.”
More than 3 million viewers regularly watch “Hannah Montana,” most of them age 6 to 14.
Media outlets, in particular the rabid celebrity-focused tabloids, have been pushing to capture new angles of the ubiquitous Ms. Cyrus. After popping up everywhere from the Academy Awards to “American Idol” in recent months, the only photos of her that are assured of selling are controversial ones.
Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content, updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.
A Disney spokeswoman, Patti McTeague, faulted Vanity Fair for the photo. “Unfortunately, as the article suggests, a situation was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines,” she said.
The article, written by Bruce Handy, seems to support that claim, quoting Ms. Cyrus as saying, “Annie took, like, a beautiful shot, and I thought it was really cool. That’s what she wanted me to do, and you can’t say no to Annie.” She also said of the photo, “I think it’s really artsy. It wasn’t in a skanky way.”
Ms. Cyrus had a different view in a prepared statement released on Sunday:
“I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed. I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about.”
Beth Kseniak, a spokeswoman for both Vanity Fair magazine and Ms. Leibovitz said, “Miley’s parents and/or minders were on the set all day. Since the photo was taken digitally, they saw it on the shoot and everyone thought it was a beautiful and natural portrait of Miley.”
At the very least, Ms. Cyrus and her advisers do not seem to be on the same page as Disney. The company learned of the photo only when “Entertainment Tonight” started showing its promos.
Last week, Gary Marsh, the president of entertainment for Disney Channel Worldwide, was quoted in Portfolio magazine saying, “For Miley Cyrus to be a ‘good girl’ is now a business decision for her. Parents have invested in her a godliness. If she violates that trust, she won’t get it back.”Update: 6:00pm – Curfew was lifted at 2pm and Disney Springs opened at 5pm with limited locations and primarily to give resort guests something to do tonight.
Update: 12:45 pm – Just heard that all four Walt Disney World parks are now scheduled to open at 8am on Saturday. This is a earlier than normal for most parks. Animal Kingdom will have Extra Magic Hours from 7am – 8am. Disney World’s two water parks and Disney Springs will return to normal operating hours.
Update 11:15 AM – While we don’t advice it, some guests are out and walking about at various resorts. Most damage is some flooding, a few large branches on the ground, and lots fo smaller debris. Hotels are opening their dining facilities to serve guests (Pop Century has limited options but is open). While livestream videos show things are pretty calm across Walt Disney World, it’s still very windy and tropical force wind gusts are still a possibility, so we recommend staying indoors unless you absolutely have to go outside.
There’s a saying forecasters like to use with Hurricanes, “Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.” With every attraction in Orlando closing early yesterday and planning to remain closed today, I’d say that everyone did a good job preparing. The good news for Walt Disney World and other Orlando tourist attractions is that Hurricane Matthew shifted course to the East. This kept hurricane force winds out of the interior of Central Florida greatly reducing the chance of damage at the parks.
The biggest problems seemed to be at Disney resorts as everyone returned from the parks at the same time and tried to get food. The hotel food courts just weren’t meant to handle that demand. So you ended up with crowds like this
Crazy.
Vacationers at Walt Disney Resort in #Florida were evacuated ahead of hurricane #Matthew. The resort will remain closed through Friday. pic.twitter.com/obPbOIm4Lo — WeatherNation (@WeatherNation) October 7, 2016
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows out there, there are still more than 275,000 people in Central Florida without power right now and there are some reports of property damage along the coast. At the time of writing much of Volusia county, which includes Daytona Beach, is still under extreme winds watch and a flood warning. Flagler County, which is just to the north, could also see serious damage and flooding.
If you do see a downed power line, do not touch it. Report the power outage to the power company. If you absolutely don’t have to get out on the roads for work, stay home. Let the first responders and power crews do their jobs today.
We live about six miles to the East of Walt Disney World resort and can report things are generally fine here with only some heavy gusts. In years past, when the was a severe weather warning but no actual damage, Disney has been known to try and get at least one of its parks open for resort guests only. We’ll keep our ears to the ground to see if any announcements are made today.
Additionally, we’ll see when Orlando International Airport is able to resume flights in and out. A lot of tourists are essentially stranded in Orlando until those flights resume. Be sure to check with your hotel to find out what their policy is in this situation.
Finally, as you can see from the projected path cone for Hurricane Matthew, the storm is expected to loop around and make another landing on the Bahamas and possibly Florida as a Tropical Storm or Hurricane. So keep the folks of Haiti, the Bahamas, and other Caribbean nations, in your thoughts.
As we said, it ain’t over yet for a lot of Florida residents, but it isn’t the worst case scenario either. If you were staying overnight in Central Florida for Hurricane Matthew, either as a resident or guest, what was your experience like?By Yuri Tarantin
27-year-old Russian junior welterweight Sergey Lipinets (10-0, 8KOs) will return on December 10th, when he takes one of his most experienced opponents to date, 28-year-old Australian puncher Leonardo 'Lenny Z' Zappavigna (35-2-1, 25KOs).
The fight will be part of the undercard to the Premier Boxing Champions doubleheader scheduled for December 10th at USC’s Galen Center in Los Angeles, California.
Richard Schaefer of RingStar Sports and Tom Brown of TGB Promotions are the co-promoters of the event.
Two titles fights will take place on the card. Former three division champion Abner Mares will finally collide with WBA'regular' featherweight champion Jesus Cuellar in the main event. The co-feature, is the long awaited fight between International Boxing Federation super welterweight champion Jermall Charlo and mandatory challenger Julian Williams.
Mares vs. Cuellar was originally set for June 25 in Brooklyn as part of the Keith Thurman-Shawn Porter undercard. The fell out at the last minute when the New York State Athletic Commission refused to give Mares medical clearance to fight - because of an issue with his medical history. The NYSAC is very strict when it comes to approving any fighter to compete when they've had eye surgery in the past.
Back in 2008, Mares had a detached retina and underwent a lasik procedure for his right eye. The California State Athletic Commission has evaluated Mares' health and vision through a series of exams.
Yuri Tarantin covers boxing for Allboxing.ru.BELGRADE (Reuters) - In the shadow of a demolished mosque, three dozen men gathered in a house in a gloomy district of northern Belgrade. The Muslim call to prayer drifted out through the open door.
Muslims attend evening prayer at the Bajrakli mosque in the district of Dorcol in Belgrade, Serbia July 9, 2013. REUTERS/Marko Djurica
“This was a family home. We can pray in it, but it’s (the building) not legal,” said Hilmija, a 47-year-old Muslim and member of Serbia’s Roma minority, as he entered. “It’s humiliating.”
The house – and the ruins it stands next to – represent just some of the ad hoc efforts of around 20,000 Muslims in the Serbian capital to gather in worship in a city which is overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian.
Belgrade has one mosque – dating from 1575 when the city was part of the Ottoman Turkish empire – and it has a fraught relationship with Islam.
Many Muslims left during the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia, when Serbia backed its ethnic kin in Bosnia in the massacre of Muslim Bosniaks and fought a counter-insurgency war in its own southern province of Kosovo against mainly Muslim Albanians.
The shortage of Belgrade mosques was thrown into sharp relief this year when authorities tore down a makeshift mosque in the northern district of Zemun Polje on the eve of Ramadan in May.
Local Muslims initially came out in protest to block the demolition, but the bulldozers returned with a police escort after dark. All that is left is a jumbled mass of broken concrete and twisted rebars. Muslims now gather in prayer in the house next door and in other private homes around the city.
The Islamic community in Serbia says Belgrade authorities have repeatedly ignored requests for new mosques to be built and says the shortage raises questions about the country’s commitment to minority rights, an important gauge of its readiness for membership of the European Union.
The EU, which Serbia is negotiating to join, has taken notice, warning in a 2016 progress report: “The rights of persons belonging to a national minority to establish and register religious institutions, build and use places of worship need to be fully guaranteed in practice”.
European Commission officials did not reply to requests for comment.
The Secretariat for Urban Planning in Belgrade’s city hall denied blocking construction of new mosques, saying it had no record of any building requests from the Islamic Community of Serbia.
Mufti Muhamed Hamdi Jusufspahic, head of the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Community of Serbia, said Serbia’s byzantine bureaucracy and suspicion of Islam meant the cards were stacked against them.
“We’ve sought permits on a number of occasions for a number of locations, for decades... but we never reached the point of even qualifying to submit papers,” he told Reuters.
“Every request would be put in the drawer.”
The Serbian justice ministry said it was unaware of any problem.
“Serbia fulfils all EU criteria on securing religious rights and liberties, along with provisions from the constitution,” Mileta Radojevic, who heads the ministry’s department for cooperation with religious communities, said in an email to Reuters.
In total, Serbia is home to around 230,000 Muslims, accounting for some 3.1 percent of the population, concentrated mainly in the southwestern Sandzak region that borders Bosnia, Kosovo and Montenegro.
Slideshow (26 Images)
In 2004, in response to a wave of Albanian attacks on minority Serbs in Kosovo, rioters set the Belgrade mosque ablaze and torched another in the southern city of Nis. Both have since been restored.
Emin Zejnulahu, mufti of the demolished mosque in Zemun Polje, said Muslims would not be deterred.
“We must practice our religion, regardless of the obstacles,” he said. “We have to be good neighbors to everyone, regardless of their faith and nationality.”Leeds scientists have shown that gold nanotubes can fight cancer in three ways: as internal nanoprobes for high-resolution photoacoustic imaging, as drug delivery vehicles, and as agents for destroying cancer cells.
The study, published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, details the first successful demonstration of the biomedical use of gold nanotubes in a mouse model of human cancer — an alternative to existing chemotherapy and radiotherapy methods, which have serious side effects.
“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first [combination] in vitro [lab] and in vivo [live in animals] study of gold nanotubes,” the researchers say.
According to study lead author Sunjie Ye, who is based in the School of Physics and Astronomy and the Leeds Institute for Biomedical and Clinical Sciences at the University of Leeds, “high recurrence rates of tumors after surgical removal remain a formidable challenge in cancer therapy. Gold nanotubes have the potential to enhance the efficacy of these conventional treatments by integrating diagnosis and therapy in one single system.”
The researchers injected the gold nanotubes intravenously. They controlled the length of the nanotubes for the right dimensions to absorb near-infrared light (which penetrates tissue well) from a pulsed infrared laser beam.
By adjusting the brightness of the laser pulse, the researchers were able to control whether the gold nanotubes were in imaging mode or cancer-destruction mode.
For imaging, after absorbing energy from the laser pulse, the gold nanotubes generated ultrasound for multispectral optoacoustic tomography (MSOT), used to detect the gold nanotubes.
For cancer destruction, there were two options:
Use a stronger laser beam to rapidly raise the temperature in the vicinity of the nanotubes so that the temperature was high enough to destroy cancer cells.
Load the central hollow core of the nanotubes with a therapeutic payload.
The gold nanotubes were coated with protective sodium polystyrenesulfonate (PSS) and were excreted from the body, and therefore are unlikely to cause problems in terms of toxicity, an important consideration when developing nanoparticles for clinical use, the researchers say.
Abstract of Engineering gold nanotubes with controlled length and near-infrared absorption for theranostic applications
Important aspects in engineering gold nanoparticles for theranostic applications include the control of size, optical properties, cytotoxicity, biodistribution, and clearance. In this study, gold nanotubes with controlled length and tunable absorption in the near-infrared (NIR) region have been exploited for applications as photothermal conversion agents and in vivo photoacoustic imaging contrast agents. A length-controlled synthesis has been developed to fabricate gold nanotubes (NTs) with well-defined shape (i.e., inner void and open ends), high crystallinity, and tunable NIR surface plasmon resonance. A coating of poly(sodium 4-styrenesulfonate) (PSS) endows the nanotubes with colloidal stability and low cytotoxicity. The PSS-coated Au NTs have the following characteristics: i) cellular uptake by colorectal cancer cells and macrophage cells, ii) photothermal ablation of cancer cells using single wavelength pulse laser irradiation, iii) excellent in vivo photoacoustic signal generation capability and accumulation at the tumor site, iv) hepatobiliary clearance within 72 h postintravenous injection. These results demonstrate that these PSS-coated Au NTs have the ideal attributes to develop their potential as effective and safe in vivo imaging nanoprobes, photothermal conversion agents, and drug delivery vehicles. To the best of knowledge, this is the first in vitro and in vivo study of gold nanotubes.Hello and welcome to new level of Minecraft chatting in-game!
Chat Overhaul brings a lot of useful features from messengers like Discord, Skype etc.
This mod expands basic text chat to multimetia dynamic chat. It has APIs along with it through wich you can create your very own renderable chat message!
But as for a regular user, you might find interest in following:
Image sharing (up to 4096x4096 images!)
File sharing (up to 500 MB! Magic of free hosting )
) Voice messages (if you use Telegram, you know what I mean) (Hold down the voice button to record and release the mouse button when you're done recording)
StreamLabs support! (see configs for more...) Donation ticker: Sends a unique message to the chat about new incoming donation, in real-time!
Voice Calls Mute microphone and/or audio completely Share your screen with the player you're talking with (WIP, may cause large latencies, has low FPS transfer rate and awful quality... but hey! It's better than nothing, ey?)
Permissions:
You can use this mod in your modpack.
You are not allowed to re-publish this mod to other sites without providing a CurseForge download link and my permission (PM to Zeitheron, or via Discord)
You are not allowed to include this (or any other mods of DragonForge team) in your own mod. Building addons, however, is allowed, but a friendly PM would be good.
Note:
The only supported version of minecraft is the latest one that this mod exists for. DO NOT ASK TO DOWNGRADE!
Want to discuss anything? Need help with APIs?
Join the discord server and follow Zeitheron on Twitter!
If you would like to support my work, you can become a patron via Patreon.Grave stones of Anzac soldiers from World War I vandalised in west London
Updated
A war cemetery in west London dedicated to Anzac soldiers who died in World War I has been targeted by vandals for the second time this year.
Key points: Almost a quarter of 112 Australian Anzac graves vandalised at English cemetery
Vandals spray painted grave stones, ripped up pavers, sawed into flag pole
Second such attacks in one year
Jane Palmer, a local councillor, discovered a series of grave stones at St Mary's Churchyard Cemetery in Harefield, around 20 miles west of central London, covered in blue spray paint on Sunday morning (local time).
She said she was brought to tears by the incident.
"In tears this morning at this desecration of Harefield Anzac War Graves," she tweeted.
Vandals also ripped up and threw pavers at some of the gravestones, causing them to chip, and tried unsuccessfully to saw the Australian flag pole in half.
It is believed the graves were vandalised overnight, and Metropolitan police are investigating the incident.
"Those who did this should give themselves up. This is not going to go away," said Rob Bryan, the neighbourhood inspector for Hillingdon North where the graves are located.
More than 100 Anzacs and one Australian nurse, treated at the nearby Harefield Hospital during WWI, are buried on the site.
About a quarter of the 112 Australian graves were vandalised.
Ms Palmer said the site linked the village with Australian history.
"The soldiers were cared for in Harefield Hospital at the top of the village and they were buried down in the churchyard that you see here," she said.
"The villagers have grown up [with] this for a hundred years and we are very proud of the Anzac graves and our link to New Zealand and Australian soldiers that gave their lives.
"I can't come up with any logical reason why anybody would do this."
Churchyard attendant Rowena said it was both frustrating and devastating to see damage inflicted at the site.
"I normally organise the Anzac Day service, so to discover this is totally devastating," she said.
"When you think that these graves have been here for 100 years and twice this year they've been desecrated... I just cannot believe that anybody would do this to these soldiers who gave up their lives to fight for their mother country."
Unclear whether vandalism linked to April attacks
It still uncertain whether there is any connection between the grave stone vandalism and the attacks on the same cemetery on Anzac day earlier this year.
According to locals, the colour of the spray paint used to deface the grave stones is the same as that used in April.
There are no clear words or symbols in the graffiti that may indicate any motive or involvement from a particular group.
Mike Bullen, the assistant director for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), which is responsible for looking after the graves, said: "We are extremely disappointed by this deliberate act of vandalism and deplore the actions of those responsible."
"We have a team at the cemetery now, taking action to clean the headstones, and we hope to get the war graves back to their original condition," he said.
Mr Bullen said the CWGC were in contact with both the Australian and New Zealand High Commissions regarding the incident.
ABC/wires
Topics: world-war-1, crime, anzac-day, united-kingdom
First postedWilliam Nylander is a year older, 15 pounds heavier and undoubtedly more confident in his second Toronto Maple Leafs training camp.
Teammates say Nylander is bigger and stronger, and coach Mike Babcock has been impressed with the 19-year-old’s play. Yet even with those developments, Nylander’s chances of making the team are slim.
With the Leafs committed to a win-later approach, they want their top prospects developing in the minor leagues and at the junior level. In keeping with that theme, Nylander will likely start the season with the American Hockey League’s Toronto Marlies.
“We think he’s good,” Babcock said. “You see players, you see whether they’re ready, you see if they’re ready defensively, you see if they’re ready offensively.
“You just watch to see if they’re ready. We want our guys over-ready.”
Babcock has never ruled out the possibility of Nylander playing so well it’s impossible to send him back to the minors. He has said it’s up to any younger player to “take someone’s job” in the NHL.
“If I take that job, I’ll be happy,” Nylander said. “If I don’t, I’ll keep working hard with the Marlies.”
Nylander starred for the Marlies last season with 14 goals and 18 assists in 37 games. It was the young Swede’s introduction to the smaller, North American-sized rink, and he mastered it quickly.
“He was one of our best players if not our best player with the Marlies last year,” defenceman T.J. Brennan said. “He’s obviously done a tremendous amount of work over the summer. Seeing him doing very well here and playing at such a high pace with some of the best players in the world and against the best players in the world, he’s keeping up.”
Centre Tyler Bozak said Nylander looks physically stronger and is playing stronger on the puck than he did at camp a year ago. He’s dazzled by Nylander’s skill, saying “there’s always an opportunity for him to make a great pass or score a goal.”
Nylander did that in the Leafs’ first pre-season game, setting up Pierre-Alexandre Parenteau for a power-play goal.
“He’s so smart with the puck so I saw that pass coming a mile away,” Parenteau said. “He’s a really good player. He’s got a great future.”
In the Leafs’ perfect vision of the future, Nylander grows up with fellow prospects Mitch Marner and Kasperi Kapanen. Nylander has played a bit with Marner on his wing in the pre-season.
Nylander has dazzled with the puck, although Babcock said the son of former NHL forward Michael Nylander has a lot to work on. Asked if he felt NHL-ready, Nylander downplayed the significance of his pre-season performance.
“These games you’ve been playing against some NHL guys, not a full NHL team,” he said. “I have no idea.”
Nylander could be ready to make his NHL debut later this season, especially if the Leafs follow last season’s blueprint and trade a handful of veterans at the deadline. Until then, he’ll keep heeding his dad’s advice.
“He just said, ‘Just work hard every day you come to the rink and just get yourself prepared,'” Nylander said.While cops in the United States persist in their prohibitionary efforts—sometimes paralyzing and brutally murdering the average citizen over marijuana—police forces throughout northeast England have pulled out of the war on weed, at least for the most part. According to reports, cops are now only busting street hooligans engaged in large-scale black market operations—small timers are free to grow.
In a move that some government officials consider insubordinate decriminalization, County Durham crime commissioner Ron Hogg recently approved a series of guidelines dictating that police resources no longer be used to crack down on low-level home pot cultivators. Instead, their authority will be used solely as a weapon to fight against the scourge of organized crime, dope dealers and street gangs.
“We are not prioritizing people who have a small number of cannabis plants for their own use” Hogg told the Telegraph. “In low-level cases we say it is better to work with them and put them in a position where they can recover.
“In these cases,” he continued, “the most likely way of dealing with them would be with a caution and by taking the plants away and disposing of them. It is unlikely that a case like that would be brought before a court.”
This rubber-fisted approach to dealing with petty pot crimes, according to Hogg, will not only save police time and money but, perhaps, even inspire a much needed debate over how the entire nation handles drug offenders.
Although marijuana cultivation is still considered a serious offense in the eyes of Crown Prosecution Services—an offense with a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison—Hogg said his troops are no longer going after “users and small-time growers” unless there is a complaint or a “blatant” disregard for the law. Therefore, as long as cannabis connoisseurs maintain grows of a reasonable size, there should never be any reason for a vicious shakedown.
The latest Crime Survey for England and Wales indicates that Hogg’s blind-eye approach to personal pot plants could remove a significant amount of heat off British cannabis culture. Statistics show that between 2012 and 2014, pot seizures increased by 45 percent. Interestingly, in around 90 percent of those cases, less than 50 plants were confiscated—evidence that the majority of these arrests have been for the average user, not large black market operations.
Yet, officials with the National Drug Prevention Alliance argue that the Durham Constabulary has gone rogue, suggesting that the publicity surrounding his newfound policy will encourage more people to grow weed. However, Hogg contends that his position is simply about “keeping people out of the criminal justice system and reducing costs.”
“Cannabis use is still illegal and smoking it is still a crime, but if you are caught, you will get this opportunity to stop re-offending,” Hogg told the Northern Echo.
Commissioner Hogg explained that although he supports decriminalization and the use of cannabis for medicinal purposes, he remains concerned about the mental health implications associated with the herb.
“Legal or illegal makes no difference—it can be detrimental to health just like alcohol,” he said.
For now, resident stoners will have to settle for this concept of quasi-decriminalization because the U.K. government has no plans to legalize the leaf anytime in the near future. Commissioner Hogg said that as long as there is evidence that weed is damaging to the mental and physical condition, parliament will not tender its support.A24 is taking over distribution of the suicide-themed drama “The Sea of Trees” from Roadside Attractions/Lionsgate.
The film, starring Matthew McConaughey and Naomi Watts, had been picked up by Roadside Attractions/Lionsgate before its debut in competition at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. The film was booed at its premiere.
Gus Van Sant directed the movie, in which McConaughey portrays an American who travels to Japan’s “Suicide Forest” with the intention of taking his own life after the death of his wife, played by Watts, and decides to help a Japanese man (Ken Watanabe) who is lost. Roadside Attractions had not given the film a release date.
A24 took a similar step in February when it picked up U.S. rights to Yorgos Lanthimos’ dark comedy “The Lobster,” which had been purchased by Alchemy at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. Alchemy was hit by financial problems earlier this year. A24 has seen nearly $7 million in domestic grosses for “The Lobster” since its May 13 release.
Ken Kao’s Waypoint Entertainment fully financed and produced “The Sea of Trees.” Producers are Kao, Gill Netter, Kevin Halloran, F. Gary Gray, Brian Dobbins and Allen Fischer.
CAA and WME brokered the original deal for “The Sea of Trees” with Roadside and Lionsgate, and the move to A24.Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist on Monday said he expects that Republicans will unveil tax reform legislation by late September.
"I think we'll have a bill out of the White House, the Senate and the House by Sept. 28," Norquist said on CNBC. "The White House and the House and Senate leadership have made it clear they're working together to write this bill."
Congressional Republican leaders and Trump administration officials last week released a joint statement containing principles for tax reform. The document is intended to guide the congressional tax-writing committees as they draft legislation.
Tax reform is one of Republicans' top priorities, and it has taken on added urgency now that the effort to repeal and replace ObamaCare has stalled in the Senate.
ADVERTISEMENT
Lawmakers and the administration want tax legislation to pass this year. But Congress will also have to deal with other issues in the fall, including funding the federal government and raising the debt ceiling.
Additionally, there could be more efforts to try to pass healthcare legislation, eating up more time on the legislative calendar.
Norquist, who has the ear of GOP lawmakers, said the tax reform process differs from healthcare because the White House and House and Senate Republicans are all involved in drafting the bill.
"This time, all three are working together," he said. "They're not going to come up with one bill and ping pong it back and forth. It's going to be sort-of pre-negotiated. And the pieces of it are a lot easier."
Norquist said that tax legislation will include lower tax rates for both corporations and businesses whose income is currently taxed through the individual code.
"That gives you the political heft for tax reform," he said.This isn't even shocking anymore but what horrible abuse for expressing an opinion pic.twitter.com/uOLeXNxWmg — helena horton? (@horton_official) September 20, 2016
Why is it that some JC backers are such nasty pieces of work?
One feature that has characterised this LAB leadership campaign has been the sheer nastiness that we have seen on social media. The above Tweet this afternoon is just the latest example.
It seems that female LAB MPs have received more of it and those, like Ruth Smeeth, who happen to be Jewish as well now have special police protection.
This didn’t before Corbyn |
claims other highways, including one leading directly from Saudi Arabia, are being considered.
In essence, these would be terrorist ratlines directly controlled by the United States, leading directly out of the very epicenter of state sponsored terrorism in the region, Saudi Arabia, other Persian Gulf states and to a lesser but still significant extent, Jordan.
They would be terrorist ratlines difficult for Iraq’s central government or its allies to attack without providing a much welcomed pretext for Washington to directly retaliate against the faction of its choosing.
While the New York Times and US politicians and businessmen involved in the highway deal attempt to portray it as a means of providing peace, stability and economic prosperity for Iraq, a quick audit of US policy in the Middle East should ground those lofty promises in a much more frightening reality.
The scope of this project is nothing short of both a US occupation and a US-administered “safe zone” in which militant groups backed by the US and its regional partners can safely be harbored, and from which they can strike out against Iraq and its neighbors with the full protection of US military force.
Some US policymakers may feel that their failing proxy war against Syria involved a cart-before-the-horse policy in which the creation of US-administered and protected safe zones turned out to be more difficult to implement than initially anticipated, and that in the future, such zones should be created before another round of proxy-hostilities.
No matter what, the US presence and the more-than-certain intentions that underpin it will ensure not peace, stability or prosperity, but another decade of division and strife both in Iraq and beyond. Confounding this project, and those like it, and replacing them with actual projects to fulfill the promises of progress the US is merely hiding behind, will be key to truly moving Iraq and the region forward.
Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.Shiloh Paving & Excavating will repave the portion of Heritage Rail Trail County Park from Lafayette Plaza to Grantley Road
Buy Photo Bicyclists ride on a portion of the Heritage Rail Trail County Park near West Market Street in this 2012 photo. That portion of the trail will be improved, with work slated to begin in March of 2016. (Photo: File, York Daily Record)Buy Photo
A contractor has been selected for the $1 million project to enhance a portion of Heritage Rail Trail County Park in downtown York.
Shiloh Paving & Excavating will re-pave the roughly one-mile stretch extending south from Lafayette Plaza to Grantley Road, following a unanimous vote by York City Council Tuesday. Lighting will also be added to the trail, with 53 light fixtures either being added or repaired, said Jeff Shue, project manager for C.S. Davidson.
The enhancements will be paid for through a grant from the state's Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and private donations, with DCNR and donors each kicking in $536,500.
The bill for Shiloh Paving & Excavating is about $915,000. That will re-pave the surface from Lafayette Plaza to Jessop Place and turn the gravel portion of the trail from Jessop Place to Grantley Road into a porous pavement surface that will provide drainage improvements, Shue said.
Downtown Inc has already raised about $466,000 and is committed to raising the remaining money it needs to complete the project, Tim Miller, deputy director for the economic development group, told council members.
Improvements will begin in March and are expected to be completed before the end of the year, Shue said.
Contact Mark Walters at 771-2032 or follow him on Twitter at @walt_walters.
Read or Share this story: http://on-ydr.co/1SWZm3pOk, as of this moment, I am hooked. I love being able to control the lighting color in my house. After reading all of the reviews I didn't use the Hue app and just found a simple app on iTunes. My needs are simple, I want to turn my lights off and on from my phone and I want to control the color - don't need any scheduling or color matching from photos. Eventually I may get curious and play with other apps but for now I'm good.
I got the downcast lights for my smallish recessed cans. The bulbs stick out below the rim of the cans but they look like they were made for them because of the silver color bands on the bulbs. I haven't noticed any odd gaps in the light they produce or 'noise' but I'm not that advanced. They produce a light comparable or better than my 60w halogens with the ability to dim the light - from the app.
As for being hooked. I keep finding lamps and fixtures that seem to need "just one more". I'm going to wait until I see how long they last and the price drops (?). May update this later. Very easy set-up and frustration-free.A 12-year-old girl who was abducted and beaten by men trying to force her into a marriage was found being guarded by three lions who apparently had chased off her captors, a policeman said Tuesday.
The girl, missing for a week, had been taken by seven men who wanted to force her to marry one of them, said Sgt. Wondimu Wedajo, speaking by telephone from the provincial capital of Bita Genet, about 350 miles southwest of Addis Ababa.
She was beaten repeatedly before she was found June 9 by police and relatives on the outskirts of Bita Genet, Wondimu said. She had been guarded by the lions for about half a day, he said.
“They stood guard until we found her and then they just left her like a gift and went back into the forest,” Wondimu said.
“If the lions had not come to her rescue, then it could have been much worse. Often these young girls are raped and severely beaten to force them to accept the marriage,” he said.
'Some kind of miracle'
Tilahun Kassa, a local government official who corroborated Wondimu’s version of the events, said one of the men had wanted to marry the girl against her wishes.
“Everyone thinks this is some kind of miracle, because normally the lions would attack people,” Wondimu said.
Stuart Williams, a wildlife expert with the rural development ministry, said the girl may have survived because she was crying from the trauma of her attack.
“A young girl whimpering could be mistaken for the mewing sound from a lion cub, which in turn could explain why they didn’t eat her,” Williams said.
Ethiopia’s lions, famous for their large black manes, are the country’s national symbol and adorn statues and the local currency. Despite a recent crackdown, hunters kill the animals for their skins, which can fetch $1,000. Williams estimates that only 1,000 Ethiopian lions remain in the wild.
The girl, the youngest of four siblings, was “shocked and terrified” after her abduction and had to be treated for the cuts from her beatings, Wondimu said.
He said police had caught four of the abductors and three were still at large.
Kidnapping young girls has long been part of the marriage custom in Ethiopia. The United Nations estimates that more than 70 percent of marriages in Ethiopia are by abduction, practiced in rural areas where most of the country’s 71 million people live.It had been Anna's idea to visit Ingrid's family farm and meet the rest of the Andersens in the first place. It would get Elsa out of the castle and into the fresh air, and give Elsa and Ingrid an excuse for more time together. Anna had pushed Elsa and Ingrid together, and she was happy it worked. She wanted her sister to have a chance at fun, and even if their relationship was, well, different, they made each other happy. If Anna just happened to satisfy her curiosity about Ingrid and her background, so much the better.
What she wasn't counting on was spending hours in a carriage with Elsa and Ingrid.
Elsa, Anna, and Ingrid entered the plain carriage just outside the royal stables in Arendelle. Anna gave her hand to Elsa to help her up. Elsa said, "Thank you, Anna," and gave her hand a subtle squeeze. As Anna was about to climb in, Ingrid offered her hand to Anna. She looked at it for a moment, then took it and stepped up into the carriage. Ingrid followed, carrying a basket, and sat next to Elsa on the bench facing Anna.
It wasn't the royal carriage, just a regular household one, and the driver wasn't wearing the royal livery. The trip was a break from the formality of court, so they didn't want to attract attention. Still, the carriage seemed comfortable enough.
As they left the city limits, Elsa reached over to pat Anna's knee. "You're looking lovely as ever, Anna."
Anna chuckled, shrugged. "Tell me again when we get off this carriage in half an hour. See if I look so fresh then."
"Yes, it would be a good idea to stop for a rest halfway there. Remind me, Ingrid."
Ingrid smiled up at the attention. "Of course."
"Wait, what?" blurted Anna. "Halfway?"
Elsa smiled indulgently. "It's over an hour to Lillefjord from here. I thought you knew." She leaned back, her smile turning a bit wicked, her arm draped over Ingrid who was snuggled next to her. "Hours enclosed together with nothing but privacy? Are you sure this was your idea?"
"Elsa…" said Anna, and raised her eyebrows in a warning.
Elsa's face was suddenly serious. "I'm sorry. Too far?"
Anna grimaced, and nodded towards Ingrid. "No, not that, I mean, you know…"
"Oh." Elsa kissed Ingrid on the temple. "Ingrid doesn't get jealous."
Ingrid nodded. "Please. Don't mind me." She patted the basket. "There's books and refreshments if you get bored later."
As they rode on, Anna felt off-balance. When Anna had a piece of pastry from the basket, Elsa moistened her fingertip and wiped the icing from the corner of Anna's mouth, then licked the icing from her own finger. It was the sort of flirtatious teasing Anna had come to accept from Elsa, but in the next moment Elsa was nuzzling and holding hands with Ingrid as if it hadn't happened. A moment later Elsa asked Ingrid for a book, and as she read Ingrid sat demurely like a perfect servant.
Elsa seemed happy. Ingrid seemed happy. But Anna felt like she was reading a book printed on flimsy paper, with three sets of words showing through. Everything was jumbled up.
When they finally arrived at the Andersen's farm, Anna climbed eagerly out of the carriage, stretching her aching back every which way and pacing stiff-legged up and down the gravel driveway. It had been a long and uncomfortable ride to the Andersen's farm, and not just because she'd been sitting for over an hour. Behind her Elsa descended gracefully, and Ingrid followed her like an echo.
Elsa told the driver to wait for them at the inn in Lillefjord and return that evening, and had Ingrid give him some money for dinner.. When she was done, Ingrid brushed herself off and said, "If I may, I'll go in ahead and prepare everyone for your arrival, if it's all right with you. I'm afraid it'll mean waiting out here for a minute."
Elsa smiled graciously and nodded. "We're here for the fresh air," she said, tipping her head towards Anna. "It'd be a shame not to breathe it for a minute before we go inside." Ingrid curtseyed and dashed ahead to a side door.
Elsa walked slowly back and forth, admiring the farmhouse. It was a U-shaped building open towards them, with off-white walls and a mossy thatched roof. The left and centre sections were the house proper, and the right arm was the barn. "It's lovely. I'm glad you thought of this, Anna. I'm feeling more relaxed already."
Anna continued to massage her own lower back. "Really? I am so stiff. How are you not stiff? Did you get the good bench? Is there a good bench? Wanna trade on the way back?"
"It was your idea to not take the royal carriage, so that no one would make a fuss. Also," and Elsa mock-scowled at her, "not slouching helps."
Anna rolled her eyes, then bumped sideways against Elsa. They laughed softly for a moment. Then Anna looked thoughtful. "Ingrid's taking a while. Think there's a problem?"
Before she finished her question, Ingrid opened the heavy door nearest them in the left part of the house, curtseyed, and swung the door open wide. Elsa strode forward and Anna followed, gravel crunching under their feet.
They entered and saw a long room with walls the same off-white as the outside, a table running down the centre, wood stove in a corner, and every remaining square foot filled by people. At least that's how it felt to Elsa. Ingrid was at the front of the crowd, next to a heavy-set man with a round face and a prominent widow's peak, and a matronly woman with long straight salt-and-pepper hair. "Your Majesty, Your Highness, may I present my parents, Thorsten and Klara Andersen. Mama, Papa, Queen Elsa and Princess Anna." Thorsten bowed, giving them a good view of how far back his slicked-down hair had receded.
Klara curtseyed and said, "It's a pleasure to meet you, Your Highness," facing Elsa, "and you, Your Majesty," facing Anna. Ingrid gave her a dismayed look and a quick head-shake, then moved on to the next couple.
"Your Majesty, Your Highness, may I present my eldest brother Ernst, and his wife Tanja."
Ernst, the image of his father but with more hair and less stomach, bowed sarcastically low to Elsa as he doffed an imaginary hat. "Your Righteous Majesty." He did the same for Anna. "Your Gracious Highness." As he did this, his pretty wife curtseyed with a half-smile and a skeptical look, as if to say that she disapproved of his behaviour but didn't disagree with his attitude.
Out of the side of her mouth Elsa whispered to Anna, "What's their issue?" Anna replied with a tiny shrug.
With a nervous grin, Ingrid continued. "May I present my eldest sister Astrid, her husband Mathias Albrecktsen, and their children Hallvard and Elsanna." As they bowed and curtseyed Mathias and Astrid's expressions were neutrally pleasant, Hallvard's sombre, and Elsanna's ecstatic.o
Anna bent down to ruffle the girl's hair. "Elsanna. That's a pretty name."
Astrid explained, "We named her Elsa Anna, after the queen and – I mean, after the two of you. But when Hallvard was little all he could manage was 'Elsanna,' and that's what we call her."
"Mo-om!" said Hallvard, mortified.
"What do you think of it?" Anna asked Elsa.
"I definitely approve of 'Elsanna'. I like it."
"Me too," said Anna.
Little Elsanna took a step towards Elsa and said, in her outside voice, "I believe in you!"
Baffled, Elsa smiled politely and said, "Thank you. I believe in you, too."
By then the restless muttering and milling around that had started at the far end of the room had reached the queen and princess, and the party had returned to its original disorder. Before Ingrid could introduce them properly, another of her brothers stepped forward. "Pleasure to meet you 'Queen Elsa', 'Princess Anna'. I'm Truls, this is my wife Merete, and the kids are…" He looked at her.
"Around here somewhere. You'll meet them soon enough." She put out a hand to shake.
Ingrid hissed frantically, "You don't just shake hands with the queen, you wait for her to offer. It's not done." She looked back and forth, her arms pulled in, looking for some way to make the chaos go away.
"It's fine," said Elsa as she took Merete's hand.
"Yeah, it's okay" said Anna. "We came here to get a break from protocol. And to meet your family, of course."
"You did your best. We'll…circulate and introduce ourselves. It'll be all right." Elsa didn't care about being disrespected, but she couldn't stand to see the disappointment on Ingrid's face.
Before Elsa could comfort her, Klara put an arm around Ingrid's shoulders and pulled her away to help with the food. "Come along, dear. I've missed having you in the kitchen." She gave her daughter a squeeze as they threaded through the crowd.
"Am I missing something?" Elsa asked Anna.
"I don't know," said Anna, scanning the room. She looked at Elsa again and put a hand on her arm. "Listen, are you okay? Do you want me to stick around?"
"No. But thanks." Elsa straightened her already-straight shoulders. "Well, let's make an appearance."
"That's the spirit," said Anna flatly, and gave Elsa a wry smile and a shrug of apology before they split up to mingle.
Elsa knew that Ingrid had six brothers and sisters, but she had failed to take into account that they would have spouses and children, plus their own friends, friends of the family, and neighbours. As she chatted, concentrating on names and relationships, she realized how much she relied on briefings, guest lists, and protocol to smooth her way at functions. Everyone she met there was friendly, but she had the feeling she was missing an inside joke, and that it was at her expense.
She literally bumped into Ernst again. "Oops. Sorry, queen." He put up his hands in mock-fear. "Don't have me beheaded."
"Don't worry. We haven't had a hanging in nearly eighty years. I'm seriously considering taking capital punishment off the books entirely."
"Right, right. Listen, Ingrid's not around, you can drop the act."
"The act? What act?"
"Come on. Ingrid told a bunch of wild stories about being friends with the queen, so she gets you and the redhead to pretend to be royalty to 'prove' she's not making it up."
"I am the queen, and she is my friend. My dear friend."
"Don't get me wrong. I'm glad you're trying to stand up for her. But it's unbelievable enough that she has two friends at all, let alone that they're royalty."
"You don't like your sister?"
"I like her just fine, but she is, you know, not…typical."
Elsa's eyes narrowed. "Neither am I."
Ernst stood a little too close. She could smell the beer on his breath. "I wish you were the queen. I've got a few things I'd like to say to her."
"To me."
"Yeah, yeah, whatever. To you."
"Do tell."
He ignored her dangerously raised eyebrow. "For starters, 'you' completely mishandled the whole Weselton thing."
"Did I?"
"A trade embargo? With Weselton? We need Weselton as a trading partner. And the Southern Isles, too. We need the money from Weselton to buy the food from the Southern Isles. Now, no food and no money. That's just shortsighted. Stupid. And it's not like the Duke did anything."
"Besides trying to have me killed."
"But not personally. That was his soldiers. And there's another thing." Ernst gestured with his non-beer-holding hand as he warmed to his subject. "Prince Hans? Sent back home without so much as a slap on the wrist? He should've been executed. At least."
"At least? What comes after 'executed'?"
"You need to make an example. Show people that we mean business, that you can't push Arendelle around. If someone gets out of line, come down on them hard. Send those people a message."
Elsa raised her head, fixing him with her gaze. "Let me see if I understand you correctly. My very first act after taking the throne should be to kill foreign royalty and plunge our country into a bloody war with a more powerful nation, but I should let a man who ordered my death go scot-free because it'd be good for business." Despite their nearness to the wood stove, it grew chilly in that corner of the room. "And that's the message you would send to 'those people': the Queen of Arendelle is bloodthirsty but mercenary. Good thinking."
"Now wait a minute – "
"As for showing people I mean business, I suppose I could start domestically. With someone who's been publicly criticizing the queen, for instance. Do you know what the penalties are for seditious slander?" She smiled sharply. "I do."
Ernst gripped his beer tightly. But before he could respond, his wife Tanja took him by the elbow. "Ernst, I told you not to talk politics. Honestly, people will think you're one of those anti-Skadists." She smiled a half-hearted apology at Elsa. "Now leave Ingrid's friend in peace and come say hi to your cousin Rickard, he came all the way from Steintøyholm," she said, dragging him away.
Farther down the room, sitting in front of a half-circle of listeners, Ingrid's brother-in-law Jakob Niequist warmed up by strumming a few chords on the mandolin in his lap. "In honour of our guests, 'The Queen's True Love', everyone," he announced. Then he began playing a catchy tune and sang. "Arendelle, sweet Arendelle, Queen Elsa's passions – "
The instrument was yanked from his grasp. He looked up to see Ingrid holding it, her white-knuckled fist wrapped around its neck as if she was trying to strangle the voice out of it. "Her Majesty doesn't want to hear that song."
A grin parted his ginger beard. "It's all right. There was a court case and everything. It's not illegal or whatever."
Her voice as tight as her fist, Ingrid repeated, "Her Majesty does not want to hear that song."
His wife, Ingrid's sister Sonja, came to her side. She put one hand on Ingrid's shoulder, the other on the mandolin. "Of course not, Ingrid," she said softly. "He'll play something else. Won't you, dear?"
"But I was – "
"Won't you, dear."
He nodded once, slowly. "Sure, of course."
She gently increased the pressure on the instrument. "Now give him back the mandolin and he'll play something nice. How about 'The Thirsty Farmer'? Everybody likes that one. Okay?"
"I'm sorry," said Ingrid, as her grip on the mandolin loosened enough for Sonja to take it from her. "I'll go help Mama some more."
"Sonja, what was that about?' asked Jakob after Ingrid had walked away. "I thought you said she was…well, not like that."
"She isn't. She's the sweetest, most gentle soul you'd ever meet. Most of the time. You didn't see her at Anders' funeral, did you."
"No. Why?"
She shook her head. "Never mind." She handed him the mandolin. "Now, 'There was a thirsty farmer,' right?"
He shrugged and resumed playing.Saints Row developer Volition has released a new video demonstrating the weird and wonderful elements of the Saints Row 4 characters, weapons and gameplay. Developer Volition was bought by Deep Silver (Koch Media) in the THQ bankruptcy firesale and this is a project that is expected to be a success for the new owners.
Dubstep gun, looks better in the video
In this game sequel the leader of the Saints gang has climbed to the top of the heap and become the President of the US of A. Boone says the team are always proud of the innovative and exotic weaponry they use in the Saints games and he starts off by demonstrating the “Inflator rifle”, you can guess what that does to people/things. This video was first shown at PAX East and a “favourite” among the crowd was the “Dubstep Gun”.
Following his outrageous gunplay episode the president decides to nip down to the gun shop in his monster truck. This section of the video demonstrates gun customisation in the game. After this we get to see the first of a powerful evil alien race called “The Zim” who will be featuring in the game. A useful new feature to help you combat such enemies may well be the new mechanoid-suit which has machine guns, rockets and jump-jet capability.
As well as these objects that you can use to enhance your character Boone said that the developers have decided that the leader of the Saints should have some “superpowers”. Demonstrating this aspect we see the on-screen character run faster than a car, leap to the top of a tower block and then fly through the sky. Also using the character superpowers you can impressive hand-to-hand combat moves against your enemies. Another featured superpower was the ability to ice-freeze things and use telekinesis. Boone promised more to come and be revealed as the game gets nearer its launch date.
When you complete a task in the new game you will achieve a completion level score, for instance if you complete a task but only just manage to scrape through, you will get a bronze level achievement. This feature helps the boost replayability factor of the single player game.
Player gets bronze during a Mech assignment
Saints Row 4 will be released on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC on 23rd August in Europe and on 20th August in North America.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
Angel Di Maria has revealed he struggled during his first season at Manchester United because of a tough summer spent at the World Cup with Argentina.
The 27-year-old made a blistering start to his career at Old Trafford following his £59.7m move from Real Madrid, scoring three goals in his first five games.
But his formed slumped during the second half of the season and he started just one of United’s final 10 games.
His first season at Old Trafford was so disappointing he’s been linked with a move away just a year after his British record move. Di Maria says Argentina’s run the World Cup final - which he missed because of a thigh injury - was the high point of his career so far.
MORE: Harry Kane flattered by talk of a move to United.
But he’s revealed the exhausting summer in Brazil impacted his first season at United.
He’s set to miss the bulk of United’s pre-season schedule again this summer with Argentina competing in the Copa America in Chile.
He told Goal: “The Angel Di Maria from before the World Cup and after the World Cup changed so much because we gave everything we had on the pitch.
“It was my happiest moment. That was the most special thing that has happened to me. We weren’t able to win, but we gave everything on the pitch and we made history.
“Argentina were back in a World Cup final. We always said we wanted to become legends and we couldn’t do it. But that stays with us.”
MORE: Who should Louis van Gaal keep and sell this summer?
United stars on the red carpet at end of season awards do.In the 1970s and early 80s, the New York Cosmos were the world’s most well-known soccer team. It’s only fitting the re-incarnation of that famous team is headed to Cuba for an historic event.
The Cosmos announced Monday they will play against the Cuban national team in Havana on June 2, becoming the first American team in 16 years to play a game on Cuban soil.
“Part of our vision for the team over time is not only to become a key player in the global soccer economy of tomorrow, but also to become a natural global ambassador for the United States, and in particular, for the great city and state of New York,” Cosmos chairman Seamus O’Brien said at a press conference in Midtown.
The Cosmos play on Long Island and compete in the North American Soccer League, one rung below MLS. With diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba fully restored, Cosmos coach Giovanni Savarese is eager to make this game about soccer, not politics.
“The most important thing is the soccer part,” Savarese said. “That’s what we worry about. We go in there to compete. We have a bye weekend and we were able to fill it in with a match, and what a match to fill for that weekend.”Breaking
This year's second-generation Apple Watch will feature improved internal components, but its external design will be largely unchanged from the first-generation model, according to well-connected insider Ming-Chi Kuo.
The KGI Securities analyst dished details on the next-generation Apple Watch in a research note issued on Monday, a copy of which was obtained by AppleInsider. Kuo claims that the 2016 Apple Watch will feature "spec improvements with limited changes to form factor design."Those expecting a new look for the Apple Watch, such as a thinner profile, will have to wait until the company's anticipated 2017 upgrade, he said. This year's model is expected to be much like the iPhone tick-tock upgrade schedule, with an "s" update focusing on the internal components rather than the external design.The claims are consistent with a rumor dating back to last July, which claimed the second-generation Apple Watch would feature an essentially identical design to the first model, focusing on internal components such as a larger battery and a display with improved outdoor visibility.Kuo, however, did not share any further details on what he believes the improved internal components of a second-generation watch might be. But he is bearish on Apple Watch sales, predicting that only 7.5 million total units will ship in 2016, citing an "immature" market for wearable devices.He believes only 10.6 million Apple Watch units were shipped in all of 2015, falling short of market consensus. Apple has declined to reveal any shipment numbers for the Apple Watch, but has said that sales have grown each quarter since it launched in the spring of 2015.Also unknown is when the next Apple Watch might launch. Incorrect predictions had pegged it for a March launch, while others forecast a June launch that might coincide with Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference. It's also possible the company could showcase an "Apple Watch 2" alongside the anticipated "iPhone 7," which is expected to be unveiled this September.Apple gave its fledgling wearable device a $50 price cut last month, with the 38-millimeter Apple Watch Sport now starting at $299. The larger 42-millimeter version can be had for $349.Kuo has a proven track record in predicting Apple's future product plans. Most recently, he was first to peg the $400 to $500 pricing range and all of the hardware specifications for Apple's newly launched iPhone SE.Game Location: C/Bethesda Softworks/Morrowwind
Morrowwind.ini
[Archives]
Archive 0=Tribunal.bsa
Archive 1=Bloodmoon.bsa
Archive 2=TR_Data.bsa
Archive 3=PT_Data.bsa
Error Report
TES3Stream Warning: Model "Meshes\TR\cr\Xtr_skyrenderM.NIF" tex not found "textures\um_em_head.dds"!
TES3Stream Warning: Model "Meshes\TR\cr\Xtr_skyrenderM.NIF" tex not found "textures\um_bb_chitin.tga"!
Texture Load Error!: textures\um_em_head.dds
Texture Load Error!: textures\um_bb_chitin.tga
Texture Load Error!: textures\um_bb_chitin.tga
Texture Load Error!: textures\um_bb_chitin.tga
bash.jpg 126.47KB 0 downloads
Installed Mods;
Morrowwind GOTY
+wiremesh 84
Recommended Mods of EmeraldFlame101 from Reddit
-Morrowind Graphics Extender- so you can see more than 10 feet in front of you
-MGE 3_3_2 Installer-5535
-Morrowimd Code patch- fixes bugs, resolution issues, and balance issues
+Timeslip's Exe Optimizer
+4GB Patch
-Apoapse's Attack Mod: Makes all attacks hit and not miss(enemys too)
-not installed (give dice rolls a go)
-Fair Magika Regen: gives you magika regen.
-Fair Magicka Regen-246
-Speed and Stamina: makes you run faster when you start and stamina regens when you run
-Speed and Stamina Tweaked-43413-1-0a
-Tamriel Rebuilt: adds the western part of the mainland of Morrowind with some new cities and quests to do
+Tamriel_Data (HD)-44537-04
-Tamriel Rebuilt 17.09
-Delayed Dark Brotherhood Attack Mod- stops the level 10-20 dark brother hood member from attacking you until you finish the main story
-DelayedDBAttacksTest-14891-2-1
-Random Passive Cliff Racers Mod: makes it so most cliff racers wont attack you
-random-passive-cliff-racers-v10
-Morrowind Official Add-ons: add-ons made by Bethesda
-Less Generic NPC's
-Less Generic NPCs-309
-Less Generic Main Quest
-cant find?
-Less Generic Tribunal
-Less Generic Tribunal v2-23363-2-0
-Less Generic Bloodmoon
-Less_Generic_Bloodmoon_V1_3-23346-1-3Public employee unions in Whitman's crosshairs POLITICS
Gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman being escorted to the ballroom at the start of the California Republican Party 2010 Spring Convention at Santa Clara Hyatt Regency and Convention Center in Santa Clara, Ca., on Friday, March 12, 2010. less Gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman being escorted to the ballroom at the start of the California Republican Party 2010 Spring Convention at Santa Clara Hyatt Regency and Convention Center in Santa Clara, Ca.,... more Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Public employee unions in Whitman's crosshairs 1 / 5 Back to Gallery
Republican Meg Whitman is sharpening her focus on one of the main foils of the billionaire executive's gubernatorial campaign: unions, particularly those representing public employees.
Her TV commercials attack GOP primary rival Steve Poizner for "joining liberal unions" to support a 2000 ballot measure that lowered the vote threshold to pass school bonds. She rejects a timeline to release her taxes, dismissing the demand as coming from a "union front for Jerry Brown." She insists that state employees make financial concessions to help balance the budget.
All of these moves are calculated to help Whitman tap into conservative and Tea Party frustrations with the increasing size of government.
At the same time, the former eBay CEO thinks private-sector workers - particularly those from the technology world - can do a better job making government more efficient and thrifty. If elected, she plans to recruit at least 100 of her top 300 key appointees from the private sector.
'Cold, hard truth'
Pointing to at least $60 billion in underfunded public-employee pensions and a $20 billion state budget deficit, Whitman told reporters in Santa Clara at the California Republican Party convention over the weekend that "here's the cold, hard truth: We have a government we can no longer afford."
She believes she can carve at least $15 billion in savings from the state budget, with the largest chunk coming from givebacks from government workers. She plans to trim 40,000 of them from the state rolls over the next four years, largely through attrition. The cuts could include some University of California and prison workers, but not public safety employees.
She will ask the University of California to look at rolling back its staffing to 2004-05 levels. She wants to use some of the savings from state cutbacks to reverse tuition increases and invest $1 billion in higher education, largely into research areas.
Whitman proposes to raise state workers' retirement age from 55 to 65, and will also ask public employees to double the amount of salary contributions to their pension plans - from 5 percent to 10 percent.
"I think the era of a defined benefit program is over relative to a defined contribution plan," said Whitman, who told Chronicle columnist Debra J. Saunders last week that she has never directly negotiated with unions before.
And when it comes to choosing her top appointments as governor, Whitman expressed confidence that top private-sector employees would take a pay cut and move to Sacramento. During the past year that she has campaigned for governor, she said she has received promises from many that they would join her administration to provide a fresh perspective on how to change government. She declined to name any.
Many retired Silicon Valley executives who have made their fortunes might be "ready to leave their mark" in public service, said Carl Guardino, CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, a public policy trade association that represents 300 of the valley's top companies. He noted that "retired" in Silicon Valley could mean anyone from "30 years old to 80."
"My sense is that Silicon Valley workers would leap at the chance to serve in state government for four to eight years," said Guardino, whose organization doesn't endorse candidates. Guardino has long known Whitman, but is not affiliated with her campaign.
"I have never witnessed so many technology executives and workers who are concerned about the health of the state," he said. If Whitman - or any candidate, he said - were looking for 100 appointees "they could find 1,000 here easily."
'Pay cut'
But Deborah Burger, president of the 86,000-member California Nurses Association, said Whitman's proposed changes for public employee union workers "are essentially a pay cut. People won't see that money until they retire."
Instead of calling for concessions from highly paid executives or fees for flush oil companies, Whitman "is attacking people who can't do damage to her politically," Burger said.
However, the nurses and other unions are trying to challenge Whitman. Burger said the California Nurses Association Political Action Committee recently contributed $100,000 to Level the Playing Field 2010, a coalition of liberal activists and unions that have aired ads ass |
wrapped around that waist.
"I could walk away from the sport and those (moments) would be enough to make it worth it."Integration of poor people into the larger community is key to eradicating poverty in Canada, says Claudette Bradshaw, a former federal Liberal MP who served in the federal cabinet and was the federal co-ordinator for homelessness.
In most ways, those living in poverty are no different from those who aren't, Bradshaw said in an interview with Information Morning Moncton.
"They are like you and me... they are in the same community, they are at the same schools," said Bradshaw, the former MP for Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe.
"They want what you want."
Claudette Bradshaw, former MP and founder of Headstart in Moncton, says the need to help people out of poverty remains. (Shutterstock/Freedom Studio) Bradshaw, a longtime activist, was speaking on the 25th anniversary of the United Nations declaration of the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.
Bradshaw opened the first food bank in Moncton and founded Headstart Early Family Intervention Centre.
Asked Wednesday how she felt about having a day for eradicating poverty, Bradshaw said she has a different outlook on it now than she did then.
"If you would have asked me that when I opened up the first food bank I would have told you how mad I was that we had to do that, OK? Now that I've matured a little bit, and my hair is a little bit whiter, and my body is a little bit wider, I will say to you it's all the time."
Many stories of success, sadness
Bradshaw said she used to go to work at Headstart and see children coming in hungry. She'd never thought Moncton would need a food bank.
"If I ever wrote a book on what I lived and stories that I seen and stuff that I heard, people would think... no that's not happening in my city, but it is happening in your city."
Bradshaw said many stories have stayed with her over the years, but the one she recalls the most is a mother of four children who dreamed of going to university and realized her dream as a mature student.
"We don't realize the potential. When you show them love, when you show them you care … they're special."
Bradshaw said the struggle at Headstart was always wondering if it should stick with core programming or do more. She added she never regretted doing more.
"The need was so big."
What made her most proud was seeing parents being able to care for their families after getting some help.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.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Fight Back! Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each 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 we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Travel With The Nation Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
Starting Friday, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will see a $5 billion reduction in funding. This means families of four who rely on food stamps will receive $36 less each month, starting now—a serious blow to struggling families, but also the economy, since every federal dollar spent on food stamps generates $1.74 in economic activity. Ad Policy
This is just a prelude to deeper food stamp cuts likely to come, as Congress debates a five-year farm bill. So it is important to get the political dynamics of Friday’s cut correct. There is a troubling trend among some left-leaning writers to blame the big bad GOP. See for example Jonathan Capehart in The Washington Post: “Oh SNAP, veterans get dissed by the GOP.” But that’s not the entire story.
SNAP benefits were boosted by the 2009 stimulus bill, and were to remain at that higher level until the annual inflation adjustments overtook it. But in 2010, Congress (controlled of course, at the time, by Democrats) passed a bill that took $2.2 billion from SNAP and applied the funds to one of Michelle Obama’s pet projects: a healthy lunch initiative for low-income children. This is what created Friday’s abrupt drop in benefits.
At the time, many House Democrats refused to punish food stamp recipients and would not agree to the funding offset, especially since SNAP had already been raided once before to help fund a round of emergency aid to states. This lead to clashes with the White House and phone calls from Michelle Obama, as a contemporary Politico story notes:
Despite heavy lobbying by the first lady, more than 100 House Democrats have balked at approving the Senate’s $4.5 billion version of the nutrition bill because it is funded in part with $2.2 billion in cuts to SNAP, the federal food stamp program. They want assurances from the Obama administration that the funding cuts the Senate approved will be restored in the near future. “The White House’s preference is to just pass the bill,” said a congressional staff member who spoke on the condition of anonymity while the negotiations are ongoing.
The White House kept promising to “find a different offset in the future,” in the words of a spokesman at the time, and Democrats eventually relented. But no offset was ever found—despite several crisis negotiations that have happened since: the spring 2011 near-shutdown, the summer 2011 debt-ceiling deal, the fiscal cliff of late 2012 and this fall’s dual government shutdown and debt-ceiling faceoff. Democrats extracted numerous policy concessions throughout all this, but solving the so-called “hunger cliff” was not one.
There were surely plenty of other funding offsets that could have been explored, or of course Democrats (who, again, controlled the House and sixty votes in the Senate) could have just passed the relatively small school lunch bill without any funding offset.
Why insist on the SNAP offset? Again, 2010-era Politico:
[Rahm] Emanuel and members of the president’s legislative affairs team have been trying to broker a deal to satisfy progressives. Offsetting the cost of the lunch program with cuts to food stamps was not an ideal approach for the White House, either; but there are also concerns about the deficit. And the White House has already made several funding promises to lawmakers, including assurances to Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) that she would receive agriculture assistance in exchange for her support for small-business legislation.
So it was “deficit” concerns and a desire to preserve “agricultural assistance” (read: farm subsidies) that motivated the White House to press House Democrats to raid SNAP.
It is no coincidence that both deficit reduction (incidentally, not offsetting a $4.5 billion bill would have a sub-trivial impact on the long-term deficit) and farm subsidies are both very high priorities to people with very large amounts of money. This gets back to a truism about Washington that is only getting more stark: the poor have virtually no pull.
Marty Gilens, a professor of politics at Princeton, has demonstrated this concept convincingly. When rich people and poor people disagree on policy, the rich people win:
Friday’s punitive and economically damaging food stamp cuts are much less a result of red-team-versus-blue-team politics, and much more a result of a political process where money talks.
That’s not to say that Republicans aren’t much worse on this front: indeed, the House GOP passed a terrible farm bill that cuts $40 billion from SNAP over ten years. House Democrats have been bravely rallying to restore the SNAP cuts this week, but getting nowhere with Republican leadership in the House.
But as the history of Friday’s “hunger cliff” shows, a basic indifference to the plight of people on food stamps is sadly a bipartisan problem. The Democratic alternative to the House farm bill is a Senate farm bill that cuts “only” $4 billion from the program, while continuing any number of bloated agricultural subsidy programs.
To actually end the insanity of simply debating the scale of harsh safety net cuts during an economic recession, instead of whether they are appropriate in the first place, it’s important to understand why this is happening. It’s not a simple case of mean old John Boehner.
Sasha Abramsky describes how the government shutdown hurt America’s most vulnerable.Coming into the 2017 NFL Draft, it was unclear whether the Miami Dolphins would draft defense heavy or not. The Dolphins had clear gaps on that side of the ball, specifically at linebacker, defensive end and cornerback. Given the recent draft where the team picked five defensive players, more than one Miami Dolphins rookie will have a chance to provide an immediate impact.
Potential Instant Impact Miami Dolphins Rookies
The Dolphins surprised many fans and experts when they passed on Reuben Foster at number 22 overall. The fact he even fell that far was astonishing. Now there are reports he could miss the entire 2017 season, not to mention he had a diluted urine sample before the draft. While Miami did not select any high profile prospects, they had a safe draft addressing every need on both sides of the ball. Now it is time to see whether the success of the 2016 draft can be duplicated.
Charles Harris – Defensive End
The Dolphins are blessed with Pro Bowler Cameron Wake on the left side on the defense. They also re-signed Andre Branch to compliment him. Many supporters seemed perplexed as to why the Dolphins would select a pass rusher with their first selection. Wake is 35 years old and is coming off a comeback season. Branch had a breakout year in 2016, but is not seen as a future star like Wake proved to be. At 27, he may be entering his prime, but adding depth to an aging rotation is important.
Miami not only added depth at this position, they drafted a young Wake in Charles Harris. Being considered a starter at defensive end is not necessarily a positive. The first two downs of a drive will usually give time to the run stopping players, while situational pass rushers will come in on third down. Harris is definitely a better run stopper than Wake, but with inexperience, he may not start on the field every game. Don’t panic Dolphins fans, his impact will come. He may be more talented than Branch, but not at first. Harris will become a starter.
Raekwon McMillan – Middle Linebacker
Linebacker was by far the most worrisome position for the Dolphins last season. The only linebacker that was worth noting last season is Kiko Alonso. However, Alonso played out of position the entire season at middle linebacker. Given Miami’s desperate need for linebacker help, they signed Lawrence Timmons in free agency. This left a gap at middle linebacker, assuming Alonso returns to his natural position. The decision to pass on Foster in the first round rendered itself even more confusing until the second round.
With their second selection of the draft, the Dolphins drafted Raekwon McMillan out of Ohio State. McMillan led his team in tackles at middle linebacker on a star studded Buckeyes defense. According to many sources, McMillan was one of the highest players on the Dolphins board. Given the natural talent he has, coupled with the fact he has little competition means he has an empty starting seat just waiting for him. At just 20 years old, he could be a potential Pro Bowl caliber player and leader at the heart of Miami’s defense.
Cordrea Tankersley – Cornerback
Cornerback was the most confusing position for the Dolphins in 2016. At times, players like Byron Maxwell, Tony Lippett and Xavien Howard looked like legitimate starters. However, when they are not dialed in or completely healthy, this core is atrocious. Howard looked like an aggressive, quick and large cornerback before his injury. Maxwell almost got back to his Seattle form for awhile. Lippett was consistent, but still lacked experience since converting from a wide receiver full time.
Cordrea Tankersley has a National Championship title to his name. Yet, he was overlooked enough to fall to the third round. He is another player Miami had much higher on their board than the third round. At 6’1″ and 190 pounds he has extremely similar measurements to Howard. Given Miami’s lackluster depth at cornerback, it is hard to tell whether Tankersley can start. If new defensive coordinator Matt Burke decides to have three corners on the field to start the game, you could see Tankersley alongside Maxwell, Howard or Lippett. Given their extensive injury records, he could be poised for more time than he expects.
Isaac Asiata – Guard
Selecting Issac Asiata out of Utah in the fifth round has proven to be a fan favorite selection already. With his Somoan background and intimidating eye paint, he looks like everything a team would want in their offensive guard. Scary. The Dolphins 2016 first round selection was Laremy Tunsil, who played left guard all season. Since Branden Albert‘s departure to Jacksonville, Tunsil has been moved to his natural position of left tackle. This leaves a gap at the guard position.
Asiata is known as a run blocker, which fits Miami’s run-first scheme for Jay Ajayi. There are a few options on Miami’s roster to fill this void, such as Kraig Urbik or Anthony Steen. However, these players had only average seasons filling in for injured players. If Asiata can perform well in camp, he could be on the cusp of a starting role.
Godchaux, Taylor and Ford
The Dolphins made a surprising move drafting back-to-back defensive tackles in the fifth and sixth rounds. Davon Godchaux and Vincent Taylor are not going to be immediate starters in Miami. But, they could have an immediate impact. Playing behind arguably the best defensive tackle in the NFL in Ndamukong Suh and the returning Jordan Phillips will be difficult. If anything, these two rookies will provide much needed depth in the run game.
In the seventh round, with their final selection, the Dolphins took Isaiah Ford. Ford is a wide receiver out of Virginia Tech. This is such a strange move, given Miami’s excellent depth at wide receiver. With the likes of Jarvis Landry, DeVante Parker, Kenny Stills, Leonte Carroo and even Jakeem Grant it will be tough for Ford to crack the 53-man roster. However, if Grant continues to struggle in the return game he could find himself on the practice squad or waivers. It is well known that Gase likes Carroo, so seeing him grab another receiver means Grant is in the hot seat. Ford’s impact, if any, will be minimal, but has the talent.
Overall Impact
Every player from Gase’s first draft in Miami is either on the 53-man roster or practice squad. Five of these players had legitimate impacts with either starting or supporting roles in 2016. If this record can be even somewhat duplicated, the 2017 draft will be highly successful. Five of the seven selections are in high contention to not only contribute, but start on a team that made the playoffs out of a division with the Super Bowl Champions. Building from the draft is something many competing teams have been able to do. This might just be the next step towards something special in Miami.ask-rainz:
askjuicygossippony: dah715: raverenn: pr1nceshawn: Reasons Why Retail Jobs are Harder than Office Jobs. And yet people don’t think retail workers should get a living wage. I’ve literally gotten a five cent raise myself.
Same Yea but atleast retail is not supposed to be permanent Umm… Do you guys not know how much fucking work an office job has to have put in?
Awww the poor office workers! It must be so hard to sit on your ass in a climate controlled office all day. Benefits, weekends and holidays off, ugh, so horrible! And sick leave! Not being told to come in to work or you’ll be written up when you can’t leave the bathroom because you’ve got it coming out both ends, oh the injustice! That must be just the worst! And there’s no heavy lifting or being screamed at by customers who can’t be bothered to read the signs and be sure that the product they’re getting is in fact the one that’s on sale. Truly, you are martyrs, you suffer so much. You have my deepest sympathies. Stay strong!
(Source: College Humor, via ask-rainz-deactivated20170817)
2 years ago 142,631 notesNo matter how well paid or how highly respected we are, from the cubicle to the corner office to the board room, we were all young once. We all dreamed of having a really cool lifestyle. The lynch-pin in our plan to hike the Himalayas, to take a weekend on the French coast, and to just generally impress everyone we met, was a really cool, well-paying job. The Cool-List is dedicated to those jobs, the sort of jobs where the answer to, “And what is it you do?” raises eyebrows and elicits admiration, and likely more than a little envy. The real reward for having a cool job, though, is the age old axiom that the happiest person is the one who gets paid to do what they love.
So, with this series about jobs that are likely to elicit a “wow!” from the other patrons at the martini bar, as well as have you happy to head to the office on a daily basis (or the jungle, the rig, the beach, the streets) and make a good living doing it, it makes sense that one of the entries covers something that most people wouldn’t consider a job at all: being a professional poker player.
Playing poker for a living is gambling with a lowercase g. People in the know compare playing poker to playing the stock market, and they’re right. The difference is that every hand of poker has enough information for a masterful player to know exactly the mathematical chance he has of making or losing money. While playing the stock market can be a stab in the dark, playing top set vs. a straight draw is a guaranteed 75% chance to win. The theory that the pros put into practice to build their bank accounts is that by always making statistically “+Expected Value” decisions, they will end up ahead, maximizing their wins and weathering the inevitable losses.
What is playing poker professionally really like? Read on.
Continue scrolling to keep reading Click the button below to start this article in quick view Start Now Share Tweet Email Copy Link Copied
4 Gambling With a Lowercase G
Many poker players will tell you that playing poker is not gambling. The smart ones, however, will never say this. When a poker player tells you that poker isn’t gambling they mean one of two things: “Poker is a game of skill,” or, “You can make money at it long term with less risk than playing dice.” Both of these statements are true, but ask any poker player about their bad beats and they’ll tell you about the time they got half of their bankroll into the pot with a 98% chance to win and the one card that could beat them came. Make no mistake, poker is gambling. You can lose no matter how good you are, no matter how strong the odds are in your favor. But people do make a living playing poker, and many recreational players strive to.
Poker is the one popular game where you can control the odds to some degree. You do have the option to only wager money in the middle when you can reasonably expect to win. This means, for serious poker players, studying takes up a huge amount of preparation time.
Around the early 1980s, private computers started becoming more available, and poker players famous for making their money on smart plays realized that they could calculate their odds to a much greater degree of accuracy. The ancient wisdom, “Never draw to an inside straight,” became antiquated when you learned that with enough money in the pot, it can actually pay to occasionally do just that.
Recognizing potentially profitable situations and exploiting them is how a profitable player makes money. Doing that requires more time studying away from the tables than is spent playing, and that’s why today’s winning poker players are young, bookworm-ish, studious types you’d expect to find at a web design firm and a far cry from the smoke-stained, cowboy hat-sporting gamblers of yesteryear.
3 Grinding
Every good poker players knows that you can’t win what you don’t risk. They also know you can’t lose what you don’t risk. The two types of poker players can be summed up by which of those two statements they prefer to live by. The best usually fall somewhere in the middle.
Truly professional players don’t take big risks. They set an hourly rate that they believe they can earn based upon the size of the game and endeavor to meet or beat that amount on average over a period of time. Some players – the greats you hear about making millions in a night – do wager more than is reasonable, trying to hit it big and buy their next luxury car in a single night. For each one that succeeds there are twenty who don’t, while the grinders keep at it day after day until they have enough to move up to a bigger game.
The amount each player aims to make varies, but a good win rate can be anywhere from $20-$50 an hour at typical live casino games. This doesn’t mean a pro expects to sit down for three hours and see $60 - $150, it means that at the end of the month they expect the average amount of money earned divided by the hours spent at the table is in that range. Some days are winners and some losers, and riding the waves takes fortitude. That’s why it’s called grinding. Just like any other hourly job, poker is a grind. The difference is that the more you have, the more you can wager, and the higher your hourly can be.
From the lowest limit player to the biggest baller, it’s every poker player’s dream to get their roll big enough to move up stakes – but true poker players fold a lot more hands than they play. The most important virtue for a poker player is patience and, let’s face it, no one gets into gambling because they’ve got the patience of a saint. The game isn’t big betting Cadillac dreams, it’s a slow climb. The big-bet million dollar bluffs are usually reserved for the movies.
2 Heading To The Office
Your office is either a laptop, a casino, a bar, or all three. Wherever there is a game with fewer grinders than gamblers, you’ve got an office, and they tend to be relaxing, fun, social places with drinks and jokes and an atmosphere you can really enjoy. Your job is to sit, think, analyze, and make your own money without anyone telling you what to do. Even better, when a pro is making money, they can set their own hours and even at the lowest stakes, the work to pay ratio just can’t be beat.
A typical working day in the life of a pro poker player will begin around noon with a wake-up and some studying. After that, they’ll check the online tables and their smartphone app of choice to see how many tables each local casino has going at the moment, and head to their laptop or whichever casino has the best table selection at the moment. For a live player, this usually means getting to the game after the recreational players get off work. Then it’s a matter of the grind described above.
First they sit at their table of choice and, if they are wise, watch the table for fifteen to twenty minutes before playing a single hand. This observation will determine the play style of the table and consequently the play style the pro adopts.
How long they play, how many hands per hour, and how many breaks they take is all a matter of personal style. They’ll try to take command of the table, or sit back and get a really big hand and collect an entire day’s winnings at once. Some players will sit for a set number of hours per day (4 – 6 is not atypical) and some will stay as long as it takes to ‘make their day.’ The best players stay as long as they are making the right moves and playing their A game, and leave the moment they realize they are making poor choices.
Once they leave the table they will review their play for the day either by taking notes, discussing with other pros, entering their hands into equity calculators, or all of the above. The learning curve for poker defies traditional learning – the game is random, after all – and so identifying their irrational biases and the ‘leaks’ in their game takes up a lot of time. The never-ending goal of the true pro is not simply to make money, but to make the most money in any given situation. Sometimes, that just means losing the least.
After the studying is done, it’s time for the player to relax, and then begin again the next day.
It only sounds like it’s comparable to any other late shift day to day job because it is. But it’s not the nature of the work that attracts many professional poker players; it’s the fact that any card table anywhere in the world is a source of potential money – a lot of money at times – and all the freedom that affords. The other attractive feature is that you are paid in cash, right away, for every correct decision you make.
The dark side of the poker pro’s life is that no matter how antagonistic you may think your office is, the poker table is truly a battleground. Everyone else at that table wants each others’ money and it’s the pro’s job to protect it, while simultaneously using it as ammunition to get everyone else’s. It’s a zero-sum game where every dollar won comes from another player. Furthermore, one can only take what another voluntarily gives. Playing poker well is an exercise in deception second only to running a con game.
1 Who Are Professional Poker Players – And Should I Become One?
Every dollar the pro won yesterday comes from someone they’re likely to see again today. It may come from a pensioner, a degenerate gambler, another pro, or a rich businessman – whoever it comes from, they were trying to take it from the pro. And sometimes they did. The pro must be competitive and aggressive to the point of ruthlessness, but more than anything else the pro must be studious and courageous.
Studious enough to know when to risk their money, and courageous enough to do it, the professional poker player is intelligent, analytical, fiercely independent, and above all patient, disciplined, and sober.
If you think you may want to become a professional poker player… you can easily start yourself on that path. There is no degree necessary, and millions of people around the world eager to give you a very expensive education the moment you let them. If you want to be a winning professional poker prepare to study, study, study, and throw away all your preconceived notions about how to play.
Learn the math behind every hand and situation you are likely to encounter. Subscribe to poker forums and participate in conversations. Realize you are a fish and learn to take criticism. Learn to divorce your emotions from your game. Prepare to make all the right decisions and lose money, the wrong decisions and win money, and don’t let that bias you at all.
The best place to get started, if you live where it is legal, is to play online for very little money and get a feel for the game and its players. When you find you are profitable over time you can move up stakes and may end up supplementing your regular income. After several years, with a ton of discipline, you may be able to make a living solely from playing poker.If you asked the average American “Where is the theme park capital of the world?” they’d tell you Orlando, Florida. But friends, these people would be wrong. The theme park capital of the world is Japan, home to a variety of local parks, small and large. It also has a massive Disneyland that’s a mishmash of the best bits of other Disney theme parks, and DisneySea, an entirely original venue with rides designed for Japan’s adult population. With Japan hosting the Olympics in 2020, its theme parks are expanding even further. Universal Studios Japan, located in Osaka, is constructing Super Nintendo World, a new land inspired by Super Mario. Today, it has released the first teaser.
The final shot suggests a layout for the land. A Mushroom Kingdom entrance echoes the classic Disneyland castle design. The path through the park progresses like a classic Mario game, beginning with the grassy terrain, before moving to colorful boxes, giant mushroom pads, and ice blocks. The promenade culminates at Bowser’s castle.
As Kotaku notes, the teaser follows this week’s reveal of a Super Mario-themed stage at Universal Studios Japan.
Alongside the opening of Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios in 2020, Disney will be upgrading its Tokyo parks with lands inspired by Big Hero 6 and Beauty and the Beast. This three-year window (2017–2020) is something of a surge for theme parks. Disney opened its first Marvel ride and an Avatar-themed land this past month.Today Lucid Games Studios released a new series of gameplay screenshots showing its next free-to-play vehicle shooter Switchblade for PC and PS4
The authors of Lucid Games open inscriptions at the next beta of Switchblade and take advantage of the opportunity to show us the first game images of this promising Unreal Engine 4 title for PC and PS4 with gameplay mechanics between Rocket League and Descruction Derby.
The developers of Geometry Wars and Project Gotham Racing describes their next title as a free-to-play arena-based 5v5 vehicular shooter that combines high-octane combat with an ever-shifting array of strategic choices. Seamlessly switch between heavily armed sci-fi vehicles at any time to create endless tactical choices. Chase down a rival in a speedy fighter, then swap to a heavy-duty battlewagon to defend a tower as your teammates switch between healers & artillery to back you up.
Switchblade will be available in the first half of 2018 for PC and PlayStation 4 as a free-to-play title.
About Switchblade
style=”display:inline-block;width:300px;height:250px”
data-ad-client=”ca-pub-5322290888481762″
data-ad-slot=”2730450105″>
From a team that has worked on titles such as Project Gotham Racing, Blur, and Geometry Wars, Switchblade is an arena-based five-versus-five vehicular shooter that combines high-octane combat with an ever-shifting array of strategic choices. Seamlessly switch between heavily armed vehicles at any time to create endless tactical choices. Chase down a rival in a speedy fighter, then swap to a heavy-duty battlewagon to attack your competitor’s tower as your teammates switch between healers & artillery to back you up.
Win battles, grab loot and create your own unique online superstar as you rise through the ranks of a spectacular e-sport championship.
HIGH OCTANE FREE-TO-PLAY ACTION
Teamwork is everything in the world’s first Moba-inspired vehicle action game.
Win battles, grab loot and create your own online superstar in a spectacular future-sport championship.
Seamlessly switch between heavily armed sci-fi vehicles at any time to create endless tactical choices.
Broadcast to a worldwide audience in an interactive spectator mode that constantly influences in-game action.
HOW TO PLAY SWITCHBLADE
Compete in a frantic 5v5 struggle to destroy opposition towers and win.
Escort explosive mobs to opposition towers and take out their defensive shields.
Once a tower’s shields are down, blast it’s core to take it out.
Destroy enough towers before the match ends and victory is yours.New plastic from Academy
Hello everyone!
Today we have another report article, and this time it is dedicated to Academy stand. Korean manufacturer has shown several new products, so let's take a closer look.
Всем привет!
Сегодня мы публикуем очередной репортаж, в этот раз посвящённый стенду компании Academy. Корейский производитель показал несколько новых продуктов, так что давайте взглянем на них поближе.
First are tank models that should be available at this moment. On the photo above, you can see M60A2 Patton in 1/35 scale.
Начнём с моделей танков, которые уже доступны. На фото выше вы можете видеть M60A2 Patton в масштабе 1/35.
Other ones - Merkava and Magach 7C.
Ещё несколько - Merkava и Magach 7C.
Here you can see T-34 with bedspring armor, which can be also purchased right now in any good model shop. T-34 747(r) will also be released, which was a captured T-34 modified by Germans.
Ну а здесь вы можете видеть Т-34 с пружинной бронёй, который можно найти в любом хорошем модельном магазине. Также в нынешнем году выпустят Т-34 747(r), который представлял собой захваченный танк, модифицированный немцами.
Pz.Kpfw. 35(t) will be released in Commander version.
Pz.Kpfw. 35(t) также будет выпущен в командирском варианте.
1/35 Tiger should also be issued in a new version. Note zimmerit and PE parts all over the model.
Тигр в 35-ом масштабе также будет перевыпущен в новом варианте. Обратите внимание на циммерит и травление по всей модели.
New edition should be called Tiger I "Gruppe Fehrmann. Essel 1945".
Новая версия будет называться Tiger I "Gruppe Fehrmann. Essel 1945".
Surprising small release that was shown under sign "to be released" - M1A2 SEP Tusk II, even though we already have an excellent kit from Tiger Model. By the way, you can read full review here on our website
Немного удивила маленькая новинка, что показали под знаком "будет выпущено" - M1A2 SEP Tusk II, хотя у нас уже есть отличный набор от Tiger Model. Кстати, вы можете прочитать полный обзор здесь на нашем сайте.
The biggest surprise? You can see it on the photos above and below.
Самый большой сюрприз? Вы можете видеть его на фото выше и ниже.
Academy decided to release 1/72 rival to Tamiya's F-16. On the exhibition, it was possible to see only assembled kit, not the sprues.
Academy решили выпустить конкурента набору F-16 от Tamiya в масштабе 1/72. На выставке была показана только собранная модель, а не литники.
Model wasn't even painted in order to show multicolored parts that should be standard in the new kit.
Самолёт не был даже окрашен, чтобы продемонстрировать цветные детали, которые будут стандартно идти в наборе.
This approach is similar to the recent F-4 in 1/72, so some professionals might complain about unnecessary colored plastic molding.
Данный подход похож на недавний F-4 в том же масштабе, так что некоторые профессионалы наверняка пожалуются на подобные ненужные вещи.
Manufacturer promises that model stand will be included into the package.
Производитель обещает, что подставка будет идти в комплекте.
On the photo above, you can check parts division. Again, canopy is a one-piece part, and parts number is reduced to the smallest possible number. Note that top fuselage half is designed together with wings. The only thing that confused me - two-piece air intake, I am not sure, why Academy has chosen such approach.
На фото выше вы можете видеть членение модели. И снова, фонарь будет цельным, а количество деталей уменьшено по максимуму. Обратите также внимание, что верхняя половина фюзеляжа выполнена вместе с крыльями. Единственное, что меня удивило - составной воздухозаборник, не совсем уверен, для чего производитель выбрал подобное решение.
Another new tool release - AH-64D Block II. Again, model was shown only in assembled state.
Ещё одна новинка - AH-64D Block II. Вертолёт был также показан только в собранном виде.
Visitors also could have noticed small picture with F/A-18F, which should be released during 2016. This is new-tool model, and it should employ the same approach as small F-16 and F-4. In other words, you can expect multicolored plastic parts and shut canopy.
Посетители также могли заметить небольшую табличку с F/A-18F, который должен будет выйти в 2016 году. Это абсолютно новая модель, созданная по той же методике, что и маленькие F-16 и F-4. Другими словами, вы можете смело ожидать цветные детали и закрытый фонарь.
In my opinion, new F-16 will be popular among modelers as a cheaper alternative to Tamiya's kit. Well, this will be true if Academy chooses the right price for the newcomer, not as high as for the last 1/72 F-4, which costs similar money as Japanese far more detailed F-16 kit.
That's all for today, stay tuned for more reports.
Don't forget to like our Facebook page, so that you can get fresh articles on time.
Я считаю, что новый F-16 станет популярным в качестве дешёвой альтернативы японскому наборy. Но это станет правдой, только если производитель выберет правильный ценник, который не будет таким высоким, как у недавнего F-4 в масштабе 1/72, стоящего примерно те же деньги, что и гораздо более подробный |
it on hardware. The EC appears to be heading in a different direction this time, but it's unclear if it will have any impact on browser choice in the European market, where Firefox has already gained mainstream acceptance.Now that Google Health has finally launched, I took a quick peek at it while Mark was taking notes at today’s Google Factory Tour presentation. It’s been a long time coming, but at first glance it looks like it will be a strong competitor to existing personal health sites such as Microsoft’s HealthVault (which launched last October), Revolution Health, or Aetna’s SmartSource (via a partnership with Healthline).
The big competition here is between Google Health and Microsoft’s HealthVault. (Revolution Health is more of an information portal at this point, and who is going to trust their health insurance company?). Whereas HealthVault’s strengths seem to lie in tying together different health information silos on the back end, Google Health is focusing more initially on the consumer side. It is trying to do an end-run around the health establishment by trying to get consumers to manually load their own medical information into their profiles. HealthVault allows this as well, but seems to have stronger partnerships with back-end health data providers. Google will no doubt tackle the existing health data silos as it proceeds. It really has no choice if it wants to organize the world’s health information.
To gain consumer acceptance, Google promises never to advertise on Google Health (although ads in related searches should be fair game) and that people’s personal health information will never appear in search results (one would hope not). Members can add their doctors to their Gmail contacts and APis are n the works.
In order for Google Health to be of much use, you need to tell it about your health history by creating a personal medical profile. It is easy enough to get started. You tell it your age, weight, medical conditions, medications, allergies, and so on. It provides guided keyword suggestions, so that when you type in a symptom, for instance, you get a list of health terms.
But the key is importing your medical record in there. That is going to be a huge hurdle in terms of people feeling comfortable giving that sort of data to Google in the first place, and then simply getting the data in an electronic form from their doctors.
Google Health lists only eight partners so far from which it can import medical records, and half of them only cover drugs (Medco, Walgreens, RXAmerica, and Longs Drug Stores). The others are Quest Diagnostics (for lab tests), MinuteClinic from CVS Caremark, and two hospitals: the Cleveland Clinic, and Beth Isreal Deaconness Medical Center.
Even if your doctor sent you a file with your complete medical record, it is not clear that you could upload it (although you could enter it by hand). It also does not let you import data directly from medical devices, a feature that Microsoft’s HealthVault does have.
Google has also created specific in-depth pages for hundreds of health topics. When you enter a condition into your profile, there is a reference link to one of these pages where you can do more research. These are really helpful. They give a summary of the symptoms, treatment, causes, and prevention of different conditions; illustrations where appropriate, as well as links to related news, Google Groups, and search trends. Here is one for “Sciatica,”for instance.
Google Health also lets you link your profile to a number of other online health services. These include ePillBox.info (medication scheduler), a heart attack risk calculator, iHealth, Livestrong.com, MyDailyApple (daily health news), MyMedicalRecords,com, and NoMoreClipboard. If Google Health wants to be the central repository of your online health profile, it needs to allow you to share your profile with as many other services as possible. You are able to grant different levels of permission to each service.
HealthVault has its own list of partner sites (American Heart Association, CapMed, HealthMedia, Healthy Circles, Kryptiq, Peaksware, Pure Wellness,Sound Health Soultions, US Wellness, Podfitness, MyVitalStatistics, Limeade, and Active Health).
Google is planning to open up APIs to Google health to make it easy for other partners to tap into its health platform. And make no mistake about it. That is what this is: a platform. Health apps anyone?A Florida man who authorities say accidentally shot and killed his 14-year-old son at a shooting range is blaming himself -- not the gun -- for the death.
Clayton Brumby, 64, told the Tampa Bay Times a smoking hot shell casing went down the back of his shirt, causing him to flail both arms in the air Sunday afternoon at High Noon Guns, where the Sarasota family had gone for shooting practice. His finger was still on the trigger, which fired.
He heard his 24-year-old son yell, "Dad, Stephen's been shot."
The bullet from the.22-semi-automatic Ruger SR22 ricocheted off the ceiling and struck the teen in the jugular vein, Brumby told the newspaper.
"The gun didn't kill my boy," Brumby said. "I did."
Brumby said the gun belonged to his 12-year-old daughter.
Brumby said he has been shooting for about three years. Stephen took up shooting about 18 months ago and his father says he was "a natural" who would "shoot anything."
Brumby's version of events differed slightly from the one offered by the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office. Deputies based their account on what witnesses told them. According to the report, Brumby tried to remove the casing, which had bounced in the back of his shirt, with his right hand, which also held the weapon.
"While doing so, he inadvertently pointed the firearm directly behind him and accidently fired," the sheriff's report said.
Brumby said he preaches gun safety. "That's why yesterday was so stupid and freaky on me because the gun is supposed to be pointed down range at all times," he said Monday. "My first thought was `That was pretty stupid of me. I should've put the gun down."'
Sarasota County Sheriff's officials are calling the shooting was accidental. As of Monday, no charges were planned.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump vowed on Wednesday to do “whatever is necessary” to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians as he hosted Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the White House, but gave no sign of how he could revive long-stalled negotiations.
In their first meeting, Trump pressed Abbas to do more to stop “incitement to violence” against Israelis and, according to the White House, urged him in private to halt payments to families of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, a demand long pressed by Israel.
Even as Trump boldly predicted he would achieve peace where other presidents had failed, he stopped short of explicitly recommitting his administration to a two-state solution to the decades-old conflict, a long-standing foundation of U.S. policy. Some Palestinians said they were disappointed by the omission.
Despite what many experts see as a long-shot bid, Trump told Abbas: “I will do whatever is necessary.... I would love to be a mediator or an arbitrator or a facilitator, and we will get this done.”
Abbas reasserted the goal of a Palestinian state, saying it must have East Jerusalem as its capital with the borders that existed before the 1967 Middle East war. Most Israelis want all of Jerusalem as their capital and reject a full return to 1967 borderlines as a threat to their security.
Trump has faced deep skepticism at home and abroad over the chances for him to achieve any quick breakthrough, not least because his administration has yet to articulate a cohesive strategy for restarting the moribund peace process.
Abbas’ White House talks followed a February visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who moved to reset ties after a combative relationship with the Republican president’s predecessor, Democrat Barack Obama.
Trump sparked international criticism at the time, when he appeared to back away from a two-state solution, saying he would leave it up to the parties to decide. Palestinian statehood has been the objective of successive U.S. administrations and the international community.
The meeting with Abbas, the Western-backed head of the Palestinian Authority, was another test of whether Trump, in office a little more than 100 days, is serious about pursuing the kind of comprehensive peace deal that eluded his predecessors.
Trump insisted he was ready to try to reach the “toughest deal.” But when he later sat down to lunch with the Palestinian leader, he said it was “maybe not as difficult as people have thought over the years.”
Trump, who said he decided to “start a process” but offered no new policy prescriptions or timetable, may be underestimating the challenge when trust between the two sides is low, analysts said.
“You can’t just pretend you only have to handle a few key issues and that’s it,” said David Makovsky, a member of Obama’s negotiating team during the last talks, which collapsed in 2014.
Still, plans are being firmed up for Trump to visit Netanyahu in Jerusalem and possibly Abbas in the West Bank on May 22 and 23, say people familiar with the matter. That has sparked speculation about a meeting of the three. U.S. and Israeli officials have declined to confirm the visit.
ABBAS UNDER PRESSURE AT HOME
Trump and Abbas appeared friendly but businesslike as they stood at side-by-side lecterns. But that was a far cry from the way Trump and Netanyahu interacted in February.
Abbas promised that under “your courageous stewardship and your wisdom, as well as your great negotiating ability,” the Palestinians would be partners seeking a “historic peace treaty.”
But under pressure at home to avoid major concessions, the 82-year-old leader said: “It’s about time for Israel to end its occupation,” referring to Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Abbas, however, did not repeat in public his demand that Israel freeze settlement construction on land Palestinians want for a state as a condition for negotiations.
U.S. lawmakers have warned that Palestinian funding could be cut off unless Abbas halts PLO stipends to families of prisoners whom Israel considers terrorists but many Palestinians see as heroes.
There was no indication Abbas, who governs in the West Bank while Hamas militants rule Gaza, bowed to pressure on the issue, especially with hundreds of Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike.
In Gaza, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the promises Abbas made at the White House “don’t obligate anyone.”
Questions have been raised about Trump’s choice of son-in-law Jared Kushner to oversee the peace initiative, along with Trump’s longtime business lawyer, Jason Greenblatt, as envoy.
Efforts to enlist Israel’s Sunni Arab neighbors, who share Israeli concerns about Shi’ite Iran, to help rejuvenate peacemaking, have yet to yield results.
U.S. President Donald Trump (R) welcomes Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, U.S. May 3, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
National security adviser H.R. McMaster described Trump’s foreign policy approach as “disruptive,” saying his unconventional ways could create an opportunity to help stabilize the Middle East.
But Trump’s unpredictability has even at times rattled a close ally like Israel.
His pro-Israeli campaign rhetoric suggested he might give Netanyahu free rein. But Trump’s promise to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv is on the back burner, and he caught Netanyahu off-guard by asking him to put unspecified limits on settlement activity.Graduale Project
After some twenty years of my church singing career I have decided to connect the beginning of the new liturgical year – the first advent Sunday of 2012 – with the beginning of a new project. The aim of the Graduale Project is to record all of the chants included in the current Graduale – Graduale Romanum. The recordings are published on the dedicated channel on youtube.
YouTube Direkt– Watch the first video of the series
When singing I use Graduale Triplex (1979) and I usually pay special attention to the St. Gallen neumatic notation.
The performing of gregorian chant is different with every singer, and it is impossible to consider any way of performing as the only correct one. Neither do I consider my way of singing as the only correct one or the best one. I am also aware, that the chants of the graduale (the main part of them) are not meant to be sung by soloist, but by a group of singers – a schola. I hope, however, that in spite of these drawbacks, my recordings will find their audience and that they can become a helpful resource for someone – a resource, which I was looking for without success at the time of my beginnings.
Marek Klein, Gregoriana – 2nd December 2012
Since December 2018 there is also supplemental Channel Cantuale, for the recordings which do not exactly fit to Graduale Project.
The first year of Graduale Project is now available for download:
Related post:
Graduale Romanum – Graduale Triplex
Follow Graduale Project:Last week, President-elect Barack Obama's call for a delay in the Digital TV transition, long scheduled for February, sent tech and telecom firms into a tizzy. Both Verizon and the Consumer Electronics Association have been pushing back hard against any postponement of the move from analog to digital broadcasting, while AT&T has joined the Consumers Union and several prominent Democratic legislators in supporting the call to give the troubled transition more time. Among those with a vested interest in the debate over a DTV delay is Clearwire, which has been racing to deploy its 4G WiMAX networks ahead of competitors wedded to the LTE standard. And Ars has learned that Clearwire Executive Vice President R. Gerard Salemme has quietly joined the Obama transition team as a key advisor on DTV issues.
The main rationale advanced for pushing back the drop-dead date for analog broadcast is that the coupon program established to subsidize digital converter boxes for those who rely on over-the-air analog signals has run out of money. Households seeking the $40 vouchers are now being placed on a burgeoning waiting list, and consumer advocates fear that without a delay, millions of older analog sets will go dark in February. Opponents of a delay have argued that changing the date would be "disruptive," upsetting longstanding plans and signaling that companies and consumers need not heed government deadlines.
A wireless battleground: LTE vs. WiMAX
But the transition will also free up huge swaths of spectrum in the 700MHz band currently in use by analog broadcasters, which the Federal Communications Commission auctioned off last year. As FCC commissioner Robert McDowell noted on a panel at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this weekend, "there are companies paying hundreds of billion of dollars to use this spectrum, and they expect the goods to be delivered."
One of those companies is Verizon, which ponied up nearly $9.4 billion for spectrum it plans to use for its 4G Long-Term Evolution wireless broadband network. In a letter to top members of the House and Senate commerce committees Monday, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg urged members of Congress to resist any delay of the transition, warning that it could impede the company's plans. "Verizon Wireless intends to begin field testing and deployment of LTE this year," wrote Seidenberg. "Deployment of LTE, however, can only be done if we have access to the 700MHz frequencies. Delaying the DTV transition will delay our ability to upgrade those frequencies to 4G broadband for American consumers and have a negative impact on our nation's international competitiveness."
That viewpoint has put Verizon at odds with AT&T, which has signaled its support for a delay in order to ensure a smooth transition—and, coincidentally, is not planning to use its own winnings from the 700Mhz block for LTE.
It's not clear whether Verizon would really be able to make good on its plans to begin deploying its LTE network by the end of 2009. Most analysts believe that a relatively short postponement, on the order of three months, would have little effect on 4G deployment—provided it did not set the stage for further delays, as Verizon clearly fears it might. Such a delay might also avoid a spate of homeowners sliding off icy rooftops as they struggle to install new antennas.
But a longer, more disruptive delay might provide some breathing room for Verizon competitor Clearwire. That company is seeking to build market share for its own WiMAX network, a joint venture with Sprint, before LTE is ready for prime time. Clearwire has boasted that it remains years ahead of the competition, but while WiMAX networks in Portland and Baltimore are already up and running, scheduled expansions to other cities have been delayed until late 2009, even as Verizon has bumped up its own schedule. The company's stock has now been in free-fall for months, and several major backers recently announced they would take major write-downs on their investments in Clearwire. (The roster of large investors in Clearwire includes Obama-ally Google.) A toxic negative feedback loop in investor confidence could leave it unable to finance its promised buildouts for 2009. With any transition delay certain to push the spectrum handover into the next quarter of the fiscal year, if not further, the attendant uncertainty could also factor into investment decisions as Wall Street—and equipment makers—decide which standard to back.
A conflict of interest?
Enter Gerry Salemme. A telecom industry veteran; former lobbyist; and Clearwire executive vice president for strategy, policy, and external affairs, Salemme has also been a generous Obama supporter. Early in the primary season, Salemme gave the maximum $2,300 to Obama for America, and then in August threw in another $10,000 to the Obama Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee that accepts large contributions and carves them up between the party and candidate. (An apparent typo in the OVF's FEC filing credits this donation to "R. Gerard Salemine." OpenSecrets shows the cash as split into $5,400 for the Democratic National Committee's Services Corporation and two contributions of $2,300 to Barack Obama, which on face would seem to exceed Salemme's cap for the primary and general combined.) Once the race to the White House was won, Salemme scrounged another $5,000 for the transition effort.
Salemme is not listed on Change.gov
As of this writing, Salemme is not mentioned anywhere on the Change.gov site—which lists members of the Obama transition's staff, policy working groups, and agency review teams—nor has there been any public announcement of his involvement with the presidential transition. A spokesman for his company says that Salemme "remains in his position as Executive VP at Clearwire." But Ars has learned that Salemme has been on leave using accrued vacation and joined the Obama transition team as a key adviser on DTV issues.
Last week, Salemme met with Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Tom Wheeler, who is heading Obama's science and technology working group, to discuss a DTV delay, Rockefeller's office confirms. Rockefeller is among the prominent Democratic legislators supporting Obama's call for a DTV changeover postponement. So is Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), whom Salemme once served as chief of staff. Both have previously expressed concern about the uneven progress of the transition. Salemme's pivotal role on the Obama team, however, suggests that his judgment would have weighed heavily in the decision to bite the bullet and call for a delay—as well as the subsequent effort to rally support for that decision.
Salemme is widely praised for his expertise, both in the tech industry and on Capitol Hill. It's no surprise his résumé made him attractive to a transition effort noted for prizing technocratic competence—especially as it became apparent how massive were the remaining challenges for DTV a mere month or so from the February deadline. And it is an unfortunate fact of life that people with serious expertise in the tech industry also tend to have strong ties to the tech industry. But Salemme's high position with a primary competitor of Verizon—the company most vocally protesting that it would be adversely affected by a delay—creates an unavoidable appearance of conflict of interest. [Update: Make that the appearance of multiple conflicts of interest.]
Wheeler, meanwhile, arguably has his own stake in the outcome of the 4G wars, albeit a more tenuous one. He's currently on leave from Core Capital Partners, whose portfolio includes a $10 million investment in BridgeWave, a company that provides the high-speed wireless backhaul services demanded by 4G networks. Companies like Verizon, flush with fiber, have less need for such services, as a BridgeWave white paper explains:
All things being equal, most operators will choose fiber optic cabling as their preferred backhaul solution. It is perceived as a well-proven technology (it's been deployed in core networks for decades) with nearly limitless capacity scalability. Unfortunately, most of the time operators do not already happen to own fiber running directly to a base station site, and are therefore faced with either paying to install a new fiber run or paying installation and recurring costs to another operator to provide fiber-based services to the site. [....] Leasing high-capacity data services from another operator is almost always unacceptable from a cost perspective.
Canadian firm DragonWave was the incumbent wireless backhaul provider for Sprint's WiMax network, and appears to have continued its relationship with the new Clearwire joint venture. Neither DragonWave nor BridgeWave, however, would comment on any future deployment plans either might have with the company.
Behind the need for speed
Opponents of a delay, such as the Consumer Electronics Association, may also have motives beyond a passion for sound policy. One Capitol Hill source complained that the electronics industry had championed a "bare-bones" converter box program in hopes that frustrated consumers would conclude it was simpler to buy newer television sets ready to receive digital signals. The cable industry, meanwhile, has remained publicly neutral, while asserting its readiness to help meet the current deadline by assisting in a recently assembled call-center effort. But cable, too, may stand to gain from a chaotic transition that drives consumers into its coaxial grasp.
Republicans, for their part, are loath to be blamed for a botched transition requiring a change of schedule. Panels at CES this weekend were rife with criticism of the FCC—and in particular of Chairman Kevin Martin, who opposes a delay—for dragging its feet in preparing for the inevitable flood of consumer questions, both before and after the transition. Any chaos that ensues when analog goes dark, however, will occur on Barack Obama's watch.
Whether Congress agrees to postpone the DTV changeover or decides to press ahead, the only certainty is that either decision will leave some powerful interests sorely displeased.All of the AMS-run restaurants that opened with the Nest, with the exception of Grand Noodle Emporium and the Pit, have either changed their name or shut down.
The AMS has declined to discuss the financial impact of its failed or revamped businesses, though meeting minutes from 2013 provide insight into how much the union has spent on several logo changes in a two-year period.
Perch, a high-end dining restaurant; Lowercase, a coffee shop; and Palate, a soup and sandwich shop, all shut down in 2016 due to poor performance. AMS President Alan Ehrenholz said Palate will reopen soon with a focus on vegan and vegetarian food, possibly as Garden Grove — the name has “gone back and forth.”
FlipSide — a burger joint — closed this year to make way for Iwana Taco, a Mexican place, but Ehrenholz said it will reopen in the near future as a food truck, which the AMS bought for an undisclosed amount.
Ehrenholz also declined to comment on expenses related to creating names and logos, hiring staff, buying furniture and equipment, or any other cost sunk into a closed-down restuarant.
“It’s just due to our internal — we have a desire to ensure that we’re not giving away too much information to our competitors,” he said. “Same as a contract, it’s just not good business practice.”
Ehrenholz said the AMS changed FlipSide into Iwana Taco due to students’ demands for a Mexican place in the Nest food survey last year. He refused to talk about how much the AMS spent on the logo or any costs involved with switching a burger place into a Mexican restaurant, other than the fact that the space was “designed with the intent to be flexible.”
He said there “a couple expenditures” related to the switch, but refused to elaborate on what those were.
Changing names
Pie R Squared (formerly Boom! Pizza); Honour Roll (formerly Peko Peko); and Blue Chip Cafe (formerly Uppercase) have undergone name and logo changes. All three changed their names from their current ones for the Nest opening, then eventually switched back.
The AMS sunk about $5,000 into the name Boom! Pizza before they reverted it to Pie R Squared before the Nest opened, largely because students thought “Boom!” was silly — “a big old mess,” according to Ehrenholz.
Ehrenholz said the AMS decided to switch the names back now to compete with the bigger food brands opening up around the Nest.
“When we look at something like a Blue Chip, people identify with the Blue Chip brand. People identify with Honour Roll because they remember Honour Roll from the old space,” he said.
AMS restaurants in the Old SUB were last operational in 2014/15, meaning the crop of students who have never seen the original Blue Chip are currently in their third year.
The only hint as to how much name changes could have cost the AMS comes from a 2013 Business Administration and Governance Board (BAGB) committee meeting minutes, when they considered ditching Boom! — which they had paid design firm Glasfurd and Walker to make for them — and revert back to Pie R Squared.
It cost $5,000 to change the name back before any signage had been manufactured. As for going with Boom!, keeping it for a year, then switching back to Pie R Squared — the same thing that happened to Blue Chip and Honour Roll — would have been “way more than $5,000.”
Ehrenholz said that no matter how much was spent changing restaurants’ names or shutting them down, it was spent in the student interest.
“It’s to serve students, right?” he said.
“We’re learning what students are doing in the Nest, how they’re using the Nest, what they want to see in the Nest. [T]hat’s why some of these decisions to rebrand were made — because the students are telling us they do want different things in the building than we originally put in.”I’m a nerd.* I program computers, like Star Wars, the whole bit. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to do things smarter, rather than harder.
These days, it’s a pretty good gig to be a nerd. While most of the U.S. is still struggling with unemployment, Silicon Valley is booming. And the nerds have been good to us: the Internet is the best encyclopedia/newspaper ever, and caters to the narrowest of interests (I mean, you’re reading this, aren’t you?).
More important but less obvious is the tremendous amount of work you don’t have to do. Industrialized agriculture means I don’t have to till the ground. Electric power means I don’t have to chop wood to have light at night (as I write this, at 10 PM).
People like me are busily engaged in automating as many things as we can. The list of things that require human labor is losing items.
Classical economic theory would hold that that’s totally fine, because instead of chopping wood or whatever, we can spend that time studying the finer points of designing iPhones. In other words, the list of things that require human labor can gain items too.
And that’s generally true. But it neglects one important thing: it retards development. While designing iPhones may be alpha, learning to design them is not. Learning is inherently a beta experience. One learns from one’s betters, not one’s inferiors.
“Smart” may be attractive, but “dutiful student” is not.
When you hear “educated, specialized economy,” think “more time spent in school in a beta frame.” Worse, the frame may be internalized, and remain after school.
Alpha is a societal resource, and the long years of preparation for specialized labor are one of the causes of the shortage of it.
Thanks, nerds.
* Nerd: a guy who reacts to being a small fish in a big pond by retreating to a smaller pond.
AdvertisementsI know this blog is supposed to be about trying new cookie recipes, but there are a few old favourites that really need to be shared. The lemon pistachio biscotti was one. And this is another. When I posted the grammy’s chocolate cookies recipe a few weeks ago, I said that while they were a good cookie (and they are!), I prefer a more intense chocolate cookie. This? This is that cookie.
Although really, this is more like a brownie than a cookie. Even the ingredients and mixing instructions are more brownie than cookie – the butter is melted with the chocolate before combining with the eggs, sugar, and a tiny measure of flour. Once mixed, the batter is really thin and must be refrigerated for several hours before it can be scooped for baking.
And chocolate? This recipe calls for a full pound of chocolate. Yikes! Be sure you choose a really good one, since that’s where all the flavour will be coming from. I used Cacao Barry for the bittersweet and Valrhona for the unsweetened, and they taste amazing. They’re dense and chewy and oozing with chocolate.
This recipe comes from what I’m pretty sure is the first dedicated baking cookbook I ever bought, Baking with Julia. I bought this book because of Julia Child, but years later I realized that this was my introduction to Dorie Greenspan‘s awesomeness (you’ll see 3 of her books on rotation in the sidebar – go check her out!). It’s loaded with wonderful recipes, thoughtful hints, and clear, concise instructions. She’s such a great writer.
Confession time – I used a coffee extract instead of the called-for instant coffee. I thought I had a jar of instant coffee on my shelf, but apparently not. By the time I realized, I already had the chocolate melting on the stove. I had no idea how much to sub and I didn’t want to add too much additional moisture, so I took a stab and used 2 teaspoons, and it ended up tasting pretty much how I remember it should.NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) – The Liberty Place monument outside of the Canal Place parking garage was the target of vandals – again.
Spray-painted on the statue Monday morning were the words, “Take Em All Down Now,” along with red spray paint along the sides of the monument.
It’s one of four Confederate monuments that the New Orleans City Council voted in December to remove. The other three are the monuments honoring Robert E. Lee, PGT Beauregard and Jefferson Davis.
The Liberty Place monument was erected in 1891, more than 20 years after the Battle of Liberty Place – an effort by the White League to stop Reconstruction after the Civil War – killed more than 30 people.
The removal process has been tied up in court with legal battles challenging the removal of the statues.
It’s not the first time the statues have been vandalized, and there has been much protest and controversy on both sides of the issue.
Members of the Take ‘Em Down Nola group say the statues are symbols of white supremacy, while those who are opposed to the monuments’ removal say they’re a part of history.GREEN BAY, Wis. -- You can never have enough pass-rushers.
You’ve heard Green Bay Packers defensive coordinator Dom Capers say something to that effect ever since he arrived in 2009.
So he should like what Mel Kiper Jr. has for the Packers in his latest mock draft, version 3.0 released on Tuesday. It’s Boise State’s Kamalei Correa to Green Bay at No. 27.
2016 NFL DRAFT Round 1: April 28, 8 p.m. ET
Rds. 2-3: April 29, 7 p.m. ET
Rds. 4-7: April 30, noon ET
Where: Auditorium Theatre, Chicago NFL draft home page » • 2016 NFL draft order »
• Todd McShay: Final mock »
• Mel Kiper Jr.: 'Grade A' Mock »
• Mel Kiper Jr.: Final mock »
• Todd McShay: Needs for each team
• Todd McShay's tier rankings
• Mel Kiper Jr.'s Big Board »
• Top prospects by position »
• NFL draft player rankings »
The 6-foot-2, 243-pound Correa played defensive end in college but at that size would have to play outside linebacker in an NFL 3-4 defense like Capers runs.
Correa was impressive at last month’s NFL scouting combine, where he ran a 4.69 40-yard dash. Although he ran with the defensive linemen, his time would have been ninth-best among all linebackers (inside and outside) who ran at the combine.
Last season as a junior, Correa led Boise State with 7.0 sacks and 11 tackles for loss.
Correa is the fourth outside linebacker to come off the board in Kiper’s latest mock draft. He follows Georgia’s Leonard Floyd (No. 11 to the Bears), Ohio State’s Darron Lee (No. 17 to the Falcons) and Eastern Kentucky’s Noah Spence (No. 24 to the Bengals).
The Packers have made no secret about their desire to move Clay Matthews back to outside linebacker this coming season and they also have Julius Peppers returning. However, both Mike Neal and Nick Perry are headed toward free agency and even if one of them returns, the Packers still could use another pass-rusher.
This is the third different player Kiper has associated with the Packers in as many mock drafts. Last month, he had them taking Arkansas tight end Hunter Henry, who isn’t among his first-round selections in his latest version. His first mock draft had the Packers taking Penn State defensive lineman Austin Johnson, who also is no longer in Kiper’s first round.Dear nation’s renters, Treasurer Scott Morrison is very, very, very worried about you people.
Indeed, worried is an understatement.
He’s damn near obsessed with your wellbeing. He’s looking at the housing affordability crisis and weeping – weeping, I tells you! – about your ability to keep a roof over your head.
And it’s totally authentic and absolutely not a way of avoiding doing anything about housing prices, let’s be clear. His empathy is totes, as the young people presumably say, legit.
It would be easy to suggest that he’s just looking for reasons to change the subject, since the government has been struggling with its bold decision to make housing affordability a core policy area after it came up in a focus group after the whole jobs and growth thing sort of fell by the wayside.
The problem that the government has created for itself is this: that housing affordability is becoming an enormous problem in the two largest cities, and that actually solving it would put their voting base generally and the members of the party specifically at a huge financial disadvantage.
See, there are two ways to “solve” housing affordability.
The first is to make everyone richer – which isn’t going to happen with flatlining wage growth, let alone a government that is actively determined to reduce the income of Sunday workers and avoiding increasing the minimum wage. So that’s out.
And making housing cheaper isn’t going to happen when at least 97 of our parliamentarians own at least one investment property. And if you’re a treasurer in a right-leaning party that markets itself to the aspirational classes, it’d be political suicide to start cracking those nest eggs.
This is why Morrison has been so keen on emphasising increasing housing supply as the only viable solution: it flies well with the developers that donate so heavily to his party, it puts the onus of success back on state and local governments rather than the federal one, and – most importantly – it won’t work.
That’s because all the incentives for investors remain, meaning that most of the supposed increase in supply can be mopped up without any of that pesky downward pressure on prices. It’s win-win! Except for people that are keen to enjoy the luxury of shelter, obviously.
There’s also the other fairly important fact that tends to get overlooked among the breathless headlines about housing prices, which is that it’s only really happening in two cities – Sydney and Melbourne – and that there’s a fair whack of nation that isn’t in either of those places.
And this illustrates the largest problem with the whole housing debate, which is that it illustrates just how many things have gone dangerously wrong.
The biggest problem isn’t Morrison’s will-he-won’t-he dance about housing affordability. It’s that he’s opened a Pandora’s Box of massive, intractable problems that have huge knock-on effects and – as have so often been the case, from the rise of One Nation to Australia’s involvement in doomed US-led military forays in the Middle East – were caused by John Howard.
The Howard government introduced generous incentives for people investing in property, specifically a 50 per cent cut to capital gains tax in 1999. This came after the Hawke government had attempted – and failed – to reign in the use of negative gearing to rental properties only in 1985.
That one-two punch did the job of encouraging investment in the building sector and allowing ordinary Australians to build wealth, but also turned housing from a thing that people needed in order to live into a conveniently on-shore tax haven.
So not only have Australians had thirty-something years of being encouraged to use property as their nest egg, but a suite of other policies have been built around it – for example, the assumption in all economic projections that most retirees own their family home outright, and that they’d be able to sell it to fund a move into an aged care facility if the need arose.
Everything – from our pension levels to the erosion of state-run aged care services and shunting of the duty of care of our elderly to the rather more predatory mercies of the for-profit sector – is based on the idea that retirees have a big fat asset they can liquidate.
Add to that the fact that people have been moving to the two large cities because that’s where the jobs are, and the government has been encouraging this with direct policies such as choosing to remove subsidies for the motor industry in SA and regional Victoria, and indirect ways such as taking to the media to angrily rail against those lazy unemployed people who aren’t prepared to uproot their lives in Burnie, say, and move to places with more employment opportunities.
There are ways to address this, of course, and some are even on the table at the moment. Encouraging long-term, low-risk investors (such as superannuation funds) to get into the low-income housing game is one genuinely good idea being floated. That would do something to help those |
that have between one and four bedrooms.
After the games they will be converted with the addition of kitchens to be sold off as flats.Lucy Nicole Schwartz[1] (born December 7, 1989) is an American singer and songwriter from Los Angeles, California.[2] She has become well known for writing and performing original songs for film and TV, including songs for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1, Nashville, Parenthood, Shrek Forever After and What Masie Knew.[3]
Career [ edit ]
In 2010, Schwartz released her sophomore album, Life in Letters.
In 2011, she had a duet with Aqualung on The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn and released the EP, "Keep Me".
Schwartz has toured with Lilith Fair,[4] alongside Sarah McLachlan and Sheryl Crow, and opened for The Weepies, Brandi Carlile, The Civil Wars, Agnes Obel, Toad the Wet Sprocket, A Fine Frenzy, Joshua Radin, and The Belle Brigade.
Her songs have been featured in over a dozen television programs, including Grey's Anatomy, Army Wives, and The Good Wife. Schwartz wrote the international theme song for NBC's show, Parenthood, and she has written original songs for numerous films, including Twilight, Shrek Forever After, Mother and Child, Post Grad, Monte Carlo, Adam, and the Meg Ryan comedy, The Women.
Her single "Boomerang" appeared in the closing credits of the fourth season finale of the television series Arrested Development, for which her father, David Schwartz, composed the soundtrack.[5] She had previously performed the vocal recordings "Mr. F" and "For British Eyes Only" in a faux-English accent for the series.[5]
Schwartz guest starred in the second season premiere of House of Lies, playing the role of a waitress dressed as a bumblebee and singing The Carpenters's song, "Close to You".[6]
"Black Roses," a song written by Schwartz, is sung by the character of Scarlett O'Connor (portrayed by Clare Bowen) in the TV show Nashville. It peaked at number 29 on the US Country chart.
She has worked with the charities Heifer International, CHOC Children's Hospital, Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls, Songs of Love for Japan, and Symphony of Hope: The Haiti Project.
Discography [ edit ]
Albums & EPs [ edit ]
Timekeeper (2013)
(2013) Keep Me EP ( 2011)
Life in Letters (2010)
(2010) "Help Me! Help Me! EP (2010)
Winter in June (2007)
Original songs in movie soundtracks [ edit ]
TV theme songs [ edit ]
“When We Were Young” — Parenthood (international theme song) (2010)There’s still a clear divide between conservatives and liberals on gun control issues and how the nation should respond to mass shootings which continue to shock the country. But out of all the debates and disputes there was at least one point which emerged where it seemed that everyone could agree. Many of the shootings which take place involve mentally ill individuals and we don’t do enough to help people suffering from such problems. While you might not be able to tell in the midst of all the election news, Congress is still conducting the nation’s business and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is working on a bill designed to provide some relief on that front.
This should be a fairly easy sell, right? Both sides recognize that there’s a need to do more so we might finally witness one of those rare moments of bipartisan cooperation. Unfortunately that still might not happen because Democrats are fighting tooth and claw to defeat provisions which would require the government to actually prove that someone is crazy before suspending their Second Amendment rights. (The Hill)
The fight over gun control is threatening to scuttle a bipartisan mental health reform effort in the Senate as lawmakers rush to get the issue to the floor. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is in talks with leaders of the Senate health committee to combine his mental health bill with one that passed the committee last month. But Democrats object to certain sections of Cornyn’s bill that they say would make it easier for mentally ill people to acquire guns, and the controversial provisions could shatter Democratic support for the bill.
The horrific provisions under discussion are one which would require a court hearing where a person suspected of being a danger to themselves or others could be adjudicated as being too dangerously incompetent or mentally unstable to be trusted with a weapon. They would also restore the gun rights of individuals who had reached the end of such a court order unless it could be demonstrated that they were still a danger to society. These requirements led Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut to say, “Obviously I can’t support a bill on the floor that has those provisions in it.”
Well… obviously. I mean, who needs a provision like that? Of course, there are tens of thousands of people in New York who might argue the point after Andrew Cuomo placed countless residents on the No Guns For You list without a single medical professional weighing in on their competence under the provisions of the NY SAFE Act.
Look, I’m not arguing that certifiably insane people should have guns. Nobody in the pro-gun rights camp is that crazy, no matter how Democrats want to portray us. But at the same time, we can’t allow a national policy such as the one in New York where you can have your Constitutional rights suspended based on nothing more than a call from a therapist saying you were once prescribed medicine for depression twenty years ago. (Yes, that has happened in New York.) If Democrats torpedo this bill based on nothing more than those common sense provisions to protect citizens from liberal government overreach then they’re not serious about helping the mentally ill at all. Of course, some of us suspected as much already, but it would be nice to be proven wrong for a change.TinyMCE 4.6 marks a significant update to the world’s most popular WYSIWYG editor since our last major release, and the many minor releases since. Most of our work focused on restructuring the TinyMCE core, as we look to continuous delivery of editor updates, and a mobile future.
We did deliver user-facing updates in 4.6, including a major improvement to the editing experience. You’ll find a new feature in the TinyMCE core that fixes one of the most frustrating aspects of writing with a WYSIWYG editor: editing a link and not knowing whether you’re “inside” or “outside” the link.
We added a Help Plugin, which includes keyboard shortcuts and some other helpful information about the editor instance.
TinyMCE 4.6 is the first official release to drop support for Internet Explorer versions 8, 9 and 10. We are committing 4.5.x to long-term support, and explain this decision in more detail below.
We all love open source and happily support our favorite projects. We added small “Powered by TinyMCE” text to the bottom of the editable area. We hope you’ll keep it in place and show a little love. If not, no problem, we understand. It can easily be disabled. btw, it disappears on a user click and doesn’t get in the way of their content creation experience.
Users of Tiny Cloud are already on the latest stable release. If you use the SDK, you can get the 4.6 release from our download page.
Let’s take a deeper look at the improvements in TinyMCE 4.6.
Rethinking the link with the new Inline Boundary feature
Editing the content inside and around hyperlinks has been a frustrating experience for a very long time. We believe we solved the problem. Introducing a new feature in TinyMCE core we call “Inline Boundary” links.
The issue for content creators is that they often want to edit their content inside the href element (often without even knowing what a href is). Historically, this involved keyboard gymnastics as they moved the cursor inside the element, added content, deleted newly redundant content, and moved back outside the element to return to normal editing. It’s difficult to appreciate how frustrating this is, unless you have to do it regularly.
To make this easier for users, we added a visual distinction when the cursor is inside the link. The linked content will become highlighted, and editable. Move outside the link, and the familiar editing behavior returns.
You can play with this right now in the demo on the tinymce.com homepage.
For developers, this feature is on by default. It can be deactivated by setting the inline_boundaries config option to false. Simple.
A quick shout out: this feature was created in collaboration with the WordPress open source project. Thanks to everyone involved in delivering this improvement. It’s a small change, that was complex to solve, and which will greatly improve the content creation experience for the tens of millions of users of WordPress and TinyMCE respectively.
A new Help Plugin
A while ago we had a help plugin. We decided to bring it back. The new Help Plugin includes keyboard shortcuts and some “nice to know” information about TinyMCE, such as which plugins are loaded, the version running, and also a small plug for our Premium Plugin features.
The shortcuts are OS aware, so if you are on a Mac, you get the Mac keyboard version; if you are on PC, you will get the PC version of the shortcuts. This dialog is also fully accessible via shortcuts itself, so a11y dependent users can discover how to more easily navigate the interface.
For developers, because this is a plugin, you need to add help to the plugin list in your init. The exception is if you’re using the default toolbar, in which case it will show up as a question mark button in the toolbar.
As with many of our plugins, we will make incremental improvements over time. We welcome your comments and feedback in our community forum.
IE 8, 9, 10 out of support
TinyMCE 4.6 sees us drop support for Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10. These versions are no longer supported by Microsoft itself, and this has been the case for IE8 over a year.
Two important things to note:
TinyMCE 4.6 will not load in these versions of Internet Explorer. If you use these IE versions, we recommend that you remain on TinyMCE 4.5.7.
If you require IE 8-9-10 support, you should run the 4.5.x version of TinyMCE. This will be under long-term support and any critical fixes will be backported to this version.
So, why did we decide to do this? In short, the 4.6 release is a look to the future of TinyMCE.
We are now able to improve our testing on other platforms. Not only conducting more tests, but more advanced tests. In fact, we ported over 4000 unit tests to a new testing framework, allowing us to do better testing. This will substantially improve editor stability.
A more stable product means we will be able to make use of more advanced browser features, creating a richer user interface (UI) and better user experience (UX).
All of this is in preparation for the delivery of what we believe will be the best mobile support of any rich-text editor in the market. We’re starting with web applications with a vision to delivering native app support. You can expect to hear us talk a lot about mobile in the coming months. We are already a very long way into delivering this functionality. We look forward to sharing more with you soon.
Have questions?
If you have any questions about the TinyMCE 4.6 release, please reach out via the community forum. We look forward connecting.
Quick linksVersion 9.6 is ready for deployment. This update will bring some big changes as well as fixes and significant vehicle rebalancing. Below you will find a handy summary of the additions and changes:
Vehicle Rebalancing
With this update, most tank destroyers and light tanks will experience significant changes in their parameters. These changes will result in TDs becoming more team dependent and the light tanks increasing in relevance on the battlefield.
For more information, please refer to our feature article.
Crew Requalification
This new feature will allow you to change the role of any tanker in your service and put them back in service again. No more idle tankers in your barracks or skilled crew members going to waste!
For more information, please refer to our feature article.
Two New Premium Vehicles
The update will introduce 2 new Premium vehicles: the Japanese Tier VIII medium tank, STA-2, and the French Tier VIII medium tank, AMX CDC. This means that the two underrepresented nations in terms of Premium vehicle availability will finally get new credit-makers and good training platforms for their crews!
For more information, look out for our upcoming feature article.
New Buildings and Reserves in Strongholds
The Strongholds game mode will be supplemented with two new buildings, each capable of producing special Reserves. Apply the devastating Airstrike and Artillery Strike attacks in battle, and bring your enemies to their knees!
For more information, please refer to our feature article.
Fixes and Improvements
The update will also introduce a number of fixes and amendments which should improve game performance and visuals, as well as correct some bugs and game mechanics.President Donald Trump slammed the news media in a speech during a veteran’s event in Washington, D.C. Saturday evening.
The president used the podium at the evangelical event to comment on the ongoing feud with members of the national media, adding that several members of the “fake media” are attempting to silence conservatives in general.
“The fake media is trying to silence us, but we will not let them,” he said. “The fake media tried to stop us from going to the White House. But I’m president, and they’re not,” he told attendees at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Saturday.
Trump added that members of the media “destroyed themselves” because they went too far in their harsh coverage of his actions as president.
MSNBC co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski slammed several Trump properties for hanging a fake TIME Magazine cover favorable to the president, calling the decision “stupid.” Trump fired back calling Scarborough “psycho Joe” and calling Brzezinski “low IQ Mika.” The feud has continued for several rounds over the last three days.
The president tweeted an edited video of him body slamming “fake news” CNN after his remarks at the rally.
Follow Phillip On Twitter
Have a Tip? Let us Know
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected] writer
In contrast to the all-hands-on-deck response to hurricanes in Texas and Florida, President Trump has been shockingly inert when it comes to Puerto Rico’s and the U.S. Virgin Islands’s devastation in the wake of Hurricane Maria — which appears far more serious and potentially long-lasting than the damage visited by hurricanes Harvey and Irma. (The Virgin Islands have been hit twice — by Irma and then by Maria.) The Post reports:
President Trump, facing mounting questions about his commitment to Puerto Rico’s recovery, took to Twitter Monday night, saying the U.S. territory is “in deep trouble,” in part because of problems that predated Hurricane Maria. Trump said Puerto Rico was already suffering from “broken infrastructure,” including an old electrical grid, which he said was “devastated” by Hurricane Maria, as well as “massive debt.” “Food, water and medical are top priorities — and doing well,” Trump said in his series of tweets, which credited the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He noted that, by contrast, Texas and Florida, hit by earlier hurricanes, “are doing great.”
This is stunning. He’s the president; his administration is responsible for the U.S. territories of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands; and his administration will be held accountable for conditions on the islands.
The administration insists that its response has been “robust,” but Americans will watch on TV the devastation, homelessness and the ongoing threat of flooding in Puerto Rico and equally awful conditions in the U.S. Virgin Islands and conclude that the administration’s response has been lacking.
Hospitals are running out of power, and communication has been cut off for most residents, creating life-threatening conditions on a massive scale. CNN reports:
Hurricane Maria whipped Puerto Rico with Irma-level winds, drenched the island with Harvey-level flooding, crippled communications, decimated buildings and damaged a dam that puts downstream residents at risk of catastrophe.
But help has been slow to come to communities where the devastation is described as “apocalyptic,” officials and residents argue. Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said the island faces a humanitarian crisis. He urged Congress to approve a commensurate aid package as the US commonwealth, already hammered by a prolonged economic crisis, tries to get back on its feet. The governor joined others in emphasizing that Puerto Ricans are American citizens.
In contrast to the relief package for Texas that flew through Congress, aid for Puerto Rico is not expected to come up for a vote for weeks.
Everyone not living under a rock during Hurricane Katrina recalls the photo of President George W. Bush looking out the airplane window at the destruction down below in New Orleans. Trying to stay out of the way of first responders, Bush was labeled as remote, cut-off and even racist. His presidency never recovered.
Here the image may be of Trump shouting about NFL players at a political rally in Alabama, or a screen shot of his obsessive tweets and insults about athletes standing (or not) during the national anthem. His neglect of the Spanish-speaking American territory will be labeled racist, and he surely has provided ample evidence of his lack of concern for anyone but his own base of primarily white males.
Someone at the White House apparently caught on. Today, the administration hurriedly announced that Trump would be visiting Puerto Rico — next Tuesday. He’d better be careful before and during his visit not be caught in his own “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” (Bush’s comment to his FEMA chief, Michael Brown) moment.
Trump cares only about what’s in front of his nose and what’s on Fox News (which has been wall-to-wall NFL-protest coverage). His obsession is divisive culture wars, not governance — and the latter is what matters in moments of true crisis. One can imagine he had no real appreciation for the depth of the suffering wrought by Maria, nor political reason that the non-voting islands would warrant his attention. He better focus fast, utilize every resource imaginable and stop engaging in divisive nonsense in lieu of responding to a third natural disaster.Don’t stop believin’: Journey, Pearl Jam, Tupac Shakur, Electric Light Orchestra, Yes and Joan Baez are the 2017 performer inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Veteran musician and producer Nile Rodgers will receive the hall’s Award for Musical Excellence. The Cleveland-based hall’s 32nd annual induction ceremony is set for April 7 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. HBO will air a special derived from the ceremony later in the year.
The 2017 selections were chosen by more than 900 music industry voters in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation. Artists become eligible for the hall 25 years after the release of their first recordings. The pool of 19 nominees for 2017 induction included such notables as Depeche Mode, Jane’s Addiction, Bad Brains, Janet Jackson and the Cars.
The five artists who receive the most votes make the cut for induction. In addition to the industry insiders, the hall solicits online votes by the public that are factored into the overall tally. On the “fan’s ballot,” the top vote-getters were Journey, Electric Light Orchestra, Yes and Pearl Jam. The fifth highest-polling act among the public, the Cars, was not selected this time around.
Related Bob Dylan, Martin Scorsese Reunite for ‘Rolling Thunder’ Film, Coming to Netflix in 2019 (EXCLUSIVE) XXXTentacion's 'Skins' and the Game: The Players Behind the Posthumous Album
Journey got its start in the early 1970s in the San Francisco area. The band’s biggest 1980s hits remain rock radio staples, among them “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Who’s Crying Now” and “Open Arms.”
Pearl Jam emerged from the Seattle’s grunge scene in the early 1990s. Britain’s Electric Light Orchestra, led by Jeff Lynne, scored a string of pop hits in the 1970s. Yes ranks among the most enduring of England’s 1970s progressive rock outfits.
Prolific rapper Tupac Shakur has exerted outsized influence on hip-hop culture since he was murdered in 1996 at the age of 25. Joan Baez is a veteran folk musician and activist who gain fame in part through her early association with Bob Dylan.
Rodgers, a founder of the disco-era hitmakers Chic, had two big hits recently in collaboration with Pharrell Williams: Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” and Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” Chic was also on the list of nominees for 2017 induction.
(Pictured: Tupac Shakur, Journey and Pearl Jam)1 person 2 people 3 people 4 people 5 people 6 people 7 people 8 people 9 people 10 people 11 people 12 people 13 people 14 people 15 people 16 people 17 people 18 people 19 people 20 people Larger party 12:00 AM 12:30 AM 1:00 AM 1:30 AM 2:00 AM 2:30 AM 3:00 AM 3:30 AM 4:00 AM 4:30 AM 5:00 AM 5:30 AM 6:00 AM 6:30 AM 7:00 AM 7:30 AM 8:00 AM 8:30 AM 9:00 AM 9:30 AM 10:00 AM 10:30 AM 11:00 AM 11:30 AM 12:00 PM 12:30 PM 1:00 PM 1:30 PM 2:00 PM 2:30 PM 3:00 PM 3:30 PM 4:00 PM 4:30 PM 5:00 PM 5:30 PM 6:00 PM 6:30 PM 7:00 PM 7:30 PM 8:00 PM 8:30 PM 9:00 PM 9:30 PM 10:00 PM 10:30 PM 11:00 PM 11:30 PMFor what one expert thought was the first time, the number of monthly foreclosures exceeded the number of monthly home sales in California in January, according to data compiled by two research companies.
The data is a grim reflection of the worsening housing market, as the number of homeowners who can’t or won’t make their payments rises and the number of home buyers dwindles.
ForeclosureRadar, a Discovery Bay real estate research firm, said 19,821 California homes went into foreclosure in January, representing about $8 billion in home loans.
Meanwhile, DataQuick reported 19,145 home and condo sales in January.
In December, there were 12,783 foreclosures, according to ForeclosureRadar, and 25,585 home and condo sales, according to DataQuick.
Sean O’Toole of ForeclosureRadar said he doubts there has ever been another time when the number of foreclosures exceeded the number of sales in a month.
DataQuick’s numbers are for closed transactions that occurred in January. ForeclosureRadar uses its own proprietary method of gathering foreclosure data.
“There’s no way a market that slow can clear these kinds of foreclosures,” said Christopher Thornberg of Beacon Economics, a Bay Area research and consulting firm. “What that number says to me is you have more homes getting dumped on the market in terms of foreclosures than there is demand for homes.”A Greek bank run looks to be in full swing.
In an article from German magazine Der Spiegel on Tuesday, the scope of Greek bank withdrawals is shown in alarming clarity. According to Georgios Provopoulos, the governor of the central bank of Greece, savings and time deposits fell by 13 to 14 billion euros in September and October of this year.
And it’s only getting worse.
“In the first 10 days of November the decline continued on a large scale,” Mr. Provopoulos told the economic affairs committee of the Greek parliament last month.
All that money spilling out of Greek banks is creating a credit crunch that’s making lending nearly impossible. The scope of withdrawals really hits you when you step back and look at just how much money Greeks have pulled out since last year.
From Der Spiegel:
At the start of 2010, savings and time deposits held by private households in Greece totalled €237.7 billion — by the end of 2010, they had fallen by €49 billion. Since then, the decline has been gaining momentum. Savings fell by a further €5.4 billion in September and by an estimated €8.5 billion in October — the biggest monthly outflow of funds since the start of the debt crisis in late 2009.
It’s not surprising bank withdrawals rapidly worsened during the last three months. Greeks were faced with massive uncertainty after former Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou announced a referendum on a bailout package to save the country. He eventually backed down, and a new Prime Minister was brought in. But obviously, the damage was done to Greek confidence in their country.
Now every level of the economy is feeling the effects of Greece’s bank run. Der Spiegel explains:
The hemorrhaging of bank savings has had a disastrous impact on the economy. Many companies have had to tap into their reserves during the recession because banks have become more reluctant to lend. More Greek families are now living off their savings because they have lost their jobs or have had their salaries or pensions cut. In August, unemployment reached 18.4%. Many Greeks now hoard their savings in their homes because they are worried the banking system may collapse. Those who can are trying to shift their funds abroad. The Greek central bank estimates that around a fifth of the deposits withdrawn have been moved out of the country. “There is a lot of uncertainty,” says Panagiotis Nikoloudis, president of the National Agency for Combating Money Laundering.
It’s hard to imagine how much more of this the Greek economy can handle.
• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: jshmuel(I work at a tourist information booth set up along the path by Niagara Falls.)
Tourist: “Excuse me, ma’am. How do I get to the falls from here?”
Me: “The Falls? They’re just behind me. That one is the Canadian Falls, also known as the Horseshoe Falls, and that other one’s the American Falls. ”
Tourist: “Why is the Cay-nay-dian Falls bigger than ours?”
Me: “Geography, I suppose.”
Tourist: “I think you have it wrong. The big one MUST be the American one.”
Me: “No, that one is the Canadian Falls.”
Tourist: “This is insane! I’m going to write my congressman and demand that that there big falls should be ours! You Cay-Nay-Dians shouldn’t have the big one!”
Me: “You’re going to annex our Falls? Really?”
Tourist: “H*** yes I am! I have more of a right to it than you do!”
Me: “But… it’s in my country.”
Tourist: “Well, we’ll just see about that!” *storms off*Lexus GS-F review New Zealand
On the mark, right on, on the mark, on the button, there are loads of terms that mean the same thing, basically when something is right or correct in my opinion it’s spot on.
I have a small family, we’re pretty much middle of the road in financial terms (actually a little lower than that) however we do like a touch of class when we can get it. We do all the usual, school runs, football practice, the odd night out and sometimes we even invite the extended family or friends out to play. My point is, that from a car ‘needs’ point of view we don’t need too much from it, reliability is a given as is safety (but from a car ‘wants’ point of view now that’s a whole different conversation).
Lexus gave me the keys to their new GS-F, they call it a performance sedan, I call it a car that goes a long way to building a bridge between my needs and wants.
From a bit of a distance (and possibly the right angle) the GS-F could be mistaken for a general runabout (okay I’m stretching a little but you get the point) it is a 4 door sedan that is in line with the segment. But move closer or approach from the front and the picture changes dramatically. It sports the trademark hourglass Lexus grille and menacing ‘eyes’. Huge air scoops fill the lower front corners and jagged ‘barbel’ looking pointy bits complete the running lights – there is a lot going on at the nose of this car and just as much going on under the bonnet.
The GS-F has a brute of a 5L naturally aspirated V8 that produces 351kW’s of grunty power and 530Nm of torque. 0-100 comes at a rate of 4.6 seconds and the brakes are strong enough to pull your face off. The 8 speed auto transmission is not that keen on being driven slowly but happily jumps up and down that range at speed but all this pales into insignificance when you stamp down hard on the accelerator and hear the V8 roar exactly as it should – the grunty tone is out of character for the big sedan and that makes it all the more sweeter. Drive modes can be selected at the turn of a dial and you can move from Eco (with a rifle look instrument dial) to Sport + (the fun department). It handles well for a car that feels a little heavy, this due to the tuned suspension and is helped by the carbon fibre front and rear spoilers.
Behind the front wheel arch (that contains 19” Alloys) Lexus have subtly placed the F badge; which in turn draws your eyes to the GS-F’s side gills, tall horizontal vents that begin a strong bodyline that runs along the foot of the doors. Around back it has darker taillights and sporty quad exhausts.
Inside Lexus have thrown a lot of money at the GS-F. The leather sports seats are wonderfully hugging and the Alcantara dash has been handstiched in Blue. The instrument panel is electronic and crystal clear as are the graphics on the indash 12.3” display screen.
Toggle thought some of the F performance settings and you get to the torque distribution display which is good and the G-force display which is better (but not necessarily for the reason you may think). The G-Force display provides you with a little yellow spot in the centre of a circle – pull away fast and the spot goes down with a ‘G’ reading (up to 1 G) and vice versa under braking. Yes you start off spend a bit of time seeing how far you can get the spot moving (I don’t think I made 1G accelerating) but I found a better use – rush hour traffic. I spent my near hour commute trying to keep the yellow spot static. It’s really therapeutic (especially as people cut across you and you resist the urge to stop people pushing in). I didn’t manage to keep it there the whole way but not too far off. The resulting by product is that the ride is smoother and fuel economy is increased – so not too bad after all.
The GS-F is a loud and snarly car when you want it to be and relatively sedate when you don’t. It’s a very luxurious sports car that more than delivers is the interior department while having enough space for 5 adults when required.
To top it all off this performance sedan has a G-Force monitor and for that reason alone (from my point of view) it’s spot on.
For more Lexus reviews click here
Subscribe to keep updated
Like this: Like Loading..."Infrastructure" = Viaduct, Correct?
From President-elect Obama's weekly address this morning:
Second, we will create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s. We’ll invest your precious tax dollars in new and smarter ways, and we’ll set a simple rule – use it or lose it. If a state doesn’t act quickly to invest in roads and bridges in their communities, they’ll lose the money. (emphasis ours)
Call us naive, but if Obama is fixing to write some ginormous checks, shouldn't we be deciding on a viaduct option muy pronto? The Emerald City is going to look a tad foolish if we walk up to the plate with eight bats on our shoulder, so to speak. Emergency task force, anyone? Special session? Hello? Is this thing on?
The Alaskan Way Viaduct is the perfect sort of high-visibility project that an entire re-election campaign can be built around. Few can debate the need for the project. The visuals are stunning and the transformation would be obvious. If, you know, we can make up our minds on what we want as a replacement.
(And the Eastside Corridor light rail project can be done for around $1 billion in case there are leftovers. Everyone wins!)Big Data should not be a faith-based initiative
Cory Doctorow summarizes the problem with the idea that sensitive personal information can be removed responsibly from big data: computer scientists are pretty sure that's impossible.
The debate is a hot one, and a lot of non-technical privacy regulators have been led on by sweet promises from the companies that they regulate about the possibility of creating booming markets in highly sensitive personal data that is somehow neutralized through a magic "de-identification" process that lets information about, say, the personal lives of cancer patients be bought and sold without compromising the patients' privacy.
The most recent example of this is a report by former Ontario privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian and Daniel Castro from the pro-market thinktank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. The authors argue that the risk of "re-identification" has been grossly exaggerated and that it is indeed possible to produce meaningful, valuable datasets that are effectively "de-identified."
Princeton's Arvind Narayanan and Ed Felten have published a stinging rebuttal, pointing out the massive holes in Cavoukian and Castro's arguments -- cherry picking studies, improperly generalizing, ignoring the existence of multiple re-identification techniques, and so on.
As Narayanan and Felten demonstrate, the Cavoukian/Castro position is grounded in a lack of understanding of both computer science and security research. The "penetrate-and-patch" method they recommend -- where systems are fielded with live data, broken through challenges, and then revised -- has been hugely ineffective in both traditional information security development and in de-identification efforts. And as Narayanan and Felten point out, there is no shortage of computer science experts who could have helped them with this.
Cavoukian and Castro are rightly excited by Big Data and the new ways that scientists are discovering to make use of data collected for one purpose in the service of another. But they do not admit that the same theoretical advances that unlock new meaning in big datasets also unlock new ways of re-identifying the people whose data is collected in the set.
Re-identification is part of the Big Data revolution: among the new meanings we are learning to extract from huge corpuses of data is the identity of the people in that dataset. And since we're commodifying and sharing these huge datasets, they will still be around in ten, twenty and fifty years, when those same Big Data advancements open up new ways of re-identifying -- and harming -- their subjects.
Narayanan and Felten would like to have a "best of both worlds" solution that lets the world reap the benefits of Big Data without compromising the privacy of the subjects of the datasets. But if there is such a solution, it is to be found through rigorous technical examinations, not through hand-waving, wishful thinking, and bad stats.
The faith-based belief in de-identification is at the root of the worst privacy laws in recent memory. In the EU, the General Data Protection Regulation -- the most-lobbied regulatory effort in EU history -- decided to divide data protection into two categories: identifiable data and "de-identified" data, with practically no limits on how the latter could be bought and sold. The mirrors the existing UK approach, which allows companies to unilaterally declare that the data they hold has been "de-identified" and then treat it as a commodity. In both cases, it's a disaster, as I wrote in the Guardian last year. You can't make good technical regulations by ignoring technical experts, even if the thing those technical experts are telling you is that your cherished plans are impossible.
I recommend you read both Narayanan and Felten's paper, and Cavoukian and Castro's. But in the meantime, Narayanan has helpfully summarized the debate:
Specifically, we argue that: 1.
There is no known effective method to anonymize location data, and no evidence that it’s meaningfully achievable. 2.
Computing re-identification probabilities based on proof-of-concept demonstrations is silly. 3.
Cavoukian and Castro ignore many realistic threats by focusing narrowly on a particular model of re-identification. 4.
Cavoukian and Castro concede that de-identification is inadequate for high-dimensional data. But nowadays most interesting datasets are high-dimensional. 5.
Penetrate-and-patch is not an option. 6.
Computer science knowledge is relevant and highly available. 7.
Cavoukian and Castro apply different standards to big data and re-identification techniques. 8.
Quantification of re-identification probabilities, which permeates Cavoukian and Castro’s arguments, is a fundamentally meaningless exercise.
-Cory DoctorowA Barrie teen is building what he hopes will be the foundation to a promising soccer career in the years ahead.
Steven Furlano, is a Grade 9 student at St. Peter’s Secondary School.
Last fall, he scored five goals, helping his high school team to the championship. The centre mid-fielder started the game at a young age with the Barrie Soccer Club. He’s been coached by his older brother, Jim, for eight years.
“We knew there was something special about him,” Jim said. “He was excelling so much, we put him in the rep program – he is a coach’s player.”
Playing for his older brother “is the best feeling ever,” Steven said.
“We never butt heads,” Jim said. “He understands the hard work he is doing is leading to something. I think Steven |
requirement for it to be multi-lingual, it was a branch off (or add-on) of another successful product (legacy windows app) of the company and somebody somewhere decided that it’s much easier to use the same database and separate stuff out by schema, I’m not belittling this decision to be clear, I don’t know the circumstances of the time and it isn’t really wasn’t that hard to separate it out at the end, but that’s not what this story is about anyway.
This was the requirement for every domain entity (after stripping out a thousand other irrelevant details):
Every entity has a “Name” field Every entity must support any number of languages for the “Name” field Every entity must be auditable, it must have therefore: CreatedBy CreatedOn ModifiedBy ModifiedOn Every entity must have an IsActive column to indicate whether it shows up in the UI Every entity must have a “Code” field indicating a business friendly code which users looking at in any language could relate to
This is the data model that was derived as a result:
public abstract class Entity { public int Id { get ; set ; } public int CreatedById { get ; set ; } public DateTime CreatedOn { get ; set ; } public int ModifiedById { get ; set ; } public DateTime ModifiedOn { get ; set ; } } public abstract class CodedEntity : Entity { public bool Active { get ; set ; } public string Code { get ; set ; } } public abstract class Translation : Entity { public int CultureID { get ; set ; } public int TranslationOfID { get ; set ; } public virtual string Name { get ; set ; } } public abstract class MultilingualEntity : CodedEntity where TTranslationEntity : Translation, new () { public string Name { get ; set ; } public virtual Collection Translations { get ; set ; } } public class AbcEntityTranslation : Translation { } public class AbcEntity : MultilingualEntity { }
The above design led to some cool generic stuff which could do something like this:
public class BlahContext : DbContext { public DbSet AbcEntities { get ; set ; } public DbSet AbcEntityTranslations { get ; set ; } } public abstract class EntityFrameworkRepositoryBase where TTranslation : Translation, new () where TEntity : MultilingualEntity { private readonly BlahContext _context; protected EntityFrameworkRepositoryBase (BlahContext context) { _context = context; } public async Task GetAsync (Expression<Func<TEntity, bool >> predicate) { return await _context.Set().Where(predicate).ToListAsync(); } public async Task< int > DeleteByIdAsync ( int id) { var set = _context.Set(); var entity = await set.FirstAsync(x => x.Id == id); set.Remove(entity); return await _context.SaveChangesAsync(); } }
Useful, right? This is what inheritance is all about, right?
It’s two years later and we now decide to separate the Siamese applications by separating out the databases and syncing data between them via API’s, to proceed further we first decided which entities would be owned by which application so that the other uses it as read-only data.
So now.. half of those entities would:
Have no created by, modified by etc, as these are synced by the system (a fixed user’s id is redundant) Translations recieved by these entities are in separate dedicated tables as the other tables have UI functionality to edit those translations, this data is no longer owned by the application and is read-only. The code field now has different requirements (length) for each of these. The active flag no longer applies to half of the read-only set (functionality change).
Hmmm… But we now have 23 entities owned by the other app referenced by 17 other classes consumed by 46 API endpoints (not kidding) consumed by I don’t know how many pages via angular services which expects all these entities to have that base class (and to have that class have the other base class) with the same properties ….well…fuck!
We achieved by using EF hacks, ignoring it in a lot of places, putting default values in other columns, basically a lot of duct tape solutions as otherwise it would have taken months to do it right with a lot of testing and nobody was willing to approve that.
What we should have done!
Enter SOLID principles! Now I’m not going to rant about what these are, people better than me have already written extensively on this topic, I recommend going through the Wikipedia article first and then taking time out to read this by Uncle Bob.
Now, let’s apply SOLID to the above code and get the entities to look a little different (while keeping in mind that I typed these in 5 minutes, not meant for copy-paste :) ):
public interface IKeyedEntity { int Id { get ; set ; } } public interface IAuditable { int CreatedById { get ; set ; } DateTime CreatedOn { get ; set ; } int ModifiedById { get ; set ; } DateTime ModifiedOn { get ; set ; } } public interface ICoded //I hate this name { string Code { get ; set ; } } public interface IArchivable { bool IsArchived { get ; set ; } } public interface ITranslation { string Value { get ; set ; } int CultureId { get ; set ; } } public interface ITranslatable { ICollection Translations { get ; set ; } } public class AbcEntity : IKeyedEntity, IAuditable, ICoded, IArchivable, ITranslatable { public int Id { get ; set ; } public int CreatedById { get ; set ; } public DateTime CreatedOn { get ; set ; } public int ModifiedById { get ; set ; } public DateTime ModifiedOn { get ; set ; } public string Code { get ; set ; } public bool IsArchived { get ; set ; } public ICollection Translations { get ; set ; } } public class AbcEntityTranslation : IKeyedEntity, ITranslation //maybe I would have even added IAuditable here { public int Id { get ; set ; } public string Value { get ; set ; } public int CultureId { get ; set ; } } public class BlahContext : DbContext { public DbSet AbcEntities { get ; set ; } public DbSet AbcEntityTranslations { get ; set ; } } public interface IEntityDeletionProvider { Task< int > DeleteByIdAsync( int id) where TEntity : class, IKeyedEntity; } public class EntityDeletionProvider : IEntityDeletionProvider { private readonly BlahContext _context; public EntityDeletionProvider (BlahContext context) { _context = context; } public async Task< int > DeleteByIdAsync( int id) where TEntity : class, IKeyedEntity { var set = _context.Set(); var entity = await set.FirstAsync(x => x.Id == id); set.Remove(entity); return await _context.SaveChangesAsync(); } }
I can now remove the functionality I want in an entity and only that functionality, whatever UI code breaks now needs to break anyway as it’s then definetly trying to write something which is supposed to be read-only (or whatever functionality I don’t want it to have) and things are much simpler, faster to change. The classes which were doing mammoth tasks expecting a heirarchy of inheritance are now broken down into smaller ones which do specific things while still keeping the usefulness of having central code for one functionality.
Don’t judge if I missed something somewhere, the key takeaway is:
FOLLOW SOLID!
and also:
Choose composition over inheritance!
Let me know by commenting below if you disagree or want to add your own story! Also, subscribe to email alerts in case you are interested in such posts in the future.
AdvertisementsHandout from talk given by Dr. Silberman at CJRR Club Meeting May 2008:
Geographic:
Demographics:
East African Coast between Ethiopa and Tanzania, size of Texas
30million people, 70 ethnic groups, no one comprises more than 20 percent of the total
Median age 18
41 percent are less than 14 years old
Economy:
World’s third largest exporter of tea
Tea, coffee, agriculture = 50% of economy
Second is Tourism
25% live on a dollar a day
25% under age 5 are malnourished
In 2001, there were fewer than three telephones for every 100 Kenyans and 1 computer
for every 200
Running:
North Rift Valley
Eldoret (200,000)
Iten (3,000)
8,000 feet, 50 – 80 degrees, no humidity, 12 hours of daylight
Kalenjin Tribe (10% of kenyan population) live throughout western highlands
Years past, ran for national pride. First for God, second for country, third for self.
Now Running = an escape = financial opportunity (for self and agents)
Results:
5 of the 10 fastest 10km
7 of the 10 fastest marathons
Catherine Ndereba 4 Boston marathons
Robert Cherioyot 4 Boston marathons
15 out of the last 17 Boston Marathons
In 2007, 68 of the top 100 marathoners in the world, 13 in the top 20
Gold in every Olympic steeplechase since 1984
Training Camps:
Basic living quarters, run, eat and sleep.
Housing, daily 2-3x / day training runs, coaching, gym, food, library
High Altitude Training Camp (HATC), Lornah Kiplagat, Iten
World Records in 5km (14.47), 10mile (50.54), 20km (63.56)
Specializes in training female athletes
www.lornah.com
Kipkeino High Performance Training Centre (KHPTC), Kipchoge Keino, Eldoret
Gold 1500m 1968, Steeplechase 1972
IOC approved high altitude training center
Nurture talent irrespective of origin
Local orphanage
www.kipkeinotraining.org
Fila training camps
,
Eldoret, Kapsait, Mount Embu; Moses Taniu
Develop Kenyans but now cross cultural exchange programs also
St. Patrick’s at Iten, small Catholic College
Graduates: Wilson Kipketer (Denmark), Bernard Lagat (USA), former Olympic 3000m
champion Mathews Birir, former Commonwealth 800m champion Japheth Kimutai, the
Chirchir brothers—Cornelius and William, former world 3000m steeplechase record
holder and champion, Boit Kipketer, former world 10,000m champion, Sally Barsosio
and former Olympic 1500m champion Peter Rono.
Kenyan Training Secrets from Scott Douglass:
Link to source, full article
1. Start slow, finish fast
2. Easy runs easier, harder runs faster
3. Train with a group
4. Run on dirt and grass
5. Run hills
6. Run diagonals
7. Do drills
ON RUNNING:
Martin Lel has been quoted, “I like to keep my legs fresh so I can run”.
Most runners don’t run. They struggle and suffer, focusing on distance at the expense
of technique and form. Terry Laughlin, of Total Immersion Swimming, has summed it up
best, and it holds true for running: “never practice struggle”.
Never focus on quantity at the expense of quality. Never run faster than you can. “Run
as fast as you can without straining (Daniels); and only as far as you can without
straining. Build slowly, remember, you didn’t run 10 kilometers to school every day.
There is no long slow distance run in Kenyan training. They train in 3 zones, easy,
medium, high sessions.
TEMPO RUN:
Link to article from Runners World
The key workout of your week is the tempo run at your maximal steady state or lactate
threshold, that pace that is fast but manageable, described as ‘comfortably hard’.
The run should always start off slow (15 minute warm-up) and pick up pace as it
progresses but not to the point of race pace (20 – 40 minutes) and then cool down (15
minutes). If you slow down then you started out too fast.
Pace:
Recent Race:
Add 30 to 40 seconds to your current 5-K pace or 15 to 20 seconds to
your 10-K pace
Heart Rate:
85 to 90 percent of your maximum heart rate
Perceived Exertion:
An 8 on a 1-to-10 scale (a comfortable effort would be a 5;
racing would be close to a 10)
Talk Test:
A question like "Pace okay?" should be possible, but conversation won't be.
VO2 – Lactate testing
can help determine exact pace.
Distance:
4-6 miles for 10km race
6-8 miles for 13.1km race
10-15 miles for the marathon.
DRILLS:
Link to video of drills
Karioke (Cross Over)
Side Steps
Skips
Butt Kick
High Knee
Backward
Strides
RUN BAREFOOT:
Stronger feet equal stronger legs. You have to be able to feel the road to run properly.
Running in cushioned bulky heavy sneakers impedes your proprioception (ability to
perceive the road), ability to lift your feet off the ground, and ability to fire and contract
your leg muscles.
If you don’t have terrain to run barefoot, perform your drills barefoot. As you improve
your technique and get stronger, you should find yourself running in flats or
‘competition’ footwear.
REST:
You have to be rested and recovered to train. This is a learned skill that comes with
maturity. Listen to your body, not your training program.
NUTRITION:
Contrary to American marketing, power bars, Gatorade, granola bars, Fig Newtons,
yoghurt, and pretzels are not ‘health’ foods. Eat real food. You’ll lose weight and feel
better.
Githeri, a stew of beans and corn.
Ugali, a stiff maize meal.
Organic meat.
Organic vegetables.
Fresh local milk.
Tea.
Sugar.
UGALI
Ingredients:
Four cups corn flour, white cornmeal or ground maize (white cornmeal is preferred, it
should be finely ground, like flour)
Water
Salt (Optional)
Instructions:
Bring water in a pan to a boil (about 8 Cups). Reduce heat to medium and put flour,
gradually stirring until the consistency is stiff. Stir continuously, and cover for about 5
minutes. Stir again and form into a mound. The Ugali will be done when it pulls from the
sides of the pan easily and does not stick. The finished product should look like stiff
grits. Cover the pot with a plate and invert the pan so that the Ugali "drops" on the
plate. Serve with meat or vegetable stew.
Books:
More Fire, How to Run The Kenyan Way,
Toby Tanser
Videos:
Train Hard, Win Easy: The Kenyan Way
Born to Run – KenyaFuelFact is a new project of FuelFix.com. In the run up to the 2012 presidential election, there is a lot of focus on high gasoline prices. We’ll be evaluating these statements, consulting with experts and rating their accuracy.
Inspired by sites like PolitiFact.com and FactCheck.org, our staff will judge the statements on our “truthiness” gasoline gauge:
Full: The statement is accurate.
The statement is accurate. Three-quarters Full: The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information.
The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Half-Full: The statement is partially accurate but omits important details or takes facts out of context.
The statement is partially accurate but omits important details or takes facts out of context. Quarter-Full: The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts.
The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts. Empty: The statement is not accurate.
SUMMARY
It’s been a familiar slogan over the past few years: “Drill, baby, drill.”
As prices continue to rise at the pump, Republicans and industry leaders have called for President Barack Obama to increased domestic production to combat the higher prices.
Just yesterday, American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard called for Obama to up domestic production by opening up more offshore areas and to reduce regulations that the industry claims are hindering oil production.
By doing so, Gerard said it could prompt a drop in the price of crude oil and eventually gasoline prices.
However, Gerard isn’t the only politician or industry officials who has called for more drilling in the U.S.
Earlier this month, GOP front-runner Mitt Romney said his solution to higher gasoline prices was more drilling in the United States, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the continental shelf.
“‘Mr. president, open up drilling in the Gulf, open up drilling in the ANWR,” Romney said. “Open up drilling in continental shelf, drill in North Dakota, drill in Oklahoma and Texas.”
So can American drill ourselves out of $4-per-gallon gasoline?
ANALYSIS
Increased domestic drilling has not made a significant impact on gasoline prices, according to an Associated Press report.
According to data from the Energy Information Administration, the United States produced about 182 million barrels of crude oil in December 2011, the most recent available statistic. The production is the most since more than 183 million barrels were pumped out from U.S. fields in May 2002.
U.S. drivers were paying on average $1.35-per-gallon of gas in May 2002, according to EIA data.
According to the Associated Press, the rate of drilling often doesn’t track the same path of gasoline prices.
For example, prices should have soared when production dropped between 1986 and 1999. Instead prices dropped by nearly a dollar, according to the AP.
Retired Duke University professor David Peterson, who analyzed the numbers, said the calculations “help make the point that U.S. production and demand have little to do with the price of gasoline in the U.S., and lend support to the notion that there is not a great deal we in the U.S., acting alone, can do to affect the price of gasoline.”
Peterson said gasoline prices often track the rise and falls of European countries, showing gasoline prices are a global market that the U.S. has little impact on.
RATING
Increased drilling might help politicians win public support, but it will make the gasoline at the pump any cheaper, analysts say. Our FuelFact “truthiness” rating: According to analysts, this claim is hitting empty on the facts.
Information from the Associated Press was used in this article.Upon entering Japan you'll soon discover an unusual trait of Japanese -- they can in a way both insult you and compliment you at the same time. One good example is that on top of a few Japanese "Love Hotels" (which are hotels decked out in glittery pink neon and rent rooms by the hour or night for obvious reasons) you will find a big Statue of Liberty. (photo) It may be flattering that such an American symbol is taken for "liberty", but at the same time to see it on top of a sleazy hotel is a little disconcerting. In the same way, the westerner coming to Japan will right from the airport be drowned in the "compliment" Nihongo wa jouzu desu neh, or "Your Japanese is so good". It's usually spoken in a "Look Mom, the horse can do math problems" kind of way -- slightly condecending. The problem with all this is that it is put on you a thousand times a day, every time you open your mouth, in exactly those same words -- never once said in a different way. And the fact that it has nothing to do with your Japanese ability. In fact, the better your Japanese gets, the less you hear it. Even more demeaning is hearing "O-hashi wa jouzu desu neh" which means you can use chopsticks well. The fact that a 4 or 5 year old Japanese child is supposed to use them easily but you're never expected to know how is a slight few Japanese are "international" enough to realize. To the Japanese, they are not consciously looking down on you, but rather trying to establish rapport through bombarding you with things they think you like to hear. It's important not to get upset about this and just as they would, play humble by denying the praise over and over. All of that is relatively benign. The real problem is dealing with the occasional neanderthal where even if you have attained near native fluency they still have a "See-White-Face, Hear-Japanese, Does-Not-Compute" mentality, or the elitist complaining how you foreigners never bother to learn Japanese, and then you come along speaking fluent Japanese and they insist in doing all communication in English. The reason being that more conservative types see language as race, and race as language, and when there is someone not part of the group suddenly among "us", they unconsciously feel a threat. There are not many countries where race and nationality are closely tied together. Dealing with such Groupthink is going to be a challenge, but while you never have to like it you're going to have to deal with it. Many Japanese view westerners on two levels -- if you are taken as a temporary visitor, they nearly always treat you extremely warmly and helpfully; even lavishly. But if you are someone trying to become a member of society, there can be quite a different attitude from some. In contrast, other Asians are expected to pick up the Japanese language quickly, and there often is little tolerance for those that do not.
The term "gaijin" according to the dictionary means foreigner or alien, and literally means outsider. In practice however, it always means "white person". Japanese use a lot of discrimination -- Chinese and Koreans are usually referred to by their nationality, not as "gaijin", unless speaking in legal terms. [And whatever your complaints you may have, remember SE Asians have it far worse.] The gaijin = white person stereotype is so deeply ingrained into the Japanese psyche that when the Japanese go abroad they still refer to whites as gaijin, and despite using their passports, US dollars, and going through US Customs, they are still not consciously aware of Hawaii as being a US state. Even though all Japanese know Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods are from America, it still doesn't dispel their notion that ALL Americans are blue-eyed blonds. Many Europeans or Australians in fact chafe at the immediate assumption in Japan that at first sight they are all American. The term "gaijin" is not in itself pejorative (though it can be used that way), but when one Japanese tells another he's doing something like a foreigner it's a strong put-down. Many Japanese ex-pats who've lived abroad are viewed supiciously. If one's English is "too good", he might be ostracized. For Japanese children who've spent time abroad and can speak English fluently (kikoku shijo), bullying from classmates can be swift and cruel. There are also more than a few binational children in private international schools because of the mistreatment they had in Japanese schools. There is one exception though -- the Celebrity Factor. If one becomes a Japanese celebrity, singer, actor/actress, etc., then paradoxically all is forgiven. Then the cruelty is turned on its ear and you become a paragon of Japanese achievement. This all sounds contradictory, but the Japanese sometimes follow such an irrational and unpredictable course.
It is important not to make a mountain out of a molehill, however. Some ex-pats start foaming at the mouth describing how on trains Japanese prefer to stand then take the last seat next to the foreigner, or going to a restaurant the nervous waitress rushes over to take away your chopsticks and bring you a spoon. While that certainly could be called discrimination and feeling some irritation is understandable, if that is the worst treatment you get then consider yourself lucky, as far as being a minority in a foreign country goes.
There is the way things are and the way we'd like them to be. The reality and the facade. The real reason and the pretext. The substance and the form. Being direct and being diplomatic. And the truth and the white lie. In short, that is honne and tatemae, respectively. Since avoiding conflict and trouble is extremely important in Japan, using diplomatic language is often used rather than the direct approach. It's said that in formal situations a direct "No" is avoided and there are a thousand nicer alternatives -- which can be true, but it depends a lot on the situation and social status of the parties involved. Some westerners unfairly call this deceptive, but this shows more ignorance of how the culture and language are intertwined. Japanese may say things very politely and vaguely, but if the meaning is not clear it's perfectly acceptable to ask for clarification. But while we in the west judge tatemae to be cake icing and hypocrisy, the Japanese have elavated it into an art. Sometimes, anyway. When it comes to creating a reason, in some cases the Japanese seem to have left their reasoning on Pluto. Like blocking European ski equipment from the Japanese market because "Japanese snow is different". In fact, almost every "reason" for not importing foreign goods is crammed full of it. While many so-called Japan "experts" tell the world about how much Japanese stress "harmony", the reality is that they push THE IMAGE OF harmony. What lies beneath may be completely different.
"Let's have dinner together sometime." -- A Culture Clash
In the west when someone says to another "let's have dinner together sometime", it usually means "let's have dinner together sometime". Sounds like an invitation, doesn't it? And if you're new in town, don't have a lot of friends yet, or looking for a date, it sounds even better. Unfortunately, if a Japanese person says that or "Come over to my place sometime" to you, what he/she really might mean is "I hope we get along well together." (In fact this is often said of Kyoto people, whose Japanese sounds among the Japanese to be extra refined and polite, and empty invitations are legendary). Is that more than a little confusing? I had 2 big shocks from this myself. When I first started working at a company, I had one secretary (the cute one everybody wanted to date) tell me this. Now, if the other 5 or 6 secretaries all said the same thing to me as a matter of etiquette, it would be obvious immediately. But only one did, and after agreeing on a date and time, I got stood up. I dismissed it as a misunderstanding, but when a similar situation occured again later, the message was clear. So let this be a caution -- take offers with a pillar of salt. Unless specifics like a date and time are mentioned, don't hold your breath. If you're really interested, leave your phone number, tell the person to call you anytime, but don't sit waiting by the phone Saturday night.
Once you adjust your thinking from romance language syntax (subject-verb-object) to the Japanese syntax (subject-object-verb), Japanese is easy to learn. Understanding it is a different matter though. How's that? In Japan, a part of tatemae is speaking diplomatically, and what is not said may be more important than what is. There are also a certain number of fixed phrases that translated directly don't mean a lot. "That's a little difficult" (Sore wa chotto muzukashii) really means "No way!". "I'll think about it" (Kangaete okimasu) is a declination or refusal. And "Yoroshiku o-negai shimasu" can mean "pleased to meet you", "with my best regards", or "I leave it in your hands, please do your best". Why don't they just say "no" when they mean no, you ask? How western of you. We might like it more but in Japan it's not part of the culture -- besides that, there's always a 1 in 100 chance that the situation might change and then you might say yes -- so why burn your bridges behind you?
Japanese society has two concurrent streams that frequently bump heads and the result as you can guess is friction, tension and stress. One current is protecting your own privacy, following your dream, and doing things your own way at your own pace. Facing this is the overwhelming social pressure to conform, follow the rules, and make sure everyone else is in the same boat as you. With big Japanese cities having extemely high population densities, personal space is scarce, and with little space in front of you many Japanese retreat to the only space they can; inside their heads. Becoming introverted, shy and withdrawn is not atypical. There are exceptions to this of course; some young people love to associate with westerners because of this and they can more freely express themselves and not have to worry about being looked down as too gregarious. Liquor consumption is also high in Japan and used as a social lubricant to loosen up. But privacy in Japan is a precious commodity, for cultural as well as demographic reasons, and nobody likes someone to butt into your life.
Unfortunately pushing everyone to rigidly conform often does just that, and many Japanese take it upon themselves to make sure everyone is in lock-step with one another. Most often, like many things in Japan it is done indirectly, such as through gossiping, backbiting and meddling. Hence in Japanese there's a plethora of terms referring to a nosy busybody, such as osekkai, sewa yaki, kansho-zuki, yakkai na sewa, and deshabari. This is viewed in different ways of course. In the ivory tower books on Japan there is the company superior who is also your counselor, paving your way to a better future, getting that reservation at a popular place or bank loan for you, etc. But there may also be the company autocrat who tries to know everything about you to manipulate you or run your social life, and for women can even cross the line into sexual harassment (seku hara).
The term goatism comes from scapegoat, and for a time was a frequently used buzzword by the Japanese. Japanese also have very positive traits, but this is not one of them. In many instances, Japanese love to think of themselves as the victim -- when trade frictions grow, when international criticism of Japanese stances mounts, or especially when it comes to responsibility for WWII, Japanese often retreat into a scapegoat or persecution complex. The fact that their export frenzies and occasional cases of dumping have brought hardship and unemployment in their target countries rarely dawns on them. Perhaps the best example of this was 20 years ago when Mitsubishi and Hitachi were accused of espionage against IBM to gain industrial secrets. Yet in the Japanese press IBM was villified of hatching a plot of entrapment along with the FBI against 2 innocent and successful Japanese firms. The Japanese are just doing their best, producing things people want. What could possibly be wrong with that?
Ok, boys and girls, it's test time! Ever see the Borg on Star Trek? Ever wonder if the Japanese are really the Borg in disguise? See if you can tell which said the following statements!
"Let's all live in a harmonious society" (whether you like it or not).
"We only wish to raise quality of life".
"We are not Saracens, we do not come as invaders to sow desolation...we offer our knowhow, better quality of life, greater reliability, and the beauty of sound and image."
"You're just raw material to them."
"You will be assimilated!! Resistance is futile!!!"
A little tough? The first and third are from Japan -- the third was a full page ad in the French newspaper Le Monde after growing criticism that Japanese mass-exports of VCRs to France were seriously hurting the economy and draining foreign exchange reserves. But the Japanese have extreme difficulty in seeing things objectively when Japan is involved. When things go well, the whole world is just jealous at how hard Japanese work. When things go bad, suddenly it hasn't anything to do with me. When the Japanese military in WWII overran other forces, the whole country rejoiced. When the war was lost, it was the army that was guilty, not me. This attitude is still in the A-bomb Museums in Nagasaki and Hiroshima -- never a word about the war or its causes; only one day the Japanese went out to work as usual and this big bad bomb was dropped on them. Want to know what happens when some Japanese brings up the subject? Look at a former mayor of Nagasaki, Hitoshi Motoshima -- he made a statement that Japanese should discuss Hirohito's role and possible amount of guilt, and a right-wing kook promptly shot him. So much for a debate in Japan. Many Japanese have their noses so hard-pressed against the grindstone that they can't see the forest for the trees. The majority of Japanese are not well educated or are indifferent about the past. And many Japanese wonder why many SE Asians still harbor ill-will towards Japan. Periodically, without fail, some Japanese politician makes a remark that Japan's "advance" into Asia (not "invasion" -- that term was purged from textbooks by the Japanese Ministry of Education) was all well intentioned, and the Rape of Nanking et al either never happened or was grossly exaggerated. And this view doesn't come from the kook fringe, it comes from the elite leading the country. If this is the way Japan's leaders act, it's no surprise that other nations still hold a grudge. Until recently all Japanese music was banned in Korea. And the Chinese, despite having a massive superiority in military might as well as nuclear weapons, is still hypersensitive when it sees anything like an active military in Japan. That said, there is no shortage of nuts online who unfairly blame today's Japanese for what happened over 75 years ago. It is not relevant to present lives today, and would be like constantly blaming today's Americans for the genocide against native Americans, or today's British for the atrocities against Indians in the 19th century. Of course, the subject is never brought up in Japan. The image of harmony is very important, and so the Japanese try to avoid open conflict wherever possible. And to be fair, the Japanese may have a lot of Groupthink, but no, they don't all act as one like The Borg. The stereotype of "Japan Inc." is false -- within the government, the parties, the companies, and the company departments you find sub-groups, all working strongly against eachother for more money, budget, power, etc. Only when the diverse groups agree on something (like keeping foreign goods out as much as possible) is anything decided and implemented quickly. The Japanese are NOT hate-mongers, it must be re-iterated; they don't froth at the mouth when you bring up these subjects, rather they think what they are taught to think. You'll find the Japanese are very open, gracious and kind to westerners in Japan. On television Japanese spend a lot of time patting eachother on the back on how supposedly "unique" they are. The problem comes when someone in charge takes that one step further and thinks unique is really "superior".
The term "giseisha" means victim, or sacrifice. It is also used when things don't go the right way. No one wants to take responsibility for reform in Japan if it offends those who pull the strings (even if it benefits the nation as a whole). "Gaiatsu", or pressure from abroad (usually for political reform the Japanese bureaucrats are too constipated to do themselves), is often used as a whipping boy. Japanese also have one other noticeable trait -- the Urami Complex. Urami means envy, and Japanese are keenly aware of what others in their group have or get. Many Japanese motives are based on envy, and while equality in the west means a fair chance for all, in Japan it's more like spoiled children thinking, "if I can't have it, neither can anyone else". Japanese society itself has been pictured as a round table, with everyone sitting around it -- and viewing what everyone else has or does. Being branded as someone who causes trouble (meiwaku) is the worst scarlet letter (even if you are just standing up for yourself) and almost carries the stigma of child killer in the West. Lots is spoken about harmony and being equals in a group. So in office politics there might appear to be a lot of non-committal attitudes and indifference, and lots of smiles and superficial agreements to avoid open conflict. But not everyone can end up as CEO or section manager, etc. so there must be a weeding out along the way. Behind the smiles and polite courtesies there are often feelings of resentment and stress, often from being in a cramped room with others for 5-7 days a week, as well as from jockeying for position on who'll get promoted. If the Japanese are really so happy and harmonious, why are so many gulping down liquor and chain-smoking their lungs out every day, not to mention the suicide rates being one of the highest in the world? Behind the veneer you'll find a lot of stress and pressure which is kept well hidden.
6. Amae - Dependency
Amae means basically dependence. In Japan, mavericks and lone-wolf types are very much frowned upon. When Japanese go off alone to a foreign country or somewhere, many rapidly become insecure. It's no exaggeration to say that Japanese (particularly women) think on a more childlike level. Again, this is a double-edged sword. Japanese women undeniably have a lot of charm that comes from this. But it has its drawbacks as well. Douglas MacArthur made a remark that the Japanese should be treated like they're all 12 years old - a highhanded, sweeping slam to be sure - yet still had a bit of truth in it. And that was over 70 years ago. That sounds condecending of course but these days you don't exactly see a large number of western women wearing frilly, cute clothes or carrying around Mickey Mouse pencil cases and Hello Kitty notebooks well into their 30s. Women are taught to act and look cute, not sophisticated (not that all do, however). Japanese pop music sounds like it was written by elementary school students, and pop-stars ("idoru", from idol) are here today, gone tomorrow. At any rate, amae is a fundamental characteristic of Japan--one (the 'kobun') presumes on a superior (the 'oyabun') in a group, and a vertical, symbiotic relationship is created. It often occurs when one joins a company or school, and a person needs something and to get integrated into a comfortable niche very quickly. The underling gets a channel to move upward and the superior |
inaudo
“Everyone knows what happened on January 5th. If I see Rinaudo I will shake his hand, I know that he only made a football play. I have been in contact with Rinaudo and I have thanked him for that.”
On the possibility of going to the World Cup
“I have not thought about the fact that I might not go to the World Cup. I want to do well in the last two games and then I want to go to Brazil.”
On how in form physically he is going into the World Cup
“I am ready for everything. I am ready to play the last two games and also the World Cup. My knee is fine and I am fine physically. It’s clear that after months [of not playing] I don’t have 90 minutes in my legs, but I can improve during the course of the next month. Whatever they ask me I am ready to do.”
On Delle Valle and next season
“Our current team is already strong. We were unlucky, even in key moments of the season in addition to the injuries and suspensions. I am proud of this team. We have two games left and we need to finish the season in the best way.”
On the events in Roma
“I am sorry for what had happened. We all anticipated a game of football and not what happened in the first 45 minutes. It’s not a good spot for the Serie A or football in general. Something has to change.”
On Cuadrado
“He is a great talent, one of the few that can evade a man with that pace. For the mercato you have to speak to the owner and the directors, I am only a footballer.”
On the game with Livorno
“I don’t know what the manager will decide but I am ready in case he wants to start me.”
On the tackles received in the game
“I also asked my teammates to do so in practice. I am happy to have been tackled.”
On where Fiorentina could have been if he had been available
“I will never know, unfortunately we were unlucky with injuries and suspensions.”
On his partnership with Mario Gomez
“We hope we can play together again soon. He is working hard to be available as soon as possible. We also expect to all play together.”
On the goal scoring standings
“I hope that an Italian wins it. So I hope that Ciro Immobile can win it.”
On the Coppa Final
“The game was beautiful. Two teams that wanted to win and that faced off in a grand way. We are very proud of what we had accomplished, because in flashes we put a great team like Napoli under [duress].”
On the Fiorentina and Italian National Team fans
“It makes me very happy to receive the affection I get from the Italian fans. I thank them for all this support. I will try to continue on this path, improving every day to reach all my goals.”The closing hymn at her memorial that day continually repeated the word "joy," apt not just for his mother's name but also for the attitude toward life she instilled in her son. He recounted her approach in one of the essays he wrote in the dawn of the digital age for The American Scholar and that were collected in a book—the last of his 19, on subjects that ranged from collected columns for Life magazine to jazz to his writing manuals—called The Writer Who Stayed:
She thought it was a Christian obligation to be cheerful, and she managed that duty with unfailing grace to the end of her life, keeping to herself the physical and emotional aches and pains of her later years. Today, at Easter, it occurs to me that she defined being “cheerful” as far more than just maintaining a positive and life-affirming nature... I now see that she made it her everyday task to generate light.
Of course Bill paid attention to the words to the hymn: He loved lyrics, and his favorite of his books, and mine, is Easy to Remember: The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs. We traded sheet music, of which he had reams, like baseball cards; just after I moved to a walkup near where he was living, he would generously let me spend as long as I liked leafing through it, looking for long-forgotten second verses to Irving Berlin and Cole Porter songs. We would sing them at the frequent musicales he hosted at his house and later at the Century Club; he took every chance he could to play for friends, and, as Douglas Martin recounted in his obituary in the Times, Bill said that getting paid to play jazz piano "might have been his proudest achievement."
The heart of that playing, though, was to bring people together. At the office he rented on West 56th Street, a way he found to fight the loneliness of the freelance life—a loneliness that he said brought him to Yale those many years ago—he was open to anyone who wanted advice or to say hello. He taught all over the city, and on one of my visits recounted teaching immigrant students at Columbia "who didn't know what a comma was, let alone how to construct a sentence in English." Helping people find their voices was his business, and his pleasure was keeping in touch with practically everyone he ever helped. "Come see me," he would end every phone conversation—and those were the only conversations he did not conduct in person. Though one of the first of the many follow-up writing manuals to On Writing Well that he wrote was Writing With a Word Processor, human contact was what he insisted on. No email, with its chances for, and usually insistence on, one-way communication.
Bill’s constant interest in people and engaging with them led The New York Times to devote a front-page story to the letter he sent out, at the age of 90, inviting everyone to "attend the next stage of my life" when, blind from glaucoma, he was confined to his apartment. On my last visit, to bring him copies of a marvelous piece he wrote for The Atlantic on the pianist Dick Hyman for his website, which he kept meticulously up-to-date and complete, he was as utterly lucid and interested as always, and funny as always too: He began a sentence, "When you're 82, or 102, or 92, or however old I am..."KYODO NEWS - Jul 4, 2017 - 21:03 | World, All
Vietnam's capital Hanoi will ban motorbikes, a hugely popular means of transport, from its inner districts by 2030 in a bid to reduce traffic congestion and air pollution, its city council decided Tuesday.
The Hanoi People's Committee, on its website, said it passed a resolution to tackle the "alarming" increase in road traffic in the city, which has more than 5 million locally registered motorbikes and nearly 500,000 cars.
Between 2011 and 2016, the number of motorbikes has increased at an average annual rate of 6.7 percent -- and cars by 10.2 percent -- causing massive congestion, especially during peak hours and holidays.
Air pollution has also worsened considerably, as have the number of road accidents.
Without timely management measures, Hanoi Department of Transport Director Vu Van Vien warned in a presentation at the meeting, traffic congestion and environmental pollution in the rapidly growing city will become more and more serious in the future.
At current growth rates, there would be more than 6 million motorbikes and 800,000 cars by 2020, and 7.5 million motorbikes and 2 million cars by 2030, he said.
The 13-year road map calls for controlling the quantity and quality of vehicles allowed access to the inner city, limiting the scope of their operation through road space rationing, and boosting traffic management capabilities.
It also calls for improving bus services, including through promotion of bus rapid transit or BRT routes, and building alternative means of public transport such as urban light rail.
The population of Hanoi, currently at over 7 million, is forecast to reach around 9.2 million by 2030.
Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Myanmar's commercial hub Yangon has long banned motorbikes from its inner city streets.This project is all about the small guys! Hairy bikers from the wastes, terrifying, smelly and holding a grudge. Ramshackle Games is proud to offer these resin models. They are designed to fit with other 28mm gaming models. They are multi-part kits and offer a wide variety of options for load-out.
Please note that clicking most of the images takes you to a higher resolution version.
The 10 model pledge painted as a post-apoc gang. (Please click the image to see a higher resolution version)
The models are supplied unpainted and unassembled. Most of the bikers come as a bike, head, base and right arm. The exception to this are Bob and Tegs, the left-handers of the gang. They have integral heads and their arm sculpts offer no options as they are supplied as shown.
THE SINGLE BIKER PLEDGE
Please select any of the bikers, any head and any weapon of your choice. The pledge also includes free shipping.
The parts for a single biker model, Barclay with a plamsa blaster, a pothelm head and a standard base.
THE 5 BIKER PLEDGE
This pledge level allows you to pick any five biker models of your choice. This includes 5 bikers, 5 arm choices and 1 set of heads. As with all the pledges in this project, free world wide shipping is included. One of the options for backers is alternate bases and these images show models mounted on 40mm plastic bases which can be supplied instead of the custom resin bases. Please note that the trike models both have integral bases.
These are all the same biker model, Davis, with crested helmets heads. (Please click the image to see a higher resolution version)
The sets of five shown are the same biker models with alternate load-outs. Backers can choose any combination of bikes they like.
These are 5 Armour bikers with mixed arms and Pothelm heads. (Please click the image to see a higher resolution version)
THE 10 BIKER PLEDGE
This pledge level allows you to pick any ten biker models of your choice. The pledge is for 10 bikers, 10 arms and 2 sets of heads of your choice.This top pledge level also includes two free "add-on" models. The add ons are the rear mounted models that go with the trikes, which is a choice of either a rear gunner, an automated heavy gun or the dwarf battle-mage. As with all the pledges in this project, free world wide shipping is included.
Please note that if you want more sets its really simple. Just pledge the combined amount for what you would like and select one of the reward levels. When the project finishes you will get a questionnaire where there will be space to let me know what you pledged for. So if you want two sets of the 10 biker pledge level, then please pledge £70, or £105 for three sets and so on.
10 model pledge gang, unpainted. (Please click the image to see a higher resolution version)
PARTS
The large list of parts available means the variety for your choices are really huge.
BIKES
Please select your bikers from those shown. (Please click the image to see a higher resolution version)
PARTS
Please select your head sets from those named above.
GUN ARMS
The right arms shown below fit with Soldier Slim, Soldier Chunky, Davis, Barclay, Trike Platform, Trike Open, Junto and Norbert.
Please select your gun arms. (Please click the image to see a higher resolution version)
The following arms are to fit the Armoured and Ironhide bikers.
Please select arms for the Armoured and Ironhide bikers. (Please click the image to see a higher resolution version)
The shock lance shown below is another option for the Armoured and Ironhide bike choices.
The Shock lance (work in progress)
Here are some pictures of the Ironhide biker armed up.
Ironhide with Creasted helm and Shock Lance
Iron hide with Iron Helm and Hammer
ADD ONS
Backers may select to add on the following models by increasing their pledge by £4 for each add on wanted.
Also, bike choices may be "swapped" for any add-on. So if you wanted 4 bikes and a battle mage that would count as 5 bike choices.
The add ons are
Rear Gunner
Automatic Gun
Battle-Mage
Head set
5 Gun Arms
Any single biker (including head and gun arm)
Sidecar and Barrel
Sidecar with gunner
Missile trooper
5 barrels and 3 beer hands
Rear Gunner
All the parts shown are included.
Please select a head for your gunner.
Automatic Gun
The assembled Automatic Gun
All the parts shown are included with the gun.
Battle-Mage
Any right arm may be selected instead of the one shown.
Side Car
The sidecar is in 3 parts and comes with a barrel.
3 part side car and a barrel
Here is the side car assembled.
Side car shown with Junto.
The barrel fits on the side car too, to provide liquid refreshment rapidly.
Junto drives his beer-bike delivery.
The side car was designed to take the Battle Mage as a passenger.
The mage has no arm! He ships with an arm.
Side Car with Gunner
The side car can also be had with a sculpted in gunner model.
Please choose a head. Shown here with the a Visor head.
The side car comes with a selection of guns to choose from.
The side car also comes with a wheel and fitting to attach it to the bike.
Missile Trooper
The missile trooper totes his weapon. He is designed to fit with either the side car or on the Trike open.
Missile trooper has a crested head.
The image shows work in progress. Please select a head.
Barrels and Beer Arms
This option is for 5 beer keg barrels and 3 arms. The arms are holding a tankard, a beer can and a pint glass. Please choose which you want.
Don't drink and drive
Free Add-ons
Remember, the 10 biker set comes with 2 free add ons, but others may be chosen if you want even more fire support for your bikers.
This is a 10 biker pledge with the two free add ons plus an extra add on. (Please click the image to see a higher resolution version)
LANCERS
Backers may choose to select lances for their bikers. I have made a conversion set that can be chosen as a right arm option. Its basically the grenade launcher plus some extra parts, to make a battery powered shock lance.The lance shaft shown is a piece of copper wire and is not supplied.
The lance shaft is not included. (Please click the image to see a higher resolution version)
EXTRA IMAGES
Below are some extra images of the models, showing more closeups and other details.
The lance option can be seen in this gang. (Please click the image to see a higher resolution version)
These bikers have been assembled with a set of the mixed heads. (Please click the image to see a higher resolution version)
Each bike also comes with a handle bar.
BACKING WITH PAYPAL
Please contact me though the message system if you would like to support using paypal.It’s not hard to argue that Jon Stewart has become one of the key political figures of our time – someone so smart, funny and gutsy that he has almost brought clarity to this politically unpleasant decade and a half. The appreciations in his final week hosting “The Daily Show” have started to roll in, and he’s virtually got a place on Rushmore ready.
"I'm going to issue an executive order,” President Obama said when he made his farewell visit two weeks ago. “Jon Stewart cannot leave the show.” Last night, Denis Leary said he and Chris Rock would write jokes for Stewart so he could stay on the air. Amy Schumer paid what seemed to be unironic appreciation Monday. Variety columnist Brian Lowry writes that Stewart’s stepping down could be as significant as any similar departure since Johnny Carson left his show in 1992.
Advertisement:
Stewart is so beloved – especially by younger, media-savvy liberals – and seems to be at the top of his game. So why, despite some talk about being “restless” and wanting to take some time with his children, does Stewart feel the need to step down? (Can’t Comedy Central give him a nice, restorative vacation?)
Watching his farewell shows alongside some of his earlier “Daily Show” appearances – his first shows from 1999, his coverage of the 2000 Bush vs. Gore election, his response to 9/11, his response to the Iraq invasion, the clashes with Tucker Carlson and Jim Cramer – it’s hard not to get a hint of what’s up.
Let’s look at one of the most perceptive farewells, from Time's James Poniewozik:
Of all the ways that I’ll miss The Daily Show host Jon Stewart—as comedian, truth teller, BS caller—above all I will miss him as a media filter. I don’t mean “media filter” in the usual sense of someone who takes in a great deal of news, scans over it and highlights those bits most worthy of your attention. I mean a filter like you find in a pool or a sewage-treatment plant, or your bloodstream: something that absorbs a torrent filled with toxins—in this case, politics, punditry and sensationalism—and passes it through in a form that you can safely tolerate.
No one is better at this than Stewart. But the steady diet of Fox News and other television news has taken its toll on him. Righteous anger is an important tool for a comedian or social commentator, or whatever Stewart is: Unlike traditional news anchors, who kept a kind of TV-ready monotone no matter what the news of the day, Steward gets upset, mad, hurt, disappointed and everything in between. It’s for real, and it reinforces our sense of him as an Everyman who feels everything we do but just happens to be more eloquent and intelligent than the rest of us.
But lately, the anger, especially, has turned into bitterness. His edge – formerly deployed from time to time, when it was necessary – has turned permanent. Watch him at the beginning of some recent episodes, and he’s already scowling or rolling his eyes even before anything’s happened. There’s plenty to be upset about these days, but Stewart is starting to get destroyed by the coverage he covers.
The opposite thing happened to David Letterman over his last seasons: In his heyday, he was defined by a kind of bemused, apolitical irony that jeered at political commitment as much as it did corporate greed. He seemed to drift off near the end, growing even more detached (alongside a grumpy-old-man persona). But somehow the disengagement also allowed Letterman to conclude his run with dignity and little apparent ego. His last few shows were as good a sendoff as I could have imagined.
Advertisement:
Stewart is, in most ways, a more substantial figure, as well as the kind of engaged public intellectual we need now. Alongside the duplicity of the George W. Bush years, the mouth-frothing of Fox News, the racially charged backlash against Obama’s presidency, and the rest of it, Stewart stepped up in a way that few could have. But the process seems to have become corrosive for him.
The problem with constant sarcasm and anger — even when it’s justified — is that it fails to persuade people not already on board. Stewart never wanted to preach to the converted; he’s also been tough on Democratic politicians, liberal MSNBC and other left-of-center institutions. But it feels like his reach is shrinking as he signs off, even as his intensity increases. Compare his manner these days to fellow progressives Elizabeth Warren or John Oliver to see just how rigid and relentless he’s become.
We’re lucky to have enjoyed Stewart’s talents, almost every weekday, for 16 years. But the last year or so does not seem to have been good for Stewart himself, or his powers as a public figure. “Watching these channels all day is incredibly depressing,” he told the Guardian. “I live in a constant state of depression. I think of us as turd miners. I put on my helmet, I go and mine turds, hopefully I don’t get turd lung disease.”
I’ll miss Stewart's tough-minded and quick-witted hosting of “The Daily Show.” But too many years of that job would destroy anyone. Here’s looking forward to the reemergence of the immensely talented Jon Stewart in a new and different form.ZEBULON, N.C. – An 18-year-old man decapitated his mother and then walked out the front door of her house holding her head in his hand while wielding a knife in the other, authorities said.
The suspect was charged with first-degree murder Monday after he called 911 to say he had killed his mother, according to a news release from the Franklin County Sheriff’s office. Authorities say he was arrested without offering resistance, and his 35-year-old mother’s body was found inside the home.
District Attorney Mike Waters said officials were seeking a mental evaluation of the suspect. His public defender, C. Boyd Sturges III, said he spoke with him for an hour in the Franklin County jail.
“It does appear there’s some substantial mental health issues involved in this case,” Sturges said. “I’m not a doctor, so I can’t really elaborate. He’s a pretty profoundly disturbed young man.”
Waters said due to the suspect’s apparent mental state, “this is something that’s going to take weeks and months for us to get some answers as to why this happened.”
Waters said the suspect was being transferred to Central Prison in Raleigh. His next court appearance is scheduled for March 14.
Two young girls in the home were not hurt. A fourth child was in school when the attack occurred. Deputies were searching the home hours after the body was discovered.
The exact names of the suspect and his mother were unclear. Local court records list the suspect’s name as Oliver Funes Machada, Sturges said. Federal records list his name as Oliver Funes Machado, said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Bryan Cox. In a news release, Cox said the suspect was from Honduras and was in the country illegally. Franklin County Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Terry Wright gave the mother’s name as Yesenia Beatriz Funez Machado, citing a spelling given to authorities by her 14-year-old son.
Neighbour Leona Smith told WRAL-TV she was still trying to come to grips with such a horrible crime happening so close by.
“It’s very hurtful to know something like this can happen in your own neighbourhood with such a quiet family with the standard white picket fence, trampoline, playground in the back,” she said.
“To see the two younger children sitting in the ditch crying, it was heartbreaking.”
Neighbor Randy Mullins, who was leaving his house minutes after the first deputy arrived, said he saw the woman’s head lying in the front yard about five feet in front of the porch. The deputy appeared to have just handcuffed the suspect and seemed rattled when Mullins approached to ask if he needed help.
“You could see in his face he had a lot of concern. I’m not saying he was scared, but you could tell he was concerned,” Mullins said of the deputy. Mullins then went back to his house across the street and told his 91-year-old mother to stay inside. He said a half-dozen more law enforcement vehicles arrived within minutes, and a deputy covered the woman’s head.
“I couldn’t believe it. Things like that don’t happen,” said the 59-year-old Mullins, who has lived in the neighbourhood for 25 years. “You can’t believe somebody would do that. You hear about that, but it never happens across the street from you.”
Mullins said the family had moved to the neighbourhood sometime around June. He didn’t know them well, but he and his mother said they seemed friendly.
“If they were outside, they always waved at you,” said Clearsy Mullins.
On Tuesday, a group of people could be seen at the house, loading a stroller and other belongings into two minivans. A neighbour who had stopped by to offer his condolences told a reporter that the people in the group didn’t want to talk, and they left after about 20 minutes.
Randy Mullins said the suspect appeared placid as he sat handcuffed and the deputy was kneeling down to comfort the two younger children.
“He was sitting there like he didn’t have a care in the world. He didn’t appear to be upset. He didn’t appear to be crying.”Paul to meet with black lawmakers on justice reforms
Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul will host a meeting with members of the Congressional Black Caucus next week to discuss criminal justice reform.
The libertarian-leaning senator from Kentucky has long been an outspoken advocate for changing how the American criminal system prosecutes and sentences. Now he’s teaming up with Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), and other black lawmakers, to craft a strategy for advancing legislation as law enforcement issues have taken center stage following the death of several unarmed black men at the hands of police.
Story Continued Below
“Not only is Senator Paul the [S]enate co-sponsor of the Justice Safety Valve Act, which provides a method for judges to override mandatory minimums, but he was also instrumental in convincing the Senate to unanimously pass H.R. 1447, the Death in Custody Reporting Act, which Congressman Scott introduced and which is the first post-Ferguson Act of Congress,” says the email from Scott’s office inviting CBC members.
The Congressional Black Caucus has been pushing for decades to reform the criminal justice system, including doing away with laws that force mandatory minimums for certain drug offenses or requiring police department to retrain and adopt body cameras.
Last week, Paul introduced legislation with Rep. Keith Ellison, a liberal Democrat from Minnesota, that seeks to reclassify some nonviolent drug possession offenses from felonies to misdemeanors.
The Scott email, which was obtained by POLITICO, added that Paul agreed “not mention this meeting or any Member’s attendance at the meeting to the media or as part of his campaign.”
The meeting is set for Wednesday night.
A spokesman from Scott’s office declined to comment and a spokeswoman from Paul’s office did not return a request for comment.A woman's photo post to Hobby Lobby's Facebook page last week has been shared and commented on tens of thousands of times.
The woman shared a photo of a cotton decoration on Sept. 14, 2017 and said it is reminiscent of slavery and those who were forced to pick cotton. She is calling for the retailer to remove the item from shelves.
As of Monday afternoon her post had more than 166,000 comments and 15,000 shares.
Several who commented on the photo disagreed with the woman, saying people of many races have picked cotton. As of Monday afternoon, Sept. 18, there was not a formal response from Hobby Lobby.
On Monday, Sept. 18, the "Cotton Stems in Glass Vase" item on Hobby Lobby's website was o n sale for $15, marked down from $29.99. It is described as a natural decor with hints of the great outdoors, including large fluffs of white cotton finish on each stem.
Individual cotton stems were $6.99 each.House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Screen Capture)
(CNSNews.com) - House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) released a statement on Friday in observance of ‘the Holy Month of Ramadan.”
“Ramadan reminds us of the rich diversity of our nation, and of the many contributions that Muslims have made to our country as public servants, members of our Armed Services, scholars, artists, athletes and engaged citizens,” Pelosi said.
Here is the minority leader’s full statement:
“The Holy Month of Ramadan is a sacred time for peaceful study and contemplation, an opportunity for spiritual renewal and a call for leading lives of greater compassion and generosity. This month is also a special occasion of joy, festivity and celebration with loved ones.
“Ramadan reminds us of the rich diversity of our nation, and of the many contributions that Muslims have made to our country as public servants, members of our Armed Services, scholars, artists, athletes and engaged citizens. This month recalls our founding creed – ‘E Pluribus Unum’ – and reaffirms the fundamental truth that in our nation’s diversity, we find strength.On The Front Lines
Victory: Court Grants Rutherford Institute Request to Stop Texas School from Kicking Student Out for Refusing to Wear “Smart ID” Tracking Badge
SAN ANTONIO, Texas — A district court judge for Bexar County, Texas, has granted The Rutherford Institute’s request for a temporary restraining order to prevent Northside Independent School District from removing a San Antonio high school student from John Jay High School’s Science and Engineering Academy because she objected to wearing a name badge signifying participation in the school district’s new “Student Locator Project.” The badges include tiny Radio Frequency Identification (“RFID”) chips that produce a radio signal, enabling school officials to track students’ precise location on school property. For sophomore Andrea Hernandez, the badges pose a significant religious freedom concern in addition to the obvious privacy issues. In coming to Andrea’s defense, Rutherford attorneys filed a petition for a temporary restraining order and immediate injunctive and declaratory relief alleging that the school’s actions violate Andrea’s rights under Texas’ Religious Freedom Act and the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. A hearing on the preliminary injunction will take place next week.
The Rutherford Institute’s petition in Hernandez v. Northside Independent School District is available at www.rutherford.org.
“The court’s willingness to grant a temporary restraining order is a good first step, but there is still a long way to go—not just in this case, but dealing with the mindset, in general, that everyone needs to be monitored and controlled,” said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute. “Regimes in the past have always started with the schools, where they develop a compliant citizenry. These ‘Student Locator’ programs are ultimately aimed at getting students used to living in a total surveillance state where there will be no privacy, and wherever you go and whatever you text or email will be watched by the government.”
The Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas, has launched a program, the “Student Locator Project,” aimed ostensibly at increasing public funding for the district by increasing student attendance rates. As part of the pilot program, roughly 4,200 students at Jay High School and Jones Middle School are being required to wear “SmartID” card badges embedded with an RFID tracking chip which will actively broadcast a signal at all times. Although the schools already boast 290 surveillance cameras, the cards will make it possible for school officials to track students’ whereabouts at all times. School officials hope to expand the program to the district’s 112 schools, with a student population of 100,000. Although implementation of the system will cost $500,000, school administrators are hoping that if the school district is able to increase attendance by tracking the students’ whereabouts, they will be rewarded with up to $1.7 million from the state government.
High school sophomore Andrea Hernandez, a Christian, expressed her sincere religious objections to being forced to participate in the RFID program. Reportedly, Hernandez was informed by school officials that “there will be consequences for refusal to wear an ID card.” For example, students who refuse to take part in the ID program won’t be able to access essential services like the cafeteria and library, nor will they be able to purchase tickets to extracurricular activities. Hernandez was prevented from voting for Homecoming King and Queen after school officials refused to verify her identity using her old, conventional student ID card. According to Hernandez, teachers are even requiring students to wear the IDs when they want to use the bathroom. School officials offered to quietly remove the tracking chip from Andrea’s card if the sophomore would agree to wear the new ID without the imbedded RFID chip so as to give the appearance of participation in the Student Locator Project. Andrea refused this offer. Andrea has also been prevented from distributing flyers to fellow students explaining her objections to the program.
Attorney Jerri Lynn Ward is assisting The Rutherford Institute with Andrea’s defense.New experiment could lead to better DNA sequencing and understanding of fluid physics
DNA molecules are most often a tangled mess and that’s a problem when scientists are trying to get an idea of what the DNA looks like.
A tangled molecule casts shadows on itself and scientists have great difficulty establishing where it begins and where it ends and it’s practically impossible to determine the distance from one point on the DNA to another.
For that reason scientists would like to be able to stretch out a DNA molecule in its full length -- and this is what a group of scientists have found a way to do.
In the study, recently published in Physical Review Letters, scientists from Denmark's Technical University (DTU) show how lasers can be used to take an individual DNA molecule and completely untangle it.
"This is an experiment with two different perspectives," says Jonas Nyvold Pedersen Ph.D from DTU's Department of Micro- and Nanotechnology.
Firstly, he says, they’ve shown how to untangle DNA so it can be photographed through a microscope. This makes it easier to get an idea of what the DNA looks like.
“Secondly, we can use the technique to get closer to understanding a physical phenomenon we have difficulty getting our minds round," he says.
Easier to interpret DNA
Associate professor of biophysics, Lene Broeng Oddershede, from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, studies the interaction between physics and biology.
According to her, the new study brings scientists closer to one of the really big goals of research.
"The major goal for the future is that one day we can stretch the DNA out and move it slowly through some kind of detector which then reads individual base pairs. This work brings us closer to an entirely new way of gene sequencing," says Oddershede.
Heat causes the DNA to stretch out
In the research, Pedersen and colleagues laid a single string of DNA into a microscopic channel in a tiny chip.
They then heated the middle of the channel using a laser so that the fluid around the DNA string was warmer at its centre than at its ends.
The differences in temperature initiated certain weak physical forces which caused the DNA to unravel.
These physical forces make the DNA molecules move away from an area that is warm and towards the cooler area. For this reason, the ends of the DNA moved in separate directions and as a result the DNA was almost entirely untangled.
"We succeeded in untangling 80 per cent of the DNA,” says Pedersen. “This is interesting.”
Unravelled DNA helps scientists piece together DNA puzzle
It’s interesting, says Pedersen, because the technique could come in handy when scientists want to sequence entire genomes.
When scientists do genome sequencing, they start of by cutting the entire genome up into millions of pieces which they then sequence and then try to piece together.
That creates problems when scientists are sequencing a new organism because they lack the knowledge of how everything fits together and it quickly turns into an attempt to assemble a jigsaw puzzle of 10 million pieces without knowing what each piece represents or what the finished picture should look like. This requires patience and enormous computing power.
By unravelling the DNA first, scientists can get a rough idea as to what the complete genome looks like and this makes it easier for them to assemble the puzzle afterwards.
Could improve knowledge of fluid physics
The other aspect of the new research has character of being basic science.
It's a question of understanding and describing what makes molecules move away from hot areas in fluids.
Scientists know why molecules behave this way in air or other gases but fluid physics are a good deal more difficult to understand -- some molecules, like DNA, move from hot to cold, while others move in the opposite direction.
The direction depends on which atoms the molecules are comprised of and also on the temperature. However, scientists do not agree on the correct explanation for this.
While the new study result doesn’t offer a new theory of how molecules behave, it does present a tool which other scientists can use in order better to understand the physics behind.
"Our technique will enable scientists to measure the physical forces on an individual molecule. Hopefully it will make it easier to understand which physical laws are behind the phenomenon," says Pedersen.
-------------
Read the original story in Danish on Videnskab.dkVolkswagen, Air France and Mobil are among a number of corporate brands under fire from climate change activists who have targeted them in a series of damning ads installed throughout Paris to coincide with the beginning of the COP21 climate change talks.
The ads are part of the Brandalism campaign, an anti-advertising movement which takes over advertising spaces in cities throughout Europe to challenge authority and criticise perceived wrongdoing. The artworks were placed in advertising spaces owned by JCDecaux, one of the talks' sponsors.
Prominent corporate sponsors of the UN summit on climate change such as Volkswagen, Air France and oil companies Mobil and Total have been castigated in some of the group’s 600 unauthorised artworks which say they are “part of the problem”.
The ads chastise the brands for their public commitments to tackling climate change, accusing them of lying and greed.
In June this year Air France signed a statement confirming its commitment to reduce its environmental footprint and increase the use of sustainable alternative fuels. The Brandalism campaign however accused the company of bribing politicians to ensure its profits aren’t affected by any emission laws.
Volkswagen was unsurprisingly targeted in the campaign following the emissions scandal in which the car manufacturer was caught installing software in 11 million cars that cheated emissions tests, making the vehicles appear greener than they actually were.
Mobil, which merged with Exxon in 1999, was also denounced after it was caught giving $2.3m to members of Congress and a corporate lobbying group that block efforts to fight climate change.
In a statement, the activists’ said that the aim was to "highlight the links between advertising, consumerism, fossil fuel dependency and climate change".
The Conference of Parties (COP21) talks, which commenced today (30 November) and are due to run through until 11 December, bring together leaders from 147 nations in the hope that a global agreement can be met on how best to tackle climate change and reduce carbon emissions.
World leaders were also part of the campaign.
David Cameron was portrayed wearing Formula 1 gear.Bug#727708: Thoughts on Init System Debate
To: [email protected]
Subject: Bug#727708: Thoughts on Init System Debate
From: Don Armstrong <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2014 20:41:32 -0800
Message-id: <[email protected]>
Reply-to: Don Armstrong <[email protected]>, [email protected] |
issued by Billboard magazine, similar to that of the Billboard Hot 100.[48]
Europe [ edit ]
The single experienced major success in Europe, most notably in the United Kingdom.[49] The song entered the UK Singles Chart at number one based on digital sales alone,[50] becoming Rihanna's first chart-topper in the country.[51] During the single's fourth week on the chart, Rihanna earned her first 'Chart Double' with both the single and subsequent album (Good Girl Gone Bad) topping the UK Singles and Albums charts simultaneously.[52] Having reached nine straight weeks at number one on the chart, it broke the record of American group Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" as the longest chart-topper of the decade.[53] "Umbrella" eventually reached a total of ten weeks at number one on the chart, becoming the country's longest-running number one single of the 21st century.[54] In addition, Rihanna become the seventh artist in history to top the chart for ten consecutive weeks.[55] By the end of 2008, "Umbrella" had sold over 600,000 copies, making it her biggest-selling single at the time, before being succeeded by "Love the Way You Lie", a collaboration with Eminem two years later in 2010.[56] It became Britain's second biggest-selling single of 2007, only behind Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love".[57] On December 12, 2008, it was certified Platinum by the British Phonographic Industry, for sales of 600,000 copies.[58] In total, "Umbrella" has amassed 51 weeks in the official Charts, making it the joint 20th longest runner of all time. It has spent a further 20 weeks to tally 71 total weeks inside the Top 100, in which it has appeared in three consecutive years; number one in 2007, 18 in 2008 and number 99 in 2009.[59]
"Umbrella" had similar success elsewhere in Europe, topping charts for lengthy periods including Switzerland for nine weeks,[60] Norway for seven weeks,[61] Germany for five weeks,[62] Austria for four weeks[63] and Belgium for three weeks.[64] It also reached number one in Denmark[65] and Hungary.[66] In Spain, the song achieved an eight-times platinum certification from PROMUSICAE, denoting sales of over 160,000 units.[67] Furthermore, "Umbrella" attained top five positions in the Czech Republic,[68] Finland,[69] Italy,[70] the Netherlands[71] and Sweden.[72] It also reached the top ten of France.[73]
Worldwide the song has sold more than 6.6 million copies, making it one of the best selling singles of all time.[74]
Music video [ edit ]
Background and concept [ edit ]
While working on the album, ideas began to circulate concerning Rihanna's image, extending into her music videos. She asked American music video director Chris Applebaum to send her "something" to work on. Def Jam representatives were expecting Applebaum of the treatment.[75] In response, Applebaum hurriedly made a treatment for the video, one of his first ideas being the silver body paint that Rihanna is seen in. Applebaum was doubtful whether Rihanna would embrace the idea, but her "positive response" following a letter the director sent to the artist ensured its approval. Makeup artist Pamela Neal mixed a silver paint that would give Rihanna such a look. During the session, the paint was re-applied between takes to ensure she was completely covered. The set was closed to Rihanna, Applebaum and a camera assistant.[75] Rihanna also contributed her own ideas towards the video shoot, suggesting to Applebaum that she dance en pointe, an idea which he accepted.[75]
Visual effects at Kroma were supervised by Bert Yukich and produced by Amy Yukich.[76] A key part of the video is a 24-second visual effects sequence in which Rihanna is surrounded by silvery strands of liquid that crisscross the frame in graceful arcs in response to her movements. Water elements were recorded on a special effects stage using a high-speed 35mm camera. Bert Yukich then composited them into the scene with the singer. He then added lighting effects to the practical water elements to give them the mirror-like texture of mercury.
Release [ edit ]
The music video premiered on April 26, 2007 at her website. Downloads were made available for those in the U.S. only from the website for a limited time. The video was officially released on the iTunes Store on May 11, 2007, peaking at number one for a period of eight weeks. On May 1, 2007, "Umbrella" debuted on MTV's Total Request Live at number 10, before reaching number one on May 9 where it remained for fifteen days, making it the longest running number one of 2007. The video was well-played in MTV during the second half of 2007; it has reached over 8,000 plays, receiving a platinum recognition at the MTV Platinum and Gold Video Awards.[77] Such was the success of the promotional video that it received five nominations at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards, including "Female Artist of the Year", "Video of the Year" and "Monster Single of the Year", going on to win the latter two.[78]
Legacy [ edit ]
"Umbrella" is widely acknowledged as the song that propelled Rihanna from rising pop act into superstardom and transformed her into a "fully fledged sex symbol" and a pop icon, with some music journalists considering it to be her signature song.[79][80][81][82][83][84][85] "Umbrella" marked the first time Rihanna transitioned from the "girl next door" persona of her first two albums for an "edgy, sexier" look, which triggered her image evolution for her subsequent albums.[86] In his book The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory, John Seabrook wrote:
"Two albums into her career, it still wasn't clear who Rihanna was. To her detractors, and there were many, she was just another wannabe-yoncé who sang through her nose and couldn't really dance. To prove them wrong, she needed a song that would define her as an artist. [...] Eleven rhythmic syllables, "umbrella-ella-ella-eh-eh-eh," did what the two previous albums together had not done: they defined Rihanna as an artist. [...] "Umbrella" marked the arrival of something new in pop: a digital icon. In the rock era, when the album was the standard unit of recorded music, listeners had ten or twelve songs to get to know the artist, but in the singles-oriented world of today, the artist has only three or four minutes to put their personality across, and at that Rihanna would prove to be without peer."[87][88]
Rapper and featured act Jay-Z recognized the song's impact for Rihanna's artistic evolution, stating: "It shows such growth for her as an artist [...] If you listen to the lyrics to that song, you know the depth and how far she's come."[89] The song's producer, Kuk Harrell reportedly commented on the song's impact on his career: "We knew it was special. [...] Nothing has been the same since we created that record. We had experience in record making but not hit making. All of a sudden you have major artists blowing up your phone. And we knew exactly how to service them; we reverted back to that jingle mentality — we were prepared for that pressure. So whether it was Beyoncé calling or Bieber calling, we knew how to operate. [...] When she recorded the 'ellas', you knew your life was about to change."[88] In January 2016, Billboard named "Umbrella" as Rihanna's best song.[81] In 2018, Rolling Stone identified "Umbrella" as Rihanna's second greatest song of her career, behind "We Found Love" (2011) and stated that "Umbrella" transformed Rihanna into a "full-fledged pop heavyweight".[90] In the same year, The Guardian named "Umbrella" as the best song to spend over 10 weeks at number one in the UK, writing that "Rihanna's Umbrella is a genuinely exceptional pop song. [...] it's perfect."[91] Canadian duo Tegan and Sara stated that "Umbrella" inspired their 2013 single "I Was a Fool".[92][93]
"Umbrella"'s reign at number one in the United Kingdom occurred as the country was hit by extreme rainfall and flooding, which led the British national newspaper The Sun to humorously suggest the two events were related, with the media referring to it as the "Rihanna Curse." The tabloid also highlighted the date of the single's video shoot, which was Friday the 13th (April 13, 2007), adding further coincidence to the curse.[94] Before the single's release on May 14, the temperature in London was relatively high, reaching 20 °C. However, just a day after the release, "severe weather warnings hit the headlines".[94] An article in The Sun urged readers to join the campaign to knock the song off the chart's top spot, suggesting to readers that they download more "positive" songs revolving around sun or summer such as Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine" and DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince's "Summertime".[94]
A similar situation occurred in New Zealand, where the song hit number one in the early winter of 2007 as the country was experiencing some of the worst storms in its history.[95] During the weather conditions, Taranaki, Tauranga, and Auckland had experienced tornadoes and flooding in the Far North of the country. Once the single was replaced on the top spot, weather conditions throughout New Zealand pacified, although Hawke's Bay was still stormy.[95]
The same happened in Romania where "Umbrella" hit the stations in the nation during the summer. That summer was in its first half the hottest and driest period of time in Romania since 1946.[96] As the song reached the top ten and then its number-one peak, the country experienced the worst storms and most pouring rains in its history.[97] As the song was losing positions in the charts, the storm ended and the temperatures lowered step-by-step.[96]
With the record-breaking success of the single and the reported coincidence with the weather, Def Jam's marketing team collaborated with British umbrella manufacturer Totes. The company produced five types of Rihanna umbrellas, one of which was a two-tone satin umbrella that Rihanna debuted in public during her performance of the song at the 2007 MTV Movie Awards.[98] Although manufactured by a UK-based company, the collection was made available only to US residents online through the company's website.[99]
Live performances [ edit ]
"Umbrella" was performed by Rihanna during the 2007 MTV Movie Awards on June 3, 2007.[100] In the United Kingdom, she performed the song on the ITV morning show GMTV and at the Brit Awards in 2008. She also performed "Umbrella" during her AOL sessions.[101] In France, she performed it on Star Academy.[102] "Umbrella" was added to the setlist of her first headlining Good Girl Gone Bad Tour where it was performed as the final song for the encore. It was also included as the closing act of the Last Girl on Earth Tour and The Loud Tour. Rihanna performed "Umbrella" at Radio 1's Hackney Weekend on May 24, 2012, as the sixteenth song on the set list.[103] The performance featured a giant sphinx on the stage.[104] The song was also performed during the Diamonds World Tour and the Anti World Tour.
Formats and track listings [ edit ]
Umbrella [ edit ] US promo only CD single[105] "Umbrella" featuring Jay-Z (Radio Edit) – 4:14 "Umbrella" Seamus Haji and Paul Emanuel Radio Edit – 4:00 Australian, European CD single "Umbrella" (Radio Edit) – 4:14 "Umbrella" (Seamus Haji and Paul Emanuel Radio Edit) – 3:59 EU enhanced Maxi-CD single GR enhanced CD single "Umbrella" (Radio Edit) – 4:14 "Umbrella" (Seamus Haji and Paul Emanuel Remix) – 4:01 "Umbrella" (The Lindbergh Palace Remix) – 7:54 "Umbrella" (Video Enhancement) American 12" vinyl Sides A & B "Umbrella" (Radio Edit) – 4:14 "Umbrella" (Radio Instrumental) – 4:17 European 12" vinyl Side A "Umbrella" (Seamus Haji and Paul Emanuel Remix) – 4:01 Side B "Umbrella" (Radio Edit) – 4:14 "Umbrella" (Instrumental) – 4:37 Umbrella: Remixes [ edit ] American, Brazilian promo CD single "Umbrella" (Seamus Haji and Paul Emanuel Radio Edit) – 3:59 "Umbrella" (Jody Den Broeder Lush Radio Edit) – 4:42 "Umbrella" (Jody Den Broeder Destruction Radio Edit) – 4:25 "Umbrella" (The Lindbergh Palace Radio Edit) – 3:54 "Umbrella" (Seamus Haji and Paul Emanuel Club Mix) – 6:35 "Umbrella" (Jody Den Broeder Lush Club Mix) – 9:11 "Umbrella" (Jody Den Broeder Destruction Club Mix) – 7:57 "Umbrella" (The Lindbergh Palace Club Mix) – 7:54 "Umbrella" (The Lindbergh Palace Dub) – 6:46 British promo CD single "Umbrella" (Seamus Haji and Paul Emanuel Club Mix) – 6:35 "Umbrella" (Jody Den Broeder Lush Club Mix) – 9:11 "Umbrella" (The Lindbergh Palace Club Mix) – 7:54 "Umbrella" (Jody Den Broeder Destruction Club Mix) – 7:57 "Umbrella" (The Lindbergh Palace Dub) – 6:46 "Umbrella" (Seamus Haji and Paul Emanuel Radio Edit) – 3:59 "Umbrella" (The Lindbergh Palace Radio Edit) – 3:54
Credits and personnel [ edit ]
Song credits "Tricky" Stewart ― produced
The-Dream ― written
Kuk Harrell ― vocal production
Rihanna ― main vocals
Jay-Z ― rap verse Video credits[76] Chris Applebaum ― direction
John Hardin ― produced
Pierre Rouger ― direction of photography
Bert Yukich and Amy Yukich (KromA) ― visual effects
Nabil Mechi ― editorial
Isaac Heckert ― production assistant
Reactor Films ― production co
Mike Sarkissian ― rep
Rihanna ― starring role
Jay-Z ― starring role
Accolades [ edit ]
Charts [ edit ]
Certifications [ edit ]
Radio and release history [ edit ]
Cover versions and remixes [ edit ]
DJ Earworm used "Umbrella" as the base track for his breakthrough mash-up, "United State of Pop", which combined Billboard's Top 25 songs of 2007.
Then-upcoming singer Marié Digby recorded an acoustic version of "Umbrella" which was released August 3, 2007 as the debut single from her Hollywood Records Start Here EP and included as the closing track on Digby's debut album Unfold.[182] Scottish rock group Biffy Clyro also released an acoustic version of the song,[183] just like the Italian singer Neja has done in her cover – album Acousticlub, while Italian band Vanilla Sky went in the opposite direction and released a punk cover of the song,[184] and Norwegian band Bare Egil Band have made a doom metal version of the song.[185]
For her debut album a.k.a Cassandra, Filipina singer and actress KC Concepcion covered the song in English, while singer Miss Ganda recorded a version in Filipino entitled "Payong" (which means umbrella in Filipino).[186] Singer and actress Mandy Moore sang an acoustic version of the song in 2007 and its video on YouTube has more than 6.6 million views by January 2019.[187]
Pop-punk outfit All Time Low covered the song for the Fearless Records compilation album Punk Goes Crunk,[188] and Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers produced their own version of "Umbrella", which was originally recorded for the album NME Awards 2008.[189] Produced in celebration of the Shockwaves NME Awards 2008 and Big Gig, that album was given free with a special souvenir box set of the magazine NME on February 27. Two additional versions (acoustic and Grand Slam mix) were later made available on iTunes, and the trio is now released together on an Umbrella EP; a video for the cover is available on the band's official website.[190]
British pop rock band McFly performed their own version of "Umbrella" during their Greatest Hits So Far Tour in 2007,[191] and Finnish melodic death metal band Children of Bodom performed their 2008 cover live at Wacken Open Air.[192] Country-pop singer-songwriter Taylor Swift recorded a live version of the song, which was later included in an iTunes Store exclusive EP titled Live from SoHo – EP (2008).[193] Her version of the song peaked at number seventy-nine on Billboard Pop 100.[194]
There have also been notable mixed versions of the song. American rapper Lil Mama recorded a version of "Umbrella" that replaced Jay-Z's opening rap verse. An article by Blender magazine, who dismissed Jay-Z's version, said "Lil Mama actually seems to understand the song's metaphorical themes of protection and loyalty".[195] American punk band Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker remixed the song, adding to the track "quicksilver snare flourishes and... real-life guitars".[196]
Singer Chris Brown created an answer song titled "Cinderella", replacing some of the verses and part of the chorus of "Umbrella" with his own lyrics. This version is the official remix. This version has been performed as a duet between Brown and Rihanna when he joined Rihanna on a late-2008 tour in the Asia-Pacific region.[197] R&B/hip-hop singer The-Dream, who wrote "Umbrella", recorded the demo with a slightly different intro and instrumental.
Recently[when?], Korean girl group 2NE1 covered this song on Music Bank. The song's drum beat is sampled in "Symphonies" by Dan Black. An episode of Glee featured this song performed by Gwyneth Paltrow in a mash-up with "Singin' in the Rain". The song has also been covered by Tiffany, an American-Korean singer from the popular girl group Girls' Generation in their first Asia Tour. In 2009, Lady Gaga incorporated the "Eh, Eh" hook for her song "Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)".[198]
At the end of 2007, Internet mash-up artist DJ Earworm used "Umbrella" as the base track for "United State of Pop", his breakthrough mix that included the top 25 songs on Billboard's Hot 100 year-end chart of 2007 (on which "Umbrella" appeared at #2).[199] On Friday, August 28, 2015, country music duo Maddie and Tae covered it on the Bobby Bones Show.
On October 15, 2015, Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox released a "Singin' in the Rain" style cover, featuring Casey Abrams & The Sole Sisters, surpassing 15 million views.[200]
In 2017, while promoting Spider-Man: Homecoming, Tom Holland (actor) performed the song in Lip Sync Battle.
The Baseballs version [ edit ]
"Umbrella" was covered by the rockabilly coverband, The Baseballs, in 2009. It was certified Platinum in Finland by Musiikkituottajat – IFPI Finland.[201]
Track listings
Promo CD and CD single[202] No. Title Length 1. "Umbrella" 3:07 2. "Bleeding Love" 3:52 Total length: 6:59
Release history
Date Country Format Label May 1, 2009 Europe CD Warner Bros. Records
Chart performance
Year-end chartsWith Terminator: Genisys stalling at the box office, Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 may not be back again.
Despite Schwarzenegger's much-heralded return to the franchise after stepping away for the poorly received Terminator Salvation back in 2009, the fifth film in this 30-year-old series has badly underperformed at the U.S. box office, grossing just $81 million since opening on July 1. It's done better overseas, with nearly $200 million in the bank, but according to The Hollywood Reporter, that doesn't make a sequel certain.
Why is that? Well, the movie cost $155 million to make and many more millions to market, which means that (because theater owners get roughly half the box office) Terminator: Genisys will have to earn probably somewhere around $400 million worldwide to break even. And while that number could be in reach, the fact that the movie is going to struggle to get there means that demand for a followup could be even weaker.
That makes Terminator: Genisys a "bubble" movie, meaning that it's not successful enough for a studio to automatically greenlight the next installment, but it's also not such a massive failure that producers have realized that enough is enough. The Reporter cites Pacific Rim (which basically owes the existence of a sequel to Chinese audiences), Godzilla and Snow White and the Huntsman as "bubble" movies that have done just well enough worldwide to get the go-ahead for a sequel, while Prometheus and the Chronicles of Narnia films have not convincingly made their case.
The producers of Terminator: Genisys very ambitiously -- and perhaps unwisely -- announced last year that they were already mapping out sequels for 2017 and 2018, along with a TV show, but it seems unlikely that those plans will stay intact if the current film does not turn itself around (a strong showing in, you guessed it, China might help).
The question is, should they stop here anyway? Terminator: Genisys got poor reviews from critics and fans alike for basically remaking the first two films while twisting the continuity to ridiculous and even incoherent extremes. James Cameron told a complete, satisfying story with The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and ever since then the owners of the rights have been attempting to extend that story with frankly diminishing returns (at least on film -- fans loved The Sarah Connor Chronicles on TV even though it wasn't around long).
How long before this continued cash grab simply becomes embarrassing? Should the Terminator saga end here?Bucs quarterback Jameis Winston has fired back at the woman who has accused him of sexual assault.
The No. 1 overall NFL draft pick and former Florida State star filed a counterclaim Friday against Zephyrhills' Erica Kinsman, alleging her rape accusations are "false, defamatory … and have maliciously and impermissibly interfered with Mr. Winston's business and personal relationships."
"Mr. Winston brings this action against Ms. Kinsman out of necessity, not malice or ill will," the court filing said. "Nonetheless, Ms. Kinsman's false statements have irreparably harmed in his professional and personal life."
The counterclaim seeks damages in excess of $75,000.
The U.S. District Court filing came three weeks after Kinsman filed a civil suit in Orange County against Winston, accusing the 2013 Heisman Trophy winner of sexual battery from a December 2012 encounter.
Winston has maintained his innocence and was never arrested or charged with a crime.
In a court filing by Winston's attorneys, John F. Meyers and David Cornwell, said Kinsman's accusation has been shot down six times, by FSU, the Tallahassee Police Department and the State Attorney's Office.
"However, Ms. Kinsman has been successful in one major area," the filing said. "She has mounted a false and vicious media campaign to vilify Mr. Winston with the objective of getting him to pay her to go away. Ms. Kinsman is motivated by the most insidious objectives — greed."
The 63-page filing states 40 different times that Winston did not commit a crime, and it details his version of the case.
It alleges that Kinsman — then an FSU student — willingly participated in the encounter at Winston's off-campus apartment and at one point asked to move from the bedroom with a broken door to somewhere more private. It also notes inconsistencies in her previous testimonies, including claims that she had been hit on the head or been drugged, when there was no evidence to support either. The State Attorney's Office cited her "problematic" testimony when it chose not to press charges against Winston in December 2013.
"If nothing else, Ms. Kinsman has been consistent at being inconsistent," Friday's filing said.
The filing questioned whether any outcry evidence has been produce, and it refuted a claim that Kinsman felt coerced to leave the Tallahassee bar with Winston that night. It also said her story shifted regarding a shot of alcohol she said she was given.
"To aid her false allegation of rape (the "False Allegation"), Ms. Kinsman tampered with witnesses, interfered with criminal investigations and manufactured new false assertions each time a prior lie was rebutted by the truth," the filing said.
Those assertions and the "almost inconceivable amount of media attention" also led to the loss of lucrative endorsement deals, the filing alleges. Her goal, according to the counterclaim, was to change the public's view of Winston and hurt his image until he paid for her silence.
"Since he is now alleging injury to his great reputation, all of his past conduct will become front and center in the case and the burden of proof will be on him," said John Clune, one of Kinsman's attorneys. "I'm not sure how well that is going to work out for him, but he certainly has the right to try."
The Bucs drafted Winston on April 30, two weeks after Kinsman's lawsuit. He has signed a $25.35 million contract and began his NFL career with a team rookie camp Friday.
Friday's filing repeats claims Cornwell has previously made that Kinsman's first attorney, Patricia Carroll, tried to settle the case for $7 million. Kinsman's attorneys have previously stated that Cornwell first reached out to discuss negotiations.
Also Friday, Winston's attorneys filed a motion to move the case to the U.S. District Court's Northern District in Tallahassee.
Other litigation remains pending. Kinsman sued FSU in January, alleging that it failed to follow the gender-equity law Title IX in its handling of the case. A federal court has taken FSU's request to dismiss the case under advisement, and a jury trial is scheduled for August 2016.
Contact Matt Baker at [email protected] Follow @MBakerTBTimes.This week our special guest is Professor Murray Straus, a pioneering researcher on the subjects of sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and child abuse. Straus is possibly the most influential researcher on this issue in the academic world, with a career going back to the 1950s. He serves as Professor of Sociology and founder and Co-Director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, a position he has held since 1968. Call in with your questions or just listen to this amazing man’s career and findings and the many, many studies he has been a part of crafting.
Join us at 1pm Eastern, noon Central, 6pm London Time for this special episode.
To visit the show page, CLICK HERE.
The episode will also be simulcast on A Voice for Men’s new Live365 station.The Doomsday rule is an algorithm of determination of the day of the week for a given date. It provides a perpetual calendar because the Gregorian calendar moves in cycles of 400 years.
The Doomsday algorithm for mental calculation was devised by John Conway[1][2] in 1973 after drawing inspiration from Lewis Carroll's perpetual calendar algorithm.[3][4] It takes advantage of each year having a certain day of the week, called the doomsday, upon which certain easy-to-remember dates fall; for example, 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12, and the last day of February all occur on the same day of the week in any year. Applying the Doomsday algorithm involves three steps:
Determination of the anchor day for the century. Calculation of the doomsday for the year from the anchor day. Selection of the closest date out of those that always fall on the doomsday, e.g., 4/4 and 6/6, and count of the number of days (modulo 7) between that date and the date in question to arrive at the day of the week.
This technique applies to both the Gregorian calendar A.D. and the Julian calendar, although their doomsdays are usually different days of the week.
Since this algorithm involves treating days of the week like numbers modulo 7, John Conway suggests thinking of the days of the week as "Noneday"; or as "Sansday" (for Sunday), "Oneday", "Twosday", "Treblesday", "Foursday", "Fiveday", and "Six-a-day". There are some languages, such as Greek, Portuguese and Galician, that base some of the names of the week days in their positional order.
The algorithm is simple enough for anyone with basic arithmetic ability to do the calculations mentally. Conway can usually give the correct answer in under two seconds. To improve his speed, he practices his calendrical calculations on his computer, which is programmed to quiz him with random dates every time he logs on.[5]
Doomsdays for some contemporary years [ edit ]
Doomsday for the current year in the Gregorian calendar (2019) is Thursday.
For some other contemporary years :
Doomsdays for the Gregorian calendar Mon. Tue. Wed. Thu. Fri. Sat. Sun. Mon. Tue. Wed. Thu. Fri. Sat. Sun. 1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 → 1904 1905 1906 1907 → 1908 1909 1910 1911 → 1912 1913 1914 1915 → 1916 1917 1918 1919 → 1920 1921 1922 1923 → 1924 1925 1926 1927 → 1928 1929 1930 1931 → 1932 1933 1934 1935 → 1936 1937 1938 1939 → 1940 1941 1942 1943 → 1944 1945 1946 1947 → 1948 1949 1950 1951 → 1952 1953 1954 1955 → 1956 1957 1958 1959 → 1960 1961 1962 1963 → 1964 1965 1966 1967 → 1968 1969 1970 1971 → 1972 1973 1974 1975 → 1976 1977 1978 1979 → 1980 1981 1982 1983 → 1984 1985 1986 1987 → 1988 1989 1990 1991 → 1992 1993 1994 1995 → 1996 1997 1998 1999 → 2000 2001 2002 2003 → 2004 2005 2006 2007 → 2008 2009 2010 2011 → 2012 2013 2014 2015 → 2016 2017 2018 2019 → 2020 2021 2022 2023 → 2024 2025 2026 2027 → 2028 2029 2030 2031 → 2032 2033 2034 2035 → 2036 2037 2038 2039 → 2040 2041 2042 2043 → 2044 2045 2046 2047 → 2048 2049 2050 2051 → 2052 2053 2054 2055 → 2056 2057 2058 2059 → 2060 2061 2062 2063 → 2064 2065 2066 2067 → 2068 2069 2070 2071 → 2072 2073 2074 2075 → 2076 2077 2078 2079 → 2080 2081 2082 2083 → 2084 2085 2086 2087 → 2088 2089 2090 2091 → 2092 2093 2094 2095 → 2096 2097 2098 2099 2100
Notes: Fill in the table horizontally, skipping one column for each leap year. This table cycles every 28 years, except in the Gregorian calendar on years multiple of 100 (like 1900 which is not a leap year) that are not multiple of 400 (like 2000 which is still a leap year). The full cycle is 28 years (1,461 weeks) in the Julian calendar, 400 years (20,871 weeks) in the Gregorian calendar.
One can easily find the day of the week of a given calendar date by using a nearby doomsday as a reference point. To help with this, the following is a list of easy-to-remember dates for each month that always land on the doomsday.
As mentioned above, the last day of February defines the doomsday. For January, January 3 is a doomsday during common years and January 4 a doomsday during leap years, which can be remembered as "the 3rd during 3 years in 4, and the 4th in the 4th year". For March, one can remember the pseudo-date "March 0", which refers to the day before March 1, i.e. the last day of February.
For the months April through December, the even numbered months are covered by the double dates 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, and 12/12, all of which fall on the doomsday. The odd numbered months can be remembered with the mnemonic "I work from 9 to 5 at the 7-11", i.e., 9/5, 7/11, and also 5/9 and 11/7, are all doomsdays.
Several common holidays are also on doomsday. The chart below includes only dates covered by the mnemonics in the sources listed.
Month Memorable date Month/Day Mnemonic[6] Complete list of days January January 3 (common years), January 4 (leap years) 1/3 or 1/4 the 3rd 3 years in 4 and the 4th in the 4th 3, 10, 17, 24, 31 OR 4, 11, 18, 25 February February 28 (common years), February 29 (leap years) 2/28 or 2/29 last day of February 0, 7, 14, 21, 28 OR 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 March "March 0" 3/0 last day of February 0, 7, 14, 21, 28 April April 4 4/4 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12 4, 11, 18, 25 May May 9 5/9 9-to-5 at 7-11 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 June June 6 6/6 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12 6, 13, 20, 27 July July 11 7/11 9-to-5 at 7-11 4, 11, 18, 25 August August 8 8/8 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 September September 5 9/5 9-to-5 at 7-11 5, 12, 19, 26 October October 10 10/10 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12 3, 10, 17, 24, 31 November November 7 11/7 9-to-5 at 7-11 0, 7, 14, 21, 28 December December 12 12/12 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12 5, 12, 19, 26
Since the doomsday for a particular year is directly related to weekdays of dates in the period from March through February of the next year, common years and leap years have to be distinguished for January and February of the same year.
Example [ edit ]
To find which day of the week Christmas Day of 2017 was: in the year 2017, doomsday was Tuesday. Since December 12 is a doomsday, December 25, being thirteen days afterwards (two weeks less a day), fell on a Monday.
It |
where Manning worked was leaky. “The facility where Manning worked did not meet the Defense Department’s own information-assurance standards,” she said. “Manning’s supervisor testified at the pretrial that soldiers would play pirated versions of movies they purchased from Iraqi nationals on their classified work stations at the facility.”
Manning’s defense lawyers would later tell a pretrial hearing that he suffered from gender-identity disorder, creating an alter-ego, Breanna Manning.
Some commentators have credited Manning’s leak with providing a spark for the revolutions that toppled the governments of Egypt and Tunisia and triggered uprisings in Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen, collectively known as the Arab Spring. Files leaked by Manning disclosed a secret relationship between the U.S. government and President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, to allow drone strikes inside the country where the United States was not in a declared war. Another cable detailed the private investments and holdings of the Tunisian ruling family.
Still other files revealed secret talks between Arab governments and Israel; the lavish spending habits of Muammar Gaddafi’s family; and suspicions from the U.S. ambassador to Georgia that Russia’s intelligence services directed a secret war in the country for much of the last decade.
The Manning leak also ushered in a new era within the Obama administration to crack down on leakers and what they deemed the “insider threat,” a term that historically referred to spies who sold or shared secrets with foreign governments. On November 28, 2010, as WikiLeaks was doling out the diplomatic cables Manning leaked to selected partner news organizations, including The New York Times and The Guardian, Jacob Lew, then Obama’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, issued a memorandum (PDF) to all government agencies that generate classified information to reform systems for protecting those secrets.
“Any failure by agencies to safeguard classified information pursuant to relevant … is unacceptable and will not be tolerated,” it said.
After the order, major defense contractors began marketing software with names like “sureview” and “checkmate,” promising to actively monitor classified computer networks to spot the next Bradley Manning. Inside the government, spokespeople for government agencies were instructed not to acknowledge any of the information from the government documents now sprouting up throughout the Internet on WikiLeaks mirror sites.
“WikiLeaks was an enormous wakeup call for the government,” said Lucy Dalglish, the dean of the University of Maryland’s college of journalism. In the past, she said, reporters from the mainstream media who obtained classified information would negotiate the details they would publish with senior government officials. Manning, she said, “uploads it to an anonymous site and it goes around the world almost instantly. They see that and say, ‘Oh my God, we are screwed.’”
One concern for many in the U.S. government was that WikiLeaks did not at first redact the names of individuals who provided sensitive information to U.S. diplomats and military officers. (The partner organizations that selectively posted information did make such redactions.)
Beginning in late November 2010, the State Department was forced to start making arrangements to move some sensitive sources in hostile countries and war zones as a result of the WikiLeaks, said P.J. Crowley, who served at the time as the State Department spokesman.
“In all cases where we highlighted, not a high-level official well-known globally, but an activist or someone who would be placed in harm’s way if published, the mainstream media was willing not to publish those names,” said Crowley. “While some individuals inside WikiLeaks shared that concern, Julian Assange did not at first and only acknowledged this danger relatively late in the process. Eventually he lost control of the archive and lots and lots of names were put out there.”
Crowley would later resign his post after publicly criticizing the treatment of Manning after his arrest, when the private was placed on suicide watch at a maximum-security militar detention center at Quantico, Virginia, between July 29, 2010, and April 2011. In this period Manning spent months confined to a cell for 24 hours a day in only his underwear. Every five minutes guards had to ask if he was OK. He was allowed only one book at a time and was given no pillows or sheets for when he slept.
While President Obama would say he believed Manning’s treatment was in accordance with U.S. military code, the judge in Manning’s case criticized the decision to keep him under suicide watch during this period, and advocates for the young private saw the conditions he was kept under as proof that he was being punished even before being convicted.
Earlier this year, Manning pleaded guilty to 10 lesser offenses in relation to WikiLeaks of mishandling information he was required to protect. But the government has continued to press its topline charges, while Manning has denied that he did his leaking to aid an enemy of the United States or in any way violated the Espionage Act. In an audio statement that surfaced in March from one of his pretrial hearings, during which he admitted to the leaks, Manning said he was moved to disclose the information to spark a wider debate about foreign policy. He observed that a 2007 video he leaked captured from a helicopter before an airstrike in Iraq showed that his fellow soldiers “dehumanized the individuals they were engaging in and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as ‘dead bastards’ and congratulating themselves on their ability to kill in large numbers.”
“With Manning’s offer of a plea bargain, which carries up to 20 years in jail, this satisfies the imperative to reinforce to those in uniform that they have a solemn responsibility to protect the national interest,” said Crowley on Sunday. The former spokesman said he believed Manning harmed the national interest with his leak. But he also said the prosecution ran the risk of taking the case too far by seeking to imprison Manning for the rest of his life for the crime of aiding the enemy. “My apprehension is that as the prosecution begins to present its case tomorrow, it risks making Bradley Manning into a martyr,” he said.CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (By Joe Rauch) - U.S. homeowners may need to look elsewhere for long-term investment returns as housing prices in some areas may not rebound long-term, Bank of America Corp Chief Executive Officer Brian Moynihan said on Tuesday.
Moynihan, CEO of the largest U.S. bank, said at a state attorneys general summit that low population growth in some regions of the country indicated that prices might not rise in the wake of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
"It's sobering to think, but some people shouldn't be thinking of (their home) as an asset," Moynihan said at the 2011 National Association of Attorneys General conference. "They should be thinking of it as a great place to live."
Moynihan said the long-term average annual rise in post-war U.S. home prices of 4 percent owed much to the explosion in domestic population and, in more recent times, the relaxation of credit standards across the mortgage industry.
"The reality is that the population is not expected to grow the way it did post World War I and World War II," he said.
Moynihan noted an Ohio customers' complaint that his 100-year-old home was valued at $50,000. The home,
Moynihan said, would be valued as "some multiples of that figure" if it were located elsewhere, but stagnant population levels in the state are driving demand and home prices lower.
The conference included many of the state attorneys general currently engaged in negotiations with BofA and other lenders about a broad settlement to allegations that the industry cut corners on foreclosures.
Moynihan said during his prepared remarks that he had spoken with the attorneys general about industry issues, but declined to comment further about the discussions.
(Reporting by Joe Rauch; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)Narayanan Krishnan (born 1981 in Madurai, Tamil Nadu) is an Indian chef-turned-social worker.[1]
Early life [ edit ]
Krishnan was an award-winning chef with Taj Hotels, Bangalore and was short-listed for an elite job in Switzerland. After witnessing a distressing incident in 2002, he quit his job and began feeding the homeless and mentally disabled in his hometown. from CNN[2]
Career [ edit ]
Krishnan founded the Akshaya Trust organization in 2003, which helps to feed the homeless and mentally-disabled in Madurai, Tamil Nadu. He serves breakfast, lunch and dinner to 425 indigent and elderly people in Madurai.[3][4]
He also provides haircuts and shaves to give dignity to those he serves. He was selected as one of the Top 10 in "CNN heroes 2010" list.[5][6][7]
The character Narayanan Krishnan played by Jayaprakash in the 2012 Malayalam film Ustad Hotel is based on him.[8]
Controversy [ edit ]
In June 2014 a 23-year-old inmate who left the Akshaya Trust home alleged that she was sexually abused. The news was featured in the media.[9] Although the Akshaya Trust home was exonerated by the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court.[10] it was asked to submit regular monthly reports since lot of human rights abuses have been reported from the home.[11]
References [ edit ]Chattering Class is the part of the show where we get schooled in a dinner party worthy topic. This week, the subject is rain and our expert is award-winning environmental journalist Cynthia Barnett. She has written two previous books about water, and her latest book, fittingly, is about rain. It is called “Rain: A Natural and Cultural History.”
Brendan Francis Newnam: Let’s just begin at the beginning. This book is humongous. I’m not going to be able to talk about everything in it, obviously, but let’s just start with the basics. What is rain? Cynthia Barnett: I can tell you that in a drop of rain is the water we know about, but then there also has to be something else. There has to be a little tiny something for the drop to cling to. So, there’s a tiny bit of dust or even a tiny bit of bacteria. Anything that’s called condensation nuclei, allows the drop to actually cling around. That’s what it needs to form a drop. Brendan Francis Newnam: Does that mean there’s no such thing as clean rain because it’s all clinging to something? Cynthia Barnett: You know, I hate to tell you this, but there’s no such thing as clean rain. Brendan Francis Newnam: Oh, man.
Cynthia Barnett: I know! I know, it dashes – there’s no clean snow, either really. When you think about it, it falls through the sky that we’ve pumped full of all kinds of emissions. It travels around the world through anything we’ve put out into the world. So, for me, that was sort of the really interesting lesson of this book.
Brendan Francis Newnam: So, getting rained on is basically like taking a dirty shower.
Cynthia Barnett: I don’t know if I’d say that. Even with everything I’ve learned about rain and what’s in rain, I love being out in the rain. I just danced with my kids in the rain yesterday.
Brendan Francis Newnam: Well, dirty or not, man has an interesting relationship with rain. Man has often tried to control rain. Your book is filled with many colorful stories about people trying to master rain in one way or another. One of them that stands out is James Pollard Espy, who was, I believe, America’s first meteorologist?
Cynthia Barnett:Â So, the interesting thing about James Pollard Espy is that he was a brilliant meteorologist, and he was the United States’s first meteorologist.
Brendan Francis Newnam: Under Ulysses S. Grant, right, the president?
Cynthia Barnett: Yes, and the one falter he had in his atmospheric brilliance is that he believed that fire caused rain, which makes sense, you know, remember what I said about you needing some little tiny particle. So, he thought that if we sent particles up into the atmosphere that it would make it rain. He actually proposed to Congress that we plant vast forests throughout the middle of the nation and light them afire when drought came so that we could make it rain, and that never happened. And the interesting thing about why it didn’t happen — it’s not that people didn’t believe that we could do it. It was that, actually, the southern congressmen were really worried about the federal government, as they still are, right? So, they didn’t want the government to be able to control the weather, and that’s why his proposal didn’t pass.
Brendan Francis Newnam: Oh, interesting. So, they weren’t suspicious of Espy’s idea that if you burned large swaths of forest, rain would come.
Cynthia Barnett: No, no. People had very crazy ideas about how to make it rain.
Brendan Francis Newnam: Well, people can turn to your book if they want to hear more of those stories because now we’re going to play a game I created. There’s so many neat facts in this book. I was trying to think of a way to get to them. So, I created this game. It’s called the “Rain Fact Lightning Round.” Get the pun?
Cynthia Barnett: I love it!
Brendan Francis Newnam:Â Thanks. So, I’m going to read you some facts I learned in your book, and you can maybe just give me a short explanation.
Cynthia Barnett: Let’s do it. I’m ready.
Brendan Francis Newnam: All right. So, the first one is the expression, “When it rains, it pours.”
Cynthia Barnett: Okay, “When it rains, it pours,” comes from an ad developed for Morton Salt Company. So, you know the wonderful girl with the umbrella on the cylinder of Morton Salt? In the early 20th century, table salt had this notorious problem of caking up in rainy weather, and nobody could get their salt out of the canister. So, Morton began adding something — it was an anti-caking agent called magnesium carbonate — to its salt so that it would pour better, but the executives didn’t want to say, “Oh yay, we have added magnesium carbonate.” So, some brilliant marketing person came up with, “When it rains, it pours,” so that they could emphasize the benefit that Morton Salt could pour in any weather.
Brendan Francis Newnam: It’s actually a really elegant tagline, and now it just reads like cynicism. You know, it’s just like, “Well, of course! When it rains, it pours.” But in reality, it’s like, no, when it rains, the salt will pour because it will not cake.
This one’s a little more obscure in the Lightning Round, but you’ll know what I’m getting at and you can explain it to us: pruned fingers.
Cynthia Barnett: Yeah. So, finger wrinkles — we evolved in what scientists call “pluvial times,” a time of a lot of rainfall in East Africa. So, many million years ago, when we began walking upright, the rainforest was turning to desert and we stand up and begin to search for rain. AÂ neurobiologist I interviewed named Mark Changizi has linked the finger wrinkles on our hands to those times. He hypothesized that we needed grips. They’re essentially rain treads for helping us get along in those jungles in super-rainy times, and we don’t need them when it’s not raining. Our fingers are smooth because it’s better to grip with smooth fingers in dry times, but in wet times, our fingers actually do a much better job of gripping when we have those finger wrinkles.
Brendan Francis Newnam: Like tires for your car.
Cynthia Barnett: Right, exactly.
Brendan Francis Newnam: All right. And so, my last question: what is your favorite song about rain?
Cynthia Barnett: That’s a really hard one. I’m going to have to say, and this is odd because I love rain, but “I Can’t Stand the Rain” by Ann Peebles.*
Brendan Francis Newnam: All right. Cynthia, thank you for braving the rain in Florida to come speak with us.
Cynthia Barnett: Thank you so much for having me on. It’s been really fun.
*Ed note: Cynthia shared her YouTube playlist of songs about rain. Check it out below!
IT’S A PARTY IN YOUR INBOX…
…when you subscribe to our weekly newsletter. You’ll find all sorts of good stuff there like bonus audio, musings on culture from our staff, photos of our guests and co-hosts being ridiculous, and new cocktail recipes. Sign up below!Iran has warned it will attack any country used to launch airstrikes against its nuclear bases, as increasingly aggressive rhetoric emanating from the Islamic Republic and Israel has increased apprehension that military confrontation is looming.
"Any spot used by the enemy for hostile operations against Iran will be subjected to retaliatory aggression by our armed forces," Hossein Salami, the deputy head of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, told the semi-official Fars news agency.
The warning followed a threat by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Friday to attack Israel in retaliation for western sanctions and a pledge to support any country or group that wanted to fight Israel.
In a two-hour televised speech, Khamenei said: "From now on, in any place, if any nation or any group confronts the Zionist regime, we will endorse and we will help. We have no fear expressing this." He referred to Israel as a "cancerous tumour that should be cut and will be cut".
At an international gathering of security officials and diplomats in Munich, the Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said a western attack on Iran would be a "disaster" and that greater diplomatic efforts were needed.
"A military option will create a disaster in our region. So before that disaster, everybody must be serious in negotiations. We hope soon both sides will meet again but this time there will be a complete result," he said.
The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, urged political colleagues to avoid "chatter [which] causes extensive damage, puts Israel on the frontline and impedes the sanctions effort".
His comments followed a formal speech by Israel's defence minister, Ehud Barak, on Thursday in which he warned that "later might be too late", as Iran was approaching a "zone of immunity" in which its nuclear facilities would be beyond the reach of airstrikes. On the same day, the US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, was quoted as warning that an Israeli attack could come as early as April, May or June.
Meanwhile, the man expected to execute a political order for such a strike was named on Sunday in an appointment that has been embroiled in controversy for weeks.
Amir Eshel is to take up the post of commander of the Israeli air force in April after his appointment was approved by Barak. The move follows reported differences between Netanyahu and the military chief of staff, Benny Gantz, over who should fill the vacancy.
Eshel is thought to be relatively cautious on the issue of military action against Iran, in tune with Gantz who strongly backed him for the post. But, he told reporters last month: "We have the ability to hit very, very hard any adversary." He also warned that a nuclear Iran would lead to proliferation across the Middle East.Called BIOHM, the probiotic product is a mixture of beneficial bacterial and fungal species along with a digestive enzyme. The underlying principle of the product, which was developed by a company called PathoBiome, is to interrupt the actions of digestive plaques—otherwise referred to as biofilms—that can negatively affect gut health.
The product is based upon the ground breaking work of Dr. Mahmoud Ghannoum, Ph.D., MBA. Dr Ghannoum’s paper of 2016 was an eye opener for microbiome scientists, said his son, attorney Afif Ghannoum, who serves as PathoBiome’s CEO.
“My father is a world leader in fungal research. His work has been cited more than 16,000 times. He was the scientist who coined the term ‘mycobiome.’He has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1993,” Afif Ghannoum told NutraIngredients-USA.
Afif Ghannoum said his father’s research has changed the way that scientists look at what’s happening inside the gut. As so often has been the case with human health research, the picture is more complex than was first imagined.
“You have all sorts of microbiomes in your body, in the lungs, the oral cavity, the vagina and of course the gut. Everybody was looking at the microbiome as just being about just good bacteria,”Afif Ghannoum said. The elder Ghannoum, who is associated with Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH, showed the importance of the fungal components of those microbiomes, he said.
“My father showed that there are not just good and bad bacteria, but also good and bad fungi,” Afif Ghannoum said.
Interkingdom cooperation
In the 2016 paper, Dr. Ghannoum and is research partners looked at parameters of microbiome makeup in Crohn’s Disease patients and healthy members of the same families in an area in Belgium. The researchers said they “identified positive interkingdom correlations between C. tropicalis (a fungus), E. coli, and S. marcescens (both microbial species) in CD patients and validated these correlations using in vitro biofilms. These results provide insight into the roles of bacteria and fungi in CD.”
Afif Ghannoum said the key insight, one that he called groundbreaking, is that his father’s team found that fungi and microbes were cooperating in the construction of the plaques. He said election microscope images show the filaments of the fungi being incorporated into the carbohydrate ‘armor’ that the bacteria start to secrete once enough individual cells have gathered at a certain location. Without the addition of the digestive enzyme to their product, he said that the plaques, once adhered to the intestinal wall, would be difficult to attack.
“The breakthrough finding was the paper that showed that there was interkingdom cooperation in the formation of these plaques. You could put all the good bacterial in the world in there and they could not penetrate these plaques,”he said.
Afif Ghannoum emphasized that while his father’s work was done on Crohn’s Disease sufferers, the company’s probiotic product was meant to support gut health, not treat disease.
“When you only maintain the good bacteria in the gut, fungus is allowed to flourish causing digestive imbalance. For the first time, consumers will be able to balance the total microbiome of bacteria and fungi in the digestive system with BIOHM,”he said.Israel Expands Attacks On Gaza As Rockets Target Israeli Cities
Enlarge this image toggle caption Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images
Updates at 5:32 p.m. ET
Israel said Tuesday it is expanding its operations against Hamas "and other terrorist organizations" in the Gaza Strip amid an escalation of violence that saw a barrage of rockets fired from the enclave toward Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and other parts of the country.
"No other country lives under such a threat. Israel will not tolerate the firing of rockets on our cities and towns," Prime Minister Benjamin Neyanyahu said on Twitter. "We have therefore significantly expanded our operations against Hamas and the other terrorist organizations in Gaza."
Rockets from Gaza were fired at targets inside Israel. No one was hurt.
Daniel Estrin, who is reporting on the story for our Newscast unit, said the sound of air raid sirens wailed outside his window in Jerusalem. He adds:
"The sirens ended about a minute later, and then — two muffled explosions. Police say a rocket landed in the southern coastal city of Ashdod, near Gaza. There were also air raid sirens in Tel Aviv, and central and southern areas of Israel. Authorities in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and other cities opened public bomb shelters. Local media said an open-air rock concert in Jerusalem was canceled and thousands of concertgoers were evacuated."
Earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Hamas, which governs Gaza, will "pay a heavy price" for the recent spike in rocket attacks. Israel conducted airstrikes early Tuesday on the Gaza Strip, and the country has called up reservists and is planning ground operations.
"No time limit was put on the operation, but senior diplomatic officials said it could be 'for a long time,' " reports the Jerusalem Post. The newspaper adds that Netanyahu says the time has come to "take off the gloves" to fight Hamas.
The two sides have increased their hostilities since the recent killing of three Israeli teenagers, which sparked a killing of a Palestinian teen in what's being seen as revenge.
From Jerusalem, NPR's Linda Gradstein reports that overnight some 60 rockets were fired from Gaza. Several reached Beersheba and Ashkelon, some 25 miles from Gaza.
YouTube
Linda reported that Israel called up some 1,500 reservists. An Israeli army spokesman said that in the airstrikes overnight, Israel destroyed the homes of several senior Hamas military men. Palestinian medics reported that at least nine people were wounded, including seven children.
The Israeli Defense Forces has posted video online of two airstrikes from last night, attacks that it says targeted the "activity sites" of two Hamas members involved in conducting rocket fire from Gaza. Helicopters and warplanes took part in dozens of other attacks.
It seems that in at least one case, the activity site was a house — and that the occupants got a phone call telling them to get out before it was bombed.
Reuters reports:NFL.com has the exclusive access to the latest Pro Bowl results. You can continue to vote through Monday.
The Pro Bowl will be Jan. 25, 2015 at 8 p.m. ET on ESPN in Glendale, Arizona, the site of Super Bowl XLIV. Like last year, it's the unconferenced format. We have some of our favorite choices for Pro Bowl voting right here.
The following are the top 10 overall vote-getters:
1. Peyton Manning, QB, Denver Broncos : 789,6082. Aaron Rodgers, QB, Green Bay Packers : 760,1303. Tom Brady, QB, New England Patriots : 659,6774. Andrew Luck, QB, Indianapolis Colts : 653,3055. DeMarco Murray, RB, Dallas Cowboys : 624,1966. Le'Veon Bell, RB, Pittsburgh Steelers, 518,8727. Antonio Brown, WR, Pittsburgh Steelers : 491,3018. Jordy Nelson, WR, Green Bay Packers : 485,6149. Marshawn Lynch, RB, Seattle Seahawks : 480,52810. Rob Gronkowski, TE, New England Patriots : 446,000
Here are the top-voted players at each offensive position.
Quarterbacks:
1. Peyton Manning 2. Aaron Rodgers 3. Tom Brady 4. Andrew Luck 5. Ben Roethlisberger 6. Tony Romo 7. Philip Rivers 8. Drew Brees 9. Russell Wilson 10. Brian Hoyer
Running backs:
1. DeMarco Murray 2. Le'Veon Bell 3. Marshawn Lynch 4. Matt Forte 5. Arian Foster 6. Jamaal Charles 7. Eddie Lacy 8. LeSean McCoy 9. Justin Forsett 10. Andre Ellington
Wide receivers:
1. Antonio Brown 2. Jordy Nelson 3. Demaryius Thomas 4. Dez Bryant 5. T.Y. Hilton 6. Randall Cobb 7. Emmanuel Sanders 8. Jeremy Maclin 9. Julio Jones 10. Golden Tate
Tight ends:
1. Rob Gronkowski 2. Julius Thomas 3. Jimmy Graham 4. Antonio Gates 5. Greg Olsen 6. Martellus Bennett 7. Jason Witten 8. Jordan Cameron 9. Dwayne Allen 10. Heath Miller
Offensive tackles:
1. Joe Thomas 2. Tyron Smith 3. Ryan Clady 4. Bryan Bulaga 5. Doug Free 6. David Bakhtiari 7. Russell Okung 8. Mitchell Schwartz 9. Jason Peters 10. Joe Staley
Guards:
1. Joel Bitonio 2. Josh Sitton 3. Zack Martin 4. T.J. Lang 5. Ronald Leary 6. Marshal Yanda 7. Orlando Franklin 8. John Greco 9. David DeCastro 10. Mike Pouncey
Centers:
1. Travis Frederick 2. Maurkice Pouncey 3. Corey Linsley 4. Max Unger 5. Nick Mangold
Fullbacks:
1. John Kuhn 2. Kyle Juszczyk 3. Darrel Young 4. Marcel Reece 5. Ray Agnew
Kickers:
1. Stephen Gostkowski 2. Dan Bailey 3. Adam Vinatieri 4. Billy Cundiff 5. Steven Hauschka
Returners:
1. Devin Hester 2. Darren Sproles 3. Jacoby Jones 4. Randall Cobb 5. Adam Jones
The latest Around The NFL Podcast reacts to the fallout of Cam Newton's car accident and debates how the Browns will look with Johnny Manziel at QB. Find more Around The NFL content on NFL NOW.The U.S. government does not know how many agencies and programs it is asking taxpayers to fund, The Daily Caller has learned.
Even though the editors of Wikipedia have been able to assemble a list of federal agencies, no complete official government list of federal agencies and programs currently exists.
The Government Performance and Results Modernization Act of 2010 (GPRAMA) — which became law on January 4, 2011 — established required quarterly performance assessments of government programs.
That bill also mandated that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) create a website that would publish quarterly performance reports by the heads of each agency.
Currently that website — Performance.gov, which was launched in 2011 — contains only a partial list of government programs, and important agencies such as the FCC aren’t on the list.
OMB is an office within the executive that is responsible for budget development and agency oversight. A spokesperson for the OMB did not respond to The Daily Caller’s request for comment.
A spokesperson for the Congressional Budget Office also confirmed to The Daily Caller that the CBO did not have a list of agencies and programs, and instead referred The Daily Caller to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
A GAO spokesman, in turn, referred The Daily Caller to OMB, stating that no list of programs has existed in the past because of the lack of a consensus within the federal government about what constitutes a program.
“OMB has not released the list of federal programs but has an effort underway to develop a count,” said another GAO official.
The CBO is a non-partisan legislative branch agency responsible for providing the “budget committees and Congress with objective, impartial information about budgetary and economic issues.”
The GAO is an independent legislative branch agency that acts as “the congressional watchdog,” responsible for investigating “how the federal government spends taxpayer dollars.”
GPRAMA also required agencies to publish their strategic and performance plans in searchable, machine-readable formats for fiscal year 2012.
Machine-readable formats are data formats that can be easily understood by computers, such as XML or StratML.
Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, told The Daily Caller that no useful list of government agencies exists.
Harper has been advocating for the creation a machine-readable federal government organization chart of several years.
The chart would map out how the federal government’s agencies and subagencies, bureaus and programs all interconnect.
“There are several lists, but none of them are machine-readable and they are by no means complete registries of the organizational units of government,” said Harper.
Harper made a similar point in a January 2012 essay about the lack of a machine-readable federal government organization chart.
Many reports, he wrote, are currently published in formats like PDF, which make it more difficult for the data to be useful to a computer.
A bill to establish reporting standards, which was supported by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, successfully made it through the House in 2012 only to die in the Senate.
That bill, called the Digital Transparency and Accountability Act (DATA Act), is currently awaiting reintroduction in the House.
Hudson Hollister, founder and executive director of the Data Transparency Coalition, told The Daily Caller that it is currently nobody’s job within the federal government to set data standards, which include both consistent identifying numbers for agencies and federal grantees, as well as consistent data formats that are machine-readable.
“When I was working for the House, I asked everybody because I was doing oversight, and I wanted to have a list of agencies,” said Hollister, who previously served as counsel for the House Oversight Committee.
“I asked CRS, and I asked GAO, and I asked OMB, and they all disagreed” about the number of agencies that exist in the federal government, Hollister said.
CRS, or Congressional Research Service, is a legislative branch agency within the Library of Congress that provides legal and policy analysis to committees and members.
Hollister pointed out that federal contractors and grantees are also identified differently by each agency.
The lack of a consistent identifier, he said, makes it difficult to track federal spending across the government.
“OMB and Treasury use different identification numbers for agencies, and nobody agrees on the number of federal agencies we have,” said Hollister.
“Without data standards — both identifiers and consistent formats — its impossible to find systemic risk from the data that’s submitted to the regulators,” he said.
“The government is a single enterprise, but it is not managed as one,” he said.
Follow Josh on TwitterThis video from Mark Brown explains something that a surprising amount of people didn't know: Resident Evil 4 came with a sliding difficulty level that was constantly being adjusted for the player, but was never discussed.
This allowed the player to stay in a state of "flow," that great feeling where the game is just hard enough to give you a challenge while still allowing you to play at your highest competency.
Scroll to continue with content Ad
This approach won't work on all games, but by removing any indicator that shows you when the difficulty is adjusted and not discussing it in interviews the team behind the game was able to give players the best possible experience without making them feel weak for taking advantage of the system.
Resident Evil 4 is an amazing game, and this sort of invisible system is part of the reason why.
Polygon Archive: Resident Evil-Remastered
More from polygon.com:After the harsh winter weather that helped bring U.S. economic growth to standstill, the strong May jobs report came as very good news. The U.S. added 280,000 new jobs and saw signs that wage growth is picking up steam. Even the uptick in the unemployment rate to 5.5 percent represents a positive development, as more job seekers are reentering the workforce.
But those happy developments for the American people are a problem for the Republican Party and its 2016 presidential candidates. After the GOP's comical failure in 2012 to pretend "Obama made the economy worse," House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) could only complain, "After so many years of little growth, few jobs, and stagnant wages, America must do more than just take one step forward for every two steps back." But it is would-be White House occupant Jeb Bush who has the biggest challenge of all. Obama, it turns out, has now created six times as many jobs as Jeb's brother George W. did in eight years in office.
Back on January 9, 2009, the reliably Republican Wall Street Journal published a helpful analysis titled, "Bush on Jobs: The Worst Track Record on Record." Last week, Bill McBride of Calculated Risk provided an updated analysis to show just how dismal. Some of the highlights:
During Dubya's two terms in office, the U.S. economy created just 1.3 million new jobs. So far, six times more--7.7 million jobs--have been added 28 months into President Obama's second term.
The private sector actually lost 463,000 jobs under George W. Bush. In contrast, Obama has presided over 63 straight months of private sector job creation, 8.3 million in all.
Under small government Republican George W. Bush, the public sector at all levels grew by 1.7 million workers. In contrast, federal, state and local governments have shed 638,000 jobs since Barack Obama first took the oath of office.
Let that settle in for a moment. Barack Obama wasn't only facing the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. The Obama recovery alone in modern American history was undermined by the overall contraction of government at all levels. The mythmaking of Kevin McCarthy aside, Obama's expansion have been more robust if Republicans on Capitol Hill and in state and local governments hadn't stood in his way. DC Republicans didn't just block Obama initiatives like the American Jobs Act and infrastructure investment that could have boosted employment when unemployment was mired at 9 percent and strangle job creation and consumer confidence with their debt ceiling hostage-taking. The destructive austerity policies of state and local governments created an "anti-stimulus," with layoffs of public sector workers and cuts to spending that only served to undermine the gains from the stimulus. By May 2013, the Hamilton Institute estimated those austerity policies cost 2.2 American million jobs and resulted in the slowest recovery since World War II. In April 2012, the Economic Policy Institute explained why:
↓ Story continues below ↓ The current recovery is the only one that has seen public-sector losses over its first 31 months...If public-sector employment had grown since June 2009 by the average amount it grew in the three previous recoveries (2.8 percent) instead of shrinking by 2.5 percent, there would be 1.2 million more public-sector jobs in the U.S. economy today. In addition, these extra public-sector jobs would have helped preserve about 500,000 private-sector jobs.
To put it another way, "Democrats saved the economy; Republicans tried to kill it." And as the job numbers continue to show, Barack Obama is just the latest to show the economy almost always does better when a Democrat is in the White House. Compared to Jeb Bush's brother, about six times better.The Kremlin-backed separatist press service refused to comment on Surkov’s alleged visit by phone. No information on Surkov’s visit could be found on the Kremlin’s website, and an emailed request for comment on June 2 to Russia’s presidential |
looked in the abstract. We found ourselves both on the ground, her arms tightly wrapped around my back, her hands stroking the back of my head. In between my sobs I found myself shouting, "I'm gonna die!"
The words were coming out before I could fully process what I was saying, which was ironic given the problem I faced. Saki kept patting my head and stroking my back, saying "You're not alone. We'll try to work this out. I'm trying my best for your sake. We'll go through this together."
I nuzzled my face into her shirt and continued to cry, my attention drifting toward the feeling of our contact, the rhythm of her breathing and stroking, the sound of her voice. Slowly, I began to calm down. We lay there like that for a few minutes until eventually I pulled away and sat up, wiping my eyes. She sat up as well and put her arm on my shoulder. After a pause, I said, "I think I'm ok now."
For the next couple of hours, we kept the conversation going. Saki talked a lot about her views on things, often going off on relevant tangents to talk about her personal experiences and things she had read about. Her age enabled her to have a deep wealth of experience and wisdom that made her come at things from a different angle than other people could.
My emotions built up again, and this time I also felt the corruption start to well up in me, like the gathering cumulonimbus before a thunderstorm. I lifted the beads again to divert the flow. I could feel that this time was going to be bad. I told Saki, fighting back the tears again, "You should leave. It's flaring up again. It's going to be bad. I think this might be the one that does me in."
"Ok. I can stay for a while. I'll feel it when I have to leave."
The air around her took on a slight optical distortion, not unlike heat blur, but with some kind of prism effect. I recognized it as the oft-warned-about spatial distortion that came from clashing Power of multiple people. The shape this distortion took made it look a little like she was sitting inside a giant soap bubble. She said that at low levels, she could oppose my Power around her body safely. I couldn't even imagine the amount of dexterity and finesse she must have had with her Power to be able to do something like that.
She started asking me about my childhood and teenage years, and I told her stories from my life. I liked doing this, because if I died today, my memories and the things that I did and saw that I found interesting would be preserved in her 'immortal' mind. I asked her what me talking about these things meant to her. She answered, "I want to know you better, and see if there are any other patterns in the people who develop Hashimoto-Applebaum syndrome. There might be something meaningful in there, something that could let me help you or others in the future. Also, do you know all of those open answer questions and interviews you were given in school?"
"Yes," I replied. Most of those things were asking about my emotions and outlook on things, and about reflection on what I had learned and my past experiences. I had guessed that they essentially existed to make sure all of the students were doing ok mentally and emotionally, and maybe to look at our styles of thought.
Saki continued, "From those, and other metrics the students are evaluated on, like coursework, they are assigned a global score, called the Personality Index. I think it's a little primitive, since collapsing a lot of information about someone into a scalar isn't the most informative or meaningful thing in my opinion, but I don't think it's an entirely useless metric for measuring the general capabilities of a person. Your score is very high. The highest I've seen in a very long time. Because of this, I was considering you as a candidate for someone to serve as my replacement should some misfortune befall me. If you survive, I'll still consider you for that position."
My life had gotten pretty strange and heavy over the past few days, but that was still a pretty shocking statement to have dropped on me. She had been paying attention to me even though we'd never spoken directly before today? And after doing so, after 'looking into the sun of my mind', she still thought that highly of me? I wasn't sure how to respond. Eventually, I replied, "I'm really surprised that you think that highly of me. I'll take the compliment though. I never really thought of myself as a leader. I think I have too many dumb and random ideas for people to take me seriously."
Then, I told the story of the time me and Atsuko got in trouble with the teachers for sneaking into Kisuge Elementary School at night because we wanted to say goodnight to the false minoshiro statue. The nostalgia and longing for a return for those days, those 'pure moments' was too much to bear, and my control wavered. I felt my anguish and fear rushing on like a wave about to break, and saw the tatami on the floor undulate in sympathy. I redoubled my efforts on the beads, and the external motion subsided, but inside I felt my emotions continue to grow like a building electric charge.
After a minute she said, "I'm really sorry, but I don't think I can stay with you any longer. I've reached the limit of my ability to protect myself. I have to go." She reached into her pocket and drew out a decent sized ball of white plastic. She levitated it in front of her and molded it into a featureless mask with slits for the holes in the eyes and mouth. She floated it to me and I put it on. She didn't need to say anything: I knew what it was. It was to have me try to hide behind the expressionless face and dampen my identity. Maybe it would help a little.
Saki got up and walked to the door, and paused right after she grabbed the handle. I replied, "It's ok. I know you have to leave. Please get out of here before you get hurt."
She opened the door, and as she was about to step through it she turned back to look at me, her hair blowing in the wind from outside, and said, "Please stay alive, Hidenori." as a tear ran down her face. I could tell that she didn't want to leave me alone, but we both knew she had to go. After a pause, she turned and walked out. Her empathy gave me strength to face the oncoming storm.
While I waited for the time I would be overcome, I studied Saki's paper creation, which she had left on the table, losing myself in its intricate symmetries. I felt like I was falling into its patterns and almost forgetting the passage of time. I think it made me last a little longer.
I wanted to get away from the hut so it wouldn't be destroyed, so I would have somewhere to talk to Saki if I survived. It was night, so the landscape had taken on a tone that was much more disturbing than its appearance during the day. I ran across the vitrified ground, crushing twisted shards underfoot, dodging pools of corrosive chemicals. To my right a lone tree still stood. Its leaves were gone and it was on fire, dropping slag into an oily pool. A fork of lightning blasted from the top of the tree into the sky, burning its image into my retinas, the thunder hurting my ears.
I kept running, and the frequency of the lightning increased, with the flashes in the sky becoming almost a constant flicker lighting up the night, and strikes on the ground occurring every few seconds. I started to feel tremors underfoot.
The snowflakes falling from the sky gave way to a rain of a dark orange-brown liquid, whose odor was nauseating beyond description and to the point of physical pain. The drops were very sparse, but large. Where the liquid touched me it instantly created burning wounds. The pain was almost unbearable, and I had nothing with which I could wash the stuff off, so it slithered down my skin, carving trails of destruction as it flowed. I realized that even just this rain was life threatening, so I used what Power I could muster control over to divert the path of the drops and make them fall around me rather than onto my body, and I tore off my shirt and tried to dab as much of it off of me as I could.
I felt it building inside me to terrifying levels, and the tremors got worse. I tried to call upon my best memories, my happiest moments, to try to bring something else into focus, to try to stop it however I could.
… naming all the plants in the garden with my mother… my first romantic kiss with a girl, my hands around Atsuko's waist in a field of moonlit mist… me and my cousin dissolving more and more sugar into a glass of icy water… Hiroshi's cry of satisfaction when I put his dick in my mouth… my grandfather showing me how he made bonsai, training branches with helices of copper wire, carving and bleaching Jin and Shari into the wood with his Power… fireworks blossom above Lake Kausmigaura… FIRE! BAMBOO VILLAGE BURNS, ATSUKO LOOKS UP AT ME DESPARETELY, HER CLOTHES IN TATTERS, BODY PARTS BURNED AWAY…
As I feel my fear enveloping me like licking flames, a ring of fire erupts around me, Fallen branches turn to scaly charcoal, and crackling sparks fly into the night.
… my father and I fix a broken oil lamp… the smell of amaryllis blooming in the closet… Atsuko's cat tackles her mechanical toy minoshiro; it pantomimes its lockstep gait as it's getting chewed on… playing catch with my mother using my newly awakened Power…HOWLING WINDS UNEARTH SKELETAL CORPSES IN THE STREETS… tadpoles of tin flow through copper, energy levels settle and the metals harden as they embrace… my groupmates play a game of searching for hidden objects… Perseid meteors raking across the night sky… mom and dad stacking huge towers of rocks by the beach… winning the ball pushing game against the students of Koumi 95… my grandparents telling me stories from their youth… INHUMAN FANGED FACES CROWD TOGETHER LIKE BUBBLES BLOWN WITH A STRAW… CARRION BIRDS OF ASH PECK AT THE CORPSES OF MY FAMILY... HIROSHI GETTING POURED ON BY THE BROWN DEATH-RAIN, WRITHING AND SCREAMING IN AGONY…
The ashes of the wood twist into terrible forms that rush around me. The dark rain starts to fall faster. I can barely keep it at bay. I am not winning this fight. The distinction between my mind's eye and what I actually observe in reality has almost completely broken down. I scramble to find something to hold on to, one last stand to make.
…family and friends sitting around the dinner table, when I turned seventeen and came of age… I HAVE MADE A MOCKERY OF ALL THAT THEY VALUE. I STAND BEFORE THE RAGING FLAMES IN THE TEMPULE OF PURIFICATION. I AM THE PAPER DOLL THAT BURNS IN THE PIT AT THE ALTAR. I AM THE BAD KARMA THAT MUST BE DISCARDED!
A form rises from a pool of the dark rain. It ripples and morphs, eventually taking the shape of my mask: a mask made of Karmic Demon's blood, its color in contrast to my white one. The mask of the Karmic Demon stares at me, a void of nothingness behind the eyeholes. It speaks no words, for it has none, but it beckons me into the abyss, the abyss that I know is me, the pitch-black abyss against which the sentience of humanity is only a fleeting and doomed adversary. The raging winds are my terror itself, the mask and rain my despair. I feel something coming, a building pressure like when my Power first awakened. But this time I feel it tainted with evil.
I knew I could no longer keep it from spilling over, so I braced myself right before the eruption that was to come. Then the depths of my personal hell opened up.
What would otherwise take millions of years was transpiring in a matter of seconds:
great fissures opened in the earth, and pieces of land rose and fell past each other, long buried rock welling up and folding over on itself in jagged sheets. I could no longer keep my footing, so I let myself fall to the ground. The winds swelled up to hurricane force, whipping dirt and glass and burning oil into me.
I covered my face with my shirt and hoped I wouldn't be crushed by flying boulders. I felt rapid oscillations of heat and cold and saw bursts of light through my shirt and closed eyelids. I do not know how long it lasted, but it felt like forever as I lay there, being tossed around from time to time, waiting for it to stop one way or the other. Eventually the chaos ramped down and I pulled the shirt off of my face and sat up. I was cut, burned, sore all over, and exhausted, but I managed to get up and walk. Somehow, I was still alive.
The hut remained, but was damaged and misshapen. The wood was twisted and warped, and there was a spire of rock jutting through the roof. I was about to pass out, and going inside before doing that seemed like a good idea. Though there was some risk of the hut collapsing on me, I thought it was more likely that the lethal rain would return, so I decided to take my chances with the hut. Luckily the door could still be opened. The tatami nearest to the door was concave since the floor had sunk down, but that didn't matter. I crumpled onto it and lost consciousness.
When I woke up, Saki had returned, and was applying disinfectant to my cuts and chemical burns. The light outside coming in through the clouds indicated that it was the next morning, and that I had slept through the night. We made eye contact, and she asked, "Those worm-burns are nasty. What the hell caused that?"
I replied, "I think it was elemental bromine." She grimaced in disgust.
She took out some bandages, and said, "There's some really dangerous stuff out there. I don't think I should go near the epicenter even now. I'm glad you made it through."
"Hutton would have loved to see my handiwork," I offered. That statement must have been unexpected, since she chuckled for quite a long time. Her laughter made me reciprocate genuinely, easing my tensions greatly.
I saw that she had used her Power to straighten out the hut a bit. It didn't look like it was likely to collapse anymore.
Saki asked, applying the bandages, "So, have you thought of anything that could help us?"
"Could I be blinded? I know that Power requires line of sight to work, so would loss of my sight be enough to stop my Power?"
"It's actually a misconception that Power requires line of sight. The idea comes from the fact that the most common use of Power is moving a macroscopic object or material. Obviously, to do that you necessarily need to know the precise location of that object or material in three dimensional space. But that's only a specific case of Power use. What exactly we are physically doing when we use our Power is still not known, but it appears that knowledge and understanding of what is to be done is the requirement. There are many things that you can know about and understand despite the fact that you can't see them, and you can use your Power to affect them. For example, you learned to manipulate the copper and tin at the molecular level despite the fact that you cannot directly perceive molecules. Likewise I cannot directly perceive my telomeres. Also, the effects of our subconscious on the environment take place over large distances and long spans of time, which is also beyond our direct perception."
That made a lot of sense. I wondered why I had just taken that line of sight factoid on face value when it was so obviously untrue upon examination. "I see…" I said, "But wouldn't just disrupting or weakening my Power be enough?
"The hypnotic strobe therapy that Head Priest Hideyoshi gave you works by overstimulating the visual cortex and attenuating your arbitrary and spontaneous visualizations. But as you've seen, it only works to a small extent. The same goes for attempting to seal your Power."
"I read that in the past only some humans had Power, since having Power is a genetic trait. Could I be genetically modified to lose my Power?"
"Unfortunately, no. It's true that Power is genetic, and we have identified some groups of genetic factors required for it, but those are developmental genes. Once your brain has already formed, and your Power is awakened, you have it. Changing the genes after the fact won't make you lose your abilities."
"What if you were to go into my brain and destroy parts of it, like my visual centers? Would that be enough to take my Power away?"
"I'm sorry, but that won't work either. After the discovery of Power, or PK as they called it back then, but before the fall of prehistoric civilization, many societies tried to destroy people's PK abilities, but to no avail. Early PKs were subjected to all sorts of horrific things, lobotomization of various brain parts for example, in an attempt to remove their Power. It was quickly learned that for someone whose Power is awakened, it is inherently a part of their mind. As long as they are alive and have brain activity, their Power exists in some form. Removing sight or visual processing may prevent a person from doing certain kinds of things with their Power, but it will still manifest in other ways. We won't be able to stop the leak by blocking your Power entirely. We have to think of something else."
We sat thinking silently for a couple of minutes. I thought of a question that could lead in a promising direction. "So why is it that my power is leaking out of control? What's going on in my mind that's causing this to happen? I don't think my personality is any different than it was a few weeks ago."
Saki thought for a little while, then responded, "Like I said before, people who become Karmic Demons are usually the most intelligent, talented, observant, and sensitive individuals. Of course, most people who fit those descriptions do not become Karmic Demons, but almost all Karmic Demons had personalities that fit those descriptions. I think from this we can assume that those traits are somehow partially responsible for the problem. The classical conception is that Karmic Demons come from these superintelligent and possibly superarrogant people, and it's somehow that pride and arrogance that makes them subconsciously think they should remake the world in their image. There may be some modicum of truth to that, but I think it's mostly a way for people to blame the Karmic Demons and hold them responsible for the problem, because it just feels 'right' for the problem to come from some character flaw in the person. The world doesn't necessarily work like that, though. There's no reason a priori that someone couldn't end up this way through no 'fault' of their own. The traits that lead to Hashimoto-Applebaum syndrome may not be bad things in isolation, but indirectly lead to disaster in the context of some other factors. I know you asked me the question, but let me turn it back to you: why do you think this is happening? Is there anything that you can see from your first-person perspective that might be an explanation, even if only a partial one?"
I took another minute of self-examination, and replied, "Now is not the time for modesty or politeness, so I'm going to be blunt. Also, this is all only a conjecture. I know I'm smart. In some ways the 'arrogant' label could apply to me as well. I try not to come across that way, and deep down I don't think I have more moral worth than other people or anything, but at the end of the day, I do feel like I have the subconscious attitude that I'm going to be the guy who has the ideas, who does the intellectual things. Maybe others have some kind of trepidation about change or their own efficacy, whereas I subconsciously want to impose my will on everything, and it creates this nexus that's too big to control on its own. Maybe one part of me isn't'ready' for all the ideas of the others… I'm not exactly sure where I'm going with this but I hope you get something from what I'm saying... But I'm not the only one who's smart. Most of the others do not get Hashimoto-Applebaum syndrome. For example, you're the smartest person I've ever met, and I can just tell that you're of no risk of having this problem. Maybe it's because you're open-minded yet not radical. You say everyone has these crazy subconscious thoughts and visualizations, and that these things do leak out of everyone at low levels. So the question really becomes: why is it that my Power decides to act on these subconscious thoughts against my volition and choice? Am I just completely oblivious with respect to whether what I'm feeling at a particular time is valid and constructive? Or does it come from some pent up subconscious feelings of inadequacy and fear? One other thing that is told in the lore of Karmic Demons is that they often come from people who were alone or isolated. In the classical sense I don't think that's the case for me: among my peers I have friends and sexual partners, my family is kind and supportive, and I consider myself to be in step with humanity and its goals. However… to my community, to culture, to the pulse of the times in Kamisu, I feel no connection. I guess it's that… I don't really see anything I could do that these people would really care about. I know that sounds like it stands in contrast to what I said before about me being the guy with the ideas, but I guess this is all about this sense I have that all of my preferences run orthogonal to everyone else's…But, going back to what I said before, you would never have this problem, even though you say you aren't so deep in our culture either… I know you could never become a Karmic Demon, but I can't verbalize why. If we could figure that out, we might have an answer. I know you have all these years of experience over me, but I get the impression you were just as stable in your youth too… I'm rambling, aren't I? Ultimately, I like who I am, but if I need to become someone else to survive, I'll do it. Especially if I also become a better person in the process."
"Your willingness to change yourself, to fundamentally become the person you need to be to survive tells me that you really have vision. And while you may be weighed down by the fetters of instinct, you are able to overcome them. We like to think of ourselves as an enlightened people, evolved beyond the tar pits of violence and strife that dragged our ancestors down. We've given ourselves free love to resolve conflict, aversions to harming our own kind, and even Death Feedback, the 'ultimate' defense against violence. But the reason we experience those sexual drives is that we have a lot of conflicts. Those aversions stay our hand but underneath the malice still exists. We wear a mask of civility on top of the animal base. This is not so fundamentally different than the barbarians that preceded us; they had masks of their own—not in the same form as ours, but serving basically the same function. I've read a lot of their books: It's a very strange experience. Most of the people's actions and motivations make sense on a basic level, but the whole thing feels like it's taking place on another planet: it's not even the fact that their methods of achieving their goals are so alien, but rather that their goals and priorities themselves are all different, too. Understandable, but different. I do think that our methods of controlling aggression are more advanced and effective, but they are still only dykes protecting the city; the raging seas beyond still exist. Some writers have tried to paint this as artistic or tragically beautiful, or that our spark of creativity and inspiration comes from this place as well. I disagree. I think there is another part of us, something that is neither mask nor beast beneath it. That place is where things like intelligence, creativity and curiosity come from. And I think that it is this thing that is the true value of humanity. We may be able to afford to lose anything else. We could lose the form of our bodies, romance and the emotion of love, the limiters on our aggression, our instincts of empathy, or even our Power itself. I do not know if we would be able to survive without these things, but I do know that the one thing we truly cannot do without is that curiosity and creativity. We may be able to survive without it, but that is the only thing we could lose where I would ask what the point of existence would be in its absence. If there is a basket into which we are forced to put all our eggs, that is the one we should choose. In my youth, my criticisms of my society—society in the Age of Mist as you would call it—focused on the repression of knowledge, the denial of truth and revision of memory. I was directly hurt by all of those things, so that is what I came to hate: being kept in ignorance. I still agree with those criticisms, but as the events grow more distant in time my reflections on them become more distant and external as well. Now I think that our real problem back then, the thing that most everything else stemmed from, was a lack of vision, a lack of that kind of creativity and curiosity. Tomiko was one of the only people to keep that alive in those times, and try to perpetuate it into the future by experimenting on my Group. Is where we go wrong always that lack of vision, lack of attention to creativity and curiosity, or is there something else?..."
She paused for a moment in thought, then continued, "So where does this leave us? Those who develop Hashimoto-Applebaum syndrome are not those with the most malice in their hearts. On the contrary, they tend to be the most sensitive people. So it is not the content of their subconscious thoughts that is the problem. It is the fact that these thoughts manifest in reality to a much greater extent than they do in normal people. I certainly don't claim to lack violence or malice in all of my subconscious thoughts, nor do I have complete conscious control over my Power. However, I do not leak enough to cause danger, and what is leaked I subconsciously direct outside the Sacred Barrier. I'd wager that the reason only those who are so sensitive and observant become Karmic Demons is that someone not so in tune with their environment wouldn't warp it to such a strong degree even if their Power was leaking out of their control. If that's right it's a pretty dark irony because you are so interested in the natural world and understanding your environment, but in the end it might be your own observation and curiosity gone rogue that is dangerously distorting it… 'Become a better person'… What is a better person that one could become?..."
I didn't have an answer to that, so I started to think about it. It was evident that Saki was also deep in thought. She startled me when she broke the silence, since she was speaking in a fast and excited manner, in contrast with the pensive tone she had before, "I just thought of something. I want to try it right now. Sorry, but I'm not going to tell you what it is until we do it, because I think it'll have the most impact that way. Come on. We have to go into town."
I responded, "What if I have another big spill when I'm there? Isn't that really risky?"
"We'll only be there for a short time. It's only to get something and leave by other means. We'll do this as quickly as possible."
"Why don't you just go get it and bring it here, then?"
"Because it will be faster if I don't have to make the return journey, and I don't know how much longer you have."
"Ok."
She took my hand and led me out of the hut. My hut was located at the peak of Tategishiyama, and the area where I had let loose was another elevated area to the north. We headed east, toward the river where her boat was tied. I wasn't in good enough shape to run, but I could walk at a decent pace, and it was only a couple of kilometers. After a time, we came to the end of the area that I had majorly corrupted and headed down into a valley that she told me was a strip mine long ago. We continued out of this depression into flatter lands, and eventually came to the water.
The boat was a speed model: lightweight ceramic sitting high in the water on two pontoons with two enantiomeric steel propellers between them. We hopped on and took off down the canal. The path the water took was narrow and winding, but Saki accelerated the boat to speeds that to me did not seem even close to safe. We must have been going at least 100 kilometers per hour. When I voiced my concern she said that she could handle it. We took a turn south onto a channel that Saki said was artificially dug to connect this system to one that led to Lake Kitaura. When we hit that system we started going southeast. The channel widened as we went, and eventually fanned out dramatically into Lake Kitaura. The place we were headed to was on the north end of Pinewind Village, which Saki told me had been destroyed when her childhood friend turned into a Karmic Demon. It had long since been rebuilt, however, so I really didn't want to be responsible for its destruction a second time.
Saki stopped the boat when we arrived at our destination. We got out and proceeded to walk across a field with several small buildings lining the perimeter. Thankfully, there was no one else around.
We came to a small brick storage shed with a wooden door pointing toward the interior of the field. Saki opened the door and I followed her in. Sitting on the ground was a short stack of pentagonal plates made of an astonishingly flawless transparent material. The diameter of their circumscribed circle would be about two meters, and they were about six centimeters thick. They were tapered, so that the bottom face was slightly larger than the top face. Saki levitated the stack and backed up out of the storeroom with it in tow.
Once we were well into the field she set the lowest plate down and stepped onto it. She beckoned for me to do the same, so I did.
Saki scattered the other plates from the stack and had them surround us. They came together to form a dodecahedral shell around us, with the plate we stood on as the bottom face. The plates then fused together, encasing us in a seamless dodecahedron.
Saki said, "This is the Mizugame. Its purpose is to allow people to leave the atmosphere and go into outer space. It's essentially a protective shell that keeps a pressurized atmosphere inside. In addition, high lead content in the material offers radiation protection."
"We're going into space? I didn't even know we had something like this. I read once that the ancients had gone into space, and I always wondered whether we would try to do that again. It's not like there's no point to flight. The Rats like to use those airplanes."
"We've had it for a few of years now, but we've only fully used it once in a test. Reentry and landing requires a lot of concentration, so we're trying to think of ways to make that process easier and safer before we start using it more. But we need to go to space to try my idea, so I'm willing to do it. I assume you're ok with the fact that it's dangerous given your situation."
"Yeah. If this doesn't work, I'm doomed anyway, so it doesn't matter. Plus, you say the hard part is landing it. If I'm going to die anyway I'd rather go into space first than not… We're really going into space. That's pretty amazing."
"It sure is an experience. I was on the Mizugame when we took it into space last time. Without further ado, let's go."
"Ok."
With a small jerk followed by a feeling of acceleration, we started to ascend. The field grew smaller and smaller, and more and more of Kamisu 66 became visible. The Tone River was southwest of us, snaking up and to the northwest. I soon could see the ocean in the distance, the beaches of Whitesand a faint strip. In only a minute, we were already many kilometers up. I could see the entire angular eastward pointing peninsula of Kamisu, and Lake Kasumigaura and Mt. Tsukuba to the west.
"Amazing…" I breathed. Looking up, I noticed I could see the stars despite the presence of the sun to the west. I could also begin to see the curvature of the Earth.
Saki said, "The atmosphere is no longer too dense. I'm going into the second phase of ascent."
Suddenly, the feeling of acceleration stopped and was replaced by freefall. My feet left the bottom of the Mizugame and I gave an involuntary yell. For a moment I thought something had gone wrong and we were plummeting to our deaths, but I could see that instead we were still rising, even faster than before. Gentle hands of Saki's Power stopped me from drifting around and we were anchored floating in the center of the Mizugame. The Earth kept dropping away, faster and faster. Now the Eastern side of the Japanese archipelago could be seen. Something didn't make sense.
"How come we're not crushed by this insane acceleration?" I asked.
"It's a little more advanced than what they teach at the Unified Class, but the theory of General Relativity states that acceleration and gravity are essentially the same thing. It also states that gravitation can be described both as a remote force and as an alteration of the shape of space. For example, one could say that a thrown object moves in a curved path because it experiences a remote force, or because the Earth's gravitational field bends space such that the path we see it take is actually a straight trajectory. Likewise, a simple levitation can be described as an application of a force, but also as a distortion of the shape of space. These are not just alternate explanations of a phenomenon: they have been demonstrated to be truly equivalent statements. If it's possible to do it to defy gravity, it's also possible to counteract acceleration. You just need to understand the principles behind it. Also, by doing this, it should be possible to reach effectively infinite speeds."
I could see that the Earth was round now. Our speed continued to increase, to the point where it looked like the Earth was falling away from us, like a ball dropped off a cliff. Even though I felt no motion, the fact that my eyes were focusing at infinity gave my brain a sense of our mind-boggling speed.
Our path started to curve so that the sun was at our backs, and we experienced a 'full Earth'. A little to my right I saw a similarly full moon in the distance.
"Is there really no limit to what our Power can do?" I mused.
"That's the biggest question, isn't it? I'll say that in this case, like with so many other things, the theoretical ideas were conceived of in the late prehistoric era. But I can personally take the credit for this one: I had the idea independently almost a century before I stumbled upon the writings of Miguel Alcubierre."
We finally started to slow down and came to a stop when the Earth's apparent diameter was about three times that of the moon from the surface.
Saki's voice was almost a whisper, "It's just suspended in the void. There's an endless expanse of nothing, and then suddenly, there's something there. And it's the nexus of our existence. Right now, we're farther away than anyone else is. I think we're farther than anyone ever has been. Even the ancients."
I whispered back, "Wow... It looks so still. It's like it's sitting there just for us to look at. The colors are so vibrant. I—I don't know what to say; it's just so beautiful. I can't even describe what this is making me feel, but it's compelling me to express myself, to do something, I don't know what."
Saki assumed the lotus position and motioned for me to do so as well. She started chanting a mantra, and I joined in, entering the tranquility of meditation. It didn't take long in this place. I saw us and the Mizugame as just another body anchored in space, all motions at this scale taking place over imperceptible periods of time.
When Saki stopped chanting and spoke, her voice commanded a new gravity and presence. It was not intimidating, however, but evoked something more like definitive advice from a trusted friend. She began, "Here we are, far from home and looking upon it from above. From this vantage, feel the insignificance and impermanence of all you know. Your existence and experiences are merely a flickering shadow in the vastness of the cosmos. You feel yourself to be separate from an external world, but reality makes no such distinction. There is only cause and effect. You are the dancer and the dance. You are the instrument the universe plays, and the universe is the instrument you play. Our Power is only one voice in the ensemble, and is ultimately no different than the others. Humanity has taken eons to reach a stage where we can use it, and our first encounter was disastrous, but over millennia we are gradually coming to learn to coexist with it. Now you need to learn to coexist with it. It is a part of the universe. It is a part of us. We are a part of the universe. We are a part of all Power. This is how things always were, even when we did not know it to be so. Coexistence is possible, for we are already coexisting."
I was one with the universe. Energy going into me, energy coming from me. I no longer held the illusion of identity that governed waking life, and I now |
online lies. This was not the first campaign to be marred by misinformation, of course. But the sheer outlandishness of the claims being made, and believed, suggested to many that the Internet had brought about a fundamental devaluing of the truth. Many pundits argued that the “hyper-democratizing” force of the Internet had helped usher in a “post-truth” world, where people based their opinions not on facts or reason but on passion and prejudice. Yet, even among this information anarchy, there remains an authority of sorts. Facebook and Google now define the experience of the Internet for most people, and in many ways they play the role of regulators. In the weeks after the election, they faced enormous criticism for their failure to halt the spread of fake news and misinformation on their services. The problem was not simply that people had been able to spread lies but that the digital platforms were set up in ways that made them especially potent. The “share” button sends lies flying around the Web faster than fact checkers can debunk them. The supposedly neutral platforms use personalized algorithms to feed us information based on precise data models of our preferences, trapping us in “filter bubbles” that cripple critical thinking and increase polarization. The threat of fake news was compounded by this sense that the role of the press had been ceded to an arcane algorithmic system created by private companies that care only about the bottom line. Not so very long ago, it was thought that the tension between commercial pressure and the public interest would be one of the many things made obsolete by the Internet. In the mid-aughts, during the height of the Web 2.0 boom, the pundit Henry Jenkins declared that the Internet was creating a “participatory culture” where the top-down hegemony of greedy media corporations would be replaced by a horizontal network of amateur “prosumers” engaged in a wonderfully democratic exchange of information in cyberspace—an epistemic agora that would allow the whole globe to come together on a level playing field. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest attained their paradoxical gatekeeper status by positioning themselves as neutral platforms that unlocked the Internet’s democratic potential by empowering users. It was on a private platform, Twitter, where pro-democracy protesters organized, and on another private platform, Google, where the knowledge of a million public libraries could be accessed for free. These companies would develop into what the tech guru Jeff Jarvis termed “radically public companies,” which operate more like public utilities than like businesses. But there has been a growing sense among mostly liberal-minded observers that the platforms’ championing of openness is at odds with the public interest. The image of Arab Spring activists using Twitter to challenge repressive dictators has been replaced, in the public imagination, by that of ISIS propagandists luring vulnerable Western teen-agers to Syria via YouTube videos and Facebook chats. The openness that was said to bring about a democratic revolution instead seems to have torn a hole in the social fabric. Today, online misinformation, hate speech, and propaganda are seen as the front line of a reactionary populist upsurge threatening liberal democracy. Once held back by democratic institutions, the bad stuff is now sluicing through a digital breach with the help of irresponsible tech companies. Stanching the torrent of fake news has become a trial by which the digital giants can prove their commitment to democracy. The effort has reignited a debate over the role of mass communication that goes back to the early days of radio.
The debate around radio at the time of “The War of the Worlds” was informed by a similar fall from utopian hopes to dystopian fears. Although radio can seem like an unremarkable medium—audio wallpaper pasted over the most boring parts of your day—the historian David Goodman’s book “Radio’s Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s” makes it clear that the birth of the technology brought about a communications revolution comparable to that of the Internet. For the first time, radio allowed a mass audience to experience the same thing simultaneously from the comfort of their homes. Early radio pioneers imagined that this unprecedented blurring of public and private space might become a sort of ethereal forum that would uplift the nation, from the urban slum dweller to the remote Montana rancher. John Dewey called radio “the most powerful instrument of social education the world has ever seen.” Populist reformers demanded that radio be treated as a common carrier and give airtime to anyone who paid a fee. Were this to have come about, it would have been very much like the early online-bulletin-board systems where strangers could come together and leave a message for any passing online wanderer. Instead, in the regulatory struggles of the twenties and thirties, the commercial networks won out. Corporate networks were supported by advertising, and what many progressives had envisaged as the ideal democratic forum began to seem more like Times Square, cluttered with ads for soap and coffee. Rather than elevating public opinion, advertisers pioneered techniques of manipulating it. Who else might be able to exploit such techniques? Many saw a link between the domestic on-air advertising boom and the rise of Fascist dictators like Hitler abroad. Tim Wu cites the leftist critic Max Lerner, who lamented that “the most damning blow the dictatorships have struck at democracy has been the compliment they have paid us in taking over and perfecting our prized techniques of persuasion and our underlying contempt for the credulity of the masses.” Amid such concerns, broadcasters were under intense pressure to show that they were not turning listeners into a zombified mass ripe for the Fascist picking. What they developed in response is, in Goodman’s phrase, a “civic paradigm”: radio would create active, rational, tolerant listeners—in other words, the ideal citizens of a democratic society. Classical-music-appreciation shows were developed with an eye toward uplift. Inspired by progressive educators, radio networks hosted “forum” programs, in which citizens from all walks of life were invited to discuss the matters of the day, with the aim of inspiring tolerance and political engagement. One such program, “America’s Town Meeting of the Air,” featured in its first episode a Communist, a Fascist, a Socialist, and a democrat. Listening to the radio, then, would be a “civic practice” that could create a more democratic society by exposing people to diversity. But only if they listened correctly. There was great concern about distracted and gullible listeners being susceptible to propagandists. A group of progressive journalists and thinkers known as “propaganda critics” set about educating radio listeners. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis, co-founded by the social psychologist Clyde R. Miller, with funding from the department-store magnate Edward Filene, was at the forefront of the movement. In newsletters, books, and lectures, the institute’s members urged listeners to attend to their own biases while analyzing broadcast voices for signs of manipulation. Listening to the radio critically became the duty of every responsible citizen. Goodman, who is generally sympathetic to the proponents of the civic paradigm, is alert to the off notes here of snobbery and disdain: much of the progressive concern about listeners’ abilities stemmed from the belief that Americans were, basically, dim-witted—an idea that gained currency after intelligence tests on soldiers during the First World War supposedly revealed discouraging news about the capacities of the average American. In the wake of “The War of the Worlds” panic, commentators didn’t hesitate to rail against “idiotic” and “stupid” listeners. Welles and his crew, Dorothy Thompson declared, “have shown up the incredible stupidity, lack of nerve and ignorance of thousands.”
Today, when we speak about people’s relationship to the Internet, we tend to adopt the nonjudgmental language of computer science. Fake news was described as a “virus” spreading among users who have been “exposed” to online misinformation. The proposed solutions to the fake-news problem typically resemble antivirus programs: their aim is to identify and quarantine all the dangerous nonfacts throughout the Web before they can infect their prospective hosts. One venture capitalist, writing on the tech blog Venture Beat, imagined deploying artificial intelligence as a “media cop,” protecting users from malicious content. “Imagine a world where every article could be assessed based on its level of sound discourse,” he wrote. The vision here was of the news consumers of the future turning the discourse setting on their browser up to eleven and soaking in pure fact. It’s possible, though, that this approach comes with its own form of myopia. Neil Postman, writing a couple of decades ago, warned of a growing tendency to view people as computers, and a corresponding devaluation of the “singular human capacity to see things whole in all their psychic, emotional and moral dimensions.” A person does not process information the way a computer does, flipping a switch of “true” or “false.” One rarely cited Pew statistic shows that only four per cent of American Internet users trust social media “a lot,” which suggests a greater resilience against online misinformation than overheated editorials might lead us to expect. Most people seem to understand that their social-media streams represent a heady mixture of gossip, political activism, news, and entertainment. You might see this as a problem, but turning to Big Data-driven algorithms to fix it will only further entrench our reliance on code to tell us what is important about the world—which is what led to the problem in the first place. Plus, it doesn’t sound very fun. The various efforts to fact-check and label and blacklist and sort all the world’s information bring to mind a quote, which appears in David Goodman’s book, from John Grierson, a documentary filmmaker: “Men don’t live by bread alone, nor by fact alone.” In the nineteen-forties, Grierson was on an F.C.C. panel that had been convened to determine how best to encourage a democratic radio, and he was frustrated by a draft report that reflected his fellow-panelists’ obsession with filling the airwaves with rationality and fact. Grierson said, “Much of this entertainment is the folk stuff... of our technological time; the patterns of observation, of humor, of fancy, which make a technological society a human society.” In recent times, Donald Trump supporters are the ones who have most effectively applied Grierson’s insight to the digital age. Young Trump enthusiasts turned Internet trolling into a potent political tool, deploying the “folk stuff” of the Web—memes, slang, the nihilistic humor of a certain subculture of Web-native gamer—to give a subversive, cyberpunk sheen to a movement that might otherwise look like a stale reactionary blend of white nationalism and anti-feminism. As crusaders against fake news push technology companies to “defend the truth,” they face a backlash from a conservative movement, retooled for the digital age, which sees claims for objectivity as a smoke screen for bias. One sign of this development came last summer, in the scandal over Facebook’s “Trending” sidebar, in which curators chose stories to feature on the user’s home page. When the tech Web site Gizmodo reported the claim of an anonymous employee that the curators were systematically suppressing conservative news stories, the right-wing blogosphere exploded. Breitbart, the far-right torchbearer, uncovered the social-media accounts of some of the employees—liberal recent college graduates—that seemed to confirm the suspicion of pervasive anti-right bias. Eventually, Facebook fired the team and retooled the feature, calling in high-profile conservatives for a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg. Although Facebook denied that there was any systematic suppression of conservative views, the outcry was enough to reverse a tiny first step it had taken toward introducing human judgment into the algorithmic machine. For conservatives, the rise of online gatekeepers may be a blessing in disguise. Throwing the charge of “liberal media bias” against powerful institutions has always provided an energizing force for the conservative movement, as the historian Nicole Hemmer shows in her new book, “Messengers of the Right.” Instead of focussing on ideas, Hemmer focusses on the galvanizing struggle over the means of distributing those ideas. The first modern conservatives were members of the America First movement, who found their isolationist views marginalized in the lead-up to the Second World War and vowed to fight back by forming the first conservative media outlets. A “vague claim of exclusion” sharpened into a “powerful and effective ideological arrow in the conservative quiver,” Hemmer argues, through battles that conservative radio broadcasters had with the F.C.C. in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. Their main obstacle was the F.C.C.’s Fairness Doctrine, which sought to protect public discourse by requiring controversial opinions to be balanced by opposing viewpoints. Since attacks on the mid-century liberal consensus were inherently controversial, conservatives found themselves constantly in regulators’ sights. In 1961, a watershed moment occurred with the leak of a memo from labor leaders to the Kennedy Administration which suggested using the Fairness Doctrine to suppress right-wing viewpoints. To many conservatives, the memo proved the existence of the vast conspiracy they had long suspected. A fund-raising letter for a prominent conservative radio show railed against the doctrine, calling it “the most dastardly collateral attack on freedom of speech in the history of the country.” Thus was born the character of the persecuted truthteller standing up to a tyrannical government—a trope on which a billion-dollar conservative-media juggernaut has been built. Today, Facebook and Google have taken the place of the F.C.C. in the conservative imagination. Conservative bloggers highlight the support that Jack Dorsey, the C.E.O. of Twitter, has expressed for Black Lives Matter, and the frequent visits that Google’s Eric Schmidt made to the Obama White House. When Facebook announced that it was partnering with a group of fact checkers from the nonprofit Poynter Institute to flag false news stories, conservatives saw another effort to censor them under the guise of objectivity. Brent Bozell, who runs the conservative media-watchdog group Media Research Center, cited the fact that Poynter received funding from the liberal financier George Soros. “Just like George Soros and company underwrote the Fairness Doctrine several years ago,” he said, “this is about going after conservative talk on the Internet and banning it by somehow projecting it as being false.” One lesson you get from Hemmer’s research is that the conservative skepticism of gatekeepers is not without a historical basis. The Fairness Doctrine really was used by liberal groups to silence conservatives, typically by flooding stations with complaints and requests for airtime to respond. This created a chilling effect, with stations often choosing to avoid controversial material. The technical fixes implemented by Google and Facebook in the rush to fight fake news seem equally open to abuse, dependent, as they are, on user-generated reports. Yet today, with a powerful, well-funded propaganda machine dedicated to publicizing any hint of liberal bias, conservatives aren’t the ones who have the most to fear. As Facebook has become an increasingly important venue for activists documenting police abuse, many of them have complained that overzealous censors routinely block their posts. A recent report by the investigative nonprofit ProPublica shows how anti-racist activism can often fall afoul of Facebook rules against offensive material, while a post by the Louisiana representative Clay Higgins calling for the slaughter of “radicalized” Muslims was deemed acceptable. In 2016, a group of civil-rights activists wrote Facebook to demand that steps be taken to insure that the platform could be used by marginalized people and social movements organizing for change. There was no high-profile meeting with Zuckerberg, only a form letter outlining Facebook’s moderation practices. The wishful story about how the Internet was creating a hyper-democratic “participatory culture” obscures the ways in which it is biased in favor of power.Wednesday, Mar 6, 2013 12:30 PM UTC
For the last decade in American politics, Hugo Chavez became a potent political weapon – within a few years of his ascent, he was transformed from just a leader of a neighboring nation into a boogeyman synonymous with extremism. Regularly invoked in over-the-top For the last decade in American politics, Hugo Chavez became a potent political weapon – within a few years of his ascent, he was transformed from just a leader of a neighboring nation into a boogeyman synonymous with extremism. Regularly invoked in over-the-top political rhetoric, Chavez’s name became a decontextualized epithet to try to attach to a political opponent so as to make that opponent look like a radical. Because of this, America barely flinched upon hearing the news that the Bush administration tried to orchestrate a coup against the democratically elected Venezuelan leader.
Just to get it out of the way, I’ll state the obvious: with respect to many policies, Chavez was no saint. He, for instance, amassed a Just to get it out of the way, I’ll state the obvious: with respect to many policies, Chavez was no saint. He, for instance, amassed a troubling record when it came to protecting human rights and basic democratic freedoms (though as Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy notes, “Venezuela is recognized by many scholars to be more democratic than it was in the pre-Chávez era”). His rein also coincided with a boom in violent crime
That said, these serious problems, while certainly worthy of harsh criticism, were not the primary reason Chavez became the favorite effigy of American politicians and pundits. In an age marked by America’s drone assaults, civil liberties abuses, and war on voting, it is not as if this nation’s political establishment sees an assault on democratic freedoms as deplorable. Likewise, that same political establishment is more than friendly with leaders of countries like Mexico and Colombia – countries which are also periodically hotbeds of crime. That said, these serious problems, while certainly worthy of harsh criticism, were not the primary reason Chavez became the favorite effigy of American politicians and pundits. In an age marked by America’s drone assaults, civil liberties abuses, and war on voting, it is not as if this nation’s political establishment sees an assault on democratic freedoms as deplorable. Likewise, that same political establishment is more than friendly with leaders of countries like Mexico and Colombia – countries which are also periodically hotbeds of violent
No, Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics, and also delivered some indisputably positive results. Indeed, as shown by some of the most significant indicators, Chavez racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving.
For instance, according to data compiled by the For instance, according to data compiled by the UK Guardian, Chavez’s first decade in office saw Venezuelan GDP more than double and both infant mortality and unemployment almost halved. Then there is a remarkable graph from the World Bank that shows that under Chavez’s brand of socialism, poverty in Venezuela plummeted (the Guardian reports that its “extreme poverty” rate fell from 23.4 percent in 1999 to 8.5 percent just a decade later). In all, that left the country with the third lowest poverty rate in Latin America. Additionally, as Weisbrot points out, “college enrollment has more than doubled, millions of people have access to health care for the first time and the number of people eligible for public pensions has quadrupled.”
When a country goes socialist and it craters, it is laughed off as a harmless and forgettable cautionary tale about the perils of command economics. When, by contrast, a country goes socialist and its economy does what Venezuela’s did, it is not perceived to be a laughing matter – and it is not so easy to write off or to ignore. It suddenly looks like a threat to the corporate capitalism, especially when said country has valuable oil resources that global powerhouses like the United States rely on.
For a flamboyant ideologue like Chavez, that meant him being seen by the transnational elite as much more than an insignificant rogue leader of a relatively small country. He came to be seen as a serious threat to the global system of corporate capitalism.Brutalized by cops, convicted Occupy protester faces seven years in jail
By Bill Van Auken
7 May 2014
Cecily McMillan, a 25-year-old student and Occupy Wall Street activist, was taken away in handcuffs to New York City’s Rikers Island prison complex Monday after being convicted on trumped up charges of assaulting a policeman during a protest two years ago.
Cecily McMillan
The trial was apparently the last for Occupy Wall Street protesters, nearly 3,000 of whom were arrested in a massive crackdown ordered by New York City’s then mayor, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, in 2011 and 2012.
McMillan, who was herself brutally beaten by cops and suffered a seizure in the March 17, 2012 incident, faces up to seven years imprisonment when she is sentenced on May 19.
“It would seem that the message that they are sending is don’t join with the dissenters or we’re going to come down on you like a ton of bricks,” McMillan’s attorney, Martin Stolar, told the WSWS Tuesday.
The verdict was handed down in courtroom ringed with guards, including some in riot gear. Supporters of Cecily McMillan shouted out “shame” when the judge denied bail and ordered her remanded to Rikers Island. They were forcibly made to sit back in their seats and then cleared from the courtroom.
Demonstration in New York against the verdict
Later that evening, supporters of McMillan gathered for a protest in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, the site of the original Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and of the six-month anniversary protest where McMillan was brutalized and arrested by police.
A sign at the demonstration in New York against the verdict
Hanging over the entire trial was the Orwellian atmosphere of a police state. McMillan, who suffered serious injuries and a seizure during the arrest and was left with post traumatic stress as a result of her encounter with the police that night, was cast as a criminal and an assailant. Meanwhile, one of the cops who attacked her, Police Officer Grantley Bovell, was portrayed as her innocent victim.
While the prosecution insisted that McMillan had deliberately struck the cop with her elbow, she insisted in her defense that she was grabbed from behind by her breast and reacted instinctively to ward off the assault.
Dismissing her testimony and that of other witnesses who had seen her brutal treatment at the hands of the police, as well a photograph showing severe bruising over her breast, where she said she had been grabbed, prosecutor Erin Cho said contemptuously that her account was “so utterly ridiculous and unbelievable that she might as well have said that aliens came down that night and assaulted her.”
In reality, there is ample videotaped evidence of police beating, knocking down and otherwise physically assaulting hundreds of demonstrators that night, including footage of McMillan herself convulsing on the ground as cops stood around and offered no assistance.
On the other hand, the main evidence presented by the prosecution was a dark and grainy 52-second video posted anonymously on YouTube that purportedly shows McMillan elbowing the cop. It is impossible, however, to see what happened beforehand to cause her reaction. In her closing argument, the prosecutor described the video evidence as “crystal clear,” prompting surprised laughter from reporters in the courtroom.
McMillan’s attorney, Stolar, said that he was “shocked and disappointed” by the jury’s verdict and even more appalled by the judge’s vindictive action in remanding his client to Rikers Island without bail.
A seasoned criminal defense attorney, Stolar said that the denial of bail was both rare and unjustifiable in A case like that of McMillan, who had no prior record, is not facing mandatory jail time and had made every scheduled appearance for two years.
“It’s punishment for having refused to accept a plea,” he said. While prosecutors had offered to accept a guilty plea from McMillan in return for a recommendation of no jail time, they refused to drop felony charges, which would have remained on her record for her entire life.
Stolar said that he is working on an appeal of the denial of bail to get Cecily out of Rikers Island, which he described as a “hell hole for anyone sent there,” and an appeal of the verdict itself.
Grounds for an appeal to throw out the verdict are substantial, he said. They include the refusal of the trial judge, Ronald Zweibel, to admit medical evidence on the injuries that McMillan suffered at the hands of the cops after her arrest and the preclusion of some witnesses prepared to speak about police conduct that night.
Also withheld from the jury was evidence relating to the abusive conduct of the cop she was alleged to have assaulted, who reportedly later the same evening smashed a protester’s head repeatedly into the steps of a bus used to transport those who had been arrested. Also kept out of the trial was the cop’s personnel file and evidence of prior acts of police brutality.
The defense attorney also questioned the use of the video as evidence sufficient to find anyone guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. “I’ve seen Facebook entries used as evidence and video from surveillance cameras, but this a first, the use of something posted anonymously on YouTube,” he said.
Apparently incensed by an innocuous comment made by Stolar to the New York Times during jury selection, the judge imposed a gag order on the defense attorneys throughout the trial.
Lawyers familiar with the judge’s record report that he is well known in the New York City courts as a “second prosecutor.” Zweibel has repeatedly been reappointed to the bench by both Democratic and Republican governors.
McMillan, a graduate student at the New School in New York, described herself in an interview with the Guardian newspaper as “absolutely terrified” by the prospect of prolonged imprisonment, but added, “People can take all sorts of things away from you besides dignity, and this is something I can sleep with.”
The prosecution of Cecily McMillan represents a culmination of the intense nationwide wave of repression unleashed against the Occupy Wall Street protests, which began in September 2011 and whose indictment of the monopoly of political and economic power by the “1 percent” struck a chord among broad layers of the population. So tense are the political and social conditions in the US, which is pervaded by an unprecedented chasm between the wealthy ruling oligarchy and the masses of working people, that even peaceful protests over the issue were seen as an unacceptable threat to be broken up by force.
The final arbitrary and vindictive prosecution carried out against Cecily McMillan is clearly meant as an act of intimidation against anyone thinking of launching similar protests. Her selection for this punishment is undoubtedly not accidental. She was an early organizer of the protests, and her name and photograph had appeared in the New York Times in connection with Occupy. It is far more likely that she was politically targeted for arrest and prosecution than that entire affair arose from a misplaced elbow.
In the course of the Occupy protests, at least 2,600 people were arrested and charged. In over 90 percent of the cases, any felony charges were dropped and pleas to misdemeanors led to release. Virtually the only other case in which the prosecution pressed for a felony conviction and jail time involved a young man who came to the protest from out of state carrying a firearm, which is illegal in New York City.
The decision to target McMillan for this heavy handed and vindictive prosecution was made by New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., a Democrat who was elected in 2009 with the endorsement of virtually all of the party’s so-called liberals. It is a manifestation of the commitment of both major parties and the entire political establishment, at the top of which stands the Obama administration, to policies of police state repression in defense of the corporate and financial elite in the US.
The Socialist Equality Party demands the the immediate release of Cecily McMillan, the overturning of her conviction and the dropping of all charges against her.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.$238 billion loss for U.S. mail; Saturday delivery may end
A letter carrier walks through snowdrifts to his mail truck Feb. 26, 2010, in Maplewood, N.J., following a snowstorm that closed area schools and delayed commuter trains.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Snail mail might soon get even slower.
The cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service announced Tuesday that it will incur about $238 billion in losses in the next 10 years if Congress doesn't permit it to revamp its outdated business model.
Digg
Buzz Up!
Email
Print
Quick Vote What should the U.S. Postal Service do first to save money? End Saturday mail delivery
Raise the price of stamps
Cut staff or View results
The agency is proposing an adjusted mail service schedule, which will likely cut Saturday delivery, and eliminating its prepaid retiree health benefits. That alone, it says, will cut $90 billion in costs over the next 10 years.
The challenges hurting USPS's bottom line reflect a "macro change in society," Postmaster General Jack Potter said at a press conference Monday previewing the proposed changes. "All posts around the world are challenged, just as we are, by the diversion of hard copy to electronic medium."
USPS unveiled a list of cost cutting measures, including closing some branches and raising its prices, two moves which would both require Congressional approval. The agency also said that it expects to save another $123 billion between now and 2020 by renegotiating transportation contracts, cutting work hours, and expanding use of self-service kiosks in grocery stores and other popular retail spots -- measures that don't require Congressional approval.
USPS is trying to curb steep losses. It posted a $3.8 billion loss in its 2009 fiscal year, the latest in a multiyear string of whopping losses. Mail volume was down 12.7% for the year, a trend the agency expects to continue over the next decade as more consumers opt for online bill payments and message delivery.
The Post Office was $10 billion in debt as of Sept. 30 -- not far off from its $15 billion debt limit, which the agency expects to hit in its 2011 fiscal year.
USPS spent $4.8 million on studies by outside consultants, Accenture, the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey and Co. to forecast a 10-year outlook and present a plan that the agency calls both "ambitious and aggressive." Any changes to the government agency's business model would have to be reviewed by the Postal Regulatory Commission, presented in a series of public hearings and approved by Congress.
The Post Office, an independent government agency, does not receive taxpayer dollars and is funded entirely by its own revenue. However, the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 constrains the agency's operations. It prohibits USPS from closing small branches based solely on economic factors, and prevents the agency from expanding its services beyond postal delivery.
Post offices in some countries, including Italy and Japan, have boosted their sales by offering ancillary services, like banking. But unless Congress steps in, USPS cannot expand beyond the postal-mail realm.
Postmaster General Potter said relaxing some of the agency's stringent regulations could allow it to tap into its strengths as one of the largest retail networks in America, as well as "The Most Trusted Government Agency" -- a title USPS has won the last five years in a row.
With 32,000 post offices throughout the country, USPS has more retail locations than McDonald's (MCD, Fortune 500), Starbucks (SBUX, Fortune 500), Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500) and Walgreens (WAG, Fortune 500) combined, Thomas Dohrmann, partner at McKinsey & Company, said in the presentation Monday. That said, the average foot traffic for a post office is about one tenth of that at Walgreens -- a mere 600 weekly customers.
USPS has already begun taking the axe to its budget. The agency made $6 billion in cuts last year, reducing its workforce by about 40,000 employees and chopping overtime hours, transportation costs and other expenses. Congress passed legislation allowing the organization to cut retiree health benefit payments by $4 billion.
Despite those measures, the agency still expects a net loss of $7.8 billion in fiscal 2010.
USPS employs about 600,000 workers and currently has a nationwide hiring freeze. Additionally, Chief Financial Officer Joseph Corbett says he expects to reduce its payrolls by the equivalent of 50,000 full-time employees in fiscal 2010 through natural attrition and by reducing overtime hours. The agency also wants to renegotiate its contracts with four unions in order to gain greater flexibility in scheduling part-time workers and moving employees across departments.
A significant postal price hike is also under consideration, although the price most consumers care about -- the rate for a first-class stamp -- is locked in at 44 cents for 2010.
"At the end of the day, I'm convinced that if we make the changes that are necessary, we can continue to provide universal service for America for decades to come," Potter said. "We can turn back from the red to the black, but there are some very significant changes that are going to have to be made."FESTIVAL OF THE PHOTOCOPIER 2016 is a four-day celebration of zine culture that culminates in a huge zine fair at Melbourne Town Hall on Sunday Feb 14th.
Here’s the program for 2016…
THURSDAY 11th FEBRUARY
8pm: Festival Of The Photocopier launch party at The Tote
Sticky presents the launch party for FESTIVAL OF THE PHOTOCOPIER 2016 at The Tote, with live music from:
Meaty, beaty, big and bouncy The Burnt Sausages
So-good punks Nun of the Tongue
High-fiving and new-waving Hi-Tec Emotions
Perth’s lo-fi heartthrob Ermine Coat
Facebook event here.
FRIDAY 12th FEBRUARY
4pm: No Brains #14 zine launch
Tahira Cham, an unemployed introvert with a fear of leaving her apartment, and a juvenile delinquent with a head injury known only as No Brains must battle their own anxieties and the mysterious forces of the Internet in this disorientating narrative. Sampling from a wide range of influences including Sailor Moon, Dilbert, Dungeons and Dragons and Alejandro Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain, this 36 page comic book marks the first issue in a monthly series by Melbourne based comic book artist Merv Heers.
5pm: Pagan Puppy zine launch
A secret and very powerful coven of pups gather under the cover of night. By the full moon they perform rituals and spells to protect their humans, curse the cats who prowl at the fringes of their territory, and put a hex on the evil postman.
Creative weirdo, dog enthusiast and illustrator Zoe Steers follows up last year’s wildly successful Fashion Puppy with the magical new zine Pagan Puppy, and to celebrate we will have a live set by dark synth wizard Ghost Like Beast.
Facebook event here.
6pm: Guest Informant #5, #6 + #7 zine launch
To give wings to the 5th, 6th, and 7th issues of Guest Informant, local black metal noise-smiths Expurgatory will once again be proving how versatile Sticky’s store space is by converting it into the deepest layer of DIY hell, full of dischord and abject prose.
Facebook event here.
7.30pm: Putting The Femme In Ephemeral exhibition launch at Rooftop Art Space
Putting The Femme In Ephemeral is an exhibition by girls who make zines, curated by Gemma Flack and Sticky Institute for Festival Of The Photocopier 2016.
The opening party will take at Rooftop Art Space (Level 7, 252 Swanston Street) from 7.30pm.
Features works by: Alice Kazam, George Rex, Katherine Pigott, Lily Cuda, Rebecca Sheedy, Samantha Riegl, Sarah McNeil, Sophia Parsons Cope, Zoe Steers
The exhibition continues until February 29th.
Facebook event here.
SATURDAY 13th FEBRUARY
12pm: We Are Infinite: An Exploration of Young Adult Fiction zine launch
Come along to the launch of Karys McEwen and Samantha Riegl’s second collaborative zine, snacks and drinks will be provided, plus enjoy a YA playlist, bookmark making station and book raffle.
Facebook event here.
2pm: State Library of Victoria zine collection tour
This event is now fully booked
4pm: Witch Songs zine launch
Soufex, creator of Witches Of Brunswick, has manifested a new zine called WITCH SONGS. Includes a guide to the Brunswick oracle, alongside illustrations and moody words. Divinations and readings will take place at this event.
5pm: Angry Girls Club colouring zine launch
To accompany her current exhibition at Off The Kerb gallery, Gemma Flack will be launching her colouring zine Angry Girls Club at #FOTP2016. Felt tips at the ready…
6pm: Feed The Animals zine fundraiser launch party
Once a year, volunteer-run Sticky Institute approaches a dozen or so zinemakers to create exclusive, limited edition zines that they can sell to help pay rent.
As part of Festival Of The Photocopier, all of these zines are being lauched at once with a party in the subway, featuring live music from:
Dilemmas (NSW)
Moonsign (acoustic) (NSW)
Piss Factory (NSW)
Rupert Ramon (NSFW)
The ‘Feed The Animals’ fundraiser features zines by Giselle Nguyen, Rebecca Sheedy, Katie Hare, Sleepless Nights Press, Samantha Riegl, Luke You, Beck Vinci, Thomas B and more.
Facebook event here.
SUNDAY 14th FEBRUARY
12 - 5pm: ZINE FAIR!!!!
The annual Festival Of The Photocopier Zine Fair will take place at Melbourne Town Hall on Sunday February 14th.
Over 150 stalls hosted by zinemakers from across the country will be in attendance, making this the biggest zine fair in FOTP history!
Facebook event here.
…
Also, throughout the festival:
Western Australia’s print enthusiasts State Team will be exhibiting in Sticky Institute’s window space for the duration of Festival Of The Photocopier 2016.
Members of the State Team / State Zine collective will be producing print works in response to this fetching tablecloth depicting WA, as found at a garage sale in Sydney. Read more here.I'm Shane Reustle, an avid traveler and software engineer. Unsatisfied with sedentary office life in New York City, I set out on a mission to slowly make my way around the world by land and sea. So far I've explored over 35 countries by bus, train, boat, and motorcycle. Meanwhile, I've been busy building a fully remote software company which has worked with a diverse set of clients to produce some exciting new products.
I've quickly come to realize that life is best spent focusing on your passions and building a career around them, not the other way around. I hope you enjoy my photos as a narrow glimpse into my recent adventures. If you have |
Atlanta Thrashers to relocate to Winnipeg. Throw in interest for new arenas in Quebec City, as well as rumblings of Seattle and Kansas City having interest, and you have a wonderful (all sarcasm intended) cloud of trepidation floating over the team all year long.
Even with Smith’s really solid play, the Coyotes still were scuffling along in a conference dominated by teams from the Central Division. As of January 31st, they had an unimpressive 52 points in 51 games, and it was difficult to determine whether or not they would remain competitive through the end of the season.
Then, just as soon as the doubters began to really pump up the volume on their criticisms, the team gelled and went absolutely lights out in February. They didn’t lose a single game in regulation during that month, going 11-0-1 over that span and winning seven games against teams who eventually made the playoffs, including two victories over the Kings and one against the Chicago Blackhawks.
The start of March brought everyone’s sudden infatuation with the Coyotes to a grinding halt, however. They lost their first five games of the month and six of their first seven, and suddenly the playoffs were once again in doubt. The team never lost faith in themselves, however, and thanks to what can only be described as a Herculean effort by Smith and the team, they won a slew of games late and ended up doing something no team in the organization’s history had done: they won the Pacific Division title. It was perhaps the biggest accomplishment the team had ever achieved, and if one was looking at the story of the team’s season, that would have been an appropriate climax.
Except the Coyotes didn’t buy into that notion.
In the first round against the Chicago Blackhawks, the team overcame questionable decisions (Raffi Torres knocking Marian Hossa out and getting suspended for 25 games) and a Blackhawks team itching to make up for the season before when they were eliminated in the first round. Despite most experts picking Chicago for the upset, the Coyotes stood their ground and won three times in one of the toughest arenas to play in leaguewide, including a shutout victory in Game 6 at the United Center to clinch their first series victory since they moved to the desert in 1996. Once again, the Coyotes’ fan base would have happily taken this as the icing on the cake of this season, but the team wasn’t done yet.
In their second round series against the Nashville Predators, just about no one picked the Coyotes to knock off Barry Trotz’s club, but that didn’t seem to phase anyone, and they dispatched the Preds with relish in only five games.
Of course, all of this is a story you know, but the fact of the matter is that it’s still just about as storybook as one team can get without actually winning a championship. Through all of the off-ice distractions about ownership and digs about the quality of the fanbase, fans of the team continued to believe in them until the very last goal scored on Tuesday night. Some will say that blind faith borders on delusion, but when it comes to the way that the fans supporting this incarnation of the Coyotes, it has to be said that they have proven that there are some very seriously dedicated hockey fans in the Valley.
Just looking at the sheer number of people who showed up at the airport the day after the Coyotes eliminated the Blackhawks provides a great example of just how dedicated the fans are to the team. Over 1000 people showed up just before noon on a weekday to support the club, and even though it wasn’t an ideal time to get a large audience, they did, and the team certainly appreciated that support all the way through to the end of their playoff run.
Now, the focus shifts back to the off-ice distractions and their hopeful resolution in the weeks ahead. The city of Glendale has approved a budget including a $17 million arena management fee to be paid to a new owner, former San Jose Sharks CEO Greg Jamison. The deal still has to have all the “I’s” dotted and the “T’s” crossed, but for the first time in the nearly three year bankruptcy saga that has ensnared the club in its clutches, the fact of the matter is that the light at the end of the tunnel is no longer a speeding freight train getting ready to take the team to Canada, but rather a brilliant sunshine that will herald in a new era of hockey in the desert.
In addition to finally answering those questions about ownership, there are a couple of other things that will need to be decided as well. For starters, will the team’s deep playoff run equal more butts in the seats when the 2012 season (hopefully, barring a labor stoppage) kicks off in October? Will the Jamison regime make good on its promises to make the team more marketable and to improve upon the state of Arizona’s growing junior hockey programs?
Those things will go a long way toward determining whether the team can be successful in Glendale in the long-term, but as for the team’s on-ice fortunes going forward, one need look no further than the aforementioned Blackhawks. In 2009, the Hawks made an improbable run to the Western Conference Final before losing to a divisional foe, the Detroit Red Wings, in five games. The very next season, with their core group of players largely intact (with the exception of Hossa joining the club), the Hawks rolled through the regular season and went on a blitzkrieg run through the playoffs, winning the team’s first Stanley Cup in nearly 50 years.
If the Phoenix Coyotes need to draw any inspiration that bigger and better things are indeed possible for this club, then they need look no further than this example. With Don Maloney at the helm, Dave Tippett still on the bench, and with an ownership group dedicated to putting together resources for the team to use in order to improve, there is no reason to suspect that this will be a one-hit wonder in the desert. Come 2013, the Coyotes should by all accounts be making a fourth consecutive playoff appearance, and this time, the sky truly could be the limit.Inside: A 3-D Thanksgiving turkey craft for kids
(Books and Giggles is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.)
I discovered this adorable new storybook, The Very Stuffed Turkey by Katharine Kenah (affiliate). It’s about a little turkey who goes visits five homes on Thanksgiving. Along the way, he encounters various traditions, and of course, eats too much.
My turkey doesn’t look anything like illustrator Binny Talb’s lovable bird. Still, I think doing a turkey craft after reading the story is a fair pairing.
While you craft, you can talk about your own family’s traditions and holiday plans.
RELATED: Craft Stick Turkey Puppet Craft
Thanksgiving Turkey Craft
There are a lot of different coffee filter turkeys on Pinterest, so I don’t know for sure if that’s what inspired me to make this one. More likely, I saw these watercolor turkey crafts on Playdough & Popsicles. They’re quite different than what I ended up with, but would be great for toddlers or younger preschoolers.
I wanted to make a 3-D turkey. When I started out making it, though, the filter went flat when I painted it. I had to experiment to figure out how to get it to hold its shape. Read on for the trick…
Materials
Coffee filter
Construction paper
Scissors
Googly eyes
Tape
Glue
Liquid food color or liquid watercolor
Paper towels
Instructions
The trick to getting the filter to hold its shape is painting it while it’s folded. You fold it into itself and tape it, like shown below. It’s kind of fiddly to do, but not hard. Try not to worry about making it perfect.
Set the folded filter on a paper towel or two. Next, drop the liquid watercolor or food coloring onto the filter. Then let it dry undisturbed.
Meanwhile, cut out all the turkey body pieces. To attach the head to the body, accordion-fold a strip of paper. Then tape it to both sides. Here’s a side-view closeup.
When your filter is totally dry, open it up and cut off the bottom so that the turkey body nestles in as shown.
Glue it in. You’re ready to gobble gobble!
RELATED: Spin Art Turkey Craft
This post is part of the Kids Are Thankful blog hop. Several other bloggers and I have teamed up to share Thanksgiving-themed storybooks with related crafts and activities. Go see which one is your favorite!Our first and perhaps greatest Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, ended his Gettysburg Address by calling on his fellow Americans to rededicate themselves to the “great task” of preserving our “government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people.” I share that commitment, which is why I have always supported term limits for our elected federal officials.
Too often today our representatives and senators seek re-election not by making an argument to their constituents, but by issuing an ultimatum.
It usually goes something like this: “I know we’re all citizens in a free republic and that means you can vote for whomever you want, but given the amount of seniority and authority that I’ve built up during my long career in Washington, if you don’t vote for me, our district or state will lose money, power, and influence.”
But this is not a choice—it’s a ploy to increase the power of Washington elites at the expense of everyone else.
Instead of intimidating voters into supporting the candidate with a proven record of maximizing their share of government spoils, Americans should be empowered to choose the candidate they think is best suited to help preserve our government of, by, and for the people.
That is why I have always supported a constitutional amendment imposing term limits on members of Congress, and it’s why I recently co-sponsored Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s plan to limit senators to two six-year terms and representatives to three two-year terms.
I may introduce my own amendment that would equalize the total number of years that members of the two chambers of Congress are allowed to serve (so that senators could serve two six-year terms and representatives could serve six two-year terms), but the final numbers are not as important as the principle: A government of, by, and for the people requires elected representatives who are more interested in securing the common good rather than maximizing their own power and prestige.
I’m often asked whether my support for mandatory term limits means that I will voluntarily impose a term limit on myself. My answer: No, because I don’t want the term-limit movement to suffer the same fate as the Shakers.
Who are the Shakers? They were an 18th-century Christian sect that believed in celibacy. Now, celibacy is a fine choice for an individual to make, but it’s not exactly a wise policy for an entire group of people that is interested in self-preservation.
So, when we do succeed, and term limits are finally in the Constitution, I will happily abide by them. But until that time, I will continue the fight to make that possibility a reality.Their offense was to have too much fun.
In Iran, social freedom has long been measured by the prevalence of male-female hand holding or how far back women push their headscarves. So the six young men and women who danced together on rooftops, hair bouncing, in their version of the viral feel-good hit "Happy" were taking a risk.
A generation ago, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, laid down an uncompromising standard when he said that God “did not create man so that he could have fun… There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam.”
The was also no music. Mr. Khomeini told Radio Iran to battle it “with all your might” because there was “no difference between music and opium.”
The six dancers were arrested, and last night they were presented on Iranian television soon after their arrest, with their backs to the camera. Tehran police chief Hossein Sajedinia said the video was “a vulgar clip" which "hurt public chastity” and warned Iranians against further “corrupt” acts.
The arrest, which sparked a firestorm of international criticism on social media, came after President Hassan Rouhani called in a weekend speech for greater Internet freedom. Today, amid reports that the “Happy” group had been released, Mr. Rouhani tweeted a quote from a speech of his last June: “#Happiness is our people’s right. We shouldn’t be too hard on behaviors caused by joy.”
Waging a war
From the outside, Iran’s culture wars may appear banal and quibbling.
But a coterie of fundamentalist officials see themselves as the guardians of the Islamic Republic’s cultural purity and warn against "cultural invasion" by the West. With Pharrell Williams' hit video for "Happy" spawning copycats in 140 countries, it is not surprising Tehran's version, which garnered 165,000 hits even before the arrest, eventually prompted a heavy-handed response.
Producing such a video was always a risk in Iran, where strict rules govern women’s hair covering, forbid dancing in public, and limit public contact between unmarried men and women.
This is what Rouhani is up against as he tries to fulfill campaign promises of greater social freedom, which have so far seen limited progress, such as the opening up of music and media.
“Why are we so shaky? Why have we cowered in a corner, grabbing onto a shield and wooden sword, lest we take a bullet in this culture war?” he said this weekend, before the "Happy" arrests. “Even if there is an onslaught, which there is, the way to face it is via modern means, not passive and cowardly methods.”
Push and pull
Several other Iranian versions of “Happy” have been produced, coinciding with a separate new Internet phenomenon, in which Iranian women post photographs of themselves outdoors but unseen, joyfully casting off their headscarves.
Two weeks ago a protest was held in Tehran against the anti-headscarf campaign and a broader loosening of modesty standards as spring temperatures rise. Fundamentalist protesters, including women wearing long black chadors, complained that those women were wearing “bad hijab."
The arrest of the “Happy” group could well backfire, spawning mockeries of the rules, such as anonymous postings of fun-less versions of “Happy” in full Islamic covering.
In the TV broadcast after the arrest, the six stood with heads hung low as if forced into a confession, and said they were duped into making the video, claiming they thought they were taking part in an audition.
The Tehran police chief boasted that when the order came to arrest the six, his agents identified them within two hours – their names were prominently displayed on the video credits – and picked them up within six hours. No one mentioned the fact that the video had already been posted for weeks.
Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy
The news website IranWire quoted one source saying, “All of the young producers received phone calls informing them that a friend had suffered a car accident and required their help. When they arrived at the address they had been given over the phone, security forces were waiting to arrest them.”
The source told IranWire yesterday that they would be released today if they posted a $10,000 bail and agreed not to speak to the media.Real Salt Lake's acquisition of Elias Vasquez looks to be heading in a positive direction, wih Guatemalan media reporting that the center back has left to join the club in the United States.
The club was unable to confirm the finality of the move, but Jeff Cassar has in the past publicly stated that RSL was working out a deal with Vasquez.
In an interview with a Guatemalan outlet, Vasquez called the move a "good opportunity." He also reportedly had an offer from Unión de Santa Fe in Argentina.
Vasquez, 22, had been playing at Comunicaciones in Guatemala until 2014 and at Dorados in Mexico last year. He's played 25 times for the Guatemalan national team, including captaining the team at the 2011 U-20 World Cup.
The move will likely end larger movements for RSL's roster, with the remaining squad positions likely to be filled by academy players and drafted players. Demar Phillips, Pecka, and Jamison Olave have all arrived from outside the club or the draft.
Real Salt Lake's center back situation is more solid as well, with Vasquez competing for minutes with Chris Schuler, Olave, Aaron Maund, and Phanuel Kavita.The University of California Firearm Violence Prevention Research Center, located in Sacramento, was launched in July and officially received funding for its research earlier this month.
The center has received a $5 million appropriation from the state for the next five years and aims to prevent firearm violence. Center director and UC Davis professor Garen Wintemute leads the center’s team of researchers from various UC campuses, including UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC Los Angeles and UC Berkeley.
Wintemute cited recent mass shootings as evidence of firearm violence, including the Las Vegas shooting earlier this month. On Oct. 1, Stephen Paddock, 64, killed 59 including himself and injured more than 500 people from the window of his room at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas.
“Our research plan was put forth before the horrible tragedy,” said George Tita, one of the center’s researchers from UC Irvine, in reference to the Las Vegas shooting. “The people who do serious gun violence research are not impacted by extreme events.”
Tita said the center has no results yet, as the funding has just arrived. Wintemute said, however, that the center is planning a descriptive epidemiology study in California, collecting “basic” information, including the rate of gun ownership, the rate of exposure to gun violence and risk factors for being shot.
Wintemute states the team is “multidisciplinary,” adding that UC Irvine is doing a detailed study in Los Angeles County, UCLA is researching intimate partner violence and UC Berkeley is looking at community-level risk factors for firearm violence.
Tita said there is not enough of this research that has been done and that it will apply broadly across different types of gun violence.
“We’re very early in the findings,” Tita said.
Tita is conducting an epidemiological study to look at patterns of gun violence in different areas around the state. He is also examining the illegal firearm market and the process by which guns are sold and used in crimes.
UC Berkeley School of Law professor and Faculty Director of Criminal Justice Studies Franklin Zimring said he is cheering the research center on, adding that state funding is now catching up with existing independent research regarding the issue. Zimring is not a part of the center, but he also researches gun violence in relation to the police — he said he hopes the university’s research center will also examine this dimension of gun violence.
“The state funding is catching up with the research effort,” Zimring said. “The whole point of the new (university research) center is not only to cover front-page headlines but to carefully assess statistically what the major problems are for most deaths and injuries.”
Contact Elise Ulwelling at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter at @EMarieulwelling.As we grapple with global warming, ocean acidification, and the possibility that life on earth really is doomed, it is with considerable chagrin that we recall how Jacques Cousteau sounded the general alarm thirty years ago. The celebrated underwater filmmaker, co-inventor of scuba diving, television star, sage of the environmental movement, and bon vivant died in 1997. But before he left he had developed a brooding pessimism about the future of humanity.
At a rally in Seattle in 1977, where he headlined in a sold-out basketball arena with energy expert Amory Lovins and population theorist Paul Ehrlich, Cousteau predicted the dire consequences of a runaway human population and its apparently insatiable appetite for fuel to heat, move, and feed itself. Cousteau toned down his pessimism for the audience of 15,000 in the arena that night, urging them to take responsibility for the environment before it is too late. But an hour later, in an interview with a pair of reporters from the Seattle Weekly, he laid out his far more dismal vision.
“Fossil fuels are polluting the air and the sea and now people are saying that nuclear energy is the answer,” said Cousteau with his sexy French accent. “They are wrong. If we continue to develop nuclear energy and make kids like crazy, we will surely end up in a police state. It will become the duty of governments of the world to suppress all dissent in order to avoid nuclear terrorism. Eh? We will have no other choice. A nuclear civilization adds up to a global police state.”
Cousteau saw overpopulation and energy collapse leading inevitably to worldwide disaster and social chaos.
“Why do anything at all?” the reporters asked him. “Why have the Cousteau Society?”
“We have no choice,” Cousteau resplied. “And there’s a slim chance we can make a difference.”
Photo: Brad MatsenThe delicious irony in all of this (very important if we are, in fact, doomed) is that Cousteau’s earliest expeditions on his famous white ship, Calypso, were financed by oil exploration charters. His second hit movie told the story of the very development of sub-sea habitats and saturation scuba diving that make today’s offshore oil production possible.
Cousteau and his divers pioneered the equipment and techniques that now anchor gigantic platforms and wellheads to the sea floor at depths of up to a thousand feet and produce 60 percent of the world’s oil and gas. Until just fifty years ago, when Cousteau and engineer Emil Gagnan invented the demand regulator for breathing and swimming free underwater, our undersea explorations had been limited by the depth to which a single breath could take us.
Cousteau’s early oil exploration charters, his best-selling, ghost-written book about inventing scuba diving, and a pair of hit movies on scuba and under-sea habitats earned him an ABC television series on the oceans. By the early 1970s, the charming French sailor was one of the most recognized people on the planet. With the power of his celebrity, he tried to make the world see that his beloved Mediterranean would be the first sea to die and that like a canary in a mineshaft, it was only the beginning of the death of the oceans unless a way to reverse the destruction could be found.
“By the time my father died, he no longer believed that humanity could save itself from disaster,” said Cousteau’s son, Jean-Michel, himself a noted champion of the oceans. “I disagree with him, but I do not hold his mistake against him.”
Now, the deadly blend of fossil fuel emissions and a booming human population has even the most optimistic among us worried. Cousteau’s predicted disaster and chaos have arrived only in the most desperate parts of the world and the political structure remains generally intact. But with scientific tools that were nowhere on the horizon when Cousteau’s instincts were screaming at him that the Mediterranean was sick, we have discovered grim, undeniable evidence that we are in real trouble. Our continued use of fossil fuels has inflicted life-threatening damage on the oceans and the atmosphere, damage that cannot be repaired for several generations, even if we could manage to reduce carbon dioxide emissions 50 percent by 2050.
Next month, the world will limp into Copenhagen, frantic because 30-year old warnings from a seductive Frenchman — among many, many others — didn’t change human behavior enough to forestall what in all likelihood is a catastrophic global disaster that began 150 years ago with the industrial revolution.
If Cousteau were alive to address the delegates in Denmark this December, he would probably summon the courageous warrior he was in his youth and insist that humanity, not the earth itself, is in danger — and that this might not be a bad thing. He would likely argue that a world with fewer people, ultimately, is the answer. Then he would demand that we keep trying in the face of terrible odds, simply because we have no other choice.Finance Minister Bill English has signalled the Government is again considering partial state asset sales - including Kiwibank.
At a post-Budget lunch in Christchurch today, English told business leaders that National would "get to grips'' with its position on state asset sales in the next eight months.
He revealed the Government was conducting a stock-take of its assets and their worth and would produce an "investment statement'' next year.
''It seems to me, and I have checked this, that there is a strong demand among the mums and dads for a Kiwi investment model and if we put product into the market people would buy it. Would I be right about that?''
A few hands went up in the room.
''In fact I think there would be a bigger proportion of the population than that would have a crack at it. So we will have a think about it,'' English said.
''My guess would be there's a lot of demand for good share value and it would certainly help us to be able to free up that capital.
"But we have made undertakings to the public and we certainly won't move anywhere without getting a mandate to do so,'' English said in answer to a question about asset sales.
A good example was Kiwibank, English said.
It had got to a size where it needed either a government guarantee or ''an awful lot of capital''. If there was any asset that was regarded as risky by credit ratings agencies it was a rapidly growing bank.
''So one option would be to go to the market and raise capital. So keep crown ownership, majority crown ownership and raise the rest of the capital from the market. So who'd buy into that.''
A member of the audience, sharebroker Jenny Moreton, said a lot of her clients would be interested in shares in Kiwibank.
English said the Government was intending to next year produce an ''investment statement'' which would tell the story of its investments and their value.
At present there were about $220 billion. That included about $40b of state-owned enterprises, nearly $80b of financial investments and about $60b of social assets such as schools and hospitals.
While the Government had a policy of not selling assets in this term the Government had been spending time on getting to grips with what investments it had. It had no visibility of what happened to the assets and had not in the past paid much attention to them.
He said the Television New Zealand business was ''going through the floor''.
After the lunch he said both of the Government's network assets, TVNZ and New Zealand Post, were being hurt by new technologies. New Zealand Rail was ''a black hole of complexity'' to which it had committed recently another $750m. ''This is the price of nostalgia,'' English said.
Asked later was he softening up for asset sales in the future English said ''No no, we are just outlining the position.''
Progressive Party leader Jim Anderton, who founded Kiwibank when he was a minister in the previous government, said the bank was a huge success because it was publicly owned.
"National's threat to sell Kiwibank is economic vandalism," he said.
"National repeatedly promised not to sell Kiwibank...people worried about Australian banks buying Kiwibank will immediately be concerned."
-with NZPAShe even made some friends with another Exo-Ls around her and she also sang along to Exo's songs until the end of the concert..
-She's so amazing..
-It's such a nice sight to see her enjoy the performances leaving the fact that she's already in her 70s:) I hope she will stay healthy and live for a long timeㅎㅎ
-Ohㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ I saw her today!
-Hul.. She's really a granny? It's hard to attend concert in standing section even for me..
-Yes! We were in the same section last week, so I lined up in the same line with her. She said she was trembling, she sounded just like another fangirlㅠㅠㅠ
-I want to age like that!!
-I heard she came with her grand daughter, she's really amazing.. The best..
-Hul.. I think I saw her today in a convenience store..
-Hul.. I personally find it hard to attend a concert in standing section, so I always think twice before buying the standing section.. I respect her..
-Whoa.. It must be hard for her to stand for the whole time.. She's so cool!!
-Standing..???????? Whoa.. So amazing..
-Hul.. Unbelievable.. I'm so jealous of this granny..
-Hul.. She looks somewhat cute..
-Didn't she also attend the first concert?
-Yes, she went to the first concert and she also went to the concert again today.
-It's hard even to get the ticket for standing section.. Whoa.. She's so amazing..
-Grannyㅜㅜ It's a relief that she's enjoying the performance just fine..
-Whoa.. I respect her..
-My granny promised me to go to Exo's concert with me someday..
-I also want to life youthfully like her..In our recent roster profile of New York Giants wide receiver Brandon Marshall we floated the idea that Marshall does not have to be the dominant No. 1 receiver he has been in other places. He needs to be an effective complementary piece to Odell Beckham Jr.
For a proud player used to be being the focal point of a passing attack, that isn’t always an easy pill to swallow. Marshall, though, appears to understand the situation. And says he will be OK with it:
“They were clear with me we have a No. 1 receiver that’s not even in his prime yet, and that we also have a freakin’ stud in Sterling Shepard, so there’s only one ball,’’ Marshall told The Post. “I want this to be my most efficient year. It may not be my best statistically, but when it comes to the standpoint of efficiency, I really want to dominate in that category.’’... “I know I could have gone to another team and caught 100-something balls and put up 1,500-1,600 yards, but that’s not the mission right now,’’ he said. “That’s not the goal. My goal is to touch that Lombardi Trophy. Sometimes you got to sacrifice. There’s gonna be times where I may think I’m open or may be open and not get the ball, and it might hurt. I understand I’m in a great place and the only thing that matters is bringing home that trophy.’’
Those things are easy to say in June when they are just possibilities. Let’s hope his actions mirror his words when those things become realities.
If Marshall can indeed thrive in a role where his volume of catches might not be what he is used to but where he still makes impact plays that will be a huge asset to the Giants.One of the greatest television traditions of the ’80s and ’90s was the annual Siskel & Ebert special that focused on the two critics’ picks for the worst movies of the year. Gene Siskel always introduced the show with some variation on this statement: “Each one of these films took two hours out of our lives — two hours we’ll never get back.”
The men of Rifftrax — Mystery Science Theater 3000 vets Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett — are carrying on that tradition by taking one last shot at some of the more notable films of 2015 with something they’re calling the Naughty List.
Because EW supports anybody willing to go to town on the unlikable mess that was Sinister 2, we’re happy to provide the Rifftrax cats a platform. And if you enjoy their comments on movies, be sure to catch the next edition of Rifftrax Live, which will take place at a theater near you on Thursday, Dec. 3 (and then replayed on Tuesday, Dec. 15). The target will be the notoriously weird stinker Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny. For more information and to get your tickets, head over to the Fathom Events website.
Check out the Rifftrax Naughty List below, and remember that their opinions do not reflect those of the management (though we’re fine with them burying Pixels on more time).
The Rifftrax Naughty List
Sinister 2
“Budget cuts forced this big screen adaptation of Marvel’s Sinister Six villain team down to one third of the team’s original size. Audiences watched in horror as Vulture (Jonathan Silverman) moved in to a Manhattan loft with Kraven the Hunter (Andrew McCarthy) and the film slowly morphed into a buddy comedy. Many feel the low point occurred during a nine-minute montage of Vulture trying on Kraven’s signature leopard-print tights during which the song “Fancy” by Iggy Azalea played in its entirety 2 1/3 times.
Entourage
“Described by many critics as ‘HBO’s Ballers, but for movies instead of sports,’ Entourage finally explored what it would be like if you had to pay 12 dollars to watch the antics of Vinnie, Turtle, E, Dr. Ama, ), U-God, and Alt-Tab instead of just borrowing your parents’ HBO Go login. There is Oscar buzz surrounding the performance of A Sentient, Angry Sack of Live Bait That is Two Days Past its Prime in a Toupee for its performance as Ari.”
Taken 3
“Liam Neeson expands his very particular set of skills to include ‘beating a dead horse’ and ‘cashing a paycheck.’ Audiences were excited for more adventures of federal agent Stack Taken (Catchphrase: ‘Take this job and take it!’) but were instead treated to a baffling shot-for-shot remake of the 1985 TV movie The Hugga Bunch, causing many to speculate that this might mark the end of the franchise… after probably just two more movies and then a reboot on whatever the hell Crackle is.”
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
“Well, Christmas is ruined. This entirely unnecessary remake is a direct insult to the groundbreaking, original Star Wars Holiday Special. The recasting is appalling: Daisy Ridley as Lumpy, Adam Driver as Itchy, Max von Sydow as Malla. The only saving grace is that a digital Andy Serkis will be filling the late Bea Arthur’s role as Ackmena.”
Fantastic Four
“The reviews are in. ‘Mother of God!’ says every single human who went to see this.”
Fifty Shades of Grey
“The scene: a boardroom at Universal Studios. A cigar chomping executive shouts at his underlings. ‘Take Twilight and dumb it way way down! What do I pay you people for anyway?!’
‘But, sir, Twilight is universally regarded as the most insipid thing ever written and… wait a minute. Wait just a minute! We could keep it nice and dumb and load it up with laughable S&M softcore porn!’
‘MAKE THAT MOVE!'”
Jurassic World
“Hey, y’know how Kid Rock makes heaps of money with lazy songs that just remind people of older, better songs they really liked? What if we did that with Jurassic Park?”
Mortdecai
“The movie that made even the most devout Johnny Depp fans stop and say, ‘Maybe we should’ve gone with Skeet Ulrich after all.'”
Pixels
“Adam Sandler and company had the vision to take the concept of a Futurama episode and turn it into a movie. The clever twist? Unlike the Futurama episode, this version sucks.”Marian Hossa likely out at least three more games
Marian Hossa was placed on injured reserve, retroactive to Dec. 20, on Tuesday. (AP Photo)
It’s been more than a month since the Blackhawks have played a game at full strength. More than two months if you count Trevor van Riemsdyk’s early season injury.
Well, it’s going to be at least a few more days.
Artem Anisimov returned to the lineup Tuesday night against the Winnipeg Jets, but Marian Hossa missed his second straight game with an upper-body injury suffered last Tuesday against Ottawa. The Hawks’ leading goal-scorer is expected to miss the road games at Nashville and Carolina this week.
Joel Quenneville said he’s “hopeful” that Hossa will be ready for the Winter Classic at Busch Stadium in St. Louis on Jan. 2.
“He checked things out [Monday] and came in today,” Quenneville said after Tuesday’s morning skate. “There’s no progress. That’s where it’s at.”
Quenneville offered no specifics on the injury, but said there wasn’t a “defining blow.”
Hossa simply swapped places with Anisimov, who was activated from injured reserve for the game against Winnipeg. Anisimov was back in his usual spot between Artemi Panarin and Patrick Kane. He said the timing of his injury was particularly frustrating because he had four goals in his last six games before getting hurt Dec. 17 in St. Louis. He missed three games.
“I feel good,” Anisimov said. “The break helped a lot because it was three days off. No skating, no practice, and just rest and refreshing everything. I’m ready to roll.”
Long day
Teams typically fly in the night before a road game, but because of the NHL’s three-day Christmas break, the Jets had to fly into Chicago on Tuesday morning, and go right to their morning skate. It’s something nine other teams around the league had to do, as well.
“I never really woke up at 5:30 for a game,” Jets defenseman Jacob Trouba said.
Blake Wheeler said it’s “just part of the process. No excuses. Half the teams are doing the same thing we’re doing today.”
This is the second straight year the Hawks have had the luxury of a home game the day after the break. Two years ago, they flew to Denver in the morning for a skate, then went on to win 5-2. Quenneville said the three days off negates much of the physical strain of skating and then playing on a travel day.
“You don’t know what to expect in games like this,” Quenneville said. “They’ll be ready, [but] it’s a hard game. As you go along 82 games, this is probably the one game where everybody’s going to be as fresh as they possibly could be, and that’s a good thing.”
PK is A-OK
Patrick Kane had 21 goals at the Christmas break last season. This year, he had just 10, with Hossa, Anisimov and Artemi Panarin scoring at a higher rate. But with 34 points in |
awkward spot. He had missed the past seven games with a back injury, which required him to watch the games from the locker room. He said he had been detached from the heat of the battle, and felt unable to voice his leadership.
It needed to come from somebody in the trenches. Somebody whose voice carried weight in the locker room.
“I’m not big on being a rah-rah guy when I’m not in the fire with the guys,’’ Aldridge said. “So I just pulled him aside and said ‘I can’t talk, but you have to talk.’
“I think everybody sees what Wes is about, and everybody respects his effort,’’ Aldridge said. “And when he talks, it’s not empty air. He says things that need to be said.’’
Matthews said he was reluctant at first. He had already been vocal with the team earlier in the season. He felt like everything had already been said. But then Aldridge said something that clicked with him.
“He mentioned that we only had 10 games left,’’ Matthews said of Aldridge. “And I don’t know why, but that just kind of made me go.’’
He stood before the team and laid it out.
“I said ‘We have played this hard, for this long, at this record, and talked about this for this long … and we are pissing it away. ’’’ Matthews said. “ I said ‘We will all regret this if we don’t make it. But we have 10 games: we are not safe. We are not guaranteed. These teams are right behind us. We have no tie breakers with anybody, which means we have to win.’’
He set a goal for the team to win seven of its final 10 games and he suggested each player look at himself and examine how he could better help the team. He went first.
“I said I need to rebound,’’ Matthews said. “That’s where I could help us. I can’t keep having games where I’m having zero, one, two rebounds anymore. I said whatever it is, you have to do a little bit more.’’
Mo Williams, in his 11th NBA season, said there are moments in a season when a teammate speaks up and it catches everybody’s attention. He said it tends to have a refocusing effect.
“That was one of those times,’’ Williams said.
When he was done, Matthews said he knew he reached his teammates.
“I could tell by the reception I got afterward,’’ Matthews said. “It was quiet. I was as irritated as I’ve been but I was looking straight ahead when I was talking. Then I looked around, and everybody’s eye was on me. They knew. They could feel it.’’
Lillard, who led the emotional meeting in San Antonio, called Matthews’ speech “huge” because “it was one of those breaking points.’’
“When Wes spoke up, everybody realized how big of a deal it was,’’ Lillard said. “It was no longer ‘We’re still good. We’ve got this.’ It was, ‘We’ve gotta find a way.’’
“Finding a way” has been somewhat of a mantra with this team late in the season, and into this first round series with Houston. The Rockets are favored and have the star power, but the Blazers keep vowing to find a way, and preach the way to do it is by sticking together.
It’s moments like the locker room in Orlando when those bonds are forged, allowing that message to resonate.
“That’s when you know who you are dealing with inside your locker room,’’ Lillard said of Orlando. “When the (stuff) gets real, it’s either guys are going to be like (he leans back cautiously) ‘I don’t know’ … or guys are going to be like (pounds his chest with his fist).
"That’s when we really saw what we were made of. We found that we are going to fight. Find a way. I think that’s when we realized our guys are built like that. So, it was huge that Wes did that.’’
-- Jason Quick | @jwquickEveryone knows the situation where you can't log into a system because you have forgotten the password. The following article explains how to reset the password and regain access to VMware vSphere 6.5 core components including vCenter, SSO and ESXi Hosts.
Reset vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 root password
Reset SSO Administrator Password (vCenter Server Appliance 6.5)
Reset ESXi root password with Host Profiles
Gain Administrative ESXi access with an Active Directory
Reset ESXi root password (Linux Live CD)
Reset vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 root password
The following method provides steps to recover the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) root password. The process is slightly different compared to previous versions as the OS has been changed to PhotonOS. The method is officially supported by VMware and documented in KB2147144.
Take a snapshot of the vCSA to be able to rollback in case of any problems during password recovery. Connect to the ESXi Host that runs the vCSA and open a remote console. Reboot the vCSA Press e immediately after the system starts (When the PhotonOS screen shows up) Append rw init=/bin/bash to the line starting with linux
Press F10 to boot In the command prompt, enter passwd and enter a new root password twice Enter umount / to unmount the root filesystem Reboot the vCSA by running the command reboot -f Verify that you can log in with the new root password and delete the snapshot created in step 1.
Reset SSO Administrator Password (vCenter Server Appliance 6.5)
The following method provides steps to recover the SSO administrator password on a vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA). The method is officially supported by VMware and documented in KB2146224.
Log in to the vCSA using SSH as root Enter shell to start the bash shell Identify the SSO Domain Name (Default is vsphere.local) # /usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/vmafd-cli get-domain-name --server-name localhost Start the vdcadmintool
# /usr/lib/vmware-vmdir/bin/vdcadmintool Press 3 (Reset account password) The tool asks for the Account UPN to reset. Enter Administrator@<DOMAIN> (identified in Step 3)
The tool generates and displays a new password. Use the password to log in with the vSphere Web Client and change the password.
Reset ESXi root password with Host Profiles
According to VMware KB1317898, "reinstalling the ESXi host is the only supported way to reset a password on ESXi". However, there is a loophole as you can set the root password with Host Profiles under certain conditions. This method has two requirements:
The ESXi hosts needs to be managed by a vCenter
vSphere Enterprise Plus License is required to use Host Profiles
The vCenter uses a vpxuser to communicate with ESXi hosts, so it does not depend on the root account. As long as the ESXi host is managed by the vCenter, you can change the configuration without knowing the ESXi root password. This method works with all ESXi 5.x and 6.x versions.
Create a Host Profile with the ESXi you want to reset the root password as reference Host
Web Client > Right-Click the ESXi Host > Host Profiles > Extract Host Profile... Navigate to the Host Profile and select Actions > Edit Settings...
Navigate to the root User Configuration
Security and Services > Security Settings > Security > User Configuration > root Set the Password configuration to Fixed password configuration and enter a new password.
Click Finish to close the profile configuration Right-Click the Host Profile and select Attach/Detach Hosts and Clusters... Highlight the ESXi host, Click Attach > and finish the configuration screen
Put the ESXi host into maintenance mode Right-Click the ESXi host and select Host Profiles > Remediate... Finish the remediation wizard. The remediation should take less than a minute, no reboot is required. Use the new root password to login
Gain Administrative ESXi access with an Active Directory
When you don't have the Enterprise Plus license, you can join an Active Directory to regain administrative access to the ESXi host. This method circumvents the limitation that root PW recovery is not supported.
Login to the vCenter with the vSphere Web Client Navigate to ESXi > Configure > System > Authentication Services Click Join Domain... Enter the domain name and user credentials Click OK In the ESXi configuration, open System > Advanced System Settings Enter Config.HostAgent.plugins.hostsvc.esxAdminsGroup in the search field Change the settings to match the Administrator group that you want to use in the Active Directory. You can either create a new group in your direcotry or enter an existing group
Reset ESXi root password (Linux Live CD)
When you need to recover root access and the methods above are not applicable, the last method explains how to reset the root password with a Linux Live CD. Please be aware that this method is not supported by VMware as KB1317898 states: "reinstalling the ESXi host is the only supported way to reset a password on ESXi". You can use any current Linux Live CD or installer CD that has a recovery mode. In this example I'm using Knoppix.Rex Tillerson’s nomination for secretary of state has been criticized by some for his friendly relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and for possible conflicts of interest relating to his employment of 41 years with Exxon Mobil, the global energy giant. These are important areas for the Senate to explore, and it owes a constitutional duty to the American people to do so fully.
ADVERTISEMENT
But, if these and similar questions are answered satisfactorily, Tillerson should be confirmed to the position.
President-elect Trump, like other presidents before him, is entitled to select members of his Cabinet with the good faith advice and consent of the Senate. Moreover, Tillerson’s background and experience is ideally suited to contribute to the work of addressing many of our nation’s most pressing diplomatic and security challenges. He has the potential to serve as a “made for the moment” secretary of state. I say this as having served as under secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, a former Defense Department official, and as former military officer and combat veteran.
Yes, Putin has consistently pursued policies that are inimical to U.S. national interests. According to the U.S. intelligence community-- the best in the business-- he personally approved a Russian government effort to hack our election and undermine our democracy, to say nothing of his government’s support for Iran in its quest for regional ascendency, its mischief in Syria, its annexation of Crimea, and its intimidation of our NATO allies in the Baltics. Make no mistake, U.S. policy should be to counter forcefully such policies with the most suitable instruments of our statecraft.
Even so, Tillerson’s relationship with Putin should not, by itself, serve as a bar to his confirmation. The real question is whether his relationship with Putin is inconsistent with pursuing forceful policies to counter Russian revisionism or whether it’s the fruit of Tillerson’s effective advocacy of Exxon’s institutional interests in a tough neighborhood. While this remains to be fully explored by the Senate, initial indications suggest that Tillerson was no Dr. Evil but rather an effective advocate for his shareholders, as was his duty.
The nation also needs to know with conviction that, to the maximum extent possible, its leaders are free in fact and appearance from any conflicts of interest. Under no circumstances should a person in a position of public trust be in a position to choose between the nation’s interest and his own. This is what we expect from rank and file civil servants, leads to better policy decisions, and is a prerequisite for the public trust that our democracy requires. Fortunately, these asserted conflicts of interest can be addressed fairly easily in this case, and the Senate should give him the chance to demonstrate his commitment to take the necessary steps to address any such potential conflicts.
Foggy Bottom and the U.S. interagency are filled with talented people, where government experience matters. However, let’s not discount what Tillerson has accomplished in his long business career, and how his career may have provided the lessons needed to effectively serve as America’s top diplomat. It’s no easy feat to become CEO of Exxon Mobil, which ranks number 2 on the Fortune 500 list. A secretary of state, like a global public company CEO, needs to know when to talk, and when to walk; he needs to know what is a stalking horse, what is a good faith offer, and whether a compromise is really possible under a given set of circumstances. He needs to gather and synthesize large amounts of disparate information, mobilize his team, and make risk-adjusted decisions on complex, time-sensitive questions. And he needs to command trust and respect: that of a president, of the American public, and of his interlocutors, friend and foe alike. By all accounts, Tillerson shows the promise to be able to do that-- if given the chance.
Finally, because energy politics so powerfully intersects with geopolitics, his fingertip familiarity with the global energy markets and its leading players will give him enormous insight and network reach. On issues as disparate as Russia, Iran, the nuclear politics of Asia, Arctic drilling, and climate change, energy politics is central to the policy equation and often shapes what is practically possible or feasible. Though legions of diplomats have access to expertise, no US or other diplomat of global consequence will have as much practical experience and honed intuition as Tillerson will have in his hip pocket, to say nothing of his Rolodex. If it ever became necessary to snap-back sanctions on Iran or refine them against Russia, for example, is there anyone better than Tillerson who would know where to most efficiently apply the pain?
Tillerson’s nomination presents a unique opportunity for our country after many years of drift on the international stage. He deserves a fair hearing from the Senate, and it’s in the national interest that he receive one.
Mario Mancuso (@MancusoOnline) is a senior visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute. He served in senior national security positions in the administration of President George W. Bush.
The views expressed by Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.Palm Beach County Sheriff's deputies are currently on scene at Frangipani Circle and San Castle Boulevard where they say a victim carrying a concealed weapon fired a shot at a man that robbed him of his wallet."The victim was getting his scuba air tank filled at a business in the 5000 block of Sandcastle Blvd., when an unknown armed black male, riding a bike, approached the victim," said Terri Barbera, public information officer with the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office. The suspect then robbed him of his wallet and took off on his bike.The victim had a concealed weapons permit and feeling threatened, fired one shot at the suspect, according to deputies. Deputies do not think the suspect was shot. His bike was found around the corner.The victim was not hurt in the altercation. PBSO currently has K9 units and a helicopter searching the area for the suspect. We will bring you the latest details as soon as we have them.
Palm Beach County Sheriff's deputies are currently on scene at Frangipani Circle and San Castle Boulevard where they say a victim carrying a concealed weapon fired a shot at a man that robbed him of his wallet.
"The victim was getting his scuba air tank filled at a business in the 5000 block of Sandcastle Blvd., when an unknown armed black male, riding a bike, approached the victim," said Terri Barbera, public information officer with the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office.
Advertisement
The suspect then robbed him of his wallet and took off on his bike.
The victim had a concealed weapons permit and feeling threatened, fired one shot at the suspect, according to deputies.
Deputies do not think the suspect was shot. His bike was found around the corner.
The victim was not hurt in the altercation. PBSO currently has K9 units and a helicopter searching the area for the suspect.
We will bring you the latest details as soon as we have them.
AlertMeSome claim that parents redshirt their kids not because their kids aren’t ready for school, but because holding them out might give them an academic, social, and athletic edge over their peers. Photo by Fotokostic/Shutterstock
Last week, two of my neighbors sent their 5-year-olds on the school bus for the first time. The families were excited but also mildly terrified. I look back fondly on kindergarten—I remember soaring around the playground as an eagle with my friend Kathleen—but kindergarten today is a vastly different beast than it was 30 years ago. Many schools have ditched play-based exploratory programs in favor of direct instruction and regular testing, in part thanks to the pressure to improve grade-school test scores. As many experts I spoke to for this column told me, kindergarten is the new first grade.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that an estimated 9 percent of parents don’t send their 5-year-olds to kindergarten anymore. They wait a year so that their savvy 6-year-olds can better handle the curriculum. This so-called “academic redshirting,” a nod to the practice of keeping young athletes on the bench until they are bigger and more skilled, is highly controversial. The National Association of Early Childhood Specialists and the National Association for the Education of Young Children fiercely oppose it, saying that redshirting “labels children as failures at the outset of their school experience.” Studies that have evaluated how well redshirted kids fare compared to their schooled-on-time peers conclude that redshirting provides no long-term academic or social advantages and can even put kids at a disadvantage.
The practice has become even more controversial in recent years over claims that some parents do it for the wrong reasons: They redshirt their kids not because their kids aren’t ready for school, but because, in the age of parenting as competitive sport, holding them out might give them an academic, social, and athletic edge over their peers. If little Delia is the star of kindergarten, they scheme, maybe she’ll ride the wave all the way to Harvard. Gaming the system this way, of course, puts other kids at a disadvantage.
Yet some experts say that redshirting can be extremely appropriate and helpful for certain kids, and they aren’t convinced by the research pooh-poohing the practice. That’s because the impact of redshirting is very difficult to evaluate, as kids who are held back are fundamentally different in many ways from kids who go to kindergarten on time, so the conclusions of some studies might be flawed. And even if redshirting might not be beneficial when effects are averaged, there could be a subset of kids who really benefit from the extra “gift of time.” But before I get into that, let me summarize some of the studies.
In 2006, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Southern California analyzed national data collected over many years from 15,000 26-year-olds. They compared what became of kids who had been redshirted to what became of kids who had been young for their class but not redshirted. They found that the redshirted kids performed worse on 10th-grade tests, were twice as likely to drop out of school, and were less likely to graduate from college; the only advantage to redshirting was that redshirted kids were marginally more likely to play varsity sports in high school. (Journalist Malcolm Gladwell made this “relative age effect” famous in his book Outliers when he pointed out that many professional hockey players were born between January and March and thus had been the oldest on their school hockey teams; however, this effect does not seem to exist for football, volleyball, and basketball or any women’s sports.)
Other research suggests that redshirted kids are less motivated and engaged than their younger peers in high school and that they are more likely to require special education services. And in a 2008 review, David Deming, an economist of education at Harvard University, and Susan Dynarski, an education and public policy expert at the University of Michigan, concluded that redshirted kids also tend to have lower IQs and earnings as adults. This latter finding is probably linked to the fact that redshirted teens are more likely to drop out of high school than non-redshirted teens. Redshirted kids tend to have lower lifetime earnings, too, because they enter the labor force a year later.
If all this makes you think redshirting is a really bad idea, you’re not alone. Many articles, including a piece published here at Slate and a 2011 New York Times op-ed titled “Delay Kindergarten at Your Child’s Peril,” have deftly argued against the practice. Others point out that redshirting could be bad on a societal level, too: When lots of kids in school are redshirted, parents demand a more advanced curriculum—they often “argue that they have invested in a child’s education, and the school must now individualize to meet a 6-year-old’s needs,” says Beth Graue, a curriculum and instruction expert at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Center for Education Research—and this could create a vicious cycle making kindergarten more and more challenging, encouraging more and more redshirting. And when redshirting is common, it can put young low-income children at a disadvantage, because these kids may not be ready for the curriculum, yet their parents often can’t afford to pay for an extra year of preschool.
Yet as I mentioned earlier, the impact of redshirting is not as clear-cut as it sounds. First, much of the research on redshirting is pretty old—some of the key studies I cited relied on cohorts of kids who were redshirted in the late ’70s or early ’80s, and kindergarten has changed a lot since then. Redshirting has also become more common over the years, although it started becoming popular as early as the 1990s. Second, redshirted kids are usually vastly different from non-redshirted kids before they even get to school, so it can be difficult to separate the effects of redshirting from these fundamental differences. Redshirted kids these days are most likely to be boys who come from affluent families—one study from California reported that parents who redshirt their kids earn, on average, 40 percent more than those who don’t—because, as mentioned earlier, low-income parents typically can’t afford to pay for another year of preschool. (In the 2006 study involving 15,000 kids, the redshirted kids’ families had lower incomes than the non-redshirted kids’ families—another reason why old studies aren’t necessarily applicable today.) So when researchers compare redshirted kids to non-redshirted kids, they’re often comparing socio-economic apples and oranges.
There’s also the fact that kids are sometimes redshirted because they have behavior or learning problems that parents mislabel as immaturity—I’m sure Kalee’s tendency to throw chairs at adults will go away once she turns 6, so we’ll just wait a year. This could explain why redshirted kids often need special education services and also why they’re more likely to drop out of school and not go to college. In other words, redshirting might not actually increase the risk of these problems—it may just be a sign of existing problems. Yet redshirting these types of kids “can in fact make the problems worse, in that the child’s access to support is delayed as the family and school wait for maturity to kick in,” Graue says.
So, is there any research that suggests redshirting is helpful? Yes—but again, this research does not actually tell us much about redshirting. Elizabeth Dhuey, an economist at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, has published a number of studies suggesting that the older kids are in a class, the better they fare academically, the more leadership roles they have in high school, and the more likely they are to attend elite universities—pretty much exactly the opposite of what the redshirting studies show. But even though her work has been used to support redshirting, “my findings relate only to a child’s age relative to their classmates—not the act of redshirting,” Dhuey explains. “These are different things altogether.” Because Dhuey’s work pools the impact of natural age differences across the school year—comparing how kids born in May fare to kids born in December—it’s dishonest to cite her work as evidence that redshirting itself is helpful, even though there were probably some redshirters in her samples.
Ultimately, at the core of the argument over redshirting are questions about how children learn. Do they develop social and cognitive skills according to automatic internal clocks that are unaffected by environmental influences—which would suggest that kids become ready to learn on their own time? Or do kids develop key learning skills based on their interactions with others and how stimulating their environments are—which would suggest that redshirting harms the children who could benefit from kindergarten the most? No one knows for sure.
At this point, I know you’re pulling your hair out and just want to know: So what should I do when it comes time to enroll my kid in kindergarten? I asked this of Deborah Stipek, the former dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education, who has studied redshirting and relative age effects. She says that parents should consider more than just their child when it comes time to make enrollment decisions—they need to consider their kindergarten, too. “I usually suggest that parents visit the kindergarten, sit in the back of the room, and envision their child in that setting, because there are some kindergartens where children would be dying if they had poor self-regulation, whereas other kindergartens are much more tolerant and much more amenable to kids who need extra support,” she says. “I think it really depends on the kid in the context of what the educational program demands.”
I have no idea what I will do if my son, who has a late spring birthday, seems unready for kindergarten when he’s 5. I sure as hell don’t want to pay for an extra year of preschool, and my instincts also tell me that I’d prefer for him to be challenged by school—not too much, but enough—than be bored by it. If he had a late summer birthday, I’d rather that he be surrounded by slightly more mature peers than slightly less mature peers. “It’s like tennis partners—you want to pick someone who is better than you,” says Sam Wang, a Princeton neuroscientist and a co-author of the book Welcome to Your Child’s Brain.
David Deming, the Harvard education economist who published the 2008 review on redshirting, agrees. He shared an illustrative example about what recently happened to his 4-year-old daughter, one of the youngest in her preschool class. She had come home complaining that her friend, who was almost 5, could already go all the way across the monkey bars. His daughter, on the other hand, could only get to the second bar. “I told her that if she keeps practicing, she will eventually get better,” he says. “She got to the third bar this morning.” If she were the oldest, automatically better at so many things than her friends, would she set as many difficult goals for herself? Would she learn as much about patience and perseverance? Maybe not.Remember how weird it seemed last year that a live-action Hollywood movie based on Detective Pikachu was getting made? Welcome to 2017, where Ryan Reynolds is in the movie. As Pikachu.
Pokémon Live-Action Movie Greenlit Will it ever actually get made and hit the big screen? Who knows. But a deal has at least been… Read more Read
THR report that Reynolds has signed on for a starring role in the project, which begins filming in London early next year.
Wait, what’s Detective Pikachu? Great Detective Pikachu is a video game released in Japan (and Japan only) in 2016. You play as a regular kid walking around trying to solve mysteries, only you’re also accompanied by Pikachu, who can now talk and wears a Sherlock Holmes hat. You can see some footage of the game in action here.
And by starring they mean starring.
Reynolds will play the titular Detective Pikachu.
The report says that the role “is said to be motion capture in nature”, since it’s a live-action role where Pikachu is digitally inserted. So think Andy Serkis and Gollum.
Advertisement
Only it’s Ryan Reynolds and Pikachu with a hat. He’ll star alongside Justice Smith, the young actor set to appear in the next Jurassic Park movie.
If you’re wondering why sign up a Hollywood actor just to make “PIKA” noises, remember, Detective Pikachu can talk. And however it goes down, at least it can’t be as bad as the last time Pikachu opened its mouth.Germany and the Allies can call it even on World War I this weekend.
On Sunday - the 20th anniversary of East and West Germany unifying about a year after the Berlin Wall fell - Deutschland will make the last in a series of reparation payments that has spanned more than nine decades.
The final payment is £59.5 million, about $93.8 million, reported London's Telegraph newspaper. Germany had to pay Belgium and France for material damages and the rest of the Allies the costs of fighting the war.
The initial tally in 1919, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel, was 96,000 tons of gold but was slashed by 40 to 60 percent (sources vary) a few years later. The debt was crippling, just as French Premier Georges Clemenceau intended.
Germany went bankrupt in the 1920s, Der Spiegel explained, and issued bonds between 1924 and 1930 to pay off the towering debt laid on it by the Allied powers in 1919's Treaty of Versailles.
Under the treaties of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Trianon, other Central Powers, namely the Austro-Hungarian empire, were forced to cede significant territory to Poland, Italy, Romania, then-Czechoslovakia and various other Slavic nations.
Germany thought U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" would provide the foundation for a future peace treaty, but Great Britain, France and Italy were still bitter, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
France had been the most devastated by the war, and Clemenceau feared Germany might attack France again if it recovered, so he and other European leaders sought to stifle the nation's economic recovery, and in effect, its ability to rearm, the museum said. Restrictions were placed on its army and navy, and it was forbidden to have an air force.
The Treaty of Versailles not only forced Germany to give up territories to France, Belgium, Poland, the Czechs and the League of Nations, but it also included a "War Guilt Clause" forcing Germany to accept responsibility for the war, thereby making it liable for the damages.
Britain's John Maynard Keynes felt the treaty's demands were too steep and resigned in 1919 after warning, "Germany will not be able to formulate correct policy if it cannot finance itself."
As Keynes predicted, the plan backfired. While Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria all violated the terms of their accords, mainstream voters flocked to Germany's right-wing parties and Adolf Hitler's Nazis rode to power on a wave of resentment over the Treaty of Versailles' terms, according to the Holocaust museum.
World War I historian Gerd Krumeich told Der Spiegel that Hitler's message of tearing up the treaty and restoring Germany to greatness resonated with the country.
"There was tremendous frustration in Germany in the 1920s - this conflict that cost 2 million lives and left 4 or 5 million wounded is supposed to have been in vain, and it was all our fault?" Krumeich told the magazine. "The reparations payments compounded everything. Not only was Germany given the moral blame, it was also supposed to pay an outlandish sum that most people had never even heard of."
Germany discontinued reparations in 1931 because of the global financial crisis, and Hitler declined to resume them when he took the nation's helm in 1933, Der Spiegel reported.
After reaching an accord in London in 1953, West Germany paid off the principal on its bonds but was allowed to wait until Germany unified to pay about 125 million euros ($171 million) in interest it accrued on its foreign debt between 1945 and 1952, the magazine said.
In 1990, Germany began paying off that interest in annual installments, the last of which will be distributed Sunday.On Wednesday, May 29 at the Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Culver City, Cheech Marin, the comedian, actor, and Chicano art advocate, led a fascinating and provocative panel discussion about the tidal wave that is Chicano art. It included Dr. Susana Smith Bautista and artists Einar & Jamex de la Torre, Shizu Saldamando, John Valadez, and Harry Gamboa Jr.
We'll be airing an excerpt this weekend on Off-Ramp, but meantime, here's the whole recording, plus an essay on the exhibition by Dr. Bautista. Artifex is up through July 6.
Five Latino artists that come from different generations, geographic conditions and cultural influences, but all with one thing in common; a commitment to artistically explore cultural artifacts that signify identity. These artifacts can be anonymous remnants from second-hand stores, found and used by Einar and Jamex de la Torre, or more personal artifacts such as the clothing, jewelry, and tattoos on the figures drawn by Shizu Saldamando, or John Valadez’s cautious use of Chicano artifacts like the low-rider car and the Virgin.
Harry Gamboa Jr.’s characters in his photographs, films, and performances have become artifacts of a new Chicano culture that is being constantly (re)created through the organic evolution of Chicano artists themselves. These five artists both appropriate cultural artifacts and create new ones through their artistic vision that reflects their immersion in contemporary culture as well as their desire to contribute to the global visual discourse.
Notions of identity, culture, and community emerged in the 1960s and ‘70s during the civil rights movement with the Brown Berets and the Chicano Moratorium. Today in 2013 the world has changed. Artists are no less conscious of their identity, but that identity is a much larger assemblage of where they were born, where they have lived, where they exhibit, where they travel, and who they meet.
To say that the de la Torre brothers are Mexican artists says nothing about their formative years in Orange County or their current experience of the U.S./Mexico border region that they cross regularly between their San Diego studio and their home in Ensenada. Younger artists like Saldamando don’t approach identity as monolithic, but rather as a remix of pop culture, fine arts, west side, east side, Mexican, Asian, and more. Gamboa Jr. started to use his camera in the 1970s to document the urban Chicano experience in his subversive style, and continues to do so as that same experience changes, even as means of subversion and assumptions of normalcy change. Valadez created a cultural iconography drawn from his neglected world to empower Chicanos, but today that world is no longer confused and angry, and creates its own iconographies.
Latino culture in the 21st century is about reflection, creation, and contribution of new ways of thinking, new ideas, and new media. The artists participate concurrently in a local and a global world, on a Latino and an American field, and in high and low cultural spaces. We cannot negate the continued presence of identity, social issues, ethnicity, history, and culture, but we can try to go beyond to focus on what really matters; the work as contemporary arte factum.The war of words between estranged couple Mike Shouhed and Jessica Parido seems to be hotting up in the wake of their divorce announcement.
The Shahs of Sunset stars are splitting after eight months of marriage, citing 'irreconcilable differences' according to E! News.
InTouch revealed the divorce papers, which show Jessica has filed for spousal support, but the reality star told E! on Tuesday she doesn't want a penny from her soon to be ex husband.
Scroll down for video
Keep your money: Jessica Parido says she wants nothing from Mike Shouhed, whom she is divorcing after just a few months
She told the site: 'I want to clear the rumor that I am asking Mike for spousal support. I am not asking him for anything.
'When I left Mike three months ago, I left with my clothes on my back and two small duffel bags.
'I haven’t gone back for one thing. I don’t want anything from him. I don’t want anything from him at all. I want to move on with my life. I don’t want a penny from him.
'That couldn’t be further from the truth. I want to move on with my life and I want to give all my time, energy and love that I gave to him to someone that deserves it, and it’s clearly not Mike.'
Not holding her back: The nurse stepped out in Beverly Hills, California, on Tuesday, just a day after the news broke of her split
Designer support: If the reality star did need some extra cash, she certainly does not need to look far as her belt and bag would pay most people's rents
That was quick: Jessica filed from divorce from her reality co-star husband Mike Shouhed after eight months of marriage (pictured here August 2014)
The pair split after claims Mike had been cheating on the star - but it is not clear whether he was unfaithful throughout their short lived marriage or before it.
On Tuesday a rep for the Mike said: 'Two years ago, before they were married, Mike made a terrible mistake and cheated on Jessica.
'She recently discovered a text message and he came completely clean to her.
'He feels so terrible. Jessica is the most amazing woman in the world.'
Claims vows were broken: The 26-year-old said that after less than six months of marriage she found out her husband had cheated on her with numerous women
According to Mike's rep, he has done everything in his power to convince his wife to take him back - but to no avail.
They said: 'He's begged for her back on hands and knees. He's offered his heartfelt apology to her. He loves Jessica and always will.'
However Jessica, 26, tells a different story, alleging her estranged husband is a serial phlianderer.
She told E! reports her other half had been unfaithful before they tied the knot were untrue - she claimed he had played away while they were wed.
Speaking to the site she claimed: 'It was not just two years and one person, that is not the case," Parido tells ET. "He cheated on me with multiple girls.'
She claims she caught him out when she saw messages come up on iMessage when she was updating her resume on their computer: 'I saw messages pop up from before we got engaged up until that present day, July 31.
'I don’t know if |
Days) Attributes: capacity: 0 mass: 0 radius: 0 volume: 0.01 Published flag: True [+] Vargur Thukker Tribe SKIN (365 Days) Attributes: capacity: 0 mass: 0 radius: 0 volume: 0.01 Published flag: True [+] Vargur Thukker Tribe SKIN (7 Days) Attributes: capacity: 0 mass: 0 radius: 0 volume: 0.01 Published flag: True [+] Vargur Thukker Tribe SKIN (90 Days) Attributes: capacity: 0 mass: 0 radius: 0 volume: 0.01 Published flag: True [+] Vargur Thukker Tribe SKIN (Permanent) Attributes: capacity: 0 mass: 0 radius: 0 volume: 0.01 Market group: Ship SKINs > Battleships > Advanced Battleships > Marauders > Minmatar Published flag: True Category: Apparel Group: Tops [*] Men's 'Humanitarian' T-shirt YC 117 Market group: From: None To: Apparel > Men's Clothing > Tops [*] Women's 'Humanitarian' T-shirt YC 117 Market group: From: None To: Apparel > Women's Clothing > Tops Category: Blueprint Group: Armor Reinforcer Blueprint [*] 'Abatis' 100mm Reinforced Steel Plates I Blueprint => 'Abatis' 100mm Steel Plates I Blueprint [*] 'Bailey' 1600mm Reinforced Steel Plates I Blueprint => 'Bailey' 1600mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] 'Barbican' 800mm Reinforced Steel Plates I Blueprint => 'Barbican' 800mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] 'Bastion' 400mm Reinforced Steel Plates I Blueprint => 'Bastion' 400mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] 'Chainmail' 200mm Reinforced Steel Plates I Blueprint => 'Chainmail' 200mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] 'Citadella' 50mm Reinforced Steel Plates I Blueprint => 'Citadella' 100mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] 100mm Reinforced Steel Plates I Blueprint => 100mm Steel Plates I Blueprint [*] 100mm Reinforced Steel Plates II Blueprint => 100mm Steel Plates II Blueprint [*] 1600mm Reinforced Steel Plates I Blueprint => 1600mm Steel Plates I Blueprint [*] 1600mm Reinforced Steel Plates II Blueprint => 1600mm Steel Plates II Blueprint [*] 200mm Reinforced Steel Plates I Blueprint => 200mm Steel Plates I Blueprint [*] 200mm Reinforced Steel Plates II Blueprint => 200mm Steel Plates II Blueprint [*] 400mm Reinforced Steel Plates I Blueprint => 400mm Steel Plates I Blueprint [*] 400mm Reinforced Steel Plates II Blueprint => 400mm Steel Plates II Blueprint [*] 50mm Reinforced Steel Plates I Blueprint => 50mm Steel Plates I Blueprint Published flag: True => False [*] 800mm Reinforced Steel Plates I Blueprint => 800mm Steel Plates I Blueprint [*] 800mm Reinforced Steel Plates II Blueprint => 800mm Steel Plates II Blueprint [*] Imperial Navy 100mm Reinforced Steel Plates 2 Blueprint => Federation Navy 100mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] Imperial Navy 1600mm Reinforced Steel Plates 2 Blueprint => Federation Navy 1600mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] Imperial Navy 200mm Reinforced Steel Plates 2 Blueprint => Federation Navy 200mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] Imperial Navy 400mm Reinforced Steel Plates 2 Blueprint => Federation Navy 400mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] Imperial Navy 800mm Reinforced Steel Plates 2 Blueprint => Federation Navy 800mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] Imperial Navy 100mm Reinforced Steel Plates 1 Blueprint => Imperial Navy 100mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] Imperial Navy 1600mm Reinforced Steel Plates 1 Blueprint => Imperial Navy 1600mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] Imperial Navy 200mm Reinforced Steel Plates 1 Blueprint => Imperial Navy 200mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] Imperial Navy 400mm Reinforced Steel Plates 1 Blueprint => Imperial Navy 400mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] Imperial Navy 800mm Reinforced Steel Plates 1 Blueprint => Imperial Navy 800mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] Syndicate 100mm Reinforced Steel Plates Blueprint => Syndicate 100mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] Syndicate 1600mm Reinforced Steel Plates Blueprint => Syndicate 1600mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] Syndicate 200mm Reinforced Steel Plates Blueprint => Syndicate 200mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] Syndicate 400mm Reinforced Steel Plates Blueprint => Syndicate 400mm Steel Plates Blueprint [*] Syndicate 800mm Reinforced Steel Plates Blueprint => Syndicate 800mm Steel Plates Blueprint Group: Propulsion Module Blueprint [*] 100MN Analog Booster Rockets Blueprint => 100MN Analog Booster Afterburner Blueprint [*] 10MN Analog Booster Rockets Blueprint => 10MN Analog Booster Afterburner Blueprint [*] 1MN Analog Booster Rockets Blueprint => 1MN Analog Booster Afterburner Blueprint [*] Civilian Afterburner Blueprint => 1MN Civilian Afterburner Blueprint [*] 100MN Digital Booster Rockets Blueprint => 500MN Digital Booster Rockets Blueprint [*] 100MN Microwarpdrive I Blueprint => 500MN Microwarpdrive I Blueprint [*] 100MN Microwarpdrive II Blueprint => 500MN Microwarpdrive II Blueprint [*] 10MN Digital Booster Rockets Blueprint => 50MN Digital Booster Microwarpdrive Blueprint [*] 10MN Microwarpdrive I Blueprint => 50MN Microwarpdrive I Blueprint [*] 10MN Microwarpdrive II Blueprint => 50MN Microwarpdrive II Blueprint [*] 1MN Digital Booster Rockets Blueprint => 5MN Digital Booster Microwarpdrive Blueprint [*] 1MN Microwarpdrive I Blueprint => 5MN Microwarpdrive I Blueprint [*] 1MN Microwarpdrive II Blueprint => 5MN Microwarpdrive II Blueprint [*] Federation Navy 100MN Microwarpdrive Blueprint => Federation Navy 500MN Microwarpdrive Blueprint [*] Federation Navy 10MN Microwarpdrive Blueprint => Federation Navy 50MN Microwarpdrive Blueprint [*] Federation Navy 1MN Microwarpdrive Blueprint => Federation Navy 5MN Microwarpdrive Blueprint [*] Republic Fleet 100MN Microwarpdrive Blueprint => Republic Fleet 500MN Microwarpdrive Blueprint [*] Republic Fleet 10MN Microwarpdrive Blueprint => Republic Fleet 50MN Microwarpdrive Blueprint [*] Republic Fleet 1MN Microwarpdrive Blueprint => Republic Fleet 5MN Microwarpdrive Blueprint Group: Shield Extender Blueprint [*] Micro 'Trapper' Shield Extender Blueprint => Small 'Trapper' Shield Extender Blueprint Category: Module Group: Armor Reinforcer [*] 'Abatis' 100mm Reinforced Steel Plates I => 'Abatis' 100mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 263 => 325 [*] cpu: 8 => 9 [*] massAddition: 37500 => 36000 [*] power: 5 => 4 [*] 'Bailey' 1600mm Reinforced Steel Plates I => 'Bailey' 1600mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 4200 => 4750 [*] cpu: 24 => 28 [*] massAddition: 3750000 => 3250000 [*] power: 450 => 490 [*] 'Barbican' 800mm Reinforced Steel Plates I => 'Barbican' 800mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 2103 => 2400 [*] cpu: 20 => 23 [*] massAddition: 1500000 => 1250000 [*] power: 180 => 195 [*] 'Bastion' 400mm Reinforced Steel Plates I => 'Bastion' 400mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 1053 => 1250 [*] cpu: 16 => 19 [*] massAddition: 375000 => 325000 [*] power: 27 => 29 [*] 'Chainmail' 200mm Reinforced Steel Plates I => 'Chainmail' 200mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 528 => 625 [*] massAddition: 150000 => 130000 [*] 'Citadella' 50mm Reinforced Steel Plates I => 'Citadella' 100mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 131 => 175 [*] massAddition: 15000 => 25000 [*] power: 1 => 2 Market group: From: Ship Equipment > Hull & Armor > Armor Plates > 50mm Armor Plate To: Ship Equipment > Hull & Armor > Armor Plates > 100mm Armor Plate [*] 100mm Reinforced Crystalline Carbonide Plates I => 100mm Crystalline Carbonide Restrained Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 244 => 250 [*] cpu: 9 => 10 [*] massAddition: 30000 => 32500 [*] metaLevel: 3 => 1 [*] 100mm Reinforced Nanofiber Plates I Market group: From: Ship Equipment > Hull & Armor > Armor Plates > 100mm Armor Plate To: None Published flag: True => False [*] 100mm Reinforced Titanium Plates I Market group: From: Ship Equipment > Hull & Armor > Armor Plates > 100mm Armor Plate To: None Published flag: True => False [*] 100mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I => 100mm Rolled Tungsten Compact Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 263 => 250 [*] massAddition: 27500 => 35000 [*] metaLevel: 4 => 1 [*] power: 5 => 4 [*] 100mm Reinforced Steel Plates I => 100mm Steel Plates I Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 188 => 200 [*] massAddition: 37500 => 35000 [*] 100mm Reinforced Steel Plates II => 100mm Steel Plates II Attributes: [*] cpu: 11 => 12 [*] 1600mm Reinforced Crystalline Carbonide Plates I => 1600mm Crystalline Carbonide Restrained Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 3900 => 4000 [*] cpu: 29 => 30 [*] metaLevel: 3 => 1 [*] 1600mm Reinforced Nanofiber Plates I Market group: From: Ship Equipment > Hull & Armor > Armor Plates > 1600mm Armor Plate To: None Published flag: True => False [*] 1600mm Reinforced Titanium Plates I Market group: From: Ship Equipment > Hull & Armor > Armor Plates > 1600mm Armor Plate To: None Published flag: True => False [*] 1600mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I => 1600mm Rolled Tungsten Compact Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 4200 => 4000 [*] cpu: 28 => 27 [*] massAddition: 2750000 => 3500000 [*] metaLevel: 4 => 1 [*] power: 500 => 480 [*] 1600mm Reinforced Steel Plates I => 1600mm Steel Plates I Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 3000 => 3500 [*] massAddition: 3750000 => 3500000 [*] 1600mm Reinforced Steel Plates II => 1600mm Steel Plates II Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 4800 => 4500 [*] cpu: 33 => 35 [*] power: 575 => 550 [*] 200mm Reinforced Crystalline Carbonide Plates I => 200mm Crystalline Carbonide Restrained Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 488 => 500 [*] cpu: 14 => 15 [*] metaLevel: 3 => 1 [*] 200mm Reinforced Nanofiber Plates I Market group: From: Ship Equipment > Hull & Armor > Armor Plates > 200mm Armor Plate To: None Published flag: True => False [*] 200mm Reinforced Titanium Plates I Market group: From: Ship Equipment > Hull & Armor > Armor Plates > 200mm Armor Plate To: None Published flag: True => False [*] 200mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I => 200mm Rolled Tungsten Compact Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 525 => 500 [*] cpu: 13 => 11 [*] massAddition: 110000 => 140000 [*] metaLevel: 4 => 1 [*] power: 10 => 9 [*] 200mm Reinforced Steel Plates I => 200mm Steel Plates I Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 375 => 450 [*] massAddition: 150000 => 140000 [*] 200mm Reinforced Steel Plates II => 200mm Steel Plates II Attributes: [*] cpu: 17 => 16 [*] 400mm Reinforced Crystalline Carbonide Plates I => 400mm Crystalline Carbonide Restrained Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 975 => 1100 [*] cpu: 19 => 20 [*] metaLevel: 3 => 1 [*] 400mm Reinforced Nanofiber Plates I Market group: From: Ship Equipment > Hull & Armor > Armor Plates > 400mm Armor Plate To: None Published flag: True => False [*] 400mm Reinforced Titanium Plates I Market group: From: Ship Equipment > Hull & Armor > Armor Plates > 400mm Armor Plate To: None Published flag: True => False [*] 400mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I => 400mm Rolled Tungsten Compact Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 1050 => 1100 [*] cpu: 18 => 17 [*] massAddition: 275000 => 350000 [*] metaLevel: 4 => 1 [*] power: 30 => 28 [*] 400mm Reinforced Steel Plates I => 400mm Steel Plates I Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 750 => 900 [*] massAddition: 375000 => 350000 [*] 400mm Reinforced Steel Plates II => 400mm Steel Plates II [*] 50mm Reinforced Crystalline Carbonide Plates I Market group: From: Ship Equipment > Hull & Armor > Armor Plates > 50mm Armor Plate To: None Published flag: True => False [*] 50mm Reinforced Nanofiber Plates I Market group: From: Ship Equipment > Hull & Armor > Armor Plates > 50mm Armor Plate To: None Published flag: True => False [*] 50mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I Market group: From: Ship Equipment > Hull & Armor > Armor Plates > 50mm Armor Plate To: None Published flag: True => False [*] 50mm Reinforced Steel Plates I Market group: From: Ship Equipment > Hull & Armor > Armor Plates > 50mm Armor Plate To: None Published flag: True => False [*] 50mm Reinforced Steel Plates II Market group: From: Ship Equipment > Hull & Armor > Armor Plates > 50mm Armor Plate To: None Published flag: True => False [*] 50mm Reinforced Titanium Plates I Market group: From: Ship Equipment > Hull & Armor > Armor Plates > 50mm Armor Plate To: None Published flag: True => False [*] 800mm Reinforced Crystalline Carbonide Plates I => 800mm Crystalline Carbonide Restrained Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 1950 => 2000 [*] cpu: 24 => 25 [*] metaLevel: 3 => 1 [*] 800mm Reinforced Nanofiber Plates I Market group: From: Ship Equipment > Hull & Armor > Armor Plates > 800mm Armor Plate To: None Published flag: True => False [*] 800mm Reinforced Titanium Plates I Market group: From: Ship Equipment > Hull & Armor > Armor Plates > 800mm Armor Plate To: None Published flag: True => False [*] 800mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I => 800mm Rolled Tungsten Compact Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 2100 => 2000 [*] cpu: 23 => 22 [*] massAddition: 1100000 => 1350000 [*] metaLevel: 4 => 1 [*] power: 200 => 190 [*] 800mm Reinforced Steel Plates I => 800mm Steel Plates I Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 1500 => 1750 [*] massAddition: 1500000 => 1350000 [*] 800mm Reinforced Steel Plates II => 800mm Steel Plates II Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 2400 => 2300 [*] massAddition: 1500000 => 1450000 [*] Federation Navy 100mm Reinforced Steel Plates => Federation Navy 100mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 263 => 350 [*] cpu: 11 => 9 [*] massAddition: 20625 => 20000 [*] metaLevel: 7 => 8 [*] Federation Navy 1600mm Reinforced Steel Plates => Federation Navy 1600mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 4200 => 5000 [*] cpu: 33 => 30 [*] massAddition: 2062500 => 2250000 [*] metaLevel: 7 => 8 [*] power: 575 => 550 [*] Federation Navy 200mm Reinforced Steel Plates => Federation Navy 200mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 528 => 650 [*] cpu: 17 => 13 [*] massAddition: 82500 => 90000 [*] metaLevel: 7 => 8 [*] power: 12 => 11 Published flag: True => False [*] Federation Navy 400mm Reinforced Steel Plates => Federation Navy 400mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 1053 => 1300 [*] cpu: 23 => 20 [*] massAddition: 206250 => 225000 [*] metaLevel: 7 => 8 [*] Federation Navy 800mm Reinforced Steel Plates => Federation Navy 800mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 2103 => 2500 [*] cpu: 28 => 25 [*] massAddition: 825000 => 900000 [*] metaLevel: 7 => 8 [*] Imperial Navy 100mm Reinforced Steel Plates => Imperial Navy 100mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 263 => 375 [*] cpu: 10 => 8 [*] massAddition: 23375 => 32500 [*] metaLevel: 7 => 8 [*] power: 6 => 7 [*] Imperial Navy 1600mm Reinforced Steel Plates => Imperial Navy 1600mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 4200 => 5250 [*] cpu: 30 => 27 [*] massAddition: 2337500 => 3000000 [*] metaLevel: 7 => 8 [*] Imperial Navy 200mm Reinforced Steel Plates => Imperial Navy 200mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 528 => 700 [*] cpu: 15 => 12 [*] massAddition: 93500 => 120000 [*] metaLevel: 7 => 8 [*] power: 12 => 13 Published flag: True => False [*] Imperial Navy 400mm Reinforced Steel Plates => Imperial Navy 400mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 1053 => 1375 [*] cpu: 21 => 18 [*] massAddition: 233750 => 300000 [*] metaLevel: 7 => 8 [*] power: 35 => 40 [*] Imperial Navy 800mm Reinforced Steel Plates => Imperial Navy 800mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 2103 => 2625 [*] cpu: 25 => 23 [*] massAddition: 935000 => 1200000 [*] metaLevel: 7 => 8 [*] power: 230 => 245 [*] Syndicate 100mm Reinforced Steel Plates => Syndicate 100mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 263 => 350 [*] cpu: 11 => 10 [*] massAddition: 22500 => 25000 [*] metaLevel: 6 => 8 [*] power: 6 => 5 [*] Syndicate 1600mm Reinforced Steel Plates => Syndicate 1600mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 4200 => 5000 [*] cpu: 33 => 35 [*] massAddition: 2250000 => 2500000 [*] metaLevel: 6 => 8 [*] power: 575 => 525 [*] Syndicate 200mm Reinforced Steel Plates => Syndicate 200mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 528 => 650 [*] cpu: 17 => 14 [*] massAddition: 90000 => 100000 [*] metaLevel: 6 => 8 [*] power: 12 => 9 Published flag: True => False [*] Syndicate 400mm Reinforced Steel Plates => Syndicate 400mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 1053 => 1300 [*] cpu: 23 => 22 [*] massAddition: 225000 => 250000 [*] metaLevel: 6 => 8 [*] power: 35 => 30 [*] Syndicate 800mm Reinforced Steel Plates => Syndicate 800mm Steel Plates Attributes: [*] armorHPBonusAdd: 2103 => 2500 [*] massAddition: 900000 => 1000000 [*] metaLevel: 6 => 8 [*] power: 230 => 220 Group: Propulsion Module [*] 100MN Afterburner I Attributes: [*] speedFactor: 112.5 => 115 [*] 100MN Afterburner II Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 352 => 350 [*] 100MN Analog Booster Rockets => 100MN Analog Booster Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 256 => 250 [*] speedFactor: 112.5 => 135 [*] Experimental 100MN Afterburner I => 100MN Monopropellant Enduring Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 320 => 250 [*] metaLevel: 3 => 1 [*] speedFactor: 126 => 125 [*] 10MN Afterburner I Attributes: [*] speedFactor: 112.5 => 115 [*] 10MN Afterburner II Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 88 => 90 [*] 10MN Analog Booster Rockets => 10MN Analog Booster Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 64 => 60 [*] speedFactor: 112.5 => 135 [*] Experimental 10MN Afterburner I => 10MN Monopropellant Enduring Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 80 => 60 [*] metaLevel: 3 => 1 [*] speedFactor: 126 => 125 [*] 1MN Afterburner I Attributes: [*] speedFactor: 112.5 => 115 [*] 1MN Analog Booster Rockets => 1MN Analog Booster Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 16 => 15 [*] speedFactor: 121.5 => 135 [*] Civilian Afterburner => 1MN Civilian Afterburner Attributes: [*] speedFactor: 32 => 60 [*] Experimental 1MN Afterburner I => 1MN Monopropellant Enduring Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 20 => 15 [*] metaLevel: 3 => 1 [*] speedFactor: 126 => 125 [*] Limited 1MN Afterburner I => 1MN Y-S8 Compact Afterburner Attributes: [*] cpu: 15 => 13 [*] metaLevel: 2 => 1 [*] power: 10 => 9 [*] speedFactor: 121.5 => 125 [*] Prototype 100MN Microwarpdrive I => 500MN Cold-Gas Enduring Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.81 => 0.75 [*] capacitorNeed: 324 => 280 [*] metaLevel: 4 => 1 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 505 [*] 100MN Digital Booster Rockets => 500MN Digital Booster Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.86 => 0.85 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 510 [*] 100MN Microwarpdrive I => 500MN Microwarpdrive I Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 324 => 320 [*] 100MN Microwarpdrive II => 500MN Microwarpdrive II Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.83 => 0.8 [*] capacitorNeed: 356 => 350 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 510 [*] Experimental 10MN Microwarpdrive I => 50MN Cold-Gas Enduring Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.81 => 0.75 [*] capacitorNeed: 180 => 160 [*] metaLevel: 3 => 1 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 505 [*] 10MN Digital Booster Rockets => 50MN Digital Booster Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.86 => 0.85 [*] capacitorNeed: 144 => 140 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 510 [*] 10MN Microwarpdrive I => 50MN Microwarpdrive I [*] 10MN Microwarpdrive II => 50MN Microwarpdrive II Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.83 => 0.8 [*] capacitorNeed: 198 => 200 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 510 [*] Upgraded 1MN Microwarpdrive I => 5MN Cold-Gas Enduring Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.78 => 0.75 [*] capacitorNeed: 45 => 35 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 505 [*] 1MN Digital Booster Rockets => 5MN Digital Booster Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.86 => 0.85 [*] capacitorNeed: 36 => 35 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 510 [*] 1MN Microwarpdrive I => 5MN Microwarpdrive I [*] 1MN Microwarpdrive II => 5MN Microwarpdrive II Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.83 => 0.8 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 510 [*] Limited 1MN Microwarpdrive I => 5MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.81 => 0.75 [*] cpu: 23 => 21 [*] metaLevel: 2 => 1 [*] power: 15 => 14 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 505 [*] Brynn's Modified 100MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 241 => 290 [*] cpu: 58 => 52 [*] overloadSpeedFactorBonus: 50 => 60 [*] power: 625 => 563 [*] Brynn's Modified 100MN Microwarpdrive => Brynn's Modified 500MN Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.92 => 0.93 [*] capacitorNeed: 324 => 280 [*] cpu: 87 => 77 [*] overloadSpeedFactorBonus: 50 => 60 [*] power: 1250 => 1125 [*] signatureRadiusBonus: 433 => 450 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 514 [*] Core A-Type 100MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 241 => 290 [*] metaLevel: 13 => 14 [*] speedFactor: 156 => 160 [*] Core A-Type 100MN Microwarpdrive => Core A-Type 500MN Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 324 => 280 [*] cpu: 95 => 94 [*] metaLevel: 13 => 14 [*] signatureRadiusBonus: 411 => 410 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 518 [*] Core B-Type 100MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 241 => 290 [*] cpu: 61 => 60 [*] speedFactor: 153 => 155 [*] Core B-Type 100MN Microwarpdrive => Core B-Type 500MN Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.94 => 0.95 [*] capacitorNeed: 324 => 280 [*] cpu: 91 => 90 [*] signatureRadiusBonus: 422 => 430 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 516 [*] Core C-Type 100MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 241 => 290 [*] metaLevel: 11 => 10 [*] Core C-Type 100MN Microwarpdrive => Core C-Type 500MN Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.92 => 0.93 [*] capacitorNeed: 324 => 280 [*] cpu: 87 => 86 [*] metaLevel: 11 => 10 [*] signatureRadiusBonus: 433 => 450 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 514 [*] Core X-Type 100MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 241 => 290 [*] cpu: 66 => 65 [*] metaLevel: 14 => 16 [*] speedFactor: 159 => 165 [*] Core X-Type 100MN Microwarpdrive => Core X-Type 500MN Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 324 => 280 [*] cpu: 100 => 98 [*] metaLevel: 14 => 16 [*] signatureRadiusBonus: 400 => 390 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 520 [*] Coreli A-Type 1MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 15 => 18 [*] metaLevel: 13 => 14 [*] speedFactor: 156 => 160 [*] Coreli A-Type 1MN Microwarpdrive => Coreli A-Type 5MN Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 45 => 40 [*] cpu: 32 => 31 [*] metaLevel: 13 => 14 [*] signatureRadiusBonus: 411 => 410 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 518 [*] Coreli B-Type 1MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 15 => 18 [*] speedFactor: 153 => 155 [*] Coreli B-Type 1MN Microwarpdrive => Coreli B-Type 5MN Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.94 => 0.95 [*] capacitorNeed: 45 => 40 [*] signatureRadiusBonus: 422 => 430 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 516 [*] Coreli C-Type 1MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 15 => 18 [*] metaLevel: 11 => 10 [*] Coreli C-Type 1MN Microwarpdrive => Coreli C-Type 5MN Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.92 => 0.93 [*] capacitorNeed: 45 => 40 [*] metaLevel: 11 => 10 [*] signatureRadiusBonus: 433 => 450 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 514 [*] Corelum A-Type 10MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 60 => 70 [*] metaLevel: 13 => 14 [*] speedFactor: 156 => 160 [*] Corelum A-Type 10MN Microwarpdrive => Corelum A-Type 50MN Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 180 => 160 [*] metaLevel: 13 => 14 [*] signatureRadiusBonus: 411 => 410 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 518 [*] Corelum B-Type 10MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 60 => 70 [*] cpu: 31 => 30 [*] speedFactor: 153 => 155 [*] Corelum B-Type 10MN Microwarpdrive => Corelum B-Type 50MN Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.94 => 0.95 [*] capacitorNeed: 180 => 160 [*] cpu: 61 => 60 [*] signatureRadiusBonus: 422 => 430 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 516 [*] Corelum C-Type 10MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 60 => 70 [*] metaLevel: 11 => 10 [*] Corelum C-Type 10MN Microwarpdrive => Corelum C-Type 50MN Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.92 => 0.93 [*] capacitorNeed: 180 => 160 [*] metaLevel: 11 => 10 [*] signatureRadiusBonus: 433 => 450 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 514 [*] Cormack's Modified 100MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 241 => 290 [*] cpu: 66 => 59 [*] metaLevel: 14 => 17 [*] overloadSpeedFactorBonus: 50 => 60 [*] power: 625 => 563 [*] speedFactor: 159 => 165 [*] Cormack's Modified 100MN Microwarpdrive => Cormack's Modified 500MN Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 324 => 280 [*] cpu: 100 => 88 [*] metaLevel: 14 => 17 [*] overloadSpeedFactorBonus: 50 => 60 [*] power: 1250 => 1125 [*] signatureRadiusBonus: 400 => 390 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 520 [*] Domination 100MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 241 => 290 [*] speedFactor: 144 => 145 [*] Domination 10MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 60 => 70 [*] speedFactor: 144 => 145 [*] Domination 1MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 15 => 18 [*] speedFactor: 144 => 145 [*] Domination 100MN Microwarpdrive => Domination 500MN Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.89 => 0.9 [*] capacitorNeed: 270 => 320 [*] signatureRadiusBonus: 467 => 450 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 512 [*] Domination 10MN Microwarpdrive => Domination 50MN Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.89 => 0.9 [*] capacitorNeed: 160 => 180 [*] power: 175 => 165 [*] signatureRadiusBonus: 467 => 450 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 512 [*] Domination 1MN Microwarpdrive => Domination 5MN Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.89 => 0.9 [*] capacitorNeed: 40 => 45 [*] signatureRadiusBonus: 467 => 450 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 512 [*] Federation Navy 100MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 320 => 290 [*] metaLevel: 7 => 8 [*] speedFactor: 141 => 145 [*] Federation Navy 10MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 80 => 70 [*] metaLevel: 7 => 8 [*] speedFactor: 141 => 145 [*] Federation Navy 1MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 20 => 18 [*] metaLevel: 7 => 8 [*] speedFactor: 141 => 145 [*] Federation Navy 100MN Microwarpdrive => Federation Navy 500MN Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.86 => 0.9 [*] capacitorNeed: 324 => 280 [*] metaLevel: 6 => 8 [*] signatureRadiusBonus: 489 => 475 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 512 [*] Federation Navy 10MN Microwarpdrive => Federation Navy 50MN Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.86 => 0.9 [*] capacitorNeed: 180 => 160 [*] metaLevel: 6 => 8 [*] signatureRadiusBonus: 489 => 475 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 512 [*] Federation Navy 1MN Microwarpdrive => Federation Navy 5MN Microwarpdrive Attributes: [*] capacitorCapacityMultiplier: 0.86 => 0.9 [*] capacitorNeed: 45 => 40 [*] metaLevel: 6 => 8 [*] signatureRadiusBonus: 489 => 475 [*] speedFactor: 500 => 512 [*] Gist A-Type 100MN Afterburner Attributes: [*] capacitorNeed: 320 => 290 [*] metaLevel: 13 => 14 [*] power: 750 => 781 [*] speedFactor: 159 => 160 [*] Gist A-Type 100MN Microwarpdrive => Gist A |
apps. Overturning these rules would also likely reverse a privacy measure meant to keep broadband providers from using and selling customer data without permission.
“Death by a thousand cuts is a constantly overused cliche, but that’s sort of what they’re aiming for right now,” said Matt Wood, the policy director of consumer group Free Press, referring to the Republicans now in power at the FCC.
The agency has five commissioners appointed by the president and oversees internet services and the broadcast industry.
DEATH TO NET NEUTRALITY
It’s no secret President Donald Trump’s hand-picked FCC chief, Ajit Pai, wants to cut regulations that he believes are holding back faster, cheaper internet.
Pai takes special aim at net neutrality rules, which regulate broadband as a utility and bar providers from playing favorites by offering speedier access to, say, their own streaming-video services. Pai considers these rules a mistake that slows investment in internet infrastructure. His goal is to expand internet access, especially in rural areas where choices are limited.
But an aggressive overhaul of net neutrality could be politically and legally difficult. For a telecom policy, net neutrality is popular with consumers, drawing attention from comedian John Oliver and spurring people to flood the FCC with roughly 4 million comments (not all in support, of course). A federal appeals court upheld the rules in June.
This may explain why the FCC has so far opted for a piecemeal attack — an approach that may continue for a while.
NIBBLING AROUND THE EDGES
A broad attack on the landmark 2015 net neutrality rules is expected. But under Pai, the FCC has made only some tweaks to the agency’s approach. These rules have barred broadband providers from blocking and slowing some websites and creating faster access for their own services. But the rules also gave the FCC broader powers to stop telecom companies from hurting competition and consumers in other ways that weren’t spelled out.
When Barack Obama was president, the FCC used those broader powers to go after “zero-rating” plans, which give subscribers free data so long as they stick with their carrier’s own streaming-TV service, like AT&T’s DirecTV Now. Zero rating may be popular with consumers — hey, free data! — but the FCC under Obama had argued that letting internet providers play favorites undermines streaming-video competition and ultimately leaves consumers worse off. After Pai took office, the FCC reversed that stance and gave a thumbs-up to AT&T and other carriers with zero-rating policies.
The agency also exempted additional smaller broadband providers from a net neutrality regulation that required companies to spell out their pricing, such as specifying how long promotional rates last and whether services capped monthly data usage.
Until the FCC or Congress goes full-bore on net neutrality, the agency will likely “stand down” from enforcing it unless there’s a “really extreme” violation, said Marc Martin, technology and telecom attorney with Perkins Coie.
ONLINE PRIVACY REDO
The agency has also blocked part of a broadband privacy measure that requires companies like Comcast and Verizon to take “reasonable measures” to secure customer information like financial data or web browsing histories.
The remaining privacy rules, which aren’t in effect yet, are now under threat. Under these rules, phone and cable companies must ask permission before using or selling your data. Phone and cable companies have complained that these rules are tougher than what internet-advertising behemoths like Google and Facebook face. Pai says he wants to work with the Federal Trade Commission, another D.C. regulator, to come up with broadband privacy rules that are more in line with the laxer standards for internet companies.
Republican lawmakers have proposed spiking them completely. Democrats say that would leave consumers vulnerable and allow companies like Verizon or AT&T able to sell consumer information to advertisers. There are vaguer privacy requirements that still apply under the net neutrality rules, but the agency may be loath to enforce them, Martin said. And the net neutrality rules are expected to be undone in any case.
BROADBAND ACCESS AND PRISON PHONE RATES
Other efforts that were intended to address inequities, like the high cost of prison phone calls and broadband for lower-income people, are seen as endangered.
The agency refused to defend in court an FCC rule that capped rates for in-state calls made to people in prison. And it has limited the availability of government-subsidized internet service for poorer Americans by pulling nine providers from a program called Lifeline. The agency cited concerns about fraud and waste. The FCC says Lifeline still had dozens of companies offering discounted broadband as of December. The FCC may be open to reconsidering its decision.The 100 Best Virtual Boy Games Ever Many seasons have passed since SydLexia.com presented you with its list of the Top 100 SNES Games Ever. The fans cried out for another Top 100 Games list, but it never materialized. Some began to believe that it never would. Sadness filled the land. The world is became veiled darkness. The wind has stopped, the sea is wild, and the earth began to rot. The people waited, their only hope, a prophecy:
When the world is in darkness, a new list will appear...
But that list never came. Until now. So now here we are, twenty-eight months after the SNES list debuted. It has now been over five full years since the launch of SydLexia.com, and I figured there's no better way to celebrate than with a list of 100 best Virtual Boy games ever. Real fucking creative, I know. I had wanted to do a list of the best TurboGrafx-16 titles ever, but the preliminary meetings didn't go well. There was this whole huge argument about whether or not the list should be just original TG-16 games or if Turbo CD games counted as well. Then one guy kept saying we should include Nintendo 64 games because he was born in 1991 and he had no idea what the hell TurboGrafx-16 even was. Then someone pointed out to him that he could have Googled it instead of whining that he didn't know what it was. Punches were thrown, wine was spilled, and everyone accused at least one other person of being gay. So then I did what any self-respecting American would do in a situation like that: I gave up on my dream and decided to try my hand at something significantly easier. Thus, the Virtual Boy list was born. I couldn't possibly undertake a spectaculur project of this magnitude on my own, so a team of expert voters was assembled to help create the master list. Some of those people worked on the previous two lists, some of them were newcomers. After everyone's picks were ranked and filed, everything was ready to go. Well, almost. Not everyone who was involved in the voting process was available to comment on the final version of the list, while others weren't invited to comment due to their inability to be sober for sustained periods of time exceeding twenty minutes. So instead, I assembled an elite team of people who I personally think are awesome to comment on the list. They are: Ed of Dark Maze Studios and Press Start. His comments appear in blue.
Alexis Acid of LZST. Her comments appear in harassing pink.
Valdronius of SydLexia.com. His comments appear in cyan.
Douche McCallister, a moderator on the SydLexia.com forums. His comments appear in green.
Kris Lexia, my biological sister and a full-time nuisance. Her comments appear in nonthreatening purple.
FNJ, gaming expert and longtime member of the SydLexia.com forums. His comments appear in contrasting color not yet used.
SpamBot 5000, a highly advanced revenue-generating ad robot built by Syd and Dr. Light. Its comments appear in goldenrod. My comments appear in a majestic shade of purplish blue that most humans can't see.
ALSO FEATURING SPECIAL BONUS COMMENTS FROM SECRET MYSTERY GUESTS! The rules for voting were the same as they were with the NES and SNES lists. Each player picked 100 games and ranked them from 1-100, with 1 being their top pick and 100 being their lowest. In order to be eligible for inclusion a game had to be available in North America and have received a commercial release. Therefore games such as Virtual Bowling, which was only released in Japan, and Star Fox Virtual Boy, which was never officially released, were not valid picks. Players were also required to vote on a game based on its merits as a Virtual Boy game. So classic games such as Mario Bros. and Panic Bomber which debuted on other hardware and had to be altered for the Virtual Boy system will not necessarily appear on this list. I said this when we did the NES and SNES lists, and I'll say it again now: it is virtually impossible (eh? eh?) to come up with a Top 100 list that satisfies everyone's sensibilities. I have no illusions that this list is anywhere near perfect. There are some omissions that disappoint me and some inclusions that disgust me. So if you think you can do better, go for it. Otherwise, shut the front door and enjoy this article for what it is: a look at 100 Virtual Boy games that are definitely worth playing.
- Syd Lexia
CLICK HERE TO BEGIN!!!Female Facebook employees were routinely asked to cover up and not wear clothing that would “distract” co-workers, a former employee of the Silicon Valley giant has claimed in a new book.
The claim, which contrasts starkly with the the professed feminism of company executives like Sheryl Sandberg, was made by Antonio García Martínez, who worked at Facebook before being fired two years ago, in a memoir about his time at the organisation entitled Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley.
In the book, he claims that the human resources department would ask female employees not to wear revealing clothing in order to avoid distracting their male counterparts.
“Our male HR authority, with occasional backup from his female counterpart, launched into a speech about avoiding clothing that ‘distracted’ coworkers. I’d later learn that managers did in fact occasionally pull aside female employees and read them the riot act,” he says.
Facebook and Silicon Valley firms have long been criticised for their male-dominated workplace culture, with 68% of Facebook employees being men, and with 84% of technology roles at the company also being occupied by men.
He also claims that CEO Mark Zuckerberg was prone to outburst of rage, with a habit of sending angry emails to all his staff saying “Please resign,” after plans were leaked, and responding badly to employees scribbling all over the firm’s walls, saying “I trusted you to create art, and what you f*****s did was vandalize the place.”
García Martínez also suggests Facebook is as corrupt as any other major sector. “The way he sees it, Silicon Valley is much like Wall Street, or any other sector of corporate America, when it comes to shady dealings,” Ellen Huet says in a review for Bloomberg.
Facebook has yet to respond to the allegations.
Chaos Monkeys is available online from $12.99
You can follow Ben Kew on Facebook, on Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at [email protected] Amazing Benefits of Rooibos Tea!
Helps to give you strong bones and teeth because of its calcium, manganese and fluoride content.
Is often prescribed for nervous tension and mild depression as it makes a relaxing sedative.
Helps to control your appetite thus beneficial in weight loss.
Contains magnesium which is necessary for a healthy nervous system.
Helps pacify infants with colic, stomach cramps and sleeping problems. Simply mix some Rooibos tea with expressed breast milk or formula. It is 100% natural with no colorants or preservatives.
Contains no oxalic acid and can therefore be enjoyed by persons suffering from kidney stones.
Put used rooibos tea bags in the refrigerator or freezer. After a hard day's work, put on tired or red eyes to soothe and relax.
Increases the absorption of iron in the body.
Makes a great thirst-quencher and sport drink. Because of its mineral content of iron, potassium, zinc, manganese and sodium, it restores the body's equilibrium after strenuous exercise.
Drink it hot or cold, with or without milk, sugar or honey. Add lemon or mix it with fruit juices for a lovely blend. Rooibos tea is also used in cooking and baking. It replaces the liquid content in recipes for soups, marinades, sauces, stews and cakes for added flavor and nutrition.
And Rooibos tastes divine! It is less bitter than most teas.
My Thoughts:
Would love to know how others make there perfect cup of Rooibos?
(OrganicJar) Rooibos (pronounced ROY-boss) appears to rival the health benefits of green, red and black tea. A favorite among South Africans for years, the tea is made from Aspalathus Linearis, an indigenous shrub that grows only in the mountainous region close to the Cape of Good Hope. The beverage is said to have 50% more antioxidants than are found in green tea and new research is showing rooibos helps delay the aging process! The aging of our bodies is caused by toxic compounds called free radicals which are produced as a by-product of normal cell function. These free radicals attack our healthy cells. Over our lifetime this damage contributes to aging and our immune system weakens. Recently, Japanese scientists have found that Rooibos tea contains a mimic of the enzyme Super Oxide Dismutase (S.O.D.), an antioxidant which attacks the free radicals and limits their damaging effects. Rooibos tea contains no colors, additives or preservatives. It helps to relieve insomnia, irritability, headaches, stomach ulcers, nausea, constipation, and heartburn. It also shows anti-mutagenic, anti-carcinogenic, anti-inflammatory and anti-viral activity. Rooibos contains alpha hydroxy acid and zinc for healthy, smooth skin. This wonder tea is especially useful when brewed and applied to skin irritations like itchy skin, eczema, sunburns, diaper rash and acne.Rooibos is my new favorite tea and it's very versatile! I brew it for about 4 minutes, then add a splash of organic hemp milk, with some raw honey....delicious! With its many positive attributes, Rooibos tea is a great choice of drink for health conscious people and a superfood we should all consume! I haven't found it in many stores, but there are lots of places online, make sure its 100% organic!Source: wikipedia.orgJUNEAU Alaska (Reuters) - A U.S. federal judge on Sunday ruled that the state of Alaska’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional.
A supporter stands waits to congratulate gay couples as they receive their marriage licenses at the Oklahoma County courthouse in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma October 6, 2014. REUTERS/Nick Oxford
Judge Timothy Burgess of the U.S. District Court for Alaska made the ruling after hearing oral arguments on Friday challenging the state’s 16-year-old ban, saying it added to discrimination already faced by gay and lesbian people every day.
“Alaska’s denial of the benefits and dignity of marriage for them only perpetuates this discrimination without legitimate grounds,” Burgess wrote.
He also barred Alaska from refusing to acknowledge lawful same-sex marriages conducted in other states.
Alaska Governor Sean Parnell said Sunday that the state would appeal the ruling, saying the constitutionality question was in flux.
“As Alaska’s governor, I have a duty to defend and uphold the law and the Alaska Constitution,” Parnell, a Republican, said.
Five couples, four of whom already had legally married in other states and a fifth wishing to marry in Alaska, filed their suit against the state in May challenging the ban.
In 1998, Alaska voters enacted a constitutional amendment that excludes same-sex couples from marriage.
The state contended that the voters should have the final word, not the courts.
Burgess disagreed, writing that the state’s right to define marriage “is not unbounded.”
“A state may not exercise its power to define marriage in a way that infringes upon individuals’ constitutional rights,” he wrote.
Sunday’s ruling caps off a busy seven days in federal court rulings on same-sex marriage.
On Tuesday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down same-sex marriage bans in Nevada and Idaho.
A day earlier the U.S. Supreme Court let another appeals court ruling stand to allow similar marriages.
On Sunday, Burgess’ 25-page ruling cited the need to bring an end to longstanding discrimination.
Joshua Decker, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska, hailed the decision.
“Alaska had the misfortune of being the first state, in 1998, to ban equal marriage and bake discrimination into our constitution,” he said. “This victory brings equal rights to thousands of Alaskan couples who are in loving, committed relationships.”Unionized bus drivers, LRT operators and others at Metro Transit voted overwhelmingly to reject a final contract offer and authorize a strike during Super Bowl festivities next year.
The Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1005, which represents about 2,500 workers at Metro Transit, voted 93 percent in favor of rejecting the Metropolitan Council’s last contract offer and authorizing a strike during the period leading up to the Super Bowl.
The vote was held on Sunday and Monday. The union says there’s disagreement over proposed changes to work rules, outsourcing and security for bus drivers.
Mark Lawson, ATU Local 1005 president, said in a statement there’s still time to reach a contract before the Super Bowl, which is expected to attract up to 1 million enthusiasts leading up to football’s big day.
Met Council officials on Monday stood by their statement last week that they are confident a deal can be reached before the Super Bowl.
A mediator from the state Bureau of Mediation Services has been involved in the negotiations.
Janet MooreThe grey, relentless motorway is barely left behind before rolling hills give way to a descent into a Scottish town from central casting. It is the sort of Ayrshire retreat that the tourists will bypass, the salesman will drive through, where the only strangers on the streets are those who are lost or wilfully drifting.
This is a town of 6,500 souls. This is Stewarton. This is Naisyland.
Steven Naismith, at 28, is Scotland's best footballer. He is central to any hopes the national team has of breaking a drought of reaching a major finals that stretches back to 1998. He plays in Liverpool. He still lives in Stewarton.
In explaining this conundrum, one comes near to understanding an extraordinary character. Naismith is not just an unusual footballer. He is a singular human being.
Profoundly courteous off the field, he is fiercely combative on it. He is dyslexic but a dedicated reader. He is driven by doubt but sustained by Stewarton, or at least by the values that he has learned in a family with three siblings and from a mother and father whose example was and is to work hard. David, his dad, is a social worker who lives in the same cul-de-sac where Naismith was brought up. His mum, Rosie, lives down the road and continues to work in Sainsbury's.
Absurdly early on a Sunday morning, I venture into town on foot with Naismith for the full tour. He is greeted with nods, words and the continual beeping of car horns. His through-the-week house is in Cheshire. But this is home. This is where he has a fine house and is building another on a patch of land bought some years ago.
This, too, is where he leaves a mark that is comically physical. This town is populated by those who take their constitutional in Rangers and Everton apparel, two of the sides, of course, that have contained Naismith. There is an explanation beyond hero worship.
"At the end of every season, I gather up all the tops, trackies and whatever and give them to my mum. People come to her and ask if she has anything and she hands them out," says Naismith, whose present job at Everton was preceded by spells at Rangers and Kilmarnock.
More spectacularly, Naismith's clearing of the dressing-room has given Stewarton Athletic, the local amateur side, an unlikely dose of romanticism. "We have to change our boots at Everton every couple of months because our suppliers want us to wear the updated versions," says Naismith. "So when the boys throw their all their discarded boots into the corner, I collect them and bring them up for the amateurs."
So a Stewarton player is careering around in the boots worn by the £28 million Belgian striker Romelu Lukaku? "No," replies Naismith quickly. "He is a size 14." Stewarton Athletic are thus waiting for a Cinderella with big feet to wear these boots but squad members turn out in the footwear worn by internationalists such as Seamus Coleman, Ross Barkley, Leighton Baines, Phil Jagielka and Aiden McGeady.
The local boys' club, Stewarton and Annick, wear shirts that are not discards but a kit in the wrapper bought and donated by Naismith, who skirts a Sunday morning training session for the youngsters to fixed stares. The gentle climb from the town centre takes us around to his primary school, Lainshaw, a place where his ability as a footballer was obvious but where he learned that life could be a struggle and that challenges had to be met with a quick-wittedness that has never deserted him, indeed buoyed him in testing moments.
"I am dyslexic," says Naismith. "It was not so bad for me because I had football and if you are at school and good at football there is a respect that comes with that. It is definitely harder for those who cannot find something to focus on when they are getting upset or annoyed at themselves. That is hard."
His condition has helped give Naismith a compassion he wears lightly. He is an ambassador for Dyslexia Scotland, has a busy charitable life, giving Everton tickets to Liverpool's unemployed or sponsoring Christmas dinners for the homeless or otherwise unfortunate.
He says of his schooldays: "I didn't think I was thick. I thought I was slow. I thought, 'How am I not getting this?' I could cover it well, though. I was only exposed in tests. I could deflect attention from my problem. I could get out of situations. I was always thinking, always looking at how to solve problems before they overwhelmed me."
This trait has undoubtedly helped his rise in football. "I would say I am sharp. In squad training, I would be the sharpest," he says. He points to a goal against Arsenal when he correctly divined the odds of Lukaku scoring, the possibilities offered by a save by the keeper and, computing a series of variables inside a fraction of a second, arrived to score what seemed a simple goal.
"That happens a lot. It is a 50-50 call and I have made the correct choice," he says. "That comes with experience. But it also comes from being the dyslexic boy in the class who has to predict just what page has to be read so he can prepare before it is his turn."
It is part of what has taken the player from Naisyland to the lush grazing grounds of the Barclays Premier League. So precisely where is Naismith and what took him there?
"I AM on holiday in Villamura in Portugal, very upmarket, very nice," says Naismith. "We are walking to dinner when I notice John Terry is limping ahead of me."
He knows the renowned Chelsea captain and tabloid staple has just had an operation. He knows, too, that he is about to catch up on him. "I am hesitant. Do I talk to him? I have played against him. But does he know me?"
Terry is Premier League aristocracy, albeit a king whose coat of arms is chequered. But he knows Naismith. He turns to the Scot, greets him warmly and asks him to wait so he can fetch his son. "You're his favourite player and he will want a photograph with you," says Terry. Naismith tells all this to illustrate how the jump to the most famous, richest league in the world may seem like a movie on occasion but it is grounded in an everyday reality.
He has no qualms about accepting the money. His latest, multimillion-pound, three-year deal further secures him and his family financially. "Football is like basketball, baseball. If you make it, great. But what if you don't? I am a lucky man but I made sacrifices and I took a gamble. Many players leave school with nothing, opting to go down a road with no guarantees. The failure rate is high. It is brutal. There are all those guys going back to college in their mid-twenties having been let go by clubs. It can be embarrassing. Your mates are out making money, moving into flats and you are back at college because you have failed at football and everyone knows it."
Naismith, a millionaire, has retained a value for money. "I will tell you my X5 story. I bought one when I was at Rangers," he says of the BMW. "But when I came to trade it in I lost thousands. I learned a lesson then. I will never throw away money like that again. I know of players who have dropped 30 grand on a car when trading it in. Not me. That's just daft."
There was another defining moment, one that occurred two decades ago. This has at its centre the boy who realised his dreams. "I remember I was a kid at a Killie-Rangers match and went to the players' door. Gordon Durie [Rangers player, now coach] came out and asked me what I was doing. I told him and he said I should just go into the dressing-room. I got a receipt out of my uncle's van and I got [Basile] Boli, [Brian] Laudrup and Stuart McCall to sign it." McCall, now Rangers manager, has coached Naismith at international level. Has Naismith reminded him of the incident? "Not yet, but I will now," he says with a smile.
SO how did the supplicant with a tattered receipt become the great footballing hope for Scotland?
"When I was growing up, my dad would tell me to Hoover the house or to clean my boots and he would always say: 'If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing right.' I took all that in. If I am doing a session in training, I do it right. Always. I put my best into it."
He adds: "I was never a standout like a Barkley." This is a reference to the English wunderkind who is his teammate at Everton. "I was always worried I would never make it. At every stage, I never saw myself as a certainty. On every step up, I have thought, 'This could be it. This could be the point when I stop.'" He struggled initially at Everton and wondered if he would have to see his contract out and go to another, lower level. He is not afraid to admit doubt; he merely has a resistance to succumbing to it. He persevered, triumphed and has recently been rewarded with his renewed contract, praise from his manager and a starting place in Gordon Strachan's national team.
"There is a part of me that is spurred on by the desire to keep doing the work but also by something else. I always think there are doubters out there who want you to fail and I want to prove them wrong."
This is said levelly but it gives an insight into the steel-hard interior that drives Naismith. He admits fear, he faces it and then he gives it what can only be called a Stewarton kiss in parting.
The journey, then, has been spectacular but he returns to Stewarton at every opportunity. His wife, Moya, also comes from the town. They have been together since they were 17 and have a daughter, Lacey. "She has made the sacrifices," says Naismith of his wife. "She left her family and friends to live down south and also has had to curtail her career.'' Moya is a dentist who will practise in Ayrshire when Naismith gives up football.
But what will he do? "I have become more interested in coaching,' he says. "But top-class football is brutal and the demands are huge. Who knows? I might want to do something else. I might want a wee break, play golf with my mates.''
These are mostly Stewarton boys who exult quietly and privately in his triumphs and slag him loudly over his failures. "They can slaughter me after a bad performance," he says with a grin.
The presence of his friends and their attitude helps him keep a fairyland world real. "I come back to Stewarton regularly - any time we can, basically," he says. "I know the Premier League is huge. I have had surreal experiences such as training in a gym in Dubai and seeing myself interviewed on screen, talking to my mate Phil Neville and realising he is a big friend of David Beckham; coming off a pitch and walking alongside a [Angel] De Maria or [Eden] Hazard or [Wayne] Rooney."
Does he feel he deserves to be there? "Yes," he says. "You do not play in the Premier League unless you are good enough. It is that simple. But I know I have to work at it.
"I was good as a kid but I wasn't better than some,'' he says when we reach the bottom of the cul de sac where he once lived and come to a patch of land where he played with mates after his paper round. "There were boys who didn't make it who were better than me. They got into drink, they got lazy, their attitude was wrong..."
He speaks of his team mate, Seamus Coleman, who will likely be in the Republic of Ireland team Naismith plays against next Saturday. "I love him because he always tells the truth," says Naismith. "He always says he sits next to me so he can catch my positivity. I like it when he says that because I like facing an issue and sorting it. I am a doer.''
So how is the man, the father, the husband, the star, compared to the boy who grew up in Stewarton? "I am much more assured. I was once very shy, very keen to stay with people I knew. I have had to change,'' he says. But not too much, certainly not in attitude.
The walk around Stewarton leads us back to his home. He has three years, at least, at the very top of football but what lies beyond? "My mate is a joiner and if he wants a labourer then I will go out with him," he says. "I am a grafter, not a star.''
Republic of Ireland play Scotland at the Aviva Stadium, Dublin, next Saturday (kick-off 5pm).Of all the things I did for Windows XP, if I had to choose the one feature that I'm most proud of, it's fixing Pinball so it doesn't consume 100% CPU.
The program was originally written for Windows 95 and had a render loop that simply painted frames as fast as possible. In the checked build, you could tell the program to display the number of frames per second. They reserved room for two digits of FPS.
When I got to looking at Pinball's CPU usage, I built the checked version and took a peek at the frame rate. Imagine my surprise when I saw that Pinball's frame rate on contemporary hardware was over one million frames per second.
I added a limiter that capped the frame rate to 120 frames per second. This was enough to drop the CPU usage from 100% to 1%. Now you can play Pinball while waiting for your document to print without noticeably impacting printing speed.Before homering last night in the first inning of a 3-2 loss to the Dodgers, Bryce Harper’s OPS had briefly fallen all the way below.900. And while that might seem like occasion to sound the alarms, let’s get one thing straight: Bryce Harper’s season numbers are still great. His OBP is still above.400, his power’s still been immense, and by wRC+, he’s still had as good a year as Nolan Arenado and the Seager boys.
But lately, things haven’t been right for the reigning MVP. A couple months ago, we had a post here on the site about how Harper was catching up to Mike Trout, and it was totally reasonable. And it still probably is, but over the last 30 days, Harper’s wRC+ is 80, his OBP the same as what Andrelton Simmons did last year, and he’s hit for as much power during that stretch as 2015 Kevin Pillar. It’s the most underwhelming Harper’s looked since the middle of 2014:
Y’know what’s not an ideal way to break out of a slump? Face Clayton Kershaw. Harper did that on Monday night, and he did not break out of the slump. No, he faced Kershaw three times, and he fanned three times.
Even with the recent slide, Harper’s still viewed as the best hitter in world, and the best hitter in the world facing the best pitcher in the world is always worth an examination. But there’s something about this particular matchup at this particular time that makes it all the more fascinating. See, something’s been happening to Harper lately. Rather, something’s been happening to the way Harper’s being pitched lately.
Last year, Harper had the very highest slugging percentage on outer-half and beyond pitches of any left-handed hitter. This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, seeing as Harper had the highest slugging percentage of all batters on all pitches, but the outer-half was where he truly thrived. When Harper went 21 at-bats without a strikeout to begin the season, I wrote up a tongue-in-cheek guide on how to strike him out, and Rule No. 1 was to not throw pitches on the outer half.
Evidently, pitchers disagree with me.
Highest rate of outer-half and beyond pitches seen, 2016
Harper’s seen the very highest rate of outer-half and beyond pitches of any qualified hitter in baseball this season. And it hasn’t always been this way:
Lately, Harper’s seen the highest rate of outer-half and beyond pitches of his career. Evidently, pitchers see something. For what it’s worth, a Nationals fan in my most recent chat mentioned Harper looking off balance on outer-half swings. His slugging percentage on outer-half pitches this season is essentially indistinguishable from the inner-half, but slugging percentage isn’t everything, and hitters know when Harper looks comfortable and when he doesn’t. The numbers seem to suggest the outer-half is when he doesn’t.
And here’s where it gets real interesting, as far as the Harper-Kershaw matchup goes. Harper’s seeing more outside pitches than anybody. And Kershaw? Kershaw throws more inside pitches than just about anybody.
Highest rate of inner-half and beyond pitches thrown, 2016
So, Derek Holland’s worth mentioning, and I’ll probably do that later this week, but there’s Kershaw, throwing the second-highest rate of inside pitches of any qualified starter in the game. Right where no one’s been putting them against Harper.
The best pitcher on the planet on the best tear of his life likes to throw inside. The best hitter on the planet during his worst slump in years has been seeing nothing but pitches on the outside. Something’s got to give. Does Kershaw stick with what makes him Kershaw? Does he exploit Harper’s perceived shortcoming? The results couldn’t not be interesting.
In the first showdown, Kershaw struck out Harper on four pitches. Those pitches:
The yellow line represents the rough center of the plate, which admittedly isn’t perfect due to the camera angle. But, it’s close. And A.J. Ellis‘ glove is set up on the outer-half of the plate on every pitch. Kershaw executes every pitch, because that’s what he does, and Harper goes down swinging on a 90-mph slider off the plate.
The second at-bat:
Five yellow lines. Five gloves to the right of that line. The best pitcher in the world, the one who’s the best pitcher in the world in part because of how often he throws inside, has set up outside against Bryce Harper nine times in nine offerings. Harper goes down swinging again.
Let’s do.gifs for at-bat number three.
The first pitch:
Set up outside. Kershaw just barely misses with the slider, but evidently isn’t deterred, because he and Ellis decide on the exact same pitch to get back into the count:
No need to change the pitch or come inside when you can just micro-correct your previous mistake. Kershaw scoots the slider in a couple inches and gets the call.
Pitch three:
It’s a fastball, set up on the outside and spotted perfectly on the outside. Harper swings through it, and it’s not a particularly intimidating swing. It’s the kind of swing that probably tells a pitcher to throw that same pitch again. Although, who are we kidding? That’s the 12th pitch Kershaw threw Harper, and on all 12, the glove was set up on the outer-half. Harper knew what was coming next. We should all know what’s coming next.
There’s that off-balance swing to which the chat commenter referred. And there’s 13 Kershaw pitches against Harper, and on every single one of them, the second-most inside-reliant pitcher in the game, the one who doesn’t need to change anything for anyone, set up outside. In all, Harper saw 17 pitches for the night, and 13 of them ended up outside.
I don’t know whether this says more about Harper, or more about Kershaw. Usually, you hear pitchers wanting to stick to what makes them successful. Here, the script flipped. It might not be that the book is out on Bryce Harper — there may never be a full book on how to beat him — but a chapter’s being written. And on Monday night in Los Angeles, Clayton Kershaw wrote three more pages.(CNN) Protesters flooded Washington and gathered in many other cities Saturday to take a stand on President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration. The protesters hoped to send a strong message to the world that they oppose this commander-in-chief. They want to make it clear that Trump does not have a mandate to take America in a new direction and that he doesn't represent the values of the nation.
Anna Galland, executive director of MoveOn.org, explained to The New Yorker: "I cut my teeth as an organizer in the movement opposing the Iraq war. I feel that was a smaller trial run for what we're going to be seeing right now."
This is not the first time that a president's inaugural celebration has been been marred by protest.
Richard Nixon experienced opposition |
the last two decades there has been enormous progress in young children not dying as much.
A couple of countries stand out for the progress they're making: Ethiopia and Malawi, for example. What have they done to bring about improvements?
Those two countries have made improvements in clean water supplies and in better sanitation practices. They've also taken really concerted efforts in trying to reach universal vaccine coverage. They also made strides in expanding education. Not so much health education but general education. We know that if moms are more educated, that correlates with women being more likely to be involved in the workforce, with women being more empowered in their own health care and the health of their children, and more in tune with their own nutrition and that of their families. So education is not a direct link to improved childhood health, but it sets things in motion for improved health.
When children can be better protected through their first five years, what life and death challenges do they face as they grow older?
The way it's gone so far is absolutely the way it should go: really focusing on vaccines, clean water, sanitation and antenatal care.
But once those are in place, and the children get older, the challenges become much more complex. You have lots of children surviving past their early years. But many of these countries may not have the necessary resources to have comprehensive childhood education. They may not be able to deal with congenital birth defects or cerebral palsy and childhood cancer and mental health disorders that start to crop up in later youth. A lot of countries are doing really well in reducing infectious diseases and providing better nutrition but haven't gotten to the point where they can manage the more complicated cases.
What kinds of complicated things happen after a child makes it safely through infancy?
It varies by location and age. In the youngest kids, a big problem is congenital birth defects, and the biggest of those is congenital heart disease, such as infants born with holes in their hearts or defects in heart valves. There's also sickle cell disease, an inherited disease of misshapen red blood cells that inhibits oxygen from reaching tissue, in sub-Saharan Africa. Those kids are more susceptible to getting sick and needing care early.
And then when you get to be older, pediatric cancer is a big problem. The treatment of common childhood cancers in the U.S. and Europe and Japan has been remarkable. But that has required a well-functioning health system. That's not available in poor countries. Even a lot of middle-income countries in Latin America have not seen improvements in the treatment of childhood cancer.
Then during adolescence, you see more injuries: road traffic accidents, drownings, self-harm and suicide are big problems. Systems are not in place to deal with immediate injuries. When girls get into adolescence, they start getting pregnant. Early teen pregnancy is still common in the developing world. Pregnancy-related death is one of the biggest risks in adolescent females.
Were there surprising findings in the report?
One thing that flies under the radar is the effect of war. In the Middle East, the biggest cause of death for all kids over the age of 5 in 2015 was the effects of war. [According to the report, "The direct mortality burden of war was extremely large in North Africa and the Middle East, where it ranked second for each sex among children aged 1 to 4 years and first in all subsequent age groups in 2015."] Then there are the long-term effects of war: PTSD, some injuries that affect children for the rest of their lives and the consequences of families being separated.
What's the purpose of a report like this, looking at the global health of children over time?
It's a kind of report card. For the last two decades, enormous progress has been made. Children under five are not dying as much. But you have to think of childhood and adolescence as a continuum. We have to continue to address the health challenges of all children and adolescents.Cliff Mass Says Whatever He Wants (Unlike at KUOW)
A patch of constrained community free speech during the next few days, followed by the sunshine of more open discussion.
Last week, my regular weather segment on KUOW's Weekday was canceled. As the whole incident has unfolded, I've realized it isn't about Northwest weather or my occasional comments on math or science education. It is about the essential nature of public radio.
The facts are clear. For 16 years, I have contributed to KUOW, mainly through a five- to six-minute spot on the station's Weekday program. I volunteered my time because I loved doing it and thought it was important. From the beginning, I insisted that it be more than a weather forecast; my segment had to provide the "whys" behind our local weather and reveal the technology underlying weather prediction. It was meant as scientific outreach, patterned (in a poor way) after the work of my mentor Carl Sagan.
Because KUOW listeners appreciated this approach, the segment continued under a variety of KUOW Weekday hosts. Over time, my topics expanded naturally to include advocacy for new coastal radar (which we got!) and even evaluations of the skill of local TV weathercasters. Based on my day job—teaching thousands of University of Washington students—I became increasingly concerned about the lack of math skills of students coming out of high school. Hundreds of my colleagues felt the same way. And I talked about that on a handful of occasions on my radio segment.
But problems started to develop a few years ago. By that time, Steve Scher was the only host on Weekday and a new producer had taken over as his aide. At first, my rare forays (perhaps twice a year) into talking about math education were no problem, but everything changed on a program when I discussed the role of "discovery" math (not direct instruction but students having to "discover" the principles, lots of group and calculator work, etc.) and the need for better math standards than the "discovery" approach in our state. Advocates of such teaching approaches at the UW College of Education and a separate math-education group in the math department bombarded KUOW with complaints. I was told by Scher and his producer never to talk about educational issues again. They said I was essentially part of KUOW news since I was a regular, and thus they had to present both sides. I countered that it was ridiculous to consider me a KUOW news staffer (after all, I had never been paid by them) and, besides, they had many regulars advocating issues without "balance" (like Rick Steves and his push for pot legalization).
This debate between us went on for a while, and then they laid out an ultimatum—talk about education even once and I was off the program. I caved, considering that if I quit, the Weekday listeners would lose out on quality weather coverage. Scher and his producer never seemed to care or consider the listeners. A year or so passed, and last month, the Seattle Times had a front-page article about strong straight-A students being rejected by the UW in order to secure high-paying out-of-staters. I am an undergraduate adviser with access to student records, and after a discussion with the dean of admissions, I knew the story was deceptive and inaccurate. (As confirmed by the dean of admissions, the only straight-A students who were being rejected were those with cream-puff classes, poor SAT scores, or some other significant deficiency. He also confirmed, as I had found out, that out-of-state students accepted were generally stronger than in-state students—e.g., higher math SATs). Furthermore, the previous discussion of this topic on Weekday's "Week in Review" session was misinformed.
The next week, when my segment was moved to the second hour, I mentioned the facts.
That sealed my fate. Shortly after, the Weekday producer sent me an e-mail saying I was forbidden from talking about issues other than weather. I waited a week to respond to this provocative e-mail and tried to be conciliatory, yet principled. I wrote back to say that while I was not looking to talk about other issues more than a few times a year, I could not agree to self-censorship and such restrictions were out of keeping with the nature of public radio. The next day, in a note from Steve Scher, I was fired.
The reaction by the public stunned me. My blog has received almost 300 comments, my e-mail inbox was filled with over 400 supportive comments, a Facebook page was created with more than 1,500 supporters, and KUOW's Facebook site and e-mail inbox were inundated with hundreds, if not thousands, of critical comments. People really cared, and the discontent extended well beyond my situation.
The huge reaction to my firing reflects the importance of public radio to so many and the isolation of many public radio staff from those they should be serving. Thousands of Northwest residents clearly care about public radio and its role as a "community center" for discussing the major issues facing our region and nation. Furthermore, beyond my situation, all the comments and e-mails suggest an unhappiness with many aspects of KUOW's offerings and a feeling that this public radio station no longer reflects the public's interests or cares about their needs.
It appears to many that when a KUOW host has control of a public radio show for decades, he comes to feel that the program is his to do with what he likes, rather than the public's. It is his show, not theirs. Increasingly, local public radio has become isolated, rigid, and unresponsive to those it serves, even as it requests increasing public support. The rise of social media has shown that other modes of creating an intellectual commons are possible, and the contrast with an aging and inflexible local public radio enterprise has become stark and obvious.
I would love to return to KUOW to continue to talk about the amazing weather of the region, but I don't want to do it with a muzzle—unable to discuss my concerns as an educator. Weather is important, but our society's failure to properly educate many of its youth is a crisis, and both deserve open discussion on the public airwaves.The NFL is in serious trouble.
It’s in serious trouble because of a problem of its own making — because NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell refused to take a stand. Since 2006, Goodell has earned $212 million in salary from the NFL; meanwhile, he’s done nothing but take the coward’s way out on every issue. Brain damage and concussions? According to Democratic members from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Goodell attempted to pressure the National Institutes of Health to cut funding to a study that was slated to damage the league. Deflategate? Goodell suddenly brought the hammer under public pressure. Ray Rice? Instead of banning him from football or suspending him for a serious amount of time, Goodell suspended him for two games, originally for knocking his girlfriend out in an elevator. Pot use? You’re suspended for a year. Military tributes at games? Goodell made the military pay $700,000 for those tributes.
Goodell, in other words, has been a disaster. But the popularity of football made up for his failings as commissioner.
Until, that is, Goodell simply let the players run roughshod over him with leftist politics. In December 2014, as controversy raged over the killing of black teenager Michael Brown, who punched a police officer, went for his gun, and then charged him before being shot, several of the then-St. Louis Rams went on the field in the fictionalized “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” pose. The NFL did nothing. Instead, the NFL stated, “We respect and understand the concerns of all individuals who have expressed views on this tragic situation.”
Meanwhile, the NFL threatened to fine players who wore 9/11 memorial cleats (they didn’t follow through). The NFL prevented Dallas Cowboys from wearing stickers honoring police officers.
Then, in late 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee for the national anthem, supposedly to protest police violence. The league did nothing. This year, dozens of players have followed suit. Nothing.
Imagine if Goodell had treated kneeling for the anthem like any other behavior he deemed unacceptable, and banned it. David Stern — a hardcore Democrat — did that after Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf stayed on the bench after the national anthem. That was the end of that. But Goodell didn’t. And so the issue percolated.
Then President Trump went directly after the NFL for allowing players to kneel for the anthem, more and more players knelt, and the American people got tired of that nonsense. The result: the NFL’s ratings and popularity have dropped precipitously. According to a new Fox poll, only 46% of voters view the NFL positively, as opposed to 41% who view it negatively. Four years ago, that number was 64% to 19%. Virtually the entire drop has been due to Republicans, whose support has dropped 37%, and independents, whose support has dropped 14%.
And it’s going to be difficult for the NFL to remake its image. When favorability in baseball dropped, it was thanks to steroids and labor issues. Ban the steroids, come to labor agreement, and the public could move on. But the NFL’s unpopularity is baked into the cake now: it’s politics and head injuries. Head injuries are a part of the game and aren’t going to stop; politics are now part of the game, and it’s too late for Goodell to step in. If Goodell were to force players to stand for the anthem, the result would be Democrats disapproving of the NFL. Goodell could have stepped in early. He didn’t, and now the league will pay the price.Hey cyberpunkers!
We have some really exciting news for you today!
>> There’s a new demo of Read Only Memories for you to play at midboss.com/ROM <<
With this new demo, there’s new UI, new music and a lot of polish. However, the story is mainly unchanged, so if you already played the first demo, you may not feel the need to go through the entire demo again.
>> There’s also some new tracks on our SoundCloud! Here's one for the elusive rapper known only as 4Moolah, as well as the Hybrid Night at Stardust, when the music and folx get even wilder... <<
--
>> Most importantly...We have a launch date! Read Only Memories will be in your paws starting... *drumroll please* August 18, 2015! <<
That’s right - in just a few months you’ll have ROM in your hands!
We’re super excited to show you what we’ve been working on! And if you're a beta backer, check http://forum.midboss.com/ for a new chapter (chapter 2) that's new as well!
the map is getting BUSY!
Consider following ROM on your socials! We’re @rom2064 on twitter and on facebook! Please help spread the word!
Thank you!
It's truly a new day.Next Chapter >
There’s little wonder that so many people look back on the mid ’80s as the golden era of rallying. Group B not only reinvented the sport from a technical standpoint, but it re-popularized it too. For a while, the World Rally Championship was bigger than Formula 1. During those crazy years from 1983 to 1986, Group B’s regulations – or lack thereof – challenged manufacturers to build the most extreme rally machines their competition departments could dream up. But it was a double edged sword. The cars became too fast and too dangerous, and that ultimately led to their abrupt demise. Those glory days may be long gone now, but the spirit of Group B lives on in the machinery that survived rallying’s wildest years. Cars like Rhys Millen’s perfectly preserved ex-Works ’84 Mazda RX-7.
Rhys certainly needs no introduction in the Speedhunters world. 2012 has been a busy year for the Kiwi-born and US-based professional driver. He won the Pikes Peak International Hillclimb outright, he podiumed in the Formula D Championship, and he even launched a new rallycross-style motorsport called Formula Cross. But the year isn’t out just yet, and as we speak he’s ticking off another long-time “to do”.
For more than a decade Rhys has dreamed of building a car to go classic rallying – an experience he could share with his father, Rod, another Millen who’s reputation proceeds him. Although best known for his Pikes Peak performances during the ’90s and early ’00s, and subsequent successes in off-road trucks, Rod cut his teeth on rally special stages. Before taking his career to the US he dominated the New Zealand Rally Championship, winning it three years running from 1975. Rhys’ idea was to build a replica of the Mazda RX-3 that took Rod to those victories. He bought an original NZ-new right-hand-drive car, shipped it to the States, and began preparing it for competition duty at his RMR compound in Huntington Beach, California. But those plans changed earlier this year when very special slice of rally history came up for sale in Belgium. A deal was struck, the funds were wired, and the car: one of a handful of Mazda RX-7s built in Belgium in 1983/1984 by Mazda Rally Team Europe (MRT) for Group B, had Rhys’s name on the papers.
If that fact didn’t make the Mazda a rare enough commodity on its own. Apart from being re-shelled into another genuine MRT-prepared RX-7 body after a crash in 1990, it’s the very same car that Rod used in the British round of the 1985 Championship. This week it’s in New Zealand, competing in the seven-day Silver Fern Rally – a marathon-style event classic and historical rally craft.
Unlike other car makers which had to manufacturer 200 road going versions of their chosen car to get a ticket into Group B, the RX-7 was accepted into the mix through prior homologation in Group 1, Group 2 and its subsequent Group 4 upgrades. Group B homologation signed off by the FIA on February 1 1984 allowed 20 ‘Evolution’ competition models to be built. Although the MRT Group B RX-7 was a highly capable rally car, the overall package built around a naturally aspirated engine and rear-wheel-drive chassis that proved no match for machines like the Audi Quattro S1, Peugeot 205 Turbo 16 and Lancia Delta S4 which all featured forced induction and four-wheel-drive. Then there was the fact that MRT never had full factory backing from Mazda Motor Company, which ultimately shunned the RX-7 and decided to put its weight behind the development of the Group A Mazda 323/Familia 4WD. But that’s another story.
But regardless of the RX-7s Group B success, there’s no denying that MRT created a very special, and very cool car. And apart from a couple of retrofitted (and easily removable) accessories – Rhys’ example is as original as they come.
If you were a Mazda Rally Team Europe mechanic back in ’84/’85 this is the scene that would have greeted you when you lifted the hood: a simple but very effective set up based on a factory Mazda peripheral ported 13B twin rotor engine. For better weight distribution the motor was shifted 4 inches (10cm) rearward from the production car position and fitted with a dry sump system.
Exotic carbon fiber/Kevlar was used prevalently during the Group B era as teams looked for ways to shed weight from their cars without reducing the stiffness or the impact resistance of the parts. MRT used the exotic material to form the engine’s intake plenum chamber which draws air from a filter mounted where the right-hand-side factory pop-headlight would normally sit.
Beneath the plenum is an MRT-modified Weber 51 IDA carburetor delivering the fuel and air mixture straight into the MFR (Mazda Factory Race) rotor housings via their peripheral intake ports.
Of course, a peripheral ported 13B driven with the butterflies of its 51mm carb wide open will consume a lot of fuel in not a lot of time. In the rear a trio of pumps fitted with large stainless steel braided lines satisfy the thirst.
The rear compartment is also home to the dry sump oil reservoir. Engine oil is cooled through a large core which is positioned in the rear wing to pick up air flowing over the car.
It all adds up to an engine that developed a reliable 300 horsepower at 8500rpm. However, due to the nature of the beast it was designed to be revved much further. In testing Rhys was keeping it safe with a self-imposed 9K limit, but realistically there’s at least a couple, maybe a few thousand more revolutions per minute in it. And yes, it makes all the right noises – you’ll just have to wait until some of Rhys’s in-car and on-car footage makes it onto RMR’s YouTube channel so you can hear it sing for yourself.
As opposed to the stark interior of a modern day WRC machine, the RX-7’s cockpit is a busy place with a dashboard that looks more like that of an aircraft than a car.
The Sparco suede-wrapped rally steering wheel and Pro 2000 seats are couple of upgrades made by RMR to improve the tactile driving experience. The vintage MRT Europe embroidery is a nice touch.
Mazda gauges keep an eye on all the critical pressure and temperatures throughout the engine and driveline. Fuses are at close-hand, too.
Terratrip recently brought back its iconic ’80s ‘Terratrip 2′ computer to satisfy the needs of classic rally car owners wanting to fit an authentic retro rally meter. Of course, this one isn’t a re-issue.
And that’s the original ’80s-cool wooden gear knob. As the pattern suggests, the MRT/PBS five-speed manual transmission features a dog-leg first gear to keep second and third gears in a straight line for quick and reliable shifts.
As I mentioned previously, there’s a very good reason why the tachometer reads to 12,000rpm!
Besides power output and chassis setup, MRT did a lot of work to the RX-7s body, adding widened fiberglass fenders front and rear, a fiberglass front cowl panel and a vented fiberglass hood. There’s also a large duck-tail fiberglass rear wing/oil cooler housing.
Lightweight fiberglass doors feature as well, as do Lexan windows, both here, in the side three quarters and in place of heavy rear hatch glass. The total curb weight is around the 2120 pound (960 kilogram) mark, which back-in-the-day was comparable to the Peugeot 205 Turbo 16’s original Group B rally guise.
The RX-7’s iconic pop-up lights are replaced with fixed fiberglass pods, which I’m guessing were made for weight saving reasons as well. Or maybe having fixed lights was a category requirement?
What the RX-7’s headlight don’t do for the drag coefficient, the aerodynamic side mirrors try to make up for. Of course they’re formed from fiberglass too.
In its own right the MRT Mazda is an impressive looking, sounding and performing machine, even 27 years after it last competed in a World Rally Championship event. I just can’t help but think what might have been though. How good could the RX-7 have been if Mazda had properly invested in the Group B and brought a four-wheel-drive and turbocharged rotary powered car to the table? We’ll never know I guess..
I’m going to wrap up this post with a couple of photos of Rhys’ Mazda Rally Team Europe RX-7 doing what it was originally designed to do, but with Rhys at the wheel, in what– believe it or not – is his very first stage rally in a rear-wheel-drive car. In the company of some very quick, and extremely well-sorted BDA-powered Escorts the RX-7 might not be the fastest car out there, but it’s definitely one of the spectator favorites.
On a side note, anyone who’s planning to attend Rod Millen’s 2013 Leadfoot Festival happening in March should be happy to know that the car will be staying in New Zealand until then so Rhys can run it up the 1-mile long tarmac driveway.
I’m hoping he’ll do it on half-worn rally rubber..
– Brad Lord
SPECIFICATIONS
1984 MAZDA RX-7 GROUP B
Engine: Mazda 13B twin rotor; factory MFR peripheral ported rotor housings; Weber 51IDA carburetor; 3x high-flow fuel pumps; braided stainless steel fuel lines; MRT carbon/Kevlar intake; K&N air filter; factory dry sump; trunk-mounted engine oil reservoir; rear-mounted oil cooler
Driveline: MRTE/PBS 5-speed dogleg gearbox; twin-plate clutch; MRTE rear axle; limited slip differential
Suspension/Brakes: Custom-built Bilstein shock absorbers; improved parallel links, four-wheel disc brakes
Wheels/Tires: Enkei 15×6″ alloy wheels, DMack DMG2 195/65R15 gravel tires (front); Enkei 15X7″ alloy wheels; DMack DMG2 205/65R15 gravel tires (rear)
Exterior: MRT Group B fiberglass wide body kit: front fenders; rear fenders; boot spoiler; vented hood; front cowl; Lexan door windows; Lexan rear screen
Interior: Sparco Pro2000 seats; Sparco suede steering wheel; Mazda 12,000rpm tachometer; Terratrip 2 rally computer
DESKTOPSA song accusing Theresa May of being a "liar" has entered the Official Singles Chart at number four.
The track has also reached number two on the iTunes download chart.
It's performed and produced by Captain Ska, promoted by campaign organisation the People's Assembly Against Austerity and features speeches and news interviews from Theresa May.
The clips are followed by a chorus of "She's a liar, liar... you can't trust her, no no no no".
The song covers the NHS, education, the snap election and poverty levels.
The track, called Liar Liar GE2017, has been available for download from last Friday but major radio stations are refusing to play it.
Radio 1 won't be playing the song but insist it hasn't been banned.
In a statement, the station said: "We do not ban songs or artists, however our editorial guidelines require us to remain impartial and the UK is currently in an election period so we will not be playing the song."
The opening lyrics are: "We all know politicians lie/Big ones, little ones, porky pies/Saying they're strong and stable/Won't disguise we're still being taken for a ride.
"Nurses going hungry, schools in decline/I don't recognise this broken country of mine."
The Big Top 40 Show on Capital FM, Heart and other commercial radio stations said the song had made the Top 10 but, during the broadcast, skipped to the track in ninth position - Power by Little Mix featuring Stormzy.
Captain Ska told Newsbeat: "The success of this song shows people are fed up with this government of the rich, for the rich.
"We're overwhelmed with the support and our message is that people do have the power to change society if we act together."
Newsbeat has sent an email asking for a response from the Conservative Party earlier this week but we haven't had a reply back yet.
Some of the proceeds from downloads of the song will be handed out to food banks.
Previous Captain Ska songs include What's the Point of Nick Clegg?, War Crime, Shame On You and US Healthcare Explained.
The band was formed by trumpet player Jake Painter in 2010, who said there wasn't a "big enough musical response to the coalition government and its austerity-driven policies".
The first version of Liar Liar made it to number one in the UK reggae chart.
Session musicians who appear live with the group have recorded and performed with the likes of Paloma Faith, The Streets, Vampire Weekend, Girls Aloud and Friendly Fires.
Find us on Instagram at BBCNewsbeat and follow us on Snapchat, search for bbc_newsbeatActor Lee Joon experienced an earthquake while visiting Mexico for a fan meeting.
On September 8, his agency Prain TPC stated, “After hearing that an earthquake of magnitude 8.0 had hit Mexico, we checked with Lee Joon and got told that he and the staff members are safe.”
Lee Joon also reassured fans on his Instagram, saying, “We’re currently in Mexico. I’m posting this message because many people are worried. The staff members and I felt the earthquake, but we all evacuated to a safe area. It’s quite scary that the magnitude was at 8.0, but the people at the hotel protected us, so we’re okay now! Please pray for everyone in Mexico right now.”
Lee Joon left for Mexico on September 6 and is planning on returning to Korea on September 11.
Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the earthquake.
Source (1)They are fighting stereotypes, breaking barriers and racing ahead to greatness. Moving forward is an ongoing process; constantly battling perceptions and preconceived notions is something women are used to in all areas of life. Despite this constant battle, women in the Indian film industry are truly rocking it and winning every day. This Women’s day, Pandolin caught up with a number of women who are an integral part of Hindi cinema to know what ‘being a woman’ in this industry is all about.
Women don’t feel the bias anymore, and that is very encouraging. “A film set is extremely gender neutral” says director, Meghna Gulzar, something that she has maintained time and again. “Whether we are men or women working, the hardships are the same for everyone, there is no cushioning of the hard work that anyone has to do, whether it is the Assistant Directors team, the production design team, the DOP team, its completely gender neutral and I just love that.”
Editor Antara Lahiri adds, “I have encountered a lot of directors who have specifically wanted to work with a woman editor because there is a conception that woman editors are eventually more nurturing.”
There may not be too many women on set, but the ones who are, are challenging their situations and blazing forward. “If you are there to do a certain job or if you want any career as an option, regardless, of whether you are a man or a woman, challenges are going to be there. So the first thing one has to remember is that no matter what your gender is, it is going to be challenging.” Says Cinematographer Savita Singh. “When you have more challenges it makes you work harder, it makes you a better professional,” she adds.
READ: WOMEN LIKE NEVER BEFORE- ANGRY INDIAN GODDESSES
When it comes to fighting stereotypes, Savita believes that “It is not exactly that grim a picture that one would like to paint, or think there is. The fact is that if women go to do anything, they will face a little bit of resistance”.
Many people believed that a female director would only make women-oriented films, movies that essentially only lean towards strong female leads. Meghna Gulzar believes that initially that’s the role she fit herself into. But now she attributes the breaking of stereotypes to Farah Khan, when it comes to direction, “The films that she makes don’t look like they have been made by a woman from any angle, they are not feminist or women-oriented at all. They are commercial, entertaining films; so that stereotype has been demolished and going forward a lot of other female directors have made films that are gender neutral, whether they are thrillers or socially relevant topics.”
READ: JIO MAMI HOSTS WOMEN IN FILM PANEL DISCUSSION
In fact, today when women go out and do something that hasn’t been done before, instead of being faced with a sense of skepticism for their ability, people greet them with a sense of pride. While recently shooting in a Konkan village, Savita was working alone, with a handheld camera. People have complimented her with amazement in their eyes. “There was no sense of surprise or wonder or pity but a sense of pride,” says the cinematographer.
READ: THE WONDER WOMEN OF BOLLYWOOD
To reach that level of acceptance from society women have faced abundant criticism. But criticism is very important; when someone is hard on you, you work harder and hone your skills further. The most admirable criticism that Meghna holds dear is what Vishal Bhardwaj told her after Talvar, “I am not going to be easy on you when it comes to criticism, because I have seen what you are capable of and you should push yourself to reach that kind of excellence every time.”
These days many people are fearful of being critical of women as they feel that they might appear to be biased, or discouraging. But the truth is that women are all set to fly towards the sun and what they need is honest criticism as fuel and passion for what they do. Production Designer Boishali Sinha says, “I get motivation in every criticism & appreciation”.
They do believe that there are some changes that need to be brought into the industry’s way of functioning, and these are not limited to the women here, but to each and every individual on set. Costume Designer Subarna Ray Chaudhari believes that there is a divide when it comes to classes and positions in the industry. Currently she is working on an international project and is very impressed by how every one of the cast and crew interact with each other. “Here everyone eats together, works out together and they all sit in the office together; they treat people equally no matter what.” This attitude and behavioral change she believes should be brought into the Indian film industry as well. She believes that as an HOD she enjoys abundant perks and luxuries, but she says “I am not so active on set; my assistants are, so they should be given more than me.“
READ: PERIOD FILMS COME NATURALLY TO ME- SUBARNA RAY CHAUDHARI
Savita wishes for a better quality of life in terms of the working hours, “A lot of men who work in the art or lights department have a very difficult and strenuous job. They don’t have any insurance, like a regular job or industry and that kind of support is very minimal. They don’t enjoy long term job and financial security.” She also believes, “This industry needs to be a lot more organized. People are really underpaid for the kind of work that they end up doing. Spot boys have the worst life. They start at three in the morning and get to sleep at three in the night. I really wonder when do they get the time to rest”.
READ: I WANTED THE PRODUCTION DESIGN TO BE VERY CLOSE TO REALITY- BOISHALI
Women in the Indian film industry are here to stay. They are reaching out in all directions, and are going to transform the functioning of the industry by concerning themselves with the well being of all. Its Women’s day everyday in this industry, and that’s what makes it a very Happy Women’s day!!
-Akshita Kariwala
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this POV/BLOG are the personal opinions of the author. PANDOLIN is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information on this blog. All information is provided on an as-is basis. The information, facts or opinions appearing on the POV/BLOG do not reflect the views of PANDOLIN and PANDOLIN does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.The flying car has been a dream pursued by inventors since the dawn of aviation and a fantasy long held by commuters wishing they could soar above traffic like George Jetson.
Engineers and eccentrics have patented more than 70 designs since 1918, and even the U.S. government and Henry Ford tried to build flying cars. But success has been elusive, the challenge too great, and such machines have remained the stuff of science fiction.
Until now.
An aeronautical startup called Terrafugia has developed a small airplane called the Transition that it says can take to the sky as easily as the road. It is about the size of a large SUV and features innovative folding wings that collapse with the press of a button. Terrafugia calls it a "personal air vehicle."
The team behind the Transition still has to design a drivetrain to propel the craft and a mechanism to transfer power from the propeller to the wheels, but it expects to begin flight tests late next year.
Production could begin as early as 2009, and Terrafugia says it's already received more than 30 orders.
Not long after Henry Ford started building cars and the Wright brothers proved we could fly, an inventor and aviator named Glenn Curtiss built the first flying car in 1917. The Curtiss Autoplane wasn't much to look at and it barely got off the ground, but it proved that it was possible to merge automobile and airplane into a single machine.
Still, the Autoplane and most of the "roadable" aircraft that followed had the same problem - combining the mechanics of an automobile with those of an airplane created something that didn't work well as either. It also proved exceedingly difficult to design a machine light enough to fly but robust enough to drive without being blown off the road. There were some that worked - most notably the Airphibian and the original Aerocar, the only flying cars certified by the Federal Aviation Administration - but most were unstable cars and clumsy airplanes.
Advancements in composite materials and metal alloys have addressed many of those problems, and Terrafugia is in a race with several other companies to bring a flying car to market. They include Moller International, Aerocar and Urban Aeronautics.
The Transition isn't so much a car you can fly but an airplane you can drive, and it is meant to be an alternative to driving for trips between 100 and 500 miles.
"This is not going to replace your Toyota Camry," company founder Carl Dietrich told the Boston Globe. "You could take it to the store, but it doesn't have the trunk space of your SUV."
The preliminary specifications calls for an aircraft 19 feet long and 80 inches wide with the wings folded (the wingspan is 27 feet). It will have a 100-horsepower engine powered by unleaded fuel and a propeller at the rear. The airplane will cruise at 115 mph and have a range of about 460 miles, and it will have room for two people and 550 pounds of cargo. It will weigh 1,320 pounds.
The self-folding wings make the Transition unique, as past flying cars used wings that had to be removed or folded manually. The idea was to make the transition from airplane to automobile as quick and seamless as possible. The design team unveiled the folding wing design in July at the annual AirVenture aviation festival, where they opened and closed the wings |
Women’s Action Network, or SWAN. A former captain and company commander, she served as a Marine officer from 1999 to 2004. But first we’re going to play part of Anu Bhagwati’s powerful testimony in March at the first Senate hearing on military sexual violence in nearly 10 years.
ANURADHA BHAGWATI: Military sexual violence is a very personal issue for me. During my five years as a Marine officer, I experienced daily discrimination and sexual harassment. I was exposed to a culture rife with sexism, rape jokes, pornography and widespread commercial sexual exploitation of women and girls, both in the United States and overseas.
My experiences came to a head while I was stationed at the School of Infantry at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, from 2002 to 2004, where I witnessed reports of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment swept under the rug by a handful of field-grade officers. Perpetrators were promoted or transferred to other units without punishment, while victims were accused of lying or exaggerating their claims in order to ruin men’s reputations.
As a company commander at the School of Infantry, I ultimately chose to sacrifice my own career to file an equal opportunity investigation against an offending officer. I was given a gag order by my commanding officer, got a military protection order against the officer in question, lived in fear of retaliation and violence from both the offender and my own chain of command, and then watched in horror as the offender was not only promoted but also given command of my company.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Anu Bhagwati testifying earlier this year at a Senate hearing on sexual violence in the military, executive director and co-founder of Service Women’s Action Network, joining us now.
Anu Bhagwati, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you back. Talk about the significance of this Pentagon finding. Seventy assaults every day in the military?
ANURADHA BHAGWATI: The numbers are outrageous, and I think we’ve reached a tipping point, finally, where we can no longer say this is an issue of zero tolerance, that the military cares, the military has time to figure it out. The American public is furious. Congressmembers are finally furious and really, really showing their outrage at military leadership. Twenty-six thousand, I mean, it’s an increase of almost 40 percent. And the significance of that number is that those were not officially reported sexual assaults. That was conducted in a gender relations survey, which was anonymous, and therefore there’s a certain degree of perceived safety in actually revealing that you were sexually assaulted. But the actual reports, the official reports, that are marked by a separate report altogether, are far fewer. And so, we can still tell that there’s a sense of fear of retaliation, of intimidation, that occurs when people actually come forward. And victims see that those few cases that are tried oftentimes don’t end in a conviction or a significant sentence. And so there’s, throughout the process—
AMY GOODMAN: How many convictions are we talking about?
ANURADHA BHAGWATI: We’ve just gotten the report, and so we’re working through a couple thousand pages right now, so…
NERMEEN SHAIKH: What do you think accounts for the rise, almost 40 percent, you said? Is it because more were reported or more occurred, or a combination?
ANURADHA BHAGWATI: I think, honestly, it has to do with this groundswell of support from the outside, from outside of the military, from congressional leadership over the last year or two, the groundswell of media attention on this issue. The military can’t hide this issue anymore, and therefore victims inside the military feel a little bit safer that there’s a community out there that is going to support them and that finally believes them. I mean, this has been happening for decades. But finally there’s a sense that, “OK, I’m not alone. People believe me. They say I’m a liar, but I’m not. People believe me out there.”
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to Tuesday’s Senate hearing, particularly the comments of U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General Mark Welsh. He dismissed senators who suggested sexual assault cases should be handled by trained prosecutors rather than by commanders, who have overturned verdicts in the past.
GEN. MARK WELSH III: In the last three years, there has been one sexual contact case, one case out of 2,511 court cases, where a commander decided not to prefer it to court, when a lawyer, well trained, educated in the law, said he shouldn’t. One case. We do not have commanders routinely overturning sexual assault convictions. There are two in the Department of Defense in the last five years that we can find. This does not happen all the time. The facts are critical as we try and figure out how we move forward to solve the problem.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Anu Bhagwati?
ANURADHA BHAGWATI: There’s really been this obsession with the few cases in which commanding officers have overturned sexual assault convictions or convictions. And that’s important, but really there’s a front-end bias, as well, where the majority of that bias happens, where commanding officers—they’re called convening authorities—they have authority from beginning to end of a trial. They determine whether or not a case even goes forward, whether or not the accused even sees the inside of a court-martial. That’s where a lot of the intimidation happens. That’s where a lot of victims feel the fear. They’re not supported. They don’t follow through with their cases. And, you know, even before that, in terms of the investigation, your commanding officers oversee that, as well. And so, it’s front end, it’s the trial process itself, and it’s the back-end bias. And so, commanding officers don’t need to be part of any part of that. In the civilian world, it’s attorneys and judges making those decisions, not your boss.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it’s an amazing story, this—at the general level, overturning. Looking at a piece in The Guardian: “Lawmakers and victims’ advocates have expressed anger at an attempt by a US air force general to justify overturning the sexual assault conviction of a star fighter pilot. … Lt General Craig Franklin, commander of the Third Air Force in Europe, describes accusations [that] he did not take sex crimes seriously as 'complete and utter nonsense.'” But he overturned a jury verdict. I believe the jury is chosen by the general, but even still, when they come up with a guilty verdict, the general overturns. And at this very moment, in the piece in The Washington Post, Claire McCaskill is holding—blocking the nomination of Lieutenant General Susan Helms, who was a crew member of the Space Shuttle Endeavour, poised to make another ascent in her career, nominated to become vice commander of Air Force’s Space Command, but Senator McCaskill wants to examine her previously unpublicized decision to overturn the conviction on charges of aggravated sexual assault of a captain at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
ANURADHA BHAGWATI: And finally congressmembers are paying attention to the promotion process. There’s a sense of careerism that, certainly on the enlisted side, servicemembers see it every day, that officers are promoted without much thought at all to whether or not they’re taking care of their troops. And really, promotion standards should include whether or not sex crimes are prosecuted, whether or not victims are supported when they report sexual assault. And that’s not part of the process yet. And so I applaud Senator McCaskill for taking action. And every—every member of Congress, every military leader should take that into account when considering an officer for his or her next promotion.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Anu Bhagwati, you’ve also pointed out that members of the military do not have access to the civilian justice system. What are the implications of that? And is that something that your group is calling for?
ANURADHA BHAGWATI: Absolutely. Access to civil remedies is a key component of justice in any institution. If you’re a civilian victim in a civilian workplace, you have access to sue your employer, to sue your sexual predator. And workplace discrimination—you know, the cultural deterrent against workplace discrimination is found in civil courts, where a victim of sexual harassment, of bias in the workplace, can hold that perpetrator or employer accountable, and then the employer is often held liable for what happens in his or her workforce. That doesn’t exist in the military. Servicemembers have no access to these courts, and therefore you have a culture which is literally decades behind in the military than it is outside the military.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, you testified at the Senate hearing in March. What was your sense of how it went, the people who testified, and what your expectations are coming out of that?
ANURADHA BHAGWATI: I mean, it was historic in the sense that you had a panel of veterans speaking about their personal experiences and a real sense by the senators that they were welcomed and that it was about time that these voices were heard. The flipside is that military leadership still does not understand this issue of command bias. There’s a sense of ego that you regularly see, that, you know, as an officer, you should have full power and control over everything that happens in your unit. Well, that’s a perfect world. I mean, we’re talking about human beings who happen to wear the military uniform, and we have to assume that some of those human beings coming into the military are just the same as they were before they came into the military, that they are sexual predators. There’s a pipeline into the military right now. We have to stop it with serious criminal justice reform.
AMY GOODMAN: During Tuesday’s hearing, Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York pressed military leaders to explain why unit commanders should have the power to handle the prosecution and investigation of sexual assault cases. Let’s go to an exchange between Gillibrand and the U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General Mark Welsh.
SEN. KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND: Because it’s in the chain of command, because this is what our witnesses have told us, people aren’t reporting. They don’t feel that there is a atmosphere by which they can report safely. They’re afraid of retaliation. They’re afraid of being treated poorly by their commanders, being treated poorly by their colleagues. There isn’t a climate by which they can receive justice in this system. And that is why I want the decision not to be part of the chain of command, but be done entirely by trained professionals who may not have a bias or may not have a lens that is untrained.
GEN. MARK WELSH III: We did a survey recently in the Third Air Force in Europe. Seventy-nine percent of the respondents said that they would report sexual assault if it occurred to them. That ends up not being true once they become victims. We find that 16 percent of our victims report. So what changes when you become a victim? I think we all know. The things that cause people to not report are—primarily, are really not chain of command. It’s: “I don’t want my family to know. I don’t want my spouse to know, or my boyfriend or girlfriend to know. I’m embarrassed that I’m in this situation.” It’s the self-blame that comes with the crime that is overridingly, on surveys over the years, the reasons that most victims don’t report. I don’t think it’s any different in the military.
AMY GOODMAN: Anu Bhagwati, your response?
ANURADHA BHAGWATI: Yeah, I would—I respectfully disagree with General Welsh. I don’t think he understands the mindset of victims at all. There is a huge sense of intimidation and fear of the people in your chain of command. The entire system is hierarchical. From day one, when you are a private in basic training, you learn to obey the orders of your seniors, period. And for a four-star general to not understand that is not surprising, but, you know, at this point, we have to deal with the power dynamics in the system, that is entirely different in the military than it is in the civilian world.
AMY GOODMAN: During yesterday’s Senate hearing, Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri questioned U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Mark Welsh, again, about Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Krusinski, the Air Force officer who led the branch’s sexual assault prevention unit, who was arrested Sunday for committing sexual assault. McCaskill also asked Welsh who would choose Krusinski’s successor.
SEN. CLAIRE McCASKILL: Did you look at his file for any kind of problems related—I mean, clearly, the accusation is, is that he was drunk and sexually attacked a complete stranger in a parking lot. It is hard for me to believe that someone would be accused of that behavior by a complete stranger and not have anything in their file that would indicate a problem in that regard. Have you looked at his file and determined that his file was absolutely pristine?
GEN. MARK WELSH III: Senator, I looked at his officer record of performance, which is all I could access last night. I talked to his current supervisor. I haven’t talked to people who knew him or supervised him in the past. There is no indication in his professional record or performance or in his current workplace that there’s any type of a problem like this.
SEN. CLAIRE McCASKILL: And who selected him? Will those two people be responsible for selecting his replacement?
GEN. MARK WELSH III: Yes, ma’am, they probably will be.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri questioning U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General Mark Welsh. And I do want to point out, seven of the 26 members—unprecedented number—of the Armed Services Committee are women, for the first time. They were the fiercest questioners yesterday. Anu?
ANURADHA BHAGWATI: Absolutely. Women in politics matter. I mean, if it were not for women on the Senate Armed Services Committee, we wouldn’t even be having these discussions—there’s no question. But, you know, again, there’s this focus on training, on the lieutenant colonel being part of the training cadre for the Air Force. The military cannot train its way out of this crisis. You cannot train your way out of sexual assault. Criminal justice reform is much more important than any element of training. Training is just one tiny piece of the puzzle. But we’re dealing with sex crimes. You can’t reform all criminals, right? And so, behavior change, in large part, is also due to the way criminals are treated and victims are cared for. And there’s very little attention being paid to that.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Anu Bhagwati, just very quickly, before we conclude, one of the prejudices against trying military rape or sexual assault, as you’ve pointed out, has to do with the fact that it’s considered a women’s issue. But you’ve pointed out, in fact, that the majority of cases reported, at least, are of—from men, male victims.
ANURADHA BHAGWATI: That’s right. Just over half the cases in the last report were male victims. And so, there’s a sense that, well, because you’re a woman, you’ll be sexually assaulted; because women are in the military, inevitably they’ll be sexually assaulted—which is completely false. And that rape mythology has to be addressed head-on, because still the vast majority of servicemembers are men. You know, men don’t perceive themselves as victims. Women are a little more acclimated. But we’ve got culture change in the military. If we have to—if we want to transform that, we have to address the ideas of gender and what it means to actually be a sexual predator, that these are crimes based on power and control, and that’s it. So, conversations have to get a very real within the military. The training and education is—it’s mandatory. It’s boring. It doesn’t get personal. And these are personal matters.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you, Anu Bhagwati, for joining us, executive director and co-founder of Service Women’s Action Network, or SWAN, former captain and company commander, served as a Marine officer from 1999 to 2004.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, the celebrated Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano joins us in studio. Stay with us.New Supergirl Clip Shows She And Superman Stopping A Bank Robbery By Conner Schwerdtfeger Random Article Blend Superheroes have to deal with quite a bit of hassle in their day to day lives. From evil megalomaniacs, to rogue cyborgs, to potentially apocalyptic alien threats, a Kryptonian's work is never done. However, that doesn't mean they turn a blind eye to simple street crime. A new clip from the upcoming episode of Supergirl has just hit the web, and it serves as a firm reminder of why you should never rob a bank in National City. Check out the scene below. A new clip from the second season of Supergirl has just been released by The CW, and it shows the solar powered Kryptonians in all of their crime fighting glory. The scene picks up in the middle of a bank robbery, only for the sounds of the alarms to compel our two heroes to save the day. Kara arrives on the scene first, and steps in front of the car to stop it -- followed swiftly by Superman, who prevents the car from backing up. Realizing their failed escape, the two bank robbers get out of the car and (rather stupidly) attempt to fight off the blue-clad superheroes with guns and fists. Spoiler alert: it doesn't go so well. After some playful banter, and a few delightful quips, Henshaw calls to the Super cousins and sends them on a new mission to take care of a bigger threat. The beauty of this scene is the way in which it captures the hopeful, whimsical tone of these heroes. They enjoy saving people, and they enjoy doing it together. While the DCEU's version of Superman has thus far proven himself to be a bit of a downer, Tyler Hoechlin has gone in the opposite direction by giving us a version of the Man of Steel that is an unquestionable symbol of all that is good. Although everyone seemed worried that he wouldn't be able to live up to the standard of the Last Son of Krypton, Hoechlin has definitely proven himself worthy of the role. He's more Christopher Reeve than Henry Cavill, which ultimately helps set him apart from the current silver screen version of the iconic DC superhero. Variety matters, after all. What do you think of the Supergirl/Superman dynamic so far? Let us know what you think in the comments section below. Supergirl airs every Monday night at 9 p.m. EST on The CW. For now, make sure to check out CinemaBlend's fall TV premiere guide and fill out your TV viewing schedules accordingly. RELATED: Caity Lotz Says Arrowverse Sex Scenes Make Her Nervous Blended From Around The Web Facebook
Back to topWASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration could revise or withdraw an Obama-era directive requiring public schools to let transgender students use bathrooms and locker rooms that match their chosen gender identity.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Tuesday the Justice Department is working on a new set of guidelines on bathroom access but offered no other details.
“I think that all you have to do is look at what the president’s view has been for a long time, that this is not something the federal government should be involved in, this is a states’ rights issue,” he said.
The Justice Department declined to comment. But Spicer’s comment stoked concerns among transgender-rights advocates about a reversal of the Obama administration’s protections.
Here’s a look at the issue and what could happen:
What is the federal guidance for school bathrooms?
The Obama administration in May told public schools nationwide that they are obligated to treat transgender students in a way that matches their gender identity, even when records differ or it makes others uncomfortable. It was the administration’s determination that Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education and activities, also applies to gender identity.
About 150,000 youth — 0.7 percent— between the ages of 13 and 17 in the United States identify as transgender, according to a study by The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
The Obama-era guidance held no force of law but sent a warning that schools could lose funding if they did not comply with the administration’s interpretation of the law. Republicans immediately pushed back, arguing it was an example of federal government overreach and the Obama administration meddling in local matters. Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick equated it to “blackmail” and said at the time that the state was ready to forfeit federal education money rather than comply with the guidance.
Thirteen states sued to challenge the directive. A federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked the guidance in August, and the Trump administration this month said it would no longer fight to limit the injunction.
What could happen if the guidance is withdrawn?
Advocates said federal law would still prohibit discrimination against students based on their gender or sexual orientation even without the Obama guidelines.
“To cloak this in federalism ignores the vital and historic role that federal law plays in ensuring that all children (including LGBT students) are able to attend school free from discrimination,” Vanita Gupta, who was head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division when the guidance was issued, said in a statement.
Still, legal experts say a change in position could have consequences for unresolved court cases dealing with Title IX.
The Supreme Court could decide to send a case about a transgender teen in Virginia back to a lower court. The high school senior was born female, but identifies as a male and wants to use the boys’ bathroom at his school. The high court is scheduled to hear the case in March. Courts are unsettled about whether, in the absence of guidance from the federal government, anti-discrimination laws require schools to allow students to use bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity. The justices could direct lower courts to decide that issue.
Similar lawsuits are still playing out across the country.
“Some courts might say the fact that they go back and forth on this every time the administration changes, maybe we shouldn’t defer to it, maybe we should just decide for ourselves,” said Arthur Leonard, a professor at New York Law School who has studied LGBT legal history.
What would the change mean for schools?
A patchwork of state laws dealing with the bathroom issue will continue to emerge. Fifteen states have explicit protections for transgender students in their state laws, and many individual school districts in other states have adopted policies that respected such students on the basis of their gender identity, said Sarah Warbelow, legal director of the Human Rights Campaign. Just one state, North Carolina, has enacted a law restricting bathroom access to the sex at birth. But so far this year, lawmakers in more than 10 states are considering similar legislation, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Transgender-rights advocates argued the guidance was a helpful tool for districts in understanding federal law. Without it, more schools could be subject to lawsuits as districts try to sort through the confusion, said Rachel Tiven, CEO of the LGBT advocacy group Lambda Legal. revising or rescinding the guidance
“The important thing to understand is that it doesn’t change the underlying law, but it’s an invitation to harm the most vulnerable kids in school,” Tiven said of any efforts to revise or rescind the guidance.
© 2017, Associated Press, All Rights Reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
This Story Filed UnderImage caption Raymond Boyle's body was recovered from the River Cam
A teenager has been found guilty of murdering a homeless man in Cambridge in what police have described as a "savage, unprovoked attack".
The body of Raymond Boyle, 53, was found in the River Cam in the city last June.
Jack Robinson, 18, of no fixed address, was found guilty by a jury at Cambridge Crown Court after a two-week trial.
Sentencing was adjourned for three weeks.
Det Ch Insp George Barr, who led the investigation, said: "This was a savage, unprovoked attack on a defenceless man.
"Robinson was involved in the attack which had been fuelled by alcohol, and was seen kicking and stamping on Mr Boyle while he lay on the floor.
Image caption Jack Robinson's attack was unprovoked
"That assault was bad enough, but for Robinson to drag him, barely conscious, into the water where he stood no chance of survival, was sickening.
"While nothing can stop the hurt felt by Mr Boyle's family, I hope today's conviction will bring them some comfort as they look to re-build their lives without him."
Mr Boyle's partner of 22 years, Carole, and his eldest daughter Toni paid tribute to him.
"Ray was a successful man, working hard over the years at a printing firm in Rochdale, Lancashire, being promoted to supervisor.
"His only demon was drink; which stemmed from a difficult childhood. He was a father to three girls and a proud grandfather, but never got the chance to meet his third grandchild who was born last month.
"He was deeply loved by everyone who was part of his life and will be greatly missed by all his family and friends."After 40 hotel-bound hours – save for a game of golf on an adjoining course –since arriving in Bangladesh, England’s cricketers experienced their first full armed convoy when travelling to the Sher-e-Bangla stadium in Dhaka for their first training session before the one-day international series begins on Friday.
The five England and Wales Cricket Board vehicles were lined by armed motorbikes and 4x4s. The task force included government troops, special forces, intelligence agencies and scores of police at ground level, with rooftop gunmen in attendance. Roads were closed for the majority of the 15-minute journey (normally it would take four times as long), but on the approach to the ground many fans – cordoned off by police – lined the streets for a glimpse of the team bus.
As many as 500 people were involved in the security effort, which was funded by the Bangladeshi government; they worked in conjunction with the Bangladesh Cricket Board and the ECB’s security adviser, Reg Dickason, whose visit last month declared Bangladesh safe to tour. Such a convoy will join the team – who have the director of cricket, Andrew Strauss, and the chief executive, Tom Harrison, for company – each time they travel to and from the ground.
Upon arrival the players seemed at ease as they were whisked into the stadium. Jos Buttler, the captain in the absence of Eoin Morgan, faced close to 100 local journalists, who echoed the public’s sentiment of goodwill that the tour is taking place. “Touring the subcontinent, security is paramount,” said Buttler. “We are looked after very well. That is part and parcel of making the tour OK. Now we are here we will focus on cricket. Those things will go back into the background.”
After Buttler spoke, England trained. First at the nets behind the ground – overlooked by Dhaka high-rises (with armed gunmen on top) – before doing fielding practice under lights on the ground (preceded, of course, by the obligatory game of football). All three ODIs – the first two are here, with the third in Chittagong – are day-night matches.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Armed police guard the England team bus at Sher-e-Bangla stadium in Dhaka. Photograph: Gareth Copley/Getty Images,
Earlier the assistant coach, Paul Farbrace, said he was “massively disappointed” with the withdrawal of Alex Hales and the regular white-ball captain Morgan, who pulled out because of security concerns, although he believes their absence presents an opportunity to some fringe players. That said, Farbrace was unequivocal in his belief that Morgan should captain the ODI side on their next tour, to India in January.
The identity of those who will replace Hales and Morgan, and Joe Root, who has been rested for this leg of the tour, should become clearer on Tuesday when England face a BCB XI at Fatullah. James Vince, Ben Duckett, Jonny Bairstow and Sam Billings are competing to replace the trio, although Farbrace did not rule out Moeen Ali returning to the top of the order. Farbrace said Buttler would keep wicket.
“I was massively disappointed that the two of them chose not to go,” Farbrace said. “But you get over that disappointment and you realise that there are opportunities for others to get a go. If we are going to be challengers in 2019 our pool of players needs to keep expanding. I feel we have 20-21 guys who could play for England and we wouldn’t have necessarily a weaker side.
“The ideal is that the guys coming in do brilliantly, so Alex and Morgs know that getting their place back will be very tough. That’s the only risk that the pair run, that the guys come in, do brilliantly, then in India obviously selection will be very tough.”
Farbrace – who like the head coach, Trevor Bayliss, who arrives from Sydney on Sunday night after visa trouble, was aboard the Sri Lankan team bus that was shot at in Pakistan in 2009 – seemed unperturbed by the security arrangements. “Around the hotel it’s not too in your face, like Pakistan where there are guards sat outside your door with guns. First thing you see in the morning is a pair of boots and the butt of a gun. It’s not like that here and I don’t think we could be in a better place really.”
Like Buttler, the management hope that after the first training session the focus will shift from security to cricket, and Farbrace was quick to warn that England will face a stern foe here. On Saturday Bangladesh completed their sixth straight ODI series win at home, a run that includes victories over South Africa, India and Pakistan, while they knocked England out of the 2015 World Cup in Adelaide.
“This is a tough place to come, which it didn’t used to be apart from the conditions,” he said. “I think a few of our lads will be quite surprised by the standard they are up against – not just the tough conditions, but the quality of the opposition. They might not admit it, but I think they will be surprised.”So, another Commission done. This time, I was asked to paint a bit more of interior, which I hate, but hey - it's a good challenge and painting anything, that doesn't suit me, improves my skills, so there goes nothing.I was scared a lot at the beginning, had no idea where to start, what to do, how to do the shading of all the stuff in there. Altough it's far from perfect, I think - given my layer management (which turned to be a little bit messy this time, as I tried to keep the number low... which went Apesh** anyway in the end) - it turned out quite well. The finishing touches (light rays and sparkles and stuff like that) improved the image tenfold, as I hoped. I tried to stay true to the reference room in the show, but if you bother and look it up on the internet or somewhere, You'll easily figure out, that this room is way smaller than the one in the show. I noticed that too late to fix it, but it looks cozier this way, so I"m happy with it as it is.Feels like I'm finally starting to get some atmosphere into my pictures...Painting time: ~18 hoursWIP: sta.sh/01zxrqz3gcq1 Timelapse: In time...Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
Only one in three Palestinians (34 percent) accepts two states for two peoples as the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to an intensive, face-to-face survey in Arabic of 1,010 Palestinian adults in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip completed this week by American pollster Stanley Greenberg.
The poll, which has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points, was conducted in partnership with the Beit Sahour-based Palestinian Center for Public Opinion and sponsored by the Israel Project, an international nonprofit organization that provides journalists and leaders with information about the Middle East.
RELATED:
The Israel Project is trying to reach out to the Arab world to promote “people-to-people peace.” The poll appears to indicate that the organization has a difficult task ahead.Respondents were asked about US President Barack Obama’s statement that “there should be two states: Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people and Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people.”Just 34% said they accepted that concept, while 61% rejected it.Sixty-six percent said the Palestinians’ real goal should be to start with a two-state solution but then move to it all being one Palestinian state.Asked about the fate of Jerusalem, 92% said it should be the capital of Palestine, 1% said the capital of Israel, 3% the capital of both, and 4% a neutral international city.Seventy-two percent backed denying the thousands of years of Jewish history in Jerusalem, 62% supported kidnapping IDF soldiers and holding them hostage, and 53% were in favor or teaching songs about hating Jews in Palestinian schools.When given a quote from the Hamas Charter about the need for battalions from the Arab and Islamic world to defeat the Jews, 80% agreed. Seventy-three percent agreed with a quote from the charter (and a hadith, or tradition ascribed to the prophet Muhammad) about the need to kill Jews hiding behind stones and trees.But only 45% said they believed in the charter’s statement that the only solution to the Palestinian problem was jihad.The survey’s more positive findings included that only 22% supported firing rockets at Israeli cities and citizens and that two-thirds preferred diplomatic engagement over violent “resistance.”Among Palestinians in general 65% preferred talks and 20% violence. In the West Bank it was 69-28%, and in Gaza, 59- 32%.Asked whether they backed seeking a Palestinian state unilaterally in the UN, 64% said yes. The number was 57% in the West Bank and 79% in Gaza. Thirty-seven percent said the UN action would bring a Palestinian state closer, 16% said it would set back the establishment of a state, and 44% said it would make no difference.When asked what Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s top priorities should be, 83% said creating jobs. Just 4% said getting the UN to recognize a Palestinian state, and only 2% said peace talks with Israel.Israel Project president Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi said she was encouraged that the Arab Spring would bring more accuracy to Arab media and by the 59% of Palestinians who are on Facebook. The Israel Project has 80,723 friends for its Arabic site, which has had 9.5 million page views in two months.“Some of the numbers in the poll are discouraging, but we are trying to change them,” she said at a Jerusalem press conference in which Greenberg presented the findings.Greenberg said the survey proved that there was a big need for public education and leadership on the Palestinian side.Greenberg and Laszlo Mizrahi have presented the findings to President Shimon Peres, opposition leader Tzipi Livni, Vice Premier Moshe Ya’alon and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s senior adviser, Ron Dermer.Next week, they have meetings scheduled in the White House and the Pentagon.Israeli leaders told Greenberg and Laszlo Mizrahi they were encouraged by Palestinian support for talks.
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>A new law aimed at ending ethnic-studies classes went into effect today.
For three years, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne pushed the bill in hopes of terminating the ethnic-studies curriculum in the Tucson Unified School District.
House Bill 2281 bans classes in kindergarten through 12th grade that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of one ethnic group, or advocate ethnic solidarity.
If districts are found in violation of the new law, the Arizona Department of Education can withhold 10 percent of the district's state funding.
Horne has long criticized Tucson's ethnic-studies program, which he said divides students by race.
"A fundamental role of the public schools is to take students of different backgrounds and teach them to treat each other as individuals and not of the race they were born into. Tucson Unified District does it the opposite," Horne said. "They divide (students) by race and teach each group about its own background only."
Horne, who will be sworn in as state attorney general on Monday, will use his last hours as schools chief to enforce the law. The Republican leader said he will hold a "lame-duck session with himself" prior to the inauguration to announce the Tucson district violated the law.
At stake is nearly $15 million of state aid to the 53,500-student school district.
The violation declaration starts a 60-day process under the statute for Tucson to correct its program. Horne said his successor, John Huppenthal, will decide whether or not to withhold state funding.
Tucson school officials said that they support the law but that there is nothing in their curriculum that would run afoul of its provisions.
Incoming TUSD Superintendent John Pedicone said it's unclear how the district could be accused of breaking a law that hadn't yet taken effect without further scrutiny of the various courses.
"How do you declare a program in violation when you haven't observed a program in its current state?" Pedicone said.
The school board met in a special session Thursday to pass its third resolution on the issue, restating its belief that the ethnic-studies programs increase student achievement and directing district employees to ensure compliance with the new law.
The district integrates Mexican-American studies into its offerings, from kindergarten through high school. The courses are open to all students, and they draw a mixed crowd, though most of the students in the Mexican-American Studies classes - those that have drawn most of Horne's ire - are Hispanic.
It's unclear if the new law will affect any other school districts.
Mexican-American Studies Director Sean Arce and nine teachers within the department banned together and filed a federal lawsuit in |
often nearly immediately start raising money. "You're pretty much raising money perpetually," Ryan said. And winning candidates are much likelier to have money left over than losers, especially in Congressional races that are uncontested.
As Election Day approaches, campaigns work to strive a delicate balance between funds raised and money spent -- especially as it begins to appear they may end up on the losing end of things. "When you see the writing on the wall, you want to try to get as close to debt-free as possible," Nelson said.Constant Stubbing in RSpec 2.11
Myron Marston
In the 2.11 release, rspec-mocks is gaining a significant new capability that, as far as I know, isn't provided by any other ruby mocking library: constant stubbing.
Let's look at the API, and then talk a bit about some of the use cases for it.
The API
The main API is stub_const :
describe "stub_const" do it "changes the constant value for the duration of the example" do stub_const ( "Foo::SIZE", 10 ) expect ( Foo :: SIZE ). to eq ( 10 ) end end
This works for both defined and undefined constants; you could stub A::B::C::D::E::F even if none of the intermediary constants exist. When the example completes, the constants will be restored to their original states: any newly defined constants will be undefined, and any modified constants will be restored to their original values.
Note that constant names must be fully qualified; the current module nesting is not considered:
module MyGem class SomeClass ; end end module MyGem describe "Something" do let ( :fake_class ) { Class. new } it "accidentally stubs the wrong constant" do # this stubs ::SomeClass (in the top-level namespace), # not MyGem::SomeClass like you probably mean. stub_const ( "SomeClass", fake_class ) end it "stubs the right constant" do stub_const ( "MyGem::SomeClass", fake_class ) end end end
stub_const also supports a :transfer_nested_constants option. Consider a case where you have nested constants:
class CardDeck SUITS = [ :spades, :diamonds, :clubs, :hearts ] NUM_CARDS = 52 end
stub_const("CardDeck", fake_class) cuts off access to the nested constants ( CardDeck::SUITS and CardDeck::NUM_CARDS ), unless you manually assign fake_class::SUITS and fake_class::NUM_CARDS. The :transfer_nested_constants option is provided to take care of this for you:
# Default behavior: fake_class = Class. new stub_const ( "CardDeck", fake_class ) CardDeck # => fake_class CardDeck :: SUITS # => raises uninitialized constant error CardDeck :: NUM_CARDS # => raises uninitialized constant error # `:transfer_nested_constants => true` transfers all nested constants: stub_const ( "CardDeck", fake_class, :transfer_nested_constants => true ) CardDeck :: SUITS # => [:spades, :diamonds, :clubs, :hearts] CardDeck :: NUM_CARDS # => 52 # Or you can specify a list of constants to transfer: stub_const ( "CardDeck", fake_class, :transfer_nested_constants => [ :SUITS ]) CardDeck :: SUITS # => [:spades, :diamonds, :clubs, :hearts] CardDeck :: NUM_CARDS # => raises uninitialized constant error
Use Cases
I've found this useful in a few different situations:
It provides a simple way to change a class setting expressed as a constant for one test. In the past, I've often defined static class methods just so they could be stubbed, even though it made more sense to use a constant. Now you can just use a constant!
It makes dependency injection easy when the class-under-test depends on a collaborator's class method (e.g. when the collaborator is stateless). You can easily stub the collaborator's class constant with a test double.
It makes stubbing unloaded dependencies dead-simple. Gary Bernhardt discussed this situation at length in Destroy all Software #46. He mentioned mutating constants as a possible way of stubbing unloaded dependencies, but recommended against it because of the complexity of safely managing this. Now that rspec-mocks can do it for you, it's far less complex, and much, much safer.
If you're curious how it all works, check out the source on github.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.The mystery of the shaking at the shore revealed. NBC 10's George Spencer explains what caused the sonic boom and how it caused panic for some. (Published Thursday, Jan. 28, 2016)
Naval tests with fancy jets were likely responsible for shaking homes up and down the New Jersey Coast multiple times Thursday afternoon leading to police begging people to stop calling 911 as they awaited word on what caused the tremors. What Shook Parts of New Jersey?
Residents around the Garden State reported hearing a loud boom and then shaking Thursday afternoon. NBC10's Cydney Long has the details. (Published Thursday, Jan. 28, 2016)
NBC10 Philadelphia’s own Ted Greenberg was one of the many people in Atlantic County and other New Jersey counties who felt something around 1:30 p.m.
There were fears of an earthquake and Hamilton Township Police reported that they received numerous calls about the shaking and asked people to only call 911 if they had an actual emergency.
Eventually, the National Weather Service in Mount Holly reported the incidents to be caused by a sonic boom.
Dr. Mitchell Gold at Columbia's Lamont Doherty Cooperative Seismographic Network told NBC New York that it didn't look seismic based on the seismographs and also leaned toward a sonic boom being the culprit for the shaking.
A few minutes later, the U.S. Geological Survey centered the shaking near Trenton Road (U.S. Route 206) in Hammonton, Atlantic County -- not far from tiny Hammonton Municipal Airport -- at 1:24 p.m. and called it a "probable sonic boom" that caused shaking over a series of time.
Officials from the Navy said the sonic booms were caused by military fighter jets conducting tests around 1:30 and 2:30 p.m.
An F-35C, which has a top speed of nearly 1,200 mph, and an F-18 from Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland were conducting supersonic testing off the coast Thursday afternoon, according to a Navy spokeswoman.
Navy spokeswoman Connie Hempel said supersonic tests flights are done almost daily in the same area but that most sonic booms aren't felt on land. They are conducted offshore in an area called the Test Track, parallel to the coast of the Delmarva Peninsula which is occupied by Delaware, Maryland and Virginia.
Certain atmospheric conditions can increase the chance of hearing the booms.
Residents in Margate and Egg Harbor reported feeling the shaking -- as did people as far away as Leesburg in Cumberland County; Lakewood, Ocean County; and even Amityville on Long Island.
Different shakes kept being felt on and off, said people in various towns. Greenberg reported feeling more rattling around 2, 2:15 and 2:25 p.m.
The booms were heard as far away as Connecticut.
Police in Barnegat Township, Ocean County blamed a crack in the Sheetrock of a home on Susan Drive on rattling. There weren't any other reports of damage and no reports of injuries.
Toms River, Ocean County, police also asked that people not call 911 and said they had received various reports of "earthquake-type-feel" shaking around 2:20 p.m.
"It almost sounded like an airplane was coming and then the whole house was shaking," said Angel Itri, who was house and babysitting along Pomona Road in Galloway, Atlantic County at the time. "We heard something like a boom or like a swishing sound and then the whole house, the windows were shaking."
Itri and her friend felt that boom twice in about 10 minutes then another eight times after that.
A geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey said there were nine total booms. Bruce Presgrave said recordings show they occurred over the span of 90 minutes.
"A sonic boom is the thunder-like noise a person on the ground hears when an aircraft or other type of aerospace vehicle flies overhead faster than the speed of sound or supersonic," explains NASA. "Air reacts like a fluid to supersonic objects. As objects travel through the air, the air molecules are pushed aside with great force and this forms a shock wave much like a boat creates a bow wave. The bigger and heavier the aircraft, the more air it displaces." Top News Photos: R. Kelly Leaves Jail After Paying Bond
There were no reports of planned military training Thursday and Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst says they had nothing going on Thursday. And Dover Air Force Base in Delaware said it has no aircraft capable of producing a sonic boom and had no planes flying in the area Thursday.
After a sonic boom in South Carolina Wednesday, College of Charleston Department of Geology associate professor Dr. Erin Beutel said sonic booms "are perceived by the people on the ground differently under different atmospheric conditions.
"It can also take between 2-60 seconds after the plane passes through for the boom to be heard, and over the ocean, the pressure wave can travel further and be heard by more people than on land," said Beutel.
Besides sonic booms and quakes, other things such as big trucks, military exercises and noisy machinery have also been known to cause shaking.
The Department of Defense employs a hotline for noise disturbances for the Naval Air Station in Patuxent River. Questions can be referred to 866-819-9028.
Did you feel the shaking? Please share your experience in the comment section.
Copyright Associated Press / NBC 10 PhiladelphiaSYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia has selected U.S. defence company Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) as its preferred bidder to supply the combat system for its new $38 billion fleet of submarines, the country’s defence industry minister said on Friday.
A sign at the new Lockheed Martin Manufacturing Centre of Excellence is seen at the company's headquarters in Ampthill near Bedford, Britain June 9, 2016. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls/File Photo
Lockheed Martin beat out competition from U.S. rival Raytheon Co (RTN.N), which built the system for Australia’s existing Collins-class submarines.
Australia chose French naval contractor DCNS Group in April to build 12 new submarines in a deal worth A$50 billion (£29.47 billion) - one of the world’s most lucrative defence contacts.
France beat out offers from Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine (TKAG.DE) and Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (7011.T) and Kawasaki Heavy Industries (7012.T).
Japan’s bid had been seen as an early frontrunner, helped by a view that the United States wanted to cement security ties between regional allies Japan and Australia to counter China’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea and beyond.
The decision to select Lockheed Martin will see Australia share the same weapons system provider as the U.S. Navy, offering greater interoperability between the two allies.
“By partnering with an Australian-based company with strong links to the United States, we will ensure that we get the best Australian and U.S. technology, while ensuring that our sensitive technology is protected,” Minister for Defence Industry Christopher Pyne said in a statement.
The value of the contract was not disclosed.
Pyne also announced Australia had signed the first contract with DCNS to commence the design work for the new submarines.
DCNS, which is 35 percent-owned by defence electronics giant Thales SA (TCFP.PA), was criticised last month after more than 22,000 pages outlining details relating to submarines it is building for India were published in an Australian newspaper.
The leak sparked concerns about DCNS’s ability to protect sensitive data and drawing a warning from Australian defence officials.
The new fleet of submarines is a key element of Australia’s increased defence spending, which will rise to A$195 billion, or 2 percent of GDP, by 2021-2022.
In addition to the submarines, Australia is buying new equipment including frigates, armoured personnel carriers, strike fighter jets and drones.
But Canberra’s defence plans have riled Beijing, with the Foreign Ministry expressing “dissatisfaction” with Australia’s “negative” remarks on the South China Sea and its military development.FILE - In this April 3, 2012 file photo, House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. introduces Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney before Romney spoke at the Grain Exchange in Milwaukee. There are plenty of reasons for Mitt Romney to pop the question to Paul Ryan: The whip smart congressman is from a swing state, stands as his partys leading voice on the nations budget and is the rare member of the GOP establishment who is also beloved by the tea party. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
WASHINGTON-- The Franciscan Action Network (FAN), a Catholic faith-based advocacy and civic engagement organization, is strongly criticizing Mitt Romney's recent ads and rhetoric regarding welfare programs and welfare recipients, urging him to spend some time in low-income communities.
"Our Christian tradition teaches that we are to treat the poor with dignity and to prioritize the poor in our policies as a society," the organization said in a press release on Thursday. "At a time when millions are struggling financially, it is degrading to talk about the 'dependency' of people hurting in this economy, as Gov. Romney did recently."
Rhett Engelking, a secular Franciscan in Milwaukee and member of FAN, has even personally invited Romney to visit with the low-income people he assists. “Political leaders would not talk about the poor in demeaning ways or cut job training programs if they spent more time with the people they are affecting with their policies," he said.
While faith-based anti-poverty and charity organizations have often criticized candidates and lawmakers for a perceived unwillingness to highlight and tackle issues affecting the very poor, FAN claims Romney's rhetoric goes a step further, unfairly using welfare recipients as political props.
FAN spokesman Lonnie Ellis told The Huffington Post that what Romney is doing is "worse than ignoring" poor people. He said Romney is essentially criticizing President Barack Obama for helping out low-income individuals. "It's saying look, 'President Obama is actually supporting poor people too much, or he's just giving a free ride to poor people,'" Ellis said. "So it's actually using poor people in a really bad way."
FAN's criticism, however, goes beyond the Romney campaign's rhetoric on welfare by condemning cuts to Pell Grants, Medicaid and Head Start programs put forth in the budget proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and supported by Romney.
“With the political conversation now on ensuring that low-income people are working, the most blatant affront is that the Romney-Ryan Budget actually cuts job training programs for low-income people,” FAN Executive Director Patrick Carolan said in a statement.
The Romney campaign could not immediately be reached for comment.
While many Catholic groups have generally been supportive of Romney and Republicans on social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, FAN joins several other prominent Catholic organizations in their harsh criticism of the Romney campaign's stance on welfare and the Ryan budget.
As ThinkProgress reported, NETWORK, a Catholic social justice advocacy group, has supported the national "Nuns On A Bus" tour, which is aimed at highlighting the negative effects of Ryan's proposed cuts, and invited Romney to spend a day with Catholic nuns helping the poor in their communities.
In April, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote a series of letters to congressional lawmakers criticizing the Ryan budget, saying that fair budget solutions "must require shared sacrifice by all, including raising adequate revenues, eliminating unnecessary military and other spending, and fairly addressing the long-term costs of health insurance and retirement programs."The shooting of a two-year-old girl by her five-year-old brother has put a spotlight on smaller guns designed for children.
The gun used in the recent shooting in Kentucky was a Crickett.22-caliber rifle, marketed with the slogan "My First Rifle," from Keystone Sporting Arms in Milton, Pa. The single-shot rifle uses the smallest caliber available and is sold by major retailers, including Wal-Mart (WMT), Cabela's (CAB) and Gander Mountain.
The Crickett website was down Friday due to "difficulties," according to John Renzulli, an attorney representing Keystone. But the site for Chipmunk, another Keystone brand, exhibited "quality firearms for America's youth" on its site, including.22-caliber rifles and pistols, with photos of children shooting them. The site includes a "kids corner" section.
Renzulli insisted that the company is not marketing firearms to children.
"No one's marketing to children," he said. "They're marketing to parents who would buy guns for children."
On its website, Wal-Mart markets the Crickett as a "youth rifle," while Gander Mountain's site describes it as a "great beginner's gun."
"All are lightweight and easy for youngsters to carry at the range and in the woods," reads the Crickett description on Cabela's site, which describes it as "a fun firearm to get your young shooter started with."
Wal-Mart did not immediately comment on whether their policy on sales of guns for children would change. Gander Mountain said it would not comment on potential policy changes, but added that it has launched a responsibility campaign aimed at keeping firearms away from "the underaged, untrained and unauthorized." Cabela's did not return a request for comment.
Related: Remington jobs rule the Rust Belt
Lawrence Keane, vice president and spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry group, described the youth firearm market as a relatively small slice of the gun industry, though large enough to have plenty of participants.
"A number of manufacturers make youth models of firearms for parents to purchase to introduce their children to adult-supervised target shooting," said Keane. "Millions of families all across America participate in the shooting sports as a family recreational activity. Children cannot purchase firearms from licensed dealers, of course."
According to the National Sports Shooting Foundation, federal data show that the number of unintentional firearm-related fatalities involving children 14 years of age and under decreased by 78% over two decades to 62 in 2008.
Related: Gun and ammo sales fuel jobs boom
Brian Rafn, gun industry analyst and director of research at Morgan Dempsey Capital Management, described the youth gun segment as a small enough portion of the $4 billion industry to call it a "ghost market." He added that most states won't issue a hunting license to children younger than 10.
"I don't know of any state, and I've been hunting for 30 years, that would allow an armed five-year-old out in the woods during hunting season," he said. "In Wisconsin where I go hunting, if you were found out in the woods with a five-year-old with a gun, the game warden would have you in cuffs."
Correction: An earlier version of this article contained incorrect statistics about accidental fatalities involving firearms and children.Get the biggest Arsenal FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Arsene Wenger will scour the transfer market for the missing ingredient in Arsenal's title charge this summer - but is the answer already on the training ground?
Gunners youngster Gedion Zelalem showed off this piece of skill in the U20s World Cup, where he is representing the USA.
His jinking run drew four New Zealand defenders towards him, but they were powerless to stop him sliding an inch-perfect ball through for an impressive assist.
It was Zelalem's first start for the side, and he played an integral part as they won 4-0, sealing their place in the knockout stages of the tournament in the process.
(Image: Action Images)
Arsenal are linked with the likes of Karim Benzema and Gonzalo Higuain in this morning's papers, but is the answer to their title charge already on the training pitch?
The German born midfielder had been the subject of a tug-of-war between his native Germany and the USA, before being granted eligibility by FIFA to play for the States.
US boss Jurgen Klinsmann spoke before the decision was made, saying: "He is a special case. I think he is already at a level that he can definitely play with the senior team."In case you guys missed it, Jason updated us earlier this week on what has been sent in the most to Toonami about manipulate the manual. Here is what he said on twitter:
Lot of responses. Most common suggestions are as follows: 1. Make Toonami LONGER. Sorry, that one is out of our hands, but we like it! — LICH KING DEMARCO (@Clarknova1) August 20, 2014
2. Go DARKER. We hear you on that. Deadman's success showed us you guys might like that… Black Lagoon a bit less so! But we have ideas. — LICH KING DEMARCO (@Clarknova1) August 20, 2014
3. KEEP things a mix of classic shows and newer stuff. A lot of you seem to like the balance we have right now! — LICH KING DEMARCO (@Clarknova1) August 20, 2014
4. No more American action! This one… Not sure we will do any time soon. Folks are very vocal bout hating this, but ratings disagree! — LICH KING DEMARCO (@Clarknova1) August 20, 2014
5. More premieres. We hear you and it's something we want. Partially not our call but we will definitely be pushing for that, promise. — LICH KING DEMARCO (@Clarknova1) August 20, 2014
6. Everything else. Some interesting suggestions re: Tom/Sara and formats/packaging, And LOTS and lots of show suggestions! — LICH KING DEMARCO (@Clarknova1) August 20, 2014
With the announcement that Hellsing Ultimate is coming to the block September 16th, it seems the crew is definitely listening. What do you guys think? Let us know by commenting below.Breaking News…The Earth Is Warming…Still!
Posted on 17 February 2012 by Glenn Tamblyn
In my under-graduate days, studying engineering some years ago (quite a few actually but the less said about that the better), one idea was drummed into us again and again. If you want to study any sort of system you absolutely need to define your ‘system boundaries’ correctly. What are the boundaries of the thing you are studying? Get this right and your analysis may be solid. Get it wrong and your analysis will be rubbish.
Bounding Around
So when we think about Global Warming we need to be really certain that our ‘system boundaries’ are right. So what is the theory of Global Warming, in a nutshell? And what does this tell us about where we need to set our boundaries. Put at its simplest, Global Warming says that more GH Gases will cause an imbalance between the amount of energy the Earth receives from the Sun, and the energy it looses to Space. More of the GH gases make it harder for the Earth to loose energy to space, so heat starts to build-up here. And this heat build up can lead to higher temperatures.
So what does this tell us about what needs to be inside our ‘system boundary’?
Our system boundary needs to include anywhere where this extra heat can accumulate! To understand Global Warming we need to look at all the places where heat can go and account for all of them.
And this is what the scientists have done. This graph, taken from the IPCC’s 2007 report shows the estimates of how much heat has been added to different parts of the environment – melting ice, warming the land, air and oceans between 1961-2003 and 1993 - 2003.
I have highlighted the atmosphere part for a very simple reason. This is what most of us think of when we talk about ‘Global Warming’; that it is changes in the air temperature!
Yet look at the graph; warming of the atmosphere really is small potatoes! The main game in Global Warming is what happens in the Oceans. Around 90% of the heat added since 1961 has happened there. In contrast warming of the atmosphere is only around 3% of the heat.
Here is a different way of looking at the same thing with data from Church et al 2011
So if we were to set our ‘system boundary’ incorrectly and just looked at the atmosphere, we would be looking at only a very small part of the system and could easily reach a poor conclusion. Like trying to understand the Dog by just looking at its Tail!
Pin the Tail on the …
So what has been happening in the oceans? How do we measure the data needed to produce these graphs? To understand this we need to measure temperatures down through the depths of the ocean at many points. Then by observing how these measurements change and knowing the thermal properties of sea water, its Specific Heat, we can start to calculate heat accumulation.
First a little bit of history. The very first measurements of deep ocean temperatures were performed with instruments lowered from a ship down into the ocean. This method is still used today for detailed studies and for looking at what is happening all the way to the sea bottom. But this method has a big disadvantage. A research ship is needed that can stop, lower a sensor platform over the side from a crane, and sample all the way down. This might take several hours to take measurements at one location. Then it moves on to another location. It is very slow and very expensive and doesn't actually cover much area.
In the 1960’s a better idea was developed. The Expendable Bathythermograph or XBT. A fairly simple, expendable device that could be dropped over the side of a ship while it was underway and report basic data as it sank. Then it just fell to the sea floor. And this didn’t just have to be done from research ships. Any commercial vessel could do it. So now there was a tool for gathering ocean temperature data cheaply from around the world. But it was limited to reporting the top 700 metres of the ocean.
Then through the 2000’s, a consortium of many nations began deploying a smarter answer; the Argo Float Array. This is a series of several thousand free floating ‘smart’ buoys that drift with the currents around the world’s oceans.
These buoys are able to auto-dive down to 2000 metres, measuring as they go, then surface and report their data, and their location via GPS, to satellites that collect the information. Now we have a more sophisticated measuring system for the world’s oceans. So what does all this data show us?
As the figure above suggests, most of the heat has gone into the oceans. But for the last decade or so Mother Nature has been playing some tricks!
Compare these two graphs which are from the National Oceanographic Data Centre (NODC) which also provides a range of other graphs looking at different aspects of sea level rise.
The upper graph shows data from the top 700 metres of the ocean. This is a combination of XBT data going back to the 1960’s and ARGO data. The second graph is showing data all the way down to 2000 metres. How can we have data to 2000 metres for those past decades when ARGO only began operation in the 2000’s? By combining data from 0-700 metres from the XBT’s, with deep data from the ‘lower a sensor over the side’ type measurement programs an estimate can be made of what was happening down deeper. But during the 2000’s we have live data from both depth ranges.
And the picture is rather strange! Up until the early 2000’s, the two trends are broadly similar. The top layer grew by about 1.7 x 1023 joules while the entire 0-2000 range warmed by about 2.1 x 1023 joules. The top layer contained about 80% of the added heat.
But for the last decade or so the top layer has nearly flat lined while the full range has continued warming. Since 2004 there is around 0.5 x 1023 joules in the full depth that isn’t in the top layer! It must be down deeper, between 700 & 2000 metres. What is Mother Nature up to? How can the deeper water be warming if the upper layer isn’t?
We pause briefly…
Here both Climate Models and Oceanography can come to our rescue. In a paper published last year Meehl et al (2011) looked at what a range of different climate models predict might happen in the future. And one rather surprising result they found were ‘Hiatus periods’. Periods of a decade or so where air temperatures - that 3% part that we live in - seem to plateau. But it is what the various models show is happening in the oceans during these periods that is really interesting.
During ‘normal’ periods, more heat goes into the upper part of the oceans and less into the lower depths. But during the ‘Hiatus’ periods, the top of the ocean doesn’t accumulate nearly as much heat whereas the next lower levels accumulate more. Exactly what the current ocean data is telling us!
But why? How can heat reach these greater depths without also heating the top layer?
It’s all about circulation patterns in the ocean. The major circulation patterns are about large surface and bottom currents. Connecting these are regions of major up-welling and down-welling – locations where significant exchanges occur between the surface and the abyssal deeps. But these abyssal deeps aren’t at 2000 metres – more like 5,000 to 8,000 metres.
However, there are also regions in the open ocean with smaller scale vertical-mixing currents that combine the very surface layer with the next level down.
Here for example is the climate model simulation of the mixing currents that overturn the upper layers of the ocean across the Pacific.
So all that Mother Nature has to do is crank these upper ocean circulation patterns up a notch for a period and heat is drawn down from the surface to the next level, to be replaced with colder water from below.
So lets consider what such a pattern will do to the Earth’s climate patterns while it lasts. The next lower level of the ocean will warm because warm water is being pumped down from above. The surface of the ocean won’t warm as much, if at all, because its heat is continually being pumped lower to be replaced by colder water. And because the ocean surface doesn’t warm very much during this period, the atmosphere doesn’t warm as much either. So from our rather limited perspective here on the surface it looks like warming has stopped. When in fact it is simply going on somewhere else. The Dog may have temporarily stopped wagging its Tail but the Dog is still trotting along.
And the models predict that these Hiatus periods last for a decade or so. Then the ocean heat patterns revert to their ‘normal’ structure. And the top layer of the ocean resumes normal heating. And then the Atmosphere resumes heating! So the Dog will resume wagging its Tail soon. It’s a Dog, it can’t help doing that.
So when you hear or read anywhere or are told by anyone that ‘warming stopped in (insert preferred date)’ the simple, observed fact is that it hasn’t stopped warming! It’s just that much of the warming has been happening somewhere else recently.
So anyone who says otherwise is simply falling into the most basic trap that any under-graduate engineer or scientist is taught to avoid. Not using the correct system boundary! And if the person saying this is a professional scientist or engineer what conclusion can we draw from their opinion? That they are incompetent? Or…?
The Smoking Gun
When the first studies of the XBT data were produced in then early 2000’s, showing just how much heat had been added to the oceans, the climate science community labelled this ‘The Smoking Gun’. They knew that increased Greenhouse Gases had to be causing a heat accumulation – the understanding of the physics of this is very solid. But they knew also that the Surface Temperature records that had been compiled to date only showed where a small percentage of the extra heat was going. The surface was warming much as the climate modelling predicted but until they could begin to confirm what was happening in the oceans, they didn’t have enough of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. They knew how to draw their system boundaries.
The appearance of the first studies on Ocean Heat Content during the 2000’s would have been one of the significant factors in the IPCC increasing its level of confidence that AGW was real in its 4th report in 2007.
Because the pattern of where the heat is going says something very important about what is causing it. It is sometimes argued that the global warming we are observing is due to internal variability, a recovery from the Little Ice Age etc. These suggestions are always based on just the surface temperature record. For these ideas to be reasonable, heat has to come from some other part of the climate system in order to warm the atmosphere. If every other part of the climate system is also warming at the same time then this cannot be ‘internal variability’. And if the total heat in the system is accumulating this can’t be due to a ‘recovery’ from the Little Ice Age. This must be new heat being added today.
But the absolute clincher is that the amount of heat going into the oceans is so great that no other source of heat here on Earth could supply it. The first two graphs at the start of this post are absolute proof that something is disturbing the Earth’s external energy balance. And since we know that the Sun’s energy output has, if anything, been declining slightly over the last ½ century the only remaining possibility is something affecting the Earth’s ability to release heat to space. There are three candidates.
Aerosols. But they would have a cooling effect.
Clouds. But they currently have a roughly neutral impact, possibly slightly warming. And there is no significant evidence that clouds have suddenly started having a major warming effect.
The last explanation standing. Increased Greenhouse Gases.
So both through many lines of evidence, and also by applying some basic engineering understanding, the idea that increased GH gases are the primary cause of the warming the Earth has seen in the last ½ century or so seems very solid. No other explanation fits the evidence.
It seems my old Professors were right; its simple really when you get your system boundaries right. Watch the Dog, not just its Tail!
So when someone tells you that warming has stopped they are simply wrong. Probably spending too much time just looking at the Dog's Tail.Authored By James Harrison
While House and Senate members continue to consider measures aimed at stonewalling online piracy, major Internet players, such as Wikipedia, plan to blackout their websites on Wednesday to protest the bills.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), have become key points of controversy as lawmakers make their return to Washington this week. The bills, proposed last fall, have drawn ire from the online community for placing power in the hands of government officials to block websites deemed as infringing on copyrighted intellectual property.
Heading into an election year, the proposals have become a liability to legislators seeking to retain their seats. Sen. Bob Corker, a co-sponsor of PIPA, recently found himself the target of an online group aiming to “take down” politicians supporting the measure.
And though dozens of his fellow congressmen have signed on as co-sponsors of the bill, Rep. Chuck Fleischmann has shied away from declaring his position on it. In a recent interview with Nooga.com, Fleischmann said he was continuing to study “both sides” of the issue.
“I’ve met with our friends in the songwriting industry who are very, very concerned, and rightfully so, because their product is getting literally stolen,” Fleischmann said. “We are certainly looking at it, studying it, and we will ultimately be making a decision on it. But we’re listening to both sides, we’re listening to our constituents and we’re proceeding with caution.”
Fleischmann’s play for time could pay off, as recent reports have mentioned House Majority Leader Eric Cantor would not bring the bill up for vote unless formidable consensus could be generated around it. And over the weekend, a White House release said the Obama administration would not support any bill that would reduce freedom of expression, increase cybersecurity risks or undermine the innovation of the global Internet.
Regardless of the apparent slowdown, Wikipedia, along with popular websites such as Reddit, Boing Boing and Scribd, are signed on to blackout their websites in protest Wednesday. Others, including Twitter and Craigslist, have voiced opposition to the measure but will continue their services as usual.
In a news release explaining the reasoning behind the decision to block services of the online encyclopedia for 24 hours, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales called the legislation “destructive.”
“This is an extraordinary action for our community to take,” Wales said. “And while we regret having to prevent the world from having access to Wikipedia for even a second, we simply cannot ignore the fact that SOPA and PIPA endanger free speech both in the United States and abroad and set a frightening precedent of Internet censorship for the world.”
Along with Corker, Sen. Lamar Alexander has signed on as a co-sponsor of PIPA. For the House version of the bill, Tennessee Reps. Marsha Blackburn and Jim Cooper are co-sponsors.Movie Review Movie Review Certain Women B+ Movie Review Certain Women B+ B+ Certain Women Director Kelly Reichardt Runtime 107 minutes Rating R Cast Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams, James Le Gros, Jared Harris, Lily Gladstone, René Auberjonois Availability Select theaters October 14
Because of their manageable length and tendency to privilege evocative description over intricate plotting, short stories are arguably easier to transport to the screen than novels are. Rather than trying to condense a couple hundred pages into a couple hours, filmmakers can build out from a compact, rock-solid foundation. How many of these adaptations, though, actually capture the spirit of the format—the open-ended mystery and vividness of great short fiction, the sense that you’re being plopped down for a few meaningful minutes into a hyper-specific space? Certain Women comes closer than most. Written and directed by Kelly Reichardt (Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves), the film assembles several movie stars for a triptych of minor-key Montana character sketches, each based on a story by award-winning author Malie Meloy. Imagine a version of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts that didn’t weave its individual tales into some ensemble tapestry, instead simply offering a few acute approximations of Raymond Carver’s voice. That’s Certain Women.
Advertisement
Meloy, the older sister |
Using Tableau software, I've put together this draft dashboard. It took weeks of compiling data from hockey DB (all dumped into one really big excel file) but FINALLY, a month before the draft, it's done. After the 2013 draft, I'll add that data in.
Version 2, to be released right before the draft, will have an additional tab that allows you to come at the data from the junior team angle -- answering the question "which NHL teams draft most frequently from each junior team?" rather than approaching it from the NHL angle, like in this tab.
This was a really fun project, and some of the numbers were really interesting to see -- for example, I had no idea that in the 2011 draft, the most-drafted-from CHL team was the Saint John Sea Dogs. Makes sense, as they won the Memorial Cup, but still neat to see.
So, without further ado, here it is. To open in it's own window, click here.Dumbledore’s definitely gay — J.K. Rowling confirmed it ages ago. But is Snape transgender?
Some Harry Potter nerds think so. The Tumblr Snapeloveposts is so dedicated to the theory that it’s hosting its third Trans Snape Week in August, where fans will submit “depictions and interpretations of Severus Snape as seen through a trans-friendly lens.”
“Within the Harry Potter fandom on Tumblr there’s a slowly growing community of people who believe Snape was trans, or choose to explore this possibility,” Tumblr user Ensnapingthesenses, a 26-year-old trans man from Spain, tells Broadly.
“We see ourselves reflected in such a complex, interesting and polarizing figure — which we don’t usually get to do, as transgender fans.”
In building a case for Snape as a trans woman, scholars point to the potion professor’s disdain for “foolish wand-waving,” which author Racheline Maltese describes as “a rejection of masculinity, especially in light of the many moments of phallic humor wands provide us throughout the series.”
Tumblr users also note how Snape has been bullied for having feminine traits.
“I feel like, even closeted, Snape suffered from the prejudices of those around her,” Ensnapingthesenses says. “And I feel that all these incidents make much more sense once you see them in this light.”
Fans further argue that the professor’s complicated relationship with Harry ultimately portrays Snape as the hero’s surrogate mother.
“Harry and Snape’s relationship reminds me more of the interactions between a teenage girl and her mom, where both have anger-management issues because they literally reflect it from each other,’ Ensnapingthesenses tells Broadly.Freak weather and severe thunderstorms made the last month one of the soggiest on record, more than tripling the amount of rainfall Calgary sees in a typical July.
Calgary, Canada's sunshine capital, was drenched with 206.1 mm of the wet stuff, compared to an average of 66 mm for the month of July.
With 10 days in a row of precipitation and just eight dry days, "It's a head shaker and an anomaly," said Environment Canada climatologist David Phillips.
Southern Alberta is known for how quickly its weather can shift.
"It hits and runs. It doesn't sort of stand around and torment you like it does in other parts of the world," he said.
Yet in an uncharacteristic fashion, July's soakers returned day after day.
"It was a weather feature that just stuck over the province and just wouldn't leave, like an unwanted house guest," he said.
"It was almost boring and monotonous. Every day seemed like the day before, and the day before that."
'Rain begets rain'
July was a "rip-roaring kind of turbulent month" in terms of thunderstorms, of which the region saw 19 in July, said Phillips.
Those severe weather systems brought fog, lightning, and hail that ranged from dime-sized to golf ball-sized, he said.
Part of the reason the region received such a persistent soaking owes to this idea that "rain begets rain," Phillips explained.
Trapped moisture from the Gulf of Alaska and northern Pacific filled dugouts, sloughs, ditches, and potholes to the brim with rainwater, which then evaporated with warm temperatures, circulated in the air and returned to the ground as precipitation.
While July 1927 still holds the record for Calgary's wettest July at 246 mm of rain, July 2016 "certainly will stand out in history as one of the more bizarre," Phillips said.
This footage shows the heavy hail that came with Tuesday afternoon's thunderstorm. Credit: Blake Bastedo 0:22
With files from The HomestretchMatthew Arcara might not be the first builder featured in the Bench Press who took to lutherie to build the pre-war Martin he couldn’t afford, but he is the first who has won the National Flat Pick Guitar Championship at the legendary Walnut Valley Festival (in 2006, after placing second in 2004). In and of itself, that’s a pretty good reason to get him on the Bench, but above and beyond, he’s making some exceptional guitars, strong in the Martin tradition without being strictly tied to it–he’s perfectly willing to add a soundport to your D-28, should you so desire. Building under the moniker MGA Guitars (for Matthew Grant Arcara) in a shop in Portland, Maine, Matthew’s parlayed his love for the guitar (and, more recently, the banjo) and a familial background in engineering into a career that is the embodiment of form meeting function.
Fretboard Journal: What’s on your bench right now?
Matthew Arcara: I just moved a batch off of my bench: I finished up three: an OM-28 Brazilian, a 12-fret 000-28 Brazilian and a D-18 with Cuban mahogany. The 28s are very traditional appointment-wise, the only update being a carbon fiber neck support in the OM. The D-18 was built custom for a good friend and great picker, Andy Cambria. It sort of imagines if Martin had built a D in the early ‘30s, so blank peghead, rosewood for binding and also in the rosette center, three dots on the fretboard descending in size at 5, 7, 9 and my favorite part, the back of the peghead brand. That aesthetic is really one of my favorites, it’s so understated and tasteful; the rosewood binding with a red hue against the brown mahogany is a good look in my opinion.
FJ: You’re one of the rare builders creating guitars and banjos; how’d that come about?
MA: They both came about because of need. I started building guitars because I was convinced that it was possible to get something closer in sound to the actual pre-war guitars. I couldn’t afford one so I set out to build it. It was really the same with banjos. I started playing banjo then decided I needed one, so I built it. I went to the great old time music gathering that is Clifftop and got a little bored playing guitar so I picked up an extra banjo at the campsite and spent the week trying to wrestle it into submission. I realized that I really love clawhammer banjo; it’s the perfect middle spot between rhythm guitar and flatpicking. You get to play some melody and improvise but you also get to really have a strong voice in the groove and rhythm behind the fiddler. After that I came home and started building one while talking with Will Fielding and Greg from Buckeye Banjos about banjo building. Once it was done, I traveled with it when I was on the road with Joy Kills Sorrow, so people saw me playing it at jams and whatnot. That turned into people asking if they could order them. I never really set out to be a banjo builder, people just liked them.
FJ: Where do you find inspiration?
MA: The first answer, specifically, is the tone of old Martins, that dry and crackly sound of a great old guitar. The ones that have a D and G string that just cut through all the noise. In a wider sense, I find a lot of inspiration in great design, skilled craftsmanship, balanced proportions, refined mechanical engineering and function. I have a father who is a retired engineer and he really helped instill in me that form and function are not mutually exclusive. The perfect function can also have the most pleasing form and, in fact, should. I find a lot of inspiration in objects that just work well and have minimized functional compromises. It could be a well-tuned motorcycle or mountain bike suspension kinematics, or perhaps the new combinations of rocker and camber in snowboard designs, the use of hydrodynamics with the design of planing hulls for surfboard design. These things inspire me to find the best function of a guitar that I am capable of. I am also lucky to have a large community of craftsmen and craftswomen as friends and that really fuels a love for skilled execution of craft, and just striving to make objects that aspire to refined taste and function.
FJ: Do you have a favorite guitar that’s crossed your bench?
MA: I am lucky to have two of my favorite guitars owned by two good friends. Both, coincidentally, are 1937 D-18s that to me are just the pinnacle of guitar tone: loud but not harsh, dry and woody yet somehow bright and resonant at the same time. I have been trusted to work on both and every time I do, I am re-inspired by the craftspeople that were working for Martin in the ‘30s–Old World craftsmanship at its best, and so pleasing to play. Those two guitars just help me strive to be a better musician, person and builder.
FJ: Tell us about your shop…
MA: My shop is in South Portland, Maine, just across the bay from my home in Portland. I have been in that space for about six or seven years. We have a really great setup and I share space and tooling with John Slobod of Circa Guitars as well as Joel Eckhaus of Earnest Instruments. It’s great to get to work with other craftsman around; we help each other as needed, act as quality control and a second set of eyes or hands. Plus I think it helps keep us all from getting too isolated working away by ourselves.
FJ: Do you have a particular philosophy about wood/materials?
MA: As much as the technocrat in me wants everything to be repeatable and measurable, the truth is, wood is not uniform. All trees have different growing seasons, patterns and personalities. We as builders have to embrace these differences and be able to adapt to the individual characteristics of a set of wood. So I guess my philosophy is to try and “see” with my hands and ears and not just my eyes.
Two winters ago I built a prototype 000-18 for myself and constructed it with sides that didn’t match the back at all, and a top that was originally sent to me as a packing top that was protection for a high-end top for a customer. It then sat on my shelf for a few years because it had hard grain lines and some color in it. I could tell it was gonna sound great, because it was stiff and responsive, but I knew a customer wasn’t going to go for it. So I used it for myself and used a lot of tinted shellac to tame the worst of the visual “imperfections.” I guess the lesson here is don’t judge by the look alone, just ‘cause a set is clean and even doesn’t mean it’s gonna sound great and just because something has perceived imperfections don’t rule it out as not functional. That guitar sounds great in my opinion and has become my full-time player. People are often surprised when I tell them the story behind the top, which presents the perfect opportunity to make the case of craftsmanship over material alone.
I think this speaks to the advantage I have of being a builder who has a lot of experience as a touring musician. I benefit from having an immediate feedback loop with my instruments and materials. I can play them and really get a fine tuned evaluation of what works with them and what doesn’t. Since I don’t have to really on words or others explanation, I think I have a more primary, fundamental and intrinsic understanding of how my instruments are working and sounding.
FJ: Are there any upcoming projects that you’re particularly excited about?
MA: The life cycle is just beginning again for me and I have just started a batch of two Ds, one mahogany and one Madagascar rosewood. I’m generally the most excited about the early stages, because I like that the work at the start doesn’t have to be very sequential. That makes me feel like I’m getting more done in the day and able to be flexible about process order. Plus it’s the state where I feel like the possibilities are more unknown; you haven’t heard the ring of the top with braces, and haven’t heard it change as it’s glued to the rib assembly. That yet-to-be-discovered sound is always of interest to me.
Here’s Matthew playing his personal 000-28, mentioned above. Check out his YouTube channel for more videos…(Reuters) - Wall Street drifted lower on Monday as investors worried that President Donald Trump’s plan to cut taxes and boost the economy could take longer than previously expected.
The U.S. stock market has been on a record-setting spree since the election of Trump as president, but the rally has faltered in recent weeks as investors fret about a lack of clarity on his proposals to reform taxes and cut regulation.
The S&P 500 and the Dow ended lower after FBI Director James Comey told a congressional hearing he had seen no evidence to support a claim by Trump that former President Barack Obama had wiretapped his campaign headquarters in Trump Tower in New York.
His unsubstantiated tweet distracted from the claims of Russian interference in the election - as well as efforts by Republicans to push through a healthcare overhaul.
“It’s just one more day delaying talking about policy,” said Ian Winer, director of trading at Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles. “The market wants tax reform, and you need to get healthcare done before you get tax reform.”
The SPDR S&P Retail ETF (XRT) fell 1.5 percent, all but erasing its gains since Trump’s election as investors fretted that a border adjustment tax being pushed by Republicans in Congress would lead to higher prices for consumer products.
The S&P 500 is unchanged from a week ago, but since the presidential election on Nov 8, it has surged 11 percent, heightening concerns about valuations. The S&P 500 is trading at nearly 18 times expected earnings, compared with a 10-year average of 14, according to Thomson Reuters Datastream.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average.DJI inched down 0.04 percent to end at 20,905.86 points, while the S&P 500.SPX lost 0.20 percent to 2,373.47.
The Nasdaq Composite.IXIC edged up 0.01 percent to finish at 5,901.53 after briefly hitting an intraday record high.
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) shortly after the opening bell in New York, U.S., March 20, 2017. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
Seven of the 11 major S&P sectors were lower, with the financial index’s.SPSY 0.9 percent fall leading the decliners.
Oil fell as investors continued to unwind bets on higher prices.
The U.S. Federal Reserve’s conservative rate guidance is also keeping the market in check. A host of Fed officials are scheduled to speak this week, including Chair Janet Yellen on Thursday.
The Fed is on track to raise interest rates twice more this year and it could be more or less aggressive depending on inflation and fiscal policies from the Trump administration, Chicago Fed President Charles Evans said on Monday.
Last week, the central bank raised interest rates for the first time this year but stuck to its outlook for two more hikes this year, instead of three expected by the market.
Apple (AAPL.O) rose 1.05 percent to a record-high close of $141.46 after Cowen & Co upgraded its price target on the stock.
Caterpillar (CAT.N) rose 2.68 percent, providing the biggest boost to the Dow, after it reported a smaller decline in sales for the 3 months through February versus the period ending in January.
Walt Disney (DIS.N) rose 0.85 percent after the company’s “Beauty and the Beast” topped box-office sales. The stock was among the biggest gainers on the Dow.
Declining issues outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE by a 1.40-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, a 1.58-to-1 ratio favored decliners.
Slideshow (5 Images)
The S&P 500 posted 26 new 52-week highs and 3 new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 103 new highs and 38 new lows.
About 5.8 billion shares changed hands in U.S. exchanges, compared with the 7.1 billion daily average over the last 20 sessions.CLOSE Brides will feel like princesses getting married outside Cinderella's Castle at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom. They can even arrive in Cinderella's carriage. USA TODAY
Is marriage on your horizon? Do you love the Disney theme parks almost as much as you love your fiancé? Imagine this fantasy scenario: (Photo11: Disney)
Is marriage on your horizon? Do you love the Disney theme parks almost as much as you love your fiancé? Imagine this fantasy scenario: It's your wedding day, and you ride up Main Street U.S.A. in Cinderella's horse-drawn carriage accompanied by bewigged, royal coachmen. A vintage jitney has already deposited your husband-to-be at the Magic Kingdom's hub. Trumpeters herald your arrival, and your wedding guests stand. You make your way to the altar in a lush garden with the majestic Cinderella Castle rising behind you.
It's not a fantasy. But it is Fantasyland. Florida's Disney World has announced that couples can now plan their wedding ceremonies inside the Magic Kingdom at the park's new East Plaza Garden.
"Brides will be able to live out a fairy tale dream like no other," says Korri McFann, marketing director for the division that helps couples plan their nuptials at the company's properties. It is called, appropriately enough, Disney's Fairy Tale Weddings.
As the world's most popular theme park with an estimated annual attendance approaching 20 million, the Magic Kingdom's central hub had been a congested hubbub. Disney recently expanded and reconfigured the area to better control the flow of guests, including new gardens on both sides. With its whimsical topiaries, fountain, and especially its striking views, the European-inspired garden on the Tomorrowland side is an ideal spot to tie the knot.
The East Plaza Garden will be available for 9:30 a.m. ceremonies and can accommodate a good-sized destination-wedding crowd of up to 100 people according to McFann. The park will also be open to regular customers at that time.
McFann says that couples have been clamoring to get closer to the iconic castle and hold their weddings in the theme park. Previously the only other Magic Kingdom spot has been the train station, and that has only been available in the early morning hours before the park opened. Now, in the shadows of the castle's spires, brides and grooms will be able to indulge their wishes amid the park's elegant, romantic, and nostalgic ambiance. Disney World has been offering wedding services for many years. One of its most popular ceremony locations is its wedding pavilion, located across the lagoon from the Magic Kingdom. It offers a prime, if distant, view of Cinderella Castle. For their receptions, couples can choose among a variety of locations throughout the vast resort, although the East Plaza Garden will only be available for ceremonies.
Disney's Fairy Tale Weddings package collections start at $2,500, and custom experiences begin at $12,000. Premiere locations such as the Magic Kingdom, with a completely customized ceremony and reception for 100 guests, start at $75,000. For more pricing and options, visit www.disneyweddings.com.
More about Disney's Fairy Tale Weddings:
CLOSE Wedding planner Korri McFann explains the many magical options, from location to style, couples can choose to create their fantasy wedding by planning with Disney's Weddings and Honeymoons. VPC
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/26AejxsThree episodes were provided prior to broadcast.
One of the most anticipated TV premieres of the new year, FX’s Legion, may also be the most difficult to describe. The new series has been billed as a total non-construction (not deconstruction) of a superpower origin story, yet it’s inextricably connected to the telepathic founder of the X-Men. Now that Legion is here though, it’s a pleasure to confirm that it’s a wholly unique and thought-fracturing show that has about as much in common with superhero television as Lost did with Survivor.
When word of Legion was first publicized in October 2015, fan reaction was understandably mute. In a crowded field of comics migrating to the screen, the very first live-action X-Men-associated TV series only stood out to deeply-read aficionados. It was hard to understand why a character who Marvel had considered too peculiar — or particular— to execute as a book series (apart from a recently concluded 25-issue run of X-Men: Legacy) was the first off the shelf for the television treatment. And while comic book TV shows have wooed diehards with promises of film universe crossovers and shared productions in the past, Legion seemed to be planned completely without the X-Men movies in mind.
Much of the fuel for the hushed anticipation that’s accompanied the project ever since it was announced is due to creator (and showrunner, writer and sometimes even director) Noah Hawley, who serves the same roles on FX’s wildly acclaimed Fargo anthology series. Whatever kind of “adaptation” he’s made of Joel and Ethan Coen’s beloved 1996 original remains tough to pin down, but the effect has been catnip for the film’s cult audience. Fans of the new series watch it with a fervor rivalled only by the likes of Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad. If Hawley and company planned to tell similarly composed stories in a more broadly-appealing package, FX seemed ready to turn on the money spigot.
So, although it may disappoint some industry wallets that that’s not what Legion is, fans should still get ready to give it their full attention. If the show delivers on the promise of its deliberately oblique premise and the ample talent from both sides of the lens on display in its first three episodes, which were provided to critics in advance, it has the potential to be even more satisfying.
Legion is something entirely fresh that doesn’t owe itself to Fargo, nor any comic book or superhero story seen on film or television to date, nor even the reference points you’ll see acknowledged in certain corners — Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Darren Aronofsky, William Wyler and a few more with notable tendencies for unexplained perfectionism. Instead, Legion owes itself to the mind of its central character, David Haller. And to whom or what David owes his mind is the story that we’ll be returning to watch each and every week.
Legion Season 1 Gallery 1 of 33
Click to skip
MORE FROM THE WEB Click to zoom
The disorienting first sixty-plus minutes of Legion (airing February 8th) don’t answer much. What the chapter does introduce though is the bar-raising performance of Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey, Beauty and the Beast) in the central role. To say Stevens is playing David Haller is accurate, but also grossly misleading. Stevens embodies David in various times and with varying control of his mental capacity. None of it resembles what we think of as superhero acting, either. David Haller is so difficult to predict because of just how much so Dan Stevens is. If you think about Rami Malek’s Emmy-winning role in Mr. Robot, you have a good starting place. But David is even less interested (or able) in having us, his audience, understand him or his world.
His focus in that world is on Sydney Barrett (Fargo alum Rachel Keller), a fellow traveler through questionable mutations who not everyone happens to think exists. Syd is David’s guardian and escape in more ways than one. Their shared romance is impossible and also inevitable. The character, like David, seems able to completely alter the paradigm of her universe, and to what extent either will do so in the series remains to be seen. But the performance of the two leads is a compelling enough reason to follow along.
What will also keep most viewers tuning in week after week is the unfolding of a new cinematic syntax that represents a polar opposite of Fargo’s famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) “true story” that’s “told exactly as it occurred.” In this series, there is no request from the survivors nor respect for the dead. We simply see what David Haller’s mind wants us to see, and if that sounds confusing, it’s because it is.
As such, huge parts of the chronology of Legion are in question. Fans accustomed to speculating about what’s going to happen next might want to start getting used to wondering what just did and didn’t happen instead. Audience demand for sophistication is going to be exceeded. Although many of the questions you have won’t be answered in week one, the ambiguity of the series’ first-depicted events will be a powerful tool as it goes on.
If you’ve read all these words and are still wondering what the series is actually ABOUT, you aren’t alone. Like Fargo, Legion points early on to its own vague “Sioux Falls” calamity, and we shouldn’t expect to understand it any better than we did those unexplained events. But regardless of what direction these characters are headed in, we’re going to be watching closely as Hawley pulls us along on this captivating new journey.PARIS (Reuters) - Deposed former Central African Republic (CAR) President Francois Bozize still nurtures ambitions of returning to power, he told French media, ending months of silence since he was ousted by rebel forces in March.
Central African president Francois Bozize speaks during a news conference at the presidential palace in Bangui, in this file photo taken January 8, 2013. REUTERS/Luc Gnago
Bozize, who ruled the mineral-rich former French colony for a decade, fled to Cameroon after rebels overthrew his government and captured the riverside capital Bangui.
In an interview with Radio France International broadcast on Saturday, Bozize said he had formed, along with some compatriots, a political organisation called the Front for the Return of Constitutional Order in CAR, or Frocca.
He said its objective was to “follow and denounce everything that is happening in the country and inform the international community which does not yet seem to have realised the grave crisis, the drama, unfolding in Central African Republic.”
The rebellion in landlocked CAR - one of the poorest places on earth - triggered a humanitarian crisis after many aid groups and U.N. agencies pulled out, leaving its 4.5 million inhabitants to fend for themselves.
The new government, headed by interim President Michel Djotodia, the head of the Seleka rebels, has issued an arrest warrant against Bozize, accusing him of “crimes against humanity and incitement to genocide.”
Asked if the formation of a new political entity meant he aimed to return to power, Bozize said: “Yes, return to power. If the occasion arises, I will do it.”
Bozize said he was in Paris to visit relatives, and aimed to organise meetings with French officials, although they were on holiday for now.
France was, he said: “the best placed to help solve the problem, with a contribution from the African Union.”
A spokeswoman for the French foreign ministry said there had not been any contact with Bozize and none was planned.
Central African Republic has rich, under-exploited deposits of gold, diamonds and uranium but has been plagued by political instability and coups since independence from France in 1960.
Bozize seized power in a 2003 coup backed by neighbouring Chad and succumbed in March to an offensive by Seleka rebels after failing to make good on a promise to share power.Whether the ongoing election season is influencing cable news particularly remains unclear but CNN's overall viewership is in decline as the network was once the top-rated cable channel in Monday-Sunday primetime and Monday-Friday primetime, according to a recent article.
CNN news
Recent ratings suggest that MSNBC finished seventh overall in primetime, averaging over 1m viewers, while CNN’s 723,000 average viewers placed it at No. 16 among all cable networks in a late summer poll. Fox News actually beat MSNBC and CNN combined in primetime and has been the highest-rated cable network during the day for most of the summer and fall. Fox News averaged 1.8m primetime viewers, topping NBC Sports Network’s Olympics coverage by roughly 600,000 per night. USA, TBS, HGTV and NBC Sports join Fox News atop primetime cable in August
Despite an organized boycott of CNN Worldwide by Donald Trump supporters that has been ongoing since July, the news network claims it has had its highest ratings in 8 years, despite falling well behind Fox News and MSNBC in the overall ratings.
Fair or unfair, there is a perception that CNN is more of a pro-Clinton news outlet and has been dubbed the 'Clinton News Network' by many of Donald Trump's supporters.
Ironically, for the most part, CNN was once perceived as the most neutral choice between the right-leaning Fox News Network and the left-leaning MSNBC. It is possible that this years election season - with its targeting of individual broadcast journalists - and the urge by the Trump campaign to boycott CNN is taking its toll.
Recently, a Fox & Friends reporter began taunting CNN broadcast journalist Brian Selter on air. Hannity ranted that " the type of coverage CNN offers in this presidential race, is they literally kiss Hillary Clinton’s ass and Obama’s ass every day”. "I literally watched this show on CNN over the weekend, and you got this little pipsqueak named Brian Stelter. And he allowed this arrogant professor from the Kennedy School of Journalism to talk about Trump being a demagogue, and demagogues like Trump become dictators," said Hannity, a conservative media talisman.
The targeted professor, Brian Stelter, responded to the rant, according to The Wrap, saying that, “I’m glad Hannity was watching. But I wish he had addressed my actual point of my segment about him: that he should help his audience instead of misinforming them with conspiracy theories."
Conspiracy theories are so prevalent in this US election that it is difficult to predict where the "eye of Sauron" will focus next - but since July it has been very focused on CNN.
Recently, CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker downplayed CNN ratings drops and has, in fact, predicted ratings will fall back down to earth after the current election cycle runs its course in November.
"There's no doubt that we are not going to have the same ratings next year, that we have this year. We're not," Zucker told the Nomura 2016 Media, Telecom & Internet Conference in New York City during a session that was webcast.
But the CNN chief added his network is well-placed for ratings and profitability in 2017 because of a broader growth strategy at the network built on "going all in" to cover breaking news as big stories, airing original series like Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and dominating the digital space in news and information, especially when targeting younger viewers.
"There's a lot of talk out there about BuzzFeed and Vice and Vox. They're all good," he said. But Zucker pointed to recent digital traffic data that has CNN outpacing upstart platforms. "Who's reaching millennials? It's CNN," Zucker told the conference.
Digital being a successful third leg of the CNN stool is rich coming from a former NBC exec who, eight years ago, dismissively coined the phrase "trading analog dollars for digital pennies." Fast-forward to today and Zucker argued digital is an increasingly key profit driver for the cable news network.
"More than 25 per cent of our global advertising is digital," he told investors. Zucker later revised that figure up to 28 per cent. "Over the next five years...as much as 50 per cent of our ad sales will be digital," he predicted.
"This is our most-watched year ever," he said, before adding: "We're within two share points of Fox News."There is no formal course for the parsing of Pete Carroll’s press conferences.
It takes an ability to break down long sentences filled with overwhelmingly positive observations and predictions as well as an ability to look at what’s not being said.
And after seven seasons of covering Pete Carroll on a daily basis, I feel fluent enough to not only record what the Seahawks coach said, but tell you what the coach means. Just keep in mind that there is a degree of error inherent in any translation, and while What Carroll said: is a literal transcription of his press conference, please take What Carroll means: as an attempt at a slightly humorous interpretation.
Reading between the lines of Seahawks’ statement about McDowell
Here is a breakdown of Carroll’s responses to questions about rookie Malik McDowell’s vehicular accident:
Q: What can you say about Malik? (We just got the news he’s back in Michigan.)
What Pete Carroll said: Yeah, we’re standing with the statement. That’s how we have to do it, but we’re really just hoping he has a really good recovery and all of that. It’s unfortunate. We’re on it. There will be more in a short time.
What Carroll meant: Well, you see we released the statement so I wouldn’t have to make a statement on the specifics of the injury, so instead of giving you any more specifics how about I just give you a general pep talk in hoping for a speedy recovery? Sounds good, right?
Q: Is it a long-term thing?
What Carroll said: We’ll wait and see. We’ll see what’s going on. It has been a little while since the accident happened, but we’re still waiting to figure all that out.
What Carroll meant: Well, your guess is as good as mine. Wait. That’s not true. I know more information than you do. Such as the fact that I know when it happened. We’ll get to that in a second. As for how long he’ll be out, can we wait until he’s actually able to travel before I start making the overly optimistic estimates that inevitably wind up projecting a guy to be back a week or two before he actually is?
Q: When did it happen?
What Carroll said: It’s a couple of weeks here I think. Ten days here. I think. I think that’s right.
What Carroll meant: More than a week, but less than a month. Don’t hold me to that, though.
Q: How is he handling it?
What Carroll said: It’s challenging. He had extraordinarily high hopes to be here, be with us, and he’s not able to. Everything is above board and clear and all that, what we’re doing, but it’s going to take a little while and just because this is the first time there has been a statement to come out and we’re just honoring the family and how to handle this properly.
What Carroll meant: Well, I’m going to guess that he’s not feeling real good right now not only because of the injuries but because of the way he suffered the injuries. And now he can’t show up for work at his new job and speaking of that, he’s not exactly going to win Employee of the Month at this rate. But this has been kept a secret since it happened for a very good reason. We’re respecting the privacy of Malik and by extension his family, which is why we aren’t saying what he hurt or specifically how he hurt it.
Q: Is there a possibility he doesn’t play this year?
What Carroll said: We’ll see. We’ll see. I don’t know that.
What Carroll meant: Remember three questions ago when someone asked me to provide a timeline? Because I remember that. And yeah, I’m not any more inclined to provide a timeline now than I was 53 seconds ago when the other guy asked about it.
Q: Can you tell us if he’s at home or is he still hospitalized?
What Carroll said: He’s at home.
What Carroll meant: He’s at home.Irving Park Safety Walk View Full Caption
IRVING PARK — On Tuesday afternoon, shots fired near Bateman Elementary had children and parents dropping to the ground in fear. On Wednesday night, more than 100 members of the surrounding Irving Park and Albany Park communities gathered on the school's playground to send a message they would not be intimidated by violence.
"There's been a lot of things going on... a lot of gunshots fired. This is just not acceptable," said Misha Mann, a member of The Residents of Irving Park civic organization.
"If we, as a group, don't do something, nothing will change," she said.
Community groups had already planned a "safety walk" for Wednesday — in response to a fatal shooting and an attack on a jogger — when Tuesday's shots fired near Bateman added to the event's urgency.
"One shooting in broad daylight near a school is enough," said Ald. Deb Mell (33rd). "Let's not forget we are a close tight-knit community."
Neighbors and the district's police officers packed Bateman Elementary's playground in a show of force against violence. [Facebook/The Residents of Irving Park]
Sarina Ortiz, who helped organize Wednesday's walk, was supervising Bateman Elementary's garden club on Tuesday when shots rang out near the school shortly after 4 p.m. The first few pops sounded like fireworks, she said, but then those were followed by a volley of six to nine more.
"I had my 4-year-old and 6-year-old. The playground was full of kids," Ortiz said.
"I yelled for kids to drop to the ground" and dialed 911, she said. "Police were here within five minutes."
No one was injured in the shooting — "There was no screaming, no altercation," Ortiz said — but the incident left her shaken.
"It was a little too close to home," said Ortiz.
Police have identified a "problem building" on nearby Whipple, which Mell has added to her list of hot spots in the ward. Her office has followed a number of similarly troubled buildings through the court system — and provides status updates in Mell's weekly newsletter.
The process is laborious, Mell said, but she's slowly seeing results.
"You have to make landlords accountable for who they're renting to," she said.
Irma Aragon (front, right) took |
up her school or injure anyone."Google says it will soon add live TV listings to its search engine, allowing web users to find out when their favorite shows or movies will be airing. But in a nod to the many non-traditional ways that consumers watch TV today, the company says that it will also display the apps and websites where you can view the show’s latest episode. This new feature is in addition to a Search upgrade launched last year, which pointed users to where shows and movies could be watched on various mobile apps from distributors, networks, or on stores like Google Play and iTunes.
However, these “video actions,” as Google calls them have been fairly hit or miss or inconsistent, to date.
For instance, a search for a popular show like “Big Bang Theory,” doesn’t obviously point you to viewing options right in the search results. Instead, you have to tap over to the episode list, then click an arrow next to an item to see where you can view the show. And even then, Google points users to buying options on YouTube and Google Play with a note at the bottom that the show is “also available on Vudu, iTunes, and Amazon Video.” (And Vudu is the only one linked!).
That show is available on CBS’s app and streaming service, but that option is not listed at all.
Meanwhile, when searching for a show from ABC, like “Scandal,” Google points to Hulu, YouTube, Vudu, and Google Play when you view a given episode. Again, Amazon Video is listed, but not linked. And iTunes, which certainly sells “Scandal,” is oddly not listed or linked.
Other popular services, ranging from big names like Netflix down to niche streaming options, are not indexed at all.
This makes using Google for finding places to stream or buy a show unreliable, and it’s unclear to what extent that will change as the new “live TV” updates roll out.
According to Google’s blog post, the big improvement is that, in addition to pointing to streaming services and apps, it will now also display air times and channels where you can watch. An “Edit provider” link will allow you to customize this option to inform Google of your cable provider, if applicable.
The company says that it’s adding this feature at a time when searches for TV shows and films on mobile have grown more than 55 percent over the past year. It didn’t say when the new feature was arriving, however, only saying that it’s coming “soon.”
Unfortunately for end users on mobile, the feature for finding streams and rentals is biased toward Google’s own properties. That will still leaving users turning to third-party apps like Yidio, TV Guide, Peel, or even Yahoo’s Video Guide for a better solution.
The announcement, made at this week’s NAB show, also included news for advertisers. With a new “DoubleClick’s Dynamic Ad Insertion” option, Google says it’s able to deliver a more personalized experience to viewers across live and on-demand TV streams, and both sold and programmatic.
Also new is what Google calls smarter ad breaks – it will now honor “competitive separation” for DoubleClick for Publisher clients. (That means two car ads won’t appear in the same commercial break, and it won’t break rules like putting alcohol and kids’ cereal ads in the same break, either.)
The company also announced new TV ad partners for DoubleClick for Publishers, MCN, Roku and Cablevision, who join AMC Networks and Globo.Earlier this week, the U.S. Navy announced that four of their “REMUS 100” unmanned underwater vehicles sailed off-radar and stopped responding to commands. The ‘bots were part of a fleet of thirteen drones being used in a training exercise to locate mine-like objects on the ocean floor off the coast of Virginia.
After days of searching for the runaway bots using manned boats and aircrafts, the U.S. Navy has yet to find anything. So now, they've called in the real underwater experts: dolphins and sea lions, trained to detect mines.
Unmanned Underwater vehicles (UUVs) started growing in popularity in the mid 1990’s, and now that the technology is more advanced they are finding work in everything from basic science research to military surveillance. For the past 10 years, the REMUS 100 has been one of the most reliable UUVs on the market, making it an easy choice for the Navy to use in shallow water mine counter measure operations.
The idea is to have these vehicles replace mammals in surveillance and mine-detection tasks. The bots have the advantage of being able to carry more equipment, like advanced cameras and side-scan sonar, and they also prevent the potential loss of life.
The mammals' advantage? Well, they have brains and bodies that are way more adaptable than software and hardware. Clearly, the bots didn't follow orders as expected. That's why the Navy is sending a bunch of dolphins and sea lions to find the drones that were supposed to replace them.
Given the REMUS 100's history of reliability, the recent disappearance comes as somewhat of a surprise. Did the bots malfunction, or did something go wrong in the control room? The Navy is still investigating what caused the disappearance, but they say "fear not" to all seafarers and fisherman out there.
Fortunately, the torpedo-shaped REMUS 100 bots are relatively harmless, measuring only 7.5 inches in diameter and carrying no weaponry. Still, let’s hope the Navy can keep tabs on their bots in the future.
– Zach Gottlieb
Photo: via WikimediaA Discovery Bay man accused of fatally stabbing a 9-year-old boy inside his home had been evaluated for possible mental health issues not once, but twice in the 24 hours before the incident.Jordon Almgren was fatally stabbed inside his home on Frost Way on Sunday.The suspect confessed in a jailhouse interview given to our media partner, the Bay Area News Group. In the interview, William Shultz, 18, admitted to killing the young boy saying, "I wanted to see what it was like to take a life before someone tried to take mine."Police arrested Shultz at a local hospital on Sunday."I wish that I hadn't. I think about what if that was my little brother," Shultz said.Police say Shultz was a family friend and stayed at Jordan's home overnight.On Saturday, Shultz was at his family's home in Discovery Bay when Contra Costa Sheriffs were called. "Apparently the family wanted the deputies to check his mental health status. So the deputies spoke to him and based on that contact, they determined that he did not meet the criteria for welfare and institutions code 5150. You have to have some kind of threat to themselves or to others or that they are gravely disabled," Contra Costa Sheriffs Department spokesperson Jimmy Lee said.Shultz did voluntarily go to the county hospital in Martinez for evaluation, but was released a few hours later.In the meantime, there is a growing memorial in front of Jordon's home. Friends and loved ones are paying tribute to a popular boy with a big smile. "He was the smallest kid on the team, but the biggest personality," Angels baseball coach Mike Delambert said. "We took a baseball there last night and had everybody sign it and it just said 'to our teammate Jordon, you'll always be an angel,"' Delambert said.Shultz is being held at the Martinez jail on $1 million bail.Shipping delays. Unusually high prices on titles. Books suddenly banished to the realm of “unavailable.” Since early May, authors and outsiders have noticed Amazon seemingly putting the squeeze on Hachette, in an attempt to strong-arm the publisher and secure better profit margins–as the e-tailer is wont to do.
Today, amid rising social-media clamor about the face-off, the notoriously camera-shy Amazon confirmed via press release that it was indeed playing hardball. “We are currently buying less (print) inventory and ‘safety stock’ on titles from the publisher, Hachette, than we ordinarily do, and are no longer taking pre-orders on titles whose publication dates are in the future,” wrote Amazon in a statement. Here’s the key part (emphasis added):
At Amazon, we do business with more than 70,000 suppliers, including thousands of publishers. One of our important suppliers is Hachette, which is part of a $10 billion media conglomerate. Unfortunately, despite much work from both sides, we have been unable to reach mutually-acceptable agreement on terms. Hachette has operated in good faith and we admire the company and its executives. Nevertheless, the two companies have so far failed to find a solution. Even more unfortunate, though we remain hopeful and are working hard to come to a resolution as soon as possible, we are not optimistic that this will be resolved soon.
Authors aren’t very happy. Hachette’s roster of heavy hitters includes J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, Malcolm Gladwell, and countless others, who will be just fine. Smaller authors, on the other hand, helplessly watch their book sales dwindle.
Perhaps sensing the growing frustration, Amazon has offered to go 50/50 on an author pool with Hachette to “mitigate the impact of this dispute on author royalties.” Although it’s unclear what kind of terms Amazon is seeking from Hachette, one industry executive told the Wall Street Journal that the spat at least partially concerns e-book prices, the margins of which are already quite handsome.Blockchain: Mohammed on the Blockchain
Greg Kerr Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 20, 2017
Photo: Holden Warren; Liberia, 2017
As-Salaam Alaykum, peace be upon you. My name is Mohammed al Global-Citizen. I am a blunt representation a large demographic on Earth. I most likely live in a coastal urban or peri-urban setting. I have limited to no access to sanitary plumbing, clean water, electricity, effective governance, legal justice, the use of an alphabet, or preventative healthcare. Notably, computer algorithms play no direct role in my life.
I earn the equivalent of $1 United States Dollar a day through physical labor. The money I earn covers basic family needs, perhaps some entertainment money, however, I do not have a bank account and access to scalable financial tools and opportunities are not even a viable wish. Recognizing the challenges of the context of my life, my struggles are measurably better than any woman in my life.
However, I do have access to mobile communications and even a community digital tablet. Due to the high cost of fossil fueled energy, up to 20% of my annual income is spent charging my personal device.
Bottom-up infrastructure development
Upon learning other communities in my surrounding area where earning digital money by producing electricity from their personal and agricultural waste my life has leap-frogged to the next level. My community leaders installed a sewage to electricity machine and built a series of community toilets throughout our neighborhood. Everyone in the surrounding area downloaded a Decentralized Application (DApp) on a personal device that manages our community’s creation and trading of community electricity.
Each time I use the community toilet my waste is measured to determine its value in producing electricity. As I leave the community water closet my personal device is credited a fraction of a crypto-coin in payment. My family managed our new crypto-value on an easy to use and picture-based DApp that helped me trade, invest and save this new value. Over time my family and I earned, traded, invested and saved enough cryptocurrency to buy solar panels for our home. As these solar panels generate energy, my digital wallet continuously registers the power being produced as currency.
Soon after my neighbors and I earned, traded, invested and saved crypto-value to the point we combined our surplus to purchase a gasification device that safely processes our garbage into electricity. The energy produced from our garbage is also registered as cryptocurrency.
With my personal waste, solar panels and garbage all earning me value and providing electricity I was able to build a rainwater capture system and run that water through a filter that measures the amount of potable water I am creating — that potable water is represented by a separate cryptocurrency on the same blockchain. Now my waste, solar panels, garbage and clean water are creating value in a scalable global economic investment market.
This short-term turn-around of sustainable power, waste management, and cleaning water has increased the human capacity in my community. The absence of fossil fuel burning generators has improved air and noise quality, allowing for better sleep, and less respiratory illness. Managing waste and wastewater has reduced killer waterborne illnesses like malaria, typhoid, and cholera.
My family’s budget has seen a dramatic turn-around. Earning money by producing energy is an upside down reversal from the days of paying between $0.34 to $0.54 a kilowatt hour, as compared to Americans that pay $0.04 to $0.08 a kilowatt hour. Not contending with chronic illness I’ve been able to attend work with less absence and more productivity. My family medical costs have spiraled downward. My daughters can finally afford proper feminine sanitation products, reducing illness and increasing school attendance up to 6 weeks a year.
The immediate benefits of creating access to value creation, sustainable energy, and clean water are obvious in my life. However, the second, third and fourth order effects are much more impactful.The Jesus & Mo image used on the society's Facebook page
"In response to complaints from a number of students, the University College London Union has insisted that the UCLU Atheist, Secularist & Humanist Society remove the following image from a Facebook event advertising a pub social. It has done so on the grounds that it may cause offence to Muslim students.
This is a gross infringement on its representatives' right to freedom of expression taken by members of the first secular university in England. All people are free to be offended by any image they view. This does not give them the right to impose their beliefs on others by censoring such images.
We the undersigned urge the University College London Union to immediately halt their attempts to censor the UCLU Atheist, Secularist & Humanist Society and uphold its members' right to freedom of expression."
The Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society (ASHS) at University College London has become embroiled in a censorship row with the university's student union over the use of a Muhammad-related cartoon on a Facebook page advertising its weekly drinks social.The image is taken from Jesus & Mo, a well-known web comic that depicts the title characters engaging in theological and philosophical chats while propping up a pub bar. Consistently amusing, frequently thought-provoking and often heart-warming, Jesus & Mo is anything but savage and crass, with its gentle take on the absurdity of theological differences and underlying message that humans really ought to just get along providing the perfect antidote to the violent and illiberal censorship it aims to satirise.It would, therefore, be somewhat ironic for someone to demand the censorship Jesus & Mo on the grounds that it is offensive, but that's precisely the mistake UCL's student union have made in response to the atheist society's Facebook page. Citing a "number of complaints" regarding both the depiction of Muhammad and the fact that the image shows him with a drink that looks like beer, the union contacted the ASHS president demanding that he removed the image as soon as possible.Having given a talk and chaired a debate on offence and censorship with the ASHS a few months ago, I know that they're a clever and inquisitive bunch who have thought long and hard about these issues, so I'm not surprised to learn that they're taking a stand against the union's attempted censorship. Pointing out that UCL was the first university in Britain to be founded on secular principles, the ASHS have refused to remove the Jesus & Mo image and have launched an online petition to defend free expression at the university. The petition, which you can sign, includes the following statement:Tony Clement is defending plans to wait until after the latest budget bill becomes law before fully detailing how Ottawa will block some public servants from going on strike.
The President of the Treasury Board is at the centre of controversy this week after the Conservative government tabled a budget bill that includes sweeping changes to federal labour laws and procedures.
The legislation would give the employer the exclusive right to declare jobs as essential services where workers could not strike, removing unions from that decision. It would also limit the role of arbitration for resolving disputes. Arbitration would be allowed only in cases where bargaining units have 80 per cent or more of their positions designated as essential, or if both parties mutually consent to binding arbitration.
Story continues below advertisement
In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Mr. Clement played down concern these powers would be used arbitrarily. He said unions would be consulted, but the government will have the final say. "Ultimately we believe the decision to protect the public is the government's decision. It's not a negotiating point that can be traded off for other things with the unions," he said.
The minister said he can't offer details on what kind of jobs would be declared essential or the expected percentages for each department.
"You can't start really implementing a bill until it's actually passed by Parliament. That's the reason why that has to wait," he said. "For observers and commentators, I'm sure they can figure out what's essential and what's not essential."
The minister was criticized in the House of Commons and on social media for refusing in a Thursday morning radio interview to answer questions about who would be declared essential.
"I am waiting for this legislation to pass and then details will come forward," he told CBC radio host Robyn Bresnahan on a local Ottawa program. Ms. Bresnahan had told the minister that the station had received a lot of negative feedback about the changes from the regions' public servants. The interview turned tense at times, with Mr. Clement flatly refusing to answer some of the host's questions.
The legislative changes are contained in Bill C-4, which introduces provisions from the March budget and includes a section that affects Canada's labour relations with federal public servants.
The government's budget bill was first introduced on Tuesday. On Thursday morning, the Conservative majority voted through a time allocation motion on the budget. As a result, second-reading debate will be limited to four more days before it is sent to committee for hearings.
Story continues below advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
The Canadian Labour Congress issued a statement Thursday calling the bill " an attack on the constitutional right to collective bargaining" and accused the government of trying to hide the changes in a budget bill.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Technology Correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones explains what happened to the O2 network
The network problems that hit hundreds of thousands of O2 customers have continued into a second day.
The mobile firm said its 2G network had now been restored and that customers should now be able to make and receive calls.
O2 is advising users to turn off their 3G setting while engineers work to restore that part of the network.
The widespread issues began "at lunchtime" on Wednesday which meant many lost voice and data services.
In a statement the firm said: "We can confirm that our 2G network service has now been restored. Customers who were affected should now be able to make and receive calls. Our 3G service is starting to restore and customers should expect to see a gradual return of data services as the day progresses."
It was advising customers still affected by the outage to switch their mobile phones off and on.
Boris Bikes
Few details have been given about what has caused the issues.
"We can confirm that the problem with our mobile service is due to a fault with one of our network systems, which has meant some mobile phone numbers are not registering correctly on our network," said the firm.
It is not clear how many of O2's 23 million customers have been hit by the fault but the operator said the problem was not based on geography. Across the country some will be able to connect at the same location as others who cannot.
Customers of other organisations that use O2's mobile masts, such as GiffGaff and Tesco Mobile, were also still affected.
Transport for London confirmed that the network issues had affected some docking stations for "Boris Bikes", the scheme which allows people to hire cycles around London.
"We are aware of this problem, and we're currently working to resolve it as soon as possible," TfL said in a statement.
O2 users contacted the BBC to describe how the glitch had affected them.
Joanne Clarkson from Newcastle said it had severely disrupted her day: "Being the mother of a child with special needs I need my phone. Until this is fixed I will have to stay home so I can be contacted by my landline if the school needs me," she said.
Chris Benson, owner of Crystal IT services based in Barry, Wales said that it had affected his business: "It's a little difficult to direct our workforce, contractors or suppliers when they all have to rely on landlines."
Others have expressed their anger via Twitter.
Customers have been told they can keep track of developments via O2's service status page.Owners of a high-profile Uptown corner are seeking approvals to build an apartment tower.
The residential high-rise would sit behind a row of one-story retail buildings at the corner of Cedar Springs Road and Fairmount Street.
Property owner Greenway Investment plans a 22-story, 320-unit apartment tower and a parking garage on what is now a parking lot at Howell and Routh streets.
The existing retail buildings and an office building on the block that’s home to Good Fulton & Farrell Architects would remain, according to filings with the city of Dallas.
Good Fulton & Farrell has designed the apartment tower.
The proposed building is one of about a dozen new high-rise rental communities in the works in downtown and Uptown Dallas.
Dallas-based Greenway Investments heads the partnership that owns the almost 4-acre site.
The development would be across the street from the Quadrangle shopping and office complex.
The building site is between the Crescent complex and Turtle Creek.
A second phase of the development could add more than 460,000 square feet of office and retail space.Get the biggest football 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
Manchester City have agreed a £6million deal for Malaga keeper Willy Caballero.
Argentinian Caballero is due to fly to Europe for talks with the champions, who are set to pay up to £10million - based on appearances and success.
City boss Manuel Pellegrini - who previously worked with the 32-year-old at Malaga - has beaten off competition from Monaco and Barcelona to sign a back-up for Joe Hart.
Meanwhile, City striker Alvaro Negredo will have to take a pay-cut to join Atletico Madrid.
Spanish champions Atletico, who also want Chelsea's Romelu Lukaku on a season-long loan as they sell Diego Costa to the Belgian's London club, will not match Negredo's current deal.
But Negredo may still move back to his hometown if Atletico give him a deal for five years on around £75,000-a-week.Aeana said: Not surprised. I kind of doubt that Level-5 was really willing to give him the amount of freedom or resources he really wanted. It'll be interesting to see where he turns up down the road. Click to expand...
brinstar said: Curious, what's wrong with their games? I've only played their Dragon Quests Click to expand...
Doesn't Akihiro Hino want to have a huge hand in every game Level 5 puts out? I feel his sort of, I dunno, Disney-esque approach to being all ages friendly doesn't exactly mesh with what Matsuno would've wanted to make.Dark Cloud 1 & 2 had loads of random dungeons, which is fine with some people... but then Rogue Galaxy had huge, long dungeons that felt like they may as well be randomly generated. That was my problem, but it also feels like they rarely manage to make that last push to really making FUN games. Charming typically, but I think as a result stuff like Dragon Quest, Layton, and Time Travellers comes out best as either A. they aren't designing the gameplay systems fully, or B. they're not really gameplay focused anyway, at least not in the sense a core game is.Reproductive health has suddenly become an issue this election. Birth control battle brings in bucks
The sudden focus on contraception and abortion in the 2012 campaign has meant a surge in fundraising for abortion rights groups that support women as congressional candidates.
EMILY’s List — whose mission is to elect pro-abortion rights Democratic women — has raised nearly twice as much for candidates at this point in the 2012 cycle as it did during the entire 2010 cycle, according to spokeswoman Jess McIntosh. And that’s with about eight months to go.
Story Continued Below
“We are on track to have one of the best first quarters we’ve ever had for candidate fundraising,” said EMILY’s List President Stephanie Schriock.
It’s a very different landscape than the one Democratic women faced in 2010, when 11 of them were ousted from the House and several were replaced by tea party-backed candidates. Democratic women fared better in the Senate, where moderate Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas was the only female Democratic incumbent to lose her reelection bid, but several others had close calls.
The shift is a surprise. Women’s groups were preparing to fend off a number of new state laws that restrict abortion access, not pull in new cash after attacks on Planned Parenthood funding and a comment from Rush Limbaugh about a female law student shifted momentum in their direction.
The fundraising boon is good news for female candidates, who are in a much stronger position in races across the country than they might have expected just a year ago when reproductive health was not expected to be a key issue this election.
EMILY’s List is helping to raise money for 37 women running for Congress — 11 in the Senate and 26 in the House. Much of the money is going to big name Senate candidates like Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Claire McCaskill in Missouri.
But lesser-known candidates are positioned to benefit, too, like Lois Frankel (D-Fla.), who is running for the seat held by deep-pocketed tea party favorite Rep. Allen West, and Ann McLane Kuster (D-N.H.), who’s challenging Republican Rep. Charlie Bass.
This cycle, pro-abortion rights groups are confident that these are winning issues for them, and they’re using recent controversies to their advantage.
Congressional Democrats have latched onto women’s issues and tried to paint the GOP as anti-woman. In the Senate, the Democrats’ message man, Chuck Schumer, plans to make a law on violence against women a wedge issue.
Other pro-abortion rights groups are including women’s health controversies in their fundraising pitches.
Planned Parenthood sent an email on International Women’s Day last week, blasting Rush Limbaugh for calling a Georgetown Law student a “slut” for her views on birth control and Texas Gov. Rick Perry for a state law that blocks funding to Planned Parenthood.
EMILY’s List has been sending emails to fire up their supporters and running ads that hammer Republicans’ recent maneuvers. The group ran an ad in February featuring remarks by GOP donor Foster Friess that women should put aspirin between their knees for contraception, and images of a House hearing on birth control that featured an all-male panel.Editor in Chief of National Geographic magazine Susan Goldberg celebrates transgenderism by putting a nine-year-old feminine boy on the January cover of the magazine.
So proud of our @NatGeo Jan issue, 100% devoted to exploring gender. We're grateful to all who let us into their lives. #GenderRevolution pic.twitter.com/jJq9HWFTSc — Susan Goldberg (@susanbgoldberg) December 15, 2016
In an op-ed at USA Today, Goldberg insists that because society is evolving in its consideration of gender, National Geographic is featuring Avery Jackson on its cover. She writes:
The story of gender plays out all around us. More and more, celebrities are shining a spotlight on the subject. But more quietly, our children, parents, teachers, medical professionals, and officials every day confront an array of issues with gender at the center. Everywhere we looked, in the U.S. and around the globe, individuals and organizations are fighting to redefine traditional gender roles, whether it is girls in war-torn Sierra Leone rejecting the cultural norm of female genital mutilation and child marriage, men in Sweden making use of extended paternal leave after having a child, or people who reject binary, boy-girl labels and find their true identity elsewhere on a gender spectrum.
Goldberg adds that she applauds the “bravery” of transgendered individuals who have revealed the “brutal discrimination and ostracism” they face.
XX and XY don't tell the full story of gender. My #GenderRevolution op-ed for @USATODAY. https://t.co/qz1Fqh785T — Susan Goldberg (@susanbgoldberg) December 19, 2016
The magazine also touts its documentary titled Gender Revolution: A Journey with Katie Couric. “Now that we know XX and XY, and blue and pink, don’t tell the full story, it is time to write a new chapter to ensure that we all can thrive in this world no matter what our gender — or decision to not identify a gender,” she states.
Breitbart News reported in June, however, that the American College of Pediatricians showed the gender ideology is harmful to children and that transgendered children are psychologically confused and at risk for mental health disorders. The College stated:
No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one… A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking. When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such. These children suffer from gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V)…
“According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty,” the College asserts. “Conditioning children into believing that a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse.”
Similarly, Youth Trans Critical Professionals — a group of self-described “left-leaning, open-minded, and pro-gay rights” professionals say it is risky to affirm young people who claim to be transgender and provide them with hormonal and surgical treatments to change their bodies.
“Our concern is with medical transition for children and youth,” say Youth Trans Critical Professionals on their website. “We feel that unnecessary surgeries and/or hormonal treatments which have not been proven safe in the long-term represent significant risks for young people.”
“Policies that encourage — either directly or indirectly — such medical treatment for young people who may not be able to evaluate the risks and benefits are highly suspect, in our opinion,” says the organization, which is composed of psychologists, social workers, doctors, and other professionals.
The professionals express “alarm” that, because of the current trendiness of being transgendered, many young people have decided they are a member of the opposite sex simply as a result of “binges” on social media sites. They describe a process of transgender activists recruiting these young people for their “cult.”
“There is evidence that vulnerable young people are being actively recruited and coached on such sites to believe that they are trans,” the professionals say.
Despite such potential mental health problems associated with gender confusion, children who claim to be the opposite sex are no longer legally permitted to see a therapist to get stabilizing “conversion therapy” in some states. Youth Trans Critical Professionals sees such state prohibitions as dangerous since they may block the process of critical thinking and evaluation of the young person regarding the reasons why he or she desires to become a transgender member of the opposite sex.
“While the sentiment behind this legislation is laudable, in some cases, it is being interpreted to mean that therapists cannot explore gender identity with a youth who is professing to be trans,” argue the professionals. “This would mean we can’t ask why; we can’t explore underlying mental health issues; we can’t consider the symbolic nature of the gender dysphoria; and we can’t look at possible confounding issues such as social media use or social contagion.”
But gay advocacy groups are determined to enforce their claims that gender is fluid, that people are free to chose their lifestyle independent of their biology, that society should insist that there’s really no such thing as a “gender binary,” and government should deny that heterosexual boys and girls, and heterosexual men and women, are the civic norm. So the gay advocacy group, the Human Rights Campaign, tweeted out its support of National Geographic‘s gender-blending, non-heterosexual cover:
Avery, a trans girl, is on @NatGeo's cover. Honored to have her parents on @HRC's Parents for Trans Equality Council https://t.co/CSg8ExkOC0 pic.twitter.com/YjKuPJAO6g — Human Rights Campaign (@HRC) December 18, 2016
A study of the 2010 census showed that only one out of every 2,400 adults have changed their names to the opposite sex.New Delhi, India - For Vishal Agnihotri, 33, a rickshaw puller in the Dwarka neighbourhood here in the capital, the Global Water Week that kicked off on Sunday in Sweden and the ice bucket challenge craze means nothing.
"I haven't had a bath for the last four days. We don't have water for drinking; forget taking a bath in ice cold water," he told Al Jazeera.
New Delhi, a union territory and the capital of India became the world's second most populous city this year after Tokyo, more than doubling its population since 1990 to 25 million, according to the latest UN report. The city is expected to retain this spot until 2030, when its population is expected to rise swiftly to 36 million, the report says.
But does the city have enough drinking water for its bulging population?
Currently the demand for potable water is around 1,100 mgd (million gallons per day) but the government only supplies around 800 mgd. About 81 percent of the households get piped water. The rest of the population relies on mobile water tankers.
Last year the Delhi government even had to insist that 35 five-star hotels cut down their consumption.
With no ensured timely distribution of water to the inhabitants at many places, the water mafia has taken over.
"Government is the biggest problem. It doesn't plan water resources," Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator with the New Delhi-based South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, told Al Jazeera.
That's why in this water-hungry city, a parallel water industry is flourishing despite tough measures taken by the Delhi Jal Board (DJB) which is responsible for maintaining Delhi's water supply.
"The water mafia will work when there is a scarcity of water. It's because of the unequal distribution of the water by the authorities. People who need water anyways see a solution in water tankers," Dewan Singh, an environmentalist at Natural Heritage First told Al Jazeera.
It's estimated that more than 2,000 private tankers draw water from tube wells and the DJB connection and sell the water to residential localities and industries at exorbitant rates. This industry earns an estimated 400 crores ($66.15m) annually.
Water tanker rates differ on the basis of capacity, season and demand, and in some cases, the customer.
Almost half of Delhi's population lives in slums where getting water is a challenge every day.
Follow Baba Tamim on Twitter: @babatamimTrigger warning: Parts of this column may be offensive and upsetting to people who believe that women face a wall of discrimination out there. Readers may want to find a safe space and seek emotional support before proceeding.
Why is the gender wage gap still so huge? In Ontario, according to the Toronto Star, women in the work force now make a whopping 31.5 per cent less than men. The Premier, Kathleen Wynne, says the problem is so grave that she has ordered her ministers to develop a strategy that will "close the gap."
But how? Here's one idea. Get women in university to switch their majors. Instead of sociology, they should take petroleum engineering, which pays three or four times as much. That would close the gap in no time.
Story continues below advertisement
In fact, most (not all) of the wage gap is a myth, based on the same sort of flawed statistics that vastly inflate the problem of "rape culture." Yet if you doubt the magnitude of either of these problems, you will probably be denounced as a misogynist, or worse.
Just ask Christina Hoff Sommers, a mild-mannered feminist who argues that modern feminism has gone off the deep end. Take the pay gap. She points out that much of the gap is explained by the fact that women choose career paths that pay less than the work men choose. Once you correct for occupational differences, hours worked per week, and tenure in the work force, most of the pay gap disappears. The statistics bear her out.
Ms. Sommers' views are so menacing that when she spoke at Oberlin College in Ohio last month, students organized a "safe space" so that anyone who was traumatized by her remarks could seek support. For her own safety, she was given a police escort. When she told the crowd how women could narrow the wage gap by switching into engineering, they erupted with "horrified gasps & jeers," according to her tweet. (She gave a similar talk at Georgetown University, which is available online.)
Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economic historian, is probably the most authoritative expert on the history of gender and wages. So what's her take? It's more nuanced than Ms. Sommers', but just as challenging to entrenched beliefs.
"The converging roles of men and women are among the grandest advances in society and the economy in the last century," she writes. Over the past few decades, the wage gap had narrowed sharply as women caught up with men in education, job experience and career choice, and even began to surpass them in some areas. In pharmacy – a high-paying, family-friendly field where women now dominate – there is no wage gap. Pharmacists, as Prof. Goldin notes, can work as much or as little as they like, with no penalty for part-time work. Occupations in which people are relatively interchangeable don't have wage gaps. Nor do ones that don't require much face time and can be done remotely. Many tech jobs are like this.
The two job areas with the greatest gender gaps are corporate management and finance. (They |
CoinJournal: How does machine learning fit into this equation?
Paulo Marques: Our machine learning algorithms work by detecting use and abuse behavior patterns, which are like “commerce DNA” – it’s unique to each user. A fraudster can steal your data, but they can’t steal your behavior. Today’s fraud patterns are evolving much too quickly for human-coded, rules-only systems to operate effectively.
Feedzai’s machine learning software watches what is happening, as it happens, and adjusts its knowledge accordingly. By adding our software on top of an existing blockchain technology, we are able to create a solution that surpasses all other fraud protection that is currently available and even go as far as to predict criminal behavior before it even happens.Al-Qaeda's leaders: (From left) Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden and Mohammed Atef
Al-Qaeda, meaning "the base", was created in 1989 as Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan and Osama Bin Laden and his colleagues began looking for new jihads.
The organisation grew out of the network of Arab volunteers who had gone to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight under the banner of Islam against Soviet Communism.
During the anti-Soviet jihad Bin Laden and his fighters received American and Saudi funding. Some analysts believe Bin Laden himself had security training from the CIA.
The "Arab Afghans", as they became known, were battle-hardened and highly motivated.
In the early 1990s Al-Qaeda operated in Sudan. After 1996 its headquarters and about a dozen training camps moved to Afghanistan, where Bin Laden forged a close relationship with the Taleban.
The US campaign in Afghanistan starting in late 2001 dispersed the organisation and drove it underground as its personnel were attacked and its bases and training camps destroyed.
Cells across the world
The organisation is thought to operate in 40 to 50 countries, not only in the Middle East and Asia but in North America and Europe.
In western Europe there have been known or suspected cells in London, Hamburg, Milan and Madrid. These have been important centres for recruitment, fundraising and planning operations.
Attacks attributed to al-Qaeda or associates 1993: World Trade Center bombing 1996: Killing of 19 US soldiers in Saudi Arabia 1998: East African bombings 2000: Attack on USS Cole in Yemen 2001: Suicide attacks on New York and Washington 2002: Attack on Israeli tourists in Mombasa 2003: Four simultaneous bomb attacks in Riyadh
For training, the group favours lawless areas where it can operate freely and in secret.
These are believed to have included Somalia, Yemen and Chechnya, as well as mountainous areas of Afghanistan.
There have been reports of a secret training camp on one of the islands of Indonesia.
Unlike the tightly-knit groups of the past, such as the Red Brigades in Italy or the Abu Nidal group in the Middle East, al-Qaeda is loosely knit. It operates across continents as a chain of interlocking networks.
Individual groups or cells appear to have a high degree of autonomy, raising their own money, often through petty crime, and making contact with other groups only when necessary.
Defining al-Qaeda?
This loose connection between groups has raised a question of definition. When we talk about al-Qaeda do we refer to an actual organisation or are we now talking about something closer to an idea?
Al-Qaeda's main figures At large: Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahri Captured by US: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah On trial: Zacarias Moussaoui, Mounir al-Motassadek Jailed: Richard Reid Believed dead: Mohammed Atef
Who's who in al-Qaeda
Some analysts have suggested that the word al-Qaeda is now used to refer to a variety of groups connected by little more than shared aims, ideals and methods.
We do however know that several radical groups are or have been formally affiliated with al-Qaeda. The most important is the radical wing of the Egyptian group Islamic Jihad whose members took refuge in Afghanistan and merged with al-Qaeda.
Its leader is Ayman al-Zawahri, a ruthless Egyptian believed to be the brains behind al-Qaeda and the mastermind of many of its most infamous operations.
These include the attacks on two US embassies in Africa in 1998 and the 11 September attacks against New York and Washington.
There are also believed to be links with:
Militant Kashmiri groups
The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU
The Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines;
The GIA, or Armed Islamic Group, in Algeria and its radical offshoot known as the Salafist group, or GSPC.
'War on terror'
Western police forces and intelligence agencies have had some successes in breaking up al-Qaeda cells, closing down front companies and freezing assets as part of the "war on terror".
Some of its top leaders have been killed or captured, and interrogations of some members at Guantanamo Bay have further weakened the organisation.
However, uprooting the organisation in its entirety has been a highly complex and frustrating task.
In a recent report on Iraq and the war on terror, the Oxford Research Group noted that despite the detention of many of its members, al-Qaeda "remains vibrant and effective".
Most frustratingly, the fate and whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden himself is still a deep mystery.Last year, the United States woke up to the reality of hundreds of thousands of soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan and began to grapple with what to do about it.
On Feb. 18, 2007, the headline "Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration at Army’s Top Medical Facility" splashed across the front page of one of the nation’s premier newspapers, the Washington Post. The article, which described unsafe conditions and substandard care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, began with the story of Army Specialist Jeremy Duncan, who was airlifted out of Iraq in February 2006 with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, "nearly dead from blood loss."
"Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold," the article read. "When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses."
The Post reported that patients inside Walter Reed, which lies just five miles from the White House, found it difficult to receive the care they were promised and felt they deserved.
When the story broke, politicians from both parties expressed outrage and promised solutions. Walter Reed’s commander, Maj. Gen. George Weightman, was fired almost immediately. Following him out the door was the secretary of the Army, Frances Harvey.
On March 6, President George W. Bush announced the formation of a bipartisan independent commission lead by former Republican senator Bob Dole and Donna Shalala, the secretary of Health and Human Services in the Bill Clinton administration.
"It’s unacceptable to me, it’s unacceptable to you, it’s unacceptable to our country, and it’s not going to continue," Bush told the American Legion in a speech announcing the commission’s formation. "My decisions have put our kids in harm’s way. And I’m concerned about the fact that when they come back they don’t get the full treatment they deserve."
Three weeks later, Bush paid a visit to Walter Reed and apologized again: "I was disturbed by their accounts of what went wrong," Bush told Walter Reed’s staff after a tour of the facility. "It is not right to have someone volunteer to wear our uniform and not get the best possible care. I apologize for what they went through, and we’re going to fix the problem."
But the allegations raised in the Washington Post were not actually new. In February 2005, the exact same conditions had been raised in a damning series in the online magazine Salon.com. Wounded soldiers at Walter Reed, reporter Mark Benjamin wrote, are "overmedicated, forced to talk about their mothers instead of Iraq, and have to fight for disability pay. Traumatized combat vets say the Army is failing them, and after a year following more than a dozen soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, I believe them."
Top Bush administration officials knew about Walter Reed’s problems, but they had other priorities. Indeed, before the Washington Post put the facility’s substandard conditions on its front page, President Bush’s appointees at the Pentagon had strenuously lobbied Congress against funding military pensions, health insurance, and benefits for widows of retirees. Their argument: that money spent caring for wounded soldiers and their families could be better spent on state-of-the-art military hardware or enticing new recruits to join the force.
In January 2005, Bush’s Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness David Chu, the official in charge of such things, went so far as to tell the Wall Street Journal veterans’ medical care and disability benefits "are hurtful" and "are taking away from the nation’s ability to defend itself."
Before the scandal at Walter Reed broke in the Washington Post, the Bush administration ran programs for injured soldiers in much the same way it did the rest of the war primarily for the benefit of an elite group of private contractors.
In 2005, with tens of thousands of casualties already reported, a Pentagon commission recommended closing Walter Reed by 2011. When the commission report became public, the Bush administration moved to privatize the facility for as long as it would remain open, turning management of the hospital over to IAP World Services, a politically well-connected firm with almost no experience in military medicine.
In January 2006, the military awarded a five-year, $120 million contract to Florida-based IAP, which had already faced scrutiny from Congress for unseemly profiteering after Hurricane Katrina. After the levees broke, FEMA ordered the company to deliver 211 million pounds of ice intended to cool food, medicine, and sweltering victims of the storm. Instead, IAP had the ice trucked around the country in circles at taxpayers’ expense, with much of it ending up in storage 1,500 miles away in Maine.
The company’s leadership had an even more extensive record of corruption. Before going to work at IAP, company CEO Al Neffgen was a top executive at Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, where he was responsible for "all work performed by KBR for the U.S. government." That included being hauled before congressional committees to testify about why the company (which had earlier been run by Vice President Dick Cheney) had overcharged U.S. taxpayers by hundreds of millions of dollars while providing support for U.S. troops in Iraq.
Neffgren wasn’t the only well-connected person at IAP. The company’s president, the aptly named David Swindle, is also a former executive at Halliburton. One of its directors is Dan Quayle, Bush senior’s vice president from 1989-1993.
Employees started to leave Walter Reed before the deal was even finalized, figuring they would lose their jobs anyway. When news of the contract first surfaced in 2005, 300 federal employees provided facilities management services at Walter Reed. That figure had dropped to fewer than 60 by Feb. 3, 2007, the day before IAP took over facilities management. When IAP did take over, the company replaced the remaining 60 employees with 50 private workers.
Inside Walter Reed, alarm bells were sounding. On Sept. 21, 2006, Garrison Commander Peter Garibaldi wrote a letter to the base’s commanding general saying privatization had put "patient care services at risk of mission failure."
"We face the critical issues of retaining skilled personnel for the hospital and diverse professionals for the Garrison, while confronted with increased difficulty in hiring," he wrote.
No one took notice then, and little has been done since to improve care or lessen bureaucracy at Walter Reed or at the Pentagon and the VA’s network of hospitals and clinics nationwide. Military hospitals are still short-staffed. Injured soldiers are still left alone for hours, or even days.
In September 2007, a congressionally mandated report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found the Pentagon and VA care for service members suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury was "inadequate" with "significant shortfalls" of doctors, nurses, and other caregivers necessary to treat wounded soldiers.
According to the GAO, "46 percent of the Army’s returning service members who were eligible to be assigned to a [medical] unit had not been assigned due in part to staffing shortages." Over half of the military’s special "Wounded Warrior Transition Units" had staffing shortfalls of more than 50 percent.
Key bases like Fort Lewis in Washington and Fort Carson in Colorado were short massive amounts of doctors, nurses, and squad leaders. In short, the Bush administration was simply not hiring enough doctors and nurses to care for what had become a tidal wave of injured soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In December, Congress put its solution forward folding a Wounded Warrior Bill designed to help disabled veterans into a massive $700 billion defense bill. But on Dec. 28, President Bush surprised many observers by vetoing the measure. Bush objected to a provision that would allow victims of Saddam Hussein’s regime to seek compensation in court.
Congressional Democrats are now checking to see if they have the votes to override Bush’s veto. If they don’t, they may send the bill back to President Bush with the offending sections removed.
Either way, Veterans for Common Sense’s Paul Sullivan says veterans are not likely to see major progress until 2009.
"Some of the problems may be solved in the next year if Congress fights hard but I do believe that the anti-veteran Bush administration does indeed need to go away so that real reform can be brought to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs," Sullivan told IPS.
(Inter Press Service)
Read more by Aaron GlantzGetty Images
Eagles tackle Lane Johnson took no steps to block his 10-game PED suspension through the legal system. However, he’s now taking full advantage of the available mechanisms for vindicating himself — and for getting back 10 game checks, and more.
Johnson, who filed an unfair labor practice charge against the NFL and the NFL Players Association in November, has now sued both management and labor. His complaint and petition to vacate the arbitration award (in English, a lawsuit aimed at scrapping his suspension) has been filed in federal court in the Northern District of Ohio.
It’s unclear why Johnson’s lawyers selected this specific federal jurisdiction; presumably, they believe that past cases from this district and the appellate circuit governing it will make it easier for Johnson to win. The first skirmish in the case could be an effort by the NFL and/or NFLPA to transfer the case to a federal district with greater connections to the parties and the underlying events (and favorable rulings in past cases), even though Johnson alleges in his complaint that he “worked... in Aurora, Ohio” while employed by the Philadelphia Eagles.
I’ve obtained and read the 45-page, 289-paragraph legal document, and somehow stayed awake. Here’s what Johnson claims, via the smallest nutshell into which it would fit.
He claims that the positive PED result arose from improper “reasonable cause” testing, explaining that “reasonable cause” testing may occur for two years after a prior PED violation and that the “reasonable cause” test in his case came after that two-year window had expired.
Johnson claims that three arbitrators were not assigned to handle the appeal, explaining that the policy requires at least three and no more than five.
Johnson alleges that the arbitrator who presided over the appeal, James Carter, has a conflict of interest arising from his association with the law firm of Wilmer Hale, which handled the Ray Rice investigation of the league office and allegedly has performed over work for the NFL and its teams.
Johnson claims that the NFL Management Council exerted undue influence over the supposedly Independent Administrator of the PED testing policy, as evidenced in part by an allegation that the NFLMC cited attorney-client privilege during one of the conference calls preceding the appeal hearing.
Johnson claims that the NFL and NFLPA failed to fill the position of Chief Forensic Toxicologist after the person holding it retired. As alleged at paragraph 91 of the complaint, “[t]he CFT is jointly selected by the NFLMC and the NFLPA, and is responsible... for auditing the operation of the testing laboratories, consulting with the Independent Administrator and the specimen Collection Vendor, and reviewing and certifying laboratory results as a condition for discipline.”
Johnson claims that his lawyer was prevented from observing the testing of Johnson’s “B” sample, which occurs after the “A” sample generates a positive outcome. A positive outcome of the “B” sample test locks in the violation.
Johnson claims that the league committed “fraud” on the arbitrator by providing false information about the testing protocols and the information shared with Johnson about it.
As to the NFLPA, Johnson claims that it entered into side agreements not ratified by the membership of the union (including the use of fewer than three arbitrators and the failure to fill the CFT position), that the NFLPA engaged in an improper public dispute with Johnson over his positive test, that the NFLPA misled Johnson about its dealings with the NFLMC, and that the NFLPA failed to properly support him (at paragraph 122, the complaint alleges that “the NFLPA expressed that Johnson appealing any suspension would be like lighting money on fire”).
The complaint asks that the end result of the appeal process be vacated, which would result in among other things the compensation of Johnson for the 10 game checks he missed and the restoration of contractual guarantees. He also seeks certain “declarations” from the court that will clarify the responsibilities of the NFL under the PED policy, and an award of punitive damages.
The detailed, systematic recitations of facts and claims is persuasive on the surface, but as in most civil lawsuits the defendants likely will produce an equally detailed and systematic denial of the charges. Still, Johnson’s ability to point to multiple bright-line problems with the process (such as the use of fewer than three arbitrators and the attempt to conduct “reasonable cause” testing beyond the two-year window following a positive PED result) makes his decision not to immediately seek a preliminary injunction staving off the suspension seem a bit confusing.
Several years ago, former Vikings defensive tackles Kevin and Pat Williams successfully delayed a suspension under the PED policy even though, ultimately, they lost the lawsuit blocking them. (For Pat Williams, the end result came after he retired.) Given the differences in the Eagles offense with and without Lane Johnson in the lineup, the team arguably would have been playing a game in this weekend’s wild-card round, if it had the benefit of Johnson’s services.A senior al-Qaeda figure with close ties to the terrorist group’s current leader has left Iran, where he had lived for years after fleeing American forces in Afghanistan in 2001, according to former and current U.S. intelligence officials.
Thirwat Shihata is the latest terrorist suspect to leave Iran, raising questions about the country’s motives for allowing or forcing the departure of a string of al-Qaeda members that it had sheltered over the past decade.
U.S. officials said that Shihata, a 53-year-old Egyptian, was the deputy of Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s current leader, when he ran Egyptian Islamic Jihad before it formally joined forces with Osama bin Laden in 1998.
“Shihata is among the few remaining members of al-Qaeda’s old guard,” said a U.S. counterterrorism official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of not having authorization to talk publicly about the movements of the al-Qaeda figures. “His ties to Zawahiri extend back decades, as both men cut their teeth in the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.... Shihata has kept a low profile in recent years, but there’s no question that he’s one of the more seasoned terrorists at large today.”
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, dozens of al-Qaeda fighters, including some senior personnel, fled to Iran. It has never been clear how much freedom of movement they enjoyed while in the country, but for some the welcome appears to be over.
In the past two years, up to a dozen notable figures have left Iran, and two — Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, accused in the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings, and Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law and former spokesman — have subsequently ended up in U.S. custody.
A top-secret 2008 U.S. document, which was leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, lists 13 senior al-Qaeda figures or associates in Iran. Five were listed as “senior management” in the terrorist group and of those, three have left Iran in recent years. Among them was Mahfouz Ould al-Walid, al-Qaeda’s ideological chief better known as Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, who returned to his native Mauritania in 2012.
The U.S. document describes Shihata as an “experienced operational planner” and “respected among al-Qaeda rank and file.”
[More details on the figures named in the 2008 document]
It was not clear when Shihata departed Iran, but a former U.S. official, who also requested anonymity, said he was believed to have traveled to Libya. The CIA declined to discuss Shihata’s whereabouts.
The former official said there was information that while in Libya in 2013, Shihata possibly met Ruqai, also known as Anas al-Libi, and Zubayr al-Maghrebi, another al-Qaeda figure who has left Iran.
U.S. forces captured Ruqai in Tripoli, Libya, in October and questioned him on a U.S. warship for days before moving him to New York to face trial on federal charges that he helped plan the bombing of the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998. Ghaith was arrested in Jordan while trying to connect to a flight to his native Kuwait, and he is also facing trial in New York on terrorism charges.
U.S. officials and counterterrorism experts are uncertain about the reason for the string of departures. “To me, it’s an enigma,” said Bruce Hoffman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University.
Seth Jones, an analyst at the Rand Corp., said the relationship between al-Qaeda and Iran is difficult to unwind. At one point, the CIA had even talked to Iran about a trade, but it never went anywhere; in return for al-Qaeda suspects, Tehran would get some Iranian dissidents based in Iraq.
Jones said the Iranians might have lost an opportunity to capitalize on their high-value guests.
“I think the strategic rationale for keeping them has decreased over time,” he said. Officials also speculate that the civil war in Syria, where the Iranian government and al-Qaeda are on opposite sides, may have strained relations to the point that the government in Tehran is no longer willing to harbor these fugitives.
In the release of a small portion of the cache of documents taken from bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, the former leader of al-Qaeda speculated that Iran freed some from detention after al-Qaeda kidnapped an Iranian diplomat.
Not much is publicly known about Shihata. He had ties to an alleged terrorist in Canada who was suspected of serving as “a communications conduit for terrorist cells” that carried out the Africa bombings,” according to a diplomatic cable released by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
In 2011, Shihata issued a statement backing the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, according to the Long War Journal. He issued the statement from Iran.Beatrix Jordan, a fourth-grader at Mukilteo Elementary, had her artwork selected as the poster art for the Mukilteo Community Orchestra concerts Sunday afternoon at Rosehill Community Center.
You must sign in or register to continue reading content.
MUKILTEO — Members of the Mukilteo Community Orchestra are eager to perform two free concerts Sunday.
That’s because the opening performance of the orchestra’s 2016-17 season is all about children.
“We are excited to offer this to the community. It’s so much more than a traditional performance,” said musician Louise Stanton-Masten. “A lot of people have been involved in this one.”
The concerts will feature Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev’s musical story “Peter and the Wolf.” Performances are set for 1 and 3:30 p.m. Nov. 6 at Rosehill Community Center, 304 Lincoln Ave., in Mukilteo.
The program, sponsored by the city of Mukilteo, also will feature artwork by elementary school students, which they submitted as part of a poster art contest that was sponsored by the orchestra as a way to engage young people.
“Maybe some of the children will be inspired to pick up an instrument,” Stanton-Masten said.
Beatrix Jordan, a Mukilteo Elementary fourth-grader, is the contest winner. Beatrix is involved in art, dance and music. She has taken several art classes and works in all media. In addition to spending time drawing, Beatrix plays the cello in her school orchestra and has taken ballet lessons for several years.
Peter and the Wolf tells the story of a young boy staying at his grandfather’s house in the forest and the animals that he encounters as he strikes out to explore the woods. Each character in the story is represented and played by different instruments in the orchestra. The story will be narrated by local actor Ron Johanson, with sign-language interpretation of the story provided by ASL interpreter Mara Rohrenbach.
While the story is introduced, photos of musical instruments and the animals they represent in the music will be displayed on a big screen, followed by illustrations of the story as the piece is played.
Audience members will also have an opportunity for hands-on instrument experiences, with an “Instrument Petting Zoo” offered by Carol Harkins from the Gene Nastri Community School of the Arts and Kennelly Keys. Teen volunteers who want to earn community service credits are needed to help with the zoo. To volunteer, call or text 425-308-5503.
The second half of the concert offers another young audience favorite, the music from the animated Disney movie “Frozen,” which is based on Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Snow Queen.” The piece includes familiar tunes such as “Do You Want to Build a Snowman,” “Let It Go” and “For The First Time In Forever.”
In keeping with the orchestra’s mission to provide educational opportunities in partnership with other community groups, young ballet dancers from Mari’s Place in Everett will be the featured performers during “Frozen.” Mari’s Place supports primarily low-income Latino families through creative projects such as ballet classes.
“We are sure that this performance, with the range of experiences that it offers, will offer both our young audience members as well as adults a new way to engage with our musical performances,” said Trevor Lutzenhiser, conductor and artistic director.
More information about the concert and images of each Peter and the Wolf poster contest artwork can be found at www.mukilteoorchestra.org.aXa Profile Blog Joined July 2010 France 748 Posts Last Edited: 2011-04-14 19:28:25 #1
If you don't know me yet, let me introduce me again: I'm aXa, French zerg player 3300 master in Season 1. I like playing out of the box and figure out new style of play.
If you are a little zerg having trouble in ZvP, go definitely check this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=211407
If you don't like at all the current dynamic in ZvZ right now, which is basically a lot of zergling and baneling in early game, this guide is for you. This time, the opening and the follow up of this strategy are closely related.
Opening & Goal
9/10: pool
10/10: overlord
10/18: 6 zergling
13/18: queen ---> larva inject
15/18-->17/18: Drone
17/18: Overlord
19/18: Queen + extractor ---> creep tumor (only 1)
As usual, the zergling are reaching the ennemy base at 17/18, so you have to be quick in order to micro the zergling AND produce the extra queen + extractor. You exactly have the right amount of money so you can't do it sooner to be more intensive on the zergling micro.
The goal of this build is to apply pressure on your opponent while walling you off with the 2 queen you produced early. It will allow you to pretty much ignore mass zergling play: The wall off will buy you the extra time you need to produce roaches and so deny the mass zergling/baneling play.
More so, it will put you ahead economically thanks to early larva inject. Your opponent will feel like he has to do some damage back, but your good defense will totally screw him up. I think the best reponse to this build is to totally ignore the early drone loss, to make a full-drone expand build. But still hard to manage has you have to be prepared to the timing push. No over-droning allowed.
Finding your opponent
On 4 player map, you will sometime need to include a drone scouting if your initial overlord don't find your opponent in close air position. The right timing in this case is to bring a drone at 10/10 food, when your second overlord is just started. Just check the close ground position. If your opponent is neither close air or close ground, it means he is cross position. don't send your drone there, just redirect the zergling in the right direction. Do notice that 4 player map with only 3 spawning location like Shakuras plateau are pretty convenient for this build, because the initial overlord will scout one position in time.
I don't use this build on Tal'darim altar or big GSL map. I go for expand first instead.
The 6 initial Zergling
If your opponent is going hatch first
Focus the hatch, your opponent will have to cancel it. Then go for the mineral line, he will have 4 ling max, so focus them so he will have to reproduce them. Anyway, it is pretty rare to see hatch first even on big map like tal darim altar, which is pretty sad. Pretty needless to say that canceling the hatch is enough damage for your 9 pool.
If your opponent is going 13 pool 13 gas
Your zergling will arrive in time, you will able to focus the drone. If your opponent is really good at managing is drone, he will lose only 2 to 3 drone, which is enough damage. If he screw up, he can lose them all, it already happen ^^but don't count on it. Anyway, the 9 pool is not supposed to be a direct win strategy at all. Don't let the drone surround you though.
If your opponent is going 9 pool
Let the best win!
Overlord placement
Your overlord placement is SO important. I have a individual overlord placement for every map, so it is too long to describe. I'd rather simply tell the goal your overlord are supposed to achieve.
Why is it so important? Well, after your initial push, you'll be locked in your base giving up map control for a long time. So you have to be ready to what your opponent is up to.
-Scouting the timing of his natural expansion: Usually with your 1st or 2nd overlord, depending which one is in the closest position. When his expansion is finished, draw your overlord back to his 3rd. He doesn't need to die to a queen.
-Scouting the attacking path between your base: In order to see his army compo and his timing attack. Always very useful in order to react properly and in time. I use 4 to 5 overlord in order to perform this mission, even on 2 player map.
Follow up
It is important that your zergling die. It is actually better to free up the supply than making another overlord, because it is a tight build.
19/18 (-3 supply considering the zergling soon to be dead): Drone with the 1st larva inject finishing.
-2nd larva inject: If you want to be super-safe, go send the queen at your ramp right now. If you feel confident he will not send early zergling, then simply wait to a 3rd larva inject, then wall off. if you see only 4 zergling coming, don't wall off. The queen in your base can manage them easily, so you can put a 3rd larva inject without any interruption.
22/26: 3rd Queen
The third queen is here to keep a continue larva inject while the 2 other queen are the main defender unit.
24/26: 3 drone into gaz
24/26: Roach warren
24/26 --> 26/26: Drone
26/26: 2 overlord
26/42: 4 to 5 roach.
-When your roaches are done, you should have 300 mineral, plant down your expansion and cover it with your roaches. Let the queen wall off the ramp.
-When you have 100 gas, tech to lair.
-As soon as your lair is started, take your second gas and start an evolution chamber.
-Theoretically, you can keep droning up. Unless your opponent is rushing you, but i will discuss this further in another part of the thread.
-As soon as you reach 100 gas again, start +1 attack
-As soon as you reach 100 gas again, start roach speed
-When your +1 range and roach speed is one third complete, start the mass roach production
-You will be able to hit a timing around 80 pop, when your speed and upgrade finishes. Go crush your opponent face.
Your one and only creep tumor
It's a very important detail. First it allow you to join your ramp quickly, as you know queen off creep are sooooo slow. Then, it will allow you to make your 4 initial roaches able to defend your expand against zergling. Without it, they can out micro you. After that, i usually don't spread the creep anymore, unless i take a third. Personnal choice here. Don't spend more energy on creep tumor, you will need it to transfuse your roach against any early agression.
Against a 1 base mass zergling player
It is maybe the most delicate build to hold against. He should attack you just when your 3rd queen is about to pop out. Send her IMMEDIATELY to the front to help the inital 2 queen. You should have just the right amount for 1 or 2 transfuse, so your queen should be able to hold until the roaches come. Needless yo say that after holding this rush, it will be pretty much GG, because he will be SO far behind economically. He spent larva on zergling whereas yours are drone.
Against a 1 base roach all-in
You'll have 1 or 2 less roach than him. Don't freak out, as long as you are able to tranfuse your own roach (you should have 4 to 5 transfuse available at this point of time) you'll be ok. Start your roach production as soon as you see the push coming, and it's gg.
Against a 1 base baneling bust
He is toasted. Queenies + tranfuse and roach in time. No match. This build was designed to counter this strat and then evolved.
Against a 2 base mass zergling player
He will not try to bust your ramp, but maybe will try to counter attack whenever your roaches are moving for the push. Just wait for 1 more round of roaches and let them at home with your 2 queen full of energy. it will be enough to hold, and your roach will reach his base so he has to back up.
It is important to engage along a wall to prevent a complete surround. keep up the hit and run micro, and you will crush him easily.
Against a standard roach user on 2 base
Well, you'll have more roach than him. Keep rally roach and push endlessly. If you see him making spincrawler and barely hold your push, just keep your roach army at his front without engaging and make an extra round of drone, then keep the roach production. If he manages to pull a even game at this point, then you are about to enter the late-game phase of the game, which i will discuss further in another part of this thread.
Against a muta user
You have 3 queen and an evo chamber up. 1 spore crawler in mineral line is enough. Take your 4 gas and start hydralisk production. When you have enough hydra to move out, move out.
Theory and practice
Of course, a well executed all in will do a lot of damage to you. A lot of time, i lose both queen and most part of the roaches. But they should never be able to do some economic damage. And you'll be like 10 to 15 drone ahead, so it's only a matter of time before they die.
Managing your economy & late game
When your roach push reach your ennemy base, it is time for you to take 1 more gas, and to start +2 attack upgrade. It is important to know when to take an additional gas, as you don't want to have a lot of minerals that you can't spend while producing your roach army. Around 40 drone is the time for you to take your 3rd gas in order to produce roach and keep upgrading while keeping your money low. It will allow you to gain a roach number and an upgrade advantage all game long. But i honestly win 90% of my ZvZ, and 90% of this win are taken when my timing push occur.
Feel free to do whatever you want in late game. Roach/hydra or Roach/infestor are both good.
Why is this strategy good?
You can find every component of a good strategy in this build:
-Apply pressure: Mistakes are a big part of this game. You can't hope your opponent makes one, but you can definitely use pressure and harassment to force them. Forcing unit instead of drone and forcing agression instead of macro is the whole point here.
-To have a plan: Going into a game with a clear plan will help you tremendously. Why is that? Because along with practice, you are gonna be able to master every stage of the game, whatever is your opponent doing. The other reason is that you NEED to be able to transition out of any situation. All-in are certainly important in this |
even a “Church of England atheist” — that is, an atheist culturally formed by a particular religious context.
Some atheists today prefer not to privilege the Judeo-Christian God by professing disbelief in “any gods,” but we are all intractably creatures of the worlds in which we are raised and live, quarrel with them how we may. It is hard for us, reading Exodus, to put ourselves imaginatively into the position of men like Seti, Rameses and perhaps Moses, for whom the default religious picture of the world was not monotheism; for whom, indeed, monotheism might have been as radical an imaginative leap as heliocentrism in Copernicus’ day or general relativity in Einstein’s.
The strangeness of Scott’s burning-bush sequence and his daring approach to representing the divine presence Moses encounters may offer an imaginative way of bridging, at least partially, this religious cultural gap between Moses' day and our own.
Unlike Charlton Heston’s Moses, who heard a disembodied voice (Heston’s own voice) at the burning bush, Bale’s Moses sees and hears a young boy — not a beatific boy speaking in dulcet tones, like a proper Christian angel, but a scowling boy with a curt manner and a temper.
In a key scene, the boy expresses indignation over the subjugation of the Hebrews and startling fury at the divine pretensions of Egypt’s leaders: “These pharaohs, who imagine they are living gods, are nothing more than flesh and blood! I want to see them on their knees begging for it to stop!” Depending on the viewer’s dispositions, the boy’s temperament could be described as fierce, petulant, spiteful, etc.
Moses’ reply clarifies a key point: The boy is not God himself, but a heavenly messenger. There is biblical warrant for the idea that Moses encountered a messenger (or angel) of the Lord (Hebrew malak YHWH) at the burning bush (see Exodus 3:2, Acts 7:30-38).
Still, I imagine many Christians, and Jews for that matter, watching this scene will end up feeling that “Malak” (as he’s credited) might represent someone else’s god, but not our God. This is precisely what intrigues me about it.
Reading Exodus 3 as a Christian, I think of the one speaking to Moses as the Holy Trinity, and rightly so. Yet I’m also aware that this story was passed down for centuries by pre-Christian Jews with no conception of the Trinity — and, of course, the story is sacred to Jews today who do not accept the Trinity. At times in Israelite history, in fact, monotheism itself was a bit fuzzy; the story of the golden calf suggests some susceptibility to pagan imagination after centuries of slavery in Egypt.
If Malak’s manner leaves us at times uncomfortable, the depiction of God in the Old Testament at times has a similar effect, or ought to, if we aren’t dulled by familiarity. For example, the Old Testament depicts God commanding the massacre of whole populations, including women and children. At times, even God’s prophets are appalled by his decisions, arguing with him and even apparently changing his mind, as when Moses persuades God not to repudiate his people (Exodus 32).
I know very well the range of theological and exegetical answers to these issues. (I am working on my second Catholic seminary master’s degree, after all, and for my first I majored in sacred Scripture, with an Old Testament focus.) But knowing the answers doesn’t mean we shouldn’t feel the weight of the questions. It’s one thing to illuminate the dark passages of Scripture; it’s another to dismiss them as a non-problem, to say there are no dark passages. There are.
Pope Benedict XVI wrote about these dark passages in his apostolic exhortation Verbum Domini, pointing out, among other things, that divine Revelation is “deeply rooted in history,” with God working in slow, progressive stages to shape his chosen people, despite the resistance of human sinfulness. God’s character and nature were thus more clearly understood in Moses’ day than in Abraham’s, and more in Isaiah’s day than Moses’ — and more in Jesus’ day than Isaiah’s.
How God is depicted in the Pentateuch may not always fully conform to a developed Christian understanding of God, but it reflects how God was understood at a certain stage in salvation history. A case can be made that dramatic adaptations of these stories can reflect this ambiguity — though, of course, what we get then is how God was understood at a certain stage in salvation history, as that is understood by the artist in his own context, for good or ill. I won’t say I’m comfortable with all of the filmmakers’ choices here, but then I’m also sometimes uncomfortable with pious biblical movies that paper over these issues, revising the story to get God off the hook, as it were.
Given this progressive nature of divine Revelation, I can roll with the movie’s conceit that it took Moses time to grasp how Pharaoh’s grip on the Hebrews would be loosened, so that Moses spins his wheels while trying guerrilla-resistance tactics before God unleashes the plagues. (Noah likewise depicts its protagonist’s understanding of the Creator’s will in the flood clarifying slowly over time.)
On the other hand, the guerrilla-resistance sequence is part of a pattern of ratcheting up the tension between Moses and Rameses (Joel Edgerton) to such a degree that Moses is basically unable to fulfill his biblical role of God’s negotiator with Pharaoh. Throughout the plague sequence, the film entirely omits the recurring pattern of Pharaoh pleading with Moses for the plagues to be lifted, then hardening his heart once relief arrives. Moses confronts Rameses only twice, once before all the plagues — in secret, in the stables, with a sword to Rameses’ throat — and then again just prior to Passover night. Moses’ prophetic function is thus greatly diminished.
The film offers interesting, sometimes plausible naturalistic rationales for most of the plagues, often finding connections between them. It has long been noted, for example, that if the Nile turned to blood and the fish died, frogs would naturally be driven out of the river and onto the land. Flies, diseased livestock and boils can all plausibly be connected. The whole business gets started on a rather ludicrous, almost horror-movie note, but it works pretty well after that.
The plagues aren’t the only instance of divine activity for which the film posits actual or possible naturalistic rationales. Moses’ encounter with Malak is preceded by a blow on the head, which Moses’ wife Zipporah argues could have caused Moses to imagine the encounter. The parting of the Red Sea (or Reed Sea) is accounted for as a dramatic draining of water caused by an approaching tsunami, which then arrives right on schedule to wipe out the Egyptians (a theory that’s been around for years).
Further complicating matters, Moses does not foretell the plagues (although he does know from Malak that something is coming); instead, he only interprets them as divine action once they are under way.
None of this means, of course, that the film doesn’t affirm God’s active presence in the story. To begin with, there is the authorial weight of the opening titles, which expressly declare that not only have the Hebrews not forgotten their God during their centuries of slavery, but God has not forgotten them. And a tsunami that comes along at precisely the right moment to drain the sea for the Hebrews and then drown the Egyptian army certainly seems heaven-sent in one way or another.
Crucially, there is one sign that is clearly supernatural: the death of the Egyptian firstborn on Passover night. In this sign, which Moses does foretell and which is accompanied by an ominous shadow from heaven falling over the land, the hand of God is nakedly at work, thereby attesting that the other signs are not just coincidence.
Exodus: Gods and Kings is a flawed but intriguing film — one that, if I can’t quite embrace it, I’ve at least enjoyed wrestling with, as it were, even as the film’s Moses (and perhaps the filmmakers?) wrestled with God.
“I’ve noticed … you don’t always agree with me,” Malak tells Moses, watching him chisel the Ten Commandments. “Yet here we are, still talking.”
This exchange seems to place the recurring theme of wrestling with God in a context of what might be called “cafeteria faith” or “loyal dissent” — of maintaining a relationship with God even if you don’t agree with everything he says, in the spirit of “spiritual but not religious” postmodernity and dissident Catholicism. That’s a stance I obviously disagree with. Even so, it’s good to keep talking.
Read more:
Interview: Exodus Director Ridley Scott and Stars Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton
Steven D. Greydanus is the Register’s film critic and creator of Decent Films.
He is studying for the permanent diaconate for the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey.
Follow him on Twitter.By Mikie Sherrill
I left the Navy as a lieutenant after spending almost 10 years as a helicopter pilot. I worked as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey. And I am the mother of four children.
I have spent my life fighting for our country and our values. When those values are jeopardized, when our democracy is threatened, I believe it is our responsibility to speak out and demand accountability.
And while it's natural at this point to immediately check President Trump's Twitter account when you hear "threat to our democracy," it's alarmingly clear we need only look in our own backyard.
Last week, Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-11th Dist.) made local and national headlines for using his power to intimidate and target one of his constituents, Saily Avelenda. She was simply exercising her First Amendment rights -- freedom of speech, the right to assemble and petition the government. Avelenda, like many of us, got involved with local grassroots groups after the election, and had protested Frelinghuysen for refusing to meet with his constituents.
Apparently, for a powerful member of Congress like Frelinghuysen, such dissent is unacceptable.
He contacted a member of her employer's board, who also happens to be one of his campaign donors, to inform him of her activities. He included a handwritten note stating, "P.S. one of the ringleaders works for your bank!" Under pressure, Avelenda resigned.
It's easy to see why Frelinghuysen is so out of touch that he wouldn't care about a constituent's job security. He has, after all, been in Washington for 22 years. But for a middle-class New Jersey family, the thought of your member of Congress using his or her power to target you for exercising your rights is chilling.
As a former federal prosecutor with experience prosecuting both violent and white-collar criminals, I've seen what it looks like when the powerful prey on the vulnerable. So for me, Frelinghuysen's abuse of power is especially concerning. It shows a disrespect for the public trust that has been conferred upon him and a concerning lack of compassion.
That's why I applaud the calls from independent ethics watchdogs and Frelinghuysen's constituents to open an ethics investigation into his alarming abuse of power.
And regardless of the Office of Congressional Ethics' eventual ruling, it is clear that Frelinghuysen's regard for his constituent's livelihood and personal freedoms is nonexistent. Coupled with his refusal to hold town hall meetings in person and his vote to gut protections for pre-existing conditions, increase premiums on New Jersey families, and kick millions of Americans off their healthcare; his immoral actions have demonstrated, once and for all, that it is time for Frelinghuysen to go.
In times like these, we need leaders who will stand up for our values and put people before their own interests. We need leaders who will fight back against this type of unethical behavior.
I am running for Congress to create a better future for New Jersey's middle-class families, to ensure Americans have access to affordable college, to deliver tax reform that supports the middle class, and to decrease wasteful spending. Most importantly, I'm running to hold Washington and Frelinghuysen accountable, not to their donors or special interests, but to you.
Mikie Sherrill, a retired Navy lieutenant and an attorney, is seeking the Democratic nomination in the 2018 race for New Jersey's 11th Congressional District.
Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.Rose: Did you lose confidence in anybody because they came to you at that point and said, "Look, he ought to get outta this race," other than Reince Priebus? I mean, did your attitude towards those people who said that, they were just wrong?
Bannon: Absolutely. The Billy Bush Saturday to me is a litmus test. It's a litmus test. And I said it the other day to [White House Chief of Staff] General [John] Kelly during the Charlottesville thing, afterwards. It's a line I remember from the movie. "The Wild Bunch." William Holden uses it right before that huge gunfight at the end. "When you side with a man, you side with him," okay? The good and the bad. You can criticize him behind, but when you side with him, you have to side with him. And that's what Billy Bush weekend showed me. Billy Bush Saturday showed me who really had Donald Trump's back to play to his better angles. All you had to do, and what he did, was go out and continue to talk to the American people. … People didn't care. They knew Donald Trump was just doing locker room talk with a guy. And they dismissed it. It had no lasting impact on the campaign. Yet, if you see the mainstream media that day, it was, literally, he was falling into Dante's Inferno.Nicole Bartley is pictured in this undated handout photo provided by New York City Department of Investigation. REUTERS/New York City Department of Investigation/Handout via Reuters
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A corrections officer at New York’s infamous Rikers Island jail complex has been arrested on charges of planning to smuggle marijuana to an inmate with whom she had a sexual relationship, authorities said on Sunday.
Nicole Bartley, 30, was charged with promoting prison contraband, as well as rape and other charges. The rape charge stems from New York law, under which inmates cannot legally consent to sex inside the jail.
Bartley is the second corrections officer to be arrested in four days for allegedly trying to bring illegal narcotics into the complex.
More than two dozen officers and other staffer members have been charged since 2014 with crimes including assault, official misconduct and smuggling, as officials seek to address criticism that Rikers is plagued by a culture of violence and abuse.
Rikers, which comprises 10 separate jails, typically has about 10,000 inmates, most of whom are either awaiting trial or serving short sentences after conviction.
The city’s Department of Investigation said a drug-sniffing dog alerted authorities to Bartley when she arrived for work at 5 a.m. on Saturday.
While Bartley did not have any drugs on her, investigators found about 70 grams of marijuana at her home that she intended to deliver to an inmate with whom she had a sexual relationship, the department said.
The same dog, named Gunner, helped authorities on Wednesday arrest another officer, Mohammed Sufian, who was found to have hidden synthetic marijuana inside his socks on his way into Rikers, authorities said.
“This case involving sex for drugs puts on full display the dangers of corruption in our City’s jails and the connection between the drugs, inappropriate relationships and violence that pervade the system,” Mark Peters, the department’s commissioner, said of the Bartley arrest.De Villiers has always had a penchant for the gruesome and the decadent. One of his models was Curzio Malaparte, an Italian journalist whose best-known book is “Kaputt,” an eerie firsthand account from behind the German front lines during World War II. Another was Georges Arnaud, the French author of several popular adventure books during the 1950s. “He was a strange guy,” de Villiers said. “He once confessed to me that he started life by murdering his father, his aunt and the maid.” (Arnaud was tried and acquitted for those murders, possibly by a rigged jury.) I couldn’t help wondering whether Georges Simenon, the famously prolific and perverted Belgian crime writer, was also an influence. Simenon is said to have taken as little as 10 days to finish his novels, and he published about 200. He also claimed to have slept with 10,000 women, mostly prostitutes. De Villiers laughed at the comparison. “I knew Simenon a little,” he said, then proceeded to tell a raunchy story he heard from Simenon’s long-suffering wife, involving roadside sex in the snow in Gstaad.
This seemed like a good moment to ask about de Villiers’s own preoccupations. “I’ve had a lot of sex in my life,” he said. “That’s why I have so much trouble with wives. In America they would say I am a ‘womanizer.’ ” He has married four times and has two children, and now has a girlfriend nearly 30 years his junior, an attractive blond woman whom I met briefly at his home. When I suggested that the sex in S.A.S. was unusually hard-core, he replied with a chuckle: “Maybe for an American. Not in France.”
One thing de Villiers does not have is serious literary ambitions. Although he is a great admirer of le Carré, he has never tried to turn espionage into the setting for a complex human drama. He writes the way he speaks, in terse, informative bursts, with a morbid sense of humor. When I asked whether it bothered him that no one took his books seriously, he did not seem at all defensive. “I don’t consider myself a literary man,” he said. “I’m a storyteller. I write fairy tales for adults. And I try to put some substance into it.”
I had no idea what kind of “substance” until a friend urged me to look at “La Liste Hariri,” one of de Villiers’s many books set in and around Lebanon. The book, published in early 2010, concerns the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister. I spent years looking into and writing about Hariri’s death, and I was curious to know what de Villiers made of it. I found the descriptions of Beirut and Damascus to be impressively accurate, as were the names of restaurants, the atmosphere of the neighborhoods and the descriptions of some of the security chiefs that I knew from my tenure as The Times’ Beirut bureau chief. But the real surprise came later. “La Liste Hariri” provides detailed information about the elaborate plot, ordered by Syria and carried out by Hezbollah, to kill Hariri. This plot is one of the great mysteries of the Middle East, and I found specific information that no journalists, to my knowledge, knew at the time of the book’s publication, including a complete list of the members of the assassination team and a description of the systematic elimination of potential witnesses by Hezbollah and its Syrian allies. I was even more impressed when I spoke to a former member of the U.N.-backed international tribunal, based in the Netherlands, that investigated Hariri’s death. “When ‘La Liste Hariri’ came out, everyone on the commission was amazed,” the former staff member said. “They were all literally wondering who on the team could have sold de Villiers this information — because it was very clear that someone had showed him the commission’s reports or the original Lebanese intelligence reports.”
When I put the question to de Villiers, a smile of discreet triumph flashed on his face. It turns out that he has been friends for years with one of Lebanon’s top intelligence officers, an austere-looking man who probably knows more about Lebanon’s unsolved murders than anyone else. It was he who handed de Villiers the list of Hariri’s killers. “He worked hard to get it, and he wanted people to know,” de Villiers said. “But he couldn’t trust journalists.” I was one of those he didn’t trust. I have interviewed the same intelligence chief multiple times on the subject of the Hariri killing, but he never told me about the list. De Villiers had also spoken with high-ranking Hezbollah officials, in meetings that he said were brokered by French intelligence. One assumes these men had not read his fiction.
What do the spies themselves say about de Villiers? I conducted my own furtive tour of the French intelligence community and found that de Villiers’s name was a very effective passe-partout, even among people who found the subject mildly embarrassing. Only one of those I spoke with, a former head of the D.G.S.E., said he never provided information to de Villiers. We met in a dim corridor outside his office, where we chatted for a while about other matters before the subject of de Villiers came up. “Ah, yes, Gérard de Villiers, I don’t know him,” he said, chuckling dismissively, as if to suggest that he had not even read the books. Then after a pause, he confessed: “But one must admit that some of his information is very good. And in fact, one sees that it has gotten better and better in the past few novels.”
Another former spook admitted freely that he had been friends with de Villiers for years. We met at a cafe in Saint-Germain-des-Prés on a cold, foggy afternoon, and as he sipped his coffee, he happily reeled off the favors he’d done — not just talking over cases but introducing de Villiers to colleagues and experts on explosives and nuclear weapons and computer hacking. “When de Villiers describes intelligence people in his book, everybody in the business knows exactly who he’s talking about,” he said. “The truth is, he’s become such a figure that lots of people in the business are desperate to meet him. There are even ministers from other countries who meet with him when they pass through Paris.”The MMQB’s Albert Breer has a story today that Kansas City Chiefs fans will like. Breer points out that almost all of the contenders this year have a potentially fatal flaw: the Vikings offensive line, the Cowboys pass rush, the Broncos quarterback and so on.
It’s a good observation with New England obviously standing out as a very good team. Who else stands out? The Chiefs. Breer quotes an AFC executive and an NFC scouting director as they make the case that the Chiefs are the most complete team in the NFL.
“It’s not a team that you look forward to playing,” an AFC exec told Breer. “You have to play well. They’re well-coached, evenly balanced. They’re not great at anything but they’re good at a lot of things. They have enough weapons on offense to create mismatches … and getting (Justin) Houston back will help the D.”
They’re not great at anything but they’re good at a lot of things... There’s some truth to this. I would argue they are very good at taking the ball away, which is a big deal. There’s some randomness to turnovers I suppose.
“You know, I think the only team they wouldn’t beat in a three-game series might be New England,” an NFC scouting director told Breer. “To me, it’s when you catch them, because they’re up and down. But from 1-53, they’re probably the most complete team.”
Whew, boy. I agree with a lot of this, the good and the bad. The Chiefs ARE up and down. The Chiefs that faced the Texans and Steelers are not the same Chiefs that took down three top 10 offenses in the past three weeks. When the Chiefs offense is clicking and the defense is doing what they usually do, this is a very difficult team to beat.
Check out the whole story here.What is Reactive Programming? In English, please.
Samer Buna Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 25, 2016 Unlisted
Reactive Programming is a popular method for writing code that is based on reacting to changes. It’s inspired by our everyday life and how we take actions and communicate with others. When performing everyday life activities, we try to multitask when we can but the brain can’t multitask no matter how hard we try to have it do. The only way we humans can multitask is to switch tasks and split them efficiently during their lifetime. This makes more sense when the tasks that we need to do require some amount of waiting, which is almost always the case. We actually always switch-tasks, even when we’re not aware of it. For example, to execute the task of getting a coffee drink from Starbucks, you need to place an order, wait for it to be prepared, and then receive your drink. You’ll most likely find something else to do while you wait. I usually check my Twitter feed. This is the simplest form of executing a task reactively, you’ll do something else while you’re waiting on a “reaction” from the barista (to call your name when your order is ready).
Reactive programming is simply to program using, and relying on, events instead of the order of lines in the code. Usually this involves more than one event, and those events happen in a sequence over time. We call this sequence of events a “stream”. Think of events as anything that might happen in the future. For example, you know that Jane (a store owner) is always tweeting interesting stuff on Twitter, every time she tweets something we call that an “event”. If you look at Jane’s Twitter feed, you have a sequence of “events” happening over time (a stream of events). Reactive programming is named so because we get to “react” to those events. For example, imagine that you’re waiting for Jane to tweet a promotional code about something cool she sells in her store, and you want to “react” to that tweet, and buy the cool thing, using the promotional code. In a simplified picture, that’s exactly what Reactive programming is all about.
To be able to react to an event, we have to be monitoring it. If we don’t monitor the event, we’ll never know when to react to it. On Twitter, to monitor the events of Jane tweeting, we follow Jane and set our phone to notify us every time she tweets. When she does, we look at the tweet and make a decision if we need to further react to it or not.
In Reactive Programming, the process of monitoring an event is known as listening or subscribing to the event. This is, in fact, very similar to subscribing to a newsletter. When you subscribe to a newsletter on the Web, you supply your email address, and every time there is a new issue of the newsletter, your email address will be used as the way for you to get a copy of the issue. Similarly, we subscribe to an event stream with a function, and every time there is a new event, the stream will use the function to enable our code to react to the event. In this analogy, the newsletter platform is the event stream, every issue of the newsletter is an event, and your email is the function you use to subscribe to the event stream.
Now imagine a dynamic newsletter that allows you to select topics and send you only the news items that match your topics. You are basically filtering the newsletter issues to your liking, and that’s something we can do on event streams as well. Also imagine that you have subscribed to multiple newsletters using different email addresses, and later decided that you want all issues of the newsletters to be sent to a new single email address. One easy thing you can do is to set an email rule that forwards any issues from any newsletter to the new email address. You’re basically merging multiple newsletter issues into one email address, and that’s another thing we can do with event streams.
Another way to think about event streams is to compare them to regular arrays. They are actually very similar. Arrays are a sequence of values in space, while event streams are a sequence of values over time. In Reactive Programming, all the functional operations that we can do on an array — like filtering, reducing, mapping, combining, piping — can also be done on event streams! We can filter an event stream, reduce the values of an event stream, map an event stream to another, combine streams, and make one stream an input to another, among many other options that all yield a new stream of values over time.
Why can’t we just use arrays then, you might ask. The answer here is mostly about constraints, here are two examples:
Event streams are ideal when we need to work with big amounts of data. Sometimes, for example, the amount of data we need to work with exceeds the amount of space we have, and working with regular data structures will not be an option. For example, imagine that we have to calculate the frequencies of characters in a 5 GB file on a machine that only has 4GB of RAM. Converting the file into a stream and reading chunks of data at a time will be a much better solution than loading up the whole file in memory.
Event streams are also ideal when elements of data depend on previous values. Imagine, for example, that we need an array where every odd-positioned number has to be picked at random, and every even-positioned number has to be double the random value before it. Without Reactive Programming, we have to preprocess that array before we can have any code work with it, while with Reactive Programming, our array can simply be a stream of values over time, and whenever we have a new value we just react to it.
Our lives are full of events, and we naturally react to those events. That’s why I think the Reactive Programming pattern is an easier concept to understand and work with, and any code that’s written in a Reactive Programming style will be easier to maintain and extend.A Case for Upserts
It looks like upserts yet again will not land in Postgres. This is deeply unsatisfying because over the last couple of years it has become more than obvious for me that this functionality is not just useful but a necessity. Interestingly enough it seems like a lot of people are suggesting that depending on upserts means that the design of the application is bad but I would argue that anything other than upserts means that the application is actually deeply unreliable or badly planned.
What's an Upsert Upserts probably got a bad reputation because they were popularized by MySQL which is often regarded as a bad SQL database. However MySQL also became popular as a driving force behind web applications so some of its design decisions work really well in a web environment. In MySQL there are two types of upserts: replaces (which can be emulated in Postgres) and the "on duplicate" clause which can be used to react on an already existing row. The latter is really hard to efficiently implement in Postgres at the moment. I will go into the details of why upserts are important in a bit, I just want to show the two types of it first.
Replaces The simple upsert in MySQL Is the replace insert. It's an insert that will implicitly delete an already existing row before it does anything. The way it's implemented is an extension to the insert syntax: replace into my_table ( key, value ) values ( 'key', 'value' ); With an alternative syntax that works similar to updates (which to be fair, MySQL also has for insert and which I find much pleasant because it mirrors the update syntax): replace my_table set key = 'key', value = 'value' ; The way both of these work is by inserting a value and deleting an already existing record for a given primary key or unique constraint. The most common case for this safely treating a table as a key value store. In this particular case you can also use a transaction safely in Postgres and you can just send a delete before the insert: begin ; delete from my_table where key = 'key' ; insert into my_table ( key, value ) values ( 'key', 'value' ); commit ; The obvious problem with this however is that a transaction that happens concurrently will not see the row any more. You can easily test this by just not committing and attempting to update from another shell. The update will block until the commit happens but once it finishes it will tell you that zero rows were updated even though there were clearly rows available to update. The reason for this is that transactions just serialize the execution, they don't guarantee any atomicity of independent row updates. After the delete happens the second transaction gets a chance to run and the update will fail because it no longer sees a row. Now if you're thinking the solution is to just raise the isolation level, you're in for a disappointment. Even with the highest isolation level the result is the same. However an explicit table lock gets around this. To be honest, this probably has the same characteristics as doing the same operation on MyISAM where MySQL got its initial upserts from: begin ; lock my_table in exclusive mode ; delete from my_table where key = 'key' ; insert into my_table ( key, value ) values ( 'key', 'value' ); commit ; This will work and still allow concurrent reads, but it will definitely block any concurrent modifications from happening.
On Duplicate Clauses The more interesting upsert in MySQL is the ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE clause. For some reason this got a bad reputation similar to basic's on error resume next even though it's not just useful but also the only safe way to handle concurrency with uniques. The way it works is by defining an insert as well as an update in the same statement. For instance this is the way to implement safe counters that are not initialized upfront: insert into counters ( counter_name, seq ) values ('my_counter', 1 ) on duplicate key update seq = seq + 1 ; If the key'my_counter' does not exist yet, the row is created by inserting it with the value 1 for seq otherwise it will execute the update statement on that particular row. There is an obvious question what happens if there are two unique constraints on a table, and the answer is quite simply that it breaks down in that case. If there are two uniques MySQL will not give an error but just execute the operation as if it was happening on the first row that matches. Essentially the where is extended to be be an or for any of the unique constraints compared to the values from the insert statement. This is obviously dangerous and definitely not optional. In a purely theoretical case the better way would be to be explicit about the uniqueness. This could work like this (if a database would support it): insert into counters ( counter_name, seq ) values ('my_counter', 1 ) on duplicate key ( counter_name ) update seq = seq + 1 ; The standard SQL way is to be super explicit about everything and very confusing MERGE STATEMENT.
Why Upserts? So why are upserts important? The reason is concurrency. Without an upsert there is no way to reliably ensure that a row is in a certain state. The only workaround is to move the code that creates the row into a locked (or semi locked) situation. For instance the traditional example of a one-to-one relationship is usually solved in postgres by just ensuring the related inserts have low chance of concurrency. Imagine for instance you have users and user settings. Each row in the users table has also a related row in the user settings table but each user can only ever have one. Since users typically only ever register once you can just hope for the best and just do an insert. In case there is some concurrency happening then the second transaction will just fail with a unique constraint failure. This reason this is a problem is because of lazy creation, network failure and the hope to make all operations idempotent.
Lazy Creation Lazy creation is the obvious example of where the lack of upserts is painful. The counter example was already brought up. In this case a counter gets created on first increment but that's by far not the only example. A much more common case is functionality that did not exist at a certain point in time and is related to bulk data already existing or is just inherently optional. For instance say you have a few million users and all the sudden you want to add a new one-to-one relationship for these users. Say for instance you added a new notification feature and you want to store the notification settings in a new table. If you don't have upserts the only way to safely deal with this is to have a migration script that adds a nulled-out row for each of these users at the time you add this feature to your application. This is expensive and ultimately a waste of space, because many of your users will already be inactive at the time you add this feature. Also not all of those users will actually use notifications. The obviously better way is an upsert: create this row when the user first needs to configure the notification settings.
Network Failure and Idempotency Upserts are especially important for web applications because the network is inherently unreliable. It's true that HTTP is implemented on top of TCP, a reliable transport, but obviously there is one case that TCP (or HTTP) cannot do by themselves: bidirectional acknowledgement of high level operations. An operation is idempotent if it can be applied multiple times without changing the outcome. An example of such an operation is any read-only operation (such as selects). It does not matter how many times you select something, it will still give you the same result. While the data returned for the next select might be slightly different because of concurrent updates, the select itself does not modify the data. Another inherently idempotent operation is obviously a deletion. No matter how many times you delete something, in the end the row is always gone. Again, someone might concurrently re-create the row but that does not make the operation non-idempotent. On the other hand inserts, increments and similar things are not idempotent. The traditional example is usually brought up with purchases but really this problem is not unique to purchases: it can happy for every single non-idempotent HTTP request. Say you click the purchase button but an error occurs: is it safe to submit the payment again or not? How would you know? The simple answer is that you cannot know because of late failure on the network. For instance say there was a badly implemented web store and a user clicks on the submit button and ultimately the website times out or the user gets a connection reset message. However as far as the server was concerned the request was made, the record for the payment was recorded, the transaction was committed and the user was redirect to a result page and the connection was closed after sending the data. Unfortunately all of this went through a proxy server and the proxy server barfed when sending the data back to the client. The only way to make such an operation idempotent is to provide extra information with the initial request to be able |
strategy, and are more suited to a longer Duel, where the rest of the Deck's inadequacies become more and more prevalent. Many of its long-term plans are also based on a mill-control type strategy, hopeless in the modern era of Graveyard effects and recursion.
That said, the main line of the Deck can be vulnerable to cards that prevent them from conducting the Battle Phase or attacking, such as "Threatening Roar" or "Battle Fader". Despite the protection given by "Goddess Urd's Verdict", they are still vulnerable to cards like "Quaking Mirror Force", "Drowning Mirror Force", "Floodgate Trap Hole", etc. This fast-paced strategy also renders them vulnerable to cards like "Anti-Spell Fragrance" and "Imperial Order", which can be fatal to the Deck, postponing the activation of key cards such as "Ride of the Valkyries" and "Mischief of the Time Goddess". Indeed, simply negating "Ride" is normally enough to stop the Valkyrie strategy cold.The 15-year-old pepper-sprayed at a Donald Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE rally earlier this week may face charges of disorderly conduct for allegedly punching a man in an altercation captured on video.
Police in Janesville, Wis., where the rally took place Tuesday, are recommending juvenile authorities bring charges — even though the man the girl allegedly punched doesn’t want to press charges, according to The Associated Press.
The girl alleges the man touched her chest, but police said Thursday they found no evidence to support that.
On video, the girl confronts a man in the crowd, and it appears she throws a punch before getting pepper-sprayed in the face.
Investigators said they’ve haven’t identified the man who pepper sprayed the girl. Police described the use of pepper spray as an act of violence and said the person responsible could face misdemeanor battery charges.Image Space Incorporated has released an on-board video of the historical Monaco street circuit that is part of their upcoming rFactor 2 title.
Following the first official video trailer that gave us a first glimpse of the track, Image Space Incorporated has released an on-board video of the historical Monaco street circuit that is part of their upcoming rFactor 2 title.
The video shows several laps in the historical Formula 2 car as it passes a Formula 3 car that is also on track. You can watch the Youtube version below, a download-link to a high-resolution version is available here.
rFactor 2 will introduce various improvements to the modding-friendly simulation including weather, driver animations and a refined graphics engine alongside plenty of current and historic motor racing content.
Recently, ISI announced the pricing structure of the upcoming title that will be available as content-limited open beta version later this year.Tabata has 3 hits in Pirates loss to Twins
BRADENTON, Fla. -- Pirates left fielder Jose Tabata is taking a liking to the leadoff spot.
The Pirates lost today, 4-2, to the Minnesota Twins in Grapefruit League play at McKechnie Field, but it was a day in which Tabata stayed hot as manager Clint Hurdle continues to bat him at the top of the order.
Tabata, went 3 for 3 with an RBI and now has hits in his last four at-bats in spring training. Last season, Tabata hit some in the leadoff spot, but it was a place in the order more reserved for center fielder Andrew McCutchen, who Hurdle has shifted to the No. 3 spot in the early portion of these spring training games.
Pirates starting pitcher Ross Ohlendorf struck out four batters and gave up two hits and an unearned run in his 1 2/3 innings to start the game. Ohlendorf was replaced before getting out of the second, as he reached his pitch limit prior to retiring six batters.
Ohlendorf not making it through the outing shouldn't be seen as too much of a negative, though, as that isn't the truest measure of such spring appearances.
He did, however, have solid command of his breaking pitch, which he said is a hybrid between a slider and curveball.
"I felt really good with how I was throwing," Ohlendorf said. "My arm feels really good. Right now to me, that is the most important thing. There are other things that are important, too. But I was really happy with today."
Third baseman Pedro Alvarez had a double for the Pirates.
Minnesota scored to make it 1-0 in the first, when Danny Valencia doubled to left to score Ben Revere. Another Valencia double in the third, scoring Trevor Plouffe this time, put the Twins ahead, 2-0.
The Pirates sliced the disadvantage in half, 2-1, in the bottom of the fifth on a Tabata RBI single.
But closer Joel Hanrahan wasn't at his sharpest as he worked the top of the sixth, giving up three hits, one of those a Luke Hughes solo home run to start the inning and make it 3-1. Minnesota scored another in the eighth to push it to 4-1 on a single by Rene Tosoni off of Pirates reliever Justin Thomas, who is fighting for a spot in the bullpen.
Dusty Brown, who is in a clash with Jason Jaramillo for a reserve catching role, had an RBI single in the bottom of the ninth bringing in Steve Pearce to cut the Pirates' deficit to 4-2.
The Pirates travel to Dunedin, Fla. at 1:05 tomorrow to face the Toronto Blue Jays.
First published on March 2, 2011 at 3:53 pmCLOSE Body camera footage from LMPD officers at the shooting scene in the 2600 block of Magazine on Wednesday. Provided by LMPD
In this image taken from LMPD body cam video, Off. Sarah Stumler draws her gun when she sees Bruce Warrick behind a mattress leaning against a wall. (Photo: LMPD body cam)
Body camera video shows that a man shot by a Louisville Metro Police officer Wednesday was unarmed and fired upon almost immediately after she told him to put his hands up.
Chief Steve Conrad said after the video was released Thursday that he is reserving judgment until the completion of an internal investigation.
Meanwhile, 38-year-old Bruce Warrick remains in critical condition at University of Louisville Hospital.
Warrick was shot in the gut when three officers searched an abandoned house about 11:30 a.m. in the 2600 block of Magazine Street, Conrad said at a Thursday news conference. They were called to the house following reports that a man was using drugs outside and then went in the house.
Video shows the officers identified themselves multiple times as they moved through the house.
►RELATED: What we know about the officers involved in the shooting
►SEE ALSO: Man sentenced in relation to Longmeyer scheme
Officer Sarah Stumler's body camera shows she approached a box spring leaning against a wall. As she looked behind the box spring, Warrick is seen in the video standing in the shadows. Stumler yelled, "Show your hands," and raised her gun from her side.
Officer Sarah Stumler (Photo: Louisville Metro Police Department)
Almost immediately, she fired once, then said, "Shit."
While the officers waited on an ambulance, they stayed beside Warrick and applied pressure to his wound. Stumler can be heard saying, "You're fine, man," and, "You're OK, just hold on."
Warrick remained conscious and was audibly in pain in the videos.
No weapon is seen and Conrad said Thursday that none was found in a search of the house.
Warrick underwent surgery to remove parts of his intestines and pancreas, according to activist Christopher 2X, who said he was speaking on behalf of Warrick's mother and grandmother Thursday at the hospital.
"He's in very, very serious condition," 2X said.
“People want answers, people want to hear what really happened, and we want everyone to be as transparent as possible.” James L. Linton, Louisville activist
One of Warrick’s cousins and 2X viewed the body camera footage with Public Integrity Unit investigators Thursday afternoon. The unit is tasked with determining what happened and whether the use of force was justified.
The cousin appreciated being shown the body camera video “but felt nothing he saw gave him any indication that his cousin was posing a threat to the officers in the room,” 2X said.
►RELATED: Metro Council frustrated as homicide toll rises
►SEE ALSO: Ali Jr.: 'I wasn’t terrorizing anybody'
Stumler, who has been with the department since February 2009, is now on administrative leave with her police powers suspended pending the completion of the investigation, per department policy.
Evidence in all police shootings is forwarded to the Commonwealth's Attorney's Office to evaluate if further investigation is needed or if criminal charges will be filed.
An internal Professional Standards Unit investigation to determine if any departmental policies were violated will then follow.
A family photo of 38-year-old Bruce Warrick in the ICU. (Photo: Courtesy of the Warrick family)
Police policy states deadly force is authorized when officers act in defense of themselves or another and reasonably believe that the subject poses an immediate threat of death or serious physical injury.
Officers Braden Lammers and Aaron Seneker, with the department since August and December 2016, respectively, were also in the house with Stumler but did not fire their weapons.
Stumler’s personnel file shows more than a dozen commendations and two disciplinary actions for court attendance and being at fault in an accident.
The officers were not injured.
Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer issued a statement Tuesday evening asking for community members to be patient as the investigation into the incident unfolds.
"In the wake of yesterday's shooting, I ask for the community to join me in prayer and compassion for Mr. Bruce Warrick and Officer Sarah Stumler and their families," Fischer's statement said. "Chief Conrad and I are committed to a thorough investigation into the circumstances, and a fully transparent process, which started with releasing the body camera video a day after the incident. I urge patience as we undertake a thorough investigation -- for Mr. Warrick, for Officer Stumler, and for our entire community."
2X, along with fellow activists Jerald Muhammad and James L. Linton, told reporters at a press conference Thursday morning that they fear the shooting could stoke existing tension between police and the black community, and they hope for transparency from police.
NEWSLETTERS Get the Breaking News newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Breaking news alerts Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-866-2211. Delivery: Varies Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Breaking News Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters
"My phone started lighting up as soon as the incident happened," said Linton, the host of the Community Connections radio show. "People want answers, people want to hear what really happened, and we want everyone to be as transparent as possible."
Warning: Video contains graphic content
The three said Conrad has been transparent in past police shootings, including the killings of 57-year-old Army veteran Darnell Wicker on Aug. 8, 2016, in southwestern Louisville and 32-year-old William Young on Feb. 12 in the 1200 block of Oleanda Avenue. Both cases remain under review.
However, the activists said they have concerns over Wednesday's shooting, including the degree of force used.
"In the past, it seems like the police always justify these shootings, so there's a lot of concerns and a lot of mistrust, and we understand that," said Muhammad, who founded Brothers Helping Brothers, a youth jobs program.
►ON THE GO? Download the CJ app for iPhone, Android and iPad
►FOLLOW US: Watch the latest featured video on YouTube
2X said the family was aware of his drug issues. He said Warrick, who grew up in the Shawnee area and is now homeless, was enrolled in substance-abuse classes and spoke with his family more than a week ago and was in "great spirits."
Court records show Warrick has previous felony drug convictions in Jefferson County.
"What his mother and grandmother have told me about him is that he had trouble with substance abuse but he was a very passive individual," 2X said. "It was not uncommon when he was depressed or anything like that to go to abandoned houses and sleep there."
Reporter Justin Sayers can be reached at [email protected] or 502-582-4252. Follow him on Twitter at @_JustinSayers. Reporter Matthew Glowicki can be reached at 502-582-4989 or [email protected].
CLOSE Christopher 2X and activists James Linton and Jerald Muhammad addressed the media on Thursday in regard to the LMPD officer related shooting on Wednesday. The victim is in critical condition after surgery after being shot in the abdomen. Alton Strupp/CJ
Read or Share this story: http://cjky.it/2lDdRMoNewly obtained video by The New Orleans Advocate shows harrowing footage of the March 2015 night when Richard White raged through a New Orleans airport terminal, violently charging people with a machete and attacking others with wasp spray.
White was shot by a Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s deputy that night and later died.
Trouble seeing the video? Click here.
In the video, White is seen challenging TSA agents at Southwest Airlines’ Concourse B. He tried to go through the preclearance lane, causing one of the agents to ask him to halt. White then sprayed two agents with a can of wasp spray. A female agent also suffered a laceration to her arm, which was later deemed to be likely caused by a stray bullet.
Additional photos show other potentially dangerous items possessed by White, including mini Molotov cocktails and firecrackers.
As the attack occurred, the video shows people fleeing in all directions for safety. When calm returned, some travelers discovered injuries suffered during the hysteria.
White, 63, refused medical treatment after he was shot due to his religious beliefs as a Jehovah's Witness. No motive for the attack was established, although family members said White suffered from depression and mental illness.
Authorities have since deemed the shooting of White as justified, concluding that Lt. Heather Sylve of JPSO followed her training and had no alternative to deadly force.
“The security officials did everything they could to stop the perpetrator, to secure the scene, and they saved a lot of lives,” New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said at the time. “Security officials, as you know by now, acted quickly. They acted heroically.
Said JPSO Sheriff Newell Normand: Officers and TSA agents “stood their ground as much as they could and, in many cases, delayed certain things. He headed back up the exit lane right up into our arms. Had (White) he made it down the concourse — who knows? Nobody will ever know.”15 OCT 3301
On Sunday, Arissa Lavigny-Duval will be crowned Emperor. Preparations for the coronation are almost complete, and the population of Capitol is eagerly awaiting the inauguration of the Empire's first female ruler. To mark this prestigious occasion, the future Emperor has invited galactic citizens to bring her gifts in exchange for certain incentives. In a statement, Lavigny-Duval said:
"It has long been a tradition for Imperial citizens to bestow gifts upon their new ruler. For the first time, and in keeping with the inclusive philosophy I intend to cultivate, I am extending this invitation to all galactic citizens. Anyone who wishes to do so may deliver coronation gifts, in the form of slaves, to Achenar."
The request for slaves is likely to invoke the ire of anti-slavery groups, but the Empire has underscored the fact that all slaves – not only Imperial slaves – will be accepted. This means that any non-Imperial slaves brought to Achenar will be reclassified as Imperial slaves, which will almost certainly improve their quality of life.
Pilots who respond to the request will be offered discounts on Imperial ships, as well as being granted access to vessels that would ordinarily require a rank in the Imperial Navy. The permit restrictions on Achenar have also been temporarily lifted to allow pilots to deliver gifts to the future Emperor.Eddie's Wheels -- Dog Wheelchairs, Made in the USA The world's best custom built wheelchair at an affordable price, starting at $355.
Eddie’s Wheels designs and manufactures custom dog wheelchairs and wheelchairs for a variety of handicapped pets.
As caregivers of disabled dogs for the past 20 years, Eddie and Leslie Grinnell knew what they wanted for their pets: a wheelchair designed for on and off-road play that would allow their pets to enjoy a good quality of life while they healed.
A mechanical engineer by trade, Ed’s revolutionary design has been endorsed by veterinarians, rehab practitioners and canine chiropractors.
Some of the benefits of an Eddie's Wheels wheelchair:
Custom-built, tailored and engineered to match your pet’s disability and body shape.
Welded, padded saddle gives your pet solid support on its pelvic floor, eliminating chafing to delicate soft tissue.
Lightweight solid aluminum construction with wheels to match your pet’s terrain.
Adjustable for height and length.
Our exclusive Variable axle carts allow owners to change the balance of the cart to compensate for increasing weakness in the front legs for dogs with degnerative myelopathy.
Easy to use, indestructible and warranteed for the life of your pet.
Hand Made in the USA in our own workshop in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, and exported all over the world!
Check out our Dog Wheelchair Comparison page to find out more about the Eddie's Wheels difference.This is the shocking moment a drink-driver plunges off a bridge and lands his car upside down on a motorway, killing himself and seriously injuring his girlfriend.
The unnamed victims were travelling at speed in the early hours of the morning, having apparently been out for a night of heavy drinking.
Traffic cameras in the city of Mudanjiang, in north-eastern China's Heilongjiang Province, show the motorist driving straight off the bridge, crashing through the concrete barrier and falling about 16 feet onto the road below.
A driver died when his car plunged off a bridge and ended up upside down on a motorway
The dramatic footage shows the vehicle landing front end first, completely destroying the bumper and scattering debris across the road, which was relatively empty at the time of the crash.
Dashcam video and mobile phone footage from the scene show passers-by surrounding the accident site, where the vehicle remained upside-down until authorities arrived.
The unnamed victims were travelling at speed in the early hours after a night of drinking
It happend in the city of Mudanjiang, in north-eastern China's Heilongjiang Province
Traffic cameras there captured the dramatic footage in which the car plunges off the bridge
The car went through a concrete barrier and fell about 16 feet onto the motorway below
Police officers and local firefighters shifted the vehicle onto its side and managed to free both driver and passenger from the mangled metal.
But the man was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics, while his girlfriend was rushed to hospital and is still in intensive care.
Mudanjiang police, who are now investigating the case, are treating the crash as an accident and have not detained anyone in connection with the fatal incident.DETROIT — Mark Howe paused, then turned away from the camera, choking back tears.
The Howe family knew this day would come — not even Mr. Hockey is immortal — but that didn’t make it any easier. There is no way to prepare for goodbye.
“It’s just hard,” Mark said, minutes after his father’s funeral mass concluded. “I’m just extremely thankful dad was able to hang on so long at the end. I really wanted to be with him. I was rubbing his forehead as he went.”
The hockey world bid farewell to Gordie Howe on Wednesday, with luminaries from Wayne Gretzky and Guy Lafleur to Chris Chelios and Dylan Larkin paying their respects in a moving service at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in downtown Detroit.
Howe passed away last Friday at the age of 88.
Howe’s youngest son, Dr. Murray Howe, presented a 27-minute eulogy before the Roman Catholic service began. Red Wings jerseys dotted the crowd, with hockey fans sharing the same audience as some of the game’s iconic names.
“My brother Murray spoke so highly of my father and the way we feel and the person my father was,” Mark said. “I would have never been able to get through that.”
Murray got through the eulogy with a touch of humour, offering insight into what it was like to grow up being the son of one of the best hockey players ever to lace up skates.
“He once signed an autograph for a little boy named Gordie, named after him, and a woman came up to him and asked ‘Are you someone famous?’” Murray recounted. “My father said, ‘No, I used to babysit that guy.’”
But Murray said the Howe children, too, grew up in awe of their dad. Murray often referred to his father as “Mr. Hockey” throughout the eulogy.
“I still pinch at the realization that he was my father,” Murray said.
Howe left his children with many life lessons over the past 60-plus years.
One was: “Don’t ever gripe about the cards you’ve been dealt. Don’t worry about anyone else’s cards. Just be thankful you get to play,” Murray remembered.
Or another: “I don’t know of any human being who can go, knock out teeth, give people cuts and bruises, punch them in the nose, elbow them in the nose and they revered the man,” Mark said. “Dad had a certain way about him, not anything you can teach, not anything you can learn. He had a special, special impact on everybody he met.”
Howe had a lasting impact on the hockey community at large, embracing what it meant to be a professional hockey star in the community. He wanted to make approaching fans feel at ease, no matter the circumstance.
“I think what I’ll remember is just how genuinely nice of a person he was,” Gretzky said. “Every story I knew about Gordie was a good story, a positive story. He had this way of making people smile and laugh.
“Athletes today are getting bigger and better, but what you don’t replace is their personalities.”
Gretzky called acting as one of Howe’s pallbearers one of the highlights of his life. He idolized Howe, studying his life and writing book reports about him as a kid growing up in Brantford, Ont.
“I was never a very good student. I didn’t read a lot of books. I couldn’t wait to get to the hockey rink most days. I didn’t get many A’s in school, unless it was a book report on Gordie Howe,” Gretzky said. “That was my life.”
Howe cannot be replaced. Helicopters and horse-mounted police stood vigil at his funeral, keeping the horde of media and onlookers at a distance. An entire city block was closed to traffic one day after lines of fans snaked around Joe Louis Arena for a public visitation.
Numerous billboards and signs around downtown Detroit celebrated Mr. Hockey and offered well wishes. The mayor of Detroit attended the funeral, along with Michigan’s governor and other hockey royalty.
“I was eight years old and I used to listen to his games on the radio,” former Red Wings teammate Frank Mahovlich said. “I looked up to him as a player and ever since. We’ve lost a great man.”
“I asked my dad a few years ago what he would like me to say at his funeral,” Murray said. “He said, ‘Say this: Finally, the end of the third period.’ Then he added, ‘I hope there is a good hockey team in heaven.’”
Once in heaven, the funeral’s celebrant priest joked: “I hope he doesn’t elbow too many angels.”
Mr. Hockey was too much of a gentleman for that.
“Mr. Hockey left the world with no regrets,” Murray said. “And although he did not lead the league in church attendance, his life has been the epitome of a faithful servant."
“My gosh,” Gretzky said. “The world today isn’t as good of a place as it was when we had Gordie.”
Contact Frank Seravalli on Twitter: @frank_seravalliTas Liberals expect to govern
Updated
Tasmania's Opposition Leader Will Hodgman says he expects to be given the opportunity to govern.
Addressing a packed tally room in Hobart, Mr Hodgman said his party looked like capturing the highest percentage of the primary vote.
"[It is] the Liberal Party that has won the most votes right across Tasmania," he said.
"Tasmanians have sent a very clear message tonight and it is one for change.
"It is one for a brighter, positive future. I will ensure that we will work constructively, positively and with their interests at our heart."
With more than 80 per cent of the vote counted, the results point to a hung Parliament as predicted.
Labor has lost four seats and the swing against the Government near the end of the first round of counting is about 12 per cent.
The likely result is Labor 10, the Liberals 10 and the Greens 5 in the 25 seat House of Assembly.
Mr Hodgman topped the poll in Franklin and has the highest vote in the state.
Greens leader Nick McKim told the tally room a hung Parliament is an opportunity for a new era of co-operative politics in Tasmania.
He described it as a historic result for his party and the Greens' best ever election achievement in any Australian state or territory.
"What an opportunity this is for Tasmania, what an opportunity for a new era of constructive, co-operative politics, for politicians to work together not to advance their own interests or their party's, but to advance Tasmania," he said.
"The Tasmanian people have moved past that tired old view."
Premier David Bartlett was the last of the leaders to speak.
He congratulated Mr Hodgman and Mr McKim and praised their campaigns.
He says he accepts responsibility for Labor's performance.
"The electorate has sent Labor a message," he said.
The undecided seats are in Denison in the south and Braddon, in the north-west.
In Denison, it is a contest between the Greens' Helen Burnett, Liberal Richard Lowrie and the Independent outsider Andrew Wilkie.
With 84 per cent of the primary vote counted, the Premier David Bartlett and Scott Bacon, Liberal Matthew Groom and the Greens' Cassy O'Connor have all been elected.
The last seat in Braddon will be won by either the incumbent Liberal MP Brett Whiteley or the Greens' Paul O'Halloran.
Labor's Bryan Green and Brenton Best have been returned, along with the Liberal deputy leader Jeremy Rockliff.
Topics: elections, alp, greens, liberals, tas, hobart-7000, launceston-7250
First postedTeam Effort
Weiss
Weiss was having a lousy day. Nothing seemed to be working right for her, which slowly over the course of the day just added to her growing irritation. She had woken up later than normal and missed breakfast before class, she had to suffer silently as she watched Ruby sleep during several of the classes. What surprised and irritated her even more is that the professors weren't saying anything to her about it. Ruby had even bumped into her and caused her to accidentally spill her drink at lunch, and now that she was developing a migraine she noticed all too plainly that Yang was very, very loud. Finally, to put the icing on the cake, she had to assist Professor Port after classes finished for the day, as part of a promise she had made to him the week prior. She should have been looking forward to it, but her irritation at the day as a whole only made it seem like a chore.
Finally, after the day was officially over for her, she made her way back to her shared dorm where she knew her team would be waiting. All she wanted to do was shower, study for a little bit, and then go to sleep to try and forget that today had even happened. She entered the room of team RWBY, and what she saw only added to her irritation. Blake and Yang were both studying, preparing for tests in the coming days, but Ruby was sitting in the floor with her legs folded playing a video game.
Ruby, without looking up, simply greeted her with, "Hey, Weiss." Weiss narrowed her eyes as she observed her team leader, who was neglecting her studies in favor of a video game. She marched over to the dresser that the TV and game console rested on and yanked the cables out of the wall, shutting both electronics off. "Hey, what gives? I was about to beat the game!"
"What do you think you're doing?" Weiss asked angrily.
"I was playing a game."
"Are you even slightly prepared for the tests coming up? Do even know that we have tests coming up?" Weiss gave a heavy sigh. "Why do I even bother trying to help you? You're just going to study in a half assed manner and fail any way." Ruby was somewhat surprised to hear Weiss swear. "For you to be a team leader, you are very clearly not doing your job at all! You're supposed to set an example for your team to follow. What have you done lately? You've slept in class, become a nuisance everywhere, and when I come back after a long day I find you not studying, but playing a video game!"
Yang and Blake both wanted to interject, but they just didn't know what they could say as they watched the Ice Queen chew Ruby out.
"Weiss," Ruby replied weekly. "I can explain."
"No. Don't. I don't want to hear your excuses. You're an idiot who can't get by without someone else's help, you don't appreciate the help that they give you, and all you do is make trouble for everyone. I think I made a mistake in taking Professor Port's advice, and I am back to square one; you are not fit to be the leader of team RWBY!"
Ruby stood up angrily, which took the other two members of team RWBY by surprise; Ruby was never angry. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to be a team leader, Weiss?"
Weiss scoffed. "It'd be child's play for me to lead a team."
"Well, that may be the case for you, but it's not for me! I barely get to do anything that I want around here. Have you not noticed at all what I've been doing for the past month?" Ruby asked, and continued before Weiss could reply. "I've planned training exercises, built up our team's cooperation through those exercises, created battle plans for our next assignment in the Emerald Forest, studied for every class we have, and I've only slept for a few hours each night to accomplish all of this! Do you want to know why I slept in class today, or why I made you spill your drink? Because I'm exhausted! I've tried to meet your standards, and the only thing you have to say about it is that I'm not doing my job. I wasn't neglecting anything by playing that game Weiss; I was taking my first real break in a god damn month!"
Weiss was taken by surprise to hear the venom in Ruby's words. The only reply Weiss could stammer out was, "O-oh."
"Yeah. 'Oh'. Maybe if you weren't always such a stuck up bitch whose only real hobby seems to be picking on me and making me feel miserable, you might notice that I'm actually trying very, very hard!"
Weiss was offended and surprised. Ruby had just called her a bitch, which never happened. She even heard Yang gasp in shock. Weiss, in her typical fashion, simply replied with, "How dare you!"
"No! How dare you! I am tired of this, Weiss. I've wanted nothing more than to be your friend, and you've only ever made my life a living hell. I can only take so much abuse, Weiss! You think I should step down as leader? Well, maybe the problem isn't the leader; it's the teammate who can't see past her own self entitled attitude!"
Weiss was about to retort with something, but she couldn't remember what it was because she felt a stinging sensation coming from her left cheek before falling to the floor; Ruby had just slapped her. "Ruby, I…" Ruby slapped her again, and was about to do so a third time.
Yang hopped off of her bunk and wrapped her arms around Ruby to keep her from getting closer to Weiss. "Ruby! Calm down! Ruby, stop it!"
Ruby was yelling with tears rolling down her face. "No! I'm tired of her, Yang! I'm tired of her treating me like garbage! She needs to know how it feels!" She struggled as she yelled. "Let me go! Let me go!"
Blake went over to Weiss once she was sure that Yang had a hold of Ruby. She helped the white haired girl up to her feet, saying, "Let's go for a walk, Weiss. Everyone needs to calm down."
Weiss nodded, failing as she tried to fight back her tears.
Ruby: Earlier that Day
Ruby was upset that the sun was already rising. Over the past month she had been studying like there was no tomorrow, preparing for the coming tests. She couldn't fail them. During a meeting of the team leaders last month, Professor Ozpin told them that the leaders would be given an even stricter grading scale, saying that it was to judge how they handle themselves as a team leader; as such, Ruby couldn't afford to do poorly. This had the negative drawback of reducing her hours of sleep to nearly zero. She got up and showered in an attempt to wash away her fatigue. When she walked out she walked by Yang, who paused and looked at her with concern; Ruby could only assumed it was because her lack of sleep was finally making itself known on her face.
She ate a quick breakfast and returned to the dorm to study a little bit more. Weiss was still sleeping, and by the time she woke up the team had to go straight to class. Ruby took her seat next to Weiss and tried her hardest to pay attention in class. Days of sleep deprivation, however, were too much for her to handle and she passed out at her desk, not noticing Weiss's growing irritation. When class was dismissed she didn't notice Weiss storming out of the room, and she felt Yang gently wake her. "Ruby, it's time for the next class."
"Hm?" Ruby replied. She bolted up. "Did I fall asleep?" she asked.
Yang nodded. "Are you okay, Ruby? I've never seen you this tired."
Ruby was about to lie and say she was fine, but she learned long ago that if there is a single person you don't lie to, it was her sister. "I haven't slept properly in a few days," she replied sheepishly.
Yang looked at her sister with growing concern, unsure of what could be keeping her sister from sleeping; Ruby wasn't allowed to tell her teammates about her strict grading on the coming tests. Yang finally smiled. "How about this; I'll take more detailed notes for you to copy later, and I'll let you sleep in the rest of our classes."
"Won't I get in trouble?"
Yang shook her head. "I'll tell the professors that you're really tired and that I'm helping you out. You'd be surprised how accommodating that they can be."
Ruby smiled somewhat weakly from her exhausted state. "Thanks, sis."
So, for the next few classes before lunch, Yang told the professors about Ruby and they agreed to let it slide for the day, and so Ruby slept. By the time lunch rolled around she felt better, but nothing could truly replace a full night's sleep. Still exhausted, she accidentally bumped into Weiss when they were walking to their table, causing her to spill her drink. "I'm sorry!" she stammered out.
Weiss just glared at her, seeming only slightly relieved that the drink didn't spill all over her uniform. She set her tray down and walked back to get another drink. Ruby felt really bad; she was clumsy from time to time, but never that clumsy. Yang smiled, trying to comfort a distressed Ruby. "Don't worry about it, sis. Just explain to her later about how you're out of it today. She should forgive you. Probably."
When Weiss came back, Yang started to have a conversation with Blake, purposely talking louder than normal to help Ruby stay awake until the next class; Ruby silently thanked her for that, because she didn't want to pass out into her salad bowl.
The day dragged on and Ruby slept in a few more classes, and by the time she returned to the dorm with Yang and Blake she felt ready to study again. Weiss had to help Professor Port with something. "Hold it!" Yang exclaimed. "I've let you rest, so now I want an answer to a question: why are you so tired?"
Ruby couldn't tell her about the strict grading, but the coming tests were sort of like midterms and thus caused stress for everyone, not just team leaders. So, she felt she could tell the truth; just not all of it. "I've just been worried about those tests is all. I've been studying night after night, hoping I can make a good score."
Yang smiled. "And how long have you been doing this?"
"A month," Ruby replied.
Yang was very proud of her sister for trying to improve her grades, but didn't want her health to suffer for it. "Tell you what; you copy my notes from today's classes, and then you are taking the rest of the night off from studying."
Ruby frowned. "Is that a good idea, Yang?"
She nodded. "I don't want you to overwork yourself like you so clearly have. You need a break. You can sleep, read, eat cookies, or play all you want after you copy the notes. I don't care, as long as you're not studying."
Ruby finally smiled. "Thanks, Yang." She quickly jotted down the notes, which were surprisingly detailed. Yang usually only wrote down what she thought would be the most important information, but these were almost word for word the lectures that day. Once done, she decided to play Yang's video game console. It was rare that she ever played video games, but she did love them. It was a simple platformer game with a small number of levels, but it was challenging enough.
After playing for a good while, she |
NFL Network’s draft expert Mike Mayock hopped on a conference call to talk draft with media across the country.
In particular, Mayock was asked about which defensive linemen would help with the Raiders pass rush from the interior defensive line.
Jack Del Rio had said in his post season press conference that the team lacked interior pass rush. For the Raiders, that could be at defensive end or tackle, depending on the alignment.
Part of the problem for the Raiders was being without Mario Edwards, who was missing all but the final couple games of the season with a hip injury. His return to form would be a great help, but the Raiders line will need more than just his presence to dominate the trenches on the defensive side as they would like.
“As far as this year's draft,” said Mayock, “Caleb Brantley from Florida, who is kind of a late first round into the second round, I think he's intriguing. He's a quick, one-gap guy. I don't think you want him playing three downs every snap. But as far as an ability to rush the quarterback and get an edge on interior offensive linemen, I think he's got that burst that you're looking for. “I think Larry Ogunjobi from Charlotte, a name that not many people know about, I think he's really a talented guy. He's probably a second-round pick. He's got some real quick one-gap-and-go possibilities. He's also a tough guy. At Charlotte, he's got a two-gap. He's got run game potential, and I think he's got upside as a pass-game guy. “As you drop down, I mean, you could even get into the third round and talk about a guy like Tanzel Smart from Tulane. Again, great motor, has some ability to push the pocket. “You know, I think Eddie Vanderdoes from UCLA really helped himself. He had a poor year coming off an ACL. I think he was heavy and out of shape. Then he showed up at The Senior Bowl and started knocking people around. He's more of a physical guy. Always going to rush the quarterback with a bull rush. He's not going to beat you with speed. But he's really strong as can be. I think there are other guys in the second-third round, Montravius Adams, Jaleel Johnson, there are some guys out there that can help even through the third round. “So I think the key to this interior defensive line class is Jonathan Allen's up top, and then I didn't even mention Malik McDowell from Michigan State who is probably a first- or second-round guy also. I think there is really good depth in the first three or four rounds for the interior D-line.”
Mayock didn’t stop with Dline, though. And from the sounds of it, he doesn’t necessarily think that’s the direction the Raiders should go with their top pick. He see a few prospects at other positions which could also be attractive options if they’re available when the Raiders pick.Promoted from the fan posts by Kid Nate.
It would be nice to have an imaginary world where we could reliably predict a wrestlers success in MMA by watching to see how they blast through double leg takedowns again and again. However, we live in the real world and that simple reduction of the difficult crossover process of a very complex set of skills does not work.
The problem is that at the moment, we have many different wrestlers-turned-MMA-fighters that exhibit many different styles and experience varying degrees of MMA success. Outward signs of "physicalness" or aggression as a wrestler are not enough. Whether clearly demonstrated or not, a wrestler achieves elite levels collegiately or internationally possesses more than adequate "physicalness" to succeed in any martial art and it is their processes and set-ups that lead to success that is more important. As a result, watching a wrestler use a double leg again and again successfully in a wrestling match does not mean that he would be a good fit for MMA.
This is relevant to American folkstyle and freestyle wrestling and perhaps to the future of MMA talent evaluation.
What style of wrestler will translate in the best MMA fighter? This question untrimmed and unqualified is impossible to answer. Few wrestlers can be reduced to a style or type, and most elite wrestlers have risen to their place in the sport through a level of refinement that leaves them completely anomalous.
What I want to do is begin a live discussion of, if not an answer to, a more manageable question. What sort of wrestling attack style will yield the best offensive wrestling results in MMA?
The avid or even casual MMA viewer will probably say, "Why of course it is the blast/straight-on, freight train double leg take down, I see wrestlers accomplishing this technique with great frequency in MMA." In fact, many within the wrestling community will say the same thing. While I do not think they are completely wrong, I think they are looking at the wrong aspect of the technique. Any elite wrestler can consistently finish a double leg once in on a fighter in a fighting stance.
Our concern should not be with what a wrestler does when he or she are already inside on a shot, but how they got there in the first place. My theory is that when predicting the success of a wrestler's offensive leg attacks in MMA, we should be looking not at how many legs are being attacked on a shot and not on whether they are high, medium or low level attacks. I believe the variable far more relevant to MMA success is the set up.
Watch the following clips
In this clip J.P. O'Connor hits a nice double on Cyler Sanderson. J.P. is working a Russian control tie (pulling the arm against the sternum with one hand grabbing the wrist and the other over-hooking the tricep), as Sanderson is posting on J.P.'s head. J.P. sets up the double leg by pushing the Russian up into the post. It helps that he reaches his lead foot as far as he can between Sanderson's legs before attempting the technique.
Jordan Burroughs is wrestling Aliyev of Azerbaijan in the semi-finals of the 2011 World Championships. As the match is winding on, Aliyev appears to be weary of Jordan's pace and starts to post his left arm on Jordan's shoulder. This is most inadvisable - as Burroughs is hard-wired to immediately chop down on this post. Chopping down on the arm on that side clears the way to Aliyev's legs and Jordan snatched his other arm down hard to get in on the double leg. Nobody on earth can stop him when he is in on both legs.
This clip from the 1999 world finals shows a freshly out of college Stephen Neal squaring off against Shumilin of Russia. The 265 pound Neal uses feints and motion to get Shumilin to raise his hands ever so slightly, then in a breathtaking display of speed, grace and power, Neal blasts in on a magnificently-timed double. We get a glimpse of the kind of athleticism that served Neal well in a long career with the New England Patriots.
Just now we have seen three of the exact same leg attack set up in three radically different ways. These are all NCAA champion wrestlers and it is not necessarily true that each would be comfortable setting up a double if one were to interchange wrestlers and set-ups. Every wrestler has different levels of skill and comfort with different types of set-ups. The three set-ups above are representatives of what could be called the three families of leg-attack set-ups. I will disclaim here and state that just because a wrestler is featured in this post performing one sort of set-up, it is not meant to imply that this is the only sort of set up that wrestler uses or even one they typically use. I also should say that many elite wrestlers are well versed in setting up shots in all three manners.
The first family of set-ups (and these are not listed in order of importance or frequency) is control ties. Control ties are holds which force their way through an opponent's "head/hands" defense, not with finesse, but through power and leverage. Two of the most widely used are the Russian tie and the underhook. This is not an exhaustive list of techniques, but I need to make some concessions to brevity.
This from the same Stephen Neal match as above, Steven blocks the knee of his opponent and leverages him over it with the underhook.
Here is Lee Weber from the University of Iowa hitting a dump (yes, we can call it many other things, but I choose this one) off of a Russian tie on Mark Munoz. Notice that there is enough downward torque on the shoulder to pull Mark all the way to his hip.
The second school is what I will call "tie-clearing" set-ups. For every wrestling tie a wrestler achieves, the opponent is forced to engage in a counter tie. Wrestlers "hand-fight" in an attempt to get a favorable tie where they can clear the opponent's tie, which opens a pathway to the legs. Watch a great example of one of these from current world pound for pound best Besik Kudukov against the USA's own, Henry Cejudo.
This is fundanental stuff and beautifully done. Kudukhov achieves inside control with a high hook over Cejudo's tricep. In turn, Cejudo ties up on the outside of Kudukhov's arm. With a classic "hair combing" motion, Kudukhov clears Henry's arm and shoots an inside-step (high crotch) single. Hold clearing set-ups would include chops, v-blocks up and forward, snaps, elbow-offs, shucks, slide-bys, arm-drags, wrist peels, and much more. I could show a million more sweet GIFs, but I have to keep moving.
Because these first two schools of set ups contain holds and situations mostly peculiar to wrestling (except underhooks), I theorize that the transition of a wrestler's leg attack success will be based on their comfort with the third family of set ups: Motion and Timing. (The other important factor is raw speed, but that would not be NEARLY as interesting a topic to post about.)
Motion and timing shot set-ups are based on moving in a specific pattern and/or waiting for the exact moment when an opponent is out of position and vulnerable to attack. These set-ups can be heavily technical and conscious tactics or simply the result of someone's freakish and annoying ability to unconsciously divine the perfect moment to shoot. Motion and timing set-ups can manifest themselves in a variety of techniques
From tie-ups:
Here we see an ankle pick from a collar-tie, the ultimate timing and motion takedown from the master of the technique, Cael Sanderson. Here is part of his sublime performance against WVU's Vertus Jones in the NCAA finals. Put in simple terms, Cael circles to get the opponent's foot exposed, grabs the ankle, and pushes the head over where the foot once resided. Cael has to take a few stabs at it this time, but the effect is the same.
Without contact:
In one of their NCAA title matches, Chris Pendleton of Oklahoma State hits a gorgeous misdirection low single on Missouri's Ben Askren. He makes a very subtle motion that causes Ben to pull back his left leg just for a heartbeat, and then is in on Ben's right ankle.
As a counter to a shot:
In the finals of last year's World Team Trials, Cael Sanderson executes this perfectly timed re-shot on Jake Herbert. It has to take place at the exact moment an opponent disengages from his own attack.
The above clips demonstrate a variety of different techniques, but the common denominator that allows them all to be successful is a finely honed sense of wrestling timing. Any elite wrestler can execute MMA appropriate takedown techniques (mid-level to high singles and doubles) with requisite proficiency. It is my oppinion that his command over timing and motion are what is most important. Here is an example of Cael Sanderson seamlessly transitioning his technique when his patented ankle pick fails to yield an immediate takedown over Josh Lambrecht. Cael has the timing to get to the leg; once he is in, it is comparatively easy for him to adapt to the situation and slide up to a power double.
Cael was not a bruiser, he was not a head-banging blast doubler and he was not a hulking grinder, but because of immaculate timing and understanding of spacing and motion, I have no doubt he would have had no problem adapting his repertoire to the meet the demands of MMA wrestling.
In modern MMA, elite fighters without a wrestling base are becoming more and more wrestling savvy - particularly in shot defense. The approach of forced takedown attempts and guileless shots without set-up is becoming ineffective and risky. A premium must be put on setting up shots in an MMA-relevant manner. To me, the school of shot set-ups which translate the most readily to MMA are timing and motion based set-ups. I believe that when evaluating the potential effectiveness of a wrestler's MMA transition, more attention should be paid to how he sets up his shots then what actual shots he uses.
This is just a theory, I have neither the time nor the means of proving it empirically. I also might be WAAAAY wrong.
Of course their may be another thing to look for to see if a wrestler will translate well to MMA
Let's go Daniel.CLOSE A rowdy crowd of protesters jeered Ramapo Town Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence and board members at a meeting on Wednesday, May 11, 2016. Michael D'Onofrio/The Journal News
A crowd of St. Lawrence supporters also showed up to the meeting Wednesday.
Buy Photo A rowdy crowd of protesters jeered Ramapo Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence and board members during a meeting Wednesday, May 11, 2016. There were also many who came out to support the embattled supervisor. (Photo: Michael D'Onofrio/The Journal News)Buy Photo
RAMAPO - Calls for embattled Town Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence to resign are only getting louder.
A rowdy crowd of protesters jeered the supervisor and board members during a meeting Wednesday, where the board voted on disciplinary charges for fire inspector Adam Peltz for failing to adequately enforce fire-safety and zoning codes.
Brian Walsh, of Suffern, said as he stood among dozens of protesters who were holding signs that he believed the charges against St. Lawrence marked the “beginning of the end” of his tenure as supervisor.
ARREST: Feds say St. Lawrence, 3 others, 'cooked the books'
ANALYSIS: St. Lawrence, undaunted by controversy, faces biggest one yet
TIMELINE: Ramapo corruption investigation
“I’m disgusted with the corruption in this town,” Walsh said. “He’s done here whether he wants to admit it or not.”
The fiery crowd of more than 120 people erupted in shouts as St. Lawrence and board appeared at the start of the meeting.
But St. Lawrence supporters were also well represented.
David Romer, of Monsey, was among more than 24 people who clapped and shouted, “Four more years!” and “They all got to stay!” during the meeting in response to the protesters. Romer said he backed the supervisor and board because they supported many interests of the large Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. He added that protesters were unfairly targeting the supervisor.
“I’m supporting everyone,” he said about St. Lawrence and the board. “If anyone stands up and helps the Jewish people a little bit, they are (seen as) an enemy" by some in the community, Romer said.
The meeting was a microcosm of the deep divide among residents, said Veronica DeMeo Boesch, the former mayor of Airmont. Boesch said she believed St. Lawrence’s own ambitions created the schism in Ramapo, and it was because he has relied too heavily on a single block of voters to keep him in office.
Buy Photo Town Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence was subjected to shouts for his resignation at a board meeting at Ramapo Town Hall on Wednesday, May 11, 2016. (Photo: Michael D'Onofrio/The Journal News)
“Supervisor, this is your legacy,” Boesch said.
“You have created it because of your political ambitions,” she continued. “You wanted to rely on a large block of voters who would always vote for you and keep you in office as long as you were legally able to remain in office, and this has caused the creation of … the them versus us in this town.”
St. Lawrence, the supervisor since 2000, faces 22 charges federal securities fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy related to the selling of $150 million in municipal bonds based on fabricated financial documents related to the development of the town's controversial baseball stadium.
WATCH: BOCES student finds her spark in welding class
REPORT: 'Zombie homes' hurting property values
The supervisor was charged alongside Aaron Troodler, the former executive director of the Ramapo Local Development Corporation. Both men pleaded not guilty.
St. Lawrence, Troodler, and two other Rockland County officials also face related civil charges brought by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission.
Multiple police officers were stationed at the meeting, and frequently had to temper supporters for and against the supervisor who at times directed their anger at one another.
The board, which was constantly interrupted by protesters, voted on disciplinary charges against Peltz.
Peltz, a longtime town employee who also serves as a volunteer member of the Monsey Fire Department and its president, has been prohibited from doing inspections and been placed on desk duty since April as the town conducted an investigation into his work.
PROBE: State questions Ramapo inspections at private schools
REVIEW: Ramapo reviews fire inspector's work after state criticism
INVESTIGATION: Ramapo fire inspector benched
NEWSLETTERS Get the Breaking News newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-888-426-6388. Delivery: Varies Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Breaking News Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters
The examination into Peltz's inspections stemmed from letters sent in March by the New York State Education Department's Office of Facilities Planning to the town sharply criticizing Peltz' inspections of four private schools. The cited schools were the Rockland Institute for Special Education, Bais Yaakov, the Green Meadow Waldorf School, and Bais Yehuda.
In a settlement with the town, Peltz, 46, admitted that the inspections he conducted were inadequate and failed to identify violations at those four private school.
Peltz was demoted in grade and pay to assistant fire safety inspector, and suspended immediately without pay for 30 days, with the potential for 30 additional days. In addition, Peltz will be prohibited from using a town-owned car for personal use or taking the vehicle home; he will have to get the permission of Chief Building Inspector Anthony Mallia to respond to fires as an inspector after his work day ends; and he will be required to complete job training.
Peltz, a Civil Service Employee Association union member, has been a town employee for 17 years who has not faced any disciplinary proceedings in the past.
While Peltz was barred from doing inspections, the town hired former Fire Inspector Thomas Buckley as a consultant on inspection issues.
Following those allegations made against Peltz, the state Division of Building Standards and Codes in April ordered Ramapo to strengthen the enforcement of its fire prevention and building codes. The state cited the town for failing to ensure work is done with proper building permits, and criticized the town for not meeting minimum standards for record keeping.
Read or Share this story: http://lohud.us/1Tc1i6lUK retailers have begun selling the PlayStation 4 for an all-time low price of £290, a little more than a week after Microsoft discounted the Xbox One RRP to £300.
On shopping sites such as Tecsco, Amazon, and Argos, both black and white PS4 units are listed at £289.99, down from the previous standard price of £330 (the official RRP remains £350). Meanwhile, retailer GAME is offering a PS4 bundle with Minecraft for £290.
These retailer deals were not enacted independently from Sony; The platform holder has even promoted the offers on its official Twitter account.
For a limited time grab a #PS4 for £299.99 at participating retailers! -> http://t.co/0Z7qZTURB6 pic.twitter.com/JmHpRfbtjM — PlayStation UK (@PlayStationUK) April 22, 2015
The deal arrives nine days after Microsoft reduced the price of the Xbox One from £330 to £300. Both platform holders say their respective discounts are a "limited time" offer; Sony states its promotion will cease April 28, while Microsoft has not yet provided a clear date for when its deal will end.
Such offers also arrive during a seasonal reduction in video game sales, as Britain crawls into the summer months. According to NPD data, total game retail sales across the US declined 20 percent in February.BALTIMORE (WJZ)– Caught on camera– a tourist being beaten in downtown Baltimore, and instead of helping him, a crowd laughs and steals his belongings.
Mike Hellgren has the video and the investigation.
Police hope this video will get the attackers off the streets.
The video shows a man being punched in the face in downtown Baltimore. You can hear his head hit the pavement near the entrance to Courthouse East.
Instead of helping, people laugh.
Then, the crowd strips him naked and takes his car keys, watch, money and iPhone.
It happened St. Patrick’s Day. Police say the victim was out partying and woke up the next day at his hotel, cut and bruised with no idea why.
“He had every right to leave wherever he was and get back to where he needed to be safely. Their behavior was just criminal,” Det. Nicole Monroe of the Baltimore City Police Department said.
“Not only was he relieved of his property after he was assaulted, but there were a lot of other things done to him that are disturbing to look at, and we want to bring these people to justice,” Monroe said.
Those who’ve seen the video are outraged.
“Oh, my God! Where’s the police?” Antonio Richardson of Baltimore said after seeing the video. “It gives us a bad name, Baltimore. And people don’t want to, you know, trust us to come down here.”
“It’s surprising, but it’s dangerous,” another person said.
“It’s awful, obviously. You just have to be really careful on those days. You can’t just be wandering around the streets,” Diego Tapia said.
Police say they’ve gotten leads but made no arrests.
“The public is going to be helpful in this case, and they have been helpful thus far,” Monroe said.
Those who filmed it for fun and posted it for the world to see unwittingly provided cops and prosecutors with the key evidence in this vicious attack.
The victim didn’t even know that such a video existed until a relative watched it online and told him.
After the attack, people bragged about it on camera. Tens of thousands of people have seen the video online.Although the debate about vaccines has been roiling in parenting circles for years, President Donald Trump's not-quite-but-close-enough anti-vaxx stance has been lending credibility to a practice modern medicine wholeheartedly agrees will damage herd immunity. John Oliver discussed vaccines on Last Week Tonight as his main story and he thoughtfully unpacked why the confusion and misinformation surrounding immunization is so dangerous.
He was super sympathetic to parents who simply feel overwhelmed by the onslaught of information that comes along with parenting in the social media age. Parents feel pummeled by conflicting ideas, with all roads seemingly leading to endangering their children. Oliver also admitted that the theory of vaccines is sort of unnerving, saying:
I kind of get why vaccines creep people out. Vaccination can mean getting injected by a needle filled with science juice. Although, pretty much every medical practice sounds terrifying when you break it down like that. An appendectomy means removing one of your organs through stabbery. Antibiotics are poisons used to murder things living in you. And even exercise means forcibly burning up your insides. My point is, the human body is a true carnival of horrors and frankly, I'm embarrassed to have one.
Oliver covered Andrew Wakefield, the researcher who lost his medical license for falsifying the now-discredited study linking the MMR vaccine to autism in children. But his work has spawned countless critics of vaccination nonetheless. Much like Trump, the majority of people aren't wholly anti-vaxx, but rather "pro-safe vaccines."
And the FDA actually removed the mercury-based preservative Thimerosal from vaccines in the early 2000s because of public outcry over its mercury content, even though multiple studies cited that it wasn't the same kind of mercury that's harmful in fish. In essence, Oliver points out, the FDA spent money to solve a problem that existed in people's imaginations. Similarly, the focus on studying the link between vaccines and autism is taking resources away from learning more about actual autism, even though study after study dismisses vaccines as its cause.
Oliver admits that people's fears of scientists being paid by big pharma companies — and thus distorting information about the drugs they study — are founded. But he also points out that on the rare occasion there has been a problem with a vaccine, it has always been pulled very quickly. And although children receive many shots in their infancy (another aspect of vaccines that frequently worries parents) those shots also have fewer antigens than ever before, and profoundly fewer antigens than children encounter in their daily lives anyway.
Most importantly, kids need to be vaccinated on schedule to protect people with vulnerable immune systems who can't necessarily tolerate vaccines. It's on the rest of society to preserve herd immunity when someone's health doesn't allow them to, and the best way to do that is to ensure every kid remains a building block in that wall.The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Shuji Nakamura, professor of materials and of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and two others.
The prize is for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes, which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources, and is shared with Isamu Akasaki of Meijo University and Nagoya University, Japan; and Hiroshi Amano of Nagoya University.
According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, when Nakamura, Akasaki and Amano “produced bright blue light beams from their semiconductors in the early 1990s, they triggered a fundamental transformation of lighting technology. Red and green diodes had been around for a long time, but without blue light, white lamps could not be created. Despite considerable efforts, both in the scientific community and in industry, the blue LED had remained a challenge for three decades.”
The LED lamp “holds great promise for increasing the quality of life for over 1.5 billion people around the world who lack access to electricity grids,” the academy continued.
Nakamura, who is also co-director of the campus’s Solid State Lighting & Energy Electronics Center, is the sixth faculty member at UCSB to have won a Nobel Prize since 1998. UCSB alumna Carol Greider received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
“I am very honored to receive the Nobel Prize from The Royal Swedish Academy of Science for my invention of the blue LED,” said Nakamura. Speaking to a room full of reporters and students who had gathered in the campus’s Engineering Sciences Building for a press conference on Oct. 7, Nakamura said it makes him happy to see his dream of LED lighting become a reality. “Nowadays we can buy energy-efficient LED light bulbs at the supermarket and help reduce energy use. I hope this helps global warming, too.”
Praising Nakamura’s great accomplishment, UCSB Chancellor Henry T. Yang offered his congratulations on behalf of the entire campus community. “We are overjoyed to congratulate our colleague Professor Shuji Nakamura on his Nobel Prize. This is a wonderful day of celebration for all of us at UC Santa Barbara, and for our extended community of scholars, alumni, colleagues, and friends around the world,” said Yang.
“Dr. Nakamura has helped to pioneer a scientific revolution in solid-state lighting, with far-reaching impact on fields ranging from information and communication, to energy and the environment, to health care and life sciences,” Yang continued. “By making it possible to bring affordable, energy-efficient LED lighting to developing countries, Professor Nakamura has also made a tremendous humanitarian contribution to our world.”
UC President Janet Napolitano also noted Nakamura’s achievement and the research that made it possible. “We honor and celebrate UC Santa Barbara’s Shuji Nakamura, who has been recognized with a Nobel Prize in Physics for his transformational research that has revolutionized lighting technology,” she said. “He and his two Japanese colleagues invented the technology that enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources, which promises to vastly improve the lives of people across the globe without access to electricity grids.
“This Nobel Prize, the 62nd awarded to a UC faculty member or researcher, underscores the paramount importance of research conducted at the University of California. Professor Nakamura’s dedication to science, research and teaching are a hallmark of or public universities,” Napolitano continued. “On behalf of the entire UC community, I join UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Henry Yang in extending heartfelt congratulations to Professor Nakamura and his colleagues.”
Said Rod Alferness, dean of UCSB’s College of Engineering: “This is an incredible honor for Professor Nakamura and the College of Engineering. Dr. Nakamura’s achievements in solid-state lighting continue to have far-reaching impact on lighting and computing technology. We all have his pioneering research to thank for the LED light bulb, monitors, mobile devices, and large flat screen displays that we enjoy today.”
Steven DenBaars, professor of materials and co-director of the Solid State Lighting & Energy Electronics Center, noted: Dr. Nakamura’s discovery in GaN materials for the high-brightness blue LEDs was the fundamental breakthrough leading to energy efficient LED lighting and displays. His work has resulted in new industries in clean technology, and in reducing energy consumption for illumination. Eventually, we expect the majority of all lighting to be done with LED’s.”
Nakamura credited his scientific success to those who have supported him over the course of his career. “I got my first break from Nobu Ogawa, chairman of Nichia, who supported my gamble to make a blue LED,” Nakamura recalled. “Also my young colleagues at Nichia helped a lot. I am also grateful for the support of UCSB Chancellor Henry Yang, and the Solid State Lighting and Energy Electronics Center, which has continued to support my research on LEDs and lasers, and my dream of LED lighting.”
Currently in Hawaii in his capacity as the chair of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) International Observatory, Yang was unable to participate in the press conference. However, he made his thoughts and well wishes known by way of a special statement read by Executive Vice Chancellor David Marshall.
“What a thrill it was to receive the early-morning phone call about Professor Shuji Nakamura,” he said. “Ever since Shuji’s invention of the blue light-emitting diode and energy-efficient white LED, he and our colleagues have been pioneers not only of a new field of research, but of a scientific revolution. Truly we have just begun explore the full potential of solid-state lighting and energy technologies.”
In his message, Yang recalled a story told by another UCSB Nobel Laureate, Professor Herbert Kroemer, who won the prize in 2000. Kroemer described seeing a bright blue LED for the first time in 1994 — and “suddenly,” he said, “the world had changed.” Kroemer heard Nakamura deliver a lecture in Berlin that same year. Nakamura showed images on an LED panel, and Kroemer turned to the colleague next to him and said, “What we are seeing here is the beginning of the end of the light bulb. We are not just talking about doing things better, but about doing things we never could before.”
Kroemer was right, Yang continued. The applications and impact of Nakamura’s inventions are far-reaching: from information and communication to energy and the environment, to health care and life sciences. “By making it possible to bring affordable, energy-efficient LED lighting to developing countries, Professor Nakamura has also made a tremendous humanitarian contribution to our world.”
Nakamura, who is also a member of the Lighting Solutions Group within UCSB’s Institute for Energy Efficiency, was born on May 22, 1954, in Ehime, Japan. He completed his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Tokushima, Japan.
He joined the UCSB faculty in 2000 and was appointed to the Cree Chair in the Solid State Lighting and Display Center in 2001. Known for his technological achievements with semiconducting gallium nitrides, he is widely recognized as the world pioneer in light emitters based on the wide-bandgap semiconductor gallium nitride (GaN) and its alloys with aluminum and indium.
Before coming to UCSB, Nakamura had worked in research for Japan’s Nichia Chemical Industries Ltd, and spent a year at the University of Florida as a visiting research associate. In 1989, he started the research of blue light emitting diodes (LEDs) using group-III nitride materials. In 1993 and 1995, he developed the first group-III nitride-based blue/green LEDs. He also developed the first group-III nitride-based violet laser diodes (LDs) in 1995.
The development of nitride-based semiconductors by Nakamura represents one of the most important achievements in the materials science of semiconductors in the last 30 years. Specifically, the discovery of p-type doping in Gallium Nitride (GaN) and the development of blue, green, and white LEDs and blue LDs have enabled energy efficient lighting and displays. Nakamura discovered that p-type GaN films could be obtained by doping GaN with Mg, with successive post-thermal annealing in nitrogen ambient. At UCSB, Nakamura continues to develop GaN thin-film technology.
In 2007, a team of UCSB researchers led by Nakamura reported a major breakthrough in laser diode development. The researchers from the Solid State Lighting and Energy Center achieved lasing operation in nonpolar GaN semiconductors, and demonstrated the world’s first nonpolar blue-violet laser diodes.
Nakamura earned his undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degrees at Japan’s University of Tokushima. He is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including the LED Pioneer Award (2012); the Technology and the Engineering Emmy Award (2011); The Harvey Award (2009); the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical Scientific Research (2008); the Czochralski Award (2007); the Millennium Technology Prize (2006); the Benjamin Franklin Medal (2002); the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Jack A. Morton Award, the British Rank Prize (1998);the Materials Research Society Medal (1997); and the Nishina Memorial Award (1996). He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2003.A statement released by the Ukraine Ministry of Defense says that the "facts suggest terrorists fired" at the public transport vehicle. The statement also says that the Kiev government "wish to emphasize" that Ukrainian servicemen "will never use weapons against civilians."
Rebels guarding the scene said that a Ukrainian diversionary group operating inside the rebel-held territory had carried out the attack, but VICE News could not verify this information.
Officials said eight people were killed at the scene and another five died en route to hospital following the morning strike on the city, the heart of rebel-held east Ukraine. Another 20 people were reportedly injured in the incident according to local news agencies.
Locals gathered at the scene said that several rounds of what they believed were mortars hit the area at around 9am local time this morning. Around the corner, a tram had also ground to a halt after the track in front of it was caved in by another shell.
Electrical wires hang loose and the wreckage of a burnt-out car is stopped dead in the middle of the road in Donetsk's Leninsky district. Inside trolley bus number 17 is a mess of smeared blood and shattered glass.
Read more
Electrical wires hang loose and the wreckage of a burnt-out car is stopped dead in the middle of the road in Donetsk's Leninsky district. Inside trolley bus number 17 is a mess of smeared blood and shattered glass.
Locals gathered at the scene said that several rounds of what they believed were mortars hit the area at around 9am local time this morning. Around the corner, a tram had also ground to a halt after the track in front of it was caved in by another shell.
Officials said eight people were killed at the scene and another five died en route to hospital following the morning strike on the city, the heart of rebel-held east Ukraine. Another 20 people were reportedly injured in the incident according to local news agencies.
Horrific scene this morning in Leninsky district up to 13 killed in trolley bus shelling — Harriet Salem (@HarrietSalem)January 22, 2015
Photo by Harriet Salem
Rebels guarding the scene said that a Ukrainian diversionary group operating inside the rebel-held territory had carried out the attack, but VICE News could not verify this information.
A statement released by the Ukraine Ministry of Defense says that the "facts suggest terrorists fired" at the public transport vehicle. The statement also says that the Kiev government "wish to emphasize" that Ukrainian servicemen "will never use weapons against civilians."
Andriy, 31, who was standing just one block from the shelled bus, said he ran for cover inside a grocery store when he heard the first rounds come in. "I heard at least five (shells), people were on their way to work, the shops were open," he told VICE News. "There are no rebel positions here, it's a civil area. I didn't want to fight before, but now, after this, I am considering joining them (the rebels)."
Drone footage shows Ukraine's Donetsk airport in ruins after months of fighting. Read more here.
This morning's incident occurred just hours after new round of diplomatic talks between representatives from Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany concluded in Berlin; shattering already tenuous hopes for a new peace deal.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian military forces have reportedly pulled out of Donetsk airport, though skirmishes continue in the area around it. This withdrawal came on the back of a heavy death toll — 10 soldiers were killed in the preceding 24 hours of fighting, according to defense officials, while 16 were wounded.
Last week, 12 people were killed in public bus passing through a Ukrainian checkpoint in Volnovakha by what the OSCE say, based on |
know.”
The Open Baltimore system includes weekly crime statistics, records of all serious crime in the city and 911 calls.
The state Department of Health typically releases overdose numbers quarterly, but the figures are often long delayed. The most recent official numbers are from the first three months of 2017.
There are differences between reporting homicides and overdoses. Declaring overdose as a cause of death requires detailed work by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
But insiders do have access to preliminary figures before they are released.
Deputy Police Commissioner Dean Palmere cited those numbers at the hearing: 1,691 fatal opioid overdoses in the state this year, 632 in Baltimore. A police spokesman said the department received that data from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.
The Sun has sought more detailed information about fatal overdoses with a Public Information Act request for data from the medical examiner’s office.
Officials released daily logs of overdoses going back to 2010, when the rate of deaths began to climb steeply, but withheld the names, ages and races of victims, citing the state’s death certificate and medical records laws. The records also don’t include detailed geographic information.
After Scott’s request, Palmere said the Police Department could produce maps showing which neighborhoods have been affected.
[email protected]
twitter.com/iduncanThe perils of online college learning
The failure of San Jose State's Udacity courses highlight an inherent problem: treating the educational content as secondary to Silicon Valley's much-hyped tools provided by the online platform.
Two weeks ago the results of the experiment came in. More than half the students flunked. San Jose's work with Udacity, the well-funded Silicon Valley start-up that set up the online program, will be suspended for the fall semester — put on "pause," as the partners say — so the courses can be retooled.
Gov. Jerry Brown, who had been pushing the state's public universities to embrace high-tech teaching modes, was on hand to mark what he called an "exciting moment in the intellectual history of our state and of our university."
The Cal State University campus set itself up as a pioneer in the field in January, when it announced plans to enroll up to 300 students in three introductory online courses; the fee would be $150, a deep discount from the usual cost of more than $2,000.
Let it not be said that San Jose State University hasn't taught the world a valuable lesson in the promises and pitfalls of the fancy new craze for online university learning.
"We want to reduce the hype and take a scientific look at the results," San Jose State's provost, Ellen Junn, told me.
That's very wise, but the chances that careful evaluation of the San Jose experiment will reduce the hype surrounding online learning are slim. Online learning is seen today as the answer to virtually every problem facing higher education, especially public higher ed.
Strapped for cash? You can vastly expand your program without hiring lots of crabby, expensive professors. For example, Georgia Tech is proposing to expand its computer science master's program from 300 students to 10,000 by offering its courses online around the world. The school figures it can do this without expanding its 80-member faculty by more than eight teachers. This looks like a "significant revenue generator for the college," according to the original proposal.
Too few classroom seats for the thousands of students hungering for your professors' lectures and your institution's degrees? Put the lectures online and reach a worldwide student body! Tired of paying to sweep your buildings' corridors and scrape ivy off the exterior walls? Online platforms require no such upkeep. Students will learn better, and at less expense, through the miracle of technology.
You don't have to ask where you've heard this before, because you hear it all the time. Every new technology is hyped as a world-changer and life-changer — just last year, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan was urging that every schoolchild have a laptop, because in the near future, textbooks would be a thing of the past. As I observed at the time, this was education as seen through the eyes of Apple Inc., not through the eyes of genuine educators.
The promise of online learning has made it onto the agendas of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where big investors and government leaders hobnob to contemplate the global future, and of TED, the lecture program where ideas, good and bad, go to get inflated to world-beating scale.
News reports and blog posts bristle with terms like MOOC (the "massive open online courses" that ostensibly deliver the best in academic lectures to anyone willing to log in).
The hype originates mostly from educational start-ups backed by millions of dollars in venture capital. Udacity, which was founded by Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford professor and Google fellow who says his goal is to bring "the very best of higher education to everyone worldwide," launched last year with $20 million in venture funds. Its closest rival, Coursera, also founded by Stanford faculty members, has collected $65 million in backing so far, including a chunk from the World Bank.
So it's not surprising that the services these firms offer resemble the product of a business model more than an educational model. More to the point, critics say, it's a Silicon Valley business model.It’s mid-morning, and Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan have the preoccupied air of exhausted parents. It’s an appropriate enough state for the stars of the hit Channel 4 comedy about an Irish teacher and American businessman who hitch up after a brief fling in London leaves her pregnant. But if the first series of Catastrophe was all about pregnancy, the second jumps straight into the war zone of parenting.
Advertisement
“The second series is the first one we dreamed up,” says Delaney, “but we realised, as we started imagining the characters and figuring out how they met, that that actually was really interesting to us, too, and that became the first series. Then after that we wanted to do what we originally wanted to do, which was a married couple in the thick of it.”
“The beginning of the first episode of the second series is the first thing we ever wrote,” adds Horgan.
When RT meets them in a largely deserted photographic studio café, it’s only been about 48 hours since they finished filming after weeks of back-to-back shooting. The fraught schedule has been made slightly easier by Delaney’s relocation to London last year. Before that he lived in LA, and he and Horgan – who lives in London with her husband and two children – got together in their respective cities whenever they could, often working around their other projects. If they share one thing beyond a comic sensibility, it’s a work ethic.
“We both like to work hard,” says Horgan. “Rob doesn’t like to take hour-long lunches. He likes to go and grab some take-out like me and eat it at the desk.”
“If we could rediscover umbilical feeding we would do it,” says Delaney. “We did a month of writing in LA and we were around the corner from an egregiously expensive juice shop. That was the best – we wouldn’t even [need to] eat solids. We would get two drinks that were called, like, ‘Be Near a Toilet!’”
“You get sleepy after a big lunch,” says Horgan, “and we had such a short amount of time, we thought, if we don’t eat solids, then we’ll just get the nutrition.”
“On the last day we went and got cheeseburgers,” says Delaney, “and we fell asleep as we were eating them.”
Horgan and Delaney have both become known – understandably, if unfairly – as late starters. It’s probably because they each achieved mainstream success in a relatively short space of time, after years of toiling in obscurity. Delaney set himself a deadline age of 35 to make it in comedy.
Horgan hung onto her waitressing job until she was 31. A few years later she found what should have been a breakthrough success with 2006’s Pulling (above), a comedy about the messy personal lives of three female friends, which she co-wrote and starred in. Pulling was critically acclaimed, popular (Delaney was a big fan before he’d ever met Horgan) and well-enough regarded to earn a Bafta nomination. Its brilliance was apparent to just about every- one apart from BBC3, who refused to commission a third series. “And look what’s happened to them,” says Delaney.
“Still, I think it was crazy that we even got to make that show,” says Horgan. “We’d written, really, nothing before, a couple of sketches. So to be given that opportunity completely unencumbered, completely getting exactly what we wanted – we were just brats.”
The first time a lot of people will have heard of Delaney was when he was named funniest person on Twitter in 2012 (it’s an actual award, conferred by Comedy Central). He now has 1.19 million followers, and a reputation as someone who sprang fully formed from social media, which can’t be true…
I'm not a hipster; I have a beard because I'm lazy. It's filled with maggots. — rob delaney (@robdelaney) October 23, 2015
“No, I was born of woman,” he confirms. But Twitter did do a lot for him, he admits. As a struggling stand-up and comedy writer who’d battled alcoholism (a near fatal drink-driving accident was, for him, the turning point), Delaney first discovered Twitter in 2009, when most people were still using it to describe their breakfast. He posted jokes instead.
“I think, looking at it backwards, the reason Twitter was good to me is because I had just piles of submissions for all the late-night TV show hosts with sketches and jokes,” he says. He kept getting solicited to write more, but never hired, resulting in a wealth of unused material. “When Twitter came along as a way to get your jokes out into the world, I was supremely positioned for that.”
Twitter is also where Delaney and Horgan first met, as it were. “I think first contact was established in 2010,” says Delaney. “And we started working on the pilot of this in 2012.” By then they’d even met in real life a few times.
That's how you get in with the cool kids… #CATASTROPHE returns Tuesday at 10pm on @Channel 4. https://t.co/gEIC35zIyG — Sharon Horgan (@SharonHorgan) October 24, 2015
“But we still didn’t know if it was going to work out,” says Horgan. “We liked each other, we liked each other’s stuff, but you just never know what’s going to happen until you sit down.” In addition to the stumbling block of living on different continents, they were both busy: Horgan was writing a pilot for the American network ABC; Delaney had a successful stand-up career to maintain. And they both had families: two decades of marriage and five kids between them (Delaney now has three children under five). Their choice of subject matter was obvious.
The first series of Catastrophe was sharply written, gloriously foul-mouthed, and assembled with exquisite timing. It was also surprisingly moving, although they did their best to keep sweetness at bay. From the outset they were determined to keep it real.
“Marriage is interesting,” says Delaney. “It’s not fun, often. It is, sometimes, but it’s a much more nuanced thing. That’s what we wanted to capture, and I guess if we were successful, it’s because we did show that warmth and near-violent confrontation can exist within the same day, within the same hour, in a marriage, even a healthy one.”
Horgan admits to being pleasantly surprised by the warmth of the finished pilot. “I think Rob kind of tempered my harshness,” she says. “And I tempered his soppiness.”
Horgan and Delaney with Star Wars actor Carrie Fisher, who plays Delaney’s mother in Catastrophe
Advertisement
Even if many elements of both series are taken from personal experience, one is warned against reading too much into the fact that the characters played by Horgan and Delaney are also called Sharon and Rob.Image copyright PA Image caption Suspects can now be charged under the Fraud Act, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years
Benefit cheats in England and Wales could face longer jail terms of up to 10 years, following new guidance from the director of public prosecutions.
Keir Starmer QC said it was time for a "tough stance" given the £1.9bn annual cost of the crime to the nation.
He urged prosecutors to consider charging under the Fraud Act - rather than social security laws - because of the scope for longer sentences.
The prime minister's spokesman said he welcomed the move.
The BBC's legal correspondent Clive Coleman said the changes meant welfare cheating would now be classed alongside offences such as money laundering and banking fraud.
Cash limit
Benefit fraud statistics (2011) 6,080 offenders were sentenced - the lowest number since 2001. (A total of 16,317 offenders were sentenced for all types of fraud in 2011)
79% of cases were seen at the magistrates' court
41% were given a community order, which means offenders serve their whole sentence in the community
17% were fined
16% were given an absolute or conditional discharge
Nearly 5% (291 offenders) were given immediate custody. The average sentence length was seven months, three weeks
54% of offenders sentenced were female (compared with 26% for all fraud offences) *Due to data classification, not all benefit fraud offences are included. Source: Fraud Offences Sentencing Data (June 2013)
In the past, benefits cheats were commonly charged under social security legislation carrying a maximum sentence of seven years.
And benefit frauds of less than £20,000 were automatically tried in magistrates' courts, which could only sentence people to up to 12 months imprisonment for multiple offences. For a single offence, the maximum was six months.
This financial threshold has been scrapped under the new guidelines, so smaller cases can be referred straight to crown courts for tougher sentencing.
Suspects can also now be charged under the Fraud Act, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years, according to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS)
In 2012, the number of offenders jailed for benefit fraud was 262 and the average sentence length was six months and one week.
Stolen identity
Mr Starmer said: "It is a myth that 'getting one over on the system' is a victimless crime: the truth is we all pay the price. But it's not only the taxpayers that suffer.
"Benefits exist to protect and support the most vulnerable people in our society and, whenever the system is defrauded, it's also taking money away from those with a genuine need."
The DPP said prosecutors should consider a number of factors when deciding how to charge, including:
Whether the fraud was professionally planned
Whether multiple frauds occurred or a single fraud was carried out over a significant period of time
Whether a false or stolen identity was used
Whether the perpetrator abused a position of trust in order to commit the offence
The move comes after the CPS merged with the Department for Work and Pensions' prosecutions division last year.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The Independent's Owen Jones: "Paedophiles, rapists and murderers are going to have lesser sentences than people who commit benefit fraud"
Jonathan Isaby, political director of the TaxPayers' Alliance, welcomed it, saying: "This is people stealing from taxpayers - stealing from vulnerable people.
"A message needs to go out that this is unacceptable and increasing sentences will act as a deterrent."
But Labour MP Theresa Pearce, who is a member of the Commons' Work and Pensions Committee, accused Mr Starmer, who is due to stand down from his CPS role in October, of "trying to look tough" on benefit cheats.
"Ten years in prison, really? For something that could be like a couple of thousand pounds. Yes, that's bad and there's a way you should get it back but I just don't understand why this is his priority in his final months," she said.
Earlier this year, MPs on the Communities and Local Government Select Committee called on the government to give a "swift assurance" that the introduction of its new welfare system, known as universal credit, would not cause a rise in benefit fraud.
Universal credit will eventually replace six key means-tested benefits with one payment.
Last year, the CPS saw more than 8,600 prosecutions in benefit and tax credit cases, and 4,000 in the first five months of 2013, Mr Starmer said. The current conviction rate is 89.7%, he added.
The government says it has saved hundreds of millions of pounds by introducing better fraud prevention and reducing errors in the tax and benefit system.
A Downing Street spokesman said: "Benefit fraud is very serious. It's wrong and that's why the prime minister warmly welcomes this announcement."This donkey trying to get out of a hole is a metaphor for today's Democratic Party. Like the Democrats, the donkey doesn't quite look enthusiastic enough. (Basel Landschaft/Keystone Police via AP)
History suggests the 2018 election will almost surely be a bad one for Republicans. Midterms are generally considered a referendum on the president, and the results are almost always bad for said president. Layer on the fact that President Trump is the most unpopular new president in the modern era, and it would seem to be — at least at this early juncture — a clear recipe for a Democratic wave.
The key word there being “seem.”
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll, as Mike DeBonis and Emily Guskin report, presents a pretty mixed bag for Democrats. It shows that registered voters say they want Democrats to control Congress to be a check on Trump by a 52-38 percent margin, but it also shows Democrats are — rather remarkably — less enthusiastic about voting than Republicans are. While 65 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning adults say they are “almost certain to vote,” just 57 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults say the same.
The question from there is which is more predictive of what lies ahead. And the answer won't necessarily make Democrats feel better.
That first number would seem to be a big one: People prefer a Democratic Congress reining in Trump by a 14-point margin! That is a big margin. It's actually similar in size to what it was for Republicans before their big wins in the 2010 and 2014 midterms. When the Post-ABC poll asked this question in April 2014, the GOP led on it by 14 points. When it was asked twice toward the end of the 2010 election, the GOP led by between eight and 16 points.
But then there's 2002. That midterm election was close to a stalemate, but just over a month beforehand, a similar question rendered a 19-point advantage to Democrats — quite similar to today's 14-point edge. Despite this, Democrats would actually go on to lose some seats in the House and the Senate.
In addition, the choice in the poll question is between being a check on the president and voting for the party that supports the president's agenda, and poll respondents are often drawn toward more middle-ground, moderate positions. Hence, Post-ABC polls show people have consistently leaned on the side of checking a president's power. But if you look at the so-called generic ballot — a simple question about which party you prefer — it's almost always closer than this. And sure enough, that's the case today, too.
So Democrats have an advantage there, though it's not clear how predictive it is. Which brings us to the flip side of the coin: enthusiasm. How bad is it that Democrats are somehow less enthusiastic about this election than are Republicans?
For past polling on that question, we have to look at registered voters rather than all adults, as we did at the top of this post. There, Republicans have a smaller, four-point advantage — with 70 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning registered voters “almost certain to vote” vs. 66 percent for Democrats.
That's actually just shy of where the GOP's advantage was for much of the 2014 election, when they went on to a big win. On the eve of that midterm, the GOP had a seven-point edge on enthusiasm in Post-ABC polling. The GOP had a bigger, double-digit edge on this heading into the 2010 election in which they won big.
And finally, many of the voters who give Democrats an advantage on that first question above say they are "almost certain to vote" but didn't actually vote in the last midterm in 2014. Democrats-as-a-check-on-Trump leads by 34 points with this group, but by just 8 points with "almost certain" voters who did vote last time. This, as much as anything, suggests enthusiasm is hugely important to Democrats.
These are indicators that fluctuate quite a bit, and we're still more than 15 months away from the 2018 election, so we'll have to stay tuned. But there seems to be almost an expectation that Trump as president will spur big Democratic turnout, and this poll calls that into question. Watch these "almost certain to vote" numbers going forward, because they are a pretty solid leading indicator.
The Post-ABC poll was conducted July 10-13 among a random national sample of 1,001 adults reached on cellular and landline phones. The margin of sampling error for overall results is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points and four points among the sample of 859 registered voters.The country’s 16 state premiers were set to meet on Tuesday evening in Berlin in an attempt to smooth over disagreements around the financing of the country's switch over to renewable energy, known as the Energiewende.
Ahead of the meeting, Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks said Germany should never consider turning to fracking as a solution for its energy needs, despite the success of the technology in the USA.
Fracking involves blasting water mixed with sand and chemicals at high pressure into rocks, releasing the gas.
“Unlike the USA, our country is densely populated and small,” Hendricks told the Passauer Neue Presse on Tuesday.
She added that not only would a successful commercial fracking industry in Germany be “wishful thinking” but that “a rethinking of our energy policy should take us away from fossil fuels – no matter where they come from.”
Germany's coalition government rejected the use of fracking when it formed in December last year, but Hendricks wants to go further and enshrine a ban in law.
"The coalition agreement is very clear [on fracking], she said. “Drinking water and health are an absolute priority for us. We reject the use of environmentally toxic substances. We will enshrine it in law."
Energy meet
Economy and Energy Minister Sigmar Gabriel and Chancellor Angela Merkel have been pushing for Germany’s 16 states to come to an agreement on capping surcharges on wind and biogas energy plants.
Gabriel wants to cap green energy surcharges paid to renewable electricity producers after a certain point.
For onshore wind, this would kick in after 2,500 megawatts of new capacity had been installed. For biomass, it would be much lower at just 100 megawatts. Critics say this could kill off biomass altogether.
Premieres of northern states – which tend to have a large proportion of the country's wind turbines – say putting caps on wind power will slow down the development of the industry and hinder the change over in general.
Schleswig-Holstein's state premier Torsten Albig said a lot of turbines in his state were being upgraded and they should not be included in the 2,500 megawatt cap.
In Lower Saxony, politicians want a general lowering of energy tax in order to halt Germany's rising electricity costs.
SEE ALSO: Energy minister says 'no alternative' to Russian gasFour senators are requesting detailed information by Monday from the FBI following director James Comey's announcement that the agency is investigating additional emails relating to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server for official business.
The news was first reported by Frank Thorpe, a producer and off-camera reporter for NBC News.
"Just ten days before a presidential election, the American people deserve more disclosure without delay regarding the FBI's most recent announcement. Anything less would be a disservice to the American people," wrote Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein, Thomas Carper, Patrick Leahy and Benjamin Cardin in a letter to Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Comey on Friday said the agency was looking into emails it found on the computer of former Congressman Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Hillary Clinton's top aide Huma Abedin.
But few details beyond the announcement were released.
"Based on Director Comey’s internal memo to FBI staff, it is not clear whether FBI agents have even obtained or reviewed the emails in question. And based on press reports, it appears possible that a significant number – if not all – of the emails could be duplicates of emails already reviewed by the FBI," wrote the four senators. "Accordingly, no later than Monday, October 31, 2016, we request that you provide us with detailed information about the investigative steps that are being taken, the number of emails involved, and what is being done to determine how many of the emails are duplicative of those already reviewed by the FBI. Just ten days before a presidential election, the American people deserve more disclosure without delay regarding the FBI’s most recent announcement. Anything less would be a disservice to the American people.”X-Files fans will be able to add a new chapter to Mulder and Scully’s story with The X-Files Origins series, a pair of YA novels about 15-year-old Dana Scully and 17-year-old Fox Mulder.
EW can exclusively announce the two new novels in The X-Files Origins series, Agent of Chaos and Devil’s Advocate. Each story is set in the spring of 1979, when serial murder, the occult, and government conspiracy were highlighted in the news. The books, acquired by Imprint/Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, follow Mulder and Scully as they experience life-changing events that set them on the path to becoming the FBI agents depicted by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson on the cult-favorite TV show The X-Files.
Agent of Chaos, Mulder’s story, will be written by No. 1 New York Times bestselling author Kami Garcia, the co-author of the Beautiful Creatures and Dangerous Creatures novels and the author of the upcoming The Lovely Reckless, publishing Oct. 2016 from Imprint. Her solo series, The Legion, includes the New York Times bestseller Unbreakable and the sequel Unmarked, which were both Bram Stoker nominees.
Devil’s Advocate, Scully’s story, will be written by Jonathan Maberry, a New York Times bestselling thriller and horror novelist, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, and Marvel Comics writer. Maberry’s novels include Assassin’s Code, Dead of Night, Patient Zero, and Rot & Ruin.
“When I watched the pilot episode back in 1993, I became immediately obsessed with The X-Files,” says Erin Stein, Publisher of Imprint, in a statement. “As a die-hard fan of the show, the opportunity to work with incredible authors on original stories about these characters is a dream come true for me. Why did Mulder become a believer? Why did Scully become a skeptic? We get to tell those stories.”
Agent of Chaos and Devil’s Advocate are set to publish simultaneously in Jan. 2017.ADVERTISEMENT
On May 8, 2014, the British Royal Navy destroyer HMS Dragon sailed from the naval base at Portsmouth on an urgent mission — to find and follow the Russian aircraft carrier Kuznetsov and six accompanying vessels steaming through the English Channel.
"A Russian task group of this size has not passed by our shores in some time," said Rex Cox, Dragon's captain.
True, the Russian navy had been more active in recent months. Moscow annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula with its strategic ports and asserted itself with troop, ship, and warplane deployments along the frontier between Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
That's important to the Kremlin because, historically, Russia has struggled to maintain warm-water ports. Seizing Crimea helps ensure Moscow's access to ice-free waters for commercial and military shipping.
But Russia's busy fleet schedule masks an underlying seagoing weakness. Moscow's warships are old and unreliable. Yet the government is finding it increasingly difficult to replace them with equally large and powerful new vessels.
Russia is a geriatric maritime giant surrounded by much more energetic rivals.
In the final years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was determined to match the mighty U.S. Navy on the high seas. Moscow funded the construction of its first three full-size aircraft carriers in the late 1970s and 1980s — the non-nuclear Kuznetsov and a sister ship, plus a nuclear-powered vessel. The United States then possessed 15 large aircraft carriers, most of them nuclear-powered. After post-Cold War force cuts, today the United States has 10 nuclear flattops plus another nine small carriers.
The Soviet Union’s collapse dashed Moscow's naval expansion plans. The Russians managed to finish paying the Ukrainian shipyard to complete Kuznetsov. But there was not enough money for the other two flattops. Today, a new aircraft carrier can cost billions of dollars.
HMS Dragon shadowing Kuznetsov's battle group in 2014 | (U.K. Ministry of Defense/Courtesy War is Boring)
Commissioned in 1991, Kuznetsov was Russia's last new large warship. In the past 23 years, Moscow has managed to complete a few new submarines and small frigates and destroyers at its main Sevmash shipyard, on the North Atlantic coast. But many of Russia's current naval vessels — and all its large vessels — are Soviet leftovers.
They're outdated, prone to mechanical breakdowns, and wickedly uncomfortable for their crews — especially compared to the latest U.S., European, and Chinese ships. Washington alone builds roughly eight new warships a year, including a brand-new nuclear carrier every four or five years.
When Moscow moved to annex Crimea in March 2014, the U.S. Navy promptly sailed its new flattop USS George H.W. Bush into the eastern Mediterranean to reassure NATO governments. Bush's battle group included no fewer than 60 high-tech warplanes and several of Washington's modern Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, armed with missiles and guns for fighting planes, submarines, and other ships.
In response, the Kremlin sent in Kuznetsov. The aging carrier — much smaller than Bush — carried a dozen or so Sukhoi fighters. Her six escorts included just a single heavily-armed vessel, the Soviet-vintage nuclear cruiser Pyotr Velikiy. The other five ships included one small amphibious landing ship plus three support tankers and a tugboat.
The tugboat was along for a good reason. On the few occasions when Kuznetsov leaves port, she often promptly breaks down. In 2009, a short circuit sparked a fire that killed one seaman aboard the rusting vessel.
Kuznetsov shadowed Bush in the Mediterranean for a few weeks, then returned home to northern Russia through the English Channel in early May 2014. That's when Dragon found her. For a more enduring presence in the Mediterranean, the Kremlin deployed one relatively modern destroyer, to reinforce Russia's small existing Mediterranean flotilla.
Sevmash shipyard | (Wikimapia/Courtesy War is Boring)
Kuznetsov doesn't have many years left in her. Her boilers are "defective," according to the trade publication Defense Industry Daily. Yet when she goes to the breakers to be dismantled, Moscow could find it impossible to replace her. For one, the shipyard that built all the Soviet carriers now belongs to Ukraine. It lies just outside of Crimea, and Russian forces did not manage to seize it.
Moreover, Ukraine is still the exclusive supplier for many of the heavy components, including engines and gears, for Russia's warships — even the ones Russia builds in its northern shipyard. With the continuing tense stand-off, Kiev recently banned arms sales to Moscow.
Russia's attempts to revitalize its domestic shipbuilding industry have not gone smoothly. In 2005, India inked a nearly $1-billion deal with Russia for a rebuilt Soviet-era small flattop. Russia's work on Vikramaditya was so poor, however, that she suffered a near-total breakdown shortly after her purported completion in 2012.
India finally accepted Vikramaditya in 2014 — after the total cost of her refurbishment had nearly tripled to $2.3 billion. If Russia can't even remodel an existing warship, imagine the difficulties it would face designing and building a big new ship from scratch.
Moscow knows its navy is in trouble. It seized on an extreme solution in 2011 — importing ships, technology and expertise from France. Russia signed a contract for two French Mistral-class helicopter carriers. Each ship costs more than $1 billion.
The plan was for Russian shipyards to help construct the vessels. "The purchase of Mistral shipbuilding technology will help Russia to grasp large-capacity shipbuilding," Adm. Vladimir Vysotsky, chief of the navy at the time. "It is important for construction of ships like the future oceangoing class destroyer and later an aircraft carrier."
Unsurprisingly, the Russian yards have proved incapable of handling intensive construction. In 2013, the Kremlin asked France to take over the bulk of the work. After Russia annexed Crimea, Paris suspended then ultimately canceled the ship deal.
But even if the deal had gone through, buying two ships from France would have done little to reform Russia's shipbuilding industry, as Russian workers wouldn’t have been directly involved in building the vessels. Now deprived of the Ukrainian-made parts, Russia's shipbuilding industry is in even worse shape than it was two years ago.
That bodes poorly for Russia's future as a naval power. Dragon's interception of Kuznetsov could prove to be a turning point. In coming years, large Russian warships could become a very rare sight.
The implications are serious for Moscow's influence in the world — and for its ability to win a war against a maritime foe.
From drones to AKs, high technology to low politics, War is Boring explores how and why we fight above, on, and below an angry world. Sign up for its daily email update here or subscribe to its RSS Feed here.
From our friends at The Daily Dot, by ______.
From drones to AKs, high technology to low politics, War is Boring explores how and why we fight above, on, and below an angry world. Sign up for its daily email update here or subscribe to its RSS Feed here.Television ads making highly exaggerated and ambiguous claims are quite common. Crashing down on such big brands which mislead consumers, the Consumer Complaints Council (CCC) under the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has banned 82 advertisements.
In June 2015, ASCI’s Consumer Complaints Council (CCC) received 148 complaints across segments during, of which 26 belonged to the Personal and Healthcare category, followed by 22 advertisements in the Education category, 9 advertisements in Food and Beverage category, 7 advertisements in media and entertainment category and 18 advertisements from other categories.
The banned ads are from prominent brands like including Flipkart, BSNL, Uber, Vodafone and Snapdeal. According to the report published by ASCI, here are the reasons behind some of these bans –
Flipkart Internet Private Limited: The website communication claims the MRP of the product as Rs.799, when actual printed MRP on product is Rs. 399 which is being offered as the discounted price for Canvera. The website communication claims the MRP of the product as Rs. 999, when actual printed MRP on product is Rs. 449 which is being offered as the discounted price for OBS. This distorts facts and is therefore misleading the consumers as to actual discount being offered.
Uber: The advertisement by Uber states, “You drink, we drive”, when read in conjunction with the depiction of logos of Bars such as Zara etc. as #UBERAPPROVED PARTNERS, was seen to promote alcohol drinking.
Jasper Infotech P. Ltd. (Snapdeal.com): The advertisement of Snapdeal.com depicts a visual of “a man riding a bike without a helmet” shows an unsafe practice.
Aakash Institute: The advertisement shows the visual of “a boy pillion riding a bike without a helmet” which depicts an unsafe practice.
BYJU’s Classes: The advertisement claims, “Announcing excellent success ratio in our first IIT batch with 161 of 212 students clearing JEE Mains” and “Get classes from India’s best teachers”, were not substantiated with data. In addition, the claim “Bangalore’s Biggest Scholarship Test for 7th to 12th Class students”, was not substantiated with comparative data.
Amity University: The advertisement claims, “Amity University ranked among the Top Universities in Asia by QS, a leading ranking organization”, was not substantiated.
Image Credit : MoneyLife
Disclaimer : We do not own the images appearing under Think Change India section of our site / Facebook page. The images are taken from different sources, and belong to their respective owners, who have respective copyright over them. If you feel that any image violates your copyright, please write to us at [email protected] and we will take it down.Athens: Anti-election action in Petralona
Hope is coming – Greece (is moving forward) WILL BURN
and Europe (is changing) WILL BURN.
(Vote for) DEATH TO Syriza.
Abstention from the ballot boxes – Rebellion and disobedience
The stencil reads: “Fire to the school cells”
In the early hours of Saturday 24th to Sunday 25th of January 2015 a small group of comrades carried out the following actions in the Athens neighbourhood of Petralona, currently decorated with pre-election materials:
At least 7 election banners of political parties were taken down or spray-painted.
Slogans were painted on walls of several streets, on the “little shop” of the Syriza party and a polling station.
An anti-election banner was hung.
Sabotage the electoral process – Death to the saviours
We declare war on democracy
Our lives in our hands
Long live anarchy
Sympraxis of AnarchistsJacob Silverman is the author of Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection.
A lone hacker comes along, dumps a massive trove of secret information about the global super-rich and powerful on the world’s media, and then, fearing for his safety and freedom, drops out of view, probably forever. Welcome to the era of the mega-leak. It’s the modern-day equivalent of David and Goli |
ease credit and financial conditions, guard against deflation, and promote economic recovery. All of this has been accomplished, I should note, at no net cost to the federal budget or to the U.S. taxpayer.
The last line should erase any doubt the Federal Reserve is now under the sway of political pressure. Note also Bernanke’s long defense of the Fed on the issue of commodity prices – clearly he is getting grief on this point. Would he even be willing to chance that he is wrong?
But not only is monetary policy out of the question at this juncture, he also argues that fiscal policy should be off the table as well:
The prospect of increasing fiscal drag on the recovery highlights one of the many difficult tradeoffs faced by fiscal policymakers: If the nation is to have a healthy economic future, policymakers urgently need to put the federal government’s finances on a sustainable trajectory. But, on the other hand, a sharp fiscal consolidation focused on the very near term could be self-defeating if it were to undercut the still-fragile recovery. The solution to this dilemma, I believe, lies in recognizing that our nation’s fiscal problems are inherently long-term in nature. Consequently, the appropriate response is to move quickly to enact a credible, long-term plan for fiscal consolidation. By taking decisions today that lead to fiscal consolidation over a longer horizon, policymakers can avoid a sudden fiscal contraction that could put the recovery at risk. At the same time, establishing a credible plan for reducing future deficits now would not only enhance economic performance in the long run, but could also yield near-term benefits by leading to lower long-term interest rates and increased consumer and business confidence.
Bernanke sees the threat posed by excessive short-term fiscal consolidation, but offers no suggestion that perhaps more short-term stimulus is still needed – that to close the output gap, fiscal authorities need to move more spending from the future to the present. But given the expansion of the balance sheet, I think Federal Reserve officials fear this road, as it creates the impression of deficit monetization. So, no stimulus, monetary or fiscal.
Finally, Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher noted:
The central banker noted consumers and firms are still traumatized by the economic and financial difficulties of recent years, and that’s part of why growth levels are still struggling. But he does expect activity to pick up: “The next half of the year will have better growth than we’ve seen recently,” Fisher said. “It’s not going to be robust” and he expects to see a “jerky motion” to activity.
The description of a recovery that is jerky and lacking robustness brings to mind something Greg Ip said last week:
Still, I was recently reminded by someone who lived through Japan’s lost decade that America is qualitatively, if not quantitatively, following the same script. That means we will often think robust, above-trend growth has begun, only to see it snuffed out by the inexorable post-bubble deleveraging. Japan offers another sobering lesson: its policy flexibility was heavily circumscribed by politics. Bail-outs, deficits and quantitative easing were no more popular in Japan than in America today. Japanese officials are far too polite to say “I told you so.” But they could.
And it is worth noting that while we think about “a lost decade” over the next ten years, the past ten years was already a lost decade for many:Let’s face it. We all have embarrassing memories about how we learned about sex. It might as well be a law of physics among youth. At some point, you’re going to learn about sex. Shortly after that, you’ll probably learn something you didn’t want to learn from a parent, teacher, or priest.
For me, one particular memory stands out and it’s one I suspect most people my age share, as well. It happened in health class during middle school, just as puberty kicked in. It had nothing to do with male or female anatomy. I already knew about that, thanks to my parents. This particular lesson was more basic in that it had a simple message.
“If you get AIDS, you will die.”
It wasn’t as much a lesson as it was a warning. Everyone in that class had been learning about sex, at least as much as any public school was allowed to teach us. We were all at that age when we started thinking, wanting, and obsessing over it. Then, this distressing caveat gets thrown into the mix and suddenly, these overwhelming desires we can’t turn off take on a whole new context.
I’m not going to lie. That was pretty terrifying. The idea that doing something you were hardwired to do, and needed to do for the propagation of the species, could kill you was akin to being forced into a cage match with a chainsaw-wielding John Cena.
It’s one thing to avoid angry predators, sharp cliffs, and confined spaces with O.J. Simpson. It’s quite another to avoid the natural horniness that comes with being human. It gives the impression that sex is so dangerous and so risky that we might as wear hazmat suits while doing it.
Thankfully, I was mistrustful enough of my health teachers to learn more on my own. Even with lousy, dial-up internet, I was able to find out that a some of the dangerous claims my teachers had given me about sex, disease, and all those other lurid topics was not entirely accurate.
Granted, I understood why they used those kinds of tactics on young, hormonal pre-teens like me. Back then, AIDS was a death sentence. A diagnosis with AIDS was like a diagnosis of terminal cancer. When it started claiming the lives of celebrities like Rock Hudson and Eazy-E, even hormonal kids took note of the danger.
It was still a dick move, though, using those kinds of scare tactics on hormonal teenagers. I remember entire classes dedicated to teaching kids the horrors of AIDS and other nasty diseases that we could get if we didn’t have sex in the way the Catholic Church or the Saudi Arabian government approved. In case you’re wondering, yes, some schools still use these tactics.
Ignoring, for a moment, the outright cruelty of scaring kids like that, it’s worth noting that the situation with AIDS and other diseases is very different. Medical science has advanced. Innovations in antibiotics, anti-viral drugs and vaccines have improved treatment or even cured some of those terrible diseases that my teachers used to scare me with.
While AIDS still has no cure, it’s not a death sentence anymore. Just ask Magic Johnson. There’s even a pill called Truvada that, when taken daily, can prevent the spread if the HIV virus. While it’s still a huge problem in places like Sub-Saharan Africa, we’re at the point in modern medicine where it can be managed.
However, it’s not going to stop there. At some point, medical science will cure diseases like AIDS. We’re already closer than you think and I’m not just referring to recent advances in technology like CRISPR.
Just this past month, a research team at the Scripps Research Institute developed a method that effectively blocks the HIV virus from infecting new cells. They’re calling it a “functional cure” in that, while it doesn’t remove the virus from the body, it effectively stops it from spreading.
This news comes shortly after the National Institutes of Health announced that they had produced an anti-body that blocks 99 percent of all HIV strains. If the results are replicated, that means a functional vaccine is not that far off. Add tools like CRISPR to the mix and it’s entirely possible that there are children alive today that will never have to worry about diseases like AIDS.
Given the amount of suffering this disease has caused, that’s an undeniable good. However, it removes a major tactic from the arsenals of sex educators who don’t want teenagers experimenting with their genitals. Now, I can understand that worry to some extent. Teenagers do have a history of doing stupid things and not just with their genitals.
Even without that stupidity, how are teachers going to convince horny teenagers to keep their pants on when they can’t scare them with diseases like AIDS? How many parents are going to gasp in horror at the notion that their precious little angels might be able to have sex with minimal consequences?
I ask these questions only half-jokingly. I also ask them with the full understanding that I may have kids of my own at some point and I too might vomit uncontrollably at the thought of them having sex. Given our collective capacity for excuse banking, I don’t doubt that anxious parents and teachers will come up with some sort of scare tactic to discourage teenagers from having sex.
It’s just going to get a lot more challenging in a world where diseases like AIDS are no longer a factor. History is certainly not on the side of those clinging to such puritanical attitudes. As I’ve mentioned before, the advent of modern antibiotics played a major part in the sexual revolution of the 1960s. A cure for AIDS might incur the same.
If that weren’t challenging enough, advances in contraception are sure to compound that effort. Advances like Vasalgel for men and IUDs for women will make it so that even the fear of pregnancy won’t be much of a scare tactic. Unlike every other generation of teenager, those in the near future may never have to worry about the kinds of consequences that have plagued horny teenagers for centuries.
That naturally doesn’t sit well with the uptight regressive crowd that belabors personal responsibility and bemoans any level of sexual freedom that goes beyond what the Catholic Church sanctions. In years past, they could refer to diseases and unwanted pregnancy to justify those attitudes. Once those factors are removed, what will they have left?
Never mind the fact that teenagers are already having less sex now than previous generations. In the minds of parents, priests, and health teachers, it’s still too much. I could bemoan how much of that reflects our poor, unhealthy attitudes towards sex, but that’s not going to change minds or sell sexy novels.
A part of me genuinely worries that there will be some people who actively oppose treating diseases like AIDS. There’s already a precedent. There are people out there who oppose the widespread use of Gardasil, a vaccine meant to treat HPV, a common virus that is often transmitted during sex and known to cause cancer.
Think about that for a moment. There are people in this world who are willing to risk young people, including their own children, getting cancer rather than risk them having care-free sex. That shows the lengths certain people will go to in order to ensure sex still has serious consequences. It says something about these attitudes when they feel they need those consequences to get their message across.
In time, some of these regressive attitudes may fade. These days, most people aren’t going to be publicly scorned for not being a virgin on their wedding night. Some parts of the world still cling to those attitudes, but most people in the developed world don’t have to worry about the Spanish Inquisition bursting into their bedroom and arresting them for having sex just for fun.
Better education will help improve attitudes and addressing the orgasm gap will go a long way, as well. It’s hard to know for sure what a future health class will look like in a world without AIDS or major disease. That world isn’t here yet, but it’s fast approaching. Parents, priests, and puritans of all stripes need to prepare. However, we should worry about how far they’ll take those preparations.Image caption Claire Perry says web firms need to be brought in line with TV stations and newsagents
Internet providers should create an "opt-in" system to prevent children gaining access to pornography, a Conservative MP has said.
Claire Perry wants age-checks to be attached to all such material to reduce exposure to it.
The mother-of-three, who has prompted a Commons debate on the issue, said internet firms should "share the responsibility" of protecting children.
A study suggests one in three under-10s has seen pornography on the web.
Four in every five children aged 14 to 16 admitted regularly accessing explicit photographs and footage on their home computers, according to Psychologies magazine.
MPs will discuss whether to bring in measures to increase protection for those under the age of 18.
Ms Perry, who represents Devizes, in Wiltshire, said: "As a mother with three children I know how difficult it is to keep children from seeing inappropriate material on the internet.
"We already successfully regulate British TV channels, cinema screens, High Street hoardings and newsagent shelves to stop children seeing inappropriate images and mobile phone companies are able to restrict access to adult material so why should the internet be any different?"
Ms Perry added: "British internet service providers should share the responsibility to keep our children safe so I am calling for ISPs to offer an 'opt-in' system that uses age verification to access pornographic material."This month’s Undersung Scientist is Dr. Shit F. Chew of the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Dr. Chew’s work has gone too-little noticed by the broader science community. Her publications include:
“Urea synthesis in the African lungfish Protopterus dolloi-hepatic carbamoyl phosphate synthetase III and glutamine synthetase are upregulated by 6 days of aerial exposure,” Shit F. Chew, et al., Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 206, 2003, pp. 3615-24.
“Nitrogen excretion and defence against ammonia toxicity,” Chew, S. F., et al., in Fish Physiology, vol. 23, The Physiology of Tropical Fishes (ed. A. Val, V. Almedia-Val and D. J. Randall), 2006, New York: Academic Press.
“The swamp eel Monopterus albus reduces endogenous ammonia production and detoxifies ammonia to glutamine during 144 h of aerial exposure,” S.L.A. Tay, S.F. Chew and, Y.K. Ip, Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 206, 2003, pp. 2473-86.
“Strategies Adopted by the Mudskipper Boleophthalmus boddaerti to Survive Sulfide Exposure in Normoxia or Hypoxia,” Yuen K. Ip, Sharon S. L. Kuah, and Shit F. Chew, Physiological and Biochemical Zoology 77(5):824-837. 2004.
This is Dr. Chew’s second appearance as Undersung Scientist of the Month, the first having come in December 2004. (Thanks to investigator David Schultz for alerting us to some of Dr. Chew’s new work.)Although occasionally blurting out inconvenient truths, President Trump has established an early record of remarkable falsehoods, raising doubts about his grasp of reality, says Lawrence Davidson.
By Lawrence Davidson
During the presidential campaign, I often referred to Donald Trump as a congenital liar, but it is possible that in doing so I made a “category mistake.” By definition liars, even chronic ones, belong to a category of people who know that there is truth from which their lies deviate. I am not sure that accurately describes President Trump’s state of mind. Perhaps a more accurate way of describing Trump’s outlook is that it presents as a “grandiose delusional disorder.”
People with this sort of disorder seem not to be able to discern what is real from what they want to be real. Their beliefs do not have to be bizarre but can appear as persistent misrepresentations that are either false or gross exaggerations. One sort of delusional disorder is called “grandiose.” Here the person has “an over-inflated sense of worth, power, knowledge, or identity.” Trump seems to fit this description.
Here are a few of Trump’s misrepresentations and exaggerations that appear to underpin his alternate reality.
— According to the President, the nation was in deep trouble when he took over. He insists that he inherited “a mess.” No one challenged this description, although it is plainly an exaggeration. In truth the economy (including job production and employment rates) under his predecessor was doing well and no new foreign wars had been launched by Washington. Civil rights were being extended to more and more minority groups. Where there was dissension it was over such things as police violence (which Trump seems not to see as a problem).
To tackle this exaggerated “mess” Trump claims to have put together a “well-oiled machine.” This is a misrepresentation. By all evidence his early administration is disorganized, amateurish and plagued by internal dissension. When the situation was reported in the press, Trump got very angry at this challenge to his preferred view of reality and declared that the media is the “enemy of the American people.”
— President Trump claims that a key to the safety of the nation is the imposition of his immigration ban blocking immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim nations. But the statistical evidence showing a lack of violence on American soil by such immigrants makes Trump’s claim insupportable. Just so his grossly exaggerated assertion that immigrants generally hurt the economy by taking jobs away from citizens.
— He (along with that other deluded leader Benjamin Netanyahu) describes Iran as the greatest terror state in the world, even though, in practice, Iran has been a discreet ally of the U.S. in the “war on terror.”
— And, of course, Trump continues to insist on his overwhelming popularity, as exemplified by claims for his Electoral College numbers and an alleged record inauguration attendance, despite the fact that each claim can easily be shown to be a misrepresentation of reality. Trump’s real approval rate now hovers around 40 percent, lower than every other post-World War II president at this point in their term.
To these instances of misrepresentation and exaggeration can be added other evidence, such as the fact that just about all contrary views appearing in the media are now described by Trump as “fake news.” In his own opinion, nothing he says or does is ever wrong or mistaken. If something does go wrong it is because some other person or group has maliciously sabotaged his efforts, while twisting the truth he knows to exist into a maligning falsehood. This is why he can’t work with anyone who has previously criticized him or who is likely to do so to his face.
Humbug or Worse
There is another way to understand what Trump is doing. This is explained in a 2005 book by Harry Frankfurt entitled On Bullshit. Actually, an older and less crude way of describing this is “humbug.” Whatever you call it, this way of relating to the world is, according to Frankfurt, worse than lying because it is “indifferent to the truth.”
Those who consistently engage in bullshit “quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant.” You do this enough and you lose your capacity to tell what is true and what isn’t. Frankfurt believes that Trump does often lie, but even more often he just bullshits, and he really cares little about what is actually true. Perhaps he has reached the stage where truth is just whatever comes out of his mouth.
How are we to understand the millions of Americans who respond to Donald Trump with uncritical enthusiasm – as if these large numbers are following a pied piper into a promised world. I think we have to see them as an archaic subset of any population. In the U.S. case, this is a largely white American subgroup that has been obsessively angry since the 1960s over both economic and cultural changes.
In other words, the progressive political and social reality that most Americans have created beginning with the Civil Rights movement is anathema to them. For these discontented people, the changes happening around them appeared unstoppable until now. However, Trump’s language, his attack on the political system per se, his choice of targets such as immigrants, have given voice and direction to the frustrations of this subgroup. Trump’s alternate reality is one that they are comfortable with. This situation is not unique to the U.S., nor is it unique to our historical period.
Even though there is no eliminating such a class of malcontents entirely, it is to be emphasized that, despite the publicity given emotional Trump rallies and the Tea Party movement, Trump devotees are a minority of the national population. If that is the case, how is it that Donald Trump occupies the White House? We can answer this question by accounting for the outlook of the rest of the adult U.S. population.
American Disaffection
First, it is important to understand that a large percentage of American adults (perhaps 40 percent) don’t vote. In my opinion, most of them are just not interested in politics. It is not an important part of their local reality. Thus, they do not show an interest in, much less an understanding of, politically important issues beyond their own immediate locale. This accounts for the chronic low turnout for American elections both national and regional. The default position of this very large number of citizens is one of political passivity.
Second, during the past campaign season, a large number of traditionally Democratic Party voters became disaffected. The party was essentially split by the Bernie Sanders challenge. When that proved of no avail against an entrenched leadership mindset more beholden to special interests then to the needs of the ordinary citizen, the party lost millions of votes. Some of these defectors probably became closet Trump supporters. Others voted for third-party candidates or simply stayed home on Election Day.
You put all of this together with other voting variables such as gerrymandered voting districts, the usual barriers to minority group voting, and the distinct lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton as a candidate, and the mystery of Trump’s victory gets less mysterious.
Actually, Donald Trump’s delusional worldview, and the reinforcing support given to it by his enthusiastic followers, does not prevent him from occasionally coming out with accurate observations. Unfortunately, these occur almost spontaneously, in what appears to spur-of-the-moment situations.
For instance, in an interview with Bill O’Reilly aired just before the Super Bowl, Trump responded to the assertion that Vladimir Putin was “a killer” by saying, “we’ve [the U.S.] got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country is so innocent?” This complemented his on-again – off-again desire to reach an accommodation with Moscow. Then, during Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent visit to Washington, Trump questioned the continuing viability of the two-state solution (of course, without contextualizing the statement by pointing a finger at Israeli policies).
Yet these relatively rare public displays of reality-based insight are of little reassurance to the rest of us just because they are intermittent and apparently not characteristic of any disciplined analytical way of thinking. So, we are still left with guy who, for most of his waking hours, lives in his own world of “humbug.”
So what can we expect from this delusional, morally suspect personality who now occupies the White House? My guess is that as things get more contentious, Trump will retreat from the policy business of governing. He will turn that over (if he hasn’t already) to his accomplices: chief strategist Stephen Bannon, chief of staff Reince Priebus and Vice President Mike Pence. Having done so he will devote more and more time to his so-called reelection campaign where he can vent his spleen amongst the adoring crowds of supporters who serve, collectively, as a stimulus for the man’s immense ego.
Lawrence Davidson is a history professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Foreign Policy Inc.: Privatizing America’s National Interest; America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood; and Islamic Fundamentalism. He blogs at www.tothepointanalyses.com.A revolutionary take on a massive set of problems: Capitalism’s failings and today’s global economic crisis.
Every Saturday, Economics Professor Richard D. Wolff and guests discuss the current state of the economy, both locally and globally in relation to the economic crisis. They focus on wages, jobs, taxes, and debts — and on interest rates, prices, and profits. The goal is to explain why certain economic changes are happening and other changes get postponed or blocked and they will explore alternative ways to organize enterprises, markets, and government policies.
The show is for people who want to understand and change not only their own financial situation but also the larger economy we all depend on.
This project is made possible because of a partnership between Truthout, Professor Wolff and 99.5 FM WBAI, New York City’s Pacifica radio station.
Show Archive:
2017
December 1st
This week’s episode addresses Uber’s corrupt profiteering, sugar producers’ immoral cancer research, Trump’s personal business, the neglect of New York subways, the UK’s historic wage decline and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund. Additionally, this episode includes an interview with economist Stephanie Kelton, adviser to Bernie Sanders.
November 24th
This week’s episode includes updates on corrupt congressional “tax reform,” giant corporations’ abuse of power, GE’s CEO wasting millions, corporate culture and sexual harassment/abuse, Detroit’s fake “renaissance,” dying US malls, unaffordable rents exposing a fake economic “recovery” and pharma giant Astra-Zeneca showing how capitalism endangers health. This episode also includes an interview with author and broadcaster Laura Flanders on mass media changes in today’s capitalism.
November 17th
This week’s episode discusses Maine’s progressive economic changes, how super-wealthy people are abusing the estate tax, how Nestle is profiting while Flint’s water continues to be polluted, how Trump and the GOP are cutting health programs, and how US profits are rising as wage share falls. Also included are discussions of the economics of migration and the economics of coalitions between labor unions and worker co-ops.
November 10th
This week’s episode discusses critiques of Uber and the gig economy; how Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson endorses inequality; how 10 percent of New York schoolchildren are homeless; and how a majority of US corporations already pay much below official 35% tax rate. This episode also includes a discussion on the changing economics of socialism.
November 3rd
This week’s episode discusses low-paid service jobs in the future of the US, the Senate deregulating banks, how college spending per student reinforces income inequality, how loneliness in the US is a factor in illnesses and premature death, University of Chicago grad students unionizing, how Brazilian civil and religious authorities push almost-rotten food for the poor, and the costs of pollution.
October 27th
This week’s episode discusses privatized probation, New Zealand rejecting austerity, electricity cutoffs refuting “recovery,” declining medical insurance, neoliberalism and rich funders of fake “public interest groups.” Also included is an interview with professors Umberto Lorenzo and Richard McIntyre on Cuba’s socialist economy changing toward worker co-ops.
October 20th
Success of New York Worker Co-ops
This week’s episode discusses the passage of California’s Disclose Act; the untrustworthiness of Equifax, Yahoo and Johnson & Johnson; Washington suing big pharma for contributing to the opioid crisis; and socially destructive corporate behavior. This episode also includes an interview with Emma Yorra, a specialist in the development of worker co-ops.
October 13th
Transition Beyond Capitalism
This week’s episode discusses the economic costs and benefits of refugees, the rise of BRICS nations in the world economy, the closing and privatization of US public libraries, the magnitude of slavery and forced child labor in the current world economy, and how the “gig” economy is just another effort to profit by lengthening the working day. This episode also includes a discussion on the transition from capitalism to an economic system based on worker cooperatives.
October 6th
Economics, Psychology and Mass Murders
This week’s episode discusses the Trump-GOP tax plan, Americans having “trouble paying bills,” how post-1989 Russia is more unequal than the USSR, the closing of rural US hospitals and Puerto Rico as a US colony. Also included is an interview with Dr. Harriet Fraad on economics, psychology and mass murders.
September 29th
Strikes and the Labor Movement Today
This episode discusses the closing of 6,400 retail stores in 2017, the start of a decline in US housing, how 800 major corporations oppose Trump on DACA and more. This episode also includes an interview with investigative journalist Bob Hennelly on the Local 3 strike in New York and its importance to the US labor movement today.
September 22nd
Capitalism, Revolution and Socialism
This week’s episode discusses major capitalist failures, buying senators on health care, the opioid crisis’ effects on insurance and on labor force participation, price gouging in emergencies and more. This episode also includes a discussion on the 100th anniversary of Russian Revolution and how to apply the lessons of the USSR’s economic history to 21st century socialism.
September 15th
Corporate Capitalism in Decline
This week’s episode discusses capitalism and hurricanes, poverty, how hookworm has returned in the US, the economics of elite universities’ tax avoidance and more. The episode also includes an interview with Chris Hedges on a declining, decaying capitalism.
September 8th
Capitalism’s Uncounted Health Costs
This week’s episode discusses Wonder Woman, the Archbishop’s critique of the economic system in the UK, US Labor Day, the McDonald’s workers strike in the UK, the economics of hurricanes and the economics of the Trump tax cut “reform.” The episode also includes an interview with Dr. Harriet Fraad on how the capitalist system’s impacts on health — from stress to death — are mostly unacknowledged in key decisions.
September 1st
A Tale of Two Crises
This week’s episode discusses the working conditions of the US in 2017, the looming US recession and plans for negative interest rates, how schools raise funds by shaming poor schoolchildren, and the economics of fascism. Also included is a discussion of why FDR’s New Deal was not repeated after 2008 and the consequences of the post-1945 destruction of the coalition that produced the New Deal.
August 25th
Human Rights vs. US Water Economics
This week’s episode discusses Trump’s battle with Amazon over taxes, how Americans are dying younger, Monsanto profiting at farmers’ expense and the economics of homeless school children. This episode also includes an interview with Rob Robinson on access to safe of water in the US.
August 18th
Economics as Deception
This week’s episode discusses how millennials have fallen behind their parents in wealth, poor US medical outcomes, deepening German car scandals and the economic lessons revealed by a Chinese T-shirt maker’s investment in Arkansas. The episode also includes an interview with Professor Michael Hudson on “junk economics.”
August 15th
Faith and Labor Fight Inequality
This week’s episode discusses how US drug corporations block cheap medicine imports, the economics and politics of scapegoating immigrants in the US and Germany and more. The episode also includes an interview with Joerg Rieger and Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger on how they combine faith and labor advocacy to fight inequality.
August 7th
Collective Action for Change
This week’s episode discusses consumers’ battling airplane seat shrinkage, the “free” press and buyers of Chicago’s Sun-Times, fake “jobs creation” for subsidies and publicity and new museum features artists challenging capitalism. Also included is an interview with Dr. Harriet Fraad on why so many hesitate so long before joining collective action to change economic and social conditions.
July 28th
The Economics of Socialism
This week’s episode discusses sanctions on Russia, medical companies’ failures, cable company monopolies, CEO pay and more. Also included is a discussion of the economics of socialism.
July 21st
Economics Taught Badly
This week’s episode discusses United Airlines’ pattern of profiting from customer abuse; a bankster who is blaming the government; China’s rapid economic growth; and worker co-op news from Greece, New York and Massachusetts. The episode also includes an interview with economics professor John Summa on the big problems that arise in teaching economics.
July 14th
Capitalism’s Leaders
This week’s episode discusses the Senate’s health bill, minimum wage cuts, the Pope’s views on labor unions and Seattle’s taxes on the rich. The episode also includes discussions on G20 “leaders,” Detroit’s “revival” and how a beer company becomes worker owned.
July 7th
Addiction, Capitalism and 12-Step Programs
This week’s episode discusses car loans, sales showing the falsity of economic “recovery” claims, airline profits vs. services, how the G-20 meetings coordinate global austerity, and the misleading debate over whether raising the minimum wage leads to job losses. The episode also includes an interview with Dr. Harriet Fraad on the connections between addiction, capitalism and 12-step programs.
June 30th
Capitalism’s Shadow of Poverty
This week’s episode discusses European sanctuary cities, the automation of McDonald’s, Uber CEO Travis Kalanic’s resignation and how a ritzy restaurant rips off its workers. The episode also includes an interview with anti-poverty activist Rob Robinson.
June 23rd
Capitalism’s Self-Destruction
This week’s episode discusses the declining California State University system, Trump vs. coal industry realities, and how lotteries and pot legalization have the same economic motives. Also included are discussions on politics and economic betrayal, Trump’s new austerity budget and why worker co-ops deserve government support.
June 16th
When the US Government Destroyed a Political Party
This week’s episode discusses Oklahoma cutting funds for public schools, why Americans don’t take the paid vacations that are owed to them and how fossil fuel companies fight green power companies to buy politicians. Also included is an interview with Lisa E. Davis, author of Undercover Girl, about undoing the New Deal, paid FBI informants and the destruction of the Communist Party USA.
June 9th
Human Nature and Capitalism
This week’s episode discusses California and Nevada’s steps toward universal medical insurance, the Toronto housing bubble, the privatization of Air Traffic Control, the US-Mexico fight over non-free market sugar and the Illinois credit decline. Also included is an interview with Dr. Harriet Fraad on human nature.
June 2nd
Economic Failures and the Blame Game
This week’s episode discusses how big banks fix rates and how CEOs’ pay rises faster than that of their employees. We also discuss the phenomena of blaming the poor for poverty and over-crediting the super-rich for prosperity, and explore the ways in which wealthy oil countries and companies control modern economies. Plus, we address the fundamental fallacies behind Trump’s attacks on Germany.
May 26th
Worker Co-ops as Our Economic Future
This week’s episode discusses Trump’s 2018 budget, Ford’s undemocratic decisions, the US’s opioid crisis, the Swiss vote to end nuclear power, Harley-Davidson moving jobs overseas and how Canada is outlawing overbooking on planes. The episode also includes an interview with John Curl, author and co-op worker, on importance of worker co-ops.
May 19th
What France’s Election Means
This week’s episode discusses Yale graduate students on hunger strike for a union, the US raising interest rates on student loans, two new Senate bills on worker ownership of enterprises and some economic dimensions of Mother’s Day. Also included is an interview with French political activist Antonin Plarier on the meaning of the French presidential election.
May 12th
Why Workers Co-ops?
This week’s episode discusses the Australian government taxing big banks, how big banks fund the Dakota Access pipeline, the meaning of the French elections and more. The episode also includes guest Professor Jessica Gordon Nembhard, a historian of worker co-ops and the African-American community, addresses the question “why worker co-ops?”
May 5th
Economics and Family Values
This week’s episode discusses the significance of the French election; Obama’s $400,000 bank speaking fee, corporate tax cuts in the US, Wells Fargo being “saved” by Warren Buffett and why bringing home foreign profits only helps big corporations. Additionally, guest Dr. Harriet Fraad discusses the contradictions of “family values” in the context of the US economy.
April 28th
The Rising Costs of Capitalism’s Failures
This week’s episode discusses the courts blocking Trump’s attack on sanctuary cities, the selling of Whole Foods, whether technology is to blame for the jobs collapse, the decrease in department store jobs since 2000 and the British queen’s enterprise award going to Suma, a UK worker co-op. The episode also takes on Trump’s corporate tax “reform” and more.
April 21st
Enabling Worker Co-ops
This week’s episode discusses capitalism and Earth Day, how the Chinese movie industry is overtaking Hollywood, and how small businesses are using cooperatives to compete with big business. Additionally, this segment features an interview with Richard Bartlett, cofounder of Loomio, a powerful software worker-cooperative that is using groundbreaking collective decision-making strategies in its everyday operations.
April 14th
US Labor Unions of the Past, Present and Future
This week’s episode discusses the United Airlines flyer abuse, New York Gov. Cuomo’s flawed tuition plan, what to do as self-driving vehicles end millions of jobs and how big investors plan to cash in on Trump’s infrastructure plans. Also included is a discussion with special guest Frank R. Annunziato on the tragedy of US labor unions today, why that tragedy happened and how to reverse it.
April 7th
Economics, Psychology and Trump
This week’s episode discusses French presidential elections, US college admissions, Citibank’s favoring of the rich and the injustices of US property tax system. In the second half of the show, Professor Wolff is joined by Dr. Harriet Fraad, who provides an economic assessment of Trump’s performance to date.
March 31st
Capitalism in Trouble
This week’s episode discusses major troubles such as Brexit and Trump, the student debt penalty, New York billionaires asking to be taxed, Trump’s job fantasies, Seattle’s official renters commission and age discrimination. Other topics include the economics of immigration and how worker co-ops differ from capitalist corporations on production.
March 24th
Capitalism and Democracy
This week’s episode discusses the economy of Puerto Rico, worsening inequality in the UK and the decision by Girl Guides of Canada to cancel all trips to the US. The episode also addresses rising US wage inequality, connections and dissonances between capitalism and democracy, and key differences between capitalist and worker-owned enterprises.
March 17th
Housing Crisis in the US
This week’s episode discusses the Fed and interest rates, new US and China inequality data, wage stagnation, and big bankers’ affinity for Trump. The episode also includes an interview with Walter South, founder of The Trust for Affordable Housing.
March 10th
Questions About Capitalism
This week’s episode discusses Obamacare, the Caterpillar equipment company’s tax evasion, the mistreatment of immigrant workers, Harvard’s history with slavery, and the economies of Puerto Rico and Greece. The episode also addresses some key questions about capitalism.
March 3rd
The Unfinished Revolution of Women’s Paid Labor
This week’s episode discusses Takata airbags and auto company misdeeds, Trump’s defense spending, deepening inequality and why capitalism provokes government “mandates.” The episode also |
released by the Kremlin Thursday, Putin said the "forces of terror are acting in an increasingly treacherous and cynical way."
He emphasized that "it's necessary to unite efforts of all members of international community to confront the terror threat."
Putin offered condolences to the families of the victims and wished a quick recovery to those injured in Wednesday's attack.
___
7:50 a.m.
British police say they believe the attacker who killed three people including a police officer outside Parliament acted alone and was "inspired by international terrorism."
Metropolitan Police counterterrorism chief Mark Rowley says that police have raided six addresses and arrested seven people in connection with Wednesday's attack by a knife-wielding man who also mowed down pedestrians with an SUV. Rowley refused to identify the attacker.
He revised the death toll down to four, including the attacker, a police officer guarding Parliament and two civilians. He said that 29 people required hospitalization and seven of them are in critical condition.
--This item has been corrected to show that death toll, including attacker, has been revised to four.
___
7:25 a.m.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has condemned the attack outside Britain's Parliament in London.
The rampage occurred hours after Erdogan warned that the safety of Western citizens could be in peril if European nations persist in what he described as their arrogant conduct.
In a series of tweets posted late Wednesday, Erdogan said Turkey shared "the pain of the United Kingdom."
Erdogan tweeted: "We stand in solidarity with the U.K., our friend and ally, against terrorism, the greatest threat to global peace and security."
Earlier Wednesday, Erdogan warned that Europeans wouldn't be able to walk the streets safely, in remarks he made amid tensions over Dutch and German restrictions on Turkish ministers wanting to hold campaign meetings with Turkish citizens.
___
7:15 a.m.
British armed police have carried out a raid on a property in the central city of Birmingham, after an attacker killed four people before being fatally shot by police within Parliament's grounds.
Police refused to say if the raid was linked to the rampage in the heart of Britain's seat of power. But British media including the Press Association on Thursday quoted an unnamed witness saying that the operation was linked to the attack that also injured around 40 people.
A knife-wielding man drove an SUV into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge before crashing the vehicle into the gates of Parliament on Wednesday. He scaled the fences and later fatally stabbed a policeman before being gunned down by officers. He hasn't been identified. Three pedestrians were among the dead.
___
4:10 a.m.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang says the attack outside the British Parliament in London was the first subject of discussion when he met with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia on Thursday morning in Canberra.
Li says that "together, we send our condolences to the prime minister of the U.K. and together we condemn terrorism and we stand against all forms of terrorism."
The Chinese leader says that "there cannot be continued instability in the world," adding: "We must cherish peace and stability."
___
1:35 a.m.
New Zealand's prime minister is condemning the attack outside Britain's Parliament that resulted in five deaths, including the assailant.
Prime Minister Bill English told reporters in Rotorua that he has written to British Prime Minister Theresa May to express support for her government and to offer his country's condolences to the victim's families.
A knife-wielding man went on the deadly rampage in the heart of Britain's seat of power Wednesday, plowing a car into pedestrians on London's Westminster Bridge before stabbing a police officer to death inside the gates of Parliament. Other officers fatally shot the attacker.
In addition to the dead, 40 people have injuries.
May has condemned the incident as a "sick and depraved terrorist attack."
___
12:15 a.m.
South Korea's Foreign Ministry says five South Koreans in their 50s and 60s were among the 40 people injured in London during the terror attack outside Parliament.
The ministry says the five were hurt when they were caught up in a stampede of people trying to escape the attack.
It says four of the South Koreans suffered broken bones and other injuries and a woman in her late 60s needed an operation to treat a head injury.
Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Jack Wilshere is facing another period on the sidelines after reports he has suffered a suspected hairline fracture of his left fibula in an incident during training.
Arsenal could yet make late bid for Real Madrid striker Karim Benzema Read more
The England midfielder, who missed nearly six months of last season after injuring his ankle in the 2-1 defeat to Manchester United at Old Trafford on 22 November, was omitted from the side who beat Chelsea 1-0 at Wembley in Sunday’s Community Shield, and afterwards Arsène Wenger said the player would only be out for “days”.
However, it now appears Wilshere’s injury is much worse than originally feared, with Arsenal prepared for bad news when the full extent of the damage to his left fibula is revealed by scans on Friday. Unconfirmed reports suggested he was injured by a tackle from the Brazilian defender Gabriel.
Premier League 2015-16 preview No1: Arsenal | Amy Lawrence Read more
If he requires surgery, the 23-year-old could be out for up to three months but could be back with six to eight weeks if not. Wilshere’s availability for England’s next two Euro 2016 qualifiers against San Marino and Switzerland at the start of September now appears very unlikely.In my last tutorial, Doodle with Strangers! Multi-User HTML5 Canvas in 4 Steps you have learned how to create a very simple doodling web app that allows multiple users draw on the canvas at the same time, using PubNub realtime JavaScript API.
In this tutorial, we’ll build off the previous example and add history (also know as Storage & Playback), so our previous doodles are saved and displayed when the page is reloaded.
If you want to check out the new demo with Storage & Playback implemented, take a look at our HTML5 canvas with History demo here. You can compare it with our first HTML5 canvas demo here.
You’ll notice clear difference, besides the background color- in the new demo, you see previously drawn canvas, while the previous demo starts with a brand-new canvas.
Fetching Old Data using History (Storage & Playback) API
You’ll first need to sign up for a PubNub account. Once you sign up, you can get your unique PubNub keys in the PubNub Developer Portal. Once you have, clone the GitHub repository, and enter your unique PubNub keys on the PubNub initialization, for example:
You can easily retrieve last drawing data using history() API. This function fetches historical messages of a channel. This Storage & Playback feature provides realtime access to a history for all messages published to PubNub.
To simply retrieve last 100 messages, this is all you need to do:
The history() returns a list of up to 100 messages, the start time token and the ending time token. The response from history() looks like:
[['message1','message2','message3',... ],'Start Time Token', 'End Time Token']
HTML5 Canvas: Blast from The Past
Let’s add this feature to your canvas app. With the API, make the app to automatically display the 50 previously drawn strokes on canvas. Before you start, you need to enable the feature on your admin dashboard (this is why you’ll first need to sign up for a PubNub account).
Once you call the history function, at the success call back, call the function drawFromStream, created at the previous HTML5 canvas tutorial.
Boom. Now, at the initial load, you get old drawings from strangers! If you would like, the entire HTML5 canvas source code of the demo is on GitHub.
Get Started
Sign up for free and use PubNub to power
your HTML5 canvas collaborative whiteboard!FOLEY, Alabama -- An Arizona couple reportedly outraged by a Foley police officer’s walk-through at an area Walmart last week was arrested after the man allegedly hit the officer and his wife jumped on him.Anthony Scott Smith, 41, and his wife, Chrisanna Elizabeth Smith, 40, of Scottsdale, Arizona, were arrested Friday and charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and second-degree assault on a police officer.According to Lt. Thurston Bullock, the couple became irate when they saw Officer Caleb Bibby in Walmart shortly before 11 p.m. Friday. They approached him aggressively, accusing him of treason and of shopping on duty and telling the officer he was under federal investigation, Bullock said.Bullock said Bibby was conducting a walk-through of the business. He said the officers are permitted to buy something during such walk-throughs, but it was unclear whether the officer made a purchase.Last month I purchased the Tortuga Air and wrote up some of my first impressions. Over the weekend just now I finally got to have my first test drive with using this bag for trips. So far I’ve only been using it as my daily commute bag since no trips were planned.
I forgot to take a photo of the bag when I first packed it, so instead you’re getting photos of the bag as it was on my way home.
I opened the bottle holder side pocket and stuffed my umbrella in there. The front strap held it in place just fine.
Hanging Pocket
That top little hanging pocket ended up serving as the “oh crap I forgot to pack my ____” pocket. Here’s a pic of what I had in there:
Macbook Air charger
Jam Classic bluetooth speaker
Nexus 5 usb/ac charging cable
I still had room in there to shove a mini train schedule when I got to the station and could have fit maybe 1 or 2 smaller items as well if needed.
Front Pocket
Pairs card game
Whatchamadrawit card game
Standard deck of cards — Zelda themed
Mini umbrella
There wasn’t much in here. I took some card games in case I got bored –a rarity for me on trips. But I haven’t played Pairs or Whatchamadrawit yet so I figured that might happen on this trip. I ended up not using any of them.
Also in the bottom of that pocket I forgot I have a small umbrella. It’s always in there as a last resort since it’s one of those $4 cheap NYC umbrellas that is good for one use before the wind tears it apart and you have to toss it. Better safe than sorry. I forgot that was in there until I emptied out that pocket for the photos.
Midori Traveler’s Notebook. Passport size
Leatherman pocket knife. The kind that has screwdrivers in the handle
Spare keys
The zippered pocket in there has a Midori Traveler’s Notebook. I always have this in there as my backup. I carry a sketchbook everywhere I go pretty much, but in the event I forget it somehow (gasp!) I know I always have this tiny guy as a backup. I also will use it if I need to rip out a sheet of paper for something.
Main Compartment
I use Eagle Creek packing cubes for everything, so there won’t be any neat traveler’s tetris style packing to see. But here it is:
Right Side:
Large Eagle Creek packing cube with a tshirt, tank top and some sweat shorts for sleep. On my trip going there it also held a fleece sweater.
Large Eagle Creek zipper bag used as a dirty laundry bag– in this pic it had a button down shirt, a pair of socks, and boxers in it.
Here’s a better view of those two items outside of the bag so you get an idea of size:
This was a new experience for me, having a travel bag that opened flat. In the past I’ve used top loading backpacks, so I end up slotting in the packing cubes next to each other in stacks of 2x2. Having the more traditional compression straps there, which normally would be holding down clothing was not something I had used before.
Even though the straps weren’t made for packing cubes of this size at all, they ended up fitting in quite well. I even cinched the straps tight to keep the cubes in place– they stayed put.
Perhaps if/when Tortuga comes out with their own packing cubes they might be tailored to fit this bag perfectly and I’ll have to do a new review. Because I’ll have to buy them, of course.
Left Side:
This is normally supposed to be used for dirty laundry maybe? Or also to serve as a built-in packing cube of sorts? Either way, I ended up just stuffing it full of packing cubes and bags.
And here’s that stuff outside of the bag for size:
Timberland dopp kit.
Eagle Creek medium zippered bag.
Eagle Creek medium packing cube. This had 2 pairs of socks and 2 pairs of boxers. These could have easily been put in the large packing cube. I was just lazy.
Dopp Kit contents (if you’re curious what I fit in there):
Two travel size Clear Care contacts solutions and cases. I didn’t realize I had two cases in there. One has been tossed in the trash since I took this photo.
Small size deodorant
Travel toothbrush — the cheap ones you find in CVS
Travel toothpaste
Comb — for keeping the beard tidy
I’m not a big fan of that Timberland kit at all. I like the thinness since it forces me to be frugal with what I bring, but the zipper doesn’t open in a way that gives you any good view of what’s inside. I will probably replace it soon.
Medium zippered bag contents:
Spare lightning/micro USB cable
Soundlogic XT backup battery. This was something I got in a company gift exchange. It’s only good for a single charge of the phone, but it’s small enough to keep it in my bag always.
Sketchbook Saddleback passport wallet
Laptop sleeve:
I carry an 11” Macbook Air. I doubt anyone needs a photo of that, but I took one anyway:
Weight/Feel:
This was only an overnight trip so I didn’t take much care with making sure I was packing as light as possible. I didn’t even do a good job rolling my clothes in the packing cubes. I knew I had plenty of room to spare, so I could afford to be sloppy.
But the single night’s worth of gear never felt a hassle at all. The chest strap took care of keeping that weight off my shoulders just fine. I’m still not happy with how small and mushy that chest clasp feels (I wrote more about that and showed some pics in my first impressions post), but it’s doing ok.
Update 6/29/15: I forgot I had recorded a short video to show the mushy quality I was talking about with the clasp. You’ll see that when I press the clasp down with my two fingers normally, the clasp will not release. You have to really use the tips of your fingers to push them in. Check it out:
I love how straight this bag stands on its own. You can feel that support on your back. The bag sits high, which I am a fan of. Every time I see someone with a backpack that is hanging low on their backs with the shoulder straps stretched out I get phantom spasms in my muscles. That can’t be comfortable right?
The Tortuga Air feels great though. No complaints.
Problems:
None that I can think of besides the clasp I mentioned already. I’m not entirely sure if I’m upset or ok with the side of the bag that the water bottle pocket is on. I definitely grabbed at the wrong side once or twice.
This was a super short trip though, so it wasn’t like I got to push it to any extent to see where any other weaknesses might show up.
Final Thoughts:
This sort of trip is ideal for a bag like the Air. I can’t imagine having to schlep the full size Tortuga backpack just for an overnight or weekend trip. In this sense the Air performed excellently. I was excited to get this bag back when I was still pining for a Minaal, and now I think the Air might be the better bag. It has a better system for packing it (the Minaal doesn’t have much structure when you are packing it. You just have to lay stuff down and sort of pull the bag over your bundle), it has that Hanging pocket which I love, and it’s ~$130 cheaper. That’s a lot of pluses in my book.
So far so good. My recommendation of this bag remains!
I’ll post again when I take a longer trip.Image copyright Invisible Edinburgh
Walking tours led by people who have been homeless have been launched in Edinburgh.
Invisible Edinburgh said the aim was to reveal a different side to Scotland's capital city.
The tours start in the Grassmarket, Castle Terrace and Middle Meadow Walk and each has a different theme and is tailored to the guide's individual experience.
The venture has funding from the Edinburgh Airport Community Fund.
The themes are powerful women of Edinburgh, crimes and punishment, community sport and food and charity.
Zakia Moulaoui, 28, from France, set up the tours after getting the idea from a project in Greece where street vendors take people on walks.
She told the BBC Scotland news website: "We have four guides at the moment but will be training up more in September.
"There is a homeless point to all the walks, which is personal to the guide, so for example the crime and punishment tour will tell you about Burke and Hare but the guide will also tell you about his own relevant problems with the court across the road with funny stories.
"The tours are a mix of old and new.
"In the powerful women of Edinburgh you will hear about Maggie Dickson but then also about JK Rowling."
The £8 tours run on a Saturday and tickets must be bought online.Google’s playing a cat and mouse game with link-sharers on the Web and the search giant is increasingly swamped with takedown requests from rights holders, or those acting on behalf of them, mainly in the music and film industries.
In the company’s latest copyright transparency report, it revealed that it received some 19 million takedown requests just last week.
That’s more than double the figure seen at the same time last year and dwarfs the 4 million requests made during the same week in 2013.
Credit: Google
That means it’s processing the equivalent of 113,668 requests per hour today, with up to 97 percent of requests upheld and then dealt with within six hours of being flagged.
The top copyright owner targeted by pirates is the British Recorded Music Industry, which looks after the likes of Adele.
The top pirate sites are all ‘free’ music and video sharing sites and typically they continue to operate, even if the relevant URL is no longer available.
It’s clear the sheer ease with which one can create a site, upload content and create new pages is creating a full-time job for those working on behalf of copyright holders.
Copyright protection has become an entire industry in itself, with companies like Degban, a “premium copyright protection agency,” specifically working on behalf of rights holders to uphold the rules.
The increase in requests, therefore, is also likely down to the industry becoming increasingly good at using tech to identify pirate sites.
Although not publishing the content itself, Google has to comply with the rules set out in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act that was created to reduce copyright infringement in the digital age.
➤ Google Transparency Report [Google via Gizmodo]
Read next: Millennials: Industrious, idealistic and in controlDebt relief? Tuition rates vary around the globe; payment is the responsibility of students and families in countries like the United States, where the average debt for 2016 graduates is $37,000, while students have fewer worries in Finland, one of 40 countries with free tuition at public universities
NEW YORK: Higher education contributes to unprecedented student loan debt challenges in both developed and developing countries. College costs are rapidly rising, and student loan debts have reached disquieting record levels for both graduates and governments.
Most recent college graduates are burdened with heavy loan debt for years with many delinquent on repayment. In the United States, for example, some 7 million borrowers, or14 percent, are in default, having gone at least a year without a payment on their federal student loans. One in four European Union citizens who earn diplomas in Britain return home countries without paying back their student loans.
Economies will struggle under the growing mound of student debt as young adults delay marriage, home purchases and childbirth and have less money to spend on housing, food, clothes or entertainment. As a consequence, governments can expect to confront a dilemma concerning increasing defaults on government-sponsored student loans: enforced repayment versus measured forgiveness. Likewise, students especially those with limited resources, struggle over whether to borrow, delay or forgo higher education.
Inequality in global tuition rates: Average annual tuition fees for full-time students vary from free to thousands of US dollars for full-time national students in public tertiary education institutions for the 2013/14 academic year (Source: OECD)
British college graduates, for example, are estimated to have an average loan debt of $55,000, compared with an average of $20,000 five years earlier. Total student loan debt in the United Kingdom has reached nearly $100 billion. The average 2016 American college graduate has $37,000 in student loan debt, up 6 percent from the previous year, and total federal student loan debt now stands at $1.3 trillion, triple the level a decade ago. Similar student debt conditions are encountered in Australia, Canada, Norway and Sweden.
In some 40 countries, of which more than half are members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, public colleges charge no tuition. Elsewhere, average annual tuition costs vary considerably from several hundred dollars in countries like Belgium, Columbia and France to thousands of dollars in Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.
While high tuition costs partly account for high student debt, free tuition does not necessarily mean students graduate without debt. Even in countries with free tuition, students are largely responsible for covering living costs and fees. In tuition-free Sweden, for example, students borrow money as frequently as American students do – about 70 percent have student loans – and Swedish students graduate with about $20,000 in debt.
A notable exception to high college costs and student loan debt is Germany. The expected cost of an undergraduate degree in Germany is about $2,200, and student debt is approximately $2,400. However, German officials are raising muted concerns about rising governmental costs for higher education. Behind closed doors, many education ministers admit that phasing out tuition fees was a wrong move fiscally and foresee reintroduction by 2020.
While college costs in developing countries may appear inexpensive in global comparisons, they are substantial for many individuals, especially students from rural areas. In China, for example, a farmer must work about 14 years to fund tuition at a Chinese university, while those in wealthier urban areas pay on average the equivalent of about four years of an individual’s annual income.
In addition, most developing countries face greater higher-education challenges than wealthier developed countries. In addition to being chronically underfunded and understaffed, schools in developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, struggle to manage growing demand for higher education and achieve international education goals.
Still, increasing numbers of young men and women recognize the need for a college degree in a competitive job market. The global number of students at the tertiary education level rose from about 160 million in 2008 to about 200 million in 2015. In addition, in striking contrast to the recent past, the average ratios of university participation of women have surpassed men. In nearly all OECD member countries, the majority of university graduates are women.
Generation gap: For many countries, adults aged 25 to 34 are more likely to hold a higher education degree than adults aged 55 to 64 – the OECD average is 26 percent for older adults and 42 percent for the younger group (Source: OECD)
Likewise, the proportions of young adults graduating with college degrees have increased to record highs. Among OECD countries, for example, the average proportion with tertiary education increased from 26 percent for those aged 55 to 64 years to 42 percent for those aged 25 to 34 years. In some countries, including Czech Republic, Italy, Poland, Portugal, South Korea and Turkey, the proportions of young adults with tertiary education have more than doubled.
China has also made impressive gains in tertiary education enrollment. China, with the world’s largest college population, or 40 million students, has one in five of all college students in the world. In addition, the proportion aged 18 to 22 years attending college has skyrocketed from less than 2 percent in 1978 to 40 percent in 2015. With increasing expenditures and development of higher education, Chinese officials expect the proportion to reach 50 percent in 2019.
Governments, businesses and non-governmental organizations around the world also recognize the many benefits of an educated population for societal well-being and economic prosperity. The international community of nations has emphasized on innumerable occasions that obtaining a quality education is the foundation to improving people’s lives and sustainable development. Moreover, with the transformation of the world economy from physical capital to knowledge based, higher education becomes critical for national competitiveness. By and large, governments have concluded that more educated citizens contribute to economic development and stability.
In addition to societal benefits, prospective students and their families continue to believe that a college degree is worth the expenditures and aspire to obtain the best education possible. In addition to the knowledge and skills gained, college graduates, on average, have substantially higher incomes, improved employment prospects and financial security than those with just a secondary level diploma.
Despite widespread agreement about higher education’s numerous economic, social and cultural advantages, decisions about who should bear the considerable costs and when should student loan debts be forgiven remain contentious. Some, especially students and graduates, contend that higher education tuition should be covered by government taxes and student loan debts should be forgiven.
Some conservatives argue that governments should get out of higher education. Students should pay tuition and related costs as they stand to gain the substantial individual rewards of an education. Also, students have an obligation to repay their loans just as others are obligated to repay their debts for homes, cars, or other merchandise.
Responding to mounting calls for reduced taxes and easing the strain on public budgets, more countries are shifting the costs of higher education from government to students and families. A major consequence of that shift is not only substantial debt for the majority of college graduates, but also huge amounts for governments to recover from graduates. Concerns about the extent of the growing student debt and inherent difficulties with collection and default among young adults have led some analysts to conclude that private financial institutions and big business, not governments, should provide college loans to students.PARIS (Reuters) - Lawyers for Dominique Strauss-Kahn have proof the IMF chief was at a restaurant having lunch with his daughter at the time he was alleged to be sexually assaulting a hotel maid, France’s RMC radio reported on Monday.
RMC said the lawyers had pieced together Strauss-Kahn’s movements and found that he left the hotel at midday, after paying his bill and handing in his key, then went to eat with his daughter and took a taxi to the airport.
The schedule meant he had already left the hotel at the time the maid alleged he chased her down a corridor, forced her into a room and assaulted her, RMC reported on its website, adding that the lawyers had material evidence and witnesses.
Strauss-Kahn, a center-left former finance minister whom polls had tipped as the likely frontrunner to win France’s 2012 presidential election, will appear in court on Monday. The case has sent shockwaves around the world.
His lawyers have said he will plead not guilty to charges of a criminal sexual act, unlawful imprisonment and attempted rape, which threaten to bring a humiliating end to his career as International Monetary Fund managing director.
The radio did not cite its sources.How positively ripping. Shooting has just started, in London and Surrey, for a movie about the life of Enid Blyton. And golly gosh, they've persuaded Helena Bonham Carter to play the children's writer in a BBC4 production, to be broadcast in the autumn. Helena is such a brick...
It doesn't, at first sight, seem terribly promising as biopics go. Blyton's life is not a thing of gripping drama, vivid incident and intellectual ferment. Most of it consisted in her sitting at a desk, knocking off 10,000 words a day and publishing 753 books over 45 years: a torrent of children's novels, stories, poems, the long sagas of the Secret Seven and the Famous Five, the Noddy books, the Angela Brazil-derived, girls-at-school books about Malory Towers and St Clare's, the tales of magic, circuses, farms and nature. They sold 600 million copies around the world and made her extremely rich and famous.
Her works defined escapism for the under-12s. She told stories of children escaping from mad or eccentric aunts and uncles to explore somewhere more exciting; children whose parents were unaccountably away for whole weekends, allowing them to roam, unchecked, through haunts of smugglers, kidnappers and dodgy foreigners – whom they would outsmart at the climax of the story and deliver to the hands of the local constabulary, before being rewarded with platefuls of plum cake and inevitably, lashing of ginger beer.
Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month
Bonham Carter's fans may enjoy watching her pound a typewriter, but might the excitement pall after a while? Blyton's home life in the 1930s had a picture-perfect quality. She lived in houses called Old Thatch – a fairy-tale cottage, with a lychgate and several pets – and Green Hedges, a mock-Tudor house in Beaconsfield with a nursery, nannies, crumpets for tea, Bimbo the cat and Topsy the dog. The image Blyton carefully projected to the outside world, of an ideal family life filled with benevolence, love and small animals, wouldn't electrify a modern TV audience.
Thank goodness, then, that her life was far from the domestic millpond she wished the world to see. Her neighbours at Green Hedges recalled how Blyton used to complain about the fearful racket made by children playing. She was frosty, distant and unkind to her younger daughter Imogen, who called her "arrogant, insecure, pretentious and without a trace of maternal instinct", and told Gyles Brandreth, "Her approach to life was quite childlike, and she could also sometimes be quite spiteful like a teenager." There was clear favouritism in the way she privileged and rewarded her elder daughter Gillian over her younger.
Blyton's first husband, Hugh, called her "Little Bunny". They were married for 19 years but, as Enid's career took off in the 1930s, Hugh grew increasingly depressed and took to nightly drinking sessions in his cellar. Enid ceased writing long enough to have adulterous affairs. The marriage deteriorated and Hugh moved out. According to the biographer Duncan McLaren, she mocked him in later adventure stories (such as The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage) as the clueless cop, PC Theophilus Goon.
At the time, she was editing and writing for a magazine she'd started called Sunny Stories. For each issue, she contributed tales and autobiographical notes, which would sometimes refer en passant to "my husband". After a bitter divorce, she remarried with startling speed: he was a surgeon called Kenneth Darrell Waters with whom, apparently, she had a properly fulfilling sex life at last. But no ripple of concern, no tiny hint of trouble, alerted readers of Sunny Stories that the person referred to as "my husband" in 1944 was a completely different model from the one in 1941.
They might have been surprised by Blyton's flightiness. A BBC documentary called Secret Lives: Enid Blyton revealed that visitors to her charming rustic retreats could arrive to find her playing tennis naked. It also hinted strongly that Blyton's intense relationship with Dorothy Richards, her children's nanny, was sexually driven. Along with her sensuous side was a streak of implacable stubbornness and cruelty. When her first husband Hugh married again – as she herself had remarried – Enid was so furious she banned her daughters from seeing their father ever again, no matter how much they (and Hugh) begged to be allowed.
Many of her authorial obsessions can be traced to her father, who left her mother when Enid was 12. She effectively seized up, physically. Later when she consulted a gynaecologist about her failure to conceive, she was diagnosed as having an "immature uterus". She needed special surgery and hormone treatment before she could have children. She remained, in other words, a little girl, stuck in the paraphernalia of childhood, suspended in a world of picnics, secret-society codes, madcap pals and midnight feasts at school – a gigantic, prepubescent comfort blanket.
It's often been remarked that, although the Famous Five are technically teenagers, they appear to suffer no hormonal promptings. Georgina ("George"), the one who hates being a girl, is 12 when we first meet her; through 21 adventures, over three or four years, she never develops breasts or mellows her attitude. Barbara Stone, Blyton's biographer, suggested that George was modelled on the young Enid, constantly rebellious, hot-tempered and pugnacious. She had, it seems, a considerable talent for concealment and silence. When her parents split up, she told nobody, not even her best friend. Her relationship with her mother was so bitter that, when she left home and found a job, she let her new colleagues assume her mother was dead. When her mother finally died, Blyton refused to attend the funeral.
So why is Enid Blyton's industrious shade enjoying a renaissance? The signs are unmistakable... Apart from the BBC extravaganza, Disney UK has green-lit a new, animated feature called Famous 5: On the Case, in which the children of the original Five (even the dog) enjoy some new adventures. Amazingly, the creator of Noddy and those malevolent muggers The Three Golliwogs, was named Britain's best-loved author in a poll for the Costa Awards. Twenty "in the style of" pastiches of Blyton classics, from the Five to Malory Towers, have been commissioned by Chorion, the Blyton estate, which comprehensively edited her works in the 1980s and 1990s to remove thousands of "offensive" racist and sexist words, phrases and references. Chorion reports a striking hike of sales (up to £7.5m) in the past 12 months.
Readers looking to explain her revival in popularity point to the recent rash of "Dangerous" books for boys and girls – invitations to connect with a world of outdoor fun, exploring rivers and old houses and mucking about with your pals all day long. As The Dangerous Book for Boys taught children how to tie knots and whistle with two fingers, Blyton's repetitive, one-dimensional adventures tell you, inter alia, how to escape from a locked room and how to write invisible messages. The stories, however flatly written, are about self-reliance and self-empowerment, in which children perform implausibly brave and superhuman feats, solve puzzles, fight crime and help police, while escaping from their parents. They endure because the quality of obsessive self-renewal in Enid Blyton's character, constantly escaping from her own past, comes strongly through.
Will Helena Bonham Carter make a convincing screen Enid? Absolutely. Look at the scene in her debut movie, Merchant-Ivory's A Room with a View, when, playing the headstrong teenager Lucy Honeychurch, she bashes merry hell out of the family piano to express her pent-up rage. It's George from the Famous Five to the life. Her years of being crammed into corsets should give her insights into the minds of Darrell and Co, the rules-bound teens at Malory Towers. Her role as the tough but weary Jewish mother in Paul Weiland's Sixty Six showed that her range could extend to take on the everyday traumas of marriage. And her readiness to remove her kit on screen, as she does (quite unnecessarily, but nobody's ever complained) at the end of The Wings of the Dove is good news for all furtive voyeurs who've always longer to visit one of Enid Blyton's unusual tennis matches. Wizard!United Nations (United States) (AFP) - UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced Wednesday he had fired the mission chief in the Central African Republic, declaring "enough is enough" after a string of allegations of child sex abuse by peacekeepers.
Babacar Gaye of Senegal "tendered his resignation at my request," Ban told reporters at the global body's headquarters in New York.
The move followed fresh accusations that a peacekeeper from the MINUSCA force had raped a 12-year-old girl, months after similar claims were made against Moroccan and Burundian troops in the unit.
Separately, France is investigating claims that more than a dozen of its soldiers serving in the Sangaris force in the Central African Republic sexually abused children they had lured with food in late 2013.
"I cannot put into words how anguished and angered and ashamed I am by recurrent reports over the years of sexual exploitation and abuse by UN forces," Ban said.
"When the United Nations deploys peacekeepers, we do so to protect the world's most vulnerable people in the world's most desperate places.
"I will not tolerate any action by people who replace trust with fear," he added.
"Enough is enough."
Gaye, 64, was appointed as the first head of the 12,000-strong MINUSCA force in July of last year and is also Ban's special envoy to the Central African Republic.
The Senegalese diplomat told France 24 that he shared Ban's outrage and that his resignation "embodies the organisation's response to behavior that is simply unacceptable from soldiers who come to defend people and protect them."
- Unprecedented -
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric described the decision to sack a mission chief as "unprecedented" and a clear signal that the United Nations was moving to address mounting allegations of misconduct by the blue helmets.
The MINUSCA force, which took over from an African Union mission |
of the decrepit old-white-man’s GOP.And that brings us to the more amazing point of the latest, which showed Obama getting his worst job approval number ever in that poll (40%).Sounds pretty bad huh?But, guess what. Barack Obama is more than twice as popular as Congressional Republicans, who currently have only an extraordinarily dismal 19% approval rating from the American people.In fact, a clear majority of Americans, 54%!—don’t like Congressional Republicans. Only 4% of respondents in the poll said they had “Very Positive” feelings about the GOP members. President Obama’s “Very Positive” rating (at 22%) is more than five times the Republican number.
Now, you may say, well of course Congressional Republicans have crappy approval numbers because they are in Congress, and people hate Congress almost as much as they hate lawyers (which is theheld by members of Congress). But then you would have to explain how it could be that Democrats in Congress are so much more popular than Republicans.While neither party is much loved by Americans, Republicans are clearly the most despised.Why?The severe decline in the popularity of Congressional Republicans goes back to the Summer of 2011.What happened then?I’m sure you’d like to forget (and the GOP would like for you to forget), but what happened was that Tea Party Republicans pushed the United States to the brink of defaulting on the national debt. Even though Barack Obama was willing to compromise to the point that he might as well have stuck an elephant on his lapel and declared himself a Republican, and he and John Boehner were close to hammering out a very pro-Republican deal, the Tea Party refused to budge on demands that Obama agree to severe budget cuts to obtain their agreement on the debt-limit increase.The result of this was eventually a downgrading of the credit rating of the US government, which increased borrowing costs for the government by billions of dollars. In the end, the two sides agreed to hammer out a budget deal by the end of 2011, with a threat of an across-the-board “sequestration” cut threatened if they failed to do it. And of course, they failed to do it, and the large cuts in government services were enacted.One can see that while Congress in general has been sinking into the gutter in approval over the last three years, most Americans blame the Republican Party for the Congressional deadlock, more than they do Democrats. And it has cost the GOP enormously in terms of approval.Add to this the cartoonish rush to the clown-car right the Republicans engineered in their 2012 presidential primary, where all their hilarious, heinous ideology was in full display before the American people for months, and the decline of the GOP into a post-killer-asteroid dinosaur slump is not expected by most people (even in the Republican Party), it is seen as necessary for the political health of the nation.In spite of all that, the WSJ/NBC poll shows something that actually doesn’t make much sense. It shows that most Americans are still unsure about which party they want controlling Congress. This represents a colossal failure on the part of Democrats and Barack Obama to convincingly articulate the big difference between the Democratic Party and the GOP. It is a difference Americans intuitively feel should be there, and it is a difference most Americans want to be there—because they so hate the Republicans.Now, the Democrats have a few weeks to encourage the clear majority that hates the GOP to show up and vote for what the Dems want Americans to believe is a real alternative.Charlie Sheen sexually assaulted Corey Haim when the late actor was just 13 years old, according to a disturbing new report.
According to a bombshell report by The National ENQUIRER, the disgraced HIV-positive actor corrupted his much younger Lucas costar on set with drugs, then had anal sex with him. Sheen was 19 at the time, while Haim was barely a teenager.
Then, after the nonconsensual sex act, Sheen cruelly rejected his alleged victim, Haim’s close pal claimed.
“Haim told me he had sex with Sheen when they filmed Lucas,” Dominick Brascia, a former actor and a close friend of Haim, told The ENQUIRER. “He told me they smoked pot and had sex. He said they had anal sex. Haim said after it happened Sheen became very cold and rejected him. When Corey wanted to fool around again, Charlie was not interested.”‘
PHOTOS: The House That Sheen Built: Check Out Where Charlie’s Ex & Kids Are Living
Years later, the two reportedly had sex again when they were both in their 20’s.
“Haim told me he had sex with Sheen again,” claimed Brascia. “He claimed he didn’t like it and was finally over Sheen. He said Charlie was a loser.”
Brascia’s horrifying account matches those of dozens of other sources who also told The ENQUIRER that Haim named Sheen, now 52, as his abuser before his 2010 death from pneumonia at just 38.
PHOTOS: Broke Or BS? Charlie Sheen Drops $1Million On Mexican Estate
“Corey was so confused by the sexual encounter he believed, like so many victims, he was ‘in love’ with his abuser,” another source told The ENQUIRER, adding that in reality it was Sheen who pressured the much-younger teen into a sexual relationship.
Actor and filmmaker Corey Feldman, 46, has claimed he and his longtime best friend were sexually abused by men in Hollywood — and even said in his 2013 memoir Haim was told by a man while filming Lucas that “it was perfectly normal for older men and younger boys in the business to have sexual relations.”
While he didn’t name any names in his book, he did claim in a later interview that he was “not a huge fan” of Sheen. He cryptically claimed: “He’s affected other people that I know.”
PHOTOS: Charlie Sheen Says He Used Drugs & Alcohol Heavily After HIV+ Diagnosis
Feldman said his former pal “fought for his entire life to recover from those early experiences and to get his life together.”
In their divorce papers, Charlie Sheen’s ex-wife Denise Richards, 46, claimed she’d caught him looking at gruesome pornography featuring boys and girls who looked to be underage.
While Sheen has never spoken out about his relationship with Haim, a source close to the star said “there’s no doubt in my mind that something went down…enough that he had a grudge against Haim forever.”
Stay with Radar for updates.
We pay for juicy info! Do you have a story for RadarOnline.com? Email us at [email protected], or call us at (866) ON-RADAR (667-2327) any time, day or night.Haim Saban is a big honking Democratic donor — and he wants you to know it.
The billionaire and his wife, Cheryl, have given a stunning $6.4 million to Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid, according to federal records confirmed with Saban’s political advisers. The donations come not only to her official campaign but also to her super PAC and state Democratic Party committees that can support the former secretary of state’s efforts.
“It’s important to me for the [entertainment] industry to know what I’m doing for Hillary, how committed I am,” Saban told TheWrap.
“I want my number to be out there so others will be inspired to do the same,” he added.
Also Read: Hillary Clinton Super PAC Gets Big Hollywood Checks from Haim Saban, Thomas Tull
So pay attention Jeffrey Katzenberg ($1 million in 2015), Steven Spielberg ($1 million in 2015), J.J. Abrams ($1 million in 2015 with wife Katie McGrath) who have given big to Clinton’s Democratic presidential campaign.
Here’s how it breaks down:
In December, Haim Saban donated $1.5 million to Priorities USA, Clinton’s super PAC. Cheryl also donated $1.5 million to the PAC.
That brought the Sabans’ total PAC donations in 2015 to $5 million.
Also Read: Bernie Sanders Tops Hillary Clinton in January Fundraising by $5 Million
That number has been widely reported. (Though recent reports of donor updates appear to have left out his wife’s December contribution.)
But there is an entire category that has so far been ignored in media reports, a slurry of soft money coming through a newly expanded pipeline — the state Democratic Party committees.
The Hillary Victory Fund is a joint fund created by the Clinton campaign, the DNC and 32 state parties. Donors are free to donate up to $10,000 to each state party, per person, per year. Although the money is ostensibly given to the state party, the money can legally be used by the national party for any legitimate purpose.
Also Read: Top 6 MSNBC Debate Moments: Hillary Loses Cool, Sanders Takes High Road
In this election, that provision is being used more aggressively than ever before. According to Saban’s political adviser, the mogul and his wife have maxed out to this fund in late 2015 and has already maxed out in 2016 — each giving $10,000 to each state party twice over.
Those donations total $1,409,000 as follows:
$310,000 by Haim Saban to 31 state parties (he had already paid the maximum to one of the states)
$320,000 from Cheryl Saban went to 32 state parties.
Each gave $320,000 again in January, maxing out their total for 2016
$33,400 to the DNC in November (maximum allowed)
$33,400 to the DNC in January (maximum allowed)
$5400 – or, $2700 each – to the Hillary Clinton campaign (hard money, maximum allowed
That totals $6.4 million and change.
The $1.4 million to the Hillary Victory fund appears in an obscure place on the FEC site, not readily visible with other PAC donations (image for 2015 donations above).It wasn’t a surprise to Georgia’s Bernie Sanders supporters that he didn’t win here. Many polls, including one by WABE, showed Democratic rival Hillary Clinton had a strong lead in the Peach State.
But Sanders’ supporters, inspired by his raw manner of speaking and lack of political polish, didn’t seem to be discouraged by the drubbing he took in the South.
“As Bernie has said, ‘It’s a marathon, not a sprint,’” said Sanders campaign volunteer Christina Kroon. “While there’s other candidates who say, ‘I will fight for you,’ he’s the only one who says, ‘I will fight with you. I will stand with you. I am one of you. Your pain is my pain.’ I think that’s going to resonate with the American people.”
Kroon, a student at Kennesaw State University, said she spends her spare time volunteering for Sanders’ campaign.
She wasn’t alone in her optimism, despite Clinton’s win here and in other Southern states. State Rep. LaDawn Jones, D-Atlanta, who is also Sanders’ Georgia campaign director, said it’s not over yet.
“This is a revolution and not a race,” she said. “A revolution takes a different route and is probably going to take us all the way to the convention.
National Nurses United, a union throwing its support behind Sanders, came to Atlanta on Super Tuesday as it tours through the states. Katy Roemer, a registered nurse from Oakland, said Sanders’ platform of creating a single-payer health care system and reducing college loan debt resonates with a lot of nurses. She wasn’t deterred by his loss in Georgia.
“I’ve waited all my life for a candidate like this, and I will do anything I can to get this man elected, so he can represent me,” she said.Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Hundreds of people chanted outside the Louisiana State Capitol Building
'We are praying that it stays peaceful' - Baton Rouge, Louisiana
In Baton Rouge, it's not anger they feel. It's rage.
The people here raised their voices in prayer, in chants and in song at the death of Alton Sterling. At one point during a demonstration, they broke into frenzied dancing to a marching brass band while singing "Free the People".
This is grieving, Louisiana style.
The events in Dallas have not altered this pattern of daily protests. But it has given community leaders pause for thought. How do they channel this need to air their grievances with the police without it breaking into violence?
On Saturday hundreds of people marched through the streets to the imposing Louisiana State Capitol Building. The men stood on the steps - clenched fists raised high. The unmistakable black power salute.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption "We want to show outrage but we don't want to tear our community up," said one protester
State Representative Patricia Smith, one of the organisers, told me: "We are praying that it stays peaceful here. We made it through another day. We've had a few arrests, but none of them were really violent.
"We are asking our young people and those from out of town to respect our wishes and the wishes of Alton Sterling's family, that there is no more bloodshed in Baton Rouge."
Community leaders are intervening whenever it looks like the gatherings could turn violent. On several occasions protesters have gathered outside the police headquarters. On Saturday evening they were led by a more militant group, the New Black Panther Party, whose members openly carry weapons.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Demonstrators confronted lines of riot officers near police headquarters
Officers dressed in riot gear responded by forming a police line and the two sides came face to face across the street. There have been a few clashes and some arrests. Cleave Dunn Junior is a business owner who, along with others, has worked day and night to defuse the worst of the tension.
He said: "The major thing we want to do is manage emotion and direct that energy on the right path. What we've done here is set the right tone. We want to show outrage, protest and we may even do some civil disobedience, but we don't want to tear our community up and we don't want to harm our city."
Despite the circumstances, our team received the warmest of welcomes. The protesters want the world to hear their cries. But in the feverish heat of summer, it's hard not to feel that this city is close to boiling point. - Laura Bicker
'This might be the tipping point' - St Paul, Minnesota
In St Paul, Minnesota a core of committed protesters still hold a round-the-clock vigil outside the governor's mansion.
On Saturday their numbers swelled for another march to remember Philando Castile, the school cafeteria supervisor shot dead by police last week - drawing a multi-racial crowd, old and young.
'It's been a very long week, a lot of anger and sadness and emptiness,' said Corydon Nilsson, a young Black Lives Matter activist.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Protesters were pushed back with pepper spray and smoke bombs
The killing of five police officers in Dallas has deepened those emotions but hasn't overtaken the outrage caused by the video of Castile's dying moments, documenting a routine traffic stop that turned into a killing.
"We mourn with everyone who dies," said Jason Sole of the Minneapolis National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). "But I don't think it's changed what we're out here fighting for. We're dying consistently for the colour of our skin… and it has to stop."
"I think [the Dallas attack] was a setback but we've reached a point where everyone is galvanized by what happened here," said Mr Nilsson, who grew up in the middle class suburb of Falcon Heights, where Castile died.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The protest shut down Minnesota's highway I-94 and police took up positions in the road
At a mostly white church in Falcon Heights, a service was held to honour all those who died in the tumultuous week and to renew pledges to fight racial injustice - mindful of the shadow of Dallas.
"I think we do have to be careful that we don't lose attention on the two deaths from earlier in the week, as much as our hearts grieve for those killed in the line of duty," said pastor Reverend Anne Swallow Gillis.
"So we have to be able to hold both in our hands and that's very difficult, very difficult," she said.
Jay Bryson, a protester, said: "Our gun culture is out of control right now. It's got to flip sometime, this might be the tipping point."
As night fell, some protesters shut down part of an interstate highway west of St Paul, throwing bottles and fireworks at policemen who used smoke bombs to disperse the crowd.
"This is what's going to get attention," said one bystander, who did not want to be named.
"If I had done the same thing [as the policeman who shot Castile] I'd be in jail," said another. "This is the consequence." - Barbara Plett Usher
More on this storyIbrahim et al. (2014) shift the tall-spined "caudal" vertebrae back to being a posterior dorsal, and they move the next tallest caudal almost all the way to the anterior part of the tail, in contrast to the positions that have been recently suggested. This results in a much shorter "retro-look" sail and a rather skinny but flexible tail. That may well be correct, but what I want to focus on is the pelvis and hindlimb proportions. The authors' provide a wonderful table (S2) with measurements of individual elements of the neotype specimen, which is naturally the first thing I went to check when I saw how radical the new interpretation was. And that's where we run into trouble.
How can we know how large the pelvis and the hind limbs are relative to the rest of the animal in a composite skeleton? The best way to tell is to scale them against the dorsal column, and luckily the neotype specimen (FSAC-KK 11888) has several vertebrae. Table S2 in the supplemental data section reports that D8 is 18 cm long. It also reports that the length of the ilium is ~71 cm in length, or nearly 4 times the length of D8 (3.94 to be precise).
As it happens you can use ImageJ or Photoshop to check the linear proportions of those elements with their respective measurement tools, and here is where something fishy happens, as the ilium in the reconstruction from the paper is much too small relative to the vertebrae from the same specimen. In fact it needs to be increased about 27% (e.g. x 1.27) to match the published length. And it's not just the ilium that is wrong; the rest of the pelvis and the entire hindlimb is off, and they are off by about the same amount, suggesting it's the reconstruction and not the measurements that are in error.
I've "corrected" the size of the pelvis and hind limb so that they match their published size relative to the dorsal vertebrae, and it makes a pretty big difference. Not only do the hindlimbs look more in line with other theropods, but the deeper pelvis would also impact the center of gravity calculations (by shifting them back). I haven't had a chance to look at the scaling of the cervical or caudal series in depth, but assuming that Table S2 is correct then the appendicular skeletal proportions published in the paper cannot be right. At the very it least it calls into question the idea that Spinosaurus was an obligate quadruped on land.With winter just around the corner, many Canadians are planning their seasonal escapes to more tropical locales. But in a bid to retain both a happy population and tourism dollars, many Canadian cities have started to embrace their snowy status, and are committed to making winter tolerable (even, dare we say, enjoyable).
With that in mind, here are 10 of Canada's best winter cities.
Edmonton
This northern Alberta city hasn't historically been known as a tourist destination, but a renewed focus on winter activities might turn that around. From a plethora of festivals — Ice on Whyte, Winter Light and Deep Freeze: A Byzantine Winter Festival — to unique attractions like Candy Cane Lane and heated winter patios, this oft-underrated city is sure to surprise. Want something a bit more active? Sip & Slide toboggan events or Swing 'n' Skate at City Hall happen on regular Sundays. Read more about Edmonton's wintry reinvention in the November issue of Canadian Geographic Travel.
Quebec City
With its European aesthetic, Quebec City is already blessed with a certain romanticism that is brought even more to the fore when a sparkling layer of snow is added to the picture. Snow baths and icy canoe races are de rigueur at Le Carnaval de Quebec, while the famous Ice Hotel offers an unforgettable night in a building made entirely of ice.
Whistler
While renowned for its skiing, this British Columbia town has garnered recognition for its off-slope activities too. From winter ziplining and bungee jumping to a raucous apres-ski nightlife, visitors could almost be forgiven for skipping the award-winning ski resort. Almost.
Ottawa
It's almost a necessity that the nation's capital embrace winter, and with the largest outdoor skating rink in the world, along with a veritable smorgasbord of winter activiites to enjoy in nearby Gatineau Park, it's safe to say "mission accomplished." The annual Winterlude festival's ice carvings are delightful to see at night with a tasty BeaverTail pastry in hand.
Montreal
With the eponymous Mont Royal smack dab in the center of the city, there's plenty of room for cross-country skiing in this bustling bilingual metropolis. Fete des neiges, which takes place in January and February, offers snow soccer and a polar circus, and a 65-foot-tall tree provides a lovely centrepiece for the Winter Village at Olympic Park over the holidays.
Winnipeg
Winter or summer, The Forks is often the place to be in Winnipeg. Located at the confluence of the Red River and Assiniboine River, this historic green space offers skate rentals and internationally-designed warming huts on one of the world's longest skating trails. There's also tons of free programming to enjoy at the Arctic Glacier Winter Park, including horse-wagon rides, snowboarding for kids, and indigenous elders telling stories and baking bannock in teepees.“I can get somebody cheaper.”
Is there anything more galling to a freelancer than sending your (carefully-considered) fee structure to a prospective client, and getting back a response like THAT?
That’s unusually blunt, of course. Variants include:
“Oh, wow. That’s higher than we budgeted.”
“Most freelancers we hire work at X rate.”
“Hmm. That’s more than we usually pay. Can you tell us how you arrive at that number?”
In my experience, there are 3 options for dealing with this kind of client response.*
(Note: any one of the 3 should be attempted only after ritual ablutions to cleanse oneself of the response’s level of sting. Effective ritual ablutions include: swearing softly at screen, rolling one’s eyes, sighing dramatically, indignant texting of loved one, passive-aggressive refusing to respond for an hour while re-watching episodes of The Office on Netflix.)
1. No Second Date (aka Abandon Ship)
This is rarely my first response, but I am willing to abandon the bid altogether under the following circumstances:
A huge discrepancy between my normal hourly fee and what they expect to pay. A little negotiation is normal, but if you offer me one-third of what I normally make, I’m better served by pursuing clients who pay reasonably.
A nasty response to my initial bid. If you can’t respond reasonably at the beginning, you probably aren’t going to be very pleasant to work with – it’s a super red flag. I try never to deal with clients who make me hate them (and myself, for taking said project).
A response that involves some variant of “we can’t actually pay you right now, but you’ll get plenty of exposure!” I work for free plenty, for myself, in my creative work. I won’t do it as a freelance copywriter – and “exposure” is easy to promise, hard to pay the bills with.
You don’t have to cannonball the entire relationship in order to abandon pursuit of the project. Just send a polite email saying that you understand their position, and you’re probably not what they’re looking for at this time, best of luck! Then move on to friendlier waters.
**2. It’s Not You, It’s Me (aka I’m Worth It) **
When I get a polite query back about why I happen to charge $X when their last copywriter charged $Y, I like to have a few tangible examples ready of why I charge what I do: relative speed of my work, relevant experience in their field, breadth of experience, etc. It’s especially helpful to have a client reference or two to sprinkle in this email, who they can call up and ask about your awesome work. It’s a version of the old you-get-what-you-pay-for argument; but I find if you can give very concrete examples of your expertise (and how its helped clients in the past), prospective clients tend to approve the rate increase.
Another thing to keep in mind is THEIR fee structure history is not really relevant; YOURS is. So if your other clients pay $X, you can stand firm – that’s your fee, and you can’t go any lower. If they can’t afford you now, maybe they can eventually – but you won’t starve in the meantime.
3. If You Want It, Better Put a Ring on It (aka Make a Commitment)
Be careful with this one – after all, a commitment goes both ways.
I, like many other freelancers, see hustling to find new regular, consistent clients exhausting. Thus, I will give a reasonable hourly / per-project discount to clients who commit to a certain number of projects or hours per week or month. Always make sure that this is put in writing, if possible – if I had a nickel for every client who told me that they were SURE I would have X hours of work a week and failed to follow through, I would never need to think about rates again. It’s worth it to me to give this extra little “bonus” to clients I enjoy working with, and having a consistent income flow is invaluable.
These are the three options I use when faced with a skeptical client response to a bid, and I don’t worry much about it once I’ve chosen one. I’ve very rarely regretted giving up a gig that didn’t meet my specifications – and narrowing it down took all the mystery out of responding. Now I can fret about a million other things, instead!
How about you, freelancers? How do you respond to a client who balks at your pricetag?
* Caveat: I will occasionally lower rates considerably for something I’m passionate about, or for a client I really desperately want to work with – and much of my purely creative work is low-paying. But those exceptions are my projects, and I’m very selective about them; the bids I’m talking about here are for “money” gigs.
Want more like this? Join Freelancers Union and never miss a post.Manchester United have reportedly spoken to Real Madrid over the availability of Gareth Bale and Raphaël Varane, according to COPE journalist Arancha Rodríguez.
French defender Varane has long interested United. They were close to signing him when he left Lens for Madrid,and his speed and awareness would be of great benefit to United’s back line.
Welshman Bale has also long been linked with a move to Old Trafford from Southampton, Tottenham and now the Bernabeu. This transfer in particular has already been drawn out through the last few months. First, rumours surfaced of him being bullied by teammates who wouldn’t pass to him enough, then it was claimed a fortnight ago that it was “almost a done deal”.
Any chance of an immediate transfer involving Bale or Varane is almost certainly out of the question now that Carlo Ancelotti has been sacked as manager of the Spanish club. The new manager, most likely Rafa Benitez, will want time to asses his players before making any decisions on players going in-or-out of the club.
Bale has long been seen as Ryan Giggs heir at Old Trafford and his powerful running would bring back memories of a young Giggs the fans.
He’d be the exciting signing from Real Madrid everyone believed Di Maria would be; his speed, technique and goals would make an instant impact at the club and he’d no doubt become a fans favourite.
Sadly, The Independent has reported that Benitez would make Bale, and not Cristiano Ronaldo, his main man at Madrid. This isn’t entirely surprising given Benitez’s familiarity with the English game and the fact that Ronaldo, despite his phenomenal record, is entering the later years of his career.
Benitez would surely want to keep hold of Varane as the long term option for the centre-back position.Sergio Ramos is still only 29, despite having been playing at the highest level for over a decade, but his regular partner Pepe is now 32.
Bale and Varane would both be fantastic additions to Van Gaal’s United squad but there is no motivation for Real to sell, besides potentially a swap involving David de Gea.
Even if United are powerless to stop De Gea joining Madrid, they are in a strong position to negotiate a deal whereby a player comes in the opposite direction.This article is over 3 years old
Country’s largest dam was briefly held by Isis, leading to a lapse in maintenance that weakened already flawed structure
Iraq has awarded Italian firm Trevi a contract to repair and maintain the country’s largest dam, which is in danger of catastrophic collapse.
The Mosul dam was built on an unstable foundation of soils that erode when exposed to water, and a lapse in maintenance after Islamic State (Isis) seized it in 2014 weakened the already flawed structure.
The dam has long been in danger of collapse, which US officials have warned could send a huge wave crashing into Isis-held Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, about 25 miles (40km) away.
The Iraqi cabinet, with the agreement of the ministry of water resources, awarded Trevi the contract “to carry out the project of rehabilitating and maintaining the Mosul dam”, a government statement said on Tuesday.
'Recapture' of Mosul Dam from Isis a major step forward, says Obama Read more
The deal has yet to be signed, according to the statement, which did not specify how much Trevi would be paid for the work.
The Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, announced in December the country would deploy 450 troops to defend the dam, a decision linked to Trevi’s interest in the project.
Italian forces are already in Iraq training police as part of international efforts to counter Isis. Italy also deployed forces to Iraq as part of the US-led coalition that overthrew Saddam Hussein, and a truck bomb killed 19 Italians south of Baghdad in 2003.
Lt Gen Sean MacFarland, the commander of the military operation against Isis, said last week that the US had put measuring devices on the dam to monitor how much it is moving or deteriorating over time.
Life in Mosul one year on: 'Isis with all its brutality is more honest than the Shia government' Read more
Since the dam’s completion in 1984, the Iraqi government has sought to shore up the foundation by injecting mortar-like grout into the subsoil and cavities and controlling seepage.
But essential maintenance stopped in 2014 when Isis briefly seized the dam.
In 2007, the US ambassador to Iraq and the top American military commander in the country wrote a letter warning that the dam could fail with devastating results.
“A catastrophic failure of the Mosul dam would result in flooding along the Tigris river all the way to Baghdad,” the letter said.
“Assuming a worst-case scenario, an instantaneous failure of Mosul dam filled to its maximum operating level could result in a flood wave 20 metres (66 feet) deep at the city of Mosul,” it said.Remind me when letting the states decide civil rights issues has ever worked out, again.
When I tell my friends that I support letting the states decide if Republicans can marry, they often ask me to leave their sauna, unfriend them on Facebook and return all of their lent toiletries.
In these instances, I’m reminded that the tradition of marriage is so sacred to many Americans that the notion of Republicans being allowed to marry can offend their very being. “Imagine,” their smoldering eyes seem to be screaming, “My dear, normal child being forced to sit in a classroom being forced to learn about Newt Gingrich’s belief that marriage should only between a man and a woman who doesn’t have cancer.”
I try to tell them that not all Republicans are like Marc Sanford, David Vitter or Herman Cain.
Not all Republicans believe in cutting health care funding for new mothers and newborns. Not all Republicans want cut public education funding and use the remaining funding to create charter schools that cherry pick the best students and boot out the rest then use slightly better test scores to funnel public money into private companies.
Not all Republicans are Rick Perry who has executed hundreds of people, many of them likely guilty of crimes, while making it nearly impossible for thousands of poor children women to find basic health care.
That’s just most Republicans, I say. And there are states where no one listens to Republicans. Like Vermont! Or California, recently.
Sure, the Bible has hundreds of passages in favor of slavery and a handful of passages against homosexuality. It never explicitly bans marriage between Republicans. (Though it never clearly says it’s okay other, either.)
So why shouldn’t Republicans be allowed to marry in states that can tolerate them?
Then we’ll decide if they should be able to adopt or drive or congregate to play “sports.”
Nothing says freedom like the right to deny grown adults the ability to enjoy the same benefits as you do because of ancient prejudices.
[Image by Anne Savage]For the first time ever, researchers have recorded chimpanzees learning skills from each other in the wild. The findings in a new study lends credence to the notion that our closest living relative passes on culture and customs just like us.
An international research team witnessed the behavior after studying the Sonso chimpanzee community in Uganda’s Budongo Forest. There, they witnessed the spread of two tool-use behaviors.
Researchers have known for years that chimpanzee troops have unique behaviors that differ from troop to troop. Some use tools, others do not. These differences are classified as ‘cultural,’ meaning one chimpanzee learns from another.
The observation of chimpanzees learning skills from each other has been observed in captivity, but not in the wild – until now.
The study, published in PLOS Biology, looked at the use of leaf-sponges – used to dip into water and drink from.
Researchers observed the alpha male make a leaf sponge with a dominant adult female looking on. Six days later, seven other chimpanzees made and used leaf sponges. The research team also saw an adult male retrieve and reuse a discarded leaf sponge. Eight more chimpanzees quickly picked up on this despite only four observing the reusing of the sponge.
Researchers created a model and estimate a chimpanzee observing the leaf-sponging technique was 15 times more likely to develop the technique.
“We conclude that group-specific behavioral variants in wild chimpanzees can be socially learned, adding to the evidence that this prerequisite for culture originated in a common ancestor of great apes and humans, long before the advent of modern humans,” reads the study abstract.Ever since ViaBTC launched their Transaction Accelerator, the company has been on an aggressive marketing path. Although it initially launched free of charge, users had to pay a small fee to use the TA less than 24 hours after launch. But it looks like ViaBTC wants to make another statement, declaring how Bitcoin Core devs “refuse to up the block size limit.” If that were the case, Segregated Witness would not be here.
Everyone knows ViaBTC as a mining pool publicly supporting Bitcoin Unlimited. This alternative branch of Bitcoin development looks to address the block size problem in a different manner. So far, there is only one mining pool supporting BU, with no indication of that situation changing soon. Then again, one pool is better than none.
But ViaBTC is not just a mining pool, as its owners have a strong opinion about Bitcoin Core. In fact, the Transaction Accelerator page now mentions how Bitcoin Core devs refuse to increase the block size. Utterly false information, even though the block size debacle has been lingering for far too long already.
An Aggressive Strategy By ViaBTC
To solve this problem, ViaBTC bluntly states everyone should support Bitcoin Unlimited. After all, this solution implements an immediate block size increase, solving the problem. But it won’t be so easy, as most Bitcoin enthusiasts and services remain loyal to Bitcoin Core. That is only normal, as their block size solution is currently available for signalling on the mainnet.
ViaBTC’s Transaction Accelerator usage will directly support Bitcoin Unlimited. Every transaction confirmed through their pool will be included in the next BU block on the network. However, the limit of 100 TX per hour is still in place, rendering this solution somewhat useless. That it, unless significant network congestion arises.
To make matters even more intriguing, ViaBTC removed the fee structure from Transaction Accelerator already. The company introduced this fee less than 24 hours after launching their TA. Going back and forth on this decision is not the most professional approach by any means. Publicly “declaring war” on Bitcoin Core developers will not do their reputation any good either.
It is evident this game between Bitcoin Unlimited and Bitcoin Core is nothing more than politics at play. ViaBTC will continue to stir up trouble whenever they possibly can in the hopes of swaying people’s minds. For now, that plan does not seem to work, and the Bitcoin community remains somewhat divided on the block size debate.
Header image courtesy of ShutterstockThe East Ramapo monitors will hold a community forum Oct. 1.
The monitors say they want to hear directly from the East Ramapo community, including from parents, educators, students, and interested community stakeholders.
They've already visited several schools, met with school and elected officials, and talked informally with parents and community activists, they said on their blog.
Appointed by the state Board of Regents and Education Department, the monitor team says, " Our goal is for action to take place long term and short term." So far what they've found that they've shared with state officials is that East Ramapo students are doing worse, in terms of graduation rates and test results, than the most needy urban and suburban districts in New York, and much worse than the Rockland and state average.
SEE: Reactions to New East Ramapo Monitor: Caution, Suspicion, Hope
The forum will run from 7-9 p.m. at the Town of Ramapo Cultural and Performing Arts Center (64 N. Main Street, Spring Valley). |
he gained 217 rushing yards on 19 carries for an average of 11.4 yards per carry.[72] On Michigan's second play from scrimmage, Robinson ran 72 yards for a touchdown.[73] On the second play of the second half, Robinson threw a 70-yard touchdown pass to Junior Hemingway, the longest of his career, to give Michigan a 28–21 lead.[73] On Michigan's next drive, Robinson aggravated the knee injury sustained the prior week against Bowling Green and came out of the game for the remainder of the drive. He returned to the game and led Michigan on a game-winning, 65-yard touchdown drive in the final minute of the game. With 21 seconds remaining, Robinson completed a 32-yard pass to the 4-yard line. On the next play, Robinson scored on a 4-yard touchdown run with 17 seconds remaining.[72][73]
With his performance against Indiana, Robinson became the first player in Division I FBS history to have two regular season games with 200 yards rushing and 200 yards passing.[74] Seven others have accomplished the feat (including Pat White, Vince Young and Antwaan Randle El), but none have done so more than once in the regular season. Vince Young accomplished this feat once in the regular season and once in the Rose Bowl.[74]
After the Indiana game, Dari Nowkhah wrote in ESPN's "Heisman Watch" column that Robinson was "running away with the Heisman Trophy" and compared him to 1988 Heisman Trophy winner Barry Sanders
We haven't seen this type of college football playmaker since... Barry Sanders? I'm not saying Robinson reminds me of Sanders. (How could a quarterback remind me of a running back?) But there is a shocking resemblance between the diminutive playmakers in their speed, elusiveness and quickness. So is the effect the two have on my sense of what is right and wrong. Being that dominant on a football field somehow feels wrong. It's unfair.[75]
On October 4, 2010, Robinson was named the Big Ten Offensive Player of the Week (for the third time in five weeks),[76] and also received the Davey O'Brien Quarterback of the Week award (for the second time in four weeks).[77] After five games, Robinson remained the nation's leading rusher in both total yards (905) and yards per game (181).[78] He also ranked fourth in the country with a quarterback rating of 180.[79]
Three consecutive mid-season losses [ edit ]
After leading Michigan to a 5–0 record and breaking the school's total offense records, Robinson was the front-runner for the Heisman Trophy. His Heisman prospects suffered after three consecutive losses to Michigan State, Iowa and Penn State.
In a 34–17 loss to Michigan State in the Paul Bunyan Trophy game, Robinson completed 17 of 29 passes for 215 passing yards but threw three interceptions.[80] He was also limited to 86 rushing yards on 21 carries. Despite a "lackluster" performance against the Spartans, Sports Illustrated selected Robinson for its "September Heisman" following the Michigan State game.[80] He was also selected by Mark Schlabach as the Offensive MVP in ESPN.com's Mid-Season Awards.[81]
One week after the loss to Michigan State, the Wolverines lost to Iowa, 38–28. Robinson was limited to 96 passing yards and 105 rushing yards and threw his fifth interception of the season. In the third quarter, Robinson suffered a shoulder injury and did not return to the game.[82][83]
Michigan's record dropped to 5–3 with a 41–31 loss to Penn State. Despite the loss, Robinson's offensive output rebounded against the Nittany Lions. He rushed for 191 yards on 27 carries (an average of 7.1 yards per carry) and passed for another 190 yards, including a 60-yard touchdown pass to Kevin Koger.[84] With 191 rushing yards against Penn State, Robinson's season rushing total reached 1,287 yards, breaking Antwaan Randle El's Big Ten record of 1,270 rushing yards by a quarterback.[85]
Offensive free-for-all against Illinois [ edit ]
In his ninth start, Robinson passed for a career-high 302 yards and ran for 62 yards against Illinois. On the first play from scrimmage, Robinson threw a 75-yard touchdown pass to Roy Roundtree.[86] In the second quarter, Robinson also threw a 33-yard touchdown pass to Roundtree and another 75-yard pass to Roundtree to set up Michigan's third touchdown. Robinson set a school single-half record with 262 passing yards in the first half.[87] Robinson came out of the game at the end of the third quarter after reporting concussion-like symptoms, including dizziness and headaches.[88] Michigan went on to win the game 67–65.[86] Robinson and substitute Tate Forcier combined to break Michigan's all-time, single-game record with 419 passing yards, surpassing the prior record of 396 yards by Tom Brady and Drew Henson against Michigan State in 1999.[89] The following week, Robinson, was named as one of sixteen Maxwell Award semifinalists.[90]
Consecutive losses to Wisconsin and Ohio State [ edit ]
Robinson's shot at the Heisman Trophy was lost with a disappointing performance against Purdue and consecutive blowout losses to Wisconsin and Ohio State.
In the Purdue game, Robinson turned the ball over four times (two interceptions and two lost fumbles) in heavy rain and gusting wind.[91] Robinson was also held to a season-low 68 rushing yards against Purdue.
One week later, Michigan suffered a 48–28 loss to Wisconsin. Robinson passed for 239 yards and two touchdowns, rushed for 121 yards and two touchdowns, set the Division I FBS record for rushing yards by a quarterback and become the first NCAA player with 1,500 rushing yards and 2,000 passing yards in the same season.[92] However, Robinson's individual performance was overshadowed by the 20-point loss to the Badgers.
In the final game of the regular season, Michigan lost by a 30-point margin (37–7) against Ohio State in The Game. Robinson failed to register a passing or rushing touchdown for the first time all season. Although he rushed for 105 yards on 18 carries, he was limited to 87 passing yards. After sustaining two dislocated fingers on his non-throwing hand, Robinson was replaced in the second half by Tate Forcier.[93]
2011 Gator Bowl [ edit ]
Michigan finished its 2010 season with a 52–14 loss to Mississippi State in the 2011 Gator Bowl, the worst defeat ever suffered by Michigan in a bowl game.[94] Robinson completed 27 of 41 passes for 254 yards, two touchdowns and one interception. He added 59 rushing yards on 11 carries for 313 yards of total offense, enough to break Drew Brees' Big Ten single-season total offense record of 4,189 yards.[95]
2010 season statistics and awards [ edit ]
Robinson finished the 2010 season with 1,702 rushing yards (130.9 yards per game), which stood as an FBS single-season record for a quarterback until it was surpassed two years later by Jordan Lynch.[96] He also passed for 2,570 yards and compiled 4,272 yards of total offense (328.6 yards per game).[97][98] In the 10th game of the season against Purdue, Robinson passed John Navarre's Michigan single-season total offense record of 3,240 yards set in 2003. Against Wisconsin one week later, he broke the Division I FBS single-season quarterback rushing record of 1,494 yards previously held by Beau Morgan of Air Force.[99] He also became the first person in NCAA (all divisions) history to record 1,500 yards rushing and passing in the same season.[100]
At the end of the regular season, Robinson received the Chicago Tribune Silver Football trophy as the Most Valuable Player in the Big Ten Conference.[101] He was also named Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year by the Big Ten coaches and media and by the College Football News.[102][103] Robinson was also selected as a first-team All-American by the Football Writers Association of America as a running back,[104] a third-team All-American by the Associated Press as an all-purpose player,[105] and an honorable mention quarterback selection by Sports Illustrated and College Football News.[106][107] He finished sixth in the 2010 Heisman Trophy voting,[108] and was selected as a first-team All-Big Ten quarterback by both the Big Ten media and College Football News.[109][110]
With 313 yards of total offense in the 2011 Gator Bowl, Robinson broke Drew Brees' Big Ten single-season total offense record of 4,189 yards.[95] He fell 116 yards short of Tim Biakabutuka's Michigan school record of 1,818 rushing yards. However, he led the conference in both total offense and rushing yards per game.[97]
Decision to stay after coaching change [ edit ]
Robinson at Michigan Stadium
Following Michigan's season-ending loss in the 2011 Gator Bowl, head coach Rich Rodriguez was fired and replaced by Brady Hoke. As Robinson had thrived in Rodriguez's spread offense, the coaching change led to speculation that Robinson may transfer. On January 17, 2011, Robinson ended the speculation when he issued a statement confirming that he would stay at Michigan.[111][112] In the video statement released by the University of Michigan, Robinson said he seriously considered transferring and noted that Rodriguez was one of the few coaches willing to give him the chance to play quarterback at the next level.[112] Robinson explained his decision to stay at Michigan: "This is my family. This is my home now.... I couldn't let it go."[112] He also noted that he talked to his teammates and told them, "'You know, I can't just leave you out there.' I've been around these guys two years and we've bonded and it's like a family here. There's nothing like this."[111]
Preseason focus on adaptability to new offense [ edit ]
Robinson entered the 2011 season on watchlists for the Maxwell Award,[113] the Davey O'Brien Award, the Walter Camp Award,[114] the Paul Hornung Award,[115] and the Manning Award.[116] In the weeks leading up to the 2011 season, the media focused on questions surrounding Robinson's ability to adapt to the pro-style offense being implemented by new offensive coordinator, Al Borges and also on Borges' willingness to adjust his game plan to take advantage of Robinson's running capability.[117][118][119] Robinson noted that the running game would remain an option even in passing situations, adding, "If nobody's open, the broken play is probably the hardest play to stop in college football – in any football."[120]
Regular season [ edit ]
Robinson at a 2011 press conference.
In Michigan's 2011 season opener against Western Michigan, Robinson completed 9 of 13 passes for 98 yards and had 46 rushing yards on eight carries. The game was ended with 1:27 left in the third quarter due to inclement weather.[121]
In Michigan's next game against Notre Dame, Robinson completed 11 of 24 passes for 338 yards with four touchdowns and had 108 yards rushing on 16 carries with a touchdown on a recovered fumble near the goal line. He threw the game-winning touchdown pass to Roy Roundtree with two seconds left in the fourth quarter to defeat the Irish 35–31.[122] The performance moved Robinson into third place in Big Ten history for rushing yards by a quarterback.[123] In recognition of his performance during the game, the Big Ten named Denard Robinson its Offensive Player of the Week, while the Davey O'Brien Award named him its Quarterback of the Week. He was also named Rivals.com's Big Ten and National Player of the Week and was nominated for the Capital One Cup Impact Performance of the Week,[124][125] which he won by fan vote.[126]
In Michigan's third game, against Eastern Michigan, Robinson posted 198 rushing yards giving him five of the top ten quarterback single-game rushing outputs in conference history.[127][128]
In Michigan's fourth game, against San Diego State, Robinson tallied three touchdowns in the first half on his way to a 200-yard rushing effort. The effort moved him into second place in Big Ten history in career rushing yards by a quarterback, behind only Antwaan Randle El.[129] He also earned Big Ten Conference Co-Offensive Player of the Week recognition.[130]
On October 8, against Northwestern, Robinson contributed 454 yards of total offense with 337 yards passing and 117 rushing. He scored two rushing touchdowns and had two passing.[131]
On October 15, against Michigan State Robinson was shut down by the Spartan defense throwing for just 123 yards completing 9 of 24 attempts and a costly interception that was returned for a touchdown with 4:31 left in the game. Robinson stated after the game "I got a little beat up," as he was knocked out of the game in the 28-14 loss, his third straight loss in the rivalry.[132]
During Michigan's November 19 victory over Nebraska, Robinson posted 180 yards passing and 83 rushing yards with two rushing touchdowns and two passing touchdowns to earn Co-Big Ten Offensive Player of the Week honors from the conference. He also won the Rivals.com Big Ten Player of the Week and was a nominee for the Capital One Cup Impact Performances of the Week.[133][134]
On November 26, in a victory over Ohio State, Fitzgerald Toussaint joined Robinson with 1,000 yards for the season, marking the first time since the 1975 team that Michigan had two 1,000-yard rushers.[135][136] Robinson posted a five-touchdown performance (three passing and two rushing) and became the fourth player in NCAA history to gain 2,000 yards passing and 1,000 yards rushing in a season twice in his career. Robinson totalled 170 yards rushing and earned a share of his fourth Big Ten Offensive Player of the Week recognition for the season.[137] He also repeated as the Rivals.com Big Ten Player of the Week and was a College Football Performance Awards honorable mention as the National Quarterback of the Week.[138]
Following the 2011 Big Ten Conference football season, he earned second team All-Conference recognition from the media.[139][140] He was voted team MVP for the second year in a row.[141] He was a Sports Illustrated All-American honorable mention selectee.[142]
In August 2012, Robinson and teammate Taylor Lewan were selected by the media among the five "Players to Watch" in Big Ten Legends Division.[143] Robinson was elected team captain.[144]
After a disappointing performance in a season-opening, 41–14 loss to Alabama (27 rushing yards, 200 passing yards, and two interceptions), Robinson rebounded in Michigan's second game against Air Force. Robinson contributed 426 yards of total offense against Air Force (208 passing yards, 218 rushing yards, two rushing touchdowns, and two passing touchdowns). For his performance, he was named Big Ten Offensive Player of the Week and received College Football Performance Award honors as National Player of the Week and National Quarterback of the Week.[145] He became the first NCAA athlete to both rush and pass for 200 yards in a game on three separate occasions. It marked the first time since the 1993 Rose Bowl performance by Tyrone Wheatley that a Michigan player had two rushing touchdowns of over 50 yards.[145]
On September 15, 2012, playing against UMass, Robinson tallied 397 yards of total offense in three quarters of play, including 291 passing yards, three passing touchdowns, and 369 yards of total offense in the first half. With the performance against UMass, Robinson passed Tom Brady on Michigan's all-time passing yardage list.[146]
On September 22, Robinson was responsible for five turnovers, four first-half interceptions and a lost fumble on the opening drive of the second half, in a 13–6 loss to Notre Dame.[147] The Detroit Free Press called it "the worst game of his Michigan career."[148]
On October 7, Robinson rushed for 235 yards on 24 carries and threw for 105 yards against Purdue. His performance gave him 3,905 career rushing yards, moving past Antwaan Randle El as the Big Ten career leader in rushing yards by a quarterback.[149][150] He also tied Mike Hart's Michigan school record with his fifth career 200-yard rushing game.[151] The 235 yards rushing was also a personal best for Robinson in a Big Ten game.[152] The performance won him recognition as the Maxwell Award Player of the Week and a Manning Award "Star of the Week".[153][154] It also earned him his ninth Big Ten Offensive Player of the Week award, tying a career record set in 1999 by Ron Dayne.[155] Robinson was named a semifinalist for the Davey O'Brien Award and a finalist for the Johnny Unitas Golden Arm Award.[156][157]
After suffering an injury and being knocked out of Michigan's game with Nebraska (a 23–9 loss to the Cornhuskers) on October 27, Robinson returned to the lineup for the last home game of the 2012 season, a 42-17 victory over Iowa. Playing in his final game at Michigan Stadium, Robinson split his playing time between the tailback, quarterback, and wide receiver positions. He accounted for 122 yards, including 98 rushing yards on 13 carries and 24 receiving yards on two receptions. With the injury to the ulnar nerve in his right elbow, Robinson did not throw the ball during the game and was forced to carry the ball in his right hand.[158]
In his final regular season game, the annual Michigan–Ohio State rivalry game, Robinson rushed for 122 yards on 10 carries, including a 67-yard touchdown run with a minute to go in the first half. He was a 2012 All-Big Ten honorable mention selection by the media for the 2012 Wolverines. Denard played his final game at Michigan on January 1, 2013 in the Outback Bowl against South Carolina.[159][160] In the game, he surpassed Pat White's FBS record for career rushing yards by a quarterback by 15 yards to reach a total of 4,495.[161] On December 28, 2015, Keenan Reynolds achieved a total of 4,559, surpassing Robinson.[162]
Statistics [ edit ]
Passing Rushing Season Team GP Att Comp Comp % Yards Yards/Att TD INT Att Yards Ave TD 2009 Michigan 10 31 14 45.2 188 6.1 2 4 69 351 5.1 5 2010 Michigan 13 291 182 62.5 2570 8.8 18 11 256 1702 6.6 14 2011 Michigan 13 258 142 55.0 2173 8.4 20 15 221 1176 5.3 16 2012 Michigan 11 167 89 53.3 1319 7.9 9 9 177 1266 7.2 7 Career 47 747 427 57.2 6250 8.36 49 39 723 4495 6.2 42
Michigan's all-time total offense leaders [ edit ]
Single game [ edit ]
As Michigan's starting quarterback, Robinson has seven of the top ten single-game performances in total yards in Michigan history, as reflected in the following list of the all-time, single-game leaders.
Rank Player Year Opponent Passing yards[163] Rushing yards[163] Total offense 1 Devin Gardner 2013 Indiana 503 81 584 2 Jake Rudock 2015 Indiana 440 64 504 3 Denard Robinson 2010 Notre Dame 244 258 502 4 Denard Robinson 2010 Indiana 277 217 494 5 Devin Gardner 2013 Ohio State 451 10 461 6 Denard Robinson 2011 Northwestern 337 117 454 7 Denard Robinson 2011 Notre Dame 338 108 446 8 Denard Robinson 2012 Air Force 208 218 426 9 Denard Robinson 2012 UMass 291 106 397 10 Denard Robinson 2010 Connecticut 186 197 383
Single season [ edit ]
Michigan's top five single-season performances in total offense are set forth below. Robinson holds the single-season record for total yards with 4272, set in 2010.
Rank Player Year Passing yards[163] Rushing yards[163] Total offense 1 Denard Robinson 2010 2570 1702 4272 2 Devin Gardner 2013 2960 483 3443 3 Denard Robinson 2011 2173 1176 3348 4 John Navarre 2003 3331 (91) 3240 5 John Navarre 2002 2905 (16) 2889
Big Ten single-game quarterback rushing yards leaders [ edit ]
Rank Player Date Team Opponent Rushing yards[128] 1 Denard Robinson September 11, 2010 Michigan Notre Dame 258 2 Denard Robinson June 10, 2012 Michigan Purdue 235 3 Denard Robinson July 9, 2012 Michigan Air Force 218 T-4 Mike Kafka January 11, 2008 Northwestern Minnesota 217 T-4 Denard Robinson October 2, 2010 Michigan Indiana 217 6 Gary Danielson Sep 23, 1972 Purdue Washington 213 7 Antwaan Randle El Oct 21, 2000 Indiana Minnesota 210 8 Antwaan Randle El April 11, 2000 Indiana Illinois 209 9 Taylor Martinez March 11, 2012 Nebraska Michigan State 205 10 Denard Robinson Sep 24, 2011 Michigan San Diego State 200
College honors and awards [ edit ]
Only 1500-yard passing/1500-yard rushing season
Most rushing yards by a QB in a career
Division I FBS 200-yard passing/200-yard rushing regular season games (career and season)
Rushing yards by a QB (single-game, single-season and career)
Total offense (single-season)
Big Ten Offensive Player of the Week awards (career)
Total offense (career)
Rushing yards on the road (single game)
Passing yards (single half)
200-yard rushing games (career)
Yards per carry (career, min 250 carries)
Other [ edit ]
Notre Dame Stadium longest run from scrimmage
High school championship
Honors
After Robinson's successful collegiate career, he was voted as the next athlete to be on the cover of NCAA Football 14. The contest achieved over six million votes making Robinson the first Michigan quarterback to be on the cover and third Wolverine overall. He is the first since Heisman Trophy winner Desmond Howard in 2006, with the other being Charles Woodson on the 1999 version of the game.[164] The voting, which took place on social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter opened in mid December 2012, lasted until March 8, 2013. During this time, the contest had gone through several rounds of voting, until finally being shrunken down to the final two, where Robinson faced off against Texas A&M wide receiver Ryan Swope. Robinson lasted through all voting rounds, and outlasted Alabama Crimson Tide running back Eddie Lacy, and possible National Football League 1st round draft selections Jarvis Jones of the Georgia Bulldogs and standout Tight End Tyler Eifert of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.[165][166] The contest gained attention worldwide, with former students and athletes vouching support for their former schools. Decorated Olympian Michael Phelps was one of many celebrities to publicly show his support for his former school (he attended the University of Michigan as a non-degree candidate while his coach Bob Bowman served as the university's swimming coach), as well as rap artist/celebrity Snoop Dogg, who does not have any ties to the University itself.
Professional career [ edit ]
2013 NFL Draft [ edit ]
After his final season at Michigan, Robinson stated that he was open to playing any position in the National Football League.[167] Some suggested that he would have a better chance of being drafted by an NFL team if he switched to cornerback, receiver, running back or kick returner because of his quickness – 4.35 in the 40 yard dash.[168] CBS Sports' Mike Freeman said his talents would be wasted on the defensive side of the ball.[169] Doug Flutie (Buffalo Bills) and Dieter Brock (Los Angeles Rams) were relatively successful quarterbacks similar in stature to Robinson. Russell Wilson who currently plays starting quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks is also similar in stature to Robinson.
Robinson participated in the 2013 Senior Bowl at wide receiver.[170] In the game, Robinson caught two passes for 21 yards and rushed the ball once for a three-yard loss.[171] His performance in the game and the preceding week of practice was regarded as unimpressive and his draft stock fell to the late rounds.[172]
Robinson was the only Wolverine from the 2012–2013 team who was invited to participate in the NFL combine. He was not invited as a quarterback, but rather as a wide receiver,[173] but he did intend to throw and return kickoffs and punts on his Pro Day.[174] On the Pro Day, he did not do quarterback drills, but he did return punts, made catches while running routes, and also did running back drills. Scouts concluded he should become a running back first before developing into a wideout.[175]
Pre-draft measurables Ht Wt Arm length Hand size 40-yard dash 10-yd split 20-yd split 20-ss 3-cone Vert jump Broad 5 ft 10 1⁄ 2 in
(1.79 m) 199 lb
(90 kg) 32 5⁄ 8 in
(0.83 m) 9 in
(0.23 m) 4.43 s 1.55 s 2.50 s 4.22 s 7.09 s 36 1⁄ 2 in
(0.93 m) 10 ft 3 in
(3.12 m) All values from NFL Combine[176]
Robinson's 40-yard dash official time of 4.43 was the tenth fastest on February 24 (quarterback, running back and wide receiver day).[177] After disappointing as a receiver at the Senior Bowl,[178] Robinson caught every pass during the gauntlet drill.[177]
Robinson was selected by the Jacksonville Jaguars in the 5th round of the 2013 NFL Draft with the 135th overall selection.[179] He was selected as a running back when his name was finally called.[180] His position is referred to by the team as "offensive weapon",[181] which involves playing running back, wide receiver, and kickoff returner.[182] He was also to contribute as a quarterback in the Wildcat formation. In midseason, they moved Robinson to the number two position on the depth chart at running back.[183] On November 24, he attempted a forward pass to Cecil Shorts III, but it was broken up by Johnathan Joseph of the Houston Texans.[184] That remains his only career pass attempt as of October 21, 2014.[185] As a rookie, Robinson played in all 16 games and totaled 66 yards rushing on 20 carries but no receptions for the 2013 Jacksonville Jaguars.[186]
2014 season [ edit ]
On September 7, in week 1 of the season, Robinson had his first reception.[187] On September 28, Robinson made his first career NFL start against the San Diego Chargers.[188] On October 19 in week 7 of 2014, Robinson made his first start at running back in place of an injured Toby Gerhart.[189] He had an NFL-career-high 127 yards rushing on 22 carries against the Cleveland Browns to help the 2014 Jacksonville Jaguars end a nine-game losing streak.[190] It was the first 100-yard rushing game for the team for the season and the most rushing yards by a Jaguar in two seasons.[189][191] He posted career highs in yards and carries and also scored his first NFL touchdown.[192] When Robinson had 108 on 18 carries the following week against Miami, he became the first Jaguar to have back-to-back 100-yard games since Maurice Jones-Drew in 2011.[193] On December 7, Robinson endured a foot sprain against the 2014 Houston Texans and he was placed on season-ending injured reserve on December 10.[194] He finished 2014 with 135 carries, 582 yards, and 4 touchdowns.[195]
2015 season [ edit ]
On September 20, in the second week of the 2015 NFL season, Robinson endured a medial collateral ligament sprain in his left knee against the Miami Dolphins while serving as a backup to T. J. Yeldon.[196] The injury caused him to miss the next three games. On December 13, Yeldon suffered the same injury against the Indianapolis Colts making way for Robinson to tally 75 yards on 14 carries and his first and only touchdown of the season that day.[197]
In July 2016, Robinson was found passed out in a partially submerged vehicle.[198][199] In May 2017, Robinson tried out with the Chicago Bears during their rookie minicamp.[200] In June 2017, he tried out at the New York Jets minicamp.[201]
Alliance [ edit ]
In 2018, Robinson signed with the Atlanta Legends of the Alliance of American Football for the 2019 season as a backup running back.[202]
Career statistics [ edit ]
NFL career statistics Season Rushing Receiving Fumbles Year Team GP GS Att Yards Avg Lng TD Rec Yards Avg Lng TD Fum Lost 2013 JAX 16 0 20 66 3.3 24 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 2 2014 JAX 13 9 135 582 4.3 41 4 23 124 5.4 19 0 2 2 2015 JAX 13 3 67 266 4.0 31 1 21 164 7.8 16 0 3 2 2016 JAX 12 1 37 127 3.4 9 0 3 22 7.3 11 0 0 0 Career 54 13 259 1,041 4.0 41 5 47 310 6.6 19 0 8 6
See also [ edit ]In mid-February, opposition websites circulated a statement signed by 49 different rebel factions in southern Syria. Banding together as the “Southern Front,” they declared themselves to be “the moderate voice and the strong arm of the Syrian people.”
It was no ordinary rebel statement. Most armed factions have adopted Islamist and often Sunni-sectarian rhetoric, but the Southern Front’s communiqué was different: it made little reference to religion and was couched in nationalist and democratic language, reminiscent of the revolutionary slogans of early 2011:
We are the farmers, the teachers, and the workers that you see every day. Many of us were among the soldiers who defected from a corrupt regime that had turned its weapons around to fight its own countrymen. We represent many classes but our goal is one: to topple the Assad regime and give Syria a chance at a better future. There is no room for sectarianism and extremism in our society, and they will find no room in Syria’s future. The Syrian people deserve the freedom to express their opinions and to work toward a better future. We are striving to create in Syria a government that represents the people and works for their interest. We are the Southern Front.
Important Signatory Groups
According to the statement, these 49 signatory factions (some sources put the number at 56 factions) add up to some 30,000 fighters and are spread across the southern border governorates of Quneitra, Daraa, and Sweida, as well as in and around Damascus. Certainly, the numbers are likely to be exaggerated, but the list of signatories did actually include some influential southern groups.
For example, Bashar al-Zoubi’s Yarmouk Brigade has often been mentioned as one of the most powerful groups in the Daraa region. A former travel agent turned rebel commander, Zoubi claimed in August 2013 to control some 4,000–5,000 fighters. He was appointed by the opposition Free Syrian Army’s Supreme Military Council as head of the local front and has long been viewed as a key conduit for foreign support.
Another example is the Syria Revolutionaries’ Front. This group was created only in December 2013, after an injection of Saudi money. Most commanders are in northwest Syria, like its best-known leader, Jamal Maarouf. But the Syria Revolutionaries’ Front does have member factions in the south, after absorbing units from a now-defunct alliance known as Ahfad al-Rasoul. Among these groups, we find Captain Qais Qatana’s Omari Brigades, which was one of the original Free Syrian Army units from 2011.
An Alliance on Paper
So, have powerful southern Syrian rebel groups joined in a non-Islamist, democratic alliance? For many Syrians, that must sound too good to be true—and it probably was just that.
Even if everything said in the statement were true (the 30,000 fighters, the long list of groups involved, and the lofty goals declared) the Southern Front would still fall far short of a functioning alliance. The February statement says there is no need for a joint leadership; instead “every leader has the freedom to conduct operations and run his group in the manner that he sees fit.”
What that means is that the Southern Front is nothing at all—it is words on paper, a mere declaration of intent, if even that. Some snippets of video have been released from the signing of the Southern Front statement, where commanders repeat the organization’s main talking points: no to sectarianism, nay to extremism. But they have not since tried to publicize the Southern Front project, and it has not been heard from since. Given that it doesn’t mean real unity and isn’t being propagated in the media, one has to ask—why was the Southern Front declaration signed at all?
Timed for a “Spring Offensive”?
The statement’s release coincided with a burst of American payments to rebels in the south of Syria, after the U.S. Congress secretly renewed its permission to arm and fund Syria’s rebels, as well as with rumors of a “spring offensive” in the south to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for his intransigence at the Geneva II peace conference that took place in January and February this year.
Since then, the purported spring offensive has had modest results, with a handful of villages and bases (and a prison) captured in the past couple of months, although it has apparently been enough to compel the government to step up aerial attacks in the south.
Still No Anti-air Missiles
On February 14, the Wall Street Journal wrote that Saudi Arabia was about to supply the rebels with advanced anti-air and anti-tank missiles, weapons that were “already waiting in warehouses in Jordan and Turkey.” Ten days later, Saudi sources speaking to the Agence France-Press added that Saudi Arabia was trying to acquire such missiles from Pakistan.
Boosting the rebels’ antiair capacity could have a major impact on their ability to advance in the south, but the Saudi promises may have been media spin, and both the United States and Jordan apparently refuse to arm the rebels with such powerful weapons. Some Jordanians are deeply worried about the evolution of Syria’s war and fear a new wave of refugees, while U.S. politicians are distrustful of Islamism and al-Qaeda ties among the rebels.
According to several sources, there has still been an uptick in support to rebels in the south since late February, with large amounts of money spent on rebel salaries and Saudi trucks moving cargo toward the Jordan-Syria border. But without a major increase in support and, probably, the addition of qualitative weapons like antiair missiles, it is hard to imagine that the rebels can advance very far—or that they will be able to unite around a single leadership.
For External Consumption
In the end, it is the supply of weapons that will matter most for both rebel advances and rebel unity, not words. But words may help unlock the storage rooms where those weapons are held, and that’s probably the way to understand the curious Southern Front statement.
Rather than an initiative from the rebels themselves, word is that it was foreign officials that called on rebel commanders to sign a statement declaring their opposition to extremism, saying it was a precondition for getting more guns and money. Since beggars can’t be choosers, the commanders then collectively shrugged their shoulders and signed—but not so much to declare a new alliance as to help U.S. officials tick all the right boxes in their reports back home, hoping that this would unlock another crate of guns.
Southern Front Signatory Factions
Below is a list of groups listed as signatories to the Southern Front statement released in February 2014.
1. Syria Revolutionaries’ Front (Southern Branch)
2. Lower Qalamoun Brigade
3. Yarmouk Brigade
4. Fallujah of Houran Brigade
5. Muhajerin and Ansar Brigade
6. Usoud al-Sunna Brigade
7. March 18 Division
8. Hamza Assadullah Brigade
9. First Commando Division
10. Fajr al-Islam Brigade
11. Shabab al-Sunna Brigade
12. al-Ezz bin Abdessalam Brigade
13. Karama Brigade
14. Tahrir al-Sham Division
15. First Artillery Regiment
16. First Brigade
17. Shuhada Douma Brigade
18. Ghouta Mujahedin Brigade
19. Ababil Houran Brigade
20. Tawhid Kataeb Houran
21. Eleventh Division/Upper Qalamoun
22. al-Moutazz Billah Brigade
23. Special Assignments Brigade
24. Quneitra Military Council
25. Seif al-Sham Brigade
26. Tahrir al-Sham Brigade
27. Damascus Martyrs Brigade
28. Islam Martyrs Brigade
29. Freedom Martyrs Brigade
30. Yarmouk |
Veggies
Enlarge this image toggle caption Mark Lennihan/AP Mark Lennihan/AP
It was the Greeks who first counseled to let food be thy medicine. And, it seems, some doctors are taking this age-old advice to heart.
In New York City physicians are writing prescriptions for fresh fruits and vegetables. That's right,'scripts for produce.
If you listen to my story on All Things Considered, you'll hear that the program is the creation of Wholesome Wave, a nonprofit that connects low-income people with local produce.
It's led by chef Michel Nischan, who was motivated to make healthful food more accessible after his two sons were diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. After learning that the Type 2 diabetes can be controlled or even reversed by good nutrition and exercise, he's made this his life's commitment.
On a recent Tuesday I met up with Nischan in New York, where we checked in on the Rx Fruit and Vegetable program.
Nischan told me he has pursued this partnership with doctors because so many people rely on their trusted advice. When docs write prescriptions for drugs, people fill them. So why not prescribe healthful food?
Basically, the initiative is designed to nudge the families of overweight kids and teens to change the way they eat. And the big incentive? Free produce as well as tips on how best to cook and economize.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Allison Aubrey/NPR Allison Aubrey/NPR
Kids enrolled in the program at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in the Bronx meet with a doctor or nutritionist once a week. During the appointment, doctors measure their blood pressure, insulin levels and weight.
At the end of the appointment they leave with a prescription that can be swapped for Health Bucks accepted at 140 farm markets in the city. Participants receive $1 per day for each person in their family. So a family of four get $28 of free produce a week.
"It's a little unusual," says Lincoln Hospital pediatrician Katherine Szema, because doctors are accustomed to writing prescriptions for drugs.
I met up with Szema and one of her patients, 14-year-old Johanna Terron, at the farm market just outside the hospital. Terron has been struggling with a weight problem and serious asthma.
"I'll be honest with you," Terron says. "I never touched vegetables." She says she used to hit Burger King almost every day and ate lots of junk, "like chips, candy, soda, ice cream." She'd never eaten a pear or cantaloupe, she said.
But over the past year, she's swapped greasy fries for peppery radishes and greens. And she says she's pretty certain her taste buds are changing.
"I don't know how to explain it, but [the fresh food] tastes better."
Szema says she's lost more than 20 pounds and her asthma's much better.
"She's healthier. She doesn't have to use her rescue pump as much," Szema says. And it's easier for her to exercise, now that her weight is down.
Szema says the simple act of prescribing fruits and vegetables doesn't change anything overnight.
It's just the first step of a long process to slim down. But, she says, she's impressed by what a powerful nudge it can be.
She's no longer just telling her patients to eat healthfully — she is actually helping them do it by making it affordable and accessible.
"You're coaching [your patients] to put what's healthy in their body," Szema says.
And in Johanna's case, the people around her are eating better, too. "The whole family is making changes" Szema says.
For Wholesome Wave's Nischan, who spent years imagining how such a program could work, the results are satisfying. There are now two years of data from pilots showing that many people who participate actually lose weight.
"The first year 38.1 percent [of the participants] dropped their body mass indexes," Nischan told me. And in the second year it was 39 percent of the participants. "So it's working; we're excited about it."
And he says he's looking forward to expanding it. "We have interest from all over the country," Nischan says, and smiles.James Joyce, author of Ulysses
Why did you decide to write this column in question-and-answer form?
Good question! As a tribute to a single chapter in Ulysses, the 70-page chapter known as the “Ithaca episode,” the penultimate section of that otherwise overrevered modernist classic.
Does it have another name?
It’s also informally known as the “catechism” chapter. It’s the one that precedes the climactic Molly Bloom soliloquy and the one that many skip over to get to Molly’s sexual meditations. More saliently, it’s the one that is written entirely in question and answer form—in tribute, parody, and affectionately snarky celebration of the interrogatory rhetoric of the theological-indoctrination catechism form.
Why undertake this task now?
Two reasons. First there was the recent London Sunday Telegraph list of the 50 most overrated novels. Actually the way they put it was “Not the 50 books you have to read before you die,” as a sort of swipe at literary bucket lists. And on top of the list, number one with a bullet, was Ulysses.
How did they characterize it?
They said: “Only a ‘modern classic’ could condense one man’s day into an experimental epic that takes years to plough through. If the early description of the protagonist going to the lavatory doesn’t make your eyes swim, the final 40 pages, untroubled by punctuation, will.”
Was this fair?
Obviously it was deliberately mean-spirited, but on the whole Ulysses is due for more than a little irreverence. People still speak of it in hushed tones, perhaps hoping nobody will ask them about the parts they skipped over.
So you do think Ulysses is overrated?
In general, yes. Loved Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, but didn’t need it blown up to Death-Star size and overinfused with deadly portentousness. Ulysses is an overwrought, overwritten epic of gratingly obvious, self-congratulatory, show-off erudition that, with its overstuffed symbolism and leaden attempts at humor, is bearable only by terminal graduate students who demand we validate the time they’ve wasted reading it.
Why so hostile?
For one thing, Ulysses gives a bad name and a misleading genealogy to “experimental literature.” For another, it’s the source of similar bloated mistakes by later novelists.
What do you mean, “misleading genealogy” of experimental literature?
The thing that’s so galling is, of course, that all Joyce’s tired and antiquated modernist tricks had long been anticipated by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, that amazing 18th-century novel that eclipses Ulysses in every way and shows how we’ve lowered the bar for anointing innovative literary “geniuses” ever since.
And what later artists’ mistakes?
I’m thinking of Thomas Pynchon after V. and The Crying of Lot 49, his two masterpieces. I think it’s clear that his followup, the bloated and nearly incoherent Gravity’s Rainbow, was his deliberate attempt—out of a misguided reverence for Joyce—to create a Ulysses of his own. It’s a mode of sloppy giganticism he’s suffered from ever since.
So why are you rushing to the defense of just this one chapter in Ulysses?
Because I don’t believe the baby should be thrown out with the bathwater. (Yes, I know, this is just the sort of cliché Joyce ridicules in the Eumaeus chapter.) Ulysses is best looked upon as a grab bag of great riffs and long stretches of tedious pretentiousness. All too many readers give up on Ulysses before Buck Mulligan finishes shaving—the silver shaving bowl is like an ecclesiastical salver, see! Isn’t that profound?—and never reach that beautiful, tender and meditative semifinal “Ithaca” chapter with its Q&A format. The one chapter you should read before you die.
Why not the final Molly Bloom chapter, the one I always hear about from Ulysses defenders?
I find that men should refrain from commenting on the Molly Bloom soliloquy because they almost always make fools of themselves in doing so.
Why?
It’s almost always a transparently sneaky attempt to promulgate the notion that they know what they’re talking about when it comes to women and sexuality. Almost all male commentary presumes the commentators have privileged access to the secrets of feminine sensibility and thus are qualified to judge whether Joyce’s rendition of Molly’s soliloquy captures it fully. It’s a surefire test for phonies in that department. Not to mention a sadly overused seduction ploy by sad-sack English majors. Pity the poor women who have to put up with multiple renditions of “I really related to Molly Bloom, you know.”
OK, then. Aside from “Ithaca” are there any other aspects of Ulysses you find worthwhile?
I do love the “Oxen of the Sun” episode, in which Joyce writes chronologically successive rafts of prose that replicate the stylistic evolution of English writing from Chaucer to the present. It’s skillful and funny and offers a tapestrylike illustration of the progress of language and rhetoric, style as content.
So what’s the problem there?
I like the Oxen chapter for all the wrong reasons: It’s a hermetic riff that invites you to join the secret society of English majors who take a selfish delight in its conceit (and in theirs). The chapter may be considered a minor tour de force, but it calls too much attention to its showy device for its own good. (Full disclosure: I was an English major, if you haven’t already guessed.)
But you’ve also written fondly about the 30-page Hamlet discussion in the “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter.
All right, it’s true, in The Shakespeare Wars I pay tribute to Joyce’s quite tender and loving speculation about the emotional resonance of one putative episode in Shakespeare’s life. It’s based on the apocryphal story that when Shakespeare was an actor at the Globe, he played Old Hamlet, the ghost of young Hamlet’s murdered father. And thus at that moment when the Ghost cries out to Hamlet on the stage, Shakespeare was—since he’d lost a son named Hamnet (or Hamlet) when the boy was only 11— in some poignant, resonant way crying out to his lost boy from the realm of the living to that of the dead. It’s just about the only biographical speculation about Shakespeare I have any patience for, and that includes Stephen Greenblatt’s elaborate but unfounded fantasy about the origin of Shylock, and James Shapiro’s baseless sophistry about how Shakespeare supposedly wanted to cut Hamlet’s last soliloquy.
Aren’t you digressing from the subject here?
Yes! That’s the reason I like the Ithaca episode. The second reason. The Q&A form allows the Questioner both to digress and to interrupt digression piling upon digression and get the Answerer back on topic.
What did Q interrupt here?
An incipient digression on my part about a long-running scholarly discussion over the relationship between the names “Hamlet” and “Hamnet” (always interchangeable back in the 16th century?), which would have obscured my main point.
Which was?
Joyce was onto something if not historically then heartbreakingly, metaphorically true when he conjured up a ghostly Shakespeare calling out to a lost Hamlet.
Was there anything else you liked about Ulysses you’re holding back on?
Well, the spelling of the sound the cat makes in the opening of the Leopold Bloom chapter.
Can you elaborate?
OK, everybody likes the opening of the Leopold Bloom section: “Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fouls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crust crumbs, fried hencod’s roes.”
I’m not hearing anything here about the cat sound.
OK, OK. The “cat-echism,” you might say, comes just a couple paragraphs later. Joyce renders a hungry morning cat’s imploration as “Mrkgnao!” an achievement of undeniably felicitous genius and accuracy that transcends by far the conventional “Meow.”
You’re digressing again. Let’s get back to the Ithaca episode. Why do you like it so much?
Well, consider the four questions it opens with. (I’ve omitted the answers.)
“What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning [from Dublin’s ‘Nighttown’]?”
“Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?”
“Did Bloom discover common factors of similarity between their respective like and unlike reactions to experience?”
“Were their views on some points divergent?”
What is it you like so much about a narrative proceeding this way?
Well, I think the signature of bad writing or writing that hasn’t been polished is the false or the forced transition. Q&A narrative pretty much dispenses with any pretense at smooth transition, thus avoiding the problem. It’s abrupt, playful, and it recognizes the two primal curiosities that enable narrative drive: the desire to know “what happened next?” and the desire to know “just who is this person or persons to whom whatever it is that happened happened?”
And what makes that different from ordinary narrative?
Well for one thing it introduces two new characters, Mr. Q and Mr. A, who hover namelessly over the two previously established protagonists’ wanderings and converse about their personalities and past and present situations. After a while Mr. Q and Mr. A turn out to have divergent personalities of their own—and divergent situations, in the metaphysical scheme of things.
Whatever do you mean by that?
How does Mr. A know so much, is he the Creator of everything in the book? Does A stand for author? Has A authored Q, too? And Q’s questions as well? But Mr. Q seems to be in some different space or place than Mr. A. It’s dizzying in a pleasurable way, the thinking about fiction this chapter gives rise to.
Why pleasurable?
Well, ordinary narrative often takes these things for granted or makes you feel unsophisticated for wondering about who the narrator is and how much he or she knows. There’s something touching about the way this narrative seems to care that you know certain things. Ordinary narrative acts as if it doesn’t care what you care about, only what it cares about and acts all superior by making you guess why. The Q&A form makes you wonder why you wonder why. It’s not about piling on literary tricks, so much as dismantling them to see how they’re done.
What’s the most revealing of the first four questions?
The answer to the fourth question on what points their view diverged: “Bloom assented covertly to Stephen’s rectification of the anachronism involved in assigning the date of the conversion of the Irish nation to christianity from druidism by Patrick son of Calpornus, son of Potitus son of Odyssus sent by pope Celestine I in the year 432 in the reign of Leary to the year 260 or thereabouts in the reign of Cormac MacArt …”
What has that got to do with the price of eggs?
Well, it suggests the comfortable interchange of two people who differ in many ways but are both erudite in a geeky way and the spiritual communion their geekdom affords them. (I also love that he slips that “Odyssus” reference in.)
Is there more to it, your interest in the catechism narrative method?
Well, to be honest I’ve only recently become fascinated by the catechism chapter and the way it uses Q&A as a narrative and meditative technique. But I love the way the form can both move things forward and also allow them to pause. To be endowed with unexpected and often surprising depth, detail, and dimensionality through the use of the interrogative (sometimes the interrogation) mode.
But that’s not all, right?
Jeez, you’re getting personal. If you must know, I’ve actually been experimenting with the catechismic method as a way of doing fiction, wondering whether an entire novel could be told that way.
What kind of novel?
A New York love story.
So what was the problem?
Well, the technical problem that besets me is my affinity for digression. I had resorted to using this catechismic technique to overcome my tendency to pile digression upon digression upon digression rather than moving the narrative forward.
Explain your epiphany in this regard.
In seeking to describe the Tribeca party where my protagonist met his new love, it took me so long to get past my many observations concerning the hors d’ouerves that I had finally out of frustration cap-locked: COME ON DAMMIT, AT LEAST DESCRIBE THE DRESS SHE WAS WEARING!! And I realized I heard an echo of the impatient catechismic Mr. Q, and suddenly realized why Joyce liked it. The way it cut through the endless possibility of digression and gets to the heart of the matter.
Are there any other reasons you want people to read the Ithaca episode?
Well, to name just one, I think it offers some of the most beautiful passages Joyce wrote in his entire oeuvre.
Like what?
The one that begins with Q asking, “What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?”
And A answers: “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”
And?
And then the next three pages of transcendently beautiful prose consisting mainly of Bloom’s meditations upon the constellations and the moon. Some of the most lyrical and spiritual writing in all Ulysses.
What is your advice to the reader of this column?
Don’t die before you read these passages.
Describe her dress.
It was a short black sleeveless shift.
Anything else?
A Betsey Johnson.
Was there a special significance to that dress?
yes he said yesStory highlights Coach describes huddling with family inside school building while tornado raged outside
More than 100,000 people without power in several states
Man describes how tornado took out power grid in his area
Air travelers are urged to call ahead, as some flights are canceled
Powerful storms pounded cities and towns across the South on Christmas Day, leaving at least two people dead and others injured.
A tornado struck Mobile, Alabama, according to the local National Weather Service office.
A tower camera for CNN affiliate WALA showed a large wedge tornado moving through the city.
Rick Cauley said he never heard the train noise witnesses to tornadoes often talk about. It was hard for him to hear at all.
Cauley, an assistant football coach and history teacher at Murphy High School, took his wife, two young children and in-laws to the school to ride out the storm in the safety of the sturdy field house.
Ten minutes after they arrived, the pressure dropped suddenly.
"Our ears popped, it was hard to hear," he told CNN affiliate WALA.
The family huddled in the hallway of the field house as destruction swooped down on the campus.
"It was pretty horrific," Cauley said.
When he emerged into the dark night it was a surreal scene.
An equipment barn was destroyed, as was the facility the school used for indoor baseball practice.
"It's nothing but kindling," he said.
Six mobile classrooms, including one Cauley taught in, were also wiped out.
Cauley said there was also significant damage to the roof of the school auditorium and the band room.
"You could see it forming... and then it came behind the church and then (there was) all green fluorescent lighting and it was like popping transformers left and right," another witness told WALA. "You heard crashing and then the power went out."
There were no initial reports of injuries, a spokesman for Mobile Fire-Rescue said.
Several buildings, including a church and a high school, were damaged by the tornado, and there were several car wrecks, Steve Huffman said.
JUST WATCHED Freezing rain triggers 21-vehicle wreck Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Freezing rain triggers 21-vehicle wreck 02:05
JUST WATCHED What it takes to prepare for the storm Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH What it takes to prepare for the storm 01:30
"One female was transported to the hospital with pregnancy issues, but she was not injured," he said.
A spokeswoman with the Alabama Emergency Management Agency said at least three counties were affected.
"We are still getting damage reports," Yasamie August said. "We know that Mobile County has significant damage from trees down and power lines down. Most of that is concentrated around Government Street. Choctaw and Clarke counties are also reporting damage.
"The city of Prichard had one person injured due to the home they were in," she said.
In Clarke County, high winds shoved a barn onto U.S. Highway 43, Emergency Management Director Roy Waite said.
Nearly 21,500 customers in Mobile were without power, Alabama Power said on its Twitter feed. Statewide, there were 26,600 homes and business in the dark. More than 84,000 customers in Arkansas and about 4,000 in Louisiana were without power late Tuesday, officials said.
A 25-year-old man in Texas was killed after a tree fell on his pickup as he was driving on the northwest side of Houston, Harris County Sheriff's Deputy Thomas Gilliland said. Officials suspected high winds knocked the tree down.
A 28-year-old woman from Woodward, Oklahoma, was killed in an accident on a snow-covered two-lane highway.
Amanda Goodman was ejected from the SUV she was riding in after the driver lost control and struck an oncoming big rig, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol said. Goodman died at the scene while the driver and a 4-year-old passenger were taken to a hospital. They were listed in stable condition. The truck driver was not injured.
An apparent tornado touched down near downtown Alexandria, Louisiana, police said. One person was injured and more than a dozen buildings suffered significant damage, Lt. Paul Ellington of Alexandria police said.
Homes in Pearl River County in central Mississippi were damaged when a storm passed through Tuesday afternoon, the director of the county's emergency management department said. Danny Manley said one person suffered minor injuries and power was out in many homes. U.S. Highway 84 in Lawrence County was shut down because of downed power lines and debris.
The Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, said conditions remained favorable for a few powerful or long-lasting tornadoes in southern and eastern Alabama, the Florida Panhandle and southwest Georgia. It is also forecast thunderstorm wind damage for parts of the Southeast into the early morning hours Wednesday.'Red' sky worries Iran as sandstorms wreak havoc
by Staff Writers
Tehran (AFP) April 14, 2011
Iranians are worried by crippling air pollution as "unprecedented" sandstorms mostly originating from neighbouring Iraq hit 20 provinces, forcing the shutdown of schools and government offices.
The blinding sandstorms hit western, central and southern provinces on Wednesday due to winds blowing at high speed, considerably reducing visibility to as low as 50 metres (yards) in some cities.
"Unprecedented sandstorms which entered from west are the most violent storms that have ever reached Iran," said Touraj Hemmati, a top environmental official in the southwestern Khuzestan province which borders Iraq.
Arman newspaper said "small Arabian sands... marked a red situation across the country's sky."
The Kayhan daily said "yellow sand rained in Khuzestan," where the rate of air pollution reached 70 times the permitted amount. It said 123 people were hospitalised in the nearby province of Ilam, also bordering Iraq.
Authorities in six western provinces, including Khuzestan and Ilam, were forced to suspend school and university activities and shut down government offices, Tehran Emrouz daily reported.
Air traffic was partially affected in the country, with incoming flights and departures cancelled in some western cities, according to Hamshahri newspaper.
State air pollution chief Amir Jamali announced on Wednesday that Iran was hit by sandstorms three times more frequently in the first Iranian month of Farvardin, from March 21 to April 20, compared to the same period last year.
"We have witnessed dust storms thrice... Drought that we experienced (last year) has intensified this phenomenon," Fars news agency quoted him as saying.
Iranian media blamed most of the sandstorms on countries west of the Islamic republic, particularly Iraq which is hit by desertification and deforestation due to a decline in the flow of water disrupted by construction of dams as well as a disappearing agriculture industry.
Arman reported that 23 lawmakers, in a letter to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday, demanded the government "resolve the problems caused by the sandstorms in western and southern provinces."
The weather phenomenon continued Thursday with less intensity in the western provinces, as adverse winds blew further into the central parts of the country. Authorities expect the sandstorms to continue until later in the evening.Chanbara fans have a lot to look forward to next Tuesday, when we welcome the six-part film adaptation of Kazuo Koike’s best-selling 1970 manga epic Lone Wolf and Cub into the collection. Released between 1972 and 1974, these blood-spattered classics are renowned for combining stylishly choreographed set pieces with a sensitive depiction of the bonds between father and son. At the heart of this sprawling saga is a shogun’s executioner named Itto Ogami (Tomisaburo Wakayama), who sets off on a mission to avenge the murder of his wife, with his infant son Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa) and a weaponized baby carriage in tow. Recent reports of an upcoming Hollywood remake are already generating buzz, so the time is ripe to dive into one of Japanese cinema’s most influential samurai series.
Among the many illuminating features in our box-set edition of Lone Wolf and Cub is a new interview with Koike, who wrote the screenplays for five of the films. In the clip below, the author discusses the challenge of crafting a samurai hero with a compelling mix of strengths and weaknesses that can sustain interest in a long serial narrative.Whether Nvidia hardware supports DirectX 12 Async Compute or not has been a hot issue of debate, exacerbated by the company’s silence. Nvidia continues to be silent on the matter and despite the best efforts of the media to get the company to comment and elaborate on the matter we have yet to see the company come out with any statements thus far.
Fortunately however, the vocal nature of Oxide Game’s engagement in this debate may help us answer some of the leering questions about Nvidia’s support for Async Compute. We’ve seen several comments from a developer at Oxide Games talking about the DirectX 12 benchmark for Ashes Of The Singularity in the past week. In which the developer elaborated on several aspects of the DirectX 12 benchmark and why Nvidia GPUs seemingly struggled with it, or at least did not perform as gracefully as their AMD Radeon counterparts in it. And the developer concluded that it was down to an advantage that AMD GPUs posses over their Nvidia counterparts with a feature dubbed Asynchronous Shading/Shaders/Compute.
Nvidia Is Actively Working With Oxide Games To Implement DirectX 12 Async Compute Support For GeForce 900 Series GPUs In Ashes Of The Singularity
Yesterday the same developer issued a status update on the very same topic of DX12 Async Compute via a comment in that same vibrant Ashes Of The Singularity overclock.net thread.
Regarding Async compute, a couple of points on this. FIrst, though we are the first D3D12 title, I wouldn’t hold us up as the prime example of this feature. There are probably better demonstrations of it. This is a pretty complex topic and to fully understand it will require significant understanding of the particular GPU in question that only an IHV can provide. I certainly wouldn’t hold Ashes up as the premier example of this feature. We actually just chatted with Nvidia about Async Compute, indeed the driver hasn’t fully implemented it yet, but it appeared like it was. We are working closely with them as they fully implement Async Compute. We’ll keep everyone posted as we learn more.
As we have already detailed in an in-depth editorial two days ago, Nvidia GTX 900 series GPUs do have the hardware capability to support asynchronous shading/computing. A question arises however if that can only be achieved through the heavy use of pre-emption and context switch, which in turn adds substantial latency and defeats the purpose of the feature which is to reduce latency / improve performance. AMD claims that this is indeed the case. Nvidia however has not yet provided us with an answer to this question when asked although they have promised to do so and as soon as that happens we will make sure to bring you an update.
In the meantime the Oxide Games developer has stated that Nvidia is actively working with them to implement support for the feature. As Async Compute has not yet been implemented fully in the latest DirectX 12 ready drivers from Nvidia. We will make sure to revisit the benchmark again once some type of support for Async Compute is achieved on GTX 900 series GPUs to see what effect it may have on performance. Although we should point out that older GeForce generations, prior to 900 series, do not have support for asynchronous shading, so the feature should have no bearing on the performance of any of those GeForce graphics cards.After a year of bureaucratic struggles, the Missionary Church of Kopimism is now an official religion in Sweden, enjoying the constitutional protection of Freedom of Religion. Information is holy to the church, and copying its sacrament.
The Missionary Church of Kopimism is a religious institution founded by people with their roots in the youth wing Ung Pirat of the Swedish Pirate Party; people who believe that copying is not just right, but has a higher purpose in itself. Information is holy, and sharing and copying is a sacred act.
The missionary kopimistsamfundet is a religious group centered in Sweden who believe that copying and the sharing of information is the best and most beautiful that is.
The request for constitutional recognition as a religion was approved just before year’s end by the Kammarkollegiet authority in Sweden. The church has tried to get official recognition for more than a year.
In a press release in Swedish and English today, the chief missionary Isak Gerson is quoted as follows:
“Being recognized by the state of Sweden is a large step for all of kopimi. Hopefully, this is one step towards the day when we can live out our faith without fear of persecution”, says Isak Gerson, spiritual leader of the Church of Kopimism.
(Cue the sparks of confusion flying from all the ancien-regime monopolists in the copyright industry, as they realize that file sharing now enjoys Freedom-of-Religion protection, in 3… 2… 1…)
Followup article: Legal ramifications of file-sharing being religious worshipStar Trek actor William Shatner, who has a longstanding (semi) good natured feud ongoing with Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher, has joined JJ Abrams in crossing the interstellar genre divide by publicising Chewbacca actor Peter Mayhew’s attempt to crowd source a film documenting an essential double knee replacement.The actor has launched a Kickstarter campaign with filmmaker W Ryan Ziegler which will document the English actor’s endeavours to have both of his knees replaced. The 7’3” actor has a form of giantism which made him a perfect candidate to play the oversized Wookiee, but which has led to long term health and frame problems.“Uncle Peter needs help! Please retweet my kickstarter to your friends & ask them to do the same. You will be my hero!” he said via Twitter to his 30,000 followers.
Peter Mayhew is crowdsourcing a film of his surgery
Uncle Peter needs help! Please retweet my kickstarter to your friends & ask them to do the same. You will be my hero! http://t.co/FEYGlN8K6X — Peter Mayhew (@TheWookieeRoars) August 21, 2013
Though I'm not a fan of Crowd funding projects, Chewbacca needs a new knee so this is an exception @TheWookieeRoarshttp://t.co/anttjCdK98 — William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) August 21, 2013
William Shatner swiftly cascaded the message to the Star Trek fraternity: “Though I'm not a fan of Crowd funding projects, Chewbacca needs a new knee so this is an exception,” he tweeted to over 1.5 million followers.Mayhew’s wife and daughter are assisting in producing the film, and wife Angie explains his predicament in an emotional on camera appeal with Mayhew by her side.“These two hurt like the devil,” he says of his knees.“When I get up in the morning I’m holding on to a wall to get to the bathroom. If I want to go anywhere you have to use a wheelchair or a crutch or a stick, looking forward to the day when I can do without the wheelchair, without the cane, and walk on my own.“Hopefully within a couple of months we’ll be able to walk an have an almost normal life," he adds.“To those people who are thinking about making a donation I am going to say thank you for making a Wookiee walk.”Filmmaker Ziegler explains on the site that the team will be following Mayhew to his last convention before the surgery, interviewing him and other celebrities from the star wars universe and the convention circuit.“You'll get a peek into his life and struggles at home as a giant. We'll be interviewing his doctors and the engineers behind his prosthetic knees that have been specially constructed for him,” he said.“Then, you'll follow Peter through the day of his 4 surgeries. During that single day they will be replacing the top and bottom of both knees. They will also be cutting through his tendons to lengthen them and allow him to straighten his legs and lock his knees.“After the surgery we will follow Peter through the two months of intense rehabilitation and recovery. Then with his friends, family and fans present we will celebrate as we get to see Peter stand and walk on his own at his full height.“Peter wants to share this, his most difficult battle yet, with his friends, fans, and family. Our goal is to be able to film an account of the struggles and successes Peter faces on his path to recovery, and to help his many fans learn more about what he goes through every day.”Mayhew shot to fame in 1977 appearing in Star Wars, written and directed by George Lucas, famed for his own preference for independent filmmaking and distaste of studio financing of motion pictures. Earlier this year he and fellow filmmaker Steven Spielberg appeared at the opening of a new media centre at the University of Southern California, lamenting that established film-makers such as themselves were struggling to find financing to get their projects into cinemas."You're talking about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas can't get their movie into a theatre!" he said.The Kickstarter campaign site has a goal of securing $42,000. At the time of publication it has raised $8,671, with 23 days to go.Researchers have developed a large plate on which to film bacteria as they mutate in the presence of higher and higher concentrations of antibiotics, providing unprecedented insights into the phenomenon of antibiotic resistance.
"Our device allows us to systematically map the different ways by which bacteria can become resistant to a range of antibiotics and antibiotic combinations," said co-author Roy Kishony, a professor in the department of systems biology at Harvard Medical School and a principal investigator at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.
The ultimate goal, Kishony added, is to develop tools "that can predict the evolution of pathogens under different treatments, and better guide treatment choice."
"With our plate device, the evolutionary paths that the bacteria follow to achieve antibiotic resistance appear clearly and visually," said co-author Michael Baym, a postdoctoral fellow in the Kishony Lab at Harvard Medical School, "and will hopefully let us start tailoring our approaches to treating resistance to different evolutionary modes."
The 2-by-4 foot petri dish used by the researchers to grow the bacteria contains nine bands at its base that can support varying concentrations of antibiotic. The results are reported in the 9 September issue of Science.
Antibiotics have been used to treat patients since the 1940s, greatly reducing illness and death. However, these drugs have been used so frequently that the bacteria they are designed to kill have adapted to them in many cases, making the drugs less effective. At least 2 million people become infected with bacteria resistant to antibiotics each year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and at least 23,000 of these die as a result.
"We know quite a bit about the internal defense mechanisms bacteria use to evade antibiotics," Baym said, "but we don't really know much about their physical movements across space as they adapt to survive in different environments."
To better understand how antibiotic resistance evolves in space and time, Baym and his colleagues developed a device called the microbial evolution growth arena plate, or MEGA-plate. The researchers used the antibiotics trimethoprim and ciprofloxacin in the MEGA plate in concentrations from zero to 10,000 times the original dose.
On the right side of the plate where antibiotic levels were zero, Baym, Kishony, and colleagues grew Escherichia coli bacteria, which appeared white on the inky black background. Over two weeks, a camera mounted on the ceiling above the plate took periodic snapshots of the bacteria mutating.
In the band with no antibiotic, the bacteria spread up until the point where they could no longer survive as they mingled with the first traces of antibiotic. Then, a small group of bacteria developed genetic mutations that allowed them to persist.
Researchers traced the branching patterns of bacterial evolution on the MEGA plate. | Katharine Sutliff/ Science
As these drug-resistant mutants arose, their descendants migrated to areas of higher and higher antibiotic concentration, developing further mutations to compete with other mutants around them. As they continued their journey to the highest antibiotic concentration level, all remaining bacterial mutants had to evolve further still.
Through this process of cumulative, successive mutations, the researchers could visualize how bacteria that are normally sensitive to antibiotics can evolve resistance to extremely high concentrations — those up to 100,000-fold higher than the one that killed their predecessors — in just over ten days.
The bacteria were unable to adapt directly from zero antibiotic |
basically creates a new node on the graph that points to both the head of master and of the branch. And then it basically takes the file contents from the 3 points, the new merge base node (the ancestor), and each parent, deltafies them and applies the result to the ancestor. Obviously if they don’t apply cleanly a conflict is created and must be resolved. The previous revisions contents is no longer relevant at all, except as a part of history, and our new snapshot of the history is born. So this is basically what we have to fix.
This is a snapshot from gitk of my repository. We can see near the bottom that it branched properly, but even though the repository was merged in svn, it doesn’t appear to be merged in our migration to git.
The way to fix this is to edit the.git/info/grafts file. With my great photoshop skills I’m going to point out what goes in there
We need to take what the first arrow is pointing to, and tell git that its parents are its current parent (the third arrow) as well as the point the branch was merged in (the second arrow). So all we have to do is add the hash from each of those commits, put the top node first, then the second and third with a space in between each to the.git/info/grafts file.
After we add those to the.git/info/grafts file we can just reload gitk or gitx to see those changes that visually show the branch was merged
When you are done you can run git-svn-abandon-cleanup which cleans up SVK style merge commit messages and removes git-svn-id strings. Another important thing that happens is the grafts entries are incorporated into the filtered commits, so the extra merge metadata becomes clonable
$ git svn-abandon-cleanup
Publish Your Repository
If you followed the last article you’ve got a gitosis setup that we can use to store our code centrally. So depending what host this is on you can import it like so
$ git remote add origin git@localhost:repository.git $ git push --all $ git push --tags
And we’re done.
Conclusion
We’ve gone over how to migrate an SVN repository to Git and how to deal with some of the complications of how Git interprets our repository based on what was in SVN and how to go about fixing that. Hopefully we also learned a little bit about Git too in the process.
ReferencesThe probable ancestor of domestic cats is the African Wildcat (F lybica/F silvestris lybica) which, through mutation and selection, has given rise to modern F catus. Professor Eric Harley considers F catus to be a natural sub-species of F lybica. The intractable European Wildcat (F silvestris/ F silvestris silvestris) can interbreed with F. lybica and may have contributed to the gene pool. The modern domestic cat will interbreed naturally with F lybica and F silvestris subspecies, producing fertile hybrids. In the 1800s it was believed that domestic cats in each country evolved from indigenous wildcat populations, so crossing domestic tabbies to Scottish wildcats was seen as back-crossing rather than hybridisation. Hybrids occur naturally in rural areas where free roaming domestic cats or feral cats encounter these wildcats. According to Clark, Borodin and other authorities, population studies of domestics in such areas indicate the heavy influence of wild type genes.
According to Charles Darwin in "The Variation Of Animals And Plants Under Domestication" (1860s), "Sir W. Jardine has no doubt that, "in the north of Scotland, there has been occasional crossing with our native species (F. sylvestris), and that the result of these crosses has been kept in our houses. I have seen," he adds, "many cats very closely resembling the wild cat, and one or two that could scarcely be distinguished from it." Mr. Blyth (1/89. Asiatic Soc. of Calcutta; Curator's Report, August 1856. The passage from Sir W. Jardine is quoted from this Report. Mr. Blyth, who has especially attended to the wild and domestic cats of India, has given in this Report a very interesting discussion on their origin.) remarks on this passage, "but such cats are never seen in the southern parts of England; still, as compared with any Indian tame cat, the affinity of the ordinary British cat to F. sylvestris is manifest; and due I suspect to frequent intermixture at a time when the tame cat was first introduced into Britain and continued rare, while the wild species was far more abundant than at present." In Hungary, Jeitteles (1/90. 'Fauna Hungariae Sup.' 1862 s. 12.) was assured on trustworthy authority that a wild male cat crossed with a female domestic cat, and that the hybrids long lived in a domesticated state. In Algiers the domestic cat has crossed with the wild cat (F. lybica) of that country. (1/91. Isid. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire 'Hist. Nat. Gen.' tome 3 page 177.) In South Africa as Mr. E. Layard informs me, the domestic cat intermingles freely with the wild F. caffra; he has seen a pair of hybrids which were quite tame and particularly attached to the lady who brought them up; and Mr. Fry has found that these hybrids are fertile. [...] Dr. D. Short has assured Mr. Blyth (1/92. 'Proc. Zoolog. Soc.' 1863 page 184.) that, at Hansi, hybrids between the common cat and F. ornata (or torquata) occur, "and that many of the domestic cats of that part of India were undistinguishable from the wild F. ornata."
Presumed hybrids between the domestic cat and Libyan Cat (F libyca ocreata) were reported by K Ackerman (1898), RI Pocock (1907). K Ackerman (1898) also reported alleged hybrids between the domestic cat and Indian Desert Cat (F libyca ornata).
Domestic cat x F libyca silvestris (European Wild Cat) and F silvestris grampia (Scottish Wildcat) hybrids have been reported on numerous occasions, both in captivity and in the wild (K Ackerman (1898), O Antonius (1951), E Hamilton (1896), HB Peters (1932), TH Gillespie (1954), H Hemmer (1968), International Zoo Yearbook (1966, 1967), I Kotarba (1968), L Martin (1878), HB Peters (1932), RI Pocock (1907)).
According to H.C. Brooke in “Cat Gossip,” 8th August 1928, “Considering that the European Wild Cat (F. sylvestris) was at one time very common all over this country, and is still common in many parts of the Continent; and that it will inter-breed with tame cats, it is very singular that it has left practically no type-impression on the latter, though now and then in Scotland tame cats are found carrying the short thick tail characteristic of their savage cousin, probably the most absolutely untameable animal in existence. The tail of the wild cat is quite different from the brush of the Persian. The fact that about the tenth century Welsh laws placed a high value on cats and kittens, the wild cat being at that period common all over Britain, shows that the domestic cats of that day were not derived from sylvestris.”
And two weeks later, in "Cat Gossip," 22nd August, 1928
TH Gillespie (1954) reported 2 presumed hybrids, a male and a female, born to a domestic cat in spring 1924. They had rusty grey-striped coats resembling the Scottish Wild Cat. These were sent to Edinburgh Zoo where they mated and produced 4 kittens that were predominantly white in colour (indicating the white spotting gene was inherited from the mother). The kittens died young. Gillespie also reported 2 litters born to a female Manx cat that mated with a European Wild Cat (presumed Scottish Wildcat?). The litters were born in successive years, but none of the kittens survived for long.
H Petzch (1958, 1959) reported that a male Steppe cat (F libyca caudata) and "predominantly black" longhaired female domestic cat were caged together at Halle Zoo. After 69 days 3 female kittens were born. 2 resembled the domestic mother (white markings?), while the third resembled the Steppe cat (flecked coat). In temperament, the hybrids were timid and intractable, taking after the wild cat rather than the domestic cat. All were shorthaired due to the longhair gene being recessive and present only in the mother. Only one of the hybrid kittens survived to maturity. When mated to a Male Siamese cat she produced 5 offspring, none of whom inherited the Steppe Cat's flecked coat. 4 of these offspring (being 75% domestic, 25% Steppe cat) resembled their maternal grandmother i.e. black in colour. Seal-point Siamese cats are genetically black and the F1 hybrids carried the recessive gene for solid black.
Hybrids between male European Wildcats and Female domestic cats have been reliably reported on several occasions. In 1964 and 1965, hybrids were born at Warsaw Zoo. HB Peters (1932) wrote of young hybrids that were heavier in build than domestic cats of the same age. They resembled the European Wild Cat in appearance and temperament (they spat even before they could crawl properly). The hybrids died aged 3.5 months of an unidentified disease (distemper and cat flu were common in captive cats as well as in domestic pets).
The various subspecies of F libyca also interbreed freely. A male European wildcat (F libyca silvestris) mated to a Libyan cat (F libyca ocreata) produced 3 hybrid kittens that resembled a mackerel tabby domestic cat. 2 kittens were killed and eaten by the mother. The third was removed and reared by a domestic cat foster mother. It was 9 weeks old when reported. SS Flower (1929), RI Pocock (1907), S Zuckerman (1953). F libyca also breeds with other other wild species and with other hybrids. The F chaus/domestic cat hybrid Chausie has also been crossed with F silvestris to produce the Euro-Chausie. The similarly named Euro-Chaus, a European Wildcat x Jungle Cat hybrid, is considered an exotic, rather than a domestic, pet.
First generation hybrids from domestic cats and the generally untameable Scottish Wildcat inherit the Wildcat temperament. Later generations (F1 x F1) exhibit throwbacks to both Wildcat and domestic grandparents. Between 1873 and 1904, the Scottish Wildcat was experimentally crossed with various domestic breeds and hybrids were exhibited at early British cat shows. In 1939, Frances Pitt wrote in "Wild Animals in Britain" that Wildcat hybrids are "nervous and queer-tempered" and tended to revert to wild type. Pitt attempted to tame a male wildcat kitten she named Satan. Although ferocious with humans, Satan was all gentleness and devotion to a domestic female kitten that had been provided as company for him. In due course they mated and their offspring resembled typical wildcats. One of these, "Imp of Satan", became partly tame. The hybrids mated among themselves and some of their offspring resembled wildcats while others resembled domestic cats. According to Guggisberg, domestic cats were rare in England up until the tenth century and some interbreeding with native wildcats almost certainly occurred.
Excerpt from The Wild Cat - A Highland Gentleman
From “The Romance of Nature” (1937ish) by Frances Pitt
Then Satan arrived. He was but a wee scrap of yellow-grey-tabby fur, as small a kitten as I could desire; but his name was bestowed on sight and never changed. It remained appropriate until the day, six years and nine months later, that an epidemic of “ cat influenza” claimed him. Yet, though there was no reason to change his designation, I believe Satan became more nearly tame than any previous wild cat. With a view to reconciling him to his lot, I obtained a tiny domestic kitten, a longhaired female, whose coat was of the blotched tabby pattern, and put this baby with the wild kitten. Although he spat fiercely at all of us, the stranger accepted the tame kitten as a friend at once, and was ever afterwards deeply attached to her. It was only so long as he was weak and small that I could handle Satan. He grew fast, and with increasing strength fought like a fury, going into paroxysms of spitting and scratching when I tried to pick him up. He was soon untouchable, but with his increase of stature he gained in knowledge and confidence.
He learnt to know the members of the family and the staff, would come to the side of his cage to get food, take it from the hand and spit savagely at the same time. He became tamer than, I believe, any wild cat had been before, but not in the least less ferocious ; yet to Beauty, the kitten brought up with him, he was all gentleness and devotion. It is said that the wild cat, unlike the domestic cat, is monogamous, and mates for life. Satan’s behaviour supports this supposition. Not only was he most affectionate to Beauty, but when I introduced other female cats into his quarters he instantly attacked them. One day I brought a nice, meek little lady, and put her on the top of the old gentleman’s sleeping-quarters. In an instant Satan, glaring anger, sprang at her and knocked her off, sending her tumbling head-over-heels. Beauty was sometimes let out of the wild cat’s place, to take exercise and pay a visit to the house, but this distressed him sorely. He rent the air with harsh cries, for his voice, though loud, was not lovely. It was similar to, but worse than, that of a domestic tom-cat.
Satan became a huge cat. Beauty also flourished, and their alliance was blessed with many offspring, all of which resembled their sire in appearance, and in many traits of character. Hybrids between the wild and domestic cats have been bred on several occasions, notably by the late Mr. A. H. Cocks and Sir Claud Alexander; and in every case the wild type has been completely dominant. Satan and Beauty had six litters, all the kittens of which were exactly like “the old man.” They should have numbered eight litters, but Beauty, alas! had no notions of constancy to a spouse, and there were two families that would have provided Satan with ample grounds for a suit for divorce.
The domestic tom-cat is not always the best of fathers ; he will even, at times, attack small kittens ; so in the case of the early litters, Beauty had been permitted to rear them apart from Satan. When the kittens of unknown parentage arrived, I allowed one to survive, and let Beauty keep it in Satan’s quarters. Though no offspring of his, he treated it delightfully, and was ever gentle and considerate to it. From that time forward she reared her families in Satan’s place, and he was always good to the kittens. Satan might be savage towards human-beings, but he was a true Highland gentleman, and his conduct gave me a great respect for his species - he was a devoted and faithful spouse, also a gentle father.
The question whether hybrids between the wild and domestic cats occur naturally is a difficult one to answer; but I think it is doubtful, at the most a rare happening. The tendency of the wild cat to mate for life precludes stray alliances, and we have the character of the offspring to consider. I have no hesitation in saying that any cat sired by a bona fide wild tom would soon be off to the woods.
The first litter of kittens that Beauty produced were brought up as house pets, but soon proved of queer character. By the way, they were three females, and my mother, remembering that their sire was Satan and their dam Beauty, named them “the World, the Flesh, and the Devil! The second kitten, burdened with such a name, came to an untimely end. The others flourished, and soon began to display strange traits. They were for ever climbing. They spent much of their time in the creepers upon the house, and upon the house-top. Although friendly with us, they were timid with strangers, and would spit on the slightest provocation.
They early began to take an interest in other livestock, particularly the tame wild ducks (my father’s pets) and the peafowl. Even as tiny kittens they studied the latter with care, but it was not until we found one of them with a duck - the duck being minus its head - that we realized how fully they had inherited the wild cat’s too sporting disposition. They had no idea where to stop, and were equally ready to hunt and kill everything that moved, from a mouse to a peacock! Poultry they regarded a fair game.” The young cats had to be domiciled in wire pen, lately a pheasant aviary; as had subsequent kittens. Not one of them could be left free after it was half-grown.
Out of the next litter I kept a tom kitten. He was named the “Imp of Satan.” He grew into a very fine cat. Had one met him on a Highland mountain-side, one would never have doubted that he was a magnificent example of the true wild cat, and he was as sporting as the rest of the breed; but he had his mother’s charming manners. The Imp would follow me like a dog. We often went for walks together, and we rarely failed to bring a rabbit home with us; but one evening he ran off after a bunny and vanished into the wood. It was growing dark, and I could not find him. In vain did I call his name into the deepening twilight : no cat emerged from the shadows beneath the trees, and I had to leave him out for the night to enjoy himself wandering through the woods and getting into who knows what mischief. In the morning came a report of poultry killed at a neighbouring cottage. I went at once to the place, and found my cat, likewise three fowls without heads. After that I refrained from taking the Imp of Satan out for walks.
The hybrids in their turn produced kittens, some of which looked pure wild cats, and some throw-backs to the domestic side of their ancestry. Unfortunately it is not easy to keep a number of cats under experimental conditions and make investigations into their genetics, but the indications were that coat-colour, pattern, and length of fur, were inherited on simple Mendelian lines, and, possibly, also temperament. One kitten seemed as savage as any wild cat. With regard to differences between the wild and domestic cats, it appears that the former is much more susceptible to what we may term civilized diseases. Wild cats rarely survive long in Zoological Gardens, quickly succumbing to pneumonia, or some similar complaint ; and hybrids are nearly as liable to infection. I gave sundry crossbred kittens to the Edinburgh Gardens, hut not one survived for long ; yet under isolated conditions they are long-lived healthy cats.
Studies indicate that continued interbreeding of Scottish Wildcats with domestics causes Wildcat type to degenerate. In "Reproduction in the Scottish Wildcat", 1941 Harrison Matthews stated that hybrids tend to be smaller. As far back as 1896, naturalist Edward Hamilton had suggested that the true Wildcat was being supplanted by hybrid "mongrel" Wildcats. In areas where they regularly interbreed, descendants become closer in type to domestic cats. In "Wildcats", naturalist Mike Tomkies reported that modern Wildcats exhibit progressively more domestic cat traits including smaller size, tapered tail with fused black banding and white markings. Conversely, in areas where the Wildcat predominates, the domestic influence will be diluted. The "Kellas Cat" may be a complex domestic x F. silvestris hybrid with Wildcat blood predominating. Some researchers believe the Scottish Wildcat is now so mongrelised that it cannot be conserved as a pure-bred species.
The Scottish Wildcat once had a far wider distribution in the British Isles and some out-of-place Wildcats do occur. Photographs of the "Tonmawr Cub", a supposed ABC cub seen in Wales ("Cat Country", Di Francis) show it to be an adult Scottish Wildcat, while sightings of Wildcats in Surrey may result from an escaped hand-reared Wildcat and his progeny ("Claws and Purrs", Peter Neville), though wildcat genes from that single individual will eventually have been swamped by domestic cat genes.
In spite of modern hype, hybrid cat breeds are nothing new. At the first cat show in July 1871, the Duke of Sutherland exhibited a British (i.e. Scottish) Wild Cat which had lost its right front paw (no doubt in a trap). Hybrid wildcats were also exhibited at early shows; the Crystal Palace show of 1875 included a class for "Wild or Hybrid between Wild and Domestic Cats" (won by an ocelot). Between 1873 and 1904, the Scottish Wildcat was experimentally crossed with various domestic breeds, including the Siamese, and some of these hybrids were exhibited at early British cat shows. At the turn of the 20th century, Champion Southampton Red Rust, Claude Alexander's exceptional Abyssinian was apparently mated to an "Imported African Wild Cat" and the female offspring, Goldtick, registered as an Abyssinian. Goldtick was mated to a red self called Ras Brouke and produced Tim the Harvester.
Bred in Belgium, the Punjabi is a hybrid of Indian Desert Cat (F lybica supspecies) and resembles the desert cat with ticked ivory or ticked pale sandy colours with grey-black and chocolate spots respectively. It is included here because domestic cats, of which the Bengal is one in spite of hybrid origins, will readily interbreed with F lybica.
There is a misconception by some credulous cryptozoologists that the Norwegian Forest Cat (another naturally occurring longhaired breed) is a cross between domesticated longhairs and Scottish Wildcats. Firstly, the Norwegian Forest Cat comes from Norway and would have to swim a long way to meet up with Scottish Wildcats! Secondly, the long haired trait is recessive and crosses between domestic longhairs and European Wildcats (the mainland relative of the Scottish Wildcat) will produce shorthaired offspring (such as the Kellas Cat).The real estate listing shows a cozy house on a river in the Rocky Mountains.
But there's a twist: The owner of the two-bedroom bungalow is welcoming payment in an unregulated online virtual currency known as bitcoins.
"I really wanted to get my hands on some bitcoins and they happen to be quite hard to get if you want to get a large number of them," said Taylor More, whose family owns the Crowsnest Pass, Alta., home.
Story continues below advertisement
Bitcoins, which were introduced in 2009 and are transferred from person to person without the use of banks, can be bought on online exchanges or traded for cash. They can also be acquired as a reward by those who use powerful computers to solve increasingly difficult algorithms.
Mr. More, a 22-year-old home-based currency trader and aspiring entrepreneur, only began buying bitcoins earlier this month. If he is able to sell his family's vacation property for bitcoins, he believes it would be the first such real estate transaction.
In addition to serving as a possible influx of bitcoins, he sees the listing as a means of "testing the waters" for possible new ventures.
While he won't reveal many details, Mr. More said one of the businesses he hopes to launch is an online real estate company that uses bitcoins as payment. He says he has support from a group of retired professional NHL players he knows through his father, Jayson More, a former defenceman who played on several teams in the 1990s.
When the younger Mr. More raised the idea of accepting bitcoins for the family's Alberta retreat, he says his father laughed. "I kind of just said, 'Let's be the first to do it. Let's be the first to try and sell some real estate for bitcoin and see what happens.' Once I explained it to him, he was on board."
The family listed the house for $405,000 earlier this week under the headline: "Bitcoin Home!" However, the listing makes clear the sellers would also accept traditional money. "If you had $405k I wouldn't turn you down but if a partial or whole transaction is done using Bitcoins the price can be reduced depending on how many Bitcoins you have to trade," it says.
Mr. More, who lives in Nashville, Tenn., says he has amassed a few hundred bitcoins and thinks their value will continue to increase. One bitcoin is currently worth about $70.
Story continues below advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
Bitcoins are accepted as an alternate payment method on several websites, including WordPress and an eBay-like service called Bitmit. Proponents say they are a cheaper, easier way to make international payments.
Bitcoins use a network of computers, or nodes, that make monitoring transactions online much more difficult. They are favoured by people seeking privacy and are used on some gambling websites as well as Silk Road, a black market website that sells illicit drugs.Not to be confused with the Mind Bender at Six Flags Over Georgia or the former Mayan Mindbender at Six Flags AstroWorld.
The Mindbender is an Anton Schwarzkopf looping roller coaster at Galaxyland Amusement Park, a major attraction inside West Edmonton Mall, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It is the largest indoor triple-looping roller coaster in the world.
Layout [ edit ]
Mindbender was designed by Germany's Werner Stengel and built by Anton Schwarzkopf. It was inspired by this team's previous design, Dreier Looping, a portable coaster that travelled the German funfair circuit, before being sold to a succession of amusement parks in Malaysia, Great Britain, and most recently, Mexico. Mindbender is a pseudo mirror-image of Dreier Looping, and is slightly taller, with additional helices at the end of the ride. Mindbender features shorter trains, with three pilot cars, whereas Dreier Looping usually ran with five trailer cars and one pilot car, occasionally rising to seven-car trains at busy funfairs.
The ride's layout features many twisting drops, three vertical loops and a double upward helix finale. The ride twists underneath, in between and around its supports. It also goes underneath the former UFO Maze attraction, which has been removed to make way for another roller coaster; Gerstlauer's Galaxy Orbiter, during the helix.
Often in high season, the last car on one of the trains is reversed, allowing guests to ride the roller coaster without being able to see where they are going.
Ride experience [ edit ]
After boarding the Mindbender, riders put on their seatbelt and lap restraints. Also, the ride operator lowers large shoulder restraints over the riders. All of the restraints keep the riders firmly secured in the seat.
After ascending the curving wheel driven lift hill, the train descends a sharp, twisting left-hand drop (sometimes referred to as a Traver drop) that climbs back up to the first of four stacked block brakes. The train negotiates a second left-hand drop that is immediately followed by the first two vertical loops. Then the train repeats the aforementioned process happens yet again: it goes up to the third block brake, then does another twisting drop and ascent before hitting the fourth block brake. After the fourth block brake, the track drops to the left and back down to ground level, and hits the third vertical loop.
Following the third loop, the coaster train does another cycle under the stacked block brakes, then shoots along a two-layered upward helix, before running behind the Galaxy Quest 7D theater to hit the final brake run and the exit/entry area.
The ride length from the initial drop should normally range from one minute five seconds to one minute twenty-five seconds. Circuits times as little as 59 seconds are possible through extensive waxing of the track, and reduction in tension on the bogey wheels. This increase in speed is not permitted during public rides, as the forces on the riders becomes severe. During testing of the renovated trains in 1987, the maximum g-force of a normal run was measured on equipment bolted into the train at 5.5 G's, which occurs in the second loop.
1986 accident [ edit ]
On the evening of June 14, 1986, the fourth car of the yellow train derailed before encountering the third and final loop. The train failed to clear the loop and slid backwards fishtailing wildly and crashing into a concrete pillar. Damage from the derailment caused the lap bars to disengage at some point during the ride, throwing its four passengers at least 25 feet (7.6 m) to the floor below. Three passengers died in the incident, while a fourth was critically injured. About 19 others were treated for less severe injuries at the nearby Misericordia Community Hospital. An investigation determined that bolts on the left wheel assembly worked loose causing the accident, and that design flaws by Schwarzkopf along with a lack of maintenance by the mall were likely to blame.[1][2][3][4][5][6]
When Mindbender reopened in January 1987, the trains were redesigned. Existing four-car trains were converted to three-car trains (reducing seating capacity from 16 to 12), and anti-roll back features were installed. The lap bar restraint was retained, but seat belts and shoulder headrests were added.[1]
Awards [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]Thanks a lot to Urakaze for translating the stats. From the same Chinese source:
TAKE THIS WITH A MODERATELY SIZED GRAIN OF SALT
SMS König Albert
Tier 3 Premium Battleship
Stats:
Ship HP: 41300
Deck Armour: 60mm
Belt Armour: 265mm
Torpedo Protection: 19%
Max. Speed: 21 knots
Rudder Shift time: 11.9 seconds
Turning Circle Radius: 600m
View Range: 16.3 km
Surface Detectability: 11.5 km
Air Detectability: 9.8 km
Main Battery
305mm/50 Drh LC/1909 (5×2)
Range: 10.8 km
Reload time : 30 seconds
Turret rotation speed: 60 second per 180 degree
Firing arc: +/- 77~147 degree (Varies due to turret positioning)
HE Shell: 3400 damage, 850m/s velocity, 22% chance of fire
AP Shell: 9300 damage,855m/s velocity, Normalization -8 degree
Secondary Battery
150mm SK L/45 C06
Range: 4 km
Reload time: 8.6 seconds
AP Shell: 3700 damage
88mm SK L/45
Range: 4 km
Reloading time: 4 seconds
HE Shell: 1100 damage, 7% chance of fire
AA: Presumed none
Price not known
SMS Kaiser
Tier 4 Regular Battleship (First tech-tree available BB)
Stats:
Ship HP: 39900 -> 46400
Deck Armour: 60mm
Belt Armour: 265mm
Torpedo Protection: 19%
Max. Speed: 21 knots -> 23 knots
Rudder Shift time: 17.9 seconds -> 12.8 seconds (Possible typo in the original leak)
Turning Circle Radius: 600m
View Range: 27.8 km
Surface Detectability: 14.2 km
Air Detectability: 10.5 km
Main Battery
305mm/50 Drh LC/1909 (5×2)
Range: 13.3 km -> 14.6 km
Reload time : 30 seconds
Turret rotation speed: 60 second per 180 degree
Firing arc: +/- 77~147 degree (Varies due to turret positioning)
HE Shell: 3400 damage, 850m/s velocity, 22% chance of fire
AP Shell: 9300 damage,855m/s velocity, Normalization -8 degree
Secondary Battery
150mm SK L/45 C06
Range: 4.5 km
Reload time: 8.6 seconds
AP Shell: 3700 damage
88mm SK L/45
Range: 4.5 km
Reloading time: 4 seconds
HE Shell: 1100 damage, 7% chance of fire
AA:
Far: None
Middle: 18 damage, Range 3.5 km
Near: 39 damage, Range 2 km
Ship price:
8400 Experience
860000 Credits
AdvertisementsComcast recently announced a deal to buy Time Warner Cable for $45 billion. This deal will merge the #1 and #2 cable television companies in the United States, giving them a 57% market share in that market. As a broadband internet provider, the new Comcast-TWC would control 37% of the market. The broadband internet market in the United States is already uncompetitive, providing us with poor internet service for relatively high prices, as the graph below shows.
If this deal is allowed, consumers in the United States are going to suffer. If Comcast has a monopoly on internet and cable television, they have no incentive to invest in infrastructure that would benefit consumers. This will keep prices high, while allowing us to lag further behind other developed nations in internet speed.
Fortunately, there is governmental oversight meant to prevent deals like this. The FCC is supposed to look over any deals like this, and see if monopolistic practices could result. If they decide that is the case, they could disallow the deal. Hopefully this is what happens, but Comcast is very well connected politically and I am concerned they will use their political sway to get this deal through the FCC.
The President appoints the voting members of the FCC, who are in charge of overseeing deals like this. One of Obama’s biggest fund-raisers and a personal friend is David Cohen. Called the most influential person at Comcast by the Financial Times, David has worked closely with politicians throughout his time at Comcast. His personal relationship with the President, as well as the $800,000+ given to the Congressional members of the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology (which oversees the FCC) may help Comcast get this deal through the FCC.
For those concerned with the influence of money in politics, this deal is a useful case study. As the situation progresses, we can see just how much influence money can buy in politics. Only 6% of people polled considered the deal to be good for consumers, so we can see if Comcast is able to circumvent public opinion in their quest to dominate the cable and internet market.
Sources:
Reuters blog post on monopoly.
Consumer survey.
Cable television in the U.S. marketshare.
Maplight on Comcast’s political donations.
Comcast to buy TWC.
AdvertisementsWhen Leonid Moroz, a neuroscientist at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience in St. Augustine, Fla., first began studying comb jellies, he was puzzled. He knew the primitive sea creatures had nerve cells — responsible, among other things, for orchestrating the darting of their tentacles and the beat of their iridescent cilia. But those neurons appeared to be invisible. The dyes that scientists typically use to stain and study those cells simply didn’t work. The comb jellies’ neural anatomy was like nothing else he had ever encountered.
After years of study, he thinks he knows why. According to traditional evolutionary biology, neurons evolved just once, hundreds of millions of years ago, likely after sea sponges branched off the evolutionary tree. But Moroz thinks it happened twice — once in ancestors of comb jellies, which split off at around the same time as sea sponges, and once in the animals that gave rise to jellyfish and all subsequent animals, including us. He cites as evidence the fact that comb jellies have a relatively alien neural system, employing different chemicals and architecture from our own. “When we look at the genome and other information, we see not only different grammar but a different alphabet,” Moroz said.
When Moroz proposed his theory, evolutionary biologists were skeptical. Neurons are the most complex cell type in existence, critics argued, capable of capturing information, making computations and executing decisions. Because they are so complicated, they are unlikely to have evolved twice.
But new support for Moroz’s idea comes from recent genetic work suggesting that comb jellies are ancient — the first group to branch off the animal family tree. If true, that would bolster the chance that they evolved neurons on their own.
The debate has generated intense interest among evolutionary biologists. Moroz’s work does not only call into question the origins of the brain and the evolutionary history of animals. It also challenges the deeply entrenched idea that evolution progresses steadily forward, building up complexity over time.
The First Split
Somewhere in the neighborhood of 540 million years ago, the ocean was poised for an explosion of animal life. The common ancestor of all animals roamed the seas, ready to diversify into the rich panoply of fauna we see today.
Scientists have long assumed that sponges were the first to branch off the main trunk of the animal family tree. They’re one of the simplest classes of animals, lacking specialized structures, such as nerves or a digestive system. Most rely on the ambient flow of water to collect food and remove waste.
Later, as is generally believed, the rest of the animal lineage split into comb jellies, also known as ctenophores (pronounced TEN-oh-fours); cnidarians (jellyfish, corals and anemones); very simple multicellular animals called placozoa; and eventually bilaterians, the branch that led to insects, humans and everything in between.
But sorting out the exact order in which the early animal branches split has been a notoriously thorny problem. We have little sense of what animals looked like so many millions of years ago because their soft bodies left little tangible evidence in rocks. “The fossil record is spotty,” said Linda Holland, an evolutionary biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.
To make up for our inability to see into the past, scientists use the morphology (structure) and genetics of living animals to try to reconstruct the relationships of ancient ones. But in the case of comb jellies, the study of living animals presents serious challenges.
Little is known about comb jellies’ basic biology |
-fledged performance plots and charts, I’m very pleased to see a developer providing this level of detail to our community and hope to see much more of this trend.
Flight Model
This is a beta product, so it wouldn’t be fair to assess the flight model in any detail – name a single module that NEVER took a tweak to the flight models – but in its current state, Belsimtek’s MiG-15bis is a very satisfying flying experience. The engine output lags the throttle input by a frustratingly large delay – a excellent representation of an early jet engine. The aircraft feels light and nimble at the right airspeeds – almost overpowered, rocketing up to the sky at an unbelievable angle at full power.
Although it demonstrates the technology to go fast, the MiG-15bis reminds us that we still didn’t know everything about going fast back then – the controls lose effectiveness at high-speed due to compressibility resulting in some pretty harrowing experiences for the complacent pilot. The MiG-15bis racks up airspeed in a dive quickly, so failure to watch gauges in a dogfight can turn deadly in a couple different ways.
Dogfighting the MiG-15bis’ mortal enemy, the F-86F Sabre, is an exhilarating experience. The two aircraft are matched to within pretty close tolerances of each other – knowing your strengths and your enemies weaknesses can help you get that much needed edge. Keeping an eye on altitude and airspeed and being able to manage your energy really pays off.
Sound
Sounds in simulations are a thankless job – do it right and nobody notices, screw up and suddenly everybody is an expert – but is critical for immersion. The engine, environment, and ambient sounds of Belsimtek’s MiG-15bis are thoroughly satisfying, both inside and outside of the cockpit.
The cannon sounds are gorgeous, with the thumps from the 37mm practically rattling my desk. If you’ve got a decent sound system, crank it up for the 37mm cannon for a good ride! Just make sure you warn your neighbors, first.
Conclusion
Currently out for beta at $49.99 USD from Eagle Dynamic’s E-Shop, the MiG-15bis is a hefty purchase, especially for a beta, but the MiG-15bis is an unmistakable icon of the jet age. If Belsimtek’s previous work is any example, this module will do its legacy justice.0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard
The Trump White House is blaming Democrats for the fact that Jeff Sessions lied about having contact with Russia during the presidential campaign.
Jim Acosta of CNN reported that the Trump administration is blaming Democrats for the Jeff Sessions story:
WH blames Sessions story on Democrats trying to damage POTUS after speech to Congress. pic.twitter.com/pZ5VcMIeEJ — Jim Acosta (@Acosta) March 2, 2017
The obvious problem with the Trump White House’s attempt to blame Democrats is that the stories that were published in The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal were all well researched and predated Trump’s speech to Congress. The second allegation that the Trump White House made was the standard claim that the story is fake news. The bellowing of fake news is the go-to response from the White House towards any story that is negative about them.
The White House’s claim that Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) is pushing the story was bizarre because Franken never asked Sessions if he had any contact with Russia. Franken’s question to Sessions during the confirmation hearing was what would Sessions do if evidence of contact was brought to him. It was Jeff Sessions who volunteered that he had no contact with Russia.
Blaming the Democrats is not going to get Trump out of this mess. Instead of coming clean and offering up facts, the Trump White House chose to appeal to their base of support within the Republican Party.
Democrats didn’t force Jeff Sessions to lie. Sessions lied on his own.
Nobody but Trump’s most loyal supporters are going to buy the White House’s howling at the partisan moon.
Blaming Democrats for the Attorney General’s lies is a bad political strategy that is a sign of an increasingly desperate administration.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:Imelda May performs the Irish national anthem before the McGregor-Mayweather fight at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. Source: PA Images
Anocht a théim sa bhearna baoil, Le gean ar Ghaeil chun báis nó saoil,
Le gunnascréach faoi lámhach na bpiléar, Seo libh canaig’ Amhrán na bhFiann!
DO YOU THINK those words, and the rest of Ireland’s national anthem, should be protected by the State?
If we do protect the national anthem, should it be enshrined in legislation? What should be classed as misuse of the anthem? And if it is misused, what should be the punishment for those who misuse it?
These are just some of the questions Seanad Éireann want to ask its citizens about how the national anthem’s use should be changed.
The copyright on Amhrán na bhFiann, which was composed in 1907 by Peadar Kearney and Patrick Heeney, is due to expire – prompting the revision and review of how it should be treated by its citizens.
The song, which is written in Irish, was used by rebels during the 1916 Easter Rising, by the IRA during the War of Independence and was and was used often at military functions as a popular Irish Army tune.
It was informally adopted as the national anthem of the Irish Free State in May 1924, and subsequent legislative changes up until as recently as 2013 have strengthened its legal position since.
Today, the Seanad Public Consultation Committee said it’s looking for written submissions between now and 4pm 2 November on how we should treat our national anthem. (There’s more about how you can do that here.)
Among the questions that they want people to answer are:
If the national anthem is enshrined in legislation, what versions of the music and words should be used, and in what languages?
What should be classed as misuse of the national anthem?
What penalties should be put in place if any proposed restrictions are breached and who should enforce the rules?
The committee is also asking if there should be restrictions for the use of the national anthem for commercial purposes like advertising – so what do you think?
Should use of the national anthem for commercial purposes be restricted?Donald Trump. John Sommers II/Getty Images Donald Trump on Wednesday used the movie "Frozen" to defend a controversial weekend tweet.
In an attempt to push back against criticism of the tweet, which many viewed as anti-Semitic, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee posted a tweet of a book about the Disney film "Frozen" that contained a six-pointed star.
"Where is the outrage for this Disney book?" he posted. "Is this the 'Star of David' also? Dishonest media! #Frozen"
The image used in the tweet was originally posted to a pro-Trump message board on Reddit under the thread "Disney is Anti-Semitic."
Aware of the ongoing firestorm, Hillary Clinton's campaign was quick to fire back a response from the presumptive Democratic nominee's Twitter account.
"Do you want to build a strawman?" she tweeted, a reference to a song from the movie.
Twitter
Trump, his campaign, and fellow surrogates have kept controversy over his Saturday tweet alive in the news by continuing to defend it.
The original weekend tweet contained an image of a six-pointed star, similar to the symbol most commonly known as the Jewish Star of David, over a pile of money. The star was inscribed with the words "most corrupt candidate ever" and appeared next to an image of Clinton.
Trump told an Ohio audience on Wednesday that he regretted his campaign's decision to scrub the image from his account.
"'You shouldn't have taken it down,'" he said, as if he were speaking to Dan Scavino, the senior aide who posted the tweet. "You know they took the star down. I said, 'Too bad, you should've left it up. I would've rather defended it. Just leave it up and say no that's not a Star of David — it's just a star.'"Can we get all the-times-they-are-a-changin' for a minute? Vanity Fair's 20th annual Hollywood Issue has a three-panel gatefold cover, as usual, but this year, there are actual black people on the first third, i.e. the part you see on the newsstand. Progress!
In 2010, Vanity Fair had a "Young Hollywood" cover that featured only white actresses. In 2011, the "Hollywood Issue" featured two people of color — Anthony Mackie and Rashida Jones — but they were on the right two-thirds of image. The part that's folded up when you see the magazine.
It was the same story in 2013 and in 2012. In fact, in 2012, we detailed the magazine's long history of pushing people of color off to the side and off of the main cover — it happened in 2008, 2005, 2004, 2002, 1997, 1996 and 1995.
Advertisement
But the main cover for 2014 (photographed, as usual, by Annie Leibovitz) features 12 Years A Slave star Chiwetel Ejiofor and Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom star Idris Elba alongside Julia Roberts and George Clooney. Black faces next to white faces on the same issue, on the newsstand. Integration!
Other actors of color included in the entire image: Michael B. Jordan (Fruitvale Station), Lupita Nyong'o (12 Years A Slave), Naomie Harris (Mandela) and Chadwick Boseman (42). Everyone looks spectacular, although a little stiff (and George Clooney's head looks pasted onto his body). It's fantastic. Hopefully newsstand sales will prove robust enough that the editors can't complain about the financial risk associated with featuring people of color. If there's any quibble to made, it's that Lupita Nyong'o didn't make it onto the left-hand side — she's become the fashion darling of awards season, and surely highlighting her would have resulted in plenty of attention and fan-girling. No matter, she's got a bright future ahead of her and someday might get a cover all her own, Kerry Washington-style.Written by Eric Rasmussen on January 10, 2014.
Cabal sandboxes were introduced in cabal 1.18, and they’re designed to let you build Haskell packages in isolated environments. Cabal sandboxes are largely based on the cabal-dev tool, and similar in spirit to hsenv (which has some other advantages).1
Simplifying your workflow
The motivation for isolating environments is straightforward: if you’re working on more than one project at a time, the projects may have conflicting dependencies, and managing all of them at the system level is a nightmare.
Throw in large libraries and web frameworks at different versions and you have a recipe for dependency hell. Trying to resolve and accommodate every new build error at the system level is enough to make anyone superstitious, performing archaic rituals and beseeching the mighty build gods before daring to run their next cabal command.
Even if you manage to make it work, it leaves your system environment in a state that might not be easy to reproduce, making it harder to troubleshoot build issues others might experience with your software. After having been through this enough times on my own (and across enough languages), I finally realized that sandboxes shouldn’t be the exception during development: they should be the default.2
Versions used here
Before we work through a quick example, here are the versions I’m using:
$ ghc --version The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System, version 7.6.3 $ cabal --version cabal-install version 1.18.0.1 using version 1.18.0 of the Cabal library
Example: building this blog
My blog is created with Hakyll, a Haskell library with many dependencies. If you wanted to learn Hakyll and use my code as a starting point, it’s entirely possible (and likely) that something in the chain of dependencies will conflict with Haskell libraries you have installed at the system level.
Here’s how you can build chromaticleaves in a sandbox to avoid these issues:
$ git clone [email protected]:ericrasmussen/chromaticleaves.git $ cd chromaticleaves $ cabal sandbox init Writing a default package environment file to /path/to/chromaticleaves/cabal.sandbox.config Creating a new sandbox at /path/to/chromaticleaves/.cabal-sandbox
Now that we’re in a sandbox, the next step is installing all the dependencies from chromaticleaves.cabal (it’s a deceptively short list, but Hakyll will pull in many other dependencies):
$ cabal install --only-dependencies
Hopefully everything will install fine, but you may still see some missing system dependencies or other issues depending on your OS. The output from the install command should provide details.
Once you’ve got that sorted out, you can install the site binary with:
$ cabal install
This will create the executable.cabal-sandbox/bin/site that you can use to launch the site locally with “site preview”, rebuild after changes with “site rebuild”, and anything else from Hakyll’s The Basics tutorial.
Lastly, you can even jump into a fully loaded GHCi session using:
$ cabal repl
Which will start GHCi with all of the top level functions from the chromaticleaves main source file.
Path hackery
When you cabal install anything in your sandbox (including any executables from the software you’re developing), they’re placed in your/sandbox/.cabal-sandbox/bin. It’s convenient to add this relative path to your system’s $PATH variable:
.cabal-sandbox/bin
Preferably adding it before your user cabal bin and other bin folders. Specifying it as a relative path means that when your current working directory contains a sandbox, any binaries installed there take precedence.
However, note that this only works for executables installed with “cabal install” in your sandbox. There’s also a “cabal build” command that creates dist files in meaningfully named subfolders. The command will work just fine, but note that the simple relative path we used above won’t pick up any binaries installed that way.
If you followed along on the above blog building example, then going to the chromaticleaves directory should automatically place the sandboxed site on your path. You can verify with:
$ which site.cabal-sandbox/bin/site
Ignorables
Initializing a cabal sandbox will add a hidden folder and a config file to your current working directory. If you manage your project with version control, you should add these to your ignore/boring files:
.cabal-sandbox/ cabal.sandbox.config
Further reading
There are many common commands and other usage patterns not covered here. The best thorough introduction to using cabal sandboxes is An Introduction to Cabal sandboxes.
It’s a must-read if you plan on using them, and you should also keep the official Cabal User Guide handy as a reference.
hsenv only works on *nix systems but has the advantage of fully sandboxing ghc, ghci, and cabal, instead of relying on their system versions and only sandboxing build dependencies.CRYPTOCURRENCY SCAM ALERT: BitDeal — Signs Point Toward a HUGE Scam. Need Confirmation.
CrowdConscious Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 19, 2017
“Website” on CoinMarketCap page. DO NOT visit this site — BitDeal.co.in.
DO NOT visit this site — BitDeal.co.
Okay so this thing came out of nowhere. BitDeal’s market cap is sitting at $72m and I haven’t heard a single word about the project. Cannot find it on any of the ICO listing launch sites either. Look at the circulating supply…300,000,000 coins while 218,363,462 actually exist? Unless it’s a CoinMarketCap glitch, this is not right.
Started doing more digging.
I wish the CryptocurrencyTalk miner who got scammed here had alerted the cryptocurrency community…
Okay, now going further into the conversation.
No social media accounts
Each social media link goes right back to the website.
These are the only BitDeals I have been able to find on Twitter — only 8 results — none with their logo.
The App Reviews Are Not Right
Link here.
Translated from Vietnamese, they mean:
I do not know how to install it
2. How does this app work?
3. No Vietnamese
Will continue editing this and adding more of the evidence I find — PLEASE BE CAREFUL WHERE YOU PUT YOUR MONEY!
Below are some resources for beginning cryptocurrency enthusiasts or others interested in something new:Jason McIntyre from Big Lead Sports is reporting that Manish Mehta will no longer be the NY Jets beat reporter for the Daily News.
Jets fans – same NYDN peeps who told me Hoops Weiss was laid off are saying@mmehtanydn is moving off NY Jets beat. New role will be [1of2] — Jason McIntyre (@TheBigLead) May 25, 2013
‘NFL Insider’ (w focus on big-picture Jets stuff) probably similar to Bedard’s old role @ Globe. Finally, a good NFL columnist there [2of2] — Jason McIntyre (@TheBigLead) May 25, 2013
Manish was known for quoting anonymous sources in many of his stories. These unnamed sources were critical of Tim Tebow and Mark Sanchez. Manish is also known for blocking many Jets fans on Twitter that disagreed with his opinions. Here is a thread with fan thoughts on Manish Mehta.
Seth Walder is in the bullpen warming up and is ready for a bigger role at the Daily News.The good news for Guatemala: Its foes at next month's Copa Centroamericana aren't going to be as talented as the Club America side it battled Wednesday night in El Reto Aguila in front of 18,632 at the Home Depot Center.
The bad news: The Chapines are going to have to mature, and fast, to contend with those foes.
America romped to a 4-1 triumph in a game much closer than the score suggests -- one goal separated the sides until the 82th minute -- yet just as one-sided as a three-goal victory ought to be.
The Mexico City powerhouse played a first-choice lineup -- all but injured Rosinei -- in its next-to-last prep before the Mexican Primera Division kicks off its Clausura season the second weekend of January, and it looks ready to make two title runs: in the domestic championship and Copa Libertadores.
The three-pronged attack -- Vicente Sanchez, Matias Vuoso and Daniel Montenegro, with midfielders Miguel Layun and newcomer Nicolas Olivera plus right back Oscar Rojas in support -- deserved more than it produced, and veteran Pavel Pardo masterfully laid a foundation in midfield for the attackers. And goalkeeper Memo Ochoa, America's reigning superstar, handled almost everything the game Guatemalans threw at him.
America went ahead on Vuoso's 19th-minute penalty kick -- Jaime Vides clipped Sanchez after a superb ball into space from Olivera -- and asserted command on a game-altering, end-to-end sequence about 10 minutes before the end of the first half.
The Chapines' inexperienced lineup had stayed with America the first 35 minutes. Carlos Figueroa, one of just five starters with more than 15 caps, was alternately awful and awesome, and he was both at a crucial juncture.
Figueroa did well to recover the ball after a silly giveaway, leaping over America's Juan Carlos Valenzuela to nod the ball to former Galaxy midfielder Pando Ramirez. Figueroa took the return pass, danced past Aquivaldo Mosquera and Patricio Trevino and tried to dribble around a prone Ochoa, who stuck his right leg out to end the threat.
Off America went on a counter up the left flank, with Sanchez delivering a ball across the Guatemalan box for Layun, and just like that it was 2-0.
Ramirez scored for Guatemala just before halftime, volleying off Ochoa's left hand, and a shaky Armando Navarrete -- he replaced Ochoa at halftime -- provided the Chapines chances in the second half, but there was never really any doubt, even before Angel Reyna scored and assisted goals two minutes apart at the end.
“The result was a very big punishment for us, because we played well for moments...,” Guatemala coach Ever Hugo Almeida said. “It's an embarrassing scoreline. When you lose, 4-1, who's going to believe you [when you say you played well]?”
Guatemala didn't play poorly, but America's speed on the flanks caused a lot of problems, and there was an abrupt difference in talent. No big deal: America might be the most talented team in Mexico, which means it might be the most talented team in North and Central America.
Almeida doesn't have every player he desires for the Copa Centroamericana, which begins Jan. 14. He's trying to get a young team, an inexperienced team, ready for group-stage matches against Honduras and Costa Rica, Central America's most powerful national sides.
On Wednesday, he gave three players their international debuts -- 29-year-old Gregory Ruiz, a second-half sub, certainly impressed. Two more were making just their second appearances for the national team, another his third, and another his fourth.
The intensity of the matches in Panama will surpass that at HDC, but going up against America -- and battling on fairly even terms much of the night -- will serve its purpose when the games with Costa Rica and Honduras arrive.
And there's another bit of good news, too. Five of seven teams at the Copa Centroamericana advance to the CONCACAF Gold Cup. Guatemala can lose both of its group games, then beat Nicaragua or Belize in the fifth-place game -- an encounter the Chapines ought to dominate -- and it's through., according to researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). The results, which also confirmed safety and feasibility as cited in earlier studies, were published online Nov. 1 in the journal STEM CELLS. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 1.7 million Americans sustain a traumatic brain injury annually. Of those, 275,000 are hospitalized and 52,000 die. TBI is a contributing factor to a third of all injury-related deaths in the country. According to published research cited in the paper, more than 6.5 million patients are burdened by the physical, cognitive and psychosocial deficits associated with TBI, leading to an economic impact of approximately $60 billion.There are few current therapies to treat TBI. Critical care teams work to stabilize patients and surgery is sometimes necessary to remove or repair damaged blood vessels or tissue, as well as provide relief from swelling.To potentially open a new avenue of treatment, Cox has been researching cell therapy for neurological disease in pre-clinical and clinical trials for more than two decades. The new study builds on his previously published research showing that autologous stem cell therapy after TBI is safe and reduces the therapeutic intensity requirements of neurocritical care. The theory is that the stem cells work in the brain to alleviate the body's inflammatory response to the trauma.Researchers enrolled 25 patients in a dose-escalation format with five controls followed by five patients in each of three different doses followed by five more controls for a total of 25. Bone marrow harvesting, cell processing and re-infusion occurred within 48 hours after injury. Cellular processing was done at The Evelyn H. Griffin Stem Cell Therapeutics Research Laboratory at McGovern Medical School.Functional and neurocognitive outcomes were measured and correlated with imaging data including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of white brain matter.Citation: Cox, Charles S., Robert A. Hetz, George P. Liao, Benjamin M. Aertker, Linda Ewing‐Cobbs, Jenifer Juranek, Sean I. Savitz et al. "Treatment of Severe Adult Traumatic Brain Injury Using Bone Marrow Mononuclear Cells." STEM CELLS.DOI: 10.1002/stem.2538 Research funding:US Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health, Glassell Foundation Stem Cell Research Program, The Brown Foundation, Inc.Adapted from press release by The University of Texas Health Science Center at HoustonBuy Photo A Delaware County EMS ambulance and squad vehicle sit outside the downtown EMS station with just a small portion of the gear they keep stocked to treat a wide array of injuries they can be called out to. (Photo: Corey Ohlenkamp/The Star Press)Buy Photo
MUNCIE, Ind. — The city of Muncie is moving ahead with creating its own ambulance service.
Muncie City Council is set to hear an ordinance creating a city Emergency Medical Service at its meeting at 7:30 p.m. Monday in the auditorium at Muncie City Hall.
The ordinance, which will be introduced Monday evening, establishes a fire department-based EMS, provides a mechanism for assessing fees and allows the city to contract with a provider "until the city determines that it has adequate personnel and equipment to provide the service."
Since The Star Press reported in August that the city was considering starting its own ambulance service, timed to coincide with the February 2018 loss of $2 million in federal SAFER funding that pays for the salaries of 16 of the city's 110 firefighters, officials have only said they're considering a program found in other cities.
Mayor Dennis Tyler, a retired firefighter, said in August that the city was looking at providing better service and faster response times than Delaware County EMS, the countywide ambulance service established four decades ago.
In early November, Fire Chief Eddie Bell and city spokesman Sarah Beach denied the city had bought ambulances for its new service.
Tyler and Bell issued a joint statement, through Beach, early Thursday afternoon:
"We are pleased to be introducing an ordinance at the city council meeting on Monday night that will give the city of Muncie the ability to pursue fire-based ambulance services for our citizens," the officials said. "We look forward to this ordinance being introduced and having the opportunity to discuss with the city council how we feel this ordinance will benefit the city of Muncie and our citizens."
PREVIOUS COVERAGE
City considering its own ambulance service
Ex-EMS director: City ambulance plan is political
W/R: City says it's still not in the ambulance biz
The ordinance says that the city EMS would be staffed and equipped by the fire department and provide both non-emergency and emergency basic life support services and advanced life support services.
The city could assess fees for services, which would go into a fund to be used for personnel or equipment costs. The ordinance would be in effect on May 1, 2018.
After hearing about the city's plans earlier this year, Delaware County officials noted that a city ambulance service would take away as much as 70 percent of Delaware County EMS' 16,000-plus runs each year.
Delaware County EMS has 45 full-time employees. It operates on a budget of $3.3 million. By the time revenue from patients, who pay up to $1,200 for advanced life support runs, is collected, county EMS nets about $32,195 a year.
City officials and Delaware County officials have been at odds for a couple of years over public safety-related issues, including the city-county 911 dispatch center, which could be split into two centers.
The city's decision to operate its own ambulance service has county officials expressing concerns.
"This is uncharted territory for all Delaware County citizens," Jason Rogers, director of Delaware County EMS and Emergency Management, told The Star Press Thursday afternoon. "Everything being on the table, we will be forced to lay off union members, lay off all our part-time employees and evaluate the run volume of every station, including stations outside the city limits."
Although few entities have publicly weighed in on the proposed city ambulance service during the months when it was mostly the subject of speculation, Muncie City Council member Dan Ridenour said he had spoken to people ranging from the emergency medical profession to members of the public and "they have not been supportive of this. I've not heard a lot of positive support. I'm open to listening, but I'm leaning against it."
Members of Delaware County Council talked about the proposal at a recent meeting and the council president, Ron Quakenbush, was critical of the idea.
"Someone wanting to break up the (ambulance) service is, I'll use a big word, asinine," Quakenbush said.
Keith Roysdon is the government watchdog reporter for The Star Press. Contact him at 765-213-5828 and [email protected].
Read or Share this story: http://tspne.ws/2ni6NKrIn our previous series on learning Powershell, the very first topic of discussion was the storage of data. In my opinion, the 2 most important things in computing are interface and data structure. As developers, our interface to the data is using varible naming conventions that make sense. Each of us have a personal style, but using descriptive names for our variables serves us when we inevitably have to revisit our own code a year from now. Comments, variable names, and formatting make it easier to get back to work rather than spending time figuring out what we were thinking a year ago.
Our most basic element of storage for a datum is a variable containing a single piece of information. Remember when I said data was plural? You thought I was just being glib. We're going to work up from this starting point:
[INT]$performanceCounterPercentage = 0.5523
Our format here is to identify the class of the datum, the variable name, the assignment operator, and the value. This lets Powershell know exactly what we're looking for, but also gives us the most information for we the programmer to be able to tell exactly what we're using that assignment for.
In terms of which class to use for a datum, it is correct to use the smallest version of the class type you need for any possible value. There is a speed cost for overprovisioning your dataset. It is easiest to use the largest one we can. That way, we can stuff anything inside it we need without worrying about exceeding those minimum and maximum ranges I illustrated for each of the different classes in the previous discussion on data types.
[byte]$inBounds = 255
[byte]$outOfBounds = 256
This will succeed for the first line as [byte] is 8 bits long, 0-255. Since 256 is larger than the memory we're telling powershell to set aside for it, the second line will produce an error. You'll note that I didn't capitalize the data type in this example. It's not case-sensitive, so we can choose how we like it to read. I'm lazy, so I tend to keep things lowercase as much as possible. You'll also note the variable names have a specific capitalization scheme. It's called "Camel Case" due to the humps in the middle. Each word is capitalized. We could also use underscores to separate the words. However it looks best to you works just fine:
$outOfBounds
$Out_Of_Bounds
$out_of_bounds
Remember that generally, your code will be written while you're conscious and alert. You'll be fixing it at 3am while mainlining coffee because your business is at risk due to your code breaking due to an update that changes the environment in which your code is supposed to be running... that feels really specific, doesn't it?
This structure works well for singular pieces of information, but often we're dealing with more than just the one piece of data. Yes, that's correct pluralization - a datum is a piece of data - stop interrupting, we've got quite a bit of work to do yet.
To deal with more than one datum (happy?), we'll use an array:
$volumeCapacities = @(
53687091200,
53687091200,
107374182400
)
This makes less sense if we're storing different pieces of information.
$drive_info = @(
"Server System Volume",
53687091200,
0.24
)
For this type of use, we really want some type of structure that let's us access the data in a meaningful way. If we look back to our previous set of lessons, we're looking for a hashtable:
$drive_info = @{
volumeName = "Server System Volume",
capacity = 53687091200,
percentUsed = 0.24
}
This will let us access the information more easily:
$drive_info.volumeName
You'll note here that Powershell chose what to use for the individual data type:
$drive_info.percentUsed.GetType().name
This shows us that it's chosen a fairly large [DOUBLE] for the percentUsed. If we don't need that many digits to the right of the decimal for these values, we should choose something smaller. If we're working on a thousand servers, that extra storage will add up and start to force more memory swapping to disk at some point. To allow for defining the data type in this type of structure, we can prepopulate our variables before adding them to the hashtable:
[string]$volumeName = "Server System Volume"
[int64]$capacity = 53687091200
[single]$percentUsed = 0.24
$drive_info = @{
volumeName = $volumeName;
capacity = $capacity;
percentUsed = $percentUsed
}
Now that same command shows us that we're storing it as a single:
$drive_info.percentUsed.GetType().name
This saves 4 bytes per instance of that hashtable. It doesn't sound like much, but we're coding for scale and speed. Every little bit (PUN!) counts. CAVEAT: The whole Y2K thing was due to variables containing only enough for 2 digits of the year to be stored. Make sure to plan for expansion while still keeping the memory footprint as light as possible.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could take our capacity and display it automatically as MB or GB without having to do any math to it? We can build our own METHOD for these types of tasks, but it'll require that we make our own class.
In the last series, when we covered loops, we used the class [PSObject]. It came with an open set of PROPERTIES that we could define with our hashtable and a set of METHODS built in. One of them that we used was.add() This was brought up as a way to speed up our script by using the built in method rather than the slower += operator that added our object to the end of our array.
In the same way we make a function:
function functionName {}
we can pre-define our own class:
class className {}
So let's make our driveInfo class:
class driveInfo {
[string]$volumeName
[int64]$capacity
[single]$percentUsed
}
So now we can ask for a new instance of that class:
$drive_1 = New-Object driveInfo
So we can set the properties directly thusly:
$drive_1.volumeName = "Server System Volume"
If you have predefined information that you want to have access to, but not something that will ever be altered, you can define it as STATIC and set a value right within the declaration:
class driveInfo {
[string]$volumeName
[int64]$capacity
[single]$percentUsed
static[string]$objectType = "Hard Drive"
}
This allos us to access it as a static property using a pair of colons. That looks like [type]::property :
$drive_2 = New-Object driveInfo
$drive_2::objectType
This will now return the value assigned in the class declaration. If you try to alter it, it'll yell at you. This is how the [system.math]::pi works. it holds the value for pi. It's predefined and changing it makes no sense at all as it's a constantly defined value. It's also the way we got to the [INT]::minValue last time.
Let's make our method using this structure within the class declaraion:
[returnType]methodName ($argument1, $argument2,...){}
If you're bringing in arguments, you'll want to make sure to verify that the values coming in are the expected type and range of value. Malicious hackers will find a way to exploit this type of thing if they're given any access at all. Bacially, it's:
[INT32]methodName ([ExpectedType]$argument1) {
if(($argument1 -ge $minVal) -and ($argument1 -le $maxVal)){
#do stuff here
}
}
I'm going to speed up the testing for these examples by adding default values directly. Let's do it!
class driveInfo {
# Property definitions here
[string]$volumeName = "Volume Name"
[int64]$capacity = 53687091200
[single]$percentUsed = 0.0
# Static values go here
static[string]$objectType = "Hard Drive"
# Methods are here
[INT32]capacityGB () {
return $this.capacity / 1GB
}
}
$drive_3 = New-Object driveInfo
Write-Output $drive_3.capacity
Write-Output $drive_3.capacityGB()
The only other thing today is to wrap your head around the fact that the properties within the class can be hashtables. You can also put these into other arrays and objects. My senior thesis in college was doing complex geospatial data visualization. The dataset for that project contained a massive amount of hashtables within hashtables within hashtables. I felt like I was losing it, but eventually, my little metal top wobbled and tipped over, so I came out of that just fine.
Next time, we'll address how to take these pieces of data and moving them around in your project.10 Memorable Movie Quotes About “The Odds”
We all have our favorite movie quotes, but we get super excited when we hear quotes about “odds” – after all, it’s what we do! So, we collected the top 10 best quotes about odds, gambling and chance, and we’re proudly sharing them with you. Just don’t blame us when you can’t get them out of your head!
1. The Empire Strikes Back:
The Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, has a sequence where Han Solo barrels the Millennium Falcon into an asteroid field to escape the Empire. It’s then that C-3PO decides this would be a great moment to do some math |
when the poison was poured. Who was the last to drink the water and be safe?” (Naofumi)
To my question, a few slaves raised their hands and took their time to talk respectively.
I learned that the well water was moved to the water jars for cooking just a little while ago.
“I wonder who the culprit was?” (Naofumi)
“Excuse me, Naofumi-sama.” (Atla)
“Hmm, what happened?” (Naofumi)
Atla raised her hand and made a proposal.
Her face seemed tense or something.
Was there something that only Atla can sense?
Atla slowly returned to the clinic and pointed at Imia’s uncle who was resting in the corner of the dining room.
“Imia’s uncle, something abominable is coiling itself around you.” (Atla)
“Huh?” (Naofumi)
Imia’s uncle looked around in a perplexed expression after being confronted by Atlas.
“I’m, what are you saying? Please be careful while joking.” (Imia’s uncle)
“Yeah Atla, no matter what, for uncle to do such a thing–“(Naofumi)
“It’s, so… No… actually, I remember causing something-” (Imia’s uncle)
Imia’s uncle was at his wit’s end and began to groan.
He pushed Imia away toward the other slaves and staggered away unsteadily.
“Hero of the Shield, please, I…” (Imia’s uncle)
Imia’s uncle asked for help as he suffered.
No, wait…
“Please punish me… Before I commit a crime again!” (Imia’s Uncle)
“When the thieves caught you, did they put a curse on you!?” (Naofumi)
“I understand, oh… Guu…”
I opened Imia’s uncle’s slave status.
To state the problem… It was different.
There’s noise! <This kind of Noise>
It’s apparent that something strange was going on.
If you thought about it calmly, he was found a day after he was supposed to arrive.
Basically, where he was attacked was uncertain.
What would have happened if Elena hadn’t passed by, I don’t know.
What would I do if I happened to pass by and had to escape from a strong adventurer?
Imia’s uncle was taken to the clinic for treatment.
And there’s no doubt that he specifically came back to the village to pour poison in the well as he was ordered.
The problem is that whatever was eroding Imia’s uncle might escape the eye of treatment.
“Hero of the Shield!” (Slaves)
“Naofumi.” (Ren)
The slaves, Ren, and Atla asked me for help.
‘I am not almighty,’ I want to say that, but I can’t. I understand the feeling of wanting help.
“We,… oh, huh!” (Atla)
“It’s no good!” (Ren)
Rishia stepped forward and stood with Imia’s uncle.
“Even though, I know how is it done!? For me,…… I can’t hold out my hand” (Imia’s uncle)
Even Ren, who’s acquainted with the slaves, can’t lend a hand?
Similarly, even the female knight cannot move.
I think, this is an abnormal situation.
If she slays Imia’s uncle, I’ll have to banish Female Knight.
I’ve been called indecisive.
I can’t follow the situation.
What should I do?
Well, if it was a game, persuasion would be the means to restore a former companion who was manipulated by someone, but it’s quite difficult in reality to break free from brainwashing. This is not a game.
Still, I cannot deal with everyone
By no means is it easy. It’s quite troublesome.
“Uncle! Please stop! ‘I’d like to be of assistance to the Hero of the Shield,’ wasn’t it you who said that!?” (Imia)
“Oh, that… GUU… ” (Imia’s uncle)
Imia’s uncle’s consciousness was becoming cloudy. This is not the situation for persuasion.
“Everything… Justice…” (Imia’s uncle)
He began to chant in a strange tone.
“Please… Stop me–” (Imia’s uncle)
Imia’s uncle began to chant magic.
The Lemo species knew the appropriateness of the soil.
He used magic that manipulated the earth to make a hole and pushed out a rock using magic.
“I am one who commands the origin of power. I have read once again and deciphered a law of nature, Earth. Slaughter these people! Zweit Earth Drive! ( ツヴァイト・アースドライブ)” (Imia’s uncle)
“I as the root of the power give an order. I have read once again and deciphered a law of nature, Earth. Hinder the magic of the person in front! Anti-Zweit Earth Drive! ( ツヴァイト・アースドライブ)” (Imia)
From the same species, Imia interfered with the magic that Imia’s uncle chanted, and there was simply a crack in the ground.
“Naofumi!” (Rat)
“What is it?” (Naofumi)
“Please confine Imia’s uncle by creating a wall in four directions! Needless to say, the strongest one. Please.” (Rat)
I see! Such a thing!
I started building magic power and mix SP into it.
“Uhh…” (Imia’s uncle)
Imia grabbed her uncle and looked at me.
“Now! Hero!” (Imia)
“Are you sure?” (Naofumi)
“Stop me! Please! I request it.” (Imia’s uncle)
“Understood! Shield Prison!” (Naofumi)
The cage made with shields confined Imia’s uncle together with Imia.
“Atla?” (Naofumi)
“Yes, the abominable power was interrupted by the cage, and its power was cut.” (Atla)
“So did it go elsewhere?” (Naofumi)
“No one among these here.” (Atla)
“That’s fortunate.” (Naofumi)
It would be serious if someone began to behave violently like Imia’s uncle did.
Afterward…
“First of all, for now, let’s figure out the situation before the cage disappears.” (Naofumi)
“Oh.”
“Yes.”
It is certain that Imia’s uncle was the one who poured poison into the well.
Perhaps it’s a kind of curse.
Thinking about it, the same as back then with Motoyasu, it looks without a doubt like a Legendary Weapon skill.
Ren has not used his.
He’s been under tight watch from the start.
If he used it, he’d be noticed. Immediately.
Motoyasu is currently on Cal Mira Island.
He may be coming back soon, unfortunately for Firo, and it would be troublesome for me.
Also, there are Motoyasu’s beloved mass-produced Filorials among the victims.
If that ridiculous condition was an act, there would be no helping it, but probably not.
Above all–.
“Itsuki-sama” (Rishia)
“The possibility is high.” (Naofumi)
From the fact that Imia’s uncle muttered justice.
To begin with, I am concerned with what kind of power was used to control Imia’s uncle.
When I think about it, the missing slaves may be related to this.
I cannot cover it anymore.
“Rishia. There are things I need to tell you.” (Naofumi)
“Oh, What is it?” (Rishia)
“Actually, quite some time ago, I saw Itsuki.” (Naofumi)
“FUE!? ( ふぇえ！? )” (Rishia)
“Do you remember when we went to buy Atla?” (Naofumi)
“Yes.” (Rishia)
“At that time, I found Itsuki in the Colosseum. Like some crippled person, he seemed to fight to receive people’s praise.” (Naofumi)
“……” (Rishia)
Rishia looked down.
Well… I knew this would happen, but it can’t be helped since I had reasons for hiding it.
“It looked like Itsuki was lost, and if Rishia were to see such a figure of Itsuki–” (Naofumi)
“That’s enough. Thank you Naofumi.” (Rishia)
Even if Rishia became estranged here, I cannot stop her.
“It’s okay. So what happened to Itsuki?” (Rishia)
“The country’s Shadow was monitoring Itsuki but lost sight of him, so his whereabouts are unknown.” (Naofumi)
“Is… is that so.” (Rishia)
We may already consider this an attack by Itsuki already.
Don’t come with nastier methods than Ren and Motoyasu.Brinkmanship (also brinksmanship) is the practice of trying to achieve an advantageous outcome by pushing dangerous events to the brink of active conflict. It occurs in international politics, foreign policy, labour relations, and (in contemporary settings) military strategy involving the threat of nuclear weapons, and high-stakes litigation.
This maneuver of pushing a situation with the opponent to the brink succeeds by forcing the opponent to back down and make concessions. This might be achieved through diplomatic maneuvers by creating the impression that one is willing to use extreme methods rather than concede. During the Cold War, the threat of nuclear force was often used as such an escalating measure.
Origins [ edit ]
Brinkmanship is the ostensible escalation of threats to achieve one's aims. The word was probably coined by Adlai Stevenson in his criticism of the philosophy described as "going to the brink" in an interview with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles under the Eisenhower administration, during the Cold War.[1] In an article written in Life Magazine, John Foster Dulles then defined his policy of brinkmanship as "The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art." [2][3] During the Cold War, this was used as a policy by the United States to coerce the Soviet Union into backing down militarily. Eventually, the threats involved might become so huge as to be unmanageable at which point both sides are likely to back down. This was the case during the Cold War; the escalation of threats of nuclear war, if carried out, are likely to lead to mutually assured destruction.[4]
Credible threats [ edit ]
For brinkmanship to be effective, the sides continuously escalate their threats and actions. However, a threat is ineffective unless credible—at some point, an aggressive party may have to prove its commitment to action.
The chance of things sliding out of control is often used in itself as a tool of brinkmanship, because it can provide credibility to an otherwise incredible threat. The Cuban Missile Crisis presents an example in which opposing leaders, namely U.S. president John F. Kennedy and Russian Leader Nikita Khrushchev, continually issued warnings, with increasing force, about impending nuclear exchanges, without necessarily validating their statements. Pioneering game theorist Thomas Schelling called this "the threat that leaves something to chance."[5]
Cold War [ edit ]
Brinkmanship was an effective tactic during the cold war because neither side of a conflict could contemplate mutual assured destruction in a nuclear war, acting as a nuclear deterrence for both the side threatening to pose damage and the country on the'receiving end'. Ultimately, it worsened the relationship between the USSR and the US.[6]
Conceptualization [ edit ]
In the spectrum of the Cold War, the concept of brinkmanship involved the West and the Soviet Union using fear tactics and intimidation as strategies to make the opposing faction back down. Each party pushed dangerous situations to the brink, with the intention of making the other back down in matters of international politics and foreign policy, to obtain concessions. Nevertheless, in the Cold War both parties were confronted with devastating consequences since the threats of nuclear war were unmanageable in any situation. By escalating threats of nuclear war and massive retaliation, both parties were forced to respond with more force. The principle of this tactic was that each party would prefer not to yield to the other; however, one would simply have to yield since if neither of the parties yielded, the outcome would be the worst possible for both. The problem, however, was that yielding would result in being labelled as the weaker of the two and in the Cold War both the Soviet Union and the United States had a reputation to uphold to both their populations and their neighboring countries or allies, thus making brinkmanship utterly risky. Since neither country would budge, the only way to avoid mutually assured destruction (MAD) was compromise. The British philosopher, mathematician, and intellectual Bertrand Russell compared it to the game of chicken:[7]
Since the nuclear stalemate became apparent, the governments of East and West have adopted the policy which Mr. Dulles calls 'brinksmanship.' This is a policy adapted from a sport which, I am told, is practiced by some youthful degenerates. This sport is called 'Chicken!'.
Contextualization [ edit ]
The Soviet Union and the West spent nearly 50 years on the brink of war. During conflicts like the Cuban Missile Crisis the tensions escalated to the point where it seemed as if the Cold War would turn into an actual weaponized war. Brinkmanship was one of the steps prior to the point where war would actually break out.
In a conflict between two nations that were so ideologically opposed, it seemed as if drastic policies such as brinkmanship were the only way to come to any sense of agreement. Both the United States and the Soviet Union maintained strict policies not to respond to military threats at this time, but by making the possibility of a war more and more likely, the two nations were able to make significant progress in discussions and peace.
Eisenhower's "New Look" policy [ edit ]
U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "New Look" policy reverted to the older notion that they could contain the Soviet Union, assuming that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was aiming to expand the Soviet's further still. This tactic was supposed to isolate Soviet Russia so that communism could not spread and would collapse in on itself. To enforce this tactic they set up many alliances with countries that would have been considered to be within the Soviet sphere of influence. As it was now known that the Soviets possessed nuclear weapons which stood the US and the Russians on more of an even playing field. To combat this problem, Eisenhower threatened to use all of his arsenal if the Soviets took offensive measures. This was a bold move as it established the stakes to be extremely high, as this action could cause mass destruction for either side. This threat caused an increase and buildup of tension, neither one wanting to pull the trigger on the other for fear of what the reaction might be.
"Flexible Response" was a defense strategy executed by John F. Kennedy in 1961. Its aim was to address the Kennedy administration's skepticism of Eisenhower's new look and its policy of Massive Retaliation. Flexible response requires mutually assured destruction (MAD) at tactical, strategic and conventional levels, bestowing upon the United States the ability to respond to aggression across the spectrum of warfare.
Flexible response required the continuous presence of substantial conventional forces. The forces were to serve two purposes; acting as a deterrent and fighting limited wars. Kennedy hoped to deter all wars regardless of their nature. Although both Eisenhower and Dulles wanted to achieve goals similar to those of Kennedy, they were rather the more concerned with cost. In order to avoid both escalation and humiliation, Kennedy highlighted the importance of adequate flexibility and disregarded cost. Prior to nuclear war, Kennedy wished to increase the range of available options. He also believed that the European allies should be contributing more to their own defense. Fundamentally, the notion of flexible response was to "increase the ability to confine the response to non-nuclear weapons".[8]
Practices and effects of Cold War [ edit ]
Korean War (1950–1953) [ edit ]
The Korean War was a military conflict between the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). It started on June 25, 1950, and was ended with the Korean Armistice Agreement on July 27, 1953. With the United States supporting the Republic of Korea, and the Soviet Union supporting the DPRK, the Korean War was the first armed conflict of the Cold War, escalating tensions between the two. In September 1949, the USSR tested its first A-Bomb,[9] making a 'limited war' virtually impossible.
Fears of communism had risen after the Second Red Scare, led by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, indirectly calling for a policy to limit Communist Threat: NSC 68. In accordance with NSC 68, a report which stated that all communist activities were controlled by Joseph Stalin, leader of the USSR, and called for military and economic aid to any country deemed to be resisting Communist threats, the United States sent troops to South Korea when it was invaded by the North on June 25, 1950. While it contradicted the report, in that the United States was once again at war (the report stated that the United States should avoid war), President Harry S. Truman feared a 'domino effect,' and wanted to prevent Communism spreading, stating:
If we let Korea down, the Soviets will keep right on going and swallow up one piece of Asia after another.... If we were to let Asia go, the Near East would collapse and no telling what would happen in Europe.... Korea is like the Greece of the Far East. If we are tough enough now, if we stand up to them like we did in Greece three years ago, they won't take any more steps.[10]
With the USSR boycotting the UN Security Council (because the US refused Communist China entry), the United Nations, supported by the United States, freely passed a resolution requesting military action against North Korea. Led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the UN Forces arrived along with the US Forces on July 1, 1950. While Truman believed that the North Korean atomic threat was "a threat based on contingency planning to use the bomb, rather than the faux pas so many assume it to be," (and hence not just brinkmanship), he continuously opted for limited war. His beliefs in ceasefire and peacekeeping between the North and the South were cause for great conflict with MacArthur, who sought total war. MacArthur believed that the United States should take the opportunity to wipe out communism permanently before it grew stronger, using all of its weapons, hence turning the war into nuclear war.[11] MacArthur was dismissed as a result of his continuous defiance to Truman and other superiors on April 11, 1951, after he sent an ultimatum to the Chinese Army, without consent of Truman.
As historian Bruce Cumings noted,[12] the Korean War heightened the Cold War, bringing both nations closer to a nuclear war. The United States wanted to ensure that the United Nations wouldn't fail, as it had done with the League of Nations, and hence wanted to show off its power to the world. Additionally, it wanted to exhibit that it could still tame the communist threat, now also present in Asia. Similarly, the Soviet Union wanted to demonstrate its newly built military strength to the United States.[13]
Berlin Crisis [ edit ]
Between 1950 and 1961, "the refugee flow continued at a rate of 100,000 to 200,000 annually" with people moving from the East to the West. The economic conditions were better in West Berlin than in East Berlin, and therefore attracted more young workers. Trying to find a way to stop the people from moving, Walter Ulbricht, president of East Germany, pressured the Soviet Union to help with the matter of Berlin and emigration. Khrushchev wanted the Western Allies to either leave Berlin or sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany, fearing that West Germany would economically and politically overwhelm East Germany, in turn undermining the Warsaw Pact that the Soviet Union dominated.[14]
On November 10, 1958, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a speech in which he demanded that the Western Powers pulled out of Western Berlin within six months. Furthermore, Khrushchev declared that East Germany was to take control of all communication lines and therefore, West Berlin would only be accessible by the permission of East Germany. Interpreting Khrushchev's speech as an ultimatum, the United States, France, and Britain declined the ultimatum and said that they would remain in West Berlin.
In 1959, the Big Four powers held a conference in Geneva where the foreign ministers attempted to negotiate an agreement on Berlin. However, the conference did not do much, other than open up talks between the Soviet Union and United States. The USSR wanted Western powers out of West Berlin in an attempt to reunify Berlin. The United States refused to give up the freedom of West Berliners. In 1961, Khrushchev met with Kennedy and they continued to solve the issue on Berlin. Again, Khrushchev sent an ultimatum to the United States, asking them to leave West Berlin. As a result, Kennedy increased military and defense expenditures.
On August 13, 1961, Walter Ulbricht had ordered barbed wire between East and West Berlin. The barbed wire was later changed to cement walls. This prevented the movement between the two sides. The division between the two Berlins was known as "The Berlin Wall". The United States heavily condemned the Berlin wall and responded by placing troops on the West German side. Their actions were followed by Soviet Union, when they placed their troops and tanks on the East German side. This led to the iconic image of tanks facing each other at "Checkpoint Charlie", which symbolized the East-West division, which is the division of the east and west parts of Germany.
Any action taken by either of the troops had the possibility of resulting in a nuclear war between the USSR and the US. As a result, in the summer of 1961 John F. Kennedy met with Khrushchev in Vienna in order to try to find a solution regarding the problem of Berlin. Kennedy suggested Khrushchev to remove the Soviet troops, after which the United States would remove their troops. However, they found no solution, because neither side was ready to make concessions. The conference ended with Khrushchev issuing another ultimatum to the United States, giving them six months to get out of Berlin. The division of Berlin had become a symbol for the success of capitalism and showed a sharp contrast between the communist and capitalist system.[15] As a result, Kennedy refused to back down and instead prepared for military action, leading to further military escalation by Khrushchev.[15]
Cuban Missile Crisis [ edit ]
A prime example of brinkmanship during the Cold War was the Cuban Missile Crisis (15.10.62 - 28.10.62), a 13-day conflict between the US, USSR and Cuba.[16] The US and the USSR, each armed with nuclear weapons, both practiced brinkmanship during this conflict. The Cuban Missile Crisis was not only the closest the US and USSR came to an armed conflict[17] during The Cold War, but also, to this day, the "closest the world has come to [a full-scale] nuclear war."[18]
The crisis was caused by the placement of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba, an island that was within the "Sphere of Influence" and launching distance of the US. This was arguably an act of brinkmanship from the USSR, intimidating the US with weapons within the region. The US responded to the presence of the weapons by blockading Cuba.[19] The Cuban blockade was also an act of brinkmanship since the US, instead of succumbing to the pressure from the USSR, decided to see how the Soviets would react to the US stopping their vessels from entering Cuba.
It can be argued that Brinkmanship, in this case, went too far. Had the US attacked Cuba through an airstrike to eliminate the weapons, the USSR may have responded in Berlin where NATO would have been pulled into a war. Had the US left the weapons where they were they would have been a threat to the majority of the American population, in the case of a Cuban missile strike. In either of the cases, retaliation could have led to a full-scale nuclear war. Had any of the two superpowers been pushed over the brink the lives of millions of people would have been at stake.
Successful brinkmanship, however, is when you push your enemy to the brink of war, but not over it, getting him to back down under the pressure. Considering this, Brinkmanship during the Cuban Missile Crisis was successful, as war was avoided. The crisis, however, was a peculiar case of brinkmanship since the two opposing powers had near equal power [20] during the crisis. Thus, in order to avoid war, both powers backed down and compromised, the Soviets removing their weapons from Cuba and the Americans secretly agreeing to remove missiles from Turkey. [2]
Arms race [ edit ]
The US was building up its missiles, with President Eisenhower issuing the National Defense Education Act in 1958, which was an attempt to close the missile gap with the Soviets. It gave funds to U.S. schools to start researching more so that the United States' military could catch up with the Soviet's technology. Eisenhower also started NASA from NACA, several research laboratories, and parts of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, see Creation of NASA.
Aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis [ edit ]
Détente [ edit ]
The Détente was essentially a stilling of the waters between the US and the USSR. It was started by Richard Nixon, elected President of the United States in 1968, and his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger and continued on through to 1980 and the start of the'second Cold War'.[10] It focused on a 'philosophical deepening' of American foreign policy to adjust to the changing international order as opposed to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations which were too single-minded in their pursuit of victory in Vietnam.[21] This move away from focusing solely on military buildup heralded a 12-year period wherein the world experienced a kind of peace due to the decreased tensions between the US and the USSR.
Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War [ edit ]
Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president of the United States on January 20, 1981. His idea of how nuclear relations was, from the outset, much different from the Détente's goal of'stability'.[10] He effectively ended the previously accepted agreement of Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, between the USSR by almost immediately increasing the pace of the buildup of arms in the US to an unprecedented rate. As well as the buildup of conventional arms, military technology was also improved. With the introduction of the stealth bomber and neutron bomb, the US again began to pull away from the Soviet Union. But the most pivotal among these was the Strategic Defense Initiative which, though it was later called 'Star Wars' because of its improbability, simultaneously brought the US to the brink of war with the USSR as the SDI nullified the idea of MAD as well as induced arms talks between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the USSR.[10]
Donald Trump and North Korea [ edit ]
The North Korean Nuclear crisis, during the presidency of US president Donald Trump, has been described as representing brinkmanship between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.[22][23]
See also [ edit ]The big-budget franchise comedy opened to an estimated $46 million in North America, a problematic start for a movie with a net production budget of $144 million.
During box-office press calls on Sunday morning, Sony executives were in full spin mode as they declared Paul Feig's all-female Ghostbusters reboot a triumph, pointing out that the $46 million opening was the biggest launch for a live-action comedy since Pitch Perfect 2 took in $69.2 million in May 2015.
"We are ecstatic with this opening. We have successfully restarted an important brand," Josh Greenstein, president of worldwide marketing and distribution, told The Hollywood Reporter.
But box-office analysts and rival studios are skeptical that Sony has indeed relaunched the storied franchise, considering $46 million is a problematic start for a movie with a net production budget of $144 million (rebates and tax incentives brought it down from $154 million). Ideally, they say, it should have opened to $60 million or more.
Feig's previous female-skewing comedies — including Bridesmaids and The Heat — were extraordinarily successful thanks to incredible multiples, as they held on week after week at the box office. But they cost a fraction of what Ghostbusters did. And they were stand-alone offerings, not a VFX-driven franchise comedy designed to revive a 30-year-old, marquee film series.
When factoring in marketing costs — the price tag for promoting a summer tentpole globally can be upward of $150 million — Ghostbusters may have to earn $375 million to $400 million worldwide to break even for Sony and partner Village Roadshow Pictures. That means it needs to do sizable business overseas, since it could top out in the $130 million range domestically. (Sony insiders counter that the break-even number is $300 million.)
Overseas, the jury is still out. Ghostbusters debuted in only a few major markets this weekend, earning $19.1 million, with first-place finishes in two major English-speaking markets, the U.K. ($6.1 million) and Australia ($3.7 million). Some analysts caution that comedy doesn't travel as well as other genres. And China is not allowing Ghostbusters into the country.
When Tom Rothman replaced Amy Pascal as chief of Sony's movie studio in 2015, he shaved at least $15 million off the Ghostbusters budget, but the risk remained high.
"The more I ponder it, the worse this scenario plays out. Curiosity played a big factor in the $46 million debut and, as such, I doubt it will hold like a typical Feig comedy. In fact, I think it's going to drop big-time when Star Trek Beyond and Ice Age: Collision Course open next week," says box-office analyst Jeff Bock.
"I know Sony is crowing about it being a great opening for a comedy, but the entire Ghostbusters legacy is what's at stake here, and it's not looking good. This was supposed to be a blockbuster," he continues. "Sony definitively did not launch a franchise, and seemingly they might be the only ones that don't know it. I know it's been a tough road for them, and I feel for them."
For the past two years, Sony and Feig have had to ward off criticism from some outspoken male fans who were unhappy with Feig's decision to go with a female cast headed by Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon and Kristen Wiig as the ghoul chasers, who were famously played by Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd in Ivan Reitman's 1984 classic film. (Reitman produced the update alongside Pascal.)
In a recent interview with THR, Rothman insisted the online bashing was "the greatest thing that ever happened. Are you kidding me? We’re in the national debate, thank you. Can we please get some more haters to say stupid things?"
At the same time, Sony made sure to court males in its marketing campaign, creating special promos that aired on ABC during the NBA Finals.
It's impossible to determine whether the naysayers hurt the movie because the opening weekend demographics were inconclusive. Men didn't exactly stay away, but women didn't show up in compensatory numbers either.
In fact, while Ghostbusters didn't play like a chick flick in North America, it didn't perform like an all-audience summer tentpole either. Instead, it landed somewhere in between. Females made up about 56 percent of the audience — versus 75 percent or more for a Pitch Perfect or Bridesmaids — while more than 60 percent of the audience was over the age of 25.
"If foreign grosses don't pick up the slack, this will go down as another big disappointment for Sony, who based their entire summer on this brand," says Bock.
Ghostbusters did earn generally good reviews, but audiences gave it a B+ CinemaScore, instead of a resounding A.Posted December 20, 2017 at 1:48 am
Firstly, I'm planning to take Monday off from the story comic for Christmas. Should still be an EGS:NP Monday, this Friday should be normal, but I want the 25th off because Santa needs my help to deliver--I mean, family gatherings and such over the weekend and Monday! Yes. Moving on.
Actual Comic Commentary
Well, of COURSE Pandora can't get into the details right now! There are vampires running about, and answers lead to more questions and more answers and more questions!
Fortunately, Diane and Zeus can at least clear up a few things. Or, at the very least, provide a theory worthy enough by my estimation to deserve panel space.
Zeus's theory raises some obvious questions, of course, but I'm not going to fling references and commentary about those until the next comic, because you just KNOW he's going to elaborate while some actiony thing is going on with Raven.
Exposition is the ultimate combat music. You didn't know?
- EGS:NP during the RIGHT NOW IT'S ALREADY UPDays after Hurricane Matthew pummeled Haiti with 145 mile-an-hour winds and drenching rain, local authorities say that the full scope of the disaster is still unclear. (See dramatic lightning sprites dance over Hurricane Matthew.)
What is already evident, however, is that the Category 4 hurricane, which struck Haiti on October 4, has leveled another blow of destruction on an island nation still reeling from the 2010 earthquake and a subsequent cholera crisis.
"Haiti was already struggling, so it doesn't have a lot of capacity to respond to the hurricane," says Andrew McConnell, a photojournalist who is on the scene. "Yet it may take the brunt of it."
Haitian officials have reported nearly nine hundred deaths so far, yet information has only slowly emerged from the southern department of Grand-Anse, near the point where Matthew made landfall. Communications in Grand-Anse have been knocked out, and roads in the area remain impassible, according to the Associated Press.
In addition, the La Digue Bridge, which serves as the primary link between the capital of Port-au-Prince and the stricken southern areas of the country, collapsed during the storm.
The situation on the ground is quite chaotic, says McConnell. "Rivers are swollen, lots of trees are down, and people’s homes have been destroyed," he says. "People are being carried on motorbikes and on others' backs."
Hospitals are overflowing and many people are seeking temporary shelter, with few options.
Hurricane Matthew is currently battering the Bahamas with 125 mile-an-hour winds and is expected to hit the southeastern United States tomorrow as the first major hurricane in a decade.
As the world's attention shifts toward the northern track of the storm, McConnell says he hopes people don't forget about Haiti. "They are likely to need a lot of assistance in the coming days," he says. "I hope my photos help show that."We've seen some amazing football receptions before. And interceptions.But never, at any level, have we seen a catch that 6-foot-2, 200-pound Gillett (Wis.) senior defensive tackle Brian Zahn pulled off in a 30-6 loss to Crivitz on Friday.Late in the first half, Crivitz quarterback Sebastian Atwood, attempting to kill the clock, spiked the ball straight down — with authority, even.Somehow, Zahn, anticipating the spike, made a diving attempt and somehow got his hands underneath the ball to make the seen-to-be-believed interception.Odell Beckham Jr., Willie Mays, Jim Edmonds, Lynn Swann and Calvin Johnson have nothing on this catch. Everything had to be perfectly timed. He had far less than a second to brace for the ball that was fired at such a high velocity.Simply spectacular.Zahn told MaxPreps Monday that two plays earlier, he noticed that when Atwood spiked the ball, it bounced up and hit him in the hip."It was so close to me, I thought to myself, 'If he does it again, I should just try to catch it,'" said Zahn, a three-sport standout at the small Northern Wisconsin school. "What have I got to lose?"On the interception, Zahn was chop-blocked at the line and just dove where he thought Atwood might spike it and put his hands out."I couldn't believe it landed in my hands," he said. "I just got lucky. I can't believe the referee noticed too."A student with a 4.14 GPA and the team's starting center, long snapper and defensive tackle, Zahn made his own luck, said his coach Rick Kamps."In more than 20 years of coaching, I've not only never seen anyone make that play, but even attempt it," Kamps said. "I don't think anyone has probably ever considered it.... I had a totally delayed reaction when it happened. I was watching, but it was like, 'What just happened?' I couldn't believe it. No one could."Zahn said he never ever considered trying to intercept a spike until the first one hit him in the hip."If I tried it a thousand times, I don't think I could make that play again," he said. "I think it was just a once-in-a-lifetime thing."Summary
Description Antonin Dvorak - symphony no. 9 in e minor 'from the new world', op. 95 - ii. largo.ogg Symphony no. 9 in e minor 'from the new world', op. 95 - ii. largo. Unknown date Unknown date Source http://www.musopen.com Author creator QS:P170,Q7298 (see Musopen for performance author information) Permission
(Reusing this file) use this content, you do not need to request permission as long as you follow any licensing requirements mentioned on this page. This work is free and may be used by anyone for any purpose. If you wish to, you do not need to request permission as long as you follow any licensing requirements mentioned on this page. Wikimedia has received an e-mail confirming that the copyright holder has approved publication under the terms mentioned on this page. This correspondence has been reviewed by an OTRS member and stored in our permission archive. The correspondence is available to trusted volunteers. If you have questions about the archived correspondence, please use the OTRS noticeboard.
Ticket link: https://ticket.wikimedia.org/otrs/index.pl?Action=AgentTicketZoom&TicketNumber=2008012110017088
Licensing
Music
Public domain Public domain false false
This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or less. You must also include a United States public domain tag to indicate why this work is in the public domain in the United States.
Recording
Public domain Public |
is wresting yet more control away from it, but it also won't come as a surprise. "It might be a big death blow to smaller companies," says Everett, who is banking the future of his company in part on an alternative platform called Heello, which Twitpic launched last year. The news, he tells me, was "one of those things we thought was coming."
Reached by phone, a representative for ImageShack, which operates the popular yfrog hosting service, declined to comment.A newly-released internal investigation by the US Air Force has shown a plague of non-mission-related accidents involving drones in its foreign operations. Meanwhile, Washington is pushing ahead with plans to allow drones into US civil airspace.
The report shows Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) crashing consistently and unpredictably due to a wide array of failures from technical malfunction, to complications in dealing with air traffic controllers, to downright incompetence. The documents, obtained by the Washington Post, number several thousand pages, and show that at least seven drones have crashed near airports in the past two years.
One account from April describes a sub-contracted operator launching an $8.9 million MQ-9 Reaper from the runway at the Seychelles International Airport without getting the go-head from the control tower. The same operator then accidentally switched off the engine without noticing and then tried an emergency landing, but did not release the wheels.
The aircraft was a write-off. It was the second similar accident at the site in just five months.
“I will be blunt here. I said, ‘I can’t believe this is happening again,’ ” the report cites an Air Force official present at the scene as saying. He later adds, “You go, ‘How stupid are you?’”.
The UAV, which was flown using a brand new, top secret technology that enabled it to be controlled locally and not from an air base in the US, was sub-contracted to Merlin RAMCo, an obscure US company.
Reports say Merlin RAMCo employed inexperienced pilots and was exempt from efficient local supervision as it had signed a highly classified contract with the Air Force. All this, while operating from an airport that is also heavily used by civilian planes.
In Djibouti – which the US uses as a base for its operations against Somali pirates and Al-Qaeda fighters in Yemen – five drones have crashed in recent years.
Reports describe tension with local air traffic controllers, who are not used to working with unfamiliar equipment, and its specific demands.
They also describe several crashes. Including one of an air drone whose throttle had failed, but which was carrying a live missile. Luckily, it did not explode upon impact.
US officials insist the safety record of its recent drones corresponds to that of the generally reliable F-16 at a similar stage of development and will only improve.
Coming to a sky near you?
Currently, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) only allows drones in the US to fly on specially-approved missions, mostly around airbases.
But this is expected to change rapidly, after legislation was passed this year that drones must be fully integrated into the US airspace by 2015 – flying alongside passenger jets.
Whatever technological tools are the fingertips of current generation pilots, all current safety strategies use visuals – “see-and-avoid” – as the ultimate accident prevention measure. The drone pilots do not have the same visibility, and cannot make the split-second decisions that are often required. Even with electronic data about their craft, they are also not able to fully assess the problems when equipment starts to malfunction. For instance, the Air Force reports noted several occasions where pilots would have been able to notice errors if they simply heard the noise the aircraft was making.
Even FAA has balked at the demanded rate of progress and violations of privacy concerns, taking its time to designate test sites.
But UAV manufacturers are pushing for the deadline to be maintained. As the United States scales back its foreign involvement, it plans to redeploy at least some of its 6,000 drones for domestic use. Only last week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said drones would be increasingly used “outside declared combat zones”
The FAA estimates that there will be 30,000 UAVs in active use by 2020.Cyber Dust lets you communicate freely and openly with anyone, anywhere. Discover and follow likeminded individuals, celebrities, athletes and professionals all in one place. Connect with friends, family and people you follow with secure disappearing messages, photos and video. You can message one to one and in group chats. Engage with your followers by blasting out content to everyone and receiving private personal responses. Build a community around a team, industry, interest or location. Cyber Dust makes it easy to connect, share, be inspired, and inspire others. **Cyber Dust prevents capturing QuickTime Screencasts on OSX Yosemite using our exclusive patent pending technology** Other great features include: Blast messages, videos, and photos to all your followers Fully encrypted messages are never touch a hard drive Detection of who can and can’t screenshot Screenshot notifications Share photos, videos, stickers, emojis and more Group messaging with 100+ friends at once User profiles now have a bio and website link Securely send your location Create custom blast lists and organize your friends Sent and Read confirmations What Cyber Dust users are saying: “I follow celebs, athletes and business experts. The content is exclusive and valuable. Best of all I can ask questions and get answers." “I use it to communicate with my coworkers. We cam exchange ideas and discuss projects privately” "We use Cyber Dust to blast out links to our articles. The click throughs compared to any other social media platform are far greater. Our traffic is way up." "I love the communities. I have made amazing friends.” “I’ve been able to build more than 1k followers in weeks and it translated to real engagements. For me, Cyber Dust has been amazon for my brand.” “Our frat uses it to send updates, meeting reminders, and more. It’s replaced out listserv. It’s truly private.” Have a question, concern or feedback? Tweet @dustsupport on twitter or message +cdteam on Cyber DustA former port on the Mississippi River in north Minneapolis is closer to being reinvented as a mixed-use development, featuring parkland and a riverside amphitheater.
City Council and Park Board committees this week advanced plans to work with United Properties to redevelop the 48-acre site known as the Upper Harbor Terminal. More planning will begin once the parties negotiate and formally approve an exclusive rights agreement. The team estimates the conceptual design process will take at least one year and additional time will be required for detailed design and construction plans.
“Although we have an unanswered questions about sound, people are excited about an entertainment venue on the river in north Minneapolis,” City Council President Barb Johnson said at a committee meeting Tuesday.
The port is in her ward, and she said people are interested in the jobs that could come with redevelopment. The port, owned by the city, has been vacant since the end of 2014.
United Properties’ pitch for the site — the only submission the city and Park Board received — includes 180,000 square feet of manufacturing space, up to 150,000 square feet of office space, no more than 70,000 square feet of retail, and 700 to 1,000 housing units in addition to the amphitheater and parkland. Thor Construction and First Avenue are among United Properties partners for the site.
Brandon Champeau, vice president at United Properties, said the company has been interested in the site for months. A “48-acre site on the river, these are rare opportunities to develop,” he said.
More planning, with community input, could take up to two years. The site will be divided into public and private uses, and they will have to figure out what to do with a power line that runs through the site and historic port structures.
Kate Lamers, design project manager for the Park Board, said the plan also will address ways to pay for the development. United Properties has estimated that its proposal could cost $500 million — money that likely would come from a variety of private and public sources.
“This is an innovative way for the city and Park Board to work together,” said Commissioner Scott Vreeland. “I am pleased with the process so far. I know we’ve a long way to go.”
Area residents have said they are excited about the creation of a large new park that connects people to the river, but also have questions about how it will fit in an industrial area. Nancy Przymus, of the Bottineau neighborhood association, noted that the amphitheater, as currently proposed, would be near a plant that manufactures shingles. “It would make it impossible to have this new amphitheater on the river,” she said.
People who submitted comments during community meetings and responded to an online survey said they liked amphitheater, although some raised questions about noise. They also noted the development should consider racial equity and minimize gentrification.WASHINGTON – Drug giant GlaxoSmithKline will plead guilty and pay $3 billion to resolve federal criminal and civil inquiries arising from the company's illegal promotion of some of its products, its failure to report safety data and alleged false price reporting, the Justice Department announced Monday.
The company agreed to plead guilty to three criminal counts, including two counts of introducing misbranded drugs — Paxil and Wellbutrin — and one count of failing to report safety data about the drug Avandia to the Food and Drug Administration.
The $3 billion fine will be the largest penalty ever paid by a drug company, Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole said. The company also agreed to be monitored by government officials for five years to attempt to ensure the company's compliance, Cole said.
Under the terms of the plea agreement, GSK will pay a total of $1 billion, including a criminal fine of $956,814,400. The company also will pay $2 billion to resolve civil claims under the federal government's False Claims Act.
Prosecutors said GlaxoSmithKline illegally promoted the drug Paxil for treating depression in children from April 1998 to August 2003, even though the FDA never approved it for anyone under age 18. The corporation also promoted the drug Wellbutrin from January 1999 to December 2003 for weight loss, the treatment of sexual dysfunction, substance addictions and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, although it was only approved for treatment of major depressive disorder.
GlaxoSmithKline CEO Sir Andrew Witty expressed regret and said they have learned "from the mistakes that were made."
"Today brings to resolution difficult, long-standing matters for GSK," he said in a statement. "Whilst these originate in a different era for the company, they cannot and will not be ignored."
Crimes and civil violations like those in the GlaxoSmithKline case have been widespread in the pharmaceutical industry and have produced a series of case with hefty fines. One reason some have said the industry regards the fines as simply a cost of doing business is because aggressively promoting drugs to doctors for uses not officially approved — including inducing other doctors to praise the drugs to colleagues at meetings — has quickly turned numerous drugs from mediocre sellers into blockbusters, with more than $1 billion in annual sales.
In the last few years, the Justice Department has become much more aggressive in pursuing such fraud, often in whistleblower cases taken on by a handful of U.S. attorneys focused on such fraud. Among the most active are the U.S. attorneys in Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco— all in regions with numerous pharmaceutical and biotech company operations.
The prior record-setting case involved Pfizer, the world's biggest drugmaker. Pfizer paid the government $2.3 billion in criminal and civil fines for improperly marketing 13 different drugs, including Viagra and cholesterol fighter Lipitor. Pfizer was accused of encouraging doctors to prescribe its drugs with free golf, massages, and junkets to posh resorts.
It is illegal to promote uses for a drug that have not been approved by the FDA — a practice known as off-label marketing.
"Let me be clear, we will not tolerate health care fraud," Cole told a news conference at the Justice Department. He would not say whether any company executives were under investigation. The company's guilty plea and sentence have to be approved by a federal court in Massachusetts.
"For far too long, we have heard that the pharmaceutical industry views these settlements merely as the cost of doing business," Acting Assistant Attorney General Stuart F. Delery, head of Justice's civil division, said at the news conference. "That is why this administration is committed to using every available tool to defeat health care fraud."
Delery added, "Today's resolution seeks not only to punish wrongdoing and recover taxpayer dollars, but to ensure GSK's future compliance with the law." He noted that a similar recent settlement with Abbott Laboratories also included continuing compliance monitoring.
Justice Department officials also said that between 2001 and 2007 GlaxoSmithKline failed to report to the FDA on safety data from certain post-marketing studies and from two studies of the cardiovascular safety of the diabetes drug Avandia. Since 2007, the FDA has added warnings to the Avandia label to alert doctors about potential increased risk of congestive heart failure and heart attack.
The drug corporation agreed to resolve civil liability for promoting the drugs Paxil, Wellbutrin, Advair, Lamictal and Zofran for off-label, non-covered uses. The company also resolved accusations that it paid kickbacks to doctors to prescribe those drugs as well as the drugs Imitrex, Lotronex, Flovent and Valtrex.
Of the penalties, $1 billion covers criminal fines and forfeitures and $2 billion is for civil settlements with the federal government and the state governments of Massachusetts and Colorado.
Glaxo is pleading guilty to these violations of FDA regulations, which are misdemeanors. It has set aside $3.5 billion to cover the cost of the fines and other penalties related to the government's seven-year probe of the company's marketing practices for Paxil, Wellbutrin and Avandia, three of its blockbuster drugs.
The company earlier set aisde $3 billion for legal costs tied to health problems that people taking Avandia and the other medicines are at risk of suffering.
Glaxo has already paid more than $700 million to resolve patient lawsuits, alleging Avandia caused heart attacks and strokes. Many of the Avandia cases have been consolidated before a federal judge in Philadelphia.
In a statement, GlaxoSmithKline said it disagreed with some statements the Justice Department made in court papers. For example, the company said its settlement with the government does "not constitute an admission of any liability or wrongdoing in the selling and marketing of Lamictal, Zofran, Imitrex, Lotronex, Flovent, Valtrex, Avandia or Advair products. The government also made allegations about Paxil, Wellbutrin that the company did not admit."
"The civil settlement agreement contains many allegations that are either inaccurate or incomplete, that selectively tell only parts of the story, and that draw unwarranted conclusions from disputed facts," the company said.While The Joker ruled in Arkham Asylum and returned for a major arc in Arkham City, in Arkham Origins we’re seeing a much deeper underworld. Click the jump to see more.
Game Informer shreds more light on the setting of the new game, Arkham Origins. According to them, setting is more like midwinter of “Year 2” of the Batman’s crime-fighting career, with the Christmas time setting giving them. Gotham will be a much larger world than the previous games, and will also represent a world lost to time, much like Batman: The Animated Series. The locations fans remember in Arkham City will still be there – but as normal locations in the more than twice-as-large city. To navigate the three-tiered city, a fast travel by way of the Bat-plane will be offered for the first time, as well. Very nice, indeed.
So, why use Black Mask this time around? Game Informer spoke to creative director, Eric Holmes who states this about Black Mask:
We realize that Black Mask is not necessarily as prominent in people’s minds as some other classic Batman villains, so we realize we also need to do work to explain why he’s really cool and make him felt in the game. It’s not something people bring a lot of baggage to when you see the Black Mask, so we have to do the work to make him scary. His thing is torture. That is what gets his rocks off. And he’s really good at it.”
Black Mask is definitely a character I want to see in live-action Batman For those of you who do not know who Black Mask is, you can read up on him. See the recommended issues featuring Black Mask.
Want to know more about Black Mask? Here’s the recommended comics reading list: Batman #386, #485-486, #518, #688-697, and Detective Comics #553.
Comment down below, DKN Facebook, or DKNewsCom.
Source- Game InformerThe quest for criminal justice is fraught with uncertainty. Did the defendant commit the crime, or is he a victim of incriminating circumstances? Is he guilty as charged, or has he been charged guilty by an overzealous prosecutor? Unsure about the truth, we often end up guessing ‘He did it’ when he might not have, or ‘He didn’t do it’ when in fact he did.
The only ones who know for sure whether a defendant is guilty or innocent are the defendant himself and God above. Asking the defendant to tell us the truth of the matter is usually useless: spontaneous confessions by the guilty are rare. But what if we could ask God to tell us instead? And what if we did? And what if it worked?
For more than 400 years, between the ninth and the early 13th centuries, that’s exactly what Europeans did. In difficult criminal cases, when ‘ordinary’ evidence was lacking, their legal systems asked God to inform them about defendants’ criminal status. The method of their request: judicial ordeals.
Judicial ordeals took several forms, from dunking the defendant in a pool of holy water to walking him barefoot across burning plowshares. Among the most popular, however, was the ordeal of boiling water and the ordeal of burning iron. In the former, the defendant plunged his hand into a cauldron of boiling water and fished out a ring. In the latter, he carried a piece of burning iron several paces. A few days later, the defendant’s hand was inspected: if it was burned, he was guilty; if not, he was innocent.
Judicial ordeals were administrated and adjudged by priests, in churches, as part of special masses. During such a mass, the priest requested God to reveal to the court the defendant’s guilt or innocence through the ordeal – letting boiling water or burning iron burn the defendant if he were guilty, performing a miracle that prevented the defendant’s hand from being burned if he were innocent. The idea that God would respond to a priest’s request in this way reflected a popular medieval belief according to which ordeals were iudiciua Dei – ‘judgments of God’.
Getting God to judge the guilt or innocence of criminal defendants is a pretty nifty trick if you could pull it off. But how could medieval European courts accomplish this?
Rather easily, it turns out. Suppose you’re a medieval European who’s been accused of stealing your neighbour’s cat. The court thinks you might have committed the theft, but it’s not sure, so it orders you to undergo the ordeal of boiling water. Like other medieval Europeans, you believe in iudicium Dei – that a priest, through the appropriate rituals, can call on God to reveal the truth by performing a miracle that prevents the water from burning you if you’re innocent, letting you burn if you’re not.
If you undergo the ordeal and God says you’re guilty, you have to pay a large fine. If He says you’re innocent, you’re cleared of the charge and pay nothing. Alternatively, you can avoid undergoing the ordeal by confessing to having stolen the cat, in which case you pay the fine, a bit reduced for having admitted your guilt.
What will you do?
Suppose you’re guilty: you know you stole your neighbour’s cat, and so does God. In this case, you expect that if you undergo the ordeal, God will let the boiling water burn you, evidencing your guilt. Thus, you’ll have to pay the large fine – and your hand will be boiled to rags to boot. In contrast, if you confess, you’ll save a bit of money, not to mention your hand. So, if you’re guilty, you’ll confess.
Now suppose you’re innocent: you know you didn’t steal your neighbour’s cat, and again so does God. In this case, you expect that if you undergo the ordeal, God will perform a miracle that prevents the boiling water from burning you, evidencing your innocence. Thus, you won’t have to pay any fine – and you’ll keep your hand intact. This is better than if you confess to stealing the cat, in which case you’d have to pay a fine for a theft you didn’t commit. So, if you’re innocent, you’ll undergo the ordeal.
Did you catch the trick? Because of your belief in iudicium Dei, the spectre of the ordeal leads you to choose one way if you’re guilty – confess – and another way if you’re innocent – undergo the ordeal – revealing the truth about your guilt or innocence to the court through the choice you make. By asking God to out you, the legal system incentivises you to out yourself. Pretty nifty indeed.
There’s just one hitch: while only an innocent defendant will choose to undergo the ordeal, which allows the court to learn that he’s in fact innocent, when he sticks his hand in the boiling water, it burns him, declaring his guilt! To deliver justice, however, the court needs to do more than simply learn that an innocent defendant is innocent – it needs to find him so.
How could an ordeal-administering priest make boiling water innocuous to an innocent defendant’s flesh? By making sure that it wasn’t actually boiling.
The ‘instruction manuals’ for administering ordeals that medieval European priests followed provided them ample opportunity to do just that. The fire used to heat the water was prepared by the priest in private, permitting him to cool the fire. The priest ‘sprinkled’ holy water over the water in the ordeal cauldron, permitting him to cool the water. The ordeal cauldron was removed from the fire at a point during the mass, and the defendant wasn’t tested until the priest was done praying, allowing him to cool the water some more by drawing out his prayers. And ordeal observers were placed at a respectable distance from the ordeal ‘stage’, enabling the priest to carry out his manipulations undetected. Did I mention that it was the priest who adjudged the ordeal’s final outcome – whether the defendant’s hand had indeed been burned?
A ‘miraculous’ result was thus practically assured. For example, in the early 13th century, 208 defendants in Várad in Hungary underwent hot-iron ordeals. Amazingly, nearly two-thirds of defendants were unscathed by the ‘red-hot’ irons they carried and hence exonerated. If the priests who administered these ordeals understood how to heat iron, as they surely did, that leaves only two explanations for the ‘miraculous’ results: either God really did intervene to reveal the defendants’ innocence, or the priests made sure that the iron they carried wasn’t hot.
In practice, it might not have mattered whether ordeals were truly God’s judgments or instead the judgments of clever legal systems that leveraged criminal defendants’ incentives to correctly find fact. For, in either case, the result was the same: improved criminal justice, thanks to God.Jon Jones will be headed to court this afternoon.
The UFC light heavyweight champion is due to appear before Judge Maria Dominguez at 1:30 p.m. local time at the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Court in New Mexico, according to court spokesman Camille Cordova.
Jones was booked in Bernalillo County Metro Detention Center on Monday evening on a felony charge for "leaving the scene of an accident" for his alleged involvement in a hit-and-run crash (pic) that left a pregnant woman, Vannessa Sonnenberg, with a broken arm (read the criminal complaint here).
Jones was released after posting the $2,500 bail amount only a few hours after his surrender.
Witnesses said Jones exited his vehicle and fled the scene on foot, before returning to grab a handful of cash and then again running off, according to the Albuquerque Police Department. An off-duty police officer identified Jones at the scene and a marijuana pipe with marijuana inside of it was also found in the 2015 Silver Buick SUV, Jones was driving.
KOB4 Eyewitness News was outside of the Bernalillo County Metro Detention Center as Jones was released on Monday evening (watch him evade reporters here) and asked Jones' lawyer, Vincent Ward, about his client being under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
"I am obviously not going to get into whatever conversations I've had with my client," Ward said. "We will have our day in court and I fee very confident about that. But I think what's telling is that the complaint speaks for itself; There aren't any allegations with respect to any alcohol or drug use."
More information on this coming shortly.Austrian President Heinz Fischer meeting Russian President Putin in June. Photo: APA/JAEGER
In an interview with a Hungarian news website the Russian nationalist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin has spoken about his vision of a Russian-led Eurasian Union - which would include Austria, as well as Hungary, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia.
Dugin, who has close ties to the Kremlin, has also been linked with right-wing politicians in Austria. Last August he called for a “genocide” of Ukrainians.
The interview with the Hungarian news site alfahir.hu is titled “An empire against the West”. The news site is known to be sympathetic to Hungary’s far-right Jobbik party, the third-largest party in Hungary's parliament.
Asked about his view of Hungary’s future Dugin replies that he envisions an end to nation states and that countries such as Hungary and Austria could be absorbed into a larger ‘Eurasian bloc’.
He adds that this would be part of a new world order which would consist of the United States, Western Europe (led by Germany) and a Eurasian Union led by Russia.
Dugin is believed to be allied with billionaire Konstantin Malofeyev, a conservative Russian Orthodox nationalist, and the pair have reportedly been trying to create an ‘elite club’ of politicians who support the Russian line.
At the end of May 2014, they hosted representatives of far-right political parties at a secret conference in Vienna, including Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ).
A few months later FPÖ politician Johann Gudenus reportedly travelled to Moscow to join a meeting which was critical of the EU and an alleged ‘gay lobby’.A hotel in England has replaced in-room bibles with the erotic bestseller "50 Shades of Grey."
Instead of the standard Gideon bible, the owner of Damson Dene opted for the steamy novel known for its explicit sexual content because he thought it was the hospitable thing to do.
“Because everybody is reading ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’ we thought it would be a hospitable thing to do, to have this available for our guests, especially if some of them were a little bit shy about buying it because of its reputation," hotel owner Jonathan Denby told NBC News.
The hotel said it discretely stashes the bestseller in the bedside table for guests to discover --the place one reserved for the bible.
Denby told NBC he found religious books a “wholly inappropriate” choice for private bedrooms in England’s modern, secular society.
Ironically, Denby bought the Damson Dene Hotel, located in England’s Lake District, from a Methodist group 10 years ago, according to NBC News.
Local vicar The Rev Michael Woodcock said the hotel is trying to cashing in on the EL James novel's runaway success, reports The Telegraph.
"It is just a gimmick really," he said. "But I am sure it will be put back in the future. The more attention that is drawn to this the more bad publicity it gets."
The Damson Dene isn't the only hotel trying to benefit from the book's success.
Several hotels in the U.S. offer "50 Shades of Grey" romance packages that let you live out your wildest Christian Grey-oriented fantasies.
In Seattle, the Edgewater and Hotel Max are offering rooms that include a bottle of Ana's favorite bubbly, Bollinger Rose. Other services include a sail boat trip in Puget Sound and a demo drive in an Audi (Grey's ride of choice).
The Heathman Hotel in Portland, Oregon also has their own “50 Shades of Grey” package, that includes dinner at the hotel, a helicopter tour of Portland and roses for the ladies.The appearance was seen as a crucial moment for the former secretary of State, and the Republican panel lobbed dozens of questions at her about her personal email setup, her longtime associate Sidney Blumenthal, and Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya killed in the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi.
But none of the lawmakers' critiques throughout the course of the long day seemed to stick.
ADVERTISEMENT
If anything, the only serious political damage seemed to have been done to GOP leaders of the panel, who were repeatedly put on defense by harsh barbs from committee’s Democrats.
The stakes were high for both sides coming into Thursday.
Clinton, a Democratic presidential candidate, needed to escape undamaged without losing her calm about the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks that killed four Americans.
Gowdy and fellow committee Republicans needed to prove their worth after a month of allegations that the panel's motivations were at least partly political.
Clinton did her job, keeping her head down and staying cool under GOP pressure.
During a previous appearance in Congress, Clinton lost her temper and pounded on the table to ask Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) “what difference, at this point, does it make” why the attack occurred.
On Thursday, that tone was absent.
Instead, committee Democrats stepped in to offer an assist whenever Clinton needed it, to change the conversation back to Republicans and what Democrats characterized as the GOP’s partisan plan to sink her presidential campaign.
Longtime Clinton allies were thrilled by her testimony, and they maintained that it only added to her recent momentum, beginning with her strong performance in last week's initial Democratic presidential debate.
“It was a textbook performance,” one longtime ally said.
“I don’t think it could have gone any better,” another said. “She schooled them. I think she’s on a roll.”
Tommy Vietor, the National Security Council spokesman during the 2012 attacks and a current Clinton supporter, said Republicans failed to rattle the former secretary of State.
“She was completely calm and relaxed and professional,” Vietor said. “Gowdy was defensive and had to spend much of the time defending the existence of the committee. He looked angry and petty and political.”
At one point, Republicans highlighted the fact that Stevens did not have Clinton’s personal email, even though Blumenthal repeatedly sent her analysis and news clippings about Libya.
Blumenthal had “unfettered access” to the former secretary of State, Gowdy said, while the late ambassador was left going through official State Department bureaucracy.
“There is no record of our security folks ever even making it to your inbox,” the panel chairman claimed.
“It looks like certain things went straight to your inbox and other things did not.”
In response, Clinton insisted that security was appropriately handled by professionals with a long tenure in the field, even though she provided general oversight.
Clinton used the attack to take on broader criticism of her unusual email setup, which has hounded her on the campaign trail.
“I did not conduct most of the business that I did on behalf of our country on email,” Clinton said. In fact, she did not even have a computer in her State Department office, she said.
Blumenthal and his nine-hour, closed-door committee deposition this summer became the subject of intense partisan fire on the committee — all of which Clinton easily ducked.
Democrats engaged in a shouting match with Gowdy over Blumenthal’s deposition, which they have tried to make public. Committee Republicans blocked Democrats’ effort to release the transcript in a vote midway through the hearing.
“What they really don’t want the American people to see is what they asked,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
Republicans have insisted that the committee has limited its scope to issues related to the 2012 Benghazi attacks, but their questions to Blumenthal about his relationship with the Clintons, work with the Clinton Foundation and other matters far outnumber those about Benghazi, Schiff said.
Clinton similarly sidestepped questions about her private email server, answering calmly but sticking to her long-established script that the setup was allowed and handled as properly as she knew how.
Staying above the fray worked for Clinton, said Steve Elmendorf, a lobbyist who is also a Clinton supporter.
“I think she needed to take it seriously,” Elmendorf said. “As ridiculous as many of us on the outside think, it is a congressional committee, and she is a witness and needs to take that seriously and she did just that.”
In December 2012, when then-State Department Deputy Secretary Tom Nides testified in the House and Senate about Benghazi, Clinton offered him a couple of words of encouragement.
“Well, what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger (as I have rationalized for years),” Clinton told Nides in an email at the time, “so just survive and you’ll have triumphed.”
On Thursday, she took those words to heart.Alex Daniel
Mining giant Glencore’s shares were on the up this morning as it announced rising adjusted profits, despite missing analyst estimates and taking a huge 41 per cent hit net income hit from costs relating to its copper and cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The firm also announced a $2bn (£1.53bn) share buyback program after shareholders suffered a tough year, involving a corruption probe and being hit by US sanctions on Russia.
Shares rose 2.89 per cent in early morning trading.
The figures
Glencore’s full-year net income fell 41 per cent to $3.4bn, mainly due to “non-cash impairments” at Mutanda and Mopani, totalling $1.4bn. Adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) were $15.7bn, up eight per cent on last year’s $14.5bn but still missing average analyst estimates of $16.2bn.
The firm saw today assets fall five per cent to $128bn from $135bn, while net debt rose 44 per cent to $14.7bn from $10.2bn.
Why it’s interesting
Glencore shareholders had a difficult 2018, with the firm’s stock falling 26.1 per cent from a 52-week high of 409.8p to 302.75p as it faced a major corruption probe in the US, as well as being hit by added costs relating to US sanctions on Russia.
Its stock underperformed compared to bitter rival BHP Group, and the share buyback program will likely be seen as a reward for sticking out the last 12 months.
The firm also said it would halve copper production at its Mutanda mine in the DRC this year, producing just 100,000 tons. The company said it would lay off workers at the site, where it also mines cobalt.
It also said it would invest in the low-carbon economy, with coal production to be limited to current levels, while added 2019 production was expected to increase overall in all its commodities.
What Glencore said
Chief executive Ivan Glasenberg said: “Our asset portfolio continued to deliver overall competitive all-in unit costs, which allowed the Company to capitalise on healthy average commodity prices and generate attractive margins.
“Our commodity portfolio and its key role in enabling the energy and mobility transition for a low-carbon economy enables us to look ahead with confidence and to remain focused on creating sustainable long-term value for all our shareholders.”
Glencore's companies employ around 158,000 people, including contractors, selling assets to the automotive, steel, power generation, oil and food processing sectors.The personal desktop computer used to once be an exclusive and expensive machine, though we now know it and its laptop counterpart as a mass-market commodity that most people can afford. This week, however, the companies that defined the personal computer, Microsoft and Apple, gave us a glimpse of the future and it looks like a return to the past: the PC is going back to being an exclusive and expensive machine.
Set aside all the explosions of color on gorgeous, high-resolution displays. Ignore the glamorous promo videos and the ultrathin, all-metal chassis of the new Surface Studio and MacBook Pro. Instead, focus on the prices.
From Microsoft, we have the $2,999 Surface Studio, which scales up to $4,199 when you juice up the RAM to 32GB and the storage to 2TB. Also out of Redmond is an updated Surface Book with up to 16 hours of battery life and a $2,399 starting price. That portable computer maxes out at $3,299 with added storage and memory.
Buying the top Surface Studio and MacBook Pro models together would cost you $8,498
Apple’s new MacBook Pro family is universally more expensive than the one it’s replacing: the supposedly entry-level MBP, lacking a Touch Bar, starts at $1,499. To get a Touch Bar, the least you’d need to spend is $1,799, and if you want to go beyond 13 inches, the 15-inch MacBook Pro starts at $2,399. Upgrade the processor and graphics, opt for 2TB of storage, and you’ll reach the incredible heights of $4,299.
Here’s my interpretation of this phenomenon: Apple and Microsoft have both come to terms with the fact that people are simply never going to buy PCs — whether in desktop or laptop form, running Windows or macOS — in the old numbers that they used to. Computers are just too good nowadays, most users are already satisfied, and so the market for new PCs inevitably shrinks. And when you can’t have growth in total sales, the logical move is to try and improve the other multiplier in the profit calculation: the per-unit price and built-in profit margin. That's been Apple's approach for a while, and now Microsoft is joining in.
If you can’t grow sales, grow the profit per sale
Pure hardware providers like Intel, Acer, and Asus have no elegant means to escape the pursuit of "sell more stuff," but Apple and Microsoft’s software control gives them the opportunity to sell people holistic experiences and solutions. Yes, those are terrible buzzwords, but it’s true that Apple’s Touch Bar, fully integrated with macOS and the MacBook Pro’s design, delivers a unique experience. Just as it’s true that a Microsoft Surface Studio is only as appealing as it is because Microsoft has tailored the Windows software to support |
Disapproval of Obama rises in state, poll shows
While a bare majority of voters in solidly blue California still approve of President Obama's job performance, dissatisfaction with his leadership on key issues has increased significantly - especially among those who were once solidly part of his base, according to a Field Poll released Tuesday.
And in a finding that could affect Obama's fellow Democrats as they head into the 2014 elections, the poll shows that just one-third of California voters surveyed say the country is moving in the right direction, while 55 percent believe it is "seriously off on the wrong track." That's a significant decline from February, when 48 percent said the country was on the right track and 44 percent said it was on the wrong track.
The 51 percent of respondents who approve of Obama's performance represents an 11-point slide in the Field Poll since the start of his second term. His disapproval rating stands at 43 percent.
Among those souring on the president are groups that have been among his strongest supporters, the poll showed - Latinos (a 16-point jump in disapproval), union households (18 points) and women (13 points).
Even among Democrats overall, Obama's negative rating is 18 percent, double the total in July.
Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll, said the downward trend is cause for concern for the Democratic Party as it looks toward the 2014 midterm elections.
Obama started his second term with a positive job rating of nearly 2-1, DiCamillo noted, "and now it's only 5-4. And what's most disturbing is that the biggest declines over that period are coming from his base, voters he carried by a huge margin. That's unusual... because it puts more voters in play if they're becoming disaffected."
The sliding right track versus wrong track numbers show that the botched implementation of Obama's signature accomplishment in domestic policy, the Affordable Care Act, is taking a toll on voter confidence, DiCamillo said. "Now people are not feeling good, even with a Democrat in the White House," he said.
Obama's approval-disapproval numbers on the issue of health care have suffered markedly, the poll showed. Half of those surveyed disapprove of Obama's performance in that area, compared with 43 percent who approve. In March 2010, when the health care law was approved, the numbers were split, 45-45 percent.
On foreign policy, Obama's approval-disapproval ratings are now 49-40 percent, down significantly from October 2009, when he enjoyed a 58-29 percent advantage, the poll showed.
The Field Poll surveyed 766 registered voters in California from Nov. 14 to Dec. 1. The margin of error on the overall job-approval rating was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points; among the smaller sample groups, the margin of error was plus or minus 4.5 points.Police are appealing for information after men in a van pulled up next to school boys and drove off.
Two boys had just left St Elphege’s School, in Wallington, after an athletics club meeting on Tuesday at 4.50pm when two men pulled up near them in a white or grey VW Transporter van outside school.
The men inside the van are described as white, one is his 30s and the other in his 40s.
No words were exchanged and there was no physical contact between the men or the pupils.
The Beddington South Safer Neighbourhoods Team (SNT) is treating the incident as suspicious.
No vehicle registration number was reported to police.
If you have any information contact Beddington South SNT on 020 8721 2073, Sutton Police station on 101 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
TODAY'S TOP SUTTON STORIESHypocrisy in Church, Journalism, Politicians, All 6/04/2016 Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte 270 Comments
"Mag prangkahan na tayo. It's better to tell the truth and agree on the truth. Rather than play bullshit with journalism. Church, politicians, police, all. There's a veil of hypocrisy. Let us unveil it so we can understand each other and live in a democracy that is run by truth, and not by vested interest of people who pretend. I will not stop. I can spend the whole six years of my presidency exposing you and attacking you... Boycott? Good if you disappear... I don't care if no one covers me... Make this trip your last in Davao." - Rodrigo Duterte, 6/2/2016 at start of a press conference, Malacanan of the South, Panacan, Davao City (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/davao/opinion/2016/06/03/editorial-elephant-room-477511)
TITUS 1:16
They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate.
MICAH 3:11
The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money: yet will they lean upon the LORD, and say, Is not the LORD among us? none evil can come upon us.
ECCLESIASTES 3:1-8
1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
It did help immensely that Velasco was endorsed by Cebu Archbishop Ricardo Cardinal Vidal, a relative of his wife, and the Iglesia ni Cristo. Velasco listed Cardinal Vidal as one of his references when he applied for the Supreme Court. Asked about the INC nomination, Velasco said, “Some of my friends and classmates may have approached the Iglesia ni Cristo.”
Years later, Velasco wrote a decision in favor of the INC when he upheld the three month suspension of the TV program, Ang Dating Daan, whose host used offensive language against a minister of the INC who also anchors a TV program, Ang Tamang Daan. These religious rivals had been at each other’s throats for years.
The majority sided with Velasco. Four justices dissented, calling the decision a “prior restraint” and therefore, a blow to freedom of speech.
The perception was that Velasco was paying his dues to INC. “It was an en banc decision,” he said, dismissing the perceived bias.
Among the justices who were beneficiaries of INC endorsements are incumbent SC Associate Justice Presbitero Velasco and retired SC justice Ruben T. Reyes. The INC also backed them when they were appointed to the Court of Appeals initially. Arroyo also appointed Reynaldo Wycoco, a retired general and INC member, as NBI chief. Wycoco died in 2005. (http://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/64529-inc-lobbies-key-government-positions).
Let’s not beat about the bush. Let’s call a spade a spade.This man is saying there is a problem of corruption on all levels and sectors. What to do? “Admit the problem, call out the elephant.” And what’s blocking it? Hypocrisy! Now, here’s the man calling a spade a spade.Forthright honest people use straightforward words. And it better be.I have come to appreciate from deep within a value, which I believe is with President- elect Rodrigo Duterte - by this declaration. This value is, however, devalued as the President said, by all institutions of men, whether it be religious, politics, media, and government. His observation that everywhere there is a veil of hypocrisy is biblically true!Hypocrisy, as defined in the dictionary, is the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform; it is pretense.Hypocrisy is overwhelmingly practiced in religions established by men. While they profess that they know God, they do monkey business, taking advantage of every opportunity for self-interests.Lately, the President-elect took to task the Catholic Church for being the “most corrupt institution.” Next, he targeted media as some of them being corrupt. How about the justice system?There is always a "season" or "time" for everything under the sun. And I believe the time has come for us to see real change.I, myself, thirst and hunger for justice because of the hypocrisy of people in religion and in government! I'm thankful that someone has thought of writing about the very doubts haunting my mind. Our unfortunate experience with the justice system in my beloved country is at most adverse! I was consoled when I read a book of a fearless journalist that exposed something I'm hesitant to lay open for fear of harassment!This book, “Shadow of Doubt: Probing the Supreme Court” by Marites Danguilan Vitug (Philippine Trust Media Group, Inc. 2010, 268 pp) wrote on Pages 93-94 -The Velasco being mentioned in the book is Presbitero J. Velasco Jr., an incumbent Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines. In fact, Velasco sued the author for libel and sought P1-M in damages - the first sitting SC justice to ever file a libel case against a journalist. He filed another case when the article appeared in Vitug's book "Shadow of Doubt: Probing the Supreme Court." He later withdrew one of the libel cases. (Purple Romero, “Justice Presbitero Velasco: Faced with 'ethical' issues,” RapplerDotCom, July 27, 2012,)What about the links of “church and court?” If a group forcefully lobbies, as is the habit of the Iglesia ni Cristo, for the endorsement of a justice, one can be sure there’s a desiderata to be reckoned with. Where then is justice to be found in their ponente? In “INC lobbies for key gov’t positions,” Aries Rufo (RapplerDotCom, July 23, 2015) wrote -I see light in these transformational change initiatives that the President-elect is launching where discipline is to be built.Go, President Duterte! We are praying for you. And if the giant media entities will leave you, so be it. We are here to help you. You can use the facilities of UNTV for free to better serve the Filipino people! May God bless you!Sincerely yours,Brother EliJonathan Barry had big dreams of selling fish eggs. His upstart New Brunswick company, Breviro Caviar, was reviving rare sturgeon stocks and sustainably harvesting them for their eggs, golden and olive-tinted beads to dust upon crème fraîche and crisped parmesan. If all went according to plan, the product would sell for $100 per coin-sized tin and bring badly needed jobs to the town of Pennfield, N.B. Breviro won innovation awards, praise at food festivals and, along the way, secured nearly $1 million in federal and provincial investments and loans. “We’ll have a globally recognized brand that is in the upper echelon of caviar,” Barry said in 2013. “I think we can build a world-class product right here in New Brunswick.”
Today little remains of Breviro’s bold plans to conquer the global caviar market. The company fell into receivership two months ago, around 4,000 sturgeon have been euthanized, and a flurry of lawsuits have been launched, claiming the company contaminated the drinking water of nearby residents. Breviro’s collapse is a cautionary tale of the inherent risks that come when governments try to pick winners from losers in the business world.
At its core, Breviro presented risks. Acipenser brevirostrum, the species of shortnose sturgeon in the Saint John River, is a long-term investment. Females only create caviar when aged seven to 13 years old. However Barry planned to biologically stimulate them to quicken their sexual maturation (a dramatic career change from his history as a vice-president of enterprise at Bell Canada). Shortnose sturgeon is also an endangered species, meaning the United States and European Union ban its import. To overcome this snag, Barry would have to convince the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species that the shortnose sturgeon in Saint John are genetically distinct from the shortnose sturgeon on its list.
Barry’s approach wasn’t unfounded. Matt Litvak, a marine biologist at Mount Allison University specializing in shortnose sturgeon, says marine farmers often quicken maturation by changing water temperature and oxygen levels. Had Breviro succeeded, he says, it would have reduced incentives for poachers, who are slaughtering sturgeon across the East Coast and in Ontario. “For me, from a fish perspective, it would’ve been very good for sturgeon,” says Litvak. There were also precedents for getting other species exempted from the endangered list. Even so, Litvak notes, “aquaculture is not for the faint of heart.”
Breviro’s backers, including in government, should have known that. Before Breviro, a company called Supreme Sturgeon and Caviar received nearly $4 million in government funding to produce the same delicacy, only to go bankrupt in 2010. Undeterred, Barry acquired Supreme Sturgeon’s assets, including a fish farm in Pennfield, and later opened a second farm in the neighbouring village of Charlo. He says now that he knew the chosen species would be toilsome to harvest, but its uniqueness gave it “allure.”
Yet the business quickly rushed downstream. When Barry tried to get the species exempted from its endangered status, scientists and regulators determined his fish were not distinct enough. At the time Barry called the ruling an “unexpected decision” but the outcome shouldn’t really have been a surprise. Years before Supreme Sturgeon had gone through the same process to get the ban lifted, requiring nine months of legal and bureaucratic manoeuvring, to no avail, and had taken its complaints to the media. Adding insult, the sturgeon got sick. Mushy membranes coated many of the eggs—possibly, suggests Barry, a result of trauma from the fish’s previous owner. Barry recruited biologists, including Litvak, to try to heal the stock. All the while producers of other types of caviar in China and Europe flooded the market, driving down prices. Breviro’s fate was sealed.
Given the sluggish economic growth that has plagued many parts of Atlantic Canada for decades, the region needs new businesses and industries to succeed. But the question of what role governments should play in fostering that remains hotly debated. At the federal level, there are six development agencies across Canada, but the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency has by far the largest budget relative to the size of the population. This year ACOA is investing in a variety of unproven aquaculture ventures, from microwavable mussels to dried sea cucumbers. For its part, the agency said in an email that all these applications “are evaluated through a stringent due diligence process. There is inherent risk associated with economic development, but the agency can’t afford not to invest in it if it wants to create wealth, jobs and a more competitive economy.”
While ACOA can point to successes like the launch of Halifax-based health care company STI Technologies, which is now backed by Imperial Capital and employs 60 people, it is also responsible for high-profile duds, such as pouring $20 million into a failed scheme to build greenhouses in frigid Newfoundland. “They’re gamblers without their own chequebook,” says Kevin Lacey, Atlantic director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. “This whole situation of the government playing in caviar, if it were a one-time thing, it might be forgiven, but it’s got a long history. It only sells hope where there is none.”
Even ACOA’s successes are minimal. David Murrell, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of New Brunswick, notes also that the grants usually only last five years. “When I think of ACOA, I think of more of a window dressing—storefront political action,” says Murrell. “Does it have an effect on the economy? I say no.”
James McNiven says yes. A professor emeritus of management at Dalhousie University, McNiven argues that ACOA’s investments help job-starved towns like Pennfield. “What you want to do is see if you can’t get something going in a small place, where even four or five jobs is equivalent to 30,000 in Toronto,” says McNiven. “It can make all the difference in the world between that community living and dying.”
Back in Pennfield, some residents say they are still grappling with the Breviro legacy. Across the street from the sturgeon farm, Blair Harris and his family of six, including an infant, had to move out in 2011 due to polluted well water. The family is just now in the process of returning home. “I’ve had to replace every piece of plumbing in my house,” says Harris. “I was basically pumping pure salt water through my pipes. As soon as Breviro got in, it all went downhill for me.” Breviro not only denies the allegations but has also launched its own spate of lawsuits over water contamination in recent years, including against the New Brunswick government and two other aquaculture companies.
By this past summer Breviro could no longer afford to feed the sturgeon at its Pennfield operation, and since the fish couldn’t be reintegrated into the wild—they would have muddled the genetic pool of wild sturgeon—the fish were left to die. The provincial Ministry of Agriculture, Aquaculture and Fisheries entered the farm in Pennfield and euthanized most of the 4,102 sturgeon itself, sparing 70 to live in a marine science centre in Saint Andrews.
Meanwhile, another 16,000 sturgeon remain alive at Breviro’s Charlo location. With the company being wound down, another New Brunswick caviar producer started a public fundraising campaign through Kickstarter last week to help save and raise the remaining sturgeon. The plan: “produce the best caviar in the world.”When new Bulls guard Kris Dunn was 9, he and his teenage brother, John, fended for themselves for weeks at a time at home in Alexandria, Va., when their mother, Pia, would spend nights in jail for petty crimes.
As the story goes, John played dice and Kris challenged older kids to one-on-one basketball games to scrounge up money for food.
The brothers told nobody of their abandonment for fear of being discovered by authorities and separated, forming a bond that remains as strong as ever. During one stint behind bars, Pia finally contacted the children's father, John Seldon, who lived 350 miles away in New London, Conn. Seldon had been searching for his sons since the day their mother fled with them nearly eight years earlier. Before long, Seldon regained custody of the boys, reunited with them in Connecticut and redirected their long, circuitous path that eventually led to a grateful family gathering Tuesday at the Advocate Center.
"When I think of when I got him as a 10-year-old, I never thought all this would happen,'' Seldon said as he watched Dunn pose for pictures with his Bulls No. 32 jersey. "He went through a lot. It was hard, but he's a fighter. That's what I love about him."
Pride moistened Seldon's eyes as he spoke. Dunn's father was surrounded by eight other family members who traveled to Chicago to see Dunn introduced along with fellow Bulls newcomers Zach LaVine and Lauri Markkanen. Dunn, whose mother died last year, referenced his childhood struggles by revealing the mantra that defines him: "The reason I'm here is I never give up,'' he said. Later, Dunn praised the people who made the trip to support him, the same people who created a stable environment so a forlorn boy could flourish as a young man.
"You can't ask for love like that,'' Dunn said, pointing to his family members. "Me having a bad year in Minnesota, I wasn't happy about it, but I was always like, it's OK. It could be worse.''
That perspective helped the No. 5 overall pick of the 2016 NBA draft cope with a disappointing rookie season with the Timberwolves. His survival instincts will serve Dunn well as he becomes a central figure in the Bulls' commitment to rebuild, a process that will require all the perseverance he can muster. Nobody expects the responsibility to overburden the 6-foot-4 guard from Providence who could emerge as the real key to the Jimmy Butler deal if he can show last season was the exception to the rule in his NBA career.
"It's like being drafted all over again, a fresh start,'' said Dunn, the only Big East player besides Patrick Ewing to be named the league's Player of the Year and Defensive Player of Year twice. "I had a bad year. I accept that. But the Bulls want to start a new direction around development and it's exciting I can be a big part of that.''
Photos of Bulls guard Kris Dunn, who was acquired in the trade with the Timberwolves for Jimmy Butler.
Curiosity drew a crowd at Tuesday's introduction more than the anticipation of information. The only news came from Bulls vice president John Paxson declaring that any potential buyout of Dwyane Wade would have to be advantageous for the team — but Paxson also didn't rule it out. The rest of the day was devoted to getting acquainted with the three players whom Paxson got to know better at dinner Monday night.
"Three high-quality, high-character guys,'' Paxson said.
Dunn, 23, sat between LaVine, 22, and Markkanen, 20, the fresh new faces of the franchise ready to "start a new chapter,'' as Paxson put it. They looked young enough to be AAU teammates at a summer tournament or late for study hall, especially when they laughed. LaVine giggled recalling growing up a Michael Jordan fan who loved "Space Jam.'' Markkanen smiled handling a question from Bulls.com writer Sam Smith about the stereotype of being a European player who is "7 foot, white and soft.''
"I know the stereotype is there, but I am not included in it,'' Markkanen said. "I am not soft. I play hard."
Speaking of perception, Dunn accepts the doubts that accompany his averages of 3.8 points and 17.1 minutes per game with the Timberwolves. But the elite defender takes solace in knowing another rookie under Thibodeau once averaged even fewer points and minutes during the 2011-12 season before ascending into an All-Star player. Some guy named Butler.
"Tom told me about Jimmy's experience and let me know at the beginning of the year he's tough on rookies and he wasn't going to play me a lot so I'd just have to accept it even if I was a top-five pick,'' Dunn said. "I wish I could have played more, but Tom taught me how to be a pro and be accountable.''
Or in the immortal words of Thibodeau: How to do his job as an NBA player.
How Dunn developed as a person always required the same approach.
"Kris will put the work in," Seldon said. "He is determined. He will find a way."
Life never gave Dunn any other choice.
[email protected]
Twitter @DavidHaughEnthusiasts of ancient rock art, markings on stone made by prehistoric people, are developing a database of material found in Wales dating back millennia. The origin of the highly decoratively carved Llwydiarth Esgob Stone, Anglesey, for example, is unknown but it is likely to have been part of a burial-ritual monument.
The Welsh Rock Art Organisation is a non-profit research body specially interested in researching and promoting prehistoric rock art in Wales. Members record as much as they can about an artwork's size, shape, complexity and location and cross-reference their findings with those across Europe.
Some of their subjects remain stunning works of beauty many centuries after they were carved by their creators. The spirals, zig-zags and other art at the Stone Age chambered tomb Barclodiad y Gawres, Anglesey, are a relatively recent discovery.
Not all the rock art they seek out can be reached easily. And photographing it in situ can require lighting. Note the measuring stick to give the image scale.
Ancient but sophisticated farming societies worked hard at their art. The Llanbedr spiral stone, a clockwise 10-ringed spiral, was pecked away by hand. This pagan symbol is found on a stone first recorded near Dyffryn Ardudwy, Gwynedd, in the 19th Century. It now stands behind the font of a church.
One art form which the group are keen to record are cupmarks. These were a common way of creating art in prehistoric Europe and the patterns of their use can be related across many sites. Maen Cattwg, Caerphilly, has 30 clear cupmarks with another 18 that are too weathered to be photographed in daylight.
Photographing in the dark is sometimes the best way to highlight how much art is on an ancient stone monument. Up to 110 cupmarks are found on the capstone of Bachwen, a burial-ritual monument in Gwynedd. The jury is still out on whether all these are original or some are later Bronze Age "graffiti".
This small stone turned up in an excavation of a Medieval field boundary near Wrexham. The Caer Alyn stone is unusual because both cupmarks have been pecked rather than gouged. Probably Bronze Age, if not earlier, it is thought this is a fragment of a much larger stone or boulder with more cupmarks.
Not all the art is an ancient as it could be, however. Ty Illtud, a prehistoric chamber and capstone also has least 60 carvings, mostly lozenges, diamonds and crosses, that may well have been put there by generations of medieval shepherd boys.CRESTVIEW – A woman who grabbed a deputy’s crotch and refused to let go was charged with battery on a law enforcement officer and simple assault.
The 35-year-old Crestview woman, whose house was too cluttered to allow officers to enter safely, also armed herself with a hammer before coming out of the house.
Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office deputies had gone to the home on Sandy Lane after getting a report about a disturbance.
The suspect was in her bedroom, but deputies noted that “excessive clutter” kept them from going in.
On her way out the door, she grabbed a hammer out of a flowerpot.
Deputies disarmed her and placed her in handcuffs, however on her way to the patrol car she turned around and lunged toward a deputy, cussing and yelling. As she was loaded into the ambulance, she grabbed a deputy’s crotch and refused to let go, according to her OCSO arrest report.
The deputy finally freed himself by pushing her away.Gabriel has failed again, and it’s my duty to catalogue it.
The way it looks if you are a father in 2017 is that you will ask yourself, “Is my daughter playing enough videogames?” To a certain extent, I just want to her to know me through my own fascinations; that’s some pretty human shit. You can’t push it too hard, and I’m careful not to. You can convert the most advanced amusement technology our species has ever developed into trout very, very easily.
VR doesn’t require a sales pitch in my house. She’d live in there if she could eat the food in Job Simulator. But if I hand her a controller for a traditional system, it’s like handing her a lumpy, variegated cyst. I want to utilize the Dowsing Rod as a metaphor, but the UI for such rods is very straightforward. In truth, the controllers for the Vive or the Rift are more like a Dowsing Rod. Essentially the idea that I’m trying to get across is this: the gamepad (and the thought-foundry that manufactured it) are artifacts of a previous generation. Let’s say it’s like handing her a sextant, in a world where the GPS is real. There is an unknowable volume of actual fun, let’s call it X, gated by this buttony lozenge. I agree that there is a lot of value to be had in its mastery, but I also know that the time they live in is one where any cartoon ever made is two, perhaps three button presses away. Interactive media has to earn their time.
So, I don’t understand how the Switch has short circuited this process. It’s covered in buttons and she wants to know what they all do. When I was opening the box in the kitchen, getting everything out, I was already planning how I would try to place the device in her periphery - at hand, with but plausibly deniable intent. I came back downstairs and she was already playing with it. Is it the size? I had intended to spend this post lauding the virtues of the form factor, but that being said, I’m unlikely to ever find the Playstation 4 hidden under her pillow. The manifold “conveniences” of the Switch exist on a sliding scale.
(CW)TB out.Imagine a future where Apple disrupts the search market. Avram Miller, retired Intel vice president of business development, has done just that, painting that future in a (maybe, maybe not) fictional look back at how Apple developed that service, which he said would be called "Found."
Will Apple Find Search?
Firstly, I love that name for a search engine. Found. It's just great. "I Found it," or "Let me Find that for you" has a great ring to it. Mr. Miller is pretty coy about whether or not his fictional account is based on real information, but if Apple is working on search, Found would be a great name.
Secondly, I am biased in my approach to Mr. Miller's piece because it fits perfectly with what I said in February of 2013: Apple needs to go into search. In that piece, I said:
[Apple] needs search data to make both maps and local search on Siri better, and it has the added benefit of depriving that information from its fierce rival Google. When you put all that together, it's something Apple simply has to do.
I also argued that there was little chance that Apple didn't have some sort of search engine in development in its deepest, darkest labs. That's essentially what Mr. Miller wrote, saying that Steve Jobs started a super secret search project that he kept secret even from his board of directors.
The heart of this super secret search project was, "an amazing Israeli scientist who developed an algorithm for search that would have the same effect on Google as Google had on Alta Vista using Page Ranking." Coincidentally, Mr. Miller has spent the last several months in Israel, according to Robert X. Cringely, who is as bullish on this story as I am.
The goal of Found, according to Mr. Miller, is to hack the legs out from under Google, a company whose monetary success has come almost exclusively from desktop search. Found would not only disrupt search by doing search better—he doesn't specify how—but Apple would have little need to monetize the service. Think ad-free.
Personally, I'm not on board with the last bit. Apple has been beefing up and constantly reshaping its iAd department. I've long suspected that iAd has bigger goals than what we know about. Even more importantly, if Apple really wants to put the hurt on Google, taking search share won't be enough. Apple needs to bleed revenue away from today's search giant, too.
Still, a best-in-class, ad-free search engine financed by the hardware profits from iPhone, iPad, Mac, iWatch, and other hardware products? A search engine where I pay for the product, rather than being the product? If Apple could do that, sign me up.
Other tidbits included in Mr. Miller's piece include Steve Jobs making Tim Cook promise to continue development of Found, and that Mr. Jobs recorded a message for the eventual launch of the product, which would take place in 2015.
Like I said, though, he plays coy with the whole thing. At the end, he wrote, "OK, this was all made up or was it? You will have to wait for about 1 1/2 years to find out."
I'd like to think it was based on something real Mr. Miller discovered either in Israel or here in Silicon Valley, where he lives down the street from Robert X. Cringely. I think Apple needs search to make Siri all that she can be, and to make Maps a better mapping service.
If Mr. Miller has it right, Apple Found that formula and is in the process of developing it. Let's hope he's right.John MacBride (sometimes written John McBride; Irish: Seán Mac Giolla Bhríde; 7 May 1868[1] – 5 May 1916) was an Irish republican and military leader executed by the British for his participation in the 1916 Irish Easter Rising in Dublin.
Early life [ edit ]
John MacBride was born at The Quay, Westport, County Mayo, Ireland, to Patrick MacBride, a shopkeeper and trader, and the former Honoria Gill, who survived her son.[2] A plaque marks the building on the Westport Quays where he was born (now the Helm Bar and Restaurant). He was educated at the Christian Brothers' School, Westport, and at St. Malachy's College, Belfast. His red hair and long nose led to him being given the nickname "Foxy Jack".[3] He worked for a period in a drapery shop in Castlerea, County Roscommon. He had studied medicine, but gave it up and began working with a chemist's firm in Dublin.
He joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood and was associated with Michael Cusack in the early days of the Gaelic Athletic Association. He also joined the Celtic Literary Society through which he came to know Arthur Griffith who was to remain a friend and influence throughout his life. Beginning in 1893, MacBride was termed a "dangerous nationalist" by the British government. In 1896 he went to the United States on behalf of the IRB. In the same year he returned and emigrated to South Africa.[2]
Participation in the Second Anglo-Boer War [ edit ]
He took part in the Second Boer War, where he raised the Irish Transvaal Brigade. What became known as MacBride's Brigade was first commanded by an Irish American, Colonel John Blake, an ex-US Cavalry Officer. MacBride recommended Blake as Commander since MacBride himself had no military experience.[4] The Brigade was given official recognition by the Boer Government with the commissions of the Brigade's officers signed by State Secretary F.W. Reitz. MacBride was commissioned with the rank of Major in the Boer army and given Boer citizenship.
The 500 Irish and Irish-Americans fought the British. Often these Irish commandos were fighting opposite such Irish regiments as the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. From the hills around the besieged town of Ladysmith to the plains of the Orange Free State, MacBride's Brigade first looked after the Boers' great Long Tom gun, then fought in the Battle of Colenso and later held the rearguard, harassing Lord Roberts' cavalry as the Boer army retreated. However, a larger number of Irish (whose sympathies led to them being labelled West British) fought for the British against the Boers.
A Second Irish Brigade was organised by Arthur Lynch. The arrival in the Irish camp of an Irish-American Ambulance Corps bolstered MacBride's Brigade. Michael Davitt who had resigned as an M.P, visited MacBride's Brigade. When Col. Blake was injured at Ladysmith MacBride had to take sole command of the Brigade. Though Blake later returned for a short period he later left the Brigade to join another commando. In Ireland, pro-Boer feeling, informed by Arthur Griffith and Maud Gonne formed the most popular and most fervent of the European pro-Boer movements.
Marriage to Maud Gonne [ edit ]
When MacBride became a citizen of the Transvaal, the British considered that, as an Irishman and citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, he had given aid to the enemy.[2] After the war he travelled to Paris where Maud Gonne lived. In 1903, he married her to the disapproval of W. B. Yeats, who considered her his muse and had previously proposed to her. The following year their son Sean MacBride was born. Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory in January 1905, the month MacBride and Maud separated, that he had been told MacBride had molested his stepdaughter, Iseult, who at that time was almost 11 years old.[8] The marriage had already failed but the couple could not agree on custody of Sean. Maud instituted divorce proceedings in Paris. No divorce was given but in a separation agreement, Maud won custody to the baby until age 12. The father got visiting rights and one month each summer. MacBride returned to Dublin and never saw his son again.[9] Anthony J. Jordan argues that MacBride was a much-maligned man in the divorce proceedings. He posits that on the merit of WB Yeats believing Maud Gonne's accusations against her husband, successive biographers of Yeats have treated them as factual, ignoring the verdict of the Parisian Divorce Court which found MacBride innocent. Dr. Caoimhe Nic Dhaibhid writes that " The target of Jordan's argument has been a number of biographies of W. B. Yeats, particularly Roy Foster's landmark 1997 |
iology”.
• What the Sami can teach Britain's rulers about country life
“The word ‘Lapp’ is a very old and discriminating word,” Mr Berg said. “I don’t know what the government lawyer was thinking. It was strange and surrealistic.”
The Swedish state has a dark history of persecuting the Sami, banning the Sami languages from schools, while Sweden's National Institute for Race Biology from 1922 spearheaded a sterilisation programme which saw many Sami women rendered infertile.
According to Mr Berg, the ‘village’, perhaps better described as a traditional grazing area claimed by a herders, covered a huge 30km-wide strip of northern Sweden stretching from the Norwegian border right down to the Baltic coast.
“Girjas Sami village has exclusive rights over small game and fishing in the Girjas Sami village area,” Judge Niklas Lind ruled in court. “The state should not grant hunting and fishing rights in the area. In addition, Girjas Sami village has the right, without the state’s agreement, to license small game hunting and fishing.”
• Suddenly, the Swedes are talking about their refugee problem
Photo: Alamy
During the five-week trial last spring the village cited their thousand-year presence in the area as justification for their rights, while the Swedish state questioned whether they were ever in fact the only indigenous inhabitants, and whether, if they were, this automatically brought them land rights.
“Sweden has in this matter no international obligations to recognise special rights of the Sami people, whether they are indigenous or not,” the government lawyers argued.
Asa Larsson Blind, vice-president of the Sami Council, which represents the ethnic group across Scandinavia and northern Russia, said the victory was “an important first step” in what she expected to be a long process, with the court’s decision likely to be appealed by the Swedish government within weeks.
“They’ve done a tremendous job bringing this case forward,” she said of the village. “Looking historically, it’s been difficult to get anywhere on Sami rights in the Swedish courts system.”
The Swedish Sami Association petitioned the European Commission and the European Court of Human Rights before the case finally came to court in Sweden.Bitter orange (Citrus aurantium) extract and its primary protoalkaloid p-synephrine are widely consumed in combination with multiple herbal ingredients for weight management and sports performance. p-Synephrine is also present in juices and foods derived from a variety of Citrus species. Questions exist regarding the safety of p-synephrine because of structural similarities with other biogenic amines. This study assessed the cardiovascular (stimulatory) effects of bitter orange extract (49-mg p-synephrine) given to 18 healthy subjects (nine men and nine women) in a double-blinded, placebo-controlled cross-over study. Heart rates, blood pressures, and electrocardiograms were determined at baseline, 30, 60, 90 min, 2, 4, 6, and 8 h. Blood samples were drawn at baseline, 2 h and 8 h for serum chemistries, blood cell counts, and p-synephrine and caffeine levels. No significant changes occurred in electrocardiograms, heart rates, systolic blood pressure, blood chemistries, or blood cell counts at any time point in either control or p-synephrine treated group. A small (4.5 mmHg) decrease in diastolic blood pressure occurred in the p-synephrine treated group at 60 min. No adverse effects were reported. Caffeine ingestion varied markedly among the participants. p-Synephrine does not act as a stimulant at the dose used.
Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.The tax bill that House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady plans to release tomorrow will reportedly end the federal deduction for state and local income and sales taxes, but keep it for state and local property taxes. This “compromise” on state and local tax (SALT) deductions — to pay for marginal income tax rate cuts — would be a bad deal for most Americans, as would a full repeal. It likely would harm state budgets nearly as much in the coming years as full repeal, would likely shift more of the load for paying state and local taxes from high-income people to low- and middle-income families, and would fall much harder on some states than others — while probably hurting local government budgets over time, too.
Property taxes are almost all levied by local governments and aren’t a major source of revenue for states, while income and general sales taxes are the two main sources of state tax revenue. Property taxes account for only 2 percent of state tax revenue nationally, while income and sales taxes account for 37 percent and 31 percent, respectively.
So for state budgets, which fund education, health care, transportation, and other services, it’s the deduction for income and sales taxes, which the House tax bill reportedly would end, that really matters. (Currently, taxpayers can deduct either their state and local income taxes or their state and local general sales taxes, whichever are higher. In all 42 states with an income tax, many more filers deduct their income taxes than sales taxes.) As we’ve explained, the deduction makes higher-income filers more willing to support state taxes, because they can reduce the federal taxes that they owe by deducting these state taxes. Repealing the deduction would make it harder for states — many of which already face serious budget strains — to raise sufficient revenues in the coming years to invest in high-quality education, infrastructure, and other priorities crucial to the nation’s long-term economic prospects.
Repealing the income tax deduction would be particularly harmful to state budgets because state income tax revenues tend to grow with the economy, while other major state revenue sources such as sales and excise taxes do not. By reducing support for state income taxes, particularly among high-income taxpayers — a group that tends to be politically influential in states — eliminating the deduction would encourage states to lean more heavily on weaker revenue sources, likely leading to cuts over time in funding for education and other public priorities. Also, state borrowing costs could rise as bond rating agencies react to states’ reduced capacity to generate adequate revenue, raising the cost of needed infrastructure projects.
Further, eliminating the income tax deduction would, over time, likely lead to a shift in who pays state and local taxes even further away from high-income residents to those with middle and lower incomes. That’s because state income taxes are the only major state and local revenue source that’s based on ability to pay, with tax rates in most states rising with income.
States with income taxes and high average incomes would be the hardest hit. They include Maryland, Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Oregon, where more than a third of filers claim the deduction, as well as California and New York, where taxpayers in 2015 deducted $80 billion and $52 billion in state and local income tax payments, respectively. But states without income taxes would also be affected. In Chairman Brady’s home state of Texas, which lacks an income tax, over 2 million households — 18 percent of all filers — deducted about $4.8 billion in state and local sales taxes in 2015. They could no longer do so under the “compromise.”
Retaining the property tax deduction might protect local governments from added budget pressures to some extent, but only temporarily. First, if they can’t deduct state and local income taxes, some taxpayers would no longer be able to itemize their deductions and, therefore, wouldn’t be able to deduct their property taxes. Second, facing greater challenges raising revenue, states likely would reduce, over time, support for local governments. (States provide 28 percent of local government revenue, including funding for school districts.) That reduced support would, in turn, force local governments to either accept less funding for schools, parks, libraries, community health centers, and other services or raise local taxes, including property taxes, to make up the difference. These challenges would add to the strain on their budgets in coming years, a period that already may be particularly challenging in part because the White House and congressional Republicans are considering shifting significant new costs to states and localities.
To be sure, eliminating either the full SALT deduction or just the deduction for state and local income taxes would — by itself — make the federal income tax more progressive. But that ignores the actual tradeoff that the House GOP tax plan proposes, which is to end the deduction and use the revenue to pay for marginal income-tax rate cuts, which are more tilted to the top than the SALT deduction. Middle- and low-income people would see little benefit from the overall tax plan, but they would bear much of the brunt of the harm that’s likely done at the state and local levels. That’s a bad deal for most of us.Your Club, Your Rules
When The Sims 4 Get Together Expansion Pack* comes out on December 8 in North America, you’ll be experiencing something totally new: Clubs! With Clubs, you’ll be able to lead groups of Sims in a Gathering, where they’ll follow Club rules, do Club activities, and react to situations in the ways their Club suggests. Sims in a Gathering will even break their own rules in favor of keeping in line with the Club’s rules.
You’ll be able to join a pre-made Club, like the food-obsessed Upper Crusts or the stylish Paragons, but you can also create your own! Here are all of the ways you can customize your own Clubs.
Choose your Club’s name. Obviously, before you start doing anything else, you’re going to want to decide what to name your Club. You could go with something fairly generic (The [THING] Club!), or try to think of something cooler – like an inside joke!
Pick Your Club Logo. When Sims are in a Gathering, little icons float above their heads showing that they’re hanging out with their Club. There are dozens to choose from, so you’ll be able to find the perfect insignia for your Club to use.
Set Club Requirements. Do you want your Club to be open to anyone and everyone? Or do you want it to be a bit more… exclusive? You can decide what sorts of people are allowed in by choosing Age Groups, Skill Levels, and even Traits that your Club members are required to have.
Choose Club Activities. Here’s where things start getting really exciting. You’re able to choose from a list of over 100 Activities that you can encourage Club members to do when they’re in a Club Gathering – things like Play Instrument, Cook, Swim, Tell Jokes, View Art, and (a lot) more. Your Club can have five Encouraged Activities, which creates a ton of possibilities!
Set Club’s Banned Activities. On the other side of the coin, you can also choose up to five things that your Club members aren’t supposed to do. When you mix these with the Club Activities, you get some absolutely crazy options. Want your members to Hug, Kiss, be Romantic, but never to WooHoo when in a Club Gathering? You can do that!
Make Your Activities More Specific. Besides being able to choose Club Activities and Banned Activities, you can take it a level deeper and say who your Members are supposed to do these things with. Your Club members might love swimming, but maybe they won’t swim with members of another specific Club. Or maybe they flat-out can’t talk to specific members of other Clubs. Break the rules, and your Sim might get kicked out of the Club!
Create a Club Outfit. Want your Club members to all wear a matching jacket and hat (with a matching Club logo) when they enter a Club Gathering? Want them to wear matching… hot dog costumes? You’re able to choose their outfits, personalizing your Club’s style as much as you want.
Pick a Hangout. A Club needs a place to hang out, right? When you’re making your Club, you can make their Hangout a general place, like any Bar or any Gym, or a specific place in the world. Different Club types call for different Hangout types – a Foodie Club might want to check out any café they can find, whereas a Workout Club might only want to frequent a specific gym.
Customize a Hangout Location. If you want to personalize your Hangouts even more, you can choose to have your Club gather at a specific lot, and then use door locks to only allow access to your Club to make an exclusive place that only they can enter. This means that an Art Club can have a secret backroom where only thebest artwork is held, or the Gaming Club could have a special room with extra computers to play on. There’s also special Club décor you can unlock to help you customize your Hangout even further.
Unlock a Club Vibe. The more your Sims preform Club activities, the more Club points you’ll earn. These can be used to unlock a slew of Perks, like secret handshakes and Club vibes. Club vibes are emotions that your members will feel once they’re in a Gathering, so you can make your Workout Club automatically Energized, or your Romance Club Flirty during Club Gatherings.
Get Club Skill Boosts. There are other Perks besides Club Vibes, though – you can also get Skill bonuses, meaning that your Sims will gain skill at an increased rate while in a Club Gathering. Mix that together with a Vibe, and you can end up with some really interesting results. An Art Club that gains Artistic skill faster and is always Inspired can be pretty awesome at cranking out incredible paintings.
We built the Club system to be as robust as possible, and we can’t wait to see the amazing things you’re going to create with them when The Sims 4 Get Together Expansion Pack launches in December!DETROIT – Pavel Datsyuk's knee feels much better now. That's good, because he's going to need some speed to keep up with Darren Helm, his new linemate.
"I not play much with him on the same line, but I sit with him for many years (in the dressing room)," Datsyuk said. "He has good speed and good power and skill. If I use the skill it will be awesome. But I need to be the same speed as him, make sure there's not two zones between us."
The Detroit Red Wings center expects to be skating much better this season. Painful knee inflammation forced him to miss 30 out of 34 games from Jan. 1 to April 2.
He said they considered surgery after the Olympics and again following the season, but opted for rest and treatment.
"Just rehab for the whole summer, more conditioning and more workouts," Datsyuk said Tuesday.
"It was much better in a few games of the Boston (playoff) series. I could push my knee, but I lost a lot of muscle. Now everything has come back. I felt better at the end of the playoffs; now it's much better and comfortable."
Is he close to 100 percent?
"At my age, oh, yeah," the 36-year-old said.
Datsyuk began skating briefly in Russia two weeks ago. He's picked up the pace since joining teammates on the ice Monday at Joe Louis Arena for informal workouts.
"I didn't skate much, but I started staking now and it feels much better," he said. "Nothing bothers me."
Coach Mike Babcock said last week that he's going to move third-line center Darren Helm to the wing on Datsyuk's line. The move enables the club to use Riley Sheahan as its third-line center and also adds speed and tenacity to Datsyuk's line.
Datsyuk said he doesn't know who'll be on the other wing. Maybe it'll be Henrik Zetterberg. It won't be Justin Abdelkader, his linemate for much of the past two seasons.
"Abby, you can tell he doesn't want to pull the piano," Datsyuk said. "He's tired."
The Red Wings return with virtually the same roster as last season, but Datsyuk believes there is much potential for improvement.
"Everybody wish we had new player but we don't have it," Datsyuk said. "Now we just stick together and play our hockey and hope we don't have many injuries. Then we'll have a good chance.
"But if we have lots of injuries it will be tough again.... For the last three years we've been back and forth (with injuries); it kills us."
Asked how excited he is for his 13th NHL season, Datsyuk said, "Oh yeah, again it's so exciting. I don't know how long I can keep it this exciting. Same like you, it's so exciting, lots of smiles from you guys (media)."
-- Download the Detroit Red Wings on MLive app for iPhone and Android
-- Follow Ansar Khan and Brendan Savage on Twitter
-- Like MLive's Detroit Red Wings Facebook pageA building in Sydney's inner west that partially collapsed last night is now being torn down.
Authorities ordered the evacuation of 40 people from a row of buildings, which contain apartments and shops, after the partial collapse of a wall adjoining a construction site.
Fire and Rescue Superintendent Adam Dewberry said crews set up an exclusion zone and ordered electricity and gas to be shut off after arriving about 9:30pm on Monday.
"They did find a building had started to collapse into an adjoining construction site and so people were evacuated from the affected building and adjoining buildings," he said.
"There was some gas leakage from broken pipes."
Superintendent Dewberry said lasers were used to monitor the structural integrity of the building.
"The building has continued to move throughout the night which indicates it is very unstable," he said.
Andry Vareltsis said her hairdressing salon, in the building, had been shaking throughout the day on Monday.
"Then all of a sudden the upstairs started cracking and then the upstairs has gone into downstairs and the side wall has collapsed, because there's... construction going next door," she said.
"We've lost everything - our shop, our business.
"The poor guy that lives upstairs has lost everything and we are not allowed to go in there and get anything."
Eleni Endt said her family had owned a hairdressing salon in the row for 30 years.
She said the tenant above the shop was lucky to have escaped.
"We got a call at around 9:30pm to say there was the sound of a crack," Ms Endt said.
"The boy that rents the room upstairs said it was really scary. There was a crack upstairs so he ran out of the building."
"His bedroom that was upstairs is now downstairs in the salon in rubble.
"We don't know officially why [it collapsed] but there's a construction site that's been sending a lot of vibrations through the building."
Police have advised motorists to avoid the area.
They have closed the westbound lanes of Liverpool Road between Beaumaris Street and Cobden Street.
Structural engineers at the site are still deciding how best to save the adjoining buildings.
Detective Superintendent Mark Jones said crews were working to make the area safe for residents to return home.
"At the moment we're in the process now of trying to knock the premises down to make it safe," he said.
"We're obviously very mindful of not causing any damage to any neighbouring premises."kava kava
piper methysticum
Kava falls into a class uniquely its own. I know of no other herb like it (nothing I've ever come across could even remotely qualify as a "substitute" for kava), and consider it one of the nature's most exquisite gifts. Though it’s gained (and lost) immense popularity over the last several years (both lauded as "nature's miracle cure for stress and anxiety" and defamed as hepatotoxic), I've always found myself disdainful of the marketing used to sell it to the public. While kava kava doubtless holds immense power for relieving stress and tension, its ongoing daily use as a "supplement" has never sat well with me. I've always felt kava is best enjoyed intentionally, and not as just a part of a daily supplement routine.
Kava is, in my opinion, primarily suited to treating acute stress that settles into the musculature of the body. It is most effective when your mind is overwhelmed and your body is tightly strung from a crazy hectic day and that's what's making you unable to relax.
The best way I can describe the effects of kava kava is to compare it to lying on a sunny beach with nothing pressing to do or think about and being so laid back it feels as if you've sunk halfway into the sand. Kava puts you there. What is so distinct about kava kava is that it's so promptly and significantly relaxant; mental stress subsides as a result of relaxation, not sedation. In fact, while the body lets go, mental acuity remains...you can definitely take kava and still be cognitively functional. This is, however, dose dependent... small doses of kava relax the body and notably clear the mind, medium doses calm the mind and have a much more pronounced relaxant action on the muscles, and large doses still the mind and make the limbs a bit wobbly. Think of kava after a crazy day at work, traffic all the way home with honking horns, people cutting you off, and an inability to physically let go when you do finally get home (with every bit of your body screaming Yikes!”). It is a perfect replacement for (and a much better option to) the archetypal "after work drink". Kava kava puts the body at peace.
Kava is native to the islands of the South Pacific; Fiji, Hawaii, Vanuatu are all know for their excellent kava kava. Studying island traditions surrounding the plant reinforce the notion of kava's ability to induce a peaceful spirit. Kava is regarded as sacred throughout its range, but, for the most part, its use is not solely relegated to ceremony; it has a strong tradition as a recreational beverage consumed freely at social gatherings, where those under the enchantment of kava converse and share their thoughts and stories. Traditionally, kava is given to feuding parties before they talk, in order to diffuse pre-existing hostility. This use was not solely reserved for the cessation of wars between different island cultures, but was also invoked when spousal or community conflicts had everyone involved all angst ridden to the point where it became difficult to resolve anything. Kava helps to diffuse the underlying "Err!" so that feuding parties can come together without being primed for conflict. Think of it in situations where your approach to settle a dispute involves making it clear that they're wrong and you're right. It is said that "hate cannot exist in the presence of kava". While this may be an ideological overstatement, kava is clearly a plant of friendship and camaraderie.
So, although it is currently touted as an anti-anxiety herb (which it is), I don't think of kava as an herb to be taken in rote daily doses for chronic anxiety. Maybe short term, but it’s best, I believe, when taken purposefully because you like and want some (or need some… kava can be helpful in quitting tobacco or other vices), rather than as a "daily supplement" because you are tense all the time. The problem with using kava on a regular basis is that it is strong, and can become escapist, or used as a crutch. Rather than make changes to address underlying issues that are creating stress and tension, you let the kava melt it away. One example of this could perhaps be using kava to relax tension and spasms due to magnesium deficiency; it's strong enough to work, but it won't resolve the underlying deficiency. So, use kava, but also look into underlying issues and be sure to address those in addition to using kava for more immediate relief.
Kava is a member of the pepper family, so, as can be expected, it has a strong and penetrating taste. It is peppery, bitter-spicy, tingly and numbing (I've sometimes said it tastes like spicy, soapy dirt), and within a minute of taking a kava extract or tea, the mouth will become tingly, then numb. Though at first not savory, the taste isn't especially bad (you might even get to like it), and (if you don't) the numbing effect makes it tolerable, as you can't taste it within a minute anyway.
But we'd be remiss to neglect (as is so often done) some of the other things kava is exceptional at addressing...
In eclectic medicine, kava was extolled as a reliever of pain, inflammation, tension and spasm in the urinary tract. Kava is also among the herbs recommended for interstitial cystitis, with some extolling its virtues, though 7Song has told me that he's seen aggravations caused by it (aggravations being not uncommon in interstitial cystitis). I've used it in a few cases and it seems generally to be a more effective relaxant/antispasmodic than wild yam or lobelia (though lobelia seems more specific for severe spasms in the moment they're bending you over). Eclectics recommended it highly for enuresis, King's stating "It is a remedy for nocturnal incontinence of urine in the young and old, when due most largely to muscular weakness." Interestingly, many eclectic accounts specifically mention its use for weakness and laxity of urinary tissues, despite its rather marked relaxant effects. Also indicated for pyuria (mucous/pus in the urine), these uses all suggest an astringency not so strongly noted outside the urinary tract.
Herbalist David Winston uses kava for fibromyalgia, often combining it with ashwagandha and black cohosh tinctures. Ellingwood reported of its use in rheumatism, combined with black cohosh as well. Facial, dental and other neuralgias are another indication. I've also used it for toothaches. Pain with restlessness and anxiety is a specific indication.
I've heard debate about whether or not kava might be considered an "aphrodisiac". That is a problematic term, at best, but I can say that if sex, or interest in sex, is inhibited by anxiety and muscle tension, kava could certainly be helpful. Its spicy flavor also indicates that it stimulates peripheral circulation, which can also be helpful. So, for cool, tense, anxious people, sounds good. People already sufficiently mellow have claimed it "puts them to sleep."
Ellingwood wrote of its topical use, the tincture diluted either with water of glycerin (1 part kava tincture, 2 parts glycerin), for pruritis of the vulva and anus (my suspicion here is that its acting both by numbing the affected area and also as an antifungal, yeast killer, which would make it useful for itching associated with candida rashes. I've seen cases people have tried this with extremely impressive results.
(I feel obligated, here, to acknowledge that yes, I did tell these women that applying kava tincture - even diluted - in such locales would very likely hurt like hell. Of course, any alcohol would, but alcohol impregnated with hot spicy kava? Pretty much everyone agreed, after the fact, that indeed it did. One woman said that it made her gain a new appreciation for the numbness that sets in shortly after taking it, which, taken orally, she'd never really liked. So far, no one who's tried it has had anything less than very impressive results. But, that's not a whole lot of people (it's a bit of a hard sell), though a couple have said that it work so much better than anything else they'd tried that it was worth the momentary agony. Probably, I'm gonna make up some suppositories with kava infused in coconut oil, which should extract the kava well, but eliminate the YEEOOOWWW!!! of the alcohol.
The Physio-Medicalists shunned kava, William Cook wrote in his Compend of the New Materia Medica that "The toxic power of kava kava is pronounced, and it begets a form of drowsy intoxication, for which the natives of New Zealand and other isles use it, and Europeans follow their example. When first taken it produces a burning sensation and an increased flow of saliva and urine, followed by numbness that is marked and a depression of all the functions. It causes complete loss of sensibility in the mouth, throat, eye and other parts to which it may be applied; and constitutionally it produces general insensibility, diminishes and finally destroys reflex action, and causes death by paralysis. It first excites and then reduces the heart action; first stimulates and then diminishes respiration, and ends by paralyzing this function. Its principal effect is upon the spinal cord, and with this the sensory nerves. Any relief it gives is the relief of sensory paralysis."
I love you, William Cook, but think your admirable insight missed the mark here. Evidently T. J. Lyle agreed with me; as he deemed kava "a stimulating and relaxing diuretic, tonic, alterant and nervine."
preparations: Personally, chewing small pieces of the root has come to be my favorite way to use it, though admittedly some don't share my appreciation for its flavor. There are also some rather strong fibers in the root that require spitting out, as they don't break down much as the root does. Tinctures are extremely useful and effective, and convey kava's virtues quite well (though only use noble kava varieties; more on that below). If using dried root, 65% - 75% alcohol seems best to me; for fresh I use pure 95% grain alcohol. A steeped tea made with water can be somewhat effective, but doesn't extract the root well. Decocting the root can help, though this isn't how I generally make water based preparations. I've always considered capsules to be comparatively lousy, though I have met some people who felt they were helpful.
A good recipe for a more traditional kava drink is to take a half ounce of ground kava, 2 tablespoons of cream or coconut milk and whisk it up in ¼ cup of water for a minute or two. Strain the mixture through a loose weave strainer (the "pulp" should get into your drink) and squeeze out the wet herb. Add another ¼ cup of water to the kava pulp, whisk up, and strain again, squeezing as much liquid from the kava pulp as possible. Or you could put about 3 ounces of powdered kava in a loose weave bag (I use a hop bag like they use in homebrewing), and knead that well in about 3 cups of coconut milk and water. For an extra kick, add a squirt or two of kava tincture per cup. This makes one rather muddy looking, very potent serving. A very authentic traditional recipe involves chewing up a lot of fresh kava kava root, spitting the masticated pulp out into a bowl with a little water, letting it steep a bit, then straining and drinking (sounds real appetizing, eh?). Actually, this method is the best way I know of to prepare it, though it requires fresh kava root. I've tried it and loved it; it was the best kava I ever had… though it does make it a difficult thing to offer visiting friends and family... "Oh, hi! I just chewed up some kava, would you like some?"
I also need to wholeheartedly extol the virtues of infused kava oil. Take roots ground to a coarse powder, and cover them in oil (I don't generally weight or measure for oils, so just eyeball it). Olive oil is of course OK, but a nice massage blend is 3 parts almond oil and 1 part sesame oil. I infuse the oil for days; even a week. It should darken and smell rich and earthy. Apply liberally. It's really just flat out incredible. Credit goes to Rob Montgomery, who was the original purveyor of the cool stuff offered through the Botanical Preservation Corps. Kava oil really relaxes muscles; its very nice for a massage... kind of takes the fight out of them when they just don't want to let go. It's also proven to be very helpful when tension interferes with intimacy. But its even better as a daily application if you know you chronically hold muscle tension in an area. Tight neck and upper shoulders every day? Apply some kava oil, every day. Recognize the pattern. Break the pattern.
considerations and contraindications: On the whole, don’t use during pregnancy. Don't drive or operate dangerous stuff if you are oversedated by Kava; coordination is markedly impaired at high dosages. This needn’t be limited to “heavy machinery”, a skateboard could be problematic as well. Be responsible, start at low doses and get a feel for how you react to it… some people seem to be especially sensitive to kava and so a little goes a long way. Also, different kavas can differ in their effect, with some being more mood modifying, while others are more powerful relaxant to the body. Don't mix with alcohol or other drugs ( one study ) suggests that kava varieties known as "tudei" or "Isa" that are high in flavokavain B can lower the threshold in which acetaminophen causes liver damage). Using a lot of kava too often can dry out the skin and induce severe dermatitis (this has been associated with kava varieties high in the kavalactones Desmethoxyyangonin/DMY, Dihydromethysticin/DHM and Yangonin/Y); this will go away after kava abuse is stopped. You'd probably have to go way overboard for this to be a concern, though if you already had psoriasis or eczema, you’d be more susceptible to this side effect.
Some people try kava and get headaches and/or digestive distress that can last into the next day like a "hangover". While this could be an indication that kava doesn't suit your constitution, it may also be that the kava you have is a tudei variety like Isa, which contains flavokavain B. "Tudei" actually derives from "two day", implying "you can feel this kava for two days". Unfortunately, it doesn't mean the positive qualities we commonly associate with kava, but the lingering side effects some people feel. I've met people who tried kava and had this reaction to it, but have no idea what kind of kava they were using, because unlike coffee and cannabis and even apples, we just call kava "kava" and rarely to products tell you which variety or chemotype they're made from. If you've had this reaction and you feel up to "risking" kava again, you can try to find a "noble" kava; one that has a long history of use and that has been deemed a prize variety of kava in the pacific island cultures that grow it. Incidentally: testing of noble kava varieties on different islands has shown that they don't contain flavokavain B. The Kava Society of New Zealand says "Even though it is still unclear exactly how harmful tudei kavas are (and it is possible that they are not necessarily more dangerous than alcohol or popular painkillers), they are certainly capable of causing a number of undesirable side-effects (such as nausea, "kava hangover" or dermopathy) and certainly unsuitable for regular consumption."
Several years ago now, kava was in the news, associated with serious liver disease, failure and even fatalities, and now information on kava is often accompanied by warnings about liver problems. This has had most herbalists rather confused, as the herb has a long history of safe usage with no serious complications. As more was learned about the nature of the "adverse event reports", it became clear than in several of the incidences, alcohol and other drugs (both pharmaceutical and recreational) may have played a role, and many herbalists based their defense of kava on the known hepatotoxic actions of these other su bstances. Still, such severe side effects and fatalities are nothing to be shrugged at, and shouldn't be dismissed too readily just because you like an herb.
While the cause of these reactions is still unclear, a number of possibilities have been presented:
In many commercial products, kava leaves and stems were used in addition to the root, and these parts of the plant contain a liver toxic alkaloid, pipermethystine, not present in the roots. This alkaloid "significantly decreased cellular ATP levels, mitochondrial membrane potential, and induced apoptosis as measured by the release of caspase-3 after 24 h of treatment. These observations suggest that PM, rather than kavalactones, is capable of causing cell death, probably in part by disrupting mitochondrial function ( see more )." In studies comparing the effect of pipermethystine to various kavalactones, toxicity was readily observed in the former, but not the latter. So, basically, supplements companies were trying to increase profits by using the less expensive, discarded leaves and stems, even though traditional south pacific cultures uniformly express that only the root is fit for use. I know kava growers and distributors who have confirmed that companies were trying to buy these plant parts. In light of this, declaring kava kava (the plant as a whole) to be toxic would be just like declaring rhubarb (the plant as a whole) to be toxic, rather that recognizing that the roots and leaves of rhubarb are toxic, but the stems aren't in any way.
There may be a problem with the highly concentrated Kava extracts being marketed at the time. Kava extracts concentrated and sometimes reduced down to a paste of kavalactones do not fully represent kava the plant... I feel that when we alter a plant's natural balance of compounds and concentrate them intensely, we may also alter the plant's relative safety; the unnatural concentration of one major constituent or group of constituents may present dangers or side effects not found in the plant in its natural state. It's also the case that some solvents used to extract and concentrate kavalactones in a preparation also concentrate the liver toxic alkaloid found in leaves and stem peelings, as well as other compounds like flavokavain B (we know from research that tudei kava extracted in water have far less flavokavian B in them than those extracted by acetone or ethanol). I also just get the shudders at using acetane and hexane as solvents for herbs.
It is quite possible that roots may have become moldy at some point in the processing (this is far more likely when dealing with the large quantities of roots needed for commercial preparations), resulting in contamination by hepatotoxic mycotoxins. Even in smaller quantities (a few pounds) mold on the fresh roots can be common if shipping takes too long (which |
kind of night. I don’t think I can average a triple-double, I’m not saying that, but I am the type of guy that can do the 14, 8 and 7 every night.
NBA.com: Why do you think more players aren’t as adept in filling up the stat sheet in a variety of ways?
NB: The system we do have helps me to do that. I know all the players I have around me. I know where they are, I watch a lot of video and I know who I am. I just know and read the game situation what I have to do. If I get 10 assists tonight, I get 10 assists. If I get 15, 20 points, that’s what I’m going to try to do. I just adjust my game to the other guys and the coach [Terry Stotts] told me that this season I am going to be the key to success.
NBA.com: It seems a good number of observers are waiting for the Blazers to flatten out a bit after such a first half of the season, or are still not yet ready to declare this team “for real.” Is this team built to continue at its current pace and challenge for the No. 1 spot in the West?
NB: We had a tough stretch at the end of December, beginning of January, like we lost four games out of six. But we knew we were going to go through tough times. The good thing on this team is we are, OK, we lost those four games, but we got back on track, we regrouped, we stayed together and now we’ve got a five-game winning streak. We know that this is the first time we’ve done this. OKC has been there, San Antonio’s been there. Last year we only had 33 wins and were like 11 or 12 in the West and now we are like No. 2 and we will be No. 1 if we win [Saturday]. So after 40 games people might be surprised or expect us to fall down, but we know who we are. We know what we’ve done to be in this position so far, so we are going to try to do the same thing.
Category: 2014 All-Star, HT News / Tags:, Amir Johnson, Anthony Davis, Carmelo Anthony, Chandler Parsons, David Lee, David West, DeMarcus Cousins, Dirk Nowitzki, Jeff Caplan, Kevin Durant, Kevin Love, LeBron James, Nicolas Batum, Portland Trail Blazers, Scottie Pippen, Shawn Marion, Terry Stotts, Tim Duncan, Tony Parker / 39 Comments on Batum Says He’s Earned All-Star Nod /Liverpool threw away another lead late in a game. After a hugely disappointing slump in the Champions League at Sevilla on Tuesday, they were at least more focused against Chelsea. But this should have been a win.
Liverpool Liverpool Chelsea Chelsea 1 1 FT Game Details GameCast
Lineups and Stats
Positives
Without being rigorously tested, the home defence stood firm for most of this game.
Negatives
Unfortunately "most" isn't good enough at this level and a Chelsea equaliser was hardly a surprise given the way the game was going. After the first week of an exhausting winter schedule, some players already look a little tired.
Manager rating out of 10
5 -- Jurgen Klopp did he want to make so many changes? Benching two of his favourite forwards suggests not. The players he did select ultimately did themselves proud but weren't helped by a manager who used his substitutions far too late. He complained about the referee not allowing a defensive change, but that was too late as well.
Player ratings: (1-10; 10=best. Players introduced after 70 minutes get no rating)
GK Simon Mignolet, 6 -- Some important saves in the middle of the first half kept Liverpool level but he will be disappointed with his footwork for Willian's equaliser, even if he was expecting a cross.
DF Joe Gomez, 7 -- Solid and reliable, particularly after his side took the lead. Numerous last-ditch tackles and interceptions were made, indicating a little tiredness was creeping in. He will probably be rested for the next game, but not because of his performance levels.
DF Joel Matip, 7 -- Better than the man he replaced, Dejan Lovren; there is an air of calm about Matip that the Croatian defender doesn't possess. Worked the offside trap well and ensured that Chelsea's Alvaro Morata caused little danger.
DF Ragnar Klavan, 7 -- Kept things simple and showed a little composure under pressure, especially as Chelsea came into the game.
DF Alberto Moreno, 7 -- A performance more about character than skill, he did his job well despite a late "blind" aerial challenge that might have given away another stupid penalty. Fortune favoured him this time and maybe he deserved that after a brave display given the criticism from midweek.
Liverpool's manager Jurgen Klopp didn't help out his players much Saturday, waiting too long to make his substitutions.
MF Jordan Henderson, 6 -- Another who stood strong after criticism of his European performance. There were some crowd complaints about playing safe passes, but for what you want from the midfield engine room he gave everything and battled constantly.
MF James Milner, 6 -- Erratic, perhaps rusty, early on but grew into the game as it developed into a war of attrition. Tired late on and wasn't great just before the Chelsea equaliser.
MF Philippe Coutinho, 6 -- One or two quality moments. including one fine pass that almost set up a second clinching goal for Mohamed Salah, but essentially ineffectual. The game was too dour and frenetic for him to truly flourish.
FW Alex Oxlade Chamberlain, 7 -- Did his best but the left wing clearly doesn't suit him. Each chance to cross meant he dragged the ball onto his right foot and lost momentum. Fared better on the opposite flank and toe-poked a clever ball to Salah for Liverpool's goal.
FW Mohamed Salah, 7 -- Once again he was the man with the golden touch in front of goal. He should have used his right foot for an earlier chance but learned his lesson quickly. Later, he brought a good save out of Courtois as Liverpool fought to restore their lead.
FW Daniel Sturridge, 5 -- Another disappointing start for a striker who looks out of place. His presence automatically makes Liverpool less creative and, thus, less likely to supply him with chances. He was taken off once Liverpool were in front so had no chance to exploit Chelsea gaps as they chased an equaliser. He be even more frustrated than before.
Substitutes:
MF Georginio Wijnaldum, 5 -- Brought on to help protect the defence and hold onto the lead but did not really do much of either. He was not bad, exactly, just a little invisible, which is a common complaint lately.
FW Sadio Mane, NR -- Little time to make an impact and, if he didn't start the game, he probably wasn't completely fit.
MF Adam Lallana, NR -- Nice to see him back but it will take time -- certainly more than the five minutes he got here -- to get back in the swing.
Steven Kelly is one of ESPN FC's Liverpool bloggers. Follow him on Twitter @SteKelly198586.Daniel Ricciardo does not believe Sebastian Vettel ever seriously considered quitting F1 during his poor run of form in 2014.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner claimed that his departed driver had gone through a period of “disillusionment” with the sport’s new regulations. The four-time world champion failed to win a race in a full season for the first time in his career and was comprehensively outperformed by Ricciardo.
However, the Australian doesn’t think he demoralised his team-mate to the point of quitting and is expecting Vettel to be reinvigorated at Ferrari.
Daniel Ricciardo believes that Red Bull can close the gap on Mercedes in 2015 Daniel Ricciardo believes that Red Bull can close the gap on Mercedes in 2015
“From what I saw he was never going to leave," Ricciardo told Sky Sports News HQ. "He’s way too passionate about the sport to just walk away.
“With Ferrari this year he’s going to have a challenge, but I think he’ll come out of his shell some more and try and get them going again.”
Vettel has replaced Fernando Alonso at Ferrari, leaving Ricciardo to take on the role of de facto team leader at Red Bull in 2015 when he is paired with 20-year-old Daniil Kvyat. The 2013 GP3 champion has just a solitary season of F1 experience, but Ricciardo is expecting big things from his new partner.
“Danii’s going to get some good results,” he added. “I’m sure he’ll get a taste of a podium and we’ll see if he can get a win, but obviously I’ll do my bit to get as many as I can.”
The Sky Sports F1 Online team will be providing live commentary of all three winter tests, starting in Jerez on Sunday February 1, with live updates from trackside also on Sky Sports News HQ.When you work for a dealership that sells exotics and other varieties of vehicles, there tends to be some ridiculous things that come in. Usually it is just a twin turbocharged Gallardo or a rare classic Ferrari. In this case it was a one of a kind Guinness World Record setting Toyota Tacoma. The Tacoma set the record for fastest time traveled to the South Pole, so this should give you an idea on why it looks the way it does. I heard that we were getting some crazy off-road Toyota and in about two months it had finally arrived.
Photos and Words by: Josh Smylie
Right away the truck was breaking necks and the entire dealership came out to see what was being delivered. Its not everyday you see a Toyota equipped with military grade steel to keep ice from piercing through the body panels. On top of that it is equipped with a front winch just in case. One of the more noticeable features of the truck other than its size is that the bed has been replaced with a 300 gallon fuel tank because there are no gas stations in Antarctica.
From the rear to the front there is nothing that really shows that it is a Tacoma. The custom front bull-bar gives an aggressive look. Not to mention that it hangs over the trunks of lesser vehicles in traffic and without paying attention could shatter the back window of a Suburban. To fill out the wider fenders and conquer large mountains of frozen water, the Tacoma is fitted with 44″ Mickey Thompson Off-Road tires on custom made 17″ wheels.
Inside all four seats were replaced with OMP WRC Racing Seats along with Sabelt harnesses up front and OMP harnesses in the rear. The vehicle is also equipped with two different forms of GPS systems to map out and document the trip. The original map is still stored inside the GPS so if you are brave and have the money you could try and beat a world record.
Throughout the interior there are cameras mounted to record all that goes on for “science”. A multi-camera recording system is mounted behind the driver seat and can save video footage onto SD Cards. Housed under the factory radio are the switches which control when the activate the different air compressor features for the front and rear diffs as well as if you need to fill up a a tire. Finally the one thing this off-road beast needed was power to make up for the weight that was added on. The engine is the 4.0L V6 mounted with a TRD Supercharger to crank out a total of 341hp. Doesn’t sound like much but when your average speed to break records is 29mph it is plenty of power.
Follow us on Facebook
Check out our instagram @Southrnfresh
Full Resolution photos can be found here
The listing for this car if you would like to purchase it can be found here.There is no fixed vision of socialism that its proponents agree to. This term first arose in the 19th century as the Industrial Revolution took hold and Western Europeans moved from the farm to the city factory. No longer could tenant farmers support themselves on their land and burgeoning industry was an economic draw. Thus, Western European society left aristocratic feudalism behind and capitalism commenced in earnest.
However, many factory workers soon found that they had to work all day, practically every day, just to earn enough wages to survive. Radical thinker Karl Marx called this wage slavery and lamented that the lower class had to work to live and in turn lived to work. Fast forward to the present day and Westerners no longer work in factories en masse, but this system of forced wage labor persists for most people, who have no option but to obtain a job working for someone else's benefit if they are to make enough money to get by.
So-called communist China has seen something similar to the European Industrial Revolution take place over the last three decades. Millions of agrarian peasants were forced by economics to move to crowded, polluted cities to find work in industry where they serve to enrich the ruling elite. Horror stories about the working conditions in Chinese factories are frequent reminders that the true cost of your cheap widget is human misery.
China is officially communist, but a true communist such as Marx would be horrified at what had taken place in his name. He would deem it state-directed capitalism. For you see, in China, the ruling Communist Party is a class unto itself. The national legislature has a higher proportion of billionaires than any other in the world. For Marx, capitalism would give way to socialism and eventually communism, which was defined by two characteristics: the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and classlessness.
Of course, anyone familiar with the history of the last several decades can see that communism in practice was a horrible failure that led to neither of those two outcomes. The Soviet Union was a brutally oppressive regime whose legacy is a modern Russia where the richest men rule with a nuclear-powered military at their disposal. By some estimates, President Vladimir Putin is the richest man in the world and Russia is commonly called an oligarchy.
So what do modern socialists advocate for their vision of an alternative to capitalism? At its core, socialism isn't just government regulation of economic markets. Socialists like Bernie Sanders want to end the system of what Marx called wage slavery, where workers have no choice but to labor for others' profit so they can survive. What this means in practice, though, is not easily defined.
There are essentially two types of socialists in modern Western democratic politics. Social democrats are effectively what the left is in nearly every Western European and North American country. They might find socialism laudable, but have made peace with enacting changes to capitalism to make it more equitable. Social democrats enacted policies typically referred to as the mixed economy or welfare state, such as Social Security and universal health care. While U.S. Democrats don't use these labels, social democrats generally define the center-left of the political spectrum in the West.
Democratic socialists on the other hand are typically seen as more radical left-wingers and advocate the outright replacement of capitalism with socialism. European parties such as Greece's Syriza or Spain's Podemos aim to drastically reduce inequality through radical changes in policy. Democratic socialists would have government inject itself into the financial system and take control of natural resources to help the broader populace before private profit.
Despite his chosen label of democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders is very much a social democrat. He repeatedly will tell you how much he admires Scandinavia. That region is the modern poster child for social democracy and its countries are the most progressive, happiest, and equal in the entire world. Sanders is not proposing radical policies, but simply what many Europeans have realized is common sense. Even in America, many of his proposals enjoy broad support, just not among elected officials.
What are these policies? In general, social democrats like Sanders want to ensure that every person has access to housing, health care, education, meaningful employment, and transportation. Furthermore, Western socialists of all stripes typically support progressive social policies such as gender equality and tolerance of differences.
In particular however, Sanders advocates for three things that should be the backbone of the Democratic Party. These include reducing economic inequality, removing the rigged influence of the rich on our political system, and of course most importantly, preventing climate change. These aren't just issues that the far left supports. These are broadly popular issues on which our political system is massively out of step with what the public wants.
To address these issues, Sanders wants to do make our taxation system more progressive by ensuring the rich pay their fair share, given how much they benefit from the labor of others. He wants to ensure that every person has access to food, shelter, health care, and a good-paying job.
Politically, Sanders wants to ensure we keep our democracy by furthering the principle of one person, one vote. To do this he would get the big money that the Roberts Court introduced through Citizens United out of political campaigns and would support publicly funded races. Under this system, politicians would no longer have to spend 80 percent of their time begging the rich for money and could instead campaign for the popular support of the people themselves.
Climate change is the most important issue of our time, and I fear that when I am old it will have become the only issue that matters. Sanders proposes taxing carbon and would do what it takes to reduce emissions in a country that emits far more per capita than practically any other industrialized country. Climate change and inequality are intertwined, as the latter enables the former by depriving those most at risk of the power they need to avoid disaster.
Sanders' platform hardly looks like radical socialism. Instead, it is what nearly every Democratic voter would support deep down and what most Americans realize is fair. Sanders simply has the audacity to call himself an actual socialist and for that he is maligned by the press and treated like a joke. His candidacy, however, is not a joke—its purpose is to advance these issues which matter to every-day Americans.
Sanders will not win the Democratic primary. I will happily vote for him, but hope Clinton wins, as much as I dislike her. Why? Because the American electorate is not ready for someone who openly calls himself a socialist. The press already has it out for Hillary and you can just imagine what they would do to someone who so openly challenges the plutocracy of modern America. We've already seen how a candidate who is viewed as ideologically extreme can provide a historic defeat for his own party. Extremist Republican Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat in 1964 ushered in the most progressive government we have ever had.
However, Sanders running is an excellent thing because it forces these progressive issues upon the political discourse. A neo-liberal like Hillary Clinton will not be able to avoid debating Sanders. Even if she welcomes his running as a "Sister Soulja" type of moment, he changes the subject of debate to issues of economic inequality. That in itself is a victory for the left, because fighting inequality is both popular and correct.
So with Sanders running a campaign I've described as being social democratic, what might true socialism look like? Underscoring how socialism doesn't require government involvement, there is a brand of it called libertarian socialism as advocated by philosophers such as Noam Chomsky. Instead of government directive, workers would directly own their place of employment and there would be a free association of firms that aimed to benefit those who were employed. At its most extreme, this is a brand of socialism that anarchists advocate.
However, this vision of libertarian socialism is problematic because of the inherent selfishness and irrationality of human beings. It is quite unlikely that a society of worker-run businesses would be able to both maximize production or innovate and also keep its egalitarian structure, given that even in the breakdown of government we do not see anything but elite-driven economic systems in practice.
Ultimately, we should want a democratic socialist government to shape society for the benefit of all. So what might that look like? Along with the aforementioned access to housing, health care, education, meaningful employment, and transportation, we should want a government that protects its' denizens rights, advances their standard of living, promotes equality, and plans for the welfare of future generations by preventing climate change.
Policies that would promote these values include:
Guaranteed Housing—Government should ensure that no one is homeless by providing all with the bare essentials of housing. Even in the U.S., local governments that simply paid to have the homeless housed have shown it is more cost-effective than leaving them on the streets.
Universal Health Care—The United Kingdom's National Health Service is a government-run and provided healthcare system that consistently ranks at the top compared to every other country while costing less than half of what the U.S. system does per capita. Health care should be a human right, given that none of us chose to be born. Everyone uses the healthcare system at some point and it makes zero sense that everyone should not be covered by it.
Free Education—All education should not only be free, but higher education should pay a stipend to counteract the opportunity cost that comes with forgoing employment as a young adult. Several European countries already do this and have some of the most educated citizens in the world. We should want our citizenry to know as much as possible, and having a robust education system is key to scientific, technological, and culture advances.
Access to Transportation—Every person should be able to easily commute to their place of employment, to basic services such as health care or food, and to basic entertainment or socializing, so that they can be happy. This entails drastically strengthening public transportation and radically reworking our economic system to reduce sprawl, reduce car use, and eliminate fossil fuel use.
Guaranteed Employment—This is perhaps the most difficult value to enforce. Many European countries have far stricter regulations on hiring and firing than the U.S., but that doesn't necessarily benefit workers. We should desire that anyone wanting to work should find a job, but it's also necessary that firms be able to hire the best labor and fire those who aren't up to the task at hand.
Employment should ensure that society gains from it. This means that workers are treated with respect and allowed to unionize and bargain on their own behalf. It means that those who become unemployed receive both financial support and assistance in finding a new job. It means that those who have newly entered the work force are assisted in finding jobs that maximize their potential. We should want a system of employment that advances humankind and the individual simultaneously, rather than one that simply allows workers to survive while others profit.
Universal Income—Along with employment, socialism would use the resources of society (such as natural resources) for public benefit. Every person would be guaranteed a minimum level of income simply for being alive. This would enable freedom to choose one's own profession, while allowing industries such as the arts to thrive without the pressure of economic necessity. Many people in our society such as homemakers do work that the market cannot fairly value, but which has merit. This would be further encouraged by a universal income.
Fighting Climate Change—Finally, there is the issue of climate change. Human beings today have a duty to their children, their children's children, and so on to provide a world that benefits them. By allowing businesses and consumers to limitlessly emit carbon, policymakers have committed a sin that could possibly destroy the human race itself. Socialists would have a duty to limit carbon pollution and eliminate climate change by drastically reducing emissions and promoting carbon-capturing technology and plant growth.
The two policies commonly discussed are a carbon tax, and cap and trade. The latter would place a maximum limit on emissions and allow the market to determine the price of available permits to emit. A carbon tax, however, provides a clear cost-per-ton emitted and provides the government with revenue that would allow it to reduce taxes elsewhere if chosen. Both methods have their merits, but something needs to be done so that we stop destroying the habitability of our planet for future generations.
Ultimately, a system of socialism is for the advancement of humanity. Communism says "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need." However, socialism holds that "from each according to their ability, to each according to their contribution" to society is the way for us to not only advance society, but ensure that the average person's well-being increases too. Socialists would consequently want to create a society in which people do work for the betterment of humankind. That includes both their own personal advancement as well as society's.
Sanders may have no hope of winning the Democratic Party nomination in 2016. However, his candidacy brings to the table issues that might otherwise be ignored and that in itself is a win for the left. At best, he will normalize talk of socialism and inform Americans why they are screwed by our current system of political economy. One day, when our climate has changed for the worse, and the elite who benefitted from it live in luxury while the rest of us live in squalor, will we finally wake up?WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A single, short electronic message can land a U.S. lawmaker in heaps of trouble, even when it does not include lewd photos or inappropriate language.
A jogger runs past The U.S. Capitol Building at sunset in Washington, U.S. May 17, 2017. REUTERS/Zach Gibson
The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ethics on Tuesday reminded the chamber’s members they are not allowed to draft, edit, comment on or send campaign communications from a House building, regardless of a message’s length or form.
It added they should not engage in campaign-related activity even in a hallway, office or cafeteria, and ethics rules also apply to messages sent from personal devices.
“In this age of always-on mobile communications, members may find it impractical or unreasonable to have to exit a House building before sending a three-word campaign email,” the committee wrote. “However, that is what the relevant law, rules, and regulations require.”
The 14-page report wrapped up an investigation into Representative Ben Ray Lujan, who joined fellow Democrats more than a year ago in a sit-in supporting a measure that would have blocked suspected terrorists from buying guns.
Lujan chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which currently recruiting candidates for the 2018 elections, and his office cast the case as “politically motivated.”
“Congressman Luján is committed to abiding by House rules and will continue to do so in the future,” said his communications director, Joe Shoemaker.
Social media lit up during the sit-in and television endeavored to cover it around the clock, even when House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, turned off cameras and microphones.
At one point Lujan forwarded a campaign volunteer a copy of an email asking people to sign a petition with the message: “Get something out.”
Because he may have sent those three ambiguous words while in the chamber, he risked running afoul of strict limitations meant to ensure representatives, who must run for re-election every other year, do not use their offices for political advantage.
Also, his campaign consultants emailed out a donation solicitation purportedly written by the New Mexico representative as he sat on the floor that included a photograph of a video of him during the sit-in. Using closed-circuit footage for partisan purposes is prohibited.
The committee closed the case without further action. It could not determine if Lujan was in a House building while sending his email, but did say he was ultimately responsible for his consultants’ violations. His campaign has taken steps “to prevent any recurrence of this issue in the future,” the report said.Jose Mourinho and Zlatan Ibrahimovic: What they have said about each other
Jose Mourinho's Chelsea knocked Zlatan Ibrahimovic's PSG out of the Champions League in 2014 quarter-finals
With Zlatan Ibrahimovic close to joining Jose Mourinho at Manchester United, we look at what the pair have said about each other over the years.
Sky Sports News HQ understands United's executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward and Ibrahimovic's representatives are finalising terms on a one-year contract, with Mourinho determined to make the Sweden international his first marquee signing at Old Trafford.
It would represent a blockbuster reunion for Mourinho and Ibrahimovic, who spent the 2008/09 season together at Inter Milan before the Swede moved to Pep Guardiola's Barcelona.
The two personalities clashed at times but Ibrahimovic fired 25 goals as Mourinho steered Inter to the Serie A title, and they formed a strong bond during their time together. With a reunion on the cards, we look at what they have said about each other over the years…
MOURINHO ON IBRAHIMOVIC
In April 2014, Mourinho recalled an episode at Inter Milan when he refused to substitute an angry Ibrahimovic, who felt his team-mates weren't helping him to score the goals he needed to win the Serie A Golden Boot.
Ibrahimovic and Mourinho worked together at Inter Milan
"He was very angry and upset as he came at me. He was shouting, 'We are champions, I helped a lot to make you champions, now nobody's helping me. I want to [come off] now'.
"But I pretended not to understand him. I said, 'What? What? Do you want a drink, do you want some water?' and I threw him a bottle. I told him, 'Here, take a drink and go'. A few minutes later he scored a beautiful goal."
In the same interview, Mourinho admitted he had a special relationship with Ibrahimovic, whose dedication was as valuable as his quality at Inter.
"A player who gave me as much as Ibra will always be in my heart. He did a lot for Inter and Inter did a lot for him. I like seeing Ibra. I greet him whenever I get the chance to and I wish him all the best - except when he plays against me. He is very special, he is one of the best strikers in the world."
Sky Sports News HQ's Andy Burton explains the potential deal that would bring Zlatan Ibrahimovic to Manchester United Sky Sports News HQ's Andy Burton explains the potential deal that would bring Zlatan Ibrahimovic to Manchester United
It was not the first time Mourinho had sung Ibrahimovic's praises. In the middle of the 2008/09 season, he described the Swede as a bigger talent than Cristiano Ronaldo.
"Ronaldo is a good player but he is certainly not the best. He deserved the Golden Ball award because his team won the Champions League and the Premier League. But, for me, Ibrahimovic is the best."
Mourinho was less complimentary when explaining the decision to allow Ibrahimovic to join Barcelona a few months later.
"Inter had two possibilities, tell Ibrahimovic, 'We're not selling you', or take Eto'o, plus Hleb on loan for a year for free, plus 50m euros. To me that seems like an incredible deal, a deal worth 100m euros, the deal of the summer. Kaka 70, Cristiano Ronaldo 96. For me this is worth 100m because Eto'o is worth not even one euro less than Ibra."
I think it's a pity for him when he finishes his career and he played in the most important countries in the world of football, and won the most important championships in the world of football, but he didn't play in the best league in the world. Jose Mourinho on Zlatan Ibrahimovic
Ahead of Chelsea's Champions League quarter-final with PSG in April 2014, Mourinho said it would be a shame if Ibrahimovic did not get the chance to play in the Premier League.
"I think he has to be where he is happy, and if he's happy in Paris then he has to stay. But at the same time I think it's a pity for him when he finishes his career and he played in the most important countries in the world of football, and won the most important championships in the world of football, but he didn't play in the best league in the world and never won the best league in the world. That's a pity."
IBRAHIMOVIC ON MOURINHO
In an interview with French outlet Telefoot in March 2015, Ibrahimovic hinted that he would like to work with Mourinho again.
"We worked together for one year at Inter. The feeling was great between us and my only regret is that we were together for only one year."
Ibrahimovic devoted plenty of his autobiography, 'I am Zlatan Ibrahimovic', to discussing his former coach.
"Jose Mourinho is a big star. The first time he met my partner Helena, he whispered to her, 'Helena, you have only one mission: feed Zlatan, let him sleep, keep him happy.'
The feeling was great between us and my only regret is that we were together for only one year. Zlatan Ibrahimovic on Jose Mourinho
The Swede also used his autobiography to compare Mourinho to Guardiola, who he didn't see eye to eye with at Barcelona.
"That guy says whatever he wants. I like him. He's the leader of his army. But he cares, too. He would text me all the time at Inter, wondering how I was doing. He's the exact opposite of Pep Guardiola. If Mourinho lights up a room, Guardiola draws the curtains. Mourinho would become a guy I was basically willing to die for."
On leaving Inter Milan to join Barcelona in 2009, Ibrahimovic said: "No matter how happy I was going to Barca, it was sad to leave Mourinho. That guy is special."
Ibrahimovic offered further insight into Mourinho's managerial techniques in Carlo Ancelotti's recently published autobiography 'Quiet Leadership'.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic left Paris Saint-Germain at the end of the season
"Mourinho is the disciplinarian. Everything with him is a mind game - he likes to manipulate. Such tricks were new for me - all the time doing one thing to get another thing, all the time triggering me. I like these games and it worked for me; I became top scorer under him and we won the league."
The striker revealed how Mourinho's motivational techniques get the blood pumping before Inter's games.
"The way Mourinho prepared for games was also new to me. I would get pumped up, believing the story he would feed us. I went through a lot of adrenaline when I played for him. It was like nothing was ever good enough. He gave and he took. Jose Mourinho knows how to treat a footballer, but Carlo knows how to treat a person."
Ibrahimovic showed more admiration for Mourinho ahead of last season's Champions League meeting with Chelsea - two months after his former manager's sacking.
"I think everybody will miss Mourinho in the game. But I believe he will be back soon in football and if you are a little patient you will soon see him managing another club."
Ibrahimovic was right about that - and it looks as though the Swede could soon join him at Old Trafford…Please enable Javascript to watch this video
SAN JOSE, CA (KTVI) - The St. Louis Blues’ season ended Wednesday night in defeat as the San Jose Sharks jumped out to an early advantage and didn’t yield despite a late St. Louis surge in a 5-2 win to claim the Western Conference Championship.
Brian Elliott was back in goal after Jake Allen got the starts in Games 4 and 5 and had to withstand an early rush from the Sharks that included the fourth goal of the series for San Jose’s Joe Pavelski. San Jose’s Joel Ward added his second and third goals of the series with tallies in the second and third periods to make it 3-0.
Vladimir Tarasenko ended his series-long scoring drought with a goal midway through the third period and another with 3:35 to cut the deficit to 4-2, but it proved too little too late.
This is San Jose’s first trip to the Stanley Cup Final. The Blues have not been back to the Cup Final since 1970.
Fox 2 Sports Director Martin Kilcoyne was in the Blues locker room after the season ending loss and has the emotional post game report.Have you ever looked at a user record in an ASP.NET Identity’s users table and wondered just what is being saved on the PasswordHash column?
It looks like this (it’s in base64):
AQAAAAEAACcQAAAAEJSPbbFM1aeXB8fGRV7RRamLpjzktAF7FjwDWtFx35eol4AxN6vm4zWR9EApc7WPsQ==
Apart from maybe satisfying your curiosity, what could you benefit from knowing exactly what’s on that seemingly random sequence of characters?
Well, you could confidently update from different versions of ASP.NET Identity.
Also, if you ever get tired of ASP.NET Identity for whatever reason, you could move your user accounts to whatever alternative you found that might be better.
Or, you just want to have a simple users’ table and not have to deal with all of what you need to know to make ASP.NET Identity work. All of this while still being able to move your user accounts to ASP.NET Identity some day if you choose to do so.
Whatever that reason may be, lets pause and think first about what makes a good stored password.
First a password should only be know by the the person that holds the account. If we look at what’s saved at the PasswordHash ‘s column that seems to be true. If I don’t tell you which password I entered to generate the PasswordHash you won’t be able to guess it.
If it becomes public somehow (e.g. the server that hosts the database where that password hash is stored is breached), the attackers won’t be able to do much with it. They might try to guess it, but if it’s a good password they shouldn’t be able to in any reasonable amount of time. For that to be the case, a salt should be used.
If you don’t know what salt is in this context I recommend my other article Things you wanted to know about storing passwords but were afraid to ask.
In case you are in a hurry here’s a summary: it’s a random piece of data that is combined with the password. That makes it impossible for an attacker to generate hashes for common passwords, store them, and then use them to compare with a password hash.
For example, imagine that [email protected] and qwerty are common passwords (they really are). If an attacker knows the algorithm that was used to hash the user’s passwords he can just compute HASH( [email protected] ) and HASH( qwerty ) and store them. Then the process of figuring out which password was used to generate a particular password hash becomes an exercise in searching for a match in the stored passwords.
That’s much faster than for each password hash, picking a possible password, generating its hash and seeing if it matches.
By using a salt the passwords will all look unique, for example, instead of querty we’d hash quertyG%2cf# and save HASH( quertyG%2cf# ) and the salt G%2cf#.
But the user table in ASP.NET Identity only has a PasswordHash column, there’s no salt column. Does that mean there’s no salt being used?
Fortunately there’s a salt being used, in fact there’s much more than the password hash in the PasswordHash column.
By the |
and stayed, spending the first year driving around the county before dawn in his hatchback, collecting samples that he would painstakingly store in dry ice for transport back to Baltimore.
Now he runs the freestanding Amish Research Clinic, with ultrasound machines and heart monitors inside and hitching posts outside for horses and buggies. He employs several nurses; each time one knocks at a door to recruit the next patient, she has an Amish liaison at her side whose presence amounts to an Amish seal of approval for Shuldiner's work. He has no plans to retire, but says when the time comes, many members of his multidisciplinary team could carry on.
When Naomi Esh met Shuldiner in 1995, he told her about a diabetes study he wanted to do. He wanted to conduct three-hour glucose tolerance tests, which required participants to fast overnight, then travel to the clinic and get blood drawn every 30 minutes.
"I'm like, 'Isn't there any way we could do this in their homes?'" recalled Esh, an Amish woman who now works for Shuldiner. But it turned out that people were willing to take time out to do what the doctor asked.
"The road to research is paved by the way he treats the community, how he cares and takes the time to talk," she said.
Word of mouth is crucial in the Amish community, and soon, people were talking about Shuldiner. They liked being a part of something that could help others. The peace of mind that came from the free medical tests was another draw. And the money they got for participating was nice, too.
Now, Esh can go nowhere - to neighboring churches, to weddings, even funerals - without being asked what new research is being done and how they can help. "Sometimes I think I should bring a pencil and paper," she said with a laugh.A Critical Look At The Foster Care System
Incentives to Foster Parents
INCENTIVES TO FOSTER PARENTS
While there are many dedicated people willing to open their homes and hearts to children in distress, it can not be denied that financial gain is among a number of significant incentives leading some to become foster parents.
As the number of licensed foster homes has dropped to a low of 100,000 for the nations' estimated 500,000 foster care children, so has the quality of foster care homes unquestionably diminished over the years.
Judge Judy Sheindlin, supervising judge for the Manhattan Family Court, describes the foster parent typically found today in the New York City foster care system:
The typical foster parent I see is a single woman who has several biological children of her own. She is supported by welfare or social security disability. She is a high school dropout whose own kids are marginally functioning. She does not have the ability to help them with their schoolwork, and she has little hope for a brighter economic or social future. [1]"Bollox" redirects here. For the board game, see Bōku
"Bollocks" is a word of Middle English origin, meaning "testicles". The word is often used figuratively in colloquial British English and Hiberno-English as a noun to mean "nonsense", an expletive following a minor accident or misfortune, or an adjective to mean "poor quality" or "useless". Similarly, common phrases like "Bollocks to this!" and "That's a load of old bollocks" generally indicate contempt for a certain task, subject or opinion. Conversely, the word also figures in idiomatic phrases such as "the dog's bollocks" or more simply "the bollocks" (as opposed to just "bollocks"), which will refer to something which is admired, approved of or well-respected.[A]
Etymology [ edit ]
The word has a long history, with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) giving examples of its usage dating back to the 13th century. One of the early references is Wycliffe's Bible (1382), Leviticus xxii, 24: "Al beeste, that... kitt and taken awey the ballokes is, ye shulen not offre to the Lord..." (any beast that is cut and taken away the bollocks, you shall not offer to the Lord, i.e. castrated animals are not suitable as sacrifices).
The OED states (with abbreviations expanded): "Probably a derivative of Teutonic ball-, of which the Old English representative would be inferred as beall-u, -a, or -e". The Teutonic ball- in turn probably derives from the Proto-Indo-European base *bhel-, to inflate or swell. This base also forms the root of many other words, including "phallus".
Meaning "nonsense" [ edit ]
From the 17th to the 19th century, bollocks or ballocks was allegedly used as a slang term for a clergyman, although this meaning is not mentioned by the OED's 1989 edition. For example, in 1864, the Commanding Officer of the Straits Fleet[which?] regularly referred to his chaplain as "Ballocks". It has been suggested that bollocks came to have its modern meaning of "nonsense" because clergymen were notorious for talking nonsense during their sermons.[2]
Severity [ edit ]
Originally, the word "bollocks" was the everyday vernacular word for testicles—as noted above, it was used in this sense in the first English-language bible, in the 14th century. By the mid-17th century, at least, it had begun to acquire coarse figurative meanings (see section on "bollocking"), for example in a translation of works by Rabelais.
It did not appear in Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary of the English language.[3] It was also omitted from the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary and its 1941 reprint, finally appearing in the 1972 supplement.[4] The first modern English dictionary to include an entry for "bollocks" was G. N. Garmonsway's Penguin English Dictionary of 1965.[citation needed]
The relative severity of the various profanities, as perceived by the British public, was studied on behalf of the Broadcasting Standards Commission, Independent Television Commission, BBC and Advertising Standards Authority. The results of this jointly commissioned research were published in December 2000 in a paper called "Delete Expletives?".[5] This placed "bollocks" in eighth position in terms of its perceived severity, between "prick" (seventh place) and "arsehole" (ninth place).[6] By comparison, the word "balls" (which has some similar meanings) was down in 22nd place. Of the people surveyed, 25% thought that "bollocks" should not be broadcast at all, and only 11% thought that it could acceptably be broadcast at times before the national 9 pm "watershed" on television (radio does not have a watershed).[7] 25% of the people regarded "bollocks" as "very severe", 32% "quite severe", 34% "mild" and 8% considered it "not swearing".[8]
A survey of the language of London teenagers (published in 2002) examined, amongst other things, the incidence of various swearwords in their speech. It noted that the top ten swearwords make up 81% of the total swearwords. "Bollocks" was the seventh most frequent swearword, after "fucking", "shit", "fuck", "bloody", "hell" and "fuck off". Below "bollocks" were "bastard", "bitch" and "damn", in eighth, ninth and tenth places.[9] This research regarded these words as swearwords in the context of their usage but noted that some might be inoffensive in other contexts.[10]
Negative uses [ edit ]
"Talking bollocks" and "bollockspeak" [ edit ]
"Talking bollocks" generally means talking nonsense or bullshit,[11] for example: "Don't listen to him, he's talking bollocks", or "... talking absolute bollocks". Another example is "I told Maurice that he was talking bollocks, that he was full of shit and that his opinions were a pile of piss. (Rhetoric was always my indulgence.)"[12] "Talking bollocks" in a corporate context is referred to as bollockspeak.[13] Bollockspeak tends to be buzzword-laden and largely content-free, like gobbledygook: "Rupert, we'll have to leverage our synergies to facilitate a paradigm shift by Q4" is an example of management bollockspeak. There is a whole parodic book entitled The Little Book of Management Bollocks.[14] When a great deal of bollocks is being spoken, it may be said that the 'bollocks quotient' is high.[15]
A "bollocks" (singular noun) [ edit ]
Comparable to cock-up, screw-up, balls-up, etc. Used with the indefinite article, it means a disaster, a mess or a failure. It is often used pejoratively, as in to have "made a bollocks out of it",[16] and it is generally used throughout Britain and Ireland.
Bollocks up (transitive verb) [ edit ]
To bollocks something up means "to mess something up". It refers to a botched job: "Well, you bollocksed it up that time, Your Majesty!" or "Bollocksed up at work again, I fear. Millions down the drain".[17]
To "drop a bollock" [ edit ]
To "drop a bollock" describes the malfunction of an operation, or messing something up, as in many sports, and in more polite business parlance, dropping the ball brings play to an unscheduled halt.[18]
Bollocking [ edit ]
Noun [ edit ]
A "bollocking" usually denotes a robust verbal chastisement for something which one has done (or not done, as the case may be), for instance: "I didn't do my homework and got a right bollocking off Mr Smith", or "A nurse was assisting at an appendix operation when she shouldn't have been... and the surgeon got a bollocking".[19] Actively, one gives or delivers a bollocking to someone; in the building trade one can 'throw a right bollocking into' someone.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives the earliest meaning as "to slander or defame" and suggests that it entered the English language from the 1653 translation of one of Rabelais' works, which includes the Middle French expression "en couilletant", translated as "ballocking". The earliest printed use in the sense of a severe reprimand is, according to the OED, from 1946.[20]
Adjective [ edit ]
Bollocking can also be used as a reinforcing adjective: "He hasn't a bollocking clue!" or "Where's me bollocking car?"[21]
"A kick in the bollocks" [ edit ]
"A kick in the bollocks" is used to describe a significant set-back or disappointment, e.g. "I was diagnosed with having skin cancer. Ye Gods! What a kick in the bollocks".[22]
"Freeze (or work) one's bollocks off" [ edit ]
To freeze one's bollocks off means to be very cold. To "work ones bollocks off" is to work very hard. This phrase is sometimes used by or about women: Boy George referred to his mother "working her bollocks off" at home.[23]
"Bollock naked" is used in the singular form to emphasise being completely nude: "he was completely pissed and stark bollock naked".[24]
Bollocks (singular noun) [ edit ]
In Ireland, "bollocks", "ballocks" or "bollox" can be used as a singular noun to mean a despicable or notorious person, for instance: "Who's the old ballocks you were talking to?",[25] or conversely as a very informal term of endearment: "Ah Ted, ye big bollocks, let's go and have a pint!".[This quote needs a citation] In Dublin it can be spelled "bollix".[citation needed]
Multiple meanings, also spelled "bolloxed" or "bollixed":
Exhausted: "I couldn't sleep at all last night, I'm completely bollocksed!" Broken: "My foot pump is bollocksed." An extreme state of inebriation or drug-induced stupor: "Last night I got completely bollocksed".[26] Hungover (or equivalent): "I drank two bottles of gin last night, I'm completely bollocksed." Made a mistake: "I tried to draw that landscape, but I bollocksed it up."
The phrase "bollocksed up" means to be in a botched, bungled, confused or disarrayed state; e.g. "He managed to bollix up the whole project."[27][28] In the printing and newspaper industries, dropping a California Job type case of moveable type – spilling the contents – was a classic example of "bollocksing up the works". The box was called "pied". "Bollocksed" in that sense meant "beyond all repair".[1]
Web design [ edit ]
"Dog's bollocks syndrome" is a term used by web designers to over-designed websites that have more flash than might be needed or justified.[B]
Positive uses [ edit ]
A usage with a positive (albeit still vulgar) sense is "the dog's bollocks".[29] An example of this usage is: "Before Tony Blair's speech, a chap near me growled: 'He thinks he's the dog's bollocks.' Well, he's entitled to. It was a commanding speech: a real dog's bollocks of an oration."[30]
Although this is a recent term (the Online Etymology Dictionary dates it to 1989[29][31]), its origins are obscure. Etymologist Eric Partridge and the Oxford English Dictionary believe the term comes from the now obsolete typographical sequence of a colon and a dash.[32] This typography, using a dash following a colon, was used to introduce a list. Thus, it is a very early example of an emoticon.[1]
The Oxford English Dictionary says the following mark (":— ") is entitled "the dog’s bollocks", defined as: "typogr. a colon followed by a dash, regarded as forming a shape resembling the male sexual organs." The usage is cited to the year 1949.[1][33]
This phrase has found its way into popular culture in a number of ways. There is a beer brewed in England by the Wychwood Brewery called the "Dog's Bollocks",[34] as well as a lager cocktail.[35]
"Chuffed to one's bollocks" [ edit ]
The phrase "chuffed to one's bollocks" describes someone who is very pleased with themselves. Nobel laureate Harold Pinter used this in The Homecoming[36] The phrase provided a serious challenge to translators of his work.[37] Pinter used a similar phrase in an open letter, published in The Guardian, and addressed to Prime Minister Tony Blair, attacking his co-operation with American foreign policy. The letter ends by saying "Oh, by the way, meant to mention, forgot to tell you, we were all chuffed to the bollocks when Labour won the election."[38]
Other uses [ edit ]
"Bollock-head" is a vulgar British term for a shaven head.[39] It can also refer to someone who is stupid, as can "bollock-brain". The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) cites the expression "His brains are in his ballocks", to designate a fool.[40]
Rhyming slang [ edit ]
The rhyming slang for bollocks is "Jackson Pollocks".[41] It can be shortened to Jacksons, as in "Modern art? Pile o' Jacksons if you ask me!". Sandra Bullocks is occasionally used to approximate rhyming slang; it does not quite rhyme, but preserves meter and rhythm. The Beautiful South bowdlerised their original line "sweaty bollocks" as "Sandra Bullocks", as one of several changes to make their song "Don't Marry Her" acceptable for mainstream radio play.
The term "Horlicks" was brought to prominence in July 2003, when then-British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw used it to describe irregularities in the preparation and provenance of the "dodgy dossier" regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Straw used the expression "a complete Horlicks",[42] instead of the more impolite "make a complete bollocks of something". This euphemism stems from an advertising campaign for the Horlicks malt drink, where people were seen to be shouting "Horlicks!" in a loud voice, to give vent to stress or frustration. Eric Morecambe was also known to cough "Horlicks!" behind his hand on The Morecambe and Wise Show.[citation needed]
Rollocking is sometimes used as a euphemism for "bollocking".[citation needed] A rollocking bollocking may be delivered by an electorate.[43]
Bollards [ edit ]
The 2007 Concise new Partridge dictionary of slang and unconventional English quotes "bollards" as meaning "testicles" and that it is a play on the word bollocks.[44]
Literature [ edit ]
The play Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery, published in 1684 and ascribed to John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, includes a character named Bolloxinion, King of Sodom (along with other characters with names such as General Buggeranthos and the maid of honour, Fuckadilla). The word bollox appears several times in the text, such as:
Had all mankind, whose pintles I adore,
With well fill'd bollox swiv'd me o'er and o'er.
None could in nature have oblig'd me more.[45]
In 1690, the publisher Benjamin Crayle was fined 20 pounds and sent to prison for his part in publishing the play.[46]
In one of the tales in Burton's 1885 translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Kafur, the eunuch, says:
But now my spirit is broken and my tricks are gone from me, so alas! are my ballocks.[47]
Obscenity court ruling [ edit ]
Perhaps the best-known use of the term is in the title of the 1977 punk rock album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols. Testimony in a resulting prosecution over the term demonstrated that in Old English, the word referred to a priest, and could also be used to mean "nonsense". Defence barrister John Mortimer QC and Virgin Records won the case: the court ruled that the word was not obscene.[48] It just means "put aside all of that other rubbish and pay attention to this".[1] In a summary for the defence, Mortimer asked,
What sort of country are we living in if a politician comes to Nottingham and speaks here to a group of people in the city centre and during his speech a heckler replies "bollocks". Are we to expect this person to be incarcerated, or do we live in a country where we are proud of our Anglo-Saxon language? Do we wish our language to be virile and strong or watered down and weak?[49]
Tony Wright, a Leicestershire trader, was given an £80 fixed penalty fine by police for selling T-shirts bearing the slogan "Bollocks to Blair". This took place on 29 June 2006 at the Royal Norfolk Show; the police issued the penalty notice, quoting Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 which refers to language "deemed to cause harassment, alarm or distress".[50]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ [1] "Dog's bollocks" has been naturally extended "sometimes for decorum’s sake, and refer to the'mutt’s nuts', the 'puppy’s privates', or... 'badger’s nadgers'." ^'"[1] "... ironically does not refer to web-content which is particularly amazing, it's derived from the joke 'why does a dog lick its bollocks? Because it can.606 shares 484
114
8
Recently emerging from stealth mode, Boston’s Rize Inc. is gearing up to launch their first 3D printer, the Rize One. The machine will be available by the end of the year and introduces a new 3D printing technology: the company calls this Augmented Polymer Deposition (APD).
I spoke with Rize CEO, Frank Marangell to find out more.
Marangell describes the Rize One 3D printer as, “a paradigm shift.” This is because of the company’s intent to “break the chains of the 3D printing lab and come out of the darkness of basement.”
This is not the first time a company has made spectacular claims, but a brief role call of those behind Rize adds weight to Marangell’s words.
Rize founder Eugene Giller and Tom Davidson, Rize’s VP Engineering are “on the patent that HP is using for their Multi-Jet Fusion Machine,” says Marangell.
Giller was also “responsible for the materials that went into Google Glasses, Google bought his company.” Marangell explains, “Eugene is a material scientist, he was in the advanced materials group at Z Corp.” Working with 3D printing on a daily basis Giller became frustrated with the existing technology.
He “was tired of powder and the post-processing,” says Marangell. Anyone familiar with the steps involved in finishing a 3D fabricated part might tell a similar story, “that’s something we all said in this industry.” Removing support structures from prints using a noxious chemical bath is probably not everyone’s idea of fun, post-processing also adds hours to total time to produce a finished part.
But post-processing is only one part of the puzzle to improve 3D printing.
“If you know the different technologies in this industry, every customer has to make a compromise,” says Marangell. For strength FDM or SLS might be good choice, but for surface finish, “more brittle acrylics print based machines, photopolymers”. The compromise is that “you don’t get strength” or you get strength but not the desired finish.
“Eugene thought there must be a better way and he came up with it, and that’s our Augmented Polymer Deposition (APD) technology.”
Augmented Polymer Deposition
APD is a technology that can put, “down a thermoplastic and then jet an additive on the layer and then another layer of thermoplastic.”
The Rize One 3D printer has, “one inkjet head that has two separate channels” and a thermoplastic extruder. With APD, filament and ink can be utilized, layer-by-layer, during the same print-run. The extruder lays down support material and fabricates the part, the inkjet print head can jet both functional inks and release inks. Functional inks can be used to change the material properties while the later ink serves to make the removal of support material an easier task.
The printer is designed for three heads, bringing the channel total to six, and development work is underway to produce, “full color.”
The process will work with, “a variety of thermoplastics.” But for the first material Rize has formulated an, “engineering medical grade plastic that has no shrinkage, no water absorption and is a compound that Eugene created.” The material is, “near isotropic,” which means it has almost identical properties in all axises.
Covering all bases
Rize seem to have the materials and hardware base well covered and their second co-founder brings the software experience.
During the funding journey, Giller connected with Leonid Raiz, the fifth employee of PTC and the founder of Revit Technology Corporation. “Revit revolutionized architectural CAD,” says Marangell. Back in the 1980s, “Chuck [Hull] said to Leonid make me something so that I can print with my 3D printer,” and the.stl file was created. “So Leonid created 3D CAD,” he adds.
Marangell himself is no stranger to the 3D printing industry, in 2006 he was hired by Objet to develop the U.S. market. At Objet Marangell, “grew the company from zero to $85 million in six years,” and held the position of president. He parted ways with the company in 2013, a year after the Stratasys acquisition.
Understandably Marangell is proud of the team behind the Rize One, but he also credits another factor with the development of APD.
“We wouldn’t be able to do this in any other city than Boston. So the U.S. headquarters for Objet was here in Boston and Z-Corp global headquarters was here and many of our team are ex-Z-Corp guys.”
The region also has, “3D printing expertise from Harvard spin offs like Voxel8 or MIT and ExOne.” Marangell says, “we’re a lean and mean team we’re 14 people. But the engineering team has more than 20 3D printing patents to their name.”
Of Voxels & Materials
The company’s first material is “high on the plastic pyramid, near a polycarbonate so we are starting at about 75 mega pascals [MPa] for the X and Y strength of the material, for the Z [axis] we only lose 5 MPa.”
“By comparison ABS is 58 MPa, but only 35 MPa, almost half it loses 40% of its material strength in the Z. So we are double the strength, and you’re only as strong as your weakest link. You can’t really create a part with all your strength in one direction and all your weakness in another direction, it will always fall apart in the way you least expect it.”
The APD process permits a new type of interaction, “between the support and model, we jet a release material that says ‘support me, but don’t stick to me’.” This means that printed supports should be significantly faster to remove than objects fabricated by other AM methods. Marangell says post-processing can be summarized in three words, “Pop it off.”
On the company’s website it says post-processing can be done with, “your bare hands; without any filing or sanding, your part is ready to use.” This is advantageous over the “noisy, smelly bath in the office air.”
That support removal bath contains, “highly alkaline sodium hydroxide and it takes 3 hours. That same part printed on our machine, is stronger, printed in about the same time [post processing] takes 25 seconds. 3 hours vs 25 seconds!”
The CEO believes the, “safety aspect and the environmental aspect of 3D printing is only just starting to get attention.” This is an area addressed by a research paper from last year.
APD allows Rize “to change material property on every voxel.” Marangell says the 3D printer, “can jet different materials on every different pixel, I can put a release on one pixel, I can put a conductive material on another, I can put an extra bonding material, I can put a smoothing material on another channel.”
This is, “a much better opportunity to control voxel by voxel printing” claims Marangell, independent reviewers will have to wait under later in the year when HP’s MJF and the Rize One become available to compare. Rize also say their software will be a significant improvement on the current options.
“We don’t fix the file, we take imperfect files and use smart algorithms to say, ‘that triangle is a little bit 90º off’ look around, verify it and just print right through.”
Benefits & Applications
Because the material does not absorb water or shrink, medical applications are among those at the forefront of possibilities. These include, “Arthroscopic surgical guides, but also dental periodontics: surgical guides for dental surgery. For orthodontic aligners, so there are so many things that a material that doesn’t shrink and is also medically grade for skin and human contact.”
Hearing aids are another potential market, and one that is very large.
“Hearing aids are all 3D printed. Mostly on SLA machines and they do an excellent job. They can print a very accurate part and everybody is happy apart from one thing, they make it in a very rigid material that has very good sound reflectivity, and doesn’t lose sound along the way and that’s great for the hole that leads to the electronics into your ear. But its not so good for the part that touches your skin. The part that sits in your ear all day long, that is, it makes noise and it makes noise every time your jaw moves or your head moves. Every time you breathe that sound also goes into the hearing aid because its such a good conductor. And it’s rigid and it’s uncomfortable in your ear, so if you could print a soft coating on a rigid thermoplastic, I’m not talking Objet like where its rubber-like, that is not strong enough to endure production and lifetime use. We’re using a real medical engineering thermoplastic that when we change it we can plasticize those areas to soften them up, during the print. We can add a plasticizer to each pixel we want, making it as soft as we want. But it will still be rigid on the inside. So the hearing aid people we’ve talked to are very open to that. So its early, but it sounds to them an excellent solution to the current problem.”
These are near term applications, and Rize are at the beta testing phase with a number of partners, some of which cannot yet be named. However, Reebok are one company who are happy to reveal their involvement.
In the longer term Marangell says, “imagine putting down layer of insulator and then high resolution jetting mechanism, jetting the printed circuits, cure it one way or the other and add the next layer on top of it. Creating fully electrical parts.”
Marangell has discussed printing “plastic test fixtures that are also static dissipative” with a PCB test manufacturing company. Such a device would mean not having to “worry about shorting out the printed circuit board because of static on the platform.” 3D printed electronics are certainly an area where activity has increased during 2016.
Other possibilities are working with Graphene, Marangell says, “the challenges of graphene 3D printing are the bond in the Z.”
“Graphene is a tough material, its usually carried by nylon, and that is the problem with these materials, there is just too much nylon in there. And nylon is soft and flexible, but it goes against the needs of the graphene which is hard and light. So we can actually put graphene in between each layer, we can align the graphene in the jetting material, so we can jet strength in any direction we want. And we can also put it inside our thermoplastics and bonds between each layer something that makes the Z bond stronger than you would get otherwise.”
Rize are working on a “full color solution, although our first release is going to be gray scale.” The solution will, “put color on the part that can’t be rubbed off, because it’s in the part.”
Marangell summarizes the Rize One’s advantages as a “printer that plugs into the wall that doesn’t have any kind of venting need, push print to go, take it out and pop-off the supports and you have useable part that is stronger and twice as strong as ABS plastic.”
APD’s advantage over FDM is due to “roundness of the edge of the filament and that makes a rough surface.” Marangell explains, “if you jet a material that kind of merges those layers together you can smooth that surface. So we’re filling the gap, we’re making a smooth surface.”
“The goal is for near injection molding quality for surface finish.” And to “make a 3D printed injection molded part with engineering/medical grade plastic.”
Pricing: the printer and the business
The Rize One “system is going to be $19,000, but I would say a package that includes material, a start-up kit and a year warranty which is extended from the three month standard. You put it all together and its $25,000.” Relative to other options in the market this is a good deal according to Marangell,
“The average price according to Wohlers, for an industrial 3D printer is $97,000. I’m providing more, zero post processing, gray scale, full picture and text, strength stronger than ABS plus, environmentally safe industrial solution that really is a paradigm shift in pricing.”
The material price will be $99/kg and the printing area of “12x8x6 covers about 80% the market of single parts.”
The “goal of Rize is to be a $1 billion valuation in the next 5-7 years. By having sales that reach $100 or $200 million,” says Marangell. When the Rize One is released later this year it will join an increasingly crowded market.
Certainly on paper the company is impressive, both the team and the technology. The true test, trial by market, will arrive this winter.
But for Marangell the warm reception by potential customers means, “Christmas already came for me, when we announced.”Leicester City youngster Jack Barmby has joined League 2 club Notts County on loan until November.
- Development Squad youngster Jack Barmby heads to Notts County on loan
- The versatile attacker has previously been on loan with Rotherham United
- Barmby could feature against York City on Saturday afternoon
Leicester City youngster Jack Barmby has joined League 2 club Notts County on loan until November.
Jack, 20, heads to Meadow Lane for what will be an important run of fixtures for the Magpies, as they look to build on a sequence of three wins in their last four games.
Barmby has been a regular in the Foxes Under-21 Development squad since joining City from Manchester United in May 2014, deployed in a variety of positions in midfield and attack.
He spent a month on loan in the Championship with Rotherham United last term and was heavily involved in City’s 2015 pre-season schedule, featuring in the friendlies at Lincoln City and Mansfield Town.
Jack will be familiar with the demands of League 2, having scored five goals in 17 appearances while on loan with Hartlepool United before joining Leicester.
Subject to his registration being approved in time, he could make his debut for Notts County this Saturday, when Ricardo Moniz’s side host York City.The government on Thursday named 27 companies, including one public institution, with exceptionally low numbers of female employees or few to no women in management.Kumho Tire was one of the high-profile companies that made the list along with Meritz Securities and Soongsil University.These companies violated the affirmative action act adopted in 2006 to increase hiring while correcting discriminatory practices against women, the Ministry of Employment and Labor said.The companies failed to meet even 70 percent of their sector’s national average in female hiring or management rate in the last three years.The lists also included companies that have been warned to hire or promote more women yet failed to follow through.“We have selected workplaces that we saw had little or no will in improving in hiring or promoting women, including creating an environment so that they could work and equally raise a family,” said Moon Ki-seop, the ministry’s employment policy officer.By industry, business support was the biggest violator as six companies made the list, or 22.2 percent of companies in the sector. Businesses that traditionally had large number of male employees, including construction, chemical and heavy firms made the list. Additionally, 12 companies or 44.4 percent of the 27 companies were businesses that employed more than 1,000.Tire manufacturer Kumho Tire had the sixth smallest rate of female employees. Among the 5,042 employees, just 247 or 4.9 percent were women. Only four of the 315 management were women or 1.3 percent.Other high-profile companies included Meritz, which has more than 1,300 employees. While it has a higher rate of female employees than Kumho Tire with 23.8 percent or 330 female workers, it had a low percentage of women in management. Of the 105 in management, two women were promoted to that status or 1.9 percent.Among the 27 companies, 63 percent or 17 companies had no female managers.GwangHyk Construction led the list of male-dominated firms. The construction company, which has more than 1,400 employees, has only seven women or 0.5 percent while none among the 27 in management.It has been more than a decade since the government implemented the affirmative action act for public companies and private workplaces with more than 500 employees to hire and promote more women.The government has been ramping up campaigns encouraging more companies to hire women whose careers were interrupted due to marriage or child-raising as the dwindling workforce is taking a toll on the nation’s economic growth.The number of women in the workforce has grown steadily in the last five years. The female employment rate rose from 35.24 percent in 2012 to 37.79 percent last year. The rate of women in management also improved, from 16.62 percent to 20.09 percent in 2016.In fact, while 1,790 men took leave to raise children in 2012, that number surged to 7,616 last year.BY LEE HO-JEONG [[email protected]]Robert Hooke was a scientist, artist, and nemesis to Isaac Newton. In his spare time, he engaged in one of the most celebrated science art projects. To do so, he was forced to get an ant drunk. Yes, really.
The artistic and scientific project in question was the Micrographia, a book of detailed and beautiful drawings of insects and other living things. It presented the bugs and mosses that people saw every day in a new light. Rather than being a sign of decay, disease, or dirt, they became a part of nature, and a work of art.
Advertisement
The trouble, Hooke found, was getting the insects to stand still and be sketched. A less compassionate man might have killed them. Hooke got them drunk. He specifically describes drunkening up an ant, saying, "I gave him a gill of brandy, which after a while knocked him down dead drunk." The ant puked up some bubbles, but was none the worse for wear. According to Hooke, after |
Sonnett seemed to enjoy the advantage earlier in the year, Ellis has preferred Engen as a late substitute in three of the U.S.’ last five matches.
Long has surged of late for the team, starting four of the U.S.’ last five matches. She also nearly scored on Saturday, but South Africa managed to clear her second-half header off the goal line.
“Every time I put the USA jersey, it’s an honor,” said Long. “I just take it game by game. It’s such a humbling experience playing for the U.S. and representing my country.”
The midfielder added that her best qualities were “being able to possess, and be a quarterback. Win my tackles on defense and build the attack from deep.”
Final projections
ON THE TEAM: Hope Solo, Mallory Pugh, Becky Sauerbrunn, Kelley O’Hara, Whitney Engen, Meghan Klingenberg, Julie Johnston, Carli Lloyd, Ali Krieger, Christen Press, Alex Morgan, Morgan Brian, Megan Rapinoe, Crystal Dunn, Tobin Heath, Lindsey Horan, Alyssa Naeher, Allie Long.
MISSES THE CUT/ALTERNATES: Samantha Mewis, Heather O’Reilly, Ashlyn Harris, Jaelene Hinkle, Emily Sonnett, Gina Lewandowski.
John D. Halloran is an American Soccer Now columnist. Follow him on Twitter.Congratulations!
Here we announce 30 winners who will receive 'Wish Formula Special Kit' for review.
Kylie
Nur Afini Atikah
MOnica
Lucy S
Denise Lim
Arianna De Dominicis
Flynn Figueroa
Therese
Victoria Flores Osor
Aleksandra Kazmierowska
Marco Antonio
Beauty Witches Blog
Paola O
S Hameed
Indira Wulandari
Sharmili
theglowinghoneybee
Lexie Bell
Ashley Hasegawa
Anna Lai
Julie Harris
jasmine cheah
Anouk
Ulrike
Peepingpomeranian
Michelle
STEPHANIE ESBIN
Ha tu
Julie
Aida Kentassova
We will contact to you individually to confirm shipping address and we will ship the item on Dec.21
After receive the item please follow below direction when you post a review.
1) The title of the review should include "[JOLSE] Wish Formula SPECIAL kit review".
2) The article should include 'jolse.com' or actual product link.
3) Deadline of posting would be Feb 10 2017.
4) After posting, please let us know by sending email to [email protected].
We are planning to hold similar events in future. We hope for your continuous support and interest!
Hi lovelies!
JOLSE is recruiting 30 reviewers for Wish Formula Special Kit
Wish Formula is focusing on 'program cosmetics' and developing unique items for home aesthetic.
http://jolse.com/category/wish-formula/519/
If you are interested in testing new item, leave a comment with a link/address of your own SNS under this posting.
(all kinds of channels are fine : instagram, FB, twitter, blog...)
We will announce winners on Dec. 15 and deadline of the posting would be Feb. 10.
Good luck and have an awesome day!More charges are being leveled against the hero doctor who helped the CIA pinpoint Usama bin Laden in what appears to be a strategy to ensure he remains behind bars even if the sham case accusing him of colluding with terrorists is overturned.
[audio-clip]
Dr. Shakil Afridi was charged with murder last week for a six-year-old case in which he tried to save a young boy stricken with appendicitis. Now, just days before a Pakistani tribunal hearing at which he could win a retrial in the case that landed him a 33-year prison sentence, his lawyers have learned that a raft of new charges await.
“It seems the prosecution and evidence is so weak, they have to frame him to keep [Afridi] in jail, fearing an acquittal," said Qamar Nadeem, a lawyer and cousin of the jailed doctor.
[pullquote]
Afridi’s lawyers say they’ve been told by a political administration official of Khyber Pakhtunkwa, the northwestern province of Pakistan where the doctor is imprisoned, that new charges accuse Afridi of medical malpractice, professional malfeasance and sexual harassment -- all from cases dating back several years.
The murder and fraud charge stems from when Afridi served as a Khyber Agency physician, according to his attorney. Although it was not acted upon at the time, the case was re-filed by the boy's mother, Naseeb Khela. According to local reports, she is now alleging that Afridi tried to kill her by a lethal injection when she threatened to take legal action.
Afridi has been imprisoned since shortly after the May 2011 raid by Navy SEALs in which Bin Laden was killed in his Abbottabad compound. The raid came after a vaccine ruse – later disclosed by former CIA Director Leon Panetta, helped the CIA pinpoint the Al Qaeda leader’s presence there. Although Pakistani officials charged him with conspiracy, his imprisonment was widely seen as punishment for helping the U.S. in a raid that was deeply embarrassing to Pakistan.
Afridi spent nearly a year in the custody of Pakistan’s prime intelligence agency being interrogated without a charge. In May 2012, a tribal court convicted him of “conspiring against the state” and sentenced him to more than three decades behind bars. Months after that sentence was handed down, Afridi was been barred from meeting his lawyers and only one short meeting with his family has been reported.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif pledged to reconsider the doctor’s case -- even suggesting a pardon was possible -- in a private meeting with congressional representatives in Washington, but said for now the case is in the hands of the tribal court. But Fox News learned last month that other cases were expected against Afridi, and public sentiment in Pakistan is that the U.S. has no influence in the case.
Anti-U.S. critics in Pakistan point to the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, a U.S.-trained neurosurgeon who left Massachusetts after 9/11 and resurfaced in Afghanistan where she was arrested for trying to kill U.S. soldiers. Siddiqui is currently serving a sentence of 86 years at a maximum security prison in Fort Worth, Texas. Pakistan has demanded her release, much as the U.S. has demanded Afridi’s.
In an interview with Fox News, cricket legend-turned-politician Imran Khan, chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf, whose party rules in the northwest province and is protesting against drone strikes by blocking NATO supplies, refused to interfere in Afridi’s case.
“The law must take its course,” Khan said. “With Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, she has been sentenced for 86 years in prison. When you talk to the U.S. and say the case against her is just so flimsy, they say well it’s the due course of law [and] we can’t interfere with our judicial process. Same is the case here," said Khan.
Afridi’s legal team is still trying to meet with him ahead of a retrial hearing scheduled for Nov. 27. The newly lodged murder and fraud cases will be heard on Dec. 20 by a tribal court judge at a proceeding where Afridi will not have legal representation. If convicted, Afridi could face up to life in prison and fines, according to his attorneys, who say they had not even heard of the case until last week.
Security has been tightened around the Peshawar Central jail since the local Taliban promoted a new and more vicious militant leader named Maulana Fazlullah after Hakeemullah Mehsud was killed in a drone strike in early November.
With Fazlullah’s father-in-law being held in the same prison as Afridi, the jailed doctor’s family, supporters and government officials fear an attack on the prison to free him and hundreds more hard-core militants.
“That’s been our worst fear, if that was to happen,” said Nadeem. “It’s happened in the past at other prisons, so who will guarantee [Afridi’s] safety?”Actress Skye McCole Bartusiak, 21, died at her home in Texas on July 18, 2014. (Photo11: Alberto E. Rodriguez, Getty Images)
Skye McCole Bartusiak, who played the youngest daughter of Mel Gibson's character in the 2000 film The Patriot, died on Saturday at her home in Houston, reports CNN and Variety. She was 21.
"We lost our girl," her mother, Helen McCole Bartusiak, told CNN. Investigators have not determined a cause of death, but Bartusiak has been suffering from epileptic seizures in recent days, according to her mother.
"She was a kind and really beautiful girl," her mother said.
WATCH: Watch Skye McCole Bartusiak's most touching scene from 'The Patriot'
Her most well-known role was in 2000's The Patriot, but Bartusiak appeared in several other films as a child actor including 1999's The Cider House Rules and 2001's Don't Say a Word opposite Michael Douglas. She also appeared on TV with roles in 24, Lost, House M.D. and CSI.
Most recently, Bartusiak had been preparing to produce and direct her first feature film, her mother said.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1ruzHBuLAS VEGAS — US spy master Keith Alexander courted hackers at an infamous Def Con gathering rife with software tricksters wary of police and ferociously protective of privacy.
National Security Agency (NSA) director Alexander was the latest, and perhaps the most controversial, federal official to attend the annual hacker conference in Las Vegas to recruit warriors for battles being fought on the Internet.
“I am absolutely impressed with some of the stuff going on here,” Alexander said during a keynote presentation to a packed auditorium.
“In this room is the talent our nation needs to secure cyber space.”
His Def Con visit came after he was quoted by the New York Times as saying that between 2009 and 2011 there was a 17-fold increase in cyber attacks on critical US infrastructure such as power grids and mobile phone networks.
Along with being boss of the NSA, Alexander is an Army general and head of US Cyber Command created to defend against Internet-based attacks.
“My concern is destructive attacks with serious consequences on critical infrastructure (and key government systems),” Alexander said.
He displayed a list of major companies including banks; credit card firms; videogame and car makers, and even computer security outfits, successfully hacked in the past two years.
“There are a lot of companies with tremendous cyber security expertise getting hacked,” Alexander said.
“The reality is that this is the community that who builds many of these tools,” he continued with an apparent reference to software weapons wielded by cyber attackers.
“This community, better than anyone, understands where this is going and what we can do to fix that.”
He referred to Def Con as “the world’s best cyber community.”
Alexander, who sprinkled humor and personal stories into his talk, displayed a website for NSA job seekers.
“We need great talent,” he said. “We don’t pay as high as some of the others, but we are fun to be around.”
Public domain photo of NSA Director Keith Alexander via Wikimedia Commons| By
Off the keyboard of RE
Follow us on Twitter @doomstead666
Friend us on Facebook
Published on The Doomstead Diner on December 7, 2016
Discuss this article at the Economics Table inside the Diner
One of the main questions those of us who have been observing collapse since the 2008 Financial Crisis have always tried to answer is just how a banking collapse would play itself out? Lately, there have been ever more clues on the shape it will take as it moves around the globe.
The first indication came with Cypress and the "bail-in" of the depositors there, and Greece shutting it's ATMs down and then only allowing small daily withdrawals of cash. In the last month, we've seen India declare all it's old "large" denomination Rupee notes declared void, issuing out new Rupees to take their place. Ahead of us, we have the imminent failure of the Italian banks on the horizon along with the possible failure of Germany largest bank, Deutchbank. Coming at some point even IF somebody loans more money to the Italian Goobermint to bail out Monte dei Paschi di Siena over the weekend.
DEFINITION of 'Bail-In'
A bail-in is rescuing a financial institution on the brink of failure by making its creditors and depositors take a loss on their holdings. A bail-in is the opposite of a bail-out, which involves the rescue of a financial institution by external parties, typically governments using taxpayers money. Typically, bail-outs have been far more common than bail-ins, but in recent years after massive bail-outs some governements now require the investors and depositors in the bank to take a loss before taxpayers.
Now, in the 2008 crisis in the aftermath of Lehman, the solution was a "bail-out" of the banks by pulling out Hank "the Skank" Paulson's "Big Bazooka" and charging it all up to the Taxpayers, as opposed to bank depositors in a Bail-in. Of course, none of the taxpayers are too happy about that, so at least in Eurotrashland rules were set in place to do bail-ins.
Once you deposit your money in a bank, you have made an UNSECURED loan to the bank. They're supposed to pay you back on demand, but of course if they go belly up and don't have the money and can't borrow it from someone else, your money essentially vanishes to the same place it came from, thin air. Obviously, depositors who have this occur to them will be even more pissed off than the taxpayers, since your tax bill is spread out incrementally over time. You don't instantly lose everything overnight, you just go broke more or less gradually as your taxes keep going up.
What bail-ins also do though besides pissing off a lot of depositors is they take a whole lot of money out of circulation, which of course is highly deflationary. Similarly, the exchange of the Rupee notes also is highly deflationary, because Da Goobermint is planning on taxing or confiscating the money that is deemed "suspicious". That means the Indian whose money was taken no longer has it to spend on goods and services in the economy.
So rather than the inflation so feared by folks like John Williams and Speedy Gonzalo Lira back in 2008, it now is looking more like an end game of deflation as both banks and goobermints confiscate money in order to try and balance their unbalanceable books. Even if they confiscated all the money in circulation and on deposit in digibits though, the whole system is still net negative due to the interest charges that have accrued and there are so many NPLs (non-performing loans) out there. Italy is in the worst shape there, with something like 20% NPLs, which is why their banking system is likely to topple first.
The problem after that becomes one of CONTAGION, because the Italian Banks are indebted to mainly the German banks, so if they go belly up the assets held by German banks are no longer assets, and they also become instantly insolvent. Well'they're already insolvent, but at this point it becomes undisguisable with fraud and accounting rule changes.
If the ECB won't print fresh Euros to recapitalize the Italian banks, where's the money going to come from for this? "Investors" (aka other TBTF banks) aren't going to buy $5B worth of equity and bonds, because they have already lost $BILLIONS$ down that rat hole. So will there be an 11th hour Stick Save by the ECB to bail OUT again these banks, which generally puts the bill for it on the backs of the German taxpayer? That's not very politically acceptable in Germany these days, they'd rather see the Italians go down the toilet, not really grasping they will follow the Italians shortly thereafter, possibly within nano-seconds.
Anyhow, given this rather deflationary trend and the likelihood that "your" money currently in your checking and savings account will get confiscated in a bail-in, it's pretty hard to see why any typical Italians right NOW at least are keeping any Euros in the banks in Italy. The Italians also currently have the very real threat that once Beppe Grillo's 5 Star Movement (M5S) gets into power, they have vowed to return to the Lira. If you have Euros in an Italian bank, POOF, overnight they magically convert to Liras, and then quickly devalue against the Euro and Dollar, while those currencies are still standing anyhow. The ew Lira currency would be close to worthless for buying anything from outside of Italy, most importantly imported energy. I would bet on a 50% devaluation within a month, and maybe 10 cents on the Lira in a year.
So as logical as it seems to take your money and run now, this is not so EZ for the typical Italian. Setting up an account in another country is tough even if you are a Eurozone member, and then making your daily withdrawals and deposits not so EZ either. If you are a small biz owner and have payroll accounts and such, using a foreign bank is also impractical.
On a small enough level of savings, say a few 1000 Euros, for the individual stuffing this in your mattress seems like a safer idea than leaving it in the bank at this point, but as the Indian example shows your paper Euros could be made worthless overnight and you would need to exchange them for "New Euros". However, you still have the issue that it is not practical to pay many of your monthly bills in cash, around here they won't even TAKE cash at the power company. They also won't take cash for my rent either. All these payments MUST be done through the banking system.
So where does this leave you with trying to protect "your" wealth in a serious banking crash and sovereign debt crisis? For this, many people believe Gold is the safest way to store your wealth, particularly "Possessible" gold like collectible coins and tiny 10 gram slips. "Paper Gold" is not looked on much better than Fiat Money since it is essentially the same kind of Ponzi scheme.
The problems this has are very similar to your paper money though. First off, it's not very good for currently paying your bills. I couldn't go over to the leasing office and pay my rent in Gold Coins any more than I could go in and pay in cash. If I was running a small business, I couldn't pay my employees in Gold either. You then also have the problem that every time you exchange Gold for some cash to go buy food at Safeway, you first have to stop in at a coin dealer and you have to pay a transaction fee of some amount. Finally, your coin dealer himself actually has to have the cash to give you in return for the Maple Leaf or teensy-weensy Gold Chip.
There is a further critical problem with using gold as money, which is that over the millenia it has become highly centralized. It began as deposits sprinkled out all over the earth and was gradually mined up, for ornamental jewelry and then used for coinage. Over time, generally by some form of theft like the Spanish Conquistadores ripping off the Aztecs, all this gold got hoarded up and ended up going right back where it came from, in a hole in the ground. Now though, the gold was "owned" by a few people, in the olden days a few Monarchs and a few Banksters. Nowadays it's Sovereign Wealth Funds, TBTF Banks and a few filthy rich Hedge Fund managers who are also Gold Bugs. Then you have another small cadre of people who have gold in the form of coin collections, and some with jewelry. Most of the population though has no gold whatsoever. So if you want to use it as money, what is the mechanism for getting it out of the hoarded piles and back into circulation for the population at large?
The answer to this dilemma often proposed is that the Banks then issue Notes on the gold, which would then be used as money. The problem there is that unless the gold is redeemable for the note, the note is not really "gold-backed", thus you are right back to the fiat money problem. In such a system, banksters ALWAYS print more notes than they actually have in gold bars in the safe. That's the principle behind fractional reserve lending and also modern rehypothecation, where the same pile of gold is used as collateral for layers of loans on top of it.
At some point these Ponzis based on gold always collapse, and a few people get gold back for their notes and the rest are left with a piece of paper. In general, the ones who end up with the gold are the guys with the combination to the vault. Back in the mining towns of the Old West, this happened all the time. The miners would go and have their gold assayed, then deposit it in the local bank where it was supposed to be safer than keeping it in your mining shack or carrying it in a pouch on your belt. In return, you would get notes from the bank that you could use to go buy a haircut and a bath, a nice steak and bottle of whiskey at the saloon and spend the night in Miss Kitty's Cat House. Then one morning you wake up and the local bankster has skipped town with the gold, and all you got left in your pocket are worthless notes.
All in all, this makes a system utilizing gold proxied by paper notes no better than the fiat system. Unless you actually are using the coins themselves as currency, then all the same problems of bankster dishonesty remain. If you do hoard your own gold at home and carry it around as currency, then you are vulnerable to theft from the other end of the spectrum, the highwaymen.
This is just your issues at the consumer level though, the much bigger issues come at the wholesale level, because once the banking lockup hits, stores can't pay their suppliers, suppliers can't pay the shippers etc, so whether you have either Cash or Gold, the products simply don't make it to the shelves to buy with money of any type. If the problem goes on for any length of time, people start to get desperate, as has occured already in India as people raid warehouses for food. That's only a one time solution though, because once the warehouse is emptied, it won't get resupplied until some new system is dropped into place. Anything more than a week long "Bank Holiday", and you are in the Deep Doo-Doo..
Most places in the world still highly dependent on cash are hard pressed to get any kind of new currency regime going, again India is the Canary in the Coal Mine for this. To get a complete exchange done takes a month at least, and meanwhile tons of people have no money whatsoever to work with. Farmers can't get seed, truckers can't get diesel, electric companies can't buy coal, etc.
Here in the FSoA where most exchange is all digital now and most people have some kind of plastic card, debit, credit or a SNAP card, as long as it was pre-planned and ready, an alternate regime could be dropped in place overnight. What this might entail would be a nation-wide bail-in of all depositors, taking 50% of everyone's savings and then using that to recapitalize the banks. This of course is also highly deflationary. It also would be EXTREMELY unpopular and you would be sure to see the Pitchforks and Torches surrounding Trumpty-Dumpty at the White House.
Besides that though, it wouldn't really solve the problem, because in fact even after doing this these banks would still be insolvent. Since the people just had half of their money stolen, now they don't have this money to pay their car loan and mortgage which means more NPLs and less assets for the bank. Real Estate prices drop precipitously as people no longer have the money to buy the McMansions and more people go into foreclosure. Rinse and Repeat.
The only advantage to this type of solution is it might allow the economy to function a while longer without complete breakdown that a paper system has to deal with on a virtually immedite basis. So rather than complete havoc occuring within a week or two it might take a few months. Maybe.
Returning to the individual, what can you do here to in some way prepare for this eventuality to occur? Well, as always you should be Prepped up with enough food to last through what hopefully is a temporary disruption of a few weeks to a couple of months. You should have a reasonable amount of cash, again a couple of months worth of your bills, and hopefully they will take your cash at the gas company office if the banking system is down. If you have enough money left over after this and think Gold is a good store of your wealth, go ahead and buy some. Personally, I would not start buying Gold as a Hedge until I had at least 6 months in Cash and Food Preps, but 2 months is a minimum here.
Far as your digibit money in the banks is concerned, Credit Unions are probably somewhat safer than banks, but not by much. Definitely keep the money in Federally Insured account and don't have more in any account than the insurance limit, which I think is around $250,000. That's a lot and most people do not have near so much, in fact most people are lucky if they have one month of bills in savings. Also, splitting up your savings to a couple of different banks might be a wise precaution. How well the FDIC progam will work in a systemic crash is open to question of course, but it's better than nothing.
The other digimoney many people support as a way to store your wealth are the Crypto-Currencies like bitcoin. I don't recommend those at all. In a systemic banking crisis I think those digibits will be worthless and not exchangeable for whatever the new currency regime is in your neghborhood. Besides that, in all likelihood after a month of disruption, the Internet will go Dark and none of your cryptomoney will be available.
Now, if you are really loaded, there are only 3 other places you might try to preserve your hoarded wealth, the traditional investment vehicles of Stocks, Bonds and Real Estate. In this type of deflationary crash, it's hard to imagine how any of the paper investments would hold much value, and they also generally suffer from the problem of being extremely illiquid. It would be hard to sell them to get any new cash being offered up by Da Goobermint, certainly you could not unload them fast enough to use the proceeds for hopping at Walmart for more Preps..
Real Estate presents probably the best of these investments for the well-to-do, but you definitely don't want to be buying it with credit on a mortgage. In a deflationary crash, it's likely to be underwater rapidly and you probably will lose your job and be unable to pay the mortgage. So you need to have enough money to buy the property in cash, and few people have enough to do that, at least no more than a few acres of raw land in a cheap area of the country anyhow.
To wrap it up here, there aren't any real fullproof solutions to preserving all that much wealth in a systemic monetary crash, particularly one which goes global. This crash will come at some point, the system has been patched together with spit, duct tape and bailing wire for almost a decade and it is teetering on the edge of the precipice. Keep your fingers crossed that the "Smartest Guys in the Room" have a Plan B here to keep things running a while. If not, we'll see the End of Industrial Civilization occur over a very short period of time.
Finally, why do you think this problem devolves FIRST to Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the OLDEST bank there is in this system, chartered even before Columbus discovered invaded Amerika in 1492? Monte dei Paschi start date 20 yers earlier. Buehler?
If nobody comes up with a good rationale on this, I will pitch mine out. To me, it is obvious, but do not know how others see this. So I ask for some speculation here.Image: Anthony Albright/Flickr
There's a bank in Lima, Peru that holds contents so valuable, they're hidden behind a thick metal door in an earthquake-proof vault. They're not lost Inca gold or mounds of jewels, but thousands and thousands of potato seeds.
Seed banks serve as a kind of genetic Noah's Ark for crops, keeping copies of as many different species of crops as possible to ensure food security in the future. These seeds are valuable because they are part of a global movement to preserve crop diversity.
"There's a huge, long chain that goes from growing food to people eating it, and at the very beginning of that chain is conservation of diversity of crops," said Colin Khoury, a researcher associate at the United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service. "In the past, that conservation wasn't so necessary. But over the last 100 to 150 years, we've started to lose that diversity of the fields."
Traditionally, farmers' fields would be filled with a variety of crops and a variety of species within those crops—you wouldn't have acre upon acre of Roundup Ready corn, you'd have a dozen or so varieties of corn all growing alongside each other, Khoury explained.
But as our farming systems have expanded and become more industrialized, they've also become more uniform. To grow enough corn to feed millions of Americans, it's a lot easier if all of the corn is the same, so the equipment and techniques used can be identical across the system.
Ana Panta, an in-vitro conservation specialist at CIP, working inside the seed bank. Image: ©International Potato Center
While this industrialization has benefits—we can feed more people this way—there are also risks. By having only one or two varieties of a given crop, it makes it that much easier for insects and pathogens to figure out how to attack. Plants that were naturally resistant to a particular pests may lose that resistance as the pest comes into contact with it more often and evolves ways around that defense.
We saw this taken to the extreme during the Irish potato famine. In the mid-1800s, much of Ireland (especially the rural poor) relied almost exclusively on potatoes for their diet.
When an outbreak of blight began to decimate the potato crops, 1 million people died from starvation or related disease. There were other factors that contributed to the famine, but the reliance on a monoculture of potatoes proved a deadly bargain.
Watch: Inside the Arctic seed vaults designed to save humanity from extinction
To counter this in the modern age, we rapidly develop slightly different varieties to roll out into our fields, Khouly explained.
"Plant breeders will keep the traits that farmers want, like a tomato that grows on the vine at the right height to be harvestable by machine, but they'll breed certain things to keep up with pests or diseases," Khouly said. "Essentially it's like buying into a very big machine that has to run faster and faster to keep up."
In order to ensure we can continue this process, we need to have lots of genetic materials from which to mix and match. That's where the seed banks come into play.
The Lima-based International Potato Center is just one of thousands of seed banks around the world. Potatoes have been a staple in the diet of many of Peru's indigenous cultures, and hold cultural significance, so it made sense for the CIP (the International Center for Potatoes' Spanish acronym) to be based there and start its seed collection.
"We have a chance to preserve the diversity that has accumulated through thousands of years of evolution and domestication," said Ana Panta, an in-vitro conservation specialist at CIP. "Potatoes were first cultivated more than 8,000 years ago and along the way, those ancient varieties accumulated valuable genes, like resistance to disease."
There are more than 4,500 varieties of potatoes—and 7,000 types of sweet potato—preserved at the bank, representing 80 percent of the world's potato genes. By preserving these seeds, plant breeders can have access to the genes of thousands of varieties to mix and match and create new species to help us preserve our farming systems.
But the CIP doesn't stop there, they're allowing these varieties to continue to evolve in the field. A project called Parque de la Papa brings together different indigenous communities from the Andes to continue cultivating local varieties of potatoes, which lets the potatoes naturally evolve and produce even more species to work with.
Seed banks are often overlooked as an important part of our food system, but as the world population continues to balloon, and resources like water and land become more scarce, we're going to need to double down on our efforts to ensure food security. The United Nations has said we need to increase our food production by 60 percent just to feed everybody by 2050, and an essential part of that will be protecting the world's seed banks.
"It's essential for combating hunger and the future problems humanity will face with climate change," Panta said. "This is why it's important to preserve these."1. OMG. I just saw Britney Spears. Tap to play GIF Tap to play GIF Logo TV Scott Gries / Getty Nope. That was Tatiana.
2. CHER! CHER, I LOVE YOU! Tap to play GIF Tap to play GIF World of Wonder Lester Cohen / Getty "Thanks," says Chad Michaels.
3. Son of a NUTCRACKER! Judge Judy is sitting right behind you! Tap to play GIF Tap to play GIF Logo TV CBS Photo Archive / Getty Actually, that's Bianca del Rio.
4. Shut. Up. It's Nicki Minaj. Tap to play GIF Tap to play GIF World of Wonder Getty / John Parra Wrong. That's Trinity K. Bonet.
5. Pink! Can you sign my face?! Tap to play GIF Tap to play GIF Logo TV alreadypretty.com No, but maybe Morgan McMichaels can.
6. Alicia Keys, I loved you in The Nanny Diaries! Tap to play GIF Tap to play GIF Logo TV Peter Kramer / Stringer / Getty ::Alexis Mateo runs away.::
8. Little Edie, I love your work! Tap to play GIF Tap to play GIF Logo TV Hulton Archive / Getty Fooled again by Jinkx Monsoon.
9. "Oh Mahatma Gandhi, that Kimora Lee Simmons..." Tap to play GIF Tap to play GIF World of Wonder Steve Granitz / Getty Nope. Just Jujubee killing it.
10. Can I get a selfie with you, Paris? Tap to play GIF Tap to play GIF World of Wonder pinterest.com "Sure," Raven says.
12. My grandmother would commit homicide for Carol Channing. Tap to play GIF Tap to play GIF World of Wonder wqed.org Would she do it for Pandora Boxx?
13. Anna Nicole Smith, you are my spirit animal. Tap to play GIF Tap to play GIF Logo TV Barry King / Getty "Thanks," says Adore Delano
14. Yasssss, Maggie Smith, yassss. Tap to play GIF Tap to play GIF World of Wonder i4.dailyrecord.co.uk Or BenDeLaCreme just running the world.Image: iStock
Last week, we brought you the news that Village Roadshow was seeking to add 40 more sites to Australia's anti-piracy block list. ISPs will now need to ban customers from accessing popular torrent and movie streaming sites that include ExtraTorrent, Demonoid, Torrent Downloads, TorrentProject, YTS, 123Movies, and Icefilms. Here is the full list of banned websites (and how to bypass the blocks).
Following the successful blocking (on paper at least) of The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, TorrentHound, IsoHunt and SolarMovies, Village Roadshow is stepping up its attack on copyright infringers. The latest hit list submitted to the courts contains dozens of domains belonging to some of the most popular torrent, streaming, and direct download sites on the internet.
Village Roadshow's application to the courts is essentially a repeat of the previous one, but with new domain names. Once again, the movie company is requesting ISPs including Telstra, Optus, Vocus, TPG and their subsidiaries to implement the blocks.
Here's the full list of blocked sites as reported by TorrentFreak:
123Movies
Alluc
Bitsnoop
Couchtuner
Demonoid
Extra.to
ExtraTorrent.cc
EYNY
EZTV
FMovies
GenVideos
Hdmovieswatch
Icefilms
Kinogo
KissCartoon
Limetorrents
MegaShare
Movie4k
Phimmoi
Piratebay.to
PrimeWire
Putlocker.ch
Putlocker.plus
Putlocker.run
Putlockers.vip
Rarbg
RIsbb
Shush
Softarchive
Spacemov
Tehparadox
Torrent Downloads
TorrentProject
Viooz
WatchFree
WatchSeries
Xemphimso
Xmovies8.org
XMovies8.tv
Yify Torrent
YTS
As we've mentioned in the past, torrenting itself is completely legal and it's not all that difficult to circumvent ISP blocking of torrent websites. Click here to find out how to circumvent the blocks.
[Via TorrentFreak]Details Created on Thursday, 22 December 2016 01:44
Ayda Erbal
Department of Politics, New York University
This essay discusses the responsibilities of scholars in a field of study where not only Turkish but also American business and state interest groups have been aggressively involved in sustaining a scholarly regime of untruths, half truths, omissions, passive silencing, obscurantism, and denial in a systematic and institutionalized way.The worst damage has not necessarily been in the field of genocide studies itself, where in the last fifteen years especially a number of scholars have debunked the major tenets of denialist literature, but in Ottoman and Turkish studies. Blind historically to the late Ottoman genocides, the field is also one where genocide denial has become normalized as a discourse and thus has been the source for pervasive moral ambiguity among scholars with or without their full knowledge of the issues or their approval of the silencing strategies.
In the introduction of his review of Donald Bloxham’s The Great Game of Genocide, the late Donald Quataert timidly and with utter care confessed the state of the field of Ottoman Studies in his lifetime. In between the lines he hinted at the power structures embedded in the field—particularly in North |
months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.
Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:
We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.
Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:
We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.
In Gimli, word of the closure has been swirling around town for the past week. Most reports suggest this will be the last season for the Coast Guard, after 40 years of service in Gimli.
“The Government of Canada must commit to keeping this Coast Guard Station open. To ensure the safety of the Canadians that use Lake Winnipeg for business or pleasure, the Gimli Coast Guard station must be open, active and fully funded,” Bezan said in a statement Thursday.
James Bezan, the MP for Selkirk-Interlake-Eastman, called on the Liberal government to ensure the funding and capabilities are in place to maintain the Coast Guard’s operations at the Gimli harbour.
In response to reports Ottawa is shutting down Coast Guard operations in Gimli, the area's Conservative MP is calling on the Trudeau government to make its intentions public.
Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 1/6/2017 (635 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 1/6/2017 (635 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
In response to reports Ottawa is shutting down Coast Guard operations in Gimli, the area's Conservative MP is calling on the Trudeau government to make its intentions public.
James Bezan, the MP for Selkirk-Interlake-Eastman, called on the Liberal government to ensure the funding and capabilities are in place to maintain the Coast Guard’s operations at the Gimli harbour.
"The Government of Canada must commit to keeping this Coast Guard Station open. To ensure the safety of the Canadians that use Lake Winnipeg for business or pleasure, the Gimli Coast Guard station must be open, active and fully funded," Bezan said in a statement Thursday.
In Gimli, word of the closure has been swirling around town for the past week. Most reports suggest this will be the last season for the Coast Guard, after 40 years of service in Gimli.
Mayor Randy Woroniuk said federal politicians aren't returning his calls, but he's spoken with Coast Guard staff, who said they have all been issued redeployment notices, meaning they can take transfers to Coast Guard jobs in the east or west coast.
Word is the RCMP are stepping into the breach after the Coast Guard winds up.
"That's what I heard... They're done at the end of the season. The RCMP... are taking over the lake next summer, and (the) Coast Guard are gone," Woroniuk said.
If that's true, Woroniuk said, the least Ottawa could have done was pick up the phone and give him a "courtesy call."
The local rural municipality supported Ottawa's plans under Stephen Harper to redevelop the Coast Guard station despite local objections. The million-dollar station with storage facilities broke ground last fall, and nobody is sure where construction will go from here.
"From a safety perspective, I don't believe this is well-thought-out," the mayor said.
"The bureaucrats in Ottawa don't realize how treacherous this lake can be. The Coast Guard, they've been doing a great job keeping our commercial fleet and recreational boaters safe.
"The RCMP do not have the capacity to provide that level of service... to be on call, to rescue people. They have a hard enough time staffing what they need on land, never mind having people out on the water," the mayor said.
"I have no problem saying this lake terrifies me at times. It's a very shallow lake, and when the winds pick up, you can hurt yourself. This isn't the Lake of the Woods or Falcon Lake, where you can drive around a 16-foot boat. It's not like that," the mayor said.
Gimli, the last Coast Guard station left on the lake, took 200 calls last year alone. It also provides navigational markers and leads search and rescue missions on the lake. There's nobody else organized to take over the functions, sources told the Free Press.
The head of the Gimli Yacht Club, Charlie Burns, said recreational boaters are worried.
"At this point, we're very concerned. We've been hearing discussions about this, that Lake Winnipeg, by not being an arm of the ocean, is not considered part of the Coast Guard," Burns said. "We've heard about it through word of mouth, and if it's confirmed, that's very unfortunate."
"Lake Winnipeg is larger than Lake Ontario, and we have a huge number of boaters. We depend on the Coast Guard to keep everybody safe. The Coast Guard maintains the buoyage system, and they have the facilities and equipment to be able to rescue anything throughout the lake, and boaters depend on that," Burns said.
So far, there's been no announcement from Ottawa, and federal officials have yet to respond to calls for comment.
In his statement, Bezan echoed local concerns and speculated if the Coast Guard is pulled from Gimli, then the days of Coast Guard service in places like Kenora could also be numbered. But for now, his sources tell him Gimli is the only Coast Guard Station facing imminent closure.
"Gimli is the only one in Manitoba. My understanding is notices have been given to employees at the Coast Guard station in Gimli, that they will not be coming back at the end of the season," Bezan said in a phone interview.
Other sources, however, told the Free Press Kenora was also going to lose Coast Guard service after this season.
Gimli is the biggest harbour between Sarnia in Ontario and Vancouver.
"So if they're shutting down Gimli, I wouldn't be surprised if they're shutting down Kenora, as well. That would be a travesty," Bezan said. "We want the government to rethink this."
This week, the Trudeau government announced plans to add four new lifeboat stations on the British Columbia coast as part of a $1.5-billion national strategy to improve "marine safety and responsible shipping." Three more stations are planned for the Atlantic coast.
Want to get a head start on your day? Get the day’s breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every morning.
About 1,000 families depend on Lake Winnipeg for their livelihoods, including commercial fishing, Bezan said. Lake Winnipeg fisheries account for 75 per cent of the province's $17-million commercial fishery, and the Coast Guard's services are an essential backstop for industry.
"They provide markers that provide for safe passage. You still have freighters going up and down the south basin, serving places like Victoria Beach and Winnipeg Beach. They also serve places like Dauphin River and going up to places like Nelson House and Oxford House, and all these communities depend on safe passage," Bezan said.
There is currently one Canadian Coast Guard vessel, the Vakta, stationed at Gimli Harbour. Vakta and her crew are on duty 24/7 during the summer season.
Under Stephen Harper's Conservative government, Bezan played a key role in landing the contract to build the new station in Gimli.
Construction started last fall, but it appears work on the site is suspended. Bezan said cement pads were poured in preparation for work this spring, but nothing seems to be happening on the site.
[email protected] kind of storytelling Discovery is hanging its hat on, with flawed characters, multi-episode story-arcs, and a grittier outlook, was pioneered (for Star Trek at least) with Deep Space Nine. With Sisko at the helm, the series also introduced new concerns about race, family (Sisko was a widower and a loving father to his son, Jake), and what it means to be the representative of a far-away government on the (final) frontier. Looking back today, “Past Tense” still stands out for its surprisingly realistic, near-future vision of racism and economic injustice. And unlike the typically optimistic characters that occupy most of Star Trek, in “Past Tense” the people of 2024 are beaten down, exhausted, and weary of their world.
In science fiction, it’s common for the problems of the human condition to be addressed through allegory. Star Trek did this regularly. Throughout the series, aliens would stand in for different elements of an all-too-familiar debate about race, class, or gender. For example, the 1969 Trek episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” tries to make a point about the absurdity of racism—via a ham-fisted story about an alien population that’s divided between individuals whose faces are half-white and half-black, and those who have the color scheme reversed. The allegory was obvious, but it elided the complexity of how racist societies operate.
“Past Tense” aired 26 years later, in the third season of Deep Space Nine. Combining a searing look at homelessness with an indictment of America’s refusal to tackle the crisis head-on, it was arguably the most straightforwardly political story Star Trek ever told. It dispensed with clumsy metaphors to examine public health and mental illness; it also confronted the effects of the country’s waning optimism following Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society,” a series of domestic programs meant to end poverty and inequality in the ’60s. The script was also written and produced only two years after the Los Angeles Riots, which clearly influenced the story. The episode could perhaps have dug even deeper into its critique of bigotry. Still, “Past Tense” was notable for depicting racism not from the perspective of a well-meaning white liberal, as seen in previous iterations of Star Trek, but through the eyes of people of color directly threatened by violence and indifference.
* * *
Seeing the main characters thrust from the relative comforts of the 24th century into the despair of the 21st is jarring. Sisko and Bashir end up in a Sanctuary District, lacking the necessary identification cards to keep them from being rounded up by the local authorities. Dax, a member of the alien Trill species who looks like a young white woman, is lucky enough to be found by a wealthy member of the media who gives her new clothes and food, and makes her part of upper-crust San Francisco society. Bashir’s incredulousness at the plight of people in the Sanctuary Districts is meant to reflect the viewer’s outrage. “Why are these people in here? Are they criminals?” he asks Commander Sisko, who replies, “They’re just people without jobs or places to live.” The district’s inhabitants come from a variety of backgrounds, a reminder of how poverty cuts across race, gender, and age. What everyone there has in common—whether they are homeless, law enforcement, or an administrator—is anger at how the U.S. government has left them behind.Initial experiments of soil by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has shown similarities between minerals in the Martian soil and the weathered basaltic soils of the volcanic origin in Hawaii.
Curiosity's Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument (CheMin) used X-ray diffraction method to study the internal structure of the minerals in the soil. This is the first time, an X-ray diffraction analysis has been performed on Mars.
"We had many previous inferences and discussions about the mineralogy of Martian soil," principal investigator for CheMin David Blake, from NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., said in a statement.
"Our quantitative results provide refined and in some cases new identifications of the minerals in this first X-ray diffraction analysis on Mars," he said.
The analysis of minerals in rocks and soil plays a significant role to assess previous environmental conditions. The minerals record the conditions in which they were formed. This could help the scientists to find out if the red planet could have supported microbial life.
The samples for the first analysis were taken from a site known as Rocknest. While the first scoop of soil was used to clean the internal surfaces of the rover's sample processing chambers, the second scoop was discarded, the third and fourth scoop were delivered to the CheMin and another instrument called sample analysis at Mars (SAM) to determine the chemical and mineral composition of the soil.
The samples sent to the CheMin instrument were processed through a sieve to remove particles larger than 0.006 inch. The soil samples were mineralogically similar to basaltic material found in Hawaii.
"We now know it is mineralogically similar to basaltic material, with significant amounts of feldspar, pyroxene and olivine, which was not unexpected. Roughly half the soil is non-crystalline material, such as volcanic glass or products from weathering of the glass," said David Bish, CheMin co-investigator with Indiana University in Bloomington.
Weathering of soil components on Mars could be the result of an interaction with water or oxygen, just like how rust forms on iron materials. Sandstorms and meteorite impact could also cause the elements of the soil to weather, said chemist Douglas Ming of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, according to a Reuters report.
Curiosity is on a two-year mission on Mars to find if there was a habitable environment. The rover is currently located at Rocknest and will later head to Glenelg, where three different terrains intersect. It will spend about a month before heading to its ultimate destination - Mount Sharp. It will take at least a year for the rover to reach Mount Sharp, where the composition of sand is different.The best writing makes you see the world anew, and science writing is no different. Whether it’s shedding light on worlds beyond us (Hidden Figures) or delving into microbial worlds within (I Contain Multitudes), these standout science books of the year illuminate the phenomena, people and microscopic organisms that shape our existence each day. Here are 10 books that will jettison you to the forefront of human knowledge and make you see your world differently—whether it’s a blade of grass, a forest, or the night sky.
“With great power comes great responsibility,” said the philosopher Voltaire (or Spiderman’s uncle, depending on your source). In his first book, David Biello argues that humanity has developed such power—but not the restraint to wield it responsibly. Humans are now “a world-changing force of nature,” the former Scientific American environment editor writes, ushering in an era of global change known as the Anthropocene. Biello delivers a balanced account of this newest chapter in Earth’s history, offering historical perspective and examining concepts like the city, “wildness,” and geoengineering. Unnatural World is a potent reminder that we have an ethical imperative to reign in our power for the collective good.
If you like your words served with a large helping of awe and wonder (and really, who doesn’t), look no further. In his acclaimed new book, Atlantic science writer Ed Yong takes readers on a Ms. Frizzle-meets-Walt-Whitman-esque journey to illuminate a strange new world composed of trillions of majestic microbes. Here at the outer (and inner) reaches of the budding field of microbiology, we find mind-bending paradoxes: For instance, about half of your cells are not actually you. Yong’s book touches on questions not only of science, but of the meaning of the self and our place in the great web of life. Multitudes, indeed. (Read an exclusive excerpt on microbes’ mighty contribution to human evolution here.)
It was World War II, and America needed all the brightest mathematical minds it could get. It found them in the form of math teachers in segregated Southern public schools. These brilliant, black female mathematicians lent their number-crunching expertise to help free NASA engineers from hand calculations in the decades before the digital age; they became known as NASA’s “human computers.” Yet while the nickname suggested a machine-like existence, these women’s lives were anything but. In Hidden Figures, Margot Lee Shetterly provides an intimate portrait of the inner lives and accomplishments of these extraordinary “computers,” who helped America make strides in both the space race and the race for human rights. Experience the book before the major motion picture hits screens next month. (Read more about the true story behind Hidden Figures here.)
Before NASA’s human computers, astronomers of the 18th century also looked to calculating brainiacs to scan their findings and perform crucial calculations. At the Harvard College Observatory—now part of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics—those talented individuals included women. In a work journalist Elizabeth Kolbert has called "sensitive, exacting, and lit with the wonder of discovery,” author Dva Sobel pores through letters, diaries and memoirs to tell the story of these remarkable women who changed how we look at the heavens. The Glass Universe complements Hidden Figures, employing history and journalistic biography to enlarge the story of the women who revolutionized astronomy.
The battlefield might seem an unlikely subject for a science writer—but then again, so might the gallows, the topic of Mary Roach’s first book. In this extremely topical study, Roach embeds with armies of soldiers and scientists to explore such weighty topics such as research on post-traumatic stress syndrome, new wound-cleaning techniques, drastic surgeries and, okay, yes, diarrhea. In short, Roach more than earns her nickname as “America's funniest science writer”—all while investigating the most critical questions in military science. You’ll be grunting, groaning and bent-over laughing as you follow her forays into labs and battlefields with her characteristic mix of “irreverence and gallows humor.” This is a tour not just of duty, but also of delight.
Nature’s poison-packed predators have earned their place in our nightmares. And molecular biologist Christie Wilcox has certainly earned her role of distilling the science behind their scariness. In Venomous, Wilcox shines her light not just on the regular suspects—like stinging jellyfish and snakes—but also on less likely characters, like bristled caterpillars and blue-ringed octopuses. She delves into the biochemistry behind some of nature’s most remarkable potions, and reveals how pharmacologists are turning to venom to save lives. Her book echoes some of evolution’s universal lessons: Bite makes right, and when in doubt, sting for your life. (Read more on the evolution of venom resistance here.)
Humans have long had an inkling that something about us gets passed down. For better or worse, children resemble their parents—like peas in a Mendelian pod. In this far-reaching yet intimate book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee traces our discovery of the gene, that fundamental unit that all of genetics rests upon. With “scope and grandeur, ” Mukherjee chronicles a search that has spanned minds and centuries, from Aristotle to Mendel to Darwin, for “a ghost lurking in the biological machine.” His book becomes more all the urgent in an era when we have the ability not just to read our own genetic code—but to rewrite it in our own image. (Read an interview with Mukherjee on his first book here.)
Science is not just a collection of facts and natural laws; it is a distinctive way of looking at the world. In Lab Girl, botanist Hope Jahren takes you inside the head of a scientist “with the soul of a poet.” In allegory and image-rich prose, she renders the outer world new again and creates a powerful bridge for layreaders. As she told NPR: “I could say that the leaves evapotranspirate... But those words are part of a language that takes years to learn and that scientists speak amongst themselves. So by describing these things in terms that you use every day, I've made the choice to come to you using your words in order that you understand me.” Jahren’s memoir delves into the complex forces that shape scientists, from the challenges of being a woman in science to the triumphs and disappointments of doing science in the lab. Ultimately, she finds beauty inside and out.
How did cats conquer the planet? That’s the driving question behind The Lion in the Living Room, a meticulously reported investigation by longtime Smithsonian contributor Abigail Tucker. To probe the biology, behavior and natural history of our feline friends, Tucker travels to the drenched forests of Key Largo, Florida and the lion-filled tar pits of La Brea in search of their evolutionary secrets. Her book comprises a “lively adventure through history, natural science, and pop culture in search of how cats conquered the world, the internet, and our hearts.” If you know a cat person who likes science, this is the book you need right meow. (Read an exclusive excerpt on the war between house cats and the woodrat here.)
The word “radiation” comes with a long history of psychological baggage, conjuring up images of Chernobyl, Hollywood apocalypse films and scare stories of cancer-causing cell phones. Science writer Timothy Jorgenson, who got his start as a researcher working in radiation medicine, takes on the task of bringing this scary abstraction down to Earth. Jorgenson lays out the progression of mankind’s understanding of radiation science over the past century, including the figures, breakthroughs and disasters that moved the field forward (for better or worse). An informative read that chronicles the history and science of humankind’s “ambivalent” relationship with this strange force.John Abraham's love for Northeast has often been highlighted through his immense support to the region
Actor-producer John Abraham has been roped in as the brand ambassador of Arunachal Pradesh Tourism and he says he has always been fascinated with Northeast India."I am honored to have been chosen to promote the tourism of Arunachal Pradesh. I have always been fascinated with northeast India: each state has its unique beauty, history and culture. It (Arunachal) is a state rich with culture, mysticism, great people and stunning views. When I'm there, all I need is some music, my boots to walk around and a mind free from all worries to be able to embrace the mesmerising beauty of Arunachal Pradesh," he said.John Abraham's love for the Northeast has often been highlighted through his immense support to the region. Besides owning the Northeast football team, Mr Abraham has supported the seven sisters through his participation in "Run for North East", a marathon hosted earlier in January.Arunachal Tourism Secretary Joram Beda said, "Our focus this year lies in boosting the tourism sector and making Arunachal Pradesh a 'Must See, Must Experience' state. For this vision's success, we need like-minded partners that see and understand our vision and can help us chart this path. We found such a partner in Viacom18 who have helped us get John Abraham, a superstar, an adventurer and a great human being on board. "John has played a pivotal role in promoting Northeast India, primarily by putting NEUFC on the map of sports. We believe our association with him will strengthen our purpose of putting out our state in the Indian diaspora as a prominent tourist destination."Eliminated by Brazil in the Quarterfinals, the Colombia National Team is Greeted by 120,000 People in Bogota
07/07/2014 - 10h40
Advertising
SYLVIA COLOMBO
SPECIAL ENVOY TO BOGOTÁ
"President Pekerman", "Yepes, marry me" and "James, the child prodigy" were some of the hand painted signs by around 100,000 fans that greeted the Colombian national team on their arrival yesterday in Bogota.
The yellow party started early. Starting at 6AM (8AM Brasília time), fans flocked to the Catam military base, on the access avenues to the city center and Simon Bolivar park, a wide green space armed with a stage and some giant video screens to receive fans.
Children amused themselves with a traditional Colombian celebration: throwing flour and cornstarch on passersby.
From 10AM on, a trio of cheerleaders gave thanks to the team and the chorus of the crowd of fans. When the video screens in the park showed the first players to leave the Avianca plane that landed at about 8:30AM, people saluted the team members one by one.
As James Rodriguez appeared, wearing sunglasses and looking down, a huge choir, mostly female, screamed his name. The captain Yepes, another of the players mostly celebrated by the women in the crowd, is departing from the squad having already turned 38 years old.
The bus that brought the players to the park had to travel much slower than was planned, due to the number of people who took to the roads and bridges. It traveled 2km (1.2 miles) per hour, carrying high in the open air, the 23 players and the coach.
Cuadrado was most excited, organizing the choreography made famous during the commemoration of goals in the World Cup.
They all received shirts that they autographed and returned to the public. In the windows and terraces of the buildings located on the avenues, residents waved flags and blew horns.
"It was our most historic participation. Now I'll have something to tell my grandchildren. I've been living a dream in recent weeks", said Carmen, who brought his two teenage kids to the park.
Over the last few days, the police, the media and the mayor asked that fans be moderate in alcohol consumption and pay attention to children.
During previous victory celebrations for the national team, the number of deaths and fights was high: nine people at the team's debut, eight on the day they advanced to the quarterfinals and ten after the game with Brazil.
The figures seem alarming only to foreign correspondents, since the news comes out with very little attention in the media.
According to journalist Mauricio Silva, author of books on the Colombian national team, the tradition of violent celebrations comes from the 1990s. "'The parties end with the bloody mixture of alcohol and localized fights that culminate in death", he explains.
In other major cities around the country, there were other parties also held, particularly in Barranquilla, on the coast, and in Medellin, cities where football is even more popular than in the capital.
President Juan Manuel Santos asked the Colombian soccer federation to confirm the continuation of Argentine coach José Néstor Pekerman in his role.
Translated by STEVE HUGHES
Read the article in the original languageAMMAN (Reuters) - President Barack Obama and Jordan’s King Abdullah presented a united front against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Friday as Jordan grapples with a refugee crisis caused by Syria’s civil war.
U.S. President Barack Obama participates in a joint news conference with Jordan's King Abdullah at Al-Hummar Palace, in Amman March 22, 2013. REUTERS/Jason Reed
Obama, in Jordan following a visit to Israel and the West Bank, pledged new aid to help the country deal with the refugee crush but stopped short of promising military assistance to Syrian rebels to speed the departure of Assad after a two-year civil war that has claimed 70,000 lives.
Syria dominated talks between Obama and King Abdullah. Jordanian authorities worry that any emergence of Islamist rule in a post-Assad Syria could embolden Islamists who are the main opposition group in Jordan.
Obama pledged to work with the U.S. Congress to provide $200 million in extra assistance to care for Syrian refugees who now number 460,000 in Jordan, a figure that the king said was equal to 10 percent of Jordan’s population and may double by year’s end.
King Abdullah vowed he would not close Jordan’s borders to the refugees, calling it “a challenge that we just can’t turn our backs on”.
Obama, who has wound down U.S. involvement in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, demonstrated a wariness about Syrian rebels even as he warned that Syria could become an enclave of extremism if a political transition does not take place.
“Ultimately what the people of Syria are looking for is not replacing oppression with a new form of oppression,” he said.
“I’m confident that Assad will go,” said Obama. “It’s not a question of if, but when.”
Obama came to Jordan to reassure King Abdullah of Washington’s support as the country tries to cope with the influx of refugees and economic difficulties.
Welcomed at an elaborate ceremony at the king’s palace that included soldiers riding camels, Obama gently encouraged Abdullah to stay on the path of what he called “necessary” political and economic reforms.
Jordan has been the scene of mostly peaceful street protests, rather than the uprisings that have shaken some of its neighbors, and the king has responded with cautious steps toward democracy.
Obama needs Abdullah’s help to advance peace prospects between Israel and the Palestinians. While in Israel and Ramallah, Obama attempted to foster a dialogue between the parties.
“My hope and expectation is that as a consequence of us doing our homework, we can explore with the parties a mechanism for them to sit back down, to get rid of some of the old assumptions and to get this done,” said Obama.
Jordan is one of only two Arab states - Egypt is the other - to have signed peace treaties with Israel, and is seen as a potential player in any future U.S.-led peace push. It also has a majority Palestinian population.
Abdullah offered to play host to Israelis and Palestinians for talks if that is what they want. He said the window of opportunity was fast closing due to continued Israeli settlement activity on the West Bank.Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Sunday announced that all illegal slaughter houses in the state will be shut down.
Madhya Pradesh becomes the third BJP-ruled state after Uttar Pradesh and Haryana to ban illegal slaughterhouses.
Chouhan made the announcement at a religious function at a Jain pilgrimage site at Mohan Kheda in Dhar district, 264km from Bhopal. The function was organised for anointing Jain saint Rishabhchandra Vijayji as Acharya.
The CM’s announcement followed Jain saint Rishabhchandra Vijay lauding him and expecting him to issue an order to shut down illegal slaughter houses in the state once he reaches Bhopal.
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader Praveen Togadia in his address said not only illegal abattoirs, all the mechanised slaughter houses should be shut down in the state.
“I also want there should be no export of meat from India,” the Hindu hardline leader said. Togadia said the discourse should not be on gau rakshaks (cow vigilantes) but on the cow-killers even as vigilantes continue to run rampage in many parts of north India.
According to officials, the slaughter of animals for food is a State subject and regulated by local bodies through licensing of slaughterhouses and retail meat shops. However, most municipal slaughterhouses and meat shops lack modern machinery and equipment with inadequate hygiene and sanitation.
Many operate in gross violation of the norms. Effluent treatment and waste disposal facilities in these traditional slaughterhouses and meat shops are also not satisfactory, sources said. Last month Bhopal Municipal Corporation had identified over 100 meat sellers in Bhopal who were found selling meat in violation of guidelines.
On Friday, the Haryana government announced that a ban would be imposed on illegal slaughter of animals and sale of meat procured thereof throughout the state from May 15.
Earlier in March, the Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh had ordered shutting down of illegal slaughterhouses.
First Published: May 07, 2017 23:44 ISTA major ice storm devastated parts of the Toronto. (Ivy Cuervo/CBC)
A baffling boom on Christmas Eve that rattled Greater Toronto Area residents reeling in the wake of an ice storm was likely a rare phenomenon known as a frost quake.
Residents in the GTA and surrounding areas took to Twitter with reports of mysterious booms late Christmas Eve and early Christmas Day that even jarred many awake from slumber.
With the area encased in ice following a nasty mix of rain and snow Sunday, many believed ice or a tree limb had fallen on their rooftop.
Does anybody know what the loud boom/ #explosion was in the middle of the night in the West end of #Kingston (around 1am)? @kingstonpolice -- Kate Kaminska (@katekaminska1) December 25, 2013
Heard 3 large boom sounds in #newmarket 140, 230 and 4am. What is it? -- Mattg123 (@mattg123) December 25, 2013
Mystery noise last night; 3 or 4 big bangs, sounded and felt like someone or something hit the side of our house. -- bithead (@mr_bithead) December 25, 2013
As As first reported by Global Toronto, the U.S. Geological Survey did not register a seismic event in Ontario on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day and there were no reports to the American Meteor Society, ruling out comets or meteors, and leaving a cryoseism, or frost quake, as a likely explanation.
A rare phenomenon, cryoseisms usually "occur when temperatures go from above to below freezing," says CBC News meteorologist Michelle Leslie.
"Water in the surrounding soil and rocks freezes. As water freezes, it expands, putting pressure on the dirt and rocks," she says.
"When the pressure build-up is too much, the dirt or rocks will crack, and you hear a loud boom."
They tend to occur between midnight and dawn, the coldest time of night and are very localized, so residents a few blocks away may not have heard the Christmas Eve or Christmas day booms.
In Toronto, an extreme cold weather alert was in effect Tuesday, and temperatures were well below freezing in the GTA and surrounding areas.SALT LAKE CITY — Donald Trump continues to be the front-runner in the GOP presidential nomination race, but he's languishing in fourth place in a new poll of Utah voters.
The new UtahPolicy.com poll by Dan Jones & Associates comes as former Utah governor and 2012 presidential candidate Jon Huntsman Jr. is suggesting Trump has a shot at winning the White House.
"People really are hungry for change. They were last time, but it hadn't reached the 212-degree boiling point. This time it has," Huntsman told USA Today's weekly "Capital Download" video series.
Huntsman said that's why he thinks Trump, "despite sometimes the over-the-top rhetoric that would have done in any other candidate in earlier election cycles, probably has some real legs."
Utah voters, though, picked Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio over the billionaire reality TV star known for making provocative statements.
One of Trump's recent pronouncements, that Muslims should be barred from entering the United States in light of terrorist attacks here and abroad, went too far for Utahns, pollster Dan Jones said.
"I'm very proud of the Utah voter," Jones said.
He said the largely Mormon electorate already views Trump as "too boisterous," and voters were turned off by his statement that faith should determine who is allowed to come to America.
Photo: Aaron Thorup, UtahPolicy.com
Last month's visit to refugee camps in Greece and a refugee shelter in Germany by Elder M. Russell Ballard of the LDS Church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles had "great impact," Jones said.
Cruz led the poll conducted Dec. 8-14 with 15 percent, but Jones said he may not remain the favorite of Utah voters because of his contentious reputation in Washington.
Carson, tumbling in the national polls, was second at 14 percent, followed by Rubio at 13 percent. The poll of 622 Utahns has a margin of error of plus or minus nearly 4 percent.
University of Utah political science professor Matthew Burbank said Trump may be hurt in Utah because he "does not particularly appeal to people who are strongly religious."
In this election, Burbank said, voters who may like Trump's stands have plenty of other conservative choices. He said it's telling that Trump's support in the Utah poll also lags among Republican voters.
Among only the smaller group of GOP voters surveyed, the new poll showed Cruz with the support of 20 percent; Carson and Rubio with 18 percent each; and Trump trailing the trio with 12 percent.
Murray resident Kathleen Ward, who describes herself as a "passionate" Trump supporter, said more Utahns aren't joining her because they're "taught to love our neighbor, but Trump is going against the grain."
Ward said Trump's call for barring Muslims may not be fair, "but I can see where he's coming from. What would you do? Would you save the Muslim or your own child? … I can appreciate he has the guts to say that."
Huntsman told USA Today that for Trump to succeed in 2016, he's going to have to change his rhetoric, "which is bright hot and really playing on the emotions of fear with respect to our place in the world and our economic conditions."
Trump would have to be seen as "a problem solver, working both sides of the aisle and working toward big goals for the country, which is where I think most Americans will want to see a general election candidate," Huntsman said.
Now the co-chairman of No Labels, a nonprofit group advocating bipartisan cooperation, as well as chairman of the Atlantic Council, a foreign affairs think tank, Huntsman said he's not looking at an independent run for president next year.
Huntsman said there are "a lot" of people encouraging him to get in the race, and he tells them he's "a public servant first and foremost. I always want to help my country where I can, but you don't want to embark on a suicide mission."
But the 55-year-old also did not rule out another bid for the White House in the video interview.
"Health and family permitting, at some point that may be something we take a look at," Huntsman said.
And while he said he's "a lifelong Republican," Huntsman said the GOP is at risk of going out of business because it hasn't been responsive to voters. He said the party needs "an overarching, coalescing theme," such as fighting terrorism.
Jones questioned Huntsman's analysis of Trump's chances.
"Jon was in the trenches," Jones said. "He actually was a presidential candidate, so I have a lot of respect for his opinion. But that will be a difficult task for Trump because of his mannerisms and his style of attacking rather than listening."
×
Photos
Related Stories#TeamUSA has a lot to be excited about after Thursday's showing at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Simone Biles took home the gold in the individual all-around gymnastics competition |
the lathi – a thick bamboo stave tipped with metal – are so common as to go unremarked by the media.
"A bit of lathi does no harm," said one retired policeman in Mumbai. By some estimates, around 800 prisoners die in custody in India each year. About four people died or were killed in police custody every day in India between 2002 and 2007, the Asian Centre for Human Rights said in a report.
Crowd control training and non-lethal equipment is rare, so officers routinely open fire on protestors – whether farmers demonstrating against the forced sale of their land or teenagers throwing stones in Kashmir. Lower ranking Indian policemen do not normally carry arms.
Significant political pressure to achieve results as well as poor living conditions, long hours and low salaries for policemen exacerbates the problem, a 2009 report by the campaign group Human Rights Watch claimed.
Many hundreds of policemen are killed or injured each year. Medical care is poor and support for families limited. Most police belong to state forces.
Many states have taken steps to improve conduct, conditions and crime-fighting tactics in recent years.RCMP in Airdrie, Alta., are trying to quell an online frenzy of reports of attempted abductions of children, calling them well-intentioned but misinformed and misleading.
It started Friday night and Saturday morning when Mounties in the Airdrie, just north of Calgary, received two complaints of attempted abductions.
The RCMP say they are being investigated but the differing circumstances and descriptions led to the conclusion there was no individual actively attempting to kidnap children.
However, over recent days Mounties say there have been numerous posts to social media by community groups detailing suspicious encounters with unknown people and several complaints filed about a suspicious male in a van near children.
Mounties say several vans were identified and in each case it was determined "that operators were abiding persons who simply live and work here in Airdrie."
They ask members of the public to come to police with any concerns rather than sharing it online.David Cook is Already Being Pimped (Video)
Talk about pimping out a potential American Idol winner. One of the top contenders,is now a real estate agents dream come true - at least that is what one agency is counting on.
Cook's childhood home has gone on the market in Blue Springs, MO. and the Reece and Nichols Real Estate Company is hoping that by using the Idol contestants name in their marketing campaign will bring in a buyer.
The home is listed at $135,000 and whether David's star status will lure perspective clients who want to owe a piece of his past is yet to be determined, but hey, whatever works.
If you missed David's performance of Billie Jean, be sure to watch the video we have provided.Diagnosis and observation of patients' behaviour during outpatient visits or hospitalisations strips the diagnostic process of the opportunity to consider their places of residence as their natural environment. In this way, patients present their symptoms and problems outside of the context of their daily life. Community-based psychiatric care, on the other hand, provides a chance to include, in the diagnostic process the environment created by a patient in their home. This image of a patient's external reality can reflect a certain mental reality. Such elements as furniture and other objects, their number, quality, distribution may reflect the inner mental world of the objects featuring in a person's mind. In some cases, this can become a valuable contribution to a diagnostic process. A description of three patients, all treated for schizophrenia, has been presented in this paper in order to explore this possible relationship. The first individual, "Patient N" lives in a flat in a state of extreme depletion of elements. "Patient N" suffers from chronic schizophrenia with severe negative symptoms. The second individual, "Patient D", has been also diagnosed with schizophrenia. Yet his home is filled with a huge number of elements, writings on the wall, things, figurines and objects of symbolic meaning. A closer examination of his psychopathological symptoms (fantastic, colourful, bizarre content) and history of his illness (unstable diagnosis of schizophrenia), and unpredictable response to antipsychotics may indicate a dissociative type of schizophrenia. Finally, "Patient K's" main living space is dominated by cats that live with him. Patient K was exposed to physical violence as a child and to him cats represent safe, non-threatening objects. He has been also treated for paranoid schizophrenia. The differences between these patients' personal histories and the courses of their illnesses are clearly manifested in the way they create their immediate environment.America, land of peace? Forget about it.
The United States is just the 85th most peaceful nation on earth, according to the fourth annual Global Peace Index (GPI), a statistical ranking based on a spectrum of 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators — from political stability and military expenditures to gun sales, violent crime and “respect for human rights.”
The 85th position does not even rank the U.S. in the upper half in the 149-nation list, which was released Tuesday.
But some of the countries ranked ahead of the U.S. may raise a few eyebrows: China, Cuba, Libya, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Chile and the United Arab Emirates are among them, based on their relative peacefulness within their own borders and with neighbors. At its most basic, the GPI simply defines peace as “an absence of violence.”
The top 10?
For the second year in a row, New Zealand is in first place, followed by Iceland, Japan, Austria, Norway, Ireland, Denmark, Luxembourg, Finland and Sweden.
The bottom 10 countries are North Korea, Congo, Chad, Georgia, Russia, Israel, Pakistan, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia and, in very last place, Iraq.
Among our Western allies, Canada is ranked 14th; Germany, 16th; Spain, 25th; the United Kingdom, 31st; France, 32nd; and Italy in the 40th spot.
“The Global Peace Index uses the definition that the absence of violence is the definition of peace. That’s something that most everyone can agree on,” GPI founder and Australian technology entrepreneur and philanthropist Steven Killelea told The Washington Times.
“We’re not out to make moral or value judgments here. We’re out to measure the peacefulness of nations, and determine what cultural attributes and other internal structures create a peaceful society,” he said.
Australia, incidentally, was ranked 19th on the GPI list.
Mr. Killelea is keenly interested in the economics of peace and insists that peace is, essentially, cheaper.
“I am a simple businessman who asked, ‘What do we know about peace?’ And what I found was that the concept of ‘peace’ was changing all the time, and more importantly, we don’t know a lot about the economics of peace. But I will say this: It’s a lot cheaper to build structures of peace in a society,” he said.
“Look at the cost of terrorism on the U.S., for example, on the airlines, on the extra loss of time going through security, multiplied over many passengers. It all adds up,” Mr. Killelea added. “Or consider that regardless of how you feel about the Iraq war, it is still a huge drain on the U.S. economy.”
Still, the determination of peacefulness is a complicated process.
A six-member board of international analysts and academics determined the parameters of the measurements, which also tallied the prison populations in each nation, the likelihood of violent demonstrations, “perceptions of criminality in society,” the potential for terrorist acts and the “ease of access to small arms and light weapons,” among other things.
The GPI is also based on a secondary set of 33 indicators that plumb the finer points of the nations in question, gauging the quality of democracy, the strength of a nation’s institutions and political process, plus their religious, educational and cultural dynamics.
Mr. Killelea also has founded the Institute for Economics and Peace, a “global” think tank with a mission to parse out the relationship among economic development, business and peace.
“We’ve come up with a reasonable definition of peace, and one that can be measured in a numerical way. This idea has captured the imaginations of governments, researchers, philanthropists,” said Clyde McConaghy, president of the group.
The researchers ultimately hope to use all their sets of data to determine what “drivers” that may influence “the creation and nurturance” of peaceful societies.
The complete Global Peace Index can be viewed at www.visionofhumanity.org.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.JAKARTA, Indonesia — The party had the feel of 1960s America, almost. A group of women, thrilled to get a break from the daily routine of hanging laundry and shuttling their children to and from school, sat in a circle, listening to a friend hawk plastic storage bowls in a dizzying array of pastels.
Some shushed babies on their laps; others occasionally leaned in for juicy pieces of news.
The women were, in fact, at a modern-day Tupperware party in the company’s biggest market. The twist? That market is halfway around the world from the product’s Massachusetts birthplace — in Indonesia.
Once a fixture in middle-class American kitchens, Tupperware has become a bit of an afterthought in its home country even as its popularity has risen abroad. (Germany was the top marketplace until Indonesia slid past it two years ago.)
Indonesia is, in many ways, in Tupperware’s sweet spot. As the economy has taken off in recent years, an expanding middle class now has more disposable income for containers of all shapes and sizes that are sturdier than those found in local markets. And, as in 1960s America, many women stay at home to keep house and raise their children, creating a captive audience for parties run by saleswomen who have begun to sidle past conservative social mores and into the work force.WESTERN Bulldogs defender Bailey Williams has signed a two-year contract extension, keeping him at Whitten Oval at least until the end of 2019.
South Australian Williams, 19, was taken with pick 48 in the 2015 NAB AFL Draft and played six games in his first season with the Bulldogs, racking up 14 disposals and 15 pressure acts on debut against Melbourne in round eight.
Playing mostly across half-back, he has appeared in four matches this season, averaging 17 disposals, three marks and three tackles per game.
Western Bulldogs list manager Jason McCartney said the club was pleased to retain Williams' services for a further two seasons.
"Bailey has shown some really promising signs since he came to the club in 2015," he told the club website.
"His poise and decision-making are of a high quality, and we're looking forward to watching him continue to develop into a quality player for the football club."Story highlights Facebook is about to completely change the way its profile pages look
Cashmore: I thrive on new things, but this change was radical even for me
Your profile will become a scrapbook documenting your entire life, all the way back to birth
Facebook users, mark my words: You'll revolt when the site rolls out its new features in the coming weeks.
Facebook is about to completely change the way its profile pages look as part of the website's biggest redesign so far, and only a fraction of the website's 800 million users seem to have the slightest clue.
I'm not talking about the new real-time "Ticker" at the top right of your Facebook profile. I'm not even talking about the "Top Stories" that now appear at the top of your Facebook news feed -- those are tiny, insignificant changes compared to what's just around the corner.
But boy, did some people react badly to even those minuscule improvements. Among my Facebook friends, more than half said they disliked the changes and some threatened to quit. Of course, they did no such thing. How will they react when Facebook throws away the old profiles and replaces them with something completely new?
If you use Facebook, chances are you're unaware of the major changes that are slated to begin rolling out by the end of this month (full disclosure: Mashable is one of several news organizations partnering with Facebook on a social news app). Only geeks like me are obsessed enough to have watched Facebook's 90-minute announcement of the new profile pages last week.
Users will eventually realize that Facebook has unleashed something remarkable, Pete Cashmore says.
And an even smaller percentage of Facebook users have discovered, like I did, that you can enable the new "Facebook Timeline" profile page right now so you're prepared for the launch.
So what's the big change? Facebook will be switching profile pages, perhaps optionally at first, to a new format called "Facebook Timeline." I switched my profile over last week and boy was it a shock -- I immediately wanted to switch it back to the old format. I'm someone who thrives on trying new things, but this change was radical even for me. Yet I could find no way to switch my profile back, so I stuck with it for a few days.
I'm so glad I did: Facebook Timeline is the best change Facebook has ever made.
JUST WATCHED Facebook unveils 'Timeline' feature Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Facebook unveils 'Timeline' feature 03:44
Here's what'll happen once the Timeline profiles are launched: Your Facebook profile will go from having one central column to two, with boxes of text, photos, videos and even maps of your favorite locations. Rather than just displaying your most recent activities, your profile will become a scrapbook documenting your entire life, all the way back to your birth. Facebook will become a record of your existence: All your memories, your victories and your defeats, your loves, your losses and everything in between.
JUST WATCHED Facebook apps go beyond 'like' feature Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Facebook apps go beyond 'like' feature 03:10
You'll be shocked, as I was, when this change is made. Suddenly your life is laid out before you, the highs and lows somehow pinpointed by Facebook's algorithms. You'll wonder why the status update box is so tiny now, and where all your most recent updates went.
You'll add a big, new "Cover photo" to your page and waste a few hours preening your Timeline, choosing to feature your happiest memories, hide the inconsequential ones, and lingering awhile on the most bittersweet of moments. And you'll realize, as I did, that Facebook knows you better than you know yourself.
Through this process, you'll realize that Facebook Timeline is much more than a way to post the minutiae of your existence. While a typical social networking profile might highlight what you ate this morning, or what time you left for work, or where you had lunch, Facebook Timeline takes these thousands of seemingly inconsequential events, discards the irrelevant ones, finds the most emotive, the most visual, the most striking and emotionally touching moments and pulls them into sharp focus.
Much like our memories, Facebook Timeline understands that some moments have resonance that lasts through the years. It's a marvel of computer programming: An algorithm that comes eerily close to emulating human memory; perhaps the first algorithm to spark such a deep emotional response.
So yes, you will hate the new Facebook profile when it launches in the coming weeks. Then, like me, you'll realize that Facebook has unleashed something so remarkable that you didn't even recognize it at first: A meaningful social network. And like any other groundbreaking technology -- the PC, the smartphone, the iPad -- you'll wonder why life wasn't always this way, and how you got by without it.President Barack Obama says he has “no intention” of sending US troops to fight militants in Yemen and Somalia and that Al-Qaeda’s activities are still centered along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
“I have every intention of working with our international partners in lawless areas around the globe to make sure that we’re keeping the American people safe,” Obama said in a People interview to be published Friday. The magazine released a transcript Sunday.
“I never rule out any possibility in a world that is this complex… In countries like Yemen, in countries like Somalia, I think working with international partners is most effective at this point.
“I have no intention of sending US boots on the ground in these regions,” he added.
Recent strikes on Al-Qaeda positions in Yemen, including cruise missile attacks, were reportedly led by the United States, which has vowed to boost its economic and military aid to Sanaa. London and Washington have already announced plans to fund a counter-extremism police in the country.
The top US military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen acknowledged in a CNN interview Sunday that the United States was providing “some support” to Yemen’s efforts to strike Al-Qaeda militants, but insisted that Sanaa led the operations.
A thinly stretched US military has deployed large troop contingents to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The number of US troops in Afghanistan — where Obama has vowed to recenter the US war against Al-Qaeda militants who have also sought refuge in neighboring Pakistan — is set to triple under his watch from 2008 levels, reaching some 100,000 later this year.
Washington has urged Yemen to crack down on Al-Qaeda after the local franchise of Osama bin Laden’s network said it was behind a narrowly-avoided Christmas Day bombing aboard a US-bound airliner.
But the impoverished Arabian Peninsula country already faces a litany of challenges, including a water shortage, dwindling oil reserves, a Shiite rebellion in the north and a movement for autonomy in the south.
Somalia is also the focus of US counterterrorism efforts, where an embattled transitional government faces relentless attacks from extremist Shebab militants and their Hezb al-Islam allies.
The central government asserts little control over the country located along key shipping routes to oil fields in the Middle East.
International navies are battling to keep key shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean free from pirates, who are broadening their area of operation.
“We’ve known throughout this year that Al-Qaeda in Yemen has become a more serious problem. And as a consequence, we have partnered with the Yemeni government to go after those terrorist training camps and cells there in a much more deliberate and sustained fashion,” Obama said.
“The same is true in Somalia, another country where there are large chunks that are not fully under government control and Al-Qaeda is trying to take advantage of them.”
He insisted that “the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan remains the epicenter of Al-Qaeda, their leadership and their extremist allies.”
US officials have said they are seeking to boost military and intelligence cooperation with Yemen.
“Yemen does not want to have American ground troops there. And that’s a good response for us to hear, certainly,” said General David Petraeus, the head of US Central Command, which oversees a region encompassing the Middle East, the Gulf, the Horn of Africa and Central Asia.
“Of course, we would always want a host nation to deal with a problem itself. We want to help. We’re providing assistance,” he told CNN.
Petraeus, who returned from a trip to Yemen, said Washington planned to more than double its economic aid to Yemen this year to 150 million dollars or more. But US officials have insisted the total aid amount has not yet been determined.
Though the figure pales in comparison to the billions of dollars Washington has poured into Afghanistan, the general stressed other allies were providing aid, including Saudi Arabia, which has reportedly allocated two billion dollars, and the United Arab Emirates, which pledged 650 million dollars to Sanaa.Among the circles in which Mr. Ignatieff once traveled, there might be a sense that anybody capable of writing a novel (“Scar Tissue”) that becomes short-listed for the Booker Prize — anybody, for that matter, who had the writer Martin Amis and Michael Palin of Monty Python as guests at his wedding — could figure out a way to jump the queue of Canadian politics.
Even so, his ascendancy puts his country on the cusp of an unusual moment, in some ways a throwback to the era of the dashing Pierre Trudeau, another smart-set intellectual who served as prime minister.
“He was brought in to reinvigorate the liberal brand, to go for the big game right away,” said Nelson Wiseman, a political scientist at the University of Toronto. “I think a lot of the party thought, ‘We need someone who has the intellectual gravitas of Pierre Trudeau.’ Like Trudeau, he came in as a fresh figure, but he also had a reputation abroad that Trudeau didn’t.”
Mr. Ignatieff has proven savvy enough in his own country. Although his opposition coalition split apart and backed down last week from its efforts to defeat the Conservative government led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, political watchers say that Mr. Ignatieff is probably just biding his time.
“He wants the crown in his own right — not through a coalition but via an election, which most of the pundits think we’ll have later this year,” Mr. Wiseman said. “He also wants the Harper administration to have to wear the recession for a while.”
Mr. Ignatieff’s rise in Parliament happened fast, he said in an interview in late January. He said that he gave up a lot by leaving behind the private contentment of a serious writer’s life to run for office.
“But I’m in here to be serious,” he said, and added: “This is the only place where I can be a participant, not a spectator. I’ve been a spectator, and now I’m in the boat fishing. That part of it, from a spiritual point of view, it feels good.”
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
A FEW years ago, a survey conducted by Foreign Policy magazine and Prospect, a British journal, ranked Mr. Ignatieff as the 37th-most influential “public intellectual” in the world (the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe was 38th). Although the clauses “for a Canadian” or, now, “for a politician” are often attached, people almost always describe Mr. Ignatieff as glamorous. Maclean’s magazine once named him Canada’s “Sexiest Cerebral Man.” He was famous in London during the 1980s and 1990s when he was the host of a television talk show devoted to books and ideas. He was a sort of Anglophone version of Bernard-Henri Lévy, but with a pedigree and without the money or aversion to shirt-buttoning.
Mr. Ignatieff’s big-time ambition is so much a part of his public identity that he often scores points by making fun of it himself. At a recent address to a group of 700 business leaders, he opened with a shout-out to a member of the audience who, he kindly noted, had run against him for his parliamentary seat. “And I beat him,” Mr. Ignatieff said, after a nicely timed comedic pause. The crowd laughed heartily.
Mr. Ignatieff’s life story is positively novelistic in its detail. His father, George Ignatieff, was a Canadian diplomat, and his grandfather and great-grandfather were both Russian counts who served as cabinet ministers in the czarist government. His mother’s brother, George Grant, was a famous political philosopher.
Mr. Ignatieff held the captainship of his boarding-school soccer team, produced a Harvard dissertation that involved spending nights watching over state prison inmates in Massachusetts and has written more than a dozen books: political tracts, three novels, a family history, a biography of his former mentor Isaiah Berlin, and — mobilized by what he saw in the Balkans — several books about human rights and intervention.
In 2004, when he was serving as the director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Mr. Ignatieff was visited by three strategists from Canada’s Liberal wing who were leading an effort to infuse a party weakened by scandal with new blood. “It was a bolt from the blue,” he recalled, when during dinner they asked him to consider coming back to run for office.
Photo
“The chance to be in the arena was pretty irresistible,” he said.
It was simultaneously of a piece with his background and somewhat incongruous. “My dad worked for four prime ministers,” he said. “I grew up in a house where public service was something you ought to do. But elected public service my father thought of with horror, because he knew how brutal it was.”
In seeking his party’s leadership position in 2006 and 2008, Mr. Ignatieff ran both times against Bob Rae, a longtime politician who happened to be one of his best friends; they had been roommates at the University of Toronto.
Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content, updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.
“It was difficult running against Bob — we are old, old friends, and our dads were in the foreign service together, ” Mr. Ignatieff said.”
In 2006, neither was elected leader, but in 2008, Mr. Rae bowed out of the contest at the last minute to throw his support to Mr. Ignatieff.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
“We had some very emotional conversations,” Mr. Rae said in an interview in Toronto. “My feeling was that Michael had the support of the small and influential group of party officials who were voting — these were special, last-minute circumstances — but that if it had been a broader election throughout the party, I’d have won.”
To this, Mr. Ignatieff said, “We’ll never know, because Bob pulled out of the race, because he made a very fine gesture.”
Mr. Ignatieff’s friend Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, described him as “a genuinely introspective individual,” but said that in the more than two decades he has been editing him, he had never heard mention of an interest in running for office. “He is, in spirit, a humanist, not a politician,” he said.
Mr. Wieseltier added: “When I would see Michael, he and I would stroll arm in arm around Covent Garden singing — poorly, of course — some of the great quintet in the first act of ‘Così Fan Tutte.’ There was in him a hunger for intellectual authority and for a certain degree of social recognition, but it was never about power."
While Mr. Ignatieff is blessed with many attributes that an elected official is supposed to possess — poise, focus and an instinct for self-preservation — he has a number of other traits that probably wouldn’t play on an American stage.
He has openly acknowledged, without much self-censorship, regret over his initial support of the Iraq war and has movingly — if painfully — wrung his hands in print, most notably in The New York Times Magazine, over both the decision and his ensuing volte-face.
In Canada, he has faced criticism for his stance on the war, not simply because of all the agonizing, but because, as Andrew Potter wrote in a 2006 issue of Maclean’s, “his arguments reek of the necessary compromises you need to make as a liberal in the U.S.”
In fact, over the years, Mr. Ignatieff has been very plain about his affinity for a country not his own. In 2002, writing in Granta, a literary magazine, he discussed his youthful opposition to the Vietnam War: “I loved my own country, but I believed in America in a way that Canada never allowed. I was against the war because I thought it betrayed something essential about the country. I marched because I believed in Jefferson and Lincoln.”
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Considering those words now over tea and biscuits in Toronto, Mr. Ignatieff said, “There are moments when I’ve identified passionately with America, and there are moments of total recoil.” (The invasion of Iraq, he said, came to encompass both feelings.)
“I think I’ve always felt passionately and proudly Canadian, and the way I prove that is that I’ve never sought another passport,” he said, then smiled as he added that he keeps a statue of Thomas Jefferson in his study.
Charges of carpetbagging — Mr. Ignatieff and his second wife, Zsuzsanna Zshoar, moved into a condominium in an area of Toronto that he doesn’t represent — and impatience to rise to the top have also provided red meat to conservatives and Canadian tabloids.
David Rieff, an American friend and author, said: “Canada, like a lot of culturally small countries, has an ambivalent relationship with countrymen who leave and make it big in the United States or in Europe. He’s considered a celebrity at home, and they’re very proud of him, but there’s also some graceless carping. It’s tall-poppy syndrome.”
MR. IGNATIEFF’S next book, “True Patriot Love: Four Generations in Search of Canada,” will be published in late April, on the eve of a possible federal election. He described it as an exploration of Canadian identity — his, as well as those of his grandfather, father and children (he has two).
“Every generation, they are all obsessed with the idea of how to maintain a Canadian empire in the face of America, this behemoth right next door.”Russia will deliver weapons to support the Libyan government if a United Nations weapons embargo is lifted, said Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, the country’s special envoy to the Middle East and Africa, on Thursday. Egypt and Libya have both requested that the arms embargo, which has been in place since 2011, be lifted so that Libya can combat the threat of ISIS and bring order to the civil war that has raged for nearly a year.
"The issue will be discussed at the U.N. Security Council. The basic understanding -- and we share this -- is that there are legally elected authorities in Libya," Bogdanov said. "Of course, we would like to really help Libya’s authorities to strengthen the state power bodies, army and law enforcement forces."
Under the dictatorship of Moammar Gadhafi, which began in 1969 and ended in mid-2011, Libya bought much of its military hardware from the Soviet Union and then latterly Russia. But since the U.N. intervention, which brought with it the embargo, Russian sales of military equipment and parts for previously sold equipment have ended.
"Traditionally, we had very successful military and technical cooperation with Libya. We are ready to resume this cooperation, but for this the common understanding in the U.N. Security Council is needed," said Bogdanov, who also mentioned concerns about those weapons falling into the wrong hands.
The discussion of Russia supplying weapons to Libya previously was raised by Russia’s permanent representative to the United Nations in February. Vitaly Churkin, like Bogdanov, said he feared Libyan forces could be overwhelmed and the weapons end up in the hands of rebel groups or the Islamic State group, as was the case with U.S.-supplied weapons in Iraq.
Russia recently renewed its military ties with Iran by supplying it with a state-of-the-art missile defense system. The sale came about after Iran and a U.S.-led group of five countries came to an agreement regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions. While sanctions have not been lifted yet, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the sale was a goodwill gesture for Iran's cooperation.The Cabinet on Friday approved a ¥2 trillion package to expand the scope of free education and child care services as part of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s push to address challenges to long-term growth posed by Japan’s declining birthrate and aging society.
The government hopes the policy package, consisting of ¥1.7 trillion from tax revenue and ¥300 billion sourced from corporate contributions, will help aging Japan maintain its global competitiveness.
But details, including how the total sum will be allocated for each policy measure, have yet to be hashed out, and restoring the country’s fiscal health, the worst among advanced countries, will become even more of a challenge.
The envisaged plan will in principle make nurseries and kindergartens free for all children between the ages of 3 and 5 regardless of household income.
For those up to the age of 2, free child care services will be provided if they come from low-income households that are exempt from residence taxes.
Expanded child care support is seen as critical in Japan, where female labor participation has been on the rise in recent years.
The administration has set a goal of eliminating waiting lists for child day care centers by building more facilities and boosting pay for nursery school teachers.
Abe has asked for financial contributions from the corporate sector, which will be spent on making day care facilities available for 320,000 children by the end of fiscal 2020. The monthly pay of nursery teachers will be raised by ¥3,000 from April 2019.
Most of the proposed programs will start in fiscal 2020 after the planned 2019 sales tax hike from 8 percent to 10 percent takes effect.
Higher education is another key pillar of the package, which was drawn up in consultation with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party-Komeito coalition.
The government will assist students with fees for higher education if they hail from low-earning households exempt from residential taxes.
Their entrance and tuition fees will be free at national universities, while financial support will be provided to those wishing to attend private universities, junior colleges, vocational schools or other institutions.
Taking heed of a request by Komeito, the government also aims to provide free education at private high schools for students from households with an annual income of less than ¥5.9 million.
In a bid to help Japan attain higher productivity and wage growth, the government will also reduce tax burdens on companies that bolster investment and raise pay.
The following is the gist of a policy package approved by the Cabinet on Friday to expand child care support and free education.
Under the package:
Children between the ages of 3 and 5 can go to nurseries and kindergartens free of charge in principle regardless of household income.
Day care services for children up to age 2 from low-income families will be provided for free.
Monthly pay for nursery school teachers will be raised by ¥3,000.
Students coming from low-income households will be exempted from entrance and tuition fees at national universities.
The government will aim to provide free education at private high schools for students from low-income families.
Tax burdens will be cut if companies proactively increase investment and raise pay.Tristan Lambright, the smiling streaker who livened up Sunday's stinker of a Buffalo Bills football game by baring his tight end, is encouraging fans to cover up for a good cause. He will lend his likeness to a T-shirt from Park Avenue Imprints, with some proceeds going to the City Mission.
The blue shirt bears Lambright's silhouette with a red streak emanating from his heart, reminiscent of the Buffalo Bills logo.
At first there was some confusion, with Lambright fearing the T-shirt sales were motivated by naked greed attempting to profit from Lambright's stunt. But then he found an email from Park Avenue Imprints lost among the hundreds of fan messages and friend requests he had received while he was being held for court.
"We have talked to the company now. They are good people," Lambright said in a private Facebook exchange. He added later, "It's an act of kindness in my eyes at this point."
The shirt was temporarily removed from the website after Lambright and his fans voiced their concerns. It's now back up for sale.
Park Avenue Imprints will buy $5 worth of winter clothing for every T-shirt sold, to be donated to the City Mission. Lambright will receive a cut of the profits as well.
"It's just a quirky little project. It will probably run its course in two or three days," said Paul Roorda, the Park Avenue owner who designed the shirt. "We just wanted to have some fun and do some good out of it."
So far, the company has sold about 50 shirts. They're priced from $14.95 for a ladies' short-sleeved tee to $24.95 for a hoodie.
Roorda recently designed a commemorative T-shirt to benefit the family of Buffalo Police Officer Craig Lehner, who died during a police underwater recovery team dive practice in the Niagara River. Park Avenue will also be accepting clothing donations for the City Mission at his shop, 2955 South Park Ave. in Lackawanna.
A "Pants Off Dance Off" will be held at the Expo Market 617 main St., at 8 p.m. Nov. 25. Proceeds from the event will go toward Lambright's legal expenses, as well as toward Crisis Services in honor of Lambright's aunt who recently died by suicide. Warm, clean clothing also will be accepted at the event on behalf of Hope House domestic violence shelter. The event was originally scheduled for the Gypsy Parlor but had to be relocated to a larger space.
Lambright was released Monday afternoon on $500 bail after being charged with criminal trespass and public lewdness. His antics quickly went viral, being showcased everywhere from Sports Illustrated to "Live with Kelly and Ryan."The infield at Daytona International Speedway is full of RVs for the taking. (Getty Images)
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Don’t steal.
But if you’re going to steal, don’t return to the same locations to commit your crimes. And if you’re going to return to the same locations, don’t keep souvenirs of your thefts. And if you’re going to keep souvenirs, for heaven’s sake don’t let yourself get caught on camera.
Scroll to continue with content Ad
Because if you steal long enough, and you return to the same locations, and you keep souvenirs, and you get caught on camera … well, son, you’re pretty much screwed.
Ladies and gentlemen, we present the story of the RV Bandit. It’s a tale that spans decades, involving dozens of crime scenes at countless racetracks, hundreds of victims, one Hollywood star and one thorough ass-kicking. It’s a tale of a million-dollar heist, one wallet at a time. And naturally, it’s centered in Florida.
Five days before this year’s Daytona 500, the United States Secret Service presented the city of Daytona Beach with a check for $188,000. It marked one of the final chapters in a story that began more than a quarter-century ago in an infield in Daytona International Speedway. Or perhaps Atlanta Motor Speedway. Or maybe any of a dozen or so other racetracks across the country.
What’s known is this: Sometime in the late 1980s, a traveling salesman by the name of Steven Garry Sanders wandered into an empty RV or team hauler parked at a racetrack and pocketed a wallet. Then he did it again. And again. And again. Same routine, different track, month after month, year after year.
“Pick a raceway, he was there,” said Robert Fultz, a special agent with the U.S. Secret |
in India. It reduces pollution, improves fertilizer's efficacy and soil health.[32][33]
Genome and transcriptomes [ edit ]
Neem genome and transcriptomes from various organs have been sequenced, analyzed, and published by Ganit Labs in Bangalore, India.[34][35][36]
ESTs were identify by generation of subtractive hybridization libraries of neem fruit, leaf, fruit mesocarp, and fruit endocarp by CSIR-CIMAP Lucknow.[37][38]
Cultural and social impact [ edit ]
The name "Nimai", a reference to this legend, means "of the neem tree" and trends at 5-10 babies per million.[39]
In 1995, the European Patent Office (EPO) granted a patent on an anti-fungal product derived from neem to the United States Department of Agriculture and W. R. Grace and Company.[40] The Indian government challenged the patent when it was granted, claiming that the process for which the patent had been granted had been in use in India for more than 2,000 years. In 2000, the EPO ruled in India's favour, but W. R. Grace appealed, claiming that prior art about the product had never been published in a scientific journal. On 8 March 2005, that appeal was lost and the EPO revoked the Neem patent.[40]
Symbolism [ edit ]
Previously, neem had been declared as the national tree of the former Hyderabad State.[citation needed] It is the state plant of Arunachal Pradesh.[citation needed]
Biotechnology [ edit ]
The biopesticide produced by extraction from the tree seeds contains limonoids. Currently, the extraction process has disadvantages such as contamination with fungi and heterogeneity in the content of limonoids due to genetic, climatic, and geographical variations.[41][42] To overcome these problems, production of limonoids from plant cell suspension and hairy root cultures in bioreactors has been studied,[43][44] including the development of a two-stage bioreactor process that enhances growth and production of limonoids with cell suspension cultures of A. indica.[45]
Gallery [ edit ]
Flowers
Unripe fruit
Neem tree in a banana farm in India
Neem tree farm
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]In an age old battle between TV and Hollywood comes a hero. But will this so called hero be able to bring peace to a dark world full of evil aspect ratios? The story of the 16:9 aspect ratio: a hero or a compromise?
When you look at your television, what do you see? Some will see a square 4:3 box that weighs as much as an elephant. These days, most see a slim rectangle in the 16:9 format, but why these aspect ratios? Why did we switch from 4:3 to 16:9? Where did these ratios come from in the first place, and who made these decisions? The story, believe it or not, starts with Thomas Edison in 1892 with the invention of film.
...the physical size of the film area between the sprocket perforations determines the image’s size. The universal standard (established by William Dickson and Thomas Edison in 1892) is a frame that is four perforations high. The film itself is 35 mm wide…leaving the de facto ratio of 4:3. (Wikipedia)
This standard was created because 4:3 mimics the human eye’s field of view (155°h x 120°v).
Then came television, bringing about a new age for film and entertainment. The average family could now stay home and be entertained. With the coming of television came a decline in theatre revenue for Hollywood. To help create a new reason for going to the theatre, the film industry started producing new, wider aspect ratios that wouldn’t look good on a 4:3 television.
When cinema attendance dropped, Hollywood created widescreen aspect ratios (such as the 1.85:1 ratio) in order to differentiate the film industry from TV. (Wikipedia)
This new deviation from the standard aspect ratio created in it’s wake multiple new ratios and new forms of film stock to shoot, in effect negating a standard aspect ratio and making it very difficult for any one ratio to take precedence. Kerns Powers, the hero behind the mask, took it upon himself to bring justice to this chaos of ratios.
Powers cut out rectangles with equal areas, shaped to match each of the popular aspect ratios. When overlapped with their center points aligned, he found that all of those aspect ratio rectangles fit within an outer rectangle with an aspect ratio of 1.77:1…The value found by Powers is exactly the geometric mean of the extreme aspect ratios, 4:3 (1.33:1) and 2.35:1, which is coincidentally close to 16:9 (1.77:1). (Wikipedia)
This is where we get the now standard aspect ratio of 16:9. It’s not because it’s the best, nor because it mimics our eye’s field of view; the only reason is that it is a peace treaty between all other ratios. We needed a standard to live by, and 16:9 had the virtues we were looking for, a common size that all ratios could live in.
But what does this mean for the rest of the aspect ratios out there? Does it mean we are forever stuck living in this rectangular ratio of a world? What do you think? Let us know below.
Posted in: Graphic Design, HD Video, Media Strategy, Post-Production, Shooting, Technology, TV, Video, Video Production, Videography, Content Development, Targeted Marketing ProgramsThe father of Otto Warmbier knocked the Obama administration for not doing enough to bring his son home from North Korea, saying “the results speak for themselves.”
During a press conference Thursday, Fred Warmbier provided updates on his son’s condition. Otto Warmbier was recently released from North Korea after being a political prisoner for over a year, and it was discovered this week that he was in a coma for most of that time.
A reporter asked Warmbier if he felt the Obama administration had done enough to bring his son back to the United States, and Warmbier gave a short but stern response.
“The question is: do I think the past administration could have done more?” Warmbier said. “I think the results speak for themselves.”
Warmbier credits Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the rest of the State Department for the release of his son.
WATCH:
Follow Amber on TwitterHey, guys! I'm backSo this is inside Canterlot, where the Elements of Harmony are housed (most notable in the season 2 premiere). As I was collecting references from the show, I realized that the original was somewhat influenced by the interior of a cathedral. So I gave the whole thing a renaissance architecture feel, or at least tried to.. could have turned out better, but oh well.Speaking of which, some parts are kind of messy and ambiguous, and less refined in terms of realism. I admit, I am a bit rusty, hahaHopefully I'll get back into the swing of things though soon enough! But I must say, it feels great to start drawing againThis was an absolute monster to finish, though. Due to a metric crap tonne of trial and error from being bed sore from the pencil, completion time was 38 hours on and off for over a week~ new record!Done on 11x14 inch paper.Vice President Binays' evocation of their class origins doesn't speak well of him or his family. It speaks of class betrayal.
Published 10:18 AM, October 13, 2014
Like many other politicians, Vice President Jejomar Binay trumpets his rise from poverty to wealth. It is a trope that ethically-challenged, and therefore also creatively-challenged, public relations people use with knee-jerk consistency.
It is such a go-to tactic, that even the best ad agencies did not think it wrong to exaggerate a former presidential candidate's humble beginnings. He was made to look like he came from an abjectly poor background when, actually, he came from just a poor one. Or, in the case of an Erap (pal) whose slogan is that he is para sa mahirap (for the poor), he was managed to look like he was one of the masa. Erap's mistakes and boorishness were made to look charming, like the adorable naiveté of the poor cousin looked down upon by the hoity-toity rich. In truth, Erap was the errant son of a doctor who did not take advantage of his upper middle class opportunities.
Elite electoral politics
It speaks to the fact that the majority of our people are still poor and need to see something in the candidate they are voting for that relates to them. What should relate to them are programs and platforms that are pro-poor, regardless of the candidate's background. But all political parties claim to be pro-poor. There is very little emphasis and education among voters about issues and platforms. Politics in the country remains personalistic. Vote-buying and other shenanigans remain the rule of the day. Thus, people hang on to the empty hope that if the candidate does come from the poor, he will know what it is like and have their best interest at heart.
Time and again this has been proven wrong. Today's case in point, VP Binay. Binay's rags-to-riches story has been no assurance that he has not enriched himself at the expense of the poor. I can cite an endless number of additional examples. But two will do: Janet Napoles and Imelda Marcos.
Poverty and relative deprivation
Without excusing their rapaciousness, one can understand why being poor can lead to a fear of deprivation that billions of pesos, expensive jewelry, art masterpieces and large estates, cannot assuage. If the initial poverty is also coupled with a sense of relative lack (that is, the relatively rich is in your face, whether because you aspire so much to be like them or you are indeed a poor cousin being treated poorly) this can explain the caricature-like pretensions of trying to outdo the Queen of England with your own Kew Gardens.
If one of her biographies is to be believed, this is precisely what happened to Imelda. Born into the poorer side of the patrician Romualdez family, she had to live close to them as the poor relative who was dependent on their charity.
I do not know enough of VP Binay's nor Janet Napoles' life stories to know whether the toxic mix of poverty and relative deprivation marked them early in life. Perhaps their sense of relative deprivation came from watching too many movies and TV programs about the life of the rich and famous.
Moral development
We have enough counter-examples to know that poverty need not lead to such horrible moral development. The award-winning film “Slumdog Millionaire” depicts a child growing up in poverty far more severe than that experienced by Imelda Marcos and Janet Napoles. But because everyone in the neighborhood was poor, this did not lead to such an extreme sense of lack.
Even more remarkably, there are real life stories of those who grew up in both relative deprivation and poverty who still really manage to end up with a strong sense of self-worth and altruism. The way our political system works, they are less likely to be rich nor in politics.
We also have enough counter-examples to know that people who grew up in relative privilege can end up disgusted with class inequity. In politics they are the ones who are able to use their educational advantages towards pro-poor social policies.
Which leads me back to the story of Jejomar Binay. His wife Elenita Binay is a doctor. Strangely enough for a public person, I couldn't find her biodata or short biography on the Internet. So I need to assume the common profile of those who are able to go to medical school. She is likely to have grown up middle class at the very least. If one believes the allegations of the Senate investigation as I do, I cannot but be truly astounded by her. There is no reason for it. It cannot be explained in my mind, other than by a failure in moral development.
Crude class analysis
This is not a treatise against what the communists call, “class analysis.” The poor indeed have very different interests from the wealthy and need to organize in order to fight for their well-being in a system skewed towards the privileges of the elite. It is however a criticism of crude applications of political theory that end up in a populism co-opted by corrupt politicians and unscrupulous public relations practitioners.
It does little service for the poor if their aspirations for empowerment are harnessed by these cheap attempts at self-aggrandizement. At least in my book, the next time I see yet another politician appeal to my pro-poor sympathies by his or her rags-to-riches story, I will take it with a large dose of cynicism. I will remind myself of that joke that many self-made men and women often fall completely in love with their maker.
In the meantime, I suggest that the Binays' evocation of their class origins doesn't speak well of him or his family. It speaks instead of class betrayal in the case of the Vice President. Or, in the case of his wife, sheer, inexplicable greed. - Rappler.comAaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots star who was convicted of murder in 2015, killed himself in his prison cell Wednesday morning, officials said.
Hernandez, 27, was found hanging in his cell by corrections officers around 3:05 a.m. at the Souza Baranowski Correctional Center, Massachusetts Department of Correction officials said in a statement.
He was pronounced dead an hour later.
Hernandez was in a single cell in a general population housing unit and hanged himself with a bed sheet attached to his cell window. He also tried blocking his door from the inside with various items, officials said.
An investigation was ongoing.
Hernandez was not on a suicide watch and authorities had yet to find any suicide note in his cell, The Boston Globe reported. Officials said Hernandez had given no indication he might try to take his own life.
“If he had made any kind of statement, he would have not been in that unit,’’ Department of Correction spokesperson Christopher Fallon said.
The death of the once-promising NFL tight end came almost two years to the day when he was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of semi-pro football player Odin Lloyd. The 15th selection in the 2010 NFL draft, Hernandez was arrested in August 2013 in connection with Lloyd's June 2013 death.
On April 14, Hernandez was found not guilty in a double homicide separate from the Lloyd case; however, he was already serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole in connection with Lloyd's murder.
The disgraced NFL star played three seasons with the Patriots, scoring 18 touchdowns and forming a fierce tight end tandem with Rob Gronkowski. He had two touchdowns in six playoff games, including eight catches for 67 yards and a touchdown in the Patriots' Super Bowl XLVI loss to the Giants.
But his seemingly ascendant career came crashing down when police began investigating Lloyd's murder and eventually came to finger Hernandez as the trigger man. The Patriots quickly cut Hernandez from the team prior to the 2013 season.
The Patriots had yet to comment on the death of Hernandez, but the team was set to be at the White House on Wednesday in honor of their Super Bowl LI victory.
Patriots spokesman Stacey James told The Boston Globe: "We are aware of the reports but I don't anticipate that we will be commenting today."Assassin's Creed III is going to introduce a lot of changes to the series. It will feature a new setting, a new time period and a new protagonist. And one of the biggest changes has yet to be fully explored—the game's soundtrack will be crafted by an entirely new composer.
Jesper Kyd, the composer responsible for the music in the first four Assassin's Creed games, will be handing the musical baton to Lorne Balfe, who along with Kyd contributed to the soundtrack to last year's Assassin's Creed: Revelations. As any longtime Assassin's Creed player likely agrees, this is a substantial change.
Assassin's Creed's stark, dry visual design and techno-retro aesthetic have always been two of its most defining characteristics, but Kyd's music has always been the soul of the series for me. Let's take a trip through the musical progression of the first four Assassin's Creed games.
"Jerusalem" - AC I
Kyd's soundtrack for the first Assassin's Creed is probably the least well-remembered—it was somewhat cold, a mix of middle eastern instruments, chanting, open drones and strings. I was one of those weirdos who loved Assassin's Creed despite and sometimes because of its flaws, but I don't have much memory of the soundtrack. I do, however, remember that it fit in very well with the open, wind-swept sound design. There was a distinct sense that this composer got what Assassin's Creed was about, from a gameplay standpoint. It was a game about sitting perched atop a high spire, surveying the horizon before making a leap of faith. Kyd captured that.
Advertisement
"Venice Rooftops" - AC II
Assassin's Creed II was better than its predecessor on every level (except, perhaps, for how much easier it was)—Ezio was a personable and relatable protagonist, the cities were gorgeous, and the game had much more variety. But the thing that really won my heart was the soundtrack. Two games later, Assassin's Creed II remains my favorite soundtrack of the series.
Advertisement
This theme, which plays while running across the rooftops of Venice, flows through many of Kyd's compositions for Assassin's Creed II. That ascending four note melody, those driving drums and guitars… it's great stuff.
"Home In Florence" - AC II
This kind of track is exactly what set the second game's soundtrack apart from the first one. A shifting, serpentine groove reminiscent of Steve Reich, eventually giving way to wide open pads with sharp, dancing harp notes… all the way to a deep, romantic string part. When this started paying for the first time in Assassin's Creed II, I thought, "Wow, shit. They are really going for it here." It almost sounds like Mass Effect, and perfectly blends the game's old-world and sci-fi sensibilities.
Advertisement
"Rome" - Brotherhood
Brotherhood was an interesting soundtrack. I didn't warm to it as immediately as I did Assassin's Creed II, but over time, I came to enjoy its dark overtones. It features more grandiose choral work than Assassin's Creed II, and is on the whole much darker—strange voices chant in the background, and Ezio's journey through Rome feels much less certain than anything in the last game.
Advertisement
"Borgia Tower" - Brotherhood
This music plays when Ezio is infiltrating a Borgia tower, looking to stir up some trouble (and light things on fire). This is some sinister stuff, dark and pulsing, very different than anything from the other games. I still remember when "Countdown" was playing and the whispering, scary music started up and I thought "Man, what the hell is going on?"
Advertisement
"Assassin's Creed Theme" - Revelations
Here we have the main theme for Revelations. The soundtrack was a joint effort between Kyd and Balfe, though Kyd wasn't involved with this particular theme. I have to say, I don't find it as interesting or memorable as the music from the first three games. It's not bad really, and it still feels like "Assassin's Creed Music," but it lacks that vision that Kyd brought to the first three soundtracks. The Revelations soundtrack is the main reason I'm somewhat apprehensive about Balfe taking the reins for Assassin's Creed III.
Advertisement
Assassin's Creed isn't the only franchise Kyd has left behind—he's also left the Hitman series, for which he was the primary composer for years. It's always nice to see artists embracing change—Kyd's music will be heard on plenty of upcoming games, including Borderlands 2 and Darksiders II, a soundtrack I've enjoyed so far.
Advertisement
For his part, Balfe has been a team member for go-to-soundtracker Hans Zimmer on films like Inception and Sherlock Holmes, as well as Zimmer-scored games like Modern Warfare 2 and Crysis 2. This is an opportunity for him to step away from Zimmer and create his own themes, so I'll be interested to see what he does with Assassin's Creed.
It is, of course, too early to say what that will be; all that seem certain is that it'll likely be markedly different than Kyd's work on the first games. That's fine; good even—with a different setting, vibe and protagonist, different music seems appropriate. Furthermore, Balfe is a skilled composer with a lot of experience, and he's worked on some soundtracks I really respect.
But there's no denying that with Jesper Kyd gone, Assassin's Creed will now be a substantially different experience. Here's hoping that Balfe can step into Kyd's rather large shoes and usher in a new era of sneaking, stabbing and soaring.
Advertisement
(Top Image via Wildcat_ZA on Photobucket)Trump’s CIA director outlines plans to make agency more aggressive, cut red tape
October 5, 2017 by Joseph Fitsanakis
The man appointed by President Donald Trump to lead the United States Central Intelligence Agency has outlined his plans to promote more aggressive intelligence operations and combat what he described as “red tape” in the agency’s culture. Mike Pompeo, a former aerospace and oil executive, who is a member of the conservative Tea Party movement, assumed the directorship of the CIA in January of this year. He succeeded John Brennan, a career CIA officer, who has been an outspoken critic of the Trump administration’s attitude to intelligence since he left office in January.
On Wednesday, Pompeo was the keynote speaker at a one-day conference on intelligence, hosted at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Entitled Ethos and Profession of Intelligence, the conference was co-sponsored by George Washington University and the CIA. In his speech, Pompeo outlined his plans to make CIA operations more aggressive and cut back what he repeatedly described as “red tape” at the agency. He based his observations on his opinion that the CIA is slow, not agile enough, and excessively centralized in its decision making. He added that, to better protect American national security, the Agency should engage in more offensive methods of intelligence collection. He went on to state that the most effective way to make the CIA more agile as an organization was to decentralize its decision-making processes. To do so, he said, decisions had to be pushed “to the lowest level possible”, thus allowing CIA station chiefs around the world to “call the shots” on operations. That was especially applicable to “tactical issues”, where the person with the most direct knowledge of the situation “is rarely me or anyone in my senior leadership team”, said Pompeo.
The CIA director went on to say that his plan is to “cut red tape” through various ways. One such way is reducing the numbers of CIA personnel that are required to review and approve intelligence operations, he said. Another way is increasing the number of CIA operations officers stationed abroad, thus placing CIA personnel closer to the agency’s intelligence targets. The goal is to “deploy our people, tools and resources into the heart of the fight”, said Pompeo. The CIA director concluded his remarks by saying he wants to instill a new culture at the Agency, based on the motto: “If you are in a process and you’re not adding value, get out of the way”.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 05 October 2017 | Permalink
AdvertisementsIf you're new here, and just looking for information about local solar installers, you can Click Here to request a free cost estimate for your home. Thanks for visiting!
Photosynthesis uses sunlight to separate oxygen and hydrogen from water.
Artificial photosynthesis was beyond our reach because no one had been able to match the speed at which this process occurred in nature. Now, all this has changed.
This article describes how researchers from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden have developed a molecular catalyzer that matches the speed of natural photosynthesis. In nature, water molecules are split into oxygen at a rate of 100 to 400 molecules per second (known as the “turnover” rate). At KTH, researchers have achieved a turnover rate of over 300 molecules per second.
What are the implications of this? An increased ability for man to produce his own renewable energy, for one. The hydrogen (which is split off from oxygen) can be used for fuel. According to Licheng Sun, a professor at KTH, “…it will be possible in ten years to produce technology based on this type of research that is sufficiently cheap to compete with carbon-based fuels.” Areas with plentiful sunlight (like the Sahara) could produce large quantities of hydrogen. Sunlight could even be used to convert carbon dioxide into methanol. This technology could be combined with solar cells to increase their efficiency in converting sunlight into electricity.
The issue with traditional solar cells is this: although researchers are working on solutions, there is a gap between the theoretical and actual limit of electricity that can be harvested from a cell. And the theoretical limit is only 33.5 percent. Obviously, more work needs to be done in order to make this technology a practical alternative to fossil fuels. Part of the solution could involve capturing and storing the solar energy in a chemical form. Licheng Sun has invested almost twenty years of research in this area and is optimistic that artificial photosynthesis could be the alternative that people are looking for.Nebraska Attorney General Hesitant to Defend Abortion Restrictions Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning said late last week that he is not prepared to exhaust all legal options to defend a state law requiring women to undergo a mental health examination prior to receiving an abortion. According to the Associated Press, Bruning said Friday during an interview on a local radio station that he was unsure if the lengthy and expensive appeals process required to keep the law was worth the time and resources. He said, "Despite the fact I'm very pro-life, I need to be realistic in utilizing the legal resources of the state." Bruning alluded to flaws in the current bill, but would not specify which elements of the law he believes need reform. He also sees drafting an entirely new bill as a possible solution, reports KHAS-TV.
The law in question was signed by Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman in the spring, and was scheduled to go into effect this month. The law, however, was put on hold two weeks ago after a Nebraska Judge place a preliminary injunction against it following a lawsuit brought by Planned Parenthood of the Heartland. According to the Associated Press, Judge Laurie Smith Camp ruled that the law would limit access to abortion by requiring mental health screenings that would be impossible to perform and regulate, given a literal interpretation of the law. Camp also disagreed with a provision in the law allowing abortion providers to be subject to civil suit if a screening were to fail to be comprehensive.
According to the Omaha World-Herald, if Bruning decides to pursue an appeal on behalf of the state, a permanent injunction hearing would be required.
Media Resources: Associated Press 7/23/10, 7/14/10; KHAS-TV 7/23/10; Omaha World-Herald 7/24/10; Feminist Daily Newswire 7/15/10, 4/13/10
© Feminist Majority Foundation, publisher of Ms. magazine If you liked this story, consider making a tax-deductible donation to support Ms. magazine.In its opinion (found here) the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) GMO addresses the safety of pollen from Monsanto’s MON 810 genetically modified maize for use ‘as or in’ a foodstuff.
The top European food regulator’s scientific opinion, published today, backs the application from the biotech giant for the placing on the market of MON 810 maize pollen under Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003.
The GMO Panel said while is ‘not in a position’ to rule on the safety of maize pollen in or as food in general, “it concludes that the genetic modification in maize MON 810 does not constitute an additional health risk if maize MON 810 pollen is to replace maize pollen from non-GM maize in or as food.”
“The overall opinion fulfils the requirements of Article 6 for the placing on the market of genetically modified maize MON 810 pollen,” reads the EFSA opinion.
In delivering its scientific opinion, the GMO Panel said it considered data from the Monsanto application (EFSA-GMO-NL-2012-107), plus data from other applications related to maize MON 810 submitted in the European Union, scientific comments submitted by the Member States and relevant scientific publications.
GM pollen and honey
Last year the EU Court of Justice, the highest court in the bloc, ruled that honey containing traces of pollen from GM plants must receive prior authorisation before it can be sold as food in the EU. However a European Commission (EC) proposal this year recognised that pollen is a natural constituent and not an ingredient of honey; therefore meaning that, in honey at least labelling rules requiring a list of ingredients would not apply.
“The Commission's proposal will not affect the conclusion of the Court as regards the application of the GMO legislation to GM pollen in food,” said the EC document.
“In particular it does not alter the Court conclusion that honey containing GM pollen can be placed on the market only if it is covered by an authorisation under the legislation.”
New opinion
The EFSA GMO Panel said: “While limited data are available on the compositional and safety characteristics of maize pollen in general and pollen of maize MON 810 in particular, the EFSA GMO Panel considered a range of additional data constituting a weight of evidence approach for the safety of maize MON 810 pollen compared with other maize pollen.”
The evidence considered by EFSA consisted of:
the molecular characterisation of maize MON 810;
extensive data on composition and agronomic/phenotypic characteristics in maize MON810, including reproductive traits related to pollen production and viability;
the food and feed safety of maize MON 810 and the newly expressed Cry1Ab protein.
“These data do not indicate potential concerns over the safety of the newly expressed Cry1Ab protein or the occurrence of unintended effects that could raise safety concerns,” said EFSA.With Ubuntu now running across all form factors and devices and entering the mobile space, a new era begins.
The challenge
While our values remain the same, we've now faced with a unique opportunity to drive adoption of our favourite Free Software OS to a user base that could potentially be one or two orders of magnitude bigger.
We've layed out the foundations of an innovative and scalable platform that provides a stunning experience for regular and power users, and that is a delight for developers to use. Years of experience, user testing and design on the desktop, pioneering work on the cloud and the app development story for the phone are some of the key aspects that have made it possible.
In this new era our community is more important than ever, with LoCo teams and the LoCo Council at the forefront. Ubuntu contributors, enthusiasts, evangelists, advocates... with your events, initiatives across the globe you are all making it happen.
With virtual UDS happening this week, we'd like to kick off a series of discussions to come up with a solid plan on how to re-energize and empower LoCo teams to scale up to these new challenges, and to involve them in the technologies and projects that are driving this new chapter in Ubuntu. The contribution of leaders in our LoCo community and the LoCo Council will be key to our success here.
The sessions
From the 19th to 21th of November, both the Community and the App Development tracks at UDS will be full with LoCo team sessions, and we'd like all advocates and everyone involved in Ubuntu local community teams to participate and contribute to our LoCo plans this cycle. Here are the sessions this week:
LoCo projects
An initiative to work with LoCos to provide projects and outcomes for those teams and individuals looking for ways of contributing to Ubuntu. We'd like to create "LoCo projects", a pool of projects LoCo teams can participate in as a team.
Join this session >
LoCo Portal promotion
The LoCo Portal is the window to the vibrant activity of our Ubuntu teams, and we want to come up with a plan to promote it and use it to highlight the awesome work that's going on in the LoCo world.
Join this session >
LoCo Leadership growth
New challenges require leadership, and we'd like to work with the LoCo Council to grow a team of leaders to drive the global LoCo community.
Join this session >
LoCo community involvement in App Development
App development is an exciting new area that is becoming key to the success of Ubuntu among mobile users. We're at a point where the platform and infrastructure is ripe for LoCo teams to get involved and start spreading the word and running Ubuntu app development events.
Join this session >
Build materials for the App Dev Schools initiative
Growing the number of learning materials to write apps for Ubuntu will be a key focus for next cycle, and it offers a great opportunity to share knowledge and help others getting started creating content for the platform. Join us to discuss the plan to create a set of materials and presentations for the App Dev Schools.
Join this session >
Campaign to grow the number of tutorials videos
As an extension to the App Dev Schools initiative, we'd like to come up with a plan to publish a series of short, topic-based app development tutorial videos.
Join this session ›
Looking forward to seeing you all at UDS this week!
Image 'Photo de groupe' by rocknpol under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0SAN FRANCISCO — The National AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park here is a somber glen of plants, trees, walks, grass and cairn, with thousands of names etched in stones and pavement. Visitors’ emotions run high, but the details of exactly how AIDS devastated and transformed the world are not found here.
“The story of AIDS is more than a disease,” said John Cunningham, executive director of the grove. “The real underpinnings of that story are about humanity, social justice, human rights and what it means to be a citizen of the world. Somehow there needs to be a keeper of the story.”
Now there is a move to create just that: a place to chronicle the AIDS tragedy more comprehensively, to explore the pandemic’s many facets in a permanent national exhibition and repository. It would be similar to institutions commemorating other cataclysmic events: the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in Manhattan and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in Japan.
The effort is in its nascent stages, being discreetly explored by the staff and board of the grove, which Congress designated a National Memorial in 1996. (It is the only AIDS-related monument to receive such status.)Social media is a wonderful place for sports fans to interact, but fans have become increasingly difficult over the years. Tennis fans are no exception to that rule.
While the Internet has brought fans closer together in dialogue, it has further separated them from reality. It makes tennis fans forget that players are human.
Tennis Fans: Obscenities are Unacceptable but Forgivable
In 2016, when something big happens on court, the player can never really get away from it. Part of that reason is that when a player does or says something controversial on court, somebody captures the moment. Right on cue, they post it on social media and the whole world sees.
This point was illustrated beautifully when Coco Vandeweghe defeated top seeded Agnieszka Radwanska in the first round of Birmingham two days back. After claiming victory, the American mouthed a verbal obscenity, seemingly directed at her opponent. This caused a rather big stir among circles of Tennis Twitter as seen right here:
Vandeweghe clearly said “fuck her” in an aggressive way after match point against Aga. Such a hideous person. #AegonClassic — WTAAddict (@WTAAddict) June 16, 2016
While this behavior is definitely inexcusable, calling a player a “hideous person” after one remark is ridiculously over the top. Not only that but it asserts that a player cannot go an entire match without saying something remotely controversial without people calling them “horrible.”
The language Vandeweghe used is identical to the one adults use in their every day life towards the people they do not like. People let out verbal obscenities under their breath towards a particular boss or coworker at work plenty of times.
But because nobody captured their words on video and posted on the internet, they are not labeled as a “hideous person,” as @WTAAddict stated. This is nonsense. All professionals are human, they all make mistakes. Would Vandeweghe say the same thing about Radwanska if they were walking past each other in the street? Probably not.
Tennis Forums: Fun but Frustrating
Forums such as tennisforum.com and menstennisforum.com are exciting ways to connect with the fans of the sport from across the globe. They are in fact where many commentators have gathered news and facts from.
Unfortunately, giving the wide range of backgrounds and players involved in the sport, many posters do not get along.
The incident where Federico Delbonis hit a cat with a tennis ball spurned 180+ posts in one thread. One of the reactions was the following:
This is another example of somebody overreacting to a player doing something in the heat of the moment. Delbonis would likely never hit a cat with a tennis ball outside the competitive sphere.
It is this sort of overreacting that causes so many fights between people on tennis fan sites like tennisforum and menstennisforums; people say over-the-top and rude things about players spurning a series of fights. Fact of the matter is that fans do not sympathize with the players enough which is the root cause of this.
Again, Tennis Fans: Top Players Don’t Always Win
Another reason that social media sports fans lose touch with reality is overreacting when certain players lose. Yes, top players losing should be shocking but it is not the end of the world. Upsets simply happen and the world goes on.
Top players that have suffered early round exits include Radwanska, Wawrinka, and recently crowned Roland Garros winner Garbiñe Muguruza.
There is no need to slander these players for losing. Kirsten Flipkens, who took out Muguruza, is a former Wimbledon semifinalist. Additionally, Vandeweghe came off winning a title, and |
a cat one as his headlamps picked up the reflection from the animal’s eyes and had he not seen it he may well have driven off the road and crashed.
He spent the following months trying to develop a man-made version of the cat’s eye and after many trials and failures he eventually took out patents on his invention in March 1935.Super Rugby to lose money in 2014, Australian Rugby Union chief Bill Pulver says
Updated
On the eve of the launch of the 2014 Super Rugby season Australian Rugby Union boss Bill Pulver concedes the competition will run at a loss this year.
Heading into a difficult year financially for Australian Rugby, Pulver told Grandstand that Super Rugby poses the biggest financial challenge for the ARU.
Super Rugby will lose money in 2014, but we are putting plans together to try and address that. Australian Rugby Union chief executive Bill Pulver
"Super Rugby will lose money in 2014, but we are putting plans together to try and address that," Pulver said.
"On one hand we have an incredibly vibrant competition with five Australian teams playing in the best provincial competition in the world. We are just trying to get the financial model right."
Pulver and the ARU board are anxious to begin negotiations for a new broadcast deal with the current contract expiring at the end of 2015.
Before Australian Rugby and SANZAR, the governing body of Super Rugby, can bid for an increased broadcast rights deal Pulver said the product must be improved.
"First of all we must agree on the format for the new competition which would start in 2016 and go through to 2020," he said.
"There is talk of new teams with the possibility of a team from Argentina and a team from Asia adding a little more interest."
Also ahead of a new broadcast rights deal Pulver is hopeful Australian teams can achieve success at Super Rugby, World Sevens and Test level to increase the appeal of the product.
On the back of a successful 2013 the ARU is in for a lean year of revenue in 2014.
Last year the ARU began 2013 with a deficit of $8.3 million but on the back of hosting a lucrative British and Irish Lions tour recovered to achieve a cash surplus of $10m by the end of the year.
We all know that Melbourne has been losing money. It has been tough in Perth, and even for the Waratahs it has been hard to break even. Rugby New South Wales chairman Nick Farr-Jones
The result was also achieved through cost savings by the ARU that included axing its Sydney and Brisbane development academies.
Former Wallabies captain and now Rugby New South Wales chairman Nick Farr-Jones acknowledges the cost savings made by the ARU but said the game is in for tough times financially.
"Super Rugby is hard," Farr-Jones told Grandstand.
"We all know that Melbourne has been losing money. It has been tough in Perth and even for the Waratahs it has been hard to break even."
National Rugby Championship looms as a financial gamble
We are facing very tough competition from the other winter sports. They are well funded and are getting a lot more out of television rights than we do."
Farr-Jones has concerns about the financial viability of the new second-tier competition, the National Rugby Championship, to kick-off later in the year.
"I'm nervous about the affordability of the National Rugby Championship," Farr-Jones said.
Pulver is confident the new competition will succeed and said it is important as a rugby pathway and also to offer broadcasters additional content.
In rugby's current financial climate Farr-Jones also believes players need to play a role in keeping their wage demands realistic.
"Can we afford one third of our revenues to to be paid to players?" Farr-Jones asked.
"Should they be more on incentive programs?"
Rugby Union Players' Association chief executive Greg Harris said the players are aware of the financial pressure on the game and have already made sacrifices.
"There was somewhat of a reluctance by the players to accept a reduction in Test match payments agreed to late last year," Harris said.
"Especially in the light of what is happening in some other codes. State of Origin payments have gone up dramatically.
"Nevertheless for the good of the game they took that on board."
Topics: super-rugby, rugby-union, sport, australia
First postedChina isn't taking accusations that it's connected to the recent hack of US government employee data lying down. "We have noticed that the US is still investigating, but feels that China is responsible," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said at a recent general briefing. "This is absurd logic." This wouldn't be the first time the US has pointed the finger at China -- it was also suspected to be behind last year's major USPS hack, among many other instances over the years. The most recent hack leaked information for more than four million federal employees, including incredibly detailed data from background checks. While that attack is still being investigated, the American government has said that it'll be making online records more secure. China, for its part, says it's also facing regular cyberattacks from the US. Meanwhile, the two frenemies are also trying to work together to take on cybercriminals.
[Photo credit: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images]Fears US video prank 'gallon smashing' is being copied in Britain after teenager is arrested for milk bottle stunt in Poundland
Craze involves slamming large milk carton into the ground and falling over
Accomplice films the incident and posts the video online
Kent Police confirmed 'gallon smashing' has led to one prankster's arrest
Fears teens are copying US viral video that attracted 1.4m views
A UK version of video has now surfaced on the internet
Supermarkets are on alert for pranksters attempting to copy an American craze known as 'gallon smashing', after one teenager was arrested for the stunt last week.
The prank involves a youngster walking into a crowded shop, before slamming a large carton of milk into the ground and lying down. Store workers are tricked into thinking there has been an accident. An accomplice meanwhile films the incident and posts the video online.
One such incident, titled 'Gallon Smashing Prank, UK Edition' has already attracted 1.12million viewers after it was posted online.
Scroll down for video
Got milk: The trickster appearing in a UK video of 'gallon smashing' holds the carton in his hand, just seconds before delivering his prank
Accidental? The man lies in a pool of spilt milk after smashing the carton onto the floor
Helping hands: Customers rally around the man as they are tricked into believing the prank is an accident
Aisle help you: The trickster lands right next to a shop worker in this 'gallon smashing' incident
An American version showing three teenagers performing the prank, went viral earlier this year.
There are now fears the fad has gained popularity on this side of the Atlantic, with police in Kent confirming they have attended calls on 'gallon smashing' incidents.
Last week, a teenager pulled the messy stunt in a Poundland store in Canterbury.
But the practical joke turned sour when staff called the police and the culprit was reprimanded.
One shopper, who hinted on Twitter that they witnessed the incident, said: 'Children in this city are out of control. I hate them all. What is wrong with them?
'When I finished a term at school, I went straight home to change into my own clothes. These days, kids want to terrorise retail staff.
'They're all stealing things and throwing bottles of milk around.'
A spokesman for Kent Police confirmed they had dealt with the incident which 'involved a container of milk'.
He said: 'Police were called to a shop in St George's Street, Canterbury, at around 5.20pm on March 28 after staff reported a disturbance involving a container of milk.
'A boy in his teens was spoken to and investigations are ongoing.'
No laughing matter: A teenager who carried out the prank at Poundland in Canterbury was arrested
One youngster thought to be involved in the prank, tweeted: 'Gonna gallon smash in Poundland,' before later posting the message, 'Biggest mistake ever'.
A spokeswoman for Poundland declined to comment.
While the latest gallon smashing prank has already garnered 1.12million views, the original American video has gained 1.14million views since it was uploaded in February.
In the US version, three brothers walk around grocery stores holding two gallon-sized containers of milk or juice and theatrically slip, while at the same time throwing the cartons in the air.
Once the inevitable mess is made, the teenagers then have to navigate the awkward attentions of fellow customers as they offer help and express concern at what looks like a nasty accident.
Walking along the grocery store frozen section with one gallon cartons in his hands (left) the American teenager pretends to slip and throw his juice in the air
While some have enjoyed the slapstick humour, brothers Omar, Faysal, and Zayd Khatib, have also come under fire for the three-minute film, as fears of copycat behaviour surfaced.
After the video was posted in February, the popular Animal NY blog posted a plea to repeat pranksters: 'Enjoy this for what it is, and don't make more of these.
'We don't need a CNN report two weeks from now about how this new fad called gallon smashing is very dangerous ('This Florida teenager slipped and suffered a leg contusion, missing two days of school!'), complete with man-on-the-street interviews of senior citizens dressing down the current generation of dumb kids.
'Sometimes a video of dumb kids spiking milk jugs can just be a video of dumb kids spiking milk jugs, and we can appreciate it then move on.'
The prank is now complete as the juice burst everywhere onto the floor - potentially causing danger for the innocent bystander out for their groceriesThis is important, Dylanites. Nearly 50 years after its release, Bob Dylan's classic "Like a Rolling Stone" has finally got an official music video, and it's pretty much the best thing ever: an interactive video that lets the viewer flip through channels on a virtual television and watch such luminaries as Drew Carey on The Price Is Right, Marc Maron on his WTF podcast, and the dudes from Pawn Stars lip-syncing to the 1965 recording of the song.
In all, there are 16 equally mesmerizing channels to choose from, from sports to cooking to world news to children's cartoons to reality shows; some of the channels are simulations of shows currently on cable, and the best part? All of the people on them know the words to "Like a Rolling Stone."
The video, which was created by Interlude, is probably the most newfangled thing Dylan has ever done (excepting of course his three-year stint on satellite radio and his recent the Bootleg Series app), is being released alongside The Complete Album Collection Volume 1, a new 47(!)-CD box set that arrives juuuust in time for the holidays. If giant boxes of compact discs aren't your thing, the collection is "also available as a limited-edition harmonica-shaped USB stick containing all the music, in both MP3 and FLAC lossless formats." (Of course it's harmonica-shaped.)TTC ridership in parts of Scarborough is expected to plummet after the 2015 Pan American Games as the obsolete rapid-transit line is shut down for four years of construction, warns general manager Gary Webster.
Dozens of extra buses will be added to the route between Kennedy Station and Scarborough Town Centre while the updated light rail system is built, but Webster thinks people are likely to return to their cars until the LRT opens in 2019.
“We’re going to drive people away from transit, there’s no question,” he said, noting that a parallel bus service that’s operated for years alongside the SRT has never been embraced by riders.
Meanwhile, Webster said the full length of the Eglinton-Scarborough Crosstown LRT won’t be done until 2022, although Metrolinx maintains it can be finished by 2020 and is considering a public-private partnership to speed things up.
To any constituents who are angry they’ll be stuck with buses during that time, local Councillor Chin Lee says: Be careful what you vote for.Try out the demo bar at the top of the page to test out our voices with your own text. Most of these voices are available to download today.
CereProc offers a range of voices in many accents. We can create amazing new voices quickly due to our innovative voice creation system. Many of our voices are built exclusively for specific customers and applications. The samples below demonstrate CereProc's non-exclusive range of voices.
Voice Demos
At CereProc we like to put our voices through their paces. So rather than the standard "hello my name is..." samples we have chosen material that allows their individual personalities to shine through.
Scottish Voices
CereProc is based in Edinburgh, Scotland and we are very proud of our Scottish voices. The Scottish accent has achieved the highest level of acceptability across a range of accredited surveys. This is one reason Scotland has long been the location of choice for contact centre operations.
CereProc Heather
click here to download the sample
The Loch Ness Monster is an alleged creature purportedly inhabiting Loch Ness in Scotland. Popular interest and belief in the animal has fluctuated since it was brought to the world's attention in 1933. Evidence of its existence is largely anecdotal, with minimal and much disputed photographic material and sonar readings. The scientific community regards the Loch Ness Monster as a modern day myth, and explains sightings as a mix of hoaxes and wishful thinking. Despite this, it remains one of the most famous examples of cryptozoology. The legendary monster has been affectionately referred to, by the diminutive, Nessie, since the 1950s.
CereProc Stuart
click here to download the sample
Islay whisky is Scotch whisky made on Islay, one of the southernmost of the Inner Hebridean Islands located off the west coast of Scotland. Islay is one of five whisky distilling localities and regions in Scotland whose identity is protected by law. There are eight active distilleries and the industry is the island's second largest employer after agriculture. Islay is a centre of whisky tourism, and hosts a Festival of Malt and Music each year on the last week of May, with events and tastings celebrating the cultural heritage of the island.
Other British English Voices
CereProc Sarah
click here to download the sample
I'm so happy today, it's such lovely weather. Last week our barbecue was a great success because of the weather.
CereProc William
click here to download the sample
About Her Majesty The Queen. The Queen has ruled for longer than any other Monarch in British history, becoming a much loved and respected figure across the globe. Her extraordinary reign has seen her travel more widely than any other monarch, undertaking many historic overseas visits. Known for her sense of duty and her devotion to a life of service, she has been an important figurehead for the UK and the Commonwealth during times of enormous social change.
CereProc Jess
click here to download the sample
CereProc has developed the world's most advanced text-to-speech technology. Our core product, CereVoice, is available on any platform, from mobile and embedded devices to desktops and servers. We can also build custom voices faster and more efficiently than anyone. Our voices have character, making them appropriate for a much wider range of applications than traditional text-to-speech systems. Our voices sound engaging when reading long documents and websites, and add realistic, emotional, voices to animated characters. CereProc has assembled a leading team of speech experts, with a track record of academic and commercial success. We partner with a range of companies and academic institutions to develop exciting new markets for text-to-speech. CereProc works with our language partners to create new versions of CereVoice in any language.
Irish Voice
CereProc Caitlin
click here to download the sample
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
From Among School Children, by William Butler Yeats
US English Voices
CereProc has developed a wide range of US English voices. You can test all the available voices using our demo bar.
CereProc Andy
click here to download the sample
Welcome home Billy. Remember you've got your reading homework to do for tomorrow. How about reading with me?
CereProc Megan
click here to download the sample
Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, has donated $4.6bn (£3.6bn) in the Microsoft founder’s biggest gift to charity since he set up the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Emotion and character
CereProc is committed to developing innovative new text-to-speech technologies. We believe that speech synthesis could, and should, be used more widely than today. We believe that creating characterful, engaging, emotional voices is the key to making this happen.
Calm and friendly Claire (CereProc Heather)
click here to download the sample
Hi, I’m Claire. I study history of art at Edinburgh University. I listen to music a lot, mostly classical, and I love old movies. As for literature, I’m interested in Latin American authors. I’m not in a relationship at the moment. I’d like to meet a caring guy with the same interests as me.
Angry Roger (CereProc William)
click here to download the sample
My name is Roger. I run the local neighbourhood watch. This is something which I really dislike. I live on Southend-on-Sea which is a bit awkward. I don’t have many interests but mowing the lawn is an obsession of mine.
Celebrity Voices
CereProc can also have some fun with voices you may be familiar with. Even with limited, low quality data, we can build recogniseable voices. Try out our Bush-o-Matic.
Obama
click here to download the sample
The people of America should have great text-to-speech technology and CereProc make the best system in the world. Trust me, I'm the president of the United States of America.
Arnie
click here to download the sample
This is governer Arnold Schwarzenegger. I think that text-to-speech voices are the future. Some of them even speak with a funny accent.
Trump
click here to download the sample
I was up late last night reading through the news on my computer and I found a company that can build synthetic speech from almost anything. A great company! Really great, maybe I’d say the greatest company in the world, amazing! Unfortunately I can’t remember their name, I fell asleep while Tweeting about them. God bless America.
Languages
CereProc offers voices in a wide range of languages and we’re continuously working on adding more! Follow us on social media (Twitter, Facebookfor updates on the latest releases.
CereProc won a prestigious tender to develop a voice for the Swedish Government Agency MTM. Download the case study to find out more about the project and our custom voice creation service.
CereProc Ylva
click here to download the sample
Kanske det finaste Sverige kan stoltsera med är den anrika tradition som kallas fika, då man släpper allt man har för händerna och tar en kopp kaffe och möjligtvis en liten munsbit, så som en kanelbulle eller en mazarin. Att samlas runt fikabordet, gärna flera gånger om dagen, är vanligt både på arbetsplatsen och i hemmet. Sverige är ett av de land som konsumerar mest kaffe i världen, men det handlar nog mer om att vara social än koffeinet.The Italian government has offered to block a move to give national parliaments—and hence some 500 million European citizens—a say on the CETA deal between the EU and Canada.
The national legislatures in the 28 member states could vote on CETA, but only if all EU governments demand it. If Italy refuses to join with the other countries, the European Commission would be able to send the agreement to the Council of the European Union for approval, where a "qualified majority" would be enough for it to be passed. There would also be a vote on the agreement in the European Parliament. However, the latter would be a simple yes/no decision, with no option to make changes to CETA's text.
Although a standard part of the EU legislative toolkit, such yes/no votes put pressure on MEPs to accept the bad parts of a deal in order to gain the benefits. However, the European Parliament set an important precedent for saying "no" to unbalanced trade deals when it rejected the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in 2012.
The offer to ignore widespread demands to allow proper parliamentary scrutiny across Europe came in a letter from the Italian minister for economic development, Carlo Calenda, to the EU commissioner for trade, Cecilia Malmström. Calenda wrote: "I would like to inform you that Italy, after a technical and political assessment, is ready to consider to support the Commission on the 'EU only' nature of abovementioned agreement."
Earlier this month, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published a report in which it claimed that the Commission was intending to bypass national politicians by treating CETA as an "EU only" matter.
Calenda's letter was obtained by the Italian "Stop TTIP Campaign," and posted on its site. Ars has asked the Italian embassy in London and the Italian government in Rome to confirm the authenticity of the document, but so far no response has been received on this point. This story will be updated when further information is available.
An article about CETA published last week in Italy's leading financial newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore, corroborates the story. It specifically mentions the offer to block national votes: "our government suggested to the Commission the idea of an Italian support to the non-mixed nature of the CETA." The term "non-mixed" means that the EU can conclude CETA on its own, without requiring national parliaments to vote on it as well.
In his letter, Calenda explained the reason for his offer: "Italy considers the CETA a milestone agreement whose failure could have major negative consequences for the EU trade policy and for the credibility of Europe as a reliable trade partner."
As Ars reported recently, CETA was negotiated in secret for many years, with no input from the public. Supporters of CETA claimed that this was not a problem, and that the negotiations were fully democratic, because the national parliaments of all 28 member states would be able to vote on it later, giving the 500 million EU citizens a chance to make their views known. If Italy vetoes those national debates, the only opportunity people will have to influence CETA's ratification will be the vote in the European Parliament.The first-ever ranking of peace in the USA finds the nation overall is the most peaceful since 1995. Maine was ranked as the most peaceful state and Louisiana the least.
The rankings are drawn up by the Institute for Economics and Peace, an international think-tank that also issues a yearly Global Peace Index.
The index, which defines peace as "the absence of violence," looks at a set of five indicators, including homicide rates, violent crimes, percentage of the population in jail, number of police officers and availability of small arms (per 100,000 people) to rank the states. The data are drawn from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, FBI and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On that basis, the institute finds that peace in the USA improved by 8% from 1995 to 2009.
It notes a significant correlation between a state's level of peace and its economic opportunity, education and health but finds peacefulness is politically neutral -- neither Republican nor Democratic states have an advantage.
Maine was ranked first overall because it topped the list of states on three of the five USPI indicators: number of violent crimes, number of police officers and incarceration rate.
Full rankings here.
The most peaceful states: 1. Maine; 2. New Hampshire; 3. Vermont; 4. Minnesota; 5. North Dakota; 6. Utah; 7. Massachusetts; 8.Rhode Island; 9. Iowa; 10. Washington.
The least peaceful states: 1. Louisiana; 2. Tennessee; 3. Nevada; 4. Florida; 5. Alabama; 6. Texas; 7. Arkansas; 8. Oklahoma; 9. South Carolina; 10. Maryland.The details are sketchy, but let's try to understand the plan Mr. Paulson has put together to help out homeowners.
First of all this doesn't really help many homeowners. Those in delinquency currently do not qualify for help. See ya! The plan only offers hope to those not currently in delinquency who in the near future face the prospect of higher interest rates and can show they will have problems making those payments. I don't know how many people that is (no one does yet).
Whatever it is, it is a drop in the bucket relative to the real problem: the incredibly high level of debt in the global economy is clearly unmanageable (that is why extraordinary steps are being taken to quell the problems caused by it) and that new borrowing has stalled completely. That will clearly hurt consumption going forward and all those rosy earnings estimates will come down.
I think what happens in the current plan is the FHA or municipality that is helping an individual work through their mortgage notifies a central information committee. That committee will amalgamate all such situations, find the CDOs affected, contact the owners of those securities, and negotiate new terms for payment. They will need a super-computer to figure all this out and it will be a mess. Frankly, I don't know how they are going to do it.
The biggest ramification is this. Those investors will have to decide whether or not to accept the new terms. If they accept lower interest payments because it is better than default, the value (price) of the CDO will go down to reflect the new present value of the payments. This is a big fact that I think everyone is missing: the price of CDOs will be marked down from current levels. Banks' desire to lend will go down as a result of this. As an illustration, the spread between libor and ECB funding rate (equivalent fed funds) rose again last night and is at a record 89 basis points.
A nuance of the above is that senior trauches of CDO now have a higher certainty of pay-outs while the junior trauches now may be worthless. These junior trauches will sue like crazy as this thing unfolds.
What will happen is that banks/other investors who own these will then take another write-down but then declare this is the end. This will not be true. A huge percent of all re-negotiated mortgages eventually still default. It just buys a little time for a few more interest payments. The bottom line is these folks bought houses they couldn't afford when paying market interest rates. This is really a plan to help banks take one more write-down and declare all is well and then hope for some magic turnaround. But there won't be a turnaround.
And now we see why the plan doesn't help the homeowner who is already in default: the CDOs affected by the default cannot be written up. The real purpose of the plan is to try to slow the deterioration in collateral values.
So far Mr. Paulson is trying to make this look like a "voluntary" plan by lenders. We all know there is lots and lots of pressure being exerted by government to get them to volunteer. But I have a feeling Mr. Paulson's plan does not end here. There is also talk of getting Congress to pass legislation to let states and municipalities issue tax-exempt debt to refinance loans for those who cannot keep their homes. This would be nothing more than a government led bailout of banks and large investors at the expense of taxpayers.
As I pointed out yesterday, central banks are desperate to keep collateral values high to keep liquidity in the system. That liquidity is currently being sucked up by banks because their collateral value was dropping precipitously.
The final and most important ramification of this plan is the future effect on CDO investors, which is a very large percent of the global liquidity pool. If they believe their contracts can be forcefully re-negotiated they will demand better terms (higher rates and wider spreads) the next time they consider such an investment. So long term liquidity will be decreased substantially.
Contract law, the foundation of capitalism and democracy, was dealt a heavy blow yesterday.
Risk is high.
Get The Minyanville
Daily Recap Newsletter Stay current on financial news,
entertainment, education and
smart market commentary. SubscribeLovie Smith just added another big-time playmaker to his 2017 recruiting class! Florida wide receiver Carmoni Green committed to Illinois on Thursday afternoon, choosing the program over Pittsburgh, Oregon State, Utah, and Central Florida.
Green hails from Miami Central High School and, according to 247Sports, he’s the No. 349 player in the country, making him the highest-rated player currently pledged to the Illini. While the former is considered to be in three-star range, Rivals has Green slotted as a four-star prospect.
Blessed to say that I'm officially committed to the University of Illinois. #WeOnOne #Big10 pic.twitter.com/27zd7Pfz0b — Carmoni Green (@Carmoni_Green) August 25, 2016
At 6-foot-2, Green has potential to become a legitimate downfield threat at the Power 5 level thanks to his excellent speed. Additionally, HUDL tape seems to suggest that Green has a knack for finishing off runs without shying away from contact. That’s a good quality for players to have in the Big Ten. It’s also worth noting that SB Nation labeled Green as one of the top players at the Miami Nike Opening Regional Camp in March — which is saying something because there was a ton of talent on hand.
Green has already said that he plans to graduate early and enroll at Illinois mid-year, so Illini fans can look forward to seeing him at Spring practice next offseason.
Looks like Miami Central four-star WR Carmoni Green will be graduating mid year. Washington State, Illinois and others involved with him — Rob Cassidy (@Cassidy_Rob) August 16, 2016
Green is now the third wideout committed to Illinois (second, if Kendall Smith switches to defense), and he’s the tenth member of the recruiting class overall. This latest addition propels the group to No. 12 (+1) in the Big Ten and No. 61 nationally (+10).
The Illini recruiting class looks primed improve even more later tonight, as three-star defensive end and top target Olalere Oladipo will announce his decision at 6:00pm CT. The Illinois native is also considering Michigan State, Penn State, Indiana, Duke, and California.
Carmoni Green HighlightsWisconsin will have a loaded backfield when it hosts Northwestern on Saturday.
Jeff Potrykus of the Journal-Sentinel reported on Tuesday that running back Bradrick Shaw is “full-go” this week and should be ready for an increased role in the Badgers’ B1G opener vs. Northwestern.
#Badgers TB Bradrick Shaw tweaked R knee in opener, missed Game 2 and had 4 carries at BYU. He is full-go this week. — Jeff Potrykus (@jaypo1961) September 26, 2017
Shaw was injured in Wisconsin’s Week 1 bout against Utah State and has been limited since. He’s rushed for 103 yards and a touchdown on 22 carries. Most of that came in the season opener, though, rushing for 84 yards against the Aggies.
With the emergence of freshman Jonathan Taylor — who leads the B1G in rushing yards per game — the Badgers have been stable on the ground. Throwing Shaw back into the mix could lead to an even more powerful attack.
It’s worth watching this weekend’s game to see how Shaw is utilized now that he’s back at full-strength.The official website for the Dragon Ball Super television anime series announced on Sunday that the Batten Showjo Tai female idol group (pictured at right) will perform the show's new ending theme song "Yokayoka Dance" ("yokayoka" means "It's fine" in Fukuoka dialect). The new song will premiere in July.
Stardust Promotion's Fukuoka branch represents the group. The group formed in June 2015 and made their major debut in April. The average age of its members is 14. "Yokayoka Dance" will be the group's second single.
Dragon Ball Super premiered in Japan in July 2015 on Fuji TV and other channels. Toonami Asia announced in November that it will show the "English-language world premiere" of Dragon Ball Super in Southeast Asia and India in mid-2016.
The anime entered the "Future Trunks Arc" in the show's 47th episode, which premiered on June 12. Original creator Akira Toriyama is plotting the story and designing the new characters for the arc, including Future Trunks' design. The arc's new enemy is called "Goku Black."(Reuters) - Dell Inc is the “strategic bidder” that offered to buy Quest Software for $2.15 billion in cash, trumping a bid by Insight Venture Partners, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The No. 2 U.S. personal computer maker is the unidentified company mentioned in a statement made by Quest, which disclosed on Thursday that it had received an offer from a “strategic bidder” of $25.50 per share - a 7 percent premium to Quest’s Wednesday close of $23.86.
Dell is being advised by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, two of the sources said.
Quest’s shares rose more than 9 percent to finish at $26.06 on Thursday.
Dell has been actively buying companies to expand its offerings to business and diversify away from personal computers, a market whose growth is decelerating as Apple Inc’s iPad and other mobile devices pull customers away.
This week, it told investors its focus on the hardware and software needs of corporate customers was gaining momentum. Quest could shore up Dell’s businesses in data management and protection and Windows server management.
On-again, off-again talks between Dell and Quest had broken off last month. The PC maker at that time was planning to offer between $23 and $26 per share to buy the software maker.
Dell, Quest and Bank of America declined to comment. Insight was not available for comment
On Tuesday, Chief Executive Michael Dell told analysts that his software business remained “modest” and was one area where he could envision his company growing rapidly.
Quest — which makes software to monitor the flow of data through networks — has worked with Dell since 2004 and is one of the PC maker’s top 10 partners. Dell ranks among Quest’s five largest partners.
THREE DAYS TO RESPOND
Quest agreed to be bought by Insight for $23 per share in March, but it also cast around for a better offer.
Insight would have the right to match rival offers, or adjust its own bid. The venture capital investment firm now has three days to respond on the offer, Quest said on Thursday.
If Quest were to strike a new deal, it would have to pay Insight a break-up fee of either $4.2 million or $6.3 million, depending on the timing of the deal.
“It’s a very small breakup provision,” Wunderlich Securities Inc analyst Brian Freed said, adding that it was “recognition by management that there were likely other buyers at higher levels.”
Aliso Viejo, California-based Quest is led by Chief Executive Vinny Smith, who has served as either chairman or the CEO for more than a decade.
Any deal with Quest is fraught with complications as roughly 34 percent of Quest is owned by Smith, who took over in February after Doug Garn stepped down, citing poor health.
Big companies can bid aggressively for smaller ones with key technology, as was the case when Dell and Hewlett-Packard Co got into a bidding war for data storage company 3Par Inc in 2010. Dell spurred that fight with an $18-a-share bid, but HP ended up buying the company for $33 a share.
And there may be a lot of upside left in Quest’s price.
“The offer from Insight was in the bottom 10 pct in the valuation range for software companies in the sector over the last two years,” Freed said.White former President Obama voters switched for Donald Trump for his views on immigration and terrorism, a new survey argues.
In a new survey by the Voter Study Group, an analysis of Americans who voted for Trump in the 2016 Election reveals how his opposition to amnesty for illegal immigrants helped put together a base of white working-class voters, many of which previously voted for Obama.
“Those who opposed a path for citizenship for undocumented immigrants and believed that undocumented immigrants detract from American society were more likely to switch their support from President Obama to Trump,” a brief of the survey stated.
The survey found that some white Obama voters mostly aligned with Trump on issues like immigration and attitudes towards Islam. In 2012, 37 percent of Obama whites held generally negative views about Muslims and 33 percent said illegal immigrants were a drain on American taxpayers.
In 2016, 81 percent of Trump’s primary base of voters said terrorism was “very important,” while 72 percent said immigration was “very important.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.A gift should make the recipient happy — or at least not sad or angry. As the gift-giving season is upon us, it’s a good time to remember that gifts are a powerful form of communication. So what messages are being sent by the holiday gifts you’ve picked out for people?
Gifts can enhance connections between people. A truly bad gift, though, can ruin a relationship, with emotional impact that’s remembered for decades. As a consumer psychologist, I’ve gotten to speak to countless people about the worst gifts they’ve ever received, and their answers can be grouped into six categories:
The All About Me Gift
Many women would be overjoyed with the gift of diamond earrings from their husbands. Not Patty, 58, who said that her husband Bill’s choice for her of flashy, pricey jewelry was the worst gift she’s ever been given. “We couldn’t afford them,” she said. “We had a new baby, a new house, and the last thing I needed was diamond earrings. Bill got them |
is:
"Three hundred fifty six billion, eight hundred seventeen million, one-hundred forty two thousand and five hundred ninety pesos."
In FILIPINO language it is:
"Tatlong daan limampu't anim na bilyon, walong daan at labing pitong milyon, sandaan at apatnapu't dalawang libo at limang raan siyamnapung piso."
Rinconada numbers in words are very simple in structure. Translations are shorter than both Filipino and English languages.
Comparison chart [ edit ]
Decimal Numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 PAN, circa 4000 BC *isa *DuSa *telu *Sepat *lima *enem *pitu *walu *Siwa *puluq Tagalog isá dalawá tatló ápat limá ánim pitó waló siyám sampu Cebuano usá duhá tuló upat limá unom pitó waló siyám napulu Rinconada əsad darwā tolō əpat limā ənəm pitō walō siyam sampōlô Chamorro maisa/håcha hugua tulu fatfat lima gunum fiti guålu sigua månot/fulu Malay satu dua tiga empat lima enam tujuh lapan sembilan sepuluh Javanese siji loro telu papat limo nem pitu wolu songo sepuluh Tongan taha ua tolu fā nima ono fitu valu hiva -fulu Samoan tasi lua tolu fā lima ono fitu valu iva sefulu Māori tahi rua toru whā rima ono whitu waru iwa tekau (archaic: ngahuru) Marquesan e tahi e 'ua e to'u e fa e 'ima e ono e fitu e va'u e iva 'onohu'u
Intelligibility [ edit ]
Coverage of Rinconada Bikol language (purple)
Coverage of Albay Bikol languages:
Buhinon Bikol (dark blue)
Libon Bikol (violet)
West Miraya Bikol (light blue)
East Miraya Bikol (blue-gray) (purple)Buhinon Bikol (dark blue)Libon Bikol (violet)West Miraya Bikol (light blue)East Miraya Bikol (blue-gray)
Although properly considered separate languages, speakers of Rinconada Bikol or Rinconada can communicate with Albay Bikol speakers with ease and without code switching. A student from Ligao City (West Miraya speaker) studying in a university in Iriga City can understand Rinconada (any variant) and can be understood by Rinconada speakers as well. The same thing will happen if a local tourist from Rinconada visits the Cagsawa Ruins in Albay or visits Donsol, Sorsogon (East Miraya speaker) for the annual whale shark sightings. The difference between Rinconada and Albay Bikol (both are included in Inland Bikol group) is comparable to German and Yiddish or Portuguese and Galician, while the differences between variants are comparable to those between English US, English British and English Australian. The mutual intelligibility of Rinconada and Albay Bikol is 80% to 85%, while intelligibility between variants is 95% to 98%.[citation needed]
Status [ edit ]
Rinconada Bikol is a minority language in the Bicol region despite having hundreds of thousands of speakers. It is currently not used in commercial media (print, radio, television) despite the fact that there are numerous prominent Rinconada speakers in the music and entertainment industry, media, and Philippine politics. It is not among the recognized regional languages in the Philippines and remains unknown to many Filipinos as it is poorly documented, researched and promoted.
Currently, the major obstacle to the diffusion of the usage and teaching of Rinconada is the lack of written material in Rinconada Bikol language, namely books, newspapers, software, magazines, etc. Thus, Rinconada, along with other Inland Bikol languages and the minor indigenous languages of Bicol region, remains essentially a spoken language.
Due to everyday exposure of younger generations to Filipino/Tagalog and English languages in mass media and social networking sites, native words that are rarely used are now disappearing and being replaced by their counterparts from other languages. If cannot be salvaged by any means, this trend is more likely to continue and might endanger the language in the near future.
Publication [ edit ]
The only dictionary written for this language is Rinconada: Bikol-Filipino-English Phrasebook: with Mini-dictionary (2001) of Jason Lobel and Grace Bucad of Nabua, Camarines Sur. Several books were successfully created and published by native speakers and non-speakers alike. Some were published by Frank Peñones, Jason Chancoco, Rizaldy Manrique, Jonher Cañeba and Kristian Cordero of Iriga City. In 2004, the Ragang Rinaranga: mga rawitdawit which was published by Frank Peñones is the first anthology written in Rinconada Bikol.
On June 25, 2013, The Camarines Sur Polytechnic Colleges (CSPC), a state college in Nabua, Camarines Sur, established the Center for Rinconada Studies that will serve as the research center for Rinconada Bikol language and heritage.[6]
Modern culture [ edit ]
In Bicol region, the language and its speakers earned the moniker: Pa-sādi pa-san, pa-sīni pa-sīton, that literally means 'will go here will go there, will go here will go there' (two different Rinconada words with the same meaning, which is a form of humor if said repeatedly). The moniker is the result of the prominence of Rinconada speakers in the region. This is due to the fact that a native speaker travelling in the region can easily be distinguished and identified because his language is different from the vast majority of Bicolanos, and to the fact that several prominent Bicolanos in the Philippines are of Rinconada heritage, gives the language and the speakers a "familiarity" to others. That makes one throwing a humorous line (the moniker) to a person telling him that he is a Rinconada speaker.
Notable speakers [ edit ]
Baao variant
Bato variant
Venus Raj (Miss Universe 2010 4th runner-up, actress & model)
Bula-Pili variant
Jericho Rosales (Filipino actor, model and band vocalist)[9]
Nabua-Balatan variant
Sofia Moran, real name is Sofia Ballon (Filipina actress & model)[10]
Iriga variant
Distribution [ edit ]
Rinconada is spoken by majority in Bula, Baao, Nabua, Balatan, Iriga and Bato in Camarines Sur (politically the 5th district of Camarines Sur province except the municipality of Buhi, where the majority speaks Buhinon). The language is dominant and the lingua franca in the southern half of the provincial capital town of Pili, the west barangays of Ocampo, and the far west barangays of Buhi; it can also be heard in neighboring places such as the northern barangays of Polangui and Libon in Albay.
Figure:
Town/City Population Percentage Baao, Cam. Sur 54,971 100% Balatan, Cam. Sur 28,699 100% (25% of the population is bilingual with Coastal Bikol) Bato, Cam. Sur 48,306 100% Buhi, Cam. Sur 24,603 1/3 of the population Bula, Cam. Sur 68,011 100% Iriga City 105,919 100% Nabua, Cam. Sur 80,111 100% Pili, Cam. Sur 41,153 (half of the population) Polangui, Albay 27,435 (1/3 of the population) Total 479,208
Based from the population of towns and city with a concentration of Rinconada Bikol speakers, the total number is 479,208 or almost half a million. This number is based from the population of the fifth district of Camarines Sur (Rinconada) and neighboring towns of Polangui and Pili, in which, Rinconada Bikol is their de facto daily language. Moreover, the total number does not include speakers outside Rinconada area. Some linguists place the native speaker population at 600,000 (estimate) because there are many speakers of this language outside the region who left in search for better job opportunities. Example of this are the Filipinos enlisted in US Navy that comes from Nabua, Camarines Sur which comprised the 10% of all Filipino US Servicemen. Most of these Rinconada speakers are now residing mostly in San Diego, California.[21]As regular readers of this blog will appreciate, I’m far from a fan of the recruitment process, with its poor ability to locate and recruit the best candidates significantly undermining organizations that thrive on the talents of their staff.
We have seen attempts to provide realistic virtual environments to allow recruiters to test out candidates in work settings during the interview process.
Whilst that may explore their practical capabilities, it does little to assess their cultural fit with the organization they hope to join.
The importance of cultural fit
According to recent studies, cultural fit is believed to cost between 50-60% of the person’s annual salary. So a recent project that attempts to provide a detailed assessment of the cultural fit of prospective candidates is certainly interesting.
The venture, known as Saberr, begins by profiling the existing employees in an organization to build up a cultural profile of the company.
This consists of a 70 question survey that’s designed to unpick the key facets of a person’s personality. Employees answer each question, and also give those questions a weighting based upon their importance to them. At the end of the survey, a score is then given to them for things such as creativity and organization.
When that organization is recruiting, candidates are given the same survey to undertake, with the apps algorithm then determining the cultural fit between the candidate and the organization, and indeed between the candidate and key members of the team they will be joining.
With studies showing that employees who have a strong cultural fit with their new employer, its coworkers and their boss report significantly higher levels of job satisfaction and job performance, it’s undoubtedly a venture that has its merits.
It will be interesting to track and explore just how valuable it is in ensuring new hires are the right hires (and vice versa).More than 200 companies, including AirBnb, Reddit and Twitter, are urging the Federal Communications Commission to reconsider its plan to repeal its net neutrality regulations.
In a letter addressed to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on Monday, the companies asked the agency to reverse course and scrap plans to roll back most of the Obama-era regulations that prevent broadband providers from messing with your internet access. The letter, released to coincide with Cyber Monday, the biggest online shopping day in the US, argues that blocking or slowing online content would hurt the US economy.
"The internet is increasingly where commerce happens," the companies said in the letter. "This would put small and medium-sized businesses at a disadvantage and prevent innovative new ones from even getting off the ground."
The letter cited figures showing Americans spent $3.5 billion on Cyber Monday last year, a 10 percent increase over the previous year's peak online shopping day.
The letter came about a week after Pai unveiled plans to dismantle the 2015 regulation that requires all internet content be treated equally. The rules banned broadband providers from "throttling" traffic. They also prohibited providers from offering so-called fast lanes to companies willing to pay extra to reach consumers more quickly than competitors.
"An internet without net neutrality protections would be the opposite of the open market, with a few powerful cable and phone companies picking winners and losers instead of consumers," the companies said in the letter.
The FCC didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
The FCC is expected to vote on Pai's proposal at the commission's next meeting on Dec. 14.
Special Reports: All of CNET's most in-depth features in one easy spot.
It's Complicated: This is dating in the age of apps. Having fun yet? These stories get to the heart of the matter.(Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Accountability is only for the little people.
The New Haven SWAT team must have been pretty amped up: It was midnight, and they were getting ready to bust down the door of a man wanted on charges involving weapons violations, robbery — and murder. They were not sure how many people were in the house, or how they’d react. After a volley of flash grenades that set fire to the carpet and a sofa, they moved in, guns drawn. A minute later, they had their man zip-tied on the floor.
Advertisement
Advertisement
If only they’d double-checked the address first.
Bobby Griffin Jr. was wanted on murder charges. His next-door neighbor on Peck Street, Joseph Adams, wasn’t. But that didn’t stop the SWAT team from knocking down his door, setting his home on fire, roughing him up, keeping him tied up in his underwear for nearly three hours, and treating the New Haven man, who is gay, to a nance show as officers taunted him with flamboyantly effeminate mannerisms. If the events detailed in Mr. Adams’s recently filed lawsuit are even remotely accurate, the episode was a moral violation and, arguably, a crime.
And when Mr. Adams showed up at the New Haven police department the next day to fill out paperwork requesting that the authorities reimburse him for the wanton destruction of his property — never mind the gross violation of his rights — the story turned Kafkaesque, as interactions with American government agencies at all levels tend to do. The police — who that same night had managed to take in the murder suspect next door without the use of flash grenades or other theatrics after his mother suggested that they were probably there for her son — denied having any record of the incident at Mr. Adams’s home ever having happened.
Advertisement
This sort of thing happens with disturbing regularity. The New York Police Department killed an older woman in Harlem when they mistakenly raided her home in 2003. In that case, too, “flash-bang” grenades were deployed, and the concussions sent 57-year-old Alberta Spruiell into cardiac arrest, killing her. The NYPD was acting on information given to them by a local lowlife drug dealer they were leaning on. It was the first information he’d given them as an informant, and based on nothing more than that they went in hard — no-knock raid, grenades, the whole circus. As it turns out, New York dope-slingers turned rat are not entirely trustworthy.
Advertisement
In Miami’s Coconut Grove, police struck a child in the head with their rifle butts after a no-knock SWAT raid. The address of the home was not the address on the warrant — that was two blocks away – but police insist they were in the right, warrant be damned. “They broke every single flat-screen TV, they broke the PlayStation 4, they broke every single picture frame, for whatever reason. Every single thing they could possibly break, they broke,” the homeowner said. The police insisted that they had meant to hit that house, in which there was no one other than the children, and that they had seized “narcotics” — a trivial amount of marijuana — and “weapons” — a handgun, which is perfectly legal to own in Florida.
Advertisement
The stories get grisly: In Habersham County, Ga., police looking for a drug dealer — at a home in which he did not reside — broke down the doors thinking they’d find drugs and guns, which of course they didn’t. But they did manage to toss a flash grenade into a baby’s playpen, burning part of the child’s face off. The family was left with nearly $1 million in medical bills, and the kid will need surgery every few years until he stops growing. The police insist they did nothing wrong. And as in New Haven, when they found the drug dealer for whom they were searching, the Georgia authorities brought him in without incident, without kicking down any doors or throwing any stun grenades.
#page#
Advertisement
Advertisement
The disfigurement of a child is horrific to contemplate. (“If you’ve never wept and want to, have a child,” David Foster Wallace wrote in “Incarnations of Burned Children.”) But the image that really hooks me is that of Joseph Adams schlepping up to the New Haven police department to endure some bureaucracy and to fill out some paperwork — because no matter how badly government screws up, fixing what’s gone wrong is always your problem. I can picture his situation precisely — every police department, driver’s-license office, tax bureau, and city licensing agency exhibits the same distinctive blind of slowly simmering hostility, smugness, contempt, and complete immunity from accountability. We are ruled by criminals, and their alibi is: “There’s no record of that in the system.” That, or: “The computer won’t let me do that.”
In a sane world, the New Haven authorities would have shown up at Adams’s house with a check, flowers, and an apology, and a certificate exempting him from taxes for the rest of his life. In this world, people in his situation get treated by the government like they are the ones who have screwed up. And of course they’d say they had no record of the episode — getting information about your situation from any government agency, especially from one that is persecuting you, requires an agonizing effort. Keeping people in the dark is part of how they maintain their power. For fun sometime, call the comical New York State tax department and note the intentionally garbled phone numbers on the recording about how to get in touch with a tax agent’s superior to complain or ask a question.
Advertisement
The strange flip-side — the second half of Samuel Francis’s “anarcho-tyranny” — is that the brunt of government abuse falls on the law-abiding. Illinois, for example, makes it difficult for an ordinary citizen to legally carry a gun for self defense — up until a couple of years ago, doing so was categorically prohibited. But Illinois police seize thousands of illegal guns from criminals each year, and the state prosecutes practically none of those weapons cases. The law-abiding — by definition law-abiding — citizens applying for concealed-carry permits get treated like criminals, and the actual criminals do not. If you follow the law and inform Illinois authorities that you have a gun in the home, you invite all sorts of intrusion and oversight. If you don’t, nobody’s really looking. Meanwhile, the streets of Chicago are full of blood, going on 1,600 shootings this year and it’s not even Halloween. Nobody is held responsible for that carnage, but if you put an eleventh round in your legally owned rifle in Oak Park, you’re looking at jail time.
Advertisement
It’s perverse: If an ordinary citizen makes a typo on his 1040EZ, he could be on the hook for untold sums of money, fines, even jail time. When the IRS abuses its power to harass political enemies, nothing happens. A few years ago, an employer of mine entered the wrong Social Security number on my paperwork — I have barbaric handwriting — and the error took months of telephone calls and mail to fix, a period of time over which I was threatened with all sorts of nasty consequences by the Social Security Administration and the IRS. But when the Social Security Administration oversees the payment of millions of dollars in benefits to Nazi war criminals summering on Croatian beaches, nothing happens. If you’re an ordinary schmo, a typo can land you in jail. If you work for the government, you can burn the face off a baby and walk.
Advertisement
Even in medieval times, the distinction between lords and serfs was not so pronounced.
— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review.Works of Karl Marx, 1844
Critical Notes on the Article:
“The King of Prussia and Social Reform.
By a Prussian” [1]
Karl Marx, Vorwarts!, No.63, August 7 1844
An article has appeared in the 60th issue of the Vorwarts! with the “The King of Prussia and Social Reform” and it is signed by “A Prussian.”
This so-called Prussian begins by reporting the contents of the Royal Prussian Order in Council on the subject of the workers’ uprising in Silesia [2] and goes on to give the opinion of the French journal La Reforme [3] of the same Prussian Order in Council. The Reforme, he says, discerns the origins of the Order in Council in the King’s “panic and his religious sentiments.” It even hails this document as a presentiment of the great reforms imminent in bourgeois society. The “Prussian” delivers the following lecture to the Reforme.
Neither the King nor German society has had any “presentiment of its reform” [4]; not even the uprisings in Bohemia and Silesia have managed to arouse such feelings. In an unpolitical country like Germany it is not possible to represent the sporadic misery of the factory districts as a matter of universal concern, let alone as a disaster to the whole civilized world. As far as the Germans are concerned, these events belong in the same category as any local shortage of food or water. In accordance with this the King views it as a failure of the administration or of charitable institutions. For this reason and because but few troops were needed to deal with the feeble weavers the destruction of factories and machines does not make the King and the authorities “panic.” Nor were religious sentiments responsible for the Order in Council; it was instead a very sober expression of Christian statesmanship and of a doctrine which does not permit any obstacles to stand in the way of its only remedy: the “good intentions of Christian hearts.” Poverty and crimes are two great evils; who can provide a cure for them? The state and the authorities? By no means. But the union of all Christian hearts can do so.
Our so-called Prussian denies that the King “panicked” for a number of reasons, among them being the fact that few troops were needed to deal with the feeble weavers.
This means that in a country where banquets with liberal toasts and liberal champagne froth provoke Royal Orders in Council (as we saw in the case of the Dusseldorf banquet [5]), where the burning desire of the entire liberal bourgeoisie for freedom of the press and a constitution could be surpassed without the aid of a single soldier, in a country where passive obedience is the order of the day, can it be anything but an event and indeed a terrifying event when armed troops have to be called out against feeble wavers? And in the first encounter the feeble weavers even gained a victory. They were only suppressed when reinforcements were brought up. Is the uprising of a mass of workers less dangerous because it can be defeated without the aid of a whole army? Our sharp-witted Prussian should compare the revolt of the Silesian weavers with the uprisings of English workers. The Silesians will then stand revealed as strong weavers.
A consideration of the general relationship between politics and the defects of society will enable us to explain why the weavers could not induce any great “panic” in the King. For the present, however, we will only point out that the uprising was directed in the first instance not against the King of Prussia but against the bourgeoisie. As an aristocrat and an absolute monarch the King of Prussia can have no love of the bourgeoisie; even less can he feel any anxiety if the submissiveness and impotence of the bourgeoisie is increased by its tense and difficult relationship with the proletariat. Similarly, an orthodox Catholic will feel a greater hostility towards an orthodox Protestant than towards an atheist, just as a legitimist will dislike a liberal more than a communist. This is not because atheists are closer to Catholics or communists closer to legitimists than they are to Protestants or liberals respectively, but, on the contrary, because they are more remote from t hem, because the latter do not impinge on their sphere of interests. The direct political antagonist of the King of Prussia, in his role as politician, is to be found in liberalism. For the King, the antagonism of the proletariat exists no more than does the King for the proletariat. This means that if the proletariat has contrived to eliminate such antipathies and political antagonisms, and to attract the entire hostility of the political powers towards itself, it must have acquired a very definite power. Lastly, the King’s appetite for interesting and significant phenomena is well known and it must have been a very pleasant surprise for him to discover such an “interesting” and “much discussed” pauperism within his very own frontiers and thus to find yet another opportunity to appear in the public eye. How he must have rejoiced to hear the news that he too now possessed his “own” Royal Prussian pauperism!
Our “Prussian” is even less fortunate when he denies that “religious sentiment” was responsible for the Royal Order in Council.
Why is “religious sentiment” not the source of this Order in Council? Because the latter “was the very sober expression of Christian statesmanship,” a “sober” expression of the doctrine whose “only remedy, the good intentions of Christian hearts... does not permit any obstacles to stand in its way.”
Is not religious sentiment the source of Christian statesmanship? Is it not true that a doctrine which possesses a universal panacea in the good intentions of Christian hearts is founded on religious sentiments? Is it true that the expression of religious feelings ceases to be the expression of religious feelings ceases to be the expression of religious feelings if it is sober? I would go even further! I would maintain that any religious feelings that contest the ability of “the state and the authorities” to “remedy great evils” while they themselves seek a cure in the “union of Christian hearts” must be conceited and drunk in the extreme. Only very drunk religious feelings could locate the course of the evil – as does our “Prussian” – in the absence of the Christian spirit. Such feelings alone could suggest that the authorities should resort to “exhortation” as the only means whereby the Christian spirit might be fortified. According to the “Prussian” Christian sentiment is the sole end aim of the Order in Council. Religious sentiment, when it is drunk, of course, not when it is sober, considers itself to be the only good. Whenever it comes across evil it attributes it to its own absence, for, if it is the only good, then it alone can create the good. Therefore, an Order in Council, dictated by religious feelings, logically enough itself decrees religious feelings. A politician with sober religious feelings would not attempt to find a “cure” for his own “perplexity” in the “exhortations of the pious Preacher to cultivate Christian sentiments.”
How then does out so-called “Prussian” demonstrate to the Reforme that the Order in Council is not an emanation of religious feeling? By describing it as an emanation of religious feeling. What insight into social movements can be expected from such an illogical mind? Let us listen to him gossiping about the relationship of German society to the workers’ movement and social reform in general.
Let us distinguish – as our “Prussian” fails to do – let us distinguish between the various categories subsumed by the expression “German society"; government, bourgeoisie, the press and finally the workers themselves. These are the various masses we are concerned with here. The “Prussia” merges them all into one mass and condemns them en masses from his exalted standpoint. According to him German society has “not even had a presentiment of its reform.”
Why is it so lacking in this instinct? Because, the Prussian explains,
In an unpolitical country like Germany it is not possible to represent the sporadic misery of the factory districts as a matter of universal concern, let alone as a disaster to the whole civilized world. As far as the Germans are concerned, these events belong in the same category as any local shortage of food or water. In accordance with this the King views it as a failure of the administration or of charitable institutions.
The “Prussian thus explain this absurd interpretation of the plight of the workers with reference to the peculiar nature of an unpolitical country.
It will be granted that England is a political nation. It will further be granted that England is the nation of pauperism; the work itself is English in origin. An examination of the situation in England is thus the most certain way whereby to discover the relation of a political nation to pauperism. In England the misery of the workers is not sporadic but universal; it is not confined to the factory districts but extends to country districts too. Workers’ movements are not in their infancy but have recurred periodically for close on a century.
What then is the view of pauperism taken by the English bourgeoisie and the government and the press concerned with it?
In so far as the English bourgeoisie regards pauperism as the fault of politics, the Whigs put the blame on the Tories and the Tories put it on the Whigs. According to the Whigs, the chief cause of pauperism is to be discovered in the monopoly of landed property property and in the laws prohibiting the import of grain. In the Tory view, the source of the trouble lies in liberalism, in competition and the excesses of the factory system. Neither party discovers the explanation in politics itself but only in the politics of the other party. Neither party would even dream of a reform of society as a whole.
The most decisive expression of the insight of the English into pauperism – and by the English we mean the English bourgeoisie and the government – is to be found in English Political Economy – i.e., the scientific reflection of the state of the economy in England.
MacCulloch, a pupil of the cynic Ricardo and one of the best and most celebrated of the English economists, is familiar with the present state of affairs and has no overall view of the movement of bourgeois society. In a public lecture, amidst applause, he had the temerity to apply to political economy what Bacon had said of philosophy:
The man who suspends his judgment with true and untiring wisdom, who progresses gradually, and who successively surmounts obstacles which impede the course of study like mountains, will in time reach the summit of knowledge where rest and pure air may be enjoyed, where Nature may be viewed in all her beauty, and whence one may descend by an easy path to the final details of practice. [6]
The pure air of the pestilential atmosphere of English basement dwellings! The great natural beauty of the fantastic rags in which the english poor are clothes and of the faded, shrivelled flesh of the women worn out by work and want; the children lying on dung-heaps; the stunted monsters produced by overwork in the mechanical monotony of the factories! The most charming final details of practice: prostitution, murder, and the gallows!
Even that section of the English bourgeoisie which is conscious of the dangers of pauperism regards both the dangers and the means for remedying them not merely as particular problems, but – to put it bluntly – in a childish and absurd manner.
Thus, for example, in his pamphlet “Recent Measures for the Promotion of Education in England,” Dr Kay reduces the whole question to the neglect of education. It is not hard to guess the reason! He argues that the worker’s lack of education prevents him from understanding the “natural laws of trade,” laws which necessarily reduce him to pauperism. For this reason, the worker rises up in rebellion. And this rebellion may well “cause embarrassment to the prosperity of the English manufactures and English commerce, impair the mutual confidence of businessmen and diminish the stability of political and social institutions.”
This is the extent of the insanity of the English bourgeoisie and its press on the subject of pauperism,the national epidemic of England.
Let us assume for the moment that the criticism levelled by our “Prussian” at German society are justified. Is it true that their explanation is to be found in the unpolitical nature of Germany? But if the bourgeoisie of an unpolitical Germany is unable to achieve clarity about the general significance of universal misery, the bourgeoisie of political England, on the other hand, manages to misunderstand the general significance of a universal state of misery whose general meaning has become apparent partly by virtue of its periodic recurrence in time, partly by its extension in space and partly by the failure of every attempt to eliminate it.
The “Prussian” heaps further obloquy on the unpolitical nature of Germany because the King of Prussia has located the cause of pauperism in “failures of the administration or of charitable institutions" and has therefore looked to administrative or charitable measures to provide a cure for pauperism.
Is this analysis peculiar to the King of Prussia? Let us again look briefly at England, the only country where these has been any large-scale action against pauperism worth mentioning.
The present English Poor Laws date from Act 43 of the reign of Elizabeth. [7] how does this legislation propose to deal with pauperism? By obliging the parishes to support their own poor workers, by the Poor Rate, by legal charity. Charity dispensed by the administration: this has been the method in force for two centuries. After long and painful experiences what view is adopted by Parliament in its Bill of Amendment in 1834?
It begins by explaining the frightening increase in pauperism as the result of a “defect in the administration.”
It therefore provides for a reform of the administration of the Poor Rate by officials of the different parishes. Unions of about 20 parishes are to be set up under a central administration. On a specified day, the Board of Guardians, consisting of officials elected by t he tax-payers, are to assemble at the headquarters of the union and decide on eligibility for relief. These Boards are presided over and controlled by government representatives from the Central Commission at Somerset House, the Ministry of Pauperism, to use the phrase aptly coined by a Frenchman [Eugen Buret]. The capital so administered is almost equal to the sum required by the War Office in France. The number of local offices thus maintained amounts to 500 and each of these local offices keeps at least 12 official busy.
The English Parliament did not rest content with the formal reform of the administration.
The chief cause of the acute condition of English pauperism was found to lie in the Poor Law itself. It was discovered that charity, the legal method of combating social evils, itself fostered social evils. As for pauperism in general, it was held to be an eternal laws of nature in accordance with Malthus’ theory:
Since the population threatens unceasingly to exceed the available means of subsistence, benevolence is folly, an open encouragement to misery. The state, therefore, can do nothing but leave misery to its fate, and, at best, facilitate the death of those in want.
The English Parliament combined this philanthropic theory with the view that pauperism is a state of misery brought on by the workers themselves, and that in consequence it should not be regarded as a misfortune to be prevented but as a crime to be suppressed and punished.
In this way, the system of the workhouse came into being – i.e., houses for the poor whose internal arrangements were devised to deter the indigent from seeking a refuge from starvation. In the workhouses charity has been ingeniously combined with the revenge of the bourgeoisie on all those wretched enough to appeal to their charity.
Initially England attempted to eliminate pauperism by means of charity and administrative measures. It then came to regard the progressive increase in pauperism not as the inevitable consequence of modern industry but rather as the consequence of the English Poor Law. It construed the state of universal need as merely a particular feature of English law. What was formerly attributed to a deficiency of charity was now ascribed to the superabundance of charity. Lastly, need was regarded as the fault of the needy and punishable as such.
The general lesson learnt by political England from its experience of pauperism is none other than that, in the course of history and despite all administrative measures, pauperism has developed into a national institution which has inevitably become the object of a highly ramified and extensive administrative system, a system however which no longer sets out to eliminate it, but which strives instead to discipline and perpetuate it. This administrative system has abandoned all attempts to stop pauperism at its source through positive measures; it confines itself to preparing a grave for it with true police mildness as soon as it erupts on the surface of officialdom. Far from advancing beyond administrative and charitable measures, the English state has regressed to a far more primitive position. It dispenses its administrative gifts only to that pauperism which is induced by despair to allow itself to be caught and incarcerated.
Thus far the Prussian” has failed to show that the procedure adopted by the King of Prussia has any features peculiar to it. But why, our great man now exclaims with rare naivety: “Why does the King not decree the education of all deprived children at a stroke?" Why must he turn first to the authorities with requests for their plans and proposals?
Our all-too-clever “Prussian” will regain his composure when he realizes that in acting thus the King of Prussia is just as unoriginal as in all his other actions. In fact, he has taken the only course of action open to the head of a state.
Napoleon wished to do away with begging at a single stroke. He instructed his officials to prepare plans for the abolition of beggary throughout the whole of France. The project was subject to delay; napoleon became impatient, he wrote to Cretet, his Minister of the Interior; he commanded him to get rid of begging within a month. He said,
One should not depart this life without leaving traces which commend our memory to posterity. Do not ask me for another three or four months to obtain information; you have young advocates, clever prefects, expert engineers of bridges and roads. Set them all in motion, do not fall into the sleepy inactivity of routine office work.
Within a few months, everything was ready. On July 5, 1808, the law to suppress begging was enacted. By what means? By means of the depots which were so speedily transformed into penal institutions that in a short time the poor man could gain access to one only via a police court. Nevertheless, M. Noailles du Gard, a member of the legislative body, was able to declare,
Eternal gratitude to the hero who has found a refuge for the needy and the means of life for the poor. Childhood will no longer be abandoned, poor families |
Jersey that he could launch a military strike against Venezuela.
When asked what would make a war on Venezuela a certainty, a White House aide said, “A 10 point boost in the polls. A war with Venezuela might be more popular than a nuclear with Korea.”
— — — —
Speaking of North Korea, Donald Трамп said on Friday that North Korea “will not get away with it” if he does anything to hurt the people of the United States.
The jury is still out on whether Donald Трамп will get away with hurting the people of the U.S.
— — — —
The state Department of Civil Rights has opened a complaint against the Michigan man who has a “No foreigners” sign on his front lawn next to one reading “For sale by owner.” The sign violates state and federal laws against discrimination based on national origin, the department said in a release Thursday.
After being informed of the news, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III promised to divert funding for the investigation to helping the racist Michigan man print more signs.
— — — —
Have you done your part today? If not, take a moment to decide what to do, how you can help, and pitch in! Maybe pitching in for you means telling me I’m dumb, go for it! Whatever it is, make your time count!
Trump says he won’t rule out military option in Venezuela
http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/11/politics/trump-xi-north-korea/index.html
Trump Warns North Korea Leader ‘Will Not Get Away With What He’s Doing’
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/trump-us-military-locked-loaded-north-korea-n791721
‘No foreigners’ sign at house for sale draws investigation
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/08/11/no-foreigners-sign-house-sale-draws-investigation/561343001/
— — — —
Catch up back issues of YOUR DAILY DYSTOPIA on …The US Department of Justice is officially coming for mobile app pirates. After a 2012 seiszure of Snappzmarket and Appbucket, two popular websites that offered pirated Android software, the DOJ has charged four people it believes were behind them.
The four men are facing maximum sentence of five years in prison for conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement charges, marking the first time the government has filed criminal charges over illegally distributed mobile software.
"The federal charges presented in this case illustrates the problems facing technology based companies in particular," said FBI special agent Ricky Maxwell, adding that the case "highlights the FBI and US government response to those engaged in such wholesale criminal activity involving the piracy of copyrighted products."
We doubt it'll be the last time.
[The Verge]The serval - a type of African wild cat - called Shakira was in poor health at a zoo near Munich in Germany after her siblings died.
However, she was rescued by Roland Adam, an animal carer, who introduced her to a canine brood.
Mr Adam said: "Shakira came to us when she was just 14 days old. A friend of mine from the zoo contacted me and told me how Shakira's mother had not produced enough milk for her litter and her other brothers and sisters had died. When I heard this, I decided to take her in."
Mr Adam, 53, spent two hours a day nursing the cub back to health, at first feeding her a few drops of milk from his finger in order to build up her weight from just 2lbs 2oz.
Eventually she became strong enough to meet a new family - a pack of Rhodesian Ridgeback dogs. The mother, Katijnga, who gave birth to 11 puppies in July, welcomed Shakira into her clan.
Mr Adam said: "I wanted to provide her with some animal kids that could be a substitute for her own brothers and sisters and for her mother. It turned out that Shakira was integrated immediately into this dog family. She plays hide and seek, catch and even play fights with the dogs. When they tire from playing with each other, the cubs lie down together.
"You see a strong bond between Shakira and her foster mother," he added. "When they play, Shakira does not even for a moment push out her claws - it is a loving family."
Servals are native to the grasslands of Africa. They can grow to about 2ft in height and almost 3ft in length, and weigh an average of just under 3 stone. Despite being wild cats, they have also long been kept as pets in Europe.Should technology companies be legally responsible for policing the global Internet to enforce the laws of any one country?
This thorny question is at the heart of a case now being heard by the Supreme Court of Canada, as Google challenges a British Columbia court order requiring it to block certain search results worldwide. If the order is upheld, it could set a precedent with profound and far-reaching implications, not only for Google and other tech firms with global reach, but also for the future of free and open access to information on the Internet.
The order against Google arose from a legal fight between a B.C.-based manufacturer of complex industrial equipment, Equustek Solutions Inc., and its former distributors, which Equustek alleges stole its trade secrets, eventually developing competing products and selling them on the Internet.
Story continues below advertisement
Read more: When search engines omit results, our rights are jeopardized
Read more: Supreme Court hears arguments in case pitting Google against B.C. firm
Despite a 2012 order for contempt of court and an ensuing arrest warrant, the former distributors have continued to flout multiple court orders to stop advertising and selling the products online. Unable to reach the defendants directly, Equustek set its sights on strangling their Internet traffic.
Equustek asked the B.C. courts to require Google to remove hundreds of websites that market the infringing products from Google search results worldwide. The order was granted and now Google is asking the Supreme Court to reverse it.
Among Google's arguments is that the B.C. court has "deputized" it to carry out the functions of Canadian law enforcement by forcing the search giant into an endless and costly game of "whack-a-mole" with the defendants' websites. Google did nothing wrong, but is being forced to bear the cost and responsibility to fix the problem.
In deciding the case, the Supreme Court will need to consider the extent to which courts may compel technology companies to act as intermediaries in combatting illegal activity. This is a contentious topic, as we saw earlier this year in the United States when Apple resisted a court order requiring it to co-operate with the FBI in circumventing security features of an iPhone belonging to one of the shooters in the San Bernardino, Calif., attack. The legal battle quickly became a charged public drama.
In its court papers, Apple argued that U.S. federal courts "have never recognized an inherent authority to order non-parties to become de facto government agents in ongoing criminal investigations." The tech community agreed, and numerous companies rushed to support Apple.
Story continues below advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
While the FBI eventually managed to crack the phone on its own, the parallels to the Google case are striking.
Like Apple, Google is an innocent third party that views itself as being pressed into service by the legal system to thwart a wrongdoer. While court orders against innocent third parties are nothing new under Canadian and U.S. law, the question before the Canadian Supreme Court is when such orders – which usually involve discreet tasks such as gathering documents or freezing bank accounts – effectively deputize tech companies into state agents with law-enforcement responsibilities.
Moreover, Google is concerned by the prospect that court orders from a single jurisdiction can require the search engine to change its worldwide results. This is particularly troubling, given that Google is neither incorporated nor has any offices in British Columbia. Courts in Canada may have jurisdiction over google.ca, but Google has more than 100 localized websites – from Andorra to Zimbabwe – and it is rightly uneasy about the Canadian courts purporting to edit them all.
Certainly, Canadians would not want their Google search results to be subject to the laws of every country where Google may be accessed, including those with authoritarian regimes that routinely stifle free speech.
Google's concerns are clear and valid: Domestic regulation that reaches outside its borders risks setting off a "global race to the bottom, harming access to information that is perfectly lawful to view in one's own country."
Ultimately, the British Columbia court did not give enough weight to the distinction between public and private actors and the importance of restraining the jurisdiction of Canadian courts to the territory of Canada. In so doing, the injunction upset the delicate balance between enforcing the rule of law and the interest we all have in safeguarding liberty and freedom of speech on the Internet, a borderless communication medium that is without precedent in human history.
Story continues below advertisement
Ivo Entchev is an attorney at Holwell Shuster & Goldberg LLP in New York and president of the Canadian American Bar Association. Jeremy Opolsky is a lawyer at Torys LLP in Toronto. The views expressed are those of the authors alone and may not reflect the views of their law firms.Recently elements of the “reform community” have been getting themselves worked up about a most improbable threat to American democracy: an organization called “Americans Elect.”
The venerable, ubiquitous everpresent omnipresent always-alarmed Reform guru-in-chief Fred Wertheimer says that Americans Elect poses a “danger to the integrity of the electoral system.” So alarmed is Wertheimer that he has even reported the group to our nation’s traditional guardian of democracy, the Internal Revenue Service, recommending an investigation. The Campaign Legal Center, a “reform” group headed by Trevor Potter, a man who repeatedly denies that participating in politics requires any particular legal acumen even while charging hundreds of dollars an hour for his services, joined Wertheimer’s alter ego, Democracy 21, in tattling to the IRS. (Their charges, if pursued, will undoubtedly impose no legal fees on Americans Elect.)
Ash Roughani, a reformer who is trying to start something called the California Moderate Party, fears its “stealthy nature” and makes that patently incorrect statement that this violates the fundamental premise of “crowdsourcing.”
Rick Hasen, the reformer law professor who publishes Election Law Blog, says he “fear[s] many aspects of [Americans Elect].” He concludes, “Watch out.” Mother Jones, the venerable, ubiquitous everpresent omnipresent always-alarmed loadstar of the lost generation, covered the group under a headline announcing that Americans Elect is “fueled by dark money.” Oooooh.
What is so scary about Americans Elect? Here, a touch of background is in order. Americans Elect emerged from the ashes of Unity ’08, a similar effort conducted back, well, before the 2008 presidential campaign. Operating on the theory that the major American political parties were trapped by their base voters and special interests into extreme positions not representative of a more moderate majority that they perceived, Unity ’08 sought to bring Americans together behind a moderate, bipartisan ticket in 2008. Unity ’08 contained a few supporters with political experience, but like many outsider reform movements, it’s leadership largely consisted of, well, outsiders, individuals who had previously had only a passing interest in the workings of politics. Like most such reform movements, such as the Reform Party of the late 1990s, it’s leaders had had deeply impressed upon them the “campaign finance reform” movement view of money and politics. It was enamored of campaign finance reform and “good government” type regulation of politics, even urging voters to pledge to vote only for a candidate who raised the majority of his campaign funds in contributions of $250 or less.
But Unity ’08 soon learned that campaign finance and other forms of political regulation are not really the outsider’s friend. Ballot access laws were, as they have always been, a tool to hinder, discourage, or prevent a national campaign outside of the two major parties. In particular, however, they discovered that campaign finance laws, and in particular provisions of the McCain-Feingold BiPartisan Campaign Reform Act (drafted with the help of Messrs. Potter and Wertheimer, among others), made formation of a new political party almost impossible – indeed, as a practical matter, illegal. But Unity ’08 ultimately decided not to die a noble death. Learning from its experience, they grew to understand that money is not the root of evil in American politics, but a vital tool to anyone who would seek to exercise their First Amendment rights on a large scale. They took things to court, and in 2010 the U.S. Court of Appeals issued a surprising decision freeing Unity ’08 from virtually all campaign finance restrictions, at least until the group nominated candidates. Thus able to raise the tens of millions needed to start a new political movement and gain ballot status in all 50 states, the organization, reconstituted as Americans Elect, went to work.
Americans Elect is in the process of gaining ballot access in all 50 states. It then plans to hold a national, on-line nominating convention, for which any U.S. voter can sign up as a delegate, with the winner being granted the Americans Elect ballot line. The candidate will be responsible for funding his or her own campaign. And Americans Elect requires just one thing of its nominee – that he or she choose a running mate who is not from the same political party. Through the online balloting and the running mate rule, they hope to empower the centrist voters they believe are out there pining for other options to select a moderate presidential ticket that will break the lock that Republicans and Democrats have on American politics.
Now, a lot of people might think that all this is a great idea, and a brilliant strategy, and a lot might think it is a bad idea; or a naive plan; or a silly idea. What’s hard to figure out is why someone would “fear” this idea or consider it “a danger to the integrity of the electoral system.” Oh, maybe Democratic or Republican partisans worried that the Americans Elect nominee will harm their party more than the other, but beyond that? The traditional “reformers,” however, are indeed afraid.
Professor Hasen, whose critique has been the most detailed and quoted, lists three “fears” about Americans Elect:
The organization’s rules allow a rules committee to disqualify a ticket that is not “balanced;” The organization has not publicly disclosed in donors.; and It’s internet based election process is not “secure.”
This, says Professor Hasen, creates a “democracy deficit.”
What? “Democracy deficit?” We find both the charge, and the way in which it is made, something close to bizarre.
Americans Elect is not the U.S. government. It is a private organization of people who are attempting to create a new way in which people might organize themselves for political purposes. While it is true that most voluntary associations in the United States adopt democratic forms, most operate as something far short of perfect democracies. Frequently few members vote; elections are uncontested; offices are maintained by individuals over long periods of time, often without any opposition; deference is given to founding members or other significant figures with the understanding that those persons “run” the organizations, and so on. None of this ever much concerns us, even though many such organizations – say Common Cause, the Campaign Legal Center, Democracy 21, or Loyola Marymount University – may exercise considerable influence on public affairs. We’re usually pretty content, so long as the actual members and participants are content. As private organizations, even ones engaged in public affairs, we don’t usually feel entitled to demand that they meet our personal standards for organization.
Let’s look but briefly at Professor Hasen’s concerns, which are more or less what other reform minded critics such as Wertheimer are saying as well.
First, there is nothing terribly unique about Americans Elect having rules and a process for enforcing those rules through an Executive Committee. Some state laws give state party leaders a veto over what candidates will appear on the ballot in their state run primaries. Of course, parties don’t have to have primaries – they can insist on nominating by convention. Delegates to national party conventions – even when chosen by primaries – can be unseated by party rules committees. They can vote for whomever they choose, and they can switch their commitments in midnight sessions in smokeless cigarette vapor-filled rooms (actual smoking in hotels and convention centers being increasingly prohibited both by property owners operating without democratic processes and governments operating with democratic processes).
Compared to the Democratic or Republican National Committees, Americans Elect seems to have established a remarkably open process for members to voice their opinions and select candidates who agree with the majority of those opinions, at least as much as is ever possible in politics. We don’t mean to suggest that reformers have no right to warn the public about the “dangers” of Americans Elect’s processes, if they think that important. But the process hardly seems less democratic than, say, the Iowa caucuses, in which campaigns can pay to bus in voters, who must then vote without the protection of a secret ballot. But we don’t hear much about a “democracy deficit” there.
Similarly Professor Hasen worries that Americans Elect has not “offered a compelling reason for failing to disclose the identity of its donors.” We find this an odd way to frame the issue – the notion that it the group has “failed” to disclose its donors, and that it must offer a “compelling reason” for this “failure.” We would think it a bit more natural to say that the group has “chosen” not to disclose its donors, a choice that the speaker disagrees with. But the Americans Elect decision isn’t a “failure,” or even poor strategy. We suppose people such as Hasen and Wertheimer may see it as “failing” to live up to its declared standards, because Americans Elect prides itself on openness. But isn’t it for Americans Elect and its members to decide what constitutes an appropriate level of openness? The lack of donor disclosure apparently doesn’t concern members. After all, it’s not something buried deep in the by-laws. If Americans Elect supporters weren’t already aware of this, that suggests they weren’t particularly worried about donor disclosure, just as most of us aren’t terribly worried about who all else gives to our favorite charity, or even the candidates we support. Meanwhile, Americans Elect’s officers and top staff are publicly known, and it has a rather large advisory board that is also quite public. Perhaps Peter Ackerman, the highly successful venture capitalist and philanthropist who is the organization’s Chairman, is simply taking orders from the big money guys in the background, and the Advisory Board, which includes some other highly successful people, are just hapless dupes. So look at their backgrounds: Does that seem likely? No? We didn’t think so either.
But we’re also puzzled by the insistance that the decision not to disclose donors to the reformers satisfaction requires a “compelling” reason. We take Professor Hasen to mean by “compelling” a reason that he personally agrees with. Hasen suggests it would be compelling if people were throwing Molotov cocktails through the windows of Americans Elect donors. While we certainly agree that that would be compelling, we hardly think such a high threshold is necessary. When Americans Elect’s CEO Khalil Byrd says that some supporters fear retribution, Hasen scoffs that “there is virtually no evidence that contributors to candidates or parties face harassment these days because of their contributions.” But leaving aside that “virtually no evidence” (as opposed to actually no evidence) may be a relatively unsatisfying standard to the person putting himself on the line, that’s not really the standard, either, is it?
Some people fear retribution (not necessarily “harassment”) from public officials for not supporting the party. Surely anyone as skeptical of the integrity of public officeholders as Fred Wertheimer can understand that. Some of those people do business with the government and may wish to keep their political expenditures quiet, fearing they’re political opposition will hurt their ability to gain what are supposed to be merit based future contracts. Others may support the purpose and approach of Americans Elect, but don’t want to give politicians – some of whom they may support – the sense that they are abandoning them for another party (which is not necessarily the case, given the Americans Elect structure.) Maybe they want to avoid the attention – in theory, at least, Americans Elect should be attracting money from people who don’t historically give to politics and aren’t used to that game. For the big donors – and Americans Elect says it has a dozen or more who have contributed at least six figures – they may not want to be bombarded with other political and charitable requests. Some have social relations they’d as leave not disturb. Some simply don’t want to have to keep answering their friends’ questions: “What are you doing! [Obama]/[Republicans] must win!” These reasons are compelling enough to the people who are contributing to the project to want to keep their identities quiet. Hasen seems a bit presumptious to claim for himself the mantle of defining whether their concerns are “compelling.” Wertheimer and the reformers who see this as a “danger to democracy” are just, well, what can one say? Overwrought?
We think much more understanding of human nature and privacy is shown by Americans Elect’s Byrd, who says, “supporting this organization is a small, but significant act of courage, and people [have] to be encouraged to emerge at their own pace, disclosing whether they’ve given a dollar or much more than that.”
Then there is the voting security issue. Is Americans Elect’s system internet voting system truly secure from hacking? Who cares? We know they’ve got experienced web people who take that possibility seriously and have tried to address it and prevent it. People participating in Americans Elect seem happy enough. and there’s no evidence that Americans Elect’s system has a security problem, just that some “reformers” fear that Americans Elect will have such a problem. Which, when you think about it, isn’t really the “reformers” problem, anyway, is it? And if, in the end, one doesn’t think the person claiming the Americans Elect ballot line is legit? Well, OK, don’t vote for him or her. But he or she ought to have at least as much as democratic legitimacy as the typical winner of a contested Democratic or Republican Party nomination, chosen largely by small coteries of activists in Iowa, New Hampshire, and a handful of other states.
But most ironic in all this is the sense that Americans Elect somehow owes reformers some type of explanation. As of this writing, for example, Professor Hasen has used not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, but six blog posts to more or less demand that Americans Elect respond to his complaints, plus several others critical of Americans Elect or noting its “democracy deficit.” In truth, however, Americans Elect has responded to Professor Hasen’s complaints, but just not to his satisfaction. The usual response when one is not satisfied with the answers is to say, “then I won’t support you,” and to move on, not to keep demanding answers, with the implicit contention that a group owes you some special accounting.
Of course, reformers are free to stay away from Americans Elect, just as they are free not to join the local Kiwanis, if they don’t like the group’s procedures. And they are free to discourage others from associating with Americans Elect. We just find their criticisms and attitude a bit strange. The insistance that Americans Elect must operate according to some set of rules that, by the way, are not always adhered to by the reformers themselves, and that it is in some way answerable to “the reform community” rather than its own members and eventually to voters for president, seems odd, and perhaps typical of the self-inflated status “reformers” often seem to possess, at least in their own minds, as the ultimate arbiters of good government. (Similarly, for example, Mr. Wertheimer also accuses Americans Elect of “circumventing campaign finance laws,” even though the U.S. Court of Appeals – which would seem to be a more authoritative arbiter of “the law” – says it has a right to do what it is doing).
In their criticism of American Elect, reformers seem to have forgotten the whole purpose of “reform.” While we’ve often disagreed with the “reform community,” we would hope that all would agree that the purpose of political regulation is not to watch over private citizens, but to watch over government. Reacting to Americans Elect, the “reform community” seems a bit like a patient having his reflexes checked. The doctor taps the knee, and the leg kicks. The kick serves no purpose; the mind doesn’t will it, and may even try to prevent it. But it can’t do anything else. It’s helpless to the impulse. Tap the knee, get a kick.
“Reform” without purpose.WINNIPEG — It was a dream day for Brendan Leipsic capped off by a big play.
The 21-year-old Winnipegger scored his first NHL goal in his first NHL game on Saturday. For his Toronto Maple Leafs, it was the game winner against the Vancouver Canucks.
A memorable but also nearly missed moment for his parents.
“Until I could actually see the arena and know I’m there, I kept wondering if we were actually going to make it,” said Greg Leipsic, Brendan’s dad.
Greg and his wife Kathleen found out Friday afternoon their son was being called up from the AHL’s Toronto Marlies by the Leafs. They had less than 36 hours to get to Vancouver for the game.
“We had to make the effort to see if we could catch it,” said Greg. “There were some hiccups and we almost didn’t (make it) but thankfully we did.”
The first problem – there were no flights to BC anywhere in the prairies. Brendan’s parents instead flew from Winnipeg to Minneapolis Saturday morning. They then hopped on a different plane bound for Seattle but the flight was delayed an hour. After they landed, they rented a car for the 2 1/2 hour drive to Vancouver but a backed up border crossing forced the pair to wait another hour. To make things worse, they were pulled in by customs. Brendan’s parents eventually made it to the rink with just 15 minutes to spare.
“They found a way,” Brendan told Leafs TV following Saturday’s game. “It was kind of planes, trains and automobiles to get there. It was definitely a really special day.”
Brendan’s parents though weren’t the only ones watching the left winger in his NHL debut. Greg’s phone buzzed the entire game with texts from fellow Winnipeggers, friends and family.
“There’s not a lot of people who are getting excited about the Leafs taking on the Canucks these days,” said Greg. “They’re just over the moon for this. That’s the part that’s so darn special.”
Among those sending congratulatory notes was former Winnipeg Jet Teemu Selanne.
Me And Brendan Leipsic eating pasta before My NHL game, tonight He is playing his First NHL game as a Maple Leaf👏👍 pic.twitter.com/ItDS3mvsVC — Teemu Selanne (@TeemuSel8nne) February 13, 2016
The NHL superstar tweeted a picture of Brendan and him eating pasta several years ago. Selanne first met the Leipsics when he played in Winnipeg and is now considered a close friend of the family.
But the most excited to see Brendan’s moment was those who helped him the most to get there.
“You know how hard they’re working,” said Greg. “The tears may be because you realized how lucky they are. There’s so many hockey players trying to get to the NHL. For him to get that game was really special.”
Even more so that his parents got the game as well.Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, and Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-NH, hold a news conference on the Benghazi terrorist attack at the U.S. Capitol, Nov. 14, 2012, in Washington. (Image credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Update at 6:29 p.m. ET:
A spokesman for Sen. McCain points out that he spent hours at the Intelligence Committee briefing Thursday afternoon, and will be at the committee's hearing with General Petraeus Friday morning.
Update at 2:05 p.m. ET:
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney called the scheduling mistake that sent Sen. John McCain to a press conference on Benghazi instead of a classified briefing "extraordinary."
"It is extraordinary that Senator McCain continues to go on television demanding answers on Benghazi, but refused to go to a classified briefing where he could get those answers," said Carney in a statement to ABC News.
Original post 12:05 p.m. ET:
Senator John McCain is demanding answers on the Benghazi attack, but his office tells ABC News he missed a classified briefing on the subject because of a "scheduling error."
The classified briefing was held on Wednesday before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee - of which Senator McCain is a member - and lasted three hours. It featured testimony by officials from the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA and the National Counterterrorism Center.
During part of the briefing, McCain was holding a press conference demanding answers about the administration's handling of the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya on Step. 11 that killed four Americans, including US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens. McCain called on Congress to launch Watergate-style hearings to get to the bottom of what happened.
"More than two months after the Benghazi attack, there are still many unanswered questions," McCain told reporters in the Capitol Hill press conference. "While we await the findings and recommendations of the administration's internal review of the Benghazi attack, it's essential for the Congress to conduct its own independent assessment."
At precisely the same time McCain was holding that press conference, the briefing for the Homeland Security Committee was happening in another part of the Capitol building.
Why did he missing the briefing on a subject he has been so adamant in demanding answers on? McCain's office says his absence was unintentional - an oversight.
"Senator McCain was absent from the hearing due to a scheduling error," McCain spokesman Brian Rogers told ABC News.
Even if he had attended, McCain was unlikely to be satisfied with what he heard.
After the briefing was over, the top Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, Senator Susan Collins, was asked if she was satisfied with the hearing.
"I really wasn't," Collins answered. "There are many, many unanswered questions. I feel that we've only scratched the surface through the briefings that we had today."
There are currently at least four Senate Committees looking into the Benghazi attack. For her part, Sen. Collins does not agree with McCain's call to combine those into one special - or "select" - committee like the one that investigated Watergate.
" I do not see the benefit of, nor the need for a select committee," Collins said. "Our committee, our Homeland Security Committee has government-wide jurisdiction and a history of producing comprehensive bipartisan reports on everything from the Ft. Hood terrorist attack to Hurricane Katrina, so I don't see the need for creating a brand new select committee to take a look at this."
The White House had no immediate comment on McCain's absence from the hearing, but one former White House official was quick to jump on it.
"It is nothing short of appalling that Senator McCain would use his time and influence to play politics instead of getting answers to the questions he claims to have," said Bill Burton of the pro-Obama group Priorities USA.
-Jonathan Karl and Sunlen Miller[UPDATE (January 11th, 2012) – Adobe has listened to customers and just reversed this change! CS3, CS4, & CS5 are all good for upgrade to CS6 now.]
HUGE breaking news out from Adobe, regarding substantial changes in upgrade pricing and policies for their very popular Creative Suite software…
For several years, the company has offered a “three-versions-back” upgrade policy – meaning anyone who owned a prior CS product up to three major versions back would be eligible for discounted upgrade pricing when moving up to the latest release.
Meaning, if you’ve got CS2, CS3, or CS4 – either a full suite or an individual point product like Photoshop – you can receive price reductions of up to 80% when upgrading to CS5.5.
Adobe now says that will be ending – the policy is going to shift dramatically, worldwide.
Starting in 2012 when CS6 comes out, this will be changing to a “one-version-back” plan – meaning to receive a price break when upgrading to CS6, you need to already be on some flavor of Creative Suite 5 – either CS5 or CS5.5.
So, what does this mean for anybody still running CS2, CS3, or CS4 at that time? Basically, if you want to upgrade later or have been waiting for CS6 to do so, it would cost you full price… To receive a discount from older versions, you’d need to upgrade to CS5 before CS6 ships.
Here it is straight from Adobe’s “Conversations” Blog:
With regards to upgrades, we are changing our policy for perpetual [permanent] license customers. In order to qualify for upgrade pricing when CS6 releases, customers will need to be on the latest version of our software (either CS5 or CS5.5 editions).
In other words, soon Adobe will only be offering the traditional upgrade savings for one major version behind… This will apply for both suites as well as the standalone applications.
There is a saving grace however – the company wants to help folks using these older versions to get current now with an extra 20% off the currently-discounted upgrade price:
If our customers are not yet on those versions, we’re offering a 20% discount through December 31, 2011 the extended date of March 15, 2012, which will qualify them for upgrade pricing when we release CS6. [see banner below]
Why is Adobe doing this? It’s part of extending their CS subscription offerings to encompass the recently-announced Creative Cloud initiative, which is also a subscription-based program.
Basically, they want to make more frequent innovation updates to the software to reflect our increasingly-dynamic environment with the web, smartphones, tablets, and mobile applications – and are adjusting the model to try to encourage customers towards cloud membership and keep them as current as possible with the products.
However, you can stick with traditionally-owned software if you desire, just like now:
For customers who prefer to remain on the current licensing model, we will continue to offer our individual point products and Adobe Creative Suite editions as perpetual licenses.
So if you’re one of them – and are happy and comfortable with your current permanent product instead of renting – then you might want to take a closer look at this fleeting window of upgrade opportunity, particularly with the extra 20% off worldwide – while it lasts.
Please spread the word and share this news with anyone who you think should know!
[UPDATE (Dec. 1st) – Share your thoughts and take our new poll on Adobe’s model change, or see the impact on Acrobat, Lightroom, and Elements.]
[UPDATE (Jan. 11th, 2012) – After feedback, Adobe has now deferred this policy change.]Subalphabetic Words
It is harder to make long words from the second half of the alphabet, as there are only two vowels, and these vowels are less common than those found in the first half of the alphabet. The longest is NONSUPPORTS (11 letters), although if place names are allowed then the 13-letter words TUTTOQQORTOOQ (in Greenland) and ROSSOUWSPOORT (in South Africa) are valid.
ACCEDED, CABBAGE, BAGGAGE, DEFACED, EFFACED, and FEEDBAG are seven-letter words which can be played on a musical instrument, that is to say they contain only letters in the range A-G. CABBAGED, at eight letters, is the longest such word.
Symmetrical Words Closely related to palindromes, symmetrical words are words that have an axis of symmetry, or point of rotational symmetry. Needless to say, it is relevant whether the word is written in upper or lower case.
Some long words with horizontal symmetry are: BEDECKED, BOOHOOED, CHECKBOOK, CODEBOOK, COOKBOOK, DECIDED, DIOXIDE, DOBCHICK, EXCEEDED, HOODOOED, and KEBOBBED. The longest such word, with ten letters, is OKEECHOBEE.
The longest words with vertical symmetry are OTTO, MAAM, and TOOT. Others include MOM, WOW, AHA, AHA, AIA, AMA, AVA, AWA, HAH, HOH, HUH, MAM, MIM, MUM, OHO, OXO, TAT, TIT, TOT, TUT, UTU, VAV, and WAW!
When written in upper case, the word BID has horizontal symmetry, but when written in lower case it has vertical symmetry – bid!
SWIMS is probably the longest word with 180-degree rotational symmetry. All of the letters in the words SOONISH (7 letters) and ONIONS (6 letters) independently have 180-degree rotational symmetry.My friend, AEI colleague, and fellow Catholic dad Ramesh Ponnuru writes that the GOP should expand the child tax credit as a pro-middle-class, pro-family policy. Maybe. I’m not big on tax credits, but I agree we should have some more pro-family tax policy. So here’s my idea:
The tax brackets should get wider as your family grows.
Let me begin my explanation by pointing out two facts about our tax code currently:
1) I get six times the personal exemption of a single person, because I have a wife and four kids. A single person’s first $4,000 is tax free ($3,900 technically, but I’m going to round it off for simplicity’s sake). My first $24,000 is tax free. I think this is good.
2) A married couple gets to make twice as much money before being bumped from the 10% bracket into the 15% bracket — and then again for being bumped into the 25% bracket. So, a single woman starts paying 25% on every marginal dollar after $36,250 in taxable income. A woman supporting her husband doesn’t start paying 25% until $72,500 in taxable income. I think this is good, too.
So, as your household grows from one person to two, your tax brackets get twice as wide. But as your household grows beyond two (as you start having kids) the only “bracket” that gets wider is your “0% bracket” — that is, your personal exemption.
The chart below shows what I’m talking about. As your household grows past 2, the only color band to grow wider is the 0% bracket. The other thresholds get higher as family size grows, but only because the widening 0% bracket pushes them up.
Mar |
love numbers, Catalina's wound up at 1/7 scale (or about 14.286% normal height, and about 0.29% overall size). This is MUCH more shrinking than Tedd can currently manage.
MANY people predicted that Rhoda thinking "it will be mutual" would result in both of them shrinking. From an in-universe perspective, the reason there was no risk of that happening is visually apparent: Rhoda uses her hands to focus on her spell targets.
Whether this is required or simply helps her focus her magic is questionable, but the end result is that her resizing has targeting assistance.
Elliot, meanwhile, is susceptable to thoughts interfering with his transformations because he has to imagine how he's going to look. With practice, he could prevent "sabotoge", but he's not there yet. In any case, that sort of sabotage isn't applicable to Rhoda, or at least not applicable in this instance.Eric Nam recently shared his honest thoughts on his “We Got Married” partner, MAMAMOO’s Solar.
The singer was a guest on MBC Radio’s “Park Kyung Lim’s 2 O’Clock Date” on July 19, where he showed off his delightful way of speaking.
When asked the question, “Would you ever lose to your girlfriend?” Eric Nam responded, “I think I’m losing.” DJ Park Kyung Lim then mentioned his victory in the swimming contest against his on-screen wife, to which he responded, “Before the match, I had lost several times. Still I wanted the prize of getting my wish granted so much, which is why I tried my best.”
Eric Nam also talked about how he used this wish to ask Solar to speak informally with him. “She would mix formal and informal speech, but when she spoke formally I thought, ‘Do I make her feel uncomfortable?’ So I asked her to speak informally in hopes that she would become more at ease around me. Right now it feels more comfortable,” he explained.
When asked about his “We Got Married” wife he said, “It’s really wonderful. Yong Sun (Solar’s real name) has so much talent and she’s really an amazing friend. In the beginning it was really awkward, but as time went on she took care of me. It feels like she is actually becoming my wife. She’s becoming more like my ideal type.”
Source (1)The Chicago City Council today voted by an overwhelming margin of 43-3 in favor of a new ordinance to reduce the penalty for simple marijuana possession. The ordinance makes it possible for police to issue only a citation punishable with a simple fine and/or community service. The policy change is expected to go into effect in the very near future. From NBC Chicago:
The new policy gives police the option to issue a ticket for possession of 15 grams of marijuana or less. Arrests would still be mandated for anyone caught smoking pot in public or possessing marijuana in or near a school or in or near a park Ald. Danny Solis (25th), who introduced the proposal last fall, called it a “monumental ordinance” that will have “a definite impact.” […] Under the plan, anyone caught with pot under the age of 17 or without proper identification would still be arrested. Tickets would range from $250 to $500. A portion of that money, Emanuel said, would be earmarked for an anti-drug campaign aimed at kids.
The new ordinance moved remarkably quickly through the city council after it was endorsed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel earlier this month.
The change is expected to save the city money and significantly reduce police hours currently wasted on processing people arrested for minor marijuana violations. This should free up police to focus their efforts on much more serious issues like violent crime.
With just under three million residents, Chicago is the third largest city in the United States and contains more people than 15 of the 50 United States. This makes the decriminalization of marijuana within its borders an important achievement for the broader marijuana reform movement.While on the campaign trail this spring, then-Conservative leader hopeful Kellie Leitch insisted to Canadians she's not a racist.
She couldn't convince the Conservative Party of Canada members to elect her as leader, and, her latest tweet is doing little to convince people she's not racist, either.
On Sunday, Leitch tweeted a link to Toronto Sun columnist Candice Malcolm's piece titled "The real legacy of Trudeau's Syrian refugee program":
A battered wife and a bloodied hockey stick. That's the legacy of Trudeau's Syrian refugee program. @CandiceMalcolm https://t.co/C8FbpwBBvF — Kellie Leitch (@KellieLeitch) June 18, 2017
In the column, Malcolm discusses a recent case of Mohamad Rafia, a Syrian refugee living in New Brunswick, who beat his wife with a hockey stick, claiming he didn't understand Canada's domestic violence laws.
"That's why it's so important that Canada properly screen and vet refugees before they get to Canada. Kellie Leitch's Canadian values test would have gone a long way," wrote Malcolm.
It looks like Leitch enjoyed Malcolm's endorsement and, in turn, shared the column on Twitter, using the column's final sentence to promote the tweet.
Reaction was swift, as Gerald Butts, principal secretary to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, addressed the tweet, saying it's not an act on Leitch's behalf:
If you thought this was a cynical act for the #cpcldr campaign, it's not. It's what she believes and whom she is. History won't be kind. https://t.co/QYLVF6UBfY — Gerald Butts 🇨🇦 (@gmbutts) June 19, 2017
Former Alberta Deputy Premier and MLA Thomas Lukaszuk also condemned the tweet, calling Leitch "despicable":
Your tactics are despicable! Thousands of law abiding refugees arrived & one recently saved Canadian's life. No place for hate in politics. https://t.co/acOnDCOBig — Thomas A. Lukaszuk (@LukaszukAB) June 19, 2017
Twitter users were dumbfounded — not to mention angry — and called Leitch out.
I await your concern for the "old stock Canadian" women who are, or is it only a "culturally barbaric practice" when done by a refugee? — (((ARC COLLECTIVE))) (@ARCCollective) June 19, 2017
there are many Canadian women who are beaten by husbands who are well aware of the laws in Canada- don't make this all about refugees — Carolynn (@carolynnmich) June 19, 2017
If you're looking to stay relevant I'd suggest a narrative that hasn't been constantly rejected by this country. We're better than you. — Anthony Urciuoli (@AnthonyCHML) June 19, 2017
What a gigantic load of politically motivated horseshit! One abuser, one battered wife - zero to do with a whole immigrant program!! Insane! — Paula (@PaulaStein3) June 19, 2017
And many said Leitch should know better, given her career experience as a surgeon:
Despite the 18 letters at the end of your name, there's an astonishing lack of rigour to your powers of reasoning + logic. Shame on you. — Joanbeam3000 (@Joanbeam3000) June 19, 2017
& YOU Ms Leitch, shld know better as a med physician tht violence agnst women & children in Cda crosses all cultures & socioeconomic bkgrnds — GoodGawdMadge🍁 (@GawdMadge) June 19, 2017
This makes as much sense as branding all surgeons rancid bigots based only on the actions of one surgeon. — Calmudgeon (@calmudge0n) June 19, 2017
Others pointed to the good work many refugees have contributed to Canadian society:
\Wrong. I have first-hand experience of Syrian refugees, and it's been nothing but a pleasure for all. They are great assets to Canada. — Bernard Simon (@bernardsimon) June 19, 2017
Disappointing that you would use this crime to promote your politics. Many refugees have settled and contributed to their communities. — Sandra Northcott (@SandraNorthcott) June 18, 2017
Classic gutless tactic Kellie. Cherry pick one terrible crime out of the thousands of positive stories coming from Syrian refugees. — Brett Bonisteel (@BrettBonisteel) June 19, 2017
While campaigning for the CPC leadership, Leitch faced frequent accusations of anti-Muslim xenophobia because of her much-discussed proposal to screen newcomers for so-called "anti-Canadian values" and her push in the 2015 election to create a tip line to report "barbaric cultural practices."
For the record, here are a few stories HuffPost Canada has covered about Syrian refugees giving back to their new Canadian communities:
Last year, Syrian refugees handed out roses as a Saskatoon mall, to thank the city for the warm welcome they'd received in the country:
And these Syrian women in Peterborough, Ont., have been busy making Canadian flags as a way of saying "thank you."
And in Halifax, N.S., a group of Syrian men have started a booth at the Seaport Farmer's Market, to help curb food waste and connect with their new community.
Subscribe to our podcast
Follow us on Facebook
NeAlso on HuffPostCo-produced by China's Spring Era Period Films, 'Troll: The Tale of a Tail' is being animated in both English and Chinese versions.
Filmmaker Kevin Munroe, best known for writing and directing Ratchet & Clank (2015) and TMNT (2007), has signed on to co-direct Troll: The Tale of a Tail (also known as The Zhou Rao Kingdom for the Chinese market), a big-budget animated feature based on a classic work of Chinese literature.
The film will be animated in both English and Chinese versions to appeal to both international and Chinese audiences — a strategy pursued most recently by DreamWorks Animation for Kung Fu Panda 3.
The picture is co-produced by China's Spring Era Period Films, China Lion Entertainment and Canada-based Blue Bug Entertainment. Made with a budget of $18 million, the project is a Chinese-Norwegian-Canadian co-production. Production is underway, and the partners are targeting a Christmas 2017 release date in China and North America.
Monroe will helm the film alongside newcomer Kristian Kamp. Animation veteran Eric Lessard (Shrek, Madagascar and Antz) has joined the project as animation supervisor.
Global Genesis Group is handling worldwide sales (excluding China) and shopping the project at the Cannes Marche du Film this week.
Based on the ancient Chinese text The Book of Mountains and Seas (Shan Hai Jing), the film centers on Chui Mu, a young troll prince of the Zhou Rao Kingdom. When Chui Mu's father, King Zhou Mo's tail is snatched by a human Troll Hunter, he turns to stone. With King Zhou Mo gone, the once idyllic troll valley falls under the tyrannical rule of his cousin Chuan. Chui Mu and Freia, a feisty troll girl, with their two-headed eccentric friend Jutul, must risk their lives in an epic journey into the human world to retrieve Chui Mu’s father's tail, conquer Chuan and his army, and bring King Zhou Mo back to life and to his throne.
"We are very pleased to have director Munroe join forces with Mr. Kamp and our animation director, Eric Lessard," said Jian-min Lu, chairman of Spring Era Period Films. "The Book of Mountain and Seas has many wonderful mythological stories from ancient China. Our hope is to make 'the Zhou Rao Kingdom' the spearhead for a series of top quality 3D animation films based on this famous treasure of classic Chinese literature. Our goal is not only to entertain Chinese children and their parents but children and parents all over the world."
Added Kevin Munroe: "Being given the chance to tell this comedic adventure story is a dream come true as a director. I'm excited to share this wonderful tale of fantasy with the world."The Steam Summer Sale is set to begin quite soon, possibly tomorrow, July 4, at least according to an influx of game bundles that have been added to the Steam database by developers from around the world.
UPDATE #2: The Steam Summer Sale of 2013 could start on July 11, at least according to the Midweek Madness sale and a Russian ad.
Update: A big list of indie game bundles and packs for the Steam Summer Sale of 2013 has been leaked so check it out right here.
Tens of millions of Steam users await two great periods each year, in the form of the Summer and Winter sales.
Seeing as how we're in the month of July, the traditional summer promotion is set to begin soon enough, as hinted at by Valve itself last month.
Now, the Steam database has seen a rush of big bundles added to its directories, including all sorts of franchises like Borderlands, Dawn of War, Trine, Fear, and much more, including the extra special Valve Complete Pack.
Considering this phenomenon was spotted before the reveal of other sales on Steam, it's quite possible that Valve will unleash 2013 edition of the Steam Summer Sale tomorrow, July 4.Huge raucous crowds converged outside bank employees' houses on Sunday afternoon to demand banks stop lobbying against Wall Street reform.
"Bank of America: bad for America!" shouted community leaders outside the house of Bank of America deputy general counsel Gregory Baer.
The Chicago-based grassroots organization National People's Action, in coordination with the SEIU, bused more than 700 workers from 20 states to Baer's neighborhood, one of the wealthiest corners of Washington. The action kicks off several days of protests targeting K Street for lobbyists' role in financial reform.
Baer himself went unnoticed until a neighbor outed him. The mob booed loudly as he walked into his house. "I don't have time for you," he said, according to Trenda Kennedy of Springfield, Ill. who used a bullhorn to tell the crowd about her trouble getting a mortgage modification from Baer's bank.
Kennedy told HuffPost she'd been making reduced monthly payments thanks to a trial modification via the Home Affordable Modification Program. She said that when the bank turned her down for a permanent mod, she was told she still owed all the money she'd been paying during the trial. She said she's been notified of several sheriff's sale dates but has somehow managed to keep her home.
"Every time I'm inches away from losing my house, by some miracle it's been pushed off," said Kennedy, who is a member of Illinois People's Action.
Passersby and dogwalkers smiled at the sight of people gathered all over Baer's lawn and blocking the road. Baer's neighbor from across the street won little sympathy when he angrily yelled at protesters for waking up his two-year-old daughter. Kennedy was one of several people who used a bullhorn to tell personal bank horror stories.
Baer, formerly a senior official at the Treasury department, is a lawyer for the bank's regulator and public policy legal group. Bank of America declined to comment.
"Bank of America came to the homes of everyday Americans when you spread predatory loans in neighborhoods across, the country, when you financed payday-lending storefronts, when your reckless behavior sent the economy to the brink of disaster, and when your bank-owned properties littered neighborhoods from coast to coast," said a letter the group asked Baer to deliver to CEO Brian Moynihan. "You've created a historic mess and have been unreceptive to very polite, very formal and very consistent requests to fix the problems you helped create."
The group also protested outside the house of Peter Scher, a lobbyist for JPMorgan Chase. Nobody answered the door.
UPDATE 5/17/10: Bank of America says Baer didn't say "I don't have time for you."
"He did not make that comment to the crowd," said a spokeswoman in an email. "Actually, Mr. Baer was away from his home and he returned home after his teenage son called him. Mr. Baer did say as he was walking up to his home that he needed to get inside his home to be with his son who was frightened and upset over what was going on outside."Fighting Back
The following article is based off a speech given on 09-25-10 at the 25th Annual Gun Rights Policy Conference in San Francisco, CA.
Michael will be a featured speaker at Nullify Now! in Orlando on 10-10-10 and Chattanooga on 10-23-10. Get tickets here – http://www.nullifynow.com/tickets/ – or by calling 888-71-TICKETS
by Michael Boldin, 10AC
I’ve often been told that when you’re giving a speech – if all you get is applause and cheers – and you never piss anyone off – you’re no better than a low-life politician, because you’re not challenging anyone’s conventional mode of thought. Hopefully, I get at least a few eyebrows raised here in my 8-9 short minutes….
So let’s start out with the easy stuff, ok? I’m a tenther. That means I believe that the federal government should exercise only those powers that we the people delegated to it in the constitution – and nothing more. For example, no Obamacare mandates, no bank bailouts, and definitely no federal gun laws – period.
Question. How many people here own a gun, or manufacture or sell guns?
And how many of you are proud felons – meaning, when the government makes rules to restrict your right to keep and bear arms, you simply ignore them because they don’t have the authority to do so?
HEMPCON
I recently went to an event called Hemp Con down in my part of the state – Los Angeles. This is a big event at the LA convention center – with loads of vendors and businesses from every angle you can think of in support of the marijuana industry. There were home security companies to help protect your weed, solar power companies to help you grow your weed, doctors giving out medical marijuana cards to virtually anyone with $80 and an hour of time. There were even delivery services – you can get your marijuana delivered to you 24 hours a day…in 30 minutes or less. The pizza companies have nothing on these guys! It was amazing if you think about it from an economic standpoint – this was capitalism, the free market – working its wonders around an industry.
What’s the point?
Virtually EVERY single one of those businesses was either directly violating federal law, or aiding someone else in doing so because marijuana is illegal, according to the feds – but not the constitution – in all situations. In 2003, Tommy Chong was arrested for merely selling pieces of glass – pipes that could be used to smoke marijuana. And today, 7 years later, we’ve got what seemed to be the WalMart of weed in Downtown Los Angeles. And guess what – no ATF or DEA thugs shut the place down. Business functioned, people did what they wanted to in freedom, and that was that.
FREEDOM TO TRAVEL
Another quick story.
In 2005, the Bush administration got the REAL ID act passed, which was – in the eyes of many – a new form of a national id card. We were warned that if this act wasn’t followed, people wouldn’t be able to travel, enter federal buildings, get on planes, and the like.
Much of my girlfriend’s family lives in Missouri, a state that’s not in compliance with the Real ID act. Her relatives do a little traveling from time to time. They get on airplanes and show their non-compliant Missouri driver’s license. No federal agents stop them and prevent them from boarding a plane.
Well, most state DL’s – including those in Missouri – don’t comply with the Real ID Act. That law is still on the books in DC – it’s never been repealed. It’s never been challenged in court either. But – due to 25 states refusing to comply with the “law” – in much of the country that Real ID act is virtually null and void.
Here in California- the state always seems to be on its knees, begging the feds for something. Well, except on marijuana. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that state medical marijuana laws were illegal. At that time there were 10 states that had such laws. Do you know how many were repealed? Zero. And today, there’s 14 states defying Washington dc, and getting away with it.
Today, we see the Firearms Freedom Act movement growing along these lines – it’s already passed in 8 states. Following that lead, 5 states have passed laws saying no to Obamacare mandates too.
THE LESSON
What’s the lesson? This is the blueprint – when enough people say no to unconstitutional laws, regulations….and mandates….and enough states pass laws to back those people up – there’s not much the federal government can do, but slowly and consistently back off. There’s no tanks rolling into Los Angeles to shut down the dispensaries, and there’s no jack-booted thugs forcing people to get new driver’s licenses in Missouri. This is far from perfect, but it can work, and it is working right now.
So here’s the final question – and the big challenge to you today.
The next time you begrudgingly follow some federal “law” that restricts your right to keep and bear arms – or the next time you hear about a gun rights case that will be decided in 2, or 4, or 6 years – with the hope that some judge will give you permission to exercise your rights, ask yourself this question:
Do you….gun rights activists….have as much courage as the pot smokers?
For the sake of liberty – I hope you do – because I believe that we the people need to exercise our rights whether they the government wants to give us “permission” to or not!This is the fourth in a series of short fiction by Ms. Kaori Shoji entitled “The Amazing Japanese Wife” about international marriages in Japan gone off the deep end. This is the first of the stories told from the women’s perspective. Any similarity to real events, persons, or incidents are your imagination and probably means that you really should have a stiff drink and contemplate the meaning of happiness, karma, and the universe. You need Suntory time. Previous chapters are below, although not all stories are clearly connected.
The Amazing Japanese Wife: Part 1
The Amazing Japanese Wife: Part 2 “Fucked Up In Six Trees”
The Amazing Japanese Wife: Part 3 “A Man Needs His Carcinogen”
I hear his car slow down, approaching the driveway, and immediately feel nauseous. I take a breath and will the corners of my mouth to turn upwards. Americans always smile and two years of Oakland living has convinced me that Northern Californians are the smiliest Americans of all. With dazzling white teeth and clear eyes, these people broadcast an unshakeable confidence, a mineral streak of inner satisfaction embedded right in the bloodstream. At first, it was unnerving to see all those supremely happy expressions, the isense of entitlement apparent in their every movement, even in the way they waved to each other from their cars, under the bright blue Californian sky. What if they had problems, like their houses burned down or spouses betrayed them or…what then?
“The point is not to BE happy, it’s to assimilate a SENSE of happiness,” said my friend Mayu-san, about a year after I got here with my husband Douglas. “Whatever is happening in your personal life, it’s only polite to present your best and happiest self. That’s how it works around here. Anything that’s not suitable for Facebook, isn’t suitable for real life.”
I remember that moment because Mayu-san never said anything out of the ordinary and suddenly there she was, articulating words that pierced me with the spear of truth. I think I responded with my mouth agape, just looking at her. And then the moment ended, Mayu-san went into the kitchen to get more drinks and the afternoon picked up where it left off–mired in banalities.
Still, Mayu-san’s words surface in my consciousness from time to time, like right about now when Douglas turns the key in the lock and walks into the foyer. I go over to greet him and we exchange a light hug. “Hey Eri,” he says. “God, what a day.”
And I follow him into the kitchen, quelling the urge to retch. Another wave of nausea washes over me like polluted sea water. “Are you tired?” I ask in Japanese and he answers in English though I’m no longer listening. He’ll want to have a Bloody Mary, and then a bite to eat and then he’ll get ready to go to the gym. I calculate that in a little over two and a half hours, Douglas will be gone again. I feel my composure returning.
This nausea thing has been going on for the past 3 months. I haven’t told Douglas because he’ll immediately say: “You’re pregnant! I gotta call my dad!”. Then, I’ll have the horrible task of telling him that no, that’s not it and no, it’s not worth going to a doctor (because I already had a check-up four months ago) and yes, I was fine. Fine. Smile. Confidence. Happiness. Words to live by if you want to survive in California.
Not that I’m not having a good time. Everyone I know back in Japan is so envious of the life I have out here, the privileges of being a wife in Silicon Valley, with her own Honda to get around in and her own circle of friends consisting of well-to-do Japanese women. There’s a whole club of them here, and when we stroll around the malls together or have lunch at a swank restaurant, white men stare with frank interest. I never knew Japanese women had such magnetism in the US, I always thought everyone preferred blondes, period. Everyday I get compliments about my smooth skin, petite figure, my flawless fashion and femininity. At parties, men come up to flirt and seem enthralled that my English isn’t that great. I also discovered that there’s a gated community known locally as ‘The Japan Palace,’ where tech moguls like Jerry Ang and the CEO of Oracle live with their Japanese wives, in huge, splendid villas.
In my head though, I’m constantly making excuses to friends and family back in Japan about my wonderful Californian life. It’s not THAT great, I would say weakly. In these imaginary conversations, I’m mostly talking to my mother or my female colleagues back in Tokyo who are trying to juggle kids, day care and a full-time job while clutching at the last strands of youth before collapsing into middle age.
Really, I say to them. Silicon Valley is the most expensive place on the face of the earth! Our rental house costs a little under 3000 dollars a month but that’s because we have only 2 bedrooms and even then the locals told us what a bargain and an exceptional piece of luck. And: A packet of organic eggs came to 6.50 at Whole Foods before the Amazon merger lowered that by about 1 dollar, like yeah, that’s supposed to make everyone feel better! And the Californians make such a big deal about the Farmer’s Markets but the produce is about 40 percent more expensive than the supermarkets in Tokyo. We can never afford to have kids, because day care is just too costly and nannies are..
What I leave out is this: I don’t want children. I’m fine with being a Japanese Wife but I would never want to be a Japanese Mother. I think about sex with Douglas, and a spasm of pain shoots up from the bottom of my spine to the back of my eyes. Mayu-san who has two kids with her husband Michael, told me that unlike Japanese husbands, American men will demand sex after childbirth and fall into black rages if their wives refuse. Mayu-san shrugged and said it was a trade-off but she didn’t specify what she was getting in return. Something she didn’t care to post on Facebook, I guess.
I recall the thrill and slight disgust of making love to Douglas for the first time and how, during the course of our dating, he never wanted to use a condom. “In America, a lot of women would qualify this as rape,” he’d say matter-of-factly as I wiped his goo off my chest. “But Japanese women love it, don’t you sweetie?”
Last month on our wedding anniversary he took me to French Laundry for dinner and then in the car heading back, leaned over and said: “I’m a great husband, aren’t I? Now you have to be extra nice to me tonight.” The fact that he said this in Japanese secretly enraged me but I laughed it off. Later, at home, after he was finally done, I locked myself in the bathroom and gargled with mouthwash over and over and when I came back to the bed, Douglas said “hey baby, did you have a good time? Oh, by the way, don’t tell my mom I took you to French Laundry, she’s dying to go but Dad’s never taken her.”
Unsuitable for Facebook again.
Once the voices in my head die down, I find myself calmly going through the day. After all, why worry? Life is so good here, and so easy. Douglas is fine with eating cereal for breakfast, he never wants to bring a Bento box lunch like he did when we were living in Tokyo. For dinner, he just grazes on whatever’s available in the fridge, a glass of vodka clutched in one hand. I make my own meals but apart from weekends when events like pot-luck parties and brunch with Douglas’s parents crowd my calendar, I never cook anything elaborate. I don’t have to, and when I think of how hard I used to work in Tokyo, earning a steady income and being the good Japanese wife, I can’t help scoffing at my poor, overworked self. If there was a time machine, I would use that to go back and tell my 36-year old self to relax. In a little while, I would be crying to my husband Douglas that I was sick of Japan and Tokyo. I would implore him to get a lucrative tech job in Nor Cal. And then I would move to a real American home with a backyard and two-car garage. So go easy on yourself because you will be SO all right, I would say. And now? Apart from this nausea and the suspicion that deep down I hated Douglas, I was having the time of my life.
“Just don’t go to Whole Foods, and avoid that fucking Aveda place like the plague,” Douglas said when we first got here. “Man, talk about overpriced BS.” Already, he was mixing Americanisms in his conversations, ignoring the fact that I couldn’t understand half of what he was saying. Not that it bothered me. In Tokyo, where we lived for 5 years before coming out here, Douglas would often launch into long diatribes against the Japanese government, Tokyo life, the joylessness of Japanese society and why we were so ‘insular’ and ‘defeatist’ and ‘fucking depressed.’ I didn’t really understand then, either.
To me, it was all the same. I grew up in a typical Japanese salariman household and there was never much smiling going on. Depression was more or less the norm. As far back as I can remember, my parents had bickered and fought. My mother sighed and washed the dishes by hand and acted tired to the very dregs of her existence, every single day. Her mantra in life went to the tune of: it was a terrible thing for a woman to be a wife and mother, tied to household drudgery for life. But equally terrible was to remain single. Either way, a woman was doomed. And then she would bend over the sink filled with dishes and it would be time for me to go to cram school, so I could at least get into a good university before becoming the ill-fated wife/mother to carry on the cycle of Japanese womanhood.
But even my seemingly miserable mom perked up whenever there was a family event, like my brother being promoted and sent to his company office in London. Or my sister’s wedding, when Mother splurged on a formal kimono with a price tag that enraged my father. He had just spent 5 million yen (a little over 50,000 USD) in getting his older daughter married and settled down and was devastated to see that his wife had gone and spent another million yen on what he saw as a completely unnecessary extravagance. “How can you say that?,” my mother wept and screamed. “All my life, I gave everything to this house and the family and now I can’t buy a little something for myself?” When she calmed down, my mother said plaintively that she will wear the same kimono at my wedding, so this purchase was actually a money-saver.
Well, she lied. Seven years later I had my own wedding in Honolulu and my mother bought a flowing silk summer dress with a hat and heels and a Fendi handbag she has never used since and is tucked away in a closet crammed with similar “little somethings” she had bought for herself over the years. “Japanese women are scary,” Douglas said to me when I told him about it. “That’s what happens when men let housewives hold the purse strings. It’s just stupid to do that, I don’t get why the majority of men in this nation insist on making their own lives miserable. I never would.” True to his word, back in Tokyo, Douglas and I had separate bank accounts. He would hand over 200,000 yen out of his payment every month. I would spend another 150,000 to cover the rest of our monthly expenses. But I had another, secret account from when I was single, in which I hoarded my personal savings. That account is still in Japan, waiting for me. I learned from watching American TV that this was called a Fuck Off Fund. Douglas was only half right – Japanese or American, women are scary. How else were we going to protect ourselves?
I have money on my mind a lot because I worked in a Tokyo bank for 16 years and 10 of those years were spent at the counter, counting the customers’ cash and helping them with their little financial problems. I wore a suit and heels to work but changed into the bank uniform once I got there, in the women’s locker room with 23 other females. I worked 10 to 11 hour days, rode a crowded train for 2 hours everyday and by the time I hit 30. I was exhausted. I was more than ready to quit the job and get married. Never mind that I would be tied to housework for life – at least I could stop forcing my body every morning into the bank uniform with its tight skirt and tiny vest. I told Naolki- my boyfriend of six years what I was feeling and he said, okay we may as well take the plunge.
But a week after this dicussion he injured a knee playing futsal–which is like indoor soccer for Japanese salarymen.He was in the hospital for 2 weeks. During that time, he got real friendly with the other patients on the floor, all with sports injuries. One of them was a 17-year old girl who hurt her spine playing volleyball for her school team. She wasn’t one of those sex-kitten high school girls of Japanese media lore – she was in fact, so wholesome and exuberant she made everyone laugh just by showing up for medication at the nurse statiom. Her hair was short, her limbs too long, she was clumsy and had no sensuality to speak of. Yet, my boyfriend fell head over heels for her.
“She’s young, she’s SO young,” he kept saying, as if I didn’t get it the first time. He talked incessantly about the latest funny thing she did, how she bit into an apple without peeling the skin, how she giggled with her family when they came to visit, and broke down in tears when they went home. “She reminds me of what it’s like to be 17 again,” he said wistfully, and would engage her in long conversations about volleyball (he too, had played in high school) and help her with school work so she wouldn’t lag behind. By the end of those 2 weeks, I really had enough of this but didn’t know how to tell him without sounding like a jealous nag. And then my boyfriend Naoki looked me right in the eye and said: “I can’t marry you. I’m sorry. I just can’t.” I did put up a fight, telling him it was just an infatuation that would go away but he shook his head. “It’s not her. It’s just that the thought of marriage is suffocating to me. It’s got nothing to do with you personally.”
Three years later when he was 33, Naoki married a woman aged 26, and the whole thing was so wounding I took time off and spent three days lying in my bed at home. By that time though, I had come to realize the horrible truth about being a woman in Japan – the options dwindle with each passing year and the number 3 at the left side of one’s age may as well have been a poisonous smudge. Up until age 29, I was used to male attention and could count on a few invitations a week to ‘networking parties’ which were actually matchmaking parties. I’ll admit that on a few occasions I went to love hotels with one or another of the men who expressed more than a passing interest, but it didn’t lead to anything much and my heart was set on Naoki anyway. And then my 30th birthday came and went. The invitations dried up and at the end of that year, Naoki was gone.
On my 35th birthday I took fate into my own hands and started looking for a foreigner husband. A little before this, my mother’s brother – my uncle who had always praised me and said I would go far in life because I was intelligent and pretty, went to Cebu on a business trip and ended up getting engaged to a 16 year old Fillippina waitress. The whole family was dumbfounded, but my uncle was ecstatic and it turned out, so was my mom. “He says that the women over there age really quickly and by the time she turns 30, there won’t be much of a difference between them,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper. “Now I call that smart. At his age, he wants a young woman to take care of him.” My uncle was 59 at the time. It was, as Douglas said to me later, “an obscene WTF situation.” We didn’t invite him to our wedding, ostensibly because Honolulu was so far away from Cebu where he now lived with his young wife. |
and least dramatic of the three debates, with genuine exchanges on policy. The questions covered the full gamut of issues facing a president, and the first 20 minutes drew predicable faultlines between the candidates on abortion, guns and immigration.
For a brief period it was possible to imagine this was another US presidential election, where both candidates accept the rules of the game and show some respect towards each other. That veneer proved flimsy.
Both questioned the fitness of the other to be president. Trump declared Clinton “should not be allowed to run”. He followed this up by refusing to say whether he would accept the results of the election, saying only he would “keep us in suspense”.
As Clinton pointed out, Trump has a record of calling foul whenever he loses, and his supporters are already calling the election rigged against him. Matt Bevin, the Tea Party Republican governor of Kentucky, has already said blood may need to be shed were Trump to lose.
The paranoid streak in American politics has never before reached the heights that it will in the wake of a Clinton victory, which looks likely.
Trump the wrecking ball
Nicole Hemmer, Assistant Professor, Miller Center, University of Virginia, and US Studies Centre, University of Sydney
There is exactly one thing that matters from the third debate: Trump refused to say he would accept the results of the 2016 election.
Never before in the history of American democracy has a candidate made the legitimacy of the results contingent on his own judgement. It is the most demagogic, dangerous statement made in a presidential debate.
What else is to be said? There was policy tonight – more than we heard in the first two – but it just doesn’t matter.
Trump’s thin-skinned reaction to his poor poll numbers – his conspiratorial fantasy of a rigged election that has zero basis in reality – endangers the most vital part of America’s representative democracy: the peaceful transfer of power from one party to the next. It has been breached exactly once, leading to the Civil War.
There will be no civil war following November’s vote, but the stakes are still quite high. Trump has become a wrecking ball smashing into the foundations of American democracy.
If nothing else, the third debate made clear the stakes of the 2016 election.
Trump ignorant on policy issues
Kumuda Simpson, Lecturer in International Relations, La Trobe University
During the final debate Trump once again demonstrated his startling ignorance on important policy issues – particularly on Iraq and Syria – and his propensity to brazenly lie about his past statements. Clinton, also once again, displayed her detailed understanding of those same issues.
Perhaps the most appalling moment was Trump saying he wouldn’t necessarily accept the election result – thus undermining the very bedrock of democracy.
While the third debate covered a lot of the same material as the previous debates, it also raised two important topics. Gun control and abortion rights are fundamental to understanding US politics.
Clinton and Trump declare vastly different views on these two issues. Trump is anti-abortion and pro-gun-rights. Clinton is pro-choice and in favour of “reasonable gun regulation”.
Since the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade, which declared abortion a constitutional right, conservative states across America have been aggressively legislating to restrict women’s access. Trump said if he were able to appoint several conservative justices to the Supreme Court they would absolutely overturn Roe v Wade. This would be a disaster for women’s rights to control their bodies and reproductive health.
Trump claimed he would hand legislative responsibility for abortion back to the states. We can already see the disastrous consequences of this, as many American states have already eroded what is a fundamental human right.
On gun control the difference was down to regulation. Trump is opposed to any regulation restricting particular types of guns or who can buy them. Clinton claimed she supported the Second Amendment, but with legislation that would close what’s known as the gun-show loophole and restrict access to certain types of weapons.
It is highly unlikely that either position would do anything to seriously tackle the staggering problem of gun violence in the US. Trump’s position certainly would not. Regulation is necessary and will help – but not solve – the problem.
The real issue here is gun violence in the US does not have one simple cause. It is a complex and multi-causal problem that deserves greater attention – and one that certainly was not going to be covered adequately in such a forum.
Debate all about character
Bryan Cranston, Online Lecturer in Politics, and PhD Candidate in Politics and History, Swinburne University of Technology
The third and final presidential debate passed with few surprises.
There was never any doubt as to who was going to win the debate. The only way Trump could have won would have been if Clinton wasn’t there.
Ironically, Trump only needed to perform slightly better than his two previous debate disasters to be considered as having done a good job. Naturally, any attempt to portray Trump as anything less than the unmitigated winner of the contest will be seen by his campaign and supporters as further evidence of a conspiracy by the mainstream media to deny him the White House.
With their response to the opening question, Clinton and Trump steadfastly staked their claims to their respective party bases. Clinton affirmed her support for abortion rights, marriage equality, and campaign finance reform, while Trump focused on the Second Amendment and gun control. This was less a debate and more about rationalising an appeal to core supporters.
Trump was less than affirmative on his position regarding abortion rights. In fact, he didn’t answer the question, which will no doubt anger many evangelical and religious conservatives.
The debate only got worse for Trump when the topic turned to Russia and national security. In a debate about policy, facts were always going to play a major role, and this is perhaps the most significant deficit in Trump’s campaign. Clinton refuted all of Trump’s attacks by citing evidence, while Trump resorted to rhetoric.
Despite attempts to make it about policy, the final debate was all about character. Each candidate talked about why the other was unfit to serve as president.
It was a nasty, personal demonstration of two people seeking the highest political office in the world. Who won? The winner was overwhelmingly clear, and it wasn’t Trump.On Saturday, the New York Times published an article based on slides obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden as well as interviews with anonymous intelligence officials that alleged the NSA had broken into the servers of Chinese telecom giant Huawei. There, the spy agency obtained sensitive information about the company's routers and switches that served to link its customers to its network. The NSA also monitored the communications of Huawei's executives, the NYT reports.
The US has long had a fraught relationship with Huawei, a company that has maintained that it is independent from the Chinese government and has no ties to the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Still, citing national security concerns, US authorities blocked Huawei's purchase of 3Com in 2008, accused it of un-American activities in 2012, and then convinced Sprint and SoftBank to limit their use of Huawei gear in 2013.
The New York Times report said that the 2010 NSA operation, code-named “Shotgiant” (link goes to leaked classified slides), was looking for clues that the giant telecom was working with the PLA.
The report also noted that the US had another strategic interest in its spying:
N.S.A. analysts made clear that they were looking for more than just “signals intelligence” about the company and its connections to Chinese leaders; they wanted to learn how to pierce its systems so that when adversaries and allies bought Huawei equipment, the United States would be plugged into those networks. (The Times withheld technical details of the operation at the request of the Obama administration, which cited national security concerns.) The N.S.A.’s operations against China do not stop at Huawei. Last year, the agency cracked two of China’s biggest cellphone networks, allowing it to track strategically important Chinese military units, according to an April 2013 document leaked by Mr. Snowden. Other major targets, the document said, are the locations where the Chinese leadership works. The country’s leaders, like everyone else, are constantly upgrading to better, faster Wi-Fi — and the N.S.A. is constantly finding new ways in.
According to Der Spiegel, a German magazine that is also in possession of the same Snowden files as the NYT, “A special unit with the US intelligence agency succeeded in infiltrating Huawei's network and copied a list of 1,400 customers as well as internal documents providing training to engineers on the use of Huwaei products, among other things.”Frustration is mounting as migrants and refugees wait to cross tightening borders. Many nations are starting to block more and more entering migrants, leaving many stranded. (Reuters)
Frustration is mounting as migrants and refugees wait to cross tightening borders. Many nations are starting to block more and more entering migrants, leaving many stranded. (Reuters)
— Nations along Europe’s refugee route are taking the boldest steps yet to clamp down on migrant flows, trapping thousands of asylum seekers and potentially blocking countless war-weary families from finding sanctuary in the West.
The crackdown in recent days, aid groups say, comes at the worst possible time — just as new arrivals are rapidly increasing and the majority of migrants, once single men, are now women and children. An even larger surge from the Middle East and beyond is expected in the coming weeks, with tens of thousands more migrants set to land in Greece and start the long trek northwest to Europe’s core.
But crisis-weary countries from Austria to Macedonia are now moving to bar the doors. Since Sunday, Macedonia and Serbia, for instance, have blocked passage to virtually all Afghans — a group accounting for roughly a third of all migrants. Even many Syrians and Iraqis without proper documentation are being turned away, aid groups and U.N. officials say, leaving a quickly increasing number of desperate asylum seekers stranded in nearly bankrupt Greece.
[Spring could bring a fresh surge of refugees. But Europe isn’t ready for them.]
There were other signs that the main route traversed by more than 1 million migrants last year was breaking down, with aid groups saying Croatia and Slovenia are also refusing entry to more asylum seekers. Slovenia’s parliament voted late Monday to dispatch the army for border control. And in yet another blow to the cherished ideal of free movement in Europe, Belgium said Tuesday that it would set up border controls on its frontier with France to block migrants recently cleared from a sprawling camp in Calais from entering its territory.
Afghans, meanwhile, were being stranded at various points along the 1,000-mile route from Athens to Vienna, as observers warned of an impending humanitarian crisis that could rival the peak of Europe’s refugee emergency this past fall.
“The situation isn’t good for us; there are no proper bathrooms or medical care. It’s very cold,” said Teimoorshah Yousefi, 40, one of 600 Afghans stranded at a northern Macedonian border crossing this week. He, along with his wife and two sons, ages 10 and 13, were being refused entry by Serbia. The family, he said, was getting frantic.
“I don’t know exactly what our final destination will be,” he said. “We want to go to any country that accepts us.”
In Europe, though, that list is getting shorter and shorter, and a war of words between nations was breaking out over the new rash of restrictions. Greece filed an official protest with Austria, which appeared to set off the domino effect of restrictions by introducing strict asylum caps last week. Athens decried what it called a “unilateral and non-friendly act” that could add a full-blown domestic refugee crisis to its already long list of financial woes. Germany and Austria also exchanged terse words.
[More European nations are barring their doors to migrants]
On Tuesday, frustrated Greek police cleared hundreds of protesting Afghans from railroad tracks where they were staging a sit-in. In videos and photos, Afghan children held signs begging Macedonian authorities to “please help us cross border.”
“We’re going to see the backlog of people grow exponentially now, and you’ll have upward of 20,000 to 40,000 people getting stuck over the next few days,” said Kirk Day, Europe representative of the International Rescue Committee. “This is a continent that says it is founded on the principle of human rights,” he continued. “But right now, all we see is a race by countries that don’t want to be the last one to close their borders.”
Afghan migrants who have no permission to cross the border between Greece and Macedonia stay behind a fence near Gevgelija, Macedonia on Feb. 23. (Georgi Licovski/EPA)
Such countries say they have no choice, citing a building resentment against asylum seekers at home, overburdened refugee systems and heightened concerns that militant extremists are blending in with migrants. Already, more than 100,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean this year, far outpacing the same period in 2015. And yet, the Austrians and other nations enacting fresh controls say, Europe has failed to put in place a working plan to tackle the crisis, leaving them with no other option but to act.
[In Europe, the refugee crisis as art: 14,000 bright orange life jackets]
On Wednesday, amid mounting criticism from the European Commission, Austria and other nations that are slapping new restrictions on migrants were set to meet to discuss the crisis. It remained unclear whether charges that some of the new moves may violate European and international law would compel those nations to change course.
“As long as there is no European solution, we will have to take national measures,” Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz said in an interview published Tuesday by Germany’s Rheinische Post.
Indeed, Austria appears to have touched off the new round of border tightening, shocking many of its neighbors by introducing caps on Friday that limit the number of migrants who can enter and claim asylum there to 80 per day. It will also allow a maximum of 3,200 migrants a day to transit to Germany, the single-largest destination for asylum seekers.
[Could Europe’s refugee crisis be the undoing of Angela Merkel?]
Berlin immediately charged Vienna with effectively creating a pipeline that would funnel migrants to Germany while Austria shouldered little burden itself. At the same time, nations south of Austria scrambled to make sure blocked migrants would not get stuck on their territories.
The moves followed a little-noticed deal struck last week by the police services of Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia to get tougher on migrants.
The changes include the barring of asylum seekers who have lived for long periods in “safe” countries such as Turkey and Iran, a group that includes many Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians. On Tuesday, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees strongly condemned the new moves, warning of “the heightened likelihood of pushbacks, of people being stranded in the open, exposed to freezing cold weather and at risk of violence and exploitation at the hands of smugglers and traffickers.”
The new steps taken by Macedonia, however, marked only the latest in a string of measures meant to choke off the single-busiest migrant route. In November, Macedonia began barring all but Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans in an effort to weed out economic migrants. The decision now to exclude Afghans, critics say, is a dramatic escalation.
Not only are their numbers huge, but unlike migrants from North Africa and Pakistan, asylum seekers from Afghanistan have high acceptance rates in nations such as Germany — raising the prospect that legitimate refugees are now being restricted.
“The last I checked, peace had not suddenly come to Afghanistan,” Day said.
The move raised fears that more migrants would hire unscrupulous smugglers or risk the more dangerous routes out of Greece. In Bulgaria, for instance, migrants have been detained and beaten, while Albania presents rugged terrain that is harder to cross than Macedonia, where temporary visas were being granted so migrants could legally take trains and buses north.
Fear was also mounting that more migrants may switch back to the treacherous route to Europe that runs through violent Libya and across a far greater expanse of sea to Italy.
At the same time, pressure was growing in Germany for Chancellor Angela Merkel to drop what has been a humanitarian posture that did not set a limit on the number of asylum seekers her nation would accept. In recent days, Germans have watched as two viral videos showed more outbursts of anti-migrant rage. On Thursday, for instance, a busload of terrified migrants was surrounded by an angry German mob chanting “Go home” in the eastern city of Clausnitz.
Calls for a migrant cap in Germany — something activists say would amount to the final blow for asylum seekers — were growing.
“The federal government... has the clear responsibility to take care of border security and reinstate the rule of law,” Bavarian Justice Minister Winfried Bausback, a member of the Christian Social Union, sister party of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, said Tuesday.
Stephanie Kirchner in Berlin and Elinda Labropoulou in Athens contributed to this report.
Read more:
Racial profiling seems to be a weapon in Europe’s war on terrorism
3 important facts about how the U.S. resettles Syrian refugees
Fear and paranoia lead Finns to form vigilante groups that ‘protect women’ from asylum seekersThe George W. Bush Administration was set on going to war with Iraq even before Colin Powell made his infamous 2003 weapons of mass destruction pitch to the United Nations, writes the former secretary of state in his new book, "It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership."
It might be Powell's biggest revelation in the book, which details the experiences and lessons learned during his career as a soldier, a four-star general and secretary of state.
Powell writes in one chapter in which he discussed his address to the U.N. that war "was approaching," reports the Huffington Post, which obtained an advanced copy of the book slated for a May 22 release.
"By then, the President did not think war could be avoided," Powell writes. "He had crossed the line in his own mind, even though the NSC [National Security Council] had never met--and never would meet--to discuss the decision."
Powell refers to the address to the U.N. as a "blot." It was during that address that he appealed to the international body to support the United States because the country--albeit, erroneously--believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, notes a Bloomberg report on the book.
The speech and the facts surrounding the speech serve as a lesson to business leaders on the importance of staying skeptical and following their intuition, Powell writes.
"Yes, a blot, a failure will always be attached to me and my UN presentation," the former U.S. secretary of state writes.... "I am mad mostly at myself for not having smelled the problem. My instincts failed me."
Powell points a finger at Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby, the former vice president's chief of staff, as the ones responsible for providing the inaccurate information about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction, the Huffington Post reports.
In the book, Powell notes the weapons of mass destruction case "was a disaster."
"I learned later that Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, had authored the unusable presentation, not the NSC staff. And several years after that, I learned from Dr. [Condoleezza] Rice that the idea of using Libby had come from the Vice President, who had persuaded the President to have Libby, a lawyer, write the 'case' as a lawyer's brief and not as an intelligence assessment."
Powell, though, takes credit for rejecting continued appeals from Cheney to add "assertions that had been rejected months earlier to links between Iraq and 9/11 and other terrorist acts," according to the Huffington Post report.
More from Yahoo! News:Clarification: This story was revised at 12:13 p.m., June 28, 2011, to clarify the casualty rate for Maine. It is 1.44 deaths per 100,000 residents.
Considering the size of its population, Maine is paying a deadlier price for the war in Afghanistan than any other state.
Additional Photos A transfer team carries the remains of Spc. Wade A. Slack, who was from Waterville, on May 8, 2010. Slack, 21, died in Afghanistan. 2010 Associated Press file photo Related Headlines General named to head US force OKs drawdown
Afghanistan’s future – and past – still murky
According to figures released last week by the Department of Defense and analyzed by The Guardian newspaper of England, Maine’s casualty rate of 1.52 deaths per 100,000 residents is the highest in the country. (Because of a residency mistake, Maine’s actual figure is 1.44.)
Only one other state – Wyoming at 1.10 – has a rate above one death per 100,000 residents from Operation Enduring Freedom, now in its 10th year.
“I think about a small state like ours,” said U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-1st District. “Virtually everybody knows someone who is currently serving, who’s been lost, who’s been injured, who has a family member who is affected, and it’s really taken a big toll.”
Pingree spoke by cellphone Monday afternoon from York County. Her office issued a news release Monday morning about the Guardian story, along with a statement reiterating her desire to withdraw troops from Afghanistan as quickly as possible.
“I’ve been opposed to the war for a long time,” she said. “Particularly since the death of (Osama) bin Laden, it’s time to remove our troops more aggressively than even the president has proposed.”
Peter W. Ogden, director of the state Bureau of Veterans’ Services, said the figures supplied by the Department of Defense are off by one.
“They show 20 (casualties) but we actually only have 19,” Ogden said. “One of the people they have listed is actually not from Maine. He’s from New Hampshire.”
That would be Master Sgt. Jared Van Aalst, 34, of Laconia, N.H. He died in action in Kunduz province last August.
Correcting for the error, New Hampshire’s rate rises to 1.06 and Maine’s falls to 1.44, which remains the country’s highest. Delaware is ranked 50th, with 0.22.
California and Texas have suffered the highest number of casualties – 152 and 127, respectively – but their rates in terms of state population are 0.41 for California and 0.50 for Texas.
“Maine’s a small state, but it has a great military tradition,” Ogden said. “People serve, and they serve with units that put them in harm’s way. … They’ve never looked to stay in the back. They’ve always wanted to be in the front.”
The number of Mainers currently on active duty is difficult to determine, Ogden said. The Department of Defense doesn’t release such figures.
“We think somewhere around 15,000 people from Maine are on active duty,” he said. “That’s just my take on it. It’s not a very scientific figure.”
According to an Army report, Maine ranked third behind only Alabama and Nevada in the number of recruits in fiscal year 2009, with 213 per 100,000 young men and women.
Both Ogden and Pingree cited Maine’s tradition of military involvement, and each mentioned economic factors as playing a role in joining and staying with the service. Each also mentioned the absence of a draft.
“So we’ve had a huge dependence on the National Guard,” Pingree said. “We have a lot of Maine citizens who participate in the National Guard and many of them have been deployed multiple times, which is different from other wars where we have a draft or more people enlisting.”
Nineteen deaths in a decade-long war in Afghanistan can be measured against Maine casualties in other wars. In World War I, 1,026 Mainers lost their lives out of more than 35,000 who served. In World War II, the numbers were 2,551 of nearly 113,000. The Korean (233) and Vietnam (343) wars saw fewer deaths of Mainers. Four died in the Persian Gulf War and 25 in Iraq.
A Pew Research Center poll released last week showed, for the first time, that a majority of Americans – 56 percent – say troops in Afghanistan should be brought back as soon as possible.
“I definitely hear that from average citizens in Maine, from veterans, from people who are currently in the military,” Pingree said. “We had a mission, and that was to capture bin Laden.
“The other side of it is to continue making America more safe. Well, we have pockets of terrorism all over the world, and only a hundred members of al-Qaida left in Afghanistan, yet we’re spending $8 billion a month, much of it on nation building in Afghanistan. That could be used here in America.”
To critics who would paint her as an isolationist, Pingree pointed to the current U.S. presence around the globe and a defense budget that topped $685 billion in 2010.
“We’re maintaining a very strong military in this country,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean we have to spend $8 billion a month in Afghanistan.”
Staff Writer Glenn Jordan can be contacted at 791-6425 or at: [email protected]
ShareTitle: Devotion
Chapter Title: Family Time
Pairing: Elsanna
Rated: T
Notes: Here is where we start branching out into new territory! I had this scene thought up for the original Devotion, but I had scrapped it in a fit of frustration. I decided to use the idea and just add to it!
Huge thanks to Jessica-X for being an awesome beta!
A quick warning before you start reading: A character is very heavily implied to be terminally ill in the flashback scene of this chapter. If that makes you uncomfortable in any way, feel free to skip it.
xxxxx
"Hi, Elsa!" Eight year old Anna waves excitedly at her friend from her place in her mother's lap. The dark haired woman is carefully weaving small flowers into Anna's braids, smiling patiently as her child's eager bouncing makes it difficult to work. They already have everything set up, the old picnic blanket more than big enough for the large basket and pile of cutlery sitting beside its two occupants. They have situated themselves under a big tree, providing tons of shade for Elsa's sensitive skin, and they are at the perfect distance from the nearby playground so that Anna and Elsa could go play after lunch.
Elsa waves back and is about to run to them when a heavy hand stops her. She looks up at her Papa curiously. Though he is smiling, there is a weary look in his eyes that Elsa doesn't understand as he regards the mother and child duo. This is far from her first time hanging out with Anna without her parents being there, though it is the first time with Anna's mother alone acting as their caretaker, rather than Elsa's Aunty Gerda or Anna's father.
"Remember to be a good girl, Elsa," her Papa instructs, giving her shoulder a squeeze. "Don't cause Lailah too much grief, stay in her sight and listen to everything she says. If you want to go home early, call Kai and he'll come get you. Do you remember Kai's number?" Elsa nods, impatient to join Anna as she listens to the familiar lecture. "Good. Do you have everything?"
"Yes, Papa." Elsa tries to keep still but Anna's obvious impatience, as well as her own, is making it hard to focus on her Papa for much longer. He must realize this, since he bends down and gives her a tight hug. One that Elsa happily returns.
"Good girl," he praises, laying a soft kiss in her hair before he straightens up and gives Lailah a nod. Lailah returns the gesture with a small smile. "Now, go on and play. I'll come pick you up later."
Elsa doesn't need to be told twice. She sprints towards her best friend and sits down beside the pair when she reaches them. Lailah gives her a warm smile.
"Hello, Darling," she greets pleasantly. Elsa smiles and shyly greets her back.
Anna's mother is sort of a mystery to Elsa. She's only met Lailah a handful of times over the three years Anna and her have been friends and any attempt to ask Anna why is met with a shrug and Anna becoming sad, so Elsa learned not to ask. When Elsa first met her, the woman was completely bald and could barely walk; yet the other times after that, she's been sporting all kinds of different hair colors and styles. Anna once explained that she's a hairstylist who liked to experiment, which is why her hair is so different all the time. One of the strangest things to Elsa is how pale and thin the woman is, seeing as Anna has nice, tan skin and is a much healthier weight in comparison. Anna simply says it's because she doesn't go outside very often.
Whenever Lailah is around, though, she treats Elsa like a second daughter; spoiling her and Anna with treats and cuddles and games. Anna's father is usually there to keep her from going too overboard but the friendly woman will still sneak the girls chocolate and loves to regale Elsa with stories about the adventures she's been on, and about Anna's early childhood. Elsa has never seen her without a smile on her face and an almost childlike sparkle in her turquoise eyes- the same one shared with her daughter.
As they ate, Anna makes wild gestures with the sandwich in her hand as she tells Elsa about the "huge squirrel monster" that stole all the seeds from the birdfeeder the day before and her passionate depiction of her valiant attack on the monster makes Elsa fall into a helpless ball of giggles. Lailah listens to her daughter's tale with a fondly exasperated smile. She takes small bites of her sandwich, occasionally pausing to remind the girls to eat or to tell Anna not to speak with her mouth full.
The second the girls finish their meals, they dash towards the playground. Lailah stays where she is, pulling a small book out of her purse so she can read while she watches. The sun is bright and unobstructed by clouds, the sunbeams pleasantly warm. Birds are singing from the trees and the chatter of other kids and their parents create a fun and exciting atmosphere for the girls as they play. To Elsa, it's a perfect day to be with her best friend.
It's about a half hour later and they are in the middle of playing a game of tag when something alarming happens. Something that sends both girls into a panic.
Lailah starts coughing, a tissue pressed to her mouth to keep any germs from spreading. However, it's unlike any cough Elsa has ever heard before. Great, painful hacks that sends the woman's frail body into a fit of shakes with every cough. Her eyes are clenched tightly shut in pain and every time she manages to catch a breath, the coughing comes back just as strong as ever.
Anna doesn't waste a second to go back to her mother's side, tears streaming down her freckled face. "Mama!" she cries, resting a small hand on her shoulder as she kneels in front of her mother. Elsa reaches them a second later, shaking in terror as she stands at Anna's side. The woman struggles to catch her breath and reaches her free hand up to rest on top of Anna's.
"I- I'm sorry, baby girls," she rasps between pants. Elsa bites her lip at just how much older she suddenly sounds. She gives Anna and Elsa a reassuring grin. "G-Go back and play, I'm okay."
"No, Mama!" Anna shakes her head so violently that her braid accidentally smacks her in the face, "Pa-Papa said that we have to call him when stuff like this happens,'member!? So we can get you to the-"
"N-No, Baby!" Lailah protests, cutting her daughter off. "I'm okay, I promise! Mama didn't mean to scare you, my Love, it was just a small episode. It's passed, see?" She pets Anna's hair with a shaking hand and presses a kiss to her forehead. "Elsa, Darling, take Anna and go play, okay? I'm fine."
Elsa hesitates, confusion and fear paralyzing her limbs. Lailah is smiling at her now, reassuring and loving despite the scary situation, so Elsa reaches out for Anna's hand. Anna doesn't fight her, just grips Elsa back tightly.
"P-Please call Papa?" Anna begs her mother, ignoring Elsa's gentle tugging as the winter blonde tries to get them back over to the playground. "Please, Mama?"
"I will, Baby. Go with Elsa for now," Lailah coos.
Anna obeys, but she's subdued and upset and Elsa doesn't know how to help. Instead of playing, the girls sit in the grass and Elsa just holds Anna to her and presses kisses to her head like her Mama does when she's upset.
Anna snuggles close but doesn't say anything. Elsa notices her gaze is instead fixed on Lailah, who's pacing the blanket now while talking on the phone. She can barely make out some of Lailah's words as her voice grows slightly louder in frustration. "-Don't want to go... want to be with... daughter...Don't know...time left!"
Elsa holds Anna tighter and presses her head against Anna's soft hair. She can't help but worry over how limp Anna is in her embrace. At only eight, she's far too young to understand what's going on, but Elsa knows, deep down, that her friend needs her now more than ever. Especially when Anna begins to sob into her neck.
xxxxx
"A picnic?"
Anna grins at her with an enthusiastic nod. "Yeah! We both have the day off today and I thought it would be good for us and Olaf to get out of this stuffy apartment and do something together!"
Elsa smiles at her friend, adjusting her hold on Olaf as he eagerly feeds. Elsa used to be too embarrassed to feed him in front of Anna, and for his first month, she always hid away in Olaf's room to nurse. After an unexpected public feeding, followed by a long and angry rant from Anna to a bigoted individual about how Elsa is completely within her rights as a nursing mother to feed her hungry child wherever she likes, she stopped caring as much. Besides, seeing Anna's look of wonder and adoration when Olaf eats is definitely worth the minor discomfort. It's always a treat to see Anna go starry eyed over every little thing her son does.
"That does sound lovely." The blonde leans back against the couch and flinches slightly when Olaf clamps down a little too hard in response to the movement. She strokes his back until he loosens.
Anna does a little hop of delight. "Great! You keep doing what you're doing! I'll get everything set up!" With that, the redhead disappears around the corner.
Only for a crashing noise to startle both mother and son. Olaf pulls away from Elsa's breast and starts to whimper and Elsa is about to stand to assist Anna when the redhead calls, "I'm okay! Just bumped into the trash can again!"
Elsa slumps against the couch with a fond sigh but she's soon distracted from warm thoughts of her goof ball of a friend by a grumpy whine. She quickly gets to work burping Olaf and while the baby stops whining, the frown on his face is still obvious.
Elsa grins down at him. "Mommy's grumpy boy," she murmurs. She pokes his nose and makes silly faces, giggling when his upset face morphs into a sunny, toothless grin that warms her entire being. She snuggles him, kissing his cheeks until he's giggling in her arms and starts pressing his own face against hers. Elsa coos and hugs him. "Oh Olaf, you are too cute!"
"You both are." Anna sounds amused from somewhere directly behind Elsa. The winter blonde takes her time to look back at her, though, reluctant to break the moment she's having with her son as his big, blue eyes twinkle up at her. Eventually, Olaf loses interest in her and turns his head to gaze curiously past Elsa's head. Elsa feels a pair of warm hands settle on her shoulder and she doesn't stop the shiver that went down her back when she hears Anna start cooing at him from just next to her ear.
"You just about ready, then?" Elsa asks. Anna nuzzles Elsa's temple with her nose instead of answering. Elsa tries not to think about how pleasant it feels. "I'm going to take that as a yes?"
"Yeah, it's all packed up in the car and ready to go." Anna drapes her arms past her shoulders in a loose hug so she can ruffle Olaf's chocolate hair. He gurgles in response and flails a tiny arm. "Just waiting on you and Olaf."
Elsa shrugs Anna off of her so she can stand, Olaf clinging to her shirt at the change in position. "Let me just get him dressed in something more outdoor appropriate." Elsa gives Anna's cheek a little peck and grins when the redhead's cheeks went that tiniest bit pink. "Meet us out at the car?"
Anna clears her throat and nods, walking away while mumbling quietly to herself. Elsa can swear she hears "You're going to be the death of me." and while her stomach still twists in a tight knot at the mention of Anna's feelings for her, Elsa can't stop herself from smiling after her.
It doesn't take long to get Olaf changed into a fresh pamper and into a pair of blue shorts and a white shirt with a smiling sun on it. The shirt is just a little bit too small, showing off a small strip of his pale belly. He looks so adorable that Elsa gives the exposed skin a couple of kisses, eliciting such sounds of delight from him that it makes Elsa's cheeks hurt from how hard she's smiling at him. A quick honk from outside jolts Elsa to the present.
"Okay, Olaf," she coos, "Let's go on an adventure with Anna, hmm?"
xxxxx
"Olaf!" Anna sings, dragging out the syllables of his name. The redhead is laying on her back with her head settled in Elsa's lap. Olaf settled on her stomach. The little boy blinks and lifts his head to peer at her curiously for a moment. Anna reaches out to tickle his cheek and he drops his head back down. "I love you, Olaf!" she sings again and Olaf lets out a little coo, nuzzling his face into the skin-warmed fabric of her shirt and smearing drool and mucus across it. Anna's face twists into an expression of mock offense. "Hey! That's one of my favourite tops, Buddy!"
Elsa regards the two warmly, running her fingers through Anna's soft hair while Anna plays with Olaf.
The three of them are |
9% positive, 81% negative
Among Latinos: 22% positive, 69% negative
Among women: 26% positive, 62% negative
Among independents: 26% positive, 52% negative
Among suburban voters: 31% positive, 55% negative
Rubio’s new ad
The Florida senator is touting his tough talk during Thursday’s FOX Business debate in a new ad, highlighting his statement that Hillary Clinton is “disqualified” from serving as president. “Hillary Clinton is disqualified from being commander-in-chief of the United States. Someone who cannot handle intelligence information appropriately cannot be commander-in-chief. And someone who lies to the families of those four victims of Benghazi can never be President of the United States.” It’ll air starting today in New Hampshire and South Carolina as he keeps trying to hammer home this part of his general election pitch.
RIP, Braden Joplin
And finally.. we’ll pause today to remember Braden Joplin, a 25 year-old campaign volunteer for Ben Carson who died yesterday after a van carrying Carson staff and volunteers flipped on an icy road in Iowa. Here at First Read, we’re devastated to hear of a loss that really hits home. Campaigns are frenetic, unpredictable and, yes – often nasty on the surface – but they’re supported by networks of volunteers willing to give up their time and talents in the name of nothing more than trying to make the country a little bit better. There’s nothing that takes the cynicism out of you like talking to a young volunteer who’s a true believer willing to do anything it takes for their candidate. And a reminder to all our readers who are staff, press or volunteers out in the field this cycle: Please be careful out there. No liveshot, no event, no deadline is worth risking an accident. So drive safely, slow down, put the phone away and be late if you have to be.
On the trail
Donald Trump holds rallies with Sarah Palin in Iowa at 9:30 am ET and in Oklahoma at 1:00 pm ET… Hillary Clinton stumps in Iowa, while Bill Clinton is in New Hampshire… Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and John Kasich are all in New Hampshire… And Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee campaigns in Iowa.
Countdown to Iowa: 12 days
Countdown to New Hampshire: 20 daysAll My Babies' Mamas Genre Reality Starring Shawty Lo Country of origin United States Original language(s) English Release Original network Oxygen Original release Canceled before airing
All My Babies' Mamas was an unaired reality television show starring rapper Shawty Lo, showcasing his lifestyle as the father of 11 children fathered by 10 different women.[1][2]
The show was set to premiere on the Oxygen Network in 2013, but garnered considerable coverage due to its allegedly stereotypical portrayal of black families and glamorizing of premarital sex and sex with multiple partners. All My Babies' Mamas was cancelled on January 15, 2013, without airing a single episode.[3]
Prerelease reaction [ edit ]
News of the show's central premise received a mostly negative reaction from critics.[4][5][6] A petition sprung up online to cancel the show, while some news commentators, and the conservative advocacy group Parents Television Council in conjunction with author Sabrina Lamb, panned the show for perpetuating or glorifying negative stereotypes.[7]
Oxygen's response [ edit ]
Oxygen network executives distanced themselves from the show,[8] and they canceled it before it aired.[3]
See also [ edit ]By Josh Abelove | WLKY News
The end of construction on the new bridges is cause for celebration, right?
Maybe not if you live in Southern Indiana or travel across the Ohio River frequently. Chances are by now you’ve heard about RiverLink, the all-electronic system that will be used to collect tolls each time you cross one of three bridges connecting metro Louisville to Indiana: the Abraham Lincoln Bridge (I-65 North), the John F. Kennedy Bridge (I-65 South), and the Lewis and Clark Bridge (connecting the Gene Snyder Freeway to State Road 265).
The start date for tolling is Friday, but first WLKY answers the top questions you may have about the system, how it works, and how it will impact you financially.
How do I sign up for a RiverLink account?
There are three ways for drivers to create a personal account. When I signed up, I used RiverLink.com. It only took a matter of minutes, so if you have computer access, this may be the most convenient method. You can also call 1-855-RIV-LINK.
If you do not have computer access or you want to speak with someone in person, there are RiverLink customer service centers located at 400 E. Main St. in Louisville and 103 Quartermaster Court in Jeffersonville. Both locations are open 7 a.m. – 7 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 a.m. – 2 p.m. Saturday.
When you create your RiverLink account, you need to have the following information:
Vehicle make, model, year and color
License plate number
Payment method
Prepaid personal accounts can be started with a minimum balance of $20.
You can register up to four vehicles to one account.
If you own more than four vehicles, you may open two or more personal accounts with the same address. When you reach a low account balance, RiverLink can replenish your account with an automatic charge to a credit card, debit card or checking account. You can also choose to replenish your account manually and will be sent a low-balance reminder via text or email.
There are no service fees for setting up or maintaining an account. You can receive your monthly account statement by email or access it online at RiverLink.com. There is a $2 fee to have a personal account statement mailed to you. The fee is waived if you have auto-replenishment activated on your account.
How does RiverLink actually work?
RiverLink is an all-electronic system. The benefit of this is there are no toll booths on the bridges, so traffic will continuously flow. Chances are you have seen the gantries after you cross the Lincoln Bridge or before you cross the Kennedy Bridge in Southern Indiana. There are sensors and high-resolution cameras attached to these gantries. The sensors will read local transponders placed on your windshield. It will then deduct the toll from your prepaid account.
If you do not have a local transponder or E-ZPass, the camera will capture an image of your license plate. Tolls will then be charged to an account matching the license plate. If no account exists, a bill will be sent to the address where that vehicle is registered. Toll rates are more per crossing for drivers who choose not to use a local transponder or E-ZPass due to higher administrative costs.
What is the difference between a local transponder and E-ZPass?
A RiverLink local transponder is free when you set up an account. It is an electronic device that is placed inside the front windshield of a vehicle. You cannot move it from vehicle to vehicle.
Mounting instructions are included with transponders. They’re placed on the inside of the windshield, as high and as central as possible. Transponders should be placed 3 inches away from any metal, tint, antenna or defroster. It will only work on the three locally tolled bridges.
A RiverLink E-ZPass transponder allows you to pay tolls automatically when you travel anywhere within the E-ZPass network.
The E-ZPass transponder is transferable between vehicles registered to a single account. These portable transponders are $15 to purchase. It is suggested that an E-ZPass transponder be purchased for each driver on your account. The E-ZPass transponder will be mailed free of charge to individuals and businesses. Drivers will pay the lowest RiverLink toll rates until transponders are in hand, as long as license plates are registered to the prepaid account with the E-ZPass transponder.
It’s important to note that drivers should have only one transponder in their vehicle at the same time. Having an E-ZPass transponder and a RiverLink local transponder in a vehicle can result in billing errors and possibly double billing.
More than 100,000 RiverLink transponders have been requested to date, including more than 82,000 RiverLink local transponders distributed and more than 18,000 RiverLink E-ZPass transponders ordered.
Nearly 45,000 families and more than 1,500 businesses have opened RiverLink accounts.
How much will it cost me to cross the bridges?
The toll rates vary depending on your vehicle classification, whether you have a local transponder and how frequently you cross one of the tolled bridges. For most of you, it will cost $2 each time you cross one of the three bridges if you have a transponder.
There is a frequent-user discount program. It is available to a driver with a registered personal account who makes 40 crossings (20 round trips) in a calendar month. After 40 crossings, the system will automatically apply a 50 percent credit per crossing for the first 40 crossings and apply a 50 percent discount to any additional crossings during that same calendar month. Unfortunately, the 40 trips associated with the frequent-user discount are measured by the transponder, not by the account. Trips can be combined on a single RiverLink E-ZPass transponder. However, only RiverLink local or RiverLink E-ZPass transponders qualify for the frequent-user discount. E-ZPass transponders from other locations won’t qualify.
Kentucky and Indiana will equally share toll revenues to meet the financial obligations to pay for the project and for maintenance on the bridges. Tolling will continue until all of the project’s financial obligations are satisfied. Currently, that is estimated to be through 2053; however, policy makers will determine at that time whether tolls continue to be necessary.
Tolls will increase annually beginning July 1, 2018, with inflation (measured by the Consumer Price Index) or 2.5 percent, whichever is higher. The expected increase would be pennies on the dollar, so it will be roughly a nickel for passenger vehicles with RiverLink local transponders or the E-ZPass.
What happens if I don’t want to sign up for a RiverLink account?
Drivers are not required to sign up for RiverLink, but it will cost you more to drive across the bridges if you do not have a RiverLink local transponder or E-ZPass.
There is another option if you only plan to cross the bridges a handful of times or maybe you have relatives who come through every few months and you want to save them money. You can get a prepaid RiverLink local transponder at one of seven temporary locations. RiverLink staff are available at the Nia Center in Louisville and at the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles in Jeffersonville. Prepaid RiverLink local transponders can also be obtained at five additional, temporary locations in Louisville and Jeffersonville.distortos
object-oriented C++ RTOS for microcontrollers
fully preemptive
round-robin and FIFO scheduling
all basic primitives aim for maximum compatibility with POSIX, thread support library from C++11 and other established standards
support for various mutex types (normal, error-checking, recursive) and mutex protocols (normal, priority inheritance, priority protection)
software timers
POSIX-style signals
static design where it is possible and makes sense
object-oriented design
written in C++11
Targets
Currently supported targets for distortos are:
ARMv6-M architecture (ARM Cortex-M0(+), ARM Cortex-M1): STM32F0, STM32L0 ARMv7-M architecture (ARM Cortex-M3, ARM Cortex-M4(F), ARM Cortex-M7(F)): STM32F1, STM32F4, STM32F7, STM32L4
Motivation and goals
First of all – distortos doesn’t aim to be the smallest or the fastest RTOS available. It’s size and execution overhead are proportional to the features offered. This of course doesn’t mean that it uses hundreds of kilobytes of ROM and RAM or all available processing power! It uses “just enough” to implement its functionality in a portable and efficient way.
There are many RTOSes available in many flavours and for many platforms, so why another? There are many reasons, but generally distortos was born of dissatisfaction with all of these existing solutions… Distortos aims to have all good features and none of the broken ones.
The second important reason is the state of support for various C++ features in existing RTOSes, which usually varies from “non existent” to “explicitly disabled” (with minor exceptions of course).
Despite the popular belief, using C++ does not automatically lead to slow/bloated/incomprehensible/… code, which distortos will try to demonstrate. Source code of distortos is self-explanatory, simple and consists of short functions. This contrasts with “typical” RTOS source code in the form of extremely long functions with very complex control flow and heavy use of macros. And that would be the third reason – showing that source code of fully-featured RTOS can be simple, while still being efficient and feature-rich.
Last, but not the least, most of these existing RTOSes require the developer to state some values during configuration – max number of threads in the system, max number of supported priorities, etc. – this makes no sense at all, because a good, scalable design doesn’t need such values.
License
This project is licensed under the terms of Mozilla Public License Version 2.0. This relatively new license is something in between other popular open source licenses like GPL or BSD. Most of the questions are answered in the MPL 2.0 FAQ.
Configuration & building
To configure & build distortos you need:
GNU Make build system;
(optionally) tup (version 0.7.3 or above) build system;
arm-none-eabi bleeding-edge-toolchain; alternatively you can try any other arm-none-eabi toolchain, but C++ exception handling code will increase the size of binary and incorrect newlib’s _reent struct configuration will dramatically increase RAM requirements (bleeding-edge-toolchain has the exceptions properly disabled and uses small variant of _reent struct – see here) – such combinations are not tested extensively;
struct configuration will dramatically increase RAM requirements (bleeding-edge-toolchain has the exceptions properly disabled and uses small variant of struct – see here) – such combinations are not tested extensively; POSIX-compatible shell (e.g. Bash);
GNU Coreutils or a set of compatible utilities;
kconfig-frontends (especially mconf tool) to create or edit the configurations;
Make sure the tools are available in your system’s PATH environment variable.
To create or edit a configuration run make menuconfig in the root of the project. You can either start from scratch or edit one of existing configurations (from configurations/<board>/<variant> folder). When creating a new configuration make sure the name of created file is distortosConfiguration.mk.
DO NOT edit distortosConfiguration.mk files manually! kconfig-frontends tools make sure that multiple pre- and post-conditions are satisfied, and these conditions can easily be violated by manual modifications of the configuration.
To select the configuration of your choice execute make configure CONFIG_PATH=<path-to-distortosConfiguration.mk>, where <path-to-distortosConfiguration.mk> is the relative path to selected distortosConfiguration.mk file. This will create selectedConfiguration.mk file which is needed to build distortos. If <path-to-distortosConfiguration.mk> is in the form configurations/<board>/<variant>, you can omit configurations/ prefix – make configure CONFIG_PATH=configurations/STM32F4DISCOVERY/test and make configure CONFIG_PATH=STM32F4DISCOVERY/test will both select the same configuration. You can execute make configure with no arguments if the selected distortosConfiguration.mk file is in the main folder of the project – in that case. is used as CONFIG_PATH.
To build just execute make (if using GNU Make) or tup (if using tup) command in the main directory of the project. If you need to see verbose compilation log, execute make VERBOSE=1 (if using GNU Make) or tup --verbose (if using tup).
To remove all generated files (tup database, build outputs, doxygen outputs and selectedConfiguration.mk file) you can run make distclean.
If you use tup and Linux
You need to set suid bit on your tup executable ( sudo chmod +s `which tup` ) and you need to make sure that fuse.conf (usually /etc/fuse.conf ) has user_allow_other option enabled.
If you use tup and Windows
Don’t use 64-bit tools (even if you have 64-bit system), as tup cannot currently handle 64-bit executables.
Tools for WindowsTribology is the science and engineering of interacting surfaces in relative motion. It includes the study and application of the principles of friction, lubrication and wear. Tribology is highly interdisciplinary. It draws on many academic fields, including physics, chemistry, materials science, mathematics, biology and engineering. People who work in the field of tribology are referred to as tribologists.
The word tribology derives from the Greek root τριβ- of the verb τρίβω, tribo, "I rub" in classic Greek, and the suffix -logy from -λογία, -logia "study of", "knowledge of". Peter Jost coined the word in 1966,[1] in the eponymous report which highlighted the cost of friction, wear and corrosion to the UK economy.[2]
History [ edit ]
Tribological experiments suggested by Leonardo da Vinci
Early history [ edit ]
Despite the relatively recent naming of the field of tribology, quantitative studies of friction can be traced as far back as 1493, when Leonardo da Vinci first noted the two fundamental ‘laws’ of friction.[3] According to da Vinci, frictional resistance was the same for two different objects of the same weight but making contact over different widths and lengths. He also observed that the force needed to overcome friction doubles as weight doubles. However, da Vinci's findings remained unpublished in his notebooks.[3]
The two fundamental ‘laws’ of friction were first published (in 1699) by Guillaume Amontons, with whose name they are now usually associated, they state that:[3]
the force of friction acting between two sliding surfaces is proportional to the load pressing the surfaces together the force of friction is independent of the apparent area of contact between the two surfaces.
Although not universally applicable, these simple statements hold for a surprisingly wide range of systems.[4] These laws were further developed by Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (in 1785), who noticed that static friction force may depend on the contact time and sliding (kinetic) friction may depend on sliding velocity, normal force and contact area.[5][6]
In 1798, Charles Hatchett and Henry Cavendish carried out the first reliable test on frictional wear. In a study commissioned by the Privy Council of the UK, they used a simple reciprocating machine to evaluate the wear rate of gold coins. They found that coins with grit between them wore at a faster rate compared to self-mated coins.[7] In 1860, Theodor Reye proposed Reye's hypothesis [it].[8] In 1953, John Frederick Archard developed the Archard equation which describes sliding wear and is based on the theory of asperity contact.[9]
Other pioneers of tribology research are Australian physicist Frank Philip Bowden[10] and British physicist David Tabor,[11] both of Cavendish Laboratory. Together they wrote the seminal textbook The Friction and Lubrication of Solids[12] (Part I originally published in 1950 and Part II in 1964). Michael J. Neale was another leader in the field during the mid-to-late 1900's. He specialized in solving problems in machine design by applying his knowledge of tribology. Neale was respected as an educator with a gift for integrating theoretical work with his own practical experience to produce easy-to-understand design guides. The Tribology Handbook,[13] which he first edited in 1973 and updated in 1995, is still used around the world and forms the basis of numerous training courses for engineering designers.
Duncan Dowson surveyed the history of tribology in his 1997 book History of Tribology (2nd edition).[5] This covers developments from prehistory, through early civilizations (Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt) and highlights the key developments up to the end of the twentieth century.
The Jost report [ edit ]
The term tribology became widely used following The Jost Report published in 1966.[1] The report highlighted the huge cost of friction, wear and corrosion to the UK economy (1.1-1.4% of GDP).[1] As a result, the UK government established several national centres to address tribological problems. Since then the term has diffused into the international community, with many specialists now identifying as "tribologists".
Significance [ edit ]
Despite considerable research since the Jost Report, the global impact of friction and wear on energy consumption, economic expenditure, and carbon dioxide emissions are still considerable. In 2017, Kenneth Holmberg and Ali Erdemir attempted to quantify their impact worldwide.[14] They considered the four main energy consuming sectors: transport, manufacturing, power generation, and residential. The following were concluded:[14]
In total, ~23% of the world’s energy consumption originates from tribological contacts. Of that, 20% is to overcome friction and 3% to remanufacture worn parts and spare equipment due to wear and wear-related.
of the world’s energy consumption originates from tribological contacts. Of that, is to overcome friction and to remanufacture worn parts and spare equipment due to wear and wear-related. By taking advantage of the new technologies for friction reduction and wear protection, energy losses due to friction and wear in vehicles, machinery and other equipment worldwide could be reduced by 40% in the long term (15 years) and 18% in the short term (8 years). On a global scale, these savings would amount to 1.4% of GDP annually and 8.7% of total energy consumption in the long term.
The largest short term energy savings are envisioned in transport (25%) and in power generation (20%) while the potential savings in the manufacturing and residential sectors are estimated to be ~10%. In the longer term, savings would be 55%, 40%, 25%, and 20%, respectively.
Implementing advanced tribological technologies can also reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 1,460 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO 2 ) and result in 450,000 million Euros cost savings in the short term. In the long term, the reduction could be as large as 3,140 MtCO 2 and the cost savings 970,000 million Euros.
Classical tribology covering such applications as ball bearings, gear drives, clutches, brakes, etc. was developed in the context of mechanical engineering. But in the last decades tribology expanded to qualitatively new fields of applications, in particular micro- and nanotechnology as well as biology and medicine[15].
Physics [ edit ]
Friction [ edit ]
The word friction comes from the Latin "frictionem", which means rubbing. This term is used to describe all those dissipative phenomena, capable of producing heat and of opposing the relative motion between two surfaces. There are two main types of friction:
Static friction, which occurs between surfaces in a quiet state; Dynamic friction, which occurs between surfaces in relative motion.
The study of friction phenomena is a predominantly empirical study and does not allow to reach precise results, but only to useful approximative conclusions. This inability to obtain a definite result is due to the extreme complexity of the phenomenon. If it's studied more closely it presents new elements, which, in turn, make the global description even more complex.[16]
Laws of friction [ edit ]
All the theories and studies on friction can be simplified into three main laws, which are valid in most cases:
First Law of Amontons.Friction is independent of the apparent area of contact;
Second Law of Amontons.The frictional force is directly proportional to the normal load;
Third Law of Coulomb.Dynamic friction is independent of the relative sliding speed.
[17] Static friction [ edit ]
Consider a block of a certain mass m, placed in a quiet position on a horizontal plane. If you want to move the block, an external force F → o u t {\displaystyle {\vec {F}}_{out}} must be applied, in this way we observe a certain resistance to the motion given by a force equal to and opposite to the applied force, which is precisely the static frictional force F → s. f. {\displaystyle {\vec {F}}_{s.f.}}.
By continuously increasing the applied force, we obtain a value such that the block starts instantly to move. At this point, also taking into account the first two friction laws stated above, it is possible to define the static friction force as a force equal in modulus to the minimum force required to cause the motion of the block, and the coefficient of static friction μ {\displaystyle \mu } as the ratio of the static friction force F → s. f. {\displaystyle {\vec {F}}_{s.f.}}. and the normal force at block N → {\displaystyle {\vec {N}}}, obtaining
F → s. f. ≤ μ N → {\displaystyle {{\vec {F}}_{s.f.}}\leq \mu {\vec {N}}}
Dynamic friction [ edit ]
Once the block has been put into motion, a friction force, with a lesser intensity than of the one of static friction F → s. f. {\displaystyle {\vec {F}}_{s.f.}}, which is the dynamic friction force F → d. f. {\displaystyle {\vec {F}}_{d.f.}}.In this case it is necessary to take into account not only the first two laws of Amontons, but also of the law of Coulomb, so as to be able to affirm that the relationship between dynamic friction force F → d. f. {\displaystyle {\vec {F}}_{d.f.}}, coefficient of dynamic friction k and normal force N is the following:
F → d. f. = k N → {\displaystyle {\vec {F}}_{d.f.}=k{\vec {N}}}
Static and dynamic friction coefficient [ edit ]
Dynamic and static coefficient
At this point it is possible to summarize the main properties of the static friction coefficients μ {\displaystyle \mu } and the dynamic one k {\displaystyle k}.
These coefficients are dimensionless quantities, given by the ratio between the intensity of the friction force F → f {\displaystyle {\vec {F}}_{f}} and the intensity of the applied load W → {\displaystyle {\vec {W}}}, depending on the type of surfaces that are involved in a mutual contact, and in any case, the condition is always valid such that: μ > k {\displaystyle \mu >k}.
Usually, the value of both coefficients does not exceed the unit and can be considered constant only within certain ranges of forces and velocities, outside of which there are extreme conditions that modify these coefficients.
The following table shows the values of the static and dynamic friction coefficients for common materials:
Table of static and dynamic friction coefficients most used Contact surfaces Static friction Dynamic friction Wood-Wood 0.25-0.5 0.2 Wood-Cardboard 0.32 0.23 Ice-Ice 0.1 0.02 Scioled wood ski - Snow 0.04 0.04 Glass-Glass 0.9-1.0 0.4 Steel-Steel (smooth) 0.6 0.6 Steel-Steel (Lubricated) 0.09 0.05 Steel-Ice 0.1 0.05 Steel-Ice (dry) 0.78 0.42 Steel-Aluminum 0.61 0.47 Steel-Brass 0.51 0.44 Steel-Air 0.001 0.001 Steel-Teflon 0.04 0.04 Teflon-Teflon 0.04 0.04 Rubber-Cement (dry) 1.0 0.8 Rubber-Cement (wet) 0.7 0.5 Copper-Steel 0.53 0.36 Copper-Glass 0.68 0.53 Synovial joints 0.01 0.003
Rolling Friction [ edit ]
In the case of bodies capable of rolling, there is a particular type of friction, in which the sliding phenomenon, typical of dynamic friction, does not occur, but there is also a force that opposes the motion, which also excludes the case of static friction. This type of friction is called rolling friction. Now we want to observe in detail what happens to a wheel that rolls on a horizontal plane. Initially the wheel is immobile and the forces acting on it are the weight force m g → {\displaystyle m{\vec {g}}} and the normal force N → {\displaystyle {\vec {N}}} given by the response to the weight of the floor.
At this point the wheel is set in motion, causing a displacement at the point of application of the normal force which is now applied in front of the center of the wheel, at a distance b, which is equal to the value of the rolling friction coefficient. The opposition to the motion is caused by the separation of the normal force and the weight force at the exact moment in which the rolling starts, so the value of the torque given by the rolling friction force is
M r. f. = b → × m g → {\displaystyle M_{r.f.}={\vec {b}}\times m{\vec {g}}}
rolling friction
What happens in detail at the microscopic level between the wheel and the supporting surface is described in Figure, where it is possible to observe what is the behavior of the reaction forces of the deformed plane acting on an immobile wheel.
Rolling the wheel continuously causes imperceptible deformations of the plane and, once passed to a subsequent point, the plane returns to its initial state. In the compression phase the plane opposes the motion of the wheel, while in the decompression phase it provides a positive contribution to the motion.
The force of rolling friction depends, therefore, on the small deformations suffered by the supporting surface and by the wheel itself, and can be expressed as
F → r = b ⋅ N → {\displaystyle {\vec {F}}_{r}=b\cdot {\vec {N}}}, where it is possible to express b in relation to the sliding friction coefficient μ {\displaystyle \mu }
b = μ v r {\displaystyle b={\mu v \over r}}, with r the wheel radius.
The surfaces [ edit ]
Going even deeper, it is possible to study not only the most external surface of the metal, but also the immediately more internal states, linked to the history of the metal, its composition and the manufacturing processes undergone by the latter.
it is possible to divide the metal into four different layers:
Crystalline structure: basic structure of the metal; Machined layer: layer which may also have inclusions of foreign material and which derives from the processing processes to which the metal has been subjected; Hardened Layer: has a crystalline structure of greater hardness than the inner layers, thanks to the rapid cooling to which they are subjected in the working processes; Outer layer or oxides: layer that is created thanks to interactions with the metal environment and the deposition of impurities;
The layer of oxides and impurities (third body) has a fundamental tribological importance, in fact it contributes to reducing friction. Another fact of fundamental importance regarding oxides is that if you could clean and smooth the surface in order to obtain a pure "metal surface ", what we would observe is the union of the two surfaces in contact In fact, in the absence of thin layers of contaminants, the atoms of the metal in question, are not able to distinguish one body from another, thus going to form a single body if put in contact.
The origin of friction [ edit ]
The contact between surfaces, in reality, is a contact between roughness and the origin of the phenomenon of friction, and therefore of the dissipation of energy, is due precisely to the deformations that such bumps undergo due to the load and of relative movement. Plastic, elastic or rupture deformations can be observed:
Plastic Deformations: permanent deformations of the shape of the bumps;
permanent deformations of the shape of the bumps; Elastic Deformations: deformations in which the energy expended in the compression phase is almost entirely recovered in the decompression phase (elastic hysteresis);
deformations in which the energy expended in the compression phase is almost entirely recovered in the decompression phase (elastic hysteresis); Break Deformations: deformations that lead to the breaking of bumps and the creation of new contact areas.
The energy that is dissipated during the phenomenon is transformed into heat, thus increasing the temperature of the surfaces in contact. The increase in temperature also depends on the relative speed and the roughness of the material, it can be so high as to even lead to the fusion of the materials involved.
The involvement in temperature friction phenomena is fundamental in many aspects of application, an example can be found in the case of brakes. If the temperature rises too much the risk is that of an excessive reduction of the friction coefficient and consequently a sharp reduction in the effectiveness of the brakes.
The cohesion theory [ edit ]
The adhesion theory states that in the case of spherical asperities in contact with each other, subjected to a W → {\displaystyle {\vec {W}}} load, a deformation is observed, which, as the load increases, passes from an elastic to a plastic deformation. This phenomenon involves an enlargement of the real contact area A r {\displaystyle A_{r}}, which for this reason can be expressed as:
A r = W → D {\displaystyle A_{r}={{\vec {W}} \over D}}
where D is the hardness of the material definable as the applied load divided by the area of the contact surface.
If at this point the two surfaces are sliding between them, a resistance to shear stress t is observed, given by the presence of adhesive bonds, which were created precisely because of the plastic deformations, and therefore the frictional force will be given by
F → a = A r t → {\displaystyle {\vec {F}}_{a}=A_{r}{\vec {t}}}
At this point, since the coefficient of friction is the ratio between the intensity of the frictional force and that of the applied load, it is possible to state that
μ = t D {\displaystyle \mu ={t \over D}}
thus relating to the two material properties: shear strength t and hardness. It should be noted that to obtain low value friction coefficients μ {\displaystyle \mu } it is possible to resort to materials which require less shear stress, but which are also very hard. In the case of lubricants, in fact, we use a substrate of material with low cutting stress t, placed on a very hard material.
It should be noted that the force acting between two solids in contact will not only have normal components, as implied so far, but will also have tangential components. This further complicates the description of the interactions between roughness, because due to this tangential component plastic deformation comes with a lower load than when ignoring this component. A more realistic description then of the area of each single junction that is created is given by
A i 2 = ( W → i / D ) 2 + α ( F → i / D ) 2 {\displaystyle {A_{i}}^{2}=({{\vec {W}}_{i}/D})^{2}+\alpha ({\vec {F}}_{i}/D)^{2}}
with α {\displaystyle \alpha } constant and a "tangent" force F → i {\displaystyle {\vec {F}}_{i}} applied to the joint.
To obtain even more realistic considerations, the phenomenon of the third body should also be considered, ie the presence of foreign materials, such as moisture, oxides or lubricants, between the two solids in contact. A coefficient c is then introduced which is able to correlate the shear strength t of the pure "material" and that of the third body t t. b. {\displaystyle t_{t.b.}}
t = c ⋅ t t. b. {\displaystyle t=c\cdot t_{t.b.}} with 0 < c <1
By studying the behavior at the limits it will be that for c = 0 t = 0 and for c = 1 it returns to the condition in which the surfaces are directly in contact and there is no presence of a third body. Keeping in mind what has just been said, it is possible to correct the friction coefficient formula as follows
μ = c [ α ( 1 − c 2 ) ] 1 / 2 {\displaystyle \mu ={{c} \over {[\alpha (1-c^{2})]^{1/2}}}}
In conclusion, the case of elastic bodies in interaction with each other is considered.
Similarly to what we have just seen, it is possible to define an equation of the type
A = K W → {\displaystyle A=K{\vec {W}}}
where, in this case, K depends on the elastic properties of the materials. Also for the elastic bodies the tangential force depends on the coefficient c seen above, and it will be
F → T = c A s {\displaystyle {\vec {F}}_{T}=cAs}
and therefore a fairly exhaustive description of the friction coefficient can be obtained
μ = c K s {\displaystyle \mu =cKs}.
Friction measurements [ edit ]
The simplest and most immediate method for evaluating the friction coefficient of two surfaces is the use of an inclined plane on which a block of material is made to slide. As can be seen in the figure, the normal force of the plane is given by m g c o s θ {\displaystyle mgcos\theta }, while the frictional force is equal to m g s i n θ {\displaystyle mgsin\theta }. This allows us to state that the coefficient of friction can be calculated very easily, by means of the tangent of the angle in which the block begins to slip. In fact we have
μ = F a N = m g s i n θ m g c o s θ = s i n θ c o s θ = t a n θ {\displaystyle \mu ={F_{a} \over N}={mgsin\theta \over mgcos\theta }={sin\theta \over cos\theta }=tan\theta }
Then from the inclined plane we moved on to more sophisticated systems, which allow us to consider all the possible environmental conditions in which the measurement is |
contributions, we developers no longer need to write with just two characters. As a matter of fact, we have entire languages. Even more, she made coding something anyone can do.
Update: November 16, 2016 – Barack Obama awards Grace Hopper a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom for her “lifelong leadership role in the field of computer science”.
Adele Goldberg, 1945: Brought computers to the masses
Dr. Adele Goldberg has received countless awards for her contributions to computer science and remains one of the most respected (albeit unsung) innovators in the software industry.
She was from a time where computers were rapidly gaining popularity – but they were hardly the Fisher-Price play centres they are now. There was no colour, desktop, windows, icons, mouse – all you had was a terminal and a keyboard. The rest was up to you.
Her career spanned numerous companies and corporations. Though her most notable and revolutionary work happened while she worked as a researcher at Xerox in the 1970’s.
She led a team of computer engineers who developed ‘Smalltalk’ and ‘Bitmapping’: the cornerstones of personal computing. Just as Grace Hopper had wanted to make coding accessible to the masses, Goldberg wanted computers to become user-friendly and easy to understand – no coding required.
She and her team decided that they wanted to employ a ‘graphical interface’ – what we now know as a GUI. It was an interface that employed imagery, icons and a ‘point-and-click’ method of navigation to make computers significantly easier to use.
When Steve Jobs discovered what her team had created, he decided Apple needed to find out precisely what was going on. Later on, Goldberg revealed her side of his famous visit. “He came back, and I almost said ‘asked’ but the truth is ‘demanded,’ that his entire programming team get a demo of the Smalltalk System… I had a big argument with these Xerox executives, telling them that they were about to give away the kitchen sink.”
Dr. Golberg was rightfully hesitant to reveal too much about her teams’ work. She argued with the executives for three full hours that the presentation was a bad move – though in the end, it went ahead regardless.
Subsequently, Apple went on to become a multi-billion dollar company. Any guilt in regards to stealing Xerox’s idea was waved away in Jobs’ signature style; “They were copier-heads who had no idea what computers could do… They could have owned the entire industry”.
Funnily enough, when Bill Gates reused the GUI idea at Microsoft, Mr. Jobs was less than impressed.
Apple and Microsoft are suitably revered as two of the greatest technology companies of all time for their countless innovations. Though if it wasn’t for the work of Adele Goldberg and her team, the computers we use today might have turned out far differently. Who knows if they would have ever evolved past their pure-text, black and white ancestors at all?
If it wasn’t for the work of Grace Hopper, we wouldn’t have had the text-based computers in the first place. And if not for Ada Lovelace, we wouldn’t have had computers at all.
We need more women in technology
I’m going to conclude with a simple thought. Women in technology have made some of the most dramatic changes to the industry. We think it’s high time Australia’s IT departments, university halls and software companies held a few more like-minded women.How can decentralised storage models prevent data breaches?
The Equifax hack has been cited as very possibly the worst leak of personal info ever due to the “breath-taking amount of highly sensitive data it handed over to criminals”. As a consequence, “more than half of all US residents who rely the most on bank loans and credit cards” will be at a “significantly higher risk of fraud” for years to come.
Writing for The Guardian, Jathan Sadowski provides an EXCELLENT overview of the “fundamental problem of the data economy as a whole: databanks like Equifax are too big”:
As epic as Equifax’s hack was, things can get a lot worse. The credit reporting agencies Experian and TransUnion are data giants on par with Equifax and there are thousands of other data brokers that also possess large databanks. Data breaches like this one are not bugs, but rather features of a system that centralises immense amounts of valuable personal data in one place.
Sadowski continues:
The vaults of these databanks are impossible to secure, in large part, because the wealth of information they hold is a beacon for hackers. Even the most impenetrable cybersecurity will eventually fail under the pressure of dogged hackers probing for weaknesses to exploit. Better cybersecurity is important, but it is not a solution. It only postpones catastrophic failure.
KEY TAKEAWAY — The future of data storage is decentralised models and the US needs to introduce stronger data protection laws — Equifax would have be fined 4% of global annual turnover under the GDPR. This is a breach no one should get away with.Ahoy there, Phinn fans! We’ve been blown away by the response to the Summer Party Phinn skin. While we intended for this skin to make Summer Live Championships that much more exciting, people have felt left out of the giveaway. Due to overwhelming demand, we’ve decided to make this skin available through more channels. So now there are more opportunities to unlock Phinn — through attending more events, participating on social media, watching streamers and even eventually through the in-app Market.
ATTEND THESE EVENTS LIVE TO GET THE SKIN
Amazon Appshop booth at gamescom in Cologne, Germany (August 18-21, 2016)
North America Summer Live Championships in Seattle (September 3-5, 2016)
Europe Summer Live Championships in Cologne (September 9-11, 2016)
PAX West Twitch booth in Seattle (September 2-5, 2016)
If you’re near (or can travel to) Seattle or Cologne, grab your tickets to the Summer Live Championships in advance now:
MORE EVENTS!
Simply sign up at the Vainglory booth to unlock Summer Phinn.
TwitchCon : September 30 – October 2, 2016, San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, USA.
: September 30 – October 2, 2016, San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, USA. Tokyo Games Show (TGS): September 15 – 18 Makuhari Messe, Tokyo, Japan
September 15 – 18 Makuhari Messe, Tokyo, Japan eSports and Gaming Summit (ESGS ): October 28- 30. SMX Convention Center, Pasay, Philippines
): October 28- 30. SMX Convention Center, Pasay, Philippines Game Show and Trade, All Round (G-STAR): November 17-20, 2016 BEXCO Busan Exhibition & Convention Center, Korea
STREAMER & CONTENT CREATOR GIVEAWAYS
We’re going to shower Vainglory streamers and YouTube video creators with Summer Party Phinn unlocks that they can give away in their own channels. More details will follow, but bottom line: After Update 1.21 releases, frequently visit your favorite Vainglory streams and video channels for plenty of chances to win a Phinn skin of your own.
Here’s a recap for all of the way to get the Summer Phinn Skin through streams:
Vainglory community streams
YouTube content creators
Vainglory YouTube channels
During gamescom, we’ll announce five winners each morning on the dev stream. Tune in each day to participate.
, we’ll announce five winners each morning on the dev stream. Tune in each day to participate. Watch the North America and Europe Summer Live Championships. Between each series we’ll award skins.
. Between each series we’ll award skins. Watch our dev streams during TwitchCon for even more chances to win!
SOCIAL MEDIA GIVEAWAYS
Additionally, we’ll be giving away Phinn skins through official social media channels (including regional channels). Keep following us and look out for new opportunities.
IN-APP MARKET
Can’t travel? No luck winning a skin in the giveaways? Don’t worry: In the future, Summer Party Phinn will be available in the in-app Vainglory Market.
SKIN HIGHLIGHTS
Captain’s hat to show you who’s in charge
Life-preserver for safety
Summer Party Phinn Alternate Fate: ‘The Lifesaver’
“Was me who saved the pretty girl from the shark, even though Muscles and Zombie over there want the credit. I saw the shadow of that toothy beauty from the deck of my boat and did what any good captain would do: threw the lifesaver out. Of course the boat was way off in the deep water, but I can throw pretty far when I put my mind to it. Was a nice change, saving a pretty girl instead of stealing her for once.” —Phinn
MORE SUMMER LORE
Note: Summer Party Phinn is NOT the third mystery summer skin! This is an extra bonus skin.A research team at the University of Regina is looking into whether bone-chilling winters and scorching summers are driving up Saskatchewan's obesity rates.
The university's faculty of kinesiology and health studies is currently measuring the activity levels of 150 people over the course of a year to get a better perspective on how the weather affects exercise routines.
Historically, Herman said most people slowed down their activity levels in the winter, mainly due to a lack of food. However, modern life has changed that significantly.
"Not only do we not have to hunt for our food, we don't have to get off our couch," said assistant professor Katya Herman. "We just have to pick up our smartphones and call up Save-On-Foods, and they show up on our doorstep."
High obesity rates in Sask.
Obesity rates in Saskatchewan are generally among the highest in the country. Recent data from Statistics Canada shows 25 per cent of people in Saskatchewan are obese, compared to 16 per cent in British Columbia.
"We have those weather extremes that other locations may not have," said Herman. "In British Columbia, the temperatures are much more moderate in both directions. They don't have the high heat of the summer, and they don't have the minus-40s that we experience."
Ultimately, the researchers want to use the study to explore ways to make it easier for people to get active during times when they may not want to venture outdoors.
"Are there facilities that people can access for much reduced rates or for free?" she asked. "Are there programs to get people active without having to go to a gym? Is there a facility where people can go for a walk and get out and be active?"
The study asks participants to fill out a lengthy questionnaire about their activity levels. It also provides the subjects with a pedometer, which tracks activity rates over the course of a year.
For more information on the study, click here.Who Needs an Exchange? Three Unconventional Ways to Acquire Bitcoin
Just recently we reported on four bitcoin exchanges that require very little identification. Alongside these peer-to-peer platforms, there are also other ways to purchase bitcoin without using a traditional exchange. There are other more unconventional methods, like purchasing bitcoin at a convenience shop or even with a store gift card.
Also Read: Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Considers Bitcoin
There are many trading platforms that people can use to purchase and sell bitcoin, but sometimes people don’t want to go through the hassle of registering with an exchange. On the other hand, some individuals also don’t want to use Localbitcoins as they may dislike the process of dealing with peer-to-peer traders. Many people don’t know that there are other types of methods individuals can use to purchase and sell bitcoin, and some of them may be at your local convenience store.
Three Unconventional Ways to Purchase and Sell Bitcoin
Liberty X
The company Liberty X (formally Liberty Teller) was founded in 2014 by launching the first bitcoin ATMs in the U.S. Since then the startup has grown into a different kind of business by operating as a “virtual” bitcoin ATM provider. In order to purchase bitcoin with Liberty X you have to download the app for either Android or iOS and register with your phone number.
Then you go onto the application’s map to find one of Liberty X’s local stores by typing in your zip code. Following this, a bunch of stores will pop up with red pendants, and you can choose the closest merchant near you. The highlighted store within the app will tell you the specific details on how much bitcoin you can buy and the fees associated with the purchase.
After you choose a store, you simply travel to the location to purchase a bitcoin voucher. On arrival, you buy a voucher from the cashier that enables you to redeem bitcoin to any address. Using Liberty X to purchase bitcoin is a different kind of buying experience, and people may appreciate purchasing from a convenience store.
Spare
Now if you want to sell bitcoin there’s another way to obtain cash for your BTC that’s similar to the Liberty X transaction above. Using an iOS-only app called Spare users can sell bitcoins at local convenience stores located in Washington DC, Colorado, New York, Philadelphia, and New Jersey with more locations to follow. Users sell bitcoins to the service and receive a one-time generated PIN to give to the nearest shop on their GPS map. The clerk at the local convenience store will then verify the Spare application’s PIN and pay cash in exchange. Spare began offering bitcoin for cash services this year, and the company believes it takes the hassle out of searching for a two-way bitcoin ATM.
“With Spare’s Bitcoin support, there will be no more wasting time searching for Bitcoin ATMs, as everything can be done directly from your iOS device. Alongside, inspired by a huge response in the domestic scene, we are now looking forward to pushing our game-changing service to international regions as well”, stated D’ontra Hughes, the founder of Spare.
Paxful
Another unconventional method to purchase and sell bitcoins is by using retail store gift cards. The peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange Paxful offers users the ability to trade gift cards for bitcoins from a wide variety of stores. Gift cards Paxful traders accept include cards for Amazon, Walmart, Vanilla Visa, Nintendo e-shop, Forever 21, Itunes, Footlocker, Fandango, and many more. To use Paxful’s gift card service just enter the type of card you have and the platform’s search engine will find traders that are willing to sell bitcoin for those cards.
The founders of Paxful, Ray Youssef, and Artur Schaback say the platform services a lot of customers as the two told Bitcoin.com the company processes 8,000 bitcoin transactions per day. Paxful operates in a similar fashion to Localbitcoins, but the trading platform does not facilitate in-person local trades. Youssef says bitcoin has allowed the marketplace to provide different feature sets like gift card sales and other ways to trade.
“The advent of an instantly transferable digital currency like bitcoin has opened the door to an era of escrow services each catering to different niches and with different feature sets,” Youssef explained to Bitcoin.com.
The Many Niche Bitcoin Markets
All of the services mentioned above have different benefits for those who would rather not trade on an online bitcoin exchange. But they also add other aspects to the equation like having to drive to physical locations to exchange. However, people may find themselves more comfortable purchasing and selling bitcoins with a store clerk in a public setting. Or maybe a person was given a few store gift cards for their birthday and would rather sell them for bitcoins.
The fact is, as the ecosystem has shown immense growth over the years there are now many niche markets in 2017 that allow different ways to obtain bitcoin.
Have you tried any of these unconventional services? Let us know about your experiences in the comments below.
Images via Shutterstock, Liberty X, Paxful, and Spare websites.
At News.Bitcoin.com all comments containing links are automatically held up for moderation in the Disqus system. That means an editor has to take a look at the comment to approve it. This is due to the many, repetitive, spam and scam links people post under our articles. We do not censor any comment content based on politics or personal opinions. So, please be patient. Your comment will be published.PARIS: French intelligence agencies are certain that Iran is hiding a nuclear weapons programme, President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Tuesday."We cannot let Iran acquire nuclear" weapons because it would also be a threat to Israel, Sarkozy said during a meeting at the Elysee presidential palace with lawmakers from his conservative UMP party."It is a certainty to all of our secret services. Iran is working today on a nuclear (weapons) programme," he said.The French leader also said he would not "shake the hand of someone who wants to wipe Israel off the map", referring to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.France and the four other permanent members of the UN Security Council -- Britain, China, Russia and the United States -- as well as Germany will hold talks with Iran on its nuclear programme on October 1.The United States, the European Union and Israel fear that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons under the guise of its civilian nuclear power programme, but Tehran denies the charges and says the programme is peaceful.The United Nations Security Council has imposed three sets of sanctions against Iran over its refusal to freeze its uranium enrichment activities.KITCHENER — The City of Kitchener plans to spend $210,000, beginning this year, to refurbish the area around the cenotaph at Duke and Frederick streets.
The work will mainly involve replacing deteriorating concrete in the parkette around the cenotaph, the war memorial that is the focus of Remembrance Day ceremonies each year.
It will also include updating the landscaping and benches and other furniture around the cenotaph, installing electrical and water service, and ensuring the site meets the most up-to-date standards for accessibility for the disabled. As well, the work would include "skateboard protection measures" such as knobs along the concrete edges of the monument.
Design work would start in 2017, with the bulk of the work taking place in 2018, said Denise McGoldrick, Kitchener's director of operations for environmental services.
"It will certainly be a fresher look," McGoldrick said.
Design plans are still very general, McGoldrick said, and will be influenced by consultations with a number of interested groups, including the city's heritage committee, veterans' groups, and the federal government, which owns the architecturally significant John Norton Building housing several federal government offices next door at 15-29 Duke St. E.
The final design will respect the historical nature of the cenotaph site, she said. "We'd want to make sure the site is designed to maximize the space to accommodate Remembrance Day celebrations, and still make it an inviting place for people the rest of the year."
The upgrades have "been identified as a need since at least 1997," McGoldrick said. The work had been scheduled to be done earlier, but was postponed so that it wouldn't conflict with the light rail construction at the intersection.
The 5.8-metre granite cenotaph itself is the original one that the city unveiled in 1929 on a traffic island on Frederick Street just steps from King Street. It has been moved twice since from that original site — first in 1949 to a prominent position in the centre of the gardens directly in front of the then-city hall. In 1973, after the city hall was demolished, it was moved to its current home, where it was rededicated by Queen Elizabeth during a royal visit that year.Creativity abounds at Marie Sklodowska Curie Metropolitan High School. Student-made artworks spangle the walls of each twisting corridor, between display boxes full of playbills from stage musicals past. A plaque commemorating the Black Eyed Peas' multi-platinum breakout record Elephunk (a gift from Keith Harris, the Grammy Award-winning producer and Curie alum who's shaped some of will.i.am and Fergie's biggest solo and collaborative hits) is displayed proudly toward the school's main entrance — just beyond the metal detector more than 3,000 students pass through each day.
Curie is a public high school with a Technical and Performing Arts magnet, as well as a competitive International Baccalaureate program. Consequently, its student body is widely varied — a blend of crazy-motivated kids with high test scores and arts-minded creative types. Most of Curie's students, though, just live in the neighborhood: Archer Heights, a historically Polish-American community in Chicago. It's located on the city's South Side, an area that has long been plagued by high murder and crime rates, which have engendered vicious cycles of concentrated poverty and violence. It's where adidas Originals has chosen to launch the newest iteration of its musical program Sound Labs, with the help of rap icon Pusha T.
"Of course the media sensationalizes and puts a negative spin on things, but the worst of the worst that you hear in the news is true — shootings, danger, gang activity, drugs," explains Curie's Assistant Principal Christopher Graves. "Does every student in our school experience that? No. But we know those who do really carry that emotional baggage. We're thankful to provide everything that we do in the school, but we understand the realities." One major way Curie supports its students through creative programming. "We're trying to build an environment that's hyperfocused on preparing students for college and careers in the arts," says Graves. "Whether they live on the North Side or in any type of neighborhood — on any side of the spectrum — we want them to think of Curie as that creative hub."
It's an ambition well suited to Chicago, a city with rich jazz, blues, and soul roots. Some of today's most forward-thinking hip-hop artists hail from the South Side: Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa, Common, and Kanye West among them. Star potential abounds at Curie, too. One of the school's choral ensembles, Musicality, made it to the semifinals on this season of America's Got Talent. Yet severe budget cuts to arts programs has made nourishing this wealth of talent a challenge for Curie's staff and faculty, including Michael Gibson, Musicality's director. "It's harder to get instruments, it's harder to keep pianos tuned. Chicago Public School system cuts present all of these challenges to us," he says (faced with a lack of practice space, Musicality conducted its daily rehearsals under a stairwell). In response to under-funding, Curie's impassioned arts faculty has gotten creative about obtaining resources. They've established partnerships with cultural institutions across Chicago, including the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Hubbard Street Dance. This drive to invest in the talented youth of tomorrow made Curie a perfect candidate for Sound Labs' support.
Through the Sound Labs program, fully functional studios — including professional-grade recording and mixing equipment — are installed in public schools that lack proper funding for music departments. Through maintenance of a 2.5 GPA, up to 50 students per academic year gain access to these invaluable resources through an after-school initiative. Like traditional music classes, Sound Labs encourages a culture of self-expression and innovation; but by providing access to such cutting-edge technologies, the program equips students with invaluable real-world audio engineering skills and training.
The inaugural Sound Lab launched last year at Detroit's Cass Technical High School under the guidance of hometown hero Big Sean. It was met with such enthusiasm (participating Cass students are soon to release their debut album, Infinite Possibilities, on SoundCloud), adidas Originals has expanded the initiative into three cities across the country. In addition to Curie, a new studio is being installed in New York, with more slated to open in 2017. To oversee this growth, adidas enlisted Pusha as Sound Labs' mentor. As the recently minted President of G.O.O.D Music, he's in constant communication with creatives across the music industry. But long before he took on the executive role, he rose to the national stage as a sharp-witted lyricist backed by his own tight-knit collaborative community. Push and his older brother Gene (aka Malice) ruled the game as dastardly lyrical duo The Clipse; their earliest sinister street sounds were concocted by childhood pals — Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo of production masterminds The Neptunes — back in Virginia Beach, a region that Timbaland and Missy Elliott also call home.
"I think the kids of my era were dreamers, huge dreamers. But people in my community never really looked at our success like, 'we have to cultivate this and push it forward.' It was more like, 'these guys are just great,' and it stopped there," Push tells me when he arrives in Chicago to meet Curie students face-to-face. "Looking back on it now, I would have thought the community or local government would see people who changed music like Timbaland or The Neptunes and say, 'This is something we should invest in and help grow.'" Before they'd achieved such success, Push and his peers struggled to get their schools, communities, and families to take their musical ambitions seriously at all. To administrators, kids congregating in the cafeteria to swap rap verses were at best a nuisance, at worst a threat. "We borrowed or rented keyboards and set them up in the house. We skipped school so we could work, because when our parents got home, we had to get out with that noise. Can you imagine if we had a studio to work out of?" Push asks.
Musicality singers record their performance
Push showed early signs of the laser-focus that's shaped his illustrious 25-year career. But a lack of accessible resources and positive reinforcement led him to engage in extracurricular activities out on the streets. "It's very easy to get into things when you have nothing else to do; I'm a prime example of that. I've done so many things out of having an abundance of free time and energy, not really focused in one particular direction or feeling like I had to be. That's the catalyst for anything to go left," he says. In an area like the South Side — one brimming with talent, but also with avenues towards violence — the Sound Lab gives kids a viable option for building a future. Demonstrating that potential was what drew Push back into high school halls: "I want these kids to understand that the music industry is real, the business is real, and that this is an amazing opportunity that they can turn into whatever they want. Everything that they now have is what makes all of us professional musicians," he says.
Over the course of his year-long mentorship, Push will periodically visit each Sound Lab to offer career guidance and production assistance to the program's students. He'll share insights about creative collaboration and behind-the-scenes team building that are valuable not only to future rhymers. "There are so many aspects of making music, from songwriting to production to engineering, that are all equally important. A program like this in a place like this brings it all together, even beyond the music itself," he explained. "There's a management side to the Sound Lab, which is great, because 'homeboy management' is the worst mistake you can make in music!" he laughs. "Now, homeboy gets to learn before he steps out into the water. This program is so ideal for creatives; it's a gift."
Members of Musicality wait to hear their tracks mixed
He wasted no time jumping into the mentorship role on Wednesday afternoon, when he addressed a handful of Curie's students at the Sound Lab's grand opening, and helped them break in their brand new studio. First up to the mic, naturally, was Musicality. The ensemble includes singers of all skin tones, shapes, sizes, socio-economic backgrounds, and vocal ranges — a reflection of the diversity that makes Chicago such a dynamic city, and Curie such an exciting educational environment. The group shattered a performance of Lady Gaga's "Born this Way," while King Push held court. He listened intently as one student hopped into the booth to deliver a re-mixed rendition of recent G.O.O.D signee Desiigner's menacing mega-viral single "Timmy Turner" (in his version, the titular Nickelodeon character was replaced with another, Jimmy Neutron). Push's ears noticeably perked up when a quiet student inaugurated the Sound Labs' mixer, debuting a darkly cinematic beat of his own making.
Asst. Principal Graves is adamant that kids who have yet to express the same eagerness as these musically-motivated students will benefit from the program, too. "We predict really only 15% of our students are arts-passionate; the other 85% are either willing to try, or resistant," he explains. "The goal with any of those kids is to open their minds, build some intrinsic motivation or lifelong passion. I think of my own childhood; my parents don't have careers in the arts, but I went to sleep every night with my dad playing the piano. That inspired me, in some way, to become a music teacher. If our kids grow into adults that enjoy music, maybe they'll raise children who are appreciative of the arts, supportive of the arts, and help provide arts funding. The Sound Lab is another opportunity for our students to express, or in some cases discover, their passion."
Push is equally excited about the unexpected new ideas Sound Labs will inspire among all kinds of students. "Anytime you invest in a kid and give him an outlet, man, nine times out of ten you're gonna come out with greatness, and at the very least, a new idea. There's nothing wrong with any of those two outcomes," he says. "You keep kids working toward something, anything, and they'll find their way."
Credits
Text Emily Manning
Photography courtesy Sam TrotterThe federal broadcast regulator says cable and satellite companies must give their customers the option of subscribing to any Canadian news service they want, either in bundles or a la carte, no later than next spring.
"Canadian news services are an important part of our democracy,” Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission chair Jean-Pierre Blais said in a release on the CRTC's website Thursday.
“With the rules we are announcing today, Canadians, as citizens, will have access to the news services that are of interest to them and will therefore have an opportunity to be exposed to a variety of opinions on matters of public concern."
May deadline
Among the measures announced is a requirement that Canadians be given the option to subscribe to all Canadian news services, either in bundles or à la carte, no later than May 18, 2014.
As it stands, upstart news services such as Sun News Network are not currently available as an option to subscribe to by customers of certain cable and satellite television providers. The network is offered to about 40 per cent of Canadian homes.
Thursday's decision means Canadian television consumers will have the option of purchasing any news channel they want in Canada, regardless of their television provider, by some time next spring, at the latest.
The move comes after the CRTC last summer rejected Sun News Network's bid for mandatory carriage status, which would have forced cable and satellite companies to carry it on all basic digital and analog services.
However, in doing so the regulator acknowledged there are significant obstacles facing newly launched news services to compete with established players.
When it rejected Sun News Network's bid for mandatory carriage, the regulator promised to review the framework for national news channels. Thursday's announcement is a result of that review.
Sun News said mandatory carriage would have provided the network with 18 cents a month for every English-language television household in Canada, and nine cents per French viewer. The network described mandatory carriage as "do-or-die" for the news channel.
In a statement Thursday, Sun News said it welcomed the CRTC's decision.
"This was never just about Sun News, it was always about putting Canadian TV first," Teneycke said. "It is no longer OK to treat foreign news channels better than Canadian ones."
The network says it will now start negotiating new cable and satellite agreements "that are in alignment with the new policy framework to ensure that Sun News is treated in a substantially similar fashion to other all news channels."37-year-old Ismat Abdul-Khaleq, a Palestinian woman accused of defaming President Mahmoud Abbas on her Facebook profile, was arrested this past Wednesday. The university lecturer, a single mother of two children, is being detained for two weeks while an investigation is carried out.
Abdul-Khaleq reportedly accused Abbas of being a traitor and demanding he resign. Some say she also claimed he partied with prostitutes on the graves of slain Palestinians, but she denies writing such things.
Activists say Abdul-Khaleq's arrest is part of a growing crackdown on writers who condemn the West Bank government. The Palestinian authorities are becoming increasingly intolerant to criticism and are more frequently searching Facebook for individuals and groups to prosecute.
A newspaper reporter is being held on suspicion of defamation since last week, according to CBS News. Two other reporters were briefly interrogated last week over their writings, one for his Facebook posts and the other over a story he was researching.
The Palestinian Authority, the administrative organization established to govern parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, considers it a crime to defame the president and other officials. Freedom of expression is allowed, but not if you're criticizing or insulting someone in power.
The news today comes after schools in the Philippines last week took a particularly critical approach to students expressing themselves on Facebook. A Catholic school in the Philippines banned girls from their graduation over Facebook photos of them wearing bikinis. Thankfully, a court ordered the school to allow the five female students to attend graduation ceremonies. Not long after, a school denied six boys their diplomas after they posted photos on Facebook that made them look like they were kissing.
See also:The European Commission is bringing forward plans to make major multinationals such as Google, Amazon and Facebook disclose exactly where and how much tax they pay across the continent.
The draft legislation being tabled on Tuesday was proposed before the latest Panama Papers scandal, but comes amid a growing clamour to force the biggest companies to pay their fair share.
The plan was expected to include rules requiring businesses earning more than £600 million a year to open up their tax affairs to public scrutiny, revealing their profits and accounts in every country in which they operate within the EU.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
Since the Panama Papers, a new clause has reportedly been added to require the companies to say how much money they make in so-called “tax havens”. A final, more general statement would reveal profits in the rest of the world, treated as a single item.
According to The Guardian, commission president Jean-Claude Juncker is said to be in favour of pushing through the initiative.
But is has come under early fire from both campaigners who say it will be toothless and business groups warning some multinationals could be put off operating in Europe altogether.
There are also some concerns surrounding the fact that there is no common view between EU members states on what constitutes a tax haven.
Shape Created with Sketch. 5 tax avoiding companies in the UK Show all 5 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. 5 tax avoiding companies in the UK 1/5 Facebook Facebook paid £4327 in corporation tax in 2014, after it made a pre-tax loss of £28.5 million, according to filings at Companies House. That's less tax that new average UK employee pays on their salary. 2/5 Amazon Amazon’s UK business paid just £11.9m in corporation tax last year, even though the online retail giant took £5.3bn in sales from British shoppers. 3/5 Google So well known for avoiding tax that it had the 'Google tax' on multinationals that move profits to low-tax countries named after it. Alarm bells started ringing in 2012, when Google revealed it payed only £11.6 million to the Treasury, despite taking £3.4 billion in the UK. 4/5 Uber Uber paid £22,134 in UK corporation tax last year despite making an £866,000 profit. 5/5 Starbucks In October, the European Commission ruled that Starbucks' tax deal in the EU was illegal, ordering it to pay pay between €20-30 million to the Netherlands. 1/5 Facebook Facebook paid £4327 in corporation tax in 2014, after it made a pre-tax loss of £28.5 million, according to filings at Companies House. That's less tax that new average UK employee pays on their salary. 2/5 Amazon Amazon’s UK business paid just £11.9m in corporation tax last year, even though the online retail giant took £5.3bn in sales from British shoppers. 3/5 Google So well known for avoiding tax that it had the 'Google tax' on multinationals that move profits to low-tax countries named after it. Alarm bells started ringing in 2012, when Google revealed it payed only £11.6 million to the Treasury, despite taking £3.4 billion in the UK. 4/5 Uber Uber paid £22,134 in UK corporation tax last year despite making an £866,000 profit. 5/5 Starbucks In October, the European Commission ruled that Starbucks' tax deal in the EU was illegal, ordering it to pay pay between €20-30 million to the Netherlands.
The plans will be presented by Britain’s EU Commissioner, Lord Hill, who told the BBC: “This is a carefully thought through but ambitious proposal for more transparency on tax.
"While our proposal on [country-by-country reporting] is not of course focused principally on the response to the Panama Papers, there is an important connection between our continuing work on tax transparency and tax havens that we are building into the proposal.”
With banks, mining and forestry companies already covered by similar reporting rules, the new proposals would see transparency brought to around 90 per cent of corporate revenues in the EU.
It remains to be seen what powers the EU would have to actively tackle tax minimisation, beyond the process of naming and shaming.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowIf you poke around SketchUp.com today, you’ll notice a few things are different. For one, a new version of SketchUp is available for download in ten languages. You’ll also find that we’ve completely rebuilt 3D Warehouse, our online repository for the millions of models shared by SketchUp users worldwide. SketchUp 2014 is here, and there’s quite a bit to explore.
A new look for 3D Warehouse
Every day, 7,000 people search for a “sofa” on 3D Warehouse, and then |
“liability issues” and the pending remodeling of the restaurant.
(images via: Virtual Globetrotting and Dark Roasted Blend)
Though the Springdale McPlane has gone to meet its maker, on the opposite side of the world another former flyer now nestles its nose to the french fries fryer. Taupo, New Zealand holds the distinction of having a decommissioned DC3 grace their McDonald’s restaurant. Insert “airline food” joke here.
Turquoise Delight
(images via: MyLot, Like the Grand Canyon, Angel_Blue, Watchmaker and Roadside America)
A McDonald’s location with green arches… no, not in Ireland! Siddown in Sedona (Arizona) for some dessert in the desert, however, and you’ll be enjoying fast food in a McDonald’s with the “world’s only Teal Green arches.”
(images via: The Adventures of Shiloh’s Traveler and Country Wings in Phoenix)
Green arches are just the start, however – teal accents highlight other signage and the building itself aspires towards an idealized dream of southwest esthetic design. No word if the Sedona McDonald’s only serves Shamrock Shakes.
(image via: Slag’s House of Stats)
Sedona is a New Age lifestyle mecca and city authorities have striven to preserve the town’s naturalistic character. When McDonald’s applied to situate a restaurant in town, they met with significant resistance centered on their trademark Golden Arches – it seems they would clash with Sedonians’ visual sensibilities. McDonald’s was asked to select a different color for the arches and the company’s first submission, turquoise, was accepted.
No Quarter Pounder
(images via: McChronicles and Imprint Talk)
With a nod to Dread Zeppelin for the title (“thank you, thank you very much”), “Quarter Pounder” was McDonald’s no-brand experiment tested on intrepid Tokyoites in 2008.
(images via: The Afterlife Epitaph and Japan Trends)
Not a golden arch in sight, teal or otherwise, and the only clowns around are the customers (heh!). Don’t think of ordering a Happy Meal at Quarter Pounder either – the only two menu offerings are a Quarter Pounder with Cheese Set (for 500 yen or about $6.40) or a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese Set (600 yen, around $7.70).
(images via: FuguTabetai.com and Girvin)
Quarter Pounder stores sought to exude a higher level of style and attract a more sophisticated clientele, and the stores’ “adult” decor and design illustrated McDonald’s efforts in those convergent directions. Both Tokyo locations of Quarter Pounder quickly sported block-long line-ups to get in… which would be impressive anywhere BUT Tokyo, where it’s standard practice.Earlier this year we reported on the world premiere of Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead; the upcoming sequel to director Tommy Wirkola’s hugely popular Norwegian zombie film. After making its debut almost eight months ago at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, production company Tappeluft Pictures has finally announced an official release date!
Arriving just in time for the Halloween season, the film will receive a limited theatrical run in North America beginning on October 10th, 2014. And to celebrate, we’ve included the official movie poster, some photos and a brand new full length trailer for you below.
Picking up immediately where the original left off, Dead Snow; Red vs. Dead wastes no time getting right to the gore-filled action, leaving a bloody trail of intestines in its wake. Director Tommy Wirkola returns to the helm with a vengeance, coming up with more inventive ways to maim and dismember than you ever thought possible. Combining wry humor with horrific worst-case scenarios, this follow-up to the 2009 Midnight classic is sure to shock the weak-of-heart and delight even the most hard-core fans of the horror genre.
Producing marketing material for a film that prominently features Nazi zombies may be a difficult task. But despite the giant swastika, this new poster managed to create one of the best and probably most ridiculous tag lines of all time… and the film itself looks truly epic!
Shot simultaneously in both English and Norwegian, this new trailer showcases what Wirkola himself describes as a “full throttle [film] from beginning to end.” So sit back and enjoy your first peek at Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead. And be sure to look for our friends over at Zombie Squad; whose organization and logo are featured prominently in the film!Hey folks, Crow here. While I personally do not own this popular low-cost 3D printer, a number of friends do and they all have run into the same problem: the controller board overheats at the power and hotbed connectors, often resulting in melted pins or wires. As this seemed to be a systemic failure, I decided to look into the board design to see what might be done.
I obtained the open-source Eagle CAD files from the reprap.org github for the Melzi version using the A4988 motor driver chips. Immediately several problems became obvious:
#1) Never use thermals on high-current connectors. Thermals are handy for isolating heat dissipation during soldering for low-current applications, but for high-current applications they become a liability as you want the best heat dissipation as possible on such connectors. For example, here is a failed set of connectors on a stock i3 Melzi control board:
The damage is to the ground-return pin of the main power connector and the PWR pin for the hot bed. Examining the board layers one will note the thermals circled in light blue that correspond to the pins shown above:
Thermals are the small traces leading from the green pad to the red (and hidden blue) copper layers that provide heat isolation. The reason these are a bad idea for power is that the overall copper width becomes an issue. Instead of the current being directly delivered into the 240mil-wide red/upper and blue/lower copper pours for power, all of the current has to go through the thermal traces. This means the main power GND return has a total of four red and (again, hidden) four blue 20 mil thermal traces for a total of 160 mils and even worse the PWR pin for the hotbed had only two 20 mil traces! This board was made using “1 oz.” copper weight, which means one ounce of copper per square foot of board material for a layer thickness of 1.27 mils or about 35 microns (0.035 mm). 160 mil of copper width is far too little for the 10 Amps a hot bed alone uses at 12VDC. These thermal traces overheat to several hundred degrees C and ultimately fail by either melting open, melting the connector body until the contact is broken, or the wires attached to the connector overheat and fail. All of these are fire hazards. This brings us to the next caveat for high current board design:
#2) Never use 1 oz. copper weight for high-current applications. It is simply too thin and requires a wide pour–wider than what is on this board. The copper will overheat at these currents resulting in the discoloration shown here:
The brown smudges are the result of the solder mask discoloring due to excessive heat for prolonged periods of time. Note the thermals on the power connectors.
For high-current applications such as this a third caveat can be stated:
#3) Always use screw terminals of the proper current rating for uses that exceed 3 Amps. I personally prefer a 50% safety margin, meaning a 15-Amp connector for 10-Amp use.
I should note the connectors used on this board are 15-Amp rated, and are a part similar to the On-Shore Technology part number EDSTL955/2.
So, how to fix all this? Time to rework the board. No more high current thermals, and make certain both layers are used for power and ground in these areas:
I am also placing a DS1822Z temperature sensor in the high-current area to measure the board temperature while it is printing. This is to make sure the board does not exceed 140C. This will need a small firmware tweak to Marlin or whatever flavor of code a Melzi runs, but this is the sort of thing that will keep your board from burning up again.
Other tweaks include rerouting the entire board, improving the power connections to the motor driver ICs (10 mil power, really?), adding headers to allow the use of external SD card readers and USB cables, adding connectors for 3.3v serial to enable the use of things like a BLE board, some extra work on the Z-stop switch input to allow the use of an inductive bed sensor for auto bed-tramming (leveling), use of all screw terminals and finally replacing the ceramic resonator on the ATMEGA1284P with a 50ppm quartz crystal. The resonator the old board used has a 0.5% tolerance, which might be a possible source of layer consistency issues. Thus I ended up with this:
Now to get some made. Well, not by OSHPark, alas. For some reason if you specify 2 oz. copper they make the board from 0.8mm FR4 instead of the usual 1.6mm. I know other versions of this board exist that (hopefully) address the problems I’ve outlined here, but this project is to get friends’ printers back up and running with a drop-in replacement as soon as possible.
Cheers, Crow
/**/Apple has quietly settled a lawsuit over its advertising practices in connection to the displays used on the MacBook and MacBook Pro. As usual, the terms were not disclosed, but the circumstances make it appear that Apple wasn't the only party trying to make the lawsuit go away.
The plaintiffs, Fred Greaves and Dave Gatley, originally brought the suit against Apple in May of 2007, alleging that Apple's displays were "grainy" and "sparkly," and that some customers had observed banding (when the display shows you bands of different shades when it is supposed to display a smooth gradient). Their proof, aside from their own observations, were pages of printed discussion threads from Apple's support forums. The lawsuit alleged that customers who complained about the displays were allegedly told that they were being too picky or that they were imagining the problems.
An example of color banding from Wikimedia.org
What the problem ultimately came down to was Apple's advertisement of "millions of colors" on its displays and its apparent use of dithering in order to achieve those "millions." The traditional 16.7 million colors advertised for many displays can be achieved through an 8-bit channel, but the plaintiffs believed that Apple actually used 6-bit displays, which generate 262,144 discreet colors before dithering. Apple does not advertise where its displays come from, but some digging showed at the time that Apple did make use of 6-bit displays in its MacBook and MacBook Pro lines.
The plaintiffs called this an illusion: "The reality is that notwithstanding Apple's misrepresentations and suggestions that its MacBook and MacBook Pro display'millions of colors,' the displays are only capable of displaying the illusion of millions of colors through the use of a software technique referred to as 'dithering,' which causes nearby pixels on the display to use slightly varying shades of colors that trick the human eye into perceiving the desired color even though it is not truly that color."
At the time, the plaintiffs were seeking to turn the suit into a class action, as they believed that a large number of people had suffered from Apple's apparent bending of the truth—particularly those who rely on color accuracy in their displays, like photographers. However, according to a Chicago Tribune blog, they were apparently unable to get other members to join the class. "[I]it was difficult to find other people who were wronged because they had bought Macs solely based on the'millions of colors' claim," a San Diego County Superior Court clerk told Tribune writer Eric Gwinn.
Why could that be? Some commenters noted that digital cameras are capable of shooting 10 bits per channel and that Photoshop can edit up to 16-bit, so Apple's use of 6-bit displays is not only unsuitable for the professional photographer, but its advertising that it is suitable is even worse. However, even many of the better displays on the market are only 8-bit per channel—those photographers who want to edit things in 16-bit are either using very high-end displays or already settling for something lesser.
In the end, it appears as though Apple and the plaintiffs decided to cut their losses. Although we won't know what amount the company settled for, Apple-watchers are sure to keep an eye on Apple's advertising to see whether it changes over the next few MacBook and MacBook Pro revisions.Even though the introduction of the iPad-only publicationThe Daily is slated to also herald the coming of iTunes app subscriptions early next year, don’t necessarily expect that move to suddenly make your iPad a digital stand-in for the local newsstand: traditional magazine publishers remain skeptical of Cupertino’s app subscription plan because of the company’s refusal to share credit and billing information.
The app subscription model Apple has been proposing “for a couple months” isn’t radically different than the model they have successfully deployed across all other aspects of the App Store: Apple is offering magazine publishers 70 percent of the sales revenue as usual.
Additionally, Apple is willing to give iTunes users’ the option of an opt-in form that would allow any app subscriber to share his name, mailing address and e-mail address with that app’s publisher. That’s a big compromise, since Apple has historically kept such data secret from app publishers, but this sort of demographical data is important in driving the existing economic engine that allows most print magazines to flourish.
So far, so good, but magazine publishers want more. Quite a lot more, in fact: they want access to app subscribers’ credit card information, allowing them to better target their marketing and offer print/digital bundles.
Apple’s position on the matter is clear: take what we’re offering or leave it. It looks like traditional magazine publishers are doing the latter, instead resting their hopes on Google tablets or selling their digital magazines as individual apps.
What makes The Daily an exception? Because its a new publication, it doesn’t need to try to fit the iPad into its obsolete print ad and marketing structures: it can launch unencumbered with its business built from the ground up embracing the strengths and limitations of the App Store’s app subscription model. That’s a limberness many dinosaur pubs don’t have and could go a long way to explain why Apple is working so closely with News Corp in getting The Daily off the ground.On-loan goalkeeper wins club's month gong
Ben Amos has claimed the Bolton Wanderers Player of the Month award for March.
The on-loan Manchester United goalkeeper turned in a string of impressive performances between the posts throughout the course of the month.
With Adam Bogdan and Andrew Lonergan both sidelined with injury, Amos played every minute of Bolton’s five games in March, keeping a clean sheet in the home victory over Millwall.
Amos claimed a total of 46 percent of the vote.
Tom Walker came in second with 18 percent, whilst Adam Le Fondre finished up third with 15 percent.
BOLTON’S MARCH GAMES
D 1-1 v Reading (H)
L 1-0 v Blackburn (A)
W 2-0 v Millwall (H)
L 0-1 v Ipswich (A)
D 1-1 v Wigan (A)
PAST PLAYER OF THE MONTH WINNERS
February: Zach Clough
January: Darren Pratley
December: Andrew Lonergan
November: Lee Chung-Yong
October: Lee Chung-Yong
September: Dorian Dervite
August: Craig DaviesJames Baxter is president of the National Motorists Association, which lobbies to preserve the rights of drivers.
In the fall of 1973, in response to the OPEC oil embargo, President Nixon issued an executive order mandating a 55 mph national maximum speed limit. The following January, Congress made it official and passed a "temporary" one-year continuation of the limit. And so began a 22-year odyssey where reality and rational public policy never crossed paths.
Initially, this law was passed to conserve motor fuels, but it soon became lauded as a safety measure. It was for safety purposes that the law was made permanent in 1975. (It was eventually learned/admitted that the reduction in highway fatalities in 1974 was largely the result of reduced travel. The high fuel costs and recession in 2008 had exactly the same effect, although to a lesser degree, because fuel availability was not an issue, unlike the 1973-74 era.)
Motorist compliance with the 55 mph limit was always problematical and became more so as time progressed. Ticketing binges, threatened financial sanctions, relentless PR, and increased fines and penalties failed to stem noncompliance. Despite increasing noncompliance and increased highway speeds, fatality rates continued to decline, contradicting the folklore that higher speed limits and higher speeds result in more serious accidents.
In 1982, congressional proponents of the 55 mph speed limit, frustrated with their inability to bludgeon the populace into compliance with it, passed legislation commissioning the National Academy of Science to do a "study of the benefits of the 55 mph National Speed Limit." Although the intent was to bolster political and public support for the law, the outcome was to be just the opposite.
While the academy study, done by the Transportation Research Board, labored to put a positive spin on the most ignored law in the nation, it also undermined the propaganda that had supported this law from its beginning. One such revelation was that the law had virtually no meaningful effect on fuel utilization. The TRB researchers estimated that if the speed limit were raised from 55 to 65, national fuel consumption would increase by.018 percent. Saving less than two tenths of one percent in fuel consumption seems a poor tradeoff for putting 200 million motorists through the misery of going back to a 1930s speed limit.
In 1987, a small dose of rationality infected Congress and the states were permitted to raise interstate speed limits to 65—fatality rates continued to decline. In 1995, as one of the few meaningful accomplishments of the "Republican Revolution," Congress repealed the mandatory 55 mph limit in its entirety, and yes, fatality rates have continued to decline.
If this 22-year experiment in politicized "command and control" traffic management had any value, it would be the lessons we should have learned. For example, any student of human nature knows that we should pay attention to what people do, not what they say. In the late 1970s, a Gallup poll reported that 80 percent of the American public supported the 55 mph speed limit. At the same time, a similar percentage of drivers on the interstate system were exceeding that same speed limit. One of the last sates to increase its speed limit was New York. Toward the end of that state's dogged retention of 55, the level of motorist compliance was less than 5 percent. Obviously, painting numbers on a sign and issuing millions of tickets didn't have much effect on traffic speeds. Not that there weren't effects. These were golden years for the radar detector business and small towns along major highways raked in huge amounts of fines, fees, and surcharges.
But what about fuel utilization? Cars going 55 mph get noticeably better mileage than cars going 75 mph. With arbitrary, low, speed limits, that advantage is reduced by interrupted traffic flow, darting, weaving, braking, and accelerating as faster traffic beats its way through slower traffic scattered across all lanes of the highway. Compare this with a highway with a more reasonable and accommodating speed limit where the traffic moves more in sync and there is less braking and accelerating and the slower traffic stays out of the left-most passing lane.
The main reason a lower speed limit cannot have a material effect on fuel consumption, besides being ignored by motorists, is that the preponderance of motor fuels is consumed on streets, roads, and highways that already have lower speed limits and, more importantly, lower speeds. Only 20 to 25 percent of all traffic volume is on highways with speed limits above 55 mph, and this traffic is already achieving superior fuel economy to that of traffic plodding along in urban and suburban areas. (Only 1.2 percent of the nation's 3.8 million roadway miles are interstate highway.) Add in conditions like congestion and bad weather where speed limits become even more irrelevant and it should become obvious that changing numbers on speed limit signs on roads where perhaps 15 percent of all fuel is consumed will not yield the nirvana of "energy independence."
If this country was serious about significantly reducing motor fuel consumption, it could start by redeploying the money being wasted on ticket-writing campaigns, laser guns, stealth cruisers, ticket cameras, and related wages and invest the savings in strategies to better move traffic in urban and suburban environments, where most fuel consumption actually occurs. There are huge savings to be realized by simply synchronizing and coordinating traffic signal systems. Cities that have started this process are not only reaping benefits like reduced fuel use, they are also realizing improved air quality, significantly faster commute times, far less congestion, and less wear and tear on vehicles. Removing obstacles to smooth traffic flow, including most stop signs and traffic "calming" devices, and scrapping other strategies intended to interrupt and disrupt traffic would dramatically improve fuel economy for the entire vehicle fleet.
I want to add that these strategies can be applied in a manner that actually improves the environment for pedestrians, bicyclists, and residential neighborhoods. We just need to get our collective heads out of the sand and rationally appraise our situation. Putting up arbitrary, irrational speed limit signs simply emulates the failures of the past.
Check out our political cartoons.
Become a political insider: Subscribe to U.S. News Weekly, our new digital magazine.Note: Latency in the video stream means index items will appear first.
11:33:58 Oral Questions to the Secretary of State for Justice
11:34:01 Q1. What support and resources the Government is providing to transgender prisoners. (908338)
11:34:04 Dr Phillip Lee MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Bracknell, Conservative)
11:34:29 Carolyn Harris MP (Swansea East, Labour)
11:34:56 Dr Phillip Lee MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Bracknell, Conservative)
11:35:28 Ben Howlett MP (Bath, Conservative)
11:35:47 Dr Phillip Lee MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Bracknell, Conservative)
11:36:06 Daniel Zeichner MP (Cambridge, Labour)
11:36:21 Dr Phillip Lee MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Bracknell, Conservative)
11:37:00 Q2. What steps the Government is taking to improve prisoner rehabilitation. (908339)
11:37:03 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
11:37:27 Jeremy Quin MP (Horsham, Conservative)
11:37:39 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
11:38:02 Mr Barry Sheerman MP (Huddersfield, Labour (Co-op))
11:38:29 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
11:39:00 Andrew Selous MP (South West Bedfordshire, Conservative)
11:39:14 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
11:39:37 Dr Lisa Cameron MP (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow, Scottish National Party)
11:39:52 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
11:40:15 Dr Tania Mathias MP (Twickenham, Conservative)
11:40:33 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
11:40:59 Derek Twigg MP (Halton, Labour)
11:41:17 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
11:41:37 Q3. What recent assessment she has made of the effectiveness of fixed-term recalls. (908340)
11:41:40 Mr Sam Gyimah MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (East Surrey, Conservative)
11:42:01 Philip Davies MP (Shipley, Conservative)
11:42:34 Mr Sam Gyimah MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (East Surrey, Conservative)
11:42:58 Tom Elliott MP (Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Ulster Unionist Party)
11:43:22 Mr Sam Gyimah MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (East Surrey, Conservative)
11:43:39 Christina Rees MP (Neath, Labour (Co-op))
11:44:06 Mr Sam Gyimah MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (East Surrey, Conservative)
11:44:42 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
11:44:43 Q4. What steps the Government is taking to support prison staff in maintaining order. (908341)
11:44:56 Sir Edward Leigh MP (Gainsborough, Conservative)
11:45:17 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
11:45:51 Rt Hon David Hanson MP (Delyn, Labour)
11:46:22 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
11:47:04 Rt Hon Sir Simon Burns MP (Chelmsford, Conservative)
11:47:39 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
11:47:59 Greg Mulholland MP (Leeds North West, Liberal Democrat)
11:48:15 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
11:48:42 Mr David Burrowes MP (Enfield, Southgate, Conservative)
11:48:59 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
11:49:21 Yasmin Qureshi MP (Bolton South East, Labour)
11:49:53 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
11:50:21 Yasmin Qureshi MP (Bolton South East, Labour)
11:50:54 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
11:51:24 Q5. What steps the Government is taking to (a) treat drug addiction in prison and (b) provide education and skills training to prisoners formerly addicted to drugs to help them to find work on release. (908342)
11:51:25 Dr Phillip Lee MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Bracknell, Conservative)
11:51:48 Amanda Solloway MP (Derby North, Conservative)
11:52:10 Dr Phillip Lee MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Bracknell, Conservative)
11:52:24 Luke Hall MP (Thornbury and Yate, Conservative)
11:52:36 Dr Phillip Lee MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Bracknell, Conservative)
11:52:57 Sir David Amess MP (Southend West, Conservative)
11:53:17 Dr Phillip Lee MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Bracknell, Conservative)
11:53:37 Jim Shannon MP (Strangford, Democratic Unionist Party)
11:53:58 Dr Phillip Lee MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Bracknell, Conservative)
11:54:38 Dr James Davies MP (Vale of Clwyd, Conservative)
11:54:51 Dr Phillip Lee MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Bracknell, Conservative)
11:55:12 Q6. What steps the Government is taking to recruit more prison staff. (908343)
11:55:13 Mr Sam Gyimah MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (East Surrey, Conservative)
11:55:38 Simon Hoare MP (North Dorset, Conservative)
11:56:02 Mr Sam Gyimah MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (East Surrey, Conservative)
11:56:20 Mary Robinson MP (Cheadle, Conservative)
11:56:43 Mr Sam Gyimah MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (East Surrey, Conservative)
11:57:01 Richard Arkless MP (Dumfries and Galloway, Scottish National Party)
11:57:19 Mr Sam Gyimah MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (East Surrey, Conservative)
11:57:49 Richard Burgon MP (Leeds East, Labour)
11:58:25 Mr Sam Gyimah MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (East Surrey, Conservative)
11:58:44 Q7. What assessment she has made of the implications for the justice system of the UK leaving the EU. (908344)
11:58:45 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
11:59:20 Scott Mann MP (North Cornwall, Conservative)
11:59:39 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
11:59:58 Steven Paterson MP (Stirling, Scottish National Party)
12:00:17 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
12:00:30 Victoria Prentis MP (Banbury, Conservative)
12:00:43 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
12:01:10 Joanna Cherry QC MP (Edinburgh South West, Scottish National Party)
12:01:38 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
12:01:53 Joanna Cherry QC MP (Edinburgh South West, Scottish National Party)
12:02:22 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
12:02:41 Mr Sam Gyimah MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (East Surrey, Conservative)
12:02:42 Q8. What recent assessment she has made of the effect of the volume of probation officer caseloads on the effectiveness of the probation service. (908345)
12:03:02 Kate Hollern MP (Blackburn, Labour)
12:03:39 Mr Sam Gyimah MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (East Surrey, Conservative)
12:04:07 Q11. What progress the Government has made on modernising the courts system. (908349)
12:04:16 Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald QC MP, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (North East Hertfordshire, Conservative)
12:04:50 Matt Warman MP (Boston and Skegness, Conservative)
12:05:15 Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald QC MP, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (North East Hertfordshire, Conservative)
12:05:29 Danny Kinahan MP (South Antrim, Ulster Unionist Party)
12:06:04 Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald QC MP, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (North East Hertfordshire, Conservative)
12:06:20 Richard Graham MP (Gloucester, Conservative)
12:06:52 Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald QC MP, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (North East Hertfordshire, Conservative)
12:07:06 Rob Marris MP (Wolverhampton South West, Labour)
12:07:38 Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald QC MP, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (North East Hertfordshire, Conservative)
12:08:23 Rehman Chishti MP (Gillingham and Rainham, Conservative)
12:08:39 Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald QC MP, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (North East Hertfordshire, Conservative)
12:09:34 Christina Rees MP (Neath, Labour (Co-op))
12:10:09 Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald QC MP, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (North East Hertfordshire, Conservative)
12:10:36 Q13. What steps the Government is taking to prepare offenders for life outside prison. (908351)
12:10:36 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
12:10:55 Bob Blackman MP (Harrow East, Conservative)
12:11:22 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
12:11:49 Chris Green MP (Bolton West, Conservative)
12:12:10 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
12:12:42 Q14. What recent progress she has made on the Government's plans to replace the Human Rights Act 1998. (908352)
12:12:44 Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald QC MP, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (North East Hertfordshire, Conservative)
12:12:54 Angela Crawley MP (Lanark and Hamilton East, Scottish National Party)
12:13:15 Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald QC MP, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (North East Hertfordshire, Conservative)
12:13:35 Mr David Nuttall MP (Bury North, Conservative)
12:13:57 Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald QC MP, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (North East Hertfordshire, Conservative)
12:14:10 Carol Monaghan MP (Glasgow North West, Scottish National Party)
12:14:30 Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald QC MP, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (North East Hertfordshire, Conservative)
12:14:57 Q15. How many foreign national offenders are in prison; and what steps she is taking to return those people to prison in their own countries. (908353)
12:14:59 Mr Sam Gyimah MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (East Surrey, Conservative)
12:15:40 Mr Philip Hollobone MP (Kettering, Conservative)
12:16:00 Mr Sam Gyimah MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (East Surrey, Conservative)
12:16:16 Diana Johnson MP (Kingston upon Hull North, Labour)
12:16:25 Mr Sam Gyimah MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (East Surrey, Conservative)
12:16:46 Margaret Ferrier MP (Rutherglen and Hamilton West, Scottish National Party)
12:16:57 Mr Sam Gyimah MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (East Surrey, Conservative)
12:17:07 Q22. When she plans to publish her Department's review of the introduction of employment tribunal fees. (908361)
12:17:10 Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald QC MP, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (North East Hertfordshire, Conservative)
12:17:15 Paul Blomfield MP (Sheffield Central, Labour)
12:17:40 Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald QC MP, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (North East Hertfordshire, Conservative)
12:17:53 Topical Questions to the Secretary of State for Justice
12:17:59 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
12:18:40 Deidre Brock MP (Edinburgh North and Leith, Scottish National Party)
12:19:14 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
12:19:38 Dr Tania Mathias MP (Twickenham, Conservative)
12:19:56 Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald QC MP, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (North East Hertfordshire, Conservative)
12:20:17 Richard Burgon MP (Leeds East, Labour)
12:20:54 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
12:21:20 Mr Laurence Robertson MP (Tewkesbury, Conservative)
12:21:37 Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald QC MP, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (North East Hertfordshire, Conservative)
12:22:06 Luciana Berger MP (Liverpool, Wavertree, Labour (Co-op))
12:22:36 Dr Phillip Lee MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Bracknell, Conservative)
12:23:01 Andrew Bridgen MP (North West Leicestershire, Conservative)
12:23:31 Dr Phillip Lee MP, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Bracknell, Conservative)
12:23:58 Helen Hayes MP (Dulwich and West Norwood, Labour)
12:24:16 Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald QC MP, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (North East Hertfordshire, Conservative)
12:24:45 Bob Blackman MP (Harrow East, Conservative)
12:25:00 Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (South West Norfolk, Conservative)
12:25:32 Ms Margaret Ritchie MP (South Down, Social Democratic & Labour Party)
12:25:44 Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald QC MP, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (North East Hertfordshire, Conservative)
12:25:59 Maria Caulfield MP (Lewes, Conservative)
12:26: |
up to two years.
The case challenged the constitutionality and the implementation of Ireland’s legislation, both the Criminal Justice (Terrorist Offences) Act 2005 and the State’s 2006 implementation of the 2006 EU data-retention directive.
In 2012, the High Court referred the case to the ECJ, asking for an opinion on the validity of the EU directive.
Invalid
In April 2014, the Luxembourg court declared the European directive invalid, saying it entailed “a wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data”.
“The fact that data are retained and subsequently used without the subscriber or registered user being informed is likely to generate in the persons concerned a feeling that their private lives are the subject of constant surveillance,” it said.
At that time, DRI chairman TJ McIntyre welcomed the ECJ ruling, describing it as the first assessment of mass surveillance by a supreme court since the Edward Snowden revelations.
“The ECJ’s judgement finds that untargeted monitoring of the entire population is unacceptable in a democratic society,” he said.
DRI is returning to the High Court on Monday following what a spokesman said was an “inconclusive exchange of correspondence with the State”.
It is seeking to have the remaining matters of EU law dealt with by the court following the ECJ ruling.
It is expected the case will be put forward to a date to fix a hearing in the new year.EDIT 12/4/13: Camera fixed! Photos uploaded.
I asked my gifter for something to put into my beta fish's tank that he could hide in. I have two plants, but there's no place where he can get away.
My gifter delivered and definitely put some time into stalking and getting the perfect gift. I absolutely love fencing and it has become my passion throughout college. My gifter bought little plastic fencer figurines and attached them to an aquarium bridge. It's fantastic! He or she even apologized for them "not being posed correctly for epee." Their attention to detail and care with choosing this present made me unbelievably happy. :)
Bonus gift: my gifter's friend makes little soap in the shape of fish, so I got one too. So afraid to use it though since it's pretty!Donald Trump Ordered For Deposition In D.C. Hotel Restaurant Case
Enlarge this image toggle caption Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
In five weeks, President Donald Trump's inauguration parade will roll past his new luxury hotel near the White House. But just over two weeks from now, Trump has to sit down with several lawyers and give a sworn deposition in a lawsuit involving the hotel.
What's the lawsuit about?
Trump is suing two chefs who bailed out on the hotel after his declaration of candidacy in June 2015 — the speech in which he said Mexican immigrants are "bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." Chefs Jose Andres and Geoffrey Zakarian, who had been building signature eateries in the historic Old Post Office building, cited the speech. Trump says they breached their contracts and is seeking $10 million from each of them.
What's a deposition, and how important is it?
A deposition, unlike a trial, is seeking information, not determining truth. They serve as a basis for trial questions, often to see if a witness's story changes. Witnesses at depositions have less leeway than trial witnesses in refusing to answer questions.
Veteran Washington lawyer William Taylor III said, "Depositions are taken by the other side for purposes of showing the person being deposed is either a liar or a crook."
There's usually no judge present at a deposition. Federal civil-trial rules, which apply in District of Columbia courts, allow depositions as long as seven hours. Trump's attorneys asked that the upcoming deposition be just two hours; D.C. Superior Court Judge Jennifer Di Toro turned them down.
Trump has already been deposed in the Zakarian case. Trump's attorneys asked the judge to prevent those questions from being repeated next month. She refused.
Doesn't Trump have presidential work to attend to?
Clearly yes, but his lawyers didn't convince Judge Di Toro that it warranted postponing the deposition. They said Trump "is extremely busy handling matters of very significant public importance." She responded that the restaurant lawyers were working around his schedule, that Trump's own statements are crucial to the case and, besides, his company Trump LLC had started the legal action.
Have other presidents-elect or presidents been deposed?
Sitting presidents who have been deposed are Ulysses Grant, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Only one of their depositions has major historical significance.
Clinton was deposed in 1998, in a sexual harassment suit by Paula Jones, a one-time government employee in Arkansas. It was the first time he was questioned about former White House intern Monica Lewinsky and their relationship. The deposition fueled investigations by independent counsel Kenneth Starr and House Republicans. In less than a year, House Republicans impeached Clinton. The Senate later voted to acquit him.
Will the deposition be videotaped?
Yes. Trump has been through many depositions, and video of the Zakarian session showed him to be a skilled witness, spare with his words and gestures. In other words, pretty much the opposite of his campaign persona. But whenever the video becomes public, his critics are certain to comb through it, examining both what he said and how he came across — looking for the kind of video moments that quickly flow into social media.Formed in 1983 and run by guitarist Trey Azagthoth, Morbid Angel is one of the biggest death metal bands of all time. Their distinct riffs, powerful drums, and dark atmospheres have kept them a favorite among metal fans young and old. To celebrate the band’s body of work this new installment of Alternative Nation’s “Ranked up” series will focus on Morbid Angel. This list will include studio albums only.
9.Illud Divinium Insanus (2011)
Often called the St. Anger of death metal, the band’s most recent album is a total train wreck. The album was hyped up due to eight years with no new Morbid Angel albums and the return of iconic vocalist David Vincent. When the album was finally released, it was met with heavy criticism and memes bashing it all over the net. Morbid Angel tried to experiment with industrial. Now if Morbid Angel took influence from bands like Throbbing Gristle, Foetus, or Skinny Puppy, this album could have been awesome. But instead they mix in cheesy Vampire Freaks.com industrial and end up sounding close to nu-metal (in 2011!). The album’s mind numbing lyrics (such as “kill a cop kill a kill a kill a cop”) make it even worse.
8. Heretic (2003)
Released three years after the amazing Gateways to Annihilation, Heretic was a huge step backwards. The style of this album is that of your usual later Morbid Angel release minus the memorable song writing. None of the songs really stand out and it just feels like a disappointment after how good the last one was. After this album vocalist Steve Tucker would leave the band and join the awesome super group Nadar Sadek. He would return to Morbid Angel in 2015. This is also the last album to feature drummer Pete Sandoval as he would leave in 2010.
7. Domination (1995)
Joined by former Ripping Corpse guitarist Erik Rutan, Domination was the band’s attempt at a more commercial sound. The album sounds overly polished,downed down and one dimensional. With that said the songs,”Dominate“, “Where the Slime Live“, and “Dawn of the Angry” are still solid tracks. After this album Erik Rutan would leave and form Hate Eternal, only to return to Morbid Angel in 2000. David Vincent would also leave the band and not return untill 2004.
6. Abominations of Desolation (1991)
Recorded in 1986 this was supposed to be the band’s debut album, but was scrapped because the band did not like the end product. In 1991 the band’s then label Earache records decided to release it due to their new found popularity. The line up on this release included Trey Azagthoth on guitar, John Ortega on bass, Richard Brunelle on guitar and Mike Browning on both drums and vocals and was produced by David Vincent. All of the songs except for “Demon Seed” would appear on later albums. This album is a fun listen mostly to hear how classics like “Chapel of Ghouls” originally sounded. After this album Mike Browning would leave to form Nocturnus. John Ortega would also leave, but not really go on to join or form any band.
5. Formulas Fatal to the Flesh (1998)
After Domination took them in a bad direction, Formulas got the band back on their feet. Out was David Vincent and in came Steve Tucker who proved he was a better vocalist (yes you read that right!). The satanic lyrics of the first four were replaced with lyrics based on Sumerian and Lovecraftian deities with some of the lyrics even being in Sumerian. This theme would follow on all of the Tucker era albums. The album’s musical sound is very similar to that of Covenant but with more extreme vocals. Highlights include the thick sounding “Prayer of Hatred”, the semi anime inspired “Hymn to the Gas Giant” and the haunting tune “Hellspawn: The Rebirth“.
4. Blessed are the Sick (1991)
This sophomore effort is known for creating the band’s signature sound. The album is slow paced although contains some very fast riffs and has overtones from goth and classical music. This style would follow the band on most later releases. Some of the best tracks from here include “Desolate ways”,”Blessed are the Sick”, and “Day of Suffering“.
3. Covenant (1993)
Morbid Angel’s third album is their most well known and their first taste of mainstream success. The album was put out by Giant records, a division of Warner Bros making it the first death metal album to be put out by a major label. The music continues the style that the previous album started but speeds it up slightly. The lyrics are the band’s most satanic to date and the song “God of Emptiness” was featured on an episode of Beavis and Butthead. Some other classic’s from this album include “Vengeance is Mine, “Rapture“, and “Angel of Disease“. In 2013 the band celebrated the 20th anniversary of this album though even when not celebrating it, plenty of songs are bound to appear in the band’s setlist.
2. Altars of Madness (1989)
One of the most iconic death metal releases of all time, Altars of Madness is a classic from front to back. Here on the band’s true debut album (not counting Abominations) Morbid Angel plays their original trashy and slightly technical death metal. Here the world got the first real taste of Trey’s amazing guitar work, Pete’s insane drumming and David’s demonic vocals on classics such as “Chapel of Ghouls“, “Immortal Rites“, “Maze of Torment” and Lord of All Fevers and Plagues“. Many music magazines and websites to this day still list it as one of the best death metal albums of all time, with a few even giving it the number one slot.
1. Gateways to Annihilation (2000)
While Covenant will always be remembered as the band’s most well known release and Altars of Madness as their most important, Gateways to Annihilation is Morbid Angel’s musical peak. With Steve Tucker on vocals, Erik Rutan returning on guitar and the combined might of Trey and Pete we get the ultimate Morbid Angel song writing team. The album’s style is much slower than any other album by the band and is heavy on atmosphere. The guitar tuning is extremely low giving the riffs are really chunky and give off a crushing sound. Erik and Trey’s lead solos bring on a feeling of destruction and chaos. Now that Steve Tucker is back in the band hopefully we will see a proper follow up to this masterpiece of music. Summoning Redemption, I and Ageless Still I Am are the best tracks from this album.Spectacular retaliation
Along the way, the rip-roaring scandal has ricocheted from hacked emails, and the sudden ouster of Trump's campaign manager, to a secret dossier with salacious content and on to wire tapped phone calls between Trump's national security adviser and Russia's ambassador. The scandal shows no signs of abating.
This weekend, Trump spectacularly retaliated, accusing his predecessor of authorising wire taps of the Trump Tower while the election campaign was still going on.
A key moment came on July 22, when the anti-secrecy organisation WikiLeaks published a vast trove of 19,252 DNC emails that revealed personal information about donors, cozy ties with media figures and evidence that the DNC was tilting the board in favour of Clinton over a rising challenger, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.
The leak took an immediate toll: DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and three other senior party officials resigned on the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, where delegates would hoist Clinton as the party's presidential nominee.
But as the convention played out, Trump artfully stole media attention. He appeared at a podium at his Doral Resort in Florida on July 27 and made a quintessentially brash Trumpian appeal: he called on Russia to locate Clinton emails that had gone missing from her private server while she was secretary of state.
"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said. "I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press."
Long-time nemesis
Advertisement
The call ruffled the presidential race. By asking Russia, a long-time US nemesis, to break US law and muck around in its computer networks, even if in a jocular tone, Trump was seen as breaking sharply from conventional Republican orthodoxy.
Trump's appeal to Russia would soon boomerang.
On August 19, his campaign chairman Paul Manafort stepped down amid allegations he had accepted millions of dollars in cash from Russian interests in Ukraine. Manafort had also been involved in gutting the GOP platform of its anti-Russia stance.
As the presidential race heated up, the White House faced new pressure to accuse Russia formally of meddling in the campaign.
In early September, another cyber security company, ThreatConnect, said Russian hackers appeared to be probing election databases in Arizona and Illinois, a possible prelude to broader interference in the November vote.
It wasn't until October 7 that the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a short statement saying US intelligence agencies were "confident that the Russian government directed the recent compromises of emails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organisations".
Coinciding with that statement was a new tranche of leaked emails, this time thousands stolen from the personal account of John Podesta, Clinton's campaign chair, and published by WikiLeaks. The leaks tore the veil off the inner workings of the campaign.
Changing mood
Advertisement
Trump, as he would do all the way until January, disparaged the notion that Russia was behind the hacks or was meddling on behalf of his campaign.
After he triumphed over Clinton in the election, Trump repeatedly exonerated Russia: "I don't believe it. I don't believe they interfered," he told Time magazine.
On December 12, Trump tweeted: "Unless you catch 'hackers' in the act, it is very hard to determine who was doing the hacking. Why wasn't this brought up before election?"
But the mood was changing in corners of the media establishment. A 35-page secret dossier had begun to circulate weeks earlier, compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, who had been hired by a Republican opponent of Trump's to develop politically damaging and unverified research about Trump.
The document suggested collusion between Trump associates and Moscow in the hacking of Democratic computers and contained lurid allegations of activities by Trump during his stay in the $US14,000-a-night presidential suite of the Moscow Ritz-Carlton Hotel in 2013, allegedly captured on video and held as "kompromat", material for potential blackmail.
Among its charges, the dossier said Russian President Vladimir Putin and his top aides had been disappointed that the leaked emails hadn't hurt Clinton more during the campaign and that some Kremlin officials felt "buyer's remorse" over support for Trump.
More forceful action
Over the year-end holiday period, then president Barack Obama took more forceful action against Russia, releasing more detailed information about the Russian hacking and ordering the expulsion of 35 Russians, presumably spies under diplomatic cover. In the December 29 action, he also forced Russia to give up a Long Island compound and an 18 hectare complex in rural Maryland.
Advertisement
Putin said he would not retaliate, as Russia has done in similar cases in past years, prompting Trump to praise the Russian leader: "I always knew he was very smart!"
A declassified January 6 report, summing up the views of major US intelligence agencies, assessed that Putin had sought to influence the campaign, undermine Americans' faith in their democracy, harm Clinton's chances and act on a "clear preference" for Trump.
Four days later, the secret dossier exploded into the public arena when the website BuzzFeed published it in its entirety.
Steele, who was well-regarded by the FBI from previous contacts, went into hiding, and in Moscow the earth trembled. A former KGB chief suspected of helping Steele, Oleg Erovinkin, had turned up dead in the back of his black Lexus on December 26. After leaving state security, Erovinkin had served as a top aide to Igor Sechin, chief of Rosneft, a state-owned oil company, and allegedly acted as an intermediary between his boss and Putin.
Tremors hit Trump camp
Two cyber experts at the FSB, Russia's federal security service, were arrested and charged with treason, raising suggestions they had been a source for US intelligence on Russian hacking during the campaign, giving credibility to the US charges of meddling.
Tremors were also hitting corners of the Trump camp as Inauguration Day neared.
The most senior victim was Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012-14 and who had gone on to become one of Trump's most trusted advisers. Flynn had grown so in sync with Trump that he'd blasted shouts of "Lock her up!" at the Republican convention in July.
Advertisement
Trump tapped Flynn to be his national security adviser in mid-November.
Flynn had his own Russia connection. He'd dined with Putin at the Metropole Hotel in Moscow in late 2015 as part of festivities to honour the RT state-run television network. Flynn was paid for the appearance.
On January 12, a columnist in The Washington Post reported that Flynn had made several calls to Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak on the very day Obama announced the expulsion of 35 Russians, and raised the question of whether Flynn had discussed US sanctions on Russia. A Trump spokesman said Flynn was simply discussing a time for Trump and Putin to speak after Inauguration Day.
Almost daily since then, events around the Russian connection have erupted.
Denials of undue connections
In an exclusive report on January 18, the McClatchy newspaper group said the FBI and five other law enforcement and intelligence agencies were collaborating on an investigation into whether the Kremlin had funnelled money to aid covertly the Trump campaign. Among the subjects of their interest: Michael Cohen, a lawyer for the Trump Organisation, who the dossier said had met with Russian government officials in Prague late last northern summer.
As recently as January 3, Trump had been pillorying the intelligence assessment of Russian hacking. But he backed off days later, acknowledging that Russia had had a role in the hacks that roiled the 2016 campaign, but he said they hadn't affected the outcome. One after another, his aides came forth to deny any undue connection with Russia. Vice President Mike Pence went on national television to say Flynn hadn't discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador, nor had anyone in the campaign spoken with Russian officials.
In Congress, a good number of legislators either wanted to investigate further or were willing to go along with an inquiry. Investigations have opened in both the House of Representatives and Senate intelligence committees into Russian influence in the campaign.
Advertisement
Even after Trump took office in a flurry of executive orders, Russia kept simmering as an issue. At the end of his first week in office, Trump received a phone call from acting attorney general Sally Yates telling him that authorities had a recording of his national security adviser Flynn talking with the Russian envoy. Yates would be fired within days.
And Flynn would be gone just 24 days into his tenure. Trump called him a "fine person" but said he'd asked for Flynn's resignation because Flynn had misled Pence about the nature of his contacts with the ambassador.
Attorney General Sessions was next to feel the tremors.
The Washington Post reported late on Wednesday that Sessions had met twice with Kislyak in 2016, including a meeting in the office he occupied in the Senate. During his confirmation hearings in January, Sessions didn't disclose the contacts.
In a media conference on Thursday afternoon, Sessions offered details of meeting with Kislyak and said he would recuse himself from any inquiry on ties between Trump aides and Russia.
MCTImage copyright CBI Image caption The CBI said its decision to register as a "No" backer was an "honest mistake"
The Confederation of British Industry's (CBI) registration as a campaigner against Scottish independence has been nullified by the elections watchdog.
The business lobby's registration with the Electoral Commission would have allowed it to spend up to £150,000 in campaigning for a "No" vote.
The CBI said it remained a "politically independent and impartial body".
The commission said the group's activities would be monitored during the referendum period.
The CBI had said its registration as a "No" supporter had been an "honest mistake" which had not been signed by an authorised signatory - an explanation which has been accepted by the elections watchdog.
The move, last month, prompted more than a dozen members to resign or suspended their membership from the organisation.
Following the Electoral Commission's decision, a number said they would review their positions after the independence referendum.
Glasgow University, said, "We have no current plans to rejoin the CBI."
Tourism agency VisitScotland said: "We will not be making any decision on this matter until after a discussion with the CBI has taken place."
STV said: "Having taken the decision to resign our membership of the CBI, we will maintain this position until after the referendum on Scottish independence when we will reconsider our position."
Robert Gordon University, said: "We will review our decision to suspend our membership after the referendum in September."
Aquamarine Power Chief Executive Martin McAdam said the wave energy company would consider re-joining the CBI after the referendum.
Economic development agency Scottish Enterprise, said: "Scottish Enterprise's decision to resign from the CBI was based on our commitment to remain impartial during the current debate. We will maintain our stated position and review post referendum."
Highlands and Islands Enterprise, said: "HIE intends to review its relationship with the CBI after the referendum."
The Law Society of Scotland, said: "We will be carefully considering the CBI's recent statements and the response received from the Electoral Commission."
Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University, said: "The issue will be considered and a decision taken in due course."
The BBC, which suspended its CBI membership between 30 May and 18 September, said: "Our position remains the same and we'll form a view in due course."
Tony Banks, chairman and founder of Balhousie Care Group, and chairman of the pro-independence Business for Scotland group, said: "The organisation needs to go through a revamp of its governance, become more transparent and have a change in leadership before we'd consider rejoining."
The commission said "the only reason" it had removed the CBI from its register was because the business body had not ensured that the person who signed its application was authorised to do so.
John McCormick, electoral commissioner for Scotland, said: "The law, and our own guidance, state who can sign a permitted participant application form. In this case, the CBI submitted a form to the Electoral Commission that had been signed by the wrong person and their application is void.
"The Electoral Commission will meet shortly with the CBI to make sure they understand the campaigning rules at this referendum. We will monitor their activities over the'referendum period' as part of the monitoring work we do ahead of any election or referendum."
Scotland's independence referendum Who? Voters in Scotland will go to the polls to vote on their country's future. What? They will be asked the yes/no question: "Should Scotland be an independent country?" When? The vote takes place on Thursday, 18 September, 2014.
Following its removal from the list, the CBI said in a statement: "The CBI is a politically independent and impartial body and will ensure that it complies with Electoral Commission guidance to safeguard its political independence.
"As businesses work hard to secure the economic recovery, the CBI has a job to do on behalf of its members and their employees to help create the right conditions for UK companies to grow and prosper, wherever they operate across the world.
"We will continue to do that without fear or favour."
On 18 September, voters in Scotland will be asked the Yes/No question: "Should Scotland be an independent country?"Ubisoft is developing a fresh 2D entry in its dormant Prince of Persia series, according to a new report.
It's been Farah too long.
French website Portail du Jeu Video states that the new game will utilise Ubisoft Montpellier's UbiArt engine - as used in Rayman Origins and Legends (thanks, Videogamer).
It's also the same engine used by upcoming Ubisoft role-player Child of Light, and Eurogamer understands that other UbiArt games are also currently in production.
The report details some of the animation possible within the engine, and that the Prince's body will be animated to look like it is a 3D model by moving a number of individual parts - his torso, legs, feet, arms and hands - as with Rayman.
Animations are in place for the Prince to run, perform sword attacks and wall-jump.
Ubisoft declined to comment on the report when contacted by Eurogamer.
Last summer, Ubisoft's European boss Alain Corre told Eurogamer that the Prince of Persia series would return when the company "feel it is ready".
"They're cooking," Corre said of the company's various dormant franchises. "Some are cooking longer than others, but they're cooking."TW: doctors, mention of weight loss
I recently changed doctors after I decided I’d had enough of my fat shaming doctor who constantly told me to loose weight or I will die. I have some medical conditions that need frequent monitoring, so I did not want to go without a doctor but could not face going back to him. A friend recommended her own doctor to me, who she said was very good and did not judge. I decided to try her out, but with much apprehension since another friend had actually recommended my previous doctor.
On my first visit, I was so nervous in the waiting room, wondering how it would go, imagining her sneering at my body type, rolling her eyes at my blood pressure, etc. When my name was called, my heart started beating quickly, but I went on, trying to stay hopeful. I was so pleasantly surprised when she smiled and said hello to me. She shook my hand like I was a real person. But then she asked me to step on the scale and my heart sank. I took a deep breath and told her I prefer not to be weight. She looked puzzled and replied that because I am on medication she would need to know my weight for her to give me prescriptions as a new patient. I hesitated. She continued by saying she knows it can be hard to face but it’s important for her to know my weight because that way she can track any changes, up or down, which could indicate a problem. She said I could turn around and not see the number if I liked. And you know what? I did it. I got on the scale and did not look at the number. She thanked me and we continued on to have a great visit.
I took a risk with trying a new doctor and luckily it worked out for me, but the anxiety i felt before and during the visit is something thin people don’t have to face.
Thin privilege is not having to be surprised by having a good doctor visit.In a groundbreaking collaboration to further push exploration of mankind’s two remaining frontiers — ocean and space — Los Angeles port officials on Thursday announced that rocket innovator SpaceX will join with marine research center AltaSea in a yearlong partnership at San Pedro’s outer harbor.
“I always thought there was a connection between the port and aerospace and this is just the beginning of building the bridge between the two,” Los Angeles Harbor Commissioner Anthony Pirozzi said.
The announcement of the offshore-platform recovery and other programs that will be launched in San Pedro elicited a wave of praise at the regular Board of Harbor Commissioners meeting.
“I’m fired up, I don’t know about you,” said Los Angeles Councilman Joe Buscaino, who called it an “amazing partnership.”
The port will provide a land-use agreement but ultimately the deal calls for SpaceX to be listed as a client of AltaSea, which is still in the process of being formed.
The port will be used as home base for three recovery vessels — Marmac 303 (a landing platform), Smith RHEA (a tug) and NRC Quest (the support boat).
SpaceX crew and the vessels will arrive in early July with a 50-member team to begin work in the outer harbor where AltaSea is located. The partnership comes at a time when AltaSea remains in its early stages of development and is seeking tenants.
AltaSea, which will be built in three phases, is envisioned as a 35-acre center with seawater laboratories, offices, a lecture hall, interpretive center and a wave tank, wrapping in participation from many of the region’s leading universities.
The matchup with SpaceX, headquartered in Hawthorne, is a significant boon to the center’s ongoing fundraising efforts.
It also is hoped to be a step forward for SpaceX and its ongoing attempts — so far unsuccessful in two tries this year — to land its reusable, Florida-launched Falcon 9 rocket on a drone/barge landing pad in the Pacific Ocean.
The challenge for SpaceX is finding a way to nail a soft, yet balanced landing so the rocket does not tip over.
Perfecting a vertical landing intact on a platform at sea, said Jimi Smoot, recovery operations engineer at SpaceX, “will revolutionize the industry.”
All 18 launches into space from Cape Canaveral so far have been successful, he said, but the recovery and landings in the Pacific still need honing.
The outer harbor location near Warehouse One, dubbed the planet’s new “gateway to space” by one of the speakers Thursday, also will support offloading of both the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rockets that carry the Dragon into space. The first mission is planned for early August with others to follow, each bringing in a new 50-member SpaceX team on rotation through July 2016.
“We plan to make the Port of Los Angeles our home” for those missions over the next year, Smoot said, adding that the arrangement could be extended after that.
The SpaceX DragonLab also will team up with AltaSea in advancing the “science of sustainability,” according to Thursday’s presentation.
“Space is said to be the final frontier, but we all know it’s just one of two final frontiers,” said marine biologist Daniel Pondella, who heads up the Southern California Marine Institute. The two centers working “side by side,” he said, will bring a new synergy to research being done by both.
The collaboration is also expected to bring jobs, businesses, educational opportunities — and some much needed buzz to the developing L.A. Waterfront.
“If the councilman is fired up and the commissioners are excited, then I’m a kid in a candy store,” said Alex Rose, an AltaSea board member and senior vice president of development for Continental Development Corp. in El Segundo.
Other speakers said the partnership offers a multitude of opportunities for area schools, entrepreneurs and businesses. It also could be a selling point for marketers trying to attract new retail and other tenants to the port community.
“This will be a great economic benefit to the region and it will have a multiplier effect,” said Alycia Witzling of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. “I grew up in the San Fernando Valley when aerospace was big. SpaceX is changing the aerospace industry and bringing an excitement to the field that I haven’t seen for a while.”Ryan Wilson could yet feature in this year's World Cup for Scotland
Scottish Rugby has suspended Ryan Wilson for three months without pay following his conviction for assault.
It was also decided that the 25-year-old Glasgow Warriors loose forward will not be considered for Scotland selection until late August, meaning he misses the Six Nations.
Last week, Wilson, capped nine times, was found guilty of assaulting a fellow rugby player on a night out.
Wilson, who has been with Glasgow since 2010, has the right to appeal.
The number eight was fined £750 at Glasgow Sheriff Court after he attacked two Glasgow Hawks players in a fast-food shop while dressed as Batman during a Halloween night out on 27 October 2013.
Charges against Warriors team-mates Ryan Grant and Rory Hughes were not proven, with the former a late call-up for the Six Nations after the trial.
Wilson's international ban ends on 23 August, four weeks before the World Cup kick-off, meaning he will miss the first two warm-up games.
Wilson has also been ordered by a Scottish Rugby disciplinary panel to take part in a programme that will "support his personal development around the factors which contributed to the original conviction".Can an old dog learn new tricks? DIVER's deep-wreck man LEIGH BISHOP enrolled on a GUE Fundamentals course to find out if he could improve his existing underwater survival skills. Set in his ways, his mojo shaky and not having taken a class for well over 20 years, the big question was this: would he actually pass?
SO WHY EXACTLY are you booked on a GUE Fundamentals course?” The question had been asked repeatedly, accompanied by puzzled looks and the odd frown. “What exactly am I going to teach you?” instructor Richard Walker asked when I booked onto the course.
Fair enough. I was an established diver with a lot of experience. I had been there at the onset of technical diving, been a rebreather development diver and a member of most significant deep shipwreck projects.
In the heyday of mixed-gas exploration, I had dived some 400 virgin wrecks. Some of today’s leading instructors tell me that my photography inspired them to get into technical diving.
So why do a basic-level scuba course? It was time to put my hand up and admit that my confidence for diving the deep had dwindled in recent years.
I had lost close friends; others were wheelchair-bound because of the bends. The psychology of it all was getting the better of me.
Older and wiser, I had developed a greater appreciation of everything around me. So I had two options – hang up my fins, or do something about it.
Experience is no use unless you learn from it. In my professional life as a firefighter, barely a month goes by without being dragged off on a training course to be updated on developments in something I may have been taught only the previous year. It’s called “continuous professional development”.
Mine is a different job in terms of safety than it was when I started 25 years ago. Does the same apply to diving?
I have had to comply with the changes at work, but not necessarily to developments in diving. If I went back to the drawing-board, could I learn something new in terms of concepts or techniques, perhaps. Ingenious safety protocols that might have saved a friend or two? Would it help to restore my confidence? Was there another deep project left in the old dog?
I quickly discovered just how many courses are now available from different agencies. Back in the day, the options were nitrox and trimix, taught by Kevin Gurr, Sheck Exley or the man who taught me about mixed gas, Rob Palmer – and that was about it!
The jokes took a back seat as my dive-buddies realised that I was serious. From now on I intended to enrol periodically on courses to continually improve my underwater skills.
But I didn’t want death by PowerPoint, I wanted quality – so where to start?
My last deep project had been on Mars. Not the planet, the 450-year-old warship wrecked in the Baltic. It was a Global Underwater Explorers project, but I was far from being a GUE diver.
I did however share a close friendship with Richard Lundgren and Jarrod Jablonski, two of the men who founded GUE and shaped it into what it is today.
Richard had invited me to dive with the group, but it wasn’t my finest hour. Following a lay-off I wasn’t seasoned, and my heart and mind weren’t in it. I was a mess.
On those dives, however, I observed what I considered some of the best divers I’d ever seen. I was inspired not only by their safe team approach but by their solid diver style and thinking.
If I was going back to basics, why not a GUE Fundamentals course?
I didn’t plan to become a full-on GUE diver, but I could study precision skills and configuration methods that I might integrate into my existing practices.
Once Rich Walker understood, he applauded my openness. Although as concerned as I was that I might be too set in my ways, he would make me work as hard as anyone else on the four-day course to reach the required standards.
I had no idea what I was signing up for, but would soon discover that it was no walk in the park.
GUE doesn’t train just for the sake of training. It is committed to redefining the nature of aquatic activity in three specific areas – education, conservation and exploration.
Instructors from other agencies had told me that a GUE qualification was accepted everywhere and never challenged. Those holding one are regarded as having had the highest level of training available.
I would have to complete a theory exam and six dives demonstrating propulsion techniques, buoyancy, trim, S drills (gas-sharing), shut-down drills, a no-mask swim (help!) and what GUE calls the Basic 5. We would also simulate moving an unconscious diver under water before making an ascent.
The form-filling had started before I arrived on site. The usual disclaimers had to be filed through the GUE website, and that took some time.
DAY 1, |
primary last year and then defeat former New York Sen. 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 (D) in the general election.
“We haven’t really seen this,” said New York-based Democratic strategist Jon Selib when asked about the crop of budding candidates in the Empire State area. “It’s pretty unusual.”
At this point it’s not clear if any of the Democrats with ties to the New York area will run for the White House in 2020, though Trump is expected to run for reelection and expressed confidence to The New York Times in a Thursday interview that he will win another four-year term.
Whether he faces another New Yorker in the general election is an open question.
Gillibrand is widely seen as a possible contender. She recently made national headlines by calling for Sen. 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’s (D-Minn.) resignation, and for saying Bill Clinton William (Bill) Jefferson ClintonInviting Kim Jong Un to Washington Howard Schultz must run as a Democrat for chance in 2020 Trump says he never told McCabe his wife was 'a loser' MORE should have stepped down during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. That led Trump to call her out in a tweet that said she used to come to him begging for money and would do “anything” for it, a remark Democrats blasted as sexist innuendo.
Booker has been seen as a future White House contender since he first reached the national stage. In December, he appeared side-by-side with Democratic candidate Doug Jones in the final days of the contentious Alabama Senate race. The Jones victory burnished Booker’s credentials.
Cuomo has long been seen as a possible White House candidate and has been in the news in recent weeks for his criticism of the tax-cut bill Trump signed into law last week.
Murphy is best known for his advocacy for gun control, which has won him a spot on many 2020 watch lists.
De Blasio recently took a trip to Iowa— a major sign that he is considering his options outside of the city. The New York City mayor gave a non-denial denial when asked about his presidential aspirations.
“Thank you for the question but it’s the same answer that I have given dozens and dozens of times,” he told Brian Lehrer, a New York radio host. “We have got a lot to do and a very aggressive agenda for New York City for the next four years. I want to use my voice to support change in our party and in our country.”
Having multiple candidates from the New York market could be a hindrance if they end up fighting for the same donors.
Susan Del Percio, a New York-based Republican strategist who worked for Cuomo several years ago, added that the candidates would have a problem differentiating themselves.
“They all sound like each other,” Del Percio said. “When you look at New York and New Jersey in particular you see a race to the progressive movement.”
When Cuomo was elected, she pointed out, his first priority was lowering taxes, but he’s since moved to a much more progressive management style.
“In terms of zeitgeist, all of these candidates have placed themselves in the middle of the resistance; Cuomo and de Blasio have been in open competition in that regard,” said Grant Reeher, the director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute at Syracuse University.
Of course, that’s also where much of the Democratic Party appears to be — which makes it difficult for candidates to stand out.
New York politicians haven’t always been able to take their brands across the country, which could be a particular problem for Cuomo and de Blasio, who have brands that are closely tied to the Empire State.
“I think the big question is ‘do you have a message that’s relatable, and does it fly in all time zones, if you will,” Del Percio said. “I think some might say, ‘You’re from New York, how do you understand my problems in Youngstown, Ohio?’ ”
Selib also said the multiple possible candidates from the New York area points to a larger geographic problem for Democrats.
“This is a challenge for Democrats who have so many candidates coming from places in the country where we're already really strong,” he said. “We'd be better off if we had a more geographically diverse set of candidates.”
But Reeher said the number of high quality candidates coming from the same area shows signs of strength for the Democratic field.
In 1988, he pointed out, the Democratic candidates were “often disparaged for lacking big names.”
“When Pat Schroeder entered the race it was labeled ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,' ” he recalled, referring to the former Colorado representative.
“That would not be the case this time. … Having that level of quality to choose from is probably a good thing for the Democratic Party, and of the process more generally, it will generate more excitement and attention.”When advocates for tighter restrictions on guns rallied last week in Austin City Hall, a small group of opponents staged a counter-rally outside, carrying firearms and waving a flag emblazoned with an assault rifle and the caption “Come and Take It.”
Texas gun rights advocates, like their counterparts who argue for gun control, have been increasingly active in the wake of recent mass shootings, organizing hundreds of grassroots demonstrations across the state. Their effort includes a simple strategy: a public display of their weapons — sometimes in front of their opponents.
“You’ve got a group of people who are carrying firearms, kids and women, smiling and waving,” said C.J. Grisham, the founder of Open Carry Texas, which wants lawmakers to allow Texans to openly carry handguns as they can carry long arms. “If we truly meant to hurt anybody, would we draw attention to ourselves by waving flags and smiling? If you think about it logically, the fact that someone is alarmed is unreasonable.”
But the tactics of groups like Open Carry Texas, which mobilizes crowds carrying shotguns, hunting rifles, AR-15s and AK-47s, have drawn criticism from gun control groups like the Texas branch of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. Stephanie Lundy, the branch’s spokeswoman, said that almost every time Moms Demand Action meets, “we wind up with armed gunmen in the parking lot.”
The Texas Tribune thanks its sponsors. Become one.
“Texas moms are tougher than $3 steak,” she said. “We will not be intimidated by armed anyone.”
In Texas, it is illegal to openly carry handguns, and a license is required to carry a concealed handgun. It is legal to visibly carry a long arm — a shotgun or a rifle — so long as it is not done in a “manner calculated to alarm.”
The definition of that qualifier is subject to interpretation. “We’re totally okay with people carrying their weapons lawfully under the Second Amendment, but the right to bear arms is not an unfettered right,” said Kevin Lawrence, executive director of the Texas Municipal Police Association. “There’s a certain point where law enforcement has a right to step in and say, ‘You’ve crossed the line.’”
Grisham started Open Carry Texas in July after he was charged with refusing to turn his assault rifle over to the police while hiking with his son. Since Grisham founded Open Carry Texas, he said it has hosted or participated in more than 400 demonstrations. It has at least one armed event each week. In October, the group helped organize what it called the “largest armed event at the Alamo since the Battle of the Alamo,” in which hundreds of gun-wielding people demonstrated in downtown San Antonio. Armed demonstrators marched down packed city streets during last month’s South by Southwest festival in Austin.
Grisham and his allies insist that the Constitution guarantees them the right to carry any firearm at any time. But supporters of tighter restrictions — specifically, of universal background checks — on guns find carrying weapons in places like shopping malls or busy city streets ill advised. Even though Moms Demand Action and its members do not have an official stance on the legality of open carry, they are put off by the provocative nature of armed demonstrations.
“This is their response to the massacre of first-graders,” said Kellye Burke, the president of the Texas chapter of Moms Demand Action, referring to the Newtown, Conn., school shootings in 2012. “Think how disgusting that is.”
The Texas Tribune thanks its sponsors. Become one.
Moms Demand Action is not retreating. The national group, as part of a recent initiative by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York to spend $50 million to build a nationwide grassroots network to curb gun violence, will be canvassing in Texas and other states to inform voters about legislators’ records on gun policy.
Open Carry Texas is also taking its strategy to other states. The group is teaching like-minded gun owners in Oklahoma, Colorado and Arkansas to emulate the armed demonstration phenomenon.
“We’re not out there to bait police officers or to scare the community,” Grisham said. “We wave, we smile, we hand out fliers. If we see someone who seems really nervous, we’ll talk to them.”Lake County deputies arrested Sharon Wolfe, the wife of Tavares Mayor Robert Wolfe, Monday afternoon after the State Attorney's Office issued a warrant for her arrest for perjury, according to the Lake County Sheriff's Office.The charge stems from sworn statements Wolfe gave in an interview with prosecutors in which she alleged her husband discharged his gun in their home during a domestic disturbance on April 24, officials said.Originally, she said her husband was drunk when he fired a bullet into the wall to intimidate her. But after the mayor was arrested, Sharon Wolfe recanted her earlier sworn statements, calling the gunshot accidental and said there was no fight.Sharon Wolfe was being held without bond.The state attorney's office said it has found no proof that the firearm was intentionally discharged or that Robert Wolfe was impaired at the time, therefore no charges will be filed against him.
Lake County deputies arrested Sharon Wolfe, the wife of Tavares Mayor Robert Wolfe, Monday afternoon after the State Attorney's Office issued a warrant for her arrest for perjury, according to the Lake County Sheriff's Office.
The charge stems from sworn statements Wolfe gave in an interview with prosecutors in which she alleged her husband discharged his gun in their home during a domestic disturbance on April 24, officials said.
Originally, she said her husband was drunk when he fired a bullet into the wall to intimidate her. But after the mayor was arrested, Sharon Wolfe recanted her earlier sworn statements, calling the gunshot accidental and said there was no fight.
Advertisement Related Content Tavares mayor faces domestic violence charges
Sharon Wolfe was being held without bond.
The state attorney's office said it has found no proof that the firearm was intentionally discharged or that Robert Wolfe was impaired at the time, therefore no charges will be filed against him.
AlertMeHow is everyone doing today? I had a hell of a week at work, so I'm pretty thankful that it is the weekend and for two days I don't have to go to work. Yes, I do have to work Monday on the holiday, but it's a short day and I get overtime, so its all good.
For today's Stamping Saturday look, I really wanted to use Color Club's Wild at Heart, which I just found recently. Since it's a dark holographic purple, I paired it with Color Club Eternal Beauty in a purple holographic gradient.
I love holographic polishes. Those rainbows make me so happy. Since I was on a purple kick, I busted out China Glaze That's Shore Bright to use as my stamping polish. I then stamped on a pattern from Pueen 65. Here is the final result.
*all products featured in this post were purchased by me
I really love the way this turned out. Don't forget to check out all the other ladies who participate. You can link up your stamped manis below! Join in the fun!Enjoy & until next time, Amy LeeThe 27-year-old hooker, whose current deal was due to expire at the end of the new season, has scored 117 points in 88 appearances for the Vikings since joining them ahead of the club's return to Super League in 2012.
Widnes coach Denis Betts said: "Lloyd has been with us for a long time and every year he is getting better and better.
"He's on the cusp of fulfilling his potential, he's had a few injury problems that he's now got over, and as a player he can be whatever he wants to be.
"He can be one of the best number nines in Super League."
White said: "The club approached me about a new deal and it was an easy decision to make. My family and I are settled here and the boys are great to be around."Is everything an illusory simulation? Was the world created by a non-physical force that we can communicate with and possibly influence with our minds, thereby participating in the creation of our own reality? These are the grandiose existential questions central to this documentary, which introduces viewers to the concept of the Simulation Hypothesis.
Teasing that there are cutting edge physics experiments that imply Simulation Hypothesis could be true, the film begins by reviewing two primary philosophies regarding the nature of life: materialism and idealism. First introduced by Democritus, materialism credits the atom as the basis for all reality, making consciousness the result of a material process. Plato, on the other hand, believed it is the mind itself that gives way to matter; therefore reality is borne from ideas.
The Simulation Hypothesis, which the filmmakers parallel very heavily against the hit sci-fi movie The Matrix, argues that matter and ideas are the result of a complex digital simulation, something akin to a video game. Theoretical physicists make their case for a programmable universe, positing that there is evidence of computer code to be found in nature and we are, put simply, expressions of a code.
Are we ourselves composed of binary strings of 0s and 1s? Could it be that subatomic particles are nature's answer to the bits and pixels that digital worlds are composed of? Though dense in scientific jargon, there is an underlying creationist belief to Simulation Hypothesis - if, in fact, the world is a program, someone must have written it. But who, or what? The film suggests that humans have an innate mental connection back to this universal programmer through the subconscious.
The Simulation Hypothesis is a thought provoking exploration of the nature of our existence, playing into the universal curiosity of how and why we came to be. Relying heavily on footage from famous movies, animated models, and the occasional interview to illustrate the concepts being presented, this episode takes viewers to the intersection of theology and science in a way that is equal parts educational and fantastical.Verizon Wireless reacts to confusion caused by terms of Verizon Plan options
Reaction and confusion to recent rate plan changes resulted in Verizon Wireless coming out this week to reiterate its support for customers on legacy contract plans.
The carrier posted a list of answers to questions it said it has received from current customers on two-year contracts that were tied to receiving a subsidized price on their handsets. The answers basically state that those customers on contract plans can continue to take advantage of subsidized device pricing tied to the renewal of those two-year contracts.
More specifically, Verizon Wireless said current customers can move to the new rate plans, though they will be charged $40 per month per line of service accessing a shared data bucket instead of the $20 that is charged as part of the new offering. Should the legacy customer reach their upgrade eligibility date and not acquire a new device, they will see their per-line access charge drop to the $20 mark.
Other tidbits include explanation that customers who do move to the new Verizon Plan will not be able to switch back to their legacy plan; current customers on a contract plan can still add a line to their existing plan; current contract customers can still purchase a new device on a monthly device installment plan; and current Edge device installment plan customers can switch to the new plans and continue paying for their device under terms of the original agreement.
“Our sole intention of this new pricing is to make things more simple for our customers – so you know exactly what you’re paying for and how you’re saving.” Verizon Wireless explained.
Verizon Wireless earlier this month launched the new rate plans that included a bucket of data access labeled “small” for 1 gigabyte of data, “medium” for 3 GB of data, “large” for 6 GB of data and “x-large” for 12 GB of data. The data buckets include unlimited voice calling and text messaging, and are priced at $30, $45, $60 and $80 per month, respectively.
Connected with the new rate plans were adjustments to per-line access charges, with smartphones now charged $20 per month; tablets and mobile hot spots priced at $10 per month; and “connected devices” like smartwatches priced at $5 per month regardless of the size of the bucket selected. Compared with legacy shared data bucket plans, the new pricing is $5 more expensive per month for smartphones on data buckets of at least 6 GB, though $5 less expensive on data buckets of 4 GB or less; $10 less for mobile hot spots; and tablets and connected devices stay the same.
A bigger headline grabber was that the new rate plans are only available through Verizon Wireless’ device-financing program. The program tacks on a monthly charge for the device on top of the rate-plan charge, or customers can pay full price for their device upfront.
Analysts had said they expect device-financing activity to provide at least a $2 billion boost to Verizon’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in 2016, though some also note the carrier will still be on the hook for more than $400 million in device subsidies that will dilute the overall EBITDA benefit.
Bored? Why not follow me on TwitterStar Wars Rebels presents us with a substantial growth of the Star Wars galaxy on a weekly basis. It gives us new characters, conflicts, technology and of course new planets. However every now and then Rebels embraces its heritage and gives us something from Star Wars past whether it be a character or ship design and now I think it’s time to see some classic planets from films and TV shows past in Rebels. Here are four planets that I think should make an appearance in future episodes of Star Wars Rebels.
Coruscant
Rebels and the original trilogy take place almost exclusively in the Outer-Rim where imperial presence is at its lowest. Even with the lowered number of Imperials the Rebel Alliance still face great odds and struggle to survive, let alone grow. So imagine if there was a mission that the rebels had to go on that took them deep into the Core Worlds where imperial presence is huge, what if they had to take part in a daring quest that took them to the very heart of the Empire itself: Coruscant. We haven’t seen Coruscant under Imperial occupation before on screen unless you count the very end of Revenge of the Sith but from what I’ve read in the new canon novels it sounds very interesting and heading to the capital of the Empire undercover would be the crew of The Ghost’s most dangerous mission yet, worthy of a season finale. Lucasfilm Animation did a tremendous job with Coruscant in The Clone Wars and I would love to see the labyrinth of skyscrapers and grungy city streets in the Rebels art style.
Yavin 4
As Rebels fast approaches the timeline of the original trilogy it makes sense for characters, events and locations to begin to match up. We don’t know how soon before A New Hope the base on the fourth moon of Yavin was set up but because of its appearance in Rogue One we know it’s been there at least a little while. I would be cool to see the crew of the Ghost help set up the base or even scout the moon to see if the location is a good place for a base. I think Yavin should probably be introduced much later in the series but I wouldn’t be against it showing up sooner especially if it means the show crosses over with Rogue One in some way. Introducing Yavin 4 also brings the possibility of seeing more of the leadership and internal machinations of the Rebel Alliance. I was sold on this show due to the fact we were going to see the Rebellion form from small disparate cells into the combined galaxy wide force that we see in the movies. So far we have only seen the crew of the Ghost team up and become a part of Phoenix squadron with other cells being mentioned very occasionally. I want to see more of Bail Antilles and Mon Mothma organising and bringing together these cells and introducing Yavin 4 may be the way to do it.
Dantooine
While I want to see Yavin 4 pretty soon we can’t forget about Dantooine. In A New Hope when pressured into giving up the location of the rebel base Leia lies and says it is on Dantooine. However we learn that there was indeed a rebel base on Dantooine but that is was recently evacuated. One of the main characters in the excellent canon novel ‘Lost Stars’ is sent to investigate the Dantooine base and is there when the Death Star is destroyed. Before we see Yavin 4 in Rebels we have to see Dantooine. Considering that the Rebellion are already on Yavin 4 by the time Rogue One takes place we can’t be too far off the Rebel Alliance settling on Dantooine in the timeline of Star Wars Rebels. Maybe it was another rebel cell that set up the base on Dantooine but it would still be cool to see considering the planet was first mentioned in 1977 and we haven’t yet seen it onscreen in canon.
Mandalore
The team behind Rebels love Mandalorians. We spent lots of time with the race and culture in The Clone Wars, we have seen them several times in Rebels and Sabine, one of the main characters, is undoubtedly Mandalorian. However we actually have yet to see Mandalore itself in Rebels and that feels like a missed opportunity. The houses and clans of Mandalore are Game of Thrones level complex as they try to fight – and backstab – each other in order to gain control and power. However at this point in the timeline this beloved infighting and usurping has been taken away from them by the Empire. We have recently seen Mandalorians who sided with the Empire in Imperial Supercommandos but what about those that are against the Empire. I would love to see the crew of the Ghost team up with some Mandalorian rebels on their homeworld as they battle the Empire. The Clone Wars was cancelled before we got any real conclusion on the Mandalore storyline and this could be the perfect way to carry on the tumultuous politics of Mandalore while seeing the planet in a new way: under Imperial occupation. We know from Katee Sackhoff that her Clone Wars character Bo-Katan in coming to Rebels so does this hint that maybe we’ll see Mandalore too?
This is the second article about planets I believe should show up on Rebels; if you think I’ve missed any off the list then read part 1 here and the planet or moon you are looking for may be there. Which planets do you want to see appear in Star Wars Rebels? Let me know in the comments and geek out with me about Star Wars on Twitter @kylebrrtt.Mulayam Singh Yadav was among the first to reach the chief minister's official residence (File photo)
After giving indications that he might support the NDA's presidential candidate, Samajwadi Party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav on Tuesday attended a dinner hosted by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath for Prime Minister Narendra Modi.Mr Yadav was among the first to reach the chief minister's official residence, 5, Kalidas Marg in Lucknow.Governor Ram Naik, deputy chief ministers Keshav Maurya and Dinesh Sharma, a number of UP ministers and senior BJP leaders also attended the dinner.However, Samajwadi Party president and former chief minister Akhilesh Yadav did not attend it."No, he (Akhilesh) will not be attending the dinner," Samajwadi Party spokesperson Rajendra Chaudhary told PTI when asked whether the party president would be at the table with PM Modi.Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati too skipped the dinner.The BSP chief had said on Monday that her party is positive about the NDA nominating Ram Nath Kovind for the presidential election but wished that the ruling alliance had named a non-political Dalit candidate for the top post."Although Kovind has been associated with the RSS and the BJP from the beginning but as he is a Dalit, our party's stand towards him cannot be negative. It will be positive, provided Opposition parties do not field any Dalit for the post, who is more capable and popular than him," she had said.Earlier on Tuesday, Mulayam Singh Yadav had extended his support to the NDA presidential nominee Ram Nath Kovind, saying he is a deserving candidate."Ram Nath Kovind is a good candidate. I have a very old relation with him. BJP has selected a strong candidate. The most important thing is that the BJP has a majority. Can't say what will opposition decide now," he told a TV news channel.Mr Yadav had earlier indicated that he would back the NDA candidate even before the announcement of Mr Kovind's name for the top constitutional post.Nominations for the Presidential elections, to be held on July 17, ends on June 28.The BJP had on Monday stumped the opposition parties by announcing the name of Mr Kovind, a Kori (Dalit) from Uttar Pradesh.The prime minister arrived in Lucknow on Thursday evening on a two-day visit to take part in the International Yoga Day event on Wednesday morning after which he will fly back to Delhi.On the first day of his visit, he inaugurated the new building of Abdul Kalam Technical University (AKTU) and visited the Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI) in Lucknow. For complete coverage on presidential elections, click hereIn a perfect world, everyone (kids included) would snack on carrots and kale chips. For those who do, hats off. But for everyone else, once you step away from the produce aisle, the choice of snacks can run the gamut from nutritionally vapid to downright deleterious. And sadly, consumers are often at the mercy of the processed food industry with its seductive yet unhealthy ingredients and powerful marketing machines. It’s all too easy to be swayed by items marketed specifically to children and parents — with enticing prices, misleading labels and the promise of convenience.
But when consumers start to dig a bit, they'll get a better picture of what’s going on inside the snacks they devour. Following is a snapshot of some of the worst offenders. The list is by no means exhaustive, but these examples provide some clues about what to look out for in the snack aisle.
1. Pop-Secret Homestyle Popcorn
Popcorn should be a great snack. It is a whole grain, naturally low in calories, and recent research has found that popped kernels are surprisingly high in antioxidants, even higher than many fruits and vegetables. So where did this super-snack go super-wrong? In the hands of food manufacturers, that’s where. How does this version compare to an order of McDonald's Kids Fries? A serving of Pop-Secret has 70 more calories, 7 grams more total fat, 2 grams more saturated fat, 4.5 grams more trans fat, and 310 milligrams more sodium than the fried spuds.
Serving size: 2 tablespoons unpopped
Calories: 170
Total fat: 12 grams
Saturated fat: 2.5 grams
Trans fat: 4.5 grams
Sodium: 380 milligrams
2. Cheetos Puffs
Nobody ever said that oddly textured cheese snacks were exactly healthy, but something about the non-greasiness and airy quality of Cheetos Puffs (vibrant hue aside) seems like this product might more benign than, let’s say, super salty fried potato chips. But … look at that total fat! That sodium! That’s half the daily fat and sodium limit for many children, right there in 2 ounces of snack.
Serving size: 2 ounces (56 grams)
Calories: 320
Total fat: 20 grams
Saturated fat: 4 grams
Sodium: 700 milligrams
3. Yoplait Original 99% Fat Free (various fruit flavors)
Yogurt is another should-be healthy snack that has been hijacked by the food industry. Many yogurts are made to be low- or non-fat but are loaded with added sugar and other ingredients that are completely superfluous.
Whereas a product like Fage 0% is made of only “Grade A Pasteurized Skimmed Milk, and Live Active Yogurt Cultures,” Yoplait Original includes sugar, modified corn starch, high fructose corn syrup, kosher gelatin, and tricalcium phosphate — yet no live and active cultures, which is one of the main reasons to be eating yogurt in the first place!
Serving Size: 1 container (170 grams)
Calories: 170
Total fat: 1.5 grams
Saturated fat: 1 gram
Sodium: 85 milligrams<</p>
Sugars: 26 grams
4. Ritz Bits Cracker Sandwiches
Cheese and crackers sounds innocuous enough, but a single serving of these guys has more sodium and more than twice the saturated fat, as a small order of Chicken McNuggets — and more sugar than two Hershey’s Kisses.
Serving size: 1 single serve package (42 grams)
Calories: 220
Total fat: 13 grams
Saturated fat 4.5 grams
Sodium: 480 milligrams
Sugars: 6 grams
5. Auntie Anne's Pepperoni Pretzel Pocket
Whole-wheat low-sodium pretzels are a good snack. Pepperoni Pretzel Pockets are a disaster. With more sodium, saturated fat and calories than a Big Mac, this one snack comes close to serving up the daily sodium and total fat limits for a child, not to mention the equivalent of nearly 3 teaspoons of granulated sugar.
Serving size: 1 pocket
Calories: 650
Total fat: 27 grams
Saturated fat 12 grams
Sodium: 1,120 milligrams
Sugars: 11 grams
6. Mott's Original Apple Sauce
This applesauce might just as well be called "high fructose corn syrup sauce," given that HFCS is the second ingredient after apples. Why do that to perfectly good apples? Apples aren't sweet enough?
Serving size: 1/2 cup (128g)
Calories: 110
Total fat: 0
Sugars: 25 grams
Instead, opt for the Mott's Natural Apple Sauce (No Sugar Added) version, which has only 50 calories and 12 grams of sugar.
7. Hostess Chocolate Pudding Pie
With the right spin, some could argue that a piece of pie isn’t the worst snack in the world. A small homemade slice filled with fruit and a light crust has some redeeming qualities. But the Hostess Chocolate Pudding Pie may, in fact, be the worst snack in the world! Why? In addition to its high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated oils, beef fat and artificial colors, it has almost twice the sugar and fat of a similarly sized slice of homemade blueberry pie. And with its cheap price and easy portability, it’s all too easy to scarf down much of your daily calorie requirement in a few bites before you’ve even left the store.
Serving size: 1 pie (128g)
Calories: 520
Total fat: 24 grams
Saturated fat 12 grams
Sugars: 40 grams
8. Winchell’s Cranberry Nut Muffin
What has the same amount of calories as four Winchell’s Chocolate Cake Doughnuts and nearly the same amount of fat as three hot dogs? One Winchell’s Cranberry Nut Muffin! To its credit, this muffin is not nutritionally void (5 grams of fiber and 14 grams of protein) but just beware: the calories, fat and sugar lodge this item more in the cupcake category than healthy snack family.
Serving size: 1 muffin
Calories: 670
Total fat: 37 grams
Saturated fat: 6 grams
Sodium: 640 milligrams
Sugars: 43 grams
How can you make better choices?
Look for snacks that are high in protein, vitamins, minerals, fiber, but relatively lower in calories, total fat, saturated fat (no trans fat), sugar and sodium.
Look at the ingredients on the label. Most of us know that ingredients are listed in order from most to least, and we may look to see where something like sugars or fats are listed in the order. But ingredient groups aren't required to be listed together. So something could contain corn syrup, cane sugar, and malt syrup in seemingly minor quantities toward the bottom of the list — but if you combine them together in a general group of "sugar," they quickly move to the top.
If a label boasts a product was made with whole grains, check to see where on the ingredient list the word "whole" is. If the first ingredient is "whole" wheat flour (or other grain), that's good. Sometimes whole grains make up only a tiny fragment of the item, and that's not good.
Also, it helps to know recommended nutritional limits. Many adults know what their numbers are, and here's what Mayo Clinic recommends for kids:
Boys and girls 4-8: 1,200-2,000 calories depending on activity, 25-35 percent calories from fat, 1,200 milligrams sodium.
Boys and girls 9-13: 1,400-2,600 calories depending on activity, 25-35 percent calories from fat, 1,300 milligrams sodium.
Boys and girls 14-18: 1,800-3,200 calories depending on activity, 25-35 percent calories from fat, 1,500 milligrams sodium.
Total fat for the categories above: 33 to 47 grams for 1,200 daily calories; 39 to 54 grams for 1,400 daily calories; 44 to 62 grams for 1,600 daily calories; 50 to 70 grams for 1,800 daily calories; 56 to 78 grams for 2,000 daily calories.
8 alarmingly unhealthy snacks to avoid
A muffin with the same amont of calories as ten chocolate donuts? A pretzel with more saturated fat than a Big Mac? Read it and weep.AC Milan will make an £80m move for Manchester City's Argentina forward Sergio Aguero, 29, in January. (Sun on Sunday)
The Italian club's hopes of signing Aguero could be helped if Manchester City succeed with a £20m bid for Arsenal and Chile forward Alexis Sanchez, 28, in the January transfer window. (Mail on Sunday)
Arsenal are planning to move for Manchester United's France forward Anthony Martial, 21, as replacement for Sanchez. (Sunday Mirror)
The Gunners also want Everton's 19-year-old forward Ademola Lookman. (Sun on Sunday)
Tottenham's 24-year-old striker Harry Kane and midfielder Dele Alli, 21, are both interesting Real Madrid as the Spanish giants plan their list of potential signings. (Marca)
Former Italy midfielder Andrea Pirlo, 38, says he may retire from playing when his contract at New York City FC expires in December. (La Gazzetta dello Sport - in Italian)
'We have the next Messi' Who is the 16-year-old sending Serie A records tumbling?
Chelsea boss Antonio Conte is considering leaving the Premier League champions at the end of the season and returning home to Italy. (Sunday Express)
Chelsea target Alex Sandro, 26, is set to sign a new deal with Italian club Juventus which will match the wages the Blues offered the Brazil left-back in the summer. (La Gazzetta dello Sport, via Mail on Sunday)
Everton manager Ronald Koeman, whose side have won once in six Premier League games, has been given until the end of October to save his job. (The People)
Liverpool are set to make a move for 26-year-old Napoli and Algeria left-back Faouzi Ghoulam, who is also attracting interest from Manchester City. (Sunday Express)
West Ham United are hoping to beat Liverpool to the signing of Anderlecht's £7m-rated Poland striker Lukasz Teodorczyk, 26. (Sunday Mirror)
Bournemouth will sell DR Congo striker Benik Afobe, 24, in the January transfer window, with West Brom and Wolves interested in signing him. (Sun on Sunday)
Real Madrid's Spain defender Sergio Ramos, 31, has signed a contract extension with the club, which was done in private and runs until June 2021. (Marca)
Meanwhile
Liverpool's owners have put a £1bn price tag on the club after preliminary buy-out talks. (Sunday Mirror)
England players are thought to be unimpressed with the reported choice of hotel for next year's World Cup in Russia, across a stretch of water from Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland. (Star on Sunday)
The Football Association was first informed of a possible links between football and dementia at least 22 years ago. (Sunday Telegraph)
Liverpool head of physiotherapy Andy Renshaw, who was only appointed to first-team duties 15 months ago, has left his position. (Sunday Telegraph)
Newcastle forward Ayoze Perez has played down the training ground bust-up between defender Jamaal Lascelles and midfielder Mohamed Diame, insisting there is a "great team spirit" at the club. (Newcastle Chronicle)
Southampton manager Mauricio Pellegrino is pursuing former club Alaves for unpaid bonuses that he believes should reach 500,000 euros. (Independent)
Everton's Yannick Bolasie, sidelined since December by a serious knee injury, has revealed how the support of the club's fans has helped him. The 28-year-old DR Congo winger has started working with the ball again as his recovery continues. (Liverpool Echo)
Manchester United full-back Matteo Darmian believes team-mate David de Gea has eclipsed Juventus' Gianluigi Buffon as the best goalkeeper in the world. (Manchester Evening News)
The best of Saturday's gossip
Chelsea's Belgium goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois, 25, is refusing to sign a new contract as he seeks a move to Real Madrid. Courtois' Stamford Bridge deal expires in 2019 |
source for that account. Sterling has pleaded not guilty, and the Justice Department is currently appealing a series of evidentiary rulings.
John Kiriakou
A 14-year veteran of the CIA and a counterterror specialist, Kiriakou blew the whistle on the CIA’s use of waterboarding and, according to prosecutors, disclosed the identities of several CIA agents. An outspoken opponent of the agency’s interrogation tactics, he went on television in 2007 and described in detail the methods used to waterboard Abu Zubaydah, a member of al Qaeda currently detained at Guantánamo Bay. Kiriakou agreed to a plea deal with prosecutors, under the terms of which he is currently serving a 30-month prison sentence.
Ed Snowden
A former NSA contractor and the source for recent revelations about the agency’s top-secret surveillance programs, Snowden is charged with espionage and theft of government property. He has provided the Washington Post and the Guardian with a wide variety of documents detailing the NSA’s efforts to monitor Internet and telephone communications. Snowden is believed to be in Hong Kong, and U.S. officials have asked authorities there to extradite him.Kamala Harris just got her first job in Congress, yet is already considered a top presidential contender.
Speaking on a panel about the 2016 presidential election at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit in Laguna Niguel, Calif. on Tuesday afternoon, three political power players all had California’s Senator-elect Harris in mind when asked about the Democratic Party’s best hope for the 2020 presidential race.
While she wasn’t the only name to come up—Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) were also mentioned—she was the only one to be unanimously considered to be a top choice by the panelists, who included Color Genomics CMO and former White House advisor Katie Jacobs Stanton, longtime Republican political strategist Juleanna Glover, and Politico senior Washington correspondent Anna Palmer.
“A lot of people think Senator-elect Harris is right in line to run for president as soon as she possibly can,” said Palmer.
While Glover’s area of expertise lies on the other side of the political spectrum, even she admitted that Harris was a major force. However, she said, “We’re also going to see a lot of conservative or Republican new personalities coming to the forefront in this new age of political unexpected and chaos.”
Subscribe to the Broadsheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the world’s most powerful women.
That all three women pointed to Harris may have something to do with her long history of being a barrier-breaker. Earlier this month, she became the first African-American to be elected as a California senator. When she was first elected California’s attorney general in 2010 (she was re-elected in 2014), she became the first woman, first African American, and the first Indian American attorney general in California.As of January, the Ohio governor's campaign had raised $8.6 million, while allied super PACs and other independent groups amassed another $20.1 million. Kasich's campaign had $1.5 million in cash on hand at the end of January, having spent 83 percent of what it had raised.
The figures trail the amounts that Trump has spent personally and that Cruz has raised over the course of their campaigns. With the need to expand rapidly into states holding primaries in the next few weeks, Kasich will need to raise cash quickly.
Related: [Kasich in Pennsylvania: Neither Cruz nor Trump can win in November]
Many of Jeb Bush's most generous financial donors have sat out of the presidential race since he dropped out in February, and Sen. Marco Rubio's biggest benefactors are up for grabs since he suspended his campaign this week.
As of Friday, Kasich had picked up a handful of new "bundlers," including billionaire businessman and philanthropist Robert Day; billionaire developer Rick Caruso; Bobbie Kilberg, a longtime GOP fundraiser based in Northern Virginia; and Richard Roeder, a California venture capitalist, campaign aides said.
Day donated $1 million to Right to Rise USA, the super PAC that supported Bush's presidential campaign. Roeder gave $25,000 to that group and donated to Rubio and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who dropped out of the race shortly before Christmas.
Kilberg was one of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's most steadfast financial supporters. After Christie gave up his presidential bid, she and her husband, Bill, became co-chairs of Bush's finance committee. She heads a Virginia technology trade association.
Caruso, who has flirted with running for mayor of Los Angeles, has been unaffiliated with any GOP presidential campaign this cycle, but he helped raise money for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign. More recently, Caruso's son, Greg, gained attention among political types during a Republican presidential debate broadcast by CNN. Seated behind moderator Jake Tapper, the younger Caruso was dubbed "Hot Debate Guy" on social media by viewers intrigued by his looks.
More bundlers, who can help Kasich raise the millions needed to continue his campaign, are set to be announced in the coming days, the governor's campaign aides said.
To date, billionaire Ken Langone, another former Christie backer, stood out as one of Kasich's most prominent financial supporters. He signed on in February.
Matea Gold and Anu Narayanswamy contributed to this report.
Ed O’Keefe covered Congress and national politics for The Washington Post from 2008 to 2018. He has also covered federal agencies and federal employees in the Washington area, the war in Iraq, and the 2016 presidential campaigns of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.
Post RecommendsThe Chicago Bears knew going into the 2017 offseason that one of their most critical job was finding a way to upgrade the secondary. It was by far their biggest weakness on defense and perhaps their biggest on the entire roster. Not surprising when the makeup of the unit was older veterans like Tracey Porter, underwhelming projects like Adrian Amos and unproven rookies like Cre’Von LeBlanc and Deon Bush.
Somebody had to be signed who could bring some credibility to the back end. Someone who could take some of the pressure off the front seven while also adding more juice to the teams’ ability to provide stable coverage. Chicago finished with just 11 total takeaways, a franchise worst. It seems they’ve pinpointed the man they want for that job in cornerback Prince Amukamara.
Bears will be signing former Giants, Jags CB Prince Amukamara, source says. — Mike Garafolo (@MikeGarafolo) March 10, 2017
He’s no superstar, but he helps them take a gigantic step in the right direction. His coverage is steady and if given a solid pass rush he’s shown an ability to force turnovers. Put in the hands of Vic Fangio, this could be a quality move. Amukamara had at least 10 passes defended and an interception in each of his last three years with the New York Giants. He earned a 76.1 coverage grade from Pro Football Focus. For context that would be three points better than any of the current corners on the Bears roster.
Now if the team can add more pieces around him, they’ll be in business. A Prince Amukamara Bears marriage should be interesting, if nothing else.Mikasa Ackerman PVC Figure by QuesQ: (4/5)
The QuesQ Attack on Titan Mikasa Ackerman PVC figure is a very attractive statue, with only a couple of visible flaws to detract from the overall appearance. We purchased this piece from our local comic book store, at $160. Expensive for its size, but we’ve come to expect a hefty price tag when dealing with figures imported from Japan.
The pose of this statue is very nice, although I would have chosen to drop her left arm slightly so that her face is visible from any angle. She’s clearly leaping into battle with a Titan, ready to defend humanity from the monsters at the wall. This figure stays true to the likeness of Mikasa as seen in the Anime “Attack on Titan”. She retains the calm, focused look that Mikasa often displays as she races towards the fight.
The uniform and gear is quite impressive. No detail was overlooked. From the scarf that she always wears to the intricate detail of the 3D maneuvering gear. You can clearly see every line and crevice in her gear. I enjoyed the added touch of the 2 cords from the 3D maneuvering device that can be inserted into the ends of the flesh paring blade handles. As an added bonus this statue comes with interchangeable hands. You can choose to display her armed with her twin flesh paring blades or with empty hands.
The packaging is well thought out. You can clearly see the statue through the clear windows of the box and it is very well protected from shipping damage.
The base is unfortunately bland and detracts from the overall appeal of the statue. The artist placed her on pale blue spinning jets, I believe that this represents air currents that Mikasa is creating as she uses her 3D maneuvering equipment to speed toward a Titan. While I feel that the attempt to create the illusion of flight was well intentioned, it falls short, especially when paired with the plain black circular base that the entire statue stands on. If it was the final decision to use the light blue jets of air as a base, it would have been much more attractive to create a larger and more stable structure from these jets instead of dropping a few of them on top of a black circle.
Mikasa is very detailed. The lines are clean and crisp with no running of colors. The interchangeable hands are a nice touch, giving the collector a choice of display options. The metal gear is rendered nicely, making it appear to be actual metal. Her hair is well done, with a single lock falling in front of her face. Unfortunately there is a very visible crease on the statues head, most likely from the mold she was cast in. This could have been buffed out and blended with the rest the hair more carefully than it was.
Overall I like this piece. There are a few flaws but the overall appearance is beautiful. While I wouldn’t go out and spend the money for the entire line of characters, I’m happy to have Mikasa, my favorite Attack on Titan character, in my display case.
Click to buy now on Amazon!
Mikasa Ackerman PVC Figure by QuesQ Packaging
protective and clearly depicts the statue Pose & Proportion
pose is lifelike but could use some minor adjustments to better display the face Detail & Paint
except visible crease this statue is artfully detailed Environment & Base
bland and somewhat awkward base Costume & Character
character is easily recognizable and the costume looks great Total
(4/5)Souma Profile Blog Joined May 2010 2nd Worst City in CA 8905 Posts Last Edited: 2015-07-21 00:45:04 #1
After a bit of delay due to (rumored) prolonged contract talks, Kenny "kennyS" Schrub and Dan "apEX" Madesclaire are finally now a part of Team EnVyUs. The biggest questions the community has now are, "Between Titan and nV, which team made it out better in the shuffle?" and, "Will nV's new players be able to perform in Vincent "Happy" Cervoni's looser system?"
The answer to the latter question is an astounding, "Yes." But first, let's analyze the trades themselves.
Did nV get the better players?
After months of the community praying for the world's (former) best AWPer in the world to join EnVyUs, the deal is finally set in stone. But now that it turns out that Titan and nV have engaged in more than a simple one-for-one trade, with Richard "shox" Papillon joining Edward "SmithZz" Dubourdeaux in their return to Titan and nV landing apEX, the French "dream team" that many hoped for—referring to shox and kennyS on the same team with the rest of the nV crew—will not be a possibility any time soon.
What did nV gain and what did they lose? In shox they lose their main entry fragger and a great all-around player who has proven to be one of the best closers in the world. In SmithZz, they lose a situational (and in recent times, secondary) AWPer and a player that has developed valuable chemistry with Fabian "kioShiMa" Fiey. Both teams will require time to polish their roles, tactics and coordination, that much is for sure.
If kennyS plays to his potential, nV will find themselves a highly consistent and poignant AWPer, something that they have been direly lacking. While apEX, when playing up to par, makes for an incredibly explosive entry fragger himself, shox's ability to close out rounds for the team will be missed. The hope for EnVyUs here is for kennyS to pull himself to form to fill in the hole as the star AWPer has shown tremendous clutch potential in the past.
As one can see, there are a lot of "if"s surrounding kennyS and apEX, as their recent struggles are a cause for worry. As such, it is difficult to say for certain who got the better players as of right now. The one thing that can be said, however, is that nV secured the players with the combined higher ceiling, and that can pay off in spades.
Why kennyS and apEX Will Thrive in nV
Since a handful of months ago, as the community theorycrafted kennyS's potential impact in a team such as nV's, many in the scene felt that the AWPer would not be able to perform up to par in a loose system that did not cater to his every need.
To that I say: What?
To make things clear, kennyS is not a product of Kévin "Ex6TenZ" Droolans' system. Before kennyS's introduction to Titan in the first half of 2014, where he replaced shox due to the latter leaving the team, the coveted player had already found himself to be a megastar on Clan-Mystik, in which he put up consistent numbers with pure individual ability against teams of all levels.
Credit: HLTV.org
To further this fact, kennyS, even during his tenure with Titan and in his peak, was simply a player that made waves regardless of his team, clutching one-versus-Xs and opening sites with nothing more than his own ability. No system in the world can be credited for the last remaining player's decimation of the opposing team.
Though he ultimately did not perform well at EMS One Katowice 2014 (and the following majors), kennyS's struggles in major tournaments are nothing new. Suffice it to say, star players that are the sole playmaker of a team are easier to counter with proper preparation. A close examination of kennyS's matches during major tournaments will clearly show that opposing teams rarely provided the AWPer with room to make plays, a tactic that for some bewildering reason was not as prolific in non-major tournaments.
But this is why kennyS will thrive in nV. Even without shox, the French squad is still packed with stars, from Happy to kioShiMa and Nathan "NBK" Schmitt. Combined with the hope that apEX will rediscover the imposing form that took the world by storm during LDLC's run at ESL One Cologne, opposing teams will no longer be able to account for just the AWPer—they will be required to focus their attention across the map, and in simple DotA terms, space will be created.
apEX will be reunited with his former leader in Happy, whose system allowed the enigmatic rifler to play at what we can only assume to be peak potential. After several months of underperformance and inconsistency in the more rigid system of Ex6TenZ, apEX will finally be able to shine once more. Much like kennyS, apEX will have more room to maneuver to make plays, but most importantly, the rifler simply seems more comfortable in a looser team that allows him to make the most of his own judgment, rather than patiently waiting for the in-game leader to make his calls.
Titan Has More Questions
While there are many ifs surrounding kennyS and apEX, Titan has more questions to address. After being knocked out in the group stages of three major tournaments in a row with three different lineups, will Ex6TenZ finally adapt to the meta with better mid-game calls? Can shox and SmithZz work in Ex6TenZ's system if he doesn't? Can Mathieu "Maniac" Quiquerez and Cédric "RpK" Guipouy step up to the plate to match EnVyUs's overall skill? Can this team develop the proper chemistry going forward?
If I was a betting man, I'd put my money on nV to come out with the better results.
Writer: Souma
Graphics: DearDave
Photos: ESL After a bit of delay due to (rumored) prolonged contract talks,Kenny "kennyS" Schrub andDan "apEX" Madesclaire are finally now a part ofTeam EnVyUs. The biggest questions the community has now are, "BetweenTitan and nV, which team made it out better in the shuffle?" and, "Will nV's new players be able to perform inVincent "Happy" Cervoni's looser system?"The answer to the latter question is an astounding, "Yes." But first, let's analyze the trades themselves.After months of the community praying for the world's (former) best AWPer in the world to join EnVyUs, the deal is finally set in stone. But now that it turns out that Titan and nV have engaged in more than a simple one-for-one trade, withRichard "shox" Papillon joiningEdward "SmithZz" Dubourdeaux in their return to Titan and nV landing apEX, the French "dream team" that many hoped for—referring to shox and kennyS on the same team with the rest of the nV crew—will not be a possibility any time soon.What did nV gain and what did they lose? In shox they lose their main entry fragger and a great all-around player who has proven to be one of the best closers in the world. In SmithZz, they lose a situational (and in recent times, secondary) AWPer and a player that has developed valuable chemistry withFabian "kioShiMa" Fiey. Both teams will require time to polish their roles, tactics and coordination, that much is for sure.If kennyS plays to his potential, nV will find themselves a highly consistent and poignant AWPer, something that they have been direly lacking. While apEX, when playing up to par, makes for an incredibly explosive entry fragger himself, shox's ability to close out rounds for the team will be missed. The hope for EnVyUs here is for kennyS to pull himself to form to fill in the hole as the star AWPer has shown tremendous clutch potential in the past.As one can see, there are a lot of "if"s surrounding kennyS and apEX, as their recent struggles are a cause for worry. As such, it is difficult to say for certain who got the better playersThe one thing that can be said, however, is that nV secured the players with the combined higher ceiling, and that can pay off in spades.Since a handful of months ago, as the community theorycrafted kennyS's potential impact in a team such as nV's, many in the scene felt that the AWPer would not be able to perform up to par in a loose system that did not cater to his every need.To that I say:To make things clear, kennyS is not a product ofKévin "Ex6TenZ" Droolans' system. Before kennyS's introduction to Titan in the first half of 2014, where he replaced shox due to the latter leaving the team, the coveted player had already found himself to be a megastar onClan-Mystik, in which he put up consistent numbers with pure individual ability against teams of all levels.To further this fact, kennyS, even during his tenure with Titan and in his peak, was simply a player that made waves regardless of his team, clutching one-versus-Xs and opening sites with nothing more than his own ability. No system in the world can be credited for the last remaining player's decimation of the opposing team.Though he ultimately did not perform well at EMS One Katowice 2014 (and the following majors), kennyS's struggles in major tournaments are nothing new. Suffice it to say, star players that are the sole playmaker of a team are easier to counter with proper preparation. A close examination of kennyS's matches during major tournaments will clearly show that opposing teams rarely provided the AWPer with room to make plays, a tactic that for some bewildering reason was not as prolific in non-major tournaments.But this is why kennyS will thrive in nV. Even without shox, the French squad is still packed with stars, from Happy to kioShiMa andNathan "NBK" Schmitt. Combined with the hope that apEX will rediscover the imposing form that took the world by storm duringLDLC's run at ESL One Cologne, opposing teams will no longer be able to account for just the AWPer—they will be required to focus their attention across the map, and in simple DotA terms, space will be created.apEX will be reunited with his former leader in Happy, whose system allowed the enigmatic rifler to play at what we can only assume to be peak potential. After several months of underperformance and inconsistency in the more rigid system of Ex6TenZ, apEX will finally be able to shine once more. Much like kennyS, apEX will have more room to maneuver to make plays, but most importantly, the rifler simply seems more comfortable in a looser team that allows him to make the most of his own judgment, rather than patiently waiting for the in-game leader to make his calls.While there are many ifs surrounding kennyS and apEX, Titan has more questions to address. After being knocked out in the group stages of three major tournaments in a row with three different lineups, will Ex6TenZ finally adapt to the meta with better mid-game calls? Can shox and SmithZz work in Ex6TenZ's system if he doesn't? CanMathieu "Maniac" Quiquerez andCédric "RpK" Guipouy step up to the plate to match EnVyUs's overall skill? Can this team develop the proper chemistry going forward?If I was a betting man, I'd put my money on nV to come out with the better results.Writer:Graphics: DearDavePhotos:
Writerazcentral sports Thu Aug 15, 2013 12:50 PM
CAMP TONTOZONA -- Former Arizona State quarterback Jake Plummer has been hired by Pac-12 Networks as a studio analyst, a school source confirmed.
Plummer, 38, led ASU to an 11-1 record and Rose Bowl appearance as a senior in 1996 and finished third in the Heisman Trophy voting. ASU's perfect season, and national-title hopes, were dashed in the finals seconds of the Rose Bowl, a 20-17 loss to Ohio State.
After finishing his career as ASU's leader in touchdown passes and passing yards, he was drafted by the Cardinals and played six seasons for them. He then played four seasons for the Denver Broncos.
Meanwhile, former ASU linebacker Adam Archuleta has left the Pac-12 Network to take a new role as game analyst on the CBS Sports Network. Archuleta will work Mountain West Conference and Conference USA games.Truck Yeah The trucks are good!
Watch what looks like the happiest moment in this pizza guy's life; handing a fresh pie straight to Pope Francis as he rolls through Naples in his bulletproof G-Wagen. Also, an errant soccer ball penetrates the papal motorcade's remarkably weak security.
Bet "Abbiamo caricato il Papa!" is already plastered above the cash register at Don Ernesto's Restaurant, and well deserved for this brave effort! If somebody tried to toss a pizza into Obama's entourage here in America the thing would have more bullet holes than pepperonis before it left the delivery dude's hand.
Pontifex has said one of the things he misses most about pre-Pope life is being able to"go to a pizzeria for a pizza," so I'm sure he was stoked to have a hot steamy snack for the rest of his ride.Helgi Tomasson’s version of Romeo and Juliet, back at the Opera House for its 21st anniversary, is better than most adaptations, and thanks to the San Francisco Ballet’s steadfast pursuit of excellence, it’s better performed than almost all of them. But it’s not a perfect ballet, despite the marvelous orchestra, conducted by Martin West, or the luminously spectacular Veronese scenery, the work of the late Jens-Jacob Worsaae.
What makes some story ballets great and some with the greatest storylines not so great is a mystery into which we might delve at some other time. But to touch on a few things, we could start with composer Sergei Prokofiev’s music, which seems sometimes to strangle on its own lugubriousness, the deep horns gasping as the violins break high and free. Maybe that’s it – too much breathlessness, not enough soulful consideration. As a whole, the ballet carries the impetuous petulance of a teenager without enough countervailing heartbreak. Truthfully, it feels a bit flat.
This may have had something to do with Friday’s opening-night principals. As Romeo and Juliet, Carlos Quenedit and Sarah Van Patten bring superb technical skill to their roles. He is a fine partner, executing Tomasson’s arduous, imaginative partnering with strength and aplomb, allowing Van Patten to virtually sing her emotions through the lovely lines of her body. So Romeo’s overhead lift takes Juliet into a wave of motion, a maximal physical extension, of the love she feels. But it never intensifies. We’re seeing a series of gorgeous feats of technique and balance; it just doesn’t reach beyond the dancers to the characters they’re playing.
We’re seeing a series of gorgeous feats of technique and balance; it just doesn’t reach beyond the dancers to the characters they’re playing. They are Romeo. And Juliet. They’re not exactly a duo; they’re dancing, but they’re not acting. This thoroughgoing expression of unity is not an easy task by any means, and it would appear that both artists have the gifts to achieve, in time, a more complete rapport.
Their performances were matched with other fine work in a rich banquet of roles and styles. Anthony Vincent’s malicious Tybalt was as thin and dangerous, as dynamic in thrust, as a sword. (Marty Pistone, with Tomasson, choreographed the fight scene, and it’s a great one.) Sherri LeBlanc’s Nurse was delightfully maternal, every gesture meaningful and tender.
A special paragraph here for Taras Domitro as Mercutio, Romeo’s amazing, loyal, and doomed wingman. There isn’t another dancer who can spin with his precision, his acceleration. You’d think his energy would run down, not up. You’d be wrong. Domitro makes it all look so easy, bringing a natural brio and charm to the provocateur side of the role as well as the masterly technique and timing it requires.
Lord and Lady Capulet (Val Caniparoli and Sofiane Sylve) were chilly and withholding, greedy to forge a union between their daughter and Paris (Steven Morse), the perfectly bland, empty suitor. Dores Andre and Dana Genshaft were perfect Harlots, blithe in their footwork, shameless in their liberties, while, as acrobats, Norika Matsuyama, Francis Mungamba, and Wei Wang provided an exciting, limber splash of carnival. Ricardo Bustamante was an affecting Friar Laurence, believably the only grownup friend Juliet’s ever had. Poor Juliet.
Yes, the whole thing is sad. But it could be absolutely heartbreaking. Is that so much to ask?While it will offer an Xbox One controller as the standard input method that comes with every Oculus Rift VR headset, Oculus also has a brand-new controller it unveiled today: the Oculus Touch.
The strange-looking, circular Touch is comprised of two controllers, one for each of your hands. Each has a traditional analog stick, two buttons, and an analog trigger, as well as haptic feedback and what Oculus calls the "hand trigger." Touch is also capable of tracking "a set of finger poses" that work to "recognize natural hand poses like pointing, waving, or giving a thumbs-up," Oculus founder Palmer Luckey explained during today's press conference.
"Developers have been working with gamepads for years in VR; they've proven you can make really compelling content with a gamepad," Luckey said.
"Brendan [Iribe, Oculus CEO] talked about how excited we are to include the Xbox One controller as part of the Rift, to make sure that developers have something that they can target, that they know every single person who has the Rift will have. Something that they can design their game to work very effectively with. And the Xbox One controller is a key part of the current virtual reality puzzle."
Luckey described the Xbox One controller as the best way to play certain games, like Lucky's Tale and Eve Valkyrie, but he then brought up the subject of future games, which will need a different type of input device.
Oculus is hoping the Touch will be exactly that. "These are going to take virtual reality gaming to the next level," Luckey said.
He describes Touch as "a pair of track controllers" that offer "hand presence, the sense of feeling as though your virtual hands are actually your real hands. This is critical to nailing the sense of overall presence. Once you have your hands involved, you really need tracking to be absolutely perfect, accurate, and low latency, or you're going to feel like your hands are dead."
Luckey went on to talk about offering a controller that allows you to do things like pick up, fire, and throw away a gun naturally, as well give a thumbs-up or wave.
"We want to enable a lot of different types of virtual reality experiences: entirely new, VR experiences; genres of games that have been around for decades that are being brought into VR; hybrid experiences that incorporate the best of traditional input with the best of Virtual reality input."
We'll have more on Oculus Rift and the Oculus Touch as we approach E3 next week.
More stories from today's Oculus Rift E3 event follow below:Looking for news you can trust?
Subscribe to our free newsletters.
Phil Klinkner takes to the pages of the LA Times this morning to tell us that immigration was a big deal in the 2016 election:
Comparing the results of the 2012 and 2016 ANES surveys shows that Trump increased his vote over Mitt Romney’s on a number of immigration-related issues. In 2012 and 2016, the ANES asked respondents their feelings toward immigrants in the country illegally. Respondents could rate them anywhere between 100 (most positive) or 0 (most negative). Among those with positive views (above 50), there was no change between 2012 and 2016, with Romney and Trump each receiving 22% of the vote. Among those who had negative views, however, Trump did better than Romney, capturing 60% of the vote compared with only 55% for Romney. ….Overall, immigration represented one of the biggest divides between Trump and Clinton voters. Among Trump voters, 67% endorsed building a southern border wall and 47% of them favored it a great deal. In contrast, 77% of Clinton voters opposed building a wall and 67 % strongly opposed it.
This gibes with my anecdotal view that a fair number of Trump voters didn’t pay much attention to anything he said except that he was going to build a wall and keep the Mexicans out. All the budget and regulation and Obamacare and climate change stuff was just noise that they didn’t take very seriously. But building a wall was nice and simple, and they thought it would bring back their jobs and keep their towns safe.
Having said that, though, I want to repeat a warning: everyone should stop looking for tectonic changes that account for Trump’s win. Hillary Clinton was running for a third Democratic term during OK-but-not-great economic times, and that’s always difficult. Most of the fundamentals-based models predicted she’d win by a couple of percentage points, and she actually did much better than that—until James Comey decided to destroy her. And even at that, she did win by a couple of percentage points. It was a fluke of the Electoral College that put Trump in the White House, not a historic shift in voting patterns.
The real question is how Trump won the Republican primary. At the presidential level, that’s a far more interesting topic than what happened in a fairly ordinary general election.Education Secretary Betsy DeVos declined to answer questions about James Runcie's resignation Wednesday as she left a House appropriations subcommittee hearing. | AP Photo Top Education Dept. official resigns after clash with DeVos James Runcie, head of the agency's student aid office, submitted his resignation Tuesday night, effective immediately.
The head of the Education Department’s student financial aid office resigned Tuesday night over what he said were simmering management problems at the agency that culminated in a dispute with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos over her insistence he testify before a congressional oversight panel.
James Runcie, chief operating officer of the Office of Federal Student Aid, submitted his resignation at about 10:30 p.m., suggesting in a memo to colleagues that his office had been micromanaged by political appointees and was being stretched too thin.
Story Continued Below
“I am incredibly concerned about significant constraints being placed on our ability to allocate and prioritize resources, make decisions and deliver on the organization’s mission,” Runcie wrote in the memo that was obtained by POLITICO. He added that he was “encumbered from exercising my authorities to properly lead this great organization” and that he could not continue as chief “given the risk associated with the current environment at the Department.”
Runcie had been ordered by DeVos to testify on Thursday before the House Oversight Committee regarding the department’s rising improper payment rate for federal student aid programs.
Runcie wrote that he defied DeVos’ request because the chief financial officer for student aid was the agency’s expert on the subject and had been prepped to speak. Runcie wrote he had “not heard a single compelling reason from Department staff regarding the need to have the Chief Operating Officer of Federal Student Aid testify on improper payments."
“Successfully leading and managing a large, complex organization in the public sector requires alignment on governance and mission between operational leaders and political ones,” Runcie said in a statement on Wednesday. “Simply put, I submitted my resignation late yesterday because that alignment no longer exists.”
DeVos declined to answer questions about Runcie's resignation Wednesday morning as she left a House appropriations subcommittee hearing. “I wish him well and thank him for his service,” she told POLITICO.
Morning Education A daily dose of education policy news — 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.
Later in the day, however, a DeVos spokeswoman fired back at Runcie’s assertions.
“The Secretary directed Mr. Runcie to comply with the request of Congress and to answer questions regarding oversight within FSA and repeated issues concerning improper payments,” spokeswoman Liz Hill said in an email. “He chose to resign rather than face Congress.”
DeVos “looks forward to finding a highly-qualified candidate to effectively lead FSA and maintain the public’s trust in this agency that is so important to students,” Hill said.
Runcie’s deputy, Matthew Sessa, will lead the office “until further notice,” the department said in a statement.
The Office of Federal Student Aid runs the federal government’s massive $1 trillion student lending operation, disburses Pell grants and regulates colleges and universities.
Several Senate Democrats said they were concerned by Runcie's sudden decision to leave. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a statement that she had "differences with Jim Runcie's leadership" over holding student loan companies and colleges more accountable. But, she said, "the idea that he would resign amid reports of political meddling from Secretary DeVos" is "cause for serious alarm."
"Congress needs to get to the bottom of what’s going on here," Warren said.
Sen. Patty Murray, ranking member on the Senate HELP Committee, said she found the resignation "deeply troubling." “This kind of chaos, mismanagement and undue political interference is not a surprise, but it is still deeply disappointing," she said. Murray urged DeVos "to hire a strong and independent" replacement for Runcie and then "let them to do their job."
Republicans, however, criticized Runcie's record and his unwillingness to answer lawmakers' questions.
House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz called it "disappointing" that "Mr. Runcie would rather resign than testify before Congress" and encouraged DeVos to appoint a new chief operating officer who "values security and competency over politics."
Chaffetz said that under Runcie's leadership, "federal aid systems are less secure, performance has suffered and improper payments have increased. For years, the Inspector General and this Committee have warned the Department of Education of vulnerabilities to its $1.1 trillion federal loans program."
House Education and the Workforce Chairwoman Virginia Foxx also questioned Runcie's management.
"No one employed by the federal government should be immune from accountability, especially someone responsible for overseeing more than $1 trillion in federal student loans," Foxx said. "Mr. Runcie has stood at the center of this mismanagement for years, and our concerns have largely fallen on deaf ears. Secretary DeVos has an important opportunity to instill new leadership and a new direction within the agency."
The resignation comes as DeVos has proposed to overhaul how the department collects student loan payments and has reportedly scaled back its enforcement of for-profit colleges. Runcie appeared to have alienated both supporters and opponents of those changes.
The student aid office "is widely seen as a strong ally to the student loan industry," Rohit Chopra, senior fellow at the Consumer Federation of America and formerly student loan ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said in a statement. "The next COO should be laser-focused on the interests of students and taxpayers."
Runcie was most |
therefore, according to Western dogma of these times, his murder must have been ordered by President Putin.
Police began investigating the crime promptly but there was no pause for deliberation on the part of some western leaders and much of their media : they reacted immediately and leapt to censure the Russian government and especially President Putin in terms that were not only abusive, insolent and confrontational but confirmation of the fact that there is no intention on their part to ever consider diplomacy in their dealings with Moscow.
French President Hollande described Nemtsov as a “defender of democracy” and called the death an assassination. Britain’s prime minister Cameron declared that “Boris Nemtsov is dead. But the values he stood for will never die,” and demanded that the death be “fully, rapidly and transparently investigated.” President Obama announced that “we call upon the Russian government to conduct a prompt, impartial, and transparent investigation into the circumstances of his murder.”
These Western heads of government knew well that their public pronouncements and peremptory demands were condemnatory insinuations against the democratically elected administration of Russia, but their intention is to cripple the country and topple President Putin and they seize any opportunity to disparage and insult him. Their line of attack is that if something unpleasant happens in Russia it is without doubt the fault of President Putin who must at once be subjected to vilification in terms that imply his personal responsibility for whatever crime has taken place.
There would have been sanctimonious uproar in the west if Putin ever commented in such a fashion about, for example, the killing by police of unarmed black people in America, but spiteful pronouncements on Russia’s domestic affairs by western leaders are considered praiseworthy by most western mainstream news outlets which have been very quiet about some strange happenings in Ukraine where, as The Economist observes, “Dodgy economic policy, distaste for reform and endemic corruption have brought the country to its knees.”
In the three months after the killing of Nemtsov there were at least eleven mysterious deaths in Ukraine, most in the capital, Kiev:
January 29: politician Aleksey Kolesnik, dead by hanging. February 24 : politician Stanislav Melnik shot dead. February 25 : mayor of Melitopol Sergey Valter dead by hanging. February 26 : deputy chief of Melitopol police, Aleksandr Bordyuga, found dead. February 28 : politician Mikhail Chechetov, dead by fall from apartment window. March 9 : politician Stanislav Melnik shot dead. March 12 : politician Oleksandr Peklushenko shot dead. March 22 : former prosecutor Serhiy Melnychuk dead by fall from apartment window. April 13: journalist Sergei Sukhobok shot dead. April 15 : politician Oleg Kalashnikov shot dead. April 16 : journalist Oles Buzyna shot dead.
By coincidence most of the dead had been critical of the Ukraine government, supportive of Russia, or possessed information that might have been embarrassing for the Ukraine’s billionaire President Petro Poroshenko, owner of a mammoth confectionary corporation, car plants, a shipyard, and a major television station, who delivered an address to a joint session of the US Congress and continues to receive unquestioning western support for his increasingly erratic statements and behavior.
Although most western media and all western political leaders ignored these deaths, the redoubtable Newsweek scented a story and began to investigate. It recorded that:
In reply to a legal request by Newsweek for information on investigations into the deaths of seven other former officials, all tied to [former President] Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, the General Prosecutor’s Office responded that all the information about all the deaths was a state secret — a staggering claim to make about a series of apparently unrelated civilian deaths they told the press were suicides.
If the equivalent office in Moscow had given such a response to a western media inquiry there would have been scathing headlines in the New York Times, the British Telegraph and all the other determinedly anti-Russian media machines of the west. Newsweek’s informative observations on obvious corruption in official legal circles in Ukraine elicited no follow-up of any kind in the west’s media — but had there been similar revelations about Russia there would have been a blitz of self-righteous condemnation.
The end of Newsweek’s piece is especially noteworthy:
Watching the [Ukraine’s] top prosecutors leaving the General Prosecutor’s Office in sharp suits and stepping into gleaming Porsches, BMWs and Land Rovers, it’s clear that the average state prosecutor’s wage, equivalent to 400 euros [USD 430] per month, isn’t their only source of income. Within the same building, officials are representing an array of different interests. With such great wealth at stake, the truth about these deaths is unlikely to emerge any time soon. Back in Odessa, three prosecutors laugh as they dismiss allegations that their office tried to cover up Sergei Melnychuk’s murder. They have good reason to be happy. They’re off to the Rugby World Cup in London later this year, an event where one ticket... sells for the equivalent of 400 euros.
Just the sort of people you would trust to conduct legal action concerning mysterious deaths of anti-government figures.
The leader of the west’s anti-Russian campaign is President Obama who told the media on March 2 that “freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of information, basic civil rights and civil liberties inside of Russia are in much worse shape now than they were four or five, ten years ago.” If this is so, then he was right to point it out.
But Obama’s condemnation of countries that are guilty of denying “civil liberties” is intriguingly selective. There is one particularly rich country that escapes the net of his disapproval.
The US State Department records that in Saudi Arabia its “citizens lack the right and legal means to change their government” while there are “pervasive restrictions on universal rights such as freedom of expression, including on the internet, and freedom of assembly, association, movement and religion; and a lack of equal rights for women...” Saudi Arabia, a valued ally of the United States, indulges in “torture and other abuses [and] arbitrary arrest and detention,” while “freedom of religion is neither recognized nor protected under the law.” It might be imagined that the President of the United States might feel it proper to indicate his righteous disapproval of the fact that in Saudi Arabia “civil law does not protect human rights, including freedom of the speech and of the press.”
But no.
President Obama pronounced on January 15, 2015 that “promoting religious freedom has always been a key objective of my Administration’s foreign policy” — but he seems to be selective about achieving that admirable goal.
Later in January Obama visited India in order to bond with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and promote US commercial ventures and military interests. Modi had been forbidden entry to the United States for nine years, on the grounds that he violated a US law denying a visa to those who had committed “severe violations of religious freedom,” but this was resolved by ignoring the problem.
While Obama was hugging the person who was no longer deemed as having committed severe violations of religious freedom there came the death of the King of Saudi Arabia, unelected ruler of the country that was noted by the US State Department as refusing to recognize or protect freedom of religion.
So the President of the United States of America cut short his visit to India and flew to Saudi Arabia to join other world leaders paying respects and offering condolences for the death of King Abdullah, in whose fiefdom “citizens lack the right and legal means to change their government.” According to Obama, King Abdullah had “in his own fashion presented some modest reform efforts within the kingdom;” but Obama obviously forgot that last year, during the reign of the modestly reforming Abdullah, the writer and commentator Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for “insulting Islam through electronic channels” and “going beyond the realm of obedience.”
Badawi suffered his first 50 lashes in front of a mosque on January 9 — six days before Obama enthusiastically declared support for religious freedom and three weeks before he offered “condolences on behalf of the American people” concerning the death of the monarch under whose authority the flogging was ordered.
On January 26 President Obama was asked if his discussions with Saudi Arabia’s new ruler, King Salman, would include mention of the kingdom’s policy concerning human rights and replied that “Sometimes we need to balance our need to speak to them about human rights issues with immediate concerns we have in terms of counter-terrorism or dealing with regional stability.” These were weasel words intended to deflect attention from the fact that he intended to do nothing whatever about Saudi Arabia’s violations of human dignity, and one result of his complacent inaction was the king’s sacking of Nora al-Fayez, the country’s first and only female minister “whose attempt to shift the boundaries of women’s education attracted the hostility of religious conservatives.”
The government of the United States considers that Ukraine and Saudi Arabia can do no wrong and that their rulers must be supported unconditionally. Support for Ukraine is based solely on its opposition to Russia which the US wishes to humiliate and destroy economically. Unqualified endorsement of the repressive Saudi regime, with its contempt for human liberty and freedom of religion, stems from motives of regional power and direct financial advantage. But whatever the purposes of Washington’s policies, the world is presented with the unedifying spectacle of the President of the world’s greatest nation indulging in grubby hypocrisy. It’s not a pretty sight.
Brian Cloughley writes about foreign policy and military affairs. He lives in Voutenay sur Cure, France.Get the biggest weekly stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Campaigners have launched a bid to ‘Keep Rossendale Valley Green’ in the face of stringent Government housing development requirements.
Hundreds of people have signed a petition urging the Prime Minister to rethink demands - revealed in last week’s Free Press - for 5,000 new homes to be built in the borough over the next 15 years.
Volunteers went out in force in Whitewell Bottom to launch the campaign to preserve the Valley’s green fields, pitches and recreational areas, a call which received cross-party backing at Rossendale’s full council meeting.
The campaign is calling for local residents to add their signatures to a letter which will be presented to David Cameron asking him to reconsider and allow local people to decide what is best for their area.
Council leader Alyson Barnes said: “We had a great deal of support for the launch of our campaign this weekend - the letter already has over 500 signatures. Local residents are keen to add their names to our letter and show their support for this important issue.
“We are determined to demonstrate that the public opinion is with us on this issue and that the Government should listen to the will of the local people. Building the number of houses that the Government demands would have a hugely negative impact on our infrastructure, services and landscape.”
The revised housing requirement has nearly doubled the housing quota which formed the basis for the council’s ill-fated ‘Lives and Landscapes’ Local Plan proposals, which were shelved last year following more than 2,700 responses.
The letter to PM David Cameron states: “The number of new houses you are making us build are just too much for this area to cope with.”
At a meeting of Rossendale council, members unanimously agreed to support writing to both the Prime Minister and Rossendale MP Jake Berry in protest at the matter. But MP Mr Berry refused to back the campaign, stating that the council’s previous Local Plan was ‘a complete and utter shambles.’"Sure, it's got a great view. But have you read these antiquated tax codes that got me a huge break?" One57
It’s the extreme end game of a tax code that shifts the burden from owners to renters, and from the wealthy to the poor.
When a duplex condominium in New York's new One57 supertall tower sold for $100.5 million dollars in January, it shattered all records. This condo is the most expensive single-family residence ever sold in Manhattan. Yet, at the rate that luxe residential towers are coming online in the part of Midtown known as Billionaires Row—consider the $91.5 million sale just last month—even that mondo One57 record may not last for long. Steamy eight- or nine-figure sales were always the dream of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "If we can find a bunch of billionaires around the world to move here, that would be a godsend,” then-Mayor Bloomberg told The New York Times back in 2013. "Because that’s where the revenue comes to take care of everybody else." Construction is now underway on Nordstrom Tower, a supertall residential tower designed by Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill, the architects behind the Burj Khalifa. When the building is finished, the Nordstrom Tower will be the tallest residential building in the world. The one-percenters who can afford its lofts will be treated to some of the best views the United States has to offer.
And that's just one of several buildings coming up that caters to the world's wealthiest. So by Bloomberg's logic, Gotham is saved, right? Not quite.
Thanks to the structure of city and state tax codes, the billionaires buying pieds-à-terre in the sky over Central Park are hardly paying property taxes at all. The values of these new condos are being assessed at just a fraction of what they're worth. And buyers are paying only a fraction of that fraction in property taxes. This is a pressing issue for at least three reasons. For one thing, the property-tax levy is New York City's single largest source of revenue. The city is leaving money behind by failing to tax the most valuable homes at a rate closer to their market value. Meanwhile, well apart from the ultra-luxury condos, the city is overtaxing apartment buildings, whose renters are struggling the most with affordability. These outcomes go hand in hand. Second, with every new supertall residential tower in Midtown—each one more architecturally dramatic than the last—the effective property tax rates paid by owners on Billionaires Row stand to fall even lower. While nice condos attract big tax breaks, nice neighborhoods earn long-lasting tax breaks. The inequitable distribution of property taxes is the reason the rent is too damned high. Finally, one major tax break behind the explosion of ultra-luxury development is up for debate right now: Next month, state lawmakers must decide whether to abandon or renew the controversial 421-a exemption program, which lowers the billable-assessed value of a property to incentivize real-estate development (and affordable-housing construction). Arguments for and against 421-a are as philosophical as they are financial. No matter what position the de Blasio administration takes on property-tax breaks in June, it will take more than a tweak in the law to fulfill Bloomberg's vision of redistribution. As it stands, the smallest sliver of New York's wealthiest homeowners pays the tiniest fraction of New York's property taxes.
In NYC, Billionaires Pay 1/100th the Average Property-Tax Rate The combined 89th and 90th floor penthouse at One57 set the new high-water mark for a single-family residence sale in New York. While the owner paid nine figures for the penthouse, the city only taxed the unit for $17,000 in property taxes. That's an effective property tax rate of 0.017 percent—about one one-hundredth of the average national tax rate. Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter. The best way to follow issues you care about. Subscribe Loading... That One57 penthouse owner didn't just luck out, either. Thanks to abatements, phase-ins, and truly systemic undervaluation, the brightest gems in New York City—and arguably, in the world—are being taxed at the same rate as much lesser homes. Max Galka, the writer behind Metrocosm and a cofounder of real-estate data site Revaluate, looked at the highest-selling condos in New York to date (minus that $91.5 million sale in April). According to his analysis at Metrocosm, the owner of the One57 penthouse pays property taxes as if the unit were a $3–$6 million condo. The gap between billable-assesed value and market-rate value is similar for all 10 of the top condos. (Three of which are also to be found in One57.)
(Data via Max Galka. Chart by Mark Byrnes/CityLab)
"You might commonly think that the assessed value [of a condo] would be based on the sale price," says Mark Willis, executive director of New York University's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. "In New York, it’s not true." Place matters for property-tax purposes. As a 2013 report by the Citizens Budget Commission explains, phase-ins and other mechanisms originally designed to prevent property-tax shocks for homeowners are now a source of "intra-class inequities" across neighborhoods. "Properties in fast-appreciating neighborhoods end up with lower effective tax rates than identically-valued properties in neighborhoods with more stable prices," the report reads.
Which means that, with Nordstrom Tower going up just a block from One57 (and other supertalls), condo owners on Billionaires Row stand to pay less in property taxes than they would if they owned the same condo in a neighborhood with fewer gee-whiz architectural wonders.
(Data via Max Galka. Chart by Mark Byrnes/CityLab)
What Bloomberg saw as a way to provide for the welfare of New York looks more like one of the firmest expressions of inequality anywhere. And these intra-class inequities are enshrined in state law. There's only so much the de Blasio administration can do about that, but addressing the city's affordability crisis may require him to take a broader stance on property-tax reform. "Everyone’s waiting to see what the de Blasio administration position on [property taxes] is," says James Parrott, deputy director and chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute. "At this point, it’s not clear what proposed changes de Blasio folks will seek, or how Albany will receive them." Property Taxes for Condos Are Set by Apartment Buildings The formula by which New York assesses property taxes is positively byzantine. A 2011 report on tax burden and distribution from the Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy provides a brief history on how it came to be so complicated. It's easy to see why it's outmoded: Changes in state law in 1981 yielded the system that's still in place today.
New York law identifies four classes of property for tax purposes. The law fixes the relative share of property taxes that each class pays into municipal coffers—slices of pie whose proportions are more or less fixed. Class 1 properties are residential: mostly small homes. Houses for up to three families, plus some small condominium buildings, are taxed as Class 1 properties. Class 1 properties are responsible for most of the market value of New York City properties (46.25 percent), but little of the property-tax share (just 15.49 percent). Class 3 is industrial. Class 4 is commercial. Class 2 is the focus here: Large condo buildings, most co-ops, and large apartment buildings all fall under this category. Calculating taxes for Class 1 properties such as brownstones is fairly simple. For the most part, the billable assessed value is 6 percent of the home's estimated market value. The New York City Department of Finance estimates the property's value by looking at comparable property sales from the prior year. Easy-peasy.
(Mark Byrnes/CityLab)
Determining property taxes for Class 2 properties is way weirder. The city assesses all Class 2 residences as if they were income-generating apartment buildings. Since most condos don't typically generate any income, the city makes up income statements for condominium buildings, whole cloth. Here's the two-step process the city uses for assessing a condo's value: For every condo building in New York, the city identifies a comparable rental building. A condo-comparable rental building means an apartment building with units of a similar number, size, age, location, and so on. Using this rental building's (real) rent roll, the Department of Finance extrapolates an (imaginary) income statement for the condo building. The condo board decides the portion allocated to individual units. The city lists these condo-comparables in this fascinating (but incomplete) database. Then the city takes 45 percent of the condo-comparable income as the billable assessed value. Finally, the city subtracts any exemptions (which reduce the assessed value) and abatements (which reduce the rate-calculated tax bill).
Voilà: the property-tax assessment for a condo. But You Can’t Compare Luxe Condos and Rental Apartments For two kinds of condos especially, the Class 2 two-step opens up gaping loopholes. The formula simply wasn't designed to anticipate changes in housing more than 30 years after the law was settled.
(Mark Byrnes/CityLab)
For classic condo buildings, property taxes wind up being distorted by rent control. The disparity between the billable-assessed value and the market-rate value for older condos can be severe. "This process severely undervalues condo or co-op buildings constructed before 1974," the Citizens Budget Commission report reads. "For these properties, the comparable rental buildings chosen by [the Department of Finance] often contain units subject to rent regulation." For stellar condo buildings—a category that has yet to be wholly accounted for in previous literature on Class 2 property-tax inequity—there simply are no rental apartment buildings that compare for tax purposes. Look at the tower at 111 W. 57th Street, designed by SHoP Architects. It’s unprecedented. It may be the skinniest super-tall tower in the world. And it isn't alone: 432 Park Avenue, designed by Rafael Viñoly, is already an architectural icon. It's the tallest residential tower in the Western Hemisphere (for the time being), and its views are intoxicating. When the so-called MoMA Tower by Jean Nouvel is finished, the cultural transformation of Midtown and Central Park may be complete. So far, One57, designed by Christian de Portzamparc, a Pritzker Prize–winning architect, is the first in the line. So what apartment building did the city decide on to set the property taxes for its penthouse pied-à-terre?
The answer is unclear. The city's database for condo-comparables doesn't include a listing for the rental building used to draw up the billable-assessed value for One57, or any of the other top-selling condos in the city. (The Department of Finance has not answered a request for this information.) I'm a Hopelessly Impoverished Renter. Why Should I Care? Looking back, state lawmakers who passed the bill resetting property taxes for New York couldn't have dreamed of a skyscraper boom almost 35 years later. A recent brief from the State University of New York at New Paltz Center for Research, Regional Education, and Outreach shows that, in fact, in the 1970s, lawmakers were almost certainly looking backward. New York City was struggling. "The best evidence we have of why it was passed, at least on the political side of things, is a 1982 brief opinion by what is now the State Department of Taxation and Finance," says Geoffrey Propheteer, a property tax analyst for the New York City Independent Budget Office. (Here's that opinion.) Propheteer says that lawmakers struggled to reconcile what appeared to be two contradictory standards for condos. One standard prohibited using similar condo sales as a system for assessing value (the way the city does for Class 1 homes). "Why they made this decision—no idea," Propheteer says. The property-tax burden has shifted from owners to renters, and from the wealthier to the poorer. Another standard set a de facto limit on the assessed value of any individual condo unit: The sum of the assessed values of the condos within a building could not exceed the assessed value of the whole building as a single parcel. So, if there are 50 units in a $50 million building, the cap on assessment for each unit is $1 million, no matter the views, location, or design—full stop. "That's the letter of the law: 'You must value these things as though they are not these things,'" Propheteer says. "That's the best evidence that currently exists for the legislative intent of the law."
The overarching sentiment behind property-tax reform in the 1970s was understandable: Homeowners were fleeing New York City, and lawmakers at the city and state level had to do something to stop the bleeding. New York City has since rebounded, of course. And as a result, the property-tax burden has shifted from owners to renters, and from the wealthier to the poorer. The higher taxes assessed for apartment buildings are passed from landlord to tenant. A system of caps, phase-ins, exemptions, and abatements rewards rising neighborhoods and punishes failing ones. The results look like a chapter from Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
A class-action lawsuit filed last year on behalf of renters could bring the whole system crashing down. This might be welcome news for most New Yorkers: The inequitable distribution of property taxes is the reason the rent is too damned high. Absent a jarring court decision, though, reform may be harder to come by. Parrott has argued explicitly for re-thinking property taxes for co-ops and condos as a way to address affordability and inequity in New York. Fixing the current regime would require the coordinated efforts of Albany and New York City. Alas, says Parrott. "At this point, there's no appetite for taking on the broad need for property-tax reform." A June Deadline The Co-op and Condominium Tax Abatement, a subsidy that's enormously popular with homeowners, will expire in June, absent legislative action. So will the more controversial 421-a exemption, which was launched in 1971 to spur multi-family housing construction.
The central question before Mayor de Blasio and the state is: Did New York already give away the farm?
"[The 421-a] tax breaks end up subsidizing thousands of luxury residential units," the Fiscal Policy Institute report reads. "The $1.1 billion annual cost of the 421-a tax breaks has soared by over 1100 percent since 1998, more than six times the growth in the City's property tax collections over that 16-year period." In 1985 and again in 2008, lawmakers took pains to tether 421-a to affordable-housing construction. The success of these efforts is the subject of fierce debate. Since the city does not keep records on the number or location of affordable-housing units built under the 421-a exemption, this debate is usually framed by conjecture. Serena Li, a graduate student at Columbia University's Center for Urban Real Estate, just completed a thesis that looks at 421-a exemptions borough by borough. Using Department of Finance data, Li discovered that Manhattan accounts for just 6.7 percent of 421-a–exempt buildings across the city. Thousands more were built in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. Yet most of the gain accrued to Manhattan, thanks in part to its density. The island accounts for almost 40 percent of all 421-a–exempt units and more than 60 percent of expenditures under the program. Because the 421-a exemption has shifted so much over time, it's hard to say whether mixed-income buildings across Manhattan was ever even the goal—much less the outcome. New Yorkers should complain that billionaires pay too little in taxes, and demand that they pay more. "There are certain situations where the real and nominal cost of living in a high-income neighborhood in a mixed-income building doesn't always make sense," says Jesse Keenan, research director at the Center for Urban Real Estate, in an email. "Of course, the counter-argument and policy of mixed-income and economic diversity is a strong one." The Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development put out a report in January arguing that few of the affordable-housing units created through 421-a are actually affordable. For the defense, the editors of The New York Observer argue that Mayor de Blasio's vision of building 200,000 affordable units is impossible, even naive, absent a legitimate incentive.
One57 is bound to emerge as exhibit A in this debate. Extell Development received a special certificate for One57 that enabled its developers to build affordable housing off-site—no poor door required. New York does not keep public data on where this housing is being built. So it's hard to judge the value of this offsite affordable housing against the tax breaks that One57's billionaire condo owners will enjoy for years.
Even if it were possible to say whether New York got its money's worth, a counterfactual still stands: Would any of it have been built without the subsidy? Propheteer poses this question a different way: The 421-a exemption decreases over time. At some point, the building does become taxable. What you want to know is whether or not the levy you’ve given up during the exemption period is greater or lesser than the present value of the marginal increase in the levy due to the exemption over the building’s lifetime. That’s a difficult empirical question to answer. Between the role that 421-a has played in the indictment of former New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and the scrutiny it has drawn from the Moreland Commission on public corruption, the era of this particular tax break may be drawing to an end. There is one line of critique that's more damning than corruption: the idea that New York heavily subsidized the construction of luxury condos that the city cannot, by law, effectively tax. If that criticism turns out to be true—measured, perhaps, by how much it sways the de Blasio administration—then One57 should be renamed the Piketty Tower, as a monument to structural inequality. Is There Any Hope for Bloomberg's Dream of Soaking These Billionaires (or at Least Taxing Them)? One all-too-obvious target for reform is replacing the bogus Class 1 and Class 2 property categories with a more intuitive division. Class 1 properties would include homes owned by homeowners: condos, co-ops, brownstones, the whole lot of them. Class 2 properties would include apartment buildings and other rental properties.
Then New York could do away with the caps and phase-ins that set the billable-assessed value for Class 1 homes so far below their market-rate value. In place of so many features designed to prevent property-tax shocks when neighborhood values rise, the city could build in "circuit breakers" to absorb shocks for home-owners who truly can't afford rising property taxes and would be displaced without assistance. According to the Citizens Budget Commission, the city could raise $1.7 billion in fiscal year 2016, simply by consolidating homeowners into a single tax category and assessing their property taxes based on their true market value. And then—once New York has effectively raised taxes on every homeowner in the city—a pitchfork-wielding mob will drum each and every elected leader in New York City and State government out of office. Correcting this imbalance is necessary in the long run, but no, restructuring society in a single go is not a winner at the polls. Still, the illogical division between Class 1 and Class 2 properties is an embarrassment. Fixing the flawed classification system—and giving renters a fairer shake—should be a priority for Albany and Gracie Mansion. Building luxury condos isn't the problem. Subsidizing luxury condos when the city cannot tax those properties fairly is a crisis. New Yorkers are right to complain that they pay too much in taxes. They do—in part because homes in New York are more valuable than homes in almost any other city in the world. Dwellings are priced high but taxed low for reasons devised in the 1970s, and by means that ultimately distort the value of land in New York City. New Yorkers are better off in the near term complaining that billionaires pay too little in taxes, and demanding that they pay more. (Millionaires as well, of course: Billionaires are merely a small but extreme tip of the iceberg.) Politically speaking, the optics on raising taxes on billionaires are excellent, if over-reliant on rather nefarious caricatures of Russian oligarchs and Saudi oil barons.
The state has already taken the smart first step of phasing out certain tax breaks for condo owners who don't call New York their primary residence. (Which they do to avoid paying income taxes. Billionaires, man.) There's nothing stopping the state from going further to levy elite properties. The Fiscal Policy Institute recommends a dedicated pied-à-terre tax: an effective property tax rate of 4 percent applied to the homes of non-primary residents. This tax would be assessed on the true market value of the condo, not on an obscurantist formula. "If this pied-à-terre tax were applied on a graduated basis to the market value above $5 million, it could generate roughly $250 million annually," the recommendation reads. Building luxury residential condos isn't the problem. Subsidizing luxury residential condos that rise out of reach of the city’s levy is a crisis. Paying for the subsidies by overtaxing renters is a catastrophe. Whatever course the de Blasio administration decides to pursue, it cannot afford to do nothing. New York City is close to the precipice already. The status quo is one that's captured quite nicely in a line from Withnail & I, a favorite old film: "Free to those that can afford it; very expensive to those that can't."shadow
NAPOLI - Il treno della Cumana, linea che da Napoli città arriva a Pozzuoli, era vecchio di cinquant’anni e la tragedia è stata evitata grazie all’intervento del capotreno e del macchinista. «Stamane alle 6.35 circa il treno proveniente da Torregaveta - spiega il presidente dell’Eav Umberto De Gregorio - giunto nella stazione di Fuorigrotta ha regolarmente imbarcato i viaggiatori diretti a Montesanto. Il capotreno ha però rilevato che dal fondo carrozza usciva del fumo, prontamente ha disposto il trasbordo viaggiatori e insieme al macchinista ha portato fuori stazione il convoglio per ricoverarlo nel vicino deposito.
Durante il trasferimento il mezzo è stato aggredito dal fuoco. Il personale di bordo ha tentato con l'uso degli estintori di spegnere l'incendio che si era nel frattempo propagato». Ma l’entità dell’incendio era tale da rendere necessario l’intervento dei vigili del fuoco che sono intervenuti con due autobotti.«Per consentire che il gettito di acqua potesse raggiungere le fiamme - spiega De Gregorio - si è provveduto a staccare l'alimentazione elettrica della linea fermando conseguentemente la circolazione dei treni».
Il convoglio in servizio da oltre 50 anni «Il convoglio (in servizio da oltre 50 anni) ancora fumante, è stato riportato sul piazzale del deposito in zona controllata e sicura ed è stata ripristinata la circolazione alle 8.45. Sono in corso gli accertamenti per capire le cause e le eventuali responsabilità dell'accaduto - prosegue -. Ci scusiamo per il disagio arrecato all'utenza, consapevoli che, in attesa della consegna dei nuovi treni, l'azienda è chiamata ad un impegno straordinario per la manutenzione del parco treni vetusto e insufficiente. Ringrazio il macchinista Lorenzo Sorrentino, il capotreno Vincenzo Rusconi, e quanti fra i lavoratori prontamente sono intervenuti evitando che l'incendio si propagasse arrecando danni ulteriori alle cose e soprattutto alle persone».Get the biggest Liverpool 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
Reds penalty hero Simon Mignolet revealed his heroics at Yankee Stadium were the first penalties he’s faced in pre-season.
The Belgian goalkeeper saved two spot kicks from Yaya Toure and Jesus Navas as Liverpool beat Manchester City 3-1 on penalties following the 2-2 draw in normal time.
Mignolet’s Liverpool career began in spectacular fashion on the opening day of last season after saving Jon Walters’ penalty to secure his new club all three points against Stoke.
“No, today was the first time this season I’ve tried to save a penalty,” Mignolet told the ECHO. “Obviously it went well.
“But the important thing is that we won the game and it gives every chance of us getting to the final in Miami.”
The game in pictures:
Liverpool now top their International Champions Cup table by one point from City after gaining two points for a win following a penalty shoot out.
A win against AC Milan in normal time will confirm their place in the final on Monday.
A final appearance would mean Liverpool have played five games in 12 days, but that doesn’t bother the Reds keeper.
“It gives every chance of us getting to the final in Miami which is an extra game for us in preparation for the season,” added Mignolet. “So it’s a good thing, and also for the confidence it is good to start like that.”
Mignolet joined the team on the Chicago leg of their US tour due to his involvement in Belgium’s run to the World Cup quarter finals.
“I’m feeling very good,” said the 26 year old. “I’ve only been out for three weeks after the World Cup, it’s the first time I’ve come into the squad later - but I feel very well and feel fit so I can join the team without any issues.”
An ever-present during his first season at Anfield, Mignolet had a strong start to his time on Merseyside but was ultimately part of the defence that conceded 50 goals.
Video: James Pearce's verdict on the City game
Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now
An ever-present during his first season at Anfield, Mignolet had a strong start to his time on Merseyside but was ultimately part of the defence that conceded 50 goals.
When asked if there was any aspect of his game he was focusing on improving, he said: “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – if you’re 26 years old as a goalkeeper there’s plenty to improve.
“I work hard every day to keep improving and that won’t change until I’m probably 38 |
half of French Muslims (48%) said they “completely understood” the outrage. 24% said they “didn’t understand at all” — not that much different from French Catholics (35%). (By a lopsided margin, the French said they disapproved of mocking religion, and called the cartoons “useless provocation” rather than a blow for “free speech.”)
When the so-called “headscarf law” was proposed in 2004 (in reality, it prohibits all conspicuous religious symbols in public schools, including yarmulkes and large crosses), 20% of French Muslims were “completely in favor” — again, not all that different from the French as a whole (32%). Only 31% of Muslims were completely opposed.
When demonstrations against the law were organized — notably, by activists who later formed the Parti des Indigènes de la République — French Muslims’ views on the protests were all over the map: 23% said they opposed them; 28% said they were “indifferent”; 23% said they were “sympathetic”; and only 22% said they “support[ed]” them.
This should not be surprising, because most French of Muslim background are not all that religious. 75% generally do not go to mosque on Friday and 84% of Muslim women never wear a headscarf. Only 41% call themselves practicing Muslims, and 26% decline to call themselves believers at all — once again, about the same as for French Catholics.
That does not mean French Muslims are indistinguishable from the general population; two-thirds abstain from alcohol and non-halal food, for example. But it does mean that being “Muslim” in France does not automatically mean one agrees with the strident fundamentalists who tearfully insist that a bunch of obnoxious cartoons in an anti-religious magazine are an unbearable insult to every Muslim. Just as not all Jews accept Abe Foxman’s right to determine what is and is not permissible, not all French Muslims line up behind their self-appointed spokespeople.
The greatest danger now — as the alarming spate of violent anti-Muslim attacks shows — is that French Muslims will be further essentialized by their enemies on the Right, who would like nothing more than to equate Arab with Muslim, Muslim with fundamentalist, and fundamentalist with terrorist.
But it is equally important that Muslims not be essentialized by their friends either. As Olivier Roy, perhaps the leading sociologist of French Islam, wrote in the wake of the attacks:
We talk continually about this famous Muslim community, on both the right and the left, either to denounce its refusal to truly integrate or to make it into a victim of Islamophobia. Both rhetorics are in fact based on the same fantasy of an imaginary Muslim community. There is no Muslim community, but rather a Muslim population. Accepting this simple observation would already be a good antidote to the hysteria of today, and that to come.Back when I wrote Perfect Passwords, I generated a list of the top 500 worst (aka most common) passwords which seems to have propagated quite a bit across the internet, including being mentioned on Gizomodo, Boing Boing, Symantec, Laughing Squid and many other sites. Since then I have collected a large number of new passwords bringing my current list to about 6.5 million unique username/password combos, including many of those that have been recently made public*.
At some point I will make this full data set publicly available but in the meantime, I have decided to release the following list of the top 10,000 most common passwords. This list is ranked by counting how many different usernames appear on my list with the same password. Note that for this list, I do not take capitalization into consideration when matching passwords so this list has been converted to all lowercase letters.
Here are the files:
[Links removed as they are quite old. See this article for a more updated list]
While many people have improved the security and strength of their passwords, there are still a huge number of people who pick from a very small list of common passwords. In fact, 40% of all passwords appear in the top 100 list.
Here are some interesting facts gleaned from my most recent data:
0.5% of users have the password password;
0.4% have the passwords password or 123456;
0.9% have the passwords password, 123456 or 12345678;
1.6% have a password from the top 10 passwords
4.4% have a password from the top 100 passwords
9.7% have a password from the top 500 passwords
13.2% have a password from the top 1,000 passwords
30% have a password from the top 10,000 passwords
So how does the new top 500 list compare to my old top 500 list? Here is a visual diff that shows how it has changed:A few days ago, after rereading my diary from the age of 13 to 15, I tweeted about its contents: “Every page: ‘I want to kill myself. I hate myself. My life is going to be awful because I’m gay.’” And swiftly followed this up with: “Wish I’d known then what I know now: being gay has made my life fascinating, liberated, immeasurably enriched, meaningful and v v fun.”
Bully for you, you might think. Yet this transformation hasn’t only happened because of changes in the law and culture but for another couple of reasons: I work in the media and live in London. And this is a problem. Our understanding of the daily realities for LGBT people in the UK does not emanate from a 14-year-old in Motherwell, or a still-closeted retiree in Penarth, but from metropolitan professionals depicting gay life from a turret of privilege.
And so we come to a blackout: a London-run media so complacent about the liberal times “we” live in that scant coverage has been devoted to the human rights regression in Northern Ireland, the potential removal of carefully built-up legal protection for gay people.
Shall we start at the top and work our way down? The first minister, Peter Robinson, is backing a private member’s bill, introduced this week by Paul Givan (the DUP member of the legislative assembly), which seeks to introduce a “conscience clause” into equality legislation allowing businesses to refuse to serve gay people on “religious” grounds.
The DUP is the party that opposed the decriminalisation of homosexuality as recently as the 1980s and today continues to block equal marriage, still illegal in Northern Ireland, even after three attempts to introduce it. And its leader is married to Iris Robinson, the former DUP health spokeswoman who said gay people could be cured.
The bill arose as a result of the furore surrounding the Ashers Bakery, which refused to make a cake with an equal marriage message. At the DUP conference last month cupcakes were sold from the Ashers Bakery and a collection was held to help fund its legal costs. Thus, the DUP is the party paying for the right to discriminate, while LGBT constituents will be the ones paying.
Children, in this dark age, already are. Last month a school in Belfast issued pupils with a worksheet about 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, with the following questions: “What do these verses tell us about homosexuals?” “Who else is included with homosexuals?” And, “What hope is there for all these people?”
We know the answer: very little, if the dignity and human rights of gay people are not protected. How, we might ask, can homophobic bullying be tackled when implicitly sanctioned by the school’s own literature?
Such a hostile environment can profoundly affect mental health. The results of a study into the wellbeing of LGBT people in Northern Ireland last year found 47% had considered suicide, 25% had attempted it, 35% had self-harmed and 71% had suffered depression.
The question we are left with then is why the DUP do not, will not, see the connection between the culture they seek to create and the 13-year-old boy sitting in his room, writing in his diary that he wants to kill himself because he, witnessing the laws that do not protect him, and the protection for those who hate him, feels this: for gay people like me there is no future.
• The Samaritans can be contacted on 08457 909090 or at [email protected]. Help is available 24 hours a day and all calls are anonymousTrey Radel is an affluent white male, former conservative talk show host, and current Republican congressman representing south Florida. He's a lifetime NRA member who wants to "Repeal Obamacare." He's also a big Public Enemy and Tupac fan. Huge.
This interview with Rep. Radel on Now This News is one of the most amazing political interviews we have heard, ever. Do the knowledge:
Trey Radel on Public Enemy
"The first [song that represents my views on Washington] that I would have to refer to would be 'Fight the Power,' by Public Enemy. This is a song that... if you really get down to it, reflects the conservative message of having a heavy handed federal government... Chuck D of Public Enemy and I may disagree on certain philosophies of government, but I think at the end of the day— and this is where I take my love of hip hop music— where there have been issues and problems with either heavy handed law enforcement... or heavy handed government itself."
Trey Radel on Making Hot Beats
"I really, really love a lot of, kinda what's happening in pop music today, with hip hop in particular, where it's like an electro, kinda house beat... I love beats like that, and so I love creating those kind of beats at home."
Trey Radel on Biggie vs. Pac
"Tupac was poetic. Tupac came out with a message... if you listen to his lyrics, there's some really serious, heavy stuff going on. To me, Tupac is what I'm going to be listening to in my car. Biggie is at the party."
Trey Radel on Florida Senator Marco Rubio's Relative Hip Hop Knowledge
"You throw me in a match in any old school hip hop, I'll kill him."
[Now This News via TB Times]Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Staff and shoppers watched in horror today as a woman killed herself by slitting her throat in a busy Asda store.
As people bought their lunches on the way to work, she took a knife from a shelf and stabbed herself in the neck, according to staff.
An Asda worker, who did not wish to be named, said: “It was no accident. A woman has gone to the hardware section and slit her throat.”
One of the store’s first aiders desperately tried to save her as she lay dying in a pool of blood in the kitchenware aisle.
But the Asian woman – aged between 20 and 40 – died at the scene around 9am this morning.
A witness said: “One of the young men who works there actually saw the woman stabbing herself in the throat. He’s in terrible shock.
“Staff told me that the woman had come in, taken a knife from a rack in the hardware department, torn it out of the packaging and then stabbed herself.”
Shoppers at the 24-hour store in Shipley, West Yorkshire, were ushered out as police interviewed staff and witnesses, and examined CCTV to try and identify the dead woman.
(Image: Ben Lack/Mirror)
They later said footage showed that the woman was on her own before and during the tragedy, dismissing earlier reports that she had entered the supermarket with a Polish friend.
Student Kerry Morgan, 19, said: “I was down at the other end of the supermarket getting something for my lunch when suddenly we were all told to leave.
“I didn’t think anything of it until I was outside and this fella, another shopper, came past looking pale and saying a lady had attacked herself with a knife and there was blood everywhere.
“He looked really distressed.
“I didn’t see the lady, but the shop was pretty busy with people doing shopping before work.”
Another witness told how staff had tried to save the pony-tailed woman, who was dressed in a dark blue top and trousers. “One of the shop’s first-aiders was trying to give CPR,” he said.
Paramedics soon arrived but were unable to revive the woman.
(Image: Ben Lack/Mirror)
The store re-opened this afternoon after all the knives from the aisle where she died had been removed from the shelves.
Police confirmed they are not looking for anyone else in connection with the tragedy.
A police statement said: “A number of enquiries have been carried out to try and identify the woman, who is Asian and believed to be aged between 20 and 40 years old.
“She is described as having shoulder-length dark hair which was tied in a ponytail and was wearing dark blue top and trousers with large silver buttons to the front and a lighter blue or purple scarf.”
Detective Inspector Ryan Bragg said: “We have tried various means to identify this woman but as yet have not been able to do so.”
An Asda spokesman said last night: “We are aware of an incident in our Shipley store this morning and our thoughts are with the individual’s family at this time.
“Our priority at this time is looking after our colleagues and supporting the police in their investigation.”From right: Oakland Athletics catcher Bruce Maxwell (13) takes a knee as Oakland Athletics left fielder Mark Canha (20) puts his hand on his shoulder during the playing of the national anthem before an MLB baseball game between the Oakland Athletics and Texas Rangers at the Oakland Coliseum on Saturday, Sept. 23, 2017, in Oakland, Calif. less From right: Oakland Athletics catcher Bruce Maxwell (13) takes a knee as Oakland Athletics left fielder Mark Canha (20) puts his hand on his shoulder during the playing of the national anthem before an MLB... more Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 37 Caption Close A’s Bruce Maxwell first MLB player to kneel for anthem 1 / 37 Back to Gallery
A’s rookie catcher Bruce Maxwell, who earlier in the day profanely bashed President Trump on Instagram, became the first major-league player to kneel during the national anthem on Saturday before Oakland’s 1-0 win at the Coliseum.
“My decision had been coming for a long time,” Maxwell said, citing his own experiences with racism while growing up in Huntsville, Ala., which is where Trump on Friday made disparaging comments about NFL players who choose to kneel for the anthem. “The only way we can come together is by informing.... To single out NFL players for doing this isn’t something we should be doing — I felt it should be a little more broad.”
Maxwell plans to continue kneeling for the anthem.
Now Playing:
“He’s very courageous,” said A’s outfielder Khris Davis, who hit his 40th homer Saturday. “I respect his decision, he’s just exercising his rights as an American.”
The product of a U.S. military family, Maxwell placed his hand on his heart and faced the flag during the anthem while taking a knee before the game against Texas.
“The point of my kneeling was not to disrespect our military or our constitution or our country,” Maxwell said. “My hand was over my heart because I love this country and I have family members, including my father, who bled for this country, and who continue to serve. At the end of the day, this is the best country on the planet. I am and forever will be an American citizen and grateful to be here, but my kneeling is what’s getting the attention, and I’m kneeling for the people who don’t have a voice.
“This goes beyond the black and Hispanic communities because right now we have a racial divide that’s being practiced from the highest power we have in this country saying it’s basically OK to treat people differently. I’m kneeling for a cause but I’m in no way disrespecting my country or my flag.”
Mark Canha, who is from San Jose and went to Cal, placed his hand on Maxwell’s shoulder. After the anthem, the teammates hugged.
“Every fiber in my being was telling me he needed a brother today,” Canha said. “I thought about kneeling myself when (Colin) Kaepernick was doing it but decided not to, but when Bruce said he was going to do it, I thought, ‘Someone has to be out there, and I have to be one of those people.’”
Maxwell held a meeting before the game to let his teammates know about his decision, along with manager Bob Melvin and general manager David Forst.
“He was as articulate as I’ve seen him,” Melvin said. “This wasn’t an emotional thing just today for him. Something had been leading up to it and he felt today would be the right platform to do it.”
The A’s issued a statement on Twitter that read: “The Oakland A’s pride ourselves on being inclusive. We respect and support all our players’ constitutional rights and freedom of expression.”
Read Full ArticleNintendo's announcement of the existence of Excitebots: Trick Racing—the sequel to Wii launch title Excite Truck—was annoyingly short on details. Consider us detail-free no more, thanks to the latest issue of Nintendo Power.
Excitebots: Trick Racing gets properly previewed in the mag's April issue, a portion of which is now available online. Don't worry, these scans are kosher, coming direct from Nintendo Power itself.
Perhaps most exciting about the Excitebots blowout is our first look at the game's visuals. Yes, you'll be piloting robot frog cars.
The Excitebots vehicle lineup includes an unusually appealing set of four-wheeled animals and insects, including bats, ladybugs, praying mantises, beetles and turtles. This thing has merchandising opportunity slathered all over it. Each is said to have its own weight and handling properties, with power-ups letting your Excitebot turn off its wheels, then run on two legs.
Controls look to be identical to the original Excite Truck, with many of the gameplay mechanics that worked in the original Wii game (ie. land deformation) returning for the more outlandish sequel.
Advertisement
Excitebots: Trick Racing looks like it will add some interesting power ups, including... tambourines? Yep, tambourines.
Nintendo Power - April Issue [Nintendo Power]Since the invention of the computer, there have been people talking about the things that computers will never be able to do. Whether it was beating a grand master at chess or winning on Jeopardy!, these predictions have always been wrong. However, some such nay-saying always had a better grounding in computer science. There were goals that, if you knew how computers worked, you knew they would be virtually impossible to achieve. Recognizing human emotions through facial expressions. Reading a wide variety of cursive handwriting. Correctly identifying the words in spoken language. Driving autonomously through busy streets.
Well, computers are now starting to be able to do all of those things, and quite a bit more. Were the nay-sayers really just too cynical about the true capabilities of digital computers? In a way, no. To solve those monumental challenges, scientists were forced to come up with a whole new type of computer, one based on the structure of the brain. These artificial neural networks (ANNs) only ever exist as a simulation running on a regular digital computer, but what goes on inside that simulation is fundamentally very different from classical computing.
Is an artificial neural network an exercise in computing science? Applied biology? Pure mathematics? Experimental philosophy? It’s all of those things, and much more.
What are ANNs?
Most people already know that the neurons that do the computation in our brain are not organized like the semiconductors in a computer processor, in a linear sequence, attached to the same board, and controlled by one unifying clock cycle. Rather, in the brain each neuron is nominally its own self-contained actor, and it’s wired to most or all of the neurons that physically surround it in highly complex and somewhat unpredictable ways.
What this means is that for a digital computer to achieve an ordered result, it needs one over-arching program to direct it and tell each semiconductor just what to do to contribute toward the overall goal. A brain, on the other hand, unifies billions of tiny, exceedingly simple units that can each have their own programming and make decisions without the need for an outside authority. Each neuron works and interacts with the neurons around it according to its own simple, pre-defined rules.
An artificial neural network is (supposed to be) the exact same thing, but simulated with software. In other words, we use a digital computer to run a simulation of a bunch of heavily interconnected little mini-programs which stand in for the neurons of our simulated neural network. Data enters the ANN and has some operation performed on it by the first “neuron,” that operation being determined by how the neuron happens to be programmed to react to data with those specific attributes. It’s then passed on to the next neuron, which is chosen in a similar way, so that another operation can be chosen and performed. There are a finite number of “layers” of these computational neurons, and after moving through them all, an output is produced.
The overall process of turning input into output is an emergent result of the programming of each individual neuron the data touches, and the starting conditions of the data itself. In the the brain, the “starting conditions” are the specific neural signals arriving from the spine, or elsewhere in the brain. In the case of an ANN, they’re whatever we’d like them to be, from the results of a search algorithm to randomly generated numbers to words typed out manually by researchers.
So, to sum up: artificial neural networks are basically simulated brains. But it’s important to note that we can give our software “neurons” basically any programming we want; we can try to set up their rules so their behavior mirrors that of a human brain, but we can also use them to solve problems we could never consider before.
How do ANNs work?
What we’ve described so far is very interesting, but largely useless for computation. That is to say, it’s very scientifically interesting to be able to simulate the cellular structure of the brain, but if I know how to go in and program every little sub-actor such that my inputs are always processed into my desired outputs, then why do I need an ANN at all? Put differently, the nature of an ANN means that intentionally building one to solve a particular problem requires such a deep working knowledge of that problem and its solutions that the ANN itself becomes a bit redundant.
However, there’s a big advantage to working with many simple actors rather than a single complex one: simple actors can self-correct. There have been attempts at self-editing versions of regular software, but it’s artificial neural networks that have taken the concept of machine learning to new heights.
You’ll hear the word “non-deterministic” used to describe the function of a neural network, and that’s in reference to the fact that our software neurons often have weighted statistical likelihoods associated with different outcomes for data; there’s a 40% chance than an input of type A gets passed to this neuron in the next layer, a 60% chance it gets passed to that one instead. These uncertainties quickly add up as neural networks get larger or more elaborately interconnected, so that the exact same starting conditions might lead to many different outcomes or, more importantly, get to the same outcome by many different paths.
So, we introduce the idea of a “learning algorithm.” A simple example is improving efficiency: send the same input into the network over and over and over, and every time it generates the correct output, record the time it took to do so. Some paths from A to B will be naturally more efficient than others, and the learning algorithm can start to reinforce neuronal behaviors that occurred during those runs that proceeded more quickly.
Much more complex ANNs can strive for more complex goals, like correctly identifying the species of animal in a Google image result. The steps in image processing and categorization get adjusted slightly, relying on an evolution-like sifting of random and non-random variation to produce a cat-finding process the ANN’s programmers could never have directly devised.
Non-deterministic ANNs becomes much more deterministic as they restructure themselves to be better at achieving certain results, as determined by the goals of their learning algorithms. This is called “training” the ANN — you train an ANN with examples of its desired function, so it can self-correct based on how well it did on each of these runs. The more you train an ANN, the better it should become at achieving its goals.
There’s also the idea of “unsupervised” or “adaptive” learning, in which you run the algorithm with no desired outputs in mind, but let it start evaluating results and adjusting itself according to its own… whims? As you might imagine, this isn’t well understood just yet, but it’s also the most likely path down which we might find true AI — or just really, really advanced AI. If we’re ever truly going to send robots out into totally unknown environments to figure out totally unforeseen problems, we’re going to need programs that can assign significance to stimuli on their own, in real time.
That’s where the power of ANNs truly lies: since their structure allows them to make iterative changes to their own programming, they have the ability to find answers that their own creators never could have. Whether you’re a hedge fund, an advertising company, or an oil prospector, the sheer potential of combining the speed of a computer with the versatility of a brain is impossible to ignore. That’s why being able to program “machine learning” algorithms is now one of the most sought-after skill sets in the world.
In the coming century we may very well be less concerned with solving problems than with teaching computers to learn to solve problems for us.
OK, but what can ANNs actually do?
The usefulness of ANNs falls into one of two basic categories: as tools for solving problems that are inherently difficult for both people and digital computers, and as experimental and conceptual models of something — classically, brains. Let’s talk about each one separately.
First, the real reason for interest (and, more importantly, investment) in ANNs is that they can solve problems. Google uses an ANN to learn how to better target “watch next” suggestions after YouTube videos. The scientists at the Large Hadron Collider turned to ANNs to sift the results of their collisions and pull the signature of just one particle out of the larger storm. Shipping companies use them to minimize route lengths over a complex scattering of destinations. Credit card companies use them to identify fraudulent transactions. They’re even becoming accessible to smaller teams and individuals — Amazon, MetaMind, and more are offering tailored machine learning services to anyone for surprisingly modest a fee.
Things are just getting started. Google’s been training its photo-analysis algorithms with more and more pictures of animals, and they’re getting pretty good at telling dogs from cats in regular photographs. Both translation and voice synthesis are progressing to the point that we could soon have a babelfish-like device offering natural, real time conversations between people speaking different languages. And, of course, there are the Big Three ostentatious examples that really wear the machine learning on their sleeve: Siri, Now, and Cortana.
The other side of a neural network lies in carefully designing it to mirror the structure of brains. Both our understanding of that structure, and the computational power necessary to simulate it, are nowhere close to what we’d need to do robust brain-science in a computer model. There have been some amazing efforts at simulating certain aspects of certain portions of the brain, but it’s still in the very preliminary stages.
One advantage of this approach is that while you can’t (or… shouldn’t) genetically engineer humans to have an experimental change built into their brains, you absolutely can perform such mad-scientist experiments on simulated brains. ANNs can explore a far wider array of possibilities than medicine could ever practically or ethically consider, and they could someday allow scientists to quickly check on more out-there, “I wonder” hypotheses with potentially unexpected results.
When you ask yourself, “Can an artificial neural network do it?” immediately after, ask yourself “Can I do it?” If the answer is yes, then your brain must be capable of doing something that an ANN might one day be able to simulate. On the other hand, there are plenty of things an ANN might one day be able to do that a brain never could.
The potential for ANNs is nearly limitless.
Check out our ExtremeTech Explains series for more in-depth coverage of today’s hottest tech topics.NEW DELHI: With reports that President Donald Trump is set to sign a new executive order aimed at overhauling H-1B and other work visas, India today said it has conveyed its "interests and concerns" to the US."India's interests and concerns have been conveyed both to the US administration and the US Congress at senior levels," External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Vikas Swarup said.However, he didn't elaborate whether the issue was raised after the recent reports that an executive order has been drafted by the Trump Administration and will severely impact Indian companies, specifically IT organisations.The draft of the order was leaked and published by some news websites yesterday.As per the leaked draft order, Trump would reverse former president Barack Obama's extension of the duration of the optional practical training work visas, which allowed foreign students to stay in the US a bit longer after completion of their studies.The draft order will not only strangulates H-1B and L1 visas, but also increases inspector raj and ends employment authorisation cards to spouses on such work visas."I think with respect to H1Bs and other visa is part of a larger immigration reform effort that the President will continue to talk about through executive order and through working with Congress," White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer had told reporters at his daily news conference yesterday.Nearly two-thirds of H1B visa applicants are Indian nationals who either work for Indian IT services firms such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro or the local operations of US firms such as Accenture, IBM and Google.Jason Isbell is one of a few artists who are changing the face of the country music genre by straying away from the pop-infused aspects of much of modern country music. The singer-songwriter got his start in the band the Drive-By Truckers, and while spending time on the road with his bandmates, he formed his opinions on good and bad music.
"When I joined the Truckers, I was 21 and riding in the van with guys who were a generation older than me. And we spent a lot of time talking about what was bulls--t, what was not real," Isbell tells GQ. "And I don't believe all music is okay. I don't believe all music is good. I believe some music is bad for people to listen to. I think it makes their taste worse, I think it makes their lives worse, I think it makes them worse people.
"Some things you have to refuse, not because of other people's image of you but because it will gradually erode you until you are making music that's not good for people and you're not challenging listeners and you're not challenging yourself," he continues. "I believe that, and I will always believe that if I have my way."
The artist explains that he often looks back to his younger self when facing major career decisions to make sure that he's not "selling out."
"I just look at who I was the first year that I played in a rock 'n' roll band, and I ask, 'Would I have thought that was bulls--t back then?' And usually, if I would have then, I still will now," he says. "The context — why you play music in the first place — I want to keep that as intact as possible."
Isbell released his fifth studio album, Something More Than Free, in 2015.By Lang Whitaker, NBA.com
ALL BALL NERVE CENTER — Last week we looked at the regular-season Horry Scale in full. Now, with the playoffs in full swing, it took just at a week to have our first postseason Horry Scale entry.
What is the Horry Scale? For those who are new around these parts, the Horry Scale examines a game-winning buzzer-beater (GWBB) in the categories of difficulty, game situation (was the team tied or behind at the time?), importance (playoff game or garden-variety Kings-Pistons game?) and celebration (is it over the top or too chill? Just the right panache or needs more sauce?). Then we give it an overall grade on a scale of 1-5 Robert Horrys, the patron saint of last-second daggers.
One thing I’d like to clear up: The Horry Scale does not measure only a game-winning shot; the Horry Scale measures several facets of a Game-Winning Buzzer-Beater. So we’re talking about not only the shot, but also the play that creates the shot, the situation and the drama, the celebrations … basically, everything surrounding and including the shot. So when I gave Randy Foye a 3 Horry rating, that wasn’t only a reflection of his shot, which was admittedly remarkable, as I wrote, but also the play, which was awful. Taj Gibson’s lefty layup wasn’t the toughest shot, but that inbounds play was terrific. Basically, everything matters.
Counting the regular season, this gives us a record-setting 18 Horry Scale entries this season. Let’s take a closer look at Vince Carter‘s game-winning three in Game 3 against San Antonio from earlier today…
DIFFICULTY
The corner three-pointer is supposedly the “easiest” three-pointer. Which doesn’t mean it’s easy, obviously. But it is a shorter shot than a straight-away or wing three. But what if you’re shooting from the corner and you’re fading away? And what if you’re covered as tightly as a smedium shirt by Manu Ginobili, with inches to get the shot off?
Photo from the Dallas Morning News pic.twitter.com/prg8YpkApD — Bryan Gutierrez (@BallinWithBryan) April 26, 2014
And what if you have less than 2 seconds left to release the shot? Well, add all those factors together and you’ve got a nearly impossible shot. Thing is, nobody told Vince Carter.
GAME SITUATION
PLAYOFFS! PLAYOFFS! The pressure doesn’t get any higher than in the postseason. As for the play itself, Dallas had the ball down two, after Ginobili scored on the other end to give San Antonio the lead. You’d think Dallas might go either Dirk or Monta, both of whom have made visits to the Horry Scale this season. You would, however, be wrong. Because, of course, the Mavs went to Vince Carter instead…
Monta Ellis says Rick Carlisle saw how Spurs were planning on defending the last play and told Vince Carter he would knock down the shot. — Earl K. Sneed (@EarlKSneed) April 26, 2014
To get Vince open on the inbound play, the Mavs stacked up Vince, Dirk and Brandan Wright, then ran Monta Ellis off the triple screen. As Ellis popped free at the top, Vince ducked to the corner, caught, spun and drained the shot. Good defense from Manu, better shot by Vince. Catch, spin, shot, bottom. Win.
CELEBRATION
Probably the best all-around celebration of the season. This is partially a function of it happening in the playoffs, when the intensity is already ratcheted up high. When the shot went through, the American Airlines Center went crazy. The Mavs all surrounded Vince and celebrated with him. Two other things that we should note? Right in the center of the Mavs celebration was owner Mark Cuban…
Hey, if I owned an NBA team and we won a playoff game on a last-second shot, I’d be up in that celebration, too.
Also, as the Mavs celebrated, we got a quick glimpse at stoic Popovich…
😐
GRADE
This is when it all counts. Heckuva situation, heckuva shot. As far as a grade, this one really had it all. I was thinking somewhere between 4 and 5 Horrys. And you know what? We’re going with 5 Horrys for this one, our first five Horry shot of the season…
Now it’s your turn! How many Horrys would you give Vince Carter’s shot?
Category: The Horry scale / Tags:, Dallas Mavericks, Dirk Nowitzki, Gregg Popovich, Horry Scale, Manu Ginobili, Monta Ellis, San Antonio Spurs, Vince Carter / 112 Comments on Horry Scale: Vince’s victory /Bear Mountain's 'Sunday In The Park' 2013: Episode 11
Weekly edit from Bear Mountain, Sunday In The Park this week Featuring JP Walker, Zak Hale, Johnny Miller, Brandon Hobush, and Scott Stevens, with comeos from Pat Fava and Austen Granger.
Sunday In The Park is one of our most popular video series on TWSNOW.com thanks to you the viewers. So Bear Mountain and TransWorld are teaming up to hook up our most loyal viewers this season. We know you are out there, those of you that don't miss an Episode. So just comment on all the twsnow.com 'Sunday In The Park' posts this season, and we'll find you and hook you up with some Bear and TransWorld schwag, and at the end of the season one lucky viewer will win a Free Season Pass for 2013/14 at Bear Mountain!
Shot by Adam "BEEF" Ruzzamenti, Lee Stockwell, and Mark Thalman.
Edit by Adam "BEEF" Ruzzamenti
Photo and Graphics by Lee StockwellBy Madeline Vann, MPH
Reviewed by Niya Jones, M.D., MPH
Los Angeles entrepreneur Neal Sideman was in the middle of an intense workout at the gym when he felt lightheaded and realized his heart was pounding. Alarmed, he immediately worried about his heart -- never thinking that he might be having a panic attack instead.
However, a visit to the doctor the next day and an EKG reassured him his heart was fine. His doctor told him that what he'd experienced were, in fact, the symptoms of anxiety.
Signs Of Anxiety And Panic Attacks
An anxiety or panic attack often comes on suddenly, with symptoms lasting only a few minutes. For doctors to diagnose a panic attack, they look for at least four of the following signs: sweating, trembling, shortness of breath, a choking sensation, chest pain, nausea, dizziness, fear of losing your mind, fear of dying, flushing, feeling that danger is nearby, a racing heart (heart palpitations) and feeling an intense need to escape.
Stress, Anxiety And Panic: |
back to health. Jerome had both legs amputated just above the knees, with evidence that it had been done by a skilled surgeon. The stumps were only partially healed and still bandaged when he was found. He was also suffering from cold and exposure.[1]
Many people eager to know more about him visited his sick bed, and through this it was discovered that he could not (or did not want to) understand French, Latin, Italian, or Spanish. He apparently shunned the attention of these curious onlookers, growling like a dog at unwanted guests.[2] The man's hands were noted as being too soft for him to be a manual labourer, and he was described as being Mediterranean in appearance.[2]
The Albrights struggled to support another mouth to feed, and Jerome was passed from house to house for a while until the mainly Baptist community of Digby Neck decided from his appearance that he must be a Catholic, and sent him to the neighbouring French community of Meteghan. The government of Nova Scotia also voted a special stipend of two dollars a week to support Jerome. The community still trying to break his relative silence, Jerome was sent to stay with Jean Nicola, a Corsican deserter and speaker of several languages. Nicola could not get him to talk, but Jerome stayed in the Nicola home for 7 more years, becoming a favourite of the ladies of the household - Jean's wife Julitte and his stepdaughter Madeleine.[2]
After the death of Julitte Nicola, her husband returned to Europe and Jerome went to stay with Dedier and Zabeth Comeau in St. Alphonse, near Meteghan. The Comeaus used Jerome's relative fame to their advantage, charging admission fees to see the mystery man, living well on this and the government stipend. But Jerome did not seem to mind, and stayed there for the rest of his life, which ended on April 15, 1912.[2]
Legacy and possible explanations [ edit ]
It has been suggested that Jerome was a sailor who may have attempted a mutiny, being punished by amputation. Another suggestion is that he could have been an heir to a fortune and was "gotten rid of" to make way for someone else seeking his inheritance.[1]
It is possible that Jerome's difficulties with producing speech could be linked to a brain injury, most likely in Broca's Area, the part of the brain that regulates speech. Jerome would have been incapable of speaking in any sort of understandable language.[1] This may account for Jerome's ability to make animalistic noises, but not replicate human language.
Jerome has figured strongly in the popular imagination in Nova Scotia, and there have been several books written about the case. In 1994 there was a feature film produced, directed by Phil Comeau, called Jerome's Secret.
In 2008, the local historian Fraser Mooney Jr. of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia published a book - Jerome: Solving the Mystery of Nova Scotia's Silent Castaway in which he offers a solution to the man's mysterious origins. He reports that, on the other side of the Bay of Fundy, in Chipman, New Brunswick in 1859 (a few years before Jerome's appearance) a young foreigner was reported as having fallen through river ice. He suffered gangrene in both legs due to the accident and they had to be amputated by a local doctor. Here he became known as "Gamby", probably because on wakening he kept calling for gamba, Italian for "leg". Gamby proved to be a burden for the people of Chipman, and it was rumoured that a passing schooner captain was paid to transport him away. The captain could possibly have just sailed to the opposite side of the bay to Nova Scotia, where he became Sandy Cove's problem.[2] Mooney's account has been controversial. Notably, the writer Noah Richler has called the book speculative and a fiction.[3]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]CLOSE Nurses, physical therapists and other senior medical staffers in the Federal Bureau of Prisons have been routinely assigned guard duties and other security-related shifts. USA TODAY
The Butner Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, N.C., is seen in 2009. (Photo: Gerry Broome, AP)
WASHINGTON — Nurses, physical therapists and other senior medical staffers in the Federal Bureau of Prisons have been routinely assigned guard duties and other security-related shifts to fill chronic personnel gaps, despite critical health care shortages throughout the vast prison system.
The reassigned medical staffers are being drawn from the ranks of the uniformed U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), whose members have little or no experience providing security inside the overcrowded federal system, PHS members told USA TODAY.
One former health service nurse reported weekly assignments away from medical duties to monitor recordings of inmate telephone calls and other communications to flag potential threats. Another PHS officer said the physical therapy program at one institution was temporarily shuttered because of the reassignments and other staffing shortages.
The four PHS officers, including the former nurse, spoke to USA TODAY on the condition that they not be publicly identified out of concern for possible retaliation. But James Currie, executive director of the public health services' Commissioned Officers Association, and Eric Young, president of the union representing civilian prison workers, said they were familiar with the internal federal staffing practices in Mississippi, North Carolina, Kentucky, Texas and Washington state.
Bureau of Prisons spokesman Justin Long, in a written response to USA TODAY's inquiries, acknowledged the use of PHS officers to staff security posts when there is sufficient need.
"The mission of the Bureau of Prisons is to protect public safety by running safe and secure prisons and helping inmates prepare for reentry. Adequately staffing custody posts is critical to carrying out this mission,'' Long said. "When an insufficient number of correctional officers are available to cover an institution’s critical custody posts on any given shift, institutions rely on overtime and the reassignment of other institution staff, including PHS officers, who are all considered correctional workers to cover such posts.''
Both Currie and Young said the practices create potential security risks because PHS officers lack proper security experience and training. At the same time, Currie and Young said, the regular re-deployments are exacerbating serious, existing problems in delivering needed health care to inmates.
Late last month, the Justice Department's inspector general found persistent staffing shortages that left some prison medical facilities with vacancy rates of 40% or higher. Throughout the prison system, which serves more than 170,000 inmates, there were 656 medical staff vacancies.
The aging inmate population has worsened staffing gaps in recent years, as the government has been unable to compete with the private sector for medical professionals who are often paid much more outside of government.
The PHS, one of the nation's seven uniform services, provides health care assistance to more than two dozen agencies across the federal government, including the prison system. Nearly 900 health service officers are assigned throughout the federal prison system.
Young said the security reassignments have been "a big problem'' for years, adding that he addressed the matter with prison bureau officials as recently as this month because the practice is now occurring at "unprecedented'' levels.
“I truly believe this could result in a loss of life,'' Young said.
In Yazoo City, Miss., for example, Young said PHS officers, along with civilian kitchen workers and secretaries, have been pressed into security-related duties. In many cases, Young said PHS officers, who are not eligible for overtime pay, are being drafted to avoid paying overtime to unionized corrections officers. In other places, including in Yazoo City, he said staffing is so thin that others are routinely drafted to fill daily voids.
“They are using everyone to cover down there,’’ he said of the Mississippi complex. “It’s a powder keg.’’
The prison bureau said the reassignments were "not a new practice.''
"As our population continues to decrease, it is our expectation that the need for this practice will continue to decline.''
Rep. David Jolly, R-Fla., takes part in a U.S. Senate debate in Orlando on April 25, 2016. (Photo: John Raoux, AP)
But Rep. David Jolly, R-Fla., who has raised concerns about reassignments, said the potential risks far outweigh any benefit.
"The whole practice should be eliminated,'' Jolly said. "It's hard to justify why a person should be acting as a security officer when they are not qualified to do that. At the very least, the men and women working those posts should have confidence that they are working shoulder to shoulder with people who are properly trained.''
Currie, too, said the security reassignments were "inviting risk.''
"I don't believe these people (PHS) have any real security training at all,'' he said.
Currie said a senior PHS nurse recently complained to him that she was notified of an assignment to a 12-hour patrol shift at an inmate recreation yard when a supervisor handed her a pair of handcuffs.
"This is a person who has over 20 years working as a nurse,'' Currie said. "She never worked that (security) duty before. This whole arrangement is wrong and it needs to end.''
The security issue represents a rare point of agreement between Currie, the health service representative and Young, the union president, in an already fraught workplace where union workers and PHS officers have been locked in a bitter labor dispute over seniority rights within the prison bureau.
The fight centers on whether PHS members are entitled to the same status as their union colleagues for such things as shift assignments and time off. The dispute has prompted discussion among PHS officers of a mass exodus from the prison system where staffing shortages are at "crisis'' levels in some institutions, according to the Justice Department's inspector general.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/26sePxCAs the 2014 regular season nears its completion, the focus for the Orioles now shifts to the playoffs and with that, decisions need to be made on what the American League Division Series roster will look like.
Despite the injuries and suspensions sustained throughout the season, the Orioles have managed to find adequate replacements throughout the journey, helping to ensure the winning ways have been maintained. However, there are still some uncertainties remaining ahead of the playoffs, in particular who will play third base in the absence of Manny Machado and what the four-man starting rotation will look like.
All things considered, listed below is one potential ALDS roster Buck Showalter may go with:
Rotation (4): Chris Tillman, Wei-Yin Chen, Miguel Gonzalez and Bud Norris
Bullpen (8): Kevin Gausman, T.J. McFarland, Brian Matusz, Brad Brach, Tommy Hunter, Andrew Miller, Darren O’Day, Zach Britton
Catchers and Infielders (7): Nick Hundley, Caleb Joseph, Steve Pearce, Jonathan Schoop, J.J. Hardy, Ryan Flaherty, Jimmy Paredes
Outfielders (6): Nick Markakis, Adam Jones, Nelson Cruz, Delmon Young, Alejandro De Aza, David Lough
Of the list above, the hard-luck story is undoubtedly Kevin Gausman, who has performed remarkably well this season, owning a 7-7 record while working to a 3.57 ERA and 1.34 WHIP. In any other season dating back to 1997 or beyond, Gausman’s performance would have seen him featured in an ALDS rotation. However, due to the strength of the five current starters, he is likely to be the one shifted to the bullpen. In addition, he is also the hardest-throwing of the five and is best suited for a bullpen role.
Another who was strongly considered and is somewhat unlucky is Kelly Johnson, who is currently battling with Jimmy Paredes for a backup infielder role on the roster. While Johnson is a safer defensive option, he hasn’t performed as well with the bat as the deserving Paredes since joining the Orioles late last month. In 15 games, Johnson has hit.250 (7-for-28) with one home run and four RBIs, as opposed to Paredes, who is hitting a very impressive.341 (15-for-44) with two home runs and eight RBIs. In addition, Paredes offers speed on the basepaths and given Quintin Berry’s absence, he could add value in a pinch-runner role as well.
David Lough’s inclusion was ultimately the reason Berry was left out. Despite having a slow start to the season, Lough has been extremely impressive since the All-Star Break, hitting.340 (17-for-50) with two home runs and five RBIs since the Midsummer Classic. In addition, Lough is arguably the best defensive outfielder on the team and like Paredes, offers speed on the basepaths. Ultimately, Lough is a far more versatile player and someone Showalter can call upon in varying situations throughout the playoffs.
The only other hard-luck story, in some respect, is that of Ubaldo Jimenez. While his struggles this season have been well-documented, he is the only player to miss out who has been with the team for the whole season. If he was to be squeezed onto this roster, it probably would have been in a long-relief role and possibly at the expense of T.J. McFarland. But Jimenez’s 4.85 ERA and 1.53 WHIP are just far too risky to take into the playoffs - despite the improvement shown in his last two starts. In addition, McFarland’s season has been very impressive, working to a 2.83 ERA out of the bullpen, often in long relief. What this low ERA does hide for McFarland, though, is that he has allowed 11 inherited runners to score, which is something he will need to address if called upon in closely fought games.
What are your thoughts on the roster listed above? Would you make any changes?
Daniel Clark blogs about the Orioles at The Big Leagues Daily from Melbourne, Australia. Follow him on Twitter: @DC_TBLDaily. His thoughts on the O’s appear here as part of MASNsports.com’s continuing commitment to welcome guest bloggers to our little corner of cyberspace. All opinions expressed are those of the guest bloggers, who are not employed by MASNsports.com but are just as passionate about their baseball as our roster of writers.Here's a very quick lesson in foreign-language menu reading. Imagine this: You're ordering off a very short menu in a restaurant in a country that speaks a very unfamiliar language. You know that one of the two entrées listed involves brie and the other, lots of tart, tangy cranberries. Can you figure out which is which? Would it help you to know that one item was called takete and the other, maluma?
If you're like a lot of people, once you hear the words, you can figure which of the two entrees they apply to. In fact, the sound symbolism is so strong that in phrasing the question in the paragraph above, I took the liberty of transposing the "right" answers.
Takete and maluma aren't real words in any language I know. But Oxford University scientist Charles Spence has been working with hot-ticket English chef Heston Blumenthal on experiments to find out how people combine auditory and gustatory experience. They're looking into what certain words "taste" like. And he's found that the connections between brie and maluma and cranberries and takete are very strong.
As they told the BBC recently, "The idea is that you get people to take part in the experiment by giving them two plates of food, and saying 'one of these is a takete and one is a maluma,' but not tell them which is which until they've eaten it."
Dr. Spence and Chef Blumenthal's work goes way beyond the kind of menu-prettification efforts such as the renaming of "dogfish" as "rock salmon" or "grayfish." What they're exploring is the phenomenon of synesthesia, in which stimulation of one sense produces a secondary response in another sense. People who experience this may associate color with sound – they "hear" music as color, for instance.
An extreme case of this may be James Wannerton, president of the UK Synaesthesia Association, who last year told a conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, how images and words trigger taste sensations in his mouth. Saying the name of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair left him with a taste of dried coconut. " 'George Bush' gives me a taste similar to the crusty potato bit on top of a cottage pie."
But Spence's work suggests that synesthesia is a far more widespread phenomenon. He and his colleague Cesare Parise conducted an experiment in which subjects were exposed to an image of a black dot, either smaller or larger, and to one of two tones, higher or lower pitched. They were asked which came first. Did they hear the tone first, or see the dot? Researchers found that their subjects naturally matched the larger dot and the lower-pitched tone, so much so that they saw them as one phenomenon. When the dot and the tone "matched," the research subjects had trouble telling which came first. When the dot and the tone didn't match, subjects found it easier to separate them perceptually.
Something similar happened when they experimented with two other images, one a vaguely starfish shape and the other more sharply angular. The angular shape "matched," in the minds of subjects, the higher pitched tone.
Spence thinks his findings can be built upon to enhance people's experience of flavor. Blumenthal may be able to incorporate words in some fashion into the dining experience at The Fat Duck, his much-honored restaurant in Bray, England.
It all gives new meaning to the idea of "I'll eat my words." And meanwhile, make mine maluma.The Iranian currency fell to a record low on Tuesday as the Islamic republic struggles under the impact of Western economic sanctions and nervous citizens rushed to change their savings into hard currency.
The Iranian government blamed speculators for the rial's collapse and ordered the security services to take action against them.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rejected criticism of his policies and insisted the country could ride out the sanctions, imposed because of Iran's nuclear programme, after the rial lost about a third of its value in a week.
"Enemies have managed to reduce our oil sales but hopefully we will compensate for this," a combative Ahmadinejad told a news conference. He suggested domestic criticism of him was part of a "psychological war" against Iran.
"According to a report from one of the security services, 22 individuals are ringleaders of the recent turmoil in the currency market, and since these individuals are known, security institutions must act," Ahmadinejad said.
The rial tumbled to a record low of around 37,500 to the U.S. dollar in the free market on Tuesday, from about 34,200 at the close of business on Monday, foreign exchange traders in Tehran said. On Monday last week, it traded at around 24,600.
Late on Tuesday, some Iranian media reported that the currency had recovered to around 32,000, but traders contacted by Reuters could not confirm this, saying they had stopped dealing because of the extreme volatility.
The rial's slide suggested the Western sanctions were doing serious damage to the country's economy.
On Sunday, Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said Iran's economy was "on the verge of collapse".
By freezing Iran out of the global banking system, sanctions have made it hard for Tehran to obtain payment for its oil exports. Iranians have responded by rushing to change their savings into hard currency, fuelling the rial's slide.
"This is going to cause a shutdown in transactions in Iran. All the main distributors of electronics and household items will be concerned about trading - they'll want to know where the bottom is and how long it will continue," said Mehrdad Emadi, an Iranian-born economic adviser to the European Union who is based in Britain.
With Iran's official inflation rate running at around 25 percent, the rial's weakness threatens to increase the costs of industrial companies, worsening a recent spate of job losses in addition to reducing living standards.
Sanctions impact
But Ahmadinejad insisted on Tuesday that the impact of the sanctions had been manageable. Iran's imports totalled $26 billion in the first half of this year, down only moderately from $29 billion in the same period last year, he said.
"The central bank has provided all the currency for these imports," he said.
Many businessmen and ordinary citizens in Iran say the government is at least partly to blame for the currency crisis, and Ahmadinejad has been criticised for it by political enemies in parliament.
The rial has been depreciating for over a year and has lost about two-thirds of its value since June 2011. Its losses accelerated in the past week after the government launched an "exchange centre" to supply dollars to importers of basic goods; businessmen say the centre failed to meet demand for dollars.
"Eighty percent of our economic issues and problems are related to the system of management," parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani said on Tuesday, quoted by the Fars news agency.
Parliamentary news agency ICANA quoting Mohammad Bayatian, a member of parliament's industry and mines committee, as saying enough signatures had been collected to call Ahmadinejad to parliament for questioning over the rial's fall.
Iranian university students protested in front of parliament on Monday over a lack of government-subsidised dollars for their studies abroad, the Iranian Labour News Agency reported.
However, there is no clear sign that the criticism has reached a level that would force any change in the government.
The Iranian government has not released data showing the impact of the sanctions on living standards, but it can be glimpsed 150 kilometres (100 miles) across the Gulf in Dubai, traditionally a major centre of trade with Iran.
At the Dubai Creek, a crowded waterway from which motorised dhows ship goods to Iran, merchants said Iranian business had fallen off dramatically in the last two weeks.
Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy
"Everyone is losing; traders from Iran are losing because of the depreciating rial, and we're losing here because Iranians can't afford to buy our products any more," said Ahmed Mohammed Amin, 53, an Iranian trader who has lived in Dubai for 40 years.
"These are our worst days."90 volunteers let go
Over 10,000 service hours to make up annually.
For decades volunteer ski patrollers have helped keep guests safe at Park City and Canyons but that era has come to an end reports the Park Record.
Related: Top 10 Reasons To Be A Ski Patroller.
Recently, resort officials including the head of ski patrol at Park City Mountain Resort announced they would be eliminating the National Ski Patrol Volunteer Program for this upcoming season. In the past, volunteer ski patrollers have been pivotal pieces of the overall mountain’s safety strategy at Park City– especially during holidays and busy weekends.
In the coming weeks, Park City officials are expecting former volunteers to apply for full time jobs. While that may work for some, it will most certainly not work for all. Most ski patrollers did their duty solely for the pleasure of being out on the mountain and helping others… not to mention a discounted ski pass.
“As our resort has grown significantly over the past few years, and in order to deliver our vision for the guest experience, we have decided to staff and further develop our patrol program using only employees and eliminating the NSP volunteer patrol program.” – Park City Mountain message to NPS volunteers
At the end of the day, PCMR has decided to end the program citing an better guest experience as their end goal. But before they offer a better, safer product for their visitors, they’ll have to replace the thousands of volunteer service hours given by the former volunteer program.
Find the entire Park Record article here: Park City Mountain Resort axes volunteer patrol programAfter a deflating 38-17 home loss to the Packers on Sunday, the Bears head back on the road this weekend with a trip to Carolina. The Bears are 2-0 on the road this season and 0-2 at home. So perhaps the journey east will do the team some good. With that in mind, we asked Jonathan Jones, who covers the Panthers for the Charlotte Observer, for his candid personal scouting report.
Here are four things you need to know about the Panthers before Sunday’s kickoff.
1. Cam Newton doesn’t appear to be the Cam Newton of old.
Newton has had a decent season to this point. He’s currently completing 63.8 percent of his passes and has yet to throw an interception on 94 throws. And his 98.2 rating speaks to his efficiency. But still slowed by offseason ankle surgery plus a hairline fracture to his ribs that he suffered in August, Newton just hasn’t been the electric dual threat that folks in Carolina are so used to seeing.
Remember in 2011 and 2012, when Newton ran for 1,447 yards and 22 scores, carrying the ball an average of eight times per start? Well nowadays, he’s being put in the pocket and reminded to use his legs sparingly. In consecutive losses to the Steelers and Ravens, Newton had four rushes for 14 yards. Total. Which seems to diminish the fear he used to strike in opposing defenses.
Tribune reporters Dan Wiederer (right) and Rich Campbell discuss Jared Allen's return to Bears practice. Tribune reporters Dan Wiederer (right) and Rich Campbell discuss Jared Allen's return to Bears practice. SEE MORE VIDEOS
In those past two defeats, the Panthers haven’t turned Newton loose on the zone read once.
“That’s been such a huge staple of their offense since 2011,” Jones said. “And if you’re not running him on that, defenses aren’t going to bite on it. So what advantage do you have as an offense?... Without Cam’s legs, you lose a weapon. It’s as simple as that.”
Panthers coach Ron Rivera has been forward in saying he has suggested to Newton to be conservative on the run until further notice. So the Panthers quarterback is not looking to break loose as much as he once did. So when will that green light come? And how will Newton show he’s physically ready to handle it?
“Cam’s just not going to be 100 percent at any point this season,” Jones said. “This is how it’s going to go. He’s going to play Sunday, wake up stiff on Monday, get his treatment through Tuesday and then hopefully be OK to practice every Wednesday. They’ll take care of him to the point where on Sundays he’ll feel as good as he’s going to feel before the game. And then he’ll play and the whole thing happens all over again.”
2. Greg Hardy’s absence has diminished the Panthers’ pass rush.
The Bears weren’t the only NFL team who suffered a lopsided loss last weekend in big part because they couldn’t create much pressure with their defense. The Panthers never did anything to rattle Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco in their own 38-10 loss. Flacco threw for 327 yards and three scores, wasn’t sacked and was only hit by the Panthers twice.
A year ago, Hardy was a terror off the edge, recording 15 sacks to rank third in the NFL. But since Week 2, he has been exiled from the team, currently sitting on the NFL’s Exempt List due to his role in a stomach-turning domestic violence case last May. If you want explicit detail on why Hardy’s legal issues have sparked outside outrage, take some time to read this story.
(Hardy’s case remains in the legal process after he appealed a North Carolina judge’s ruling that he was guilty of misdemeanor charges of assault on a female and communicating threats.)
From a football standpoint, the Panthers haven’t quite been able to replace what Hardy offered with his pass rush skills.
“Hardy and (left defensive end) Charles Johnson worked really well together,” Jones said. “Hardy was a dependable three-down guy. And now they’re filling his spot with Wes Horton, who’s a second-year undrafted player whose more of a first- and second-down guy. And then there’s Mario Addison, who has a couple of good moves. But he’s only a situational pass rusher who’s about 260 pounds. So now that ripple effect sends a lot of attention Charles Johnson’s way. And he’s just getting stonewalled.”
That should be encouraging news to Bears quarterback Jay Cutler. Carolina currently ranks 13th in the NFL with eight sacks.
“They are getting little pressure whatsoever,” Jones said. “Flacco was able to get the ball out quickly. It was right out of Drew Brees’ formula to beat the Panthers. Get the ball away quickly and make things happen. But the Panthers seemed ill prepared for that. They were trying not to get beat by Flacco’s big arm and keeping everything in front of them. But with that, they were playing too soft on the back end. And the pass rush wasn’t working. And Flacco just sliced away for 300-plus yards.”
3. The Panthers’ rush defense is suspect as well.
In addition to Hardy’s absence, linebacker Thomas Davis has been battling injuries. Davis seemed a step slow in the Panthers’ Week 3 loss to the Steelers as he battled a hip injury. And then he suffered a hamstring injury at the end of that game, causing him to miss the Week 4 game against the Ravens. That’s left Carolina vulnerable against the run. The Steelers had two backs go up over 100 yards rushing as Leveon Bell (21 carries, 147 yards) and Legarrette Blount (10 for 118) accomplished the feat. Last week, the Ravens ran for 127 yards.The Sinai mosque attackers were carrying the flags of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) group, Ahram news agency reports citing the public prosecutor’s office. There were around 25-30 militants, the statement said, adding that the death toll has risen to 305.
The militants arrived at the Bir al-Abd mosque in five all-terrain vehicles, took up positions at the mosque’s door and 12 windows and started firing on worshippers inside, Egypt’s chief prosecutor Nabil Sadeq said in a statement Saturday. They are also said to have set fire to seven cars parked outside the mosque.
People ran for their lives after the gunmen detonated a bomb at Al-Rawdah mosque at the end of Friday prayers. They then opened fire on those fleeing and ambulances that arrived at the scene.
According to the Egyptian Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper, the prosecutor has been hearing witnesses who confirmed that some of the attackers were masked, while all were dressed in military-style clothes. One of the perpetrators was reportedly carrying a black flag, saying “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah, that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.”
READ MORE: 'They shot at ambulances': 235 dead, scores injured in bomb & gun attack at Sinai mosque (GRAPHIC)
So far, no group has claimed responsibility for what is believed to be the worst attack in Egypt’s recent history. The country’s president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi vowed“the military and the police will take revenge,” saying the attack has only prompted Cairo to step up its efforts in targeting terrorism.
Following the Friday slaughter, the military conducted air strikes and raids overnight in North Sinai “to comb terrorist hideouts and find and eliminate the rest of extremists,” Ahram newspaper cited the army spokesman Tamer El-Refaie as saying. A number of terrorists have been killed in the operation, led by the air force and law enforcement, he added.
To honor the victims, the Egyptian leader announced a three-day period of mourning and ordered the building of a memorial. He also directed that the relatives of those killed, as well as the injured, be paid a compensation.It’s been more than 4 years since I embarked on the adventure of animating Kerbals. I got to work with amazingly talented people, and can’t measure the tons of experience I was able to gain from them. I’m really grateful to have been part of Squad, and most important of the trust they weighted on me while having creative control over the animated characters. I feel the love of the community for the Kerbals and it really makes me happy to see all the fan work in the forums: drawings, illustrations, animations, all of it.
It’s time for me to take a step forward and take care of one personal project, which involves being a student once more in pursuit of a postgraduate degree, and I need to be 100% focused on that path to make it happen.
I always tell the guys here at the office I don’t like watching the old animations I’ve done, but you don’t realize how much you’ve learned until you look back. The very first animation I did with the Kerbals looked something like this:
And the latest one looked something like...
I hope you were all entertained by the Kerbals I was handled to animate and their misfortunes adventures, as much I was making them suffer happy. I’m pretty sure Kerbals will be around for a long period of time, they are really amazing characters to work with from an artistic point of view. For me, it was an amazing experience being able to shape the foundations of the Kerbals as animated characters.
All the best, and thank you for being such an amazing community
Dan
@danrpaulsenA driver's profile ImNotLolzor Jul 2nd, 2015 28 Never 28Never
Not a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features!
rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 0.99 KB NAME: UNKOWN ALIAS: LUCA, VIKTOR, DAVID [21 more...] APPEARANCE: RED-HAIR, 3-DAY-BEARD, DARK-BROWN/GREEN EYES, OFTEN WEARS SUITS PROFESSION: V.I.P TRANSPORTER BACKGROUND: ACTIVELY WORKED FOR US FOR ABOUT 1-2 YEARS, OFTEN TRANSPORTED OUR MEN, SOMETIMES PARTICIPATED IN OUR MISSIONS AGE: 24 FAMILY: MOTHER - JOANA [DECEASED] FATHER - JEROME [DECEASED] BROTHER - UNKOWN [UNKOWN] LANGUAGES: FRENCH, LATIN, GERMAN, ENGLISH KNOWN FOR: HIS CONTACTS, POPULAR AMONGST CRIMINALS FOR TRANSPORT, FORMER INFORMANT FOR OUR CAUSE INCOME: UNKOWN LOCATION: UNKOWN LAST SEEN: ALLEY [DATA PRIVATE] RECORDINGS: ALL RECORDINGS OF THIS PERSON SEEMINGLY DISSAPEAR WITHIN A MATTER OF MINUTES ACCUSED OF: BACKSTABBING OUR ORGANIZATION, IT IS ASSUMED THAT HE ALSO HAS RATS/CONTACTS IN HERE. TRAITORS SHALL BE DEALT WITH ACCORDINGLY THREAT: MEDIUM // Comment : This guy is a fucking ghost. But I am pretty sure he won't snitch on us, since he is in a very difficult position right now. Termination not yet required. //
RAW Paste Data
NAME: UNKOWN ALIAS: LUCA, VIKTOR, DAVID [21 more...] APPEARANCE: RED-HAIR, 3-DAY-BEARD, DARK-BROWN/GREEN EYES, OFTEN WEARS SUITS PROFESSION: V.I.P TRANSPORTER BACKGROUND: ACTIVELY WORKED FOR US FOR ABOUT 1-2 YEARS, OFTEN TRANSPORTED OUR MEN, SOMETIMES PARTICIPATED IN OUR MISSIONS AGE: 24 FAMILY: MOTHER - JOANA [DECEASED] FATHER - JEROME [DECEASED] BROTHER - UNKOWN [UNKOWN] LANGUAGES: FRENCH, LATIN, GERMAN, ENGLISH KNOWN FOR: HIS CONTACTS, POPULAR AMONGST CRIMINALS FOR TRANSPORT, FORMER INFORMANT FOR OUR CAUSE INCOME: UNKOWN LOCATION: UNKOWN LAST SEEN: ALLEY [DATA PRIVATE] RECORDINGS: ALL RECORDINGS OF THIS PERSON SEEMINGLY DISSAPEAR WITHIN A MATTER OF MINUTES ACCUSED OF: BACKSTABBING OUR ORGANIZATION, IT IS ASSUMED THAT HE ALSO HAS RATS/CONTACTS IN HERE. TRAITORS SHALL BE DEALT WITH ACCORDINGLY THREAT: MEDIUM // Comment : This guy is a fucking ghost. But I am pretty sure he won't snitch on us, since he is in a very difficult position right now. Termination not yet required. //Researchers say such treatment pathologises homosexuality Therapists are still offering treatments for homosexuality despite there being no evidence that such methods work, research suggests. A significant minority of mental health professionals had agreed to help at least one patient "reduce" their gay or lesbian feelings when asked to do so. The survey, published in the journal BMC Psychiatry and conducted by London researchers, involved 1,400 therapists. Many were acting with the "best of intentions", said the lead author. Only 4% said they would attempt to change a client's sexual orientation, but when asked if they would help curb homosexual feelings some 17% - or one in six - said they had done so. The incidence appeared to be as prevalent in recent years as decades earlier. The conclusions of this research are a welcome reminder that what lesbian and gay people need is equal treatment by society, not misguided treatment by a minority of health professionals
Derek Munn
Stonewall "Of course it's incumbent on a professional to assist a client who wants help, but this should be done using evidence-based therapies - exploring their distress and helping them to adjust to their situation," said Professor Michael King of University College London. "We know now that efforts to change people's sexual orientation result in very little change and can cause immense harm. "We found it very worrying that there was a significant minority who appeared to ignore this - even if they had all the right intentions." 'Right to treatment' The Royal College of Psychiatrists says all homosexuals have "a right to protection from therapies that are potentially damaging, particularly those that purport to change sexual orientation". FROM THE TODAY PROGRAMME Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
More from Today programme In the US, where there has been heated debate on the issue of "curing" homosexuality, The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has urged all "ethical practitioners to refrain from attempts to change individuals' sexual orientation". However there are organisations which campaign both for an individual's right to seek treatment and a professional's right to offer it. They point to work by Robert Spitzer, a psychiatrist who lobbied for the removal of homosexuality from APA's list of mental illnesses but went on to suggest in a controversial 2001 study that therapy could bring about change in sexual orientation. Researchers in the UK are launching a website to collect stories from around the world about such therapies. They hope in this way to |
iddy, Dixie and Cranky. And as with DKC Returns, results are mixed. On the plus side, if one of you gets struck down then the other can carry on and pop a barrel floated in by balloon to release you again. You can also team up whenever you like, giving player one control of Donkey and ally as though you were playing alone. It's clearly a game designed to be played alone, though - the biggest problem being that if the other player gets ahead of you then you can't see what you're doing off-screen. Mine cart or rocket barrel levels are also a bit pointless with two players - you can both hit the jump button, but one of you might as well take a nap. Oh, and if the second player is using a Wiimote then he or she has to contend with more awkward controls - non-analogue directional movement, which is particularly dodgy underwater, and various waggles to perform basic actions. Overall multiplayer is acceptable if you're that way inclined, but vastly inferior to other Wii U games that have been designed with it in mind.
Swimming levels! These are new for the Wii years, at least, and actually rather good. The infuriating collision detection and enemy design of the Super Nintendo swimming levels is obviously long gone, but Retro has also developed tight new controls and come up with some nice gimmicks, so these watery diversions stick in the memory for the right reasons.
You can also find Dixie and Cranky Kong in barrels now, as well as Diddy Kong, giving you a range of helpful companions. Dixie's ponytail is similar to Diddy's jetpack, but it gives you a lift at the end, while Cranky's pogo-stick cane brings you down to earth faster and sends you higher. The gameplay implications are subtle, though, just as they are for the other new feature, Kong-POW, which lets you wipe the screen of enemies when it's powered up. You don't see your friends enough on the last few islands, anyway, where getting knocked back to a checkpoint is often a double blow because you won't see a DD/DK/CK barrel again unless you have a perk queued up.
The likelihood, then, is that people who played DKC Returns will find Tropical Freeze a little uninspiring. It's a superior game - it looks nicer, it's easier to control on the GamePad than it was on the Wiimote, and there's slightly more to do - but like a lot of Nintendo's recent sequels, that doesn't feel like quite enough. The craftsman has turned in a damn fine table, for sure, but the chances are you already have a table.
DKC Returns had a Super Guide. DKC Tropical Freeze does not. Cranky approves of the increased difficulty this brings.
So who does that leave? Well, if you played DKC Returns and just want more of the same, you will love this. Buy it now. And I suppose there will be people who haven't gone near Donkey Kong Country since the SNES and were after a smart new take on it rather than a dependable sequel instalment. I'm afraid there's nothing for you here.
And then there's me. I've played Nintendo games all my life, and while I enjoyed DKC Tropical Freeze, I can't help feeling saddened by it at the same time. DKC is becoming another Nintendo series where quality grows and importance shrinks with each faithful new instalment. Not all Nintendo's franchises have fallen into this pattern, but games like Tropical Freeze make me wonder whether they all eventually will, turning up to be damned by praise that appears fainter with every passing chapter.Australian rapper, songwriter, and model
Amethyst Amelia Kelly (born 7 June 1990), known professionally as Iggy Azalea (), is an Australian rapper, singer, songwriter, model and television personality.[1] Azalea moved to the United States at the age of 16 to pursue a career in music, and has since resided in Los Angeles. Her stage name, from the masculine Egnatius[citation needed], comes from the name of her dog and the street she lived on. She earned public recognition after releasing music videos for her songs "Pu$$y" and "Two Times" on YouTube. In 2012 Azalea signed a recording contract with Grand Hustle Records, which is owned by American rapper T.I., after gaining attention from her first full-length project, a mixtape titled Ignorant Art.
Azalea's debut studio album, The New Classic (2014), peaked among the top five of several charts worldwide and received generally mixed reviews. It topped the Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums making Azalea the first non-American female rapper to reach the top of the chart.[2] The album was preceded by her debut single "Work", and generated the US Billboard Hot 100 chart-topping single "Fancy". Azalea was featured on Ariana Grande's single "Problem", which peaked at No. 2 while "Fancy" was No. 1. Azalea joined The Beatles as the only acts to rank at numbers one and two simultaneously with their first two Hot 100 entries.[3][4][5] She achieved three top-ten hits simultaneously on the Hot 100 with the aforementioned songs along with the album's fifth single, "Black Widow", later that year.[6] Following a slew of moderately successful singles, Azalea released the EP Survive the Summer (2018).
As of 5 December 2018, Azalea's official YouTube channel has accumulated 2.6 billion views, while she has had 13 music videos receive over 100 million views on Vevo.
Early life [ edit ]
An aerial perspective of Mullumbimby, NSW, where Azalea grew up
Amethyst Amelia Kelly was born in Sydney and brought up in Mullumbimby, New South Wales. Her father, Brendan Kelly, was a European-Australian painter and comic artist,[7] while her mother, Tanya,[8] cleaned holiday houses and hotels.[9] Azalea lived in a house that her father built by hand from mud-bricks, surrounded by 5 hectares (12 acres) of land.[9][10][11] According to Azalea, she has some Aboriginal (Indigenous Australian) ancestry: "My family came to Australia on the First Fleet. My family's been in that country for a long time, over 100 years.[12] If your family's lived in Australia for a long time, everyone has a little bit of [Aborigine blood]. I know my family does because we have an eye condition that only Aboriginal people have." Azalea has also said that her father "made her look at [art] as a teenager", which has always influenced her life and work.[9] She began rapping at age 14.[11] Before embarking on a solo career, Azalea formed a group with two other girls from her neighbourhood: "I was like, I could be the rapper. This could be like TLC. I'll be Left Eye."[13] Azalea eventually decided to disband the group because the other girls weren't taking it seriously: "I take everything I do serious [sic]. I'm too competitive."[13]
In pursuit of her desire to move to America, Azalea dropped out of high school. She worked and saved the money she earned by cleaning hotel rooms and holiday houses with her mother. She claims to have hated school, which, apart from art class, only made her miserable. She also said she had no friends and was teased for her homemade outfits.[14] Azalea travelled to the United States in 2006, shortly before she turned 16. She told her parents she was going "on a holiday" with a friend, but eventually decided to stay and shortly afterwards told them she was not coming back home: "I was drawn to America because I felt like an outsider in my own country, I was in love with hip hop, and America is the birthplace of that, so I figured the closer I was to the music, the happier I'd be. I was right."[15] She recalled, "My mum was crying, saying, 'Just be safe.' I was thinking, 'I'm going by myself. I'm fucking crazy!'."[16] After her arrival in the US, she received her GED, and resided in the country on a visa waiver for six years, returning to Australia every three months to renew it. Azalea worked in the US illegally until February 2013 when she was granted a five-year O visa.[17]
Music career [ edit ]
2006–11: Career beginnings in the US [ edit ]
When she first arrived in the United States in 2006, she stayed in Miami, Florida, and afterwards lived briefly in Houston, Texas. Azalea settled for a few years in Atlanta, Georgia, working with a member of the Dungeon Family named Backbone. During that period, she met future collaborators FKi and Natalie Sims.[18][19] She took her stage name from the name of her childhood dog, Iggy, and the street she grew up on, Azalea Street, where her family lives to this day.[20] She said people would laugh at her because "they thought my raps sucked." But having grown up getting laughed at, she was able to shrug it off.[21] Meanwhile, she'd met someone from Interscope Records who encouraged her to move to Los Angeles, and so in the summer of 2010, she decided to do so. She was briefly managed by Interscope.[15][21]
On 27 September 2011, Azalea released her first full-length project, a mixtape titled Ignorant Art, saying she made it "with the intent to make people question and redefine old ideals".[22] Her song "Pu$y" was included on the mixtape, alongside guest appearances from YG, Joe Moses, Chevy Jones, and Problem. In November 2011, she released a music video for her song "My World", directed by Alex/2tone. The video features a cameo appearance from character actor and former wrestler Tiny Lister, which earned her more attention due to its rising popularity online.[23] "It's supposed to have like, all the ridiculousness of a big-budget '90s video, but then chopped and screwed," said Azalea, of the video.[24] In December 2011, Azalea revealed she would release her debut studio album, entitled The New Classic, as soon as she signed a major record label deal: "Once that's sorted out and I establish an overall sound and direction for the album, I will be able to know what artists would make for a dynamic collaboration".[25] On 11 January 2012, Azalea released the music video for "The Last Song", her third video from Ignorant Art.[26] In an interview with Billboard, released on 27 January, Azalea hinted at an Interscope Records signing, while also revealing hopes of releasing The New Classic in June, and for her debut single to precede it in March.[27]
2012: Label issues and Glory [ edit ]
Ignorant Art, and I don't know who yet. I'm still looking. T.I.'s gonna be helping me with it, kinda like "I'm working with a different production company for my album than what I did for my mixtape, and I don't know who yet. I'm still looking. T.I.'s gonna be helping me with it, kinda like A&Ring, kinda like executive-producing. He called me up and was like, 'Yo.' And I was like, 'Definitely. You're Tip. I love you, of course.' So he's gonna be kinda helping me out, like just kinda reaching out to people and helping me find production and pointing me in the direction of things that I might like. We're gonna start on that next week together. I'll probably fly out to Atlanta and we'll do it in between there because he's weird with traveling and stuff. I understand. We're in touch with each other. I have legal issues, he has legal issues. I get it. So hopefully that will be really dynamic and it'll help speed things along." – Azalea speaking on her phone call and decision to work with T.I..[28]
Azalea reached out to Southern rapper T.I., for the direction of her debut album. T.I. was set to executive produce The New Classic, soon after a phone call the two had. At the time, Azalea was eyeing a summer release for The New Classic: "Hopefully if all goes to plan, my album will be out in June and I'll have it recorded by the end of the month."[28] However, after Interscope did not allow T.I. to be an ongoing part of her deal, Azalea opted not to sign with the major label and stay independently signed to Grand Hustle Records, until the release of her first album, which had then been postponed.[29] In early 2012, Azalea was featured on the cover of XXL, as part of its annual "Top 10 Freshman List", along with fellow up-and-coming rappers French Montana, MGK, Danny Brown, Hopsin, and Roscoe Dash.[30] On 1 March 2012, T.I. announced he signed Azalea to Grand Hustle Records, along with rappers Chip and Trae tha Truth.[31] On 26 March 2012, Azalea posted "Murda Bizness", the intended lead single for The New Classic, on her YouTube account. The song was produced by Bei Maejor and features a verse from her Grand Hustle label-boss T.I.. Around this time, Azalea also caused controversy for her 2011 song "D.R.U.G.S", a remix of Kendrick Lamar's "Look Out for Detox", having adapted one of its lyrics to "When the relay starts, I'm a runaway slave / Master," leading her to release a letter online apologising, stating that it was a "tacky and careless thing to say."[32]
In April 2012, via her Twitter feed, Azalea announced plans to release an extended play (EP) entitled Glory, later in May: "I'm just onto something right now, the last two weeks and it's glory. Azaleans need something new."[33] Also in April, Azalea starred alongside Grammy-nominated producer Diplo and FKi in the world's first fully interactive'shoppable' music video for Canadian fashion retailer, SSENSE.[34] In May 2012, it was confirmed by T.I., on MTV's HipHopPov, that Azalea had not yet secured distribution for her deal with Grand Hustle Records, and was described by T.I. as a "free agent". It was later revealed in the interview that she was in negotiation with labels other than Interscope, possibly Def Jam Recordings (wherein Bu Thiam, whom of which originally placed a bid to sign her is VP of A&R).[35] Azalea was also featured on Steve Aoki and Angger Dimas' collaborative electronic track "Beat Down", which was released on 31 May 2012.[36]
Azalea performing at Converse Get Dirty Festival in Austria, April 2013
On 24 June 2012, Azalea released "Millionaire Misfits", the second offering from her EP Glory; the first being "Murda Bizness". On 21 July, the official music video for "Murda Bizness" was released online. Glory, although not released in May, as it was originally scheduled, was released 30 July 2012. Azalea was also one of the acts on MTV's 2012 Closer to My Dreams Tour, along with Tyga and Kirko Bangz.[37] On 28 September 2012, Azalea announced she would be releasing her second mixtape on 11 October 2012. Titling it TrapGold, the mixtape was produced entirely by Diplo and FKi. She later premiered teaser visuals for the track "Bac 2 Tha Future (My Time)".[38] On 9 October 2012, Azalea made her US national television debut, appearing alongside T.I., B.o.B and other Grand Hustle artists in a cypher, at the 2012 BET Hip Hop Awards. Later that month, she embarked on yet another North American mini-concert tour with Roc Nation singer-songwriter Rita Ora, on her Ora Tour.[39] Azalea then headlined a tour in Europe to support TrapGold.[40] On 16 December 2012, Azalea performed live alongside Natasha Bedingfield and Bootsy Collins, covering Deee-Lite's 1990 hit disco song "Groove Is in the Heart", on the annual television series VH1 Divas.
2013–15: The New Classic [ edit ]
In January and February 2013, Azalea worked on tour while still in progress on her upcoming singles and summer release of The New Classic. She was the opening act for Rita Ora's Radioactive Tour, in the United Kingdom.[41] As part of her set for Ora's Radioactive Tour, Azalea premiered her commercial debut single "Work", which also serves as the lead single for her debut album. The single premiered on BBC Radio 1Xtra on 11 February 2013.[42] On 13 February 2013, it was announced Azalea had signed a record deal with Mercury Records.[43] The music video for her debut single "Work", was directed by Jonas & François and released 13 March 2013.[44] In March 2013, Azalea also joined renowned East Coast rapper Nas, on the European leg of his Life Is Good Tour.[44]
On 15 April 2013, Vevo announced Azalea as its second LIFT artist of 2013 and that she would film live festival performances, fashion and style pieces and behind-the-scenes interviews as part of the eight-week-long campaign. It was also revealed that the music video for her second single "Bounce", would premiere on Vevo at the end of the month.[45] On 16 March 2013, it was announced that Azalea would perform in the beneficent concert "Chime for Change", scheduled to take place on 1 June in London, alongside Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez and others. On 23 April 2013, Azalea announced that she had signed a solo record deal with Island Def Jam.[46] On 26 April 2013, Azalea's second European single "Bounce", premiered on BBC Radio 1.[47] She also noted that the third international single taken from her debut album is entitled "Change Your Life" and features a verse from T.I.. Azalea also confirmed that she is not signed to Grand Hustle Records; however, heavily affiliated with the label.[48]
Azalea performing at Irving Plaza in New York City on The New Classic Tour, May 2014
On 25 May 2013, Azalea, as part of Radio 1's Big Weekend in Londonderry, performed an acclaimed carnival themed set on the In New Music We Trust stage. The setlist contained songs from previous EP's and album material such as "Bounce" and "Work". The show was the start of a short set of UK pre-album promotional appearances.[49] In June 2013, Azalea confirmed that the album was nearly finished and that it's slated for release in September 2013.[50] On 29 July 2013, Azalea revealed she will be opening for Beyoncé on the 17-date Australia leg of her Mrs. Carter Show World Tour in October and November.[51] The third single from The New Classic, titled "Change Your Life", was premiered by BBC Radio 1Xtra's MistaJam, on 19 August 2013.[52][53] On 3 October 2013, Azalea made her first appearance on BET's 106 & Park, where she was interviewed and performed "Change Your Life", alongside T.I.[54][55][56]
Azalea's debut album was slated for an October release but in an interview with Australia's Herald Sun, she revealed due to other commitments such as supporting Beyoncé on her Mrs. Carter Show World Tour her record label would not allow her to release The New Classic until March 2014. She said: "The official date? Fucked if I know! It's done, it's so depressing to say this but it's the beginning of March, it's so far away but I just have to accept that." She explained the reasons behind the delay: "It was supposed to be October but obviously I'm going on tour with Beyoncé and they said I'm not allowed to put an album out while I'm on tour because I'll be trapped in Australia and I won't be able to do any TV appearances and I thought that's fair enough, that's three weeks and then they said 'You can't put an album out around Christmas time, that's a bad time' and I said 'What about January?' 'Well nobody gets back off holidays and then it's the BRIT Awards, you can't release an album, it's terrible for marketing' which brings me to February."[57] On 10 November, Azalea performed "Blurred Lines" with Robin Thicke at the 2013 MTV Europe Music Awards.[58]
Azalea performing at the ACL Music Festival, October 2014
On 5 December 2013, an unfinished song by Azalea titled "Leave It" and the tag produced by DJ Mustard, was leaked.[59][60][61] Azalea later revealed the song was in fact produced by The Invisible Men and The Arcade, whom she collaborated with on the entire album.[62] In February 2014, Azalea announced that she would be releasing a new single titled "Fancy", featuring English singer-songwriter Charli XCX.[63] The song was premiered on BBC Radio 1 Xtra at 7 pm GMT on 6 February 2014. After the song's premiere, it was revealed "Fancy" was the song that had leaked titled "Leave It". On 17 February 2014, the song was serviced to urban contemporary radio in the United Kingdom as the album's fourth single and became her highest charting song at the time.[64] The music video for "Fancy", inspired by the 1995 American comedy film Clueless was released on 4 March.[65] "Fancy" went on to become Azalea's most successful single to date, becoming her first single to chart on the US Billboard Hot 100.[66] It also reached number-one on Billboard's Hot Rap Songs chart,[67] as well as number-one the US Dance Club Play chart.[68]
Azalea's often-delayed and long-awaited debut album, The New Classic, was released on 21 April 2014.[69] Upon its release, the album debuted at number-three on the Billboard 200 chart, with first-week sales of 52,000 copies in the United States. The New Classic was the highest-charting female rap album since American rapper Nicki Minaj's Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded (2012). Azalea also logs the highest bow for a female rapper's debut album since Pink Friday (2010), which had entered at number-two with 375,000 copies sold.[70][71] Azalea was then featured on American singer Ariana Grande's single "Problem", which was released on 28 April 2014. The song was released as the lead single from Grande's second studio album. Shortly after, Azalea also appeared on Jennifer Lopez's single "Booty".
On 28 May 2014, The New Classic's fourth single "Fancy", reached number-one on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, with Azalea being the fourth solo female rapper ever to top the Hot 100. On the same day, "Problem" rose to number-two on the Hot 100, with Azalea becoming the only artist since The Beatles, to rank at numbers one and two simultaneously, with their first two respective Hot 100 entries. "Fancy" also topped the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip Hop Songs chart.[72] On 24 June 2014, Azalea's song "Black Widow", featuring Rita Ora, was serviced to rhythmic contemporary radio, as her debut album's fifth single in the US. It eventually peaked at number-three on the Billboard Hot 100.[73] A reissue of The New Classic, titled Reclassified, was released in November 2014; featuring five new songs, including new singles "Beg for It" and "Trouble".
On 10 December 2014, when reflecting on the year she's had and the struggles she faced in the years before, Azalea announced plans of an arena tour for 2015 and a second studio album via her Twitter account. The same day, she revealed the title of the tour, The Great Escape Tour, and the concept behind it, which is Azalea picturing herself as "a musical escape artist for people." Azalea also stated that the name of the tour went along with the title of her upcoming second studio album, which would also be promoted on the tour.[74] Azalea declared she had started to work on her second studio album in January 2015.[75] On 4 May 2015, she released a duet with Britney Spears titled "Pretty Girls."[76] On 29 May 2015, it was reported The Great Escape Tour had been canceled and there would be a new tour planned around Azalea's new album to be released in 2016.[77] Azalea later clarified she "had a different creative change of heart" and would also be taking a break to figure out the progression she wanted for her sound and visuals.[78] In June, when asked details on her new music, she explained she had scrapped six months of work to start from scratch.[79] On 30 August, Azalea performed "Cool for the Summer" with Demi Lovato at the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards, after a collaboration (Kingdom Come) between the two was announced for Lovato's fifth studio album Confident.[80]
2016–18: Career setbacks and Survive the Summer [ edit ]
In October 2015, Azalea revealed the initial title of her second album to be Digital Distortion.[81] A buzz track off the album, "Azillion", was made available for free streaming on SoundCloud on 9 January 2016.[82] The project's lead single "Team" was released on 18 March 2016 along with a dance video.[83] An accompanying music video premiered on 31 March.[84] In March 2016, Azalea revealed she had started a production company, having "bought the rights to a couple of books that I really like, and also some television shows from Australia that I really believed in and was a fan of when I was a kid, and I had some ideas to rework [them]."[85] In July 2016, she announced that her company, Azalea Street Productions, had signed a deal to create original content for NBCUniversal.[86]
On 12 June 2016, Seven Network revealed that Azalea had signed on to be a judge on The X Factor Australia for its eighth season, broadcast from October to November 2016.[87] In September 2016, Azalea explained she was delaying the release of her album to 2017, despite it initially being set for July 2016, after ending the relationship with her fiancé, "[I] just needed to have some me time to get my life in order and process the changes that are happening in my private life," and wanting to record new songs that reflected her mindset: "when I wrote [my album] I was about to get married... I don't want to go and promote my album and get asked about my relationship that has just crumbled."[88][89] Azalea released two singles, "Mo Bounce" and "Switch", on 24 March 2017 and 19 May 2017 respectively.[90][91] The latter track features Brazilian singer Anitta.[91] Azalea promoted "Switch" through a performance on the 2017 iHeartRadio Much Music Video Awards.
On 7 November 2017, Azalea stated that she wasn't allowed to release music until January 2018, as she signed with a new label. She additionally announced the new title of her second album, Surviving the Summer, and put four new tracks for free download via WeTransfer.[92][93] The media has dubbed the songs as a four-track mixtape or EP called 4 My Ratz.[94][95] In January 2018, Azalea announced the title of the lead single from Surviving the Summer, "Savior" featuring Quavo, which was released on 2 February 2018.
On 8 June 2018, the rapper revealed that Survive the Summer is an EP. She also stated that the reason behind the postponed release date—originally for 2 June, then 30 June release—was the changing president of her record label, Island Records.[96] On 5 July, Azalea released two tracks from the EP: "Tokyo Snow Trip" and "Kream", the latter featuring Tyga.[97] Survive the Summer was released on 3 August 2018, and it debuted at number 144 on the Billboard 200.
2018–present: In My Defense [ edit ]
On 3 November 2018, Azalea left her record label, Island Records, according to her tweet, which she was signed to in 2017,[98] and established her own record label, which was then-named New Classic Records. Two weeks later, she announced she had signed a $2.7 million dollar distribution deal with an unidentified company. She stated that she would be an independent artist, be able to sign other artists, and own all her masters, with exceptions to her music licensed under Universal. On 20 November 2018, it was announced that she had signed a partnership deal with Empire Distribution.[99] She would later rename her record label to Bad Dreams in January 2019.[100][101]
Azalea announced in early February 2019, that she had completed work on her second studio album, In My Defense. She has furthered stated her plans to release it in Spring of that same year.
Artistry [ edit ]
Public image [ edit ]
After at first resisting suggestions to try modeling,[102] in 2012 Azalea signed with Wilhelmina Models International Inc., a model and celebrity agency in the fashion industry.[103] She featured in promotional ads for Los Angeles-based lifestyle brand Dim Mak's 2012 fall/winter collection.[104] Also in 2012, Azalea was the face of Levi's "Go Forth" campaign.[105] Azalea also appeared in House of Holland's first eyewear collection campaign.[106] In July 2014, MTV announced that Azalea would be the host of the revived House of Style.[107] Azalea appeared in the seventh installment of The Fast and the Furious film series, Furious 7, released in 2015.[108] In August 2014, the New York Post's Page Six reported that Azalea had formed a footwear collaboration with Steve Madden.[109] Their shoe collection was unveiled in February 2015.[110] In October 2014, Azalea and her boyfriend Nick Young were announced as the new faces of Forever 21's 2014 holiday campaign.[111] In April 2015, she signed on to be the 100th birthday ambassador of Australian underwear and clothing company Bonds.[112]
Musical style and influences [ edit ]
Azalea at the ESPYs in 2014
Although Azalea is Australian, she raps with a Southern U.S. accent.[113] When she first moved to America, she was involved in the Southern hip hop scene of Miami and later Atlanta, which made it easy for her to cultivate the Southern influence in her music: "I lived in the South for five years; you pick up things from your surroundings and teachers. The people who taught me to rap are all from the South and so was the music I had listened to as a teen."[114] While Azalea's debut extended play Glory was intended to focus on hardcore-rap, the EP also touched up on other genres including electronic dance music.[115][116] Music critics have defined her singles "Fancy" and "Team" as electro-hop.[83][117]
At the age of 11, Azalea was infatuated with hip hop when she heard Tupac Shakur's "Baby Don't Cry (Keep Ya Head Up II)": "It was the song that made me fall in love with music and also what sparked my Tupac fascination. That would later make me pick up my own pen and write songs".[114] In her early interviews, Azalea regularly mentioned Shakur's influence: "I was sickly obsessed. I had every picture of Tupac ever printed on my wall".[11] She has credited Beyoncé as an influence[118] and Missy Elliott as the female rapper who she is influenced by and admires the most.[114] Outside of music, her fashion sense is influenced by Grace Kelly, Lil' Kim, Gwen Stefani, the Spice Girls, Fran Drescher, Eve, Trina, Fergie, and Christina Aguilera.[114][119][120][121] Azalea has also been credited as a director for some of her music videos, and often mentions the importance she attributes to them: "For me, visuals are as important as the music, I just love escapism and giving people something to escape to. To me, that's what art is."[122][123][124]
Controversy [ edit ]
Cultural appropriation [ edit ]
According to the UK newspaper The Guardian, there have been "accusations of racism against Azalea" focused on her "...insensitivity to the complexities of race relations and cultural appropriation."[125] Salon writer Brittney Cooper critiqued Azalea's "co-optation and appropriation of sonic Southern Blackness, particularly the sonic Blackness of Southern Black women."[126] Her use of an African American English accent [127] has been compared to blackface [128][129] and part of a "broad, vague area of white people pretending to be black: those who do it culturally, rather than cosmetically",[130] but also conversely as "wilful ignorance." [131] Both supporters and critics of Azalea's rise to fame within the hip-hop industry noted that it was important to be inclusive while acknowledging and respecting the role of African-Americans in pioneering hip-hop [132]
In 2018, Azalea claimed that U.S. history of racism causes its audiences to dismiss her and claims that she "grew up in a situation that didn't involve any privilege and I worked really hard," later reiterating on US race relations "I make 'black' music. I don't want people to think it's not something I care about. I want to make music for girls in the gym.".[133] She lamented that, "many people think I still live in that bubble and that I don't understand that the United States is set up in a way that doesn't benefit minorities. I've lived here for 10 years now, and I don't want it to be that way either. I'm marrying a black man and my children will be half black – of course I care about these things."[134] She further dismisses the legitimacy of the racial controversy, believing sexism to be the true cause of criticism.[135] In a feature covering Azalea's career, Clove Hope wrote, "Rather than seeing race as an issue, Iggy focused on the trend of women in rap being over-policed and accused of not writing their own rhymes, while in the process overlooking how artists like herself and Macklemore hold a broader industry advantage, even as they feel like outcasts in their field."[136] In 2014, journalist Natalie Morin tracked down a history of homophobic and racist statements and sentiments from Azalea's social media accounts, which Azalea deleted, acknowledged and claimed were before her rise to fame.[137]
Personal life [ edit ]
In late 2011, Azalea began dating American rapper A$AP Rocky, whom she met through American record producer Chase N. Cashe. She confirmed that they were dating in a January 2012 interview with Vibe. It was around this time that she got the title of Rocky's breakout mixtape Live. Love. A$AP tattooed on her fingers.[138] She claimed she and Rocky both had tattoos dedicated to the relationship but his were not visible.[138] In July 2012, Rocky stated they were no longer dating.[139] In March 2013, Azalea revealed she had crossed out the "A$AP" part of the tattoo months previously.[140]
She began a relationship with Los Angeles Lakers basketball player Nick Young in November 2013. Azalea and Young were featured in the March 2014 issue of GQ magazine. They resided together in Tarzana, California.[141] On 1 June 2015, they announced their engagement.[142] On 19 June 2016, Azalea announced that she and Young had split after a video leaked on the internet showing Young bragging about cheating on Azalea.[143]
In March 2015, while talking about her body shape with Vogue, Azalea revealed she had undergone breast augmentation, saying, "I did change something: Four months ago, I got bigger boobs! I'd thought about it my entire life," adding she was sick of having to sew padding into her stage costumes and wanted to be able to wear lingerie without wiring. After initially resolving never to discuss it publicly as she didn't want other girls to feel bad about their bodies, she concluded, "But then, I decided I wasn't into secret-keeping."[144] In August 2015, she talked about having a nose job with Seventeen magazine, adding, "Your perception of yourself can change a lot over time, so I think it's important to wait and make sure it's the right choice. Plastic surgery is an emotional journey. [...] There are things that I didn't like about myself that I changed through surgery. There are other things I dislike but I've learned to accept. It's important to remember you can't change everything. You can never be perfect."[145]
In March 2018, she was approved for permanent residence in the United States.[ |
, never mind.
The most obvious explanation is Pac-12 teams run complicated offenses and pass a lot -- six rank among the top-26 in passing and nine are in the top-55. Teams that run complicated offenses and pass a lot would tend to commit more penalties, most particularly the costly holding or pass interference calls.
Further, the NCAA's emphasis on stopping head shots this year led to a lot more personal foul penalties on plays in the secondary that previously would have earned players helmet stickers and spots on highlight shows. Those crunching blows from run-away safeties on unprotected receivers don't happen as much on running plays.
I called Pac-12 coordinator of officiating Tony Corrente for an explanation, but he apparently flagged me for potentially annoying phone call and didn't respond to a message. Nor did Pac-12 officiating consultant Mike Pereira. Perhaps they went skiing in the Alps or something?
That's actually a good thing, because they would have given me a reasonable explanation that probably would perfectly counter my position.
Pac-12 officials: When in doubt, keep your hands away from the yellow hankie.
I know, I know: You call them like you see 'em. Just make sure you really, really see them.Baker administration officials are high on the potential of energy storage, with the state's top energy resources official telling the News Service she sees it as a potential "game-changer."
"If we want to truly integrate renewables into helping us solve, and incorporating them into our electric grid when we actually really need them at times of peak, storage is going to be the key solution for us to do that, especially around solar," Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Matthew Beaton told lawmakers on Thursday.
A Department of Energy Resources (DOER) report due out the coming days will serve as a "catalyst" for storage initiatives, including a $10 million pilot. DOER Commissioner Judith Judson told the News Service over the winter that demonstration projects are being planned.
"It really can be a game-changer," Judson said. "Electricity is really the only supply chain in the world where the project, electricity, has to be generated and consumed at the exact same time. If you have storage you can store the energy when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing and use it at times when it is not."Jules Conroy, a 23-year old student of classical guitar at Holyoke Community College in Massachusetts, has spent three years preparing this 17-minute YouTube video of classic game music performed as heavy metal, which covers 40 years of video game history.
It is a beautiful homage to gaming and an outstanding piece of music composition. It’s had me laughing with joy and getting teary-eyed with nostalgia over the half dozen times I’ve listened to it so far. And Conroy made the entire thing in his bedroom.
“I’ve been shooting crappy home movies since I was in middle school and stopped when I got into music in high school,” Conroy told me via email. “My YouTube presence was based on a challenge that I gave myself to make a video game cover/medley every week for a year (ended up doing it for 3 years! This video was the finale!)”
Correcting for my obvious bias as a video game player, I’m also a former jazz musician, and I’m familiar with all the original music he’s vamping off in this video. Conroy’s ability to translate into metal and smoothly transition through so many different types of songs across the space of this video is impressive. Conroy doesn’t think it’s that big of a deal. “I’ve made some pretty weird songs metal over the years, so I didn’t really worry about that in the song choice stage,” he said.
Explaining his musical lineage, Conroy said he currently studies with Phillip DeFremery. “Phil is a monster player and writer. I would go so far as to call him a philosopher in the ways of the guitar,” said Conroy. DeFremery, in turn, studied with Oscar Ghiglia, who studied with Andrés Segovia. “Segovia was arguably the Hendrix of the classical guitar world in the 20th century,” Conroy said.
Even if you don’t recognize any of those names, you can probably take Conroy’s word on it. What you should recognize is that Conroy is playing what looks like a genuine Ocarina from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time when he’s playing the game’s theme in the video.
“STLOcarina got a hold of me a year or so ago and asked if I would play one of their ocarinas in a video,” Conroy said. “Being relatively unhealthy with my Zelda obsession, I said yes and buried myself in a corner for a few days and squeaked like hell on it, until I could make something arguably musical.”
I also recognized, in another unabashedly geeky moment, that Conroy has the watch from GoldenEye, the most iconic game released on the Nintendo 64, and arguably the progenitor of first-person shooters on game consoles, hanging on the neck of his guitar as he’s playing the GoldenEye 007 theme seven minutes into the video. I had to ask if it was real.
“Well, define real. I saw a post on Reddit a little over a year ago for a website that allowed for custom images on sports watches and people were getting the Goldeneye watch. I just HAD to have it. The only thing more unhealthy than my obsession with Zelda is my obsession with James Bond and Goldeneye.”
Ultimately, it’s that passion that makes Conroy’s metal tribute so fantastic. It’s a perfect blend of his geekery over guitar lineage and video games.
Correction: A previous version of this story misrepresented the amount of time this video took to make. Conroy emailed to clarify that while he spent three years preparing these performances, the video itself actually came together in a mere eight days.
H/T Kotaku | Image courtesy of Jules ConroyLast Thursday, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was suspended from the presidency when the Senate voted, 55-22, to try her on the impeachment charges, approved by the lower house, involving alleged budgetary maneuvers (“pedaladas”) designed to obscure the size of public debt. Although she nominally remains the president and continues to reside in Brasília’s presidential palace, her duties are being carried out by her vice president, Michel Temer — now “interim” President Temer — and the right-wing, corruption-tainted, all-white-male cabinet he has assembled (due to Brazil’s coalition politics, Temer is from a different party than Rousseff). Rousseff’s suspension will last up to 180 days as her Senate impeachment trial takes place, at which point she will either be acquitted or (as is widely expected) convicted and permanently removed from her office.
On Tuesday, I spoke to President Rousseff in the presidential palace for her first interview since being suspended. The 22-minute interview, conducted in Portuguese with English subtitles, is below. Rather than subdued, resigned, and defeated, Rousseff — who was imprisoned and tortured for three years in the 1970s by the U.S.-supported military dictatorship that ruled the country for 21 years — is more combative, defiant, and resolute than ever.
Photo: Igo Estrela/Getty Images
Since he has taken power, Temer has exacerbated the fears of those who regard impeachment as an attack on democracy or even a coup. Unlike Rousseff, he is personally implicated in corruption scandals. He was just fined for election-law violations and faces an eight-year ban on running for any office (including the one into which he was just installed). Polls show only 2 percent of Brazilians would support him in an actual election, while close to 60 percent want him impeached.
Worse, Temer created a worldwide controversy when he appointed 23 ministers, all of whom were white and male in a deeply diverse country, and one-third of whom are under suspicion in various corruption inquiries. And his government — beloved by hedge funds and Wall Street but very few other factions — has begun preparing the groundwork for a radical right-wing attack on the country’s social safety net, which could never attract the support of actual voters if it were subjected to a democratic framework. Meanwhile, as the Olympics arrive in Rio in 10 weeks, protests are breaking out all over the country and are certain to become more destabilizing and disruptive as the Temer government attempts to cut some of the most critical social programs established by Rousseff’s party (which has won four straight national elections).
I spoke with President Rousseff about all of these matters, as well as whether it is now justified for Brazilians to use civil disobedience against the government she describes as “illegitimate,” and the likely impact on international affairs and economic realignment from this extreme and undemocratic change of ideology in the world’s fifth most populous country and seventh largest economy. (Interim President Temer has not yet responded to The Intercept’s request for an interview.)
The interview can be watched on the recorder below. A full transcript appears below that.
Recent articles about Brazil from The Intercept
(This transcript has been lightly edited for continuity and clarity)
GLENN GREENWALD: I’m Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept and I’m here at the presidential palace, in Brasília, to speak with the Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, for her first interview since being suspended last week by the Senate, after it voted to try her on impeachment charges.
Good morning, madam president, and thank you for the interview.
DILMA ROUSSEFF: Good morning, Greenwald.
GG: The last stage of the impeachment proceedings takes place at the Supreme Court, which is constituted of 11 judges; eight of them were nominated by the Workers’ Party (PT), five of them by you. Would you say that the court and its decisions are legitimate?
DR: I do believe that the court’s decisions have been legitimate. I don’t think that the court will judge it; it’s not the Supreme Court that will judge the impeachment proceedings. In Brazil, impeachment proceedings are judged by the Senate. The session is conducted by the president of the court, Judge Lewandowski. I hope that his leadership makes the proceedings more consistent. … Photo: Evaristo Sa/AFP/Getty Images
GG: But if the Senate impeaches you, you could ask the Supreme Court to reject that decision and rule on whether there were indeed high crimes and misdemeanors. Also, the Supreme Court could have interrupted the process, but has not so far. Can a process being conducted under the authority of a legitimate court be considered a “coup”?
DR: Look, these are two completely different things. The proceedings, according to Brazilian law, are conducted by the Senate. I can appeal to the Supreme Court, and that will happen at the appropriate time for my defense. But, in the meantime, it will go through the court. It will be undertaken by the Senate. The Senate is the appropriate court. After that, I can debate whether the proceedings were carried out accurately, whether they were correctly accepted, whether we were given a fair trial, and whether there was any interference in the proceedings. We are appealing this.
We have not been granted an injunction, but the Senate is analyzing the request, which will be presented to the full Supreme Court. It has not been accepted by the judge. … He has not granted a suspension of proceedings. Now, they will have to deliberate.
GG: But will you have the opportunity to ask the Supreme Court to define whether there were high crimes? …
DR: The merits [of the impeachment charges]!
GG: After …
DR: Afterward. Photo: Evaristo Sa/AFP/Getty Images
GG: On the day after the Senate voted, [Supreme Court] Justice Gilmar Mendes suspended the investigation of Aécio Neves, defeated by you in the last election. Many people saw that and thought, “The court is behaving like a political actor. The suspension paves the way to bury the Car Wash investigation.” Would you agree with that? What does this suspension mean?
DR: I think the suspension is strange; as far as I know, no proceedings have been suspended up until now. No Car Wash investigations have been suspended. But Justice Gilmar Mendes is not the only judge on the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is composed of 12 [sic] members. Not all of the 12 [sic] members have similar dispositions, that of a real militant, an obvious militant, as Judge Gilmar Mendes does. His actions will be judged over time by the Brazilian people.
GG: Do you think there’s a risk …
DR: We should not have double standards in our country. If you’re investigating one, you have to investigate them all. No one should be spared from the investigations.
GG: Do you think there’s a risk, after you leave office — if it comes to that — that Operation Car Wash will be swept under the carpet?
DR: That might be a threat, but I believe that there are many parties interested in the continuation of the Car Wash investigation.
So I don’t think that it will be simple to bury Operation Car Wash. I am more concerned about reverting back to the previous situation, in which the prosecutor general was not chosen from a list of three nominees, but was selected on the basis of their political alignment, which led to lots of inquiries being “filed away.” So much so that the prosecutor general of the republic became known as the “filing clerk of the republic.”
After President Lula took office — and I carried on the same practice — what procedure did we adopt? We generally chose the first name on the three-nominee list. Why? To give the Prosecutor’s Office more investigative autonomy and to stop the filing away of inquiries. I believe that there is a structure today — the Prosecutor’s Office, the Federal Police, and segments of the judiciary branch, like the Supreme Court and the Superior Court of Justice — that is willing to undertake investigations. Now, no institution is immune to the political process. They all suffer the consequences of the country’s political climate. Photo: Erick Dau/The Intercept
GG: Regarding the allegations against you: I know that other presidents, including Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and some governors also performed the budgetary maneuvers that you did, although perhaps not to the same extent as you, but they did use them. I know you insist that the budgetary maneuvers are not high crimes and misdemeanors that deserve an impeachment.
DR: They are not high crimes just as much as they are not crimes against the budget. They are not crimes.
GG: But would you agree that the Fiscal Responsibility Act prohibits them?
DR: No, because it is not prohibited by the Fiscal Responsibility Act. What is considered a budgetary maneuver? The appropriation bill authorizes the process known as complementary credits. And what does it say? It says that if you expect to collect a surplus in taxes from a specific initiative, the surplus can be re-invested. So let me ask you this: Where do these decrees come from? The Superior Electoral Court. The credit I authorized was requested by the Justice Department, by the court.
This is not a surplus from the general pot; it was an extra credit from individual headings, which is something extremely technical. Nothing was concealed. It crossed everyone’s desks. The court has always done that sort of analysis. Interim President Michel Temer, center, held the first cabinet meeting to discuss the first steps of the government at the Planalto Palace in Brasília, Brazil, on May 13, 2016. Photo: Agencia Estado/AP
GG: I’d like to switch gears now. You were the first female president of Brazil, and your interim replacement, Michel Temer, revealed his cabinet of 23 ministers last week: not a single woman or black person and one-third are accused of corruption. How did you react when you saw his team?
DR: Look, I think that … it seems to me that this interim and illegitimate government will be very conservative from every aspect. One of which is the fact that it is a government of white men, without black people, in a country that, in the last census in 2010, and I think this is very important, more than 50 percent of the population self-identified as being of African origin. So, I think that not having any women or black people in the government shows a certain lack of care for the country you are governing.
GG: Would you say that we have arrived at the end of Brazilian democracy?
DR: No, I wouldn’t. Why wouldn’t I say that it’s the end of democracy? Because today, institutions can be disrupted, but they’re stronger than you think. I’m apprehensive now, because what happens under an illegitimate government? An illegitimate government tries to dress itself in the veil of pseudo-order; it bans protests and freedom of expression and, above all, shows an enormous willingness to cut social programs.
GG: OK. Since you classify this government as illegitimate, do you believe it’s correct for Brazilians to fight against this government with civil disobedience, as you did after the coup of ’64?
DR: I think they are completely different situations …
GG: I understand. But should Brazilians engage in civil disobedience to fight against this? I know the situations are different. But have we arrived at the point in which it is justified for Brazilians to fight against this government, which you’re classifying as illegitimate, with civil disobedience?
DR: I think that, in Brazil, we need to fight against it, protest it, and also exert some pressure on members of Congress. I think we need to urge all social movements to engage …
GG: And with Bolsa Família [social program for the poor] now …
DR: No, I’m just trying to give the example.
GG: But I want to ask only about …
DR: Because we need concrete battles — not a generalized civil disobedience. There will be some concrete struggles. People will have to organize in the most diverse ways. If you call protests civil disobedience, then I’d say, yes, civil disobedience. Now, it depends how you define it.
GG: OK, but many people are now going to the streets to protest in your defense, in defense of democracy, and they are very worried that they can be caught up in this anti-terrorism law that you approved just two months ago.
And when I interviewed ex-President Lula last month, he said he’s against this law, because it gives powers to the government that are unnecessary and dangerous and subject to abuse. Now that these powers are in the hands of another president, do you think it was a mistake to approve this law?
DR: No, I don’t think so. Do you know why? Because I vetoed all the items in the law that would make that sort of use possible. This law was approved in Congress; it is about the Olympic Games. It …
GG: That’s what it’s for, but it can be used …
DR: I know, but it doesn’t have the scope to be applied to social movements or political protests. Everything that was somewhat vague we vetoed. So, I’m sorry, I slightly disagree with President Lula on this matter. He would be completely right if it had been approved in the format sent by Congress. Children stand outside a small store in Olinda, Brazil, on Jan. 20, 2016. Photo: Rafael Fabres/Bloomberg/Getty Images
GG: The Temer government said that it would “focus” on Bolsa Família [social program] only for the poorest 5 percent. What impact would this have and how would the population react to that, in your opinion?
DR: Greenwald, I think people will not receive it well. Why? If you focus on only 5 percent in a country of 200 million people, 204 million, that would be 10 million people. Today, Bolsa Família reaches around 47 million people. We need to clarify what the target audience of Bolsa Família is. It’s not aimed at adults. It’s basically designed for children.
The programs require a key condition: Keep children in school, vaccinated and provided with medical care. With that, we reduced child mortality. With that, we brought children back to school. It’s not possible to create programs for the children without caring for their parents, families and mothers. And I think this clearly shows the regressive nature of conservatism.
GG: There’s an American journalist, based in Brazil for a long time, Alex Cuadros, who wrote an article in the Washington Post three weeks ago with this headline: “How the Workers’ Party Lost the Workers.” He pointed out that the Workers’ Party has transferred a significant amount of money to billionaires, to the richest, to large corporations, and at the same time, has imposed austerity measures on the poorest. Is it because of these policies that a large part of your party’s base has abandoned you?
DR: Well, firstly, I don’t think that my party’s base has abandoned me …
GG: But there are many supporters who now are not supporting you …
DR: Well, I have not observed this, quite the opposite, actually. I have seen a lot of support from my party’s base and from the progressive base in Brazil. One of the results of this process was a vast regrouping movement. See, let’s understand the scenario we currently live in. Brazil, as all other countries in the world, is now facing an economic crisis that started in 2014.
Obviously, when a crisis emerges, the growth rates begin to decline, rather than rise, and you lose the instruments needed to implement counter-cyclical policies. We implemented counter-cyclical policies: in 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014. In 2014, the fiscal capacity necessary for these counter-cyclical policies was depleted. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Glenn Greenwald on May 17, 2016. Image: The Intercept
GG: I know, but during this period you helped many billionaires, many large corporations …
DR: I’d like it if you would explain to me where I helped billionaires and large corporations. Why? Because of the following: We did not adjust to the crisis by cutting social programs. We preserved Bolsa Família, we preserved the PROUNI and FIES [higher education funding programs], we preserved all of the policies for small-scale agriculture, the food acquisition program, all funding for this small farming, our policies for women, for communities founded by former slaves, for the indigenous — all of these things they are trying to take apart.
GG: You said earlier that Michel Temer is building a very conservative government, and also that he is a leader of this coup, or least involved in it. Also, two weeks ago, Eduardo Cunha was removed from the presidency of the lower house of Congress because of corruption. Why did you choose these two people as such close allies?
DR: Let’s be clear … I was even looking at this today. In Brazil, you have a process that, I believe, is perhaps one of the most distorted in the world. The number of parties is systematically increasing and every successive government needs more parties to form a simple majority and a two-thirds majority in Congress. To form a coalition you have to have a base of alliances. Larger coalitions cause decreased ideological alignment on policy. And you have to build very broad alliances. This is an extremely complex process. Beyond that, it has another feature. This coup has a leader. It was not the interim president.
GG: But he was involved.
DR: No. Wait. The leader is not the acting president. The leader is the president of the lower house of Congress [Eduardo Cunha], who is now removed from office. A little late, but better late than never, as I said. This leader, he represents a conservative sector, extremely conservative.
GG: But he was your ally for a long time, wasn’t he? Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images
DR: Hold on. He was my ally because he was with the centrist party ’99, built the majority with the governments. He is not part of … It’s a complex party; it’s not an ideological party. So, you have to understand the fact that inside this party one finds many different characteristics. He inexorably, was, quote-unquote, my “ally.” We began to have friction from the first day of my government, of my second government. During my first term, we had systematic friction with him. So this is an issue that is very important to be understood, because he will act … he works … under the cloak of darkness. He’s very good at acting in the dark.
GG: In your opinion, could the change of government and foreign policy damage Brazil’s relationship with the BRICS [association of emerging nations: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa] and Mercosul [multi-lateral Latin American trading group]?
DR: I hope they don’t do something this absurd to the country. I hope. I think that UNASUL, Mercosul, and the BRICS are some of Brazil’s greatest accomplishments. To assume that it’s possible for a country of Brazil’s dimension not to have a close relationship with the countries of UNASUL, Mercosul, and the great achievement of multilateralism that is the BRICS, would be reckless. It is reckless. I think it would be, at the very least, greatly ignorant. It would reflect a huge ignorance of international affairs.
GG: You’ve said many times that you will fight until the end against the impeachment proceedings, but if you do end up losing and have to leave office, what would be better: that Michel Temer stays in office without the approval of voters or holding new elections?
DR: Please forgive me for not answering that question.
GG: Because you’re still fighting.
DR: Because I’ll fight until the end.
GG: I understand.
DR: Don’t ask me … Because you’ll understand that if I asked myself that question, I’d be giving up.
GG: You are known to be a very strong woman and have mentioned many times that there’s no comparison between what you went through in the past and what is happening now, but the crisis has been very harsh on the country, and on you as well. Is this affecting you and your family?
DR: Look, I think it does affect us, it affects you personally, I even mentioned that the other day. On the day I lost the status of acting president — I’m still the incumbent president of Brazil, and the legitimate one. I think it affects me in this sense: because it’s unjust. Maybe the hardest thing for someone to withstand, besides pain, illness, and torture, is injustice. Why? Because you feel like you’re trapped.
Of course, after a while they said that I was a person — a woman — I think they assumed that I would simply resign. Why did they want me to resign? Because my presence unsettles them. Because I don’t have foreign accounts. They totally took apart my affairs: I have never received a bribe. I refuse to consent to corruption. One of the reasons why they say I’m tough is because it’s very difficult to approach me and propose anything illicit.
The injustice of this situation, the political injustice of this, the personal injustice, it affects me, it affects my family, and it affects all of us. The other day I said I was a victim, not a sacrificial victim, but a victim of injustice. I am a victim of injustice.
GG: Madam president, thank you very much for the interview.
DR: Thank you.The United States has joined a small group of global outliers on Friday after a historic United Nations treaty to ban nuclear weapons was adopted by a majority of the world's nations.
"The adoption of the nuclear weapons ban treaty marks an historic turning point in the centuries-old battle to eliminate all weapons of mass destruction," said Jeff Carter, executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Ahead of its adoption, Elayne Whyte Gómez, Coasta Rica's ambassador to the U.N. and president of the United Nations Conference to Negotiate a Legally Binding Instrument to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, championed the "historic"agreement, calling it "the first multilateral nuclear disarmament treaty to be concluded in more than 20 years."
Noting that the landmark moment comes 72 years after the atomic-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an editorial in Japan's Mainichi said: "The international community's firm determination not to repeat these tragedies is the linchpin of the convention."
We have just made history! The #nuclearban treaty is adopted! pic.twitter.com/A08gT0E80Q — ICAN (@nuclearban) July 7, 2017
One hundred twenty-two nations agreed to the final draft text after weeks of negotiations that were not attended by any of the nine nuclear-armed states, which include the U.S., Russia, and North Korea. (Among those signing on, however, are two of the other "axis of evil" states: Iran and Iraq.) The Netherlands cast the sole vote against the treaty.
"The nuclear weapons states' boycott of the ban treaty negotiations," Carter said last month, "illustrates a denial of medical science," referring to "empirically known consequences of the use, testing, and development of these weapons on human lives."
The treaty is based in humanitarian law and prohibits the development, testing, production, possession, or stockpiling of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, the transfer of such weapons, and also bans not only their use but the threat of their use. It also calls for states to undertake environmental remediation for areas contaminated by nuclear weapons use or testing, and for states to provide assistance to victims "including medical care, rehabilitation, and psychological support, as well as provide for their social and economic inclusion."
As John Loretz, program director at International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, explained Friday:
The nuclear-armed and nuclear-dependent states have been provided with practical and flexible ways to comply with those prohibitions once they decide to join. If they persist in defying the norms established by the treaty, they will be outlaw states. The treaty refutes the claim made by a handful of states that they need nuclear weapons to ensure their own security, and that humanitarian consequences must somehow be balanced with those needs. Not only does the treaty insist that the dangers posed by nuclear weapons "concern the security of all humanity," but it also calls the long-overdue elimination of nuclear weapons "a global public good of the highest order, serving both national and collective security interests."
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) said Thursday it was "overwhelmingly positive about the draft treaty," adding: "We are on the cusp of a truly historic moment—when the international community declares, unambiguously, for the first time, that nuclear weapons are not only immoral, but also illegal. There should be no doubt that the draft before us establishes a clear, categorical ban on the worst weapons of mass destruction."
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Help Keep Common Dreams Alive Our progressive news model only survives if those informed and inspired by this work support our efforts
The New York Times writes: "The new agreement is partly rooted in the disappointment among non-nuclear-armed nations that the Nonproliferation Treaty's disarmament aspirations have not worked."
Indeed, said Dr. Matthew McKinzie, Natural Resources Defense Council Senior Scientist and director of NRDC's nuclear program, at a U.N. media briefing last month, "Both the U.S. and Russia are modernizing their nuclear arsenals."
"That reveals an expectation that instead of reducing and eliminating nuclear arsenals, we will have these weapons for generations to come. That's not the future we want," he said.
Further explaining this trend, Matt Taibbi wrote at Rolling Stone:
This slowing of the disarmament movement began during Barack Obama's last term, coinciding with the collapse of relations between the U.S. and Russia. Particularly since 2011, when the U.S. and Russia concluded the "New START" treaty on the reduction of each others' arsenals, dialogue has almost completely ended on the subject. Whatever you want to point to as the reason—the much-condemned Russian adventurism in Ukraine, or maybe the 2012 passage of the Magnitsky Act sanctioning Russia for human rights abuses, a law that outraged Putin and inspired a vicious ban on American adoption of Russian children—communication between Russia and the United States had long ago dropped to almost nil. This was before last summer's election, the DNC hack, or the rise of Trump. As a result, the two countries who maintain about 90 percent of the world's warheads have stopped talking about nuclear reduction, and the rest of the world—which was promised disarmament—has noticed, leading to protest moves like this new treaty ban.
"Right now," Carter added, "the U.S. government defies its existing disarmament obligations under the Nonproliferation Treaty by planning to fund an extensive buildup of its nuclear arsenal. The ban treaty is the start of a new worldwide movement that gives the United States an opportunity to break from its self-destructive nuclear weapons policy."
"In the twenty-first century, we can no longer pretend that these doomsday devices are instruments of security. The active conscience of the American health community calls on the United States to sign the nuclear weapons ban treaty to ensure that we safeguard our world for the next generation. It's past time that we part from this untenable path. Prohibiting and eliminating these weapons of mass destruction is the only responsible course of action for U.S. nuclear weapons policy," Carter continued.
Added Jon Rainwater, executive director of Peace Action: "Preaching temperance from a barstool never works. The U.S. can not lead the push for nuclear non-proliferation on the Korean peninsula while it spends billions to maintain one of the world's two biggest nuclear arsenals. It's time for the U.S. to get off of the barstool and lead by example."
States can sign on to the treaty starting September 20, 2017.Two Israeli soldiers were killed and seven wounded on Wednesday morning, after an anti-tank missile struck an Israel Defense Forces vehicle in the Har Dov area near the Lebanon border, as mortar shells were fired at nearby areas.
IDF forces responded with artillery fire, shelling several targets in southern Lebanon. A Spanish UNIFIL soldier was killed in the strikes.
According to messages relayed between Hezbollah and Israel through UNIFIL it appears that the two sides wish to avoid further escalation.
In a message relayed to Israel from Hezbollah through UNIFIL, it was passed along that Hezbollah considers the attack an adequate retaliation to the airstrike in Syria last week, attributed to Israel, that killed seven Hezbollah operatives.
The Israeli side is still holding consultations, but at this stage, it appears Israel does not wish further escalation.
The wounded IDF troops were being treated at the Sieff Hospital in Safed and the Rambam Hospital in Haifa. Three suffered light to moderate wounds, and the rest were lightly wounded. The IDF said that no soldier had been kidnapped, despite earlier reports.
The two soldiers killed were named as Captain Yochai Kalangel, 25, and Sergeant Dor Chaim Nini, 20, both of them from the Givati Brigade.
Keep updated: Sign up to our newsletter Email * Please enter a valid email address Sign up Please wait… Thank you for signing up. We've got more newsletters we think you'll find interesting. Click here Oops. Something went wrong. Please try again later. Try again Thank you, The email address you have provided is already registered. Close
Despite the high alert in recent days, following the unconfirmed Israeli strike in Syria, the soldiers were driving in an unarmored vehicle on the Lebanon border when they were ambushed. At least five Kornet anti-tank missiles are believed to have been fired in the incident. A senior Israeli army officer said that he doesn't think the lack of armor on the vehicle is significant considering the type of missiles used.
The IDF declared a closed military zone in the area between the Dafna kibbutz in the upper Galilee to the Mas'ade village in the eastern Golan Heights. The zone will be in effect until Wednesday noon.
The site of the attack was about 200 meters before the road leading to Ghajar. The first missile struck a D-Max vehicle and killed two soldiers. After the strike, soldiers driving in other vehicles stepped out, and thus sustained lighter wounds when the second missile hit, the IDF said.
The Israeli army said it will launch an investigation into the soldiers' conduct.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said before a situation assessment with Israel's security chiefs that "whoever is behind today's attack will pay the full price."
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman called his Spanish counterpart to convey Israel's condolences for the death of the Spanish soldier, and said Hezbollah is to blame for the attack, and that Israel considers the Lebanese government responsible for any attack out of its territory.
Lieberman, who was meeting with China's foreign minister in Beijing, said Israel should respond in a "forceful and disproportionate manner" to the events, in the way that the U.S. or China would respond to similar events. He told his Chinese counterpart that he expects Israel to receive support from her friends in the world for such a response.
Zionist Camp co-chair MK Tzipi Livni said during a tour of the northern border that Israel will respond "harshly" to Hezbollah's attack.
One of the mortar shells fired from Lebanon struck a home in Ghajar, a village which straddles the border, setting the structure alight. The mortar fire continued into the afternoon, aimed at the Hermon region. Hezbollah claimed responsibility for all of the attacks.
The IDF responded by shelling targets in southern Lebanon. Lebanese media quoted security officials as saying that Israel has fired at least 25 artillery shells into Lebanese territory. The officials said the shelling targeted the border villages of Majidiyeh, Abbasiyeh and Kfar Chouba near the Shebaa Farms area, according to Lebanese media.
A spokesman for UNIFIL, the UN peacekeeping force deployed in south Lebanon since 1978, said the UN is looking into the circumstances of the incident in which one of the force's soliders was killed. He did not disclose the nationality of the soldier, but local media reports said he was a Spanish national.
The IDF warned that its response would only escalate if the attacks did. IDF spokesman Moti Almoz said the military views Hezbollah as responsible for the attacks, and said the IDF's shelling of targets in south Lebanon "would not necessarily be the final response to this incident."
The attacks took place as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in the southern city of Sderot, laying the cornerstone for a new neighborhood. "At these moments, the IDF is responding to the events in the north. Look what happened here. Not far from the city of Sderot, in Gaza, Hamas was hit by the strongest blow it ever received last summer Security comes before all else. Security is the foundation for everything."
Netanyahu cut short his visit to Sderot and joined Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon for a security briefing in the Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv.
Residents |
2014
That July 18 game is the first game after the All Star Break. The Rangers are currently rolling with Chris Gimenez and Robinson Chirinos at catcher, and would have an interesting decision to make in regards to their roster once Soto returns. Chirinos has options and Gimenez doesn't, which means sending Gimenez down would require him to clear waivers (and accept an outright assignment), whereas sending Chirinos down wouldn't risk him being lost from the organization. The Rangers could, alternatively, keep three catchers on the roster, since it isn't like their bench is a paragon of strength right now anyway.This time around we will be looking at KDE: powerful, graphically beautiful, and filled with an array of useful software; but the most resource intensive of the major desktop environments.
KDE has always been a weird thing for me, I quite enjoy its almost limitless amount of customizability, the great tools that it comes with, and yet I never seem to stick with it and I have no idea why; I actually couldn’t pinpoint the reason even if I tried, so you can take that as you wish.
Check out the first part of the desktop environments overview covering Mate here.
A Look at Desktop Environments: KDE 5 Plasma
The machine I am using has the following specs:
Intel i5-4210U
8GB DDR3
SSD
Fresh install of Manjaro KDE with no extra software installed
For this I decided to wipe my Manjaro XFCE/MATE install and install a fresh copy of Manjaro KDE for two reasons.
Firstly, because I read that installing KDE over XFCE with Manjaro can be a headache and I simply didn’t want to deal with that.
Secondly, I initially was going to install OpenSUSE as it’s my favourite KDE powered distro, but I read that Manjaro KDE was very well put together, I hadn’t tried it yet, and I love Manjaro; so I thought it would be a good experience. However, this overview will not be focusing on Manjaro specific software.
Customization and Default Appearance
KDE is gorgeous, this is a well known fact; it’s got plenty of bells and whistles, effects, transitions, animations and other various forms of eye candy.
In Manjaro running KDE Plasma, it’s a mostly dark theme with green accents, flat icons, and an abstract background by default; overall, a great start.
Right clicking the desktop and selecting “Configure Desktop” took me to where I could change my wallpaper and a few other options, so I promptly swapped over to one of the other defaults, a nice forest photo.
The kicker menu in the bottom left corner is nice, great animations, nice organization too; however I find it clunky and slow, I absolutely love it’s organization but I find the delay in animations slows down my productivity.
Thankfully, KDE has the options built right in to change your menu style to either a fullscreen system that reminds me of Gnome or UNITY as well as the Launchpad from Mac OS X, or a more traditional cascading menu like the older windows systems.
I prefer the cascading menu, as it’s still got superb organization including the option to add favourite applications to a little side bar built into the menu for quick and easy launching of frequently used programs.
The animations have a lot more zip to them as well, so no delay when you want to find a program, and overall I find it still looks attractive to the eye as well. To make this change, you simply right click the kicker, and select “Alternatives.”
Changing themes was a breeze in KDE as well, and has some rather nice options included by default. Clicking the kicker menu > Settings > System Settings, will take you to a screen where you have all the various settings similar to the Windows Control Panel; simply click “Workspace Theme” and the theme manager will open.
I personally selected “Maia Dark” as my theme, and I must say it’s rather nice. More themes can be downloaded from https://store.kde.org/
Default Software
Talking about default KDE software, should always begin with Dolphin in my opinion. Dolphin is the creme de la creme of GNU/Linux file browsers; powerful, attractive, full of features and nicely organized, it’s truly hard to beat Dolphin.
I typically customize my Dolphin to include a filter bar, folder tree, and split screen view; maximizing my efficiency and saving myself clicks down the road when I have work to do I don’t feel like doing via CLI.
Other awesome pieces of software include things like Gwenview, which is the default photo organizer and viewer for KDE Plasma; it’s attractive yet minimalistic (for KDE), and does everything I personally need... digiKam however takes that to the next level with an open source KDE alternative to Adobe Bridge.
A very powerful, professional grade photo organizer and manager; digiKam is a great piece of software for anyone who’s seriously shutter happy like I am.
One piece of software I’m not sure about whether is shipped with KDE Plasma by default or whether the Manjaro team decided to use on their own, was Krita:
Krita is a photo editor similar to GIMP or Adobe Photoshop, however I personally haven’t used it much.
Note: it is available as a free download for Linux, Mac and Windows here.
Doing a little research on it, it seems like many people are starting to switch from GIMP to Krita, and it (apparently) has much better organization and tools that neither GIMP nor Photoshop have. So, YMMV with Krita, but definitely worth checking out!
Some other noteworthy applications included with KDE are:
Kget – A download manager that I have made great use of in the past
Konversation – an IRC Client. I typically use weechat (a CLI IRC client) inside a screen session on a VPS of mine so I’m constantly connected, but Konversation is quite great for casual IRC users.
KnetAttach – A tool to make easy Dolphin integration to remote folders a breeze.
K3b – CD/DVD burning software
KDE Partition manager
Ksysguard – KDE Task manager. Very similar to Windows Task Manager, very simple to use (CNTRL+Esc makes for a nice and easy hotkey too, which is set by default)
Kate – KDE version of notepad
Ark – Very powerful and easy to use archive manager similar to winRAR / 7zip /pzip
There are others included as well, KDE does a wonderful job of including plenty of built in tools to manage your system, and all of them are powerful.
System Resources
The one potential downside to running KDE is that it’s hungry. I do not recommend running KDE on a netbook, older machine, or anything less than a decent i3 with 4-6GB of RAM minimum. Just my own personal recommendation mind you, those are not official numbers from the KDE community.
On my system, with nothing open or running outside of the default startup services, KDE used around 600MB of RAM and 8% CPU. With Firefox +40 Tabs on the Manjaro Homepage, Gwenview with a photo loaded, LibreOffice with this document loaded, Dolphin and Spotify with a song playing, it used 1.7GB of RAM, and around 18-20% CPU; not the end of the world, this laptop handled it without issue, but do keep in mind if you are using a netbook or other older machine that KDE will without any doubt run your machine to a grinding halt.
Final Words
KDE is beautiful. KDE is powerful. KDE is customizable beyond potentially all other desktop environments with the inclusion of things like widgets / plasmoids and endless amount of theme possibilities...I do not have any real reason why I have never stuck with KDE in the past; perhaps since it’s installed on this laptop I’ll run it for a while and see if it can trump MATE in my personal preferences. I do highly recommend KDE to anyone who doesn’t mind sparing the resources, and desires a gorgeous and mighty environment for their GNU/Linux machine!
What about you? What are your thoughts on KDE? What DE do you use?
More desktop environment overviews to come, so stay tuned!
Summary Article Name A Look at Desktop Environments: KDE 5 Plasma Description Mike Turcotte takes a look at the KDE5 Plasma desktop environment on Manjaro covering customization, resource usage, and default software. Author Mike Turcotte Publisher Ghacks Technology News Logo
AdvertisementCompanies used to borrow in the markets as a last resort finance investment in their business. Now it’s a front for shareholder giveaways
“All these people have a sort of parlay mentality, and they need to get on the playing field before they can start running it up. I’m a trader. It all happens for me in the transition. The moment of liquidation is the essence of capitalism.”
“What about the man in Rigby?”
“He’s an end user. He wants to keep it.”
I reflected on the pathos of ownership, and the ways it could bog you down.
—Tom McGuane, Gallatin Canyon
In January 2010, Wall Street Journal columnist Brett Aronds wrote a peevish article about Apple. Instead of wasting its money on this stupid tablet thing, he said, the company should “hand it back to its rightful owners. … The money belongs to stockholders: Give. Indeed Jobs should go further. Apple should—gasp—start borrowing, and hand that money back, too … the biggest innovation we’d like to see from Apple this season isn’t the iPad or iSlate or iTablet. It’s the iGetsomemoneyback.”
Given the spectacular success of the iPad launch a few months later, Aronds’ complaint would seem singularly ill timed. But no: It was prescient. In 2012, under the prodding of activist investor Carl Icahn, Apple announced it would begin paying dividends for the first time in its history. And it began a share-repurchase program to “return capital to shareholders” (in the words of its press release) that rapidly expanded in size. By last year, Apple’s share repurchases had reached a pace of $30 billion per year, on top of $11 billion in dividends. This tribute to shareholders represents four-fifths of the company’s cash from operations and slightly exceeds its $37 billion reported net income for 2013, compared with just $8 billion spent on fixed investment and $4 billion on R&D.
If you read the business press, you’re used to these kinds of stories. A company whose mission is making something gets bought out or bullied into becoming a company whose mission is making payments to shareholders. Apple is only an especially dramatic example. But the familiarity of this kind of story is a sign of a different relationship between corporations and the financial system from what prevailed a generation ago.
Prior to the 1980s, share repurchases were tightly limited by law, and a firm that borrowed in order to pay higher dividends would have been regarded as engaging in a kind of fraud. Shareholders were entitled to their dividends and nothing more—neither a share in any exceptional profits, nor a say in the management of the firm. In the view of Owen Young, the long-serving chairman of General Electric in the early 20th century, “the stockholders are confined to a maximum return equivalent to a risk premium. The remaining profit stays in the enterprise, is paid out in higher wages, or is passed on to the customer.”
In the managerial corporation of the mid-20th century, firms did not go straight to the markets for investment funds. Money for investment came first from internal funds—profits in excess of the standard dividend—which were freely at the disposal of management. They represented the lowest-cost source of investment capital and were exhausted first before a firm turned to financial markets for additional funds. If the firm’s investment demand was strong enough, it turned next to credit markets, seeking bank loans or issuing bonds. Only those firms with the most ambitious investment projects and most limited internal resources—typically those just starting—would consider raising funds from the stock market. On the other side, the supply of funds from markets was limited by the existence of a partitioned, heavily regulated financial system, so that even the largest firms could find themselves credit-constrained, unable to borrow as much as they would have wanted at the prevailing interest rates.
This hierarchy of investment finance implied a clear relationship between corporate investment and cash flow from operations, and between investment and borrowing. In 1960, there was a strong link between borrowing and investment. A firm that was borrowing $1 million more than a typical firm of that size would usually be investing $750,000 more. This relationship is consistent with a world where autonomous managers made their own decisions about the use of the firm’s funds, and the power of financial markets came only from the terms on which they would make any additional funds available.
Much discussion of corporate finance, both mainstream and heterodox, takes it for granted that this is still the world we live in. But in fact, by the mid-2000s the relationship between investment and borrowing had practically vanished, and the correlation between investment and cashflow was less than half as strong as in 1960. Unusually heavy borrowing was no longer correlated to high levels of investment; investment decisions seem almost unrelated to the funds flowing into corporations from operations and from credit markets.
If borrowing no longer matters for investment, what is the purpose of it? As at Apple, it is financing payouts to shareholders.
Before 1980, there was no statistical relationship between borrowing and payouts in the form of dividends and share repurchases at the firm level. But since then, a clear positive relationship emerged, especially at business-cycle peaks. Firms that borrow more have significantly higher payouts to shareholders.
For example: In the period from 2002 to 2008, net corporate borrowing rose from 1 percent to 6 percent of GDP. But unlike in earlier episodes of rising corporate borrowing, payouts rose point for point with borrowing. By the end of the boom, corporations were paying out more than 100 percent of their cash flow to shareholders. So on net, corporations raised no net funds from financial markets. The money that flowed in the front door as new borrowing flowed right out the back as higher dividends and share repurchases.
It was a common trope in accounts of the housing bubble that greedy or shortsighted homeowners were extracting equity from their houses with second mortgages or cash-out refinancing to pay for extra consumption. What nobody mentioned was that the rentier class had been playing a similar game longer and on a much larger scale. At the top of every boom in the neoliberal era, there’s been a massive round of stock buybacks, which you could think of as shareholders cashing out their bubble wealth. It’s a bit like the homeowners “using their houses as ATMs” during the 2000s, except that the shareholders don’t get stuck with the mortgage payments. The businesses’ workers and customers get to share the pain.
The transformation in corporate investment financing went largely unnoticed by the economics profession, but it was widely noted in the financial press. In the Financial Times, you’d read regularly about how “Corporate treasurers are shoveling investment-grade bonds out the door to raise money to buy back shares,” or that “U.S. blue-chip companies from Philip Morris to AT&T are taking advantage of cheap debt to finance share buy-backs and mergers and acquisitions activity at an accelerated pace.”
The change in the use of corporate funds helps explain one of the outstanding puzzles of the Great Recession: the lack of any clear connection between the financial crisis and the steep contemporaneous fall in corporate investment. Even the most sophisticated research finds that access to bank credit helps explain the fall in investment spending only for small firms. But it’s the largest firms that are responsible for the large majority of borrowing and investment. In 2009-2010, investment fell by as much at the largest businesses, and at debt-free businesses, as at small bank-dependent businesses. If the financial crisis interrupted the flow of credit only to small, bank-dependent businesses, it can explain at best a small part of the collapse in business investment after 2008.
Paradoxically, outside finance matters less for corporate investment decisions even as firms rely on it more. If shareholders effectively exercise first claim on every dollar that comes into the firm, it doesn’t matter whether borrowing is cheap and easy or hard and expensive. All that changes is the amount flowing out the door. Firms’ investment decisions, then, don’t depend on current earnings or credit conditions; they depend on whether management can propose projects with high enough returns to convince shareholders to leave “their” money inside the firm. The challenge is keeping money from flowing out of the firm, not bringing it in.
Under these conditions, the idea that fixing the financial system will boost growth and employment in the rest of the economy amounts to pouring water into a bucket that is already overflowing, and is also shot through with holes.
The transformation of corporate finance since 1980 has been driven by changing relations between corporate managers and the owning class. When Marx published volume one of Capital, he could speak of the capitalist as simply “the personification of capital” without begging too many questions. But today it’s harder to ignore capital’s split personality. Capital, after all, is a process, not a concrete thing—it exists in the exchange of money for means of production, in the labor process that converts those means of production into finished commodities, in the moment when the value of those commodities are realized through sale, and in the moment where the resulting money-value begins the process again. And as enterprises get larger and more complex, those different moments in the circuit of capital become the provinces of different specialists—managers, investors, financial intermediaries—any of whom can legitimately claim to personify capital.
Already by the end of the 19th century, it was evident to observers like Veblen that the separation of ownership from management was creating a new kind of bourgeois class, less connected to particular enterprises. As Dumenil and Levy write in The Crisis of Neoliberalism (probably the best recent discussion of these issues), after the 1890s the “concentration of capitalist power within financial institutions and importance of securities in ownership of the means of production gave … the capitalist class a strong financial character.” But asset owners are the capitalist class only in retrospect. Through much of the 20th century, the managers of the production process seemed to have the better claim to be capital’s human embodiments.
The decades around World War II were the heyday of the managerial capitalism described by writers from Berle and Means (The Modern Corporation and Private Property) to Alfred Chandler (The Visible Hand), from liberals like John Kenneth Galbraith to Marxists like Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy. In managerial capitalism, the executives responsible for production and marketing were the real decision makers in the economy, with shareholders reduced to a passive role as income recipients. Whether the managerial firm was the “soulful corporation” of Galbraith or the soul-crushing monopoly capital of Baran and Sweezy, it was run according to its own growth imperatives, not to maximize returns to shareholders. The strategic choices in the economy rested with those who actively controlled the production process, not those who merely exercised financial claims to it. As Peter Drucker wrote (in 1949, the noontide of managerialism), “Where only twenty years ago the bright graduate of the Harvard Business School aimed at a job with a New York Stock Exchange house, he now seeks employment with a steel, oil or automobile company.”
The story of how autonomous management gave way to today’s shareholder dominance has been told many times. The best account remains Doug Henwood’s Wall Street, which I draw on here. Initially, this transformation had a strong element of conflict, with organized shareholders coercively asserting their control over a distinct group of managers. Over time, the conflictual aspect receded—though it has never disappeared—and rentier control came to be asserted more through the adoption by managers themselves of “shareholder value” as their overriding goal.
The idea that corporations exist solely to maximize shareholder wealth is as old as the corporation itself, and in the early days of the corporation it was accepted legal and economic doctrine. But it largely receded from view during the middle of the century, until the work of Michael Jensen and his coauthors legitimized the idea of takeovers and restructurings as tools to put the interests of shareholders first. For Jensen, the central task for finance was “to motivate managers to disgorge the cash rather than investing it at below the cost of capital or wasting it on organization inefficiencies.”
A number of legislative and administrative reforms in the early 1980s made it more feasible for shareholders to assert power over management. The Supreme Court overturned state limits on hostile takeovers of corporations and the Reagan Justice Department revised antitrust rules, opening up new possibilities for intra-industry mergers and the breaking up of conglomerates. Financial market changes made takeovers more feasible by creating new sources of funds to finance changes in corporate control.
During the 1980s, the central front in the shareholder revolution was the hostile takeover. Takeovers, as Margaret Blair’s emphasizes, were “used to discipline corporate managers and pressure them to pay out more money to shareholders and other investors.” Over the course of the 1980s, nearly half of U.S. corporations received takeover offers, and in several years acquisition volume reached the historically high level of 10% of total stock market capitalization. Among Fortune 500 companies, 28 percent were the object of takeover attempts, the majority hostile and the majority successful.
The era of hostile takeovers did not extend past the 1980s; KKR’s takeover of RJR-Nabisco was the last major deal of its kind. After 1990, the disciplinary aspect of the rentier-management relationship was more likely to take the form of shareholder activism, with large outsider investors publicly pressuring management to increase payouts and adopt “value-enhancing” policies. As with the earlier takeover movement, the rhetoric of shareholder activism highlighted productive efficiency, but the real goal was to get management to disgorge funds to shareholders.
In the familiar Foucauldian story, a power that was initially exercised coercively from the outside came to be internalized by its objects. By 1997, the repudiation of managerialism was sufficiently thorough for the Business Roundtable—representing the CEOs of the 200 largest American companies, and initially a site of bitter criticism of the shareholder revolution—to change its position on business objectives to read “the paramount duty of management and the board is to the shareholder and not to … other stakeholders.”
Today, thanks to new compensation practices, increased executive mobility between firms, and the fact that top managers can themselves expect to become members of the wealth-owning class, managers have become less concerned with the survival and growth of the firm as an institution and more concerned with maximizing the flow of money it generates for owners. Dumenil has put it well: After some stormy conflicts, finance and management have achieved a loving marriage.
It’s hard now to separate the hostile-takeover wave from the sticky cultural residue of the 1980s. Mention of hostile takeovers conjures images of Gordon Gekko, or Richard Gere in Pretty Woman. What was it really all about?
It’s tempting to see productive business and finance as separate social actors (and to choose sides between them). And it’s tempting to see what they’re fighting over as money—who gets it, what it is used for. In this story, the fall in the profit share and rising inflation of the 1970s created sufficient urgency for the asset-owning class that—catalyzed by ideological entrepreneurs—they overcame their coordination problems and asserted themselves politically.
I think this misses the real content of the shareholder revolution. A useful way to think management and finance is as the embodiment of two different moments in the circuit of capital. The conflict isn’t about who gets the money. It’s about the extent to which productive activity should take the form of money at all. It’s about how oriented business should be toward the moment of liquidation. If we want to understand the specific conflict between shareholders and management—a conflict between worldviews as much as between distinct groups of people —we need to turn to Keynes and “the fetish of liquidity.”
As Keynes understood, liquidity is what stock markets are for. What they’re not for is raising funds for investment. Consider a recent example: Groupon. Their IPO raised $700 million. So the people who bought shares are getting ownership of the company in return for providing it much needed funds for expansion, right?
Except that, as Reuters columnist Felix Salmon points out, “Groupon has been shouting until it’s blue in the face that it doesn’t need the IPO cash.” Its cash flow was more than enough to finance all foreseeable expansion plans. So why go public at all? Because existing investors want cash. Pre-IPO, Groupon was already notorious for using venture-capital funds to cash out earlier investors. But the venture capitalists need to be cashed out in their turn.
And that’s what Wall Street is for: to give capitalists their exit. The problem finance solves is not how to allocate society’s scarce savings between competing investment opportunities. The problem is how to separate the rents that come from control of a strategic social coordination problem from the social ties and obligations that go with it. True capitalists don’t want to make steel or restaurant deals or jumbo jets or search engines. They want to make money.
Historically, the publicly owned corporation came into being to allow owners (or more often, their heirs) to delink their fortunes from particular firms or industries. In her history of the mergers of the 1890s, Naomi Lamoreaux notes that raising funds for investment was not an important motivation for adopting the new corporate form. In contemporary accounts, she says, “Access to capital is not mentioned.” The same point is developed by historians Thomas Navin and Marian Sears, who note that owners of the first firms to go public were motivated by “an opportunity to liquidate part of their investment” and thus have access to “immediate liquidity.”
This preference for immediate liquidity goes back to the beginnings of capitalism. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Fernand Braudel writes, “it was in the sphere of circulation, trade and marketing that capitalism was most at home; even if it sometimes made fleeting incursions on to the territory of production.” Production was “foreign territory” for capitalists, which they only entered reluctantly, always taking the first chance to return to the familiar ground of finance and long-distance trade.
When Marx first introduces the circuit of capital, M-C-P-C’-M’, we’re encouraged to think of the whole thing taking place in a short period. The capitalist shows up at the beginning of the year with a bag of money, buys means of production and labor power, coerces productive labor out of the labor power; by the end of the year the means of production are all used up, the commodities are sold, and the capitalist walks away with a bigger bag of money. But it doesn’t really work that way. Efficient production requires some large part of the capital to remain in the C-P-C’ stage indefinitely, steadily throwing off money but never fully returning to M. This is the case as soon as you have long-lived capital goods; it’s even more so as production increasingly happens through large, complex organizations. You can’t have an ongoing business unless people are oriented toward doing their job for its own sake; the whole thing will break down if everyone, and not just the capitalist, is looking for the exit.
Production can only be carried out successfully by managers who want to make things, and not just to make money. But profits do still have to take the form of money. To reproduce itself, capital must alternately be fixed in productive activity (and its physical and social requirements), and liquidated as money. Maintaining this cycle requires that political agency be exercised sometimes at one point in the circuit, sometimes at another.
Keynes’s call for the “euthanasia of the rentier” toward the end of The General Theory is typically taken as a playful provocation. But as Jim Crotty has argued, this idea was one of Keynes’s main preoccupations in his political writings in the 1920s. In his 1926 essay “The End of Laissez Faire,” he observed that “one of the most interesting and unnoticed developments of recent decades has been the tendency of big enterprise to socialize itself.” As shareholders’ role in the enterprise diminishes, “the general stability and reputation of the institution are more considered by the management than the maximum of profit for the shareholders.” With enough time, the corporations may evolve into quasi-public institutions like universities, “bodies whose criterion of action within their own field is solely the public good as they understand it.” Veblen, observing the same developments but with a less sunny disposition, imagined that the managers of productive enterprises would eventually tire of “sabotage” by the notional owners and organize to overthrow them, seizing control of production as a “Soviet of engineers.”
The function of finance is to keep this from happening. For the individual capitalist, finance provides liquidity—it turns a concrete claim on a particular production process into an abstract claim on the social product in general. For capital as a whole, it does something analogous — it ensures that concrete production remains oriented toward profits. The point isn’t to take money away from productive enterprises, but to ensure that productive activity eventually takes the form of money.
At the moment, finance seems to be doing its job well. The idea that corporations will spontaneously socialize themselves looks utopian and naïve. The evolution described by Keynes, Berle and Means, Galbraith, and other theorists of managerialism early in the 20th century had been halted or reversed by its end.
But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. Just look at the scale of the financial apparatus required to keep productive enterprises focused on profit maximization, and the fear capitalists have of allowing managers discretion over corporate resources, even when their incentives have been arduously “aligned.” Isn’t it testimony to how tenuous and unnatural production for profit is? In these far from revolutionary times, radicals often fret about the difficulty of transforming the existing organization of production into socialism. But this project is nothing compared with the Sisyphean task faced by the other side, of constantly transforming the existing organization of production into capitalism.“If I walk across this road and get hit by a bus, there’s no problem. The scramble will be on. I see them all every day when I come to work. They’re standing on the second floor, looking out the window as I cross the street, wondering, ‘Is he going to make it today?’” Peter Mansbridge
Peter Mansbridge is talking about his future.
Peter Mansbridge, who turns 66 in July, says he has no intention of anchoring The National into his next decade. He signed a new contract in November, with undisclosed terms. ( CBC ) Sitting at the counter in his favourite Toronto diner, Peter Mansbridge is almost inconspicuous — until you hear his voice. The anchor says he's been through tough times before at the network he's called home for 46 years, but the crisis now facing the CBC is different — "This one has the most riding on it." ( Vinay Menon / Toronto Star ) Mansbridge estimates The National’s budget is less than half what it was in 1988, the year he succeeded Knowlton Nash, right, at the helm of the show. ( Reg Innell / Toronto Star file photo ) Peter Mansbridge, seen in 1983. Says Amanda Lang, CBC’s senior business correspondent: "I can’t imagine there is a soul in here who is anticipating eagerly the day Peter goes. He is absolutely true to journalism. His instincts on why a story should lead The National are unerring." ( David Cooper / Toronto Star file photo )
We are inside the Avenue Diner on Davenport, an all-day breakfast joint established in 1944. It’s just after 9 a.m. and sunshine invades this time capsule of an eatery, bathing staff and patrons in unforgiving light. On this morning, inside a sliver of Toronto that feels immune to change, Mansbridge hardly looks like the man who has anchored CBC’s The National since 1988. The wool suits and striped neckties have given way to a black Tommy Bahama sweatshirt and silver chain. His face is not dusted with high-def makeup. The Order of Canada lapel pin is gone, replaced with the crest of a flying fish and, in tiny letters, the word “Relax.” If you didn’t know this was the face of CBC News, you might guess it belonged to a geologist, Eminem’s great-uncle or the owner of a tackle shop in Hastings.
Article Continued Below
Then his baritone rumbles to life like a gas generator. Heads swivel and brows lift and even when Mansbridge says something mundane — “I’ll just get a couple of eggs, over-easy, with brown toast and sliced tomatoes, please” — it sounds momentous, like breakfast will be followed by a referendum or Gulf war. There it is. The voice. A voice that was discovered in 1968 when a CBC manager was at the airport in Churchill, Man. The airport was short-staffed that day, and Mansbridge, then a 19-year-old baggage handler, was nudged toward the intercom, where he made a flight call for Transair. The CBC manager, like generations of Canadians to follow, oriented to the voice. He tracked down Mansbridge in the dingy terminal. He offered him a job. The next night, the baggage handler was on the air for CBC Radio.
Mansbridge estimates The National’s budget is less than half what it was in 1988, the year he succeeded Knowlton Nash, left, at the helm of the show. ( Reg Innell )
That was the past. We are here to talk about the future — his future, the future of a network that seemed indestructible in 1968. MORE ON THESTAR.COM:
Article Continued Below
Why CBC desperately needs a hit TV show Just about everyone inside the CBC is now in a state of high anxiety. If fear and loathing were airborne contagions, the broadcast centre on Front St. would be under quarantine. A $130-million budget shortfall, 657 lost jobs and the coming end of Hockey Night in Canada, the network’s biggest money-maker, have ramped up the dread. CBC isn’t just reeling from more cuts, the third round since 2009. It is now gasping for air. Every service, especially television, is getting an emergency X-ray as the broadcaster prepares to perform surgery on itself in a bid for long-term survival. “It’s tense,” says Mansbridge. “I’ve been there 46 years, so I’ve seen a number of transitions and a number of times when there’ve been cuts and people lost jobs. And that’s never fun. It’s hard. It’s demoralizing. “But this is different. This one has the most riding on it. We really are at the point where we are trying, not just to reposition, but to almost reimagine who we are and what we are, how we fit in a broadcast landscape that’s changed so dramatically.” What does this mean for Mansbridge? “I can safely tell you this,” he says, tapping the tabletop with his left fist. “I’ve made it very clear to everybody that I have no intention of doing this job with a ‘7’ in front of my age. So there is a limitation there on how long I would go, if they even wanted me to go that long.” He squints toward the window and, with another tap, adds: “Which they wouldn’t.” I attempt a bit of mental arithmetic. Mansbridge wants to spend more time at home when his son Will is in high school. Will is now 14. Mansbridge turns 66 in July. He signed a new contract in November, with undisclosed terms. “I don’t have a date in mind beyond what I’ve just told you,” he says, after I start doing the math out loud. “Look, I’m happy to be there. But I serve at their pleasure. And when we signed this contract in November, we didn’t know we were going to lose hockey.” Mansbridge does not feel in “peril,” to use his word. But in a country with few Craigslist ads for “national news anchor,” he knows there is no shortage of ambitious heirs who’d gladly chew off their toes to inherit his exalted perch. “We have the luxury of having a lot of people who can step into that job tonight,” he says. “If I walk across this road and get hit by a bus, there’s no problem. The scramble will be on. I see them all every day when I come to work. They’re standing on the second floor, looking out the window as I cross the street, wondering, ‘Is he going to make it today?’” I nearly spit out my coffee. Later, when I ask Jennifer McGuire, editor-in-chief of CBC News, about possible succession plans, she answers with Socratic efficacy by interviewing herself: “Does he want to do it forever? No, he doesn’t. Are we actively having an open conversation about who’s after Peter Mansbridge? No, we are not quite at that point yet. Have we identified potential people who could succeed him internally and externally? Of course. Is that a tomorrow exercise? No.”
Peter Mansbridge, who turns 66 in July, says he has no intention of anchoring The National into his next decade. He signed a new contract in November, with undisclosed terms.
There was a time when the face of CBC News was afforded a bit of respect. It was a face that was trusted and revered, not slapped and spat upon. In recent months, though, that face has become a punching bag as detractors have excoriated Mansbridge, accusing him of everything from conducting a softball Rob Fordinterview with Rob Ford to accepting money from the oil and gas lobby for a speech. “Sometimes I think all of this bugs me more than it bugs him,” says actress Cynthia Dale, Mansbridge’s wife. “What is unbelievable to me is that people would try and call him on his journalistic integrity. That to me is absolutely abhorrent. But Pete has really big shoulders, thank God. He can handle a lot.” Then there is the obsession with his salary. With apologies to McGuire (and Socrates), here goes: Does the CBC receive public funding? Yes. Does the CBC have competitive reasons to not disclose what it pays talent? Yes. Do some taxpayers and senators reject this argument? Yes. Does the Privacy Act trump their rejection? Yes. Did I ask Peter Mansbridge what he makes? Yes. Did he tell me? No. Was he tempted to punch me square in the mouth? Perhaps. Will this issue go away? Probably not until he is paraded around Nathan Phillips Square with his social insurance number scrawled across his bare chest and copies of recent T4s clamped in his jaws. Of the recent controversies, Mansbridge seems most baffled by the fallout over the oil speech, which he gave in 2012 at a dinner organized by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. As with all his speeches, he |
fine alternative but there’s a catch.
In Phantasy Star Portable 2 Infinity, when you get a very rare item, you can NPC it in the shop for less than 20 meseta. It’s not always consistent though, there are some rare items that sells for a good amount of meseta but by the time you reach that level, it isn’t of much significance. If Sakai follows the guidelines laid out by Infinity (which he has been pretty much doing throughout PSO2’s development) there would not be any incentive to NPC your very rare items.
The best thing to do for you money makers is to watch the market, see what very rare items are selling. If you get one in a drop, just bite the bullet and set up a trade or put it in the shop immediately.
From what others have been saying about this, this Item Binding method lets everyone focus on getting rare items themselves, so you won’t rely on player shops to get weapons for you. For now I will just wait until a future blog post on the exact details on how Item Binding will work and what we should expect.
Selected Japanese player responsesVihra is an energetic and curious girl, who prefers action and adventures to beautiful dresses. She has inherited some of her Zmei father’s abilities but she still hasn’t learned to control them. Her hair is a cloud, which changes with her mood – it’s fluffy and clear blue when she’s calm, and darker, with little lightnings in it when she’s angry. She has grown up in Khan where humans and spirits co-exist peacefully. As the daughter of the two leading town figures, she’s used to attending social events and tries to be as classy and knowledgeable as her mother but is better at being outdoors, where her father teaches her to throw lightnings and tells her funny stories about spirits. Vihra is curious, headstrong and very determined, which sometimes gets her in trouble. In the beginning of the series, she is also pompous and slightly naive, because of the way she was treated in Khan. Still, she is very kind hearted and believes that both spirits and people should co-exist peacefully next to each other.
Bran is a 16-year-old boy from the mountain town of Kukerovo. It is a place where the forest spirits are aggressive, so all his life he has believed all spirits are evil. Even though he is the older of two brothers, Bran is small for his age. To compensate, he is overenergetic, very loud and impulsive – a real hurricane. He often gets in trouble and his younger brother Vlad has to help him. Bran dreams of being a great warrior. Together with his brother Vlad he’s studying and training to become a Kuker warrior, so that he can fight the evil spirits using magic steps and bells (Chans).
Vlad is the younger of the two Kuker brothers. He is big and very strong, which has made him a bit slow, lumbering and very careful not to break anything. Vlad is very calm, gentle and very polite. He speaks little and with a hint of good-natured sarcasm. For him knowledge is the greatest power and books are sacred, so he is constantly reading, even when walking. Although timid and shy, when Vlad puts on his Kuker costume and enters a battle – he becomes a confident and skilled warrior. He knows the Kuker guide by heart and often cites it to his impulsive brother Bran.
Tina-Pakostina is Vihra’s best friend. She is a 15-year-old Samodiva nymph, who is mischievous, very talkative and likes playing jokes. Tina belongs to a conservative Samodiva tribe from the forest near the town of Khan, but she is curious about the world outside her forest so every chance she gets, she sneaks out in search of adventures with Vihra. As a samodiva nymph, she can influence nature around herself through her song and dance. Tina is also a healer. She knows all the plants and their properties and can mix all sorts of potions. Tina is quite feminine and cares greatly about her appearance. When she moves about, she floats above the ground – although she occasionally experiments with walking and complains about it.
Iskra is Vihra’s mother. She is a human and many years ago arrived in the city of Khan as a teacher. She is now the mayor and the leading figure in the city’s social and public life. Iskra is the type of person, who looks at you and you realise she already knows everything, so it’s better if you just admit anything there is to admit. :) Iskra is strict, confident and likes rules, quick to take a decision before a new problem arises. She is trying to bring up Vihra as a lady and is always teaching her etiquette and social manners. Iskra and Vulkan Zmei (Vihra’s dad) are a loving family and even during the conflict and the open divide between humans and spirits (season 1), both of them work as a team to find a solution and stop an open war from happening.
Vulkan is Vihra’s father. He is a Zmei (spirit of the storms), so his hair and beard are made of clouds. Vulkan is the leader of the spirits in the city of Khan and one of the few spirits married to a human. Respected and loved by both spirits and humans, he is good- natured and loves telling stories and jokes, winning time to think about a problem for a while and consider all sides, before taking a decision. Some spirits and people consider him soft because of this…but when Vulkan gets angry or his family is in danger, he becomes a personified force of nature! His spirit form is a giant serpent-like creature, which can control lightning storms, clouds and fog. Like Vihra, Vulkan Zmei prefers spending his time in the outdoors, rather than the city life.
The sheep from Kuber Mountain are born with wool of unique and colourful patterns. This only happens in Kuber Mountain, and the shepherds there take great pride in their colourful herds. The Sheep (Harry) is the comic relief character of the series. Throughout the season, we will see him at random moments somewhere near our characters – always munching away on something, always completely casual and uninterested in the events taking place around him. He often overcomes obstacles faced earlier by our characters with unparalleled cool and ease.
The spirits are a variety of species, each personifying a different force of nature, dream, fear, disease, season, etc. Some of the more common ones are: The Kara-kondjuls are small, mischievous spirits. In small numbers they are mostly harmless, but when a lot of them gather – they can be deadly. The Strashnik is a large forest spirit, whose main purpose is to protect the forest from intruders and scare them off. It rarely leaves its forest unless something provokes him to do so.
The Greycloaks are a union of various tribes and people searching for a new place to settle after they have used up all the natural resources of their previous home, and turned it into a wasteland. They believe this was because of the spirits living there, and so they hate spirits with a passion and hunt them down wherever they go. The goal of their horde is to find a new place to settle down, and they are slowly moving towards Kuber Mountain, where the golden apple is. On their way, they aggressively try to push out the native inhabitants off the lands they live on, and enslave all spirits they encounter. The Greycloaks are the main antagonists of season one. It is widely known that after a prolonged conflict in a place called Eagle Mountain, the Greycloaks set ablaze the entire mountain and all the forests, out of frustration from the resistance of the people and spirits there. The blaze turned Eagle Mountain into scorched earth and nothing lives there now. They are called “Greycloaks” because the smoke and dust of all the places they have burned has stuck to their clothes and turned them grey.
Kukerovo is one of the oldest towns and home of the Kuker brothers Vlad and Bran. It is located in the Kuker mountain and the forests surrounding it are full of aggressive spirits. Legend has it that hundreds of years ago, a blacksmith, enchanted by a Samodiva spirit, created a type of magic bells, called Chans. Their sound can drive off evil spirits and the blacksmiths in Kukerovo are known to be the best in the land to make these Chans. Each town in the Kuker mountains has its own Kuker warrior clan, which uses a combination of special moves and the magic bells to fight the aggressive spirits.World's first baby born using DNA from three parents
World's first baby born using DNA from three parents
Fertility doctors say the world's first baby has been born using DNA from three parents in a technique hailed as "revolutionary".
The controversial "three-parent" technique allows people with rare genetic mutations to have healthy babies.
The baby called Abrahim, whose mother and father are Jordanian, was born in Mexico with the help of a New-York based team led by Dr John Zhang.
The mother has genes for Leigh syndrome, a fatal disorder that affects the developing nervous system.
Her son was conceived from an egg containing nuclear DNA from his parents, and mitochondrial DNA from a "second" mother - an unknown female donor.
The technique has been approved in the UK - but this time it was altered slightly because as Muslims the parents were against the destruction of embryos.
The aim was to replace defective mitochondrial DNA that may have condemned Abrahim to Leigh syndrome.
About a quarter of the mother's mitochondria have the disease-causing mutation.
While she is healthy, the syndrome was responsible for the deaths of her first two children, so she sought out Dr Zhang's help.
His team carried out a technique called spindle nuclear transfer - where they removed the nucleus from one of the mother's eggs and inserted it into a donor egg that had had its own nucleus removed.
The resulting egg - with nuclear DNA from the mother and mitochondrial DNA from a donor - was then fertilised with the father's sperm.
Five embryos were created, one of which developed normally. This embryo was implanted in the mother and the child was born nine months later.
Dr Dusko Ilic, an expert from King's College London, told New Scientist magazine: "This is great news and a huge deal. It's revolutionary".
The UK-backed method, called pronuclear transfer, is where the mother's egg and a donor egg are fertilised with the father's sperm.
Each nucleus of the fertilised eggs is then removed before they divide into early-stage embryos.
The nucleus from the donor's fertilised egg is discarded and replaced by that from the mother's fertilised egg.Much had been made of the Los Angeles Dodgers' inability to make it to the World Series in recent years, let alone win it. Last year, they made it to the National League Championship Series after two years in a row of getting bounced in the Division Series.
MLBPipeline.com breaks down how each postseason team used the Draft, the international market and free-agent signings to build its team.
MLBPipeline.com breaks down how each postseason team used the Draft, the international market and free-agent signings to build its team.
Much had been made of the Los Angeles Dodgers' inability to make it to the World Series in recent years, let alone win it. Last year, they made it to the National League Championship Series after two years in a row of getting bounced in the Division Series.
That talk should now dissipate, though focusing on postseason futility distracts from what the organization has managed to accomplish for the past five years. The Dodgers won the NL West for the fifth season in a row in 2017, making them just the ninth team in history to make five (or more) consecutive trips to the playoffs.
:: How each postseason team was built ::
"Each season we have a regular-season goal, which we've been fortunate to accomplish with this five-year run that helps you accomplish your ultimate goal," said Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers' president of baseball operations, who came aboard following the 2014 season, the second year in this run. "We've come up short on that front and that's something all of us are working hard together on to accomplish. All of us really want to deliver a world championship to who are, in our opinion, the best fans in sports."
A good amount of the key personnel making up the Dodgers' core during this run is still on the roster. There is an expectation every year they'll be standing right where they are. That culture, where the first language spoken in the clubhouse is winning, makes it easier for any additions to fit in.
"I remember a week after we traded for Tony Watson, I went up to him and asked him if he was acclimating well," Friedman said. "He said it couldn't be any easier and was blown away that every single guy is focused on how to win that night's game. He said, 'It's incredible and it makes it easy to seamlessly transition and join in the conversation.'"
HOMEGROWN
Player, how acquired, year, 2017 Baseball-Reference WAR (21.6):
Kenley Jansen, Int'l sign, 2004, 2.9
Clayton Kershaw, Draft, 2006 (1st), 4.6
Joc Pederson, Draft, 2010, (11th), -0.4
Yasiel Puig, Int'l sign, 2012, 3.7
Corey Seager, Draft, 2012 (1st), 5.6
Ross Stripling, Draft, 2012, 0.5
Cody Bellinger, Draft, 2013 (4th round), 4.2
Kenta Maeda, Int'l sign, 2016, 0.5
In 2016, Seager turned his first full Major League season into a Rookie of the Year campaign, then followed that up with an All-Star season in 2017. This year, it was Bellinger's turn, and in some ways, his sure-to-be Rookie of the Year turn was even better than Seager's.
That evaluation goes beyond just statistics, where Seager's rookie WAR of 5.6 bests Bellinger's 4.2. But Bellinger didn't even start the year in the big leagues, and then was called upon to step in to fill very large holes at first base and in the outfield.
"We expected Cody to debut this year, but this was well beyond what we imagined in terms of the amount of time up, A, and B, the impact," Friedman said. "We were extremely high on him as a prospect coming up, but there's that last-mile challenge, when he goes from the minors to the major leagues, that you can't simulate in any way. There's that unknown.
"Pretty early on, we had a pretty good feel that this was different and unique with how he was able to make adjustments on the fly. The impact he's had in the batter's box is obvious. His athleticism and versatility, along with how well he's fit in the clubhouse have had an impact, too."
TRADES/WAIVERS
Player, year, acquired from, bWAR (21.1):
Austin Barnes, 2014, Marlins, 2.6
Tony Cingrani, 2017, Reds, 0.1
Yu Darvish, 2017, Rangers, 0.6
Andre Ethier, 2005, Athletics, -0.1
Josh Fields, 2016, Astros, 0.8
Logan Forsythe, 2017, Rays, 1.8
Yasmani Grandal, 2014, Padres, 2.2
Enrique Hernandez, 2014, Marlins, 1.4
Rich Hill, 2016, A's, 2.2
Chris Taylor, 2016, Mariners, 4.8
Chase Utley, 2015, Phillies, 1
Tony Watson, 2017, Pirates, 0.4
Alex Wood, 2015, Braves, 3.3
Because the Dodgers kind of ran away and hid in the NL West this season, they had some time to really look at what pieces they might need at the Deadline to help them prolong their run in October. This is a front office that's not afraid to tinker while continuing to win, as evidenced by the fact that 14 players on the roster came via trade, the most of any postseason team.
The first thing on the wish list was left-handed relief help. The losses of Grant Dayton and Adam Liberatore to injury made that a necessity and the Dodgers felt fortunate to bring in the Tonys, Watson and Cingrani, both of whom have pitched well down the stretch and in the postseason.
Video: Dodgers used trades to add talent like Darvish
"Watson has been high on our radar for a while and we checked in periodically with the Pirates about him," Friedman said. "He is a master of inducing weak contact and he's a great competitor and teammate. He's been a big part of our continued success and is going to help lengthen our bullpen in October.
"Cingrani, some of our scouts really liked. And talking to some of our big league hitters, they talked about what an uncomfortable at-bat it was against him. The combination of that made him attractive. We've seen another gear from him."
While taking care of that primary need, the Dodgers were keeping an eye out for anything bigger that might come available. Seemingly last minute, that player surfaced in the form of Yu Darvish, who was really sharp right at the end of the season, something that carried over into the playoffs.
"We went into July with the mindset of focusing on impact-type talent," Friedman said. "To the extent we were able to line up on it, we would be aggressive in doing that. Our most acute need was left-handed relief, but if there was someone who could impact us in October … and Yu fits that perfectly.
"He's done a tremendous job of acclimating, his teammates love him. He's a great competitor. He's tuned up his delivery with [pitching coach] Rick Honeycutt and that's taken hold. In his last three starts, he's looking like a guy who can really impact the game in October."
FREE AGENTS
Player, year, bWAR (7.6):
Brandon Morrow, 2017, 1.1
Justin Turner, 2014, 5.7
Charlie Culberson, 2015, 0.1
Brandon McCarthy, 2014, 0.7
As much as the Dodgers are a big-market team, they have not been active on the big league free-agent market. They've used their resources on the international market as well as for long-term extensions for players they already have.
But it was a smaller free-agent signing, made before the 2014 season by the previous regime, that might stand out the most. Justin Turner looked like a veteran utility type when he signed a $1 million contract for the 2014 season. He was a part-time player that year, but one who hit.340. Friedman and company took over and Turner morphed into a big league regular and hasn't looked back since.
Video: Turner among Dodgers' free agent contributors
He was a free agent after the 2016 season, but this time got a contract worthy of his production, a four-year, $64 million deal. He's responded with an All-Star season and several career highs offensively. Prior to coming to the Dodgers, Turner's career WAR was 0.8. Since donning Dodger blue, he has amassed an 18.8 WAR.
"It's a testament to him," Friedman said. "He went to work on his swing, was able to find one that really worked well for him and his body. He's been able to lock that down and just do maintenance on it. He's turned into one of the best hitters in the National League."
Jonathan Mayo is a reporter for MLBPipeline.com and writes a blog, B3. Follow @JonathanMayo on Twitter. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.The Belgian National Funds for Scientific Research (FNRS), Fonds Léon Fredericq, the European Commission, the James McDonnell Foundation, the Mind Science Foundation, the French Speaking Community Concerted Research Action, the University of Copenhagen, and the University of Liège.
Cerebral 18 F-FDG PET could be used to complement bedside examinations and predict long-term recovery of patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome. Active fMRI might also be useful for differential diagnosis, but seems to be less accurate.
We included 41 patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, four with locked-in syndrome, and 81 in a minimally conscious state (48=traumatic, 78=non-traumatic; 110=chronic, 16=subacute). 18 F-FDG PET had high sensitivity for identification of patients in a minimally conscious state (93%, 95% CI 85–98) and high congruence (85%, 77–90) with behavioural CRS–R scores. The active fMRI method was less sensitive at diagnosis of a minimally conscious state (45%, 30–61) and had lower overall congruence with behavioural scores (63%, 51–73) than PET imaging. 18 F-FDG PET correctly predicted outcome in 75 of 102 patients (74%, 64–81), and fMRI in 36 of 65 patients (56%, 43–67). 13 of 41 (32%) of the behaviourally unresponsive patients (ie, diagnosed as unresponsive with CRS–R) showed brain activity compatible with (minimal) consciousness (ie, activity associated with consciousness, but diminished compared with fully conscious individuals) on at least one neuroimaging test; 69% of these (9 of 13) patients subsequently recovered consciousness.
For this clinical validation study, we included patients referred to the University Hospital of Liège, Belgium, between January, 2008, and June, 2012, who were diagnosed by our unit with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, locked-in syndrome, or minimally conscious state with traumatic or non-traumatic causes. We did repeated standardised clinical assessments with the Coma Recovery Scale–Revised (CRS–R), cerebral 18 F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) PET, and fMRI during mental activation tasks. We calculated the diagnostic accuracy of both imaging methods with CRS–R diagnosis as reference. We assessed outcome after 12 months with the Glasgow Outcome Scale–Extended.
Bedside clinical examinations can have high rates of misdiagnosis of unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (vegetative state) or minimally conscious state. The diagnostic and prognostic usefulness of neuroimaging-based approaches has not been established in a clinical setting. We did a validation study of two neuroimaging-based diagnostic methods: PET imaging and functional MRI (fMRI).
We aimed to test the hypothesis that neuroimaging withF-FDG PET at rest and fMRI during mental tasks can complement bedside clinical detection of consciousness and prediction of recovery. Inclusion of patients with locked-in syndrome (ie, a brain-damaged yet conscious control group)allows internal validity to be controlled by verifying the ability of the tests to detect awareness in fully conscious but physically incapacitated patients.
On the basis of these studies, FDG PET and fMRI might, in theory, distinguish patients in a minimally conscious state from those with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome. Because patients in a minimally conscious state, compared with patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, have better outcomes, neuroimaging tests could also provide prognostic predictions. However, the diagnostic utility of these tests needs validation in clinical practice.
Activity in neuronal populations also triggers fluctuations in capillary deoxyhaemoglobin concentrations. Such increases can be seen with functional MRI (fMRI), and form the basis of maps of the functional architecture of brain activity.When asked to do mental tasks, such as motor or visuospatial imagery tasks, healthy patients generate reproducible and specific patterns of brain activation.Some patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome or those in a minimally conscious state can do similar mental tasks on request.Assuming that such brain activations constitute mental parallels of outward communication, fMRI testing might enable detection of consciousness in cases in which severe paralysis or spasticity makes regular communication impossible.
Consciousness is supported by internally and externally related awareness networks encompassing the frontoparietal associative cortices, cingulate gyrus, precuneus, and thalamus.Neural activity in these areas can be examined byF-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) PET, which allows visualisation of glucose metabolism at a whole brain level. Generally, the rate of cerebral energy turnover is proportional to the rate of synaptic firing. Therefore, lowered glucose metabolic rates suggest dysfunctional or dormant brain areas.Specific metabolic decreases of the frontoparietal associative cortices are seen in patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome and those in a minimally conscious state. Patients in a minimally conscious state maintain partial metabolism in the frontoparietal networks, whereas patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome show a broad bilateral frontoparietal dysfunction.Similar findings of extensive frontoparietal hypometabolism are seen in deep sleepand general anaesthesia,suggesting that this pattern is associated with unawareness.
Relationship between regional cerebral metabolism and consciousness disturbance in traumatic diffuse brain injury without large focal lesions: an FDG-PET study with statistical parametric mapping analysis.
Two distinct neuronal networks mediate the awareness of environment and of self.
The detection of unambiguous signs of consciousness in severely brain-damaged patients is challenging. The frequency of misdiagnoses of patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome by clinical consensus methods is up to 40%.This error rate can be attenuated by the use of standardised scoring systems, such as the Coma Recovery Scale–Revised (CRS–R).However, misdiagnosis can still arise even with rigorous behavioural testing.Neuroimaging methods are being developed to complement the bedside examinations to investigate whether a patient has cerebral activity compatible with consciousness. These tests can assess spontaneous brain activity in the so-called resting brain, or specific responses to mental tasks. For example, findings of recent neuroimaging studiesshow that some patients diagnosed with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome probably can modulate their thoughts voluntarily, which suggests at least minimal awareness. The existence of locked-in syndromeproves that even behaviourally unresponsive patients can be conscious. This knowledge of a patient otherwise perceived as unconscious fundamentally alters his or her ethical, legal, and possibly social and therapeutic standing.
American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine Recommendations for use of uniform nomenclature pertinent to patients with severe alterations in consciousness.
Reliability and diagnostic characteristics of the JFK coma recovery scale-revised: exploring the influence of rater's level of experience.
Many studies have been done on the differential diagnosis of disorders of consciousness.The term covers several pathological states, characterised by diminished consciousness and responsiveness. Among these, patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, also known as a vegetative state,retain arousal but show no behavioural signs of awareness.Patients in a minimally conscious state show fluctuating awareness, and can respond appropriately to some stimuli.By convention, emergence from minimally conscious state arises when the patient regains a capacity for functional communication or object use.Because these states occupy a border zone between awareness and unconsciousness, the distinction between them has important ethical and therapeutic implications.For example, patients in minimally conscious states are more likely to have pain or suffer, and might benefit from analgesic treatment or other interventions aimed to improve quality of life.Patients in a minimally conscious state are also more likely to recover higher levels of consciousness than are patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome.Several countries have established the legal right of physicians to withdraw artificial life support from patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndromebut not from patients in a minimally conscious state.
SLaureysGGCelesiaFCohadon for the European Task Force on Disorders of Consciousness Unresponsive wakefulness syndrome: a new name for the vegetative state or apallic syndrome.
The sponsor of the study had no role in study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the report. The corresponding author had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication.
We calculated correlations between diagnostic results with Pearson's phi coefficient. To control for confounders, we tested for correlation between diagnostic results by modality, time since injury (<1 month, <6 months, <1 year, and >1 year), and traumatic and non-traumatic causes. For all correlations, we used a two-tailed significance level of 5% after Bonferroni correction for six comparisons. For the clinical consensus diagnosis, we calculated sensitivity and relative congruence with CRS–R score only. We calculated the rate of correctly predicted outcomes by neuroimaging, and used the McNemar's test to estimate the association between predicted and actual outcome. Differences in demographic and clinical characteristics (age, time since injury, cause, and diagnosis) between the cohort with outcome data and those lost to follow-up were assessed using Student's t test. Likewise, for each imaging method, we tested clinical and demographic differences between patients who were examined and those who were not with Student's t tests. Results were considered significant at p<0·05, not corrected for multiple comparisons. Data were analysed with Stata (version 12).
We calculated the diagnostic accuracy of each examination method by use of the best repeated CRS–R diagnosis as reference, and established the practical feasibility as the ratio of successfully executed examinations to examinations that could not be done. For each diagnostic modality, we recorded the total number of examinations and the number of examinations yielding interpretable results. From the interpretable results, we calculated the sensitivity to detect (minimal) consciousness (ie, activity associated with consciousness, but diminished compared with fully conscious individuals) as the ratio of patients who were in a minimally conscious state on the test to patients diagnosed as being in a minimally conscious state on the CRS–R. Because we treated the differential diagnosis as dichotomous, this number corresponds to the specificity to identify unresponsive wakefulness syndrome ( appendix ). Thus, the ratio of tests in agreement with CRS–R was calculated for minimally conscious states and unresponsive wakefulness syndrome. We counted the number of cases in which we detected signs of consciousness by neuroimaging but not behavioural methods.
We measured the sensitivity and specificity (terms that generally describe detection rate of disease in a healthy population) in two mutually exclusive disorders. Hence, we adapted the terminology to suit the circumstances. Sensitivity to a minimally conscious state signified the chance to correctly identify a patient with a CRS–R diagnosis of a minimally conscious state, and thereby rule out unresponsive wakefulness syndrome. This sensitivity to the minimally conscious state corresponds to specificity to unresponsive wakefulness syndrome. Specificity to a minimally conscious state signified the chance to correctly identify a patient with a CRS–R diagnosis of unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, ruling out minimally conscious states.
12 months after the initial assessment, we assessed functional outcome with the Glasgow Outcome Scale–Extended (GOS-E),which rates the patient's status into one of eight categories ranging from dead to upper good recovery ( appendix ). We obtained outcome assessment from the patient's medical reports in our institution (University Hospital of Liège). In case of incomplete data, the referent physician or legal guardian was contacted. Because we tested the ability of each method to predict recovery of consciousness, the outcomes were ultimately stratified into two groups, unconscious (GOS-E ≤2) or conscious (GOS-E >2). We hypothesise that imaging diagnosis of minimally conscious states is predictive of recovery of consciousness, whereas imaging diagnosis of unresponsive wakefulness syndrome is predictive of no recovery.
Analyzing outcome of treatment of severe head injury: a review and update on advancing the use of the Glasgow Outcome Scale.
Imaging data were analysed by neuroscientists masked to the behavioural results, and provisional diagnoses were provided by modality.
Activations associated with the motor imagery compared with spatial imagery tasks (yellow and red) and the spatial imagery compared with motor imagery tasks (blue and green). These scans were obtained from a group of healthy controls and a patient with severe traumatic brain injury. Adapted from Monti and Vanhaudenhuyse and colleagues,by permission of Massachusetts Medical Society.
We computed contrast images and identified differences in brain activity in response to active task as compared with rest. Results were thresholded at family wise error small volume corrected sphere (p<0·05), centred around coordinates of areas previously associated with active tasks.The patients' activation patterns were compared with average patterns obtained from healthy controls (16 paid volunteers, with no history of neurological disorders [9 males, mean age 24 years, SD 12]; figure 2 ). For diagnosis of minimally conscious states, task-related activation was needed in at least one of the relevant anatomical areas.
For mental imagery fMRI, patients were asked to do motor and visuospatial imagery tasks during the scanning session.In the motor imagery task patients were instructed to imagine playing tennis, and in the spatial navigation task to imagine walking into their house, sequentially visualising while traversing the rooms. We compared activity patterns during motor imagery, spatial imagery, and rest. Functional data were preprocessed and analysed by use of SPM-8 with a two-step procedure (random effect analysis).The appendix shows information about image acquisition and preprocessing. We created a design matrix with a block design for every individual patient incorporating different stimulations (rest vs active task) as regressors of interest, and movement parameters as supplementary regressors.
(A) Minimally conscious state. (B) Unresponsive wakefulness syndrome. Areas where cerebral glucose metabolism is decreased and preserved in individual patients in a minimally conscious state and or vegetative state (unresponsive wakefulness syndrome), compared with 39 healthy patients. Blue=areas with significantly lowered metabolism. Red=areas with preserved metabolism (p<0·05).
ForF-FDG PET, we used statistical parametric mapping (SPM version 8) to identify brain regions with significantly decreased or preserved activity, after we scaled intensity to a global mean. The appendix gives details on image acquisition and preprocessing. We contrasted each patient against 39 healthy controls (17 men; mean age 46, SD 18 years). We contrasted patients against 39 healthy, paid volunteers, with no history of neurological disorders. A diagnosis was made by visual examination of the SPM analysis of hypometabolic and preserved regions. Complete bilateral hypometabolism of the associative frontoparietal cortex with no voxels with preserved metabolism led to a diagnosis of unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, whereas incomplete hypometabolism and partial preservation of activity within these areas yielded a diagnosis of minimally conscious state ( figure 1 ).The stringent requirements for this classification and a dichotomous diagnostic framework minimise the subjective element in the pattern analysis. Failure to detect hypometabolic areas because of conservative statistical thresholds could lead to optimistic assessments of brain activity. Therefore, we used a lenient threshold in all contrasts; voxelwise results were deemed significant at uncorrected p values of less than 0·05.
Relationship between regional cerebral metabolism and consciousness disturbance in traumatic diffuse brain injury without large focal lesions: an FDG-PET study with statistical parametric mapping analysis.
All patients were diagnosed with four different methods: before admission by their referring hospital, designated the clinical consensus diagnosis on referral; on basis of repeated CRS–R assessments; and from each neuroimaging method ofF-FDG PET and mental imagery fMRI. Both neuroimaging methods were attempted in each patient, but if the patient moved too much to obtain a reliable scan, the procedure was omitted. Therefore, not all patients were assessed with each imaging modality. CRS–R is deemed the most validated and sensitive method for discrimination of very low awareness.The scale consists of six subscales: auditory function, visual function, motor function, oromotor and verbal functions, communication, and level of arousal. The 23 items are ordered by degree of complexity, ranging from reflexive to cognitively mediated behaviours ( appendix ). Trained experienced neuropsychologists did a CRS–R assessment at least once a day for 5 days and used the best response to establish the final diagnosis. In case of remaining ambiguity or disagreement between examiners, the patient was re-assessed until consensus was reached within the neuropsychological team.
RTSeelMShererJWhyte the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine Brain Injury-Interdisciplinary Special Interest Group Disorders of Consciousness Task Force Assessment scales for disorders of consciousness: evidence-based recommendations for clinical practice and research.
For this clinical validation study, we included patients referred to the University Hospital of Liège, Belgium, from clinical centres across Europe between January, 2008, and June, 2012, who were diagnosed with CRS–R as having unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, having locked-in syndrome, or being in a minimally conscious state. These patients were assessed with at least one neuroimaging-based examination. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the University Hospital of Liège, and legal guardians of all participating patients gave written informed consent. We asssessed patients with locked-in syndrome as a separate internal validation control group; ethics approval applied to these patients too.
In summary, we detected brain activity deemed to suggest (minimal) consciousness with at least one neuroimaging modality in 13 of 41 (32%) patients diagnosed with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome ( table 2 ). Of those, five were of traumatic cause (of seven patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome with a traumatic cause). Follow-up at 12 months after examination showed that nine of these 13 patients had progressed into minimally conscious states or a higher level of consciousness; three died from complications (eg, pneumonia) or withholding of treatment, and one remained unresponsive wakefulness syndrome ( appendix ). Aside from these nine, no patients diagnosed with unresponsive wakefulness recovered consciousness at 1 year after examination. All four patients with locked-in syndrome were identified with CRS–R,F-FDG PET, and fMRI as conscious on all applied examination modalities.
Outcome data were obtained for 65 of 70 (93%) patients. Demographic and clinical data were not significantly different between the group with outcome data and those lost in follow-up. Mental imagery fMRI predicted 56% of all known outcomes. 12 of 19 (63%) responders were conscious at follow-up (six of 19 [32%] had died). 24 of 46 (52%) non-responders were unconscious (nine of 46, 20%) or dead (15 of 46, 33%; table 3 ). Task response and outcome were significantly associated (p=0·012). Results from resting stateF-FDG PET and active fMRI showed significant correlation (phi=0·37, p=0·024).
70 of 72 (97%) remaining tests presented interpretable results, and two (3%) contained large motion artifacts, which |
rocked the city on February 21.
NSG sources said the officer reportedly talked about the movement of the NSG teams to the blasts venue and did not share any important clue about the trigger mechanism of the explosives that was used in the blasts in Hyderabad's Dilsukhnagar that had left 16 people dead.
It is suspected that the conversation took place over phone and security agencies running counter-intelligence detected the conversation which was later reported to the NSG headquarters here, they said.
Sources said such incidents keep happening in the intelligence and security domain and regular advisories are sent to officials to not talk randomly to un-verified people over phone, in-person, Internet or any other mode of communication.
The NSG, officials said, had also issued advisories in this regard early last month.
Please read our terms of use before posting commentsThis is a continuation of the hop breeding experiments that I first wrote about in 2013. If you are wondering why someone would bother growing hops from seed – go check out that post.
Hop pollen
Last year, I was fortunate to start a few plants from native neomexicanus seed obtained from plants growing wild in Wyoming and Colorado. These plants are doing well, but as first-year plants, did not produce pollen/seeds of their own. Instead, I was able to obtain pollen from a female hop plant. Yes – a female plant!
Under stress, many hop plants will throw male flowers. This “gender swap” is a survival tactic for dioecious plants in times of drought or other environmental problems. It can allow them to create offspring, even when no other plants are around. Growers of hops close cousin, cannabis, will often stress plants to create feminized pollen for breeding purposes. However, with hops, this pollen is rarely viable. As a commercial grower told me: “the monoecious plants never have viable pollen… Though in botany, you should never really say never”. And, for the most part, I found this to be true. Many previous experiments with feminized pollen failed to produce any seeds.
A new generation of seed
In 2013, I decided to try again. This time, with pollen collected from various sources.
Only one set of the pollen resulted in any seed formation – it was from a naturally stressed Magnum plant. The pollen was applied to a burrs (immature cones) on each of my plants with a small brush. Paper bags were used to mark the pollinate cones and keep them isolated. At the end of the year, many of the cones contained seeds!
Out of the seeds collected, many were not viable – being soft, or even hollow. The others were sorted, sterilized and placed in the refrigerator to stratify. After nearly 4 months they were placed in soil to sprout (2014-02-11). Before planting, the seeds were examined for signs of life. Several of the seeds had indeed already started to sprout – very exciting!
I will continue to update this page as thing progress.
Update: Feb 26
The germination rate was around 50%, though more may still sprout. Out of that, about 20 of the young seedlings are thriving. Many have already developed their second sets of leaves.
There is also one very special sprout in the group. This happy little mutant popped open with four cotyledon (rather than 2) and continued on to develop four true leaves at the first node. We’ve nicknamed her “Hydra”. From what I can gather, quadrifoliate traits can be attributed to either genetic mutations, or environmental factors during seed development. If the latter is true, she’ll probably revert to a bifoliate pattern at some point – but, we can always hope.
Update: Mar 5
Many of the plants have been moved to another location and planted. This hop yard has a 60′ run with posts holding 1/4inch cable up about 12′. The hops will outgrow this structure, but for for the first year or two, this should be fine.
Update: Aug 10
Most of the hops in the yard have maturing cones. Several of the crosses initially sprouted male flowers, but now even those have female flowers. We have started replacing those with the ones that were still in pots. I was amazed at the size of the rhizomes and felt a bit bad killing them – however, we have to culling at some point. The yard is just not big enough for all the plants.
Update: Aug 17
There are several promising new plants. One is covered with large, heavy cones. The largest ones have an elongated torpedo shape and are overflowing with neon yellow lupulin. Being a first year, it is probably not yet reflecting the full aroma… but it already has a strong citrus/spicy scent.
Update: Sept 4
Picked, sorted, and cataloged all of the hop cones. In total there were 18 plants with a significant amount of cones. The differences between the cone size and yield is amazing. Go check out the 2014 hop breeding results page for details…
Data
To help me track things… NHB = Nagmay Hop Breeding. 001-004 were sprouted last year.The researcher stared at a writhing star-shaped mass of tentacle-like appendages, each with a mouth and teeth, and with a few of these severing themselves in half and carrying on individually …
Readers would be forgiven for assuming this was the sighting of a cosmic entity at the end of a Lovecraft novella, except the scientists in question are from Oxford, not Miskatonic University, and the phenomena form the findings of a recent paper in Current Biology, recommended to F1000Prime by Faculty Member Bob Goldstein, who aptly uses the words “weird”, “bizarre” and “completely unknown” to describe the article.
The entity itself is not from some God-forsaken antimatter galaxy, but is rather a group of the humble nematodes, found almost everywhere on the planet (although they have in actual fact been to space, but they are unlikely to have originated from there … [citation needed]).
Nematodes, or roundworms, are a diverse phylum of organisms, the most well-known of which, Caenorhabditis elegans, has been of great use to life science, advocated as a model organism for neuronal development by Sydney Brenner in 1963 and the first multicellular organism to have its whole genome sequenced.
Nematodes seem quite a simple organism, with a slender worm-like body around 2.5mm in length (although some parasitic species can reach over a metre!), but their simplistic appearance belies some strange behaviours, which have recently been the subject of two F1000Prime recommendations and an F1000Prime Report.
Nematodes of the genus Caenorhabditis are reproductively similar to most animals – with male and female versions of the species – but some, including the above mentioned C. elegans and another well-studied species Caenorhabditis briggsae, are hermaphrodites; more specifically, they are ‘androdioecious’: the species being made up of males and hermaphrodites.
[pullquote]… nematode mating systems are ideal for elucidating the origin of novel traits, and studying the influence of developmental processes on evolutionary change”. Ronald Ellis and Shin-Yi Lin[/pullquote]
The F1000Prime Report “The evolutionary origins and consequences of self-fertility in nematodes“, published this month and written by Ronald Ellis and Shin-Ye Lin of the Department of Molecular Biology, The State University of New Jersey, takes a look at how this reproductive and mating system evolved and developed, and how such a complicated physiological change occurred in terms of genetics and regulatory pathways. As well as being a fascinating example in which to study evolutionary biology, the authors note that “the task is simplified” by the existence of the genome sequences of these much-studied organisms.
Whilst on the subject of the unusual mating practices, the darker side of this arrangement was demonstrated in the PLoS One paper “Intense Sperm-Mediated Sexual Conflict Promotes Reproductive Isolation in Caenorhabditis Nematodes“, recommended to F1000Prime by Genomics & Genetics Faculty Member Norman Johnson.
Interspecies mating is possible in the Caenorhabditis genus – so what happens if a male from a species with no hermaphrodites (‘dioecious’) mates with a hermaphrodite from an androdioecious species? Again, evolutionary biology plays its role. Males from the dioecious species have the selective pressure of competing with other males’ sperm when mating; the onus is then on having the most ‘aggressive’ sperm to successfully fertilise the female. The androdioecious do not have the same selective pressures and thus the hermaphrodites are not used to such physiologically potent sperm. The findings of the paper demonstrated that the sperm is so potent that the poor hermaphrodite’s reproductive tract is actually damaged by it, with the sperm sometimes penetrating into other tissue, often rendering the worm sterile and shortening their lifespan.
So what of our pulpy, tentacled horror? The “worm-star” phenomena is described by Hodgkin et al. in their chillingly titled paper “Two Leucobacter Strains Exert Complementary Virulence on Caenorhabditis Including Death by Worm-Star Formation“. The researchers observed the behaviour of worms from Cape Verde that had been infected by bacteria. On infecting clean C. elegans with one of the bacterial strains, the worms’ tails were fused together by the pathogen, creating a star-shaped body of trapped worms that would then perish, ostensibly a strategy that allows greater bacterial growth.
All was not lost, however, as the nematodes have a last ditch escape plan, involving ‘autotomy’ – the purposeful severing of an organism’s own body, and the first example of this in the entire nematode phylum.
As a parting note, I’ll leave you with this musing on just how ubiquitous these often terrifying little creatures are, from the turn of the century “father of nematology”, Nathan Cobb:CONSENSUS STATEMENT
1) Morality is a natural phenomenon and a cultural phenomenon
Like language, sexuality, or music, morality emerges from the interaction of multiple psychological building blocks within each person, and from the interactions of many people within a society. These building blocks are the products of evolution, with natural selection playing a critical role. They are assembled into coherent moralities as individuals mature within a cultural context. The scientific study of morality therefore requires the combined efforts of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. 2) Many of the psychological building blocks of morality are innate
The word "innate," as we use it in the context of moral cognition, does not mean immutable, operational at birth, or visible in every known culture. It means "organized in advance of experience," although experience can revise that organization to produce variation within and across cultures. Many of the building blocks of morality can be found, in some form, in other primates, including sympathy, friendship, hierarchical relationships, and coalition-building. Many of the building blocks of morality are visible in all human culture, including sympathy, friendship, reciprocity, and the ability to represent others' beliefs and intentions. Some of the building blocks of morality become operational quite early in childhood, such as the capacity to respond with empathy to human suffering, to act altruistically, and to punish those who harm others. 3) Moral judgments are often made intuitively, with little deliberation or conscious weighing of evidence and alternatives
Like judgments about the grammaticality of sentences, moral judgments are often experienced as occurring rapidly, effortlessly, and automatically. They occur even when a person cannot articulate reasons for them. 4) Conscious moral reasoning plays multiple roles in our moral lives
People often apply moral principles and engage in moral reasoning. For example, people use reasoning to detect moral inconsistencies in others and in themselves, or when moral intuitions conflict, or are absent. Moral reasoning often serves an argumentative function; it is often a preparation for social interaction and persuasion, rather than an open-minded search for the truth. In line with its persuasive function, moral reasoning can have important causal effects interpersonally. Reasons and arguments can establish new principles (e.g., racial equality, animal rights) and produce moral change in a society. 5) Moral judgments and values are often at odds with actual behavior
People often fail to live up to their consciously-endorsed values. One of the many reasons for the disconnect is that moral action often depends on self-control, which is a fluctuating and limited resource. Doing what is morally right, especially when contrary to selfish desires, often depends on an effortful inner struggle with an uncertain outcome. 6) Many areas of the brain are recruited for moral cognition, yet there is no "moral center" in the brain
Moral judgments depend on the operation of multiple neural systems that are distinct but that interact with one another, sometimes in a competitive fashion. Many of these systems play comparable roles in non-moral contexts. For example, there are systems that support the implementation of cognitive control, the representation of mental states, and the affective representation of value in both moral and non-moral contexts. 7) Morality varies across individuals and cultures
People within each culture vary in their moral judgments and behaviors. Some of this variation is due to heritable differences in temperament (for example, agreeableness or conscientiousness) or in morally-relevant capacities (such as one’s ability to take the perspective of others). Some of this difference is due to variations in childhood experiences; some is due to the roles and contexts influencing a person at the moment of judgment or action. Morality varies across cultures in many ways, including the overall moral domain (what kinds of things get regulated), as well as specific moral norms, practices, values, and institutions. Moral virtues and values are strongly influenced by local and historical circumstances, such as the nature of economic activity, form of government, frequency of warfare, and strength of institutions for dispute resolution. 8) Moral systems support human flourishing, to varying degrees
The emergence of morality allowed much larger groups of people to live together and reap the benefits of trust, trade, shared security, long term planning, and a variety of other non-zero-sum interactions. Some moral systems do this better than others, and therefore it is possible to make some comparative judgments. The existence of moral diversity as an empirical fact does not support an "anything-goes" version of moral relativism in which all moral systems must be judged to be equally good. We note, however, that moral evaluations across cultures must be made cautiously because there are multiple justifiable visions of flourishing and wellbeing, even within Western societies. Furthermore, because of the power of moral intuitions to influence reasoning, social scientists studying morality are at risk of being biased by their own culturally shaped values and desires. Signed by: Roy Baumeister, Florida State University
Paul Bloom, Yale University
Joshua Greene, Harvard University
Jonathan Haidt, University of Virginia
Sam Harris, Project Reason
Joshua Knobe, Yale University
David Pizarro, Cornell University ____
To view videos and transcripts of the conference, please visit:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/morality10/morality10_index.htmlDoug Short has produced a new market chart. This one aligns the four big bear markets from the bottom of their first major collapse...and then charts their recoveries off the lows.
Bulls and bears alike will be glad to know... we just beat the rally at the end of 1929!
That is to say: Our recovery off the bottom has just surpassed the violent rally from the end of 1929 to the spring of 1930--the one that convinced everyone in that era that the crash was done and it was off to the races again.
Notably, that rally lasted almost exactly as long as the one we've just had: 5 months. Then it failed. Two years later, the market finally bottomed down almost 90% from the peak (and 70% or so from the interim peak).
Keeping our fingers crossed...
Here's a larger version at dshort.com >The price ain’t right: Canadians liked carbon tax in theory, but support declines as plan becomes a reality
Canadians concerned their industries may face disadvantage as Trump pulls out of Paris Agreement
July 5, 2017– A new study from the Angus Reid Institute indicates Canadian support for federal carbon pricing has cooled as the issue morphs from plan to reality.
Several provinces have already implemented their own emissions reduction plans – either through a carbon tax or cap and trade – in order to reduce emissions in order to meet targets set by the ratification of the Paris accord.
But at least half of the population in every region outside of Quebec tells the Institute it is opposed to Ottawa’s program of setting a mandatory nationwide carbon price for provinces who fail to create their own acceptable plan.
This study also finds a substantial number of Canadians would like to see their own provincial leaders push back against the federal carbon pricing minimums.
Four-in-ten Canadians – including slim majorities in Alberta, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick – say their provinces should resist federal standards, which call for a minimum tax of $10 per tonne in 2018, rising to $50 per tonne by 2022 – an addition of approximately 11 cents on a litre of gas at the 2022 rate.
Key Findings:
Opposition to carbon pricing is strongest in Alberta (68%) and Saskatchewan (71%). Seven-in-ten residents in each province oppose the Trudeau government’s plan
Four-in-ten Canadians (38%) say they would prefer if their province undertook its own carbon pricing plan, while one-in-five (19%) say their province should do nothing and allow the federal government to manage carbon pricing in their region
One major concern for more than half of the population is cross-border industry competitiveness. More than half of all Canadians (55%) say that this country should not proceed with its carbon pricing plan if it creates a competitive disadvantage with American businesses. This, after President Trump announced his country would be leaving the Paris Agreement to limit emissions
Support for carbon pricing drops as plans become reality
When the Angus Reid Institute explored this issue in the spring of 2015, the conversation around carbon pricing was hypothetical, and support for emission reduction policies appeared high. Indeed, more than half of Canadians said the federal government wasn’t paying enough attention to climate change, and most said they’d be supportive if it implemented a carbon tax. This was the case again in November that same year, shortly after Canadians elected the Trudeau Liberals, who had campaigned on a promise to pursue such a plan.
Cut to 2017.
Now that the federal government has formalized arrangements to impose a carbon tax in provinces that haven’t already put a price on carbon emissions, beginning in 2018, the impending reality of the program is beginning to kick in. At the $50 per tonne target the federal government has set for 2022, gasoline would cost roughly 11 cents more per litre. Canadians, in turn, are singing a different tune. Support has dropped to 44 per cent nationwide:
Slight majority support from prairie provinces in early 2015 has turned to wholesale opposition, and even in BC, where a carbon tax has been in place since 2008, support has eroded, replaced by a 50/50 split:
In Alberta, Premier Rachel Notley committed to the federal plan after securing the Liberal government’s approval for the Kinder Morgan TransMountain pipeline twinning project. While residents will be buoyed by the pipeline approval, 50 per cent still say they strongly oppose a carbon tax, second only to Saskatchewan in this level of opposition. In New Brunswick, where NB Power released a report predicting rapid price increases due to federal plan, strong opposition stands at 48 per cent.
Nationwide, one-in-three Canadians (33%) are strongly opposed:
Fight back or live with it?
One of the most vocal opponents of the federal carbon tax plan has been Saskatchewan’s Brad Wall. Facing a $1.3 billion budget deficit, tax increases and spending cuts, the premier has suggested this is not the right time for a carbon levy, and that he’s willing to fight its implementation in the courts.
This resistance resonates among a plurality of Canadians. Given three options, the largest number, fully four-in-ten (43%) say that their provincial government should fight the implementation of the federal carbon pricing plan.
Almost as many (38%) say they would like to see their own province do what works locally, and run its own carbon pricing program. Manitoba’s Brian Pallister has supported this, and signaled that his province will come up with its own plan to suit its needs while combating emissions. One-in-five Canadians (19%) say their province should let the federal plan take effect in their jurisdiction.
Of note: Alberta’s NDP government implemented a $20 per tonne carbon tax in January. Premier Notley has said she will support the federal plan, while most of her province would prefer the government fight it.
What role does U.S. policy play?
Much of the debate about Canada’s environmental obligations centres on how this country should respond to policy changes unfolding south of the border. After President Donald Trump pulled his country out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reaffirmed his government’s commitment to the pact and expressed disappointment – a position the public appears to support based on previous Angus Reid Institute polling.
But others, including some of Canada’s premiers, have voiced concerns about the comparative disadvantage that both the Paris Agreement and carbon pricing may create for Canadian producers, compared to their unburdened American competitors.
A slight majority of Canadians see merit in this concern. Those under 55 years of age are close to split on whether Canada should hold off on carbon pricing or ignore U.S. policy and go ahead, while six-in-ten (61%) older Canadians lean toward delaying any decision that may disadvantage Canadian producers.
Regionally, public opinion largely mirrors the broader “support or oppose” question. Quebec and B.C. are most likely to say what the U.S. does shouldn’t matter, while Alberta and Saskatchewan are most convinced Canada should hold off on implementing carbon pricing for now:
The Angus Reid Institute (ARI) was founded in October 2014 by pollster and sociologist, Dr. Angus Reid. ARI is a national, not-for-profit, non-partisan public opinion research foundation established to advance education by commissioning, conducting and disseminating to the public accessible and impartial statistical data, research and policy analysis on economics, political science, philanthropy, public administration, domestic and international affairs and other socio-economic issues of importance to Canada and its world.
MEDIA CONTACTS:
Shachi Kurl, Executive Director: 604.908.1693 [email protected] @shachikurl
Dave Korzinski, Research Associate: 250-899-0821 [email protected]
Click here for the full report including tables and methodology
Click here for the questionnaire used in the survey
Related PostsThe Midnight Shift is on the case when weird stuff happens in "Gotham by Midnight." (Photo: Ben Templesmith/DC Comics)
Gotham City is a place where the monsters walk, and so does one Old Testament-style spirit of vengeance.
DC Comics' Gotham by Midnight kicks off Wednesday, and in it writer Ray Fawkes (Batman Eternal, Constantine) and artist Ben Templesmith (30 Days of Night) are taking a gothic, Lovecraftian approach to Batman's hometown.
The new series has strong roots in a book like the acclaimed police procedural Gotham Central, Fawkes says, but it's very steeped in the horror angle as well following Gotham cop Jim Corrigan and his task force "dedicated to dealing with the extremely weird cases that don't really make sense on the law books. Because of that they're kinda marginalized."
The new characters being introduced as Corrigan's new crew are "all pretty unabashedly freaky people," Fawkes admits. Nicknamed "The Midnight Shift," the group tackling Gotham's supernatural element includes Corrigan's partner Lisa Drake, religious consultant/nun Sister Justine and forensic specialist Dr. Szandor Tarr.
Tarr is already one of Fawkes' favorites. A Bela Lugosi-sounding oddball, he is a "fantastically open-minded" guy who dives into all of the strangeness headfirst, whether it's an insect monster or a menace down at Gotham General Hospital.
"I love that attitude," the writer explains. "Every other character in the book carries these natural prejudices with them — that's where a lot of the fun and tension in the book comes from. But Dr. Tarr is really, really pleasant to write because some kind of screaming three-headed beast with a talking tongue will show up in front of him, and he'll be like, 'OK, I wonder what this is. Let me have a look at it.' "
Gotham City cop Jim Corrigan carries within him the Spectre, a powerful spirit of vengeance, in "Gotham by Midnight." (Photo: DC Comics)
Some of the team are harboring secrets, though longtime comic readers know Corrigan's: He's carrying around the Spectre, a spirit of God's judgment, in his body.
The Spectre will be seen occasionally, and even when he's not out and about, Templesmith has created an effect in his artwork that shows when the powerful force is stirring within Corrigan.
And it's definitely not a good thing when the Spectre appears because when that happens, everybody — from good guys to sinners — is getting judged, Fawkes says. "Jim Corrigan is usually quite desperately trying to solve cases before this higher authority comes down and 'fixes' things."
Different corners of Gotham City are being explored in other new comics such as Gotham Academy and Arkham Manor, but Fawkes says Gotham by Midnight is "definitely for readers who are into dark stuff and the fun of horror."
He adds that DC has given the creative team a lot of freedom "to interpret it and throw this freak party in Gotham."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1vH57alTraining to Get Strong & Athletic (and Look Good Naked) w/ Jackie Perez – EPISODE 142
Audio Only: iTunes, Stitcher
This week on Barbell Shrugged we welcome Jackie Perez back to the show. I don’t think you need to be reminded about Jackie, she’s hard to ignore for a number of reasons. But just in case, make sure you go back and check out Episode 124 of the podcast. Trust me, it’s a must see.
We learned a lot about Jackie the first time around, but maybe the most surprising thing was that, despite the glossy, well tanned appearance and strong social media presence, this girl works very hard for what she has. Jackie might seek out her fair share of recreation, but most of her time is spent training and coaching clients.
There are quite a few online critics that seem to believe that what they see on Instagram is no more than a lucky roll of the genetic dice. But that’s not all that accurate. As Jackie will tell you, “Those people don’t notice the amount work I have to put in to look this way. You’re damn right I’m going to wear my bikini when I get the chance!”
Again, it’s hard not to love Jackie for her fun bite and flair, but she has a damn good point here. Genetically she’s doing just fine, believe me, but there’s a plan at work. Her training is well-thought out, progressive and performance based. Her diet is designed to appropriately fuel her training and her body. She doesn’t punish herself with long, grueling “fat burning” sessions on the treadmill. She doesn’t deprive herself of calories and food selection. Maybe most importantly, she understands that a few cocktails here and there go a long way towards relieving stress and improving recovery.
Hater’s are going to hate, as they say, but that doesn’t change the fact that you still have to have a great plan in place if you want a result in the gym. Sometimes great bodies are born, that’s true, but more often than that they are built and earned. We can’t forget that.
Ready to put in the work and get the body you’ve always dreamed of? Check out Barbell Bikini.
If you want to get as lean, you can’t turn to tricks, hacks and shortcuts. You plan for it. You take steps towards your goal daily, weekly, and monthly, just like you would if you wanted to increase your squatting strength or drop your Fran time. But that right there is a whole other issue amongst the critics.
“Should someone that’s interested in improving functional fitness and performance even care about looks? Isn’t that a shallow, cosmetic goal for an athlete?” No, not at all. It’s true that looks where the focus for far too long, at the expense of function. But a big swing in the other direction is just as silly. In reality, these goals are intimately linked. Both are important. If you train hard, with a long-term plan, and you eat to perform, then you will feel damn good about the result. You will also start looking better and better, of course, which will likely make you feel damn good. That will really show in the gym when it comes to performance.
Jackie, it was a blast hanging out with you again. Keep up that grind, Darling.
Cheers,
Chris Moore
For more
Interested in getting lean and staying strong while you do it? Download our FREE Get Lean Starter Kit. Guys click here. Ladies click here.MARAUDER COUNTDOWN: 4 days to release
Marauder Camo Patterns
MARAUDER COUNTDOWN: 5 days to release
Marauder Scale Video
MARAUDER COUNTDOWN: 6 days to release
TITLES AND BADGES
Standard Package:
The Raider
Collectors Package:
(also receives standard badge and title)
The Money Maker
MARAUDER COUNTDOWN: 7 days to release
LORE and BLUEPRINT
Dawn River Region
Nova Roma
The Protectorate, Free Worlds League
20 June 3014
The black-sheathed Marauder fought like a demon.
While the blue-tinted sun of Nova Roma was still an hour from the horizon, deep in the ravine dusk was already here, incandescently illuminated by bursts of charged particle beams, lasers, muzzle flashes, and the explosions of devastating impacts. Outnumbered more than two to one, a heavy lance of Wolf’s Dragoons Beta Regiment, Special Recon Group, still lashed out with a fury that shocked the attacking loyalists.
From a concealed alcove at the end of the five-kilometer-long ravine—big enough to fit his Warhammer—the Bounty Hunter scratched at his unshaven face, the dried sweat of days in the cockpit flaking away. He tapped his BattleMech’s cockpit console to zoom his forward viewscreen onto the right region of the evolving battle, just as a large-bore autocannon stream of metal death savaged the internal structure of a Dragoons Phoenix Hawk. The forty-five-ton BattleMech seemed to collapse in on itself as frayed bits of what remained of its internal torso collapsed under the remaining weight, and it toppled to the ground.
Despite the growing darkness, he saw no ejection.
The Bounty Hunter stretched until ligaments and vertebrae popped. He took a sip of water while watching the trap spring. Sorry about that, Natasha, he mused. I know much you care about your misfits. But business is business, and the loyalists pay better than Anton. To ease the day’s long hunger pang, he crunched on a granola bar pulled from a small pack behind his command couch. Not to mention, doesn’t matter how many successful battles and inroads he makes. We all know Anton’s revolt is doomed. It may take a bit for the Captain-General to cow the disparate hotheads into line, but once the rest of the Free Worlds League’s might is brought to bear …
As though driven to new heights of acumen, the black Marauder raised both arm weapon pods, pointing them toward two separate targets. Azure particle beams whipped towards loyalist BattleMechs. The first shot punched through the head of a Hermes; the BattleMech felled as though poleaxed. The second seemed to embrace the right leg of a previously damaged Hunchback, tearing the weakened limb clean away. That ’Mech toppled as well.
The Bounty Hunter’s eyes widened; the battle seeming to pause as though mid-heart beat. Then the loyalist BattleMechs ignored the remaining Dragoon pilot and poured all of their firepower into the Marauder.
A whistled filled his cockpit. “Blake’s Blood, Web-Head. You are as good as you say.”
Natasha’s Marauder, already severely damaged, disappeared for a moment under the brutal onslaught, before a small but brilliant flash from within the tempest announced an ejection, and her command couch rocketed away, leaving the BattleMech crouched down, somehow managing to stay upright. The loyalists finished off the last Black Widow BattleMech in short order.
The Bounty Hunter pulled his neurohelmet back on with a smile and powered up his Warhammer.
Good … looks like you’re gonna survive, Web-Head. And to really stick this knife, I’m gonna make your Marauder my own. If we meet again, I want you frothing … and I’ll still take you down.
MARAUDER “BOUNTY HUNTER”
One of the first designs to embrace a nonhumanoid configuration, the Marauder was hailed as the pinnacle of BattleMech design when it was unveiled in 2612. As with the Warhammer, the Marauder quickly became a heavy BattleMech of choice across the Star League Defense Force. Its battlefield performance—along with its unusual, menacing outline—even gave birth to the belief that claiming a kill against a Marauder was a hallmark of personal prominence.
Any child across the Inner Sphere knows the name “Bounty Hunter.” This phenomenon arose from a convergence of several factors.
Modern rumors traced to a “bounty hunter in a green BattleMech” first appeared in the 2920s, then grew in dark corners as the Bounty Hunter began to appear over the decades, always with a splash in a spectacular battle.
In 3014, a personal feud began between the Bounty Hunter and the femme fatale of the Inner Sphere, Natasha Kerensky, which saw his star rise further.
In 3047, a bombastic action holovid series, The Bounty Hunters, exploded into high ratings across the Inner Sphere. While it only lasted three seasons before the reality of the Clan Invasion soured most audiences on its gratuitous violence, the holovid had left its mark. While only loosely based on reports of the real Bounty Hunter, myth and reality were forever merged until most can’t tell the difference.
No one is sure who the Bounty Hunter is or whether it’s a title handed down through the years. Only those that have faced him and managed to come out the other side alive know the reality may even exceed the wildest conjecture.
Written by Randall Neil Bills
Catalyst Game LabsCLOSE More CEOs are turning the back on President Trump following his delayed condemnation of white supremacists after the violent rally in Charlottesville. Buzz60
12. Kevin Plank, founder and CEO of Under Armour (Photo11: H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY Sports)
Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank said late Monday he's stepping down from President Trump's manufacturing job council, joining Merck and Intel in distancing his company from the administration following Trump's widely criticized response to white nationalists' rally at Charlottesville.
"We remain resolute in our potential and ability to improve American manufacturing," Plank said in a statement. "However, Under Armour engages in innovation and sports, not politics."
Also late Monday, Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel, said in a company blog post he also had resigned from the manufacturing council.
"I resigned to call attention to the serious harm our divided political climate is causing to critical issues, including the serious need to address the decline of American manufacturing," Krzanich wrote. "Politics and political agendas have sidelined the important mission of rebuilding America’s manufacturing base."
Earlier Monday Merck CEO Ken Frazier announced his intention to step down from the council "as a matter of personal conscience."
Frazier's resignation prompted angry responses from Trump on Twitter. In the morning, Trump tweeted that Frazier's response would give him "more time to lower ripoff drug prices."
Trump stepped up his Twitter criticism of the pharmaceutical giant and Frazier later in the afternoon, hours after his delayed denunciation of specific racist hate groups involved in the weekend's tragedy.
Plank said his company — which makes athletic gear endorsed by players including Stephen Curry of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors and Tom Brady of the NFL’s New England Patriots — joined the council "to have an active seat at the table" for discussions on how to spur manufacturing jobs.
"I am appreciative of the opportunity to have served, but have decided to step down from the council," Plank said. "I love our country and our company and will continue to focus my efforts on inspiring every person that they can do anything through the power of sport which promotes unity, diversity and inclusion."
I love our country & company. I am stepping down from the council to focus on inspiring & uniting through power of sport. - CEO Kevin Plank pic.twitter.com/8YvndJMjj1 — Under Armour (@UnderArmour) August 15, 2017
Trump came under fire over the weekend for his refusal to specifically denounce neo-Nazis, KKK and other racist groups after their rally in Charlottesville resulted in at least three people killed and dozens more hurt.
Trump's statement over the weekend that condemned "this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, many sides" was considered inadequate by numerous lawmakers, including some Republicans. Some of Trump's political opponents called it a "dog whistle" to far-right and extremist supporters.
After repeated calls for a more forceful response, Trump finally addressed reporters in the White House on Monday afternoon and said "racism is evil."
"And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups," Trump said before leaving the lectern without taking questions.
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2w53Z6M“The OA” is a new sci-fi/drama series that debuted on Netflix today. Starring Brit Marling, it was also co-written by Marling alongside her frequent collaborator Zal Batmanglij—who happens to be the brother of Rostam Batmanglij. Now, it has been revealed in T Magazine that Rostam was responsible for composing all the music for “The OA,” as Stereogum points out. Speaking on Rostam’s song “Wood” and its influence on her writing, Marling said |
such as Hamadi to tire of the protests. “They will end gradually, not in one day but over time,” Moussawi predicted.
The residents of Fallujah say they won’t give up. They plan to take their protests next week to Baghdad — which would pose a far bigger challenge to Maliki’s government.
“Maliki doesn’t care if people protest in Anbar. It’s too far,” said Mustafa Alani, director of defense and security studies at the
Geneva-based Gulf Research Center. “The secret of any revolution is the capital.”
The closely guarded capital, with its Shiite-majority population, will also present a challenge to the Sunni protest movement, which appears genuinely to want to avoid violence, Alani said.
“Syria is not an inspiration, to be honest,” he said. “Nobody wants to go through that experience. But if Maliki doesn’t respond to these peaceful protests, they could develop very quickly beyond his control into something much more.”Horror doesn’t get much better than The Exorcist—it changed the very landscape of the genre, and in December of 1973 it shook the entire world of cinema. At the time of its release it wasn’t just one of the scariest movies ever made, it WAS the scariest movie ever made. No one had ever seen anything like it—it was at a time before possessions and exorcisms became a standard horror trope—so it’s understandable that audiences lost their damn minds when they saw young Regan’s head spinning or that horrifying scene with a crucifix. William Friedkin’s masterpiece had such an impact on the genre, and film in general, that modern audiences will likely never experience the same shock that fell on them over 40 years ago.
This is a film that’s often cited as one of the scariest ever made, so how do you portray that same terror in a single image? Artist Sam Wolfe Connelly has done exactly that, brilliantly capturing the same level of shit-your-pants horror that the film so famously evoked. The way the rosary draws your eyes to Regan’s twisted smile is the stuff of nightmares—and when you turn out the lights, that same smile glows back at you in the dark. Nope. All the nopes. This was a privately commissioned print, so congrats to all of those involved on a wonderful and terrifying piece by the immensely talented Sam Wolfe Connelly.
Twitter: @deadthicket
Website: http://samwolfeconnelly.comMalaria is spread by mosquitoes An emerging new form of malaria poses a deadly threat to humans, research has shown. It had been thought the parasite Plasmodium knowlesi infected only monkeys. But it has recently been found to be widespread in humans in Malaysia, and the latest study confirms that it can kill if not treated quickly. The work, by an international team, appears in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. The increase in tourism in Southeast Asia may mean that more cases are detected in the future, including in Western countries
Professor Balbir Singh
University Malaysia Sarawak Although the new form of the disease has so far been concentrated in South East Asia, the researchers warn that tourism to the region could soon see cases appearing in Western countries too. Malaria kills more than a million people each year. It is caused by malaria parasites, which are injected into the bloodstream by infected mosquitoes. Of the four species of malaria parasite that often cause disease in humans, P. falciparum, found most commonly in Africa, is the most deadly. Another parasite, P. malariae, found in tropical and sub-tropical regions across the globe, has symptoms that are usually less serious. P. knowlesi had been thought only to infect monkeys, in particular long-tailed and pig-tailed macaques found in the rainforests of South East Asia. But following work by a team at the University Malaysia Sarawak it has now been recognised as a significant cause of disease in humans. The latest study shows that P. knowlesi can easily be confused with P. malariae under the microscope. Speedy reproduction However, unlike its cousin, P. knowlesi has the ability to reproduce every 24 hours in the blood - meaning infection is potentially deadly. Researcher Professor Balbir Singh said this meant early diagnosis and treatment were crucial. The researchers carried out tests on over 150 patients admitted to hospital in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, between July 2006 and January 2008 with malaria infection. They found that P. knowlesi accounted for more than two-thirds of the infections, resulting in a wide spectrum of disease. Most cases of infection were uncomplicated and easily treated with drugs, including chloroquine and primaquine. However, around one in ten patients had developed complications, such as breathing difficulties and kidney problems, and two died. Although the fatality rate was just under 2%, that made P. knowlesi as deadly as P. falciparum malaria. And the researchers stress it is hard to determine an accurate fatality rate given the small number of cases so far studied. Low platelet count All of the P. knowlesi patients had a low blood platelet count, significantly lower than that usually found for other types of malaria. However, even though blood platelets are essential for blood clotting, no cases of excessive bleeding or problems with clotting were identified. The researchers believe the low blood platelet count could be used as a potential way to diagnose P. knowlesi infections. Professor Singh said: "The increase in tourism in South East Asia may mean that more cases are detected in the future, including in Western countries. "Clinicians assessing a patient who has visited an area with known or possible P. knowlesi transmission should be aware of the diagnosis, clinical manifestations, and rapid and potentially serious course of P. knowlesi malaria." Dr Kevin Baird, a malaria expert at the University of Oxford, said the study discredited the long-standing theory that malaria does not cross from species to species. However, he said it was unclear what proportion of all malaria cases were likely to be due to P. knowlesi infection in the future. He said: "We just do not know the scale of the problem." Dr Baird added that the P. knowlesi parasite has previously been used as a therapy for advanced syphilis.
Bookmark with: Delicious
Digg
reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionThe first week of the new HGC league format is nearly upon us! Here we’ll give a preview of the first Team Dignitas match of the week, which also happens to be the very first match of the season! Team Dignitas will be taking on their EU rival, Misfits. Both are considered top contenders in the region and with this matchup being the very first of the season it will surely bring the hype!
Team Dignitas vs. Misfits - Friday, January 20th @ 9am PST / 6pm CET
This first series of the league will be a best-of-five between two of EU’s top teams. This is the only game Team Dignitas will play this week.
Team Dignitas has a hefty reputation within the EU region, having won 4 HGC 2016 regional events, as well as having decent placements in the world championships. With recent roster changes welcoming on Kenn ‘Zaelia’ Rasmussen, it will be interesting to see how Dignitas will keep their regional dominance and prove the roster change has improved their team synergy and gameplay.
Their opponent, Misfits, formerly mYinsanity, has been a stable roster for the past year. They’ve always been a top team within the EU scene, but after a very difficult and hard fought day at the EU Gamescon 2016, they lost a tie-breaking qualification match against Team Fnatic for their chance to go to Blizzcon. Having missed out on the experience of global competitions such as Blizzcon and Gold Club World Championships, Misfits may have a bit of a disadvantage coming up against Team Dignitas.
With Zaelia filling the melee assassin role, there is a bit of mystery surrounding his hero preferences until this first match up. Likely to be seen within these games will be heroes such as Thrall, Zeratul, Illidan, and Kerrigan. This first week of games will showcase the evolution of the meta, so there may be changes as to who on the team plays the off-tank bruiser role. Thomas ‘Mene’ Cailleux has shown his dominance playing ranged heroes such as Guldan, Kael’Thas, and Li-Ming, but he has also recently played quite a bit of Zarya. Joshua ‘Snitch’ Bennett will be the flex of the team, often playing the second support role with heroes such as Tassadar and Medivh, but perhaps we will also see him playing the off-tank bruiser role as well. Snitch has an amazing Falstad and is known for busting out heroes such as Abathur and The Lost Vikings. Expect to see Jérôme ‘JayPL’ Trinh mastering the main warrior/tank role with exceptional his Tyreal, Muradin, and Stitches plays. The captain of the team, James ‘Bakery’ Baker, is the support main, and with the support meta being so small at the moment, we will likely see him playing a lot of Malfurion, Rehgar, and Auriel. One of the best parts of a new season is seeing how the pro players have changed and evolved the meta.
Tune into the games starting up this Friday!
Twitch: BlizzHeroesNew Delhi: Transport minister Nitin Gadkari has asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to scrap a plan by the nation’s previous administration to impose duties on solar imports from China, the US, Malaysia and Taiwan, the Hindu Business Line newspaper reported.
Gadkari, the minister for road, transport and highways, opposed the duties in a letter to Nirmala Sitharaman, his counterpart at the ministry of commerce and industry, the newspaper reported. It did not say how it obtained the note.
Gadkari set up Purti Solar Systems Pvt. in his home state of Maharashtra in 2010, according to the company’s website.
The commerce ministry recommended anti-dumping duties ranging from 11 cents to 81 cents per watt on solar imports on 22 May, four days before Modi’s government took office. The tariffs would stall three-quarters of photovoltaic capacity under way in Asia’s third-biggest solar market, according to Headway Solar Pvt., a Gurgaon-based industry consultant.
In the letter, Gadkari said duties would double the cost of solar power, according to the report. Gadkari is the founder and chairman of Nagpur-based Purti Group, which owns Purti Solar Systems, according to its website. The group supplies solar-powered products including irrigation pumps and plans to build a photovoltaic power plant, according to its website.
K. Syama Prasad, information officer to Gadkari, said he was unaware of the letter or Gadkari’s affiliation with Purti. Gadkari did not respond to emails, a text message and a phone call to his office. A call to Purti Group’s office was also not answered.
Piyush Goyal, minister for power and renewable energy, has also asked Sitharaman to review the proposed duties, the Times of India newspaper reported on Wednesday, without saying where it got the information. The finance ministry has until 22 August to implement the duties. BloombergFather warned son
The Harrells, who describe themselves as avid hunters and staunch defenders of the right to protect their home and property, said they had suspected for several months that their son was involved in drugs.
In December, Tyler Harrell informed his parents that he had been at the home of another teenager when an intruder came in with a gun and yelled, “Give me all your drugs, give me all of your money.” Peter Harrell said the gunman fired a single shot that whizzed past Tyler’s head, and that his son wrestled the gun away from the perpetrator and disposed of it.
While the Harrells said that Tyler didn’t report the incident, they believe police might have learned their son’s identity from some of the other participants. They said they warned their son to “get out of whatever he had been doing,” Peter Harrell said.
By this spring, records show Austin police were building a case to search the Harrell home. A warrant seeking permission to raid the house said that, after receiving a tip, officers conducted three “trash runs” and found “food saver bags with marijuana residue,” “a black container labeled ‘Ground Swell Cannabis Boutique,’” and two package casings for ammunition, among other items.
“The multiple small individual sized baggies and suspected marijuana evidence (indicate) likely distribution occurring inside the home,” the warrant said. It said police intended to use a “no-knock” approach “based on the presence of an assault rifle ammunition in the trash and possibly of armed suspects residing in the home.”
Just before 6 a.m. on April 14, officers burst into the two-story home on Morrow Street, west of Lamar Boulevard in North-Central Austin.
At the time of the raid, Peter Harrell was already at work as an Uber driver. But Lisa Harrell, a state employee, said she was coming out of an upstairs bathroom when, “all of a sudden, I heard ‘bam!’ It was flash-bang, flash-bang, flash-bang,” she said. “I went in my bedroom and laid on the floor and put my hands up, just waiting for them to do what they were going to do.”
Lisa said that as she dove for cover she caught a glimpse at the dimly lit bottom of the stairs of what she said appeared to be a person outfitted in military clothes. She said only then did she realize the intruders might be police.
Then she saw her son dash from his bedroom and begin shooting downward, from near the top of a staircase, toward the front door — a view that is partially blocked by a wall.
“I screamed, ‘Stop! Stop, Tyler!’” Lisa said. “‘I think it’s the police.’”
She said she only heard police announce themselves about a minute later. “I know my son thought there was an intruder in the house,” she said. “Tyler would not shoot a cop knowingly.”
In an interview with detectives, Tyler Harrell said he kept the recently purchased AK-47 — his parents said he bought it for personal protection after the December incident — by his bed.
After hearing a loud bang and “his mother scream that someone was coming in … he said he fired his rifle down the stairs approximately 15 to 20 times and that when he heard the loud speaker say, ‘APD,’ he stopped firing,” according to an affidavit.
But police said they announced their presence immediately upon entering the home. Police declined to make video and audio recordings of the raid available, but an affidavit said a lieutenant can be heard on recordings of the incident using a loudspeaker repeatedly announcing that they were serving a search warrant.
“It was a worst-case scenario, and our SWAT team did a fantastic job,” Socha said.
Two months later, the Harrells said they remain disturbed by the decision to enter their home with such force and are now devoted to aiding their son’s criminal case, and learning from it. Lisa said she hopes the Austin Police Department will use the case to develop better procedures about when and how to raid a home.
“I’d like to say to the general public, ‘It could be you next,’” Peter Harrell added.URBANA — Although he admitted he saw his buddy rob a man on a city street, Deadric Gaines told police he wasn’t part of what happened.
A Champaign County jury disagreed on Thursday.
After a two-day trial before Judge John Kennedy and five hours of deliberation, six men and six women convicted Gaines, 21, who listed an address in the 2700 block of East Illinois Street, Urbana, of armed robbery.
Yang Lu, 23, a University of Illinois student from China living in Urbana, testified that on Oct. 31, 2015, he had gone shopping at Schnucks in Urbana and was walking back to his home about 7:30 p.m., carrying his recently purchased frozen pizza, when he was approached by two men.
Lu said he was in the 400 block of West Springfield Avenue, just west of the Strawberry Fields store.
They approach, one guy in front and one in back. They kinda squeeze me like a sandwich,” said Lu, adding that both men were in touching distance.
Lu said both men were wearing sweatshirts with hoods up. He said the one behind him was touching his backpack. The one in front of him was holding a gun at waist level.
“They asked me for money. I said, ‘I don’t have any money or a phone.’ The one in front asked what was in my pocket. He was holding the gun down near his belly button,” pointed at Lu’s stomach.
Lu said that after hearing he had no cash or phone with him, the man in front of him grabbed the pizza, and both men then ran south.
Lu headed to a nearby apartment to call police, but when no one answered, he went home and made the call. Within two to three minutes, Urbana police arrived, got his description of the men and were looking for the robbers.
About 15 to 20 minutes later, police located two men, identified as Gaines and Dominique Smith, 19, of Urbana, on a Mass Transit District bus near the Meijer store in southeast Urbana.
Bus driver Gary Reid testified that police had relayed the descriptions of the robbers to the MTD, which then broadcast the information to drivers. Reid said he had picked up two men near Lincoln Square who matched the descriptions.
“I let control know they were on the bus,” Reid said.
Champaign County sheriff’s deputies and Urbana police surrounded the bus and took Gaines and Smith, the only two passengers on the bus, into custody.
Lu was taken to where they were but was unable to positively identify either.
On the bus where Smith had been seated was a backpack containing a loaded handgun matching the description of the gun Lu had supplied. Gaines was wearing his backpack as he attempted to get off the bus. There was no contraband in it, police said.
At the Urbana police station, Officer Mike Cervantes said he interviewed Gaines, who told him he had only met Smith earlier that day at the home of a mutual friend.
Cervantes said Gaines admitted he was walking with Smith near Strawberry Fields when they saw a man carrying a bag. Gaines claimed that he stepped into an area off the sidewalk between 401 and 403 W. Springfield Ave. and was sitting down in what he called “the cut” or a shortcut near a fence.
“Dominique approached the Chinese guy, said something to him, then came running back with the pizza,” Cervantes recounted of Gaines’ statement.
Gaines told Cervantes the holdup took 15 to 20 seconds, and both he and Smith ran and got on the MTD bus at Vine and Illinois streets. On the bus, Gaines saw Smith take a gun from his waistband and put it in his backpack.
Gaines told Cervantes that when he and Smith realized they had a frozen pizza, they tossed it.
Gaines exercised his right not to testify. His attorney, Assistant Public Defender Tony Allegretti, called no witnesses on Gaines’ behalf.
In closing arguments, Assistant State’s Attorney Scott Larson said that Gaines was accountable for the actions of Smith and that Lu was clear in describing being approached by two men who “sandwiched” him.
“A better word is probably trapped. They did it together — one man in front and one in back,” Larson said. “They showed him the gun, took his pizza and they both ran in the same direction.”
Larson noted that video taken from the MTD bus showed Gaines trying to get off as soon as it was stopped. At the police station, Larson said Gaines “tries to minimize his role” in the encounter.
“He is there the entire time, all the way through to arrest. He’s accountable,” said Larson.
Allegretti maintained that Smith, who has yet to be tried, acted alone. A hearing in his case is scheduled for April 21.
“The state wants you to hold Gaines accountable for the actions that Mr. Smith did in 15 to 20 seconds. This is a decision made by Dominique Smith alone. There was no planning here. Dominique Smith saw a guy with a pizza, and he decides, ‘I’m going to rob this guy.’ This happened on the fly,” Allegretti said.
“He didn’t aid. He didn’t abet. He didn’t solicit. He didn’t participate in this crime. He was there at the wrong time with a guy with a gun he just met,” Allegretti argued.
Gaines faces penalties ranging from six to 30 years in prison. Kennedy set sentencing for May 13.Are you going to be taking a break from Marvel to focus on creator-owned like Hickman/Remender? If so, I hope this means you'll still be writing Darth Vader.
Yup, I’m still be writing Darth Vader.
It’s less of a deliberate move to writing creator-owned work, and more of a lot of commitments coming to a head, and realising my schedule won’t support anything else like an ongoing - especially when Vader is basically a book and a half. In terms of what I’m committed to write it’s…
DARTH VADER (1.5 Monthly)
WICDIV (Basically Monthly)
MERCURY HEAT (Monthly)
UBER (on haitus, but still being written on a 6-week deadline)
As well as that, PHONOGRAM, SIEGE, CROSSED, ANGELA are all coming out and need me to work on them. Especially Phonogram, that’s not a small amount of work.
Put it like this - as frustrated as I was when I realised that Ludocrats wasn’t going to happen this year, I also realised that taking 3 issues out of my schedule wasn’t a bad thing in any way.
I’m doing a few other small little things, some of which are WFH, some of which aren’t, but they’re usually limited commitment, which is a different thing from an ongoing.
Realising that this is how it was going to be was one of the reasons why I wanted to do SIEGE. A sort of swansong to that era of my work seemed a fun thing to do. I like throwing going away parties.
I think it’s for the best. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve done at Marvel, but I’m aware that I’m starting to feel a little burned out on the MU. Both Iron Man and Young Avengers took more out of me than I was completely aware of at the time, and the work there has often felt hard since that (With the notable exception of SIEGE, which was designed to be a giggle.) That writing Darth Vader was so freeing made me suspect that even if my schedule hadn’t demanded it, I’d be better taking a step away from the MU and superheroes for a bit to recharge. I’ll see where my head’s at in 2016.She's the newest addition to Bravo's reality series Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles.
But even as 42-year-old realtor Tracy Tutor-Maltas' career continues to ascend, her personal life is somewhat more problematic, with the reality TV star set to divorce her husband of 13 years, residential contractor Jason Maltas.
The divorce cites 'irreconcilable differences', according to documents obtained by TMZ.
Happier times: 42-year-old realtor Tracy Tutor-Maltas is set to divorce her husband of 13 years, residential contractor Jason Maltas, according to TMZ
The gossip site has reported that the couple's split is 'totally amicable' and that they will divide their assets '50/50' as the couple have a prenuptial agreement in place.
Tutor-Maltas is 'asking the judge not to award spousal support to either Jason or herself' and wants joint custody of their children.
The couple share two daughters, Juliet and Scarlett.
Still friends: The gossip site has reported that the couple's split is 'totally amicable' and that they will divide their assets '50/50' as the couple have a prenuptial agreement in place
It appears the couple remain close despite the divorce.
In an Instagram post made by the realtor on Christmas Day, she shows the family all together for the holiday.
The family snap is captioned 'Merry Christmas to everyone from our family to yours #traditions #holidayparty #santaiscoming #mdlla'.Who was your weed dealer in high school?
Did you know Cameron Diaz and Snoop Dogg went to high school together? And that’s just the beginning of their connection.
Finding a “weed guy” is an entirely fundamental part of cannabis culture. If you want to smoke you’ve got to have your hook up.
Every once in a while a weed guy goes big time and becomes an all-out sensi celebrity. What better example of this then the king of cannabis himself, Snoop Dogg?
From local Long Beach weed guy to rap superstar to ganja mogul, Snoop’s built his entire career on a solid foundation of marijuana.
And as it turns out, Snoop’s pot-infused life involves the lives of other celebrities in some kind of interesting ways. One of the coolest cannabis connections between Snoop and other celebrities is his little-known past as Cameron Diaz’s high school weed dealer.
This connection came to light when Cameron Diaz was a guest on the now-defunct nighttime talk show “Lopez Tonight,” which was hosted by comedian George Lopez.
On the show, Diaz said that when she was a teen, she attended Long Beach Polytechnic High School, the same school Snoop went to.
Diaz was one year behind the up-and-coming rapper, and apparently, Snoop was her pot hook up.Jeffrey Loria is an art dealer by trade. He also happens to own the Miami Marlins and, in turn, is one of the most loathed people in North American sports.
This week Loria sold Alberto Giacometti’s portrait of his brother Diego, a 1954 painting, for roughly $32.6 million at a Christies Art Auction in New York. The painting was valued as highly as $50 million.
The Marlins 2013 payroll? Roughly $39 million after they sent their highest-paid player — Ricky Nolasco ($11.25 milion) — to the Dodgers in a mid-season trade. Let’s go out on a limb and assume Loria isn’t going to use that money on veteran free agents this winter.
Via MLB Trade Rumors, the Marlins only have around $8 million committed to players for 2014, including $4 million to Heath Bell (!!!), $1.7 million to Greg Dobbs and $1.4 million to Jeff Mathis. That number will rise when players like trade-candidate Giancarlo Stanton go to salary arbitration, but the Miami payroll will be one of the two or three lowest in the Majors next year. That said, with young players like Jose Fernandez under team control for the next couple seasons the situation isn’t as bleak as it sounds … that is until Loria’s next fire sale.
Here’s the painting if you’re curious:
Let this go down as reason No. 4,302 why people hate Jeffrey Loria. [H/T Broward Palm Beach NewTimes]
Related: Marlins Fan Jumps Up to Celebrate, Fails Miserably at Sitting Back DownThe “hole” in the ozone layer is sometimes invoked by those who downplay environmental concerns as an example of “sky is falling” warnings that never came to pass. It's an odd example. There's a simple reason ozone problems didn't come to pass: the world came together and agreed to phase out key ozone-depleting chemicals.
It’s a major success story, and one that should be remembered. As we consider the cost of dealing with ongoing environmental problems, it's worth considering: how much better off are we for the action we did take to preserve the ozone layer? Some scientists have now tackled this question.
Ozone gas in the stratosphere is enormously important for life on Earth. Ozone absorbs ultraviolet radiation emitted by the Sun, greatly reducing the amount that reaches the surface. It’s sunscreen for the planet, as UV causes skin cancer and sunburns. In the 1970s and early 1980s, it was discovered that compounds called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), commonly used as refrigerants and in aerosol sprays, were breaking down stratospheric ozone.
That chemical reaction requires sunlight and is facilitated by cold temperatures, so it occurred most vigorously over Antarctica in the spring. A hole opened up over Antarctica, where so little ozone survived that most UV radiation passed right through. Ozone was destroyed elsewhere around the world but to a lesser degree.
The havoc-causing chlorine (or, in some cases, bromine) from these compounds can last a long time in the atmosphere and packs a strong pound-for-pound ozone punch. After we cut our emissions, however, atmospheric chlorine peaked in the mid-1990s and has dropped slightly since.
If we had kept emitting these compounds, how bad would things have gotten? A number of studies have looked at this “world avoided” scenario, using climate models to project through the 21st century. Those simulations are grim, showing an ozone “hole” that grows to encompass the entire planet around mid-century. (Incidentally, CFCs are also very potent greenhouse gases, so the outlook for global warming would be even worse.)
A team led by University of Leeds researcher Martyn Chipperfield took a slightly different approach to address the same question. Instead of simulating the future with climate models, they used a “reanalysis” of the past—a kind of model that fills in the gaps between all the available observations to draw a complete picture of recent conditions around the globe. They used this representation of actual conditions since the 1980s to drive a chemical model calculating the effects of ozone-depleting chemicals. One version of the model reflected the phase-out of CFCs, matching the actual behavior of the ozone layer that we’ve observed over the years. Another version simulated the consequences of CFC emissions continuing to rise at about three percent per year.
In that parallel reality—the world where we never took action—things would already be considerably worse than they are today. The Antarctic hole would be about 40 percent bigger at this point.
And it would have an Arctic twin. In 2011, atmospheric conditions conspired to produce exceptional ozone loss in the Arctic, although it never reached the threshold used to define ozone holes. But in the simulated world where there are continued CFC emissions, those conditions would have produced a legitimate hole extending over most of the Arctic Ocean and south over Scandinavia, Finland, and part of Russia. That’s as big as the Antarctic hole has been.
Beyond that, the Arctic would be seeing a hole one-third to one-half that size every spring.
Moving away from the poles, we would also find a thinner ozone layer. In the tropics, we would have about five percent less ozone today. The mid-latitudes would be seeing around 10 percent additional losses on top of the current four percent decline from pre-1970s levels seen today—after CFCs have been on the decline.
These numbers would have real health impacts. Australia and New Zealand, which have the highest skin cancer mortality rates in the world today, would be bathed in eight to 12 percent more UV radiation. Northern Europe and the UK would be getting about 14 percent more. Unless this triggered a compensating increase in protective behavior, the result would be more cases of skin cancer—not just in the future, but in 2015.
Fortunately, we took responsible actions to avoid that world, which now only exists in computer models.
Open Access at Nature Communications, 2015. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms8233 (About DOIs).A lesbian mother in Alabama has asked a Christian judge in DeKalb Circuit Court to recuse himself from her divorce case because of his stance against homosexuality.
Tiara Brooke Lycans, in her divorce case against husband Zachary Thomas Lycans, filed two motions earlier this year asking trial Judge Shaunathan C. Bell to recuse himself from the case. Bell declined to recuse himself both times.
Tiara Lycans then petitioned the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals, which on Thursday also denied her request for recusal.
She has argued in her requests for recusal that Bell has for 15 years been a preacher at a fundamentalist church and continued to serve as a preacher even after taking office as a judge.
In his campaign materials, Bell listed his political views as "conservative" and his religious views as "Baptist."
Tiara Lycans argued that Bell's "publicly expressed belief that homosexual relationships and marriages are contrary to God's law" might influence his decision-making on the custody of the child born to her marriage with Zachary Lycans, according to court documents.
The appeals court noted that Judge Bell, in his initial pending ruling on custody, granted the Lycans joint physical custody alternating weekly, and that he had done the same in two other divorce cases involving lesbian mothers.Nice Price Or Crack Pipe Is this used car a good deal? You decide!
While the Ariel Atom takes the prize for open-everything motoring, today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe minimalist Miata will give it a run for its money. It’s up to you to say whether this mad Mazda is worth running for your money.
Yesterday’s TV show remnant the Astroghini turned out to be the lastroghini thing anybody’d drop eight grand on, evidenced by its overwhelming 90% Crack Pipe loss. If it follows the path of other has-been TV celebrities then its next step will be a series of incomprehensible tweets, unfortunate selfies culminating with a stint on the creepy Dr Drew’s Celebrity Rehab show. Or maybe just a junkyard, it’s all good.
If today’s 1993 Mazda MX5 were to appear on TV, it would most likely be on AMC’s Freakshow, beside persian carpet-like Marcus “the Creature” and lightbulb snacking Brianna Belladonna.
Described as “Precustomized” this MX5 takes everything you love about Mazda’s little sports car and then diamond plates it. Building this custom, it must have been tough to give without taking, and hence while imbued with a carpet of steel plate, this Miata’s dashboard and most of its windscreen have been tossed in the hopper.
Advertisement
Along with those parts, so have gone the doors and a good bit of the front fenders, replaced here with what looks to be plywood. Other notable precustomizations include a pair of high-back racing chairs, pretzel roll bar, hood-punching air scoop, and weirdest of all, a speaker-housing plexiglass fairing behind the driver’s head.
Mechanically, the car appears to be pretty stock, which means a 116-horse DOHC four and 5-speed stick with nirvana-like actuation. Big-ass six spoke alloys allow easy viewing of the brakes, which also appear to be stock.
Advertisement
Taken as a whole, you might wonder whether the builder simply had a lot of time on his hands, or dropped a lot of acid, or perhaps both. Maybe a better answer to the conundrum of this car’s existence would be found in its location, as it is offered up for sale in Trampa Florida.
As yes, Florida. That's where elderly New Yorkers go to complain about the heat, invasive pythons eat formerly fashionable shitty little dogs, and every freaking wackadoodle batshitcrazypants car known to man is created. Seriously, I want a show of hands of all of you Floridians here, because you have a lot for which to answer.
Advertisement
I mean, what the hell is going on down there? First you literally vote BatBoy to be your governor, then you give the world face-eating hobos, because apparently we needed those. Now precustomized MX5s are a thing. Is it the heat, the realization that the state will soon be mostly underwater, or the fact that it looks like a giant dingus that drives this kind of crazy down there? Inquiring minds, people.
Perhaps I’m being too harsh. After all, whomever created this Miata was generous enough to pre-customize it. That’s sort of like Ikea being nice enough to check and make sure the entertainment center you carted home and have half assembled actually had all the necessary hardware in the box before selling it. That’s a solid, am I right?
You now need to determine if this mad as a March Hare Miata is rightly priced at $1,900. And as a further indication of the seller’s munificence, he’s willing to work out a payment schedule. What a nice guy. Do you also think he was nice in setting his price? Is $1,900 a deal for this precustomized MX5? Or, does the car deserve a price that’s as stripped down as it is?
Advertisement
You decide!
Tampa Craigslist, or go here if the ad disappears.
H/T to Deadspin Tim for the hookup!
Help me out with NPOCP. Click here to send a me a fixed-price tip, and remember to include your commenter handle.FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – The New England Revolution released their preseason training camp roster on Monday, featuring seven unsigned invitees. Six of seven invitees are in their early twenties with many being undrafted college seniors. Two invitees recently signed with lower division U.S. soccer team.
Forwards Marco Fenelus—the Revolution’s third round 2015 MLS SuperDraft pick—and Tim Mulgrew, midfielder Tyler Rudy, defenders Jacob VanCompernolle and London Woodberry and goalkeepers Trevor Spangenberg and Joe Nasco are all part of the Revolution’s preseason plans. Nasco and Woodberry are in camp, despite recently signing for the Fort Lauderdale Strikers of the NASL and re-signing for the Arizona United of USL-Pro, respectively. The Revolution hold Nasco’s MLS rights after an offseason trade with the Colorado Rapids.
Fenelus, 22, a 5-foot-10 striker went 47th overall in this year’s SuperDraft after his senior season at Cal State-Fullerton. The Haitian born forward moved to Turks & Caicos after flooding in 2004 destroyed his family’s home. Fenelus has since represented the Turks & Caicos national team and this summer scored the nation’s first goal since 2008 in a 2-0 victory over the British Virgin Islands in Caribbean Cup qualification. Fenelus led Cal State-Fullerton with seven goals this year, while also recording two assists in 24 games. In two years after transferring to Cal State-Full |
Risk of ARDS Mechanical ventilation in 25% 33, associated with higher mortality 34
GI Diarrhea, melena, small bowel ulcerations, colonic perforation, small bowel intussusception, stenosis, strictures, stomatitis
Skin Long-term hyper-/hypopigmentation in virtually all children tends to fade partially fade with time Hypertrophic changes, scarring
Urogenital Urethritis
Diagnosis
Confirmation by skin biopsy 35-36 Apoptosis, necrosis, and vacuolization of keratinocytes Dermo-epidermal detachment Lymphocytic infiltration of perivascular regions
Patch testing, pin prick, intradermal injection lack sensitivity for predicting SJS/TEN 37
Lab abnormalities Anemia, lymphopenia Neutropenia in 1/3 of cases, with poor prognosis 7 Hypoalbuminemia, electrolyte imbalance, increased BUN, increased glucose
Management
Withdrawal of drug Reduces mortality and improves prognosis In 10-year observational study of 113 patients, there was better prognosis (outcome measure: no death before hospital discharge) by odds ratio 0.69 (about 30%) for each day before blister development that drug was withdrawn. 38 In retrospective study of 19 patients, 21% mortality vs. the predicted mortalities by APACHE II (22%) and SCORTEN (30%) 39 Drugs with long half-lives had increased risk of death (odds ratio 4.9), independent of drug withdrawal 38
Supportive care Wound care 40 Debride wounds, moisture-retentive ointments and/or topical Abx to improve barrier function and prevent bacterial infection, non-adherent monocrystalline gauze materials containing silver, whirlpool therapy, anti-shear wound care, fluidized air beds, copper sulfate Fluid and electrolyte management Increased water loss from denuded dermis Volume loss ~1/3 less than that for burn victims 41 Nutritional support Early oral feeding 7 High-calorie requirements similar to those in burn injury 42-43 Temperature management Temp increased up to 30-32 deg Celsius to prevent excessive caloric expenditures from epidermal loss 1 Ocular care Early baseline Ophtho consult Cleaning of eye lids, daily lubrication Daily Erythromycin drops to prevent infection, corticosteroid drops to reduce inflammation 44 Pain control Pulmonary toilet Monitoring and treatment of super-infections Sterile handling, antiseptic solutions Repeated cultures q48h of skin, blood, catheters, gastric, urinary tubes Signs of infection: visible changes in skin lesions, increase in quantity of cultured bacteria, sudden decrease in temp, general deterioration No prophylactic abx; can cause emergence of resistant bacteria and negatively impact survival 45
Therapies
No established therapies No randomized prospective trials due to rarity of condition and ethical considerations; few studies and minimal standardization to this point Conflicting data in children 46, 48
IVIg 47, 49-52
Corticosteroids 53-59
Prognosis/Triage
SCORTEN (severity-of-illness score) 60 Validated for adults and children combined on days 1 and 3 of hospitalization 61-62 Not yet validated for children specifically
Kaplan-Meier Analysis of survival of patients with TEN based upon SCORTEN score, calculated within 24 hours of hospital admission.
Adapted with permission from: Guegan, S, Bastuji-Garin, S, Poszepczynska-Guigne, E, et al. J Invest Dermatol 2006, 126:272.
Transfer to non-specialized wards: 63 Limited skin involvement, SCORTEN score 0-1, non-rapidly progressive disease
Transfer to ICU or burn unit: 63 More severe disease, SCORTEN >= 2 Retrospective review of 199 patients showed mortality of 32% with early ICU/burn unit transfer vs 51% with transfer after 1 week 64 Longer hospital stay if transferred to burn unit after 1 week 66
Negative prognostic factors: hypernatremia 67, increased BUN, neutropenia, thrombocytopenia, visceral involvement, delayed presentation 8, 45, 68
Mortality (from large RegiSCAR study) 69
SJS: 10%
TEN: >30%
23% mortality at 6 weeks, 34% at 1 year
Slightly lower mortality when a drug was identified as the cause
Major prognostic factor for death within 90 days only: disease severity Beyond 90 days: serious comorbidities and age
Lower for children
Major causes of death: sepsis, ARDS, multiple organ failure
Recurrence
May occur with drug re-exposure
In a retrospective study of 55 cases, 10 children had recurrence between 2 months and 7 years after first episode, 3 had multiple recurrences, and 1 died 70
Recurrence of such rare event suggests long-lasting vulnerability and genetic predisposition
ED Pearls
Be on guard for alerting signs: Skin tenderness, blistering, mucositis, and fever >100.4
If such early signs even minimally present, find out whether “notorious” drugs were initiated within past 2 months: Sulfa Abx, Phenobarbital, Lamotrigine, Carbamazepine, NSAIDS, Allopurinol
Withdraw all non-essential medications immediately
Strongly consider transfer to burn unit or ICU, or at very least make a consult
, or at very least make a consult Early Ophtho consult to prevent common and long-lasting sequelae
to prevent common and long-lasting sequelae Watch for super-infection : visible changes in skin lesions, increase in quantity of bacteria cultured, sudden decrease in temp, general deterioration
: visible changes in skin lesions, increase in quantity of bacteria cultured, sudden decrease in temp, general deterioration Recurrence of such a rare condition suggests future risk Educate about future avoidance, allergy passport
References Letko E, Papaliodis DN, Papliodis GN, et al. Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis: a review of the literature. Ann Allergy Asthma Immunol 2005; 94:419. Rzany B, Mockenhaupt M, Baur S, et al. Epidemiology of erythema exsudativum multiforme majus, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, and toxic epidermal necrolysis in Germany (1990-1992): structure and results of a population-based registry. J Clin Epidemiol 1996; 49:769. Strom BL, Carson JL, Halpem AC, et al. Using a claims database to investigate drug-induced Stevens-Johnson syndrome. Stat Med 1991; 10:565. Chan HL, Stern RS, Amdt KA, et al. The incidence of erythema multiforme, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, and toxic epidermal necrolysis. A population-based study with particular reference to reactions caused by drugs among outpatients. Arch Dermatol 1990; 126:43. Schopf E, Stuhmer A, Rzany B, et al. Toxic epidermal necrolysis and Stevens-Johnson syndrome. An epidemiologic study from West Germany. Arch Dermatol 1991; 127:839. Prendiville JS, Hebert AA, Greenwald MJ, et al: Management of Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis in children. J Pediatr 1989; 115:881-887. Roujeau JC, Chosidow O, Saiag P, et al. Toxic epidermal necrolysis (Lyell syndrome). J Am Acad Dermatol 1990; 23: 1039-1058. Roujeau JC, Stern RS: Severe adverse cutaneous reactions to drugs. New Eng J Med 1994; 331:1272-1285. Spies M, Sanford AP, Aili Low JF, et al. Treatment of extensive toxic epidermal necrolysis in children. Pediatrics 2001; 108:1162-1168. Levi N, Bastujo-Garin S, Mockenhaupt M, et al. Medications as risk factors of Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis in children: A pooled analysis. Pediatrics 2009; 123:3297-e304. Mockenhaupt M, Viboud C, Durant A, et al. Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis: assessment of medication risks with emphasis on recently marketed drugs. The Euro-SCAR-study. J Invest Dermatol 2008; 128:35. Halevy S, Ghislain PD, Mockenhaupt M, et al. Allopurinol is the most common cause of Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis in Europe and Israel. J Am Acad Dermatol 2008; 58:25. Famularo G, De Simone C, Minisola G. Stevens-Johnson syndrome associated with single high dose of lamotrigine in a patient taking valproate. Dermatol Online J. 2005; 11:25. Rzany B, Correia O, Kelly JP, et al. Risk of Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis during first weeks of antiepileptic therapy: a case-control study. Study Group of the International Case Control Study on Severe Cutaneous Adverse Reactions. Lancet 1999; 353:2190. Sassolas B, Haddad C, Mockenhaupt M, et al. ALDEN, an algorithm for assessment of drug causality in Stevens-Johnson Syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis: comparison with case-control analysis. Clin Pharmacol Ther 2010; 88:60. Wetter DA, Camilleri MJ. Clinical, etiologic, and histopathologic features of Stevens-Johnson syndrome during an 8-tear period at Mayo Clinic. Mayo Clinic Proc 2010; 85:131. Ferandiz-Pulido C, Garcia-Patos V. A review of causes of Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis in children. Arch Dis Child 2013; 98:998. Fournier S, Bastuji-Garin S, Mentec H, et al. Toxic epidermal necrolysis associated with Mycoplasma pneumoniae infection. Eur J Clin Microbiol Infect Dis 1995; 14:558-559. Meseguer MA, de Rafael L, Vidal ML. Stevens-Johnson syndrome with isolation of Mycoplasma pneumoniae from skin lesions. Eur J Clin Microbiol 1986; 5:167-168. Stutman HR. Stevens-Johnson syndrome and Mycoplasma pneumoniae: Evidence for cutaneous infection. J Pediatr 1987; 111:845-847. Werblowsky-Constantini N, Livshin R, Burstein M, et al. Toxic epidermal necrolysis associated with acute cholestatic viral hepatitis A. J Clin Gastroenterol 1989; 11:691-693. Leaute-Labreze C, Lamireau T, Chawski D, Maleville J, Taieb A. Diagnosis, classification, and management of erythema multiforme and Stevens-Johnson syndrome. Arch Dis Child 2000;83:347-52. Mittmann N, Knowles SR, Koo M, et al. Incidence of toxic epidermal necrolysis and Stevens-Johnson syndrome in an HIV cohort: an observational, retrospective case series study. Am J Clin Dermatol 2012; 13:49. Gravante G, Delogu D, Marianetti M, et al. Toxic epidermal necrolysis and Stevens-Johnson syndrome in oncologic patients. Eur Rev Med Pharmacol Sci 2007; 11:269. Rosen AC, Balagula Y, Raisch DW, et al. Life-threatening dermatologic adverse events in oncology. Anticancer Drugs 2014; 25:225. Horne NS, Narayan AR, Young RM, Frieri M. Toxic epidermal necrolysis in systemic lupus erythematosus. Autoimmune Rev 2006; 5:160. Ruggiero A, Buonuomo PS, Maurizi P, et al: Stevens-Johnson syndrome in children receiving Phenobarbital therapy and cranial radiotherapy. J Neurooncol 2007; 85:213-215. Maiche A, Teerenhovi L. Stevens-Johnson syndrome in patients receiving radiation therapy. Lancet 1985; 2:45. Duncan KO, Tigelaar RE, Bolognia JL. Stevens-Johnson syndrome limited to multiple sites of radiation therapy in a patient receiving Phenobarbital. J AM Acad Dermatol 1999; 40:493. Knowles SR, Shapiro LE, Shear NH. Drug Eruptions. In: Schachner LA, Hansen RC, editors. Pediatric Dermatology. 3rd Edition ed. London, UK: Mosby; 2003; 1267-76. de Prost N, Ingen-Housz-Oro S, Duong Ta, et al. Bacteremia in Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis: epidemiology, risk factors, and predictive value of skin cultures. Medicine (Baltimore) 2010; 89:28. Power WJ, Ghoraishi M, Merayo-Lloves J, et al. Analysis of the acute ophthalmic manifestations of the erythema multiforme/Stevens-Johnson syndrome/toxic epidermal necrolysis disease spectrum. Ophthalmology 1995; 102:1669-1676. de Prost N, Mekontso-Dessap A, Valeyrie-Allanore L, et al. Acute respiratory failure in patients with toxic epidermal necrolysis: clinical features and factors associated with mechanical ventilation. Crit Care Med 2014; 42:118. Namdar T, Stang FH, Siemers F, et al. Mechanical ventilation in toxic epidermal necrolysis. Handchir Mikrochir Plast Chir 2010. French LE. Toxic epidermal necrolysis and Stevens-Johnson syndrome: our current understanding. Allergol Int 2006; 55:9-16. Hockett KC. Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis: oncologic considerations. Clin J Oncol Nurs. 2004; 8:27-30, 55. Blanca M, Romano A, Torres MJ, et al. Update on the evaluation of hypersensitivity reactions to beta-lactams. Allergy 2009: 64 (2):183-193. Garcia-Doval I, LeCleach L, Bocquet H, et al. Toxic epidermal necrolysis and Stevens-Johnson syndrome: Does early withdrawal of causative drugs decrease the risk of death? Arch Dermatol 2000; 136:323-327. Gerdts B, Vloemans AF, Kreis RW. Toxic epidermal necrolysis: 15 years’ experience in a Dutch burns centre. J Eur Acad Dermatol Venereol 2007; 21:781-788. Pacquet P, Pierard GE. Topical treatment options for drug-induced toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN). Expert Opin Pharmacother 2010: 11(15): 2447-2458. Mayes T, Gottschlich M, Khoury J, et al. Energy requirements of pediatric patients with Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis. Nutr Clin Pract 2008; 23:547. Coss-Bu JA, Jefferson LS, Levy ML, et al. Nutrition requirements in patients with toxic epidermal necrolysis. Nutr Clin Pract 1997; 12:81-84. Hildreth MA. Caloric needs of patients with toxic epidermal necrolysis. J Am Diet Assoc 1990; 90:A99. Kumar G, Fadel HJ, Beckman TJ. 36-year-old man with productive cough and diffuse rash. Mayo Clin Proc 2006; 81:945-948. Schulz J, Sheridan RL, Ryan CM, et al. A 10-year experience with toxic epidermal necrolysis. J Burn Care Rehabil 2000. 21: 199-204. Knowles S, Shear NH. Clinical risk management of Stevens-Johnson syndrome/toxic epidermal necrolysis spectrum. Dermatol Ther 2009. 22(5):441-451. Morici MV, Galen WK, Shetty AK, et al. Intravenous immunoglobulin therapy for children with Stevens-Johnson syndrome. J Rheumatol 2000. 27(10):2494-2497. Koh MJ, Tay YK. An update on Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis in children. Curr Opin Pediatr 2009. 21(4):505-510. Metry DW, Jung P, Levy ML. Use of intravenous immunoglobulin in children with Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis: seven cases and review of the literature. Pediatrics 2003; 112:1430-1436. Prins C, Kerdel FA, Padilla RS, et al. Treatment of toxic epidermal necrolysis with high-dose intravenous immunoglobulins: multicenter retrospective analysis of 48 consecutive cases. Arch Dermatol 2003; 139:26-32. Tristani-Firouzi P, Petersen MJ, Saffle JR, et al. Treatment of toxic epidermal necrolysis with intravenous immunoglobulin in children. J Am Acad Dermatol 2002; 47:548-552. Brown KM, Silver GM, Halerz M, et al. Toxic epidermal necrolysis: does immunoglobulin make a difference? J Burn Care Rehabil 2004; 25:81-88. Kakourou T, Klontza D, Soteropoulou F, et al. Corticosteroid treatment of erythema multiforme major (Stevens-Johnson syndrome) in children. Eur J Pediatr 1997; 95:181-186. Schneck J, Fagot JP, Sekula P, et al. Effects of treatments on the mortality of Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis: a retrospective study on patients included in the prospective EuroSCAR Study. J Am Acad Dermatol 2008; 58:33-40. Hynes AY, Kafkala C, Daoud YJ, Foster CS. Controversey in the use of high-dose systemic steroids in the acute care of patients with Stevens-Johnson syndrome. Int Ophthalmol Clin 2005. 45:25-48. Patterson R, Grammer LC, Greenberger PA, Lawrence ID, Zeiss CR, Detjen PF, et al. Stevens-Johnson syndrome (SJS): effectiveness of corticosteroids in management and recurrent SJS. Allergy Proc 1992; 13:89-95. Tripathi A, Ditto AM, Grammer LC, Greenberger PA, McGrath KG, Zeiss CR, et al. Corticosteroid therapy in an additional 13 cases of Stevens-Johnson syndrome: a total series of 67 cases. Allergy Asthma Proc 2000; 21:101-5. Halebian PH, Corder VJ, Madden MR, Finklestein JL, Shires GT. Improved burn center survival of patients with toxic epidermal necrolysis managed without corticosteroids. Ann Surg 1986; 204:503-12. Engelhardt SL, Schurr MJ, Helgerson RB. Toxic epidermal necrolysis: an analysis of referral patterns and steroid usage. J Burn Care Rehabil 1997; 18:520-4. Bastuji-Garin S, Fouchard N, Bertocchi M, et al. SCORTEN: A severity-of-illness score for toxic epidermal necrolysis. J Invest Dermatol 2000; 115:149-153. Trent JT, Kirsner RS, Romanelli P, Kerdel FA. Use of SCORTEN to accurately predict mortality in patients with toxic epidermal necrolysis in the United States. Arch Dermatol 2004; 140:890. Guegan S, Bastuji-Garin S, Poszepczynska-Guigne E, et al. Performance of the SCORTEN during the first five days of hospitalization to predict the prognosis of epidermal necrolysis. J Invest Dermatol 2006; 126:272. Valeyrie-Allanore L, Roujeau J-C. Epidermal necrolysis (Stevens-Johnson Syndrome and Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis). In: Fitzpatrick’s Dermatology in General Medicine, 8th Edition, Goldsmith LA, Katz SI, Gilchrest BA, Paller AS. (Eds), Mcgraw-Hill, 2012. Palmieri TL, Greenhalgh DG, Saffle JR, et al. A multicenter review of toxic epidermal necrolysis treated in U.S. burn centers at the end of the twentieth century. J Burn Care Rehabil 2002; 23:87. Firoz BF, Henning JS, Zarzabal LA, Pollock BH. Toxic epidermal necrolysis: five years of treatment experience from a burn unit. J Am Acad Dermatol 2012; 67:630. Kelemen JJ III, Cioffi WG, McManus WF, et al. Burn center care for patients with toxic epidermal necrolysis. J Am Coll Surg 1995; 180:273-278. Namdar T, von Wild T, Siemers F, et al. Does hypernatremia impact mortality in toxic epidermal necrolysis? Ger Med Sci 2010; 8:doc30. Westly ED, Wechsler HL. Toxic epidermal necrolysis: granulocytic leucopenia as a prognostic indicator. Arch Dermatol 1984; 120:721-726. Sekula P, Dunant A, Mockenhaupt M, et al. Comprehensive survival analysis of a cohort of patients with Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis. J Invest Dermatol 2013; 133:1197. Finkelstein Y, Soon GS, Acuna P, et al. Recurrence and outcomes of Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis in children. Pediatrics 2011; 128:723.Resistance wins this one too. If you been playing for a while (if you're new, join Resistance, because Enlightened cheats) you will see that Resistance figures are better than Enlightened loser figures. Resistance has Rio5 (don't trust the Rio5) Rio 6 and Joe Philley. It may have taken a lot of Rio's to get it right, but the 5th Rio is badass. and smart. and well connected. (and BRRN too.) The new Rio number 6 should be cool we hope and Joe Philley is Resistance and works for the Niantic people who made the game that the Enligthened ruins all the times. Resistance has more of the betterer people but that's secret because secrets are cool. Enlightened only has that KingFish person and some silly LexyBooHoo girl with different colours of hair (because Enligheneds are confused or something) and goes to Ingress events and another silly blonde girl in Europe-land name Madeline or something that works for Google or Niantics or something in another country. and some guy in calforina called puppychild or doggykid or something like that. Again, Resistance wins, Enlightened loses (all the things again. you suck frog cheaters) Resistance = Better players. Better people. Better secrets. Better winners.Welcome to my Noisey tutorial series.
This series aims to cover the basics about using noise from a programming perspective. I will cover the basics of noise functions, showing how one might implement them. The basic assumptions made by this series are that you are familiar with basic java programming and have an understanding of basic mathematics.
This first tutorial will cover an implementation of a noise function using pseudo-random number generation. The code from this tutorial will use Java, as will most of my tutorials!
What is noise?
Noise is defined as a random fluctuation in a signal over time. This signal can be represented on a graph like shown below.
An example of this is the flickering static screen of a television which is the television picking up electromagnetic noise from various sources (electrical devices, background radiation, etc.).
Why is noise useful?
Whilst basic incoherent noise is just about as useful to us as any random number generator, there are ways of composing the noise function such that it will be much more useful.
A neat example of a noise application is the world generation algorithm in the game Minecraft, which uses a 3D variation of perlin noise to generate its mountainous landscapes (The Word of Notch). If this interests you I will touch upon Perlin noise later on in the series, but first we will cover the basics of generating noise.
A Word on Randomness
As noise is fundamentally a function of randomised values, randomness if obviously very important to us here. This means we need a method of generating random numbers.
Generating truly random values is certainly not easy to do on a computer, as to actually do this we would have to rely off some external random event. An example of this would be monitoring the number of nuclear decays in some interval using a geiger counter, but as most computers are not capable of this, such a strategy is not possible.
So in order for us to generate a random number realistically, we settle for second best, a pseudo-random algorithm. A pseudo-random algorithm is not truly random as it must be deterministic, that is, when given the same seed value a pseudo-random number generator will always generate the exact same values each time it is run. For our purpose this function will accept a parameter and return a random value based on this input seed value.
Pseudorandom Generator
Firstly, let us consider how a PRNG(Pseudo-random number generators) must work. Let us say our PRNG uses a function called f(x), where x is the input parameter.
The simplest PRNGs work using a seed value and then generating a sequence of numbers using a linear congruential function, which uses a recursive formula to generate the next value.
f(x+1) = ( a*f(x) + c ) % m f(0) = seed //a and c are prime numbers //m is our range 1 2 3 4 f ( x + 1 ) = ( a * f ( x ) + c ) % m f ( 0 ) = seed //a and c are prime numbers //m is our range
This however will not suffice for our purpose, as we are only generation one output per input.
In order for us to get seemingly random results, we must make sure that f(x) is not related to f(x+1), nor f(x-1) and such that there is seemingly no correlation between consecutive values.
In order to do this, we “scramble” the input value by applying several operations on it. These operations will rely on the value on the input, and should separate the number over the given range suitably.
Random Integer Function Range: 0 to (2^31 – 1)
public static int randomInt(int n){ //we want numbers which are close to bear no relation to each other //left shift our number by 13, making it larger generally, then bitwise exor with original number n = (n << 13)^n; //Square n and use the linear congruential generator method on it with some primes n = (n * n * 15731 + 15484279); //square this number and add another prime to it n = n * n + 15485849; //ignore the first bit of the integer using bitwise and. Brings our number to within the range of 0 to (2^31)-1 n = n & 0x7fffffff; //return our number return n; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 public static int randomInt ( int n ) { //we want numbers which are close to bear no relation to each other //left shift our number by 13, making it larger generally, then bitwise exor with original number n = ( n << 13 ) ^ n ; //Square n and use the linear congruential generator method on it with some primes n = ( n * n * 15731 + 15484279 ) ; //square this number and add another prime to it n = n * n + 15485849 ; //ignore the first bit of the integer using bitwise and. Brings our number to within the range of 0 to (2^31)-1 n = n & 0x7fffffff ; //return our number return n ; }
I have commented out an example of a PRNG of positive integers. As we can see, this strategy involves many steps each involving simple arithmetic operations. It is important that these operations scatter the input values:
Away from other close input values, as we said before.
And uniformly over the result space, from 0 to 2^31.
The numbers 15731, 15484279 and 15485849 are prime, the reason for this is to remove any patterns from the output, which might arise using numbers with common factors. These can be swapped with other prime numbers to produce different random number generators, which will be extremely useful to us later on.
Finally, in the last step we use bitwise AND with 0x7fffffff, which essentially sets the first bit of our integer to 0. The number remaining will always be between 0 and 2^31-1, which fixes the number nicely into range.
Some outputs of our function are shown below:
randomInt(0) = 901271478 randomInt(1) = 1971789069 randomInt(2) = 266967294 randomInt(3) = 365035341.... 1 2 3 4 5 randomInt ( 0 ) = 901271478 randomInt ( 1 ) = 1971789069 randomInt ( 2 ) = 266967294 randomInt ( 3 ) = 365035341....
Changing our Range to Doubles
Now that we have a working PRNG, let us fix the range and make it slightly more useful so we can plot this in a graph. We want to fix the range of the function to be something convenient, such as doubles between -1.0 and 1.0.
To do this, we squash our range space down from 2^31 to 2, this is obviously done by dividing by 2^30. Next we simple subtract the result from one to put in the desired position.
//returns a random double between -1 and 1 public static double noise(int x) { return 1.0-(randomInt(x)/1073741824.0); // 1073741824.0 = 2 ^ 30 } 1 2 3 4 //returns a random double between -1 and 1 public static double noise ( int x ) { return 1.0 - ( randomInt ( x ) / 1073741824.0 ) ; // 1073741824.0 = 2 ^ 30 }
Here is an example of the output of our function:
noise(0) = 0.1606255266815424 noise(1) = -0.8363716723397374 noise(2) = 0.7513673324137926 noise(3) = 0.6600343463942409... 1 2 3 4 5 noise ( 0 ) = 0.1606255266815424 noise ( 1 ) = - 0.8363716723397374 noise ( 2 ) = 0.7513673324137926 noise ( 3 ) = 0.6600343463942409...
As you can see, we have effectively produced a raw, incoherent noise function from scratch!
We will be using this noise function in our next tutorial, and using this to create some smoothed noise. I will provide a less verbose version of the noise function below:
public static double noise(int x) { x = (x << 13) ^ x; return ( 1.0 - ( (x * (x * x * 15731 + 15484279) + 15485849) & 0x7fffffff) / 1073741824.0); } 1 2 3 4 public static double noise ( int x ) { x = ( x << 13 ) ^ x ; return ( 1.0 - ( ( x * ( x * x * 15731 + 15484279 ) + 15485849 ) & 0x7fffffff ) / 1073741824.0 ) ; }
Problems with our Pseudo-random noise
Although we have produced an unpredictable looking number generator, this algorithm does have many flaws, in that it would fail statistical tests for a random distribution. For our purpose of generating simple noise, this algorithm should suffice for now, although I am planning to cover a more sophisticated and better PRNG in a future tutorial.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading the first part of my noise tutorial.
You should have learned what noise is, difficulty in generating random numbers on a computer and how to write a simple implementation of a noise function.
Our next stage of the tutorial will involve converting this noise into coherent noise using interpolation!
Further ReadingThe Conservative campaign has dropped another Toronto candidate over offensive and embarrassing online videos.
Tim Dutaud, who was running for the Tories in Toronto-Danforth, was forced out Monday after he was identified as a man known as the UniCaller in prank YouTube videos that included him pretending to orgasm while on the phone with a female customer service representative and mocking people with mental disabilities. The videos appear to have been posted about six years ago.
The move came just hours after the party ended the candidacy of Jerry Bance in the Toronto riding of Scarborough-Rouge Park, after he was identified as a repairman caught on camera peeing in a homeowner's coffee cup during a service call in a 2012 CBC Marketplace investigation.
The party said Bance was dropped for failing to disclose information during the candidate vetting process.
The Conservative webpage for the Toronto-Danforth riding describes Dutaud as "an actor and producer," listing the television drama Flashpoint and the comedy series The Jon Dore Television Show among his appearances. According to his LinkedIn page, Dutaud was a radio host with The Score for nine years, in until 2010, and before that worked in television production at CBC from 1995 to 2001.
Attempts by CBC News to reach Dutaud on Monday were unsuccessful. The party biography says he is now a Toronto realtor and minor hockey coach and has a two-year-old daughter.
He has also worked under the name Killian Gray, according to his Internet Movie Database profile page. The YouTube videos appeared to have been produced as prankster-style comedy videos as a character called the UniCaller.
At a campaign event in the same part of Toronto Dutaud was running to represent, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper was asked what the controversies involving the two candidates meant for his party.
"What this means is that we keep the highest standard for candidates and these two individuals are no longer candidates," Harper said.
Harper said there would be new candidates in the ridings.
Harper 'didn't bother' to vet candidates: Trudeau
Speaking Monday at a campaign event in Summerside, P.E.I., Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau said the incidents show Harper is out of touch and "didn't bother" to find out the past of two of his candidates.
"And he lost them today," Trudeau told supporters before slipping in a barb over suspended Senator Mike Duffy's residency troubles.
"But really, is that something so surprising from a man who still believes Mike Duffy is a Prince Edward Islander?"
Dutaud and Bance are just the latest candidates to drop out during the election campaign.
Gilles Guibord ended his Conservative candidacy in Montreal after some online comments he made in recent years about First Nations and women were called into question. Ala Buzreba, the Liberals' candidate in Calgary Nose Hill, stepped down after comments she made on Twitter as a teenager resurfaced. And the NDP's candidate in Nova Scotia's Kings-Hants riding, Morgan Wheeldon, resigned after deleted Facebook posts with comments about Israel were circulated by the Conservatives.
The deadline for candidate nominations is Monday, Sept. 28 at 2 p.m. ET.TRAVEL BRIEFCASE LAX fails to land in top 100 ranking of world's best airports
Passengers surveyed for the Skytrax World Airport Awards give LAX low scores for the long time it takes to get through security and immigration and customs.
Passengers surveyed for Skytrax gave LAX low scores for the long time it takes to get through security and immigration and customs, said Peter Miller, a spokesman for the aviation research group.
It echoed the low grades given to LAX by several previous surveys.
Obama was referring to a ranking released in April — the Skytrax World Airport Awards — that is based on a survey of 12.1 million travelers around the world. Out of 395 airports worldwide, LAX ranked 109th overall and 24th among 50 airports in North America.
If you're a |
to be a donor; in opt-out countries, like Sweden, people are assumed to be donors unless they indicate that they do not wish to be one. As the authors report, the opt-in countries have much lower effective consent rates (on average, 60% lower) and the two groups represent non-overlapping populations. That data supplements the other experimental findings from Johnson & Goldstein (2003) as well. The authors had 161 participants take part in an experiment where they were asked to imagine they had moved to a new state. This state either treated organ donation as the default option or non-donation as the default, and participants were asked whether they would like to confirm or change their status. There was also a third condition where no default answer was provided. When no default answer was given, 79% of participants said they would be willing to be an organ donor; a percentage which did not differ from those who confirmed their donor status when it was the default (82%). However, when non-donor status was the default, only 42% of the participants changed their status to donor.
So defaults seem to matter quite a bit, but let's assume that a nation isn't going to change its policy from opt-in to opt-out anytime soon. What else might we do if we wanted to improve the rates of people signing up to be an organ donor in the short term? Eyting et al (2016) tested a rather simple method: paying people €10. The researchers recruited 320 German university students who did not currently have an organ donor card and provided them the opportunity to fill one out. These participants were split into three groups: one in which there was no compensation offered for filling out the card, one in which they would personally receive €10 for filling out a card (regardless of which they picked: donor or non-donor), and a final condition in which €10 would be donated to a charitable organization (the Red Cross) if they filled out a card. No differences were observed between the percentage of participants who filled out the card between the control (35%) and charity (36%) conditions. However, in the personal benefit group, there was a spike in the number of people filling out the card (72%). Not all those who filled out the cards opted for donor status, though. Between conditions, the percentage of people who both (a) filled out the card and (b) indicated they wanted to be a donor where about 44% in the personal payment condition, 28% in the control condition, and only 19% in the charity group. Not only did the charity appeal not seem particularly effective, it was even nominally counterproductive.
Source: Flickr/Patrik Theander
Now, admittedly, helping others because there's something in it for you isn't quite as sexy (figuratively speaking) as helping because you're driven by an overwhelming sense of,, or simply helping for no benefit at all. This is because there's a lower signal value in that kind of self-beneficial helping; it doesn't predict future behavior in the absence of those benefits. As such, it's unlikely to be particularly effective at building meaningful social connections between helpers and others. However, if the current data is any indication, such helping is also likely to be consistently effective. If one's goal is to increase the benefits being delivered to others (rather than building social connections), that will often involve providing valued incentives for the people doing the helping.
On one final note, it's worth mentioning that these papers only deal with people becoming a donor after death; not the prospect of donating organs while alive. If one wanted to, say, incentivize someone to donate a kidney while alive, a good way to do so might be to offer them money; that is, allow people to buy and sell organs they are already capable of donating. If people were allowed to engage in mutually-beneficial interactions when it came to selling organs, it is likely we would see certain organ shortages decrease as well. Unfortunately for those in need of organs and/or money, our moral systems often oppose this course of action (Tetlock, 2000), likely contingent on perceptions about which groups would be benefiting the most. I think this serves as yet another demonstration that our moral sense might not be well-suited for maximizing the welfare of people in the wider social world, much like our empathetic systems don't.
References: Eyting, M., Hosemann, A., & Johannesson, M. (2016). Can monetary incentives increase organ donations? Economics Letters, 142, 56-58.
Johnson, E. & Goldstein, D. (2003). Do defaults save lives? Science, 132, 1338-1339.
Tetlock, P. (2000). Coping with trade-offs: Psychological constraints and political implications. In Elements of Reason:, Choice, & the Bounds of Rationality. Ed. Lupia, A., McCubbins, M., & Popkin, S. 239-322.ADVERTISEMENT
What happened
Federal regulators conducting “stress tests” of 19 U.S. banks have reportedly determined that Bank of America needs $34 billion in new capital, the largest shortfall among the tested banks. In all, 10 of the 19 banks are expected to require more capital. The Federal Reserve will officially unveil the results of the stress tests Thursday evening. (Bloomberg)
What the commentators said
Bank of America needs $34 billion? said Felix Salmon in Reuters. Yikes! If BofA needs that much, the collective needs of all the banks must be a “shockingly enormous sum.” Let’s hope the Obama team knows what it’s doing with these stress tests, despite the “ham-fisted” leaking of the results.
The stress tests are already “yielding benefits,” said Binyamin Appelbaum in The Washington Post. BofA’s shares have climbed 129 percent since the tests were launched, and even Citigroup is up 27 percent. But the point isn’t to rescue the banks, it’s to “rescue the economy,” and the 12-week testing period has let the markets “breathe deeply” and the banks race to get stronger.
If the tests show BofA or other banks as weak, that could spark debilitating selloffs, said The Salt Lake Tribune in an editorial. But the Obama team should still “disclose as much as possible” about the health of the banks. The weak ones won’t be allowed to fail, and the strong ones will get stronger with investor confidence, allowing them to lend again—“the goal of federal banking policy.”BELFAST (Reuters) - At least 29 police officers were injured when pro-British and Irish nationalist youths clashed in the Northern Irish capital on Saturday following another protest against the removal of the British flag from Belfast City Hall.
Police officers in riot gear look on as a hijacked car burns during rioting in East Belfast, January 12, 2013. Violent protests continue in Northern Ireland as loyalists renewed their anger against restrictions on flying the union flag from Belfast City Hall. REUTERS/Cathal McNaughton
Rioting started as the mainly Protestant protesters passed a Catholic area on their way home from a rally in central Belfast against the flag’s removal. Police scrambled to separate crowds of youths who pelted each other with bricks and bottles.
The unrest over the past five weeks has been some of the most sustained in the British-ruled province since a 1998 peace deal ended 30 years of conflict between Catholic Irish nationalists seeking union with Ireland and Protestant loyalists determined to remain part of the United Kingdom.
Exposing a deep vein of discontent with the peace deal, loyalists have held nightly protests since councilors voted last month to end a century-old tradition of flying the British union flag every day over the city hall.
Loyalist politicians have joined their nationalist rivals in condemning the violence, but they have been unable to prevent groups of young men draped in British flags from clashing with police.
The protesters have complained that the removal of the flag was a step too far in the ebbing of loyalist dominance in the province, saying too many concessions had been given to Irish nationalists in a power-sharing government.
“The protests will continue until our concerns are met,” said Fergus Ferguson, from south Belfast, who described the decision to take down the flag as “illegal”.
At least 1,000 loyalists, some with Union Jack tops, balaclavas and “No Surrender” banners, gathered at City Hall on Saturday.
After police blocked their way towards East Belfast the loyalist protesters took a detour towards the nationalist Short Strand area, a traditional flash point for sectarian violence, where they clashed with local youths.
After the nationalists dispersed, police turned water cannon on loyalist protesters who pushed riot police back with metal fencing and ripped up paving stones to hurl at police lines.
Reinforcements including dozens of jeeps, a helicopter and at least three water cannon trucks were sent in to try to control the crowds. Police said they fired at least six plastic bullet rounds.
Chief Constable Matt Baggott said his officers acted with “exceptional courage” during the disturbances, which led to four officers being treated in hospital. But community leaders criticized the police for failing to stop the protest passing a well-known trouble spot.
“The police have a lot to answer for. We had women and children in this parade. It’s a miracle nobody was killed,” said Matthew Ferguson, who attended the protest with his 12-year-old son.
Train services in Belfast were disrupted on Saturday when a small explosive device was found near a rail line in the city, a police spokesman said.Andrew Kaczynski’s KFile on CNN dug up a video of Moore from late August speaking at Citizen Impact USA, making the comments that have CNN and the GOP establishment in Washington similarly freaked out.
“We are losing the acknowledgement of God and I’m standing here talking to Christians and pastors and I’m telling you we’re losing the acknowledgement of God,” Moore said, per CNN’s report.
After, per Kaczynski, Moore began “reciting several verses from the Old Testament book of Hosea that deal with lack of knowledge of God,” the front-running candidate for the U.S. Senate in Alabama argued that shootings and killings in U.S. society today is because of the lack of God in public life.
“You wonder why we’re having shootings, and killings here in 2017? Because we’ve asked for it,” Moore said. “We’ve taken God out of everything. We’ve taken prayer out of school, we’ve taken prayer out of council meetings.”
In a video of Moore’s speech to Citizen Impact USA, he can be heard saying, “There’s no truth, no mercy, no knowledge of God in the land.” He then referenced Hosea 4:2 (King James Version) saying, “By swearing and lying and killing and stealing … they break forth and blood touches blood.”
https://youtu.be/Q7Fw9ZeINg8
Moore went on to cite a recent example of a coach who was barred from going out on the 50-yard line to kneel and say a silent prayer before a football game began. The school district filed a suit which resulted in an injunction to prevent the coach from praying at the 50-yard-line.
Within seconds of the CNN piece posting, the Senate Leadership Fund—a PAC affiliated with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell which has spent millions upon millions of dollars in Alabama to try to prop up failing establishment candidate Luther Strange—spokesman Chris Pack tweeted the attack against Moore from CNN:
Using the same logic as the 9/11 attacks, @MooreSenate says Americans have “asked for” shootings and killings #ALSen https://t.co/VEIBIBUYID — Chris Pack (@ChrisPack716) September 19, 2017
It is not the first time that McConnell’s organization has been working with CNN to attack Moore, the conservative candidate much more closely aligned with President Trump’s agenda than Strange—the establishment-backed candidate that Trump has endorsed and is set to campaign for later this week. Last week, as Breitbart News reported, Senate Leadership Fund and CNN teamed up to attack Moore for suggesting that the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened as a result of the lack of God in American society.
While both that attack over 9/11 and this one over shootings may seem harsh in Washington, D.C., or on the island of Manhattan, the message Moore gave in both actually is a positive one among GOP primary voters in Alabama. Polling data from JMC Analytics has shown that most likely voters in Alabama’s upcoming GOP primary runoff on Sept. 26 do not think less of Moore as a result of these statements, and actually like what he says.
For instance, in response to the 9/11 attack, most astute observers understood that it is actually a positive in Alabama—not an attack:
hahah he's 100 percent gonna win https://t.co/VR0bGd3Mky — Gideon Resnick (@GideonResnick) September 14, 2017
The same goes for this latest attack.
What is perhaps more interesting, however, is the emergence of a new alliance between Senate Leadership Fund—McConnell’s organization—and CNN. President Trump despises CNN, and calls it a “very fake news” network. He has bashed the network repeatedly from rally stages, and cheered when three senior CNN staffers were forced to resign earlier this year as the result of a Breitbart News investigation that uncovered they published extraordinarily fake news regarding the Russia scandal.
The McConnell group’s decision to keep working with CNN to attack a GOP candidate who supports the president’s agenda, Moore, and create further division inside the GOP is not the only time the group has lined up against President Trump and his agenda. The Senate Leadership Fund has been caught in the act of publishing deceptively edited videos falsely suggesting that Moore does not support the president’s planned border wall. Creating division inside the GOP and falsely alleging that a Republican does not support the president’s agenda is in and of itself an attack on the president and his agenda.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at [email protected] a friend or family member is painful enough, but imagine the extra, unnecessary jabs when that friend's social networking profile continues to pop up in searches. Or say your friend was particularly wise or witty when posting online, but when you went back to reference something later, the entire record was gone without a trace.
Today, many of us keep our profiles, blog posts, and musings entirely online, leaving family, friends, and service providers stuck trying to figure out what to do with a deceased user's digital bits.
I have a personal interest in this topic, as I'm of a generation that largely grew up with the Internet while our parents largely remain uninvolved (mine are surprisingly Internet literate, but most of my friends' parents aren't). An Ars reader and close friend of mine passed away in early 2008, and all of his online musings remain in limbo to this day—his MySpace profile is still active as if he was still around, confusing old high school friends, yet his blog has mysteriously disappeared and no one will be able to get it back.
This prompted us to start looking into various sites' policies on deceased users' accounts and what you can do about them—whether you want to preserve them, delete them, or otherwise.
Facebook
Facebook may not have been the first to create a specialized policy for deceased users, but it was one of the highest profile because of the way it handled the issue. Instead of merely agreeing to let a family member take control of the account, the company instead decided to take things a step further and let people turn someone's account into a memorial.
This is helpful for two reasons. First, it preserves that user's identity online so that people can come to the page, read about him or her, and leave posts on the Wall in remembrance. To those of us who live our lives online, there's little more terrifying than the thought of completely disappearing, and we like for our friends who have moved on to stay around online as well.
However, we don't like to constantly be reminded about that person's disappearance, so when Facebook converts an account into a memorial, the person in question no longer pops up in Facebook's friend suggestions (that would be awkward). The person's profile also automatically becomes private to everyone but confirmed friends, so vandals can't come by and trash the place without anyone there to clean up. Contact information also gets removed, and no one can log into the account in the future.
In order to do this, family or friends must fill out Facebook's special contact form and include proof of death (usually a link to an obituary or a news article). Unlike other social networks, Facebook actually allows nonfamily to perform this task, which is helpful in a situation where the deceased user's friends are more Internet-savvy than the family. As you can probably tell from our tone in this section, we're fans of Facebook's policy.
MySpace
MySpace also has a deceased user policy, but let's just say it's less "robust" than Facebook's. It's more of a standard policy that doesn't put as much thought into issues like privacy and searches, but it's there nonetheless.
In the case of a MySpace profile, a next of kin must contact MySpace via e-mail with proof of death and the user's MySpace ID number (not username).
"Unfortunately, we can't let you access, edit, or delete any of the content or settings on the user's profile yourself, but we'll be sure to review and remove any content you find objectionable," reads MySpace's policy.
Such a policy has problems, starting with the next-of-kin requirement. In my single, only-child friend's case, his only next-of-kin were his retired parents, and they don't use the Internet. As a concerned friend, I'm simply not going to call them up to have them e-mail a copy of my friend's death certificate to some unknown social network. It would be easier if I or one of his coworkers could do this instead; because we can't, we're defaulting on the side of tact and simply leaving his profile as-is.
Whoever manages to show proof of death won't be able to access or edit the profile. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if MySpace automatically made parts of the profile private like Facebook does; since it doesn't, the next best policy would allow next of kin to remove things like phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
This part of the policy is especially strange because of MySpace's admission right on the policy page that anyone who has access to the deceased user's e-mail account can use the "Forgot Password" link to retrieve it and then do whatever they want.
MySpace did not respond to our requests for further explanation of this policy.
Blogger, Gmail, Buzz, and anything else tied to a Google account
One benefit to having all of Google's services tied into the same Google account is that the company's policies and procedures generally cover everything. Such is the case when a user passes away; Google told Ars that it's all handled centrally and concerned parties just need to go through the steps once in order to gain access to everything.
Here's the good news: Google says it won't delete the blog, Buzzes, or anything at all of the deceased user until someone asks it to.
"We just leave it as is unless someone was able to access it," a Google spokesperson told Ars. This means that, without any intervention, a friend or family member's posts will remain online indefinitely.
If you don't want them to remain, or if you need access to the person's Gmail account for whatever reason, you must follow the steps outlined in Google's Help section. Again, you must be a lawful representative of the deceased (which means friends are out) and be able to provide proof of that authority. You must also include proof of death and a full e-mail header from the person in question to show that the person knew and was in contact with you.
After that, Google needs 30 days to process the documents, but notes that a "valid third party court order or other appropriate legal process" will get you access sooner.
In this case, we can understand why Google would have strict guidelines on who can access the account—this isn't just someone's social networking profile, it's access to his or her e-mail, contacts, and everything else associated with a Google account.
Twitter
Last but not least is Twitter. We spent three weeks trying to get in touch with Twitter to find out if the company has a policy on handling deceased user accounts, but the company has not responded to our requests.
In lieu of any official response from Twitter, we'll engage in some informed speculation. It appears as if the company does not have any sort of published policy on this matter. We have heard from multiple users, however, that Twitter has just deleted the timelines of users who have passed, much to the chagrin of friends who would have liked that person's postings to be preserved.
We were unable to confirm whether this has actually happened, but our reports indicate it only took place when Twitter was made aware of a user's passing.
In other words, if Twitter doesn't know about it, it's likely the account will be kept around indefinitely. Twitter users abandon their accounts all the time—the person who has the @joel account last tweeted almost two full years ago, for example, and his account is still there. We have no reason to believe this would change for any other user who drops off the face of the earth (literally or figuratively), so for now, we'll have to settle for that.
Update (8/9/2010): Twitter now has a slightly more formal method posted in its Help Center for family members who want to either remove or archive tweets from a deceased user's account.A Secret Service officer who guarded Vice President Joe Biden's residence was arrested Monday for allegedly sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl he was taking care of.
Hector Reynaldo Cuellar, of Woodbridge, Va., is accused of assaulting his family member several times between August and October, according to a police report obtained by Fox News.
The police report does not mention Cuellar's employment, but Fox News reports that he is a uniformed division officer assigned to Biden's home in Washington, D.C. Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan told the station that he is "aware of the arrest" and that Cuellar was placed on administrative leave.
Donovan wouldn't release more information.
Cuellar faces charges of sexual battery and indecent liberties, according to WJLA. No court date has been set and Cuellar is being held without bond.A new species of dinosaur is so recently discovered it doesn't even have a name yet — so the fresh specimen from Alberta's Dinosaur Provincial Park is simply known as Hannah, for now.
The species is in the Ceratopsian family — think Cera for those of us who only know dinosaurs from The Land Before Time — and it potentially bridges the evolutionary gap between the Centrosaurus and the Styracosaurus.
A new species of dinosaur has been unearthed in Alberta's Dinosaur Provincial Park. University of Alberta paleontologist Scott Persons, the man who made the discovery, talks about finding the new species. 7:12
In fact, Hannah wouldn't be much different from either of those two previously-discovered species, except that its horns show a combination of characteristics from both.
There's still some work to be done, however, to confirm its distinct place in the evolutionary tree.
Scott Persons, a paleontologist at the University of Alberta, told The Calgary Eyeopener that it is by far the most exciting thing he's ever discovered.
"I'm incredibly thrilled, but discovering it in the field, it's a really slow burn," Persons said.
The discovery of the new species was made over the course of days while they extracted the animal's skull last summer.
Hannah's skull was found in Dinosaur Provincial Park in the summer of 2015. This summer they returned to see what other parts of her body they could dig up. (Amanda Kelley)
The primary purpose of a dinosaur's horns were defence, Persons explained, but there was also a social aspect to them.
Evolution would have continued to change the horns of dinosaurs over time, and that's likely what is being seen here with Hannah.
Where she was found in the earth's surface is important, because the Centrosaurus has been found in deeper layers of earth, while the Styracosaurus has been found in higher strata.
Hannah was found in between the two, which shows it likely bridges an evolutionary gap between the two species.
Hannah's skull was discovered in 2015, and in June this year the team returned to see what remained of her skeleton to be unearthed.
As it turns out, Hannah's skeleton is nearly complete. The team will return again next summer to complete the dig.
For every hour spent in the field, another 10 hours will be spent in the lab doing analysis, Persons said. That will be where they confirm and document this new species.
"There's still a lot of the work that needs to be done, even though we've gotten a lot of the bones up and out of the field, we still have to do a lot of the very close cleaning and preparation work back at the laboratory," Persons said.
"Once that's done, we can take the detailed measurements and really start to say for sure what's going on."
Hannah was found horn first, the tip peeking out of the dirt in Alberta's Badlands.
Since Persons was the one to find her, he was the one who earned the right to give her the nickname Hannah, inspired by his beloved dog, who sometimes helps on digs, Persons said.phyphor Senior Guild Member
Join Date: 21st Oct, 2005 Location: London, England Posts: 1,255
Possible United Kingdom (of Loathing) non-con (Saturday September 21st)
Is there any interest in meeting up somewhere on the Saturday?
We'd meet up, have a few drinks, maybe play a few games (I've recently got Dungeon Roll and Heroes of Metro City through Kickstarter which I was going to take with me over to Az) and generally socialise as best we can whilst being several thousand miles away from the real party.
I may even be able to walk (albeit not very far)!
It's a bit late notice, and usually non-con events don't tend to happen because if people could go they'd be at Con, so I'm not booking anywhere just yet.
One advantage of it being in the UK is that is slightly quicker and cheaper for our European brethren to visit and so they might be able to make it over whereas spending 10+ hours on a flight for a day visit to the US would be out of the question.
If this does happen I'd like someone at Con-proper to have a laptop so we can Skype in (albeit briefly) at 9pm UK time/1pm Az time and have a shared drink to absent friends and family.
Name: KoLon-non-Con
When: September 21st from 2pm
Where: The Montago Pyke, London, Charing Cross road
http://www.jdwetherspoon.co.uk/home/...e-montagu-pyke
Why: Because some people can't get to Arizona but can get to London
Who: phyphor + some people, maybe YOU? (table booked for 10 people - should be able to change it up or down as necessary) For various reasons various people on the British side of the pond are not able to make it to KoL Con this year.Is there any interest in meeting up somewhere on the Saturday?We'd meet up, have a few drinks, maybe play a few games (I've recently got Dungeon Roll and Heroes of Metro City through Kickstarter which I was going to take with me over to Az) and generally socialise as best we can whilst being several thousand miles away from the real party.I may even be able to walk (albeit not very far)!It's a bit late notice, and usually non-con events don't tend to happen because if people could go they'd be at Con, so I'm not booking anywhere just yet.One advantage of it being in the UK is that is slightly quicker and cheaper for our European brethren to visit and so they might be able to make it over whereas spending 10+ hours on a flight for a day visit to the US would be out of the question.If this does happen I'd like someone at Con-proper to have a laptop so we can Skype in (albeit briefly) at 9pm UK time/1pm Az time and have a shared drink to absent friends and family.Name: KoLon-non-ConWhen: September 21st from 2pmWhere: The Montago Pyke, London, Charing Cross roadWhy: Because some people can't get to Arizona but can get to LondonWho: phyphor + some people, maybe YOU? (table booked for 10 people - should be able to change it up or down as necessary) Last edited by phyphor; Wed, Sep 18th, 2013 at 01:36 PM.Artwork // Klaus, Shaelyn, Lore, Etc - © Kristopher P. Love
The banner of House Lysenia dates its origins back to the end of the Shadow Era, when Lady Lysenia's children adopted her name as their family title, at the moving suggestion of an Ailyrenain emissary who respectfully attended their mother's funeral. The emissary's suggestion was at the behest of Phoenix King, Rainier the Reborn, who saw House Lysenia's birth as instrumental to show his recovering kingdom's support in maintaining a strong alliance with the realms of mankind in the west. As such, House Lysenia was much like an early diplomatic bridge for the two sentient races.Though many nelri were at first appalled by the notion of a human family in control of a province in their eastern lands, few forgot the great deeds of Lady Lysenia, or that of her unforgettable guardian and future husband, Renvar Shadowsbane. It was Lysenia who, in her youth, did not abandon the nelri in an age when humankind had long resented them for the acts of their former Phoenix King, Meiliketh the Mad. After the Mad King's demise, war crimes exploded across Ailyrenai as human soldiers loyal to the Gaelferan Empire seized control, raping and pillaging with bitter, restless hearts. There were few instances of mercy from their battle-hardened armies as nelri civilians became accustomed to violent acts and public humiliation, knowing it was their fate to bear.That was until worse things arose amidst the chaos, twisted and evil. Lysenia was caught up in the middle of it as she accompanied her first husband, once a pious Gaelferan noble, who was at the time leading a small army further into the heart of the nelri kingdom as aid to a much larger war host making its way towards claiming Ailyrenai's capital, Aelorethar. A prize they would fail to reach.Lysenia was spared from the awakened thirsts of shadowy beasts that slew her husband and two thirds of his men before they were slain themselves. It was Renvar, once a nameless soldier loyal to Lysenia's husband, who took charge of the survivors and obeyed his lord's dying wish to take his wife and the rest of their men back across the River Tear to escape what were impossible risks. The return was treacherous as they witnessed firsthand the true fall of the nelri kingdom at the hands of creatures spawned from darkness itself. There was nary a life in the east not affected by them and in desperation no human refused the aid of their former enemies, the nelri, who fought side by side with them as they struggled to survive in lands no longer safe for anyone or anything.Lysenia's heart went out to the many innocent lost to it. As they made their way closer to the Tear, she began questioning her worth, her reasons to live, before a day moved her to speak with a man she knew shared similar feelings to her. In the end she begged him not to abandon the nelri in their direst hour for sake of only her health. She wanted to stay and do all they could to help.Renvar honoured her wish, and the rest is history.It was thanks to him, Lysenia and the last of her able-bodied soldiers under their command that some semblance of order remained in the east and stood as a beacon of hope for those trying to escape the chaos. It was at an abandoned nelri temple citadel on the edge of the Yaeauri Wilds that they made their home and within mere months the occupied citadel then known as the Forthright was one of the last remaining strongholds in the east that stood defiant with the aid of thankful refugees who vowed to stay there and help Lysenia's cause. Few places were as welcoming to wary travellers as it slowly became the heart of a city that formed new walls around it and expanded its influence to the point that new villages were appointed with the guidance of Lysenia and Renvar, who became an inseparable married couple and, with the historic birth of the Shadowsbane Order there as well, there was no arguing that Lysenia was perhaps one of the most remarkable women of her time. Yet her deeds were still overshadowed by Renvar himself, who became a great hero and, with the aid of his inspired shadowsbane brethren, helped return Eastern Elshanae to the nelri.Centuries have passed since then and, while much has changed, House Lysenia still holds lordship over the fertile province of Mynes, which shares its borders with the provinces of Ky, Euris and Tihr. Mynes' capital is Suno, which once housed the unofficial headquarters of the Shadowsbane Order, before it was relocated in secret to the Savares Kingdom. It still remains a holy site to its followers, however, and according to some historians most, if not all, end up visiting it once in their lives to travel to the heart of the city where the Forthright Citadel still exists towering above the cityscape.While there are several family lines who can trace back their lineage to Lysenia and Renvar's blood, only one lord is ever appointed to reign over Mynes Province and call The Forthright their home, while their younger siblings usually inherit some form of wealth but no entitlement to land, unless they acquire it through other legal means. This has lead to the province establishing a monarchy of sorts and to this end a High Lord, according to tradition, can attain the rights of a prince if they marry into a king's ruling family. Such are the politics surrounding the surviving bloodlines of Lysenia and Renvar as their ancestral parents, and it is known that Lysenia herself was a princess from the northlands as a descendant of Raleigh King Rurik the Maker. So to say that House Lysenia's nobility is enriched by a strong bloodline since before its conception could be deemed an understatement. Admittedly, some even feel it holds more right to certain thrones than their current rulers...Whether this is the reason why the noble houses of Raleigh and Lysenia have been close allies for the last three hundred years is another thing, although there are rumours that their friendship has strained over the years. It began after the disappearance of High Lord Ragnar Raleigh and most of his family's military strength in the Forbidden North on some doomed, secret expeditionary crusade. It is one of the reasons Klaus has kept an eye on the north with his secret web of spies. But even then there is only so much a spy can learn without disturbing the dens of wolves...~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I've never really drawn a house emblem before... That said, though, it might be a safe bet to expect to see Klaus and Shae drawn again soonish... (Like maybe for my next work!)Hope you enjoyed the lore, btw. Took me at least a day to work it out from my mind. Kinda got stuck on names, but I guess it did force me to flesh out my world more.Wendy’s brings fresh mozzarella to the menu with the nationwide launch of the Fresh Mozzarella Chicken Sandwich and Fresh Mozzarella Chicken Salad.
The Fresh Mozzarella Chicken Sandwich, as reported here by Chew Boom, was first spotted last summer at select US test locations.
The new limited-time chicken sandwich features fresh hand-cut mozzarella, grilled chicken breast filet, house-made balsamic diced tomatoes and creamy basil pesto, on a toasted brioche bun.
The new Fresh Mozzarella Chicken Salad is made with fresh hand-cut mozzarella, grilled chicken, lettuce, grape tomatoes, croutons and creamy basil pesto.
With an emphasis on freshness, Wendy’s is directing franchise owners to have their employees prepare fresh balsamic diced tomatoes twice daily, and discard at close.
Employees are also instructed to follow proper fresh mozzarella cutting procedures and to fill the salad blend even with the salad bowl rim.
Look for the Fresh Mozzarella Chicken Sandwich and Fresh Mozzarella Chicken Salad to start rolling out nationwide in April, however, some locations are already serving up the two new menu items.
Image – Wendy’s8.58am BST
Good morning and welcome to the Middle East live blog.
Here are today’s headlines:
Syria
• The Syrian National Coalition, the umbrella opposition group recognised by the west, has called on the UN security council to allow its inspectors in Cyprus to enter Syria to search for chemical weapons. “We have confirmed reports from a number of countries in the world that the Syrian regime used chemical weapons on a limited scale, but it is seriously preparing for repeat use on a large scale, and the world must act before a major disaster occurs, not afterwards,” the opposition said in a statement.
• Barack Obama has made his clearest threat yet of international action against Syria, if the US can confidently establish that Bashar al-Assad's government was responsible for the recent alleged use of chemical weapons in the country. However, speaking at the White House after days of ambiguous rhetoric from Washington, the president said that he did not yet believe there was sufficient evidence to trace the use of chemical weapons back to President Assad's government. Obama told reporters:
What we now have is evidence that chemical weapons have been used inside Syria. What we don't know is who used them. We don't have a chain of custody. Without evidence of what happened, how can I make a decision what to do? I have got to make sure I have got the facts. If we rush to judgment without hard evidence we will find ourselves in a position where we cannot mobilise the international community for what we have to do. It is important that we do this in a prudent way.
But he also hinted that any use of chemical weapons would be a “game-changer”. The New York Times reported he was considering arming the rebels. Targeted missile strikes and a no-fly zone are also possible options, according to the Associated Press.
• Five people have been killed in fighting across Syria so far this |
service members who were professional recruiters took advantage of the program too, pocketing in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars each. Investigators also say that “in many cases, high school guidance counselors and even principals with access to their students’ personal information took credit for recruiting students who they happened to know were joining the Army,” according to The New York Times. Although the program ended in 2012, this investigation will likely take years.
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
“Clearly, we’re talking about one of the largest criminal investigations in the history of the Army,” Senator Claire McCaskill, chair of the Financial and Contracting Oversight Committee, told USA Today.
In 2011, the Commission on Wartime Contracting determined that the total money lost through waste and fraud throughout the supply chain was "at least $31 billion, and possibly as much as $60 billion."
While this investigation is certainly impressive in size, and scope, and the potential cost of the crimes being examined (estimated at nearly $100 million), it’s not at all unprecedented. With regard to shocking scandals involving various branches of the military, it’s not even alone in the current news cycle. There are the queasy-making scandals, like widespread cheating on exams in Navy and Air Force programs that train men and women to handle nuclear reactors and launch intercontinental missiles, among other things. There are icky individual cases, like the head of a program to prevent sexual assault in the Air Force being arrested for sexual battery outside a strip club, and absurd cases, like the Navy commander who traded military secrets for prostitutes and Lady Gaga tickets.
Then, of course, there are the insidious scandals that actually drain the nation’s war chest, one greasy palm at a time. In 2011, an FBI-led task force against contract corruption in Afghanistan reported that the U.S. had spent over $770 billion on private contractors in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait since 2002. That includes money for both fighting and reconstruction. “With that much money at stake, fraud and corruption are inevitable,” reads a summary on the FBI website. And that grand total has certainly grown since then. As for how much money has been wasted through corruption, the FBI didn’t say. But also in 2011, the Commission on Wartime Contracting determined that the total money lost through waste and fraud throughout the supply chain was “at least $31 billion, and possibly as much as $60 billion.” The commission also warned that “as least as much additional waste may develop if host countries cannot or will not sustain U.S.-funded projects and programs after the United States hands them over or reduces its support.”
Joe Newman, director of communications at the Project on Government Oversight, a non-profit watchdog group, says that this type of corruption—if not on this scale—has been going on since long before President Eisenhower warned of the potential for undue influence of the military-industrial complex in 1961. Certainly, if money corrupts, there was quite a lot of it wrapped up in that complex since 2002. Newman says that it’s not the case that the culture of the military is itself corrupt. Rather, the inherent structure of the military means that when people high up in the chain of command aren’t held responsible for the crimes they commit, that message will quickly ripple down the ranks. The fact that over 200 of the 1,200 service members being investigated in the National Guard kickback scheme are officers, including two generals, is a dangerous one.
“The military by its very nature is a very top-down institution,” Newman says. “And it’s based on discipline, and it's based on integrity. That's thoroughly shaken by some of these scandals: if officers and generals and colonels are being implicated in some of these scandals, what effect does that have on the guys lower down? Does it become OK to steal something from the supply room, because the command structure up top has already set that tone?”
Speaking of “supply rooms,” one of the most valuable supplies that soldiers overseas can access is fuel, and capitalizing on access that can be a strong and dangerous temptation. Just last week, a former Army soldier was sentenced for her role in facilitating the theft of fuel from an Afghanistan base over several months in 2010. According to the Justice Department:
The essence of the scheme was that the conspirators would create fraudulent TMRs [transportation movement requests] that purported to authorize the transport of fuel from FOB Fenty to other military bases, even though no legitimate fuel transportation mission was required. After the trucks were filled with fuel, the fraudulent TMRs were used by the drivers of the fuel trucks at FOB Fenty’s departure checkpoint to justify the trucks’ departures from FOB Fenty. In truth, the fuel was simply stolen, and the conspirators would receive money from the trucking company that stole the fuel.
The stolen fuel was worth over $1.2 million. The soldier got sentenced to 87 months in jail. That particular theft occurred in 2010, but then two years later, different soldiers on the same base in Afghanistan also stole and then sold jet fuel on the black market.
"It seems like a victimless crime to folks, if you're just siphoning off a little bit for yourself,” says Newman, of these types of fuel thefts. “I can't speak for these people, but maybe you justify it in your mind, if you're a sergeant on a military base, and you know someone higher up in your chain of command has done worse.”
Higher up in the chain—much higher—Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, has condemned the “growing problem” of ethical scandals in the military. A Pentagon spokesman told reporters last week, “Secretary Hagel is not afraid to hold people accountable,” even “very senior people.”
Newman says he is heartened by Hagel’s stance, and agrees that holding senior officers accountable is a vital first step. As for more long-term solutions to cleaning up the culture, Newman offers: limiting the revolving door between military service and private contracting, more education early on in military training, and much stronger protections for whistleblowers who speak out when they see fraud and abuse of power.
"There are more good apples than bad apples,” Newman says, “but the few bad apples that we read about, what influence does that have?"0 Officer shot 14 times, killed hours after walking son to 1st day of school
HOMECROFT, Ind. - A photo shot last week by an Indiana police officer’s wife shows the tender moment in which Southport police Lt. Aaron Allan walked their 5-year-old son, hand in hand, to the bus stop for his first day of kindergarten.
Less than six hours later, Allan was dead, shot 14 times by a man trapped upside down in his vehicle following a crash. The 38-year-old Allan was a 20-year law enforcement veteran, serving his last six years with the Southport Police Department.
Southport police Chief Tom Vaughn told the Indianapolis Star that Allan, described by those who knew him as a “big Teddy bear” with a gift for community policing, asked to come into work late so he could experience that milestone with his son.
The Star reported that Allan responded to the scene of a crash around 2:30 p.m. Thursday in Homecroft, a small town just north of Southport. The driver and shooting suspect, Jason Brown, reportedly lost control of his speeding BMW and struck a median before going airborne and flipping the car into the front yard of a residence.
A 20-year-old passenger had exited the car and was standing on the driver’s side when Allan and Homecroft police Major C.T. Bowman arrived.
A probable cause affidavit made public Monday indicated that Bowman was talking to the passenger and witnesses as Allan crawled into the car from the passenger side to calm Brown down.
“The guy was hysterical,” Bowman told investigators, according to the Star. “Lt. Allan climbed into the car thinking that it was a personal injury accident, not thinking the guy is going to start shooting.”
TRENDING STORIES:
Allan was reassuring Brown, who was wedged into the car and hanging upside down by his seat belt, that help was on the way when he was shot, WRTV in Indianapolis reported. A witness standing outside the driver’s side of the BMW told police he saw Brown reach for something behind his back.
The witness said he saw a pistol just as someone on the scene shouted, “Gun!”
A second witness sitting in a vehicle nearby saw Brown fire multiple shots at Allan, even as Allan tried to crawl away, the affidavit said, according to WRTV. Allan sustained gunshot wounds to the abdomen, arms, legs, back and buttocks, the news station reported.
Allan was pronounced dead at Eskenazi Hospital, the same hospital where Brown remained Monday as he recovered from his own gunshot wounds.
Brown was shot by Bowman and an off-duty Johnson County deputy who had also responded to the crash scene to offer assistance. The extent of Brown’s injuries was not clear, though friends told Indianapolis news station WXIN that the tattoo artist was shot in the face.
His first court appearance is scheduled for Tuesday. WRTV reported that preliminary charges include murder and possession of a controlled substance.
IMPD believes this man, 28-year-old Jason Brown, is responsible for the death of Lt. Aaron Allan. He was arrested on suspicion of murder. pic.twitter.com/NE8fop2Mj3 — 93 WIBC Indianapolis (@93wibc) July 28, 2017
The drug charge stems from the discovery of more than a dozen small bags of suspected marijuana in his overturned vehicle, the news station reported.
Also seized after the shooting was the suspected murder weapon, a black semi-automatic Springfield XDM-9. The gun’s slide was locked back and it held an empty magazine with a 20-round capacity, WRTV reported.
Brown’s passenger, who was questioned and released without being charged, told investigators that Brown picked him up at an apartment complex shortly before the crash. After a stop at a gas station, Brown began to speed and dart through traffic, going around other vehicles, according to the passenger. The man told police he did not know why Brown started driving erratically.
Southport Police Chief Tom Vaughn described Allan as a hard worker who “responded to (Brown’s) crash with urgency to preserve life” before losing his own. The chief has set up a GoFundMe account to assist Allan’s widow, Stacy, and their two sons.
As of Monday afternoon, the crowdfunding site had raised more than $67,000 of its $100,000 goal.
>> Read more trending news
Stacy Allan released a statement on behalf of her family in which she thanked their community and people across the country for the “outpouring” of support since her husband’s slaying.
“Aaron, my husband, a family man and an amazing friend to so many, helped anyone in need. Aaron was my rock and we are all so heartbroken,” Stacy Allan wrote, according to WTHR-TV. “I will be forever grateful our Heavenly Father shared him with me and our boys, where we experienced such unconditional love. He was not only proud to wear the badge, he was a proud father and husband.
“There is no room in my heart for anger or hate, only peace knowing Aaron died doing what he loved,” she wrote. “Aaron was honored to serve with his brothers and sisters in blue.”
The widow asked for privacy as the family and department celebrate her husband’s life.
Allan’s funeral is scheduled for Saturday. It is open to the public.
Vaughn told the Star that Allan was his department’s sole full-time, paid officer. Allan joined the force as a volunteer reserve officer in 2011. At the time, he also served as a school resource officer in the Franklin Township schools.
In 2015, Allan was awarded the department’s inaugural Officer of the Year Award. He was hired as the city’s first full-time officer position in January.
Allan is also the first Southport police officer killed in the line of duty.
© 2019 Cox Media Group.Even by the standards of the traditionally harrowing back stories of rags-to-riches-to-rags prizefighters, the early years of the great light heavyweight, Matthew Saad Muhammad, are particularly heart-rending. He was 27 years old by the time he knew his birth name and recollections of his time on earth as Maxwell Antonio Loach remained hazy until the day he died this May.
He could not recall the death of his mother or the disappearance of his father, or the time he and and his elder brother spent living in poverty with their aunt in South Philadelphia. Presumably his sub-conscious made the executive decision that no good could come from a child carrying around memories from such a start to life.
What he does remember is running after his brother when he was around five years old. I say around because his date of birth is known to the nearest three months rather than the nearest minute like most of us born in the second half of the 20th century. His brother’s legs proved too long and they soon disappeared from view. Little Maxwell was left lost, alone and helpless beside the busy Benjamin Franklin Parkway, a six-lane stretch of road that slices through the heart of Philadelphia and a stone’s throw from the steps Sylvester Stallone would immortalise in the Rocky movies.
He would later learn that this was the plan. His aunt couldn’t cope with the extra mouths to feed and the law of last in, first out decreed that Maxwell had to go. Found sleeping on the steps of the Cathedral Basilica by police and frightened into a near catatonic state, the Catholic Social Services in the form of a Sister Bernadette were called and took him in. The nuns also named him: Matthew, meaning chosen one, and Franklin, after the Parkway. This appellation lasted longer than his original title, right through until a 1979 conversion to Islam.
Though thankfully lacking a comparable bite of tragedy, Álvaro López’s childhood is no less interesting. Born in a two-room hovel under a plaza de toros in Zacatecas, in north Mexico, he always presumed it would be duelling with Bos Taurus in the bullring, rather than his own species in the boxing ring, that would bring him fame and fortune.
With this in mind, 12-year-old Álvaro skipped school one Monday morning to enter the redondel and test himself against a beast that had been spared the estocada the day before when inclement weather cancelled that Sunday’s weekly fight to the death. Mercifully, the bull went easy on him and decided a short, sharp goring of the right shin would be sufficient to pierce any dangerous delusions of grandeur and send Álvarito out of the arena for good.
His parents then ratified the bovine’s judgement by moving to Stockton, California, and a relatively bull-free existence. They sent their only son to the local school but his English was limited and after six months of relentless teasing from classmates, Álvaro opted for a life driving farm machinery and picking fruit in surroundings straight out of a John Steinbeck novel.
At this point, almost 3,000 miles apart on opposite sides of the United States, neither boy had set foot in a boxing ring. But that was to change in 1968.
It was love that drew Álvaro to the game. His sweetheart’s father, Jack Cruz, was a local boxing promoter whose eyes lit up when he saw the long-armed, rangy-yet-robust physique of his future son-in-law. It was a win-win situation for Cruz. If the Mexican farm labourer turned out to be a decent boxer he would be set to make a few bucks. And if not, at least he’d get to see the boy attempting to relinquish the innocence from the apple of his eye get beaten up every other month.
Predictably, Matthew’s route into the dark trade was more to do with survival than love. Now living with adoptive parents, his daily commute to school included daily beatings from the 13th Street gangs that menaced South Philadelphia. Unable to beat them, Matthew joined them and began administering beatings of his own. Substance abuse and reform school inevitably followed and it was there he was encouraged to channel his aggression in the Jupiter Gym.
Temerarious styles meant neither man excelled in short amateur careers. Matthew lost four of his 29 bouts and Álvaro lost three of his 16. Both were cut from a cloth not best suited to the amateur game and their brief apprenticeships were served with an impatience that rendered futile any didactic intentions from managers or trainers. Indeed, in a 2011 interview, Álvaro laughed as he spoke of how his team tried to get him to work on jabbing and moving in and out of range. “You just want to go,” was how he described his mindset in the ring.
By the time Álvaro made his professional debut a few weeks before his 21st birthday, his style may not have changed, but his name had. Following a victory in front of a predominantly Native American audience, his father-in-law decided to play to that crowd and announced that the full-blooded Mexican was in fact of Indian origin. When pushed for more information on which tribe exactly, Cruz blurted out “Yaqui” and the moniker stuck.
Matthew Franklin was still Matthew Franklin when he first met Yaqui López in a 12-round contest for the NABF Light Heavyweight title in 1978. He already had three losses and two draws on his record but was in the middle of an 18-fight winning streak in which he would claim the WBC world title. Yaqui was even more familiar with the bitter taste of defeat, largely down to very tough matchmaking early in his career, and when Franklin stopped him at the end of the bloody 11th round, it was the eighth time he had lost out.
The Mexican had earned the American’s respect, however, and Matthew promised the defeated man a shot at the world title if he ever held it. True to his word, barely a year on from claiming the WBC strap in the 1979 fight of the year war with Marvin Johnson, the recently converted Matthew Saad Muhammad gave Yaqui his opportunity in McAfee, New Jersey. Once again it turned out to be a bit special.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Matthew Saad Muhammad enters the ring with his belt before his fight against Yaqui López. Photograph: Getty Images
It is not uncommon for boxing matches to abruptly change direction midway through the contest. What makes the about-turn in Muhammad v Yaqui II unique, however, is that the pivot on which the bout rotated 180 degrees was not the traditional flash-knockdown or flurry of mean activity from the eventual victor. In fact, throughout the watershed moment, a brutal eighth round in which a referee with a weaker stomach than Waldemar Schmidt may have called a halt to proceedings, the punishment being meted out to the eventual winner continued and even intensified to the point where it looked like his end was nigh. That these three minutes served as the launch pad for Muhammad’s victory simply beggars belief.
More than in any of his previous 58 bouts, Yaqui was adhering to a gameplan that demanded lateral movement and snapping out piston-like left jabs in order to leverage his height and reach advantage in a concerted effort to control the tempo of the night. But circumspection is a relative quality and even the most cautious of Mexican fighters tend to be as heedful of physical consequences as a suicidal lemming on a trip to the Cliffs of Moher. It is difficult to teach an old perro new tricks and when the leather of Muhammad’s gloves entered Yaqui’s nostrils, he reacted much like the Mexican bull had all those years ago when Álvarito taunted him with a red cape in Zacatecas: he looked to pierce skin and draw blood.
This he did as early as the second round, in which he had Muhammad already backing and covering up. He may not have won the third, fourth or fifth outright but he didn’t lose them, as his varied attack and a pace more akin to a welterweight contest kept the champion guessing throughout.
As they traded in the sixth, an uppercut from the gates of hell buzzed Muhammad and some complementary hooks to the body left the champion open-mouthed and hungry for air. A vicious, rising left hook to Yaqui’s jaw in the seventh did nothing to stop his momentum and he rose confidently early and prowled to the neutral corner for the beginning of the eighth.
Until this point in the contest, Yaqui had been giving a masterful display. He switched from head to body, brawled then danced, probed with multiple jabs then suddenly led with a bomb. His performance appeared to be slowly but surely building to a crescendo that Beethoven himself would have been proud to compose. And if this bout had been a piece of classical music, the eighth round would undoubtedly have an fff notation alongside it to signify fortississimo.
The champion started off well. He marched down Yaqui and at ringside they spoke of the famed Saad Muhammad second wind that had carried him away from danger and safely home so often in the past. Sanguine rivulets of blood flowed slightly swifter from cuts between and over the challenger’s eyes and helped render him flat-footed against the ropes and shipping punches for the first time that night.
From that unfavourable position, a minute and a half into a round he was losing, he unleashed a furious attack of around forty unanswered blows. There were rights and lefts that both Muhammad’s zygomatic arches would have nightmares about for years to come. The champ grinned but he was fooling no one. This was the most visceral theatre of visible psychomachy since his childhood scraps on 13th Street and few watching on were backing his body to triumph. Had in-play online betting been around, there wouldn’t have been enough zeros on the internet to offer appropriate odds on him retaining his belt.
Yet when Yaqui finally paused for breath, presumably confident that his opponent would do nothing more threatening than breathe heavily into his ear and hang on for a few seconds of respite before being put out of his misery, Muhammad immediately came back to life. If this was a movie we’d all be panning it for the unacceptable levels of implausibility.
But it is there, see for yourself. Yaqui threw a couple of stalling hooks to keep him honest, and was moving forward and landing a fizzing straight right as the bell called time on the greatest three minutes of 1980, but somehow the course of the narrative had been irrevocably removed from his gloved fists. Though it was Yaqui’s round and he was still up on all scorecards and yet to be truly troubled, simply by staying upright, Muhammad had wrestled the initiative and belief and momentum from the Mexican.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Matthew Saad Muhammad lands a punch on Yaqui Lopez. Photograph: The Ring Magazine/Getty Images
Yaqui didn’t win another round. As an offensive force he was spent bar some sporadic bursts that caught the observer’s eye more than his opponent’s attention. Every report you read will tell you he punched himself out: that it was physical exhaustion that cost him. But it was deeper than that. A psychological exhaustion cloaked him like a wet quilt and his soul drowned before his body followed into the depths. Muhammad’s ability to withstand 24 minutes of his most articulate violence broke his spirit. All that was left for the champ was to finish off the tiring flesh and bone that circled, at times totally innocuously, away from him in the remaining seven rounds.
In the end he only needed six, with the lack of a three-knockdown rule forcing the challenger to go down four times in the 14th before the referee had seen enough. Yaqui was as magnanimous in defeat as Muhammad was in victory as both men praised the other before the orphaned American took the opportunity to highlight an ongoing quest to discover his biological parents.
Yaqui went on to have a fifth and final crack at a world title but after coming up short one again he was left with the dubious honour of being regarded as the greatest light heavyweight never to be a world champion. He still lives in Stockton, where he has a gym and runs a program for at-risk kids with a history of gang involvement.
Muhammad successfully defended his title another four times before Dwight Muhammad Qawi stopped him in ten. He battled on for another 11 years but never reached the same levels again. Regardless, he had done more than enough to deserve the Hall of Fame spot he was awarded in 1998. He personally invited Yaqui to the inauguration.
Life after boxing proved tougher than anything Matthew faced in the ring and by middle age he was living in a homeless shelter in Philadelphia. True to form he battled through the darkest days. When he succumbed to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis six months ago he was working for a non-profit as an advocate for the homeless. Until the very end, he continued giving more than he ever took.
• This is an article from our Guardian Sport Network
• This article first appeared on The Balls of Wrath
• Follow The Balls of Wrath on TwitterNEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks fell on Wednesday, with the S&P 500 snapping a four-day streak of gains after the Federal Reserve said it had a weaker growth outlook for the economy, even as it held steady with its stimulus program for the time being.
Trading was volatile following the release of the statement, with the major U.S. stock indexes cutting losses to turn flat and dropping to session lows. Almost 70 percent of stocks on both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq declined, while all 10 S&P 500 sector indexes fell.
While it had been widely expected that the U.S. central bank wouldn’t announce any adjustments to its bond-buying program, the statement wasn’t enough to extend a rally that has driven both the Dow and the S&P 500 to repeated record highs, including in early trading on Wednesday.
“While there were essentially no changes between this statement and previous ones, it is clear that even this wasn’t as dovish as some investors were expecting, especially with the bull market getting a bit long in the tooth,” said Michael Mullaney, who oversees about $10.7 billion as chief investment officer of Fiduciary Trust Co in Boston.
While the Fed’s stimulus has kept a floor under stock prices this year, there have been signs that growth is slowing, including weak economic data and an earnings season marked by tepid revenue growth.
In trading following the market’s close, Expedia Inc (EXPE.O) surged 18.3 percent to $59.10 after reporting its results, while Facebook (FB.O) erased an after-hours gain of more than 15 percent to trade down 3 percent at $47.57 after comments during the earnings call.
Starbucks Corp (SBUX.O) shares fell 2.8 percent to $78.60 after the bell because the world’s biggest coffee chain gave a 2014 profit outlook that was below expectations.
The Dow Jones industrial average.DJI slipped 61.59 points, or 0.39 percent, to end at 15,618.76. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index.SPX dropped 8.64 points, or 0.49 percent, to finish at 1,763.31. The Nasdaq Composite Index.IXIC fell 21.72 points, or 0.55 percent, to close at 3,930.62.
The Dow industrials hit a record intraday high of 15,721 shortly after Wednesday’s opening bell, while the S&P 500 also reached a lifetime intraday high of 1,775.22 early in the session.
Many analysts expect the Fed to delay until at least March in easing the stimulus measures that have encouraged investors to buy riskier assets, like stocks, contributing to the S&P 500’s gain of more than 20 percent this year.
The central bank has held interest rates near zero since late 2008 and quadrupled the size of its balance sheet to more than $3.7 trillion through three rounds of bond buying.
Private-sector employers hired the fewest workers in six months in October, according to a report released on Wednesday, while the U.S. consumer price index showed benign inflation. Both indicators supported the Fed’s stimulus policy.
In the latest batch of earnings, General Motors Co (GM.N) rose 3.2 percent to $37.23 after the U.S. automaker reported stronger-than-expected quarterly profit because of strength in its core North American market and a smaller-than-anticipated loss in Europe.
On the downside, Yelp Inc (YELP.N) dropped 2.6 percent to $67.05 a day after it reported a wider third-quarter loss, while Western Union (WU.N) shares slid 12.4 percent to $16.85 after the company posted a steep drop in third-quarter earnings. <ID:L3N0II3TR>
“Earnings haven’t been amazing, but they’ve been steady and sustainable, which the market likes enough to help us reach all-time highs,” said Andres Garcia-Amaya, global market strategist at J.P. Morgan Funds in New York, which has $400 billion in assets under management.
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, October 25, 2013. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
“When the season ends and we focus on the macro again, that probably won’t be good for the market.”
Of the 313 companies in the S&P 500 that had reported earnings through Wednesday morning, 68.4 percent have topped Wall Street’s expectations, above both the 63 percent beat rate since 1994 and the 66 percent rate for the past four quarters, according to Thomson Reuters data.
Revenue performance has been mixed, however, with 53.7 percent of S&P 500 companies beating expectations, well below the 61 percent average since 2002, but slightly above the 49 percent rate for the last four quarters.A city in the sky, floating, suspended in the air, a true Eden you might say where everyone is happy, everyone has faith, and more importantly, everyone knows their savior, the prophet, the one who will save them all from the false shepherd who only wants to stray the flock from the truth and the certainty of their lives and bring chaos and destruction upon their perfect Eden. This Eden is nothing other than Columbia.
Bioshock Infinite is Irrational Games’ latest (and long overdue) installment in the highly regarded Bioshock series, however unlike Bioshock 2, Bioshock Infinite is mostly developed by the same team that brought us the first Bioshock, spearheaded by Ken Levine who brought us the clusterfuck of a storyline that was the first Bioshock.
Plot:
It’s 1912, you’re Booker Dewitt, a man with a simple mission, bring them the girl and wipe away the debt. On that note, Dewitt travels by sea to an island lighthouse by two seemingly off people, he goes in the lighthouse and continues to see messages from his employers all over the walls, “bring us the girl and wipe away the debt”, he then proceeds to enter a rocket silo which takes him into the skies, to Columbia. Dewitt goes into a church that has a statue of their prophet, Comstock, and proceeds to explore the church until he finds a priest and some other people standing around said priest, the priest immediately notices Dewitt and tells him that he should be baptized in order to enter the city of Columbia, after accepting baptism (and renouncing your ways of evil, you evil people, you) Dewitt enters Columbia and proceeds to go through the city. All around the city the people are very cheerful, nice folks that just want to live without trouble, having nice conversations with one another, except there seems to be something off, you start to notice weird things in the conversations if you loiter long enough, like a woman telling her husband that she was worried because she noticed a hint of an accent in their waiter’s voice, or the odd mention of colored people every now and then, or the complete lack of any black person for that matter anywhere you go. Dewitt keeps on moving until he sees in front of him a poster with a picture of the false shepherd’s hand with the letters AD engraved on it, and this is the sign the people of Columbia will know the false shepherd by, and surprise surprise, Dewitt looks at his hand, and sees the unmistakable AD scars. He then gets a telegram telling him not to pick number 77, Dewitt takes the telegram and proceeds on to the carnival, where he’s invited to pick a ball from a basket, each ball is numbered, and well, he picks number 77, just because. Once Dewitt picks the ball, the true nature of Columbia is revealed, you are asked to throw the ball at either an interracial couple or the presenter asking you to throw the ball. Before Dewitt is able to throw the ball, he is stopped by Columbia’s police after they notice the AD on his throwing hand and proceed to try and arrest him, after they’re taken care of, Dewitt begins his journey into Columbia of finding the girl, and try and take her back to New York where he can wipe away his debt.
Gameplay:
Bioshock Infinite incorporates some of the same mechanics as the first Bioshock, except for, you know, the sky bit. When you start out in the game all you have is a Vigor that you acquire during the carnival, Vigors are Bioshock Infinite’s Plasmids, if you’ve played the first Bioshock. That first Vigor allows you to convert enemies and turrets alike to fight for you for a short duration, or, and that’s a new thing for Bioshock, you can make a trap that will convert an enemy that walks through, which can be handy at times. After you kill the first officer during the carnival – in a very nicely gruesome manner I might add – you acquire his skyhook. The Skyhook is the melee weapon of Bioshock Infinite, along with giving you the invaluable ability to zip along sky lines and attach to freight hooks in order to get to higher places or just do some awesome sky executions, jump around through the area, gaze at the magnificence that is Columbia, or do awesome sky executions, did I mention the awesome sky executions? That’s not all what the Skyhook is good for though, aside from just hitting people closely, you can execute them when they are low on health, you get a nice bloody “cutscene” with the execution whenever you decide that they’ve outlived their usefulness as your mindless minions.
Onto the shooting mechanics, there is absolutely no shortage of weapons in Bioshock Infinite, througout Columbia you’ll find a plethora of weapon classes ranging from pistols to RPGs and even miniguns. Unlike the first Bioshock though, weapon upgrades are readily available if you have the silver eagles to purchase them, which makes upgrading weaponry less cumbersome. There are two classes of each weapon, however I won’t divulge more than that lest I spoil something.
The Vigors have been reworked from the first Bioshock, each Vigor has a primary and secondary firing method, primary is mainly just shooting at the enemy, and the secondary usually sets a trap for enemies that are unfortunate enough to pass by. While zapping enemies isn’t as fun in Bioshock Infinite as it was in Bioshock, setting a spark trap is always a good way to see a lot of enemies ensnared and in spasm from the shocks. Each vigor can be upgraded twice, however at a steeper cost than the weapon upgrades, while some upgrades offer higher damage, other upgrades either offer less salt usage, more hit chaining to nearby enemies, or in some cases, completely new abilities which makes upgrading Vigors exciting every time you do it. There is a total of 8 Vigors found throughout Columbia, 7 of them you will definitely find with only one that could be missed.
Throughout Columbia you’ll also find pieces of gear that you can equip, each piece of gear, or clothing, gives certain advantages, such as extra melee damage, incineration of melee targets, extra weapon damage while on skylines, and a good amount of other bonuses. These pieces of gear are scattered around Columbia is usually secret places, so a little bit of exploration will yield great benefits.
Dewitt himself can have his shield, health, or salt capacities upgraded via Infusions that are usually in secret places as well. Speaking of these secret areas, they’re usually either alternate paths or riddles written on walls, when you encounter the latter though you’ll need to look around for cypher books in order to access these hidden areas.
Throughout the game you’ll be playing with Elizabeth, and I can honestly say that Elizabeth is by far the best and most advantageous friendly AI that has been introduced in any game. What Elizabeth offers in terms of story enrichment is undeniable, taking aside the fact that the story more or less revolves around her, she offers commentaries on certain things you find throughout Columbia, she offers her opinions on the Comstock statues and the quotes written everywhere, and she genuinely makes you care about her. Elizabeth also offers lock picking abilities whenever you need them, she gives you salts, health and ammunition when you’re low during combat, and she tosses you the occasional silver eagle whenever she finds it. Elizabeth also has the ability to open tears in the world, you can bring back a turret, or a motorized patriot to fight alongside you, you can bring back weapons, health kits, salts, or even a wall for cover against bullets. There is no denying that Elizabeth makes Bioshock Infinite a lot more enjoyable than it already is, and I found myself bothered by the missions where she wasn’t there to help out, or give her insights.
Visuals:
Bioshock Infinite is jaw dropping to say the least, the first time you see Columbia you’re bound to have your mouth open in astonishment. The details in Columbia are sublime, the buildings in the sky, the clouds, everywhere you look you’ll find something to be amazed by. My only complaint with the visuals is the textures that are of very low resolution, you’ll find those in the form of flowers or fruits that can’t be picked up, while they don’t take away from the glorious sights throughout Columbia, they can be a little off putting. The game was running on my computer with everything set to the highest setting except for the dynamic shadows and it was running at a nice steady 60FPS with no frame drops that I noticed.
Audio:
The game is filled with that good ol’ 1910’s music, whenever you enter shops you’ll hear songs from that era that fit the world quite nicely. If you stand long enough beside some citizens you’ll hear their conversations which is a really nice touch. The weapons sound genuine, so do the Vigors, with every Vigor having sounds to incorporate what said Vigor does.
Replay-ability:
After the game is beat you unlock the 1999 mode, which is a hardcore-ish mode where eveything is a LOT harder. Bioshock Infinite also offers a lot of replay-ability in merit of |
at Rice; Wu Zhou, a research associate at Vanderbilt University and Wigner Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Xuebei Yang, a former research assistant at Rice, now at Agilent Technologies; Jingjiang Yu, a scientist at Agilent Technologies; and Juan-Carlos Idrobo, a research professor of physics at Vanderbilt and a guest scientist at Oak Ridge. Lou is an associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science. Ajayan is the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and of chemistry at Rice.
The work was supported by U.S. Army Research Office and U.S. Office of Naval Research Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative grants; the Nanoelectronics Research Corp; a U.S.-Japan Cooperative Research and Education in Terahertz grant; the Welch Foundation; the National Science Foundation; and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Shared Research Equipment User Program, sponsored by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences, U.S. Department of Energy.
-30-
Read the abstract at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/NNANO.2012.256
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews
Related Materials:
Lou Group: http://mems.rice.edu/~jlou/
Ajayan Group: http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~rv4/Ajayan/
Graphene and boron nitride lateral heterostructures for atomically thin circuitry: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v488/n7413/full/nature11408.html
Images for download:
http://news.rice.edu/files/2013/01/G-hBN-1-WEB.jpg
A photolithography process was used at Rice University to develop a patterned, one-atom-thick hybrid of graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). Graphene is a conductor and hBN is an insulator, so the 2-D material has unique electrical properties. (Credit: Zheng Liu/Rice University)
http://news.rice.edu/files/2013/01/G-hBN-2-WEB.jpg
A scanning transmission electron microscope image shows a razor-sharp transition between the hexagonal boron nitride domain at top left and graphene at bottom right in the 2-D hybrid material created at Rice University. (Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratories/Rice University)
http://news.rice.edu/files/2013/01/G-hBN-3-WEB.jpg
An atom-thick Rice Owl (scale bar equals 100 micrometers) was created to show the ability to make fine patterns in hybrid graphene/hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). In this image, the owl is hBN and the lighter material around it is graphene. The ability to pattern a conductor (graphene) and insulator (hBN) into a single layer may advance the ability to shrink electronic devices. (Credit: Zheng Liu/Rice University)
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 2 for “best value” among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to http://tinyurl.com/AboutRice.(Silva / Flickr)
Central Park's speed limit will fall from 25 to 20 mph. According to a DOT release, in addition to the lowering of the speed limit, "four key crossings across the park will receive substantial enhancements, including highly prominent “Pedestrian Crossing” warning signs at the intersections, advisory 10 MPH speed signs, and advance pedestrian crossing signs before each intersection."
Per the release, the four intersections are West Drive at Delacorte Theater (near W. 81st Street), West Drive at Sheep Meadow (near W. 68th Street), West Drive at Heckscher Ballfields Crossing (near E. 63rd Street), East Drive at Terrace Drive (near E. 72nd Street).
The news was first reported by A Walk In The Park.
Geoffrey Croft of NYC Park Advocates implies that the lowering of the speed limit is designed to slow bike traffic, after two pedestrians were killed by cyclists in Central Park this year; three others had their skulls fractured in their collisions with cyclists.
Jason Marshall, the cyclist who fatally struck Jill Tarlov near West 63rd and West Drive in September, denied that he was speeding at the time of the crash. Witnesses claim otherwise. In August, Irving Schacter, 75, was fatally struck on the loop near East 72nd Street by a 17-year-old cyclist. Neither has been charged.
The number of tickets the NYPD has issued to cyclists in Central Park this year has quadrupled compared to 2013. According to Croft, police have written 865 citations as of November 12the most common infractions are failure to yield to pedestrians (386), wearing two headphones (164), biking on pathways (117), and running red lights (94)compared to 212 over the same time period last year.
The Central Park Precinct has issued a total of 4,035 moving violations this year [PDF] as of the end of October, and only 177 of them were for speeding. Improper turning was the most common citation (923), followed by failing to yield to pedestrians (515).
A spokesman for the Mayor's Office did not return an email concerning the new speed limit.
Last month, Irving Schachter's wife, Hindy, wrote an editorial for the Daily News about street safety:Kellyanne Conway praised Donald Trump for showing restraint at the debate. | AP Photo Trump camp: ‘Donald Trump is guilty of answering the question asked’
Donald Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway praised her candidate for showing restraint at the tail end of Monday night’s debate when Hillary Clinton attacked his history of disrespectful and derogatory remarks about women.
“I have to say, certainly as a woman, I appreciated the restraint at the end. I am not sure I would have been able to exercise it myself, but restraint is a virtue and it’s a presidential virtue,” Conway told MSNBC’s Morning Joe Tuesday. “To tell Hillary Clinton after she accused him of being terrible with women, to tell Hillary Clinton ‘I was prepared to go rough tonight and I am not going to do it because your husband and daughter are here.’ That is going to grow in importance in the next couple of days in a moment of great temperance and restraint.”
Story Continued Below
With just minutes left in Monday night’s debate, Clinton managed to work in a line of attack against Trump that she has also used most-recently in a new campaign ad, hitting the Manhattan billionaire as “a man who has called women pigs, slobs and dogs.” After the debate, Trump told CNN that ““I was going to say something extremely rough to Hillary, to her family, and I said to myself, I can't do it,” indicating that he was uncomfortable leveling such an attack with Clinton’s husband and daughter in the audience.
Tuesday morning, Conway was happy to fill in the blanks for viewers wondering what exactly Trump’s attack might have been.
“I think he could have said what was on millions of Americans’ minds, no doubt, that are we going to relitigate who’s been good to women and who hasn't?” Conway said. “They’re taking a couple comments he made over any number of years as a private citizen, versus where he could have gone, and I think we all can finish the sentence. People did last night, they finished the sentence, they said, you know, maybe he was going to talk about Bill Clinton's record with women, but he decided not to.”
Overall, Conway said Clinton failed to deliver a “knockout punch” that would have forced Trump into a major error. Instead, Trump’s campaign manager said the former secretary of state came off as rehearsed and determined to squeeze her talking points into the conversation, regardless of how pertinent they were to the questions of moderator Lester Holt.
“Donald Trump is guilty of answering the question asked, and I thought Hillary Clinton last night wanted to make sure that no matter what was asked and what was answered, she was going to repeat back to us everything that she had learned in the last week or two weeks, and that’s fine,” Conway said.
“I don't think Hillary Clinton did a thing last night. If somebody can correct me, what was the big takeaway moment where she offers this huge vision for economic growth and an end to wage stagnation,” she added. “So I didn't hear any big moment for her where she convinced the 70 percent of Americans who want change, who want a different direction, that she's their gal.”The authors argue that given the uncertainties in the current evidence, the risk of psychological harm and the impacts of applying one-size-fits-all diagnostic criteria to an-often wide-ranging set of presenting symptoms, it is important not to rush into diagnosing women as having a lifelong condition with unknown benefit.
Furthermore, without clear data, the scientists say it may be better to treat those at risk of overdiagnosis symptomatically, such as adolescents, young women and those with the milder characteristics or phenotypes, rather than on the basis of a definition that has inadvertently led to likely over-diagnosis, overtreatment and harm.
Changing definitions
Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) happens when a woman's ovaries or adrenal glands produce more male hormones than normal. PCOS is the most commonly diagnosed endocrine disorder in reproductive aged women, and is associated with an increased risk of diabetes, metabolic syndrome, heart disease, high blood pressure, and poorer psychological wellbeing.
It is considered a lifelong condition that has no cure, and includes a wide range of symptoms, such as irregular periods, polycystic appearing ovaries, hirsutism (excess hair) and acne.
First described in 1935, The National Institutes of Health (NIH) established two diagnostic criteria for PCOS in 1990. In 2003, at a meeting of experts in Rotterdam, sonographic presence of polycystic ovaries was added to the original NIH criteria. This change contributed to an increase in prevalence from about five percent to as many as 21 percent of women of reproductive age.
In 2006, experts recommended that clinical or biochemical evidence of hyperandrogenism was essential for the diagnosis to be made, as “the non-hyperandrogenic phenotypes do not have the same associated risks of long-term implications that are evident in the hyperandrogenic phenotypes.”
Problems of overdiagnosis
Symptoms tend to first appear during adolescence, and because the syndrome is linked toglucose intolerance and increased risk of type 2 diabetes, early diagnosis may help reduce long-term health issues, experts say.
But diagnosing PCOS in adolescence is challenging, according to Tessa Copp of the University of Sydney who is the leading author on the BMJ article.In documentary filmmaking, truth is almost always filled with lies.
It’s just the nature of the form, really—of any filmmaking at all, for that matter. Even a home video recording, if you’ve ever made or watched or starred in one, is marred by manipulation: Whether you’re aware you’re being “watched” or not, your truth is a sort of surreal quilt of camera placement, cuts and atmosphere, totally mitigated by the lens and then, further down the food chain, the ultimate observer. If you know you’re being watched, you act accordingly; if you don’t, the recording may carry a subtle tone of voyeurism, of intrusiveness—the feeling that something isn’t quite right.
And yet, from direct cinema to Dogme 95, truth has always been an idealistic goal for many filmmakers, and not necessarily the purity of it, but the translation of its most deeply held essentials. Arguably, documentary filmmaking has always been at the forefront of that aim, though during much of its primordial beginnings—especially throughout the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s—documentary filmmakers trolled truth as if it was yet another stuffy branch of bourgeois power.
In Land Without Bread (1933), Luis Buñuel parodied the white guilt of popular travelogue docs of the time, pointing out that sadness and economical devastation existed in Spain itself—no need to travel to some faraway land. In Nanook of the North (1922), the life of an Inuit clan was notoriously messed with. And Man with a Movie Camera (1929) pretty much just made a bunch of shit up. Their goals weren’t to leave truth unfondled, but to say that an unfondled truth is an unexplored one: shallow and meaningless.
Once Jean Rouche, Frederick Wiseman, D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysles, however, pioneered and then defined throughout the 1950s and ’60s what came to be known as cinéma vérité, documentary filmmaking shouldered the burden of truth, resolving to allow life to operate on its own, brushed only briefly by the manipulative fingers of the filmmaker. This was coupled with advances in filmmaking technology, notably that equipment became lighter, and more mobile. In turn, crews shrank, and coverage became paramount. That Nick Broomfield’s films are filmed with a minute crew on minute budgets, or that Oscar-winning Searching for Sugar Man (2012) was captured partly on an iPhone camera, means that today, as it is with most art, anyone can be a documentary filmmaker.
Which isn’t a bad thing. Because truth belongs to the people, by definition—it is ours to shape and hone and mold into something that enriches each of our lives and each of our worldviews however we see fit. That the following list leans heavily on films released in the past five years isn’t a coincidence, nor is it a factor of some shortsighted list-making. Instead, it points directly to our increased capacity to capture, reproduce and respect truth. If anything, we’re coming full circle.
Will the truth set you free? Probably not, but we believe the following 100 documentaries are the all-time greatest attempts to find out.
100. Deep Water
Directors: Jerry Rothwell, Louise Osmond
Year: 2006
Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell’s 2006 documentary Deep Water feels like an homage: to sailing, to the sea, to adventure, to vindaloo paste, but mostly to the unknown. In it, Osmond and Rothwell, with narrative help from friends and then—sure—Tilda Swinton, chronicle the 1968 round-the-world Sunday Times Golden Globe yacht race, wherein nine of the world’s best sailors, plus one large-hearted electronics engineer named Donald Crowhurst—pretty much the definition of a “weekend sailor”—set out to circumnavigate the globe. They started in the UK, went south and around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, around Cape Horn, and then back across the Atlantic to complete the loop. It was supposed to take about nine months. Instead, Crowhurst’s story found incomprehensible tragedy—and weirdness.
While Deep Water often trumps melodramatic musical cues and interstitial vignettes even Errol Morris would call cheesy, pushing the narrative into heartrending territory the story itself could easily attain on its own, long passages of screen time are devoted, just as simply, to staring at the sea. Like Herzog’s seemingly interminable shots of whitewater on the Amazon in Aguirre, the viewer is expected to hold her gaze. It’s a hypnotic sight; it’s also simultaneously overwhelming and calm, vicious and passive, loud and susurrate to the point of silence. In that middle ground, between poles (or, rather, where two ends meet, at both the end and the beginning), there is the terror of the unknown. There is this ocean and that ocean and thousands of miles of incomprehensible vista. —Dom Sinacola
99. Low and Clear
Directors: Kahlil Hudson, Tyler Hughen
Year: 2012
Reading the description of Kahlil Hudson and Tyler Hughen’s remarkable film—two friends who are world-class fishermen, half a country apart, take a trip to British Columbia to fly fish and reconnect—you’d think that you’re in for a slow, meditative, deeply felt journey with beautiful scenery so bounteous you’re bound to take it for granted. It is all of that: meditative and deeply felt and beautiful—but it’s anything but slow. Having two fascinating, outspoken and often at-odds subjects helps, as does the deft and slightly mischievous touch of editor Alex Jablonski. But most of all, Hudson and Hughen seem determined not to settle for a tone poem. They want to tell something thrilling—and what they come up with is up to the task, a mesmerizing feast for the senses. —Michael Dunaway
98. Spellbound
Director: Jeffrey Blitz
Year: 2002
The oh gawrsh factor is through the roof in this crowd-pleasing look at the efforts of eight youngsters, in 8th grade and under, to win the 1999 Scripps National Spelling Bee. It’s also a surprisingly suspenseful watch, thanks to some smart editing and the bright-eyed charisma of these kids—among some 250 hopefuls—cheered on by parents, teachers and audiences at these de facto intellectual Olympics. A quintessentially “American” portrait, Jeffrey Blitz’s Oscar-nominated film touches on issues of race, class and ethnic background in delving into each competitor’s journey to the event in Washington D.C., but Spellbound gets a pass for its many tropes because they’re, well, true—that, and its up-with-nerds charm. —Amanda Schurr
97. Dig!
Director: Ondi Timoner
Year: 2004
Chronicling seven years in the turbulent career of the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, Dig! reveals the messy details of not only what it meant to rise in the ’90s indie rock scene, but what it took to navigate the complicated friendships and ambitions that formed it. The film goes beyond footage of sex and drugs to tell the urgent story of two bands seeking fame and radical musical revolution—but mostly fame. At the most, it’s a test of endurance: To what extent are you willing to tolerate the excessively putrid behavior of people who may (or may not) be making brilliant art? Those on the fence with Kanye, take note. —Caroline Klibanoff
96. Murderball
Directors: Henry Alex Rubin, Dana Adam Shapiro
Year: 2005
As a documentary that sets out to shatter our assumptions about quadriplegics, Murderball tries admirably to paint its characters as regular guys. Except these aren’t; they’re testosterone-fueled jocks proud of their aggressive playing and even prouder of their dicks (which still function, they’re quick to point out, when their legs or arms don’t). These young men devote themselves to wheelchair rugby, which they aptly dubbed “murderball” before it gained enough popularity to earn corporate sponsorship and a place in the Paralympic Games. It’s a sport played by teams in armored wheelchairs, by guys who arguably have chips on their soldiers rolling around on an indoor court in order to knock each other sideways and incite a roar from the crowd. It has all the trappings of any other team sport, including hot-headed coaches, displays of bravado and nail-biting championship games. Yet, despite the adrenaline and dick-waving, the heart of the film is something more important than just a game: It’s watching these guys struggle to accept themselves. Each tough, competitive personality shelters a damaged but recovering self-image. —Robert Davis
95. Room 237
Director: Rodney Ascher
Year: 2013
There exists a rare species of obsessive cinephile: the hyper-fan who focuses on one film, mentally and emotionally ingesting it dozens, maybe hundreds, of times. Along a certain parallel, there is also a serious breed of conspiracy theorist, compulsive in his or her beliefs, taking things far beyond just watching Doomsday Preppers for fun. Push these two types inextricably together, you get Room 237, the confounding, eye-opening and often hilarious documentary about individuals whose over-wired brains are devoted to one cinematic masterpiece, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
The most outlandish—and perplexing—theories in Room 237 posit The Shining either as a vehicle meant to comment on dark, oppressive periods in history, or as a massive, cryptic revelation. As a cinema sociologist, director Rodney Ascher acts as non-participant observer, letting his Room 237 subjects sell themselves, leaving us to jump on, laugh or stare in amazement. As a documentary filmmaker, Ascher voraciously digs into the stories, freezing frames from the 1980 classic, adding explanatory graphics and complex maps of the hotel’s physical layout. As the subjects analyze Kubrick, Ascher analyzes their analyses, which in turn inspires an analysis of Room 237 itself, making for a documentary film that twists in on its own guts so thoroughly one can’t help but feel similarly obsessed by film’s end. —Norm Schrager
94. L’amour Fou
Director: Pierre Thoretton
Year: 2010
At first, this exceedingly quiet film seems to offer little in the way of insight: through the laconic accounts of long-time partner Pierre Bergé, the story of fashion industry icon Yves Saint Laurent is laid out in strikingly economical detail. He gained notoriety, and with it critical respect, as he lost much of a perspective on the bounds of his wealth and the impenetrability of his depression. In fact, upon learning Laurent had only a few weeks to live due to brain cancer, Bergé elected to keep the information from his partner—and husband, married only a few days before Laurent’s death—because he knew the designer wouldn’t be able to functionally deal with the news. In these moments, L’amour fou plays out like a touching, though slight, testament to a great artist and the unyielding love some people felt for him. It’s probably no surprise that as his profile rose, Laurent began to pull away, both physically and mentally, from the person with whom he chose to spend his life.
Yet, the film’s success lies in the way it thoughtfully dwells over every insignificant piece of rare art or expensive accoutrement amassed by the couple over their lifetimes, so much so that (especially with Laurent’s presence removed) Bergé’s home looks little more than a stuffy, poorly organized museum—fastidious and far from homely. And then, when Bergé endeavors to sell all of it on auction, the sense of loss grows to tenuous levels: Is he trying to find closure, or instead proving that everything they accumulated did nothing to make their lives any better, or any worse, when viewed in retrospect? Bergé, the inheritor of an astounding amount of money due to the auction (which Thoretton documents plainly, watching Bergé as he calmly hears one astronomical closing bid after another), finds nothing in the end but whatever security all that wealth provides … which, as we watch Bergé blankly stare out of a dreary window, Come Aguiar’s perfectly nuanced score accompanying his silence, feels like even more of nothing at all. —D.S.
93. Koko, the Talking Gorilla (Koko, le gorille qui parl)
Director: Barbet Schroeder
Year: 1978
Koko, the Talking Gorilla uses the story of Koko, a gorilla who is able to communicate through sign language, to ask: “What rights should animals have?” As part of that project, director Barbet Schroeder plays with various levels of conundrum: money-focused interests want to put Koko on display while Koko’s trainer, Penny Patterson, argues that Koko should have the same rights afforded human children, because Koko demonstrates the same capacities as a typical young child. To his credit, Schroeder doesn’t shirk the obvious fact that the whole reason any of us are watching a documentary about a talking gorilla is right there in the title: it’s a talking gorilla, meaning we too are implicated in the exploitation of Koko’s humanity. Schroeder also chooses to linger on Patterson’s confessionals and her interactions with Koko, suggesting that Patterson’s expectations may be far too ambitious, and that her faith in Koko’s humanity might say more about Patterson herself than Koko, the latter of whom spends most of the film studiously ignoring the camera.
Watching it now, I’m struck by another way to view the film. Because this was released the same year as the English translation of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, it’s also possible to see the film as an exploration of how scientists were dealing with emerging anxieties over the postmodern assertion that “nurture” was as or more important than “nature.” In that sense, Koko is merely a prop for a broader discussion about what the “self” is, sure, but it grants the film an intellectual and cultural context that makes it more than just an early missive in the debate over animal rights. —Mark Abraham
92. The Hellstrom Chronicle
Directors: Walon Green, Ed Spiegel
Year: 1971
When Dr. Nils Hellstrom (played by a flamboyantly serious Lawrence Pressman) says that The Hellstrom Chronicle will convince us of our inherent folly in assuming we will forever be Earth’s dominant species, we balk—because why wouldn’t we? His statement seems laughable at best, and evidence of his mental instability at worse. Yet, in proving that the Kingdom of Insects will eventually dominate the globe due to a brilliant combination of groupthink, corporeal efficiency and sheer attrition, the film is a convincing case for, at the very least, respecting the lives of those creatures we habitually take for granted. Filmed in sumptuous close-up, timelapse and nearly suffocating intimacy with worlds that, typically unavailable to us, feel completely alien, The Hellstrom Chronicle gleefully farts all over stuffy nature documentaries and sci-fi B-movies and cheap-o public access diatribes in order to come up with a viewing experience that is awful, hilarious and terrifying all at once. —D.S.
91. Biggie & Tupac
Director: Nick Broomfield
Year: 2002
From its very first moments, Biggie & Tupac—a sort of truther’s glimpse into the murders of rappers Notorious BIG and 2Pac—is an exceptionally strange film. Director and narrator Nick Broomfield speaks in a clipped cadence, as if English isn’t his first language, and Earth isn’t his home planet. That he is somehow able to waddle his way into the most exclusive (and sometimes terrifying) situations is nearly incomprehensible, until one realizes that, to some extent, all his weirdness probably makes him seem so non-threatening that the folks who spill deeply incriminating confessions probably never figure his footage will ever see the light of day. And yet, Biggie & Tupac is endlessly compelling, far from an actually competent procedural but still ringing with enough sincerity that, buried beneath Broomfield’s weirdness and his very dubious journalistic intentions, there must be something true he’s tapping into. I’ve heard Broomfield referred to, among other epithets, as a “bottom-feeding creep,” and it’s not a stretch to see how his methods and results could be construed as the work of such. Yet, the access the man gets … when it comes to documentary film, do the ends justify the means? Because: the last 10 minutes of the film alone are worth the journey, in which an interview with Suge Knight (whom the film pretty clearly portrays as the orchestrator of both murders) reveals unnerving opinions on socioeconomic and racial realities. —D.S.
90. Fambul Tok
Director: Sara Terry
Year: 2011
In this incredible documentary, people of the African nation of Sierra Leone practice an ancient ritual of family talk called Fambul Tok. These are citizens whose lives were horrifically changed by civil war, a time when family members became killers of their own families, when where torture and cruelty were everyday occurrences—a time when, even though the fighting had finished, rapists and murderers still walked among the victims and victims’ families with impunity. Yet, instead of imprisonment, perpetrators are reconciled with the citizenry through Fambul Tok. The film portrays a body of people who demonstrate a remarkable amount of tolerance and forgiveness as they gather to heal the emotional scars of everything they’ve endured. Sierra Leone, we learn, has a saying that sums it up best: “There is no place to throw away a bad child.” —Tim Basham
89. Bus 174
Director: Felipe Lacerda, Jose Padilha
Year: 2003
On July 12, 2000, a young homeless man named Sando took hostage a bus carrying 11 people on a busy Rio de Janeiro street. Because of the police force’s ineptitude, the area around the bus was never secured and TV reporters were able to place their cameras within just a few yards, broadcasting the entire ordeal live.
Bus 174 wants to be more than just an account of a hostage drama, exploring the class issues that eventually steered the young man toward crisis, as well as why the police had such a difficult time resolving it. Though the movie is more sympathetic to the gunman than some viewers might appreciate, look only to its opening helicopter shot, which tracks the bus’s normal route, highlights the enormous division in Rio. By situating a hostage drama within a larger socioeconomic setting, Bus 174 forces the audience to see the story as so much more than just a spectacle. —J. Robert Parks
88. Helvetica
Director: Gary Hustwit
Year: 2007
What’s in a font? Gary Hustwit examines the go-to typeface, now almost 60 years old, in this fascinating look at graphic design and its effects on sensory-overloaded consumers. Along with an inherent self-awareness comes a po-mo debate about aesthetics and global impact, from corporate and pop culture to the warfront. Lest we take for granted the efficiency of the images we encounter every waking minute, Helvetica probes the reasons for its namesake’s ubiquity, as well as the psychology and politics behind its multi-purpose appeal. Straightforward, agreeable and with few stylistic frills, the film—the first in a “design” trilogy including Objectified and Urbanized—echoes its subject. (Full disclosure: The above was originally written in Arial. Cough.) -A.S.
87. Brooklyn Castle
Director: Katie Dellamaggiore
Year: 2012
The premise behind Brooklyn Castle is the stuff of soppy, Oscar-baiting drama: At I.S. 138 in Brooklyn, New York, a competitive chess program has helped an extraordinary number of lower-income inner city students improve their standings in life. Which makes the triumphs and failures of these kids all the more biting. More than just a run through a delightful roster of vibrant young people, Brooklyn Castle is as much about the struggles of public schools with funding and the suffering extracurricular world of your typical student. It’s is a timely cry for help from a broken educational system. —Dan Schindel
86. How to Survive a Plague
Directors: David France
Year: 2012
A New York journalist who has covered the AIDS epidemic for 30 years, first-time filmmaker David France has assembled both a superbly researched record of the decade-long fight for a viable treatment protocol and an intimate portrait of the personalities leading the charge. Serendipitously, the arrival of HIV coincided with the availability of consumer-grade camcorders, and as a result, much of this developing story—from private conversations to public protests—was recorded for posterity. France combines this historic footage, courtesy of more than 30 videographers, with archival news reports and present-day interviews to craft a complete picture of the founding, mission, strategies, in-fighting, splintering, failures and successes of ACT UP, a Greenwich Village-based protest group that forced government agencies and health organizations to take AIDS seriously and invest in finding a cure.
Yet, by the time this story ends in 1996, with the development of a combination drug therapy that actually works, 8.2 million people had died. How to Survive is indeed a tale of survival, but the AIDS community didn’t get there without a fight—and a steep personal toll. —Annlee Ellingson
85. Born into Brothels
Directors: Zana Briski, Ross Kauffman
Year: 2004
Zana Briski was working as a documentary photographer in Calcutta when she began teaching photography to the children of prostitutes. The resulting film, Born into Brothels, though not without controversy, offered a glimpse into the difficult lives of the kids who were finally given a medium and a voice to document their lives. Briski’s continued Kids With Cameras project offers hope and a path for some of these children to find new opportunities outside the brothels, but there’s no candy-coating the difficulties facing them, even once they’ve headed off to school. If the documentary form has any sort of social-shaking effect, in Born into Brothels the form finds its most welcome, most populist purpose. —Josh Jackson
84. Waltz with Bashir
Director: Ari Folman
Year: 2008
As much about memory’s hallucinatory inventions as the facts of the 1982 massacre at a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut by the so-called Phalangist Christian militia, Ari Folman’s animated Waltz with Bashir begins with 26 barking dogs rushing through a city—from there, the emotion builds, relentlessly. Though Folman, a veteran Israeli documentarian, calls Bashir a documentary based on the interviews at its core (mostly with fellow soldiers), his cameras go places the handiest cinematographer could never venture: Beams of light bend between branches during a forest battle; and the dream images of men rising naked from the sea—while balls of fire fall from the sky—are just as real as the chasm-like blank spots in Folman’s mind as he reconstructs his mission into Lebanon. Powerful beyond a doubt, especially during a fourth-wall shattering climax, Waltz with Bashir borrows the visually manifest mind games of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly and dances them to the deep end. —Jesse Jarnow
83. Dark Days
Director: Marc Singer
Year: 2000
Marc Singer never intended to be a filmmaker when he befriended a few groups from New York’s homeless community; he never intended to move in for a few months with the denizens of the Freedom Tunnel when he became so close them. And he never intended a documentary, crewed by its own subjects, as anything more than a way to financially help those same subjects. Yet, despite Singer’s less-than-artistic origins, Dark Days rings with unmitigated sincerity—so immersive as to be practically claustrophobic, capturing in stark chiaroscuro a world suffocating beneath the City. It’s rare that a documentary feels almost too up close and personal. —D.S.
82. The Imposter
Director: Burt Layton
Year: 2013
From the beginning, it’s obvious The Imposter is going to be a thriller—which it is, and then some. Three years after the disappearance of their 13-year-old son, a Texas family receive word he’s been found in Spain. When they go to pick him up, they’re so desperate to believe he’s alive that they don’t even notice that the “boy” is actually a French man in his mid-twenties. Is it a monumental case of grief and hope blinding sense, or is there a darker explanation? Director Bart Layton mixes elements of documentary and narrative filmmaking seamlessly, uncovering in each and every character he encounters more of a treasure trove of odd nonfiction than the last, crafting endlessly compelling portraits of people willing to push their lies to obsessive, and ultimately sad, extremes. —M.D.
81. 12 O’Clock Boys
Directors: Lotfy Nathan
Year: 2013
An elegant mix between a scrappy visual bildungsroman of a 13-year-old Baltimore youth and a cursory glance at the dirt-bike and four-wheeler culture that’s risen to near legendary status in the city, 12 O’Clock Boys is a gorgeously shot testament to the social climate that has made Baltimore such a focus for racial and institutional tension in the past two weeks. But don’t dare compare this to The Wire—Nathan’s documentary is almost totally removed from any particular time. Instead, it’s concerned more with the quotidian, how the City’s youth live for their bikes, for the thrill of testing their physical limits, for the freedom and personality such machines afford them in a place that rarely allows them to ever express the same. Baltimore’s problems have been indelible to its personality for so long, and yet, as embraced by Pug—our protagonist, the boy who obsesses over joining the 12 O’Clock Boys, Baltimore’s so-called biker gang—the City is a complex web of thoroughfares and blank slates ready to be etched into stone by anyone with a motor and a death wish. Between goose-pimply vignettes of the 12 O’Clock boys posturing for the camera—popping wheelies and grinning wildly—and sobering passages in which Pug’s family (and friends) face one tragedy after another, the film is moored to the foundation of Pug’s dream: That one day he too will be legend. —D.S.
80. Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Directors: David Gelb
Year: 2012
Jiro Dreams of Sushi is about one of the greatest masters of the culinary world, one of whom casual foodies have never even heard. Although Jiro’s work—literally, the dishes he so effortlessly prepares, and then the act of watching him as he watches his customers eating the dishes—is ostensibly the film’s focus, the story is truly propelled by the chef’s relationship with his two sons: the youngest started his own restaurant, and the oldest, at the age of 50, continues to work with his father, training to one day take over Jiro’s infamous restaurant. Devoid of the typical familial jealousy you may expect (and so devoid, arguably, of much conflict at all), Jiro |
the disease.
"Unfortunately, she came down with the disease and by the time it was recognized had already exposed a large number of children at the facility," he said.
Dr. Fauci: It's a "shame" children are not being vaccinated for measles
England said health officials will check in with the families of the children following the 21-day incubation period, which ends Feb. 11-12. He said most parents understand the importance of keeping their children home.
Phoenix Children's spokeswoman Debra Stevens said Wednesday that anyone who suspects they have measles is being asked to call ahead so that staff can take the necessary precautions to help keep measles from spreading, including bringing masks to incoming patients.
"If someone has chosen not to vaccinate their children or for some reason cannot vaccinate their children, they face a higher responsibility now to let their health care provider know in advance," she said.
Meanwhile, masks are being placed outside health care facilities and signs went up outside a handful of places in Kearny warning customers and employees that they could have been exposed to measles. A man who is recovering from measles also came into contact with the Pinal County family that visited Disneyland.
Gila County health officials say they are tracking 17 people who were at a hospital in Globe in the same time frame as a person confirmed to have measles.Hillary Clinton was in Chicago this week promoting her book, and as the Washington Post noted, she raised a notable observation about some of her critics.
[Clinton] quipped about conservative media outlets’ preoccupation with a vanquished presidential candidate while big news surrounded the one who won. “All the networks except Fox are reporting what’s really going on…. It appears they don’t know I’m not president,” tweeted NBC News politics reporter Alex Seitz-Wald, quoting Clinton, who held an event at the Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University on Monday night.
This struck a chord because it’s true in a rather literal sense. One former Trump aide appeared in conservative media over the weekend and called for increased scrutiny of Hillary Clinton’s administration, which, the last time I checked, does not exist.
Two days later, another Trump ally in conservative media referred to “President Clinton” – and he was referring to Hillary, not Bill.
Of course, it’s not just media personalities who seem confused. Donald Trump can’t stop talking and tweeting about his former rival. The president’s aides appear fixated on Clinton. Congressional Republicans, who ostensibly have responsibility to oversee the executive branch, are launching investigations into Clinton.
“It appears they don’t know I’m not president” is a phrase with surprisingly broad applicability.
I sometimes wonder if both sides would’ve been more satisfied if the election had gone the other way. Trump could whine about Clinton full time without the burdens of governing; his allies could focus their attention on a White House that exists, rather than a former cabinet secretary who left public office five years ago; and Democrats would be pleased to have at least some control over the levers of federal power.This morning Christians and others gathered around the country to protest Planned Parenthood and government funding for the organization. Early reports say pro-life groups gathered at some 320 clinics around the country, making it likely the largest protest against Planned Parenthood coordinated to date. This included the clinic in St. Paul, Minnesota, where John Piper participated. He was asked to pray at the gathering. The above is a field recording.
Let us pray.
Father in heaven, it is a sober moment to be this near to this place. And I pray that there would be in my heart and all of our hearts a kind of earnestness about what we are doing here. We want to just pause and stand in awe of you for a moment, because you made us. You made all the children. You made all the abortionists. You are our Creator. You uphold all things by the word of your power. You sustain all things. You govern all things.
You say, “I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose’” (Isaiah 46:9–10). You are God and we are not. We humble ourselves under your mighty hand and we stand in praise and awe of your justice and wisdom and goodness and truth and power and eternal mercies towards your creation.
And we acknowledge in the face of your holiness and power that we are sinners. Everyone standing here in this gathering is a sinner in desperate need of salvation that you offer in Jesus Christ. We know that our conscience condemns us, and if our own consciences do, how much more your holy law. So, we have not lived up even to our own standards, let alone to your standards.
And we confess our sins corporately before you as individuals. As churches we have not given heed to your word as we ought. As a nation we have not listened to the word, “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Proverbs 14:34). And we are a sinful people. We have gloried in our shame and we have perverted your law and made good what you call evil. And we confess corporately that we are not what we ought to be.
Therefore, we fly to Jesus Christ. We love your Son. What would we do? We sinners here on this street, what would we do if there were no redemption in Jesus? So, thank you for putting him forward to bear your holy wrath and take our punishment and put our sins on his back “that we might die to sin and live to righteousness” (1 Peter 2:24).
“We pray that you would grant Planned Parenthood and our nation to see that killing children is not acceptable.” Twitter Tweet Facebook Share on Facebook
And that is why we are here, Lord. We want to dedicate ourselves afresh and we want to pray for Planned Parenthood that they might “live to righteousness.” We want to ask that according to their title, which is on the wall — Planned Parenthood — that they would bring about nurturing parents rather than helping parents stop being parents by killing their children. We ask that you would help them create and bring about nurturing parents by not taking the lives of future parents in the womb. We ask that you would grant that they would see, along with our nation, that killing children is not an acceptable solution to a crisis pregnancy. There are other ways forward. You are God. You make ways for people out of difficulties, and killing is not one of them.
So God, grant, I pray, that because of this event and all these videos and other things that you are going to be doing in our days, that truth would hold sway. We are not eager to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. We just want to see truth hold sway. So, bring out of this building here all the truth that goes on in there. Let it be seen for what it is. And so, Lord, when you do these mighty works, may your name be honored, may Christ be exalted, and may the gospel advance in our land. In Jesus’s name I pray, amen.
This recording was released in the daily Ask Pastor John podcast. Follow the link for recent episodes and to find the podcast apps (Apple and Android).CryptoKitties, the massively popular Ethereum-based digital kitten breeding app and collectibles marketplace, has surpassed major decentralized cryptocurrency exchange EtherDelta to become the largest decentralized application (dapp) on the Ethereum protocol by gas consumption.
According to ETH Gas Station, the CryptoKitties Ethereum smart contract accounted for 13.94 percent of Ethereum’s transaction volume over the last 1,500 blocks, surpassing non-custodial cryptocurrency exchanges EtherDelta and ShapeShift.
Reason behind the success of CryptoKitties
CryptoKitties allows anyone within the Ethereum network to purchase or sell breedable cartoon kittens. The decentralized structure of the Ethereum network disallows the alteration of ownership or production of fraudulent kittens, providing value to the kittens as collectibles with scarcity and rarity.
ProductHunt founder Ryan Hoover explained that CryptoKitties is essentially the first Ethereum-based decentralized Pokemon-like game, in which users can collect and breed digital kittens. The key difference between CryptoKitties and other games like Pokemon and Tamagotchi is that through a decentralized marketplace, users can purchase or sell breedable kittens with Ether.
As shown by Crypto Kitty Sales, three of the rarest and expensive digital kittens on CryptoKitties were sold for $114,573, $81,549, and $69,600 respectively, amounting more than 572 Ether.
The CryptoKitties dapp gained popularity amongst Ethereum users and members of the global cryptocurrency community primarily due to its unique model and its strategy. The CryptoKitties development team noted that the platform was created for everyone in the cryptocurrency sector, and it is not limited or exclusive to a handful of users and organizations.
“The future is exciting. And we believe that Blockchain is the future—but Blockchain is about as approachable as a bunch of ones and zeroes. We want a future for everyone, not one exclusive to Bitcoin miners, VCs, ICOs, and other equally fun acronyms,” said the CryptoKitties team.
Is CryptoKitties sustainable?
Techcrunch reported that $1.3 mln worth of cartoon kittens on the dapp have been traded. Users have spent more than a million dollars on purchasing cartoon kittens on the platform over the past few weeks. The growth rate of the CryptoKitties platform has increased to a point in which it had led to an Ethereum network congestion.
“Due to network congestion, we are increasing the birthing fee from 0.001 ETH to 0.002 ETH. This will ensure your kittens are born on time! The extra is needed to incentivize miners to add birthing txs to the chain. Long-term solution will be explored very soon,” said CryptoKitties on Dec. 4.
As Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam stated, Ethereum-based dapps like EtherDelta have the potential to target and penetrate a multi-trillion dollar industry in the long-term, given that Ethereum’s scaling issues can be solved within the next few years. The cryptocurrency exchange market alone is already a multi-billion dollar industry. Soon, Ethereum-based exchange protocols will be able to provide infrastructures to compete with leading financial institutions in the global market.
In contrast to such ambitious projects, dapps like CryptoKitties serve a much smaller purpose, to simply entertain the cryptocurrency community with a collectibles-based game. But, CryptoKitties has utilized the Ethereum Blockchain network to create the first successful decentralized game, and in the long-term, developers in the traditional gaming industry could explore and evaluate the success story of CryptoKitties.After several acts of violence by the El Salvadorian trans-national gang, the New York State Police have decided to create a special unit to counter MS-13.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) announced on Wednesday that he is deploying 25 state troopers to Long Island to combat the notoriously violent MS-13 street gang, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The announcement comes days after the gruesome murders of four teenagers there, which investigators say is related to MS-13.
“We will do everything we need to do to eliminate this criminal organization,” Cuomo said during the press conference.
The new unit is expected to share intelligence, surveillance assets, and other resources with law local enforcement.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Monday that Long Island is home to more than 200 dedicated members of MS-13.
Recent Long Island area murders by MS-13 include those of Nisa Mickens and Kayla Cuevas; as well as five other individuals by a group of mostly illegal alien MS-13 members, Breitbart Texas reported.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is expected to visit a dangerous section of Long Island on Friday where he will speak about the violence from MS-13.
Ryan Saavedra is a contributor for Breitbart Texas and can be found on Twitter at @RealSaavedra.One of the great, unsung heroes of the 1970s is a black cowboy by the name of The Loop Garoo Kid, the hero of Ishmael Reed’s 1969 novel, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. In Reed’s tall tale, a brilliant spaghetti-noir—A Fistful of Dollars meets Killer of Sheep—Loop Garoo is a wandering cowpoke who also happens to be a fiercely independent experimental novelist. Early in the novel, The Kid gets ambushed on the edge of the desert by “Bo Shmo and the neo-social realist gang.”
“The trouble with you Loop is that you’re too abstract,” their leader declares, “far out esoteric bullshit is where you’re at. Why in those suffering books that I write about my old neighborhood and how hard it was every gumdrop machine is in place while your work is a blur and a doodle.” Loop keeps his cool and answers his truth: “No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.” The neo-social realists have no answer to this, and “being not very original,” decide to discipline Loop by smearing jelly on his face and burying him up to his neck in the sand.
Loop Garoo’s fix is that of all writers struggling to define themselves against a tide of assumptions about who they are and how they ought to exercise their craft. But he’s also very specifically an avatar for the figure of the black writer in America, struggling to outrun the ambushes of racist strictures—the demand that one focus relentlessly on “how hard it was” in the “old neighborhood” or face accusations of betrayal and questions of authenticity, while simultaneously be ignored if one deviates from the expected script. In short, it’s the old canard that the black writer faces a zero-sum choice between political responsibility and alienated indulgence. I suppose it is for this reason, along with the Western theme, that the perilous path of the Kid reminds me of no other contemporary writer more than Percival Everett, a writer whose thirty-year career has produced a dazzling and prolific array of experimental novels, short stories, and poetry that have won him something of a near-legendary reputation himself, an outsider roaming the American West where he has long made his home.
With Everett the appearance of a new novel is always an unpredictable affair, and even longtime fans and followers know they have to be prepared to, well, get thrown for a loop. The plot of So Much Blue, Everett’s latest, braids together a story out of three narrative arcs pursued in alternating chapters—a dynamic triptych sequencing the life of a mildly depressive, post-middle age painter named Kevin Pace. One strand follows Pace’s homelife on a comfortable property (“very arty and New Englandy”) in Rhode Island (summers on Martha’s Vineyard), with a focus on his parenting struggles as the father of two teens and marital troubles with his wife Linda. A second recounts the evolution of an affair conducted in Paris ten years earlier with a 22-year-old French woman named Victoire. The third takes us back to El Salvador in 1979 and a rescue mission set during the opening phase of the country’s civil war, when Kevin (the novel sticks to first names) joins his friend Richard on a desperate bid to find Richard’s brother Tad, a “fuckup” who has gone missing and is possibly caught up in drug trafficking. The novel holds these three apparently incongruous storylines in suspense before gradually and deftly revealing how a set of nested secrets entwines them.
The novel opens with the Paris affair, a seamless sequence of familiar images and plotting filtered through Kevin’s dry and ironic gaze. In a bit of soliloquizing, he admits that “the only thing extraordinary,” about his affair is, “that I would admit to something so pathetically clichéd.” He meets Victoire at an exhibition in the museum at the Jardin du Luxembourg. Victoire is blond and attractive and has, Kevin thinks, “perhaps the whitest skin I had ever seen.” Kevin ponders the hue: “Was she zinc white? Titanium? I decided she was flake white, with all its lead danger.” Victoire is a watercolorist, and a student at the École des Beaux Arts, yet somehow possesses the means to have a small apartment conveniently located right around the corner from the museum. She also has a thing for older men. Wandering through a gallery together the lovers lapse into competing clichés. He is the wizened and weary older artist with deep thoughts: “I’ve come to dislike museums... it’s where art comes to die.” She plays the role of the whimsical siren: “You’re afraid of us” she warns provocatively, only to segue into an open invitation: “I have nice tea at my flat.” “Do you?” “It is Iranian tea.” Compounding her role as the ideal side-girl, Victoire reassures Kevin that she doesn’t mind that he’s married with children, that she wants nothing from him, and that she’s in love. She is sexually available, and—perhaps to add a touch of Gallicism—we learn that her mother is happy to meet this older married black man and does not disapprove of the relationship.
In a characteristic Everett move, Kevin’s race is only glancingly evoked in the novel. The first overt mention of it unsurprisingly comes from The Bummer, a character in the El Salvador section who is the walking embodiment of crude explicit racism. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you’re a nigger,” he warns. When Kevin’s son Will asks him what he wanted to be when he was growing up, we learn that Kevin had an uncle Ty who was a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, an illustrious heritage deflated by the knowledge that “Uncle Ty was a fucking asshole.” One of Everett’s great achievements has always been his unassuming portrayal of characters that defy the grotesque strait-jacket of racialized characterization, which so much of American fiction (or American culture in general) simply can’t give up. But racial invisibility is as pure a fantasy as racial stereotype, and Kevin’s effortless gliding around Paris with Victoire adds to the already strained plausibility of a frictionless fantasy. But then an unfortunate (and sometimes unnerving) flatness extends to all the characters in the book. Linda is the intelligent, busy wife who worries quietly about her marriage and is frustrated and out of touch with her teenage daughter April. Richard is a reliable wingman buddy who is loyal, dependable, and honest: “I call a spade a spade.” (“Careful,” Kevin interjects in a rare misfire in their banter.)
The El Salvador material feels like the least realized of the novel’s threads. Kevin and Richard rent a Cadillac and (on a tip from the American Embassy) make contact with The Bummer, a hillbilly Vietnam-vet-turned-mercenary who has retreated to El Salvador where he can keep up his unsavory lifestyle and lie low, possibly to avoid prosecution for war crimes: “Every fuckin’ slant I saw, I killed, what do you girls think about that.” The Bummer promises to help them find Tad and a good part of the novel follows the trio into the Salvadoran hinterlands as signs of the civil war rumble in the background and The Bummer tirelessly calls into question his companion’s virility while greasing his long gun. The feel of these passages is cinematic, heavy with buddy dialogue and well-established sets: a roadside cantina is described as “so much a cliché that it wasn’t one”; a dramatic encounter occurs at a little village in a jungle clearing; a sprint to the airport is held in suspense by the traffic of an angry street demonstration. In this respect it can sometimes read like a loose adaptation of Oliver Stone’s 1986 film Salvador (featuring James Woods and Jim Belushi in a Camaro), with even less of an interest in the political and historical context, aside from a few scattered and generally comical references to the looming presence of the CIA. Everett has written tightly constructed, atmospheric thrillers before. One of his most recent, Assumption (2011), set in a small town in the New Mexican desert, is also arguably his best. So it’s all the more surprising that El Salvador in this book remains such a blank canvas.
Perhaps Everett felt he needed a vivid counterpoint to the domestic drama. The novel certainly treads more assuredly on home turf (the Rhode Island sections are simply labeled “Home”), where intimate vignettes from contemporary bourgeois American life are rendered with wry irony but also a reserve of compassion: the way a partner in an unhappy couple will hang fire, as a sushi dinner turns into a tactical verbal engagement; the distinctive tone kids fall into with their parents on the phone when they’re tired; how to deal with your friend the art gallery director when he’s snorted one too many rails. The most enthralling scene in the novel is a rare moment when we get to see Kevin Pace acting as a responsible father, as he catches up to and takes care of his son Will, who has tried to walk home after school in the middle of a snowstorm.
Like Reed before him, Everett is a writer alive to the paradoxes and traps of an artist’s life, so it is particularly strange that he reduces the mind of the painter to a world literally conceived in terms of painting. In what comes to feel like a tired mannerism, Kevin never misses an opportunity to whip out his (exquisitely refined) palette or namedrop a blue-chip artist. Considering his “guilty guiltlessness” as he lies in bed with Victoire, he muses, “if this feeling were a color, I considered, it would be the orange threads of slightly diluted saffron.” Elsewhere, a road in El Salvador wet with stones “looked like a Pollock.”
The color blue naturally receives special consideration. Recovering from a traumatic encounter with death, Richard asks Kevin to describe the sky overhead. “I would call that a very light manganese blue,” he responds. At a vernissage in Paris Victoire arrives “wearing a cerulean coat covered with white clouds, after Magritte but missing the overcoated men in bowler hats.” Later on a lonely walk around the city Kevin sees, “the blue of rain, how it tinged the darkness of night sapphire and how Alice blue made lavender the leading edge of morning.” (“Alice Blue,” if you were wondering, is an ultra-pale and almost green azure, like the core of an ice floe.) In the middle of a crucial, action-packed scene, Kevin stops to notice, unforgivably, that the body of a dead Salvadoran man, “looked like a drawing by Käthe Kollwitz.”
Everett has long evinced a passion for the visual arts, and for abstract painting in particular. His novels, and even more especially his poetry are peppered with allusions to Masters Old and New. The poetry collection, There Are No Names for Red, a collaboration with Chris Abani, features some of his own illustrations. But expressing the vision of the abstract artist is not the same thing as having a keen interest in the form. Naming the right set of colors is just putting a kaleidoscope to the eye: it’s fun and dazzling, but it doesn’t cohere into a vision of the world. Nor can curation ever be effectively neutral, which invites a whole new set of questions that don’t get considered here. It would be wonderful if Norman Lewis and Alma Thomas were recognized for their contributions to Abstract Expressionism in the same way that Willem de Kooning and Lee Krasner are—but that would be a different country.
One is left with the impression that the abstract artist working on his masterpiece, the artist struggling with hidden secrets in his past and unavowable passions (or extinctions) of the heart in the present, exists here so that we can notice the pockets of emptiness and swatches of incompleteness in the frame, the lurking stains behind the figure of success and mastery who apparently has it all. This mood of tense masculine anxiety—a Miles Davis kind of blue—is the true subject of the novel. It is a testament to Percival Everett’s enormous talent that despite its weaknesses, So Much Blue does succeed in meshing its wildly different parts into a whole. There is underneath the stilted search for effects, a genuine feeling for the colossal pressure closely guarded secrets exert, the mysterious process of erosion that allows intimate relationships to cohere and quickly fray, or conceptions of self to shift under the pressure of sudden revelation.
This sense of humanistic concern pulsing underneath intellectual fireworks of extraordinary and sometimes overwhelming intensity suggests affinities with David Foster Wallace, a writer of roughly the same generation whose engagement with postmodernism passes in part likewise through a passion for philosophy, particularly the kind of ordinary language philosophy dominant in the American university in their student years. Like Wallace, the young Everett was consumed by problems in logic and linguistics and gravitated toward Wittgenstein, before eventually pulling away to pursue creative writing instead. Traces of that intellectual penchant (or nerdiness) can be found throughout Everett’s writing. The protagonist of Glyph, Baby Ralph, is a genius (think Stewie from Family Guy) who spews out the Western canon and simultaneously its deconstruction. The working title for Percival Everett by Virgil Russell was apparently “Frege’s Puzzle,” a classic paradox in semantic theory. Asked if he admired the famous “Incompleteness Theorem” in formal logic, Everett told the Paris Review recently, “If I could write something like Gödel’s proof, I’d be happy.”
This is not to say that Wallace and Everett’s projects are exactly aligned, though I think they certainly complement each other. But the greater problem is that they are seldom read together, or by the same people. Indeed, those who ardently prize Wallace’s difficulty and experimentation and tout his achievement seldom seem to have read much, if any, of Everett’s work and therefore cannot know whether it ought to be considered for such accolades.
Neglect is a fate all experimental writers risk, but if they happen to be black it can seem almost impossible to avoid. Everett always intended to chart his own course. He picked the novel up where Ishmael Reed had taken it, but pivoted away from Reed’s zaniness toward a prismatic allegorical realism, a constant reinvention of form designed to grapple with the vertiginous ends of America’s violent and often contradictory racial, economic, geographic, and sexual epistemologies—a project consonant in many ways with Wallace’s, but evidently not one that could generate the same kind of popular appeal.
This is a shame because Everett brings something to the contemporary American novel that is—in part since Wallace’s early death—sorely missing: utter fearlessness in placing demands upon a reader combined with real compassion for ordinary people. Everett’s prose may not have the ionized finish prized by fellow icons of postmodernism and metafiction like Don DeLillo or Tom McCarthy. But he possesses something crucial that neither of them do: an extraordinarily deft capacity for rendering human foibles without contempt—getting characters on the page that are painfully recognizable and yet free of pathology, never reduced to being mere pawns in an overarching authorial conspiracy. His metafictional layering never feels gratuitous or indulgent as it sometimes does in others. Rather, in his hands it serves what are usually thought to be the traditional ends of realism—a serious and capacious humanistic rendering of the adventure of ordinary life (and more often than not of black lives), which he treats with an unsentimental dose of lucidity reminiscent of Margo Jefferson’s crisp essayistic stitch.
So my reservations about So Much Blue must be set against the record of a master artificer who in the space of thirty-four years has produced eighteen novels—nineteen if you include his epistolary office thriller, A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid (2004), not to mention some four collections of short stories, and more recently several collections of poetry. It’s a long career that’s been built against the grain. In the teeth of the kind of stupidity and prejudice encountered by Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, the protagonist of Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, whose attempt to get his own novel published exposes, under a blistering and exquisitely handled satirical blade, the pitiful cultural lies we tell ourselves about race and all that we “know” about it.
Within the arc of Everett’s career Erasure reads as the culmination of a decade of literary experiments—in retrospect perhaps a bit too obsessed with the scholasticism of high theory in the academy, but nevertheless a wonderful suite of metamorphoses borrowing from every corner of the universe of language in order to self-fashion a radical and perpetually unpredictable voice: a postmodern Henry Box Brown always reenacting his evasion of the plantation confines erected by the limited taste and enduring whiteness of the (corporate) American publishing industry’s conceptions of what African American literature is, and how it will sell.
And so I would beg you to go to your local bookstore (almost all of Everett’s work has been published by small independent or university presses) and ask for his first novel, Suder, and discover the tender yet restrained magical realism of Craig Suder’s adventures across the country which lead him (among other places) to the forests of Oregon, where he lives on “Ezra Pond” with an elephant named Renoir, and (with a nod to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon), eventually learns to fly. Revisit The Water Cure, and its indictment of the moral turpitude of America in the Bush years. Pick up the Shandyesque adventures of Not Sidney Poitier, the misfortunately named foundling adopted by Ted Turner and hero of the rollicking I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Read, teach, and share his justly celebrated short story “The Appropriation of Cultures,” a parable that could not possibly be more timely. Consider the extraordinary Percival Everett by Virgil Russell a storying retold in between the lines of other stories exchanged between a father and his son caring for him in a hospice—a novel I think is likely to stand out eventually as a contemporary masterpiece.
As for Kevin Pace and his bourgeois blues, it’s possible I’ve missed something. Everett is an inveterate trickster, and one can never be sure where the Borgesian game of literature begins or ends with him. If you take a look at the book jacket to his novel Glyph, you’ll find a photo featuring Everett and Thelonius Monk—his mule—side by side staring back at you. It’s almost enough to make you wonder if So Much Blue isn’t a prank. Everett’s sly signifying on a white mainstream America he secretly loathes even as it painlessly ignores him; a cool answer to its swooning embrace of the upmarket scripts and scene-changes of “prestige television” with all its glossily repackaged and ever seductive clichés: the secret affair in Paris; the south of the border that is always and forever Narcos; a way of acknowledging that he knows damn well most of his readers, as soon as they’ve put down with a sigh the last pages of their semi-genuflection into the dip of current “cultural” fare will put on Netflix.
Either way it seems all but certain that this book won’t receive the estimation it merits, nor help to garner Everett the kind of recognition and awards he so richly deserves. For those who count themselves among his dedicated or occasional followers, So Much Blue will neither make nor break Everett’s reputation, built as it is upon an extraordinary body of work, a great fund of invention that—however neglected by contemporary readers—will undoubtedly prove an enduring wellspring for writers, particularly black ones, in the coming years. In the meantime, we can eagerly await the next reinvention, the next raid into the desert of contemporary American fiction by our black Lone Ranger—that long hour of sunset in the West when the Kid rides again.
If you like this article, please subscribe to n+1.In the United States, nearly eight years of stagnation, hardship, a pervasive sense of decline, and seemingly insurmountable challenges abroad have taken their toll. Add to this the depressed anxiety concomitant with the renewed threat of intermittent mass casualty attacks directed from or inspired by radical Islamist terrorists overseas, and you have the ingredients for populist rebellion. Fueling insurgent presidential candidacies on both the left and the right with a potent appeal to a significant segment of American society is the perception that the traditional remedies for social, economic, and foreign ills have failed. Only something very new, even potentially radical, can ease their conditions now.
This response from a substantial segment of the electorate confounds American policy experts. On a macro level, American job growth has remained steady while the unemployment rate has decreased at a commensurate rate. The illegal immigrant population and the competition they create for low-skilled employment has declined from its 2006 peak (a phenomenon that can be explained by reduced employment opportunities resulting from the 2007-2008 recession). Terrorism fears are rising, and that is to be expected as radical Islamism has been allowed to flourish in safe harbors in the Middle East and North Africa. But terroristic violence isn’t touching American shores in the same way that it is in Europe. There, Islamist terrorism is disrupting millions of lives, and it is compounded by a genuine refugee crisis characterized by waves of North African and Middle Eastern civilians flooding the continent. America usually resettles no more than 70,000 asylum-seekers annually (give or take), but policy makers in Washington want to hike that cap to 85,000 in 2016 to take some of the pressure off Europe. As of last November, the United States has resettled a total of 2,290 Syrian refugees since the civil war began in 2011.
If these conditions are moving the United States toward a restless era of populism, imagine the social forces that are boiling just beneath the surface in Europe.
In just over a year, France has been transformed from the center of European sophistication and culture into the front lines in a new war against radicalism. One year ago, Islamist terrorists slaughtered police and the editors of a satirical magazine. That attack was immediately followed by an assault on a kosher supermarket, where another radicalized Islamist gunman murdered four Jewish hostages. In June of 2015, an improvised bomb exploded outside a factory in Lyon, where investigators later found an ISIS flag and the terrorist organization’s gruesome calling card, a severed head. Two months later, an Islamist terrorist with an assault rifle opened fire on passengers traveling by train from Amsterdam to Paris. A coordinated series of attacks in November took the lives of 132 civilians and sparked a wave of anxiety across Europe as fears of a follow-up attack paralyzed the continent. Today, a man wearing a fake suicide belt and armed with a knife ran screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’ into a Parisian police station where he was shot to death.
France isn’t alone in this fight. The streets of Brussels have descended into a war zone on multiple occasions over the course of the last two years; Belgium has sacrificed its residents’ freedom, canceled public events, and forced civilians indoors for extended periods in order to combat the terror threat. In November, two civilians were killed and five others injured when a radicalized Islamic gunman opened fire on an event celebrating free, provocative speech in Denmark. Three British citizens were stabbed in December in an attack linked to the Islamic State, an assault that echoed the murder and attempted beheading of the British Fusilier Lee Rigby on the streets of London.
Europe is thoroughly terrorized. What’s worse, Europeans are being told by their elected leaders that they are to empathize with and welcome their attackers.
As Jonathan Tobin has observed, the crisis in Europe touched off by a flood of refugees has evolved a disturbing feature that could only be characterized as a clash of competing civilizational views. A New Year’s Day event in the German city of Cologne was marred by something new – mass, coordinated gang violence and sexual assault. The elite response to this gang violence has been to assume it was precipitated by the shock associated with former Middle Eastern residents coping with an immersion into an alien and comparatively permissive culture and to lecture Europeans about their provocative behaviors. Cologne’s mayor advised young women who find themselves surrounded by aggravated men to maintain “arm’s length” distance from their would-be attackers.
The suspected attackers, meanwhile, who have yet to be publicly identified, have displayed a galling sense of entitlement – one that has only been encouraged by European authorities. Police reports published in two German newspapers indicate that recent Syrian refugees were involved in this assault and that they are utterly unrepentant. “You can’t do anything to me, I can get a new one tomorrow,” one allegedly said while ripping up his residence permit right in front of inquiring police. “I am Syrian. You have to treat me kindly,” remarked another. “Mrs. Merkel invited me.” These are the individuals who are flooding a continent that already suffers from un-and-under-employment rates far higher than they are in the United States. Europe now faces the prospect of millions of men and women populating camps, outnumbering the native populations of towns and cities in which they are resettled, and who are openly resentful of the cultures into which they are expected to assimilate.
Where will this elite contempt for European culture, its values, and its residents and citizens lead the continent? Ultimately, an insular and paranoid place that is not familiar to most living Americans. A terrorized people who find their hospitality unappreciated and whose leaders are openly contemptuous of them won’t long endure those insults. If America is gripped by a rising tide of protectionist, even nativist, populism, the kind of backlash against egalitarian internationalism that is in store for Europe is one that should frighten anyone with even a mild appreciation of 20th Century history.
None of this is occurring in a vacuum. These are the wages of non-interventionism. The West hoped to avoid engaging in the conflicts that arose from the Arab Spring, and they were woefully underprepared to handle those in which they did involve themselves. The conflict in Syria was allowed to metastasize until even now, and it has become the source of millions of refugees, Islamist terrorism, and the worst humanitarian crisis this century. Western forces intervened in North Africa with the explicit intention of avoiding regime change, and, as a result, they were ill-prepared to guide Libya toward a stable transitional government when the regime fell. Out of chaos and nightmarish adversity, hundreds of thousands of both well-meaning and dangerous individuals descended on a naïve West.
It is perhaps already too late to prevent the transformation Europe will soon undergo. American conservatives who may be tempted to believe that the continent will abandon its comfortable embrace of permissiveness and social-welfare will find the New Europe is by no means warmly democratic or friendly toward Washington. An ethnically conscious Europe is as likely to look eastward as it is across the Atlantic. The resulting tribalism and communalism on the continent will |
ives create powerful social systems mirroring processes occurring in the natural world?” I asked as I began mentally aligning Einstein’s analogies about dropping rocks, elevators and train tracks with the political events of 2016. This brief essay reflects this intellectual convergence in an effort to offer a new frame and understanding for the persistence and influence of race and racism. The central claim: white power enterprises (e.g. imperialism, colonization and manifest destiny) alongside the resistance and movements of minorities produced the enduring principles of the social world: social gravity and social acceleration, race and racism, respectively.
Stated differently, the history, acts and agitation between the oppressor and the oppressed since the colonial period has participated in making race function much in the way that Einstein characterizes gravity. Much like how gravity affects matter in the natural world, in the social world22 Humans are social beings. This observation is a central tenet across the social sciences. That humans perform and accomplish identities and establish and maintain institutions, politics and structures is also a somewhat settled notion. But some serious considerations of this question can be found, for example, in the work of urban ecologists, many of who sought to demonstrate how residential and communal patterns within Chicago reflect a “natural order” of human movement and habitation. Roughly, the urban ecology logic asserts: As new groups age out and are incorporated into the body politic they are then replaced geographically and socially by subsequent incoming groups. However, as a generation of race scholars have shown, conventional wisdom on matters of human sociality and ecology often pay short shrift to the invention and intervention of race and racism in the world order (see e.g. Bronfenbrenner and Brofenbrenner 2009 Bronfenbrenner, Urie, and Urie Bronfenbrenner. 2009. The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design. Cambridge : Harvard University Press.; Park 1936 Park, R. E. 1936. “Succession, an Ecological Concept.” American Sociological Review 1 (2): 171–179. doi: 10.2307/2084475).View all notes race in varying degrees draws people apart and together, binds people to sidewalks, neighbourhoods and institutions of civil society. Racism, in turn, operates as a socio-economic and political accelerant and force that leads to racially disparate outcomes and privileges.
In what follows, I build a theory of race and racism influenced philosophically and metaphorically by Einstein’s principle of equivalence and theories of relativity. I will use his philosophical and scientific insights on general and special relativity as a springboard to provoke a new imagining and awareness of the workings of race and racism, especially in light of the recent political season. Thereafter, I build out the metaphor to illustrate how political events of the past year affirm that race and racism are not only obdurate and enduring, but also function and influence the social world in ways that deeply mirror major components of Einstein’s theory for the effects and understanding of gravity, acceleration and simultaneity; thus there are two interrelated goals for this essay: (1) providing a critical race conscious assessment of the 2016 political season both within the United States and abroad, and (2) demonstrating how race and racism reflect a broader social cosmology of great consequence, underscoring the tendency among humans to develop constructs that persist across space and time with effects that mirror the nature and properties of matter and energy.
Race as gravity, racism as accelerant “The present book is intended, as far as possible, to give an exact insight into the theory of Relativity to those readers who”, Einstein (2015 Einstein, A. 2015. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. Princeton : Princeton University Press., 31) writes at the book’s opening, “from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics”. To illustrate the physical and philosophical principles guiding his theories of relativity, Einstein offers an example pregnant with great insight. Suppose “I stand at the window of a railway carriage which is travelling uniformly”, Einstein (2015 Einstein, A. 2015. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. Princeton : Princeton University Press., 39) first asks us to imagine, and drop a stone on the embankment, without throwing it. Then, disregarding the influence of the air resistance, I see the stone descend in a straight line. A pedestrian who observes the misdeed from the footpath notices that the stone falls to earth in a parabolic curve. Standpoint and intersectional vantage points are angles in and through the truth about (the) matter. Importantly, Einstein notes that his theories of relativity are not merely a matter of physics but also a philosophy – an epistemology and ontology for the nature and ways of things. Add to this example, Einstein’s physics provocation better known as the principle of equivalence. Roughly, the principle holds that the impact of gravity on mass and the force on inert matter are identical. From Einstein’s provocation, a popular analogy drawn from everyday life has been used often to illustrate this principle: the elevator. Imagine stepping upon an elevator. At the moment of entrance your body feels a force acting, keeping your feet to the elevator’s floor. This same force felt upon entering the elevator is then relatively indistinguishable from the subsequent movement of the elevator upwards or downwards. Of course, the descent or ascent if hurried could mean that the individual would suddenly be lifted from the elevator floor in a state similar to that of free-floating astronauts in space.33 The elevator analogy is quite common and can be found in provocative iterations in Smolin (2006 Smolin, L. 2006. The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. New York : Houghton Mifflin.) and Wald (2010 Wald, R. M. 2010. General Relativity. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.).View all notes In his later life, Einstein would also provide important criticism of the nature of race and racism that share links to his understanding of physical principles and theories. Not only convinced that “whiteness is a disease”, in a 1946 essay “On the Negro Question” Einstein (2011 Einstein, A. 2011. Essays in Humanism. New York : Open Road Media., 12) aggressively noted how race and racism seemed a form of social magnetism and force historically oppressing black people: I am firmly convinced that whoever believes this suffers from a fatal misconception. Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force; and in the white man’s quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is the result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition.44 The quote is pulled a longer powerful analysis offered by Einstein in the essay. Furthermore, his lecture and time at Lincoln University, the Historically Black College, influenced his anti-racists leanings. Einstein (2011 Einstein, A. 2011. Essays in Humanism. New York : Open Road Media., 12) further offers: There is, however, a somber point in the social outlook of Americans. Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to men of white skins. Even among these there are prejudices of which I as a Jew am clearly conscious; but they are unimportant in comparison with the attitude of the “Whites” toward their fellow-citizens of darker complexion, particularly toward Negroes. The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me. I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out.Importantly, Einstein would be one of few prominent intellectuals to volunteer to testify on behalf of W.E.B. Du Bois after the United States State Department falsely accused and tried Du Bois as a foreign agent/spy in 1951.View all notes This patchwork of Einstein’s theories of relativity alongside his condemnation of whiteness provide an opportunity to explore the enduring legacy of race and racism of the sort he critiqued, illustrating the resilient gravitational pull of race especially when paired with the force of racism, its relatively indistinguishable kindred social process.
‘La resistance’ will not be televised because the Queen is brexiting stage left Racial gravity is a feeling. It is the invisible hand organizing us all. Racial gravity also pulls bodies into formation. And so it was that I arrived to Paris just as the Eurozone was determining where and how to allocate Syrian refugees, African asylum seekers and unemployed (and usually young) Eastern Europeans. During that spring of 2015 several protests occurred all around Paris metro over this allocation and asylum, thus falling under the broad umbrella of “immigration”. While in other nations and places immigration may be or appears as a discrete issue, in a country with a history like France this could not be further from the truth (see e.g. Fanon 2007 Fanon, F. 2007. The Wretched of the Earth. New York : Grove/Atlantic, 2008 Fanon, F. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. New York : Grove Press.; James 2001 James, C. L. R. 2001. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York : Penguin.; Memmi 2000 Memmi, A. 2000. Racism. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press.). Over the last decade, France’s reputation as one of the world’s most pervasive and effective colonizers was now intervening in its future. The revolutions and uprisings that roiled throughout the African continent have roots in the colonial period and also involved (and sometimes required) contemporary intervention by the French, British and United States governments. Though long-forgotten stateside by many white Europeans, in nations across the world, especially in Africa and the Caribbean, the era of the European expansion and colonization set many oppressions, migrations and immigrations in motion (e.g. Beaman 2010 Beaman, J. 2010. “Identity, Marginalization, and Parisian Banlieues.” Research in Urban Sociology Book Series 10: 153–175. doi: 10.1108/S1047-0042(2010)0000010009, 2015a Beaman, J. 2015a. “As French as Anyone Else: Islam and the North African Second Generation in France.” International Migration Review 50 (1): 41–69. doi: 10.1111/imre.12184, 2015b Beaman, J. 2015b. “Boundaries of Frenchness: Cultural Citizenship and France’s Middle-Class North African Second-Generation.” Identities 22 (1): 36–52. doi: 10.1080/1070289X.2014.931235; Lamont 1992 Lamont, M. 1992. Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.; Rodney 1972 Rodney, W. 1972. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London : Bogle L'Ouverture and Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House.; Wacquant 2008 Wacquant, L. 2008. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge : Polity.). And the Eurozone, the popular shorthand for a geo-political economic strategy of European stability and contraction, was no longer proving to be an effective buffer or nation-state binding agent. I arrived to Paris a few months after the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo headquarters. In the weeks following the attack, extreme conservative Marie Le Pen and her father were politically cashing in on the fear leading to a surge in the nationalist right. Despite the sentiment among white Francophiles that people of colour and immigrants were everywhere in France, I found they were everywhere in certain places. After querying locals on where people of African and Arab descent dominate, I was told time and again of the “lost territories”, suburban exburbs of urban France where dreams of white socialism died decades ago. It was on the streets of Parisian suburbs like St. Denis that descendants of those brutalized, enslaved and colonized were seeking refuge, work and full citizenship, many of whom though black were natural born French citizens. Unable to locate a critical mass of black or Arab elected officials, professionals or rentiers, I saw how race and racism worked much like the elevator metaphors commonly used by physicists for Einstein’s principle of equivalence. There is an elevator in France (the Eurozone) and during the Great Recession everyone who stepped on it could feel the weight. Whether or not someone then gets pulled up or down on that elevator gets understood as an educational, class or moral issue or failing. Yet those who are ascending in French society are still pretty white, and those who were descending look rather much like descendants of the colonized and enslaved. And so I took the inventive train round-trip from France’s Gard du Nord to London’s King’s Cross Station. That the United Kingdom, England in particular, uses the English Channel as a buffer from the rest of Europe and the world has been a critical feature, if not a metaphor, of British geo-politics and xenophobia for some time (see e.g. Alexander 1996 Alexander, C. 1996. The Art of Being Black: The Creation of Black British Youth Identities. New York : Oxford University Press., 2002 Alexander, C. 2002. “Beyond Black: Re-Thinking the Colour/Culture Divide.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 25 (4): 552–571. doi: 10.1080/01419870220136637; Gilroy 1993 Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge : Harvard University Press., 2000 Gilroy, P. 2000. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge : Harvard University Press.; Rodney 1972 Rodney, W. 1972. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London : Bogle L'Ouverture and Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House.). A medium through which to retreat, retrench and re-protect, the train rides illustrated just how close and how far away the United Kingdom could be when and if it chooses. Indeed, I dare say the security measures for travel by train between Paris and London rival that of international air travel security, while much less precaution takes place when flying within and across mainland Europe (say from Paris to Milan or Paris to Amsterdam or Belgium to Berlin). Recovering from its own series of terror acts and threats, the United Kingdom was not unlike France in its noticeable though underreported racial xenophobia. And with the Syrian civil war emboldening Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, breathing new life into Vladamir Putin’s Russian empiric dreams, many voters outside of the United Kingdom’s urban core wanted out of the Eurozone altogether. Though many saw a need for there to be refuge for Syrian and African asylum seekers, it just would need to happen in somebody else’s country. To be certain, the need to flee areas of Asia Minor and Africa is impacted by current political dangers on the ground, but were set into motion by the purposeful underdevelopment of Africa and neoliberal and neoconservative conquests. As a mechanism of these sorts of geo-political approaches, race again worked as social gravity, putting countries and peoples in their “proper” place. Meanwhile, racism rolled like a wave effect from London to Berlin in hopes of accelerating and decelerating the fortunes of the powerful and the powerless, those at home and those abroad.55 This is not to say that race and racism operate or function in this matter simply because they are mere preference.View all notes Power and privilege are to whiteness as servitude and caste are to blackness. Africans are black, even if they were not born in Africa. Arabs are black. As an emergent permanent service class across Europe, Eastern Europeans are black. Disqualified for many benefits from the welfare state due to their age, youth across Europe are black. Race hits you in the elevator of opportunity, and racism shoots you in whatever direction sometimes without any notice. And so the English countryside and Northern Ireland brexited and Marie Le Pen is campaigning on racial quotas. What a Eurozone this has become.
How America got trumped “Chickens coming home to roost”, an emboldened Malcolm X proclaimed more than fifty years ago to reporters upon questions about the events surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. An expression of his insight about the collateral damage of white supremacy and anti-blackness, Malcolm X’s comment would lead to his being silenced by the Nation of Islam and a permanent reputation as a radical agitator within and outside of the Civil Rights Movement. As I boarded the plane to Michigan on Election Day, Malcolm X and his provocation had been weighing heavy on mind. I had never been to the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. So when the opportunity came to give a lecture on black Detroit in November I jumped at the chance. Amidst the clearing rain clouds, I arrived at Detroit International Airport just in time to watch the election returns. During a lively discussion over the drive from the airport to Ann Arbor, I was convinced that our prolonged punishment known as the presidential election campaign season would end with the formal selection of the nation’s first woman president. Focus groups and polls had for the previous two weeks indicated a vast swing in the electorate in favour of Hillary Clinton, with some models suggesting she would win the presidency by significant margins. Still, there was tension and fear in the air. “Trump could still win”, I was reminded just as we arrived at the Graduate Hotel in the centre of Ann Arbor. Once checked-in and relatively unpacked, I began tuning into various stations for the election returns. Exit polls in places like Pennsylvania, my home state, were hot topics. According to early exit polling many white voters had rejected Donald Trump, telling exit pollsters that they instead chose to vote for write-in candidates, the Green Party nominee, Clinton or some derivative thereof. This seemed to make sense, especially after the widely discussed revelation of Trump’s use of mints to bypass laws protecting women from physical harm and molestation. Yet, within a few hours Pennsylvania and Michigan turned red before my eyes. A dejected Rachel Maddow, wall magician John King’s look of surprise, and a solemn Lester Holmes were the sights and sounds of the announcement of the election result that Trump would become the forty-fifth President of the United States. Like many campuses across the country, the next morning Ann Arbor was sombre and unusually empty. For many, the election was a matter of life or death and the next four or more years will prove trying at the very least. Yet, I cannot help but to continually ask myself: “What would Malcolm X think or say?” – especially given that Michigan was his birthplace. Have we not witnessed an assassination of some sort during this presidential campaign? The integrity of black and brown people, women, immigrants and Muslims has surely been attacked if not assassinated over the last two years. And there has most definitely been a roosting of chickens. These chickens, however, dissembled their way into the coop. The exit polls were not wrong simply due to mere statistical errors. Rather, many white voters lied. They lied in focus groups. They lied in robocalls. They lied just before Election Day and sure enough kept on lying. The exit pollsters had been duped. There had never been any real political departure away from Trump. The media and Democrat campaign to disqualify Trump and turn supporting his candidacy into shorthand for being a proponent of racism, sexism, heterosexism and xenophobia did not work. Though many predicted that Trump’s temperament, incendiary comments and political incorrectness spelled his doom among educated white women and Latin@ voters, in states like Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania the tide turned and all of a sudden most all of the map of America was red.66 This conservative shift is well covered and forecasted in great detail in Skocpol and Williamson and their analysis of the “Tea Party” (2012 Skocpol, T., and V. Williamson. 2012. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Oxford : Oxford University Press.).View all notes White resentment fomenting during the Obama presidency has concretized into white retrenchment of the sort that black feminist legal scholar Crenshaw (1988 Crenshaw, K. 1988. “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law.” Harvard Law Review 101: 1331–1387. doi: 10.2307/1341398) warned of nearly three decades earlier. Indeed, many Trump voters across race, gender and class dissembled until they reached the safety of the voting booth where they roosted, bringing to the surface all of the redness that has been hidden in the nooks and crannies of the American South. Now that America’s redness has been exposed and the chickens have roosted, it is white America that has illustrated that race is gravity and racism can accelerate a rich white man into the White House over and over.hand poured in small batches, with 100% soy derived from American-grown soy beans for an eco-friendly, clean burn. we use lead-free cotton wicks, and pure essential oils. no added dyes or chemicals. each candle is packaged in an organic cotton reusable bag.
8 oz reusable glass jar
organic cotton muslin bag
soy is 100% renewable, sustainable, vegan, and eco-friendly.
Instructions: When first lighting our candles, please be sure to hold the lighter to the base of the wick. We STRONGLY suggest holding the lighter to the wick for 20-30 seconds to get a good first light. NEVER burn our candles for more than 4 hours at a time. This will cause the soy to burn extremely fast. 2-4 hour increments will have your candle lasting from 45-55 hours!
Benjamin Soap Company was established in 2014 with the sole mission of making pure, additive free bath, body and home products affordable for everyone. We strive to use the purest ingredients and source locally when we can.According to possibly apocryphal lore, Tommy Lasorda described baseball thusly:
No matter how good you are, you're going to lose one-third of your games. No matter how bad you are you're going to win one-third of your games. It's the other third that makes the difference.
The season is so long and the at-bats so plentiful that baseball is the avatar for a process-over-results mindset, especially as sabermetrics gain an ever-tighter stranglehold on the sport. The best players are those who figure out how to have slightly more successes than failures each game, and when you add it all up over the course of a long season it makes a big difference. This applies to everybody in the sport—except for managers.
Instead, managing a baseball team is an exercise in being second-guessed. Before each decision is made dozens of inputs must be considered, and a verdict on its validity is rendered almost immediately. The pinch hitter either gets on base or he doesn't; the reliever either gets an out or he doesn't.
Advertisement
ESPN analyst Keith Law sent the above tweet after Adam Wainwright completed pitching the fifth inning of Game 5 of the NLCS, and he may well have been right. The heart of the Giants order was coming up for the third time, and Law smartly reasoned the Cardinals would rather have a fresh reliever facing them than a possibly injured Wainwright. Instead, manager Mike Matheny left Wainwright in the game, where he promptly struck out the side in the sixth inning and induced three easy outs in the seventh. Law may well have been right, but he turned out to be very, very wrong. Backseat managing can be brutal.
Matheny had another chance to snub the baseball-twitter cognoscenti with a pitching decision in bottom of the ninth inning. With the game tied 3–3, and having already burned his best reliever, he had to decide who to bring into the game to hopefully extend it into extra innings. It was the most high-leverage situation of the year for the Cardinals—a single, measly run meant the end of their season—yet Matheny opted for…Michael Wacha?
Advertisement
Don't get me wrong: on the whole Michael Wacha is a pretty good pitcher. But he hasn't been anywhere close to decent since mid-June, when he went down with a stress reaction in his scapula. Since then he only pitched four games—all starts—and didn't throw a single inning in the postseason until the fateful Game 5. After Wacha got loose in the bullpen but didn't end up throwing in Game 4, Matheny explained his role on the team to reporters:
We haven't had a situation really to get him in there that he's going to get stretched out like we need him to. We're also in that spot that if we get a chance to get somebody on and hit a home run and we don't have anybody at the back end of this game to throw multiple innings, we're in bad shape
Matheny's explanation makes perfect sense. There's a time and a place for an emergency reliever, especially in the postseason. The Giants have one on their postseason roster; his name is Tim Lincecum. But when you absolutely must get through an inning unscathed, that's the last pitcher you should send to the bump.
Advertisement
Wacha immediately got into trouble in the bottom of the ninth, giving up a single to leadoff man Pablo Sandoval. After retiring Hunter Pence, Wacha didn't make Brandon Belt even remove the bat from his shoulder, walking him on four straight pitches. This brought up Travis Ishikawa, perhaps the Giants least-feared hitter, a guy who was cut by the Pirates earlier in the season and seriously contemplated retirement. But all Wacha could do is watch in dismay as Ishikawa hammered the third pitch of the at-bat to right for a walk-off home run.
After the game, Matheny was asked why he went with Wacha for the crucial inning. Here's what he said:
I put him in a tough spot. But you [saw] the first couple pitches come out of [his] hand and I think everybody in the baseball world asked why we had been waiting so long to let this kid throw. Just a tough spot for him to be in and not the spot we want him to be in but we'll put him out there again in a similar situation.
Advertisement
No, Mike, the entire baseball world was screaming "WHY THE HELL IS THE GUY WHO HASN'T PITCHED IN 20 DAYS IN THE GAME RIGHT NOW?" And the entire baseball world was right. Matheny could've thrown a perfectly well-rested Trevor Rosenthal—heaven forbid using your closer in a non-save situation—or how about Seth Maness or Carlos Martinez, who combined only gave up one run in 10 2/3 innings of postseason pitching? Really, anybody but the guy you were calling your "break glass in case of emergency extra innings game" pitcher just 24 hours ago.
Baseball is the longest season, and it's undeniably cruel that six months of hard work can be reduced to a single decision. But more often than not mind-numbingly crazy decisions are punished, and that's exactly what happened to Mike Matheny Thursday night.
Advertisement
Photo via Christian Petersen/GettyThe Vancouver Canucks have two of the best players in all of US college hockey in Thatcher Demko and Brock Boeser. Both players have Canucks fans excited about the future of the franchise. With the Canucks on pace for their worst finish since the late 90s, the timing of Boeser and Demko’s emergence is a great relief to management and the fan base.
Lukas Jasek and Nikita Tryamkin were the only Canucks prospects playing in Europe in 2015-16. Tryamkin’s KHL season has already ended and he is now a member of the Vancouver Canucks.
Here is a look at all the Canucks prospects that played in the NCAA or the European leagues for the majority of the 2015-16 season.
NCAA
Thatcher Demko, G, Boston College (Hockey East)
Drafted 2nd Round (36th Overall), 2014
Thatcher Demko has had an absolutely fantastic 2015-16 season so far with the Eagles and recently received the honor of being named co-winner of Hockey East Player of the Year. Demko is at or near the top of all statistical categories in the NCAA and even went so far as to break Boston College’s shut-out record previously held by former Canuck Cory Schneider by putting up ten shut-outs.
A fine season personally will mean little to Demko however, unless the Eagles can win the Frozen Four Tournament set to start April 7th in Tampa. Boston College has a roster loaded with future NHL players yet Demko has been the Eagles most valuable player throughout the season. A national title would be the cherry on top for the great season Demko and the Eagles have had so far.
Canucks fans have watched with anticipation as Demko has gotten better and better over his college career and he may be ready to turn pro this summer. If Demko does sign a contract with Vancouver he will likely be given the chance to start the majority of games for the Utica Comets in 2016-17 while the Canucks sort out the starter and back-up roles with the big club. With little left to prove at the NCAA level it appears very likely that Demko will turn pro and join the Canucks organization sometime in the very near future.
Brock Boeser, RW, University of North Dakota (NCHC)
Drafted 1st Round (23rd Overall), 2015
Brock Boeser has been a huge bright spot for the Canucks organization. Heading to UND for 2015-16, few expected Boeser to catch fire like he did and lead the team in scoring as a freshman. Playing on a top line with Drake Caggiula and Nick Schmaltz, Boeser has learned the intricacies of the college game from his veteran linemates. The chemistry between the three is evident and the scoresheet has their names all over it on most nights.
Not only did Boeser manage to lead his team in scoring but he has helped get the Fighting Hawks into the Frozen Four Tournament with a legitimate shot at a national title. Boeser received several honors from the NCHC including being named a First-Team All-Conference and to the NCHC All-Rookie Team.
Breaking scoring records in NCHC play and earning honors for his efforts, even he didn’t expect the kind of success that he achieved in 2015-16. Winning a national title would be the perfect end to a nearly perfect season for Boeser. As far as the future for Boeser, the Canucks will likely allow him another year in college before he turns pro and begins his career as a Vancouver Canuck. When that day comes the organization will have a legitimate top-six scoring winger in Brock Boeser.
Adam Gaudette, C, Northeastern University (Hockey East)
Drafted 5th Round (149th Overall), 2015
Gaudette got off to a bit of a slow start to his collegiate career but caught fire mid-way through the season. He managed to push into the top five for points and third for goals with Northeastern. In addition, his 30 points in 41 games was good for 15th among under-20 players and ahead of several with more impressive draft pedigrees.
Gaudette was often overlooked as Brock Boeser and Thatcher Demko put together amazing seasons with their respective teams, but Gaudette has managed to gain some attention with his own successful season. Still a long term prospect, Gaudette has shown that he is going to work hard to get to the next level and he should eventually be a useful bottom-six forward with a solid two-way game.
Europe
Nikita Tryamkin, D, Avtomobilist Yekaterinburg (KHL)
Drafted 3rd Round (66th Overall), 2014
Tryamkin was signed by the Canucks to an entry-level contract after the conclusion of his season with Yekaterinburg of the KHL and brought to Vancouver to audition for a role with the Canucks in 2016-17.
Tryamkin finished out his time in the KHL having played over 200 games so his transition to the NHL was quite seamless. Tryamkin was a bit overwhelmed in his first game as a Canuck and opened his NHL career with a nervous twelve second shift before heading to the bench for a change. Once he calmed down and fell into the flow of the game, Tryamkin started to show signs of why the Canucks selected him 66th overall back in 2014.
Tryamkin skates well for a big man and is rarely caught out of position. His active stick and good gap control make him a good all-around defender but Canuck fans and management alike want to see the big man display a bit more of a nasty side. He finishes his checks and clears the front of the net well but a man of his size should be physically dominating in all aspects of the game. If he develops that physical edge, Tryamkin will be a force to be reckoned with and in the physical Western Conference that is exactly what the Canucks need moving forward. The Canucks have even used Tryamkin on the power play as a human wall to screen opposing goalies so he is certainly being given every opportunity to succeed so far in Vancouver. All signs so far indicate that Tryamkin has likely secured a spot in the Canucks’ top six defensemen group for next season and beyond.
Lukas Jasek, RW, HC Trinec (Czech)
Drafted 6th Round (174th Overall), 2015
A season of bouncing around the Czech leagues has left Canucks fans wondering what they really have in the young winger. Jasek is dominant against other under-20 Czech players but has had trouble producing against men in the elite league.
Jasek’s puck skills and playmaking ability are not in doubt, but it is his lack of a physical dimension that has some scouts concerned about his overall potential. Jasek often appears outmatched when playing against men and he needs to add some muscle to his frame before his potential can truly be assessed. If he bulks up and learns to play with a bit of a physical edge then he should be in consideration for a move to North America where he can gain some experience on the smaller ice surfaces of the CHL or AHL, depending on where the Canucks place him for the 2016-17 season.
Another season of bouncing around the Czech leagues cannot be the best developmental path for young Jasek – who does not turn 19 until the end of August – so a move to North America seems like the best option at this point. Whether he suits up for Utica or is even placed in one of the major junior leagues remains to be seen but it is in Jasek’s best interest to get some experience playing on the North American ice. While still an intriguing prospect, the jury remains out on Jasek’s overall potential as an NHL player and it will be up to him to take the necessary steps to advance himself to the next level.
Prospect of the Month
As noted above, Brock Boeser has been simply phenomenal so far in his college career and it appears that the sky is the limit for the young forward. Boeser’s stock has definitely risen over the course of the 2015-16 season and Canucks fans are eagerly anticipating the day when Boeser joins the big club.
It seems incredible that North Dakota, for all the program’s success, has not won a national title since 2000. Boeser could further solidify a place in school history by helping to add to the team’s hardware.The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office is currently looking into allegations of “inappropriate behavior and potential conflicts of interest” involving Councilwoman Jeannine Pearce and her former chief of staff Devin Cotter stemming from an incident early last month, according to the Long Beach Police Department.
Early in the morning of June 3, Pearce was briefly detained by authorities investigating a possible DUI and domestic violence incident involving her and Cotter.
In late June, Pearce released a statement announcing that the LBPD was investigating multiple incidences of domestic violence committed against her, but did not state who the perpetrator was.
In a statement released yesterday, the LBPD said its criminal investigation into domestic violence allegations involving Pearce and Cotter was presented to the district attorney’s office for consideration on June 29. However, not finding enough evidence for a felony charge, the district attorney’s office then referred the case to the Long Beach City Prosecutor’s Office, where it is currently being reviewed as a misdemeanor charge.
While the LBPD was investigating alleged domestic violence, officials said the department was also made aware of information regarding events not related to the June incident.
“Pearce and Cotter have both made statements accusing each other of participating in inappropriate activity,” LBPD officials stated. “Based on this information, the Police Department initiated an investigation into these allegations, which include inappropriate behavior and potential conflicts of interest.This investigation, along with the information related to the June 3, 2017 investigation, was presented to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office for filing consideration.”
The case is currently under independent review with the district attorney’s office’s Public Integrity Division.
Greg Risling, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office, confirmed the division had received the case, stating in an email to the Post that “The office’s Public Integrity Division has received an allegation against Mr. Cotter. It remains under review.”
Authorities also addressed public concerns stating that police employees may have given preferential treatment to Pearce and Cotter.
According to the statement, LBPD Chief Robert Luna initiated an Internal Affairs investigation in response to those concerns and 22 separate interviews were subsequently conducted to determine if the actions taken by LBPD employees were appropriate.
The investigation included interviews with LBPD personnel and California Highway Patrol personnel involved in the June 3 incident, as well as civilian witnesses.
Investigators also reviewed documents, reports, computer data, recordings and other relevant data, officials stated, with more than 300 hours of work spent to determine if the employees’ actions were consistent with department policies and procedures. A final case briefing was then presented to Luna and the department’s Executive Command Team.
“After thoroughly reviewing the facts and evidence presented during the final briefing, it was determined that the allegations of misconduct were unfounded, which means that the alleged misconduct did not occur,” the release stated. “A single training issue related to the review of criminal histories was identified and addressed.”
The Citizen Police Complaint Commission is also currently conducting a separate investigation into the allegations of misconduct after a formal complaint was filed related to the handling of the June 3 incident.
“The department takes all allegations of potential misconduct very seriously and consistently applies a multi-step review |
told DC Entertainment have thought long and hard about having several different universes, but through the success of Marvel, have decided that it wouldn't make sense to the audience and financially to have numerous actors playing the same roles year by year.
Regarding Green Lantern, we're told they have yet to decide on their Green Lantern property as well, but are leaning towards a reboot with a new actor playing Hal Jordan (the Green Lantern in the Justice League) being introduced in Justice League movie as an already established hero.
We''ll say while this is to be considered rumor, the source has previously provided us with information that has seemingly been verified, including the aforementioned Batman 2016 movie reboot as well as the news that the new Zack Snyer Superman movie starring Henry Cavill, Man of Steel, will launch a new DC shared movie universe.
Now if the rumor is true and Warner Bros. does indeed go forth with a new Batman movie based on Arkham Asylum, that brings with it some rather interesting questions.
First off all, the obvious inclusion of the Joker. This would certainly bring up reference to Heath Ledger in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. So would Warner Bros. go with it? It could be said that the Joker is a Batman villain, the Batman villain, in addition, the Nolan-verse was its own thing and is over. There is also the fact the added hype having the Joker "come back" would give to the movie. Interestingly enough, the Joker is to make his first appearance in the new DC comic books next month by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo. We already know the Man of Steel movie executives have a hand in the Superman comic books, so it's not that far of a stretch to think the same about the New 52 Batman.
Another - perhaps - issue would be the use of Bane following The Dark Knight Rises. Bane was also featured in Arkham Asylum, as the Joker attempted to create an army of Bane-like thugs as well as using a chemical based off "Venom," which gives Bane his super-strength. However, in Arkham Asylum this version of Bane is more like his comic book counter-part compared to the Tom Hardy version. So could we see the comic book Bane hit the big screen in 2016?
The video game does include a vast number of Batman villains, some of which could be written out of the Batman 2016 movie reboot, but from the sounds of it, the Joker would have to stay.A court ruling will allow CIA torture victims to sue two psychologists who designed and operated the agency’s brutal interrogation program.
US District Court Judge Justin Quackenbush ruled Friday that Tanzanian Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Libyan Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and the family of deceased Afghani Gul Rahman have the right to hold individuals accountable for the CIA program that led to their abuse.
Rahman died in CIA custody in 2002 from hypothermia, dehydration and exposure. His family have never been officially notified of his death and have yet to receive his remains.
James Elmer Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, two CIA-contracted psychologists, are being sued under the Alien Tort Statute for “their commission of torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; non-consensual human experimentation; and war crimes”.
Read more
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) claim Mitchell, Jessen & Associates were paid over $80 million by the US government for their torture program that “preformed illegal human experimentation on CIA prisoners to test and refine the program”.
The program’s methods were devised by Mitchell and Jessen, and ACLU claim the two “personally took part in torture sessions and oversaw the program’s implementation for the CIA”.
“This is a historic win in the fight to hold the people responsible for torture accountable for their despicable and unlawful actions,” said ACLU Staff Attorney Dror Ladin, who argued in court Friday.
“Thanks to this unprecedented ruling, CIA victims will be able to call their torturers to account in court for the first time.”
The ACLU are leading the case on behalf of the men who are just three of “at least 119 individuals” held at CIA secret overseas black sites.
Read more
“None of the men were ever charged with a crime or accused of being members of Al-Qaeda,” reports Rudaw.
The black sites used “enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT)” which were “far more brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others,” according to the 6,700-page Senate report following a five-and-a-half year investigation into CIA interrogations.
“Interrogation techniques such as slaps and "wallings" (slamming detainees against a wall) were used in combination, frequently concurrent with sleep deprivation and nudity… The waterboarding technique was physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting,” according to the Senate report.
This will be the first lawsuit that will hold individuals accountable for the CIA torture program. Until now, each case was dismissed after the government argued a trial would reveal state secrets. However, this time, the DOJ filed a “statement of interest” in the case.
“This is amazing, this is unprecedented. This is the first step towards accountability.” @ACLU's Steven Watt: https://t.co/oaUz9h2sah — Sarah Dougherty (@sm_doug) April 22, 2016
The US Justice Department said they would be open to the case proceeding to discovery, as long as certain information pertaining to identities of covert CIA operatives were kept off-limits.
The DOJ and ACLU attorneys now have 30 days to wade through “a plethora of classified information” before the judge hears from the psychologists and the victims, according to the Guardian.
READ MORE: CIA took nude photos of detainees before rendition to torture sites – reportDo you know the easiest way to kill a dragon? Just stuff a sheep or ram with a heap of poisonous filth and feed it to a dragon. Of course it’s not the most heroic method but it is very safe and effective. Another option is to announce a reward for the dragon’s head. After that the only thing you have to do is wait while the army of heroes, wizards and freaks drive a monster to its grave. It is always necessary to find a solution to the dragon problem because all the members of this scale-winged tribe have the same disease. It is a strong allergy to humans and their settlements and all dragons use the only medicine against this illness; total annihilation of the humans.It's ironic, really. But when James Cameron's romantic disaster classic Titanic held its world premiere in November 1997, studio bosses were worried it might sink without trace - as it was hitting cinemas at the same time as classics including Tomorrow Never Dies, Flubber and, er, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.
How wrong they were. The film would go on to become the most successful movie of the 20th century - winning a staggering 11 Academy Awards (tying it with All About Eve and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King) and earning more than $2 billion at the box office.
Moreover, it also kickstarted the careers of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. And let's face it, the world would be a poorer place without Leo's endless quest for an Oscar and Kate's brutal honesty.
And so, as Titanic turns 18 years old, here are 18 facts about the movie that - like an enormous iceberg of trivia - you probably weren't aware of...
1. It's a James Cameron movie with a difference
Titanic is the only James Cameron movie that doesn't include or mention nuclear weapons.
2. Leonardo DiCaprio nearly didn't play Jack Dawson
Remember Elton from Clueless and Billy Chenowith in Six Feet Under? Yes, Jeremy Sisto was in the running to play Jack Dawson before Leonardo DiCaprio landed the role. And we have video proof! Watch his screen test with Kate Winslet in the video below.
Prior to that, early studio favourites for the lead roles were reportedly Matthew McConaughey and Gwyneth Paltrow, while everyone from Christian Bale to Claire Danes was linked to the project before Cameron eventually struck gold with Kate and Leo.
Although the director's luck ran out elsewhere: Robert De Niro was offered the role of Captain Smith, but was forced to turn it down due to a gastrointestinal infection at the time. In addition to that King Kong icon Fay Wray said no to playing the elderly rose saying it looked like a "tortuous experience".
3. There was a J Dawson on board the real Titanic
His name was Joseph Dawson and he worked shovelling coal in the ship's engine room. Joseph was one of the 1,500 passengers who went down with the vessel, and his gravestone can be found at the Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
4. The cast and crew tripped out on angel dust
On the final night of shooting in Nova Scotia, one or more pranksters mixed PCP into the clam chowder served to the cast and crew. 80 people were sent to the hospital with hallucinations.
5. The actors hired for the engine room scenes were only 5 ft tall
Cameron used short people to make his already sizeable set look larger on screen.
6. Kate Winslet had one hell of an ice breaker for Leonardo DiCaprio
The first scene Winslet and DiCaprio shot together was the moment Rose strips and asks Jack to "draw me like one of your French girls". How did Winslet cut through any potential awkwardness with DiCaprio? She flashed him the first time they met...
7. Paint me like one of your French girls Jack James
That famous sketch of a naked Rose wearing the Heart of the Ocean diamond was actually drawn by James Cameron. The film's writer/director is left-handed so he flipped the film to match the right-handed DiCaprio.
8. Kate Winslet's nude sketch fetched $16,000 at auction
Cameron's topless drawing of Winslet was sold off in a movie memorabilia auction by Premiere Props in 2011.
9. Kate Winslet caught pneumonia on set
The leading lady was one of the few actors and crew members who didn't wear a wetsuit during filming. Consequently, she caught pneumonia because, despite the water being heated, it was still pumped in from the freezing cold Pacific Ocean.
10. Kate Winslet hates Celine Dion's 'My Heart Will Go On'
"I wish I could say, 'Oh listen, everybody! It's the Celine Dion song!' But I don't," Winslet said in 2012 to coincide with the film's re-release. "I just have to sit there, you know, kind of straight-faced with a massive internal eye roll... It haunts me."
11. James Cameron wanted Enya but DIDN'T want Celine Dion
Yes, Irish warbler Enya was top choice to compose the music for the film. Cameron even went as far as using existing tracks on the temp score for his rough cut. When Enya turned down the gig, in stepped Cameron's Aliens composer James Horner.
The director initially objected to the inclusion of any songs in the film, but Horner and Will Jennings covertly recorded a demo version of 'My Heart Will Go On' with Celine Dion and it eventually received the Cameron seal of approval.
12. Lindsay Lohan was almost in it
The future wild child auditioned impressively to play Cora Cartmell and was reportedly Cameron's top choice. However, the role eventually went to Alexandrea Owens after Cameron thought Lohan's red hair would lead audiences to think her character was related to Rose.
13. The time on the clock in the final scene holds huge significance
As Rose is reunited with Jack the time on the giant clock behind him reads 2.20am. This is the exact time the Titanic slipped beneath the surface of the water on April 15, 1912.
14. "I'm the king of the world!" was improvised
The film's iconic line was unscripted, with DiCaprio saying it the first time he stood on the bow of the ship. Cameron kept the line in, and even yelled it from on-stage at the Academy Awards when he won the Best Picture Oscar.
20th Century Fox
15. Jack WASN'T able to climb onto the raft with Rose
There was plenty of room for Jack aboard the makeshift life raft with Rose, right? RIGHT? Well, yes, according to James Cameron, but the debate is over buoyancy and not space.
"When Jack puts Rose on the raft, he tries to get on the raft - he's not an idiot, he doesn't want to die - and the raft sinks; it kind of flips," he told IGN.
"And so it's clear that there's really only enough buoyancy available for one person. So he makes the decision to let her be that person."
20th Century Fox
16. There was just a single change to the 2012 re-release of Titanic
George Lucas may like to tinker with his movies after the fact, but James Cameron isn't so fiddly. For the 2012 re-release of Titanic the only change (aside from the 3D conversion) was to the arrangement of a star constellation in the night sky.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson had been complaining for years that Cameron's depiction of the sky at around 4.20am on April 15, 1912 was way off the mark. He provided Cameron with a detailed map and the film was digitally altered for that scene.
17. A TERRIBLE alternate ending was filmed
Forget all about that emotional reunion between Jack and Rose on the Titanic's grand staircase. No - criminally, the film almost ended with this clunky stand-off between Bill Paxton's Brock and Gloria Stuart's elderly Rose as she drops the Heart of the Ocean diamond into the sea.
18. Titanic 2 actually happened...
Despite the obvious limitations, there was a straight-to-video sequel made in 2010. And you'll never guess: it was AWFUL.
"On the 100th anniversary of the original voyage, a modern luxury liner christened Titanic 2, follows the path of its namesake," the synopsis reads. "But when a tsunami hurls an iceberg into the new ship's path, the passengers and crew must fight to avoid a similar fate."Welcome to A1 Tent & Party Rentals -- we are excited to do business with you. A1 Tent & Party Rentals is an established company with a reputation for providing excellent service and quality products at competitive prices in the Atlanta, Georgia area.
This website and catalog have been developed to inform you of the many options available to make your celebration a success. A1 Tent & Party Rentals should have the equipment you need. If you don't see what you're looking for, please feel free to ask! We continually update our rental inventory to meet customer demand. We also rent restrooms.
Remember, this website and catalog are guidelines only and some adjustments may be necessary. Your A1 Tent & Party Rental representative can help fine tune your planning. A1 Tent & Party Rentals wishes you much success for your event and we look forward to helping you achieve that success.
20,000 Sq. Ft. Facility
Please visit our 20,000 sq. ft. facility. We have a showroom with experienced rental specialists to help you.
With over 25 years experience, A-1 Rentals offers a full range of tents and party rental equipment to make your event a complete success. Whether it is a wedding, corporate event, reunion, carnival, or backyard party, A-1 Rentals offers various sizes and styles of tents and equipment to meet your needs. In addition to tents, we furnish tables, chairs, lighting, staging, dance floors, linens, china, portable restrooms, and much more to make your event complete. Call us at 770-458-7740. Serving the Atlanta and North Georgia area.Using a type of human stem cell, Johns Hopkins researchers say they have created a three-dimensional complement of human retinal tissue in the laboratory, which notably includes functioning photoreceptor cells capable of responding to light, the first step in the process of converting it into visual images.
"We have basically created a miniature human retina in a dish that not only has the architectural organization of the retina but also has the ability to sense light," says study leader M. Valeria Canto-Soler, Ph.D., an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She says the work, reported online June 10 in the journal Nature Communications, "advances opportunities for vision-saving research and may ultimately lead to technologies that restore vision in people with retinal diseases."
Like many processes in the body, vision depends on many different types of cells working in concert, in this case to turn light into something that can be recognized by the brain as an image. Canto-Soler cautions that photoreceptors are only part of the story in the complex eye-brain process of vision, and her lab hasn't yet recreated all of the functions of the human eye and its links to the visual cortex of the brain. "Is our lab retina capable of producing a visual signal that the brain can interpret into an image? Probably not, but this is a good start," she says.
The achievement emerged from experiments with human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) and could, eventually, enable genetically engineered retinal cell transplants that halt or even reverse a patient's march toward blindness, the researchers say.
The iPS cells are adult cells that have been genetically reprogrammed to their most primitive state. Under the right circumstances, they can develop into most or all of the 200 cell types in the human body. In this case, the Johns Hopkins team turned them into retinal progenitor cells destined to form light-sensitive retinal tissue that lines the back of the eye.
Using a simple, straightforward technique they developed to foster the growth of the retinal progenitors, Canto-Soler and her team saw retinal cells and then tissue grow in their petri dishes, says Xiufeng Zhong, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in Canto-Soler's lab. The growth, she says, corresponded in timing and duration to retinal development in a human fetus in the womb. Moreover, the photoreceptors were mature enough to develop outer segments, a structure essential for photoreceptors to function.
Retinal tissue is complex, comprising seven major cell types, including six kinds of neurons, which are all organized into specific cell layers that absorb and process light, "see," and transmit those visual signals to the brain for interpretation. The lab-grown retinas recreate the three-dimensional architecture of the human retina. "We knew that a 3-D cellular structure was necessary if we wanted to reproduce functional characteristics of the retina," says Canto-Soler, "but when we began this work, we didn't think stem cells would be able to build up a retina almost on their own. In our system, somehow the cells knew what to do."
When the retinal tissue was at a stage equivalent to 28 weeks of development in the womb, with fairly mature photoreceptors, the researchers tested these mini-retinas to see if the photoreceptors could in fact sense and transform light into visual signals.
They did so by placing an electrode into a single photoreceptor cell and then giving a pulse of light to the cell, which reacted in a biochemical pattern similar to the behavior of photoreceptors in people exposed to light.
Specifically, she says, the lab-grown photoreceptors responded to light the way retinal rods do. Human retinas contain two major photoreceptor cell types called rods and cones. The vast majority of photoreceptors in humans are rods, which enable vision in low light. The retinas grown by the Johns Hopkins team were also dominated by rods.
Canto-Soler says that the newly developed system gives them the ability to generate hundreds of mini-retinas at a time directly from a person affected by a particular retinal disease such as retinitis pigmentosa. This provides a unique biological system to study the cause of retinal diseases directly in human tissue, instead of relying on animal models.
The system, she says, also opens an array of possibilities for personalized medicine such as testing drugs to treat these diseases in a patient-specific way. In the long term, the potential is also there to replace diseased or dead retinal tissue with lab-grown material to restore vision.
Other Johns Hopkins researchers involved in this study include Christian Gutierrez, Tian Xue, Christopher Hampton, M. Natalia Vergara, Li-Hui Cao, Tea Soon Park, Elias T. Zambidis and King-Wai Yau. Jason S. Meyer of Purdue University and David M. Gamm of the University of Wisconsin also contributed to the work.
This research was supported by grants from the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund; the William and Ella Owens Medical Research Foundation; The J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation; the William and Mary Greve Special Scholar Award from Research to Prevent Blindness, and the National Institutes of Health's National Eye Institute (R01EY022631, EY1765, R01EY021218 and R01EY06837).Wonder if others feel the same way? If you go back in your memory for about 10 years ago you would remember the world was a much kinder place. People seemed to see each other more – poking and chatting on Facebook don’t count. More importantly, you would always find people helping each other out.
Not to sound like my parents, and to control the amount of selective memory enhancements that I apply, I hit the web looking for examples of how kindness changed with the advent of the web. One of the first things I came by was a wonderful talk (embedded at the end of this post) that was both inspiring and amusing. From there, I kept on looking for how the web helped to make the world a better place – one person at time.
My findings give the impression that, if anything, the internet enabled many acts of kindness to occur. According to some, the whole internet could collapse if it weren’t for those acts of kindness. So here are some places on the net where kindness is alive, well and plentiful!
1. Free Rice
Feel good about yourself and have fun at the same time. This website will make donations of rice in partnership with the WFP for every word you guess correctly. Not much can be said about this site other than it’s all around awesome. [link to Free Rice]
2. Couch Surfing
What is more heart warming than opening up your home to a total stranger and allowing them to stay over without any expectation for anything in return but kindness? I know the concept sounds almost creepy, who in this day and age, allows a hitchhiker into his car never mind his home? Nonetheless the concept works brilliantly and there are plenty of happy people because of it! [link to Couch Surfing]
3. Random Acts of Kindness
Part of the World Kindness Movement. The idea is to inspire other people to be kind to each other and to lead by example. The site is a resource for materials and ideas on how to be kind to your fellow humans, and how to pass on that message to your students, partners, faith group and so on. And if the self satisfaction that kindness provides is not enough for you, you can share your random act of kindness too. Remember to mark November 13th on your calendars! [link to Random Acts of Kindness]
4. Network for Good
The biggest on-line fund-raising site helping other nonprofits to raise money and communicate with supporters and organizers. You can call it good and effective social networking and it definitely helped change the way funds are raised. [link to Network for Good]
5. Wikipedia
What’s more powerful than information? Free information but of course! The impact that Wikipedia had on how information is accessed can not be understated and no one is more thankful than high school and university students! The fact that a bunch of people that would come together to create, update and maintain an entire encyclopedia – for free- is a testament that there is a lot of kindness to go around in the world. [link to Wikipedia]
An Inspiration
Here is a video of Jonathan Zittrain talking about how the web is just a series of random acts of kindness; a really interesting video (about 20 min). This was actually were I got the inspiration for this post, and as a matter of fact I think TED is one of the kindest places on the web since it allows a lot of people like me to get inspired and motivated through watching any of their many presentations that provide great insights into humanity and our world at large…
After watching the video, what do you think? Do you think the internet and social networks will allow people to express their kindness more often? What role do we have in propagating the wave of kindness around the world? Is joining a “feel good group” on Facebook enough to count as an act of kindness? Where do we draw the line?Story highlights "Better to get your news directly from the president," Smith said
Trump has trafficked in falsehoods during his political career
Washington (CNN) The chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee is asking Americans to trust the information they get from the President over the news produced by the media.
Republican Rep. Lamar Smith saluted President Donald Trump from the floor of the House on Tuesday evening, rattling off his first-week accomplishments but saying Trump is not getting the press coverage he deserves.
"The national liberal media won't print that, or air it or post it," Smith said. "Better to get your news directly from the President. In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth."
Trump has been called out for highlighting falsehoods and conspiracy theories during his political career and has repeatedly attacked the mainstream press as pushing "fake news."
The most recent flare-up came this week when Trump and his aides claimed that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally in the 2016 election, an allegation that is not supported by any evidence.CINCINNATI -- It appears rookie right-handed pitcher Jon Moscot will be done for the season with "significant damage" in his left shoulder.
CINCINNATI -- It appears rookie right-handed pitcher Jon Moscot will be done for the season with "significant damage" in his left shoulder.
• Cast your Esurance All-Star ballot for #ASGWorthy players
View Full Game Coverage
Reds manager Bryan Price announced on Thursday that Moscot (1-1, 4.63) will need surgery to repair a dislocated left shoulder. Moscot experienced the injury while tagging Tigers' center fielder Anthony Gose at second base in the first inning on Monday.
"It would be optimistic to think that he'll be back pitching [this season]," Price said. "That being said, he's a young man with a great work ethic so I don't know the exact time table. It's certainly longer than it would be if the injury didn't need the surgical repair so the exact amount of time I'm not 100 percent sure. I don't think it's probable that he will be pitching by the end of the year but we'll see."
Moscot, who was put on the 15-day disabled list on Tuesday, suffered the injury in only his third career start. The 23-year-old recorded a loss in his Major League debut on June 5 against the Padres, giving up four earned runs on four hits and three walks in five innings pitched. However, he bounced back in his second start on June 10 against the Phillies, giving up only two earned runs in six innings for his first career win.
"He certainly will be ready for 2016," Price said. "The good news is it's something that he has to do to create the stability in the shoulder and may as well do it now, and get it taken care of and not have to worry about it going forward when his rehab is finished."
A replacement for Moscot in the rotation has yet to be announced by Price. Moscot's next start was slated for Saturday against the Marlins.
Moscot is the Reds' third starting pitcher currently on the DL, including fellow rookie Raisel Iglesias and veteran Homer Bailey. Iglesias is expected to return from a left oblique strain, while Bailey has been shut down for the season after Tommy John surgery on May 8.Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE has hired Republican operative David Bossie to be his deputy campaign manager.
ADVERTISEMENT
Trump told The Washington Post about the hire in a phone call Thursday.
"A friend of mine for many years," he said. "Solid. Smart. Loves politics, knows how to win."
New Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said Bossie will be helping her with the campaign’s operations and planning.
"He's a battle-tested warrior and a brilliant strategist," she said. "He's a nuts-and-bolts tactician as well, who's going to help us fully integrate our ground game and data operations, and help with overall strategy as my deputy."
Bossie is the president of Citizens United, a conservative group best known for its namesake lawsuit that opened the door to political spending from corporations, nonprofits and other organizations.
Bossie got his start working on the Senate’s investigation of the Clintons' Whitewater real estate controversy in the '90s before being tapped by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich to be the House Oversight Committee’s chief investigator.
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 campaign chairman John Podesta blasted the new hire in a statement Thursday night.
"David Bossie is so craven and maniacal that in the heyday of the overreaching, Gingrich-era Congress, the top Whitewater conspiracy theorist in the House had to fire him for doctoring evidence," Podesta said. "He has devoted his career ever since to trying to tear down Hillary Clinton. For months now, Citizens United has been acting as an arm of the Trump campaign, and this hiring of Bossie now makes it official. This is just the latest sign that Donald Trump has put the most extreme elements of the right-wing fringe in the driver's seat of his campaign."
Bossie was reportedly fired from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for his role in selectively editing transcripts from a Clinton administration official to cast blame on Hillary Clinton.
The Clinton campaign similarly seized on another recent Trump hire: Steve Bannon, the former executive chairman of the right-wing Breitbart News.HOUSTON - Authorities are investigating a string of armed robberies at three Denny's restaurants across the Houston area. Police said they don't believe the same people committed all three robberies.
The first robbery happened at around midnight near Wilcrest and the Katy Freeway. Investigators said two men in white hoodies ran inside demanding cash.
"I was waiting for my bill to come. They came running in, and one of them had a weapon," said customer Dale Hayden. "As soon as he approached me, that's when I jumped up after him and chased him outside."
Investigators said the robbers stole cash from the register. They didn't try to rob any customers but they pistol-whipped Hayden when he tried to stop them.
The second incident happened at around 1 a.m. at the Denny's on Southmore Boulevard near Highway 288. Three armed robbers walked inside the restaurant and held employees at gunpoint, police said.
"It was a terrifying night for us," said employee Olivia Johnson. "We were scared and we were crying in the back of the storage room."
Johnson said she heard the crooks telling her manager to give them the money. Investigators said the trio stole cash from the register then ran outside and stole cellphones from two customers.
Witnesses told police that the suspects fled the scene in a dark-colored vehicle.
The last robbery happened just before 4 a.m. at the Denny's near Wilson Road and Beltway 8. Detectives said three armed men got away with an undisclosed amount of cash. No one was hurt.
In response to the rash of robberies, Houston Police Chief Charles McClelland announced his department is working on setting up a multi-agency task force. The officers will come up with a plan to catch and arrest the suspects responsible for the late-night robberies.
Denny's isn't the only late-night restaurant being targeted by robbers. In the last month, armed gunmen have hit five Houston area IHOPs. All of those incidents also happened between midnight and 4 a.m. No word yet if those five incidents are connected.
Copyright 2014 by Click2Houston.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Looking for news you can trust?
Subscribe to our free newsletters.
Editors’ note: Mac McClelland is spending a month in her home state of Ohio, reporting on the Wisconsin-style showdown involving Republican Governor John Kasich, public employees, unions, teachers, students, and struggling middle-class families.
Yesterday I did something I haven’t done in a really long time: went to school. Middle school. My new/temporary landlord/roommate/reporting subject, Erin, teaches outside Columbus, and I joined her for one of the last days of class before school lets out for summer.
Out here, the public schools spend nearly 20 percent less per student than the national average. The lack of resources can be challenging—one local school closed down because its AC broke and the summer heat was too sweltering for the kids. Erin’s school doesn’t even have AC, but she loves loves loves her job. As a writing teacher, she brought me in to talk to her students about what it’s like to be a professional writer. So I spent the day fielding some excellent questions (as well as a couple of racist and homophobic ones) from her seventh and eighth graders. I also heard about their plans for the summer. Lots of them have jobs, mostly with companies or farms owned by their families. Some of those without those types of connections are having more trouble finding work, not totally surprising since job growth in this town is -4.6 percent. As one 14-year-old explained his failure to land summer employment despite having applied at several places, “No jobs to be HAD.”
When Anthony, Erin’s husband, got home last night, he told me he’d spent the day talking about employment as well. Since he and so many of his coworkers at the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel are facing layoffs under Gov. Kasich’s proposed budget cuts, his office had brought in people to talk to them about resources for getting new jobs, like résumé services. Anthony has started searching for alternate work, but hasn’t had any more luck than the 14-year-old yet.
Since Kasich’s budget also targets schools, I asked Erin if she’s concerned that the threat of becoming a single-income household could actually be a threat of becoming a no-income household. Her school recently had to lay off a couple of teachers already, and cut a few more to half-time. But she thinks her position is secure. Ohio is one of the states where teacher seniority is protected by law, a law that teachers’ unions are fighting to defend. So it’s a good thing Erin’s been teaching for eight years. The bad news is that the governor’s trying to cut her union’s power, too.This is part II of my tour of Spiran writing found in the world of Final Fantasy X. Let's turn to Al Bhed script, the language of Spira's outcast minority group persecuted as "heathens" by the Yevonite majority.
The need to simplify game design means there's a bit of hand-waving going on, for both spoken and written Al Bhed. Even though Rikku and her people are supposed to be talking in another language, their spoken words are actually a cipher for Japanese (in the original game) or a cipher for English.
However, in all versions of the game, the written letters of Al Bhed are a cipher for English (Roman) letters. Of course, we can pretend that the letters that I'm rendering as T, S, A are really the Al Bhed letters for the sounds D, C, and Y, but that doesn't work with the Japanese edition of the game.
Credits: Screengrabs adapted from dansg08's amazing FFX commentary walkthrough. For labels, I'm using ShinLadyAnarki's Al Bhed Font.An investigation by the Labour party into allegations of inappropriate behaviour by the politician Carl Sargeant, who died four days after being sacked as a Welsh government minister, has been dropped.
The party said it was no longer possible to take forward the investigation into Sargeant. The first minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones, also said he did not feel guilty that he had sacked Sargeant and insisted that he was confident he had acted properly.
Investigations have begun into how Jones handled the allegations against Sargeant, and whether news of his sacking was leaked.
A third inquiry is to focus on allegations of bullying within the Labour Welsh government.
The Labour general secretary, Iain McNicol, has written to Sargeant’s family solicitor to say the party’s investigation into him would not continue. In the letter, which has been seen by the Guardian, McNicol said: “It is no longer possible to take forward any investigation under our procedures and therefore the Labour party deems its investigation closed.”
McNicol said the Labour party had acted in accordance with its procedures. He wrote: “As you know our procedures require that after a complaint has been received the Labour party sends an agreed formal statement of the complainant to the respondent so that the respondent may revert.
“The Labour party received the initial complaint on Friday 3 November and was waiting for the formal statement to send to Mr Sargeant when the tragic news reached us of his passing.
“At no stage did the Labour party assume or confer any guilt on any individual … The Labour party rejects any liability for costs in this matter. We are confident we have acted in accordance with our procedures at all times.”
Sargeant was dismissed as cabinet secretary for communities and children on that same day, 3 November. He apparently took his own life at the family home in Connah’s Quay, north Wales, on 7 November. A complaint by Sargeant’s family and friends is that he did not know what allegations he was facing and had been left in limbo.
Speaking to the BBC, the Welsh first minister said he felt loss but not guilt over Sargeant’s death. “Carl was a good friend. I knew Carl for many, many, years. We never once argued. I’m confident that I did everything as I should have done. Could I have done something different? No. The only way I could have done it different would have been to have ignored the allegations.” There was no suggestion that Sargeant “was in a state that was vulnerable to do what he did”, he said.
Jones criticised the former local government minister Leighton Andrews, who said that the atmosphere in the Welsh government was toxic during the last assembly term. The first |
interfaces, was designing for them. Users who were figuratively still using IE6. Who were afraid of clicking things lest they break something.
These users needed to see this new device – this new interface method – looking friendly. It needed to look easy and fun. And at a glance, hate it though you may, well-designed metaphorical interfaces do a good job of that. They look fun and easy.
Communicating with your users is your job. And to do that you must continue to devise smart UI conventions and employ good taste – and that means choosing carefully where on the skeuomorphic spectrum you wish to design. Skeuomorphic is not a bad word. It’s what you do.Trivia
Trivia News
KVSC's 40th annual Trivia Weekend is Feb. 15-17, 2019
Trivia Leadership Board
View current scores here: http://kvsc.org/trivia/points/latest.php
View scores by hour here: http://kvsc.org/trivia/points/hourlist.php
_____________________________________________________________________
The tenured question writers are ready to enroll you in...
There are 50 credit hours to complete as you apply to be accepted to Trivia University. The curriculum has yet to be written by the faculty question writers but all course work must be completed from February 15-17. While there are no pre-requisites, you can conduct academic and field research to make the Dean’s trivia list.
We are accepting enrollment to Trivia University on Friday, December 14. The registrar's office is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on business days, but is closed on holidays. Enrollment is open until 4:30 p.m. on Friday, Febraury 15.
For 50-consecutive hours KVSC will broadcast between 9-18 trivia questions per hour, on a variety subjects ranging from pop culture, science, history and other oddball factoids. Teams call in their guesses to our Trivia Phone Hotlines as fast as they can! College and high school teams can compete for free, there is a $50 fee for community teams. Check the registration and rules pages to learn the details.
Perhaps you’ll attend a lecture on the history of St. Cloud State University, or prepare for a pop quiz to bolster your trivia transcript. There may be elective classes in library sciences, zoology of rodentia, polysomnography and the history of telephonic communication. Alumni are as important to KVSC's 40th anniversary theme as are the freshman, and don’t forget the fraternities and sororities.
Real Geniuses, enroll in...Trivia University. Celebrating academia, 150 Years of St. Cloud State, hilarious and fun-filled college experiences and 40 years of KVSC’s Trivia Weekend, where it all began, at SCSU.
By the way…there is a potential for DOUBLE SECRET PROBATION if you change Wikipedia entries to hinder other teams. The tenured question writers remind you, “No one is really going to be free until nerd persecution ends.”
Start your mental stretches and prepare to execute your perfect Triple Lindy for Trivia University. Finally, don’t forget, there’s always a future in plastics.
Minnesota Masters of Trivia Traveling Trophy currently held by 2018's winning team "It Just Doesn't Matter."
READ MORE: Register for Trivia Weekend: Our 40th Weekend Will Focus On St. Cloud State (Story and Images) by Jeff Wood, University Communications, December 2018.
About Trivia Weekend
The History of KVSC’s Trivia Marathon
Trivia weekend was created to alleviate Minnesota’s infamous cabin fever and debuted in 1980 with 25 teams participating. In 2018, Trivia Weekend attracted 50 teams, more than 20 teams played via the Internet from various parts of the country and globally. As the weekend grew in popularity, so did its organizational sophistication. Visit our Trivia History page for a full report.
How Does Trivia Weekend Work?
Each year, a different theme is chosen to pay homage to a particular phenomena. The questions asked represent a broad range of categories including but not limited to: movies, pop culture, sports, science and history. Of course, teams can expect to be bombarded with many theme-based questions. After a team registers, it receives the official trivia kit, which includes a visual-trivia packet and two collectible posters. Kits are mailed to all teams outside the St. Cloud metro area.
Trivia Weekend is typically scheduled for the second weekend of February and begins on Friday at 5 p.m. Participating teams will endure 50 hours of non-stop trivia. Each hour, nine questions are broadcast on KVSC 88.1FM. The contest also features speed rounds (double questions), audio and visual trivia. Teams outside the Central Minnesota area are encouraged to play as well. Each year, numerous teams played nationwide and sometimes internationally via the Internet.
To ensure team success, we recommend that each team have a recording device in close proximity-- it comes in handy when audio trivia questions are broadcast. There is no limit on team size. The KVSC crew recommends that all teams have reference books, a steady supply of caffeine, extra cell phones and high speed Internet access.
Trivia Storm 2017 news--They're the 2018 Champs Too.
Congratulations to trivia team It Just Doesn't Matter on their repeat victory! They earned 13,750 points to take first place in Trivia Storm 2017.
CLICK HERE FOR FINAL SCORES
Did you miss the 2017 awards ceremony? You can watch the ceremony HERE.
Trivia Storm: 50 Hours of Torrential Trivia merchandise is still available in limited T-shirt sizes as well as 2017 Question Books.
Trivia Weekend Cool Connections
Visit the following websites to see who all is involved with #TriviaWeekend:
Trivia Weekend's house band, the Shake a Hamster Band writes, records and performs parodies of pop tunes throughout Trivia Weekend. Go ahead and give them a like on their Facebook Page here.
The Goat Posse manages the Challenge Line during #TriviaWeekend, they also make things a little more entertaining for all of us throughout the weekend. Visit the Goat Posse website here. Visit their Facebook Page here.
Also keep in mind that many teams also create their own websites, see a full list of those pages here.
Interested in becoming a Sponsor of Trivia Weekend? Email [email protected] with your inquiry. Check out the list of last years Sponsors here.
It Just Doesn't Matter take home Minnesota Masters of Trivia Traveling Trophy as 2016 champions.
Congrats to It Just Doesn't Matter for taking first in Trivia Cruisin': Racing, Road Tripping, and Rock & Roll with 14,590 points! The competition was a close contest with Stefan's Dream XVII: Stefan's Pole Position taking second with 14,540 points and Meyer Meyer a Decade on Fire taking third with 14,440 points.
Click here for the final Trivia Team Scores of Trivia Cruisin': Racing, Road Tripping, and Rock & Roll.
Click here for Archived hourly scores.
Did you miss the 2016 awards ceremony? You can watch the ceremony HERE.
Congratulations to all 59 teams that played in 2016 making it through 50 consecutive hours of trivia! Get a complete list of the final scores here.
Stefan's Dream XVI: Stefan, Warrior Princess takes home the golden urn for gAME OF trivia 2015: QUEST FOr FUTILE FACTS
The 36th annual Trivia Weekend contest came to a close with Stefan's Dream XVI:Stefan Warrior Princess winning the weekend with 14,150 points. They are the first team to win KVSC's Trivia Weekend 6 Times! Congratulations to Stefan's Dream XVI: Stefan, Warrior Princess on an incredible showing and record breaking year.
Congratulations to all 64 teams for making it through 50 consecutive hours of trivia! Get a complete list of the final scores here.
Stefan's Dream XIV: stefan's re-entry takes home the golden urn for trivia 2013: A space oddity
The 34th annual Trivia Weekend contest came to a close with Stefan's Dream XIV: Stefan's Re-Entry winning the weekend with 16,190 points. Trivia 2013: A Space Oddity was a close contest with Pull-Start Diesel taking second with 15,595 points and Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women taking third with 15,570 points. Congratulations to all 62 teams for making it through 50 consecutive hours of trivia! Get a complete list of the final scores here.
Overall, Trivia 2013: A Space Oddity brought in hundreds of volunteers, alumni and staff in addition to dozens of area business sponsors. The 50-hour weekend concluded with an awards ceremony and an after part at the Red Carpet Nightclub in downtown St. Cloud.
LEARNED PIGS & FIREPROOF WOMEN TAKE HOME THE GOLDEN URN IN THE 2012 TRIVIA WEEKEND CONTEST
The 33rd annual Trivia Weekend contest came to a close with Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women coming out on top with 15,980 points. 33 1/3: Trivia Long Play was a close contest with Mustache taking second place with 15,855 points and Stefan's Dream Xlll: Stefan Pulls Out coming in a close third with a total of 15,850 points. Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women took home the coveted 'Golden Urn' traveling trophy for the first time since 2006. Congratulations to all 67 teams for making it through 50 consecutive hours of trivia madness! Get a complete list of final scores here or see hourly archives here.
33 1/3: Trivia Long Play honored the 33rd consecutive year of Trivia Weekend and saluted KVSC--the only central Minnesota station still playing vinyl records. From eight-tracks and cassette tapes to CDs and mp3s, there is only one medium that has stood the test of time: Vinyl records.
Overall, the 2012 Trivia Weekend brought in 67 teamsto the annual event and hundreds of volunteers, alumni and staff to help make 33 1/3: Trivia Long Play a success. The 50-hour weekend concluded with an awards ceremony and an after party at the Red Carpet Nightclub in St. Cloud.
A big thank you goes out to sponsors who supplied our volunteers with the best food we could have asked for and prizes for the top three teams.
If you missed the awards ceremony, you can listen to it in full here.
View an Archive of Hourly Scores Here.Tonight’s budget is expected to tighten a tax loophole for charities which run businesses unrelated to their charitable work. The government thinks it will increase revenue for Australia’s coffers. It won’t. It will simply line the pockets of lawyers and tax consultants.
The Hillsong church, which has links to the Gloria Jean’s coffee shop franchise, and the Seventh Day Adventist Church with its cereal company, Sanitarium, have been highlighted as possible organisations which would be caught by the new laws.
Ministers are acting after being lobbied by various sources, but in particular the Australian Tax Office. The idea is that the change will increase tax revenue, remove any uncompetitive advantage that charities with business links have, and changes will bring Australia in line with international practice.
But international experience suggests that taxing not-for-profit business income does not result in any increase in the tax take. Australia can’t expect to be any different.
The US experience
In the US in 1950 Congress enacted the Unrelated Business Income Tax (UBIT) which imposes a tax on the unrelated business activities carried on by not-for-profits. It denied exemption to “feeder organisations” operated for the primary purpose of carrying on a trade or business to pass profits to a not-for-profit.
Congress’ intention was to prevent exempt organisations from competing unfairly with for-profit firms and to protect the federal tax base.
So if any not-for-profit group makes money from an activity unrelated to the purpose for which it was granted the tax exemption, it is required to pay taxes on that income.
But near zero taxable income was reported by US not-for-profit organisations in the last ten financial years.
How can this be? There’s a widespread practice among not-for-profits to shift the expenses of mission-related activities to their commercial subsidiary’s books, not to mention a flurry of clever accounting practices, and much dancing on a pinhead about what constitutes a related purpose to the charity.
In particular, US universities have argued that for income to be taxable it must be earned in the process of a trade or business that is regularly carried on, a case that they argue does not apply to managing income from debt-financed investments.
The UBIT has, in effect, become a voluntary tax.
The UK experience
In Britain, there’s been an explosion in the number of charity shops in the last 20 years. They are profitable and a legal way to transfer money back to the parent charity.
Not-for-profits are using the Gift Aid scheme to significantly reduce their taxable income. It allows them to convert all the profits of their separate taxable subsidiaries to the not-for-profit parent.
So, as in Australia the tax system emphasises the destination of income rather than the source.
What it means for Australia
Not-for-profits have come to embrace the idea of participating in the market to maximise revenue. They have been involved in commercial businesses for a long time.
But if international experience is anything to go by, the proposed changes are unlikely to raise much revenue for the government.
Yet is likely to increase confusion among not-for-profits as they operate under a vague fear that commercial operations imperil their tax-exempt status.
The additional reporting to the ATO and not-for-profits’ need for advice from tax and legal consultants is likely to increase administrative and compliance costs.
This might well be a boon for the legal and tax consultancy industry but not the charity sector, or Australia’s bank balance.Nicotine addiction is a chronic brain disorder that is characterized by dysphoria upon smoking cessation and relapse after brief periods of abstinence. It has been hypothesized that the negative mood state associated with nicotine withdrawal is partly mediated by a heightened activity of brain stress systems. Animal studies suggest that blockade of vasopressin 1b (V1b) receptors diminishes high levels of drug intake in dependent animals and attenuates the emotional response to stressors. The goal of the present studies was to investigate the effect of acute and chronic treatment with the V1b receptor antagonist SSR149415 on the negative mood state associated with nicotine withdrawal in rats. An intracranial self-stimulation (ICSS) procedure was used to assess mood states and nicotine dependence was induced using minipumps. The nicotinic receptor antagonist mecamylamine was used to precipitate withdrawal. Mecamylamine elevated the brain reward thresholds of the nicotine dependent rats, which reflects a negative mood state. Mecamylamine did not affect the brain reward thresholds of the saline-treated control rats. Chronic treatment with SSR149415 completely prevented the elevations in brain reward thresholds associated with nicotine withdrawal while acute treatment only partly prevented nicotine withdrawal. These data suggest that chronic treatment with V1b receptor antagonists may prevent the dysphoria associated with smoking cessation and thereby improve relapse rates.
Published by Elsevier B.V.Review: Palehound, 'A Place I'll Always Go'
Note: NPR's First Listen audio comes down after the album is released. However, you can still listen with the Spotify or Apple Music playlist at the bottom of the page.
toggle caption Courtesy of artist
An inexorable truth of life is that we all will lose someone close. Death is cruelly indifferent, and no matter how expected or seemingly random it is, no one is ever truly prepared when a loved one is all of sudden gone. Palehound's Ellen Kempner understands this as much as anyone. In relatively close succession last year, the Boston-based songwriter faced the unforeseen death of a friend, and the passing of her grandmother, and was left reeling as a result. Palehound's second full-length album, A Place I'll Always Go, cannot help but be informed by these experiences. Channeling her grief into honest songs about mortality and the search for closure, the album reveals details from her personal life like never before.
On "If You Met Her," a song about the lingering heartache felt by her friend's absence, Kempner recalls happy moments preserved as memories, and marking the time since she passed. "Starting to count up to two / Another year of missing you / When the dust clears, where's my body?," she asks. She then flips the script with these final, devastating lines, "I'm with someone new / And I know that you would love her / If you met her," she pines with a plaintive, breathy whisper. Elsewhere, Kempner confronts her past ("Turning 21"), and admits feigning happiness while unraveling within ("Silver Toaster"). In "Flowing Over," she describes listening to sad music as a way to quell the anxiety attacks. "Flowing over 'til I'm empty!," she shouts in a mantra that others might turn to during their own low moments.
Still, for all its rumination, the album gradually projects a flicker of light amid the darkness: During this same tumultuous time, Kempner found herself entering into her first healthy relationship. A Place I'll Always Go grapples not only with the contradictory flood of emotions and guilt that arise when attempting to move on, but with the burgeoning excitement of new love. In "Room," Kempner both evokes the cloistered sanctuary of her newfound companionship and romance, and reflects a contentment and ease with her queer identity. "Call us sinners but we eat all our dinners in my room... Rests her head near, I'm feeling OK here in my room," she sings atop a bed of jangling guitars and glistening keyboard hooks.
Recorded in late 2016 at Brooklyn's Thump Studios with assistance from Gabe Wax (who also worked on Palehound's superb 2015 album, Dry Food), A Place I'll Always Go galvanizes its bedroom confessionals with Kempner's dexterous finger-plucked arpeggios and buzzy guitar melodies, and the propulsive rocking energy of drummer Jesse Weiss and bassist Larz Brogan. Palehound adds richer instrumental shadings on the album's bookends: On the transportive opener, "Hunter's Gun," loping electronic beats and ethereal guitars glide underneath the hushed vocals; in the closer, "At Night I'm Alright With You," eschews guitar for a stark synth hum and scratchy pulse that blossoms into bliss as she sings "But at night I'm alright with you," with a sense of calming reprieve.
Kempner ultimately finds that without pain, there's no joy. You can deny your grief or push it down deep, but the only relief comes when you let it be felt, and derive strength from your vulnerabilities. While the arc of A Place I'll Always Go may have initially begun in the wake of tremendous loss, Palehound's unflinching songs are also a celebration of life and embrace of love, and an empathetic reflection on how endings usually lead to beginnings.BEIRUT (Reuters) - Western intelligence agencies warned former Lebanese prime minister Saad al-Hariri of an assassination plot against him, the Saudi-owned pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat reported on Sunday. It cited unnamed sources close to Hariri.
Lebanon's Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri is seen at the governmental palace in Beirut, Lebanon October 24, 2017. Picture taken October 24, 2017. REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir
However, Major General Abbas Ibrahim, head of Lebanon’s General Security, said he had no information about an assassination plot against political figures in Lebanon. The army also said it had not uncovered any such plots.
Asharq al-Awsat reported that the sources “revealed that he had received Western warnings of an assassination attempt that was prepared against him”. It did not give further details of the alleged plot.
Hariri announced his surprise resignation on Saturday, citing a plot to kill him, and saying the climate in Lebanon resembled that before the assassination of his father Rafik al-Hariri, who was also prime minister, in 2005.
He criticized Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah for their role in Lebanon and other Arab countries.
Hariri traveled to Riyadh on Friday and did not return to Lebanon. His resignation was made in a televised statement from Saudi Arabia, an arch rival of Iran.
Asharq al-Awsat reported the same unnamed sources as speculating that Hariri would probably remain outside Lebanon because of the security threat against him.
On Saturday, Saudi-owned television channel al-Arabiya al-Hadath, part of the same media group as Asharq al-Awsat, reported that an assassination plot against Hariri had been foiled in Beirut days earlier, citing an unnamed source.
Saudi Gulf Affairs Minister Thamer al-Sabhan said in a television interview that Hariri’s personal security detail had “confirmed information” of a plot to kill him.
Lebanon’s internal security force said in a statement on the reports that it had no information about the matter.Warning: This article contains spoilers for Game of Thrones season 7.
As Cersei Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen fight amongst each other for the Iron Throne, Jon Snow has been preparing for a much bigger threat on their doorstep. And the main reason the Night King and his army haven’t already taken over Westeros is that something has been standing in their way since long before the Seven Kingdoms existed.
Located at the northern edge of Westeros, the Wall has been a part of Game of Thrones since the very beginning. It’s one of the few constants in every Game of Thrones opening sequence, which animates Castle Black and the Wall. It’s also one of the single largest features of Westeros. It peaks at around 700 feet (roughly two football fields stacked end to end) and spans 300 miles across the northern border of Westeros. (That’s just shy of the distance between Chicago and Cleveland.)
It’s weathered through thousands of years of wear and tear and the occasional climb by daring wildlings. Although men expanded it over thousands of years, there’s always been something not quite human about the Wall. And long before Bran Stark ever encountered the Night King, many fans have been convinced that one day it would fall.
“Don’t knock it down while I’m gone,” Jon joked to Edd Tollett last season.
For now, the Wall still stands. But the Night King marches south, and as Jon told Dany in the episode preview for “Eastwatch,” Bran saw the Night King and his army approaching Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, the easternmost castle maintained by the Night’s Watch in Westeros. How much longer will it last?
The Wall’s origins are linked to legend—and the Night’s Watch
With the threat of the Night King, the White Walkers, and an army of wights approaching, characters have referenced “The Long Night,” a legendary and harsh winter that lasted a generation, in every episode so far this season. It’s an important point in Westerosi history not only because it can warn everyone of what might happen to them, but because of what came out of it.
During that winter, which took place approximately 8,000 years before the beginning of Game of Thrones, the White Walkers (who were created by the children of the forest) descended onto Westeros. It was only after the children, the First Men, and a legendary figure who might’ve been Azor Ahai teamed up fight against the White Walkers that they defeated them. That final fight, called the Battle for the Dawn, drove them back far north. Once the threat of the White Walkers disappeared, the survivors made sure to protect themselves in case it were to ever happen again: both the Night’s Watch and the Wall came out of the Long Night. It’s hard to mention one without the other, because the Night’s Watch resides at the bottom of the Wall, guards it, and fixes it when cracks appear or ice chunks break free.
Photo via HBO At the height of the Night’s Watch, it could easily man all 19 of the castles located at the foot of the Wall, but that was a long time ago. Only three castles—Shadow Tower, Castle Black, and Eastwatch-by-the-Sea—are manned thousands of years later, and by the start of Game of Thrones, the Night’s Watch has lost most of its glory. Many of the sworn brothers are thieves, rapists, and murderers who are essentially sentenced to join, although some recruits are essentially forced to join by their families. Few choose to join. As Maester Aemon Targaryen put it to Tyrion in season 1, the Night’s Watch has “become an army of undisciplined boys and tired old men.”
The thinly stretched Night’s Watch only won the battle against Mance Rayder’s wildling army because Stannis Baratheon’s army intervened. They’re even less prepared for the very real threat of White Walkers and wights approaching their doorstep, a mission that many of the brothers had forgotten because their origins had turned into myth.
“The Night’s Watch has forgotten its true purpose, Tarly,” Jeor Mormont said to Samwell Tarly in A Storm of Swords. “You don’t build a wall seven hundred feet high to keep savages in skins from stealing women. The Wall was made to guard the realms of men … and not against other men, which is all the wildlings are when you come right down to it. Too many years, Tarly, too many hundreds and thousands of years. We lost sight of the true enemy.”
Photo via HBO
A Stark and (possibly) some children and giants raise a Wall
Like the Long Night itself, the actual story behind the creation of the Wall is mostly lost to the passage of time. The common story heard by children of Westeros is that it involved Brandon (Stark) the Builder, magic woven into structure itself, and giants.
The World of Ice and Fire also alludes to that legend, although its in-universe author, Maester Yandel, doubts the validity of the claim.
Legend has it that the giants helped raise the the Wall, using their great strength to wrestle the blocks of ice into place. There may be some truth to this though the stories make the giants out to be far larger and more powerful than they truly were. These same legends also say that the children of the forest—who did not themselves build walls of either ice or stone—would contribute their magic to the construction. But the legends, as always, are of dubious value.
According to the works of another maester, Brandon the Builder—the founder of House Stark—sought out the Children of the Forest to help him raise the Wall with their magic. He’s credited not only with building the Wall, but also parts of Winterfell and Storm’s End among other feats, leading some to believe that the extent of his life’s work has been exaggerated. He’s why Brandon is such a popular Stark name. Ned’s older brother was a Brandon, murdered by King Aerys II Targaryen, and there’s also Bran himself.
Parts of the Wall were made of stone, while much of it was believed to be built with blocks of ice taken from the haunted forest north of where the Wall. It contains tunnels for the Night’s Watch to move around and through it, and it’s wide enough at the top that 12 knights in armor could ride on horses across it. George R.R. Martin said in 2000 that there’s more ice than stone in the Wall and took thousands of years of building to get to its incredible size.
Screengrab via Game of Thrones/HBO As for how true any of this is, Martin doesn’t say for certain. How the Wall came to be is something of a Westerosi legend comparable to legendary figures—who may have never existed.
The magic embedded deep within the ice
As Martin hinted—and we see in both Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire—pure ice isn’t the only thing incorporated into the Wall. In Sam’s narration about the history of the Wall, which is part of Game of Thrones’ animated Histories & Lore Blu-ray series, he hints at the Wall’s treacherous nature against those who attempt to climb it. Jon also believed that Wall had protections after witnessing wildlings fall to their deaths as he climbed it with them in A Storm of Swords; the experience led Ygritte to tell Jon that it was “made o’ blood.”
But the largest and (so far) unexplored kind of protection is part of the fundamental reason it was built in the first place. It’s not to keep wildlings from entering Westeros, though it often does that, but to keep the dead out.
“Beyond the Wall the monsters live, and the giants and ghouls… but they cannot pass so long as the Wall stands strong and the men of the Night’s Watch are true,” Bran recalled Old Nan telling him in A Dance With Dragons.
Photo via HBO We first see the extent of the Wall’s protections in A Storm of Swords after a mysterious creature who resembles a wight saves Sam and Gilly from wights beyond the Wall. Gilly calls him Coldhands, and he tasks Sam with bringing Bran and his companions to him through the Black Gate at Nightfort, one of the 19 Night’s Watch castles, because the Wall’s magic prevents him from crossing the Wall. Although Coldhands is an ally to Bran, Meera and Jojen Reed, Hodor, and Summer, he is also unable to enter the entrance of the Three-Eyed Raven’s cave when the arrive in A Dance With Dragons because of magical protections.
Game of Thrones took a different approach to the introduction of the Wall’s magic. We see first-hand that wights cannot enter the Three-Eyed Raven’s cave in “The Children”: their bodies exploded as they attempted to enter the cave after Bran, Meera, Hodor, and Summer. The protections of the cave kept Bran hidden from the Night King until he touched Bran’s arm in the episode “The Door.” With the protection barrier down, it didn’t take long for the Night King and his army to follow.
And when Meera couldn’t take Bran any further, a pale figure dressed in black rode in and saved him. Bran later recognized him as his uncle Benjen Stark, who hadn’t been seen since season 1. The White Walkers stabbed him, but the children of the forest put dragonglass in his heart to stop him from turning. Although Benjen doesn’t appear to be Coldhands in the books, he returns as the Coldhands-like figure for the show.
Photo via Helen Sloan/HBO And like Coldhands, Benjen can’t go past the Wall—even though he still fights for the living.
“The Wall is not just ice and stone,” Benjen said. “Ancient spells were carved into its foundations. Strong magic to protect men from what lies beyond. And while it stands, the dead cannot pass. I cannot pass.”
“He’s coming for us. For all of us.”
The Wall has withstood the test of time, but as the Night King approaches, the question of whether it can be taken down is more vital than ever.
In Martin’s books, there is a legendary horn called the Horn of Winter (or the Horn of Joramun, named after the first King-Beyond-the-Wall) that reportedly would wake “the giants from the earth” and bring down the Wall. Mance Rayder claimed to have it during the Battle of Castle Black and threatened to order Tormund Giantsbane to blow it if the Night’s Watch didn’t allow the wildings to pass through the Wall. The horn burns in a pyre, but Tormund later reveals it was a fake.
However, some fans believe that the horn has been hiding in plain sight the entire time. An old warhorn is discovered with spears and arrowheads made of dragonglass at the Fist of the First Men in season 2. The warhorn doesn’t appear to have played any role since—and the Horn of Winter as a legend doesn’t exist in the show—but considering we’ve seen old weapons reappear before, there’s always the smallest of possibilities it could return.
Others suspect that the mark on Bran’s arm from the Night King, which brought down the protections surrounding the Three-Eyed Raven’s cave, could also remove the Wall’s protections. It’s a sound theory, but one we haven’t been able to test in part because we haven’t seen the Wall since Bran and Meera crossed it in the season 7 premiere. And we can’t imagine either Bran or Meera keeping that news to themselves after arriving in Winterfell so if Bran’s mark has anything to do with it, it’s not the only piece of the puzzle.
So far this season we’ve been kept in the dark about the Night King’s plan aside from what we hear in the preview. He’s got an Army of the Dead that can grow with more “recruits,” and time and winter are on his side. One way or another, he’s going to try getting through.
The question is, will he take the Wall down with him when he does?Even if the Guardians of the Galaxy can only come up with 12% of a plan, director James Gunn has revealed 100% of the Guardians sequel’s title. The film will be called…
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.
Gunn, who has been hard at work on the film’s script, made the title official on his Twitter and Facebook pages after Marvel’s Kevin Feige let the title slip while discussing Ant-Man with Collider.
Yes, the official title for the @Guardians sequel is GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2. Nice detective work, @colliderfrosty, etc! You got us! — James Gunn (@JamesGunn) June 29, 2015
“Kevin Feige recently let the title slip while doing Ant-Man press, which I’m really happy about because God knows I’ve let more than one thing slip accidentally while chattering away on this FB page,” Gunn joked on his Facebook page.
The title is a riff on the Awesome Mix Vol. 1 Peter Quill listens to in the first film. The film’s soundtrack was key to the experience of making the film and the final product. And with this title, it looks like it’s a safe bet that the Awesome Mix Vol. 2, whatever may appear on it, will likely be just as integral to the sequel.
Gunn recently spoke about the film’s “more emotional” focus, and also teased that “Awesome Mix Vol. 2” will be heard in the upcoming film.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 will hit theaters on May 5, 2017.
Related Stories
•James Gunn says Guardians of the Galaxy 2 will be ‘a more emotional movie’
•James Gunn teases ‘Guardians of the Galaxy 2’ script (but not the title)
•Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn defends ‘tsunami of superhero movies’WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday brushed off sharp criticism from President Donald Trump over his recusal from the Justice Department’s Russia investigation, saying he loved his job and planned to continue serving.
“We love this job, we love this department, and I plan to continue to do so as long as that is appropriate,” Sessions said at a news conference announcing a cyber crime bust.
Sessions was flanked by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Acting Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Andrew McCabe, who were both also criticized by the president in an interview with the New York Times on Wednesday.
Trump took a broad swipe at his administration’s top law officers in the interview, saying he would not have appointed Sessions as attorney general if he had known he would recuse himself. The Republican president also noted Rosenstein’s connection to Democratic Baltimore and that McCabe’s wife took money from a leading Democrat during a political campaign.
The public lashing came after a turbulent first six months in office during which Trump fired national security adviser Michael Flynn and FBI Director James Comey, then the top official leading the probe into whether Russian meddled in the 2016 presidential election and possible ties to the Trump campaign.
Sessions recused himself in March from the Russia criminal investigation. He did so after failing to disclose at his confirmation hearing that he had held meetings last year with Russia’s ambassador.
“Sessions should have never recused himself and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” the Times quoted Trump as saying.
White House spokesman Sarah Sanders said later on Thursday that, while Trump was disappointed in the recusal, “clearly he has confidence in him or he would not be the attorney general.”
Sessions was Trump’s first supporter in the U.S. Senate and helped shape his political team throughout the campaign and into the transition after the Nov. 8 election.
He declined on Thursday to acknowledge Trump’s criticism.
“I have the honor of serving as attorney general. It’s something that goes beyond any thought I would have ever had for myself,” Sessions said.
Similarly, Rosenstein declined to comment when asked about Trump’s remarks that there were very few Republicans in Baltimore, where he was a former federal prosecutor. “I was proud to be here yesterday, I’m proud to be here today, I’ll be proud to work here tomorrow,” he said.
“NOTHING NEW”
They took only a few questions before a spokesman asked if there were any questions about the department’s dismantlement of AlphaBay, a “dark web” market. Seeing no hands, Sessions left as reporters shouted questions about whether he would resign.
An aide to Sessions said the recent disparaging remarks from Trump are “nothing new,” given news media reports last month that the president was upset with the attorney general over the Russia recusal.
A federal special counsel has been appointed to take over the Russia investigation, and several congressional committees are conducting probes. Next week, Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser, Jared Kushner, and the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., are scheduled to testify before Senate panels, as well as former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.
The Kremlin says it did not interfere in the election, and Trump has denied any collusion.
In the Times interview, the president also took aim at the special counsel appointed to take over the Russia investigation, Robert Mueller, saying Mueller would be crossing a “red line” if he began investigating Trump’s personal finances.
“I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia,” Trump told the Times.
At the White House, Sanders said Trump has no intention of firing Mueller at this time.
The Times also reported on Wednesday that Deutsche Bank AG (DBKGn.DE) has been in contact with federal investigators about Trump’s accounts, citing two people briefed on the matter. And the bank was expecting to eventually have to provide information to Mueller, they said.
Deutsche Bank, which has loaned the Trump Organization family business millions of dollars for real-estate ventures, late last month rejected demands by Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives to provide details of Trump’s finances, citing privacy laws.
U.S. |
Baule, on the Breton Coast, raising the specter of the accusatory press, ''the cameras are attracted immediately to the only shaved head in the hall, even if there are 10,000 other heads that are not shaved. And the suggestion is that behind that single shaved skull among my supporters are harbored I do not know what sorts of dictatorial machinations. And so, if the actual discourse of Le Pen appears too moderate, if it seems to be actually reasonable, then at least the television has a shaved skull to broadcast to show that Le Pen could not be these things.'') According to Le Pen, the National Front represents the true classic right in France, where, he says, the conservative parties from de Gaulle onward have carried out ''leftist policies'' even as they have held to a rightist vocabulary. He accuses the established parties of being rife with ''sclerotic privileges'' paid for by the taxpayers. ''Moliere's miser,'' he said, referring to the play, ''hoarded money, but it was his own money. The minister of finance hoards the money that the French have labored to produce.''
On his main theme, immigration, Le Pen mingles seriousness with sarcasm. He performs a little charade on the lawn of his backyard, imitating the accent of an Arab speaking French, as he tells his friends that if he has no money or job in Algeria, ''it's simple - I just go to France.'' Then, he delivers his more reasoned discourse:
''In one generation, other immigrants, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Russians, the Poles, became integrated in France. But what is happening with the Chinese, the Indochinese and the Arabs is that they are constituting themselves as separate entities. There is a struggle for life inside of life, and we are not guaranteed to survive just because we are inscribed at the United Nations.''
Le Pen's stress on the alleged immigrant danger has clearly been fed by an increase in the numbers of non-European foreigners, particularly Arabs and Asians, who have come to France in recent years. There are an estimated four million in the country today out of a population of 55 million. But, while many accuse Le Pen of inciting racist animosity, he denies the charge. ''I defy anybody to look at the record of our statements over the years and find something racist in them,'' he said.
Insinuations that his beliefs are simply an updated facism emerge, he maintains, from the campaign of incomprehension and slander that surrounds him. ''I know my philosophy, and it is the national philosophy. Moreover, I'm waiting to hear on what points people like Chirac disagree with me,'' he said, referring to the conservative Prime Minister who will also be a presidential candidate in next year's elections. ''If it's on immigration, he'll lose half of his votes if he says it.''
LE PEN'S CAMPAIGN HAS proved remarkably impervious to the hostility of most of the French press and his own recurring tendency to end up in farcical, even scandalous situations. Two years ago, he was publicly accused by a former political ally, Jean-Maurice Demarquet, of having tortured prisoners while a soldier in the Algerian war - something Le Pen denies. The National Front leader was a ''great, paranoid poo-bah,'' Demarquet said, in a comment gleefully publicized by the French press, and he is surrounded by ''little grass-roots paranoids.''
Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content, updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.
Earlier this year, in an incident that drew satisfied snickers from his critics, Le Pen's estranged wife, Pierrette, appeared nude in the French edition of Playboy. She explained her move as a kind of vengeance against her husband, an effort to embarrass him because of what she termed his cruelty and authoritarianism.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Le Pen has tarnished his own reputation by intemperate and erroneous declarations seen by many as revealing a sort of core extremism in his political personality, or, perhaps, a persecution complex. The notion is supported by the National Front's stress on the idea that the most dread dangers to France, and to civilization, inevitably come from outside the country. Recently, for instance, Le Pen claimed publicly that AIDS, known as SIDA in France, can be transmitted by saliva or sweat, and has called for all ''Sidaiques'' to be interned in what he called ''Sidatoriums.''
The comment caused one of those small storms that always seem to surround Le Pen, making him a kind of martyr to some and public enemy No. 1 to others. Immediately following his coinage of the words ''Sidaique'' and ''Sidatorium,'' there were suggestions - made in one instance by Laurent Fabius, the former Socialist Prime Minister - that the terms echoed ''Judaique'' and ''crematorium.'' The very idea, Le Pen told his summertime crowds, was, in itself, a ''racial perversion'' and another example of the establishment's persecution of him.
Indeed, Le Pen (who is pro-Israeli in his comments on foreign affairs) has said nothing of an overtly anti-Semitic nature, at least not until his controversial remark about the gas chambers last month. In what was seen by many to be a genuine burst of traditional French anti-Semitism, he seemed to give some credibility to ''revisionist'' views of the Holocaust, saying that the existence of the gas chambers was not a ''revealed truth'' that had to be believed as a ''moral obligation.'' ''Historians are debating these questions,'' Le Pen said.
The remark seemed to underscore another feature of his discourse, namely that a large share of those most commonly attacked by Le Pen are Jews. Two years ago, the centerpiece of a so-called blue, white and red rally was Le Pen's citing of four journalists on his enemies list, calling them ''the liars of the press'' and ''the shame of their profession.'' All four had conspicuously Jewish names, even though plenty of Le Pen's critics do not. Could Le Pen be merely reacting to harsh criticism of him from France's Jewish organizations and leaders? It seems more likely that he wants to appeal to the small exclusionist bloc that has always existed in France, even while trying to win the support of moderates by avoiding explicitly racist remarks.
JUST AS THE WHIFFS OF PERsonal scandal seem to confirm the impression of Le Pen as lacking in judgment, his biography establishes deep links with the ultraright of France's recent history, and this, among a majority of French voters, will no doubt help make the extremist label stick.
After a youth spent in Brittany, where he was born in 1928, Le Pen enlisted in virtually all of the major battles waged by what Le Monde has called France's national populists. As a law student in Paris, he was the president of a rightist organization called Corpo, whose stated aim was to prevent the Left Bank from being taken over by the Communists. His police record of those days shows involvement in at least two public brawls. In the mid-1950's, he became a follower of Pierre Poujade, who created a radical middle-class taxpayers' revolt against the Socialist Government. Le Pen was elected a member of the French Parliament in 1956, when he was 27.
He enlisted in the French expeditionary corps in Suez in 1956; he was a parachutist in the bitter, bruising fight against Algerian independence. For several years, he was among the hard-line deputies who fought de Gaulle's plan to accord independence to Algeria (though he was not a member of the O.A.S., the Secret Armed Organization that mounted a campaign of terror inside France in an effort to stop the plan).
Le Pen lost his parliamentary seat in 1962 and remained for some 20 years in relative obscurity, founding the National Front in 1972. Never a man of great means, he inherited the fortune of a millionaire follower, one Hubert Lambert, who died in 1976, and today he lives in the mansion in the Saint Cloud suburb of Paris bequeathed to him. The inheritance, along with donations from supporters and proceeds from the sales of books, pennants, posters and other paraphernalia, provides the basis for his party's finances.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
In 1981, when the Socialists came to power in France for the first time in 25 years, Le Pen's obscure movement began to gain prominence, bolstered by the wave of conservative anxiety provoked by the left's victory. In 1984, the National Front won 11 percent of the vote in elections for the European Parliament, and ever since, Le Pen has basked in the ambiguous sunshine of nonstop notoriety.
''Le Pen-ism was a mood waiting for a Le Pen,'' said Jean Daniel, the editor of Le Nouvel Observateur magazine. The view of Le Pen's critics is that he signals what Daniel has called ''a return of the repressed'' - a resurgence of a nostalgia in France for disappearing traditions, for rock-solid authority, for the imagined wholeness of a life rooted deeply in the historical soil, drenched in the imperishable blood of France. In some ways, Le Pen emerges as a kind of French George Wallace, a man who breaks the taboos of politics-as-usual to pose, according to Le Monde's front-page analysis, ''the instinct of the humble against the 'logic' of the intellectuals.''
The tradition that the National Front belongs to is a longstanding alternative to the open, humanist ideals of France. ''National populism,'' the newspaper said, ''erects a tribal egotism as a spiritual and political ideal. The obsession with 'race,' the terror of interbreeding, the hatred of the foreign, these are the current expressions of this regression to the stage of the closed society.''
In this sense, Le Pen is the contemporary symbol of a recurrent theme (Continued on Page 64) in French history. In the difficult years of the 1930's, for example, leading to France's complex reception of the Nazi invasion, a whole array of groups, most of them virulently anti-Semitic, hurled the slogan ''France to the French,'' suggesting, as Le Pen does today, that all of the national problems can be attributed to a single, basic source - foreigners.
EARLY IN THE SUMMER, A young conservative cabinet minister, Michel Noir, gave an interview to Le Monde in which he argued that the coalition of parties on the right that now control the French Government should refuse to cooperate in any way with Le Pen - even if it meant losing next May's scheduled presidential elections. (The electoral loss would presumably result from Le Pen's drawing enough votes away from the major conservative candidates to allow the Socialist candidate to emerge the winner. One very likely candidate, Francois Mitterrand, has enjoyed record popularity in recent months.) ''A politician's responsibility is not only to win elections,'' Noir said. ''It is also to insure that society does not forget the values on which it is built.''
Noir's remarks were quietly supported by many in the conservative majority. But they also caused consternation within Chirac's government, which has been visibly torn by the question of how to deal with Le Pen's potential strength. Thus, the Minister of the Interior, Charles Pasqua, a close Chirac ally, publicly reprimanded Mr. Noir for his unsoldierly behavior.
The country's major conservative parties have made considerable efforts to occupy a part of Le Pen's terrain. Under Chirac, legislation has been introduced that would make it more difficult for the foreigners' children, even those born in France, to obtain French nationality. Members of the Government have talked in harsh terms about the need to expel illegal immigrants. In the spring, Pasqua said he would organize deportation trains if necessary, sending a shudder through many who remember the convoys of World War II. Touring the southern tiers of France in the election campaign last year, Chirac condemned the Socialists for ''laxness'' toward illegal immigrants, arguing over and over that France could be multiracial but should never be allowed to become what he called ''multicultural.''
All of this comes against a resurgence of ethnic antagonism and anti-foreign sentiment - some of it fueled by last year's Arab terror attacks in Paris. Down along the wharves in Marseilles, Toulon and Montpellier, where large North African communities have sprung up, working-class habitues of seedy local bars complain about the ''Arab invasion.'' They are not racist, they say; they are simply worried about the deteriorating quality of life in France. The country, a man in Toulon commented, ''will be Arab in five years'' unless something is done about it. Le Pen himself in recent speeches has been claiming that the fundamentalist revolution in the Middle East increases the menace already posed, in his view, by Moslems living in France.
France, of course, will not be Arab in five years. But the country is different, more ethnically varied now than it ever has been, and this fact, which gave rise to Le Pen's movement, appears to be permanent. There will continue to be ethnic animosity and as long as it persists, blue, white and red figures like Jean-Marie Le Pen will have no difficulty drawing people into their circus tents.President Obama on Wednesday announced sweeping measures to reform the nation’s gun laws. Read the full transcript from his White House press conference below:
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AND THE VICE PRESIDENT
ON GUN VIOLENCE
South Court Auditorium
11:52 A.M. EST
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Before I begin today, let me say to the families of the innocents who were murdered 33 days ago, our heart goes out to you. And you show incredible courage — incredible courage — being here. And the President and I are going to do everything in our power to honor the memory of your children and your wives with the work we take up here today.
It’s been 33 days since the nation’s heart was broken by the horrific, senseless violence that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School — 20 — 20 beautiful first-graders gunned down in a place that’s supposed to be their second sanctuary. Six members of the staff killed trying to save those children. It’s literally been hard for the nation to comprehend, hard for the nation to fathom.
And I know for the families who are here that time is not measured in days, but it’s measured in minutes, in seconds, since you received that news. Another minute without your daughter. Another minute without your son. Another minute without your wife. Another minute without your mom.
I want to personally thank Chris and Lynn McDonald, who lost their beautiful daughter, Grace, and the other parents who I had a chance to speak to, for their suggestions and for — again, just for the courage of all of you to be here today. I admire the grace and the resolve that you all are showing. And I must say I’ve been deeply affected by your faith, as well. And the President and I are going to do everything to try to match the resolve you’ve demonstrated.
No one can know for certain if this senseless act could have been prevented, but we all know we have a moral obligation — a moral obligation — to do everything in our power to diminish the prospect that something like this could happen again.
As the President knows, I’ve worked in this field a long time — in the United States Senate, having chaired a committee that had jurisdiction over these issues of guns and crime, and having drafted the first gun violence legislation — the last gun violence legislation, I should say. And I have no illusions about what we’re up against or how hard the task is in front of us. But I also have never seen the nation’s conscience so shaken by what happened at Sandy Hook. The world has changed, and it’s demanding action.
It’s in this context that the President asked me to put together, along with Cabinet members, a set of recommendations about how we should proceed to meet that moral obligation we have. And toward that end, the Cabinet members and I sat down with 229 groups — not just individuals, representing groups — 229 groups from law enforcement agencies to public health officials, to gun officials, to gun advocacy groups, to sportsmen and hunters and religious leaders. And I’ve spoken with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, had extensive conversations with mayors and governors and county officials.
And the recommendations we provided to the President on Monday call for executive actions he could sign, legislation he could call for, and long-term research that should be undertaken. They’re based on the emerging consensus we heard from all the groups with whom we spoke, including some of you who are victims of this god-awful occurrence — ways to keep guns out of the wrong hands, as well as ways to take comprehensive action to prevent violence in the first place.
We should do as much as we can, as quickly as we can. And we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good. So some of what you will hear from the President will happen immediately; some will take some time. But we have begun. And we are starting here today and we’re going to resolve to continue this fight.
During the meetings that we held, we met with a young man who’s here today — I think Colin Goddard is here. Where are you, Colin? Colin was one of the survivors of the Virginia Tech massacre. He was in the classroom. He calls himself one of the “lucky seven.” And he’ll tell you he was shot four times on that day and he has three bullets that are still inside him.
And when I asked Colin about what he thought we should be doing, he said, “I’m not here because of what happened to me. I’m here because of what happened to me keeps happening to other people and we have to do something about it.”
Colin, we will. Colin, I promise you, we will. This is our intention. We must do what we can now. And there’s no person who is more committed to acting on this moral obligation we have than the President of the United States of America.
Ladies and gentlemen, President Barack Obama. (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, everybody. Please have a seat. Good afternoon, everybody.
Let me begin by thanking our Vice President, Joe Biden, for your dedication, Joe, to this issue, for bringing so many different voices to the table. Because while reducing gun violence is a complicated challenge, protecting our children from harm shouldn’t be a divisive one.
Over the month since the tragedy in Newtown, we’ve heard from so many, and, obviously, none have affected us more than the families of those gorgeous children and their teachers and guardians who were lost. And so we’re grateful to all of you for taking the time to be here, and recognizing that we honor their memories in part by doing everything we can to prevent this from happening again.
But we also heard from some unexpected people. In particular, I started getting a lot of letters from kids. Four of them are here today — Grant Fritz, Julia Stokes, Hinna Zeejah, and Teja Goode. They’re pretty representative of some of the messages that I got. These are some pretty smart letters from some pretty smart young people.
Hinna, a third-grader — you can go ahead and wave, Hinna. That’s you — (laughter.) Hinna wrote, “I feel terrible for the parents who lost their children…I love my country and [I] want everybody to be happy and safe.”
And then, Grant — go ahead and wave, Grant. (Laughter.) Grant said, “I think there should be some changes. We should learn from what happened at Sandy Hook…I feel really bad.”
And then, Julia said — Julia, where are you? There you go — “I’m not scared for my safety, I’m scared for others. I have four brothers and sisters and I know I would not be able to bear the thought of losing any of them.”
These are our kids. This is what they’re thinking about. And so what we should be thinking about is our responsibility to care for them, and shield them from harm, and give them the tools they need to grow up and do everything that they’re capable of doing — not just to pursue their own dreams, but to help build this country. This is our first task as a society, keeping our children safe. This is how we will be judged. And their voices should compel us to change.
And that’s why, last month, I asked Joe to lead an effort, along with members of my Cabinet, to come up with some concrete steps we can take right now to keep our children safe, to help prevent mass shootings, to reduce the broader epidemic of gun violence in this country.
And we can’t put this off any longer. Just last Thursday, as TV networks were covering one of Joe’s meetings on this topic, news broke of another school shooting, this one in California. In the month since 20 precious children and six brave adults were violently taken from us at Sandy Hook Elementary, more than 900 of our fellow Americans have reportedly died at the end of a gun — 900 in the past month. And every day we wait, that number will keep growing.
So I’m putting forward a specific set of proposals based on the work of Joe’s task force. And in the days ahead, I intend to use whatever weight this office holds to make them a reality. Because while there is no law or set of laws that can prevent every senseless act of violence completely, no piece of legislation that will prevent every tragedy, every act of evil, if there is even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there is even one life that can be saved, then we’ve got an obligation to try.
And I’m going to do my part. As soon as I’m finished speaking here, I will sit at that desk and I will sign a directive giving law enforcement, schools, mental health professionals and the public health community some of the tools they need to help reduce gun violence.
We will make it easier to keep guns out of the hands of criminals by strengthening the background check system. We will help schools hire more resource officers if they want them and develop emergency preparedness plans. We will make sure mental health professionals know their options for reporting threats of violence — even as we acknowledge that someone with a mental illness is far more likely to be a victim of violent crime than the perpetrator.
And while year after year, those who oppose even modest gun safety measures have threatened to defund scientific or medical research into the causes of gun violence, I will direct the Centers for Disease Control to go ahead and study the best ways to reduce it — and Congress should fund research into the effects that violent video games have on young minds. We don’t benefit from ignorance. We don’t benefit from not knowing the science of this epidemic of violence.
These are a few of the 23 executive actions that I’m announcing today. But as important as these steps are, they are in no way a substitute for action from members of Congress. To make a real and lasting difference, Congress, too, must act — and Congress must act soon. And I’m calling on Congress to pass some very specific proposals right away.
First: It’s time for Congress to require a universal background check for anyone trying to buy a gun. (Applause.) The law already requires licensed gun dealers to run background checks, and over the last 14 years that’s kept 1.5 million of the wrong people from getting their hands on a gun. But it’s hard to enforce that law when as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases are conducted without a background check. That’s not safe. That’s not smart. It’s not fair to responsible gun buyers or sellers.
If you want to buy a gun — whether it’s from a licensed dealer or a private seller — you should at least have to show you are not a felon or somebody legally prohibited from buying one. This is common sense. And an overwhelming majority of Americans agree with us on the need for universal background checks — including more than 70 percent of the National Rifle Association’s members, according to one survey. So there’s no reason we can’t do this.
Second: Congress should restore a ban on military-style assault weapons, and a 10-round limit for magazines. (Applause.) The type of assault rifle used in Aurora, for example, when paired with high-capacity magazines, has one purpose — to pump out as many bullets as possible, as quickly as possible; to do as much damage, using bullets often designed to inflict maximum damage.
And that’s what allowed the gunman in Aurora to shoot 70 people — 70 people — killing 12 in a matter of minutes. Weapons designed for the theater of war have no place in a movie theater. A majority of Americans agree with us on this.
And, by the way, so did Ronald Reagan, one of the staunchest defenders of the Second Amendment, who wrote to Congress in 1994, urging them — this is Ronald Reagan speaking — urging them to “listen to the American public and to the law enforcement community and support a ban on the further manufacture of [military-style assault] weapons.” (Applause.)
And finally, Congress needs to help, rather than hinder, law enforcement as it does its job. We should get tougher on people who buy guns with the express purpose of turning around and selling them to criminals. And we should severely punish anybody who helps them do this. Since Congress hasn’t confirmed a director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in six years, they should confirm Todd Jones, who will be — who has been Acting, and I will be nominating for the post. (Applause.)
And at a time when budget cuts are forcing many communities to reduce their police force, we should put more cops back on the job and back on our streets.
Let me be absolutely clear. Like most Americans, I believe the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms. I respect our strong tradition of gun ownership and the rights of hunters and sportsmen. There are millions of responsible, law-abiding gun owners in America who cherish their right to bear arms for hunting, or sport, or protection, or collection.
I also believe most gun owners agree that we can respect the Second Amendment while keeping an irresponsible, law-breaking few from inflicting harm on a massive scale. I believe most of them agree that if America worked harder to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, there would be fewer atrocities like the one that occurred in Newtown. That’s what these reforms are designed to do. They’re common-sense measures. They have the support of the majority of the American people.
And yet, that doesn’t mean any of this is going to be easy to enact or implement. If it were, we’d already have universal background checks. The ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines never would have been allowed to expire. More of our fellow Americans might still be alive, celebrating birthdays and anniversaries and graduations.
This will be difficult. There will be pundits and politicians and special interest lobbyists publicly warning of a tyrannical, all-out assault on liberty — not because that’s true, but because they want to gin up fear or higher ratings or revenue for themselves. And behind the scenes, they’ll do everything they can to block any common-sense reform and make sure nothing changes whatsoever.
The only way we will be able to change is if their audience, their constituents, their membership says this time must be different — that this time, we must do something to protect our communities and our kids.
I will put everything I’ve got into this, and so will Joe. But I tell you, the only way we can change is if the American people demand it. And by the way, that doesn’t just mean from certain parts of the country. We’re going to need voices in those areas, in those congressional districts, where the tradition of gun ownership is strong to speak up and to say this is important. It can’t just be the usual suspects. We have to examine ourselves and our hearts, and ask ourselves what is important.
This will not happen unless the American people demand it. If parents and teachers, police officers and pastors, if hunters and sportsmen, if responsible gun owners, if Americans of every background stand up and say, enough; we’ve suffered too much pain and care too much about our children to allow this to continue — then change will come. That’s what it’s going to take.
In the letter that Julia wrote me, she said, “I know that laws have to be passed by Congress, but I beg you to try very hard.” (Laughter.) Julia, I will try very hard. But she’s right. The most important changes we can make depend on congressional action. They need to bring these proposals up for a vote, and the American people need to make sure that they do.
Get them on record. Ask your member of Congress if they support universal background checks to keep guns out of the wrong hands. Ask them if they support renewing a ban on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. And if they say no, ask them why not. Ask them what’s more important — doing whatever it takes to get a A grade from the gun lobby that funds their campaigns, or giving parents some peace of mind when they drop their child off for first grade? (Applause.)
This is the land of the free, and it always will be. As Americans, we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights that no man or government can take away from us. But we’ve also long recognized, as our Founders recognized, that with rights come responsibilities. Along with our freedom to live our lives as we will comes an obligation to allow others to do the same. We don’t live in isolation. We live in a society, a government of, and by, and for the people. We are responsible for each other.
The right to worship freely and safely, that right was denied to Sikhs in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. The right to assemble peaceably, that right was denied shoppers in Clackamas, Oregon, and moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado. That most fundamental set of rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness — fundamental rights that were denied to college students at Virginia Tech, and high school students at Columbine, and elementary school students in Newtown, and kids on street corners in Chicago on too frequent a basis to tolerate, and all the families who’ve never imagined that they’d lose a loved one to a bullet — those rights are at stake. We’re responsible.
When I visited Newtown last month, I spent some private time with many of the families who lost their children that day. And one was the family of Grace McDonald. Grace’s parents are here. Grace was seven years old when she was struck down — just a gorgeous, caring, joyful little girl. I’m told she loved pink. She loved the beach. She dreamed of becoming a painter.
And so just before I left, Chris, her father, gave me one of her paintings, and I hung it in my private study just off the Oval Office. And every time I look at that painting, I think about Grace. And I think about the life that she lived and the life that lay ahead of her, and most of all, I think about how, when it comes to protecting the most vulnerable among us, we must act now — for Grace. For the 25 other innocent children and devoted educators who had so much left to give. For the men and women in big cities and small towns who fall victim to senseless violence each and every day. For all the Americans who are counting on us to keep them safe from harm. Let’s do the right thing. Let’s do the right thing for them, and for this country that we love so much. (Applause.)
Thank you. Let’s sign these orders. (Applause.)
(The executive orders are signed.) (Applause.)
All right, there we go. (Applause.)
END 12:17 P.M. ESTFriends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to recreate Shakespeare, not to praise him.
– Monkey Julius Caesar
Update 1: The monkeys recreated every work of Shakespeare and went viral. See the project project postmortem for my thoughts on going viral and what I learned during the project.
Update 2: I created a new visualization of the monkeys’ data.
Today (2011-09-23) at 2:30 PST the monkeys successfully randomly recreated A Lover’s Complaint, The Tempest (2011-09-26), As You Like It (2011-09-28), Loves Labours Lost (2011-09-29), Much Ado About Nothing (2011-09-29), The Merchant Of Venice (2011-09-29), The Sonnets (2011-09-29), The Third Part Of King Henry The Sixth (2011-09-29), The Two Gentlemen Of Verona (2011-09-29), A Midsummer Nights Dream (2011-09-30), As You Like It (2011-09-30), The Life Of King Henry The Fifth (2011-09-30), The First Part Of Henry The Sixth (2011-09-30), The Tragedy Of Titus Andronicus (2011-09-30), The Winters Tale (2011-09-30), Measure for Measure (2011-10-01), The First Part Of King Henry The Fourth (2011-10-01), and The History Of Troilus (2011-10-01), Cressida (2011-10-01), Cymbeline (2011-10-02), King Richard The Second (2011-10-02), The Comedy Of Errors (2011-10-02), The Life Of Timon Of Athens (2011-10-02), The Tragedy Of Macbeth (2011-10-02), The Tragedy Of Othello Moor Of Venice (2011-10-02), Twelfth Night Or What You Will (2011-10-02), Alls Well That Ends Well (2011-10-03), King Henry The Eighth (2011-10-03), The Second Part Of King Henry The Sixth (2011-10-03), The Tragedy Of Hamlet Prince Of Denmark (2011-10-03), The Tragedy Of Julius Caesar (2011-10-03), The Tragedy Of Romeo And Juliet (2011-10-03), King John (2011-10-04), King Richard III (2011-10-04), Second Part Of King Henry IV (2011-10-04), The Tragedy Of Antony And Cleopatra (2011-10-04), The Tragedy Of Coriolanus (2011-10-04), The Tragedy Of King Lear (2011-10-04), and The Taming Of The Shrew (2011-10-06). This is the first time a work of Shakespeare has actually been randomly reproduced. Furthermore, this is the largest work ever randomly reproduced. It is one small step for a monkey, one giant leap for virtual primates everywhere.
The monkeys will continue typing away until every work of Shakespeare is randomly created. Until then, you can continue to view the monkeys’ progress on that page. I am making the raw data available to anyone who wants it. Please use the Contact page to ask for the URL. If you have a Hadoop cluster that I could run the monkeys project on, please contact me as well.
This project originally started on August 21, 2011. Over the course of the project, over 6.5 trillion character groups have been randomly generated and checked out of the 5.5 trillion possible combinations.
So far, the project has appeared on Slashdot, Fox News, Engadget, Japanese Engadget, and Solidot. The radio interviews are Australian Broadcasting Company, Little Tommy, Jeff and Jer in San Diego and Radio New Zealand. If you would like to do a story, please contact me via the Contact page.
The Inspiration
This project comes from one of my favorite Simpsons episodes which has a scene where Mr. Burns brings Homer to his mansion (YouTube Video). One of his rooms has a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters. One of the monkeys writes a slightly incorrect line from Charles Dickens “It was the best of times, it was blurst of times.” The joke is a play on the theory that a million monkeys sitting at a million typewriters will eventually produce Shakespeare. And that is what I did. I created millions of monkeys on Amazon EC2 (then my home computer) and put them at virtual typewriters (aka Infinite Monkey Theorem).
Less Technical Explanation
Instead of having real monkeys typing on keyboards, I have virtual, computerized monkeys that output random gibberish. This is supposed to mimic a monkey randomly mashing the keys on a keyboard. The computer program I wrote compares that monkey’s gibberish to every work of Shakespeare to see if it actually matches a small portion of what Shakespeare wrote. If it does match, the portion of gibberish that matched Shakespeare is marked with green in the images below to show it was found by a monkey. The table below shows the exact number of characters and percentage the monkeys have found in Shakespeare. The parts of Shakespeare that have not been found are colored white. This process is repeated over and over until the monkeys have created every work of Shakespeare through random gibberish.
Technical Explanation
For this project, I used Hadoop, Amazon EC2, and Ubuntu Linux. Since I don’t have real monkeys, I have to create fake Amazonian Map Monkeys. The Map Monkeys create random data in ASCII between a and z. It uses Sean Luke’s Mersenne Twister to make sure I have fast, random, well behaved monkeys. Once the monkey’s output is mapped, it is passed to the reducer which runs the characters through a Bloom Field membership test. If the monkey output passes the membership test, the Shakespearean works are checked using a string comparison. If that passes, a genius monkey has written 9 characters of Shakespeare. The source material is all of Shakespeare’s works as taken from Project Gutenberg.
The monkeys’ data from Amazon’s cloud is updated on this site every 30 minutes. The images below show green for every character group that was found and white for those that are still missing. The images output is kind of like the animations for defrag utilities. As the monkeys progress through the works, more and more character groups will be found and show green.
LinkedIn
Digg
Google+
reddit
Hacker News
Delicious
This chart shows the total number of character groups as more |
They had a couple big pushes. I thought in Game 4, the game we won, he made some huge saves to keep that game 1-0 at the time. But I have all the confidence in the world that he can be the guy. Down the stretch here, 25 games in 35 days, did that impact him? I don’t know. He played a lot of hockey. Everybody in the league played a lot of hockey. Did that impact him? I don’t know. But I thought he played well in the playoffs.”
On the need of a better backup, Fletcher said, “It’s critical. That’s a great point. That’s a fair point. The margin between success and failure is so small now. You need your backup goalie to win games and to play games. Maybe if your No. 1 guy is a little tired or having a tough stretch maybe to be able to sit him for a week and have your backup guy go in for a few games, that stuff is critical. I thought Alex had a tremendous year. It was really interesting when we signed Alex last summer, I think he recognized that he had been a backup for a few years and he hadn’t played a lot of games. When you’re a backup and you haven’t played a lot of games, I think your game really struggles. And he was adamant that he had to go down to Iowa. He wanted to be a No. 1 guy. He wanted to get games. He wanted to give himself a chance to be a competitive No. 2 goalie again. And he did that. He was a little sick early in the year, but from November on he played great. I think that team improved by 20 points this year, and we didn’t score a lot down there, so it was a large part because of how he played. So we’re very confident in Alex, and obviously we’ll look and see what other options are there. I think you need three good goalies. Hopefully another guy or two that you’re developing and three guys that can compete. But certainly Alex will be given a very strong chance to be that guy.”
ON OFFSEASON NEEDS, A NEED FOR A PHYSICAL DEFENSEMAN
“We are going to have to look at that. I think there's a couple trends with our team that I've seen from Day 1 that I think Bruce would acknowledge too that we need to get better. We have to become a little bit better of a net-front team. Maybe go back to [the] Andrew Brunette [era] even, I don't know if we're a team that gets good net front presence. I'd also say in fairness I think we can do a lot better of a job of getting pucks in from the point. I think our D need to do a better job of creating shooting lanes. Sometimes it's hard to go stand in front of the net and take a beating if the puck isn't going to get there. I'm sure the defensemen would say if the guy was standing in front of the net I'd get the puck there. So it's a little bit the chicken or the egg. I think that's an area. We scored a lot of goals this year. We were a very highly skilled team. We scored a lot of goals off rush plays. In the playoffs St. Louis just collapsed five guys in the front of the net and basically said, 'Just get it to the point and shoot it because there's no room around the net.' You've got to fight to get into the middle of the ice. You've got to find a way to get pucks through. And it's hard. It's a hard way score. I think there's ways to do that. I like the depth of our team. We are going to have to add some young guys. There are going to be some young guys that get a chance to make the team. But I like the way we move the puck. I like our skill. I like our depth. You always want to be a little bit bigger. Add a physical defenseman. We will potentially look at that. And just make sure we have enough depth. It's a good group. It's a good team. We have to keep pushing.”
Boudeau on what he wants next season: “Well I think as a coach you want everything. You want to get bigger, faster, stronger, younger. You've got to look at, definitely the salary cap comes into play. I think we have a lot of players still on the upside of having their best years. And to me it's always been that those guys when they get to be in their mid to late 20s is when they're physically the strongest and hopefully they've gone through the wars where they can be mentally the strongest. I don't see where anybody is at the age where they should be taking a backseat to being on the decline of their career. If anything, MIkko had his best year, the first time he's been a Selke finalist. Granny is a finalist for the Lady Byng, he had his best year. Eric Staal had his best year in five years. I think there's a lot of upside where we're going to get better rather than be on the decline. And they all know me now so they know what to expect come training camp. There's going to be no guessing. That part of it is all over. I would anticipate that in my mind that we're going to be better team than we were this year.?”
Boudreau on his desire to solidify the top-4 particularly with a bigger, physical defenseman: “You always have wish lists. I do think that that would be something that we'd like. But at the same time when we get that we're going to look and go, 'Man. I wish we had some more mobility back there.' So either way there's never the perfect combination. You'd like to be able to think that you're a bigger team and faster team. And getting a bigger defenseman on the back end, a more physical defenseman anyway, is something that I think we need. Whether we can get it or not, I don't know. Whether we could survive without it, I mean, up until March we were No. 2 in the league defensively so we did obviously survive without it. So we'll see how the summer plays out.”
WHAT HAPPENED IN FEBRUARY/MARCH AND WHY THE HANZAL TRADE
Here’s Fletcher on this subject: “It's interesting because all the stats tell a different story than what our record was. We were actually the best CORSI team in the league in March. I think our concern in February was personally I didn't think we had a lot of depth at center after Staal and Koivu. I was a little bit worried about our fourth line and how it was constituted. And we tried Charlie a little bit at center in February and at that time what we were trying to decide was, we knew we needed to add at least one or two forwards to our group. We thought we had 10 good forwards. Do we keep Charlie at center and get a winger, maybe a scoring winger? Or if we kept Charlie at the wing, we thought we had enough skill at wing where we would need a center. You know, with 20 games in 35 days we didn't know if Koivu and Staal with the wear and tear, were they going to be healthy. An injury to one of those two guys would've ended our season. So we thought adding Hanzal would really help and push Haula to the fourth line which in theory would give us a massive advantage in the fourth line hole and really help that bottom six get more production, have the puck a little bit more, play a little bit more in the offensive zone. We thought part of the game was slipping in February. We were very reliant on our top six forwards and we did get to be a little bit of a deeper team as the season went on. We will have to take a deeper look at everything. There's no question our shooting percentage went down, our save percentage went down. Clearly we weren't doing as well in every area. I thought at the end of the season -- the last seven or eight games -- we played a lot better. Even went into Detroit and lost a game in a shootout, I thought we played a really solid game. We were defending the way we were earlier in the year. Guys were squeezing their stick and maybe not scoring goals like we did. But I thought toward the end of the season we were playing better. I thought in the playoffs we generated a lot of chances. I thought we defended pretty well. We just have to execute. At the end of the day you've got to score goals when you have those looks and we didn't.”
EXPANSION
Fletcher has begun preliminary discussions with Golden Knights GM George McPhee about trying to dictate what player he selects from the Wild – the Wild will protect seven forwards, three defensemen and one goalie. But Fletcher won’t get down to the nitty gritty with McPhee until he knows for certain if he can make any trades with the other 29 teams beforehand.
Fletcher told me after the news conference, “I’ve had so many calls on a lot of our guys the last year. We held on to everybody because we wanted to make a run. But if someone’s going to offer me a good deal right now, I’m all ears.”
I know everybody wants me to write an expansive Vegas advance, and that’ll come and I’ll point you to the several stories and features I wrote on Vegas before and early in the season. But right now, it’s absolutely pointless to try to figure out which players will be exposed before we see if Fletcher actually uses a defenseman or forward to try to acquire a scorer or physical defenseman.
And that very well could happen before the lists have to be submitted June 17.
Fletcher said, “I've already had a few conversations with him. I've got a pretty good sense of what they're looking to accomplish and I think they have a good sense of what we're trying to do. We will just have to see if we can find a fit. Certainly over the next couple of weeks I'll speak to George. He's overseas right now. I'll be in contact with him. They know what we're trying to achieve and they're trying to achieve some different things so I think there could be a fit there. We will work through it. We're going to lose a good asset one way or the other. Part of what we need to do is also find out what's out there on the marketplace outside of Vegas. That's the part where there's a little bit more uncertainty.”
ON IF HE EXPECTED THE SALARY CAP TO BE THIS FLAT WHEN HE COMMITTED THESE LONG-TERM CONTRACTS
Fletcher said, “I think going back to about the summer of 15 there were some projections that the cap would grow 5, 6, 7 percent, 10 percent in some cases. You know, for the last few years we've been pretty aware that we're in a flat cap world. We spend to the cap every year because we're competing and Craig is great and he gives us those resources every year and allows us to spend to the cap. When you spend to the cap sometimes it means you have to dig out from year to year. Last year we bought out Thomas Vanek which gave us the money to sign both Staal and Stewart. You're forced to make those kinds of decisions that isn't ideal but that's the reality that we're in. And this summer is going to present some different challenge. As I mentioned earlier, it's going to be difficult, but I think there's opportunities to bring in some different things to our team. There will be some opportunity next year. We are going to have some players on entry level deals play. There's no other way of making it work. We'll see who's ready. There will be opportunity whether it's Tuch or Kunin or Soucy or Reilly or Olofsson. There are some young players. Not all of them will make it but someone is going to have to and hopefully they'll have big summers and show up.”
FLETCHER PAINTING ROSY PICTURE ON SEASON
I wondered in my analysis here in Monday’s paper if Fletcher would go all Stan Bowman and call this season a “complete failure” and unacceptable. He didn’t.
Here’s Fletcher’s opening to today’s presser:
“This year is different. First of all you have to give credit to St. Louis. That was a very good hockey club. I think they were 21-7 the last two months. Obviously had some struggles in the middle of the year themselves. They had a really tough stretch in December and January. But from February on they played great, they rediscovered their identity and they were a hard team to play against. They played well, it was a very close series. Every game was hard-fought.
“This was the first year we had home-ice advantage. Of the six previous playoff series we’ve been a part f since I’ve been here, we’ve been the underdog in every one of them. Last year we played a Dallas team that was, I think 23 points ahead of us in the standings, and we played them without our two best offensive players in Parise and Vanek, our goalie had a broken hand, we were an 87-point team and we took them to six (games). I don’t think there was a human being that picked us to win that series.
“Whatever we did the previous four years has no bearing on this year. Go back to 2013 we played the Chicago Blackhawks. First time making the playoffs in four years, your goalie gets hurt in warmup before the first game. They were a better team than us, and they beat us. We were not favored to win that series.
“We’ve been about to win two first round series in the previous four years as underdogs and that’s a credit to those groups, but this year was different. This year it’s very disappointing to lose after a tremendous regular season. You look at our regular season, we had three bad weeks, and it hurt us to go 4 and whatever, 4-10 in March. Those three weeks definitely hurt, but the previous four months I don’t think we lost consecutive games in regulation.
“So it was a strong group. I thought the leadership core was tremendous all season to have that kind of consistency. There was a little bump in March but we were able to go 5-1-2 in the last eight to right the ship and then I thought we played pretty well in the playoffs and lost to a team that played hard.”
So how do you make the next step? Fletcher said, “Yeah, we didn’t (meet expectations). We lost in the first round. Twenty-nine of 30 teams are not going to reach their goal this year. That’s the nature of the game. But you’ve got to look at the big picture. Go back a year ago and the questions then. I remember sitting in this room…and the question was is Granlund ever going to become a player, was Jason Zucker ever going to become a player, what happened to Marco Scandella, what happened to Jonas Brodin, can he get a centerman, how do you have a center, do you have enough depth, how are you going to take a step when the team fell back? And I think we had the fifth-biggest improvement of any team over the regular season.
“People don’t want to hear about the regular season but it’s still an 82-game picture. That’s six months of hockey where we were in the top ten in goals against, goals for, power play, penalty kill, home record, road record. Again, four months without consecutive regulation losses. We were a remarkably consistent team. That whole group of kids 24 to 26 all took a step, not even just in terms of production where they had career years, but I think you look at a couple of them in particular and Granlund and Spurgeon have begun to take on leadership responsibilities, which is very important. The older group or however you want to define them, guys who are 32, 33, 34, you look at a guy like Koivu who had arguably his best year in three or four. I think Eric Staal probably produced more than most people would’ve anticipated and certainly had a major impact on the hockey club. You look at Ryan Suter who had another tremendous season, Jason Pominville I think was in the top 25 in the league in points per minutes played even strength and had a big bounce-back year. And Zach finished really strong after a real disappointing start with injury and illness. It just seemed like everything that could go wrong for that guy. Who gets strep throat four or five times in six months. He batted through a lot and he finished strong.
“You look at all those things and it’s still a very good core, it’s a strong team. To me we took a lot of steps this year. Bruce and his coaching staff did a very good job. It was a disappointing five-game playoff series, yet a playoff series that I think could’ve gone the other way. Give St. Louis credit. But you look over 82 games and we took big strides and were one of the more competitive teams in the league. There’s no reason we won’t continue to be that way.”
Asked if he feels this roster can make a deep run, Fletcher said, “Obviously we do. First of all, there’s going to be changes. With the salary cap and expansion, whether we won the Cup or finished 30th in the league, there’s going to be changes. We can’t bring this team back as it is. So there will be some challenges this season for those reasons, but also opportunities. And I think we can certainly look at important things that we do need to improve upon going forward. But this is a team that has three lines that can score, five quality D, a real good goaltender, so wholesale changes, I don’t think we need wholesale changes. Certainly we can look at ways to improve the team and that’s what we’ll do. And again there will be significant challenges for a lot of teams this summer, and we’re one of them.”
BOUDREAU ON LEADERSHIP
“Well, I think they came to play every night. You know, I think they prepared the right way. I think they did everything right. Mentally strong. We battled back all the time. I didn’t think that there was any point in the series where guys said, ‘Aw, crap. We’ve lost this.’ I mean, every time we got behind we came back. So the mental part of the game I think was fine. The leadership was really good, and we just didn’t get the job done. I’m not concerned about whether they can mentally go a second or a third or a fourth round. I think they can, and I think they’re striving towards that, and I think they want that opportunity, and I think there’s not a guy on the time that is happy with the outcome, and they’re all kicking themselves a little bit as much as the coaches are kicking themselves. We’d like another crack at it as soon as possible.
“They were easy to talk to, easy to approach. If I wanted something done and I talked to the leaders they would make sure that the room got it done. They came to practice hard every day. They did it with a smile on their face too. So I have no problem talking to any of them about anything.”
SOME PLAYER QUOTES
KOIVU
“It’s probably a little bit too early to start putting the positives right now. I think you’ve gotta be always critical on what went wrong and why we didn’t get the results we wanted, but for sure, there’s a lot of good things going on throughout the season. We finished, got the home ice, that was our goal going in to the season and I thought that for the most part we learned from the previous seasons. We were able to keep our level of the regular season pretty much, not every game, but every week basically. We had a little setback there in March but I think every team will face that and we got out of it, so yeah, there’s always something good if you’re able to get the home ice and all that but at the end it’s playoffs and when you have disappointment there then it’s tough to find those positive things right away.”
On roster changes: “I think the future looks good. I think for sure there’s going to be, with new teams coming in to the league and things like that there will be some changes on I’m sure every team in the league but I think we proved that what we were able to do throughout the regular season and, I say it again, I believe we played good, played good enough to win for sure more than one [playoff] game and for sure changes are small in the series like if you get a goal you’re in the game, if you get a second win, you know what I mean. A loss is a loss, like I said, there’s no excuses on that but I think you gotta look at the bigger picture on that and the way you play and the way we were in the series I think there was a lot of good in that series as well.”
On Boudreau: “I think it’s always when a new coach comes in there’s always a lot of new and basically the whole staff changed so, a lot of new ideas and the way we play the game and the work up to, it was a short camp but I thought we responded well but like I said going back to the regular season I thought we were able to get better as a team from previous years and I think the results will show that aw ell.I think we played some good hockey and I think, it’s not always an easy thing to do, I think payers are excited to get something new but at the same time it’s challenging to go and do things right away, usually it takes awhile but I think we were able to get where we wanted pretty fast early on the season and for sure did a lot of good with that.”
PARISE
Some fans say this should be blown up? “I don’t think that’s the case. But everyone can have their own opinion. … I think we all like to think we can do that (make a deep run). Unfortunately it just didn’t happen this year like we had anticipated and like I think everyone had anticipated. But we’ll come back next year and try it again.”
Was this a good step this year? “I think we all like to think so. It’s pretty easy right now to forget about the good regular season we had because of what happened last week. Really, it’s about what you do in the playoffs. A good regular season is all you want, but we all want to win in the postseason. It just didn’t happen. We lost in five games, so it’s pretty easy to forget about the regular season.”
On his season? “It was a pretty unique year. It felt like I was chasing the year for a long time. Pretty unlucky, but it’s over now. By the end of the year, I felt fine. It was just a tough start.”
Nice not to be rehabbing in summer? “Yeah. But we’d all love to still be playing right now. Looking back on last year, going into the summer with what happened at the end of the year, yeah it’s nice to not be rehabbing today and for the next couple months. That part is nice, but I wish we were still playing.”
Left with more questions than answers? “It’s different. We talked about that before the playoffs started. But we didn’t play well going into the playoffs. We weren’t really peaking at the right time. We were struggling a little bit at the end of the year. There’s a lot of questions. I think we all want to know the reasons and are trying to figure out the reasons. Unfortunately, we have a lot of time to do that.
How’d your back hold up? “Great. No problems. Thank you for asking.”
SUTER
How do you balance successful regular season with playoff defeat? “Obviously you feel like you should still be playing, the way that the season went. But the reality is we’re not. We’re here doing this and that’s the last place we wanna be right now.
Was this as fun of a regular season as you’ve had? “Definitely. We had a good group of guys. We have a great group of guys. And it’s just so frustrating, disappointing that you had so much fun and had such a good regular season and then to have it end like that.
Takeaway from sometimes being one of the best in the NHL? “Obviously it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish, right? At the end of the day, every team that doesn’t win their last game is probably disappointed. I felt, with the team we had, we should still be playing, but that’s why you have to play the games.”
What worked well under Boudreau? “I think our group of guys has matured one more year. We got some depth down the middle, which we knew we needed, and everybody played up to their capability. I thought it was a solid year. But I think our group of guys is a great group of guys here.”
Is he the kind of coach that could take you guys a step further next season? “Yeah, at the end of the day, it comes down to your players, right? You have to perform and you have to perform at your best in the playoffs and we were unable to do that.
Summer plans? “Probably, gonna sound like a farmer now… plant some corn. No. Lots of lawn mowin’, I’m sure.”
That’s it.
Crazy long blog and thanks to the numerous reporters who helped compile this quote loop. If you have questions, find me on Twitter or email.
I’ll be on KFAN on Wednesday afternoon with Barreiro.
The Russo-Souhan Show will be at Hell’s Kitchen at 6 p.m. Wednesday and I’ll be doing another video podcast with Souhan and Anthony LaPanta, I believe, at 4:30 p.m. Friday from Hell’s Kitchen.
I’m also filling in for Paul Allen at 9 a.m.-noon May 3.
Hope you enjoyed our coverage this season. Talk to you in September.Last week, Saudi activists circulated on social media a video of two young women, identified only as Ashwaq and Areej, apparently sisters, who said they were in Turkey and were in danger of being repatriated to Saudi Arabia, where they claimed they would face violence. Thanks to cases like theirs, a social media campaign by Saudi women with the hashtag #StopEnslavingSaudiWomen has gone viral.
I recently met Ms. al-Johani, the lawyer, and another Saudi woman, Danah, in New York. They are the “lucky” ones who got away from abusive families. Ms. al-Johani said her family kept her locked up for eight months when she made a visit home during her studies in America. She has begun an application for asylum in the United States. Danah has decided to try to stay in the United States, too. One Saudi sociologist estimates that more than 1,000 women flee the kingdom every year, while more escape Riyadh for Jidda, the Red Sea city, which is considered more liberal than the capital.
I was 15 when my family moved to Jidda from Britain in 1982. Living in Saudi Arabia was such a shock to my system that I like to say I was traumatized into feminism. The kingdom enforces a pervasive segregation of the sexes. It is the only country in the world that upholds a ban on women’s driving. And the country’s male guardianship system renders women perpetual minors, who need permission from a father, brother or even a son to travel, study, marry or gain access to government services. (A recent government order promises to relax such rules, but whether it is enforced effectively remains to be seen.)
It is impossible to convey the lived reality of what is essentially gender apartheid. When I first read Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” it was Saudi Arabia as I knew it that came to mind, not a dystopian future United States as in the new television adaptation. The Saudi-American poet Majda Gama told me she was unable to sleep after watching the main protagonist, Offred, played by Elisabeth Moss, in the opening episodes.
“It raised thoughts I literally never tell my Caucasian friends because they wouldn’t understand,” she said, “because what Offred lived as some cautionary tale felt very much like my lived reality. One woman’s dystopia is another woman’s reality.”
Ms. Atwood has famously said all the horrors she included in her 1985 book have actually happened in one place and at one time or another. As far as Saudi Arabia is concerned, many of them continue to happen. There is Offred being dragged back to the re-education center after she tried to escape with her friend, Moira. Here is Ms. Lasloom dragged onto a plane to Riyadh and into detention, where, activists say, only government officials and family members can contact her.
“Most young Saudi women who are imprisoned there,” explained Hala al-Dosari, a women’s-rights campaigner, “are sentenced for morality-related charges such as being caught in the company of an unrelated male, being accused of running away from home by a male relative or being disobedient to parents.” The latter, she said, is treated as “a crime calling for immediate detention in Saudi Arabia.”
Ms. al-Dosari published a petition, which more than 14,000 Saudi women signed last year, calling on King Salman to abolish the guardianship system completely.Barcelona star makes shocking admission to Back of the Net's John Foster...
After being awarded the Ballon dâÂÂOr for the fourth consecutive year, Lionel Messi has spoken of his âÂÂpride, happiness, and heartfelt reliefâ that he will have at least one more year to locate the trophy he misplaced at some point in 2010.â¨â¨
Messi pipped longtime rival Cristiano Ronaldo and clubmate Andrés Iniesta to the trophy, gaining 40% of the vote. He admitted, however, that the fact 60% of the voters believed that the gong should have gone either to scampering hypnotist Iniesta or simpering cruiserweight Ronaldo made him a little anxious that they knew something was up.
âÂÂI canâÂÂt blame people for being suspicious,â Messi told FourFourTwo. âÂÂIâÂÂm sure they just want to check IâÂÂm taking good care of it. Well, it was looking great in 2010.âÂÂ
Messi has taken to spending most of his free time away from the training ground looking for the solid gold trophy, awarded every year since 1956 to the best player in the world.
"I'm sure I left that thing in here somewhere..."
âÂÂIâÂÂd love to be out crashing expensive cars and chasing supermodels, but that thingâÂÂs not going to find itself,â he said. âÂÂAt some point that steroided ferret-man [Ronaldo] is bound to win it, and heâÂÂs going to smother me to death with body lotion if I donâÂÂt hand it over.âÂÂ
âÂÂI thought IâÂÂd found it a week ago, but it turned out to be my four Champions League top goalscorer trophies that had clumped together in a box. Maybe this year IâÂÂll get round to putting them on the wall.âÂÂ
There was also controversy around FIFAâÂÂs Best Goal trophy, which was won by FenerbahceâÂÂs Miroslav Stoch. As he collected the award, Stoch was knocked unconscious by a pool cue flung at him from forty metres away by an infuriated Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
Editor's note: this is satire and not a serious accusation - all quotes are fictionalised. But you knew that, because you're not stupid.
More from Back of the Net
Gold's children urge West Ham to sign Anelka, Batman & Spongebob
Mark Lawrenson spotted buying discounted Christmas crackers
Grumpy Villas-Boas takes negatives from Tottenham performance
Sturridge's Liverpool move held up by fact'squillion' not a number
Brighton inadvertently sign former England keeper Chris Woods
Giggs causes concern with tendency to invoke 150-year-old rules
All Back of the Net blogs >>As 2016 hits the halfway mark, here are the films we're championing as the best released in theaters so far.
5. “Creative Control”
With its crisp black-and-white photography and snazzy effects, Benjamin Dickinson’s mesmerizing science fiction thriller “Creative Control” cleverly envisions a technology-dominated society that’s right around the corner. But the particulars of the plot, in which the Brooklyn-based developer of new augmented reality glasses loses touch with the world around him, imbues the target of its critique with a sharp contemporary edge. It’s at once otherworldly and familiar — a futuristic satire that stings with immediate relevance.
4. “The Witch”
Billed as a “New England Folktale,” writer-director Robert Eggers’ accomplished feature-length debut manages a tricky balance: On the one hand an elegant period piece about the dissolution of a New England family circa 1630, it’s also a genuinely unsettling horror movie about possession. Almost exclusively set at a drab cabin and the ominous woods surrounding it, the movie’s minimalist approach doesn’t lack for authenticity, as Eggers relies on court records and other documents to script the dialogue along with costumes from the period in question. The effect is a haunting narrative of otherworldly forces made especially scary due to the realism surrounding them.
3. “The Lobster”
It doesn’t take much to synopsize the fundamental weirdness of “The Lobster,” Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ marvelously offbeat English-language debut: It’s a movie set in a world where being single is a crime and subordinates get transformed into animals of their choosing. Perhaps understanding as much, Lanthimos gets that high concept premise out of the way upfront, establishing the plight of leading man David (Colin Farrell, mustachioed and pot-bellied, submerged in a wonderfully unglamorous turn), one of the unlucky bachelors in question. David is a hapless anti-hero less interested in rebelling against the system than simply letting it toss him around — until he wanders elsewhere and discovers love in an unorthodox place. Per usual with Lanthimos, the boundaries of a restrictive society were meant to be broken, and “The Lobster” excels at exploring the catharsis of escaping expectations.
2. “Neon Bull”
Many filmmakers obsess over characters living on the margins of civilization, but Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro has the rare ability to burrow inside their experiences. In two narrative features and a handful of documentaries, Mascaro’s filmography blends an textured storytelling with anthropological investigation. The newest of them, “Neon Bull,” offers startling proof of this talent. Mascaro’s vibrant depiction of Brazilian cowhands delivers a detailed look at a nomadic universe that’s simultaneously flamboyant and gritty. While technically a fictional narrative, it provides a bridge to Mascaro’s nonfiction background by emphasizing the sights and sounds of a contained environment. Lyrically involving and deeply sensual, “Neon Bull” showcases a full-fledged artist in command of his form.
1. “Weiner”
The second downfall of Anthony Weiner, during his disastrous New York mayoral campaign, became a national joke for obvious reasons. But the public couldn’t see the sheer mayhem of the Weiner campaign as the politician faced one of the greatest public humiliations in recent history. “Weiner,” which won the grand jury prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, pulls back that veil to reveal one of the great farces of modern campaign history (at least prior to the current presidential season). Co-directed by former Weiner chief of staff Josh Kriegman with Elyse Steinberg, the movie captures Weiner and his beleaguered wife, Hilary Clinton adviser Huma Abedin, through a series of cringe-inducing circumstances as the media continually preys on the family’s hardships.
Weiner’s attempt at pressing ahead against impossible odds results in a spectacularly entertaining look at the pratfalls of modern celebrity and the hubris involved in chasing power in the political arena. On the one hand, “Weiner” is first-rate cinema verite, capturing its subject’s constant humiliation and absurd investment in his campaign against impossible odds with striking details, even as the mayhem surrounding his downfall indicts the media’s obsession over his scandal as well. At the same time, it’s a boisterous editorial cartoon about the inherent madness of a system rigged for self-destruction.
Anne Thompson, Editor at Large
5. “A War”
Writer-director Tobias Lindholm’s Venice Fest entry “A War,” a tough hand-held Afghanistan movie (shot in Jordan and other locations) focuses on the stresses on the captain (“R” and “Borgen” star Pilou Asbæk, who’s co-starring in “Game of Thrones” and “Ghost in the Shell”) as well as his wife (Tuva Novotny) and family back home. Lindholm is a strong writer (Oscar nominee “The Hunt”) who does his research. When he read that a soldier returning from Afghanistan was more afraid of being court-martialed than of being killed, that inspired him to write and direct “A War.” The movie became Denmark’s Oscar submission over chief rival, Josh Oppenheimer doc “The Look of Silence,” and landed a nomination. It makes sense that Kathryn Bigelow would want to executive produce “A War,” as Lindholm’s cast of veteran soldiers anxiously pick their way across IED-infested Afghanistan terrain. She became a fan after seeing his taut high-seas thriller “A Hijacking.” Lindholm’s now collaborating with Paul Greengrass on period Berlin drama “The Tunnels.”
Paramount Pictures
4. “Everybody Wants Some!!”
Richard Linklater’s college comedy ”Everybody Wants Some!!” is hugely entertaining, shot with the familiar ”Dazed and Confused” aesthetic (and many of the same crew) and cast with young discoveries, including Wyatt Russell (son of Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell) and Zoey Deutch, (daughter of actress Lea Thompson and director |
bombers with receiving equipment. Two dedicated air refueling units were formed on June 30, 1948: the 43d Air Refueling Squadron at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona, and the 509th Air Refueling Squadron at Walker Air Force Base, New Mexico. The first ARS aircraft used FRL's looped-hose refueling system, but testing with a boom system followed quickly in the autumn of 1948.
The first use of aerial refueling in combat took place during the Korean War, involving F-84 fighter-bombers flying missions from Japanese airfields, due to Chinese-North Korean forces overrunning many of the bases for jet aircraft in South Korea, refueling from converted B-29s using the drogue-and-probe in-flight refueling system with the probe located in one of the F-84's wing-tip fuel tanks.
Systems [ edit ]
Two different methods are used to connect tanker to receiver: the flying boom system (sometimes called boom and receptacle) and the probe-and-drogue system. The less popular wing-to-wing system is no longer used.
Flying boom [ edit ]
The flying boom is a rigid, telescoping tube with movable flight control surfaces that a boom operator on the tanker aircraft extends and inserts into a receptacle on the receiving aircraft. All boom-equipped tankers (e.g. KC-135 Stratotanker, KC-10 Extender) have a single boom, and can refuel one aircraft at a time with this mechanism.
History [ edit ]
In the late 1940s, General Curtis LeMay, commander of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), asked Boeing to develop a refueling system that could transfer fuel at a higher rate than had been possible with earlier systems using flexible hoses, resulting in the flying boom system. The B-29 was the first to employ the boom, and between 1950 and 1951, 116 original B-29s, designated KB-29Ps, were converted at the Boeing plant at Renton, Washington. Boeing went on to develop the world’s first production aerial tanker, the KC-97 Stratofreighter, a piston-engined Boeing Stratocruiser (USAF designation C-97 Stratofreighter) with a Boeing-developed flying boom and extra kerosene (jet fuel) tanks feeding the boom. The Stratocruiser airliner itself was developed from the B-29 bomber after World War II. In the KC-97, the mixed gasoline/kerosene fuel system was clearly not desirable and it was obvious that a jet-powered tanker aircraft would be the next development, having a single type of fuel for both its own engines and for passing to receiver aircraft. The 230 mph (370 km/h) cruise speed of the slower, piston-engined KC-97 was also a serious issue, as using it as an aerial tanker forced the newer jet-powered military aircraft to slow down to mate with the tanker's boom, a highly serious issue with the newer supersonic aircraft coming into service at that time, which could force such receiving aircraft in some situations to slow down enough to approach their stall speed during the approach to the tanker. It was no surprise that, after the KC-97, Boeing began receiving contracts from the USAF to build jet tankers based on the Boeing 367-80 (Dash-80) airframe. The result was the Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker, of which 732 were built.
Operation [ edit ]
The flying boom is attached to the rear of the tanker aircraft. The attachment is gimballed, allowing the boom to move with the receiver aircraft. The boom contains a rigid pipe to transfer fuel. The fuel pipe ends in a nozzle with a flexible ball joint. The nozzle mates to the "receptacle" in the receiver aircraft during fuel transfer. A poppet valve in the end of the nozzle prevents fuel from exiting the tube until the nozzle properly mates with the receiver's refueling receptacle. Once properly mated, toggles in the receptacle engage the nozzle, holding it locked during fuel transfer.
The "flying" boom is so named because flight control surfaces, small movable airfoils that are often in a V-tail configuration, are used to move the boom by creating aerodynamic forces. They are actuated hydraulically and controlled by the boom operator using a control stick. The boom operator also telescopes the boom to make the connection with the receiver's receptacle.
To complete an aerial refueling, the tanker and receiver aircraft rendezvous, flying in formation. The receiver moves to a position behind the tanker, within safe limits of travel for the boom, aided by director lights or directions radioed by the boom operator. Once in position, the operator extends the boom to make contact with the receiver aircraft. Once in contact, fuel is pumped through the boom into the receiver aircraft.
KC-30A. Cameras in place of a visual boom control station as used on an Australian
While in contact, the receiver pilot must continue to fly within the "air refueling envelope," the area in which contact with the boom is safe. Moving outside of this envelope can damage the boom or lead to mid-air collision, for example the 1966 Palomares B-52 crash. If the receiving aircraft approaches the outer limits of the envelope, the boom operator will command the receiver pilot to correct his position and disconnect the boom if necessary.
When the desired amount of fuel has been transferred, the two aircraft disconnect and the receiver aircraft departs the formation. When not in use, the boom is stored flush with the bottom of the tanker's fuselage to minimize drag.
Systems in service [ edit ]
US Air Force fixed-wing aircraft use the flying boom system. Typically countries operating F-16 or F-15 variants have had a need for boom equipped tankers. Therefore, in addition to the USAF, the boom system is used by Australia (KC-30A), the Netherlands (KDC-10), Israel (modified Boeing 707), Turkey (surplus US KC-135Rs), and Iran (Boeing 747).
Advantages
Higher fuel flow rates (up to 1,000 US gallons (3,800 l) / 6,500 pounds (2,900 kg) per minute for the KC-135 tanker) can be achieved with the large diameter of the pipe in the flying boom, requiring less time to complete refueling operations than probe-and-drogue systems.
Less susceptible to receiving aircraft pilot error and fatigue. [ citation needed ]
Less susceptible to adverse weather conditions. [ citation needed ]
Boom equipped tankers are readily convertible to multisystem refuel methods.[ citation needed ]
Disadvantages
Requires a boom operator.
Added complexity of modification with attaching a boom to an aircraft.
Boom only allows for one receiver at a time.
Fighter aircraft cannot accept fuel at the boom’s maximum flow rate, requiring a reduction in refueling pressure when servicing these aircraft,[24] reducing (but not eliminating) the flying boom's advantage over the drogue system when refueling fighter aircraft.[25]
USAF KC-135 hose-drogue pod
View, on approach to a drogue basket
The probe-and-drogue refueling method employs a flexible hose that trails from the tanker aircraft. The drogue (or para-drogue), sometimes called a basket, is a fitting resembling a shuttlecock, attached at its narrow end (like the "cork" nose of a shuttlecock) with a valve to a flexible hose. The drogue stabilizes the hose in flight and provides a funnel to aid insertion of the receiver aircraft probe into the hose. The hose connects to a Hose Drum Unit (HDU). When not in use, the hose/drogue is reeled completely into the HDU. The receiver has a probe, which is a rigid, protruding or pivoted retractable arm placed on the aircraft's nose or fuselage to make the connection. Most modern versions of the probe are usually designed to be retractable, and are retracted when not in use, particularly on high speed aircraft.[citation needed]
At the end of the probe is a valve that is closed until it mates with the drogue's forward internal receptacle, after which it opens and allows fuel to pass from tanker to receiver.[citation needed] The valves in the probe and drogue that are most commonly used are to a NATO standard and were originally developed by the company Flight Refuelling Limited in the UK and deployed in the late 1940s and 1950s.[citation needed] This standardization allows drogue-equipped tanker aircraft from many nations the ability to refuel probe-equipped aircraft from other nations. The NATO standard probe system incorporates shear rivets that attach the refueling valve to the end of the probe.[citation needed] This is so that if a large side or vertical load develops while in contact with the drogue, the rivets shear and the fuel valve breaks off, rather than the probe or receiver aircraft suffering structural damage. A so-called "broken probe" (actually a broken fuel valve, as described above) may happen if poor flying technique is used by the receiver pilot, or in turbulence.[citation needed] Sometimes the valve is retained in the tanker drogue and prevents further refueling from that drogue until removed during ground maintenance.
Buddy store
A "buddy store" or "buddy pod" is an external pod loaded on an aircraft hardpoint that contains a hose and drogue system (HDU).[26] Buddy stores allow fighter / bomber aircraft to be reconfigured for "buddy tanking" other aircraft. This allows an air combat force without dedicated/specialized tanker support (for instance, a carrier air wing) to extend the range of its strike aircraft. In other cases, using the buddy store method allows a carrier-based aircraft to take-off with a heavier than usual load, the aircraft then being topped-up with fuel from a HDU-equipped "buddy" tanker, a method previously used by the Royal Navy in operating its Supermarine Scimitar, de Havilland Sea Vixen and Blackburn Buccaneers, in the Buccaneer's case using a bomb-bay-mounted tank and HDU.[citation needed]
Operation
An RAF Victor K2 trails its three hose lines - standard operations would usually see small aircraft refuelling from the two wing hoses, while larger aircraft would use the longer belly hose.
The tanker aircraft flies straight and level and extends the hose/drogue which is allowed to trail out behind and below the tanker under normal aerodynamic forces. The pilot of the receiver aircraft extends his probe (if required) and uses normal flight controls to "fly" the refueling probe directly into the basket. This requires a closure rate of approximately two knots (walking speed) in order to establish solid probe/drogue coupling and push the hose several feet into the HDU. Too little closure will cause an incomplete connection and no fuel flow (or occasionally leaking fuel). Too much closure is dangerous because it can trigger a strong transverse oscillation in the hose, severing the probe tip. Another significant danger is that the drogue may hit the recipient aircraft and damage it—instances have occurred in which the drogue has shattered the canopy of a fighter aircraft, causing great danger to its pilot.[citation needed]
The optimal approach is from behind and below (not level with) the drogue. Because the drogue is relatively light (typically soft canvas webbing) and subject to aerodynamic forces, it can be pushed around by the bow wave of approaching aircraft, exacerbating engagement even in smooth air. After initial contact, the hose and drogue is pushed forward by the receiver a certain distance (typically, a few feet), and the hose is reeled slowly back onto its drum in the HDU. This opens the tanker's main refueling valve allowing fuel to flow to the drogue under the appropriate pressure (assuming the tanker crew has energized the pump). Tension on the hose is aerodynamically 'balanced' by a motor in the HDU so that as the receiver aircraft moves fore and aft, the hose retracts and extends, thus preventing bends in the hose that would cause undue side loads on the probe. Fuel flow is typically indicated by illumination of a green light near the HDU. If the hose is pushed in too far or not far enough, a cutoff switch will inhibit fuel flow, which is typically accompanied by an amber light. Disengagement is commanded by the tanker pilot with a red light.[26]
Systems in service [ edit ]
US military helicopters, and all US Navy and Marine Corps aircraft (except the Boeing E-6 Mercury and Boeing P-8 Poseidon) refuel using the "hose-and-drogue." Western-European tactical aircraft manufacturers typically design with the probe-and-drogue method. The Soviet Union also reverse engineered the NATO hose and drogue system[citation needed], which is called UPAZ,[27] so all Russian aircraft are also equipped with probe and drogue. The Chinese PLAF has a fleet of Xian H-6 bombers modified for aerial refueling as well as forthcoming Russian Ilyushin Il-78 aerial refueling tankers.[28]
Advantages
Simpler tanker design.
Tankers can be equipped with multipoint hose-and-drogue systems allowing two (or more) aircraft to refuel simultaneously, reducing time spent refueling by as much as 75% for a four aircraft strike package. [29]
Multiple refueling points also offers redundancy over the single refueling point system.
Helicopters and small aircraft are easily equipped with a refueling probe.
No boom operator is needed.
Disadvantages
Lower flow rates (to 1,500 to 4,500 pounds (680 to 2,040 kg) per minute) [30] due to a lower pressure and limited hose diameter resulting in longer refueling times for larger aircraft.
due to a lower pressure and limited hose diameter resulting in longer refueling times for larger aircraft. To achieve higher flow rates, a centerline hose drum unit is needed and requires fuselage modifications [ citation needed ]
Subject to turbulence [31] and aerodynamic forces (bow wave) of approaching aircraft.
and aerodynamic forces (bow wave) of approaching aircraft. Requires greater receiving pilot input and susceptible to receiving pilot fatigue.
Susceptible to adverse weather conditions. [ citation needed ]
Cannot be easily converted to a multisystem tanker [ citation needed ] ; A basket may be attached to a boom but the opposite is impractical. [ citation needed ]
; A basket may be attached to a boom but the opposite is impractical. Requires fitment of refueling probes to receiving aircraft.
Receiving aircraft typically have the probe in the front which present problems such as: sensitive avionics equipment (pitot static and angle of attack probes, etc.), can easily be damaged by the drogue, and FOD, including fuel or probe/drogue parts can be ingested into the plane's engines.[ citation needed ]
Boom drogue adapter units [ edit ]
A KC-10 Extender approaching a second KC-10 for aerial refuelling during Exercise Talisman Saber 2017. Owing to the long flight times aerial refuelling aircraft undertake, some tanker aircraft types have systems to allow them to be aerially refuelled by other tankers.
USAF KC-135 and French Air Force KC-135FR refueling-boom equipped tankers can be field converted to a probe-and-drogue system using a special adapter unit. In this configuration, the tanker retains its articulated boom, but has a hose/drogue at the end of it instead of the usual nozzle. The tanker boom operator holds the boom in a static position, while the receiver aircraft then flies the probe into the basket. Unlike the soft canvas basket used in most drogue systems, the adapter units use a steel basket, grimly known as the "iron maiden" by naval aviators because of its unforgiving nature. Soft drogues can be contacted slightly off center, wherein the probe is guided into the hose receptacle by the canvas drogue. The metal drogue, when contacted even slightly off center, will pivot out of place, potentially "slapping" the aircraft's fuselage and causing damage.
The other major difference with this system is that when contacted, the hose does not "retract" into an HDU. Instead, the hose bends depending on how far it is pushed toward the boom. If it is pushed too far, it can loop around the probe or nose of the aircraft, damage the windscreen, or cause contact with the rigid boom. If not pushed far enough, the probe will disengage, halting fueling. Because of a much smaller position keeping tolerance, staying properly connected to a KC-135 adapter unit is considerably more difficult than staying in a traditional hose/drogue configuration. When fueling is complete, the receiver carefully backs off until the probe refueling valve disconnects from the valve in the basket. Off center disengagements, like engagements, can cause the drogue to "prang" the probe and/or strike the aircraft’s fuselage.
Multiple systems [ edit ]
USAF KC-135 using Mk32B hose-drogue pods refueling a pair of British Tornado GR4s over Iraq in 2003. The wing pods allow for use of the centerline refueling boom.
Some tankers have both a boom and one or more complete hose-and-drogue systems. The USAF KC-10 has both a flying boom and also a separate hose and drogue system manufactured by Cobham plc. Both are on the aircraft centerline at the tail of the aircraft, so only one system can be used at once. However, such a system allows all types of probe- and receptacle-equipped aircraft to be refueled in a single mission, without landing to install an adapter. Many KC-135s and some KC-10s are also equipped with dual under-wing hose-and-drogue attachments known as Multi-point Refueling System (MPRSs) or Wing Air Refueling Pods (WARPs), respectively.
In this method, similar to the probe-and-drogue method but more complicated, the tanker aircraft released a flexible hose from its wingtip. An aircraft, flying beside it, had to catch the hose with a special lock under its wingtip. After the hose was locked, and the connection was established, the fuel was pumped. It was used on a small number of Soviet Tu-4 and Tu-16 only (the tanker variant was Tu-16Z).[32]
Simple grappling [ edit ]
Some historic systems used for pioneering aerial refueling used the grappling method, where the tanker aircraft unreeled the fuel hose and the receiver aircraft would grapple the hose midair, reel it in and connect it so that fuel can be transferred either with the assistance of pumps or simply by gravity feed. This was the method used on the Question Mark endurance flight in 1929.
Compatibility issues [ edit ]
The probe-and-drogue system is not compatible with flying boom equipment, creating a problem for military planners where mixed forces are involved.[33] Incompatibility can also complicate the procurement of new systems — the Royal Canadian Air Force currently wish to purchase the F-35A, which can only refuel via the flying boom, but only possess probe-and-drogue refuelers. The potential cost of converting F-35As to probe-and-drogue refueling (as is used on U.S. Navy & Marine Corps F-35Bs and F-35Cs) has added to the political controversy which already surrounds F-35 procurement within the RCAF.[34]
These concerns can be addressed by drogue adapters (see section "Boom drogue adapter units" above) that allow drogue aircraft to refuel from boom-equipped aircraft, and by refuelers which are equipped with both drogue and boom units and can thus refuel both types in the same flight, such as the KC-10, MPRS KC-135, or Airbus A330 MRTT.
Uses and considerations [ edit ]
Strategic [ edit ]
The development of the KC-97 and Boeing KC-135 Stratotankers was pushed by the Cold War requirement of the United States to be able to keep fleets of nuclear-armed B-47 Stratojet and B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers airborne around-the-clock either to threaten retaliation against a Soviet strike for mutual assured destruction, or to bomb the U.S.S.R. first had it been ordered to do so by the President of the United States. The bombers would fly orbits around their assigned positions from which they were to enter Soviet airspace if they received the order, and the tankers would refill the bombers' fuel tanks so that they could keep a force in the air 24 hours a day, and still have enough fuel to reach their targets in the Soviet Union. This also ensured that a first strike against the bombers' airfields could not obliterate the U.S.'s ability to retaliate by bomber.
In 1958, Valiant tankers in the UK were developed with one HDU mounted in the bomb-bay. Valiant tankers of 214 Squadron were used to demonstrate radius of action by refueling a Valiant bomber non-stop from UK to Singapore in 1960 and a Vulcan bomber to Australia in 1961. Other UK exercises involving refueling aircraft from Valiant tankers included Javelin and Lightning fighters, also Vulcan and Victor bombers. For instance, in 1962 a squadron of Javelin air defense aircraft was refueled in stages from the UK to India and back (exercise "Shiksha"). After the retirement of the Valiant in 1965, the Handley Page Victor took over the UK refueling role and had three hoses (HDUs). These were a fuselage-mounted HDU and a refueling pod on each wing. The center hose could refuel any probe-equipped aircraft, the wing pods could refuel the more maneuverable fighter/ground attack types.
A byproduct of this development effort and the building of large numbers of tankers was that these tankers were also available to refuel cargo aircraft, fighter aircraft, and ground attack aircraft, in addition to bombers, for ferrying to distant theaters of operations. This was much used during the Vietnam War, when many aircraft could not have covered the transoceanic distances without aerial refueling, even with intermediate bases in Hawaii and Okinawa. In addition to allowing the transport of the aircraft themselves, the cargo aircraft could also carry matériel, supplies, and personnel to Vietnam without landing to refuel. KC-135s were also frequently used for refueling of air combat missions from air bases in Thailand.
Boeing KC-135Q refueling SR-71
The USAF SR-71 Blackbird strategic reconnaissance aircraft made frequent use of air-to-air refueling. Indeed, design considerations of the aircraft made its mission impossible without aerial refueling. Based at Beale AFB in central California, SR-71s had to be forward deployed to Europe and Japan prior to flying actual reconnaissance missions. These trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic flights during deployment were impossible without aerial refueling. The SR-71's designers traded takeoff performance for better high-speed, high-altitude performance, necessitating takeoff with less-than-full fuel tanks from even the longest runways. Once airborne, the Blackbird would accelerate to supersonic speed using afterburners to facilitate structural heating and expansion. The magnitude of temperature changes experienced by the SR-71, from parked to its maximum speed, resulted in significant expansion of its structural parts in cruise flight. To allow for the expansion, the Blackbird's parts had to fit loosely when cold, so loosely, in fact, that the Blackbird constantly leaked fuel before heating expanded the airframe enough to seal its fuel tanks. Following the supersonic dash, and to stop the fuel leaks, the SR-71 would then rendezvous with a tanker to fill its now nearly empty tanks before proceeding on its mission. This was referred to as the LTTR (for "Launch To Tanker Rendezvous") profile. LTTR had the added advantage of providing an operational test of the Blackbird's refueling capability within minutes after takeoff, enabling a Return-To-Launch-Site abort capability if necessary. At its most efficient altitude and speed, the Blackbird was capable of flying for many hours without refueling. The SR-71 used a special fuel, JP-7, with a very high flash point to withstand the extreme skin temperatures generated during Mach 3+ cruise flight.[35] While JP-7 could be used by other aircraft, its burn characteristics posed problems in certain situations (such as high-altitude, emergency engine starts) that made it less than optimal for aircraft other than the SR-71.
Normally, all the fuel aboard a tanker aircraft may be either offloaded, or burned by the tanker as necessary. To make this possible, the KC-135 fuel system incorporated gravity draining and pumps to allow moving fuel from tank to tank depending on mission needs. Mixing JP-7 with JP-4 or Jet A, however, rendered it unsuitable for use by the SR-71, so the US Air Force commissioned a specially modified KC-135 variant, the KC-135Q, which included changes to the fuel system and operating procedures preventing inadvertent inflight mixing of fuel intended for offload with fuel intended for use by the tanker. SR-71 aircraft were refueled exclusively by KC-135Q tankers.
The French strategic Force de dissuasion or Force de frappe strategic nuclear deterrent force uses KC-135 tankers to refuel and extend the range of Mirage 2000N fighter-bombers and, before their retirement, Dassault Mirage IV supersonic bombers which were sometimes planned to operate in pairs, one armed, and one carrying a buddy pack air refueling pod.
Israel has a fleet of Boeing 707s equipped with a boom refueling system similar to the KC-135, used to refuel and extend the range of fighter bombers such as the F-15I and F-16I for deterrent and strike missions.[36][37]
Tactical [ edit ]
Tankers are considered "force multipliers," because they convey considerable tactical advantages. Primarily, aerial refueling adds to the combat radius of attack, fighter and bombers aircraft, and allows patrol aircraft to remain airborne longer, thereby reducing the numbers of aircraft necessary to accomplish a given mission. Aerial refueling can also mitigate basing issues which might otherwise place limitations on combat payload. Combat aircraft operating from airfields with shorter runways must limit their takeoff weight, which could mean a choice between range (fuel) and combat payload (munitions). Aerial refueling, however, eliminates many of these basing difficulties because a combat aircraft can take off with a full combat payload and refuel immediately.
Aside from these issues, the psychological advantage of full fuel tanks – and a tanker likely available nearby – gives a pilot a distinct edge in combat. In most combat situations, speed is a necessity for optimal completion of the mission at hand. As high speeds require fuel, pilots must always balance fuel and speed requirements. Pilots operating aircraft with aerial refueling capability eliminate low-fuel concerns.
Vietnam War [ edit ]
During the Vietnam War, it was common for USAF fighter-bombers flying from Thailand to North Vietnam to refuel from KC-135s en route to their target. Besides extending their range, this enabled the F-105s and F-4 Phantoms to carry more bombs and rockets. Tankers were also available for refueling on the way back if necessary. In addition to ferrying aircraft across the Pacific Ocean, aerial refueling made it possible for battle-damaged fighters, with heavily leaking fuel tanks, to hook up to the tankers and let the tanker feed its engine(s) until the point where they could glide to the base and land. This saved numerous aircraft.[citation needed]
The US Navy frequently used carrier-based aerial tankers like the KA-3 Skywarrior to refuel Navy and Marine aircraft such as the F-4, A-4 Skyhawk, A-6 Intruder, and A-7 Corsair II. This was particularly useful when a pilot returning from an airstrike was having difficulty landing and was running low on jet fuel. This gave him fuel for more attempts at landing for a successful "trap" on an aircraft carrier. The KA-3 could also refuel fighters on extended Combat Air Patrol. USMC jets based in South Vietnam and Thailand also used USMC KC-130 Hercules transports for air-to-air refueling on missions.
Iran–Iraq War [ edit ]
During the 1980s Iran–Iraq War, the Iranian Air Force maintained at least one KC 707-3J9C aerial tanker, which the Islamic Republic had inherited from the Shah's government. This was used most effectively on April 4, 1981, refueling eight IRIAF F-4 Phantoms on long-range sorties into Iraq to bomb the H-3 Al Walid airfield near the Jordanian border.[38]
Israeli Air Force Boeing 707 Tanker refueling F-15s
Israeli Tunisian PLO strike [ edit ]
In 1985, Israeli F-15s used heavily modified Boeing 707 aircraft to provide aerial refueling over the Mediterranean Sea in order to extend their range for the 2,000 km flight during the Operation Wooden Leg air raid on the headquarters of the PLO near Tunis, Tunisia.[39]
Falklands War [ edit ]
During the Falklands War, aerial refueling played a vital role in all of the successful Argentine attacks against the Royal Navy. The Argentine Air Force had only two KC-130H Hercules available and they were used to refuel both Air Force and Navy A-4 Skyhawks and Navy Super Etendards in their Exocet strikes. The Hercules on several occasions approached the islands (where the Sea Harriers were in patrol) to search and guide the A-4s in their returning flights. On one of those flights (callsign Jaguar) one of the KC-130s went to rescue a damaged A-4 and delivered 39,000 lb (18,000 kg) of fuel while carrying it to its airfield at San Julian. However, the Mirage IIIs and Daggers lack of air refueling capability prevented them from achieving better results. The Mirages were unable to reach the islands with a strike payload, and the Daggers could do so only for a five-minute strike flight.
On the British side, air refueling was carried out by the Handley Page Victor K.2 and, after the Argentine surrender, by modified C-130 Hercules tankers. These aircraft aided deployments from the UK to the Ascension Island staging post in the Atlantic and further deployments south of bomber, transport and maritime patrol aircraft. The most famous refueling missions were the 8,000 nmi (15,000 km) "Operation Black Buck" sorties which used 14 Victor tankers to allow an Avro Vulcan bomber (with a flying reserve bomber) to attack the Argentine-captured airfield at Port Stanley on the Falkland Islands. With all the aircraft flying from Ascension, the tankers themselves needed refueling. The raids were the longest-range bombing raids in history until surpassed by the Boeing B-52s flying from the States to bomb Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War and later B-2 flights.
The Victor tankers, retired in 1993, were replaced in RAF service by Lockheed L-1011 and Vickers VC10 transports which were bought second-hand and fitted as tankers. The L-1011s, converted by Marshall Aerospace, and VC10s, converted by British Aerospace, can refuel any aircraft fitted with the NATO standard probe system. These aircraft have since been retired (although the TriStars are being kept airworthy at Bruntingthorpe in anticipation of a sale and return to service), and have been replaced by the purpose-built Airbus A330 MRTT.
Libya [ edit ]
During Operation El Dorado Canyon, first use of the KC-10 Extender, several F-111 Aardvark fighter-bombers stationed in the United Kingdom used aerial refueling to enable them to fly non-stop to targets in Libya. The KC-10s were refueled by KC-135s. Since the aircraft were not allowed to cross through French or Spanish airspace, they had to make a detour around the Iberian Peninsula and stay above international waters during the mission.
Gulf War [ edit ]
During the time of Operation Desert Shield, the military buildup to the Persian Gulf War, US Air Force Boeing KC-135s & McDonnell Douglas KC-10As, and USMC KC-130 Hercules aircraft were deployed to forward air bases in England, Diego Garcia, and Saudi Arabia. Aircraft stationed in Saudi Arabia normally maintained an orbit in the Saudi–Iraqi neutral zone, informally known as "Frisbee", and refueled Coalition Aircraft whenever necessary. Two side by side tracks over central Saudi Arabia called "Prune" and "Raisin" featured 2–4 basket equipped KC-135 tankers each and were used by Navy aircraft from the Red Sea Battle Force. Large Navy strike groups from the Red Sea would send A-6 tankers to the Prune and Raisin tracks ahead of the strike aircraft arriving to top off and take up station to the right of the Air Force tankers thereby providing an additional tanking point. RAF Handley Page Victor and Vickers VC10 tankers were also used to refuel British and coalition aircraft and were popular with the US Navy for their docile basket behavior and having three point refueling stations. An additional track was maintained close to the northwest border for the E-3 AWACS aircraft and any Navy aircraft needing emergency fuel. These 24-hour air-refueling zones helped make the intense air campaign during Operation Desert Storm possible. An additional 24/7 tanker presence was maintained over the Red Sea itself to refuel Navy F-14 Tomcats maintaining Combat Air Patrol tracks. During the last week of the conflict, KC-10 tankers moved inside Iraq to support barrier CAP missions set up to block Iraqi fighters from escaping to Iran.
On January 16–17, 1991, the first combat sortie of Operation Desert Storm, and the longest combat sortie in history, at that time, was launched from Barksdale AFB, Louisiana. Seven B-52Gs flew a thirty-five-hour mission to the Persian Gulf region, and back, to launch Boeing Air Launched Cruise Missiles (ALCMs) with the surprise use of conventional warheads. All of this was made possible by in-flight refueling, and by the secret switch away from nuclear warheads on the ALCMs.
An extremely useful aerial tanker in Desert Storm was the USAF KC-10A Extender. Besides being larger than the other tankers, the KC-10A is equipped with the USAF "boom" refueling and also the "hose-and-drogue" system. This makes it possible for the KC-10A to refuel USAF aircraft, and also USMC and US Navy jets that use the "probe-and-drogue" system, and also allied aircraft, such as those from the UK and Saudi Arabia. KC-135s may be equipped with a drogue depending on the mission profile.
The KC-10A was originally designed for the support of NATO in Europe by the USAF. In the case of armed conflict, with a full jet fuel load, the KC-10A is capable of flying from a base on the east coast of the US or Canada, flying nonstop to Europe, transferring a considerable amount of fuel in air-to-air refueling, and then returning to its home base, all without landing anywhere. This could have been very useful in the Cold War era when numerous European bases would (probably) have been disabled by Warsaw Pact strikes in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, France, and the United Kingdom.
Kosovo War [ edit ]
The USAF provided KC-135 and KC-10 tankers.[40] Tankers were also provided from Britain’s RAF (TriStars and VC10s), French Air Force and Turkish Air Force KC-135s, Italian Air Force B.707 T/T, Spanish Air Force KC-130 Hercules and Royal Netherlands Air Force KDC-10s. Although some European nations provided air-refueling aircraft, the conflict highlighted the problem Europe has with a lack of such aircraft and dependence on the United States for tanker support during a major operation. Some European nations sought to address this lack of capability, such as the Italian Air Force purchase of the Boeing KC-767, but there is still a huge difference in air-refueling capability between the US and some European air forces.
Helicopters [ edit ]
Helicopter In-Flight Refueling (HIFR) is a variation of aerial refueling when a naval helicopter approaches a warship (not necessarily suited for landing operations) and receives fuel through the cabin while hovering. Alternatively, some helicopters equipped with a probe extending out the front can be refueled from a drogue-equipped tanker aircraft in a similar manner to fixed-wing aircraft by matching a high forward speed for a helicopter to a slow speed for the fixed-wing tanker.
Longest manned flight record [ edit ]
A mission modified Cessna 172 Skyhawk with a crew of two set the world record for the longest continuous manned flight without landing of 64 days, 22 hours, 19 minutes, and five seconds in 1958 by refueling and transferring food and supplies from a convertible top Ford Thunderbird automobile. The publicity flight for a Las Vegas area hotel ended when the aircraft's performance had degraded to the point where the Cessna had difficulty climbing away from the refueling car.[41][42]
Developments [ edit ]
Operators [ edit ]
Former [ edit ]
Popular culture [ edit ]
In 2011, BMW launched a commercial featuring the 2011 BMW 5 Series named "refuel". The driver in the commercial has his coffee cup refilled by an aerial refueling aircraft, similar to that of a KC-135 Stratotanker boom but a KC-10 nozzle.
Film
See also [ edit ]
Military logistics
Propellant depot
Underway replenishment, the transfer of refuel and stores at seaJay Pasachoff enjoys four books heralding this summer's US total solar eclipse.
American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World By David Baron Liveright: 2017. 9781631490163
The progress of an eclipse seen from Australia in 2012. Image: Stocktrek Images/National Geographic Creative
On 21 August 2017, the United States will experience its first all-American total solar eclipse. The path of totality's full shadow — some 100 kilometres wide — will for the first time make landfall only in the United States, passing over the homes of 12 million people in 14 states, from Oregon to the Carolinas. Heliophysicists and umbraphiles from around the world are preparing for it, along with Department of Transportation officials. The former are still pondering the results of the 1999 eclipse, whose path crossed Europe from Cornwall to Romania and beyond, and of total eclipses since. The latter are doing their best to ensure that millions of drivers get safely into and out of the path.
“A total solar eclipse is the most stupendous sight in nature.”
The fuss is understandable. A total solar eclipse is the most stupendous sight in nature: the abruptly darkening sky; Baily's beads, glints of sunlight shining through lunar valleys; the dazzling diamond-ring effect; the spiky, pearly solar corona. Then, a |
ultimately served the purpose of maintaining a particular order of property convenient to a small historical elite — including its racial dimension in America. Yet it is inconceivable that an HBO series or a whole range of commercially and aesthetically successful films would be made portraying KKK members and their organizations as flawed but dignified antiheroes. Of course, race can’t be overlooked here. While early twentieth century blockbusters like Gone With the Wind and Birth of a Nation are now condemned for their depictions of African Americans, such criticisms are almost never leveled against mafia films.
Those who know more about the mobster genre will no doubt accuse me of missing the finer details of the films in question. That may be so. But if I misunderstand them in the specific, it is precisely by understanding them in the general. We should reject the romanticizing of an institution that under both feudal and capitalist conditions has always been the worst enforcer of exploitation. Just like there is nothing heroic about the KKK, not even anti-heroic, the same is true of the mob.BBC Sport profiles the most likely transfer targets during the January window - at home and abroad.
Last January, the headlines were made on deadline day when Chelsea spent £50m on Fernando Torres and Liverpool replaced the Spaniard with £35m striker Andy Carroll.
Here are our top 50 suggestions for high-profile moves this time...
POTENTIAL PREMIER LEAGUE MOVERS
CARLOS TEVEZ (aged 27, forward) Manchester City The Argentine is on his way out and, although City want a permanent deal, they may be prepared to initially loan him to AC Milan.
WAYNE BRIDGE (31, left-back) Manchester City Pocketing a reported £90k-a-week but not in manager Roberto Mancini's plans and looks certain to leave. Possible Arsenal target.
CHEICK TIOTE (25, midfielder) Newcastle United Despite signing a new long-term contract in February, the Ivory Coast star has created a lot of interest prior to leaving for the Africa Cup of Nations.
MAROUANE CHAMAKH (27, forward) Arsenal After a blistering start to his Arsenal career, went dramatically off the boil. He will not want to sit on the bench for too much longer.
JACK RODWELL (20, midfielder) Everton The Toffees are desperate for a striker but David Moyes needs to sell before he can buy. Everton could be tempted if a high enough offer comes in.
GARY CAHILL (26, centre-back) Bolton Wanderers The England international's contract expires at the end of the season and Bolton will sell him. Chelsea are the front-runners.
CHRIS SAMBA (27, centre-back) Blackburn Rovers Unhappy at the club and has made that clear for a while now. A big asking price may put off any potential suitors from making a bid.
JUNIOR HOILETT (21, winger) Blackburn Rovers Rovers's top performer in their despairing situation. Contract ends in the summer so Rovers may take the money for the Canadian.
FLORENT MALOUDA (31, winger) Chelsea Has been sidelined since Juan Mata's arrival at Stamford Bridge. He may return to France and join ex-Blues boss Carlo Ancelotti at Paris Saint-Germain.
DARRON GIBSON (24, midfielder) Manchester United Joined Everton on a four-and-a-half year deal after finding first-team opportunities limited at Old Trafford.
TOMASZ KUSZCZAK (29, goalkeeper) Manchester United Another whose contract expires at the end of the season, but the reserve keeper may move earlier having stated his desire to quit United.
POTENTIAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE AND SPL MOVERS
JAMES TOMKINS (22, centre-back) West Ham United Talented England Under-21 central defender who could be snapped up by a top-flight club should they be looking to strengthen their backline.
ROBERT SNODGRASS (24, winger) Leeds United Had appendix surgery at Christmas but wants to cement his place in the Scotland team. A Premier League club could target him.
JORDAN RHODES (21, forward) Huddersfield Town Has already scored 19 League One goals and West Ham have declared a strong interest in the English-born Scottish international.
LEWIS McGUGAN (23, midfielder) Nottingham Forest With Forest struggling, he may be sold by Steve Cotterill to bring in more players. His thunderbolt shooting is his greatest asset.
LIAM RIDGEWELL (27, centre-back) Birmingham The defender had a transfer request rejected in August. Nothing has changed for him to rethink his decision about leaving.
WILFRIED ZAHA (19, forward) Crystal Palace Impressed against Manchester United in their Carling Cup win, the England Under-19 man possesses all the qualities to be a top striker.
NICKY MAYNARD (25, forward) Bristol City After refusing to sign a new contract, he has been told he can leave Ashton Gate. There won't be any shortage of managers wanting him.
NIKICA JELAVIC (26, forward) Rangers Nearly moved to Leicester in the summer, the Croatian will be looking to test himself in England and plenty of clubs will be lining up for him.
POTENTIAL EUROPEAN MOVERS
WESLEY SNEIJDER (27, midfielder) Inter Milan Inter may decide to cash-in on their Dutch star but a destination isn't clear. His sky-high wages and a hefty transfer fee could put clubs off.
MARIO GOTZE (19, midfielder/forward) Borussia Dortmund 'The German Messi' as described by Franz Beckenbauer. Extremely skilful and attracting plenty of interest from Arsenal and Manchester United.
CHRISTIAN ERIKSEN (19, midfielder/forward) Ajax Starred for Denmark against England in February. Manchester United are among a host of major clubs who have been tracking him.
RASMUS ELM (23, midfielder) AZ Alkmaar The talented Swede has attracted plenty of interest from Premier League and Serie A clubs, including Arsenal, Manchester United and Spurs.
MARCO REUS (22, midfielder/forward) Borussia Monchengladbach Champions Borussia Dortmund showed big intent by re-signing their former youth player for €17.5million on a five-year deal.
XHERDAN SHAQIRI (20, midfielder) FC Basel The talented Swiss impressed against Manchester United in the Champions League and both United and Liverpool may target the £10m-rated player.
YOANN GOURCUFF (25, midfielder/forward) Lyon Disappointing since his £18m move from Bordeaux, Lyon are ready to cut their losses on the playmaker and may even consider a loan.
ANDRE-PIERRE GIGNAC (26, forward) Marseille His move to Fulham collapsed at the last minute in August but could be back on after a falling out with coach Didier Deschamps.
EDEN HAZARD (20, winger/forward) Lille The exciting Belgian is a tasty prospect for Arsenal, Chelsea and Man City fans, but is also being targeted by wealthy domestic rivals Paris Saint-Germain.
BENJAMIN CORGNET (24, midfielder/forward) Dijon Hugely impressive in his first Ligue 1 season, the dynamic attacking midfielder is reportedly attracting interest from Chelsea and Liverpool.
OLIVIER GIROUD (25, forward) Montpellier His strength and aerial prowess make him an attractive prospect but it would take a large bid to sway the title hopefuls.
MODIBO MAIGA (25, winger/forward) Sochaux Unhappy with Newcastle's decision to withdraw interest following a medical, the Malian would be open to offers from other Premier League clubs.
PAPA 'BABA' DIAWARA (23, forward) Maritimo The Senegalese striker nearly moved to Celtic last summer and could be on his way this time via imminent receipt of a Portuguese passport.
ALVARO PEREIRA (26, left-back) FC Porto The attacking full-back is strongly linked with Chelsea. The Portuguese champions have a replacement in Brazil's Alex Sandro and may be ready to haggle.
EWERTON (22, centre-back) SC Braga The defender has impressed while on loan from Corinthians Alagoano, but his fate is not in Braga's hands. Porto and some Premier League sides are keen.
NICOLAS GAITAN (23, midfielder) Benfica The Argentine sparkled in the Champions League group stage, but the extent of Manchester United's interest is the subject of some debate.
HULK (25, forward) Porto Few clubs in the world have a realistic chance of luring the burly Brazil striker, who has an £83m buy-out clause - but Chelsea or Paris Saint-Germain might be tempted to break the bank.
KAKA (29, forward) Real Madrid The Spanish giants are keen to offload a player earning £8.5m-plus per year. Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea and a return to Brazil have all been mooted but the £25m price tag is too high.
MARTIN CACERES (24, full-back) Sevilla Selling the cultured Uruguayan would raise funds for Sevilla. He has attracted admiring glances in La Liga and abroad. Juventus are keen and £8m might do it.
NILMAR (27, forward) Villarreal The Brazilian striker initially flopped at Lyon but has impressed since arriving from Internacional. Roma and Barcelona are monitoring but would need to find £25m.
ESTEBAN GRANERO (24, midfielder) Real Madrid Has been limited to a handful of minutes as a sub this season. Arsenal have a long-standing admiration, as do Malaga.
CARLOS KAMENI (27, goalkeeper) Espanyol The Catalans are keen to sell to generate transfer funds and the Cameroonian stopper is one of their big assets. Moneybags Malaga are especially keen.
JOSE ANTONIO REYES (28, midfielder) Sevilla The ex-Arsenal utility frontman rejoined Sevilla from Atlético Madrid on 5 January, signing a contract through to 2015.
DANIELE DE ROSSI (28, midfielder) Roma His contract expires in the summer and has not yet signed a new deal. Manchester City have repeatedly denied an interest in the Italian.
RICCARDO MONTOLIVO (26, midfielder) Fiorentina The Italian looks likely to move away from the Viola with Arsenal potential suitors. AC Milan and Liverpool are also in the frame.
POTENTIAL SOUTH AMERICAN MOVERS
NEYMAR (19, forward) Santos Outrageously talented wonderkid whose desire for a move may have been boosted by the mauling his Brazilian club suffered against Barcelona in the World Club Cup.
DEDE (23, centre-back) Vasco da Gama Tall, strong and very quick. A giant in defence who also likes to make an attacking contribution. Linked with Real Madrid.
LEANDRO DAMIAO (22, forward) Internacional Tall target man who enjoyed a wonderful 2011. Has been attracting interest from Tottenham, Arsenal and Juventus.
CARLOS LUQUE (18, winger) Colon Displays pace and tricky dribbling skills. A hit in the World Youth Cup, which Brazil won, the Argentine has been doing well at senior level.
LUCAS OCAMPO (17, midfielder/forward) River Plate Tall, dynamic and skilful and can play up front or in midfield, but may not be sold until his club have been promoted back to the First Division.
ANDY POLO (17, forward) Universitario Strong and stocky bullet-fast support striker who made a huge impression in 2011. The appalling financial position of his Peruvian club could force a sale.
Compiled by contributors Andy Brassell, Tim Vickery and Matt Spiro and BBC Sport's Shamoon Hafez and Howard Nurse.North Carolina GOP official Don Yelton [Comedy Central]
A North Carolina Republican official has been fired from the state party executive board following an appearance on The Daily Show in which he boasted about the implications of the widely-criticized voting law recently enacted by the GOP-heavy state legislature, but he refuses to apologize for his remarks.
“There’s nothing I said that I would take back. So be it,” state GOP executive committee member Don Yelton said in an interview with the Asheville Citizen-Times published on Thursday. “The activity going on across the state today proves what I said is true. The Democrats are jumping on it like flies after honey.”
In the interview, which aired Wednesday night, Yelton tells Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi that the new voting law, which mandates voter identifications, the curtailing of early voting operations and does not allow college students to vote using their school ID, “is going to kick the Democrats in the butt.” He also dismisses concerns that the law will particularly affect communities of color by saying, “If it hurts a bunch of lazy Blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.”
The interview was quickly criticized by the state conference of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in a statement on Thursday.
“I was disgusted, but not surprised, by Don Yelton’s arrogant remarks about North Carolina’s voter suppression law,” conference president Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II said in the ACLU’s statement. “This Republican executive committee member laid bare everything that we know politicians are trying to do through this legislation – which is to manipulate our voting laws, making it harder for certain communities to participate, in order to unfairly win elections. This shameful law is not about stopping voter fraud; it’s about stopping voting.”
According to WRAL-TV, Buncombe County GOP Chairman Henry Mitchell confirmed in a separate statement that Yelton had been asked to vacate his position and also called Yelton’s statements “offensive, uniformed and unacceptable of any member within the Republican Party.”
“Let me make it very clear: Mr. Yelton’s comments do not reflect the belief or feelings of Buncombe Republicans, nor do they mirror any core principle that our party is founded upon,” Mitchell’s statement read. “This mentality will not be supported or propagated within our party.”
Watch the interview that got Yelton in trouble, as aired Wednesday night on Comedy Central, below.Since Hideo Nomo broke open the door for Japanese stars to move abroad, not a single infielder has been among the 12 players to make a big league all-star team — although that may change in the future with the removal of one more obstacle in their path.
Moving to the majors requires Japanese players to make a mountain of adjustments. Everyone has to deal with the harder travel necessitated by playing a longer schedule in a shorter amount of time over four different time zones.
Pitchers have to contend with a different ball and batters who will look to put every mistake in the seats, with the starters working every fifth day instead of every seventh. Hitters, who are already into the prime of their careers by the time they sign abroad, have the unenviable task of suddenly adjusting to faster and — due to the ball — livelier fastballs than they have ever seen.
On top of dealing with faster pitchers, infielders also have to deal with natural grass and — until now — routine collisions at second base, which are a fairly rare occurrence in Nippon Professional Baseball.
This year, however, Major League Baseball has made it more difficult for runners to physically break up double plays at second, requiring “bona fide” slides to the bag. This change, to reduce injury, was welcomed by former big leaguer Kazuo Matsui, who holds the record for major league games played by a Japanese infielder with 630.
“The (take-out slide) has been eliminated, and I think that is big,” Matsui told Kyodo News on Sunday at Seibu Prince Dome. “Compared to the majors, Japan is not very rough. But over there, a lot of guys have gotten hurt, a lot of injuries to the knees and so on.
“That (the rule change) is a good thing, if you think about the health of the players. From the players’ perspective, it (breaking up the double play) is something you had to do in order to win. Sliding hard was a way to contribute. From my perspective, it’s complicated. I slid hard, too, but the rule change is really great for the players. This, the players’ longevity, is a big issue.”
Tadahito Iguchi, whose 493 games are second to Matsui’s, thinks the transition for Japanese infielders will always be a hard one and pointed a finger at coaching methods in Japam.
“Obviously, guys have to be really talented and practice hard if they are going to make the grade over there,” Iguchi said recently. “This will make it easier, but the standard for major league infielders is very high in terms of speed and arm strength, which is only natural since the best players in the world go there.
“A big issue is Japanese coaching, which tends to be lenient about handling the ball (on the double play).
“Japanese are taught from a young age that the proper way to field a ground ball is to get in front of it. Over there, kids learn early how to backhand the ball — and from there be thinking about the next play (and in position to throw).”
While Japanese coaches often see backhanded grabs as lazy and unsound, Matsui said they are anything but.
“There is a fundamentally sound way to backhand the ball, and anyone who knows what they are (talking) about can tell you whether a player is doing it right or not,” Matsui said. “At shortstop, for example, if you insist that a player gets in front of the ball first, a lot of runners will be safe at second because he is slow getting the ball off. So naturally, players try to backhand. But like anything, it is something you have to practice or else you can’t execute it in a game.”
Former Hiroshima Carp and Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles manager Marty Brown doesn’t expect the new rule to help the Asian imports much, since he predicts dangerous slides will still happen — despite the rule change that will hand the defense an automatic double play if the runner is ruled to have interfered.
“Guys will do it because 90 percent of the time those plays happen when the guy at first is going to be out anyway,” Brown said.
When the new rules were announced, New York Mets skipper Terry Collins predicted “someone will get killed” because they won’t be ready for the hard slide. This scenario played out recently in Japan, when former U.S. minor leaguer Kensuke Tanaka of Hokkaido Nippon Ham took out Fukuoka SoftBank second baseman Keizo Kawashima — a play NPB is expected to ban next year.
Yet Iguchi was heartened by the effort last year of South Korea’s Kang Jung-ho, who finished third in the National League’s Rookie of the Year voting — but whose season ironically ended in September with a fracture on a play 3 meters from the second base bag.
“I’m looking forward to more Japanese and Asians going over there and changing how Asian infielders are regarded,” said Iguchi, who was a key part of the Chicago White Sox 2005 World Series team. “Unfortunately, I didn’t do a very good job of raising the bar.”
Matsui, who was easily the Pacific League’s best player from 1997 to 2000, said he was eager for the day when Japan’s infield elite achieve proportionate success in the big leagues. But he is not holding his breath.
“We’re going to have to wait and see what happens before we really know,” Matsui said. “But I’d like to see it.”WARSAW — Sunday’s parliamentary election wasn’t the first crucial political test faced by Beata Szydło, who is slated to become Poland’s next prime minister.
Her real trial came in 2011 when Jarosław Kaczyński, the founder of their Law and Justice party (PiS), was besieged by a group of young Turks he felt threatened his leadership. Szydło refused to join the rebel group, staying loyal to Kaczyński, as did Andrzej Duda, who was elected Polish president in May.
“Szydło is only getting the chance to be prime minister because Kaczyński was certain that she’d never break from him. It’s just the same for Duda,” said Marek Migalski, a political scientist and former MEP backed by Law and Justice who himself joined a group of party rebels and was ejected from Kaczyński’s inner circle.
Kaczyński, 66, isn’t Poland’s president and says he won't be prime minister, a job he held in 2006-2007. But after this year's twin successes for his right-wing party, he looks like Poland's most powerful politician. It was Kaczyński who plucked Duda from the back benches of the European Parliament to run for president. He chose Szydło to be his party’s candidate for prime minister.
“As of Monday, Kaczyński is the king of Poland,” Migalski said.
The question in the Polish capital in the hours after an unprecedented political housecleaning is how Kaczyński will wield his power, and to what ends. His long life in politics provides a few possible answers.
Retreat to win
Say what you will, he is a political original who has experienced brief highs and frequent stumbles. He seemingly learned from both.
The former childhood film actor and Solidarity activist retains the fervent loyalty of older, rightwing stalwarts in Law and Justice, known as PiS in Poland. “Jarosław save us,” is a common cry at party rallies.
“With Jarosław Kaczyński as candidate for prime minister [we] would not be able to win the elections” — Jarosław Kaczyński
At the same time, Kaczyński is Poland’s most divisive politician. The CBOS polling organization found he was trusted by less than a third of Poles. In the previous eight years, in successive presidential and parliamentary elections, the more centrist Civic Platform party fell back on one campaign slogan: You don't want to let Kaczyński back into power.
The scaremongering worked as long as memories stayed fresh of his short stint as prime minister in 2006-2007. His governing coalition fought bitterly and relations with Germany were terrible. The PiS government relied on secret police agencies and powerful prosecutors to track down crooks, spies, and bent businessmen that Kaczyński said ran Poland from behind the scenes.
This year, Kaczyński didn't contest any of the leadership spots. “I understood that I have no chances for such a position,” Kaczyński said in a recent interview with the Dziennik Polski newspaper. “PiS with Jarosław Kaczyński as candidate for prime minister would not be able to win the elections. In such a situation you have to be able to retreat.”
With Kaczyński’s support and trust, Duda and Szydło became the new faces of Law and Justice.
Szydło, 52, will soon be setting up office in the pastel-yellow buildings that house Poland’s prime minister. Duda’s residence is an old aristocratic palace in the heart of the Polish capital. But the country’s real center of power may be a decrepit grey concrete office building on the edge of downtown with a pool hall in the basement. That’s where Kaczyński has his office, and where PiS has its headquarters. In an example of the power he wields, it was from that office that he decided in 2006 to fire another stand-in prime minister, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, and to take his place.
According to people who know him, loyalty is paramount for Kaczyński. His closest relationships were with his mother, Jadwiga, who died in 2013, and his twin brother Lech, Poland’s president who died in the 2010 crash of a government airliner in Smolensk, Russia.
“His first characteristic when it comes to people is to put loyalists in key positions,” said Paweł Zalewski, a former senior member of PiS who defected to join Civic Platform.
Conflict on the path to power
The loyalty he demands from others hasn't often been repaid. Kaczyński's political history is littered with double-crosses and shifts of allegiance.
He helped negotiate a 1989 accord with the ruling communists that allowed for partly free elections that year and for the Solidarity labor union to form the country’s first non-communist post-war government.
Within months Kaczyński helped set off an internal war inside Solidarity between its leader Lech Wałęsa and Poland's first post-communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki. He then turned on Wałęsa, leading fierce street opposition after Wałęsa was elected president.
Exiled into the political wilderness in the 1990s, Kaczyński alienated his old allies. He came back into the limelight when his more affable brother Lech became justice minister in 2000.
His first long march back to power culminated in 2005, when Lech was elected president and Law and Justice gained a parliamentary majority with the help of two smaller populist parties. Initially, Kaczyński promised that he would not serve as prime minister, instead appointing a little-known MP, Marcinkiewicz, to lead the government.
That lasted only nine months, before Kaczyński ousted the increasingly popular Marcinkiewicz and took the job himself.
“This will be the same situation now,” said Zalewski. “Neither Duda nor Szydło have the chance to become independent politicians.”
Kaczyński’s government collapsed in 2007 in a tangle of corruption allegations levied against one of his coalition partners.
How will Kaczyński wield power, and to what end?
Since then he has bid his time, planning his return. He built an alliance with the nationalist right wing of the Roman Catholic Church. He strengthened PiS’s support among those who felt left out by Poland’s dramatic economic transformation. He also pruned Law and Justice, crushing at least three rebellions in the last eight years and ruthlessly culling anyone who was disloyal. Every MP was put on the party lists with Kaczyński’s approval.
It's not easy to divine his ambitions for what to do with power. Kaczyński has never shown much interest in economics. His foreign policy has largely been limited to ensuring that Poland is respected as a serious European power. He personally hasn't spelled out much of a program at all. His motivations often seem more personal than political, tied to his brother's death and the need to seek Lech's rehabilitation. Some Polish analysts say the party wants to carry through an ambitious transformation, by constitutional means if possible, of Poland from a European liberal country to a solidly nationalist, Christian one.
Seeking revenge for a tragic death
One clear immediate aim was achieved: To oust the hated Civic Platform party, until recently led by his onetime ally turned bitter enemy Donald Tusk, now president of the European Council.
“Removing the current government from power is my primary patriotic duty,” he said in the newspaper interview.
His disdain for Tusk was heightened by the Smolensk air disaster, which investigators have blamed on undertrained pilots trying to land the plane in dense fog. Kaczyński and his supporters accuse Tusk and his government of complicity in a cover up.
“In a political sense you bear 100 percent of the responsibility for the catastrophe,” Kaczyński told Tusk in parliament in 2012.
Kaczyński and his lieutenant, Antoni Macierewicz, are likely to unleash the full power of the state to find those they deem guilty of Lech’s death.
“Of course there will be revenge,” said Migalski.
“In a political sense you bear 100 percent of the responsibility for the [Smolensk] catastrophe” — Kaczyński to Tusk, 2012
Speaking before a delirious crowd of supporters after voting ended Sunday night, Kaczyński didn't talk about policies and projects. He talked about his brother. "Mr. President, mission accomplished," said Kaczyński, close to tears.
Lech’s death, and his mother’s passing shortly after that, left Kaczyński alone. He has few friends and has never married. His closest companion is his cat, Fiona. Politics "limited the circle of people I meet, although I've never been very sociable," he told the Dziennik. "That group of friends slowly shrank and crumbled away because I was too busy... It’s my job. For 20 or 30 years I’ve done nothing else." He still remembers his brother’s mobile phone number and said he feels the need to talk to Lech “several times a day.”
Michał Krzymowski, the author of a new book, "The Secrets of Jarosław Kaczyński," said in an interview with the Onet portal, "Kaczyński is a secretive figure, a closed person, a loner who doesn't open up in front of others."
And his trust in Szydło? It’s high, but not absolute.
“If Beata Szydło is a good prime minister, then she’ll rule for four years,” was the qualified comment from Kaczyński to Polish television before the election. If that’s not the case, he added, “the interest of Poland is what's important.”
When voting ended Sunday and the exit polls showed a PiS rout, it was Kaczyński who made the first speech celebrating the victory, only turning to Szydło after a few minutes. When he did so, he addressed her as "Madame Chairwoman" (a reference to her party rank) and not "Prime Minister."What do Uber, Facebook, Alibaba, and AirBnB all have in common? They're all digital-first businesses and new leaders in long-established industries. They're proof that every industry is going digital, and at tremendous speed. Consider this:
“Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate,” writes Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media.
These are all powerful reminders that, regardless of what industry you're in, going digital will play a huge role in your ability survive. Specifically, in the digital future:
Mobile will be how you'll deliver your digital business experience. The Internet of Things will be what your analog business will do in the digital realm. And the cloud will be where your digital business will run. And across all of these technologies, open source is leading the way and creating new categories of functionality. That's why I believe that if you want to be a player in this digital future, you must embrace open source and all that it enables.
I've been working with open source technologies for more than a decade, and in that time I've seen open source go from a cheaper alternative to proprietary software to becoming the primary source of innovation that is driving the industry forward. Just look at how fast new technologies such as containers, Hadoop, and OpenStack arrived. Even those industry-leading digital businesses I cited earlier are turning to open source technologies as a source of innovation.
Meeting mobile expectations
Let's begin with mobile. Going forward, your customers and users will expect to be able to interact with your services on their mobile devices. As your IT organization dives deeper into delivering new capabilities through a mobile experience, you're going to be focused on delivering applications that are secure, that can scale out in terms of how they provide capabilities, and you're going to want to create these applications very quickly.
These changes require new kinds of infrastructure, different architectures, and different development styles. The days of 18-month lead times are gone. Enterprise mobile applications need to be updated much more quickly. And if you look at the technologies that leading-edge IT organizations are using to power, build, and measure data from the next generation of applications, they're being powered and done on open source technology.
I've witnessed this shift in recent years and attribute it to the pace of innovation offered by open source solutions. Developing mobile experiences requires stitching together a variety of capabilities like analytics, scaling out application architecture, using different application frameworks, and implementing mobile back-end services. The flexibility and breadth of capabilities offered by open source solutions gives you a much better platform to start with and makes integration easier.
IoT is maturing
The future of IoT goes beyond having connected devices send data directly to the cloud. As IoT matures, devices are going to become more sophisticated, and the data associated with those devices will become increasingly voluminous and valuable. And, in many cases, processing and reacting to this data immediately is going to become increasingly critical.
Enterprises need more than just a good architecture and data to deploy IoT successfully. They also need to be able to manage important capabilities such as security, reliability, and the lifecycle of devices and gateways. As your organization advances its IoT efforts, intelligent gateways could help by projecting the power of the datacenter to close proximity of devices, providing real-time data collection, analytics, and automation for devices. Since your gateways need to be low cost relative to the devices to which they connect, open source is a great fit because it gives you the best value. Additionally, gateways need robust capabilities, and by leveraging the same, proven open source software from your data center you can count on those features.
Open source software is also a great fit for your IoT efforts because of the diversity of devices and standards you’ll encounter. By leveraging open source rather than proprietary software, it will be easier to deal with that diversity.
The role of cloud
To digitize your business, you need to provide a digital experience with mobile. And, you need to connect your analog business to the digital world with IoT. To power those workloads, you must be turning to the cloud. Only the cloud provides the agility, scalability, and new capabilities necessary to power your digital enterprise.
And when it comes to the cloud, most enterprises are going hybrid, leveraging both public cloud services and private cloud capabilities in their own environments. In doing so, these organizations likely are working with multiple vendors, different types of technologies, and implementing cloud in different ways across the business. For that reason, an open architecture is hugely important because you can’t standardize on just one platform. And, open source is driving the future of these new technologies across projects like OpenStack, containers, and Linux.
If you want to be a player in this digital future, I believe you must embrace open source and all that it enables.This is the final post. -N
The circumstances under which I first began blogging were very different than the circumstances under which I’m now leaving.
I began being invited to speak about trans and LGBTQ issues in a cis-dominated space. My role was, more or less explicitly, to simply be a trans voice in that space. The readership was cis, and didn’t understand much about those things.
And I was pretty new to all of it myself. I’d only been purposefully living as a woman for a few months.
So I focused in on the “basics” of transgenderism… what I believed it was, what I believed was important about it, how I believed our rights and identities and lives should be approached…. I tried to articulate the fundamentals of what set us apart and to address the fact of our mistreatment. I did it in a “trans 101” way, explaining a few basic terminologies and some easily grasped principles of etiquette, discussing a few of the more mainstream and visible political issues, that kind of thing. I did this because it’s what made sense, what fit the context and my (assumed) role within it… and because it was all I really knew about anything at the time.
A few months of experiences as a trans woman, and being read as such by a hostile society, are not substantial experiences. They don’t provide much to go on, and I was only maybe a year out from my initial confrontation with the discourse of gender variance… a year out from a time where I still spoke in terms like “natal female” or “GG”, where I was anxious about whether or not I’d be “passable”, where I would talk about “feminine features” as objective qualities and “girl mode” and “boy mode” as definitive categories of presentation. The evolution of my thinking to the point that it was aware of phenomena like cissexism and femmephobia and the difference between transphobia and trans-misogyny, the point that I understood the relationship between trans-misogyny and patriarchy and I’d come to be regarded as feminist (and arguably trans-feminist)… that process was mostly just all about reading.
I’d had minimal experiences, and minimal contact with other trans people. What contact I had had with them was with The Trans Community, the centralized, heirarchial and internally normative spaces that tend to be the only means of access, resources and information most people questioning, or not yet plugged into the wider discourse, have available. And the books I was reading were simply the ones that sell, the ones that are widely available and widely known, like Julia Serano and Kate Bornstein… authors who themselves benefited from affirming the concepts their audiences believed in or wanted to believe to at least the same degree that they challenged anything; authors who benefitted from being privileged within the standards, heirarchies and expectations of The Trans Community and who met the conventions established for what a trans advocate or community leader is supposed to be.
Consequently, the ideas of transgenderism, transsexuality and gender itself, even my feminism as a whole, wasn’t anything new. It was simply inherited. I just happened to be a trans woman in a specific place, at a specific time (trans news stories were very rapidly becoming increasingly prevalent in the news during 2011, and we were becoming an increasingly visible demographic), in a specific little niche (the skeptic community) who were, in that moment, increasingly concerned with questions of diversity and gender. And I was just articulate enough to be able to play the role of introducing this basic trans discourse into that specific context, through that specific lens of skepticism and critical thinking, with a pro-science slant. I knew just enough about the related science, and had just enough understanding of the principles of skepticism, to be able to apply it, and talk about feminism and trans issues in terms of how misogyny and cissexism are products of cultural bias, how things like “scientifically, biologically male” are not actually more substantiated by science than trans self-identification. I t was Trans 101 with only the small shift of ditching the |
earlier date and a lower level. That date is where emissions cross the uptake trend line. Here is my optimistic view: If emissions fall back to the level of the year 2000 by 2050, looking at Figure 3, one can imagine that the CO2 level will peak at about 450 ppm near that year and fall after that.
What will this do to global warming? The slight increase in CO2 induced warming might just offset the coming sun-induced cooling. Perhaps we will have a century of constant temperature.For hundreds of years, residents in the Dombes region of eastern France worshipped a saint who was said to help protect infants from illness and danger. They prayed to his name, and brought sick infants to his shrine for healing.
Such tales aren't very unusual for a saint—except this one was a dog.
According to a legend that originated some time before the 12th century, St. Guinefort was a greyhound owned by a wealthy knight. One day, the knight and his wife left their infant son for the day in the care of his nurse and their loyal dog. They returned to find a scene of carnage in the child’s nursery—the crib overturned, and blood spattered around the room. Guinefort had blood smeared all over his muzzle.
The knight, believing that Guinefort had killed his son, struck the dog with his sword, killing him. Immediately afterward, he heard the cry of a baby and found his son, healthy and whole, underneath the overturned crib. (It's not clear where the nurse was during this time, but she evidently wasn't doing a very good job protecting the child.) Next to the baby was a snake that had been bitten to bloody pieces.
The knight realized that he had killed the dog unjustly—Guinefort had in fact protected the baby. To make amends, he buried the dog in a well and planted a grove of trees around it as a memorial.
As the story of the brave and loyal Guinefort spread, people began to visit the well and brought their sick children there for healing. There are reports of women leaving salt as an offering, or placing children in the grove with lit candles overnight in hopes they would be healed by morning.
These local rituals had continued for about a hundred years when a friar named Stephen of Bourbon heard of the legend and the local custom [PDF]. He declared that the veneration of a dog was heathen—the people who were asking for intercession from the saint were really invoking demons, he said, and the women leaving their children at the shrine overnight were trying to commit infanticide. He had the dog’s body dug up and burned, and the trees cut down.
But the cult of St. Guinefort lived on, and the locals continued to pray to him. A folklorist found that the well and grove still existed in the late 1870s, while a historian discovered evidence that people were still venerating the dog-saint after World War I. Reverberations of his legend—that of a dog-healer living in the forest—seem to have lasted as late as the 1960s.
St. Guinefort was never officially recognized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church—or anyone else. In order to recognize someone as a saint, the Vatican requires evidence that the person led a holy life and performed miracles. (They also usually require evidence that the individual was human.) But the legend of St. Guinefort dates to before this process of sainthood was formalized, when individuals of great holiness were often spontaneously acclaimed by the people in their local areas.
As it turns out, the Guinefort legend has parallels around the world. There are similar legends elsewhere in Europe and beyond of loyal dogs that are killed after being accused of endangering a child they had in fact protected. One legend from 13th century Wales concerns a dog named Gelert, who saved a child from a wolf but was killed when his master misunderstood the bloodied scene (and thought he'd killed his child instead of the wolf). There is a more modern echo of the story in the film Lady and the Tramp (1955), when Tramp defends a baby from a rat and is hauled off by the dogcatcher for his trouble. In India, a similar story is told about a woman who kills a mongoose who has defended her son from a snake; in Malaysia, the protector is a tame bear who defends a child from a tiger. Folklorists think the tales are told as a caution against acting too hastily in the heat of the moment.
By some accounts, August 22 is St. Guinefort's feast day (although this may be a confusion with an earlier, human saint). And while there's no official dog saint, if you need heavenly intercession for any canine problems, the patron saint of dogs and dog owners is St. Roch—who is also the patron saint for those, like Guinefort, who were unjustly accused.amazingxkcd Profile Blog Joined September 2010 GRAND OLD AMERICA 15736 Posts #2 LETS GET HYPEEEE The world is burning and you rather be on this terrible website discussing video games and your shallow feelings
outscar Profile Joined September 2014 1495 Posts #3 I'm waiting for another stomp just like SSL11 because I think EffOrt is even more challenging opponent than herO for Bisu. He is who grabbed 4th OSL from Flash's hand. Time for him to show that he can win it even if organizers change his machine to Linux or Mac. sunbeams are never made like me...
BisuDagger Profile Blog Joined October 2009 Bisutopia 16636 Posts #4 On January 23 2016 03:06 outscar wrote:
I'm waiting for another stomp just like SSL11 because I think EffOrt is even more challenging opponent than herO for Bisu. He is who grabbed 4th OSL from Flash's hand. Time for him to show that he can win it even if organizers change his machine to Linux or Mac.
Bisu's level of play is far above what it was 6 months ago. There's now way it goes the same way. It will be very close and challenging for both imo. Bisu's level of play is far above what it was 6 months ago. There's now way it goes the same way. It will be very close and challenging for both imo. Moderator Ofiicial Afreeca Starleague Caster: http://afreeca.tv/ASL2ENG2
Nikon Profile Blog Joined May 2009 Bulgaria 5151 Posts #5 I hope I catch this. Fight fight!
[sc1f]eonzerg Profile Blog Joined February 2010 Belgium 5639 Posts #6 smelling 3-2 bisu 2 gates in the last game -_-
Foxxan Profile Joined October 2004 Sweden 3408 Posts #7 Bisu better play alot better than the last tourament, the one whicvh he lost against a zerg in the final.
His pay was very lacking. He made bad cheeses and stuff and still won cuz zerg opponent fucked up.
prech Profile Joined March 2014 United States 2947 Posts Last Edited: 2016-01-22 23:52:44 #8 On January 23 2016 03:28 BisuDagger wrote:
Show nested quote +
On January 23 2016 03:06 outscar wrote:
I'm waiting for another stomp just like SSL11 because I think EffOrt is even more challenging opponent than herO for Bisu. He is who grabbed 4th OSL from Flash's hand. Time for him to show that he can win it even if organizers change his machine to Linux or Mac.
Bisu's level of play is far above what it was 6 months ago. There's now way it goes the same way. It will be very close and challenging for both imo. Bisu's level of play is far above what it was 6 months ago. There's now way it goes the same way. It will be very close and challenging for both imo.
Hmm, I watch all of Bisu's streams and don't really sense significant change one way or the other over the past year... His PvZ is dominant as always and that hero series still feels like an aberration.
I'd guess Bisu has played hero and EffOrt in best-of series (usually Bo3) ~5 times every week over the past many months and won a good 90% of them. That SSL11 loss was by far the worst, unfortunately, it also happened to be on the biggest of stages.
It seems EffOrt's had the most success when expanding conservatively to the nearby third and preventing Bisu from taking his third, with big hydra/ling pushes, followed by muta HT sniping. Conversely, when EffOrt expands cross map to take a main/natural, Bisu just takes his third and macros his way through EffOrt's split forces/defenses.
Basically, fully expecting EffOrt to be conservative in these finals with his third, but Circuit Breaker spells big trouble... CB could potentially be played twice, and that awkward third expansion for Zerg, be it the mineral only or the more distant mid-map spot, make it really tempting to expand cross map instead. As we saw against GuemChi in the quarters, EffOrt's forced to turtle and Protoss out macros him.
Hoping it'll be an exciting finals, either way! Hmm, I watch all ofBisu's streams and don't really sense significant change one way or the other over the past year... His PvZ is dominant as always and thathero series still feels like an aberration.I'd guess Bisu has played hero andEffOrt in best-of series (usually Bo3) ~5 times every week over the past many months and won a good 90% of them. That SSL11 loss was by far the worst, unfortunately, it also happened to be on the biggest of stages.It seems EffOrt's had the most success when expanding conservatively to the nearby third and preventing Bisu from taking his third, with big hydra/ling pushes, followed by muta HT sniping. Conversely, when EffOrt expands cross map to take a main/natural, Bisu just takes his third and macros his way through EffOrt's split forces/defenses.Basically, fully expecting EffOrt to be conservative in these finals with his third, but Circuit Breaker spells big trouble... CB could potentially be played twice, and that awkward third expansion for Zerg, be it the mineral only or the more distant mid-map spot, make it really tempting to expand cross map instead. As we saw againstGuemChi in the quarters, EffOrt's forced to turtle and Protoss out macros him.Hoping it'll be an exciting finals, either way! Liquipedia
Chef Profile Blog Joined August 2005 10670 Posts Last Edited: 2016-01-22 20:34:49 #9 That graphic makes the players look like they have unfortunate skin conditions / the photos are really old.
Still super excited about this. Can't wait to listen to my old SC heroes cast an great final. LEGEND!! LEGEND!!
prech Profile Joined March 2014 United States 2947 Posts Last Edited: 2016-01-22 20:40:44 #10
Source
Was expecting a much more Bisu-favored audience, but only ~60:40 Checking out the Korean fan predictions/bets over at Ygosu, with about 100 entries:Was expecting a much more Bisu-favored audience, but only ~60:40 Liquipedia
HyralGambit Profile Joined February 2014 2439 Posts Last Edited: 2016-01-22 22:01:34 #11
Get out ZerO :^)
My hype video is better than yours btw: Why is ZerO's face at the top?Get out ZerO :^)My hype video is better than yours btw:
Reddit post: Reddit post: https://redd.it/427ua7 Passion overcomes corporate stupidity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX9hbbA-WP4#t=4h2m
tanngard Profile Joined April 2011 Norway 1193 Posts Last Edited: 2016-01-22 22:07:33 #12
Actually after digging around i found that you also wrote this in the afreeca thread in early december after effort won 2 BO3 and bisu won 1 against eachother
On December 06 2015 12:59 prech wrote:
Show nested quote +
On December 06 2015 11:50 c3rberUs wrote:
Was this played yesterday Korean time? I saw 2 or 3 games and EffOrt was just so aggressive with hydras and lurkers. Bisu won one after beating back EffOrt's everything with his everything (zeal/goon/ht/archon/corsair/dt/reavers.)
Yup, exactly, they played 3 Bo3's, all on FS and La Mancha, if I recall
First time I can remember that EffOrt won so many times again Bisu, having watched all of their games since EffOrt joined the scene.
It almost seems like EffOrt has realized the winning formula. 1) Expand to the nearby third instead of cross-map, give up economy for aggressive early play instead of blowing resources on defense 2) Going hydra den first instead of lair + spire and 3) Doing everything possible to prevent Bisu from taking his third. Basically the hero playbook, and it's been paying off...
EffOrt and Bisu must have played something like 50-100 times on CB over the past few months and EffOrt expands cross-map for his third 90%+ of the time, and he loses a good 75%+ of the time... Learn by trial and error Yup, exactly, they played 3 Bo3's, all on FS and La Mancha, if I recallFirst time I can remember that EffOrt won so many times again Bisu, having watched all of their games since EffOrt joined the scene.It almost seems like EffOrt has realized the winning formula. 1) Expand to the nearby third instead of cross-map, give up economy for aggressive early play instead of blowing resources on defense 2) Going hydra den first instead of lair + spire and 3) Doing everything possible to prevent Bisu from taking his third. Basically thehero playbook, and it's been paying off...EffOrt and Bisu must have played something like 50-100 times on CB over the past few months and EffOrt expands cross-map for his third 90%+ of the time, and he loses a good 75%+ of the time... Learn by trial and error
You have some key insights that will make me anticipate the games for tomorrow that much more. Thank you very much! I really did not know effort had so much problem with taking third at the other natural. But when you say he does not go directly into spire from three hatches, does that mean he goes for something like a fake hydra bust? Forcing bisu to invest in static defence, meanwhile saving drones from not building his own sunkens, saturating at his third and getting lair for lurkers...and then use lurkers to try and mantain bisu from moving out. What about a real hydra bust? Is he known for trying that or is bisu to good to scout and defend properly? Hmm i did not know Bisu was that favoured Prech. I thought effort was for sure on level with him. Are you sure bisu wins 90 %? I guess im shocked to hear this considering efforts got a 18-3 winning record against protoss.Actually after digging around i found that you also wrote this in the afreeca thread in early december after effort won 2 BO3 and bisu won 1 against eachotherYou have some key insights that will make me anticipate the games for tomorrow that much more. Thank you very much! I really did not know effort had so much problem with taking third at the other natural. But when you say he does not go directly into spire from three hatches, does that mean he goes for something like a fake hydra bust? Forcing bisu to invest in static defence, meanwhile saving drones from not building his own sunkens, saturating at his third and getting lair for lurkers...and then use lurkers to try and mantain bisu from moving out. What about a real hydra bust? Is he known for trying that or is bisu to good to scout and defend properly?
purakushi Profile Joined August 2012 United States 3240 Posts Last Edited: 2016-01-22 22:21:41 #13 Revenge of the eyebrows keke
Someone photoshop the header image. June 2010 - August 2017: waiting for the return of Starcraft
c3rberUs Profile Blog Joined December 2010 Japan 11274 Posts #14 I'll miss most if this live T_T.
GG Writer Movie, 진영화 : "StarCraft will never die".
Qikz Profile Blog Joined November 2009 United Kingdom 10996 Posts #15 Oh woops glad I checked. This is at 8AM my time. I thought it was 10.
Better get up early! FanTaSy's #1 Fan | STPL Caster/Organiser | SKT BEST KT | https://twitch.tv/qikzsd
prech Profile Joined March 2014 United States 2947 Posts Last Edited: 2016-01-22 23:50:02 #16 On January 23 2016 07:06 tanngard wrote:
Hmm i did not know Bisu was that favoured Prech. I thought effort was for sure on level with him. Are you sure bisu wins 90 %? I guess im shocked to hear this considering efforts got a 18-3 winning record against protoss.
Actually after digging around i found that you also wrote this in the afreeca thread in early december after effort won 2 BO3 and bisu won 1 against eachother
Show nested quote +
On December 06 2015 12:59 prech wrote:
On December 06 2015 11:50 c3rberUs wrote:
Was this played yesterday Korean time? I saw 2 or 3 games and EffOrt was just so aggressive with hydras and lurkers. Bisu won one after beating back EffOrt's everything with his everything (zeal/goon/ht/archon/corsair/dt/reavers.)
Yup, exactly, they played 3 Bo3's, all on FS and La Mancha, if I recall
First time I can remember that EffOrt won so many times again Bisu, having watched all of their games since EffOrt joined the scene.
It almost seems like EffOrt has realized the winning formula. 1) Expand to the nearby third instead of cross-map, give up economy for aggressive early play instead of blowing resources on defense 2) Going hydra den first instead of lair + spire and 3) Doing everything possible to prevent Bisu from taking his third. Basically the hero playbook, and it's been paying off...
EffOrt and Bisu must have played something like 50-100 times on CB over the past few months and EffOrt expands cross-map for his third 90%+ of the time, and he loses a good 75%+ of the time... Learn by trial and error Yup, exactly, they played 3 Bo3's, all on FS and La Mancha, if I recallFirst time I can remember that EffOrt won so many times again Bisu, having watched all of their games since EffOrt joined the scene.It almost seems like EffOrt has realized the winning formula. 1) Expand to the nearby third instead of cross-map, give up economy for aggressive early play instead of blowing resources on defense 2) Going hydra den first instead of lair + spire and 3) Doing everything possible to prevent Bisu from taking his third. Basically thehero playbook, and it's been paying off...EffOrt and Bisu must have played something like 50-100 times on CB over the past few months and EffOrt expands cross-map for his third 90%+ of the time, and he loses a good 75%+ of the time... Learn by trial and error
You have some key insights that will make me anticipate the games for tomorrow that much more. Thank you very much! I really did not know effort had so much problem with taking third at the other natural. But when you say he does not go directly into spire from three hatches, does that mean he goes for something like a fake hydra bust? Forcing bisu to invest in static defence, meanwhile saving drones from not building his own sunkens, saturating at his third and getting lair for lurkers...and then use lurkers to try and mantain bisu from moving out. What about a real hydra bust? Is he known for trying that or is bisu to good to scout and defend properly? Hmm i did not know Bisu was that favoured Prech. I thought effort was for sure on level with him. Are you sure bisu wins 90 %? I guess im shocked to hear this considering efforts got a 18-3 winning record against protoss.Actually after digging around i found that you also wrote this in the afreeca thread in early december after effort won 2 BO3 and bisu won 1 against eachotherYou have some key insights that will make me anticipate the games for tomorrow that much more. Thank you very much! I really did not know effort had so much problem with taking third at the other natural. But when you say he does not go directly into spire from three hatches, does that mean he goes for something like a fake hydra bust? Forcing bisu to invest in static defence, meanwhile saving drones from not building his own sunkens, saturating at his third and getting lair for lurkers...and then use lurkers to try and mantain bisu from moving out. What about a real hydra bust? Is he known for trying that or is bisu to good to scout and defend properly?
It might be easier to watch some of those Bisu/EffOrt Bo3's than going into detail, thanks to
It might be easier to watch some of those Bisu/EffOrt Bo3's than going into detail, thanks to Korhal (Bo3 starting at around 25mins)
(Bo3 starting at around 25mins) (2x Bo3 starting at around 23mins then 57mins)
EffOrt mixes it up with the build orders, sometimes hydra den before lair, sometimes lair before den, but yea, when taking a nearby third rather than expanding cross map, EffOrt forces Bisu to make 4-6 cannons in most of these games.
On La Mancha, the thirds are similar to CB where they're more distant and difficult to defend for Zerg, so that makes for a few straight forward Bisu wins.
As for all-in hydra busts, I recall only a handful of attempts in recent months and Bisu's roaming corsairs usually pick that up -- it's easy to see EffOrt's rally point set up outside Bisu's natural so the cannons and psi storms are usually ready. EffOrt usually gg's after the failed attempt :/ (2x Bo3 starting at around 23mins then 57mins)EffOrt mixes it up with the build orders, sometimes hydra den before lair, sometimes lair before den, but yea, when taking a nearby third rather than expanding cross map, EffOrt forces Bisu to make 4-6 cannons in most of these games.On La Mancha, the thirds are similar to CB where they're more distant and difficult to defend for Zerg, so that makes for a few straight forward Bisu wins.As for all-in hydra busts, I recall only a handful of attempts in recent months and Bisu's roaming corsairs usually pick that up -- it's easy to see EffOrt's rally point set up outside Bisu's natural so the cannons and psi storms are usually ready. EffOrt usually gg's after the failed attempt :/ Liquipedia
xccam Profile Blog Joined September 2009 Great Britain 1126 Posts #17 I'll miss it due to work, but can't wait to watch the vods!
Hoping for a 3-2!
HyralGambit Profile Joined February 2014 2439 Posts #18
https://redd.it/428cwf Second reddit post with 8 hours countdown: Passion overcomes corporate stupidity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX9hbbA-WP4#t=4h2m
Cele Profile Blog Joined December 2008 Germany 3524 Posts #19 HYPE-TRAIN, HYPE-TRAIN! Broodwar for life!
cha0 Profile Joined March 2010 Canada 370 Posts #20 The hype is real!!! We need the effort. Let's see the effort.
1 2 3 4 5 53 54 55 NextA new study by the Road Safety Authority has found that defective tyres were a significant factor in a number of fatal collisions on Irish roads.
An analysis of forensic collision investigations conducted by gardaí between 2008 and 2012 has found that tyres were a contributory factor in 8% of 858 fatal crashes.
The study found that 111 people lost their lives and 30 were seriously injured in collisions in which vehicle defects were a contributory factor.
The RSA said defects may not have been the sole cause of the collisions, but coupled with the combination of other pre-crash behaviours, resulted in these deaths.
The study found that in over half of collisions where vehicles had defective tyres, tyres were dangerously worn, while in 10% of cases tyres were under-inflated.
The largest age group driving with defective, worn or under-inflated tyres was those aged 17-24.
Donegal had the largest proportion of culpable drivers with defective tyres on their vehicles, followed by Cork, Kerry and Wexford.
The RSA says this analysis shows that defective tyres are a bigger contributory factor to deaths and injuries on Irish roads than previously identified.
It will now begin a major awareness and safety campaign, beginning today.
In a statement Minister for Transport Paschal Donohoe said the report "highlights just how important it is that every aspect of a vehicle, whether a car, truck, van or motorcycle, is in proper, roadworthy condition.
"None of us can predict what will happen when we use the roads - we may encounter other drivers behaving poorly, or weather conditions could be particularly bad.
"But we can take personal responsibility for ensuring our vehicle is properly maintained so that we can rely on our tyres responding to the conditions as they should or our brakes working when they need to."
He added work is under way to bring the offence of defective and non-roadworthy tyres within the penalty point system.Bitcoin is increasingly gaining popularity and support not only among financial institutions and companies but also common people.
D Alex Miller, a former high school teacher and software engineer, is running for Canada's upcoming elections as an independent candidate for Vancouver East, reported by straight.com. Citing the reason behind his decision to contest in the election he said, "I'm passionate about an issue the big parties are ignoring: money creation."
"The way money is created affects jobs and the economy. It affects the affordability of housing, education, retirement, and childcare. It affects other things too. But most of all, it affects equality", he said.
In this connection he voiced his opinion about bitcoin. He said that bitcoin is a new currency with some "cool" features, such as, integrity and transparency.
Moreover, it facilitates instantaneous sending and receiving of money anywhere in the world, almost for free. Access to global markets and no fees charged by credit card companies will make way for innumerable business opportunities and work will need to be done, that is to say, increase in job opportunities.
He concluded saying, "Canadians enjoy freedom of speech and freedom of religion, I'm running for for parliament because I believe we need freedom of money."Last week, conspiracy theorist and End Times radio host Rick Wiles informed his audience that he would be stepping away from the microphone and his daily hosting duties for the near future because God had told him to focus his energy on creating a television studio through which he could better promote his dire warnings that the world is doomed.
In the interim, the radio show would be anchored by like-minded guest hosts while continuing to feature exactly the sorts of guests we have come to expect from Wiles’ program, such as crackpot preacher James David Manning, who told host Rev. Dr. David Berman yesterday that violent revolution against the US government is inevitable because public schools are indoctrinating kids with homosexuality and teaching them to rebel against the church, which is why so many people have begun stockpiling weapons:This article is over 3 years old
Official advice to postpone all non-urgent travel is latest move in row over shooting down of Russian jet
Turkey’s foreign ministry has advised people to postpone all non-urgent travel to Russia, the latest move in an escalating row between Moscow and Ankara over a Russian jet shot down by Turkey.
The ministry said in a statement that, following difficulties faced by Turkish visitors and residents in Russia, it advised Turks to postpone all non-urgent travel.
It said Turks should delay travel plans until “the situation becomes clear”.
Turkey’s downing of the Russian military jet on Tuesday, the first time in half a century that a Nato member has shot down a Russian plane, has drawn a harsh response from Moscow.
Russia has restricted tourist travel, left Turkish trucks stranded at the border, confiscated large quantities of Turkish food imports and started preparing a raft of broader economic sanctions.A senior lawmaker says the US is provoking Iran to leave the 2015 nuclear accord with world countries, but the Islamic Republic will not withdraw from the deal.
"It's a conspiracy of the Americans who want to pressure the people and the government to get out of the JCPOA and pay the cost of stopping it," Hossein Naghavi Hosseini told Tasnim news agency on Saturday.
Naghavi Hosseini, who is the spokesman for the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee of Iran's parliament, was referring to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action as the nuclear accord is known.
On Thursday, the US Senate approved new sanctions against the Islamic Republic, which Iranian officials said violated the JCPOA. The US Department of the Treasury on Friday imposed more embargoes on Iranian companies after the country launched a satellite carrier rocket.
Meanwhile, Iranian media reported on Saturday that the parliament has approved a special plan aimed at countering hostile US measures in the region.
Tensions have mounted between Washington and Tehran, which severed diplomatic ties after Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, since President Donald Trump took office six months ago.
Naghavi Hosseini said the Americans continue to treat Iran with "enmity, spite and hostility" despite the nuclear agreement, adding the "Americans have become more emboldened after the JCPOA and their hostilities increased."
"After the conclusion of the JCPOA, it was expected that the Americans would moderate their hostilities and enmities to some extent.
"But you saw that not only did this not happen and the hostilities were not tempered, but they also intensified these hostilities, so that since the implementation of the JCPOA, the Americans have imposed new sanctions or breached their covenant and the accord for more than 17 times," he said.
The MP likened the US to "a brute that if you stand against it, it will also stand; if you follow it, it will run away but if you retreat, it will come after you and follow you up to your doorsteps."
On Friday, the New York Times said Trump was frustrated that his national security aides had not given him any options on how the United States could leave the Iran nuclear deal.
The paper said the US president had instructed his aides to find a pretext for declaring that Iran was violating the terms of the accord.
American officials, it said, have already told allies they should be prepared to join in reopening negotiations with Iran or expect that the United States may abandon the agreement, as it did the Paris climate accord.
According to the NY Times, the US has begun raising with inspectors in Vienna the possibility of demanding access to military sites and if the Iranians balk, Washington could use it as a pretext to declare Tehran in violation.
Iran's First Vice President Es'haq Jahangiri, pictured below, said the new American administration is "a new trend which is engaged in designing measures with a more hardline approach than before against the Islamic Republic."
"The Islamic Republic of Iran will not only not retreat in the face of threatening moves, but it will take harsher measures or proportionate with them," he said on Saturday.
Jahangiri said a committee supervising the implementation of the JCPOA, which is headed by President Hassan Rouhani, is monitoring US moves, adding if the panel deems the Americans to be violating the accord, "the Islamic Republic of Iran will react severely."
The JCPOA is an agreement reached between Iran and the five members of the UN Security Council, namely the US, Russia, Britain, France and China, plus Germany.
Naghavi Hosseini said, "Of the six members of the opposite side, one actor is an outlaw. But we will not ruin the game because of one actor... and we will rather deal with this offending actor."
The lawmaker said a bill on “US adventurist and terrorist” moves in the region was passed on the Majlis floor on July 18, which designates US military forces and intelligence services as supporters of terrorist groups in the Middle East.Photo by methodshop
An atheist recently asked for advice on Twitter about a difficult situation she encountered at work. She indicated that a Christian co-worker had found out that she was an atheist and had started spreading vicious rumors about her. She wanted to know what she could do in this situation. I'll admit that the first thing that went through my head was, "We'll let you know as soon as we figure out what to do about PZ Myers." I'm kidding! That wouldn't have been particularly helpful.Instead, I suggested that she start documenting what the co-worker was saying and doing in case she needed to support a formal complaint through human resources at some point. These complaints often end up being more successful when the complainant can provide evidence of a pattern of behavior interfering with their ability to do their job, creating a hostile workplace, and the like. Even though documenting incidents is a pain in the ass, I have found that it is far better to have the documentation and not need it than to need it and not have it.Finding oneself in a situation like this (i.e., a Christian co-worker decides that one's atheism warrants mistreatment) is not a pleasant experience. I suspect it is not an altogether uncommon experience either. With that in mind, I thought I'd use this post to share some thoughts about what I might do in such a situation and invite readers to chime in with their thoughts. The first thing I'd probably do in such a situation is assess the nature of my workplace. I'd start by asking myself whether there are likely to be supportive others in my workplace. Do I have co-workers who know I am an atheist and are okay with it, or is one Christian co-worker likely to be able to poison many others against me? I'd also consider my boss. Is this someone I can go to about this issue, or would that be ill advised?. I'd also make sure I knew how to access the human resources department or the person tasked with this responsibility. This sort of assessment would not necessarily determine how I would proceed, but it would likely influence it.With those initial bases covered, I would - as I suggested above - be sure to document every incident involving the Christian co-worker. I'd do this in a brief diary sort of format in which I recorded the date, time, who was present, and what was said or what happened. I'd keep my notes descriptive and refrain from interpretations. That is, I'd record only what I heard or saw and make no attempt to infer intent, motive, and the like.With my recording system in place, I'd ask myself whether it made sense to have a conversation with the Christian co-worker in which I calmly explained how I was being affected by his or her behavior and requesting that he or she stop spreading rumors or doing whatever else he or she was doing. I'd only have such a conversation if I was sure I could get through it calmly and without saying anything I might later regret. If I were to choose to have such a conversation, I might mention that I was considering taking the issue to our boss, human resources, etc. But since conversations like this have a real potential to do more harm than good, I'd be sure to think through it carefully before deciding to have one. And if I did initiate such a conversation, I'd be sure to document it.If I had a conversation with the co-worker and the behavior continued or if I decided that it was unwise to have a conversation with the co-worker at this point, I'd next be in a position to consider bringing the matter to my boss and/or human resources department. Were this to happen to me in my current job, I'd go directly to human resources because I have ample experience suggesting that my boss would side with the Christian co-worker. This would be the point where I would explain what was happening, how it was impacting my ability to do my job, and be prepared to provide specific detailed examples from my documentation. I would expect that human resources would take some time to investigate the matter, and I'd do my best to steer clear of the Christian co-worker while they did so.While all of this was going on, there would be a number of things I would try hard to avoid doing. I would not do or say anything that could be reasonably perceived as provoking the Christian co-worker or as indicating mutual animosity. I would be very careful about complaining to other co-workers about this co-worker. I would expect that my boss and/or someone from human resources might talk to my co-workers as part of their fact-finding process, and I'd want to be careful about what I had said to them.And finally, I might consider consulting an attorney. I would be more likely to do this if it looked like my employer was unwilling to resolve the situation, the situation became worse, or if I started to worry that my job was in jeopardy. Sadly, I suspect that some employers would love to brand the atheist as making trouble. This would be the sort of scenario where I'd want to make sure I had legal advice.What additional thoughts |
's chief prosecutor turned to the Constitutional Court in June at the behest of animal rights groups.
The issue lacks the same politically tinged feel as in west European countries with large Muslim communities, were some opponents are accused of exploiting animal welfare campaigning for racist reasons.
Jews and Muslims represent a tiny minority of several tens of thousands in this overwhelmingly Catholic nation of 38 million.
But kosher meat in particular has a symbolic pull because Poland was Europe's Jewish heartland until Nazi Germany killed the vast majority of the community during World War II.
Poland is also a leading producer of both kosher and halal meat for export to other European countries.
The country is home to two dozen abattoirs specialised in kosher and halal slaughter, with the value of last year's exports estimated at €200 million ($259 million).From the section
Dundee secured the Championship title and promotion to the top flight with a dramatic victory over Dumbarton.
With Hamilton hammering Morton 10-2, a late Sons equaliser would have sent Accies to the top instead.
Headers from Christian Nade and Peter MacDonald had signalled a championship party in the stands before the break.
But Scott Agnew's 69th-minute penalty gave the Sons a lifeline and Dundee needed a late Kyle Letheren save to win the title for Paul Hartley's side.
Nade had opened the scoring after 25 minutes when he headed in a free-kick from Kevin McBride.
MacDonald doubled the advantage with another header, this time from a cross by Gary Irvine.
Agnew ensured that nervy finish when he tucked away a 69th-minute penalty after Bryan Prunty was fouled by Willie Dyer.
However, Dundee held out to claim top spot by two points from Hamilton, who have to be content with a place in the play-offs.328 SHARES Facebook Twitter Linkedin Reddit
Executive produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Robert Stromberg, a sneak-peek of The Martian VR Experience has landed on Samsung’s Gear VR headset. The full experience is set to debut in 2016 on desktop-class VR headsets, clocking in at 15-20 minutes.
Created in partnership with 20th Century Fox, Fox Innovation Lab, RSA Films, and The VR Company, The Martian VR Experience will transport the audience to Mars to experience the trials of the film’s protagonist, Mark Watney, a NASA astronaut who becomes stranded on the planet.
A three and a half minute sneak peek of the experience, Executive produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Robert Stromberg, has just launched on the Gear VR headset through Samsung’s VR video distribution app, Milk VR.
See Also: Samsung Launches ‘Milk VR’ Service for Curated 360 Video on Gear VR
While the sneak peek consists of both CGI and live-action shots rendered into a 360 degree video for playback on Gear VR, the full experience will debut in 2016 on desktop-class VR headsets and will be interactive (presumably rendered in real-time), and clock in between 15 and 20 minutes runtime, according to 20th Century Fox.
The Martian VR Experience sneak peek on Gear VR opens with the viewer floating slowly toward the Red Planet, with narration from the film setting the scene. In what appears to be an interesting mechanism to define the ideal gaze direction for the viewer, the voice of the narration becomes skewed in an interesting way when looking away from the planet, causing an intuitive desire to look in the direction providing the most clarity from the audio.
Zooming closer, down to the planet’s topology and then down to the very surface, we eventually find ourselves beside the film’s protagonist, Mark Watney, who is unconscious, half covered in martian soil—a CGI recreation of the same scene from the film, which sounds to be borrowing audio from the film itself. Eventually the viewer takes a first-person perspective through Watney’s eyes, looking out of his dust covered helmet.
The next several scenes of the sneak peek play out in a montage-like fashion, giving glimpses of the full experience to come, including some impressively rendered 360 scenes of the rover vehicle depicted in the film.
Given the limitations of 360 degree video alone (non-interactive), The Martian VR Experience sneak peak on Gear VR does a fine job of previewing the full blown experience which will debut in 2016 on desktop-class headsets. It isn’t clear yet on which headsets it will launch, but it will almost certainly find its way to the Oculus Rift, given Fox Innovation Lab’s partnership with Oculus as announced back in September.The video will start in 8 Cancel
Get the biggest Newcastle 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
Matt Ritchie admits he has been critical of his own goalscoring record this season as he looks to improve on his tally of four league goals.
The winger netted the opener in the 3-1 victory against Nottingham Forest on December 30 after his free-kick was deflected in, and the Scotsman passionately celebrated by kicking the corner flag.
Speaking to NUFC.co.uk, the 27-year-old said he hopes the goals become more frequent.
“I’ve been beating myself up a bit about the amount of goals I’ve scored,” he said. “I would like to score a few more and hopefully that will give me the confidence to do so.
(Image: Newcastle United)
“It was a little bit lucky but felt I needed a bit of luck and the team as well. We haven’t had many things fall for us in the last few weeks so it was nice to get on the scoreheet in whatever way.
“It was good to get back to winning ways.
“Obviously we had the blip on boxing day but we put in a good performance today.”
Ritchie was a stand-out performer as United went back to the top of the league in the last fixture of 2016.
Nicolao Dumitru equalised for Forest after Ritchie’s fourth-minute free-kick, before a second-half double from Dwight Gayle sealed the three points for Rafa Benitez’s men.Hearing so much chatter about “change” in the Republican Party, the innocent voter might believe that the Republicans had learned important lessons from their stinging electoral defeat. On closer examination, however, the likelihood of real change appears nil, because the party’s leaders and thinkers can cite so many excuses to remain utterly the same.
At the Republican Governors Association conference last week, for instance, the favored explanation for the voting public’s emphatic rejection of Mitt Romney had nothing to do with issues or ideology, but only with more effective Democratic Party organizing and communicating. According to Wade Goodwyn, the National Public Radio reporter who covered the GOP governors’ meeting, their post-election mood was not one of shock, but complacency.
“It was widely agreed that nothing needed to be changed except perhaps the tone,” he found. “For example, the idea that more than 70 percent of Hispanics voted for the president because of Republican positions on illegal immigration was rejected by the Republican governors.”
That would be hard to believe if Goodwyn were not such an excellent and experienced journalist, because it is so stupid, so insulting, and makes so little sense. Could it really be true that the nation’s Republican governors — one of whom is quite likely to be the party’s next presidential nominee — are so obtuse and so obstinate that they would reject change even on immigration?
Republican leaders also seem inclined to ignore voter sentiment on the issue of taxes, despite majorities of 70 percent or better that agree the rich should pay more (including many voters who identify with the GOP). Rep. Mike Pence, who will become the governor of Indiana next January, told the Republican governors that he remains firmly opposed any tax increase, especially on “those in the best position to put hurting Americans back to work,” which is GOP code for mega-millionaires and above.
Clearly the Republicans in Congress too feel free to ignore public opinion on this question, since Speaker John Boehner and his caucus have offered a “compromise” on fiscal policy that represents no change whatsoever from their earlier positions and the Romney platform. Government can accrue fresh revenues from growth, they say; nothing new or even meaningful there. And government can close unspecified loopholes and deductions to increase revenues, too. Where have we heard that before?
Meanwhile, the consulting geniuses who predicted a Romney victory — a landslide, even! — are peddling alibis about why their party lost despite billions spent. Fox News expert Dick Morris says it is because their voter machinery failed, the Romney campaign didn’t fight back, and Hurricane Sandy persuaded all of the undecided voters to back Barack Obama.
589
0
0
0
108
697GI Joe and Thundercats are all well and good, but what about the poor, long forgotten rubbish action figures from the 80s?
Some of my fondest memories from my childhood revolve around Christmas. Well, more accurately, the toys section of the Christmas edition of the catalogue my parents would get.
I was like a junkie allowed to glimpse into Amy Winehouse’s bathroom cabinet. I wanted it all, but knew i would only be allowed a few things. What this meant was prioritising the bigger, better toy brands.
Star Wars was my first love and one I would continue to have dalliances with throughout the 80s. After that came He-Man, swiftly followed by Transformers. GI Joe and Thundercats came and went. There were others after that too, but that is not what this article is about.
The most rubbish action figures from the 80s
Here are the also-rans, the ones who got left behind. The toys that John forgot! (Please imagine the word ‘forgot’ repeated until it fades to nothing).
Dino-Riders
Do you know what’s fucking awesome? Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are awesome! Several tons of muscle, teeth and horn wrapped in scaly fury. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to out-awesome a dinosaur. That is until some genius toy designer thought to himself “You know what else is awesome? Big fucking guns!” All it took after this realisation was a basic bit of toy maths and the Dino-Riders were born!
That’s right! Dinosaurs tooled up to the max with all sorts of firepower and futuristic technology. Also they were being ridden by people. I feel the bit where people rode them was more of an afterthought to explain how a creature with massively disproportionate forelimbs could mount dual miniguns onto his own torso.
Add in a time travel element and some alien adversaries and you have what could have been the greatest idea in the history of child pacification. The cartoon lasted four seasons and as it went on the toys started to delve into the ranks of the lesser heard of dinosaurs, Quetzalcoatlus anybody?
Eventually, as these things do, it died out when mammals were introduced in the fourth season. Nobody seems to see the irony in this demise!
Visionaries
One toy series that I did get a few of but quickly became relegated to the hand-me-down pile were Visionaries, the supposed ‘knights of the magical light’. Past? future? I don’t fucking know, knights that had glowing animal forms on their chests.
In the cartoon these chest emblems were creatures that they magically turned into. In the toyline they were tiny holograms. This is where it all fell apart for me. I’ve bought the toy and am now expected to just imagine that it changes into its animal form?
Let me run that past you again, they were knights, whose only fucking job was to turn into animals and scrap. The very least of these two things you would expect from the toy was to transform into an animal! I’d even have settled for having a little toy version of the animal packaged with the action figure, but no they did nothing.
I can’t iterate enough how much of a shitty cop out that was. Even as a child of 10 or 11, I still realised I was being conned. That is like Hasbro releasing a load of toy cars and asking you to pretend they turn into robots! I will credit the fact they did have some tidy vehicles but even these were meant to transform into beasts and the such. They should have been called The Don’t Transformers.
As opposed to the mystery of why Dinoriders have been relegated to the vault of obscure toy ideas, it is quite clear how Visionaries ended up there. Fuck you Visionaries, if I wanted to use my imagination I’d have asked for a book.
The A-Team
It wasn’t just cartoons that made for toy ideas. Oh no, if they thought kids liked it they’d make anything on TV into a toy range. The A-Team was just screaming to be made into a series of action figures. It had guns, a cool van, wacky improvised war objects, and Mr T, who was kind of a very aggressive crossdresser. As soon as its popularity with kids became evident out came the toys.
At about the same relative size as He-Man figures, these figures came with an array of weaponry and gadgets. You could get Hannibal, Face, Murdoch, B.A. and even Amy, their inexplicable lady friend. And that’s where it stopped.
Basically the show didn’t have a story arc with proper recognisable baddies so they didn’t make any. If you wanted to re-enact an episode you had to use other toys as the bad guys and that sucked. The amount of times Ram-man locked them in a barn under instructions of Funshine Bear was ridiculous.
Soon after the figures were released they realised that kids loved the van and sports cars that were synonymous with the series but it would be impractical to build them to this scale. The solution was GI Joe size figures and accompanying vehicles. This also allowed them to address the lack of baddies problem by releasing some generic figures to act as protagonists.
Now that is a sneaky, shitty move right there. Get us to buy all our favourite characters on two different scales just so you could sell us the cars. At least George Lucas sold us the same character in 10 different outfits all at the same scale. By now, largely due to the fickle nature of children, they no longer cared about A-Team toys so that was that.
The A-Team itself was famous for its almost comic violence. Nobody got killed despite thousands of rounds of ammunition (and in one episode lots of cabbages) being fired at them.
Cars would crash and we’d see everyone scramble out to get their legal and above board comeuppance. This is a safe, child friendly platform to base a toy line on. This is in stark contrast to our final and possibly most obscure offering. In 1985 in a moment baffling misjudgement they made toys of John fucking Rambo.
Rambo
I am not sure how it happened but one day some guy decided that this verbally challenged murder machine would make an excellent line of toys and a cartoon. It must have been someone so intrinsically attuned to marketing that they watched the psychological trauma-fest of First Blood and the senseless slaughterama of Rambo and all they took from it was kids would go gaga over this shit.
I imagine the world is like the fucking Matrix through the eyes of Neo to these people, everything is a scrolling series of dollar signs and inspirational slogans.
The inspiration behind the Hungerford massacre was now a range of toys. Of course it had to be toned down from the films so Rambo was given a team and base much like GI Joe. This is where the comparison ends however, as instead of COBRA, Rambo an odd array of slightly racist stereotypes to fire rockets at. In fact the only thing most of the bizarrely random assortment of figures had in common was their slightly racist overtones.
Take for example Nomad, a character whose only evil trait appeared to be that he was an Arab replete with turban. So many people complained about Nomad that they had to withdraw the figure. Rambo even had a Native American comrade who was just called Chief.
Rambo did not do well as a cartoon or toy, hence no one bar myself seems to remember them. I had to do a bit of research to find any extra information on them at all. It’s like their creators have tried to erase all memory of them from the internet. I couldn’t find a single picture of White Hooded Colonel Trautman with Cross Burning action.
So there you have it, toys I remember for varying reasons both good and bad, that just didn’t make the grade. There were, of course, a myriad of others. I didn’t even start on Super Naturals, Karate Kid or Musclemen.
I was going to finish with the ill fated line of Chuck Norris figures but like the man himself, they are so boring I couldn’t find much to say. Check out old archived catalogues yourself and enjoy the mad and amazing world of 80s toys. Perhaps you too will rediscover a long forgotten grudge about disappointing holograms.
Summary Title: Rubbish action figures from the 80s best forgotten about Description: GI Joe and Thundercats are all well and good, but what about the poor, long forgotten rubbish action figures from the 80s? Author: John Hayward Brought to you by: Methods Unsound Logo:Gene Wilder, Star Of 'Willy Wonka' And 'Young Frankenstein,' Dies
Enlarge this image toggle caption Silver Screen Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Silver Screen Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Actor and writer Gene Wilder, who brought his signature manic energy to films such as The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and the role that forever ensconced him in the collective memory of a generation of children, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, has died. He was 83.
Wilder died early Monday at his home in Stamford, Conn., of complications from Alzheimer's disease, according to a statement from his nephew Jordan Walker-Pearlman.
"The decision to wait until this time to disclose his condition wasn't vanity, but more so that the countless young children that would smile or call out to him 'there's Willy Wonka,' would not have to be then exposed to an adult referencing illness or trouble and causing delight to travel to worry, disappointment or confusion," the statement read. "He simply couldn't bear the idea of one less smile in the world."
Gene Wilder's Nephew On The Actor's Comedic Talent And Alzheimer's Diagnosis Listen · 5:27 5:27
In the first of his three pairings with director Mel Brooks, 1967's The Producers, Wilder endeared himself to audiences as the anxious accountant Leo Bloom, a nebbish drawn into an elaborate scheme to create a surefire theatrical flop. Wilder's pale blue eyes flashed on the movie screen, which helped lend him the profoundly soulful quality for which he became known.
In roles such as Blazing Saddles' washed-up gunslinger, and Silver Streak's book editor, he exuded a gentleness and warmth. But he also fully committed to every performance.
Young Frankenstein, the 1974 film in which he played the grandson of the infamous Victor Frankenstein, begins with a scene that shows off the deftness of his comedic gifts. As the pompous surgeon Frederick Frankenstein concludes a lecture, Wilder seems cool and slick, but when questioned about his grandfather's work by a student, he ramps up into a hilarious screaming fit, allowing us to see just how fragile the young doctor's composure truly is.
As the eccentric chocolatier of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Wilder tempered the on-screen hysterics for which he was known with a slyly mysterious quality that lent the children's film a peculiar, menacing edge. Famously, he refused to take the role unless his character could make his entrance limping out of the factory, planting his cane in the ground, and doing a somersault.
When director Mel Stuart asked him why, Wilder said, "Because from that time on, no one will know if I'm lying or telling the truth."
As a result, it's Wilder's performance in Wonka that's perhaps his most indelible: He shades his cheerful confectioner with a capriciousness that serves to keep a film about a candy factory from feeling saccharine.
Wilder's 1984 marriage to comedian Gilda Radner turned the couple into latter-day Hollywood royalty. Separately, both performers had been hugely popular; together, they were beloved. Just five years later, however, Radner died of ovarian cancer, leaving Wilder devastated, according to his 2005 memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art.
He went on to help found Gilda's Club (now known as the Cancer Support Community), an organization that provides social and emotional support for cancer patients and their families. Wilder and Radner appeared together in three films. (He remarried in 1991.)
Wilder co-wrote the screenplay for Young Frankenstein with Mel Brooks, and later in life he turned to writing full time, producing three novels and a collection of short stories.So it's been a while since I painted anything and let's be honest, all my old paintings suck hard. Anyway,and I made a deal that we would create one painting per week to improve our skills over time. This is my first painting - your turn DougThis painting took roughly 6 hours (3 for the head and ears, 2 for the body and 1 for the wings and 'feet') and I'm pretty happy with it. I used Paint Tool SAI and a new method I wanted to try out which only uses two layers, one for line art (which you do not see in the end result) and one for all the colour and shading. Basically, it may as well be traditional art. I'm pretty pleased with it, I hope you guys enjoy checking this out as much as I did making itLatias happens to be a registered trade mark of Game Freak so hats off to those guys for coming up with such an awesome design.Now I'm requesting critiques because I want to improve my artwork. Thanks.Ever since Mayor Tory’s election campaign, we have been told that SmartTrack is a something-for-nothing project that would bring vastly improved transit service to Toronto at little or new added cost to taxpayers. This would occur through the hocus-pocus of Tax Increment Financing TIF).
For those new to the subject, the premise here is that building a new transit line causes property values to rise and new development that would not occur in the absence of the transit investment. That generates new tax revenue that could be used to pay off the construction debt. However, the city’s staff, who are bending over backwards to make Tory’s transit plans workable, do not see TIF as coming close to paying for Toronto’s share of SmartTrack.
See also:
Jennifer Pagliaro’s article in the Toronto Star, “Major unknowns, risks in funding Tory’s SmartTrack plan remain ahead of vote”
Tricia Wood’s article on the Torontoist site, “Crunching the Numbers on SmartTrack’s Ridership”
Sean Marshall’s article on the Torontoist site, “Here’s What the Development Opportunities at SmartTrack Stations Look Like”
The election premise was that SmartTrack would be built at a cost of $8 billion, would provide a total of 22 stations and frequent service over a route from Markham to the Airport Corporate Centre (south of Pearson Airport). This would be shared equally by all three levels of government making Toronto’s share about $2.7 billion, if one believes the premise of the campaign.
The situation has changed over the past two years. The Eglinton branch of SmartTrack as a railway operation was never a good idea, and it has reverted to the original LRT proposal from Transit City. Tory takes advantage of the more closely-spaced stops on the LRT to bolster his SmartTrack station count. In fact there would be more new LRT stations than SmartTrack/GO stations as the plan now stands.
GO Transit’s Regional Express Rail (RER) program will see widespread infrastructure and service improvements beyond which SmartTrack will only add six new stations. The projected cost of “SmartTrack” has gone down, but the City’s share remains above $2 billion. (The values below do not include cost of financing and risk transfer under Ontario’s procurement system that could bump these numbers by 20%.)
[Source: Transit Network Plan Update and Financial Strategy, p. 11.]
City staff argue that the benefits available from “value uplift” of existing properties will be low, and they have not included this in their calculations. From new development, the added tax revenue would be $857.1 million over the life of the financing scheme, and to be conservative, staff recommend that only half of this be presumed for SmartTrack financing.
This calculation does not address how the services new commercial or residential development will require would be financed if some or all of their new tax revenues were dedicated to SmartTrack.
The chart below shows the considerable spread between TIF and Development Charges (DCs) revenues and the actual requirements for SmartTrack financing, including the LRT line on Eglinton from Mount Dennis to Renforth.
[Source: Transit Network Plan Update and Financial Strategy, p. 12]
The two percent tax increase would be applied to residential property with only a.67% increase for commercial property. This arises from the City’s policy of rebalancing residential and commercial tax rates, a process that will complete in 2020. Given the timing of borrowing for SmartTrack, one must ask whether the balancing policy should apply in this case, and whether it is time for the commercial sector to pay its full share of taxes that will be collected almost entirely beyond the date when the balancing program completes. (Note that “commercial” includes rental apartment buildings.)
The estimates for TIF and DC revenue arise from projections in a report, Commercial & Multi-Residential Forecasts for the Review of SmartTrack, by Strategic Regional Research Alliance (SRRA) that was commissioned by Council to examine the question in detail. (The SRRA report begins at page 8 of the document.)
To put this in context, SRRA was co-founded by Iain Dobson who was an advisor to Tory’s election campaign. In May 2014, just as the SmartTrack campaign started, he was appointed to the Metrolinx Board during Glen Murray’s final days as Minister of Transportation. The consulting contract was awarded by Council on a sole source basis.
When SmartTrack was proposed, the intent was to improve access to areas of potential development. The following map shows these areas and their relationship to the SmartTrack corridor.
[Source: SRRA study at p. 21. “Nodes” is misspelled in the map title, and the Downsview node is mistakenly labelled “Lever”. How this might reflect on the care taken on the report I leave to the reader’s judgement.]
Several of the nodes lie outside of Toronto or far from the SmartTrack corridor (blue line and circles). These will either not produce new tax revenue within the 416 or they are too far from ST to benefit from its construction.
A vital question, then, is whether the amount of development contemplated in the January 2016 SRRA report and resulting tax revenues will actually flow to the city. SRRA’s analysis begins with a map of the “TIF Zones”, the areas around stations where tax increases could be expected.
Many of the stations are existing or planned GO stops that will see added service without any SmartTrack investment, and ST adds nothing to them (Milliken, Agincourt, Kennedy, Main, Union, Bloor, Mount Dennis). The map also shows a station at Spadina that will not be part of the upgrades planned for the ST corridor.
Although many zones are shown, most of them will not be affected by SmartTrack as it is now proposed, merely the addition of six stations to the GO Transit map: Finch East, Lawrence East, Gerrard, East Harbour (Lever), Liberty Village and St. Clair.
Although the SRRA report discusses the methodology for analysis of the effect of SmartTrack in the TIF zones, it does not provide a dollar value for the actual tax increments this would produce, nor a description of how this might be calculated. Numbers cited in the City report imply that a more detailed breakdown exists for the SRRA data, but that it has not been published.
An important component of the stimulus attributed to SmartTrack is the construction of additional residential units because ST would make jobs in the outlying centres (notably Markham and the airport) easier to reach and thereby allow reverse commuting. However, there is no “ST service” per se, only the provision of stops where riders might board GO RER trains running less frequently than original claims for ST itself.
Projections for employment and residential growth are shown in charts.
The core area remains the primary location for employment growth, although the projection with SmartTrack diverts some of this to other areas, notably the Queen/Carlaw area (i.e. the Lever site) and Liberty Village. The latter is a bit of a stretch because the station would be located at the northeast end of the district while commercial development, such as there may be, will be toward the southwest.
An important distinction here is that in the “secondary zones” (those along transit corridors other than ST) and in the non-TIF part of the city, the projected employment with ST is generally lower than if ST exists. In other words, potential development that might hold these employees shifts into areas where it contributes to projected TIF revenue.
A similar situation applies with residential units.
The city adjusts for this numerically in their backgrounder on City Funding and Financing Strategy.
What is not clear, however, is which of the TIF zones are included for this analysis, in particular those which are at existing GO stops, nor whether the effect of ST’s having no marginal service beyond that provided by GO RER has been take into account. If all zones were included, has the potential revenue due only to SmartTrack been overstated?
A similar problem exists for the calculation of Development Charges because the formula for these, set by provincial law, makes them applicable only to the benefits provided by the expenses undertaken by the City, not to improvements others such as GO might provide nor to improvements existing transit riders might obtain from the new stations/services. This considerably limits the scope for recapture of costs through DCs. (In Scarborough there was was a successful appeal by developers that reduced DCs attributable to the Scarborough Subway. This was based on a higher estimate used for new riders in the DC calculation, and hence the proportion of riders from new development, than in a later estimate.)
There is a more general problem with DCs in that they affect every new building in the city, not just those along the transit corridors. Developers who do not benefit from the projects these charges help to finance are not enthusiastic about building yet more costs into the base borne by would-be purchasers.
Questions for the City
All of this raises many questions about the validity of the calculated TIF revenues available to finance the SmartTrack scheme. I have sent queries about this to City staff, and await a reply. This article will be updated when more information is available.
Council will debate the SmartTrack reports at its meeting beginning on November 8, 2016. Here, in brief, are my questions.
The staff presentation to Council expresses commercial growth in thousands of square feet while SRRA uses employment. These can be converted to each other with a ratio, but what number has been used? How do the City numbers relate to the SRRA values?
The bar graphs in SRRA’s report do not include actual values making direct calculations such as selective inclusion or exclusion of TIF zones difficult. What are the numbers?
Which TIF zones were used for the calculations in the City presentation? Only the six the City is paying for, or zones at all “SmartTrack” stations even though many of these are GO RER locations to which ST will not add any service?
What adjustments in projections have occurred between the original SRRA estimates and those used in current City estimates?
As with TIF, have DCs been calculated only based on the six added “City” stations, or for all of the ST/RER locations?
TIF revenue is projected to grow uniformly and across all included zones. Is this a realistic assumption, how much growth is projected in each zone, and when is this expected to occur?
If the SmartTrack tax were implemented at the same rate across all property classes, at what level would the tax be set?SAN BERNARDINO (CN) – A class action accuses The New England Mint of defrauding consumers by selling “normal $2 bills at grossly inflated prices.” The class claims the company is “tricking consumers into believing that the ‘National Park $2 Bills’ they sell are unique bills with decorative print produced by the U.S. government and that they are rate. In reality, they are just normal $2 bills that are commonly available, with a cheap sticker placed on one side.”
The complaint continues: “In an effort to further deceive consumers … defendants offer their ‘National Park $2 Bills’ with another ‘free’ product, typically a second $2 bill with a ‘National Park’ sticker. In addition, defendants have artificially ‘lowered’ the price of their ‘products,’ only to make an inflated profit by charging excessive and illegal shipping and handling fees, and tricking consumers into thinking they are getting something for free. This practice is illegal.”
Named plaintiff Heidi Walker asks the Superior Court to “enjoin the ongoing defrauding of thousands of California consumers by defendants, and to recover the money taken by this deceptive practice.”
The class sues The New England Mint, of Connecticut, and its corporate parent, Lippenwald, Inc.
Among the alleged “deceptive and unethical practices” are the defendants’ claims that their deal is a “once in a lifetime opportunity,” that “$2 bills are among the rarest U.S. currencies,” that “these crisp uncirculated $2 bills are not being released through this special offer from the New England Mint,” and that they “come with a ‘certificate of authenticity.'”
The class claims that the truth is that the “defendants simply place a sticker on normal, common $2 bills.” They offer a $2 bill for sale for $10, with a second $2 bill for “free,” but charge $5.95 for “shipping and handling” for each bill, so the suckers actually have to pay $21.90, according to the complaint.
The class seeks restitution, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, punitive and statutory damages, and an injunction. It is represented by Scott Ferrell with the Newport Trial Group of Newport Beach.
Like this: Like Loading...Apparently, propagandists in the so-called “mainstream media” think their First Amendment right to a free press gives them carte blanche to violate laws if it further erodes the Trump administration. On Friday, the Washington Free Beacon reported that John Harwood, a journalist for the New York Times and CNBC, called on a White House staffer to illegally leak a transcript of a potential call between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in a tweet sent Thursday.
“Dear Leaker (you know who you are), please just send me transcript of Putin call. won’t bug you for any more. that’s only one I need,” he said, signing off with, “thx J.”
Dear Leaker (you know who you are),
please just send me transcript of Putin call. won't bug you for any more. that's only one I need.
thx J — John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) August 3, 2017
Trending: Video of the Day: UCLA Students Sign Petition to put Conservatives in Concentration Camps
The Free Beacon added:
The legality of requests such as Harwood’s has long been a matter of debate. The Supreme Court has upheld the right of media outlets to publish unsolicited, illegally obtained information in cases such as Bartnicki v. Vopper.
But it’s generally illegal to solicit someone to commit a crime. As NPR put it, “Ample legal precedent suggests a protection for journalists as long as they do not themselves break the law or encourage or direct others to do so.”
In 2013, the Obama Justice Department named Fox News reporter James Rosen an unindicted “criminal co-conspirator” on the theory that he solicited the classified information he published. No journalist has ever been prosecuted for solicitation.
Does the 1st Amendment grant the media immunity from prosecution for encouraging illegal behavior? https://t.co/FxQBr2sFwM — Vancouver Osprey (@VancouverOsprey) August 3, 2017
Technically, as the Free Beacon explained, no.
Another person added:
It isn't a funny joke. Leaking a conversation between heads of state is breaking the law. Soliciting it is as well. — James Hicks 🚒🚑👨🚒 (@Jhic709365) August 4, 2017
But who cares about something as trivial as the law these days? After all, look at what Hillary was allowed to get away with. And now we have an out-of-control special counsel doing everything he can to enact a coup against Trump over a media-driven conspiracy theory.
As a post at Weasel Zippers noted:
“Potentially a crime in and of itself. Is it not clear that some in media view themselves as the opposition? They don’t care about violating the law or endangering the United States in their quest to get Trump.”
H/T: TunnelWall
Related:
If you haven’t checked out and liked our Facebook page, please go here and do so.
And if you’re as concerned about Facebook censorship as we are, go here and order this book:News from the IFS confirms what others, including Money Saving Expert’s Martin Lewis and of course Nick Clegg, have previously argued:
The government’s decision to raise maximum tuition fees to £9,000 will create a system that is “substantially more progressive” than the previous system. That is because the 30% of graduates with the lowest lifetime earnings will be better off under the new arrangements.
And no cynical comments please about just how far down The Guardian’s story this paragraph was placed.
P.S. As it’s the weekend and people may have other things to do, in order to save time I’ve taken the liberty of pre-writing a few comments.
Comment A: I DON’T CARE WHAT SOME NEWSPAPER SAYS YOURE ALL LIARS AND CHEATS
Comment B: Scrapping Trident and axing tuition fees would be much more progressive.
Comment C: Silly, stupid, nonsense. I’ve seen those idle students enjoying several years drinking and fornicating at the local Uni, just to spend rest of their lives stacking shelves in Tesco. Now you tell me it is good they won’t have to pay their money back????? I call that scrounging not progressive!!!!
Comment D: Security message from HSBC – please email me your account number and password to confirm access to your account, which will otherwise by shut down at midnight.
Comment E: How dare you say the Liberal Democrats were right to break their pledge and raise tuition fees! And don’t you dare point out that you don’t say that in the post – that’s just typical weasley politician for you.Can you |
them from these monthly reports.
**I base these on every Tesla statement I can find on the matter as well as Tesla registration data in Europe and China. But note that Tesla doesn’t publicly break out monthly sales and doesn’t break out country-by-country sales, so these estimates are definitely not precise.
Also published on EV Obsession’s Electric Car Sales page.President Trump on Monday reinstated a US policy preventing foreign nonprofit groups that receive federal funds from administering abortions or providing abortion counseling or referrals.
Originally enacted by President Ronald Reagan in 1984, the “Mexico City Policy” was rescinded by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — and reinstated by George W. Bush and now Donald Trump — in the first days of each new administration.
Known as the “global gag rule” by pro-abortion rights groups, the Mexico City Policy goes a step further than existing legislation, which prevents federal dollars from being used for abortions. Instead, it prevents organizations that receive any federal funds from paying for their own abortion programs.
advertisement
Existing legislation known as the Helms Amendment already prevents federal funding of foreign abortions “as a method of family planning,” a restriction abortion rights advocates say has led to excessive interpretation. George W. Bush’s administration clarified that the amendment exempted abortions performed in cases of rape, incest, or when the mother’s life would be endangered by the pregnancy.
Trump’s move forces nonprofit groups to choose between cutting abortion services altogether or looking to fill a major budget gap left by the withholding of federal dollars.
Marie Stopes International, a group that provides contraceptive and abortion services, says it gave 2,843 general and gynecological checkups and performed 586 contraceptive implant insertions in the wake of the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. Those procedures, it says, would not have been possible without US federal aid.
Ipas, an international abortion rights and women’s health NGO, estimates that women in more than 40 countries receive services made possible through US-funded family planning and reproductive health programs.
Other restrictions on US federal funds for organizations that provide abortion, Ipas says, have “led to fragmentation of basic health services.”
The executive order comes as part of a broader salvo on federally funded abortion and contraceptive coverage.
Separately, a bill under consideration by the House rules committee aims to change the Hyde Amendment, a provision in annual appropriations bills that prohibits federally funded abortions, into permanent law. The proposal would also make employers with insurance plans that cover abortion ineligible for tax credits under the Affordable Care Act.
Trump also issued an executive order on Friday that, depending on how the Department of Health and Human Services interprets it, could eliminate the ACA requirement that private insurers include contraception in their coverage.
Newsletters Sign up for our revamped D.C. Diagnosis newsletter Please enter a valid email address. Privacy Policy Leave this field empty if you're human:
An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that President George H.W. Bush reinstated the “Mexico City Policy” in the first days of his administration. It was standing policy when he succeeded President Ronald Reagan.Stocks have fallen on fears over the health of the global economy, after last week's weak US jobs data and persistent fears over the eurozone.
The US Dow Jones index fell 1.7%, its worst day so far this year.
Earlier, France's Cac 40 fell 3.1%, the UK's FTSE 100 and Germany's Dax lost about 2.5%.
Spanish bond yields hit a new high for this year as concerns have returned about Madrid's ability to repay its debts.
Banks were hit particularly hard, with Societe Generale down 6.2% and BNP Paribas 5.7% lower in French trading. In the UK, Barclays fell 5.9% while Lloyds lost 5%.
In Germany, Commerzbank ended the day down 5.9%.
Italian shares fell 5% on media reports the government was about to cut its growth forecast for this year.
And oil declined too. Brent crude fell $2.80 to just under $120 a barrel in London.
US growth
Figures released on Friday by the US Labor Department showed the smallest growth in employment in five months.
The US economy added 120,000 jobs during March, less than the 200,000 widely predicted by analysts.
They've managed to put a Band-Aid on the debt crisis, but there's really no solution Colleen Supran, Portfolio manager
Investors in Europe were given their first chance after the Easter break to react to Friday's disappointing US jobs data.
The figures raised fears about the strength of the recovery in the US economy.
"Opening losses for European stock markets this morning are suggestive of the heavy, negative overhang from last Friday's disappointing US payrolls report," said Jane Foley at Rabobank International.
Spanish bonds
Meanwhile, the interest rate on Spanish bonds traded in the secondary market continued to rise.
The yield on 10-year bonds hit 5.99%, up from 5.74% on Monday, indicating that investors are getting increasingly concerned about Spain's ability to repay its debts.
"They've managed to put a Band-Aid on the debt crisis, but there's really no solution," said investment portfolio manager Colleen Supran. "And Spain is a much bigger problem than Greece."
Spain makes up about 11% of the total output of the 17 countries that use the euro, while Greece accounts for 2%.
The Iberian nation has introduced a raft of tough austerity measures in recent weeks, partly in an attempt to calm investors' nerves and bring yields down.
Yields are now at their highest level since the beginning of this year, but are still below the 7% considered by markets to be unsustainable.
Also on Tuesday, the head of Spain's central bank, Miguel Angel Fernandez Ordonez, suggested the banking sector may need further support if the economy deteriorates.
"If the Spanish economy finally recovers, what has been done will be enough, but if the economy worsens more than expected, it will be necessary to continue increasing and improving capital as necessary in order to have solid entities," he said.
Investors in Europe also had an eye on Chinese data showing a rise in exports but a sharp fall in imports, while a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) also gave mixed messages.
It identified a "potential turning point in economic activity in the euro area and regained momentum in other major economies", particularly the US and Japan.
But the report also talked of "diverging" economies in Europe, with Germany and the UK showing a "positive change in momentum" but France and Italy displaying "continued sluggish activity".
Analysts noted general caution ahead of the first quarter reporting season in the US, beginning later on Tuesday with aluminium giant Alcoa.The longest knitted scarf measures 4,565.46 m (14,978 ft 6.16 in) long and was achieved by Helge Johansen (Norway), in Oslo, Norway, on 12 November 2013. It’s taken nimble-fingered Norwegian Helge 30 years to knit his neck-warmer to an incredible 4,565.46 m – as long as 550 London double-decker buses or sufficient to stretch the entire length of Central Park in Manhattan, New York, USA. In order to measure his knitwear for Guinness World Records Day 2013, Helge unravelled his scarf – which he usually keeps in a ball – in a sports centre in Oslo, Norway, snaking the scarf in dozens of tight loops.
All records listed on our website are current and up-to-date. For a full list of record titles, please use our Record Application Search. (You will be need to register / login for access)
Comments below may relate to previous holders of this record.The small, round Yucho Chow Studio seal, with its Chinese characters and Vancouver Chinatown address, is embossed on hundreds of group and individual portraits taken over four decades during the early 1900s.
Most are now tucked in dusty albums in basements and attics across the city. They were taken by a jovial, prolific artist, whose own image and story had been little known, and fading away even to his own descendants, until now.
For years, Catherine Clement, as curator of the Chinese-Canadian Military Museum, had been meeting with veterans and their relatives. They would bring out their old family photos and, over and over again, Clement would see that same Yucho Chow Studio seal.
She started to link his photos together for a unique crispness or “a really interesting background,” the flair of a long, flowing curtain, or the modernity of a young boy plopped on a tricycle for a studio shot in the late 1920s.
By fluke, Clement was interviewing a woman about her husband one day, when the conversation steered off to her grandfather.
From there, she was able to track down and recently unveil a life-size image of Chow himself, as part of the city-backed “Chinatown History Windows” project.
Chow is wearing a pale-coloured, three-piece suit and Panama hat with a dark ribbon. His broad face wears a warm smile. The year is 1927.
“He’s got kind of an air about him. In another (photo), he has a cigar and is sort of looking at the camera,” said Clement, who has been bringing to life “big pivotal moments and trends in Chinatown history,” but has a soft spot for this rather unsung one.
“All these hundreds and hundreds of families, who have his seal in their photo albums. … And for the first time, we get to see him. Only a few people are left who ever met (Chow), and yet his work resides in the heritage vaults of so many families.”
Leonard Chow, a 77-year-old retired Vancouver dentist and Yucho’s grandson, agrees that his grandfather’s contribution hasn’t been much noted, although he does recall a photo of him that may have been hung inside the halls of the Chinese Cultural Centre.
There is “a little bit” of talk among older family members, but “if the topic is never brought up” there isn’t much harkening back to the days of when he was a young boy, watching his grandfather take countless photos. Sometimes, as the oldest grandson, he would stay overnight at the family’s studio, first on Pender Street and later on Main.
“When I was around four or five years old, I would spend quite a few days sleeping on three chairs pushed together with a blanket over me,” he said.
He remembers going to the railway station with his grandfather to take photos of newcomers stepping off the train. These would have been at the end of the years spanning the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923, when immigration from China was closed, to gains made in 1947 when Chinese-Canadians won the right to vote.
When babies were born in Vancouver, Yucho Chow would take photos of them, naked, so families back in China could see that a son had been born to the family, said Clement. He would also take photos when people died in Vancouver so that an unofficial but validating “death certificate” could be returned to families in China “with whatever money was left.”
Aside from many family weddings and elementary class pictures, there are also quietly poignant Yucho Chow photos such as one of “members of the Chinese student concert in aid of the (University of B.C.) stadium fund” in 1931. Another random, lost moment in time features six men standing outside the “Quon On Jan Travel Agency at 7880 Seymour Street” with owner Maw Sun Hay in 1915.
Chow also photographed many Japanese and South Asian families, said Clement.
Leonard Chow’s father, Jack, became an optometrist, but his uncles Peter and Philip and his aunt Jessie all worked in the family studio. “Aunt Jessie did the colouring,” taking oil paints to add dabs of pink, blue and yellow to black-and-white photos.
Leonard says his grandfather came to Vancouver around 1908, worked as a houseboy, and then as an assistant to a photographer before striking out on his own.
“He was a prominent citizen. I remember on Sundays, he would take me around to visit all the Chinese benevolent societies and masons. He greeted everyone by name and knew them all.”
[email protected] were several very worthwhile candidates this week. Bears defensive tackle Jeremiah Ratliff had himself one hell of a day with three and a half sacks against the Dolphins. Broncos outside linebacker DeMarcus Ware showed he still has some life in those old legs, coming home with three sacks against the 49ers. Ware's young counterpart Von Miller had two sacks and was in the backfield all night. Ravens "backup" outside linebackers Pernell McPhee and Elvis Dumervil also had two sacks apiece against the Falcons. However, I ended up picking Vikings defensive end Everson Griffen because not only did he notch three sacks against the Bills, but they all came at crucial points in the game.
This off-season the Vikings decided to move on from Jared Allen. They rewarded Griffen, a backup until this year, with a fat new contract betting that he would be able to replace Allen's pass rush presence. So far, so good on that wager. Griffen has seven sacks in seven games, one off his career high for a single season. He and the rest of the Vikings still lost to the Bills, but Griffen did everything in his power to try to prevent that. As a matter of fact, last drive of the game aside, it seemed like every time the Bills were threatening to take the lead, he would stand up and make a big play to hold them off. Unfortunately for the Vikings, he just didn't have one last big play left in him at the end of the game.
Sack No. 1
The Vikings had just scored a touchdown in the middle of the second quarter for a 10-7 lead. On the ensuing drive Bills running back C.J. Spiller broke off a 53-yard run that put his team in scoring position on the Vikings 15-yard line. Griffen helped to bring down running back Anthony Dixon on first down for a gain of four. Vikings rookie linebacker Anthony Barr broke up Kyle Orton's pass on second down, and the Bills were looking at third-and-six from the Vikings 11-yard line going in.
Griffen got off on the snap and initially tried to turn the corner around left tackle Cordy Glenn. Feeling that he was about to run too deep behind Orton, Griffen spun back inside just as Orton was trying to avoid defensive tackle Tom Johnson. Before Orton could take off out of the pocket for a first down or to try to get a pass off, Griffen grabbed him from behind and tackled him straight to the ground. The Bills would have to settle for a field goal after that play.
Sack No. 2
On Griffen's second sack the Vikings found themselves in a very similar position. This time they were up 13-10 in the third quarter, but the Bills were driving into their territory. The Bills had just crossed over into the red zone after a 3-yard run by fullback Frank Summers on second-and-2 giving them a new set of downs from the Vikings 17-yard line.
Griffen gave a head fake inside as he came out of his stance. Glen stopped his feet for a split second, just long enough for Griffen to beat him with an outside rush. Orton tried to step up in the pocket and away from Griffen's rush, but he couldn't get away from Griffen and ended up losing the ball. The Vikings recovered, and the Bills lost a great scoring opportunity thanks to Griffen's efforts. Mind you a sack-fumble is huge at any time, but it's especially huge if you can pull it off in the red zone.
Sack No. 3
Griffen was able to help force a punt with his third sack, which happened on the Bills' next series. The Bills were facing a third-and-5 on their own 18-yard line with the Vikings still clinging to a three point lead. This time Griffen ran a TEX pass rush game with defensive tackle Sharrif Floyd where he started up the field like a speed rush and then looped inside to the A gap. Because the center slid away from them, Griffen was able to come through and get Orton on the ground yet again. Not only did that sack force the Bills to punt, it also helped get Minnesota the ball on their 49-yard line.
Now, Griffen didn't record another sack the rest of the game. He and Floyd ran that TEX game again a little later with a little less than eight minutes left in the game, and this time it was Floyd who sacked Orton to force a punt. Griffen did a good job of getting off the ball and getting Glen to set back which helped open things up for Floyd in the B gap. After he looped inside, he helped Floyd finish the tackle. Griffen doesn't get anything on the stat sheet for that play, but he definitely a big role in making it happen.
It sucks that Everson Griffen's great effort was wasted in what was literally a last second loss, but at the same time you sit back and realize that if he didn't make those plays, then the game might not have been close at all.
Big time players make big time plays at crucial times in the game. That's exactly what Griffen did last Sunday. That is why he is my Hoss Of The Week for Week 7.Image copyright Reuters
The Swiss Competition Commission (Comco) has fined several European and US banks for rigging benchmark interest rates and related products.
JP Morgan Chase received the largest fine, 33.9m Swiss francs (£26.7m), for colluding with Royal Bank of Scotland over the Swiss franc Libor rate.
Barclays was fined 29.8m Swiss francs for its part in a cartel to rig euro interest rate derivatives.
The fines, for collusion between 2005 and 2010, totalled 99m Swiss francs.
"It is a big sanction based on an in-depth investigation," said Vincent Martenet, President of Comco.
"It was a lengthy process, but we had good co-operation from the banks," he said.
Following the financial crisis in 2008, several international banks were investigated and fined for colluding to influence key interest rates including Libor, the rate at which London banks lend to each other overnight and its European equivalent, Euribor.
Such rates reflect the confidence banks have in each other's financial health and are used to determine the value of millions of trades, as well as borrowing by households and companies.
Even very slight shifts in those rates can result in significant changes to banks' profits.
Image copyright PA
In the case of the collusion between JPMorgan Chase and Royal Bank of Scotland cartel, RBS was granted immunity for revealing the existence of the cartel to the authorities.
JPMorgan and RBS had tried to distort the pricing of interest rate derivatives denominated in Swiss franc between March 2008 and July 2009, Comco said.
Future vigilance
Although Comco's investigation referred to activity before 2010, Mr Martenet said the Swiss authorities would remain vigilant.
"It's important for us to send this message to the banks: this particular problem might be finished but they have to understand if there is a distortion in other circumstances, we are there, we will intervene. It's important even if this concrete behaviour belongs to the past."
Barclays, RBS and Societe General were fined a total of 45.3m Swiss Francs for colluding over the setting of Euribor, the interbank interest rate at which eurozone banks lend, between 2005 and 2008. Deutsche Bank received immunity over its participation in that cartel for communicating it's existence to Comco, the authorities said.
The investigation continues into the roles of BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole, HSBC, JPMorgan and Rabobank in the Euribor market. Mr Martenet said there was still room for an amicable settlement with those banks.
There were smaller fines for Credit Suisse, JP Morgan and RBS related to the bid-ask spread on Swiss franc interest rate derivatives in 2007 and for Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan and RBS for their role in Yen Libor and Euroyen Tibor cartels.
"These fines represent the tail-end of regulatory action against corporates, who will be glad that finally these long-running conduct issues will be put to bed," commented Hannah Laming, business crime specialist at the law firm Peters & Peters.
"Regulatory attention is now focused squarely on using civil and criminal enforcement against individuals to drive cultural change in these organisations, and it is likely there is still much activity to be seen in this space in 2017 and beyond."With the holiday season in full swing, we’ve asked some CNY mixologists to provide us with some Holiday Cocktail Recipes! You can try making these at home or head out to try one from the experts! As always, please be sure to drink responsibly this holiday season, and don’t drink and drive. Cheers!
Tiramisu Martini
Recipe provided by Scott Chambers from The Black Olive
Ingredients:
1 parts RumChata (cream based rum)
1 part Sobieski espresso vodk
1 part Kahlua
1 part Half & Half cream.
Garnish with a cinnamon stick and dash of cinnamon power.
A great creamy cinnamon flavor for the Holiday’s!
“Snickerdoodle”
Recipe provided by Maria Cannon from bc Restaurant
1.5 oz cinnamon sugar vodka
1 oz Bailey’s
.5 oz Faretti Biscotti liqueur
3 dashes Mad Fellows sarsparilla bitters
Shake and strain into coupe glass.
Top with cinnamon, Sip and enjoy!
“The Christmas Cookie”
Recipe provided by Piotr Perski from Lamont Tavern
1 oz. Peppermint Schnapps
1 oz. Kahlua
1 oz. Bailey’s
Shake with ice and strain into a martini or rocks glass – with a crushed candy cane rim.
(Tone it down a touch by adding a little Half & Half cream)
“The Nutcracker Sweet”
Recipe provided by Ryan Diana from Rain Lounge
Ingredients:
1 part Bailey’s
1 part Kahlua
1 part DiSaronno
Serve as a martini or on the rocks.
(for a more festive approach, use Kahlua Peppermint)
“Peppermint-tini”
Recipe provided by Lexi and Jamie at Dolce Vita
1 oz. vodka
1 oz. raspberry liqueur
1 oz. creme de cacao
3/4 oz. peppermint
Add cream
Do you have a Holiday Cocktail recipe you’d like to share? Email: [email protected] or visit our Facebook Page
Prohibition in Syracuse – CLICK HERE
Are you a baker? Here’s some buy local options! CLICK HERE
Some Tips for a Buy Local Holiday! CLICK HERE
Local Flavor – CLICK HERE
commentsThe Blu R1 HD starts at $50, works on T-Mobile or AT&T, and will arrive on your doorstep in two days. It is, for all intents and purposes, an Amazon phone.
Not the Amazon phone, the Fire, that failed so hard a few years ago. The R1 HD is a phone made by another company, with a few customizations by Amazon, and sold by Amazon.
For Prime members who are fully entrenched in Amazon’s ecosystem, from Photos to Music to Video to Cloud Drive, the Blu R1 HD comes preinstalled with every Amazon app from the factory.
Now, before you get too excited, you have to remember it’s a $50 phone.
Amazon ads all up in your face
In June, Amazon announced a new program in which the company takes preexisting Android devices, preloads the complete suite of Amazon apps and tweaks the operating system. Those tweaks allow Amazon to push ads to the lock screen of the device, similar to what the company has long done with its Kindle lineup.
It's not all bad news. The ads fill up the lock screen when you don't have any pending notifications. But if you do have pending notifications, they just show up like any other notification.
It's jarring to see the ads at first, but after a few days I got used to seeing them every time I woke up the phone. If you flat out dislike the idea of ads on your phone, you'll want to look elsewhere. Also, know that you can't pay a one-time fee to remove them later like you can with the Kindles with ads.
Hope you like seeing ads on the lockscreen. Image: screenshot: jason cipriani/mashable And using Amazon apps. Image: SCREENSHOT: JASON CIPRIANI/MASHABLE
In exchange for letting Amazon shove ads in your face every time you pick up your phone, the company knocks the price down.
For example, the Blu R1 HD with 16GB of storage and 2GB of RAM normally would set you back $110. Someone who purchases the same phone through Amazon’s Prime Exclusive Phones will get a $50 discount, making the total cost for an unlocked smartphone $60.
There’s a less equipped version of the Blu R1 HD with 8GB of storage and 1GB of memory you can get for $50. Both models have a microSD card slot capable of accepting cards up to 64GB.
Motorola has partnered with Amazon on two of its Moto G4 devices, priced at $100 and $150 after the discount.
Google and Amazon apps
Image: JASON CIPRIANI/MASHABLE
The Blu R1 HD runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow, and as previously mentioned comes preloaded with Amazon apps. The good news is when you enter your Amazon credentials during setup, all of the Amazon apps — Prime Music, Video, Photos, or Alexa — are already set up for use with your account.
For what it’s worth, you can’t completely remove any of the Amazon apps, which makes sense. You can, however, disable the apps so you don’t have to look at any unused app icons.
There’s little in the way of customizations from Blu, save for an option to schedule a time for the device to turn itself off and on.
Outside of that, the Blue R1 HD provides a pretty basic Android experience. No frills, no fluff, just Amazon and Google playing nice together.
Surprising performance
Image: JASON CIPRIANI/MASHABLE
I was somewhat surprised at how well the Blu R1 HD performed during my time with the phone. As it cost $59, my expectations for the device were very low. I anticipated having to wait for emails to open, apps to launch, and taps or swipes to register.
For the most part, I was wrong and the phone handled common tasks as one would expect. In other words, emails promptly opened, apps launched with quickness, and taps or swipes were registered without any delay.
Image: JASON CIPRIANI/MASHABLE Image: JASON CIPRIANI/MASHABLE
Gaming, however, is where the Blu R1 HD begins to show its low-end specs. Asphalt 8 is a game I play on all review devices as a way of pushing the device to its limits (plus I enjoy the game quite a bit).
On the Blu R1 HD, graphics stuttered as the phone tried to keep up with gameplay. It’s not enough to make the game unplayable, but it’s not something I could do for an extended chunk of time.
My loudest gripe, outside of the camera, has to be the display's brightness. I couldn’t leave the auto-brightness setting turned on because any lower than 80 percent brightness and the screen was just too dim. Ultimately I left the display set to max, and found it to work in all environments.
Overall battery life was just alright. You’ll probably get a full day of use out of it, but barely.
Crummy camera
Image: JASON CIPRIANI/MASHABLE
I think this is the first smartphone camera I wouldn’t feel comfortable applying the “good enough for Facebook” tagline to.
I don’t know how else to say it, but the photos are bad. Like really bad. Colors are either overly muted and not all that realistic, or so overblown that the photo is, again, not close to reality.
Camera samples Image: JASON CIPRIANI/MASHABLE Image: jason cipriani/mashable
Then again, maybe I’m expecting too much from a phone that costs $1 more than Apple’s leather case for the iPhone 7 Plus. Yes, the camera can take pictures and video, just don’t expect to be happy with the results on most occasions.
Should you buy it?
Image: JASON CIPRIANI/MASHABLE
The vast majority — like 99.75 percent — of the time, that answer is “no.” The Blu R1 HD is a $50 phone with more concessions than giving Amazon access to blast ads to your lock screen. The camera alone almost makes it a no-go. Heck, for $50 more you can get the Amazon Prime Exclusive version of the Moto G4 Play and find yourself with a battery camera and superior battery life.
With that said, for someone who has met the sad fate of losing a phone and can’t afford a new iPhone or Samsung Galaxy phone, the Blu R1 HD will get the job done.
And who knows, maybe the ads you see from Amazon will save you money on purchases you were going to end up making anyways.Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in Geneva March 2, 2015. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran’s foreign minister accused Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Friday of fomenting strife in the Middle East, rebuffing his accusation that Iran was trying to dominate the region.
“It would be better if those who have created irreparable damages with their strategic mistakes and lofty politics would adopt responsible policies,” Mohammad Javad Zarif was quoted as saying by the semi-official Fars news agency.
“Under the current circumstances, all countries must work toward establishing stability and preventing the spread of insecurity in the region,” Zarif, who is attending negotiations on Iran’s disputed nuclear program in Switzerland, added.
Erdogan declared his support on Thursday for a Saudi-led military operation in Yemen targeting the Houthis, and suggested the group’s links to Tehran were evidence of Iranian ambitions.
“Iran is trying to dominate the region... This has begun annoying us, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries. This is really not tolerable and Iran has to see this,” Erdogan said at a press conference.
He later implied in a television interview that Iran had forces inside Yemen, saying that “Iran and the terrorist groups must withdraw”.
Tehran supports the Houthis but denies giving them military support or having its own forces in Yemen.
Saudi Arabia and Arab allies launched air strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen on Thursday and Friday in support of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, whose forces had been pushed back to the southern city of Aden.
Tensions between Iran and Turkey have increased as Iran has taken a larger role in the fight against Islamic State. Iran has sent military commanders to lead irregular forces in Iraq and Syria, both of which border Turkey.It is that time of the year again when the coaching rumor mills start turning at full speed in college football and in the NFL. That means Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly and UCLA head coach Jim Mora are once again being connected to various NFL coaching discussions, which has been the norm the past few years. Texas A&M’s Kevin Sumlin is also in the NFL rumor boat.
Ian Rapoport of NFL Network reported this morning, via Twitter, Kelly would be a name of significant interest for the New York Giants if a vacancy opens up. Tom Coughlin is currently still the head coach, but speculation is a change could be coming in New York at some point, and the Giants would be a good coaching job to take on for the right candidate. Kelly has long been seen as a coach with the right approach to the NFL and will surely have his name connected to a handful of NFL coaching rumors in the months to come.
Mora has previous NFL experience, which is commonly seen as a benefit for any coaching candidate in the NFL. Mora has been the head coach of the Atlanta Falcons and the Seattle Seahawks. Mora was initially seen by many as a questionable hire at UCLA, but Mora has done well in holding his own on the job despite not leading the Bruins to a Pac-12 title. Mora was a name floating in the NFL coaching rumor pool last season along with Kelly, so neither should be a surprise to be connected to NFL talks now.
Texas A&M’s Sumlin has also been seen as a trendy coaching candidate with the right kind of swagger to take on an NFL gig should the right opportunity come along. Sumlin has done a solid job in helping Texas A&M build its program during the transition into the SEC. Sumlin helped pave a path to the NFL for Case Keenum and Johnny Manziel. Neither has panned out at the next level, but they got there thanks in part to Sumlin’s coaching.
Follow @KevinOnCFBOriginally published February 13, 2015 at 6:35 PM | Page modified February 13, 2015 at 7:23 PM
The online-retail giant offers another glimpse into its robotics strategy, showcasing a six-ton robotic arm used to move larger items around one of its newest warehouses.
DUPONT, Pierce County — Amazon said as little as it could about its plans for Kiva Systems, when it bought robot maker in 2012 for $775 million.
These days, Amazon can’t talk enough about the way those robots automate its warehouses.
The retail giant invited the press and local dignitaries Friday to one of its newest warehouses, a 1 million square foot facility in DuPont. The company, which said it would spend $100 million on the warehouse when it announced plans to build it in 2012, stocks large items there, including strollers, vacuum cleaners and boxes with 48 rolls of toilet paper.
Amazon.com, which has 109 warehouses worldwide, ships smaller items, such as books, DVDs and toys, from other warehouses, including the one it has in Sumner.
The DuPont warehouse, which opened last June, is teeming with hundreds of Kiva robots. Those are the squat, coffee table-sized gadgets that buzz around, lifting and moving shelves of products, delivering them to workers who pluck items to be shipped off to customers.
The warehouse also uses a six-ton robotic arm, one of seven Amazon owns, that can lift pallets of products weighing as much as 3,000 pounds. It’s a key piece to a massively automated system that stows, picks and ships the larger products stocked at the DuPont facility.
Last November, Amazon unveiled the Kiva robots at its Tracy, Calif., warehouse, highlighting its innovation while trying to generate buzz before the Cyber Monday shopping spree. Then, as now, the company said that the robots won’t replace employees; the devices will make work easier for the workers.
“They do the repetitive, tedious jobs that humans don’t want to do,” said Mike Roth, Amazon’s vice president of North American operations.
What’s more, the robots allow Amazon to pack more products into the warehouses because workers no longer need to race through the aisles of shelves, picking products. Instead, robots move the massive shelving to pick the precise products customers want. That means shelves can be stacked tightly next to one another, giving Amazon 50 percent more space to store inventory.
Amazon employs 500 full-time workers in DuPont, including 60 military veterans, many of whom were stationed at the nearby Joint Base Lewis-McChord. It added 400 workers temporarily during the busy holiday-shopping season.
The warehouse is Amazon’s third in the state, including the Sumner facility and a smaller operations in Bellevue, home to its local AmazonFresh grocery-delivery service.
The company plans to open another warehouse in Kent within 12 months.
“We’re going to see even more use of robotics,” Roth said. That warehouse will be adjacent to a so-called “sortation” center the company opened last year. It’s one of more than a dozen such facilities where Amazon sorts packages by ZIP codes and delivers them directly to local post offices in order to speed delivery.
Amazon has doubled up the number of warehouses it operates in the past four years, working to cut into the key advantage brick-and-mortar stores hold: instant gratification customers get when they take possession of a product the second it’s been purchased.
And while some investors fret over how Amazon’s continued spending eats into its margins, Roth said the company will continue to open warehouses as demand merits.
Jay Greene: 206-464-2231 or [email protected]. Twitter @greene
Four weeks for 99 cents of unlimited digital access to The Seattle Times. Try it now!After graduating from Seoul National University in 1990, Sooyong Park worked as a nature documentary Producer and Director for EBS(Educational Broadcasting System) in South Korea from 1991 to 2010. His programs have always focused on the wild Siberian tiger ‘Panthera tigris altaica’.
As a researcher and documentary film-maker, he has studied Siberian tigers for the past twenty years. His filming projects have covered areas such as the Maritime Province of Russia, Manchuria in China, the North Korean border with China, and Taebaek Mountains range in South Korea.
Sooyong Park has spent many months tracking Siberian tigers but also many months incarcerated in a hide, hoping to catch a glimpse of a tiger. Totally alone in the forests of far-eastern Russia, he has endured temperatures of -30 degrees Celsius and the most basic conditions, in an effort to capture this most elusive tiger on film.
Sooyong Park has recorded every moment of his search on film and shot over 1000 hours of material.
He has recently written a book ‘The Great Soul of Siberia’ about the Siberian tiger and has established his own small non-profit organisation, The Siberian Tiger Protection Society, whose main goal is to protect and conserve the remaining populations of Siberian tiger in far-eastern Russia, Manchuria and the Korean peninsula.
Sooyong Park hopes that his continuing research into tracking and studying these wild populations will give him the evidence he needs to gain greater support and protection for the small population of wild Siberian tigers that still exist.
Film credits:
“The Endangered Emperors of Siberia”
“The Elusive Siberian Tiger”
“The Wild Ussury Tiger”
“The Vanishing Amur Leopard”
“In the Tracks of the Korean Tiger”
“Tigers and Humans in China”
“Udeghe and the tiger, The Silence Trackers”
“Blood Exchange Project of the Isolated Wild Tiger”
Awards:
Du Public, Jules Verns Film Festival, 2006, France
Excellence Prize, The 9th Tokyo Global Environmental Film Festival
The 11th ‘Best Producer of This Year’ in Korea
The Grand Prix, 26th Korean Broadcasting Awards
|
’s population chart can tell you, feminism goes hand-in-hand with depopulation. The UN offers confirmation that feminism is a great form of birth control since they consider it essential for “sustainable development,” globalist code for reducing the birth rate.
[Human settlement improvements] should be based on technical cooperation activities, partnerships among the public, private and community sectors and participation in the decision-making process by community groups and special interest groups such as women, indigenous people, the elderly and the disabled. These approaches should form the core principles of national settlement strategies. In developing these strategies, countries will need to set priorities among the eight programme areas in this chapter in accordance with their national plans and objectives, taking fully into account their social and cultural capabilities. Furthermore, countries should make appropriate provision to monitor the impact of their strategies on marginalized and disenfranchised groups, with particular reference to the needs of women.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) is led by Christiana Figueres, the daughter of Costa Rica’s former president, ensuring her admission to the globalist club. She states in the following video that the UN should “make every effort” to decrease population from its current trajectory (start at 4:30).
The former Chief Of Bioethics to the National Institute Of Health (NIH) is Israeli Ezekiel Emanual, who is brother to former Obama advisor and Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel. In an Atlantic article, he claimed that we should all consider dropping dead at 75 because it would save the government trillions of dollars. The most anti-ethical and chaotic arguments will come under the guise of ethics and world order.
I am talking about how long I want to live and the kind and amount of health care I will consent to after 75. Americans seem to be obsessed with exercising, doing mental puzzles, consuming various juice and protein concoctions, sticking to strict diets, and popping vitamins and supplements, all in a valiant effort to cheat death and prolong life as long as possible. This has become so pervasive that it now defines a cultural type: what I call the American immortal. I reject this aspiration. I think this manic desperation to endlessly extend life is misguided and potentially destructive. For many reasons, 75 is a pretty good age to aim to stop.
The quotes, videos, and articles above barely scratch the surface of what you can research yourself on Youtube and Google. While there is an unhinged element on many of the sites that talk about depopulation, I trust you can use your own judgement in separating fact from emotion.
Most corporations, whose sole motivation is profit for shareholders, have for some odd reason pathological soft spots for women and the environment. It’s no coincidence that empowerment of women into becoming corporate workers and mindless consumers shatters their reproduction while promotion of environmental concerns makes you not only guilty to have a family of your own, but inclined to give unwavering support and authority to globalist agendas that limit population in the “privileged” Western world while at the same time supporting the breeding of third-world immigrants to displace them.
Men who have come to the conclusion of depopulation arrive at it from different paths. I saw it not through politics but through sex. I saw firsthand how the government, media, and universities are deliberately trying to promote mistrust between man and woman through feminism, the myth of rape culture, and social justice ideas that allow a divide and conquer strategy to pit the sexes against each other, making every woman see a man as a potential rapist and every man see a woman as someone who could ruin his life.
The fact that men are scared to death of a false rape accusation or are fearful of being taken to the cleaners in divorce is a feature of depopulation-driven progressivism, not a bug. A wedge has been driven between men and women so that you see each other as threats to your happiness and livelihood. It is by design that you are not capable or willing of doing anything more with a woman than mutual masturbation under the influence of alcohol that will not result in family creation. Just in case you do want to make babies, a backup plan has been enacted so that reproduction will still not result: essentially all fertile young women are on birth control, encouraged to go on it after puberty. Even if she does become pregnant, the means to abort it will be so easy, especially with you convincing her to do so since coincidentally there are state and federal laws that enslave any middle class man who thinks having children could somehow serve his interests.
It’s important to understand that birth control doesn’t have to be only biological in the form of pills or abortion, but in the form of ideas and beliefs that instill fear and dread about reproducing by associating having a child with a loss of individual or consumer freedom. I wouldn’t be surprised if “men going their own way” groups are indirectly supported by the state to increase a man’s fear of reproducing with women.
In case you still have doubts that depopulation is the overreaching agenda of Western elites, I ask you to take a look at charts of fertility birth rates from World Bank data and ask yourself why isn’t there any concerted effort to reverse the declines? Why aren’t governments supporting natalist policies like in Russia that aim to seed future generations of natives to create a stronger nation that will endure the ages, instead of importing criminals and democratically challenged Mexicans or radical Islamists?
What’s amazing is that the US birth rate is below replacement rate even accounting for its fecund immigrants, showing that fertile peoples become effectively sterile once inserted into an environment that has been slated for depopulation. Currently there is not one European nation west of Russia, even when including Eastern Europe, that has a fertility rate above that of the replacement rate. By comparison, the fertility rate of Niger is 7.56, four times that of the United States, but don’t worry, Bill Gates’ humanitarian “vaccine” program will take care of that problem when the time is right through his pet project, a birth control microchip that can be turned on and off by wireless remote.
The three main cultural mechanisms of reducing native populations is to program people to be concerned for women’s rights, third world immigration, and the environment. This is why nearly everyone on the left, including SJW’s, are fanatically supportive of all three. Leftists have been soundly convinced of issues that lead to the destruction of the family unit, the breakdown of their society’s social fabric, and their own voluntary sterilization. When you combine biological efforts that include birth control and abortion, you can see how Westerners have absolutely no chance of recovering their population compared to African, Middle Eastern, and Asian populations that do not currently face both cultural and biological bombs to reduce their birth rates, but will soon enough be targeted once the Westerners are sufficiently weakened and depopulation goals are met.
You probably now understand why when Brussels accepts a new country into the European Union, the first thing they do is mandate a gay pride parade on the capital streets, and why they immediately start screeching about the need for more women’s rights. This is the cultural attack that aims to limit the reproduction of that country so that their sovereignty can be easily dismantled within only two generations, an attack that begins even before they join the EU in order to “prove” they are ready to destroy themselves for the short term gain of big loans and free trade for that nation’s local elite.
Even the form of game that I taught early in my career, of one-night stands, was compatible with the depopulation agenda since reproduction would often not result from it. This meant that I was a useful idiot for many years. I can’t help but notice that attacks against me have increased in intensity as I move away from teaching sterile sex and anti-family ideas to promoting more traditional values that are far likelier to result in reproduction.
While I would certainly agree with you that there are plenty of people currently inhabiting the Earth, I disagree that a small group of globalists at the top should be able to play Dr. Eugenicist and determine who reproduces or not without limiting their own reproduction, especially since their hypocrisy about caring for the environment is on full display as they fly around the world in their private jets to their numerous mansions. They do not want you to impregnate a fertile 19 year old and have many home-schooled and ritalin-free children with her. Instead, you’re bombarded with messages to marry an aging spinster whose womb is likely already sterile and who can’t give you more than two children, which is not nearly enough to sustain the population.
Perhaps in the 1950’s you were told that having a big family is the masculine thing to do, but it’s almost impossible these days to see images of large nuclear families represented positively in television or commercials, especially with women under 25 who are not already slaves to corporations and government propaganda.
I’m coming to the conclusion that the only way to defeat the evils of liberalism, feminism, social justice, and progressivism is to have huge families and create tribes that are free-thinking, self-reliant, and, most importantly, armed. The men of the future who can resist totalitarianism and unjust government authority come from the wombs of the women living today, and those women must at some point be convinced that being stay-at-home mothers who raise strong men is superior to becoming zombie consumers who poison and sterilize their own bodies.
The last thing that those in power want is for women to pair-bond with independent, masculine men who do not need the state and who place more importance and loyalty in their blood relatives and nation than to leftist ideas, iPhones, and sports teams. In the past, my fantasies were about sleeping with as many women as possible so I can be the playboy that I saw in the Hollywood movies, but now they are about creating the sons who will one day lead their people and their nation. It’s squarely up to us to create the men who can eliminate the parasites that are successfully controlling modern humanity.
If you like this article and are concerned about the future of the Western world, check out my book Free Speech Isn't Free. It gives an inside look to how the globalist establishment is attempting to marginalize masculine men with a leftist agenda that promotes censorship, feminism, and sterility. It also shares key knowledge and tools that you can use to defend yourself against social justice attacks. Click here to learn more about the book. Your support will help maintain my operation.
Read Next: Western Men Are Becoming Evolutionary Dead-EndsBeard today, gone tomorrow!
Kit Harington revealed a baby-faced look, sans his trademark beard, after performing in his new play, "Doctor Faustus," in London.
Captured by some awkward fan selfies, it's fair to say that the "Game of Thrones" actor looks like a cross between Heath Ledger in "10 Things I Hate About You" and a goth teen at a Cure concert. Of course, he's still as handsome as ever.
Despite all the buzz this beard grooming has caused, Harington recently told The Sunday Times that he wants the world to know he's more than just his luscious locks (it's like he knew this obsession was coming).
"I like to think of myself as more than a head of hair or a set of looks. It’s demeaning," Harington said. "Yes, in some ways you could argue I’ve been employed for a look I have."
The "Games of Thrones" actor added, "At some points during photoshoots when I’m asked to strip down, I felt that [objectification]. If I felt I was being employed just for my looks, I’d stop acting."If today is any indication, we’re all finally regretting we wished for winter to arrive after what was likely the warmest year on record. It’s that very special time of year where we feel the sudden urge to climb the icy urban waterfalls and build snow forts; only to be beaten senseless by arctic windchills and freezing our damn pants off!
A few ideas to keep away the frostbite this week:
THURS. JAN 5TH
Ectoplasm Photo Ritual @ Seen The Future (2223 E 35th St, Mpls) – 7-11pm, FREE.
One of those dark arts performances you always wanted to go to but were too afraid of being the only normie in the room. But, who knows…? Might be fun.
Record On Draft @ Fulton Brewery Taproom – 3-10pm, FREE.
Bring your own record to play and you might also get a free beer(?)
Kilimanjaro w/ Steve Japs @ Midwest Mountaineering – 6:30-8pm, FREE.
Get mountain climbing and rugged travel tips from professional trekker, Steve Japs, who’s spent 19 days traversing the Norongoro Crater and Mount Kilimanjaro. Maybe FREE coffee also.
FRI. JAN 6TH
A Clockwork Orange: @ Trylon Microcinema – 7, 8:30pm (thru Sun, diff times), $8.
Clamp in those eyelids, sit back, and feast your eyeballs upon this Kubrick classic.
Land O’Lakes Dog Show: @ River Center – 10:30am-3pm (through Sun), $9.
Let’s face it, we all want a dog but can’t have one in our damn apartments. So why not pay a paltry fee instead of being that creepy person at the dog park?
Minneapolis Rubbermen Holiday Party: @ Latte and Leather – 6:30pm, FREE.
So you want some free food and you’re willing to endure men hanging around in rubber suits? Got just the thing for you! Not sure what else might happen, but maybe you’ll learn something.
SAT. JAN 7TH
Art Shanty Season Kickoff @ Soo Visual Art Center – 6-9pm.
Features art shanty project art and photographs. Karaoke, free appetizers.
Arts and Ales: Leather Making Workshop @ Indeed Brewery – 5:30pm, $85.
Get a free beer, leather pouch, leather crafting tools and learn from a professional leatherworker at Indeed Brewery.
Brewer’s Battle – Ski and Bike Racing @ Afton Alps – 12:30pm, $48-58.
Watch teams represented by 10 different breweries take on each other on the “slopes”.
Free First Saturdays @ Walker Art Center – 10am-6pm, FREE.
All of the Walker, all to yourself! (Except the hundreds of other freeloaders). Running exhibits: Question the Wall and Land Speed Record, art-making projects, and My Neighbor Totoro screening (11am, 1pm).
SUN. JAN 8TH
Dr. Sketchy’s Model Posing @ 331 Club – 2-pm, $10.
Who would have guessed you’d enjoy drawing an art model while drinking a beer at a dive bar on a Sunday afternoon?
Energy Work & Psychic Defense @ Eye of Horus Metaphysical – 1pm, $25.
Learn how those chicks from Hocus Pocus got their groove on, or whatever. Sounds sick as hell.
Underdog Rescue @ Urban Tails – 1:30-3:30pm, FREE.
If you’ve ever thought about adopting, this might be the easiest way to make up your mind. I know you love the doges.
MON. JAN 9TH
Beer and Canvas Night @ New Bohemia Uptown – 5-7pm, $35.
Learn how to paint by a local artist and drink some brewskies.
“Artist Way” Art Lesson @ Big Sunny Studios – 6-8pm, FREE.
Take a beginners course in various arts in Northeast.
Monday Night Comedy Show @ Club Underground – 8-10pm, FREE
Moonsault Mondays @ Grumpy’s Bar Downtown – Mon. Jan 9th, 10pm, FREE.
Prove to your friends who knows more about professional wrestling (or not). Drink specials and live wrestling projected on the big screen. 50% off MN taps.
TUE. JAN 10TH
In The Dark: Panel w/ Jacob Wetterling Journalists @ Murphy Hall UMN, 6-8pm, FREE. Live discussion with APM journalists Madeleine Baran and Samara Freemark who covered the Wetterling case starting in 1989.
AdvertisementsOf the nine million people who voted Labour in May around four million withhold their backing for Corbyn and McDonnell on the economy
Here is the really bad news for Labour. It has nothing to do with Syria, which is unlikely to influence the outcome of the next general election. Nor is it to do with Europe, providing that we vote to stay in the EU, as now seems likely although far from certain. The bad news concerns the subject that always matters hugely at election time, and usually matters most: the economy.
Last week George Osborne delivered his Autumn Statement. In as far as its impact on the news agenda lasted beyond the first 24 hours, it was because the Chancellor dug himself out of a hole (by scrapping the planned changes to tax credits) while his shadow, John McDonnell, dug himself into one (by quoting Chairman Mao’s little red book). However, YouGov’s post-Autumn Statement survey suggests that Labour is failing totally to exploit a widespread public mood of dissatisfaction with the Government’s plans.
On each measure in the chart above there there has been a significant deterioration. Moreover, only 6% expect the Autumn Statement to make them better off. And expectations for the coming years provide ministers with little to cheer. By margins of between two-to-one and four-to-one, voters expect the government to fail in its ambitions to make people with low-paid jobs better off, to protect the NHS and state schools, to reduce crime rates and eliminate the deficit. (On the economy more generally, expectations are evenly divided.)
This ought to be a time when the opposition, buoyed by the election of a new leader, should be winning support for its own plans for managing the economy. Our survey finds that it isn’t – and that, on most indicators, Labour is going backwards, not forwards:
Asked who they trust more to improve the economy, 40% of voters say the Conservatives, and only 23% say Labour. This 17-point lead is the Government’s greatest since Labour lost power more than five years ago.
On the deficit, the story is the same. The Conservative lead of 18 points (39% trust the Tories more, compared with 21% for Labour) is, once more, a post-2010 record.
Only on who would make the better Chancellor has Labour not slipped back. The 20% who name John McDonnell now is exactly the same as the 20% who named Ed Balls shortly before this year’s election. The number preferring Osborne is virtually unchanged (40% in March, 38% now). If anything, that comparison flatters McDonnell, for Balls’s 20% was his lowest figure; for much of the last parliament, Osborne’s lead over his Labour shadow was in single figures.
These are of course early days. Corbyn and McDonnell have more than four years to turn these figures round (providing they are still in post in 2020). But they have much to do. In particular, they need to reassure the voters who backed Labour in May. But whereas 83% of those who voted Conservative trust their party most to improve the economy, only 56% of Labour voters trust their party more.
In other words, of the nine million people who voted Labour in May, around four million withhold their backing for Corbyn and McDonnell on the economy, saying they trust the Tories more, or trust neither party, or simply ‘don’t know’. Unless the great bulk of these doubters can be won over, Labour will not be able even to get back to nine million votes, let alone the 10-11 million it needs to become the largest party, or the 12 million-plus it needs to win outright.
PA image
See the full poll resultsWritten by Scott Berson
Americans want a new idea of the city. Downtowns are choked with cars and taxis, seas of parking lots and strip malls. Trees, parks, and even people are shoved to the periphery, making way for trucks, garages, and office plazas.
Citizens have lived this, grimaced, and have now decided it’s not what they want anymore.
Americans (especially younger ones) want to get around without a car, to meet other people outside, spontaneously; and feel like they can be part of the community, rather than migrants, grimly hoping to navigate through the chaos from work and back.
Columbus saw this type of change coming years ago, and the progress, overall in that direction, has been remarkable. Revitalization and investment is at an all-time high, and certainly doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
We have wonderful new restaurants, businesses arriving every few months, and a community that shows up every day to support them. In order to keep that momentum going, Columbus needs to completely embrace the idea of the new city: the walkable, community-oriented city.
Columbus already has about 26 miles of mixed use trails. The beautiful 14 mile RiverWalk connects neighborhoods, parks, businesses, attractions, and people all along a wonderfully designed riverfront trail, which thousands use every week.
The Fall Line Trace, built atop an abandoned railroad line in 2010, provides an artery from the vibrant downtown. It runs straight into the heart of the city towards more parks, the university, and various businesses and neighborhoods. I use it almost every day, going to work and school.
The Minimum Grid project was announced earlier in 2015 as a mixed use trail system (which will include cars) to connect the people and neighborhoods of MidTown. Construction began in June on the South Lumpkin Road Trail (official name pending) in South Columbus.
We are moving forward in designing a true, walkable city. We are on the right path. Now, the opportunity has come to think bigger.
The Friends of the Columbus Greenway Trail Committee at the Community Foundation, in partnership with the nonprofit PATH foundation (perhaps most famous for designing the Atlanta Beltline and Silver Comet Trail), have stated their desire to more than double the mileage of trails in Columbus by adding 27.5 miles of new, mixed-use paths all throughout the city.
At the public unveiling of the proposal, some 60 interested citizens listened as PATH executive director, Ed McBrayer, detailed the plans for the new system, which has been given the tentative name, “Riverlink.”
The system focuses on connecting certain “missing links” throughout the city to each other, and ultimately to the RiverWalk, which is seen as the crowning point of the trail system. McBrayer presented twelve different “links” that need to be built to create a true “intercity trail network”.
The most important link, McBrayer said, was connecting the Fall Line Trace with the RiverWalk. Presently, the trail ends at MidTown Medical Center and becomes a bike route where cyclists share the road with motorists. The problem with that, says McBrayer, is that it prevents people who aren’t on bikes, or aren’t comfortable on the roads, from following the trail downtown and to the river. “People just don’t feel safe crossing that intersection,” he said.
McBrayer proposed adding a true traffic signal at the intersection between the hospital and 10th Avenue, and then widening the sidewalk to create a true mixed-use trail that connects the Fall Line Trace directly to the RiverWalk. This will eliminate the danger of tangling with motorists. “If you’re going to fix any of the missing links, this is the one to fix,” he said. “These two trails need to be connected.”
Among the proposed links is a connection between downtown and Lakebottom/Wildwood Parks, a new RiverWalk entranceway with a plaza on 10th street for better direction to bikers,
a corridor along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard,
a vision for the City Mills area, and a more intact RiverWalk.
The cost of these new trails hasn’t been determined yet, as the project is in a conceptual stage; but, Attorney Ken Henson, a member of the committee, says he is convinced the money can be found if the public decides they really want these trails. McBrayer (pictured below) hopes to have an official proposal to submit to the city in the coming months, and has hopes to complete the project within five years.
It should not be misunderstood how important these trails can be. Having a trail nearby draws businesses and increases property values, virtually without exception. As a worker in the tourism industry in Columbus, I can promise that when visitors from out of town see our RiverWalk and our trail system, they fall in love. They want to come back, and they want to stay here longer. Investments like these are more than eye candy or vanity projects. They have real, tangible, and almost universally, beneficial effects on quality of life. They bring business, visitors, and events to town. To become the new, modern city, we must embrace these types of projects. Whatever we put in, they will give back ten times over.
Pictures provided by PATHThe Sydney Ducks was the name given to a gang of criminal immigrants from Australia in San Francisco, during the mid-19th century. Because many of these criminals came from the well-known British penal colonies in Australia, and were known to commit arson, they were blamed for an 1849 fire that devastated the heart of San Francisco, as well as the rampant crime in the city at the time.[1]
The Sydney Ducks were criminals who operated as a gang, in a community that also included sailors, longshoremen, teamsters, wheelwrights, shipwrights, bartenders, saloon keepers, washerwomen, domestic servants, and dressmakers. The largest proportion (44%) were born in Ireland and migrated during the Great Irish Famine, first to Australia as laborers and then to California as part of the Gold Rush.[2][3]
The criminality of the Sydney Ducks was the catalyst for the formation of the first Committee of Vigilance of 1851. The vigilantes usurped political power from the corrupt or incompetent officials in the city, conducted secret trials, lynchings, and deportations, which effectively decimated the Sydney Ducks. The area where the Sydney Ducks clustered at the base of Telegraph Hill was originally known as "Sydney-Town," but by the 1860s was called exclusively by its better-known name, the Barbary Coast.
On December 19, 1854 five members of the gang were involved in the Jonathan R. Davis fight.[4]
See also [ edit ]A co-ordinated Taliban assault on checkpoints in southern Afghanistan has killed five police officers and 25 Taliban fighters, local officials have said.
Omar Zwak, the provincial governor's spokesman, said that there were 500 to 1,000 Taliban fighters involved in fighting in Helmand province, which raged for 24 hourss.
However, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) issued a written statement which said that it had not seen anywhere near that number of Taliban fighters.
"Our reporting shows there were about 10 groups of four to five fighters each doing drive-by shootings against five police checkpoints," the ISAF statement said. ISAF also denied that the checkpoints were overrun.
'Success without NATO
Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, spokesman for the Taliban, told Al Jazeera that a group of local Taliban had captured three government checkpoints during the attacks.
He said the Taliban had killed a number of Afghan security forces, including two top Afghan police commanders in the area as part of its spring offensive.
Al Jazeera's Jennifer Glasse, reporting from Kabul, said that amid the conflicting reports it was agreed that it was the largest Taliban attack since the group launched its offensive in April.
Glasse said it was significant that Afghan security forces did not ask for NATO assistance.
"This, of course, is the year that Afghan security forces take control of security of the entire country, NATO watching to see how they'll do," she said.
"The Afghan provincial government spokesman in Helmand province told Al Jazeera that actually this is a success, they've pushed back the Taliban and it shows that the Afghan security forces can do well on their own."
Bomb kills police
The fighting came as officials said that a powerful roadside bomb killed seven policemen in the Chishti Sharif district of Herat province in western Afghanistan.
The policemen died when their vehicle hit the explosive device planted in the road on Tuesday morning, police said.
The officers were from the Afghan Public Protection Force, a government-run force that provides security for international supply convoys, aid groups and foreign-funded reconstruction sites.
The blast ripped through the vehicle as the men were heading to Obe district in Herat, where India is rebuilding a major hydroelectric dam.
Sher Agha, the district police chief, said that the explosion was so strong that the police truck was obliterated in the blast and there were no survivors.
There was no claim of responsibility for the deadly assault on the policemen, who were guards of the Salma dam project and were on their way to Herat city.The Luxembourg government adopted a draft law Friday that might change the present scenario of space mining. While not many private operators are working on space mining due to the legalities involved, the new law will instill confidence about extractors' rights in outer space. The legal framework is a part of the SpaceResources.lu initiative for exploration and commercial use of resources extracted from Near Earth Objects like asteroids.
“The legal framework we put in place is perfectly in line with the Outer Space Treaty. Our law does not suggest to either establish or imply in any way sovereignty over a territory or over a celestial body. Only the appropriation of space resources is addressed in the legal framework,” Etienne Schneider, deputy prime minister and minister of the economy, said in an official announcement of the draft law.
According to Article 1 of the draft law, space resources are capable of being appropriated in accordance with international law. This makes Luxembourg the first European country to provide legal ownership of external space resources. It also lays down the regulations for authorization and supervision of space resources utilization missions -- for both the exploration and the use of such resources.
Schneider added that negotiations are underway to formalize relationships with 20 companies and entrepreneurs globally for supporting the SpaceResources.lu initiative.
"Luxembourg’s new space legislation confirms the strong commitment to become a European hub for the exploration and use of space resources,” Schneider said.Wireless provider Telus Corp. is planning to reduce its workforce by 1,500 positions as it boosts dividend payments to shareholders.
The Vancouver-based company, which operates one of Canada's biggest telecommunications networks, said Thursday that the layoffs will save as much as $125 million each year.
At the same time, Telus told shareholders it would raise their dividend payments by 10 per cent, to 44 cents per share, starting in January.
The company provided few details about the downsizing, except to say that many would be voluntary departures and early retirements. Calls to a company spokesman were not immediately returned.
"These are very difficult decisions to make but a necessary element of aligning our organization with the growth, customer service and capital allocation activities we are implementing,'' said Telus president and CEO Darren Entwistle in a statement.
Entwistle returned to the leadership role at Telus after the sudden departure of president and CEO Joe Natale in August.
Telus said the decision was made after its board concluded the company's CEO should reside in Western Canada, and that Natale wasn't interested in moving.
Telus also reported its third-quarter financial results, which showed profits and revenue grew in line with analyst expectations.
Net income and adjusted net income both were up about 2.8 per cent, rising to $365 million and $398 million respectively.
Adjusted income increased about three per cent to 66 cents per share, which was better than estimates of 64 cents per share from analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.
Revenue grew 4.2 per cent from last year, rising to $3.15 billion from $3.03 billion.
"Our company continued to deliver solid financial and operational results in both our wireline and wireless businesses,'' said Entwistle.
He also said Telus has just completed one of its biggest year's in terms of capital projects, which he described as "generational investments'' that include initiatives to improve processes and efficiency.30. Carolina Hurricanes
https://medium.com/media/978a33df6e7236bcb6b5d977ae15d811/href
29. Montreal Canadiens
https://medium.com/media/19b9c6d34ae1eec0801aa11adb5f1d43/href
28. Columbus Blue Jackets
https://medium.com/media/c6df53b1f734b0ca0c0d5f340245a17f/href
27. Anaheim Ducks
https://medium.com/media/fa6c6c6bacbba9d5d43cadc6851519f5/href
26. Toronto Maple Leafs
https://medium.com/media/65b153edeeea66fb747f96e528230b57/href
25. Los Angeles Kings
https://medium.com/media/2b7649bb92a051af668b31a078969684/href
24. Ottawa Senators
https://medium.com/media/06545eb7bd49ecc34d3ef29ab3321332/href
23. Colorado Avalanche
https://medium.com/media/42e88fb97226b68d6fe72f86fcfc1982/href
22. Pittsburgh Penguins
https://medium.com/media/16e536c1f3a122f7c9f54236df6caef8/href
21. Phoenix Coyotes
https://medium.com/media/91a0c8387f4c54f824963cde35b91b14/href
20. New Jersey Devils
https://medium.com/media/0c788c1afd4fd067ef65aa12b61e4d1e/href
19. Dallas Stars
https://medium.com/media/02a1ee0bf338062105465d16106d53d3/href
18. Minnesota Wild
https://medium.com/media/0ca1c789dd36128a4ed23012dabd0f30/href
17. Florida Panthers
https://medium.com/media/34ff68bf9468604c185da1e0cd8bbfaa/href
16. Philadelphia Flyers
https://medium.com/media/8c48983df262db26e7e13bf9b0580518/href
15. Nashville Predators
https://medium.com/media/6f63695b1050407fb3e2031e698669de/href
14. New York Islanders
https://medium.com/media/aff1bf114bf59c65a18cfcc2acf833ce/href
13. Vancouver Canucks
https://medium.com/media/514a7827d4cc2bdb6ad3966769079a87/href
12. Tampa Bay Lightning
https://medium.com/media/44e62e7dddd2d1799e49ca95a8cff696/href
11. New York Rangers
https://medium.com/media/f39812904544fdc59e4af38f1c1f5945/href
10. San Jose Sharks
https://medium.com/media/36ccc564e3bb83a1dc81ab01633680c1/href
9. Chicago Blackhawks
https://medium.com/media/dda34e119f4b56fc516050d47ca574d6/href
8. St. Louis Blues
https://medium.com/media/27042c3039368f032fe2cacf54c48fc1/href
7. Calgary Flames
https://medium.com/media/021592e2acd5c882bf93d6b9eb76f999/href
6. Detroit Red Wings
https://medium.com/media/1396def080f986da8ad89519670adba9/href
5. Boston Bruins
https://medium.com/media/ed319d0df674c75bc3e392680dbcdde7/href
4. Buffalo Sabres
https://medium.com/media/09c86328c2293a8ae9e5a05918d35792/href
3. Edmonton Oilers
https://medium.com/media/a4b65386e311545543e429e854de2886/href
2. Washington Capitals
https://medium.com/media/866d004d81866982b8576a2bc272be6c/href
1. Atlanta Thrashers
https://medium.com/media/d3d51780089f1a8d9a1a32bc2610ef54/href
Victoria Johnson is a cartographer and this is her Tumblr.
Photo by Dan4th via Flickr.OpenTraffic is a global data platform to process anonymous positions of vehicles and smartphones into real-time and historical traffic statistics. We're building this in the open, using fully open-source software, with involvement from a growing list of partners.
Get Involved
We are working with vehicle fleet operators, app developers, and governments to develop and operate the OpenTraffic platform. Learn how you can contribute and benefit:
Do you collect traffic or location data? Join our community of data contributors sharing anonymized traffic statistics. You'll benefit from combining your data with sources to create a more complete and current data set. In addition to using this data in your own applications you'll be improving the global data pool and help improve transport outcomes in your community. Contact Us
Do you need traffic data for your application? Historical and real-time travel speeds will enable accurate routing, estimated time of arrival and other transport analysis and planning applications. Follow the development of the OpenTraffic platform, and we'll let you know as APIs and data extracts become available. Sign up for our Newsletter
Do you need traffic data for your city? Use traffic data to help inform transportation planning decisions in your community. OpenTraffic's analysis applications will allow users to query real-time and historical traffic conditions and monitor roadway conditions. Sign up for our newsletter, and we'll let you know as these tools become available for wider testing. Sign up for our Newsletter
About OpenTraffic
OpenTraffic, forming as a nonprofit organization, is coordinating open source software development and data collection by individuals and organizations across the transport sector.
Founding Members and Partners
Special thanks to Ben Richardson for the generous donation of the project domain name.As the Internet buzzes with social media activity, knowing where to network can be a challenge.
While LinkedIn is still viewed by many as an online resume (huge mistake btw!) – it lives at the top of my list for professional networking.
Not spending any time on LinkedIn? Let me tell you why you should.
LinkedIn operates the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 347 million members in over 200 countries and territories.
Professionals are signing up to join LinkedIn at a rate of more than two new members per second.
Average time a user spends on LinkedIn |
, Max Hill QC prosecuting, said.
They discussed “multiple targets” but the men were under surveillance by MI5 and counter terrorism police who had listening devices in two of their cars.
Iqbal, 31, Mohammed Ahmed, 25, Syed Hussain, 21, Umar Arshad, 24, all British and from Luton, all admitted a series of terrorism offences at an earlier date and are expected to be sentenced on Tuesday.
In one of the secret recordings, Iqbal told Ahmed: "I was looking and drove past like the TA centre, Marsh Road. At the bottom of their gate there's quite a big gap.
"If you had a little toy car it drives underneath one of their vehicles or something."
Ahmed said he could place a mobile phone instead of a timer on the car so they cold control its detonation.
He was heard saying: “We can try it with something like very small first time do you get me.
“You don't want to be expecting something huge and something little goes off."
He added: “I can choose the exact moment and then not only that, to attach it like a remote control car 'cause I saw that as well.
“Obviously the test run is going to be a bit hot. And you need to be careful because you don't want to get caught.”
The idea came from al-Qaeda’s banned online magazine Inspire and the men were also followers of the now dead Yemen-based terrorist An war al-Awake who encouraged people to attack in whatever form they could.
They had originally planned to carry out Jihad overseas and underwent several trips to Snowdonia to prepare themselves for conditions in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the court heard.
In one Snowdonia trip they undertook military style training drills and marching and even used wooden logs as mock guns.
In other recordings, they talked about doing an “inside job against MI5 while another boasted to having a cousin in the US air force.
They also mentioned the English Defence League as a possible target.
The hearing continues.In this tutorial we are going to learn how to build and deploy a custom Slack slash command using Node.js and the Express web framework.
If you are interested in creating Slack integrations with Node.js, you might also be interested in a previous article that illustrates how to build a Slack bot with Node.js.
Hi, I am Luciano (@loige on Twitter) and I am the co-author of Node.js Design Patterns Second Edition (Packt), a book that will take you on a journey across various ideas and components, and the challenges you would commonly encounter while designing and developing software using the Node.js platform. In this book you will discover the "Node.js way" of dealing with design and coding decisions. I am also the co-maintainer of FullStack Bulletin, a free weekly newsletter for the ambitious full stack developer.
Slash commands are special messages that begin with a slash ( / ) and behave differently from regular chat messages. For example, you can use the /feed command to subscribe the current channel to an RSS feed and receive notifications directly into Slack everytime a new article is published into that feed.
There are many slash commands available by default, and you can create your custom ones to trigger special actions or to retrieve information from external sources without leaving Slack.
In this tutorial we are going to build a "URL shortener" slash command, which will allow us to generate personalised short urls with a versatile syntax. For example, we want the following command to generate the shorturl http://loige.link/rome17 :
/urlshortener create a short url for the link http://loige.co/my-universal-javascript-web-applications-talk-at-codemotion-rome-2017/ using the domain @loige.link and the custom slashtag ~rome17
We are going to use Rebrandly as Short URL service. If you don't know this service I totally recommend you, essentially for 3 reasons:
It offers a very extensive FREE plan. Has an easy to use and well documented API for creating short URLs programmatically. Supports custom domains (I personally use it for my blog with loige.link and for FullStack Bulletin with fstack.link).
So, before starting the tutorial, be sure to have a Rebrandly account and an API Key, which you can generate from the API settings page once you are logged in.
In order to create a new custom slash command for a given Slack organisation you have to create an app in the Slack developer platform.
There are a number of easy steps you will need to follow to get started:
Select the option to create a new slash command
Specify some simple options for the slash command
Notice that, for now, we are passing a sample request bin URL as Request URL so that we can inspect what's the payload that gets sent by Slack before implementing our custom logic.
Install the new app in your test organisation
Now the command is linked and can be already used in your slack organisation, as you can see in the following image:
When you submit this command, Slack servers will send a POST request to the Request URL with all the details necessary to implement your custom logic and provide a response to the user invoking the command:
Before moving on, let's understand how the data flows between the different components that make the Slack slash command work. Let's start with a picture:
In brief:
A user types a slash command followed by some text (the arguments of the command) into a Slack chat window. The Slack server receives the command and forwards it with an HTTP POST request to the Request URL associated with the command (hosted by the slash command developer on a separate server). The POST request contains many details about the command that has been invoked, so that the server receiving it can react accordingly. Some of the fields passed by Slack to the application server are: token : a unique value generated by Slack for this integration, it should be kept secret and can be used to verify that the slash command request is really coming from Slack and not from another external source. Take not of your because you will need it later on.
: a unique value generated by Slack for this integration, it should be kept secret and can be used to verify that the slash command request is really coming from Slack and not from another external source.. text : the full text passed as argument to the slash command
: the full text passed as argument to the slash command team_id : the Slack id of the team where the slash cammand has been installed
: the Slack id of the team where the slash cammand has been installed channel_name : the name of the channel where the command was invoked
: the name of the channel where the command was invoked user_name : the user name of the user who invoked the command
: the user name of the user who invoked the command response_url: a special URL that can be used by the server to provide an asynchronous response to slack (useful for managing long lived tasks that might take more than 3 seconds to complete). The application server responds to the HTTP request with 200 OK and a message containing the output of the command that should be displayed to the user.
So it should be clear now that our goal is to implement a little web server app that receives url shortening commands, calls the rebrandly APIs to do so and returns the shortened URLs back to the Slack server.
We can break down our app into some well-defined components:
The web server: deals with all the HTTP nuances, receives and decodes requests from the Slack server and forwards it to the underlying components. Collects the result from them and returns it as an HTTP response. The command parser: parses the text (arguments) of the slash commands and extract URLS, slashtags and domains. The url shortener: uses the result of the command parser to generate the short URLs by invoking the Rebrandly APIs.
For this project we will Node.js 6.0 or higher, so, before moving on, be use you have this version in your machine.
Let's get ready to write some come, but first create a new folder and run npm init in it. In this tutorial we are going to use some external dependencies that we need to fetch from npm:
npm install \ body-parser@^1.17.2 \ express@^4.15.3 \ request-promise-native@^1.0.4 \ string-tokenizer@^0.0.8 \ url-regex@^4.0.0
Now let's create a folder called src and inside of it we can create all the files that we will need to write:
mkdir src touch \ src/commandParser.js \ src/createShortUrls.js \ src/server.js \ src/slashCommand.js \ src/validateCommandInput.js
Quite some files, uh? Let's see what we need them for:
server.js : is our web server app. It spins up an HTTP server using Express that can be called by the Slack server. It servers as an entry point for the whole app, but the file itself will deal only with the HTTP nuances of the app (routing, request parsing, response formatting, etc.) while the actual business logic will be spread in the other files.
: is our web server app. It spins up an HTTP server using Express that can be called by the Slack server. It servers as an entry point for the whole app, but the file itself will deal only with the HTTP nuances of the app (routing, request parsing, response formatting, etc.) while the actual business logic will be spread in the other files. slashCommand.js : implements the high level business logic needed for the slash command to work. It reiceves the content of the HTTP request coming from the Slack server and will use other submodules to process it and validate it. It will also invoke the module that deals with the Rebrandly APIs and manage the response, properly formatting it into JSON objects that are recognized by Slack. It will delegate some of the business logic to other modules: commandParser, validateCommandInput and createShortUrls.
: implements the high level business logic needed for the slash command to work. It reiceves the content of the HTTP request coming from the Slack server and will use other submodules to process it and validate it. It will also invoke the module that deals with the Rebrandly APIs and manage the response, properly formatting it into JSON objects that are recognized by Slack. It will delegate some of the business logic to other modules:, and. commandParser : this is probably the core module of our project. It has the goal to take an arbitrary string of text and extract some informations like URLs, domains and slashtags.
: this is probably the core module of our project. It has the goal to take an arbitrary string of text and extract some informations like URLs, domains and slashtags. validateCommandInput : implements some simple validation rule to check if the result of the command parser is something that can be used with the Rebrandly APIs to create one or more short URLs.
: implements some simple validation rule to check if the result of the command parser is something that can be used with the Rebrandly APIs to create one or more short URLs. createShortUrls : implements the business logic that invokes the Rebrandly APIs to create one or more custom short URLs.
This should give you a top-down view of the architecture of the app we are going to implement in a moment. If you are a visual person (like me), you might love to have a chart to visualize how those modules are interconnected, here you go, lady/sir:
We said that the command parser is the core of our application, so it makes sense to start to code it first. Let's jump straight into the source code:
const tokenizer = require ('string-tokenizer' ) const createUrlRegex = require ( 'url-regex' ) const arrayOrUndefined = ( data ) => { if ( typeof data === 'undefined' || Array. isArray ( data ) ) { return data } return [ data ] } const commandParser = ( commandText ) => { const tokens = tokenizer ( ). input ( commandText ). token ( 'url', createUrlRegex ( ) ). token ( 'domain', /(?:@)((?:(?:[a-z\\u00a1-\\uffff0-9]-*)*[a-z\\u00a1-\\uffff0-9]+)*\.[a-z\\u00a1-\\uffff]{2,})/, match => match [ 2 ] ). token ('slashtag', /(?:~)(\w{2,})/, match => match [ 2 ] ). resolve ( ) return { urls : arrayOrUndefined ( tokens. url ), domain : tokens. domain, slashtags : arrayOrUndefined ( tokens. slashtag ) } } module. exports = commandParser
This module exports the function commandParser. This function accepts a string called commandText as the only argument. This string will be the text coming from the slash command.
The goal of the function is to be able to extrapolate all the meaningful information for our task from a free format string. In particular we want to extrapolate URLs, domains and slashtags.
In order to do this we use the module string-tokenizer and some regular expressions:
The module url-regex is used to recognize all valid formats of URLs.
is used to recognize all valid formats of URLs. Then we define our own regex to extract domains, assuming that they will be prefixed by the @ character. We also specify an inline function to normalize all the matches and get rid of the @ prefix in the resulting output.
character. We also specify an inline function to normalize all the matches and get rid of the prefix in the resulting output. Similarly we define a regular expression to extract slashtags, which needs to have the ~ character as prefix. Here as well we cleanup the resulting matches to get rid of the ~ prefix.
With this configuration, the string-tokenizer module will return an object with all the matching components organised by key: all the URLs will be stored in an array under the key url and the same will happen with domain and slashtag for domains and slashtags respectively.
The caveat is that, for every given token, string-tokenizer returns undefined if no match is found, a simple string if only one match is found and an array if there are several substring matching the token regex.
Since we want to have potentially many urls and many associated slashtags but only one URL at the time, we want to return an object with a very specific format that satisfies those expectations:
urls : an array of urls (or undefined if none is found)
: an array of urls (or if none is found) domain : the domain as a string (or undefined if none is specified)
: the domain as a string (or if none is specified) slashtags : an array of slashtags (or undefined if none is found)
We process the output obtained with the string-tokenizer module (also using the simple helper function arrayOrUndefined ) and return the resulting object.
That's all for this module.
In case you want to learn more about regular expressions, there's an amazing article about regular expressions available here at Scotch.io.
The goal of the commandParser module was very clear: extract and normalize some information from a text in order to construct an object that describes all the short URLs that needs to be created and their options.
The issue is that the resulting command object might be inconsistent in respect to some business rules that we need to enforce to interact with the Rebrandly APIs:
There must be at least one URL.
There must be at most one domain per command (if none is specified a default one will be used).
The number of slashtags cannot exceed the number of URLs (slashtags will be mapped to URLs in order, if there are more URLs than slashtags, the remaining URLs will get a randomly generated slashtag).
A command cannot contain more than 5 URLs (Rebrandly standard APIs are limited to 10 requests per second, so with this rule we should reasonably avoid to reach the limit).
The module validateCommandInput is here to help use ensure that all those rules are respected. Let's see its code:
const validateCommandInput = ( urls, domain, slashtags ) => { if (! urls ) { return new Error ( 'No url found in the message' ) } if ( Array. isArray ( domain ) ) { return new Error ( 'Multiple domains found. You can specify at most one domain' ) } if ( Array. isArray ( slashtags ) && slashtags. length > urls. length ) { return new Error ( 'Urls/Slashtags mismatch: you specified more slashtags than urls' ) } if ( urls. length > 5 ) { return new Error ( 'You cannot shorten more than 5 URLs at the time' ) } } module. exports = validateCommandInput
The code is very simple and pretty much self-descriptive. The only important thing to underline is that the validateCommandInput function will return undefined in case all the validation rules are respected or an Error object as soon as one validation rule catches an issue with the input data. We will see soon how this design decision will make our validation logic very concise in the next modules.
Ok, at this stage we start to see things coming together: we have a module to parse a free text and generate a command object, another module to validate this command, so now we need a module that uses the data in the command to actually interact with our short URL service of choice through rest APIs. The createShortUrls is here to address this need.
const request = require ('request-promise-native' ) const createErrorDescription = ( code, err ) => { switch ( code ) { case 400 : return 'Bad Request' case 401 : return 'Unauthorized: Be sure you configured the integration to use a valid API key' case 403 : return `Invalid request: ${ err. source } ${ err. message } ` case 404 : return `Not found: ${ err. source } ${ err. message } ` case 503 : return `Short URL service currently under maintenance. Retry later` default : return `Unexpected error connecting to Rebrandly APIs` } } const createError = ( sourceUrl, err ) => { const errorDescription = createErrorDescription ( err. statusCode, JSON. parse ( err. body ) ) return new Error ( `Cannot create short URL for " ${ sourceUrl } ": ${ errorDescription } ` ) } const createShortUrlFactory = ( apikey ) => ( options ) => new Promise ( ( resolve, reject ) => { const body = { destination : options. url, domain : options. domain? { fullName : options. domain } : undefined, slashtag : options. slashtag? options. slashtag : undefined } const req = request ( { url : 'https://api.rebrandly.com/v1/links', method : 'POST', headers : { apikey, 'Content-Type' : 'application/json' }, body : JSON. stringify ( body, null, 2 ), resolveWithFullResponse : true } ) req. then ( ( response ) => { const result = JSON. parse ( response. body ) resolve ( result ) } ). catch ( ( err ) => { resolve ( createError ( options. url, err. response ) ) } ) } ) const createShortUrlsFactory = ( apikey ) => ( urls, domain, slashtags ) => { const structuredUrls = urls. map ( url => ( { url, domain, slashtag : undefined } ) ) if ( Array. isArray ( slashtags ) ) { slashtags. forEach ( ( slashtag, i ) => ( structuredUrls [ i ]. slashtag = slashtag ) ) } const requestsPromise = structuredUrls. map ( createShortUrlFactory ( apikey ) ) return Promise. all ( requestsPromise ) } module. exports = createShortUrlsFactory
This module is probably the longest and the most complex of our application, so let's spend 5 minutes together to understand all it's parts.
The Rebrandly API allows to create one short URL at the time, but this module exposes an interface with which is possible to create multiple short URLs with a single function call. For this reason inside the module we have two abstraction:
createShortUrlFactory : that allows to create a single URL and remains private inside the module (it's not exported).
: that allows to create a single URL and remains private inside the module (it's not exported). createShortUrlsFactory : (notice Url vs Urls ) that uses the previous function multiple times. This is the publicly exported function from the module.
Another important details is that both functions here are implementing the factory function design pattern. Both functions are used to create two new functions were that contains the Rebrandly apikey in their scope, this way you don't need to pass the API key around everytime you want to create a short url and you can reuse and share the generated functions.
With all these details in mind, undestanding the rest of the code should be fairly easy, because we are only building some levels of abstraction over a REST request to the Rebrandly API (using request-promise-native ).
Ok, now that we have the three main modules we can combine them together into our slashCommand module.
Before jumping into the code, remember that the goal of this module is to grab the request received from Slack, process it a generate a valid response using Slack application message formatting rules and Slack message attachments:
const commandParser = require ( './commandParser' ) const validateCommandInput = require ( './validateCommandInput' ) const createErrorAttachment = ( error ) => ( { color : 'danger', text : `*Error*:
${ error. message } `, mrkdwn_in : [ 'text' ] } ) const createSuccessAttachment = ( link ) => ( { color : 'good', text : `*<http:// ${ link. shortUrl } | ${ link. shortUrl } >* (<https://www.rebrandly.com/links/ ${ link. id } |edit>):
${ link. destination } `, mrkdwn_in : [ 'text' ] } ) const createAttachment = ( result ) => { if ( result. constructor === Error ) { return createErrorAttachment ( result ) } return createSuccessAttachment ( result ) } const slashCommandFactory = ( createShortUrls, slackToken ) => ( body ) => new Promise ( ( resolve, reject ) => { if (! body ) { return resolve ( { text : '', attachments : [ createErrorAttachment ( new Error ( 'Invalid body' ) ) ] } ) } if ( slackToken!== body. token ) { return resolve ( { text : '', attachments : [ createErrorAttachment ( new Error ( 'Invalid token' ) ) ] } ) } const { urls, domain, slashtags } = commandParser ( body. text ) let error if ( ( error = validateCommandInput ( urls, domain, slashtags ) ) ) { return resolve ( { text : '', attachments : [ createErrorAttachment ( error ) ] } ) } createShortUrls ( urls, domain, slashtags ). then ( ( result ) => { return resolve ( { text : ` ${ result. length } link(s) processed`, attachments : result. map ( createAttachment ) } ) } ) } ) module. exports = slashCommandFactory
So, the main function here is slashCommandFactory, which is the function exported by the module. Again we are using the factory pattern. At this stage you might have noticed, how I tend to prefer this more functional approach as opposed to creating classes and constructors to keep track of initialization values.
In this module the factory generates a new function that has createShortUrls and slackToken in the function scope. The createShortUrls argument is a function that needs to be created with the createShortUrlsFactory that we saw in the previous module. We are using another important design pattern here, the Dependency injection pattern, that allows us to combine different modules in a very versatile way. This patterns offers many advantages, like:
Keep modules decoupled.
Allow to switch implementation of the dependency without changing the code of the dependant modules, for example we could switch to another short URL service without the need of changing a single line of code in this module.
Simplified testability.
Enough with design patterns and back to our slashCommandFactory function... The function it generates contains the real business logic of this module which, more or leass, reads like this:
Verify if the current message body is present (otherwise stop and return error message). Verify that the request token is the one we were expecting from Slack (the request is very unlikely to have been forged by a third party). If the token is not valid stop and return error message. Use the commandParser to extrapolate information about the meaning of the current received command. Validate the command details using validateCommandInput (if the validation fails, stop and return an error message). Use the injected createShortUrls function to generate all the requested short URLs. Creates a response object for Slack containing details about every generated short URL (or errors that happened during the generation of one or more of them). For this last step we also use the internal utility function createAttachment.
Also notice that, since the operation performed by this module is asynchronous, we are returning a Promise, and that we resolve the promise also in case of errors. We didn't use a reject because we are managing those errors and we want to propagate them up to Slack as valid responses to the Slack server so that the user can visualize a meaningful error message.
We are almost there, the last bit missing is the web server. With Express on our side and all the other business logic modules already written this should be an easy task:
const Express = require ( 'express' ) const bodyParser = require ( 'body-parser' ) const createShortUrlsFactory = require ( './createShortUrls' ) const slashCommandFactory = require ( './slashCommand' ) const app = new Express ( ) app. use ( bodyParser. urlencoded ( { extended : true } ) ) const { SLACK_TOKEN : slackToken, REBRANDLY_APIKEY : apiKey, PORT } = process. env if (! slackToken ||! apiKey ) { console. error ('missing environment variables SLACK_TOKEN and/or REBRANDLY_APIKEY' ) process. exit ( 1 ) } const port = PORT || 80 const rebrandlyClient = createShortUrlsFactory ( apiKey ) const slashCommand = slashCommandFactory ( rebrandlyClient, slackToken ) app. post ( '/', ( req, res ) => { slashCommand ( req. body ). then ( ( result ) => { return res. json ( result ) } ). catch ( console. error ) } ) app. listen ( port, ( ) => { console. log ( `Server started at localhost: ${ port } ` ) } )
I believe the code above is quite self descriptive, but let's recap what's going on in there:
We initialize a new Express app and activate the body parser extension (which allows us to parse urlencoded messages from Slack). We verify if the app has been initialized with all the necessary environment variables ( SLACK_TOKEN for the Slack slash command token and REBRANDLY_APIKEY for the Rebrandly API key), otherwise we shutdown the application with an error. We can optionally specify also the environment variable PORT to use a different HTTP port for the server (by default 80 ). We use our factory functions to generate the rebrandlyClient and initialize the slashCommand. At this stage we are ready to register a POST route for the slash command which will just hook the parse the incoming HTTP requests and pass them to the slashCommand function we created before. When the slashCommand completes we just return its response as JSON to the Slack server using res.json. Finally, we can start the app with app.listen.
That's all, hooray! Let's move into running and test this Slack integration!
Our app is complete and you can start it by running:
export SLACK_TOKEN = "your slack token" export REBRANDLY_APIKEY = "your rebrandly API key" export PORT = 8080 node src/server
At this stage our app will be listening at localhost on port 8080 (or whatever other port you specified during the initialization). In order for Slack to reach it you will need a publicly available URL.
For now we don't need a permanent publicly available server, we just need a public URL to test the app. We can easily get a temporary one using ngrok.
After installing ngrok, we have to run:
ngrok http 8080
This command will print a public https URL. You can copy this into your Slack slash command Request URL.
Finally we are ready to go into our Slack app and invoke our custom slash command:
If we did everything correctly, at this stage, you should see a response from our app directly in Slack:
If you are happy with the current status of the app and you want to have permanently available for your Slack team it's time to move it online. Generally for those kind of cases Heroku can be a quick and easy option.
If you want to host this app on Heroku, be sure to have an account and the Heroku CLI already installed, then initialize a new Heroku app in the current project folder with:
heroku create awesome-slack-shorturl-integration
Beware that you might need to replace awesome-slack-shorturl-integration with a unique name for an Heroku app (somebody else reading this tutorial might have taken this one).
Let's configure the app:
heroku config:set --app awesome-slack-shorturl-integration SLACK_TOKEN = < YOUR_SLACK_TOKEN > REBRANDLY_APIKEY = < YOUR_REBRANDLY_APIKEY >
Be sure to replace <YOUR_SLACK_TOKEN> and <YOUR_REBRANDLY_APIKEY> with your actual configuration values and then you are ready to deploy the app with:
git push heroku master
This will produce a long output. At the end of it you should see the URL of the app on Heroku. Copy it and paste it as Request URL in the slash command config on your Slack app.
Now your server should be up and running on Heroku.
Enjoy it and keep shortening your URLs wisely!
So, we are at the end of this tutorial, I really hope you had fun and that I inspired you to create some new cool Slack integration! Well, if you are out of ideas I can give you few:
/willIGoOutThisWeekend : to get the weather forecast in your area for the coming weekend.
: to get the weather forecast in your area for the coming weekend. /howManyHolidaysLeft : to tell you how many days of holiday you have left in this year.
: to tell you how many days of holiday you have left in this year. /atlunch and /backfromlunch : to strategically change your availability status when you are going to lunch and when you are back.
and : to strategically change your availability status when you are going to lunch and when you are back. /randomEmoji : in case you need help in finding new emojis to throw at your team members.
... OK ok, I am going to stop here, at this stage you will probably have better ideas :)
I hope you will share your creatins with me in the comments here, I might want to add some new integration in my Slack team!
Before closing off, I have thank you few people for reviewing this article:
Also, here are few related links that I hope you will enjoy:
Official Slack documentation for building apps: in case you want to understand all the capabilities of the Slack platform.
Rebrandly custom short link api: if you want to build some other cool integration with Rebrandly.
Node.js design patterns (my book!): in case you liked the use of the factory and the dependency injection patterns and want to learn some other cool tricks to improve the quality of your code.
Unshorten short URLs with Node.js: an article I wrote in my blog that also goes into deep about how short URLs work, it should be a relevant read if you enjoyied the topic.
FullStack Bulletin: a free weekly newsletter for the ambitious full stack developer (I am one the founders and maintainers).
Cheers :)The "Undisputable Cuz," a 40-ton, 75-foot, 24-smokestack barbecue pit is on the market for a smooth $350,000. (Photo11: KHOU)
BRENHAM, Texas – Along Highway 290 between Houston and Austin sits the indisputable proof that everything's bigger in Texas.
"It's the world's largest barbecue pit," says Kim Folsom, proudly describing the giant smoker in her front yard.
Weighing 40 tons, stretching 75 feet in length, ventilated by seven smokestacks, it's the "Undisputable Cuz," a barbecue pit so huge law enforcement authorities have required special permits and escorts just to move it down the road.
Drivers passing through sometimes stop and take pictures of the black behemoth sitting alongside the road in Brenham, Texas perhaps drawn by the hand-painted sign proclaiming it the planet's biggest barbecue pit and offering it for sale.
The price: $350,000. That's without the low-mileage 18-speed Peterbilt that's hauled it around the highways that's on the market for $50,000.
"It has 24 doors – 12 on this side, 12 on the other," said Terry Folsom.
"These are your smokestacks," he said, pointing to the top of the pit. "These are your dampers that control it."
The "Undisputable Cu"' can cook four tons of meat at a time, roughly the amount of brisket served outside the Texas Capitol to all of the visitors attending the recent inauguration of the state's new governor.
It's also equipped with a walk-in cooler that has space for kegs attached to beer taps on the outside.
The heat comes from a surprisingly small fire that burns just a couple of cords of wood. A tube carries the heat along the length of the entire rig.
Terry Folsom said he acquired the pit in a business deal with its original owner, who used to take it on tour.
The Folsom's have also listed the barbecue pit on eBay.
"Some people tell me we ought to put it back on tour," Kim Folsom said. "But I'd rather just sell it and get it gone."
Her husband hopes some rich guy driving down the highway will see his wife's sign, stop on the road and write him a check.
"Get me a certified check and bring it on over here and give it to me they'll own it," he said with a laugh. "I'll take it right where they'll need it."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1JlzhBYUPDATE
] – VMware have released an official KB for the CBT issue.
Sadly if you recognize the title of this post it’s because this isn’t the first time I’ve felt compelled to write about the continued industry frustration with some repeat ESXi bugs. In February I wrote in general around the recent history of bugs slipping through VMware QA. Four months later and there has been another CBT bug slip through the net…just to reaffirm the core message of my last post I talked about the fact:
There are a number of competing vendors (and industry watchers) waiting to capitalize on any weakness shown in the VMware stack and with the recent number of QA issues leading to a significant bugs popping up not abating, I wonder how much longer VMware can afford to continue to slip up before it genuinely hurts its standing
The one area of absolute concern is the amount of Change Blog Tracking bugs that seems to slip into new builds of ESXi. This time it’s Express Patch 6 for ESXi 6 (Build 3825889) that contains an apparently new symptom of our old friend the CBT Bug. The patch it’s self is a fairly critical one for those running VSAN and VMXNET3 NICs as it addresses some core issues around them but if you use quiesced snapshots duing a VM Backup may have issues with CBT. The vmware.log of a VM being backed up will contain:
vcpu-0| xxxx: SNAPSHOT:SnapshotBranchDisk: Failed to acquire current epoch for disk /vmfs/volumes/
vmdk : Change tracking is not active for this disk xxx.
For a detailed explanation of the issue go to: http://www.running-system.com/take-care-express-patch-6-esxi-6-can-break-backup-cbt-bug/
[UPDATE]
VMware Support is aware of this issue and are currently working on it.
This KB article will be updated once the fix for this issue is released.
Disable application-consistent quiescing on the affected virtual machines. For more information, see Enabling and disabling Windows 2008 application-consistent quiescing on ESXi/ESX (1028881). Rollback the ESXi host to version 6.0 U2. For more information, see Reverting to a previous version of ESXi (1033604). To work around this issue, apply one of these options:
Again as a Service Provider the CBT bugs are the most worrying because they fundamentally threaten the integrity of backup data which is not something that IT Operation staff or end users who’s data is put at risk should have to worry about and most backup vendor’s use CBT to make backups more efficient. In this case…specifically if you use Veeam the lack of CBT will extend backup windows and increase the chances of VMs not being backed up as expected.
VMware need to continue to nail ESXi (and vCenter) as well as keeping focus on the new products. VSAN, NSX and everything that VMware offers runs on or off of ESXi and though hypervisors are not as front of mind anymore, everything that VMware does relies on ESXi and VMware partners who create products to work with ESXi need it to be stable…especially around backups. Everyone needs to backup with absolute confidence…the more these CBT bugs appear the less confident pundits become…I already hear of people not wanting to go to ESXi 6.0 because of issues like such as this latest one.
That’s not a good place for VMware to be.
Note: I had sat on this post since Friday, but reading through Anton’s Veeam Community Forums Digest this morning where he lamented the lack of QC and repeat issues. He suggest’s that this is the new normal…and that maybe the thing to do is wait and hope for vSphere 6.5…not a good situation. However, like me he also believes that this can be fixed…but it needs to happen before the next release.
References:
https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2144685
Share this: Twitter
LinkedIn
Reddit
Pocket
WhatsApp
PinterestMexican prosecutors said Sunday that they have detained a U.S. citizen as the main suspect in the shooting of an official at the U.S. consulate in the western city of Guadalajara.
The federal Attorney General's Office said that "a U.S. citizen was identified and detained for his presumed involvement in the case. This person will be deported to the United States, to determine his legal situation |
would have been attempted but prevented by restraints during the original event. Although it is seldom described as such, the Circumstraint used in routine infant circumcision provides a striking example of forcibly inhibited defensive reactions to this trauma. The limbs of baby boys are strapped down to prevent them from using their hands, knees, or feet, or their ability to assume a self-protective “cannonball” or “roly-poly” posture to interfere with or thwart the violence being perpetrated (see Figure 3). Defeating the baby’s only defense mechanisms in this way adds to the repressed memory of genital pain, a profound sense of helplessness, and ineffectuality. My unimpeded, baby-like, defensive actions during that regression appear to have been the key that unlocked the somatic memory of my life’s worst experience (see Figure 4).
Figure 3. Forced inhibition of defensive reactions. (Goldman, 1997, p.96)
Figure 4. Release of repressed anger and defensive reactions
to circumcision decades after the original, forced inhibition.
(Modified from Lowen, 1975)
Now, with the benefit of three years’ hindsight, I can also see that the defensive actions of my arms and legs during that regression constituted a first step toward dismantling a timid, defeated attitude that had plagued me throughout my life, in spite of the calm, confident manner I had developed as a façade to obscure those feelings. To use a term from Transactional Analysis, the feeling of inevitable defeat associated with circumcision may become the entire “lifescript” of a man. However, allowing a grown man in the course of a regression to this buried memory to express his infant self’s rage with the power of his adult male body, can contribute to the rewriting of this script and the emergence of a new pattern of feeling, outlook, and behavior.
Hartman and Zimberoff point out that “There is sublime release of shame when one is able to experience in the original regressed ego state overcoming what was inhibited, forbidden, or impossible in the past experience, and expressing it in the present situation” (p. 9). By revisiting the source of their chronic, defeated attitudes toward experience and discovering within themselves a new, self-affirming response to the initially agonizing experience, victims of early trauma are able to gain a new sense of power and effectiveness.
A word should be said here about the circumstances in which anger can help heal trauma. Many men habitually express anger or aggression as a way of asserting their masculinity and may do so reflexively when hurt — partly to hide from themselves or others their feelings of being a victim or “loser.” This is one form of what psychologists call “dissociation.” When we imagine the feelings most men would naturally have if they faced the facts of what was done to their genitals in infancy, it becomes immediately clear why most men, including circumcised doctors, are in denial about anything “bad” ever having happened down there. They are, in other words, dissociated from their authentic selves. I would go so far as to assert that on some level such men have always been aware that something is wrong — something is missing. In the most blatant sense, of course, what is missing for circumcised men is their foreskins. In a deeper sense, however, what is missing is awareness of any feelings whatever about missing a foreskin. When Hartman and Zimberoff speak of “building authenticity through release of dissociation and identification and reclaiming self-reflective identity” they are pointing out that regressive therapy, though admittedly painful in many respects, is extremely beneficial in that it can introduce people to their true selves. Circumcised men, for instance, can discover that they were “robbed” as infants. This discovery, combined with experiencing the sorrow and grief that go along with it and the expression of reactions “in the original regressed ego state” to the violence perpetrated on their genitals are essential aspects of healing the trauma.
It may be true that many men, upon realizing that they lost part of their sexual birthright as a result of surgery by some known or anonymous doctor, can gain momentary satisfaction by expressing rage toward the individual or the medical profession at large that they now perceive as having betrayed them. This anger can have great benefit if it leads to the release — as it often does — of tears of grief. This grief, in turn, once deeply felt and identified with, can eventually enable the authentic individual to pursue regressive therapy and discover the benefits of expressing the anger that was repressed at the time of violation. Hartman and Zimberoff state that releasing this repressed anger “fosters an empowering cognitive-emotional shift.” They cite Van Velsor and Cox (2001) who describe how the expression of repressed anger toward a rapist by a female rape victim can lead to healing. For the purposes of this paper, I will exchange “she” for “he” and “her” for “his” in the following quote without changing the basic meaning:
When the client experiences the healthy unleashing of repressed anger toward [his] perpetrators... [he] claims a boundary, or a piece of personal entitlement to certain rights involving safety and protection, personal integrity, emotional reality, and the outward expression thereof, and reinstitutes feelings of personal efficacy and power.
This is not to say, however, that adult, objective rage, properly channeled, should never be used in the campaign against circumcision. Rage against a system collectively ignorant of the consequences of its routines can be legitimately channeled into peaceful anti-circumcision gatherings, editorials, and demonstrations. System-wide revolts also can be useful, such as the refusal of nurses to participate in circumcisions in a particular hospital.
To the victims of this practice, many of whom are themselves medical interns or doctors, I would urge that you seek psychological healing by returning to the state that formed your personality... the innocent state of being a newborn baby boy with a foreskin. Recalling then how it felt to be bound, clamped, and circumcised, express your rage as you wish you could have then. Lift your knees until the leg restraints snap! Push away the doctor who approaches you with misleading smiles, scalpels, and a Gomco clamp! Assert your right to be left alone! Say “Leave me alone!” if that helps, but above all, keep those sharp instruments away from your body. Protect yourself! Be victorious! Even if this be fantasy only, exult in this moment of triumph over those intent on damaging you! Trust that you are right and they are wrong!
Not everyone is able to access what Goldman (1997) describes as the “hidden trauma” of circumcision, but if anyone reading this — including a male doctor — feels the need to heal his own circumcision-related trauma and is unsure how to proceed, I advise starting by reading some of the therapy-related documents and Internet resources listed at the end of this article.
Restoring a Foreskin
There is an additional way that victims of circumcision can regain some of the capability denied them by this surgical procedure: restoring a foreskin. An excellent resource on this subject is a book by Jim Bigelow (1992), called The Joy of Uncircumcising: Exploring Circumcision: History, Myths, Psychology, Restoration, Sexual Pleasure, and Human Rights. This volume discusses the history of circumcision and practices that can facilitate restoration of foreskin. Today, thousands of men around the globe are using one or another technique proven to cause new skin cells to develop in the remaining shaft skin of their circumcised penises. The process is slow, but patience and diligence can enable a person to develop a foreskin that will cover the glans, protecting it from further abrasion, enabling it to shed keratinized cells and restore its sensitivity. A restored foreskin lacks the erogenous nerves of the original, lost foreskin, but it greatly facilitates intercourse and, according to many reports, greatly increases sexual pleasure for both the restored man and his partner. In light of the fact that Bigelow’s volume is no longer new, it would also be wise to consult websites for one of the many national branches of NORM (National Organization of Restoring Men) that usually contain contact information for individuals who can provide information over the phone, in emails, or through group or individual meetings. These websites also generally contain links to countless articles, books, and online discussions concerning circumcision and restoring. The papers by Ron Low and Wayne Griffiths in this volume also provide useful historical and current information on restoring devices.
I should add that, in my opinion, the best way to overcome a significant amount of the damage of circumcision is to combine regressive therapy with restoration. The more aware a person becomes of the psychological trauma, the more keenly he will be aware of the physical and sexual loss. Restoring augments the psychological healing process with a physical process that may help a person to gain new confidence in his sexual equipment, even if circumcision has dealt a heavy blow.
Words of Caution
In case my story inspires anyone to pursue some form of regressive therapy in hopes of resolving emotional issues associated with circumcision, I should add a few cautionary comments. In my view, no amount of re-experiencing, catharsis, corrective emotional experience, or restoring can entirely remove from circumcision its inherently tragic nature. Even if a person were to become one of the few who are able to access feelings experienced in infancy, let alone those feelings associated with circumcision itself, please don’t expect any powerful connection to those feelings to miraculously provide long-term happiness or to quickly eliminate all the problems this surgery has caused. All I can guarantee for those determined to pursue regressive therapy is that this endeavor has the capacity to present, over time, a completely new, more accurate grasp of personal history. If a person happens to be circumcised, the probability is that somewhere in the unconscious mind is the repressed memory of that event. Painful and saddening though it almost certainly would be to re-experience that particular memory (or some other, unanticipated traumatic memory), doing so can be extremely rewarding for truth-seekers, whether or not the truths that emerge bring happiness. Also, many will testify that the cognitive dissonance resulting from the continual sabotage of efforts to enjoy life and love brought on by repressed, unfelt pain begins to resolve itself once a person starts having connected regressions. Feeling and owning those long-dissociated pains can eventually enable the conscious mind to make peace with the unconscious mind, leaving one sadder but wiser, and freer to chart one’s own future.
Advice for Doctors
If you are convinced that circumcising a baby boy’s penis does no harm, please think again. Read carefully the Taylor, et al., study on the anatomy of the foreskin (1996) and the Sorrels, et al., study (2007) comparing the sexual sensitivity of the intact versus the circumcised penis. Also, find on the Internet a video of a medical circumcision (e.g., www.nocirc.org.) Watch it carefully, but listen to the sounds produced by the baby. Imagine that you are the baby rather than the surgeon. This exercise, if pursued objectively, should help provide a new perspective.
I would like to quote from a personal communication from Gabriela Monasterio, a practitioner of deep feeling therapy in Mexico, who believes that unresolved inner pain is what prevents individuals from feeling the natural joy of being alive. In the following response to a video of a routine medical circumcision of a newborn male, Monasterio offers some additional possible explanations for a circumcising doctor’s apparent indifference to the baby boy’s suffering:
Watching this video of a baby boy being circumcised, I wondered how on earth this doctor or anyone who witnessed the circumcision could be deaf to the sound of the baby’s cries and the evident fact that he was in shock. The doctor continued to describe the process as if he were talking about a cooking recipe. I feel that this kind of reaction reveals an emotional numbness and deafness in the doctor that can only come from denying and stuffing up his own pain... and possibly from a deep “acting out” of that denied pain evident in the fact that he could circumcise that poor baby as if he were just following instructions in a manual.
Torturing babies through circumcision is plain torture and we are not here to sugarcoat, justify, or hide this fact. The younger the victims are the worse they are harmed. Facing this truth is the only way we can change what needs to be changed. All that is needed is that we change the way we treat children. If we would stop needlessly torturing them, we could undoubtedly change the world in profound ways. If children grow up accepted as they are, they will become humane and compassionate. If they are not, then humankind will be condemned to repeat its mistakes over and over, till we destroy ourselves (Monasterio, 2007).
Fully realizing that doctors perform miracles of healing daily through the removal of malignant tumors and the mending of broken bodies, my final word of advice is simply that physicians remember the first part of the Hippocratic Oath taken upon entering this profession: “..never do harm to anyone.” If there is nothing malignant or broken about a newborn boy’s foreskin, what could be simpler and more wonderful than to let it be? If, on the other hand, you choose to circumcise a baby’s healthy foreskin, please remember: he will never forget and likely will never forgive the harm you have needlessly done.
References
Bigelow, J. (1992). The Joy of Uncircumcising: Exploring Circumcision: History, Myths, Psychology, Restoration, Sexual Pleasure, and Human Rights. Lindenhurst, IL: Hourglass Book Publishers.
Boyd, B. (1998). Circumcision Exposed: Rethinking a Medical and Cultural Tradition. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press.
Chamberlain, D. (1989). Babies remember pain. Pre- and Peri-natal Psychology Journal, 3(4), 297-310.
Freud, S. (1916-1917/1933). New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis (Lecture XXXII, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life.” In J. Strachey (Ed. & Translator) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 22, pp. 81-95), London: Hogarth Press (Original work published 1916-1917).
Golden, T. (1999). Do men “remember” the trauma of circumcision? Posted on MENWEB (www.menweb.org/circtom.html).
Goldman, R. (1997). Circumcision: The Hidden Trauma; How an American Cultural Practice Affects Infants and Ultimately Us All. Boston: Vanguard Publications.
Hartman, D., & Zimberoff, D. (2004). Corrective emotional experience in the therapeutic process. Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 7(2), 3-84.
Holmes, S., Morris, R., Clance, P., & Putney, R. (1996). Holotropic Breathwork: An experiential approach to psychotherapy. Psychotherapy, Theory, Research, Practice, Training. 33(1), 114-120.
Jackins, H. (1970). Fundamentals of Co-counseling Manual. Seattle: Rational Island.
Janov, A. (1970). The Primal Scream. New York: Dell Publishing.
Janov, A. (1983). Imprints: The Lifelong Effects of the Birth Experience. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc.
Janov, A. (1991). The New Primal Scream: Primal Therapy 20 Years On. Wilmington, DE: Enterprise Publishing.
Janov, A. (2007). Primal Healing: Access the Incredible Power of Feelings to Improve Your Health. Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books.
Kellogg, J.H. (1888). Plain Facts for Old and Young: Natural History and Hygiene of Organic Life. Burlington, Iowa: F. Segner & Co. (Facsimile reprint: New York: Arno Press, 1974).
Levine, P. (1999). Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body. Boulder, CO: Sounds True.
Lewis, V. (2006). A mutilator’s question. In D. Bollinger (Ed.) Project blOUCH!, April 28, 2006, available online at: www.genitalintegrity.net/blouch/2006/a_mutilators_question.php
Page accessed February 20, 2008.
Lowen, A. (1967). The Betrayal of the Body. New York: MacMillan Company.
Lowen, A. (1975). Bioenergetics. New York: Putnam Publishing Group.
Maimonides, M. (1963). The Guide of the Perplexed. Translation by Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago, p.609.
Milos, M. (1989). Infant circumcision: What I wish I had known. In J. Prescott (Ed.) The Truth Seeker: Crimes of Genital Mutiliation, 1(3):3.
Monasterio, G. (2007). Personal communication, June 5, 2007.
NORM: The National Organization of Restoring Men. Website: http://www.norm.org/ (Accessed 1/1/09).
O’Hara, K. (2002). Sex as Nature Intended It: The Most Important Thing You Need to Know about Making Love, but No One Could Tell You Until Now (2nd Edition). Hudson, MA: Turning Point Publications
O’Mara, P. (Ed.) (1993). Circumcision: The Rest of the Story. Santa Fe, NM: Mothering Magazine.
Phelps, E., & Anderson, A. (1997). Emotional memory: What does the amygdala do? Current Biology, 7(5), 311-314.
Preston, E.N. (1970). Whither the foreskin? Journal of the American Medical Association, 213(11), 1853-1858.
Reich, W. (1949). Character Analysis: Third, Enlarged Edition. New York: Orgone Institute Press.
Rhinehart, J. (1999). Neonatal circumcision reconsidered. Transactional Analysis Journal, 29(3), 215-221.
Romberg, R. (1985). Circumcision: The Painful Dilemma. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey.
Rowan, J. (2000). Primal Integration counselling and psychotherapy. In S. Palmer (Ed.) Introduction to Counselling and Psychotherapy London: Sage.
Schore, A. (1994). Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Shapiro, S. & Forrest, M. (1997). EMDR: The Breakthrough “Eye Movement” Therapy for Overcoming Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma. New York: Basic Books.
Sidler, D., Smith, J., & Rode, H. (2008). Neonatal circumcision does not reduce HIV/AIDS infection rates. South African Medical Journal, 98(10), 762-766.
Siegel, D. (1999). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. New York: The Guilford Press.
Sorrells, M.L., Snyder, J.L., Reiss, M.D., Eden, C., Milos, M.F., Wilcox, N., & Van Howe, R.S. (2007). Fine-touch pressure thresholds in the adult penis, BJU International, 99(April), 864-869.
Taylor, J.R., Lockwood, A.P., & Taylor, A.J. (1996). The prepuce: Specialized mucosa of the penis and its loss to circumcision. British Journal of Urology, 77, 291-295.
Van Velsor, P., & Cox, D.L. (Dec 2001). Anger as a vehicle in the treatment of women who are sexual abuse survivors: Re-attributing responsibility and accessing personal power. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 32(6), 618-625.
Vereshack, P. (2001). The Psychotherapy of the Deepest Self, 5th Edition. Toronto, Ontario: Life Perspectives. [Available online as Help Me, I’m Tired of Feeling Bad at www.paulvereshack.com]
Wallerstein, E. (1980). Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy (Springer Series: Focus on Men, Volume One). New York: Springer Publishing Company.
Weiss, C. (1964). Routine non-ritual circumcision in infancy. Clinical Pediatrics, 3, 560-563.Senator Brian Schatz’s (D-HI) filed an amendment for the immigration bill Wednesday that would allow stateless people in the U.S. to seek conditional lawful status if their nations have been made uninhabitable by climate change.
Drought in Mexico? Gee, we never have droughts in Mexico. But now that we have had one, say hello to your 25 million new, specially-amnestied US citizens.
This is a political game, and a political game moreover from which half of America is being excluded from playing.
What’s going on is that Liberals are offering absurd amendments to be “traded away” in exchange for Conservatives dropping their non-absurd demands, such as for increased border security.
So the liberals will ultimately “trade” their idiotic amendments for our sensible ones on border security, and then our elected conmen will tell us we “got a good deal,” so we should take the Gang of 8 proposal as is. See? It was a straight-up, even-steven trade. Now we must pass this bill, Because, Compromise!
Enough. Enough.
via @lilmissrightieRichard Spencer, pictured on October 19, 2017, is scheduled to be a panelist at its "Europe of future" debate in Warsaw
ADVERTISING Read more
Warsaw (AFP)
Poland's foreign ministry on Thursday said it objected to a visit by US white supremacist Richard Spencer, whom Polish nationalists have invited to an Independence Day event next month.
Spencer is the 39-year-old leader of the so-called "alt-right" movement -- encompassing white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan -- and the organiser of a white supremacist rally that erupted in deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia earlier this year.
"As a country that was one of the Nazis' greatest victims, we believe that the ideas propagated by Mr. Spencer and his followers may be a danger to all who hold dear human rights and democracy. They are also against Polish law and order," the Polish foreign ministry wrote in a statement posted to its Twitter account.
"The foreign ministry staunchly objects to a Polish visit by people expressing views based on racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic ideas," it added, without clarifying whether Spencer would be prevented from entering the country.
Earlier this month, the Polish far-right National Social Congress (KNS) wrote on its Facebook page that Spencer would be a panelist at its "Europe of future" debate in Warsaw on November 10, on the eve of Poland's Independence Day.
On Monday, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) called on Polish authorities to stop Spencer from taking part in the event.
"We believe it is necessary for authorities to send out a clear, strong signal that taking part in Richard B. Spencer's activities is unacceptable," AJC Central Europe director Agnieszka Markiewicz wrote in an oped published in the Gazeta Wyborcza daily.
The white nationalist rally in Charlottesville that Spencer organised in August triggered a weekend of clashes in which a woman was killed when a car ploughed into counter-protesters, and two police officers died in a helicopter crash as they were responding to the violence.
Spencer also co-organised a conference titled "The Future of Europe - Perspectives on Geopolitics, Identity and Nationalism" that was slated to take place in Budapest in October 2014 but was cancelled by the interior minister, who described the speakers as "proponents of racist ideologies".
Spencer was then deported from Hungary.
© 2017 AFP2013 is coming to an end, but it doesn’t mean we ran out of awesome BCI stories. Following yesterday’s winning candidate for our nonexisting WTF contest, today we have something truly wonderful to show you: Audi Mind Race, an inspiring race track installation with eight Audi R18 e-tron toy cars respectively controlled through eight NeuroSky MindWave headsets.
Built by the Hungarian-Spanish 20H team for a joint event of Audi and the Football Club Barcelona, the concept idea was to get the Spanish football players to control toy cars with their level of attention.
Since Audi is a premium partner of the Barcelona team, the German car giant handed out new cars to the squad for the 2013/14 season.
Before the handover, the football players took part in this unique activity that called on them to use their minds: The Audi Mind Race, featuring eight miniature handmade Audi R18 e-tron quattro cars which the players moved through their own mind, as the energy generated by the players’ brains powered the vehicles.
As you can see in the video below, the track also features a real time mapping animation that follows the cars performances.
The realization of the concept is simply amazing. This is probably the coolest phygital (physical + digital) project of the year, where BCI technology meets fast moving object detection and projection mapping, completed with an artistic touch in Tron-like style.
Beside the football players, as part of the Audi Attitudes social initiative, 24 girls and boys aged between 8 and 10 were also invited to the event to play and challenge each other.
To see additional photos and learn more about Audi Mind Race visit the project page on the 20H website.The Irish are facing the worst cuts in the history of the state and Cowen will leave office by taking a cut in salary
Ireland budget: Cowen to cut salary by €14,000. And his point is?
Today the Irish public will feel the chill winds that follow the IMF and EU bailout with the most draconian budget in the history of the state this afternoon.
But the country's leaders still don't get it.
The Irish Times reports that Brian Cowen is going to lead from the front – he's going to take a €14,000 (£12,000) pay cut. For a man whose ratings have collapsed to just 8%, this is an extraordinarily empty gesture.
First it won't affect Cowen – it's an early Christmas gift for an opposition leader. Second, it isn't a massive cut and the Taoiseach, whoever that will be, will still be one of the best paid leaders in the world.
Maybe he was taking a leaf out of Gordon Brown's book. He, if you remember, slashed his pay knowing he also was about to leave office, leaving David Cameron with a remuneration package down from £194,000 to £142,000.
If the Irish Times report is proved right later today, Cowen or his successor will still have a headline salary (without pension, car, accommodation etc) of €214,000.
Following the hue and cry over the use of state cars at a recent Fianna Fáil summit in Farmleigh House, the government will trim down its fleet and start pooling cars, several papers report this morning. One of the government jets will also be mothballed.
Public sector pay continues to be a controversial issue, reflected in your comments on the blog on the subject yesterday.
Today's budget is expected to include a €250,000 cap on bosses' pay in the public sector, although this is unlikely to cover the semi-state bodies, including the Electricity Supply Board and the Dublin Airport Authority whose bosses take home €750,000 and €550,000 respectively, or those already under contract.
These gestures will be cold comfort to the public who are facing child welfare cuts, income tax hikes and a reduction in the minimum wage.
Budget headline changes
• The introduction of a "universal charge" to take the place of the PRSI (social insurance) and the healthy levy. This will hit higher earners and those on substantial pensions – the old PRSI ceiling of €75,000 will be removed.
• The narrowing of the income tax bands forcing those on as little as €15,000 to pay tax. The threshold currently starts at around €18,000 a year.
• No stamp duty for those in arrears who trade down.
• A cut of 5% in social welfare payments including dole.
• Removal of tax advantages for private and personal pensions. This is expected to include a cap on the tax-free lump sum people can take out of their pension in the first year. Previously this was not capped.
• A cut of €10 a month in child benefit for the first and second child and €20 for subsequent children.
• An increase in excise duty on petrol and possibly alcohol and cigarettes.
• Registration fees to go up from €1,500 to €2,000 for third-level college. This will only apply to the first child – a "crumb of comfort" says the Irish Independent.
• A cut in airport tax from €10 to €2 per flight
Elsewhere in the papers today Independent columnist Sam Smyth notes that Brian Lenihan is unperturbed by yesterday's Financial Times survey of European finance ministers which ranked him the worst out of 19.
He notes the same paper also voted his predecessor, one Brian Cowen, the best finance minister four years ago. Don't expect too much humble pie at the FT this morning.
But if you want a little lift before the frighteners are put on you at 3.45pm today, enjoy the fact that Ireland can still punch above its weight culturally – something the government should bear in mind when it considers the tax breaks it gives TV and film production.
Yesterday we welcomed Stephen Fry to our shores for a cameo role in the Irish language soap opera Ros na Run on TG4.
And Eddie Izzard was in Dublin filming as Long John Silver in Treasure Island.
Fry told his two million followers on Twitter that he got slightly inebriated with the Connemara hospitality before going for a spot of lobstering.
"I shall lurch slightly on account of six pints of Guinness hospitably poured down my throat".
Stephen Fry samples a drink on the set of Irish language soap Ros na Run in Connemara
He might help the country off its knees by giving tourism a lift. Last night he told followers that "Connemara is pretty extraordinary. It's like the sea - wet and very cold, but actually it's beautiful."Two schools in the UK are testing the use of body cameras worn by teachers in order to deter bad behavior in the classroom. The move is part of an “unstoppable” trend for the adoption of this technology, says criminal justice researcher Tom Ellis, who revealed the existence of the three-month trials in a report for The Conversation.
According to Ellis, the cameras are optional, only turned on when it is “legitimate, proportionate, and necessary,” and are intended to help teachers resolve conflicts and reduce low-level disturbances. “The cameras are not on all the time,” Ellis told The Guardian. “Where there is a perceived threat to a member of staff or pupil for example, they are used. It’s not like a surveillance camera.”
Children are told when they’re about to be filmed
The names of the schools involved are not being disclosed in order for the trials to be carried out without interference. Children are told when they’re about to be filmed by teachers, and any recorded footage is encrypted and stored in a cloud system similar to that used for by the UK police for their body cameras.
The Information Commissioner’s office — the UK agency responsible for data privacy — has said there’s no issue with schools using body cameras as long as the footage is stored securely. The Department for Education has also commented that the trials are a matter for individual schools to handle. A spokesperson for the department told The Guardian: “The schools are acting within the law as far as we know but we haven’t investigated this matter.”
Schools in the US are also experimenting with the use of body cameras, but their deployment has mostly been limited to “school resource officers” — sworn law enforcement officers who work exclusively within schools. Giving the same technology to teachers as a way of controlling pupils is arguably a very different measure.
In both the US and the UK, body cameras are now relatively common among law enforcement, although reactions to their use is mixed. Although trials have shown that wearing cameras leads to reduced a number of assaults and complaints against officers, one of the touted benefits of the technology — transparency — hasn’t really come to fruition. In the US, a study of 25 police departments using the cameras found that only two shared footage with citizens who wanted evidence when making a complaint against an officer. Similarly, there have been a number of incidents where officers have simply turned off their cameras, rather than record arrests and killings.
Of course, the stakes for teachers are not as high as for police officers, but the evidence so far suggests body cameras are not a straightforward fix to any problem.AUSTIN, Texas – Texas Men's Golf senior Doug Ghim defeated Sahith Theegala in 19 holes and Joey Vrzich, 3 & 2, to advance to the quarterfinal round of match play at the U.S. Amateur on Thursday at Riviera Country Club.
In the round of 32, Ghim struck first to take a 1 up lead after making a birdie on the second hole, but Theegala responded to win the next two holes to take a 1 up lead. Ghim fired back, winning two out of the next three holes on birdies and kept a 1 up lead until Theegala made a birdie on 17 to win the hole to return to all square. The two players made par on 18, but Ghim came out on top with a par on 19 to Theegala's bogey.
Ghim never trailed in his match with Vrzich, taking an early 1 up lead on the second hole, before returning to all square on hole three. He returned to 1 up after making a birdie on hole six's par-3 and extended his lead with pars on eight and nine. Vrzich made a birdie on 10, but Ghim won hole 12 and held on through 16 for the win.
Ghim will face Connor Swyme at 3:30 p.m. CT on Friday, Aug. 18 in the quarterfinals. The winners of Friday's matches will advance to Saturday's semifinal round.
For live scoringAfter publicly airing some of their grievances with the GOP’s current strategy of repealing Obamacare without a replacement plan, a handful of Republican senators put their concerns in legislative writing. Five senators on Monday evening introduced a measure that would delay the next steps on repealing the Affordable Care Act by more than a month. The senators, in their statements accompanying the provision, said the delay would buy Congress more time to work out of the the details of a replacement.
“This amendment will ensure that we move forward with a smart, responsible plan to replace the law as quickly as possible,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) in a statement announcing the measure. He was joined by Bob Corker (R-TN), Susan Collins (R-ME), Bill Cassidy (R-LA.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) in introducing the proposal.
The proposal would amend the budget resolution currently being considered by the Senate that is supposed to act as a vehicle for the Republicans’ repeal effort. The budget resolution as it now stands directs the relevant committees in the House and Senate to come up with the actual repeal legislation that will be passed through the process known as reconciliation, which requires only a majority vote in the Senate. The budget resolution, which was introduced last week, gives the committees until Jan. 27 to submit their repeal bills for the next steps in the legislative process.
In contrast, the amendment introduced Monday evening would extend that deadline until March 3, so that the incoming Health and Human Services secretary (likely Georgia GOP Rep. Tom Price) has “adequate time to review what the Trump administration can repeal and replace administratively versus legislatively, and ensure that Congress puts in place a responsible timeline for replacing the law,” according to the amendment’s press release.
On the House side, rank and file members have expressed a desire to slow the process as well. After a meeting Monday evening at Tortilla Coast, a restaurant near the Capitol, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), the chair of the House Freedom Caucus, said that there was an “overwhelming consensus” among the group of conservative hardliners that they’d like to see more specifics about the plan to repeal and replace Obamacare before voting on the budget resolution, which is expected to be up for a vote in the House this week.Beginning June 6, a portion of Cedar Lane in Bethesda will close to traffic for at least two months.
WASHINGTON — Beginning June 6, a portion of Cedar Lane in Bethesda will close to traffic for at least two months.
The Maryland State Highway Administration will close the road from Rockville Pike to Elmhirst Parkway, at the Stone Ridge School, to replace pipes beneath the road.
The project is part of a larger effort to improve the intersection of Cedar Lane and Rockville Pike, which the highway administration calls one of the most congested intersections in Montgomery County. A right-turn only lane ill be added to Rockville Pike, turning onto Cedar Lane.
Congestion has worsened since the Base Realignment and Closure added thousands of staff and visitors to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center nearby.
Cyclists and pedestrians will be able to travel through the work zone.
The closure will detour school buses and Route 34 RideOn buses.
The highway administration has posted a suggested detour for passenger vehicles.
The road will close just after midnight on June 6 and is expected to reopen in the middle of August.
View a map of the area of the closure:
Follow @WTOP and @WTOPTraffic on Twitter and WTOP on Facebook.The Chirok reconnaissance and combat hovercraft drone which can be operated both in manned and unmanned mode is set to be unveiled at the MAKS 2015 show later this month in Zhukovsky, near Moscow.
The United Instrument Manufacturing Corporation (UIMC) developed the Chirok UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) after a five year effort, a Rostec press release said yesterday.
The UAV needs only 100 meters to take off from uneven or marshy areas. Chirok is designed to monitor the ground or water surfaces, as well to transport various payloads including cruise missiles. The military will be able to use this drone for reconnaissance and attack purposes |
62 votes out of 3,000 cast. Her loss immediately set off protests from hundreds of her backers, many of whom charged that there were irregularities that included allowing voters to cast proxy ballots without proper ID.
Some Democratic insiders are already worried the dispute has potential to do long-term damage, creating a rift in the state party as it heads into crucial 2018 elections, where as many as nine GOP House seats could be at stake in California.
Get the inside story Sign up for POLITICO Playbook and get the latest news, every morning — 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.
“This is our Tea Party moment,’’ said one leading Democratic strategist. “And it’s not going away.”
Republicans have already seized on the protests. State party chairman Jim Brulte said the issue underscores “the complete hypocrisy of the Democrats when it comes to election integrity.”
“Democrats think voter identification laws are important for their party elections, but don’t think they are good enough for the California voters,” Bruite said in a statement. “It should be clear to the people of California that the Democrats are willing to put the elections of our state officials at risk while protecting their own Party elections."
Steve Maviglio, a spokesman for Bauman, said he welcomes the review process and will not interfere in it.
“This has never been a secret ballot election. The party’s going to make all records available for review,’’ Maviglio said. “The ballots were counted with representative of all candidates in the room in a very public process, and they’re allowed to inspect everything available,’’ he said.
He said Bauman is convinced “the results of the election will speak for themselves.”
Ellis backers say they’re so convinced the audit will find the outcome in their favor that, if necessary, they will use the manpower and money necessary to contact every one of the nearly 3,000 delegates who cast votes in the race to sign legal affidavits regarding their vote.
“We raised half a million dollars for this election,” said Ellis’ strategist Joe Macaluso, “and we’ll have the volunteers and donations to support the effort.”
The race between Bauman, a longtime party operative, and Ellis, a relative newcomer, was cast as one between the left and the far left of the party, between “new school” and “old school’’ wings — Berniecrat activists and more traditional Democrats.
Macaluso, a lead strategist for the Ellis, said that going into the election during the Democratic Convention in Sacramento, the Ellis campaign had carefully tracked its voters and it determined that 97 percent of those who said they would support her turned up to vote for her.
When the razor-thin outcome was announced, Ellis supporters demanded recounts and a re-vote from the floor — only to be told by Burton there were no provisions for such a move. But Burton did promise Ellis would be given full access to the ballots, now in the possession of the party’s executive director, Chris Myers, for examination.
Macaluso said Ellis will not concede the election until the audit is finished, a process that’s expected to be done quickly, and that she will abide by the results.
“Kimberly says we need to assume the best in everyone, but until we look at it, we won’t be able to validate the election,’’ he said. “But nobody has more of a vested interest in making sure there is no question about the fairness of this election than Eric Bauman. So of all people who should want this to be done cleanly – it’s him.”
Authors:
This story tagged under: California
Bernie SandersLast year, Tahj Malik Chandler dropped my favorite project of the year.
The rapper known as Saba faced stiff competition considering Chicago’s regional scene was firing from all cylinders (shoutout Jamilla Woods and Noname) and Isaiah Rashad’s first studio album proved to be a tremendous body of work.
Rap Alias: Saba
Name: Tahj Malik Chandler
Age: 22
Social Media: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
Saba first got his shine from the mainstream when he was featured on Chance’s lead single and music video “Angels“. The track features the Chicago native on hook duty while Chance spits on the playful beat.
However, diving through his catalogue has shown that he is not a voice that should be relegated to a supportive role.
ComfortZone, his second mixtape, is where the artist starts to truly find his lane. Much of the young MC’s standout efforts are highlighted when musicality is involved. Tracks 2 (Burnout) and 3 (Butter) still has one of the most rhythmically smooth transitions heard within a Hip-Hop body of work.
The rapper’s more recent offering “Bucket List Project” has shown a conceptual progression within his artistry. With interludes offered at the end of the track by the likes of Chi-town OG Lupe Fiasco and underrated talent Jean Deaux, the album feels more cohesive in its narrative of experiencing life to the fullest before death. His lyricism is as sharp as it’s ever been.
It’s been a minute since Saba’s dropped new material. The Westside Chicago lyricist is currently touring continentally within the U.S. so it’s unsure when new music will be surfacing.
The sure thing is that he’s only getting started.
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE:
With Chief Keef’s rise, Drill Rap came to define Chicago’s Hip Hop scene in the early 2010’s. Saba bucks the trend and forces listeners to come to terms with a less visible narrative when thinking of Black youth in Chicago. Saba is a thoughtful mind who excelled in academia as a child. Much of his offerings deal with the tragedies and triumphs of growing up in his environment. The rap artist provokes pensiveness and does not shy away from reflecting on his own personal experiences.
TRACKS IN ROTATION:
ComfortZone and Bucket List Project in its entirety
(Personal favorites include the following)
Stoney – Saba
Church / Liquor Store (feat. Noname) – Saba
Photosynthesis (feat. Jean Deaux) – Saba
Shadow Man (feat. Saba, Smino & Phoelix) – Noname
AdvertisementsCapitalism has been the world’s dominant economic system for more than 700 years. And as it brings the planet to new crises, author Raj Patel believes it’s important to imagine what might replace it.
Capitalism values cheapness above all else.
But reform won’t happen unless we understand capitalism’s appeal and historical rise, says Patel, a food justice activist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin. It’s remarkably resilient and can be traced to a process he calls “cheapness.”
Together with Binghamton University professor Jason W. Moore, he has written The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press, 2017), which aims to put it all together for us. The seven “things” of the title aren’t physical objects as much as they are a hidden social, ecological and economic infrastructure: nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives. The point being that cheapness is a process of responding to economic crises by devaluing each of those forces so that capitalism can continue to concentrate wealth in the hands of the already-wealthy. In that sense, “cheap nature” refers to the way in which land and its resources are systematically given away to businesses for exploitation, “cheap work” refers to slavery and other anti-worker tactics that keep wages low, and so on.
Capitalism values cheapness above all else. And through this lens, Patel and Moore explore the evolution of capitalism from its roots in the late medieval period with the collapse of feudalism in Western Europe caused by climate change and the Black Death to—now.
Raj Patel spoke with YES! Magazine senior editor Chris Winters in Seattle. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Winters: If I were to take a single important concept away from this book, what should it be?
Patel: The idea would be that we are made by capitalism, and that capitalism can’t last forever. The reason we wrote the book is so we could help broker conversations between the different areas of social movement activism and social transformation. We’re hoping that these ideas of seven cheap things can help social movements identify their shared points of solidarity with other movements. When movements begin, they always start with living politics and real struggles.
Capitalism can’t last forever.
Obviously, people start the work of change and resistance where they are. You always start with the politics the way you find them, you can’t start from any ideal position. But understanding that, for example, the struggles of activism in Black Lives Matter are linked to the struggles of activism in 350.org, which is linked in turn to the struggles of activism in certain parts of Slow Food, is I think the contribution that we wanted to make.
And if you think systemically, we can figure out ways of fighting them all at once, which is what we have to do.
Winters: You identify toward the end of the book some promising signs where organizations are in fact taking on causes transcending their traditional political boundaries: the Movement for Black Lives taking on fossil fuels, for example. La Via Campesina talking about disability rights. Are you seeing the future of activism moving in that direction, toward taking that broader view?
Patel: I do. I know that there are still parts of, for example, the environmental movement that don’t particularly care about people as much as they care about pandas, and that their environmentalists can sometimes be misanthropic. But in general, even the Sierra Club has started to melt its traditional antipathy towards immigration and is taking race more seriously than it has in the past. The Sierra Club is a fairly large environmental movement, and its transformations have been made possible by the ceaseless activism of people who are in the environmental justice community. La Via Campesina starts off as an organization that’s about fighting the World Trade Organization and ends up as an organization that is transforming human relationships with nature, that takes feminism incredibly seriously, that tackles issues of gender violence. And that’s because they have to. It’s not because someone in a Politburo meeting decides, “Oh, this is probably what we ought to tackle next.” It’s because the way that La Via Campesina has built their politics around food sovereignty encourages and demands this kind of spread of mission, because actually in order to be food sovereign as La Via Campesina wants to be, they have to attend to issues of gender equality.
Winters: I read this book as an upending of the traditional historical narrative in the sense that you’re taking a look at the significant events of the past 700 years and looking at them not as what they meant at the time, but how they laid the groundwork for what we are experiencing in right now. When you were researching the book, were you intending to look at the historical underpinnings of our current system and how it got there, or were you working backwards from the present?
Patel: I think, in a sense, it was a bit of both. And that’s because we knew that the sorts of intervention we wanted to make, and in particular we wanted to bring history to some of the debate and some of the activism. But we also discovered new historical connections based on the kinds of questions we’re asking of our present moment.
We wanted to bring history to some of the debate and some of the activism.
Early on that we knew that Christopher Columbus was going to be an interesting figure, for example, in the stories that we were telling. So we dug deeper and deeper and deeper and found much more about him than either of us had known. For instance, since we’re interested in how finance works today, we wanted to find out more about what Columbus did. The structure of the finance that made Christopher Columbus’ journeys possible, I think, is very interesting, based on a web of promises of future colonization, and financiers made rich through war looking for a high return. It’s very modern. His attitudes toward women and his attitudes toward work … and what he thought of nature. What we found was that by coming at the history of capitalism with a clear analytical agenda and then doing the deep sort of archival work, we were then able to sort of spin it back to the present.
For instance: here we are in Seattle. Jeff Bezos is one of the kings of the hill in this town. And in many ways, the things that Columbus says and the way he talks investors into giving him money, through which he always manages to get paid and his investors have to wait a long time for their money to come, the ways that he offers new frontiers in which entrepreneurship and civilization will be brought back—that’s almost exactly the kind of language that Jeff Bezos is using right now to talk about going into space and colonizing the moon.
If you look at the finances, the kinds of promises that (Columbus) offers his bankers, the structure of financing through which that money comes, the way that he swindles his workers out of full payment and relies on slaves, it all looks very contemporary. This is not to say Jeff Bezos is a slaver, but it certainly does say that the kinds of minerals that allow Alexa to order things for you in the shower come from the systems that require modern day slavery in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
There are 40 million slaves in the world today. The persistence of slavery and its compatibility with high finance and with people being paid wage labor, that’s old. You don’t need to be conspiratorial, and one doesn’t need to bend history at all to observe that slaves, alongside wage workers, alongside entrepreneurs, alongside bankers, alongside people offering new things from the frontier, is happening in the 21st century as much as it was in Columbus’ day.
Winters: You define cheapness as a system that the capitalist system has used to overcome its periodic crises. There’s a quote in here: “We’re arguing that the modern world emerged from systematic attempts to fix crises at the frontier, crises that resulted from human and extrahuman life inserting itself into the calculus. The modern world happened because externalities struck back.” Is there a lower limit to cheapness within the capitalist world structure, or a finite number of frontiers that we’re going to run up against?
Patel: One oughtn’t bet against the imagination of capitalism to be able to open up new frontiers. The frontier of genetic material is one that continues to be profitably mined. The fact that (Tesla founder Elon) Musk and Bezos are off into space, that The Financial Times recently had a supplement on space mining, is, I think, very telling.
Systems change happens when business as usual can no longer continue.
At the end of the day, when we talk about externalities striking back, it’s not just about a climatic or geological shift. This is also about the ways that humans have rebelled against certain kinds of order being put on them, whether it’s about slavery or about domestic work or it’s about racism. … Whether it’s about workers going on strike or about slave rebellions, or about certain ideas of a nation coming back to bite the colonists on the ass, that’s what we’re getting at with the idea of externalities striking back. There always comes a point at which societies undergo a state shift. Now looks like one of those times.
The reason we look to the plague, the Black Death, and the end of the Medieval Warming Period is because, they may be augurs of change. It’s a sad commonplace to hear a lament that, in order for things to get better, they need to get worse. “Oh we just have to get to a point when so many people are suffering, and then there’ll be a change.” But how bad does it have to be? We’ve already had a billion people going hungry. Systems change happens when business as usual can no longer continue. Business as usual is entirely compatible with a billion people going hungry on the Earth today.
So you have to ask, “Well, what is it that’s going to create that phase shift?” Historically in Europe, the answer lay in a mixture of disease, climate (change), and a strong hand being given for the peasantry and the exploited. And the number of exploited in the world today is fairly large. We are in a time of particular climate tumult, and the possibility of old orders being transformed or resurrected or remixed is one that a lot of groups are interested in looking at.
Winters: The concept of capitalism as something to name and define and study, it only goes back to the 19th century or so. What we’re describing here is, especially in the medieval period, is human greed as the driving force. Is there a point where it became meta-capitalism, the capitalists became capitalistic about the capitalist system, and it wasn’t just about trying to line their own bank accounts?
Patel: Banking and the modern banking system that emerges from Italian city-states, I think, constitute a very important moment in how that greed gets facilitated and channeled. … That’s why again Christopher Columbus gets to be such an important figure. What he embodies is not just a greed for money, but an attitude that can look on the world and automatically appraise its value—the retail profit in slaves, nature, and so on.
I don’t think that you need money in order to be able to make social change happen.
So is there a moment where capitalists become meta-capitalists? No, but I think that when you see the confluence of seven cheap things coming together, I do think the “long 15th century,” to use Fernand Braudel’s term, is sort of the beginning of capitalism. If you want to give it a birthdate, the first Columbus Day is as good as any.
Winters: When we start talking about the solutions at the end of the book, the broader steps to build or at least lay the groundwork for something that would come after capitalism, one of them is the idea of re-imagination. You’ve made this abstract distinction between nature and society as these two things that were separated arbitrarily in the beginning, and that this abstraction has allowed this classification system that we call capitalism today. Re-imagination, as you define it, is a psychological shift, presumably that would allow us to go back to this original abstraction and repair that split, or would allow something to be created that would be something other than just yet another thing that is embedded within the capitalist worldview.
Patel: Well, I’m glad you seized on that. The bumper sticker problem that a number of people notice is that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. When you ask folks to imagine what they want instead of this world? Blank stares all around.
Yet, not far from here, you have Coast Salish communities that have profoundly interesting relationships with nature, relationships that can point the way to what a different world might be like. So let’s look at the salmon festival. It begins with the celebration of the first salmon caught swimming upstream. The festival runs for 10 days, during which no fishing is allowed. While the first salmon is prepared and eaten, all the other salmon go upstream and they spawn. And then you start fishing for salmon. But for 10 days, you don’t, and instead you celebrate the treaty that your people have with the salmon people.
These transformations have to be collective and social.
It’s not open season. It’s the result of a treaty. To enter into a treaty with extra-human life rather than simply possess it involves a deep psychological reorientation. It’s an individual transformation of a relationship in the world and with nature, but also it’s a social one. If an individual asserted, “I’ve signed a treaty with salmon,” that’d be bonkers. … These transformations have to be collective and social.
Winters: Can you fight capital without capital?
Patel: That’s the only way it’s ever been fought. There’s a very good book called The Revolution Will Not Be Funded (Duke University Press, 2017). And particularly in a town like Seattle, the home of the Gates Foundation, that’s important to bear in mind.
Obviously movements need money for buses and childcare and organizing materials and salaries. But the idea that it’s only through having vast scads of cash that the big transformation’s going to happen—I think that’s misguided. I mean, look at the white supremacists who seem to have something of a foothold in this town. Their ideology is spreading without having massive infusions of money, it’s spreading through viral means and through getting people to do things and turning up at events and participating in what they understand to be a movement. And they’re doing that for free.
So I don’t think that you need money in order to be able to make social change happen. I mean, it helps, but it shouldn’t substitute for the hard grassroots organizing. … The movements that I’ve seen around the world that have been able to organize successfully, they’ve done it on a shoestring.Last year Heaps guided the Revolution to the MLS Cup final (a 2-1 overtime loss to the Los Angeles Galaxy).
Jay Heaps had never been a head coach before being hired by the Revolution before the 2012 season. But Heaps proved himself in his first three seasons, convincing the team to sign him to a second long-term contract.
The contract extension was finalized soon after the Revolution reached the MLS Cup in December, according to multiple sources. Revolution team policy prevents the announcing of contract signings of coaches, and team officials would not comment on Heaps’s renewal.
Heaps, 39, succeeded Steve Nicol after the Revolution finished in 17th place in the overall MLS standings with a 5-16-13 record in 2011. In Heaps’s first season, the Revolution finished in 16th place with a 9-17-8 record. In 2013, the Revolution went 14-11-9, reaching the playoffs.
Advertisement
Last year Heaps guided the Revolution to the final (2-1 overtime loss to the Los Angeles Galaxy), spurred by the August arrival of Jermaine Jones.
Get Sports Headlines in your inbox: The most recent sports headlines delivered to your inbox every morning. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here
Currently the Revolution are 8-9-7, tied for fourth place in the Eastern Conference.
Contract terms were not revealed when Heaps was named Revolution coach in November 2011. The new contract likely will keep him with the Revolution at least through the 2017 season.
Heaps’s signing signals stability for the Revolution, who have made two coaching changes since 1999. Heaps is the sixth coach in the Revolution’s 20-year history. They went through four coaches (Frank Stapleton, Thomas Rongen, Walter Zenga, and Nicol) in their first four seasons.
Fernando Clavijo became the first to coach the team for more than two full years before being replaced early in the 2002 season by Nicol, who had been hired on an interim basis for two games in 1999. Nicol led the Revolution to four MLS Cup final appearances from 2002-11.
Advertisement
Assistant coaches Remi Roy and Tom Soehn also agreed to multiyear pacts, but the Revolution still lag behind teams such as the Galaxy, who list five assistant coaches.
When Heaps concluded his playing career in 2009, he was the Revolution’s leader in appearances in all competitions (294). That mark was surpassed by Shalrie Joseph, who played 305 games for the Revolution before retiring after last season.
Heaps played basketball and soccer at Longmeadow High School and Duke University, where he was a member of NCAA Final Four teams in both sports.
In 1999, Heaps joined the Miami Fusion, and in 2001 was traded to the Revolution for defender Brian Dunseth. With the Revolution, Heaps won the US Open Cup in 2007 and the North American SuperLiga in 2008. He also was a starter in four MLS Cup final matches and earned four caps playing for the US national team.ST. AUGUSTINE BEACH, Fla. - A 25-year-old Stuart man was arrested Sunday in St. Augustine Beach after police spotted him getting into a car that had been reported stolen from Marion County, police said.
Robert Hardister told police that he knew the car Chrysler Sebring was stolen and that he was a drug dealer that had “fronted” an unknown individual methamphetamine in exchange for the car.
According to the St. Augustine Beach Police Department, an officer on routine patrol in the 10th Street parking lot just east of A1A Beach Boulevard ran the 2007 Sebring's tag about 8 p.m. Sunday and learned it had been reported stolen.
He called for back-up and staked out the car until Hardister returned and unlocked it with a set of keys.
He was arrested as soon as he sat behind the wheel.
Hardister told police he had a lot of experience in “boosting” cars from individuals.
Police also learned Hardister had an active warrant out of North Carolina for violation of parole.
Hardister was charged with car theft and parole violation.
He is being held without bond in the St. Johns County Jail.
This was his second run-in with law enforcement over a stolen vehicle in less than a year.
Hardister was found asleep in a stolen 1998 Ford F-150 in a Jupiter Walmart parking lot last September, according to a report from WPTV. He was charged with grand theft auto in that case.
Copyright 2017 by WJXT News4Jax - All rights reserved.Monastic Tradition
Camino de Los Tiburón
Monks who take up the mask of this tradition seek to follow in the footsteps of Los Tiburon, a mighty Half-Orc who developed his own unique fighting style with which he subdued many great evils, including the dragon menacing the countryside around his hometown of Tecnico.
Monks who follow El Camino, as the tradition has come to be called, are not peaceful, tranquil warriors like their more traditional brethren. These Luchadores have a flaming passion in their breast -- a lust for honor and glory that can only be sated by seeking out the most powerful foes and defeating them in pitched combat, earning fame and adoration as a true master of Lucha Libre.
La Máscara
Starting when you choose this tradition at 3rd level, you fashion a mask for yourself that covers most of your face and grants you a new identity. The features you gain from this Monastic Tradition can only be used while you wear the mask, which supernaturally prevents other creatures from realizing who you are unless you reveal your secret identity.
Forcibly de-masking a Luchador is a grave dishonor. If you are de-masked, you must defeat the creature who de-masked you in single combat (during which you may still use features from this Tradition), or else discard the name associated with that mask forever and fashion a new one. For all intents and purposes, the "person" you became when you put on the old mask is dead.
Lucharan
At 3rd level, you learn the techniques of Lucha Libre, a fighting style based around strategic holds and throwing your opponent. You may use Dexterity (Acrobatics) as your skill when making a Grapple check. You may attempt to grapple any size creature, and creatures that are larger than you don’t automatically succeed on checks to escape your grapple.
In addition, you gain the following abilities:
Whenever you hit a creature with an unarmed strike, you may attempt to grapple that creature as a Bonus Action.
As an action, you may attempt to throw a Large or smaller creature you are grappling. Make a grapple check against the creature. On a success, you hurl the enemy up to 30 feet away. It falls Prone when it lands. If it collides with a creature its size or smaller, the thrown creature stops. Both creatures are knocked Prone and take your Martial Arts die in Bludgeoning damage.
Your bonus action attack from Martial Arts becomes a special move respected amongst the followers of Los Tiburon: the Tope, or headbutt. If the Tope hits a creature, that creature must make a Constitution saving throw against your Ki Save DC or be Incapacitated for a round.
.
Peleemos!
At 6th level, your desire to meet your enemies in honorable pitched combat bursts forth when frustrated, manifesting as a shouted challenge that bends a creature's will to your own, making them as eager as you to prove their mettle.
You may spend a Ki point to cast Compelled Duel on a creature that can hear and understand you. The spell does not require concentration, and it does not end until one of you falls unconscious or takes damage from a creature not affected by the spell.
Mucha Lucha!
At 11th level, your fighting spirit burns bright, and your attacks gain a panache that makes you the favorite of any crowd. You have advantage on checks to make or escape a grapple, do not suffer the usual penalty to your speed from pulling a grappled creature, and add your Wisdom modifier to the damage of unarmed strikes against a grappled target.
In addition, you may use Wisdom as your ability score for Intimidation and Performance checks.
Finishing Move
At 17th level, you master the art of Lucha, developing a unique Finishing Move that is wholly your own. This attack may be a deadly leg drop, a piledriver, an excruciating submission hold, or a unique move devised on the spot.
No matter the move's specifics, you must use an action to spend 3 ki points and make a grapple check against a creature within 5 feet. This check is made with advantage if you are already grappling the creature. If you succeed, the creature must make a Constitution saving throw or be instantly reduced to 0 hit points. If the creature succeeds on its own saving throw, it still takes 10d10 Bludgeoning damage from the sheer force of the attack.
Once you successfully execute a Finishing Move on a creature, it cannot be affected by this feature again until you complete a short rest.Asso di Picche, founded in 1947 and wearing a black Ace of Spades on red, is the oldest of the nine pedestrian teams of orange throwers that partake in the Battle of the Oranges. Here they battle against one of the approximately forty Aranceri Carri da Getto – orange-throwers in carts. The, founded in 1947 and wearing a black Ace of Spades on red, is the oldest of the nine pedestrian teams of orange throwers that partake in the Battle of the Oranges. Here they battle against one of the approximately forty– orange-throwers in carts.
The Battle of the Oranges is a festival in the Northern Italian city of Ivrea, which includes a tradition of throwing of oranges between organized groups. It is the largest comida fight in Italy.[1]
History of the festival [ edit ]
Stockpile of "ammunition" for the battle
The festival's origins are somewhat unclear. A popular account has it that it commemorates the city's defiance against the city's tyrant, who is either a member of the Ranieri family[2] or a conflation of the 12th-century Ranieri di Biandrate and the 13th-century Marquis William VII of Montferrat.[3] This tyrant attempted to rape a young commoner (often specified as a miller's daughter[4]) on the evening of her wedding, supposedly exercising the droit du seigneur. The tyrant's plan backfired when the young woman instead decapitated him, after which the populace stormed and burned the palace.[5] Each year, a young girl is chosen to play the part of Violetta, the defiant young woman.[1][6]
Every year the citizens remember their liberation with the Battle of the Oranges, where teams of aranceri (orange handlers) on foot throw oranges (representing old weapons and stones) against aranceri riding in carts (representing the tyrant's ranks). During the 19th-century French occupation of Italy, the Carnival of Ivrea was modified to add representatives of the French army. Another adaptation of the story has the oranges used to symbolize the removed testicles of the tyrant.
The oldest rituals of Ivrea Carnival include a large bonfire and are similar to ancient celebrations linked to the end of winter and the rise of the new spring.
Celebration [ edit ]
A carriage pulled by four horses that will be used in the battle
Mugnaia (photo Baldo Simone)
Battle (photo Baldo Simone)
The core celebration is based on a locally famous Battle of the Oranges that involves some thousands of townspeople, divided into nine combat teams, who throw oranges at each other – with considerable violence – during the traditional carnival days: Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. The carnival takes place in February (occasionally in March): it ends on the night of Shrove Tuesday with a solemn funeral. Traditionally, at the end of the silent march that closes the carnival the "General" says goodbye to everyone with the classical phrase in dialect "arvedse a giobia a ‘n bot", translated as "we'll see each other on Thursday at one", referring to the Thursday the carnival will start the next year.[7]
Miller's daughter [ edit ]
One of the citizens is elected Mugnaia (miller's daughter). Legend has it that Ivrea was once ruled by an evil duke (identified by historians with Guido III, against whom the population really rose, demolishing his castle, in 1194[citation needed]). After the miller's daughter (la "Mugnaia") Violetta got married, the duke claimed his droit du seigneur, the right to spend a night with each newly wed woman, and forced her into his castle. Once in the duke's rooms, Violetta used the opportunity to cut his head off, starting a revolution that eventually brought the destruction of the castle. Today the carriages are said to represent the duke's army and the orange throwers the revolutionaries.[citation needed]
Originally beans were thrown, then apples. Later, in the 19th century, oranges came to represent the stones thrown at the king's castle in order to demolish it. The origin of the tradition of throwing oranges is not well understood, particularly as oranges do not grow in the foothills of the Italian Alps and must be imported from Sicily. In 1994, an estimated 265,000 kilograms (584,000 lb) of oranges were brought to the city, mainly coming from the leftovers of the winter crop in southern Italy.[citation needed]
The teams [ edit ]
The historical foot "aranceri" teams that participate in the defense of Ivrea against the Tyrant's carted henchmen are 9:
Aranceri Asso di Picche (Ace of Spades) : red and blue jersey with black neck scarf. Their symbol is a single spade and their home ground is the main town square which they share with the second oldest throwing team. Created in 1947.
: red and blue jersey with black neck scarf. Their symbol is a single spade and their home ground is the main town square which they share with the second oldest throwing team. Created in 1947. Aranceri della Morte (Death's Aranceri) : black jersey, red pants. Their symbol is a white skull. Created in 1954.
: black jersey, red pants. Their symbol is a white skull. Created in 1954. Aranceri Tuchini del Borghetto (Revolutionaries of the Borough) : green jersey, red pants and a black crow in a white field on the back. Created in 1964.
: green jersey, red pants and a black crow in a white field on the back. Created in 1964. Aranceri degli Scacchi (The Chess) : chequered black and white jersey with an orange tower as their symbol. Created in 1964.
: chequered black and white jersey with an orange tower as their symbol. Created in 1964. Aranceri Pantera Nera (Black Panther) : black jersey with a black panther on a yellow field on the back. Created in 1965.
: black jersey with a black panther on a yellow field on the back. Created in 1965. Aranceri Scorpioni d'Arduino (Arduino's Scorpions) : yellow jersey, green pants and a black scorpion as their symbol. Created in 1966.
: yellow jersey, green pants and a black scorpion as their symbol. Created in 1966. Aranceri Diavoli (The Devils) : red and yellow jersey with a red devil. Created in 1973.
: red and yellow jersey with a red devil. Created in 1973. Aranceri Mercenari (The Mercenaries) : maroon jersey, yellow pants. Their symbol is a yellow star with maroon swords. Created in 1974.
: maroon jersey, yellow pants. Their symbol is a yellow star with maroon swords. Created in 1974. Aranceri Credendari: blue jersey and yellow pants, the Palazzo della Credenza (Palace of Credence) and the town arms as their symbol. Created in 1985.
Attending the event [ edit ]
There are a handful of routes that are allowed for spectators. The first is to hide behind the nets that are draped around the buildings, this is by far the safest choice and is highly recommended for those planning to attend with children. The more adventurous spectator can simply stay on the battlefield throughout the whole battle. This choice has to be made with certain considerations, the biggest of which is rogue oranges that have missed their targets and are on a trajectory right towards the middle of the battle where the spectators are located. Despite what one may expect the armored "palace guards" are not the ones that you have to be wary of when spectating, but the throwers on the other side of the chariots who are attempting to hit the guards. Every spectator is encouraged to purchase and wear, at all times, the Berretto Frigio/Phrygian Cap/red hat for "protection." Wearing the hat signifies that you are part of the revolutionaries and will protect you from getting oranges directly thrown at you,[8] however, as previously mentioned, if you are in the battlefield the hazard of getting hit by oranges is still a very real and essentially guaranteed occurrence. Spectators are not allowed to throw oranges as long as they are wearing their Berretto Frigio, however because of the nature of the event spectators can get away with certain amounts of throwing.
The caps also serve a separate more cosmetic purpose according to locals. The sea of red caps adds to the festivities and the visual effect of the event as a whole.
See also [ edit ]
La Tomatina, Spain's battle of the tomatoes
Notes [ edit ]
Media related to Carnival of Ivrea at Wikimedia CommonsBillionaire Paul Singer just visited the White House, President Donald Trump said during a Thursday news conference.
"As you know, Paul was very much involved |
know such true counterfactuals. Second, it is plausible that the Law of Conditional Excluded Middle (LCEM) holds for counterfactuals of a certain special form, usually called "counterfactuals of creaturely freedom." Third, the Scriptures are replete with counterfactual statements, so that the Christian theist, at least, should be committed to the truth of certain counterfactuals about free, creaturely actions.”[8]
Theological implications [ edit ]
William Lane Craig calls Molinism “one of the most fruitful theological ideas ever conceived. For it would serve to explain not only God’s knowledge of the future, but divine providence and predestination as well”.[9] Under it, God retains a measure of divine providence without hindering humanity's freedom. Because God has middle knowledge, he knows what an agent would freely do in a particular situation. So, agent A, if placed in circumstance C, would freely choose option X over option Y. Thus, if God wanted to accomplish X, all God would do is, using his middle knowledge, actualize the world in which A was placed in C, and A would freely choose X. God retains an element of providence without nullifying A's choice and God's purpose (the actualization of X) is fulfilled.
Molinists also believe it can aid one's understanding of salvation. Ever since Augustine and Pelagius there has been debate over the issue of salvation; more specifically how can God elect believers and believers still come to God freely? Protestants who lean more towards God's election and sovereignty are usually Calvinists while those who lean more towards humanity's free choice follow Arminianism. However, the Molinist can embrace both God's sovereignty and human free choice.
Take the salvation of Agent A. God knows that if he were to place A in circumstances C, then A would freely choose to believe in Christ. So God actualizes the world where C occurs, and then A freely believes. God still retains a measure of his divine providence because he actualizes the world in which A freely chooses. But, A still retains freedom in the sense of being able to choose either option. Molinism does not affirm two contradictory propositions when it affirms both God's providence and humanity's freedom. God's providence extends to the actualization of the world in which an agent may believe upon Christ.
Difference from Calvinism and from Arminianism [ edit ]
Molinism differs from Calvinism by affirming that God grants salvation, but humanity has the choice to freely accept it or reject it (but God knows that if the person were put in a particular situation he or she would not reject it). This differs from Calvinistic predestination, which states that a person's salvation is already determined by God such that he or she cannot choose otherwise or resist God’s grace.
It also differs from Arminianism because it claims that God definitively knows how a person would react to the Gospel message if they were put in a particular situation. Molinists have internal disagreements about the extent to which they agree with Calvinism, some holding to unconditional election, others holding to conditional election and others still holding to an election that is partly both. Alfred Freddoso explains: “Some Molinists, including Bellarmine and Suárez, agree with the Bañezians that God antecedently elects certain people to eternal glory and only then consults his middle knowledge to discover which graces will guarantee their salvation. Thus, in Peter's case, God would have chosen different graces if those he actually chose had been foreknown to be merely sufficient and not efficacious for Peter's salvation. Other Molinists, including Molina himself, vigorously reject any such antecedent absolute election of Peter to salvation. They insist instead that God simply chooses to create a world in which he infallibly foresees Peter's good use of the supernatural graces afforded him, and only then does he accept Peter among the elect in light of his free consent to those graces.” [10] Other Molinists avoid the issue altogether by holding to the highly controversial view of trans-world damnation, the idea that the unsaved in this world would have rejected Christ in any world.
Debate between Jesuit Molinists and Dominicans [ edit ]
In 1581, a heated argument erupted between the Jesuits, who advocated Molinism, and the Dominicans, who had a different understanding of God's foreknowledge and the nature of predestination. In 1597, Pope Clement VIII established the Congregatio de Auxiliis, a committee whose purpose was to settle this controversy. In 1607, Pope Paul V ended the quarrel by forbidding each side to accuse the other of heresy, allowing both views to exist side-by-side in the Catholic Church.
Other implications [ edit ]
Thomas Flint has developed what he considers other implications of Molinism, including papal infallibility, prophecy, and prayer.[11] William Lane Craig uses Molinism to reconcile scriptural passages warning of apostasy with passages teaching the security of believers.[12] Craig has also used middle knowledge to explain a wide range of theological issues, such as divine providence[13] and predestination,[14] biblical inspiration,[15] perseverance of the saints,[16] and Christian particularism.[17]
Biblical texts for Molinism [ edit ]
Molinists have often argued that their position is the Biblical one by indicating passages they understand to teach God's middle knowledge. Molina advanced the following three texts: 1 Samuel 23:8-14, Proverbs 4:11, and Matthew 11:23. Other passages which Molinists use are Ezekiel 3:6-7, Jeremiah 38:17-18, 1 Corinthians 2:8, Deuteronomy 28:51-57, Matthew 23:27-32, Matthew 12:7, Matthew 24:43, Luke 16:30-31, and Luke 22:67-68. William Lane Craig has argued at length that many of Christ's statements seem to indicate middle knowledge. Craig cites the following passages: Matthew 17:27, John 21:6, John 15:22-24, John 18:36, Luke 4:24-44 and Matthew 26:24.[18] Craig accepts that the most these texts indicate is that God has counterfactual knowledge. In order for this knowledge to be middle knowledge, it must be logically prior to God's free knowledge, something the Biblical texts mentioned do not seem to affirm or deny. However, Craig argues that if God’s decree were logically prior to his middle knowledge, that would “make God the author of sin and to obliterate human freedom, since in that case it is God who decrees which counterfactuals about creaturely free acts are true, including counterfactuals concerning sinful human decisions. Thus, we have good reason for thinking that if such counterfactuals are now true or false, they must have been so logically prior to God's decree.”[19]
Thomas Flint claims the twin foundations of Molinism are God’s providence and man’s freedom.[20] Molinism harmonizes texts teaching God’s providence (such as Acts 4:28 or Ephesians 1:11) with texts emphasizing man’s choice (such as Deuteronomy 30:19 or Luke 13:34).
Criticism [ edit ]
Molinism has been controversial and criticized since its inception in Molina’s concordia. The Dominican Order which espoused strict Thomism criticized that novel doctrine and found fault with the scientia media, which they think implies passivity, which is repugnant to Pure Act. The Thomists disputed it before the Popes, as bordering on Semi-Pelagianism, and afterwards there were ten years of debate in the famous Congregation de Auxiliis.
The grounding objection is at present the most debated objection to Molinism, and often considered the strongest. The argument claims that there are no metaphysical grounds for the truthfulness of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. As Hugh J. McCann puts it, “Perhaps the most serious objection against it is that there does not appear to be any way God could come by such knowledge. Knowledge, as we have seen, is not merely a matter of conceiving a proposition and correctly believing it to be true. It requires justification: one must have good reasons for believing. But what justification could God have for believing the propositions that are supposed to constitute middle knowledge? The truth of subjunctives of freedom cannot be discerned a priori, for they are contingent. It is not a necessary truth that if placed in circumstances C, I will decide to attend the concert tonight. Nor can we allow that God might learn the truth of C from my actual behavior — that is, by observing that I actually do, in circumstances C, decide to attend the concert. For God could not make observations like this without also finding out what creative decisions he is actually going to make, which would destroy the whole purpose of middle knowledge.”[21] Thus, there are no "truth makers" that ground counterfactuals. Opponents to middle knowledge claim that the historical antecedent of any possible world does not determine the truthfulness of a counterfactual for a creature, if that creature is free in the libertarian sense. (Molinists naturally accept this, but deny that this entails that counterfactuals of creaturely freedom lack truth values.)
Many philosophers and theologians who embrace the grounding objection prefer to claim that instead of counterfactuals of freedom being true, probable counterfactuals are true instead.[22] So instead of truths of the following sort: "God knows that in circumstance C creature X will freely do A" God knows truths of this sort: "God knows that in circumstances C creature X would probably do A." Yet, as Edward Wierenga has pointed out, probable counterfactuals are also contingent truths and fall victim to the same grounding objection.[23]
Molinists have responded to the aforementioned argument two ways. First, as Alfred Freddoso states, "it seems reasonable to claim that there are now adequate metaphysical grounds for the truth of conditional future contingent Ft(P) on H just in case there would be adequate metaphysical grounds at t for the truth of the present-tense proposition p on the conditions that H should obtain at t."[24] William Lane Craig agrees "[I]n order for a counterfactual of freedom to be true, it is not required that the events to which they refer actually exist; all that is required is that they would exist under the specified conditions."[25] The idea here is that if we imagine God creating multiple universes in multiple dimensions and giving people libertarian free will in the various universes and letting events all play out, we would have no problem grounding counterfactuals of freedom based on the events in the various universes. But why should God need to create such universes to know how events would unfold, and couldn’t how they would turn out ground statements about how they would turn out?
Further objections at this point lead to a second line of response. Alvin Plantinga responds to the grounding objection by saying "It seems to me much clearer that some counterfactuals of freedom are at least possibly true than that the truth of propositions must, in general, be grounded in this way."[26] William Lane Craig follows up on this by pointing out the burden of proof the grounding objector bears. The grounding objection “asserts that there are no true counterfactuals about how creatures would freely act under any given set of circumstances. This assertion is no mere ostensibly undercutting defeater of Molinism, but a putatively rebutting defeater. It makes a bold and positive assertion and therefore requires warrant in excess of that which attends the Molinist assumption that there are true counterfactuals about creaturely free actions.” Latter, Craig points out “Anti–Molinists have not even begun the task of showing that counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are members of the set of propositions or statements which require truth–makers if they are to be true.”[8] Thus the grounding objector must prove a universal negative regarding the falsity of counterfactuals of freedom or he must explain his theory of the basis for truth and prove that theory true.
The difference in perspectives here may be briefly described in the following way. According to critics, the way in which an agent will make a free choice inherently cannot be known apart from observation of the choice being actualized. God may be able to observe these choices via prescience, but even he must still observe them to know them. Therefore, God cannot know what we will do, unless he sees the future. The Molinist position, exemplified by Craig in the preceding paragraph, is 1) to argue this requires potentially heretical arguments relating to a limitation of divine omniscience, and 2) that a choice can be free, and yet the way in which an agent will make that choice can be known apart from observation of the actualized choice itself (and even apart from the actualization of the choice entirely). Critics maintain that this is no longer really a free choice: if it is known that "If she were offered a dollar, she would take it," apart from actually offering that person a dollar, then she is not free to take or not take that dollar. It will be noted that the question hinges upon whether, by the definition of a free choice, it is possible to know which choice will be made independently from the actualization of that choice.
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]The administration says that its scheme does not reward people who recklessly borrowed too much. This is untrue: the plan will certainly help some people who borrowed more than they should have. No doubt, it would be fairer to help only borrowers whose standard repayments (after teaser rates expired) were no more than say 30 percent of gross income to begin with, and/or who borrowed less than 80% of their property's initial value--in other words, to help only borrowers who behaved prudently, and who are now in trouble because their income has fallen. But of course this would have meant many more defaults. Because foreclosures also hurt innocent bystanders, there is a public interest in limiting them. The second part of the plan, I think, is indeed unfair and does raise moral hazard concerns--but I'd say that is a price worth paying if it stems the tide of foreclosures.
Will it succeed in doing that? It certainly gives loan modification a much firmer push than seen up to now. Lenders will not be forced to modify, but TARP beneficiaries will have to apply the guidelines, and show that they are making an effort. The new prospect of bankruptcy-court cramdowns (this requires legislation) should also help to focus minds. A standard Treasury-endorsed modification template ought to ease some of the worries servicers have about being sued by investors over unauthorized modifications of securitized mortgages. An important question is how far cuts in repayments will be achieved by interest-rate reductions as opposed to cuts in principal. Many observers reckon that principal reductions would curb foreclosures more effectively. The plan sees principal reductions as a possibility, but the incentives appear to grant that method of reducing repayments no special favors. Maybe this will have changed by the time we get full details of the plan next month.
The third part--$200 billion of new capital for the GSEs--improves Fannie's and Freddie's ability to buy mortgage-backed securities, supports the market value of those securities, and keeps downward pressure on the interest rates lenders charge mortgage borrowers. This too makes sense.
I'm sure the plan will reduce the rate of foreclosures--as compared with a no-plan baseline. How much it will reduce them, and whether that will be enough to stabilize the housing market, is impossible to say just yet. But after many months of almost total neglect, this is a big step forward.Hillary Clinton may well be the most "known" politician in the world.
She and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have been on the national stage for more than two decades -- traveling from Arkansas to the White House to the Senate to the 2008 campaign trail and finally to the State Department. During that time, every look and utterance from Hillary has been examined, then examined again, then analyzed, then overanalyzed.
That's why this series of photos -- shot by LIFE magazine in 1969 as part of a feature on outstanding college students -- is so fascinating. It captures Clinton before she became "HILLARY CLINTON".
LIFE let us have two pictures from their Clinton shoot. You can check all of them out here.
* Clinton, gesturing.
Lee Balterman—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
*Clinton, gesturing (part 2)
Lee Balterman—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
RELATED GALLERY: Hillary Clinton away from the microphoneARLINGTON, Va., Oct. 14 (UPI) -- Non-U.S. standard ammunition is to be produced by ATK for U.S. allies under a contract from the Department of Defense, the company announced.
The two separate ammunition orders were received in August and September, the company said this week, and come under the company's indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity and Basic Ordering Agreement contracts with the U.S. military, which are worth a total of $203.7 million. ATK, which manufactures ammunition, precision weapons and rocket motors, did not specify the amount of non-U.S. standard, or NSA, ammunition ordered or their calibers.
"We are honored to support our Army customer in every facet of ammunition requirements they may have, and these significant awards will continue ATK's legacy of commitment and performance to the U.S. Army NSA program," said Kent Holiday, vice president and general manager of ATK's Small Caliber Systems division.
"ATK's ability to satisfy varied munitions needs provides a strategic advantage to the United States as it supports its allies across the globe," said Mike Kahn, president of ATK's Defense Group."RVD" redirects here. For other uses, see RVD (disambiguation)
Rob Szatkowski[1][2][6] (born December 18, 1970),[1][2] better known by his ring name Rob Van Dam is an American professional wrestler and actor (frequently abbreviated to RVD). Throughout his career, he worked for multiple organizations including Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW), World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment (WWF/E), and Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA). Van Dam has won 21 total championships, and is the only wrestler in history to have held the WWE Championship, the ECW World Heavyweight Championship, and the TNA World Heavyweight Championship (once holding the WWE and ECW titles simultaneously within WWE).
Van Dam gained mainstream popularity in ECW before also having success in WWE and TNA. Between ECW, WWF/E, and TNA, Van Dam headlined many pay-per-view events throughout three decades between the 1990s and 2010s. In 2002, Van Dam was ranked the number one pro wrestler in the world by Pro Wrestling Illustrated. He was voted "Most Popular Wrestler" by readers of the magazine in 2001 and again in 2002. WWE named him the greatest star in ECW history in 2014.[7]
Background [ edit ]
Szatkowski grew up in Battle Creek, Michigan and graduated from Pennfield Senior High School. Szatkowski made his first appearance on WWF television in 1987 in a skit with "The Million Dollar Man" Ted DiBiase. At the time, DiBiase was selecting plants from the audience and offering to pay them to perform degrading acts and offered the 16-year-old Szatkowski $100 to enter the ring and kiss his foot, which he did.[8] This early appearance was later included as a bonus feature on WWE's Before They Were Superstars DVD and on WWE's Rob Van Dam: One of a Kind DVD.[9] He was also in attendance at WrestleMania III as stated on The Hulk Hogan: The Ultimate Anthology DVD.
Professional wrestling career [ edit ]
Early career (1990–1995) [ edit ]
The name "Rob Van Dam" was given to him in 1991 by Ron Slinker, a promoter in Florida, possibly because of his martial arts experience and his resemblance to actor Jean-Claude Van Damme.[10] He wrestled in many independent promotions across Michigan, including the United States Wrestling Association (USWA) and South Atlantic Pro Wrestling (SAPW). In SAPW, he won his first wrestling championship, the SAPW Tag Team Championship, in July 1992 with Chaz Rocco.[11] He also wrestled in several independent promotions across America, and in All Japan Pro Wrestling, where he challenged for the World Junior Heavyweight Championship on several occasions.[12]
World Championship Wrestling (1992-1993) [ edit ]
He signed with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) in late 1992 and was dubbed Robbie V by Ron Slinker upon his arrival since Bill Watts did not like the name Rob Van Dam.[13] Robbie made his WCW debut on the January 23, 1993 episode of Saturday Night as a fan favorite, defeating enhancement talent Pat Rose. The following month, Robbie V entered a tournament for the vacant World Television Championship, defeating Shanghai Pierce in the first round but lost to Vinnie Vegas in the second round, which aired on the March 20 episode of WorldWide. His last televised match was on the May 22 episode of Saturday Night, a tag team loss with Erik Watts against Shanghai Pierce and Tex Slazenger.[14] He departed the company after an uneventful and forgettable run.
Extreme Championship Wrestling [ edit ]
Feuding and teaming with Sabu (1996-1998) [ edit ]
In January 1996, Van Dam signed with promoter Paul Heyman's Philadelphia-based promotion Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW), defeating Axl Rotten in his debut match at House Party.[15] Van Dam's mannerisms were those of a stoner, and he became a face due to his laid-back attitude and unorthodox style. On March 30, he faced 2 Cold Scorpio in a match for the World Television Championship. The match ended in a draw with 2 Cold Scorpio retaining the title.[16][17]
Van Dam gained attention following a series of matches with long-time rival Sabu, which began with a match at Hostile City Showdown, won by Sabu.[18] After the match, Van Dam declined to show proper respect for his opponent, leading to a rematch at A Matter of Respect, which was won by Van Dam.[17] Per the pre-match stipulation, Sabu then offered Van Dam a handshake, but was again ignored. Instead, Van Dam left the ring and turned heel under the management of Bill Alfonso.[17][19] At Hardcore Heaven, Van Dam faced his rival Sabu once again, in a match to prove who was the better man, but Sabu won the match.[17][20] The two faced each other yet again in a stretcher match at The Doctor Is In. Van Dam lost the match after missing a Plancha to the outside, hitting the railing and falling onto the stretcher.[21] He was quickly rolled out.[17]
At Natural Born Killaz, Van Dam defeated Doug Furnas in a match. Post-match, Van Dam offered Furnas a handshake, but Furnas instead hit Van Dam with a short-arm clothesline, starting a rivalry between the two.[17] After his rivalry with Furnas expanded to also include Dan Kroffat, Van Dam wanted a tag team partner of his own. After losing to long-time rival Sabu once again at Unluckily Lottery, the two united and formed what was to become one of the most successful tag teams in ECW history.[22] They feuded with Furnas and Kroffat defeating them at When Worlds Collide II and High Incident.[17][23][24]
Van Dam and Sabu next feuded with The Eliminators, John Kronus and Perry Saturn. On November 1, the two teams fought to a draw.[25] Van Dam then feuded with Taz, to whom he lost at Holiday Hell via knockout.[26] Sabu and Van Dam continued to feud with The Eliminators for the World Tag Team Championship into 1997. At Crossing the Line Again and Cyberslam, the teams faced off for the ECW World Tag Team Championship in a pair of matches, both of which were won by The Eliminators.[27][28][29] At CyberSlam, the two teams faced each other for the title in a Tables, Ladders, and Chairs match, in which The Eliminators again retained their title.[30]
At ECW's first pay-per-view event Barely Legal, Van Dam defeated Lance Storm as a last-minute replacement for the injured Chris Candido.[31] Immediately following the match, Van Dam expressed his distaste for being chosen as a back-up for "some guy who couldn't even lace his boots". Van Dam delivered a speech directed towards Paul Heyman, and not being originally booked on the show was a point of contention between Van Dam and Heyman for a time.[29]
In May 1997, ECW "invaded" the World Wrestling Federation's (WWF) Monday Night Raw television show, drawing the ire of color commentator Jerry Lawler. Lawler then promised he would show up at an ECW show in order to gain revenge, and when he did show up, he had ECW mainstays Van Dam (who turned heel) and Sabu with him. Van Dam made speeches about how he was too good for ECW and deserved to be in one of the "Big Two" (WWF or WCW) on one of their Monday Night programs (Monday Night Raw or Monday Nitro). Lawler began to call Van Dam Mr. Monday Night on an episode of Raw which became a moniker that would stay with Van Dam, changing to suit the day of the week of whichever program was being broadcast. Despite his arrogance and "betrayal" of ECW, over time Van Dam became applauded by fans recognizing his athleticism and unique maneuvers.[32]
Van Dam continued to team up with Sabu upon his return to ECW on June 13.[33] Taz's manager Bill Alfonso betrayed Taz and joined Sabu and Van Dam. Van Dam started a new rivalry with Tommy Dreamer, who wanted to gain revenge on Van Dam for his betrayal of ECW.[32][34] On June 21, Van Dam and Sabu earned a victory over Dreamer and The Sandman.[35] Van Dam and Sabu emerged victorious against Dreamer and Sandman again at Orgy of Violence.[36] At Heat Wave, Van Dam, Sabu, and WWF's Jerry "The King" Lawler fought Dreamer, Sandman, and Rick Rude to a no contest.[37] Van Dam and Dreamer faced each other in a hardcore match at Born to Be Wired, won by Van Dam after he performed a leg drop on Dreamer with a trashcan.[34][38] Van Dam and Sabu became partners while Dreamer teamed up with Taz.[34] At Fright Fight, Van Dam lost to Dreamer in a flag match.[39] At Ultimate Jeopardy, Van Dam and Sabu faced Dreamer and Taz, a match won by Taz and Dreamer after Dreamer pinned Van Dam. At November to Remember, Van Dam faced Dreamer in another flag match which went to a no contest.[40] At Better Than Ever, Van Dam and Sabu faced Dreamer and Taz in a rematch. This time, Van Dam pinned Dreamer to give the victory to his team and to settle their rivalry.[41] Van Dam's final encounter with Dreamer came on January 5, when Dreamer teamed up with Taz, Al Snow, and Sandman to take on Van Dam, Sabu, Doug Furnas, and Phil Lafon. Van Dam's team lost the match.[42]
In 1998, Van Dam turned face and started a feud with Triple Threat (Shane Douglas, Bam Bam Bigelow, and Chris Candido).[43] At House Party, Van Dam defeated Bam Bam Bigelow.[44] At Hostile City Showdown, Van Dam and Sabu defeated Axl Rotten and Balls Mahoney by disqualification.[45] The two went on to win a fatal four-way elimination tag team match later that night.[45] At CyberSlam, Van Dam and Sabu lost to World Heavyweight Champion Shane Douglas and Bam Bam Bigelow.[46]
Van Dam's popularity increased when he got his first taste of ECW gold, on April 4 when he defeated Bam Bam Bigelow to win the World Television Championship.[47][48] Van Dam retained the belt in his first title defense on April 10 against Doug Furnas.[49] Sabu also expressed interest in Van Dam's championship, leading to a title match between the two at Wrestlepalooza. Van Dam retained the title as the match ended in a time limit draw.[43][50]
At A Matter of Respect, Van Dam and Sabu were forced to face each other in a tag team match as they both teamed up with World Tag Team Champions. Van Dam teamed with the one half of the champions, Lance Storm, while Sabu teamed with the other half, Chris Candido. Van Dam and Sabu reconciled and instead took out Storm and Candido making it a no contest.[43][51] Van Dam and Sabu started a feud with Storm and Candido in the next month for the tag team title.[43] On June 29, Van Dam and Sabu beat Storm and Candido to win the World Tag Team Championship,[52] which made Van Dam a double champion.[43] On October 24, Sabu and Van Dam lost the title to the Dudley Boyz (Buh Buh Ray and D-Von) after interference from Triple Threat.[43][53] Van Dam sought revenge and at November to Remember, Van Dam and Sabu teamed with Taz to defeat Triple Threat.[43][54] On December 13, Van Dam and Sabu won the World Tag Team Championship for a second time by beating the Dudley Boyz in Japan at a Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling ECW/FMW Supershow.[43][52]
World Television Champion (1998–2001) [ edit ]
Van Dam remained the World Television Champion for the rest of 1998, and he started 1999 by making successful title defenses against the likes of Spike Dudley,[55] Lance Storm at Guilty as Charged,[56] Jerry Lynn at Crossing the Line, Balls Mahoney at Anarchy Rulz,[57] and 2 Cold Scorpio at CyberSlam.[58][59]
Van Dam and Sabu were scheduled to make a title defense on April 17, but Sabu was suspended by ECW before the match occurred.[59] Instead, Van Dam faced D-Von Dudley in a singles match and as a result of losing the match, Van Dam also lost the Tag Team Title to the Dudleyz.[60] After losing the Tag Team titles, Van Dam focused on defending the Television title.[59] He entered into a rivalry with Jerry Lynn against whom he defended the Television title at Hardcore Heaven in a "no time limit" match.[61] Van Dam retained the title, and the match was deemed so good that Paul Heyman aired it on ECW's debut on TNN in place of a shoot promo about TNN that he was planning, but was not allowed to air.[61] Van Dam continued to defend the ECW World Television Championship for the remainder of the year.
Van Dam began a feud with Rhino in the beginning of 2000. RVD successfully defended the ECW World Television Championship against Rhino on January 7.[62] RVD got a victory during a title defence against Sabu at Guilty as Charged which was Sabu's last match in the promotion.[63][64] Van Dam was scheduled to perform in a "champion vs. champion" pay-per-view main event against the World Heavyweight Champion Mike Awesome. This match potentially could have been ECW's most lucrative pay-per-view main event, and Heyman was depending on it to bring an influx of badly needed finances, but the match never occurred because Van Dam suffered a broken ankle during a successful title defense against Rhino on January 29.[63][65] The injury also forced Van Dam to vacate the World Television Championship.
He returned to ECW at Hardcore Heaven and faced long-time rival Jerry Lynn. Van Dam was supported by his real-life friend Scotty Anton who eventually turned on him when Van Dam was going to perform a Five-Star Frog Splash on Lynn. Anton pushed him from the top rope, which helped Lynn win the match.[63][66] Van Dam feuded with Anton and took his revenge at Heat Wave by defeating Anton after a Van Terminator.[63][67] Van Dam then attempted to exact revenge on Rhino for forcing his injury. He received many opportunities to win the World Television Championship back from Rhino, but Rhino's allies usually attacked Van Dam, causing disqualifications and allowing Rhino to retain the title.[63] At Anarchy Rulz, Van Dam faced Rhino for the World Television Championship but was screwed when a heel referee made a fast count during a pinfall attempt made by Rhino.[63][68]
Van Dam was not advertised and did not show for a large number of ECW events due to the large sum of money owed to him.[63] He appeared at ECW's final pay-per-view event Guilty as Charged, where he defeated Jerry Lynn.[69][70] This was Van Dam's last appearance in ECW, as ECW only held two more shows after the pay-per-view.
World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment [ edit ]
The Invasion (2001) [ edit ]
Several months after the closure of ECW, Van Dam was signed to a short term contract by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). Along with fellow ECW alumnus Tommy Dreamer, Van Dam returned to WWF television on the July 9, 2001 episode of Raw in Atlanta, Georgia as a heel, and attacking WWF wrestlers Kane and Chris Jericho.[71][72] Later that night, five wrestlers from WWF and five wrestlers from WCW took on ten ECW wrestlers, including Van Dam. The match never took place as instead the WCW wrestlers aligned themselves with the ECW wrestlers.[71][72]
Despite being a heel, Van Dam was popular with the WWF fans, who were aware of his reputation in ECW. After defeating Jeff Hardy for the WWF Hardcore Championship at Invasion,[71][71][73][74][75] Van Dam lost the Hardcore title to Hardy on the August 13 episode of Raw,[76] but regained it at SummerSlam. During this time Van Dam had defeated wrestlers such as Kane, The Undertaker, Kurt Angle, Chris Jericho, The Rock and even the Alliance leader Stone Cold Steve Austin in singles and tag team matches.[74][77] Van Dam became one of the most popular members of the Alliance who faced The Rock for the WCW Championship on multiple occasions, and even challenged Alliance leader Stone Cold Steve Austin for the WWF Championship including a triple threat match at No Mercy also involving Kurt Angle, but did not win. At Survivor Series on November 18, Van Dam and four other Alliance members faced five WWF wrestlers in a Winner Take All match. Team WWF won, and the members of the Alliance were fired; however, as he held the Hardcore Championship, Van Dam was able to retain his job.[71][78]
Intercontinental Champion (2001–2002) [ edit ]
Van Dam became a face, but lost the Hardcore Championship to The Undertaker at Vengeance.[79][80] He then entered into a rivalry with William Regal over Regal's Intercontinental title.[81] On the February 25 episode of Raw, Van Dam defeated Lance Storm and Big Show in a triple threat match to become the #1 contender to the Intercontinental Championship.[81][82] At WrestleMania X8, RVD faced Regal for the Intercontinental Championship and won the match after he hit Regal with a Five-Star Frog Splash.[81][83][84]
When the WWF was divided into two "brands", Raw and SmackDown! in 2002, Van Dam was drafted to the Raw brand as the fourth pick.[85][86] After he defended his title successfully against Booker T, Eddie Guerrero returned to the WWF and attacked Van Dam.[85][87] He started a feud with Eddie Guerrero over the Intercontinental title. At Backlash, Van Dam lost the Intercontinental Title to Guerrero.[85][88] At Insurrextion, Van Dam and Guerrero had a rematch for the Intercontinental Championship. Guerrero was disqualified after hitting the referee with the Intercontinental Championship; as a result, Van Dam won the match but not the title because a title cannot change hands by disqualification.[85][89] At Judgment Day, Van Dam failed to win the Intercontinental Title in another rematch.[85][90] The following night he defeated The Undertaker for the WWE Championship but authority figure Ric Flair restarted the match, which Van Dam then lost negating the title win.[85][91] On the May 27 episode of Raw, Van Dam defeated Eddie Guerrero in a ladder match for the Intercontinental Championship.[85][92][93]
After facing each other in the final round of the King of the Ring tournament, Van Dam and Brock Lesnar began feuding with each other. Van Dam defended his Intercontinental Championship against Lesnar twice and retained his title both times by disqualification.[85][94][95] On July 22, 2002, Van Dam unified the WWE European Championship[note 1] into the WWE Intercontinental Championship after he defeated European Champion Jeff Hardy in a title unification ladder match. As a result, the European title was abandoned. On the July 29 episode of Raw, Van Dam lost the Intercontinental Championship to Chris Benoit.[85][96]
Van Dam as Intercontinental Champion
At SummerSlam, Van Dam won his third WWE Intercontinental Championship by defeating Benoit in a rematch for the title.[85][97][98] As Benoit brought the title to SmackDown when he switched brands shortly after winning it, RVD brought the Intercontinental Title back to Raw.[85] On the August 26 episode of Raw, Van Dam also unified the WWE Hardcore Championship into the WWE Intercontinental Championship by defeating Hardcore Champion Tommy Dreamer in a hardcore title unification match. As a result, the WWE Hardcore Championship was abandoned.[74][85][99] On the September 9 episode of Raw, Van Dam became the number one contender to the World Heavyweight Championship by defeating Chris Jericho, Jeff Hardy, and Big Show in a fatal four-way elimination match.[85][100]
Van Dam started feuding with the World Heavyweight Champion Triple H. On the September 16 episode of Raw, Van Dam lost the Intercontinental Championship to Chris Jericho after interference by Triple H.[85 |
from the La Scala management. Also in 1965 Pavarotti made his American debut in Miami, Florida, as Edgardo in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. Illness troubled him during his New York City debut at the Metropolitan Opera in November 1968 and compelled him to cancel after the second act of the second performance. Nineteenth-century Italian opera comprises most of Pavarotti's repertoire (group of songs that one can sing), particularly Puccini, Verdi, and Donizetti, whose music he found the most comfortable to sing. He sings few recitals, because he regards them as more strenuous than opera.
Expands his career Very few opera singers are convincing actors and Pavarotti is not among them. However, by the mid-1980s he spent nearly as much time on practicing his acting as on his singing. In 1972 he starred in a commercial film, Yes, Giorgio. His solo album of Neapolitan songs, "O Sole Mio," outsold any other record by a classical singer. Throughout the 1980s Pavarotti strengthened his status as one of the opera world's leading figures. Televised performances of Pavarotti in many of his greatest and favorite roles helped him broaden his appeal. He was able to reach millions of viewers each time one of his opera performances or solo concerts was seen. He also began to show increasing flexibility as a recording artist. He recorded classical operas and Italian folk songs. He also recorded contemporary popular songs with composer and conductor Henry Mancini (1924–1994). He became the world's third-highest top-selling musician, right behind Madonna (1958–) and Elton John (1947–). By the time Pavarotti proposed and staged the first "Three Tenors" concert in Rome, he was unabashedly (boldly, without disguise) thrilled with his immense popularity. "I want to be famous everywhere," he told Newsweek. Pavarotti received his share of criticism and rejection as well. He was barred from contracts with the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1989 because he canceled many performances due to bad health. He was sued by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in 1992 for selling the network a lip-synched (pre-tending to sing to a pre-recorded track) concert. He was booed at La Scala during a performance of Don Carlo. He finally canceled tours and took several months off to rest. Pavarotti returned to the stage in 1993 with a concert before five hundred thousand people in Central Park, in New York City. Critics accused him of blatant commercialism (overly concerned with making money), but the crowds loved the performances. In 1997 the three tenors—Placido Domingo (1941–), Jose Carreras (1947–) and Pavarotti—toured to mixed reviews, but delighted audiences who seemed unwilling to let Pavarotti even think of retiring. In 2000 prosecutors in Bologna, Italy, tried Pavarotti on tax fraud charges. They claimed that although Pavarotti lived in Monte Carlo he still had many property holdings in Italy. Pavarotti was accused of owing almost $5 million and could have spent as much as a year and a half in prison. In the end, he was acquitted (had charges dismissed). In 2002 Pavarotti continued to drop hints that he would be retiring soon, but had not given any specific date. Through his talent and his desire to reach out to audiences everywhere, Pavarotti has been an important figure in bringing the world of opera to a great variety of people.Shazam has told CNET that it will be changing the way the Mac app works in response to privacy concerns. This is despite an earlier statement to Motherboard that it had no reason to make changes.
NordVPN
Security researcher Patrick Wardle yesterday spotted that the Shazam app keeps the Mac’s microphone switched on even when the app is set to off. Wardle’s blog post noted that the app doesn’t process audio data in any way when it is set to off, and stated that he was ‘conflicted on whether or not this is a big deal.’ But the publicity seems to have spooked Shazam, which has now said that it will change this behavior, even though it will deliver a worse experience for users.
Shazam acknowledged that Wardle was correct: the app does indeed continue to leave the mic open when Shazam’s toggle is set to ‘off,’ but VP James Pearson explained both why this was done and why the company doesn’t believe it creates a security risk.
There is no privacy issue since the audio is not processed unless the user actively turns the app ‘ON.’ If the mic wasn’t left on, it would take the app longer to both initialize the mic and then start buffering audio, and this is more likely to result in a poor user experience where users ‘miss out’ on a song they were trying to identify.
This approach supported the company’s pitch when it first launched the Mac app that it ‘operates magically in the background, ready to name that tune at a moment’s notice.’
The piece initially seemed to be just an interesting tech analysis, with Pearson telling Motherboard that the company did ‘not have any reason to make changes’ to the app. The company’s chief product officer Fabio Santini further elaborated to CNET on why they didn’t see reason for concern.
Santini told us that even if a hacker could get hold of that data, it still wouldn’t let them eavesdrop on your personal conversations: Shazam just samples a few points along the audio wave to create a digital “fingerprint” that it matches against other “fingerprints” in the company’s music database. “Those points can’t be reverse-engineered to reconstruct original audio,” he tells us.
But it seems the company doesn’t want to risk bad PR, and Santini went on to say that the company would now be changing the app’s behavior after all.
Even though we don’t recognize a meaningful risk, we want to make this configuration change to show that we care, and we pay attention, and we want them to feel good about using Shazam on their Mac.
The downgrade should be arriving on your Mac in the next few days … If you’re not already using Shazam for Mac, you can grab it from the Mac App Store or Shazam’s own site.Years ago I had coffee with a friend who ran a startup. He had just turned 40. His father was ill, his back was sore, and he found himself overwhelmed by life. “Don’t laugh at me,” he said, “but I was counting on the singularity.”
My friend worked in technology; he’d seen the changes that faster microprocessors and networks had wrought. It wasn’t that much of a step for him to believe that before he was beset by middle age, the intelligence of machines would exceed that of humans—a moment that futurists call the singularity. A benevolent superintelligence might analyze the human genetic code at great speed and unlock the secret to eternal youth. At the very least, it might know how to fix your back.
But what if it wasn’t so benevolent? Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who directs the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, describes the following scenario in his book Superintelligence, which has prompted a great deal of debate about the future of artificial intelligence. Imagine a machine that we might call a “paper-clip maximizer”—that is, a machine programmed to make as many paper clips as possible. Now imagine that this machine somehow became incredibly intelligent. Given its goals, it might then decide to create new, more efficient paper-clip-manufacturing machines—until, King Midas style, it had converted essentially everything to paper clips.
No worries, you might say: you could just program it to make exactly a million paper clips and halt. But what if it makes the paper clips and then decides to check its work? Has it counted correctly? It needs to become smarter to be sure. The superintelligent machine manufactures some as-yet-uninvented raw-computing material (call it “computronium”) and uses that to check each doubt. But each new doubt yields further digital doubts, and so on, until the entire earth is converted to computronium. Except for the million paper clips.
Things Reviewed “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies” By Nick Bostrom
Oxford University Press, 2014
Bostrom does not believe that the paper-clip maximizer will come to be, exactly; it’s a thought experiment, one designed to show how even careful system design can fail to restrain extreme machine intelligence. But he does believe that superintelligence could emerge, and while it could be great, he thinks it could also decide it doesn’t need humans around. Or do any number of other things that destroy the world. The title of chapter 8 is: “Is the default outcome doom?”
If this sounds absurd to you, you’re not alone. Critics such as the robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks say that people who fear a runaway AI misunderstand what computers are doing when we say they’re thinking or getting smart. From this perspective, the putative superintelligence Bostrom describes is far in the future and perhaps impossible.
Yet a lot of smart, thoughtful people agree with Bostrom and are worried now. Why?
Volition
The question “Can a machine think?” has shadowed computer science from its beginnings. Alan Turing proposed in 1950 that a machine could be taught like a child; John McCarthy, inventor of the programming language LISP, coined the term “artificial intelligence” in 1955. As AI researchers in the 1960s and 1970s began to use computers to recognize images, translate between languages, and understand instructions in normal language and not just code, the idea that computers would eventually develop the ability to speak and think—and thus to do evil—bubbled into mainstream culture. Even beyond the oft-referenced HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1970 movie Colossus: The Forbin Project featured a large blinking mainframe computer that brings the world to the brink of nuclear destruction; a similar theme was explored 13 years later in WarGames. The androids of 1973’s Westworld went crazy and started killing.
Extreme AI predictions are “comparable to seeing more efficient internal combustion engines… and jumping to the conclusion that the warp drives are just around the corner,” Rodney Brooks writes.
When AI research fell far short of its lofty goals, funding dried up to a trickle, beginning long “AI winters.” Even so, the torch of the intelligent machine was carried forth in the 1980s and ’90s by sci-fi authors like Vernor Vinge, who popularized the concept of the singularity; researchers like the roboticist Hans Moravec, an expert in computer vision; and the engineer/entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, author of the 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines. Whereas Turing had posited a humanlike intelligence, Vinge, Moravec, and Kurzweil were thinking bigger: when a computer became capable of independently devising ways to achieve goals, it would very likely be capable of introspection—and thus able to modify its software and make itself more intelligent. In short order, such a computer would be able to design its own hardware.
As Kurzweil described it, this would begin a beautiful new era. Such machines would have the insight and patience (measured in picoseconds) to solve the outstanding problems of nanotechnology and spaceflight; they would improve the human condition and let us upload our consciousness into an immortal digital form. Intelligence would spread throughout the cosmos.
You can also find the exact opposite of such sunny optimism. Stephen Hawking has warned that because people would be unable to compete with an advanced AI, it “could spell the end of the human race.” Upon reading Superintelligence, the entrepreneur Elon Musk tweeted: “Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable.” Musk then followed with a $10 million grant to the Future of Life Institute. Not to be confused with Bostrom’s center, this is an organization that says it is “working to mitigate existential risks facing humanity,” the ones that could arise “from the development of human-level artificial intelligence.”
No one is suggesting that anything like superintelligence exists now. In fact, we still have nothing approaching a general-purpose artificial intelligence or even a clear path to how it could be achieved. Recent advances in AI, from automated assistants such as Apple’s Siri to Google’s driverless cars, also reveal the technology’s severe limitations; both can be thrown off by situations that they haven’t encountered before. Artificial neural networks can learn for themselves to recognize cats in photos. But they must be shown hundreds of thousands of examples and still end up much less accurate at spotting cats than a child.
This is where skeptics such as Brooks, a founder of iRobot and Rethink Robotics, come in. Even if it’s impressive—relative to what earlier computers could manage—for a computer to recognize a picture of a cat, the machine has no volition, no sense of what cat-ness is or what else is happening in the picture, and none of the countless other insights that humans have. In this view, AI could possibly lead to intelligent machines, but it would take much more work than people like Bostrom imagine. And even if it could happen, intelligence will not necessarily lead to sentience. Extrapolating from the state of AI today to suggest that superintelligence is looming is “comparable to seeing more efficient internal combustion engines appearing and jumping to the conclusion that warp drives are just around the corner,” Brooks wrote recently on Edge.org. “Malevolent AI” is nothing to worry about, he says, for a few hundred years at least.
Insurance policy
Even if the odds of a superintelligence arising are very long, perhaps it’s irresponsible to take the chance. One person who shares Bostrom’s concerns is Stuart J. Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Russell is the author, with Peter Norvig (a peer of Kurzweil’s at Google), of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which has been the standard AI textbook for two decades.
“There are a lot of supposedly smart public intellectuals who just haven’t a clue,” Russell told me. He pointed out that AI has advanced tremendously in the last decade, and that while the public might understand progress in terms of Moore’s Law (faster computers are doing more), in fact recent AI work has been fundamental, with techniques like deep learning laying the groundwork for computers that can automatically increase their understanding of the world around them.
Bostrom’s book proposes ways to align computers with human needs. We’re basically telling a god how we’d like to be treated.
Because Google, Facebook, and other companies are actively looking to create an intelligent, “learning” machine, he reasons, “I would say that one of the things we ought not to do is to press full steam ahead on building superintelligence without giving thought to the potential risks. It just seems a bit daft.” Russell made an analogy: “It’s like fusion research. If you ask a fusion researcher what they do, they say they work on containment. If you want unlimited energy you’d better contain the fusion reaction.” Similarly, he says, if you want unlimited intelligence, you’d better figure out how to align computers with human needs.
Bostrom’s book is a research proposal for doing so. A superintelligence would be godlike, but would it be animated by wrath or by love? It’s up to us (that is, the engineers). Like any parent, we must give our child a set of values. And not just any values, but those that are in the best interest of humanity. We’re basically telling a god how we’d like to be treated. How to proceed?
Bostrom draws heavily on an idea from a thinker named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who talks about “coherent extrapolated volition”—the consensus-derived “best self” of all people. AI would, we hope, wish to give us rich, happy, fulfilling lives: fix our sore backs and show us how to get to Mars. And since humans will never fully agree on anything, we’ll sometimes need it to decide for us—to make the best decisions for humanity as a whole. How, then, do we program those values into our (potential) superintelligences? What sort of mathematics can define them? These are the problems, Bostrom believes, that researchers should be solving now. Bostrom says it is “the essential task of our age.”
For the civilian, there’s no reason to lose sleep over scary robots. We have no technology that is remotely close to superintelligence. Then again, many of the largest corporations in the world are deeply invested in making their computers more intelligent; a true AI would give any one of these companies an unbelievable advantage. They also should be attuned to its potential downsides and figuring out how to avoid them.
This somewhat more nuanced suggestion—without any claims of a looming AI-mageddon—is the basis of an open letter on the website of the Future of Life Institute, the group that got Musk’s donation. Rather than warning of existential disaster, the letter calls for more research into reaping the benefits of AI “while avoiding potential pitfalls.” This letter is signed not just by AI outsiders such as Hawking, Musk, and Bostrom but also by prominent computer scientists (including Demis Hassabis, a top AI researcher). You can see where they’re coming from. After all, if they develop an artificial intelligence that doesn’t share the best human values, it will mean they weren’t smart enough to control their own creations.
Paul Ford, a freelance writer in New York, wrote about Bitcoin in March/April 2014.American Airlines passengers try to get the airline to put them on a different flight after their scheduled flight was canceled. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.
The good news for American Airlines is that it’s prepared to announce that by Saturday none of its 757s will have seats that come loose during flight. The bad news, obviously, is that as of last Thursday, American had to cancel 50 flights because 48 of their planes couldn’t be flown safely. The problem, it says, is that spilled sodas blocked the locking pins used on some of the seats, a flaw that can be corrected by using a different mechanism. The deeper problem for American is that seats coasting around the cabin in flight isn’t even the biggest problem it’s wrestling with this fall. American is bankrupt, and the bankruptcy proceeding—while designed to restore the airline to health—has ignited a multifront civil war pitting executives against their own employees.
Things are so bad for American that the hilarious Sept. 29 New York Times op-ed by novelist Gary Shteyngart about his nightmarish experience on a trans-Atlantic American flight actually understated the case. Everyone who flies has an airline horror story or two to tell, but this fall American is demonstrably worse than the competition.
Consider the latest on-time arrival data. About a third of American’s flights were delayed 15 minutes or more, compared to just 22 percent for United, 18.1 percent for US Airways, or 13.5 percent for Delta. Now consider that this was actually a huge improvement over how American had been doing in the second half of September when almost half of flights were delayed.
American’s tardiness isn’t bad luck. American couldn’t get passengers to the airport on time because the pilots who fly the planes didn’t want to get passengers to the airport on time.
This horror story begins with the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing made by AMR Corp. (the holding company that owns American Airlines) last November. Bankruptcy, conventionally speaking, is about restructuring debts owed to banks and bondholders. But most of American’s debt was backed by hard assets like airplanes. What’s more, AMR actually had some cash on hand at the time of the filing. The debts American really wanted to restructure were the implicit debts to employees. As S&P analyst Philip Baggaley put it at the time, the goal was to “reorganize in Chapter 11 and emerge as a somewhat smaller airline with more competitive labor costs and a lighter debt load.” In other words, American went into bankruptcy primarily so it could pay people less.
The bankruptcy process gave American management leverage with which to extract concessions from its labor unions. American got those concessions, except from the pilots’ union, with which no agreement could be reached. So American decided to call the pilots’ bluff and got a bankruptcy judge to void the pilots’ contract.
It turns out that the pilots weren’t bluffing. Organized labor in the United States—especially in the private sector—has been in decline for so long that management seems to have forgotten that a disciplined union can exert a ton of pressure under the right circumstances, even if the legal environment is hostile. American pilots weren’t allowed to strike over the contract voiding, so instead they did something clever: They started following the rules.
If you own a car or a home, you know that you don’t get every little problem fixed right away. Some issues are so severe as to require immediate attention, but a lot of stuff you let slide until it’s more convenient or financially viable to fix. A plane turns out to be the same way. Part of what a good pilot does is know the difference between something that needs to be fixed right now and something that can wait until fixing it won’t cause massive delays or tons of missed connections. When American angered its pilots, they struck back by doing the reverse—deliberately calling in every little complaint, timed for the worst possible moment. The results were catastrophic, and it’s no surprise that the recent improvement in flight timeliness has coincided with a resumption of negotiations. But American doesn’t seem to have backed away from a philosophical commitment to hardball anti-union tactics. In June, it persuaded a federal judge to rule that a new, higher threshold for triggering a unionization vote among passenger-service agents should be applied retroactively, contrary to the interpretation of the National Mediation Board. On Oct. 3, an appeals court judge overruled that call, but the airline insists it’s going to keep fighting rather than allow an election to go forward. If nothing else, American may delay the process until next year in hopes that Mitt Romney wins the election and appoints a more management-friendly National Mediation Board.
To rebuild traveler confidence in the airline, American is going to need to do more than reattach its seats. It needs to repair its relationships with its workers. Labor and management have some divergent interests, but there should be room for ample common ground. At any firm, workers can obtain high wages and job stability if the firm succeeds and generates enough revenue to pay them. And as American is finding out, an airline can only succeed if its workers want it to succeed. In this sense, the original sin of the American saga is perverse incentives built into the compensation structure of American’s executives. The aviation industry has been consolidating for decades, and last winter it looked like American would likely end up merging with either Delta or US Airways, both of which were interested. A Delta merger would pose serious anti-trust questions, but a US Airways merger would work for federal regulators, and US Airways management smartly sought and obtained a thumbs-up from American’s three major labor unions. But American brushed these overtures off and preferred to continue brinkmanship and independence under the umbrella of bankruptcy.
The reason, as Andrew Ross Sorkin explained in July before the pilots’ situation really blew up, is that CEO Tom Horton and the rest of his executive team can earn a huge payday by keeping the company independent. During bankruptcy, Horton earns a relatively modest $660,000 salary. But “in an odd twist of the bankruptcy process, airline management teams have typically managed to extract 5 percent to 10 percent of the company’s shares for themselves upon exiting Chapter 11,” a stake that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. There’s no particular reason to think this outcome would be better for shareholders than seriously pursuing a merger with US Airways, but it’s easy to see why it’s appealing to Horton. And by the same token, it’s easy to see why the pilots’ union is in no mood to make concessions whose objectives are as much about executives’ pocketbooks as they are about the viability of the airline. Until that breach of trust is repaired, don’t count on American getting you where you’re going on time.Democrats are Trying to Fast-Track Cap and Trade Bill Before Americans Realize What it Means
Democrats are trying to rush through the administration’s cap and trade bill before people have a chance to see what is actually in it. Does that sound familiar? I think that is does. Can you say stimulus bill?
This bill is 1,000 pages long and debate is going to be short and sweet. Once again lawmakers will be asked to vote on a bill that they can’t possibly read before voting. Does this sound familiar? I think that is does. Can you say stimulus bill?
There is a reason that Democrats want this bill, which will raise taxes on 80% of Americans, passed before the public can see what is in it. And that reason is the American people have no idea what the hell cap and trade is.
The poll showed that only 24 percent of voters could correctly identify that cap and trade is an environmental policy
Simple math tells us that 76% of Americans don’t even know that cap and trade is an environmental policy.
But that is not all.
29% thought it dealt with Wall Street
Almost 30% of people polled think that cap and trade is a bill that will make Wall Street pay for the sin of being successful and having more money than they do. How many of these people support this legislation because the falsely believe it will punish the rich? Is it any wonder that a majority of this group of people probably support cap and trade?
But it continues.
17 percent thought it was health care reform
17% of those polled think that cap and trade means that they are going to get free health-care. No wonder why they support it.
And one last little tidbit.
30% had no idea what the term means
I give these people credit, at least they admit that they don’t know what the hell they are a talking about. These people at least told the truth and admitted that they don’t know what issue cap and trade is supposed to deal with.
Is it any wonder that the administration wants to act fast on this legislation? If the 76% of Americans that couldn’t correctly identify what issue cap and trade dealt with ever found out that the legislation was designed to raise their energy prices and force them to pay more taxes would they still support this legislation? I think not.
It is sad to me that such a large percentage of the voters don’t know what such a large part of the president’s agenda actually deals with. At least we can now understand how he was elected in the first place.
This administration sees an opportunity here and that opportunity is the ignorance of a large portion of the voting public. The administration needs to strike while the iron is hot. Delay could breed knowledge and that is the last thing that this administration needs. That is why Democrats are trying to rush this legislation through.
AdvertisementsA school prayer lawsuit against the River Forest School Corporation in Hobart, Ind., sputters on.
Parent Jim Bellar told Chicago Tribune columnist Jerry Davich on Monday that he rejected a potential settlement because it didn’t require the school district to admit wrongdoing. Instead, he filed an amended complaint that now names the five athletic coaches that he claims are responsible for coercing players – including his son – into religious activity. (The column may be behind a paywall for some readers.)
In his original suit, filed by the ACLU of Indiana, Bellar claimed specifically that coaches led athletes in Christian prayer, that the school led Christian prayers at its graduation services, and that the River Forest school board delivered exclusively Christian prayers at its meetings. These practices are so pervasive, he said, that when his son objected to them, faculty and students promptly ostracized him and targeted him for prolonged bullying.“We did not do this for money,” he said in a previous interview. “We are looking for justice.”
“The practices that form the basis for the lawsuit are not the types of practices where reasonable people might disagree on their constitutionality,” Bellar’s ACLU attorney, Gavin Rose, added. “Under those circumstances, it is exceedingly unfortunate that a public school would choose to turn its own students into outsiders in this manner.”
Now, Bellar says he’s pulled his child from school.
“I believe he will have a better chance in life and a better education,” he told Davich this week.
“We have been to hell and back,” he added. “I know many people may not like what we are doing, but what if their kid was being bullied by coaches and teachers? I want them to understand there were a lot more issues involved than just prayers in school.”
That’s why he wants the school to own up to its mistakes. “I'd settle for the lowest amount of money if they will agree to that,” he said.
But Bellar may hope in vain. In his column, Davich argues that it isn’t likely the school will publicly acknowledge any wrong-doing; he may well be correct.
Regardless of the case’s outcome, the experience Bellar describes will sound familiar to many school prayer plaintiffs. They customarily face extreme harassment for their actions. Consider the Dobrich family, who filed suit in 2008 against Delaware’s Sussex County Schools after a minister proselytized students at their daughter’s high school graduation: They received so many violent threats they were forced to move out of town.
Then there’s the case of Jessica Ahlquist. In 2012, the Rhode Island high school student filed suit to have a Christian prayer removed from a place of prominence in the Cranston High School West cafeteria. She received so many threats she required a police escort from school. She, like Bellar’s son, eventually left school due to on-going harassment.
There are many other similar cases -- the Jesus Pizza saga is barely behind us -- and they demonstrate two important realities about public schools and the separation of church and state.
First, some public school administrators and faculty violate the First Amendment on a disturbingly frequent basis. The offenses almost without exception involve the promotion of Christianity to the exclusion of all other faiths and belief systems. Second, schools and communities often react badly when a student or parent complains about unconstitutional practices.
The First Amendment applies to all 50 states. The River Forest School Corporation is not exempt. Georgia’s West Laurens High School Marching Band is not exempt. Florence High School in Colorado, home of Jesus Pizza, was not exempt; neither was Cranston High School West or the Sussex County Schools.
These aren’t victimless crimes. When school administrators fail their responsibility to uphold church-state separation, students suffer. That should disturb any educator, but case after case demonstrates that many still place their personal religious convictions over the welfare of their students.
If that’s the case in River Forest, it’s hardly strange that Jim Bellar won’t go gently into that good night.25 Best Self Development Books to read in your 20s
When you’re starting your life journey, you often start off blindly with no idea on what you should do. It then gets stressful because you have no idea what to do or where to go. You wonder how life will go for you after college or what you should do in relation to your goals and ambitions.
But one of the first reassurances you need to tell yourself is that no one has all the answers they need to immediately skyrocket their career. When Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both established their companies, they heavily relied on books to guide them through their hardships.
Everyone starts off with questions no matter where they begin and they read books to uncover those answers. Perhaps you have a negativity problem or a lack of motivation. Either way, reading is meant to feed you with possible ideas on how to be the best version of yourself. It saves you months and years of struggling to find yourself because you’re reading the experiences of those who already suffered what you’re going through.
Rather than blindly searching for books to determine which ones will help you in the start of your journey, here are 25 best development books to read in your 20s.
1.The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem: The Definitive Work on Self-Esteem by the Leading Pioneer in the Field by Nathaniel Branden
The Six Pillars Of Self-Esteem is essential for anyone who wants to accelerate their self-esteem. Branden introduces the six pillars-six action-based practices for daily living that provide the foundation for self-esteem.
He explores the central importance of self-esteem in five areas: the workplace, parenting, education, psychotherapy, and the culture at large. The work provides concrete guidelines for teachers, parents, managers, and therapists who are responsible for developing the self-esteem of others.
2. Use Your Body to Heal Your Mind: Revolutionary Methods to Release All Barriers to Health, Healing and Happiness by Ph.D Henry Grayson
Through years of research and helping his private clients, Dr. Grayson has developed a step-by-step formula to identify what keeps people stuck repeating unproductive activities.
You will learn how to identify the origins of automatic, and most often, unconscious behaviors through informational questionnaires, easy to do exercises, and clear explanations on how to become more aware of conscious thought patterns that contribute to this vicious cycle of trying but not succeeding in long term positive actions.
3. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma by Peter A. Levine
Waking the Tiger normalizes the symptoms of trauma and the steps needed to heal them. People are often traumatized by seemingly ordinary experiences.
You will be taken on a guided tour of the subtle, yet powerful impulses that govern your responses to overwhelming life events. To do this, it employs a series of exercises that helps you focus on bodily sensations.
4. Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System for Wealth, Health, Peace, and More by Joe Vitale
Joe Vitale was once homeless. Now, he’s the millionaire author of numerous bestselling books, an Internet celebrity, and an in-demand online marketing guru.
What happened to create all of that success? How did he make it happen? Was it hard work, divine providence, or both? The answer may surprise you.
It wasn’t until he discovered the ancient Hawaiian Ho’oponopono system that he finally found truly unlimited success. Updated for modern times, Ho’oponopono is a self-help methodology that removes the mental obstacles that block your path, freeing your mind to find new and unexpected ways to get what you want out of life.
5. The Road Less Traveled, Timeless Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth by M. Scott Peck
The Road Less Traveled helps you explore the very nature of loving relationships and leads you toward a new serenity and fullness of life.
You’ll learn how to distinguish dependency from love, how to become a more sensitive parent, and ultimately how to become one’s own true self.
6. Awaken the Giant Within : How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny! by Tony Robbins
A great book to start your self development journey for the lifestyle you want. Anthony Robbins provides a step-by-step program teaching the fundamental lessons of self-mastery that will enable you to discover your true purpose, take control of your life, and harness the forces that shape your destiny.
7. The Breakout Principle: How to Activate the Natural Trigger That Maximizes Creativity, Athletic Performance, Productivity, and Personal Well-Being by Herbert Benson
Would it surprise you to learn that to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem, you need to get up and leave the room? A walk in the woods will help you finish your novel? Humming can make you a better tennis player? Or completely giving up is the way to succeed?
The Breakout Principle reports the discovery of an easy-to-access inner switch that increases mental function, enhances creativity and productivity, maximizes athletic performance, and enriches spiritual life.
8. The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book) by Don Miguel Ruiz
The Four Agreements gives four principles to practice in order to create love and happiness in your life. As you practice living these four practices your life will dramatically change.
In the beginning these new habits will be challenging and you might lapse countless times. With practice these agreements become integrated into your being and every area of your life and become easy habits to keep.
9. iWant: My Journey from Addiction and Overconsumption to a Simpler, Honest Life by Jane Velez-Mitchell
Using a specific set of Twelve Steps in every aspect of her life, Velez-Mitchell shares how she shed many of the self-destructive habits that plague Americans, habits responsible for a host of social ills from the obesity crisis to environmental wreckage.
10. The Wounded Heart: Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse by Dan B. Allender
The Wounded Heart is an intensely personal and specific look at sexual abuse. Dr. Allender explores the secret lament of the soul damaged by sexual abuse and lays hold of the hope buried there by the One whose unstained image we all bear.
11. The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy
In The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, Dr. Joseph Murphy gives you the tools you need to unlock the awesome powers of your subconscious mind.
You can improve your relationships, your finances, your physical well-being. Once you learn how to use this unbelievably powerful force there is nothing you will not be able to accomplish.
12. What the Heck Am I Going to Do with My Life? (Twentys) by Margaret Feinberg
One of the top struggles listed by twentysomethings is the fight to find a purpose and a calling. They find themselves studying a major or working in a job they do not really enjoy, and soon self-doubt surrounds, bombarding them with questions such as,
What am I doing? Shouldn’t I have this figured out by now? and Am I the only one who doesn’t get it? This book takes readers on a soul-searching journey that gets to the heart of their passions, talents, abilities, and life goals.
13. Life After College: The Complete Guide to Getting What You Want by Jenny Blake
Life After College is essential for every graduating student and young professional. It features practical, actionable advice that helps people focus on the BIG picture of their lives, not just the details.
Life After College will leave you feeling inspired, confident and ready to take action toward creating the life you really want.
14. You Majored in What?: Mapping Your Path from Chaos to Career by Katharine Brooks
Dr. Katharine Brooks provides a road map for 20 somethings, replacing obsolete thinking that “major = career,” and instead using positive psychology, mapping techniques, and experimental wanderings to help job seekers reframe their skills.
Brooks provides effective strategies to help you mine your academic and life experiences for new insights into landing jobs with the best employers, and finding alternatives when the situation calls for a Plan B.
15. Love Is Letting Go of |
names of Caesar and Julia. They are also dated, with one coin showing the head of Philip himself revealing that it was minted in 30 CE (denoted by Year 34 of his reign), the time of the Gospel events.
Aristobulus of Chalcis (ruled 57 CE - 92 CE)
The portion of Lebanon called Chalcis was given to the son of Aristobulus (Mariamme's son). Herod III eventually passed his land on to his own son named Aristobulus.
One extremely interesting coin was known to have been issued by Aristobulus. On one side is shown the head of Aristobulus with the inscription OF KING ARISTOBULUS in Greek. On the other side is the head of a woman wearing a crown. surrounded by the inscription QUEEN SALOME. This is Aristobulus' wife (Antiquities 18.5.4 137), who is the same Salome as in the John the Baptist story. It is a rare depiction of a person from a New Testament story.
Agrippa I (ruled 37 CE - 44 CE)
As the son of Aristobulus, who was one of the two sons of Mariamme, Agrippa I bore the lineage of the original Hasmonean dynasty. He was therefore a popular favorite to become the next ruler of a reunited Judaea, and slowly the Roman emperors awarded him territory, including the predominantly non-Jewish areas formerly belonging to Philip. Thus many of his coins are of Greek type and show heads of the Emperor and of himself and his son.
Agrippa issued a variety of artistic coins, with horses, multiple figures, and dramatic scenes. Many coins were fairly large, the size of a U.S. quarter. All were bronze. They bore the date, KING AGRIPPA in Greek, and at times the names of his son or the Emperor.
Only one coin seemed to circulate within Jewish areas, and unlike the others is not rare today. This shows no human figures, only a royal parasol on one side, with the name of the king, and three ears of barley on the other, with the date Year 6 of his reign, which translates to 42 CE.
Agrippa I's story is told at intervals in Books 18 and 19 of the Antiquities.
Agrippa II (ruled 56 CE - 95 CE)
"King Agrippa to Josephus, his dear friend, sends greetings. I have read over your book with great pleasure, and it appears to me that you have done it much more accurately and with greater care, than have the other writers. Send me the rest of these books. Farewell, my dear friend."
The son of Agrippa I, the great-grandson of the Hasmonean Mariamme, inherited his father's popularity and lands. Agrippa II accrued more over time from the Roman emperors, Nero awarding him cities in Galilee and authority over the Temple and the High Priest.
He was a friend of Josephus and the two corresponded frequently on historical matters; in his autobiography, Josephus states that Agrippa wrote him sixty-two letters concerning his work (Life 1.65 364). The above quotation is one of the letters he cites.
The coins of Agrippa form a long series both before and after the war against Rome, to which he was opposed. The heads of the Emperors are on most of the coins. Inscriptions are all in Greek, giving the name of the emperor, his own KING AGRIPPA, and the date in terms of his regnal year. Some of the coins after the war are modeled on the Judea Capta coins issued by Rome to commemorate the defeat. The implication throughout is that Agrippa did all he could to remain friendly with Rome even at the most tumultuous times.
Agrippa II appears throughout the War and the Life and in Book 20 of the Antiquities.
The Procurators (ruled 6 CE - 66 CE)
Herod Archelaus, whose territory included Jerusalem, was succeeded in power by Roman administrators; fourteen of these procurators governed until the outbreak of the war.
Their coins show attention to Jewish sensibilities in their avoidance of human and animal images. They are all small bronze coins and usually depict palm trees, ears of barley, cornucopias, and wreaths. The name of the emperor and the year appear in Greek inscriptions. The procurators did not put their own name on the coins, so we can only associate the two groups through the dates given by Josephus.
Only one governor shows an insensitivity in his coins, perhaps even a deliberate intent to provoke. These coins show not neutral agricultural symbols but pictures of implements used in Roman religious ceremonies. Thus they stood, by association, for Roman gods themselves, the closest a coin designer can come without actually depicting a god. Interesting enough, the governor responsible for these coins was Pontius Pilate. This accords with Josephus' accounts of his provocation of the Jews of his time, and perhaps sheds some light on the Gospel events.
The procurators are discussed particularly in Antiquities Book 18 Ch. 1-4 and Book 20 Ch. 5-9.
The Tyrian Shekel and The Temple Tax
A requirement for Jews everywhere, whether or not they lived in the land of Israel, was to make an annual payment to support the Temple in Jerusalem. The Biblical amount of the payment was one-half shekel. As Josephus tells it:
"And when Moses had gathered the multitude together again, he ordained that they should offer half a shekel for every man, as an oblation to God; which shekel is a piece among the Hebrews, and is equal to four Athenian drachmae." (Antiquities 3.8.2)
As noted before, the weight of the Biblical shekel was actually less than four drachmae, but in Josephus' time these two were equated, probably out of convenience in dealing with the Greek monetary system.
Only one coin was acceptable to the Temple for the paying of the tax at the time of Josephus: this was the four-drachmae silver piece minted at the city of Tyre (located on the coast of Lebanon). Throughout the region people gave this coin its highest confidence due to the purity of its silver, which had been maintained for the two centuries of the coin's production. This four-drachmae or "tetradrachma" piece was equated with one Hebrew shekel of silver and therefore was acceptable for two payments of the Temple tax. A half-shekel coin was also produced.
The Tyrian shekel is referred to by name at one point by Josephus:
"He then bought up all the oil, paying Tyrian coin of the value of four Athenian drachmas for four amphoras and proceeded to sell half an amphora at the same price." (War 2.21.2 592)
The coin is large and thick, about the diameter of a U.S. quarter, and weighed the 14 grams of the shekel (about half an ounce). On the obverse is the sturdy head of the Phoenecian god Melkart wearing a laurel wreath on his head and a lion skin on his shoulders. On the reverse is a fierce eagle facing left, in a style resembling that of the American eagle that at one time was on the silver dollar; it clutches the prow of a ship in its right claw, and around it is the legend in Greek, OF TYRE THE HOLY AND INVINCIBLE. With imagery like this it is no wonder the coin inspired confidence among traders.
The coin is dated on the reverse. It began to be minted in 126 BCE and ceased production in 70 CE -- coincidentally, the last year of the Jewish war. There is somewhat of a change in style for coins dated after 18 BCE, and numismatists suggest that these later coins were actually minted in Jerusalem expressly for use in the Temple. It is odd that coins bearing the image of a foreign god would be produced in Israel and accepted by the Temple, but perhaps necessity and a careful interpretation of the Law swayed the authorities: one should not make graven images, so as long as they are made by Gentiles, and are not worshipped by Jews, they might have been deemed safe for use.
The Revolt Against Rome (66 CE - 70 CE)
The revolutionary government during the war against Rome minted its own coins. These announced the government's goals and authority as well as serving as a medium of exchange.
The coins of the revolt are an exciting series with vivid imagery and defiant slogans that were at once nationalistic and messianic. Contrasting them to the dry Hasmonean money one sees a religious dedication and even fervor in the revolt coins that is lacking in the earlier government's; the old kings inscribed their own name and did not use the name of a nation, while the revolt coinage used the name of no leader and put the nation's names everywhere. As a consequence, however, we do not know who in fact issued the revolt coins; Josephus does not tell us.
All the coins of the revolution use the same antique Hebrew lettering as the Hasmonean coins, deliberately recalling the old kingdom of Israel. Greek is never used on these coins.
The Silver Shekels
The most famous coins of the revolt are the large, thick silver shekels. As discussed above, the Temple would only take the Tyrian shekel as payment for the Temple tax. The new revolutionary coins of the same weight were undoubtedly intended as nationalist replacements for the foreign and idolatrous Tyrian shekel.
The shekels have about the same diameter as a U. S. quarter and the same weight as the U. S. half dollar.
These coins are beautifully made. On the obverse is a chalice surrounded by the inscription sheqel yisroael, SHEKEL OF ISRAEL, and an indication of the date, YEAR 1,2,3, or 4, with coins of the last year (69/70 CE) being extremely rare.
On the reverse is a stem with three of what appear to be pomegranates. The careful positioning of the fruits implies this symbol was of great importance to the revolt, but we do not know what that was. Surrounding this is the inscription yerushalaim hakodesh, JERUSALEM THE HOLY.
A half-shekel of similar design was also minted.
Josephus makes reference to a shekel coin twice in his history of the war. One of them was already quoted above (see the Tyrian Shekel section). The other appears in the context of the intense famine that Jerusalem suffered during the Roman siege:
"Others devoured tufts of withered grass; indeed some collectors of stalks sold a trifling quantity for four Athenian drachmas." (War 6.3.3 198)
As we saw, Josephus equates the shekel with four Athenian drachmas, so it is most likely he is referring to a tetradrachm coin, either the Tyrian or the Israeli shekel. Another interesting reference to money demonstrates the inflation that resulted when the Temple treasury was opened:
"Gold was so abundant in the town that they could purchase for twelve Athenian drachmas coin formerly worth twenty-five." (War 5.13.4 550)
The Amphora Bronze
The most plentiful issue of the revolutionary government is a small bronze coin with the same diameter as a U.S. dime. On the obverse is a vase with two handles, an "amphora." It is surrounded by the date in large antique Hebrew letters, and reads either shanat shtayim, YEAR TWO, or shanat shalosh, YEAR THREE. The dates on all revolutionary coins count from the beginning of the war in 66 CE, so these are from 67/68 and 68/69 CE. The third year coin differs in the shape of the amphora, which has an ornate lid.
The reverse of the bronze depicts a leaf of the grape vine hanging from a branch. Surrounding it is the legend herut tzion, FOR THE FREEDOM OF ZION.
The imagery shows a chief source of wealth of Israel, wine production. The amphora perhaps contains the finished product of which the leaf is the beginning. Wine also was important in Jewish religious ceremonies. The image may involve symbolism we can only guess at today; for example, the vine leaf may also represent the immense and finely crafted golden vine that hung over the entrance to the Temple (Antiquities 15.11.3 395).
Many variations of the amphora bronze have been found, and numismatists suggest there may have been many different minting centers. Because of their plenty their price is relatively low, and many visitors to Israel buy them as souvenirs.
The Succoth Bronzes
A more ornate set of larger bronzes appeared later in the war, in 69 CE. These are relatively rare and highly priced in today's market.
These bronzes depict religious articles related to the celebration of Succoth, the Festival of Tabernacles. One way to interpret this is to recall that the festival celebrates the journey from Egypt before the Israelites reached the promised land. The coin may be suggesting that the people have freed themselves from a foreign power but have not yet attained a peaceful and safe nation.
One coin of this category shows on the obverse an etrog with a lulav on either side of it, surrounded by the inscription YEAR FOUR HALF. On the reverse is a seven-branched date palm tree, recalling not only a chief product of the land but also the seven-branched menorah in the Temple. Two baskets of fruit are at its base. It is surrounded by the inscription l'goalit tzion, FOR THE REDEMPTION OF ZION.
The inscription doubtless reminded the people of the Biblical promises of redemption by the Lord. "Redeem" is almost a technical term in Biblical language signifying a future era of freedom, brought about, potentially, by a specially appointed messenger -- a Messiah. The Greek equivalent appears only twice in the Gospels, oddly enough both in Luke in strategic positions: once in the first chapter and once in the last chapter. The latter reference occurs in the Emmaus narrative which parallels the Testimonium passage of Josephus (as discussed elsewhere on this web site): "For we thought he would be the one to redeem Israel." This ties Luke to the language of the revolution as shown on the Succoth coins, and makes plain the expectation among many Jews that Jesus would bring political freedom, if not more, thirty-five years before actual war broke out.
Other types of Succoth coins show variations of the lulav and etrog symbols, as well as an ornate chalice.
Judaea Capta
A sobering series of Roman coins celebrating their victory over Judaea replaces those of the revolution. These "Judaea Capta" coins advertised the outcome of the difficult war to all parts of the empire, serving as a reminder to other provinces not to have similar ideas of freedom. They also celebrated the war that elevated the Vespasian, the commander of the Roman forces in Judaea, to the rank of Emperor.
Josephus had predicted this to Vespasian (War 3.8.9 399) and as a consequence was rewarded (War 4.10.7 622) and, eventually, made a member of Vespasian's family, the Flavians. One might say that the victory coins served the same purpose as Josephus' history of the war: to tell of the capture of the rebellious province and to gratify the new emperor.
Many different coins referring to the victory were struck throughout the empire over a period of more than a decade, both by Vespasian and by his son Titus when the latter became Emperor. The most famous type is the Vespasian denarius. These coins, about the size of a U.S. dime, were minted in both silver and gold.
On the obverse is the head of Vespasian wearing a laurel wreath, surrounded by an inscription naming him and indicating by his titles the year it was struck. Those minted at the war's end in 70 CE bear the Latin inscription IMP CAESAR VESPASIANVS AVG, i.e., EMPEROR CAESAR VESPASIAN AUGUSTUS.
On the reverse is a design depicting a personification of Judaea as a captured woman. This occurs in a variety of forms. The most common shows Judea as w woman in long robes, sitting on the ground in a position of mourning; at her back is a victory trophy, a post with Roman armor. Below her is the name of the country, IUDAEA.
Another variety shows Judaea seated with her hands bound behind her; a nearby date palm aids in depicting the country.
Large bronze coins were also struck on the same theme. The sestertius denomination was large enough to present an ornate picture of a weeping Jewish woman sitting on the ground by a date palm tree, together with a bearded Jewish man with his hands bound behind him and a shield on the ground. Others show a tall Roman soldier holding a spear standing over the woman. These coins bear the legend IVDAEA CAPTA (JUDAEA CAPTURED).
Many coins were actually struck at Caesarea in Judaea rather than in Rome. They were widely circulated in Judaea. These bear Greek inscriptions (the common language of the region). The obverse bears the usual head of Vespasian, but with the inscription in Greek; the reverse shows Nike, the Goddess of Victory, writing on a shield that hangs on a palm tree. The surrounding Greek inscription reads JUDAEA DEFEATED.In seven games last season, Brock Osweiler was a great game manager but nothing more, and the Broncos were smart to let him go.
Admittedly I bought into Brock-mania last season. I was in attendance for three of his starts, including the Patriots Overtime thriller, which was his best performance of the season. Osweiler was exciting, and seeing him rocket the ball into receiver’s hands was a refreshing site, after watching Peyton Manning lob the ball for the better part of 2014-15. If you go back and look at the numbers, he was not very impressive, and John Elway was wise not to overpay the inexperienced quarterback.
Bye-Bye Brocketman: Analysis and reaction to Brock Osweiler leaving Broncos in free agency
Osweiler completed a modest 61.8 percent of his passes in 2015. Considering the Broncos offense was extremely conservative, and were playing to not lose the game with Os, his eight turnovers, (6 interceptions, 2 fumbles), to just ten touchdowns was not very impressive.
Osweiler played good enough to keep the Broncos in games, and the defense took care of the rest. Obviously there were some highs during the Osweiler-run in Denver. Victories over New England and Cincinnati were impressive feats. The Oakland loss was ugly, but Pittsburgh was not really his fault.
At $18 million per-season, Osweiler would have been crazy not to take the deal with the Texans, but the Broncos may have dodged a bullet in the long run. Sure Osweiler has some potential, and paired with Lamar Miller and Deandre Hopkins, the Texans have potential to put up some points this season, something they would have loved to have in the Playoffs last year. The thing is, the Texans are guaranteeing nearly $36 million over the next two seasons. That is a ton of cash for a quarterback that has seven career starts.
Over those starts Osweiler played decent, but as Mark Kiszla pointed out in the Denver Post Thursday morning, Elway draws a line in the sand, when it comes to negotiating contracts. Elway let Dumervil bolt for Baltimore after 2012, and did not budge with Dominique Rodgers Cromartie, before signing Aqib Talib.
“In an NFL where player expenditures are limited by a salary cap, it is folly to pay the going rate for a free agent unless you are absolutely certain the money makes sense for your team. From Albert Haynesworth to DeMarco Murray, one of the quickest ways to do an embarrassing belly flop is by trying to make a splash in free agency.” Kiszla said in his Column titled Why the Broncos are better off without Peyton Manning, Brock Osweiler.
Along with multiple reports hinting that Osweiler has had one foot out the door since being pulled Week 17, and the ludicrous $72 million he received from Houston, Denver is just as well off without Brock lobster.
The quarterback options on the open market are slim, but there are experienced players available. Most notably Ryan Fitzpatrick and Robert Griffin III are both free agents still. Elway could trade for a quarterback like Tampa Bay’s Mike Glennon or Los Angeles’ Case Keenum, but the most likely target seems to be Colin Kaepernick.
Reports: 49ers will trade Colin Kaepernick; Jets believe quarterback is headed to Broncos
According to ESPN’S Adam Schefter, the Cleveland Browns, New York Jets, and Broncos have all expressed interest in trading for the second round pick out of Nevada. Kaepernick wants out of San Francisco, and the defending Super Bowl champions would be an appealing place for anyone.
If the Broncos could get Kaepernick at the right price, he would fit perfectly in the Denver offense. Kaepernick has an absolute cannon for an arm. His athleticism allows him to improvise and make plays downfield, and he is better from the pocket than people give him credit for.
Kaepernick has shown moments of greatness, especially early in his career with Jim Harbaugh. Gary Kubiak resurrected Jake Plummer’s career, and he was able to coach Manning to a Super Bowl victory at 39 years old. If anybody could turn Kaepernick’s career back in the right direction, it would be Kubiak.
Kaepernick’s year-to-year deal means there is a lot of room for restructuring in the future. Kaepernick is only 28 years old and should have a lot of football left to play in his career. With 57 career starts, a pair of NFC Championship appearances, and one Super Bowl appearance, we know Kaepernick can handle the big stage.
Trade talks happen all the time, and there is no guarantee Kaepernick will be out of San Francisco next season, but he might be the Broncos best option at quarterback moving forward. Elway always has something up his sleeve, will it include a deal for Colin Kaepernick?Half of registered voters disapprove of the job Donald Trump is doing as president. | Getty Poll: Trump approval rating hits new low
Donald Trump’s approval rating is at a new low — and that's before claims that he disclosed sensitive information to Russian officials in the Oval Office and tried to shut down an FBI investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
A new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, conducted after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey but before the two latest blockbuster revelations, shows Trump’s approval rating at 42 percent, with half of registered voters disapproving of the job Trump is doing as president. In the previous poll, conducted last Tuesday through Thursday, 46 percent of voters approved of Trump’s job performance, and 47 percent disapproved.
Story Continued Below
Even more strikingly, twice as many voters “strongly disapprove” of Trump (38 percent) compared to those who strongly approve (19 percent). A 64-percent majority of Democrats strongly disapprove of Trump, but only 43 percent of Republicans strongly approve. Just 42 percent of self-identified Trump voters in last year's election strongly approve of his job performance, while 70 percent of those who said they voted for Hillary Clinton last fall strongly disapprove of Trump.
Trump’s approval rating overall remains high with Republicans, however, despite the dampened enthusiasm. Seventy-nine percent of GOP voters approve of the job he is doing, while only 16 percent disapprove. That’s a mirror image of Trump’s approval rating among Democratic voters: 15 percent approve, versus 79 percent who disapprove.
Independent voters tilt against Trump, however: Only 39 percent approve of the job Trump is doing, compared with 50 percent who disapprove.
Trump’s 42-percent approval rating is his lowest yet in POLITICO/Morning Consult’s weekly survey, which has tended to show more positive results for Trump than most other public polls. The 50-percent disapproval rating matches the previous high — in late March, following the collapse of the first GOP-drafted health care bill in the House.
"President Trump's approval has fallen from 51 percent in mid-April to 42 percent today," said Morning Consult Co-Founder and Chief Research Officer Kyle Dropp. "A less reported-on trend is the waning enthusiasm for Trump in his base. When Trump took office, 56 percent of his voters strongly approved of his job performance. Today that number stands at 42 percent."
The poll was conducted last Friday through Sunday, in the days following Comey’s dismissal but before news broke Monday that Trump shared classified information with senior Russian government officials in the Oval Office last week and a Tuesday New York Times report that Comey detailed in a memo that Trump asked him to drop the probe into Flynn's activities.
A separate POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, conducted immediately following Comey’s firing, found voters divided on whether Trump acted appropriately, with nearly a third undecided. In the new poll, however, there is an uptick in the percentage who think Trump’s action was improper.
The percentage of voters who said Trump was right to remove Comey as FBI director, 34 percent, is virtually unchanged from the 35 percent who previously said Trump did the right thing. But the percentage who said Trump should have allowed Comey to continue leading the FBI increased from 33 percent in the initial survey to 40 percent now. Around a quarter, 26 percent, are undecided, down from 32 percent in the previous poll.
Similarly, 35 percent of voters say Trump’s decision was appropriate, down marginally from 37 percent earlier last week. Forty-two percent say Trump acted inappropriately, up from 34 percent in the previous poll.
The Comey news came just days after the House advanced one of Trump’s key legislative goals, passing a bill that would make significant changes to the nation’s health care system and replace many of the initiatives enacted by the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
The new survey shows a plurality of voters continue to oppose the new GOP health care bill. In the new poll, 38 percent of voters approve of the new bill, unchanged from a week before. And 45 percent disapprove, statistically unchanged from last week’s 44 percent.
Breaking News Alerts Get breaking news when it happens — 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.
Trump’s other major legislative goal — rewriting the nation’s tax code — also faces some headwinds, according to the poll. While a survey two weeks ago showed initial openness to Trump’s proposal, this week’s poll suggests Trump and the GOP could struggle to sell voters on key elements of the proposal, including lowering rates for upper-income individuals and corporations. Majorities of voters say both corporations (59 percent) and upper-income Americans (62 percent) pay too little in taxes.
But lower tax rates for small businesses and lower- and middle-income Americans could be more popular. Half of voters or greater say small businesses (52 percent), lower-income Americans (50 percent) or middle-income Americans (56 percent) pay too much in taxes. And 57 percent of voters say they personally pay too much in taxes.
The poll surveyed 2,001 registered voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
Morning Consult is a nonpartisan media and technology company that provides data-driven research and insights on politics, policy and business strategy.
More details on the poll and its methodology can be found in these two documents — Toplines: http://politi.co/2rnFVG0 | Crosstabs: http://politi.co/2qoQ5s4Hackage GSoC: Beginnings of an Infrastructure for Modular Features
Hi everyone. The process of transforming the Hackage codebase is ongoing, and I’ve made some sweeping changes and introduced a few regressions. (I’d more optimistically call them “todo list items”.) I’ve spent 3/4 of the last week working on the code base, and 1/4 reading books and websites and working on the site design. Site design here refers to the interface that everyone who uses Hackage sees, and I’ve posted a preliminary draft of the proposed URIs.
The goal is to make a REST API which can be read and manipulated by automated clients, and of course perused by web browsers just like the current Hackage. One of the purposes of REST (Representational State Transfer) is simplifying state between the client and server by manipulating representation of resources using plain old HTTP.
Those Haskellers who are familiar with REST might point out that documenting an API and setting up URI conventions (like I did on the Hackage wiki) are partly antithetical to the goals of REST, which eschew servers that only understand highly specific remote procedural calls and clients which construct URIs based on hard-coded conventions (coupling). Roy Fielding, the inventor of REST, stresses that REST APIs must be hypertext-driven. Don’t worry: my intention is to make all of the URIs fully discoverable from the server root, whether browsing the HTML representation or, say, a JSON version. The URI page is an aid in design, not documentation. Since there tends to be a one-to-one mapping between each URI/method pair I’ve listed and each feature I’d like to implement, it tells me what I have left to do.
Fine-tuning data structures
To this end, I’ve made and committed some changes to hackage-server. Some of time was spent adjusting a few important types, and the rest dealing with the subsequent code breakages. It is still better and safer than doing similar things in a dynamically typed programming language, where I’d end up either sweeping the entire code base or analyzing call graphs manually to determine what broke. Here’s an example of a type I altered, the PkgInfo type, which holds information about a specific package version:
data PkgInfo = PkgInfo { -- | The name and version represented here pkgInfoId ::!PackageIdentifier, -- | Parsed information from the cabal file. pkgDesc ::!GenericPackageDescription, -- | The current.cabal file text. pkgData ::!ByteString, -- | The actual package.tar.gz file, where BlobId -- is a filename in the state/blobs/ folder. -- The head of the list is the current package tarball. pkgTarball ::![(BlobId, UploadInfo)], -- | Previous.cabal file texts, and when they were uploaded. pkgDataOld ::![(ByteString, UploadInfo)], -- | When the package was created with the.cabal file. pkgUploadData ::!UploadInfo } deriving (Typeable, Show)
type UploadInfo = (UTCTime, UserId)
The global Hackage state defines a mapping from PackageName to [PkgInfo]. Subtle differences in which types of values are allowed to inhabit PkgInfo have important consequences for package uploading policy. There are a few notable results of this definition.
A package can exist without a tarball. This is more significant for importing data to create secondary Hackages than the normal upload process. The more incrementally importing can happen, the simpler it will be. Alternatively, this would allow for a metadata-only Hackage mirror. Cabal files can be updated, with a complete history, without having to change the version number. This would allow maintainers to expand version brackets or compiler flags, so long as the changes don’t break anything (constricting version brackets is more dangerous). Tarballs can be updated, also with a complete history, without having to change the version number. This probably won’t be enabled on the main Hackage, but exceptions can be granted by admins. If an ultra-unstable Hackage mirror came about, as opposed to the somewhat-unstable model we have now, this might be allowed.
Modular RESTful features
The HackageFeature data structure is intended to encapsulate the behavior of a feature and its state. Features include the core feature set—the minimal functionality that a server must have to be considered a Hackage server, which is serving package tarballs and cabal files—supplemented by user accounts, package pages, reverse dependencies, Linux distro integration, and so on.
The most important field of a feature is the locations :: [(BranchPath, ServerResponse)]. The BranchPath is the generic form of a URI, a list of BranchComponent s. Taking inspiration from Ruby on Rails routing, you can construct one with the syntax "/package/:package/reports/:id", where visiting http://hackage.haskell.org/HDBC/reports/4/ will pass [("package", "HDBC"), ("id", "4")] to the code serving build reports. You can define arbitrary ServerPart Response s at a path, or you can use a Resource abstraction which lets you specify different HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE). This system is still in development.
HTTP goodies
Because each resource defines its method set upfront, it’s possible to make an HTTP OPTIONS method for each one. This is an example of something you get “for free” by structuring resources in certain ways. As I’ve discovered, there can be an unfortunate trade-off: requiring too much structure makes it unpleasant to extend Hackage with new functionality (having to deal with all of the guts of the server). Too little structure means that those implementing new features can accidentally break the site’s design principles and generally cause havoc. A reasonable middle ground is the convention over configuration approach: I’d have plenty of configurable structure internally, and combinators which build on that structure by filling in recommended conventions. This applies particularly to getting the most out of HTTP.
The idea of content negotiation in HTTP is simple, although there’s no clear path ahead for implementing it yet. For Hackage, content negotiation consists of responding to preferences in the client’s Accept header, which contains MIME types with various priorities. (Other sorts of negotiation include those for languages and encoding.) A web browser like Firefox might send
text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8, and a hypothetical newer cabal-install client would send application/json for miscellaneous data it needs to read.
Authentication functionality is essentially done, although I had originally planned to work on it later this month. The types might still need some tweaking, of course. There is a system of access control lists called UserList s, each of which is a Data.IntSet of UserId s. With this, we can have an extensible hierarchy of user groups, such as site administrators, per-package maintainers, and trustees (allowed to manipulate all packages without possessing other admin functionality). The type signature for the main authentication function is:
requireHackageAuth :: MonadIO m => Users -> Maybe UserList -> Maybe AuthType -> ServerPartT m UserId
Users is the type containing the site’s entire user database. AuthType, either BasicAuth or DigestAuth, can be passed in to force the type of authentication: either basic or digest. Since all passwords are currently hashed in crypt form. This method either returns the UserId, assuming authentication succeeded, or forces a 401 Unauthorized or 403 Forbidden. With this, we can easily extend it to handle specific tasks:
requirePackageAuth :: (MonadIO m, Package pkg) => pkg -> ServerPartT m UserId requirePackageAuth pkg = do userDb <- query $ GetUserDb pkgm <- query $ GetPackageMaintainers (packageName pkg) trust <- query $ GetHackageTrustees let groupSum = Groups.unions [trust, fromMaybe Groups.empty pkgm] requireHackageAuth userDb (Just groupSum) Nothing
Import/export
To paraphrase Don’s comment on my previous post, we absolutely can’t afford to lose any data. Although the state/db/ directory contains all of happstack-state’s MACID data, and can be periodically backed-up off-site, binary data is by nature easy to mess up and hard to recover. A bit of redundancy in storage is a reasonable safeguard, and there’s little more redundant than English, at least compared to bit-packing.
Antoine had implemented an extensive Hackage-to-CSV export/import system, where instead of e.g. having a single bit represent whether an account is enabled or disabled, we use the words “enabled” and “disabled”, and put the resulting export tarball in a safe place. Instead of having one centralized system, each HackageFeature should take care of its own data, and so I’d like to work on decentralizing the system in the days ahead. The type signatures, suggested by Duncan, are:
data HackageFeature = {... dumpBackup :: IO [BackupEntry], restoreBackup :: [BackupEntry] -> IO (),... }
type BackupEntry = ([FilePath], ByteString)
Bringing features together
There are notable tasks remaining for the basic infrastructure, such as implementing this import/export system. Another major one is creating a hook system with the usual dual nature of one part that responds to actions (like uploading pages) and another which edits documents on the fly (like adding sections to a package page). If you have experience with website plugin systems, what are your thoughts on getting this done this in a strongly, safety typed manner?
Having taken a brief tour of the internal server proto-design and the types of functionality that can be implemented with it, I’d like to show how we can leverage these to implement some useful features, some this summer if we as a community approve of them:
Build reports, to see if a given package builds on your OS (might save time for unfortunately oft-neglected Windows-users), on your architecture, with your set of dependencies. I would strongly encourage all of you to at least submit anonymized build reports once the feature goes live (check out the client-side implementation), if not the full build log, although I promise we won’t stoop to a “Do you want to submit a build report?” query every single time a build fails: maybe only just the first time :) Submitting or not is more of a configuration option. Build reports will probably be anonymized for the public interface, but available in full to package maintainers through the requireHackageAuth authentication mechanism.
authentication mechanism. Reverse dependencies. This is a HackageFeature that doesn’t need to define any of its own persistent data, just its own compact index of depedencies that subscribes to a package uploading hook. You can peruse Roel’s revdeps Hackage, and if you feel like setting up hackage-scripts with Apache, you can apply his patch to run your own.
that doesn’t need to define any of its own persistent data, just its own compact index of depedencies that subscribes to a package uploading hook. You can peruse Roel’s revdeps Hackage, and if you feel like setting up hackage-scripts with Apache, you can apply his patch to run your own. Hackage mirrors. It should be |
. After all, they only have 30 seconds or three minutes to grab people's attention.
Advertisement:
"KONY2012" complicates this long-held assumption. Invisible Children has captured the attention of millions with a 30-minute video. If 100 million people watch "KONY2012," that is 50 million hours of people's time. And yet, in those 30 minutes, the campaign purposefully maintains a dangerously simple message, preferring to communicate one so simple as to fit within the 140 characters of a single tweet.
Understanding need not be sacrificed on the false altar of awareness. It is possible to raise both awareness and understanding simultaneously. Choosing not to is just that – a choice. The viral videos and stories that characterized the Arab Spring, for example, shed light on emerging crises, the attitudes of participants and the challenges ahead without resorting to this kind of simplistic marketing. They increased our understanding and made us aware of the dramatic developments as they unfolded.
Many commentators have suggested that the film breeds "slacktivism" – lazy, proxy activism wherein active activism is replaced by dealing with latent moral outrage and guilt via the click of a "share" button. But, the problem with this critique is that it assumes that those who have clicked are activists in the first place. As Zeynep Tufekci has rightly noted, “[s]ince these so-called'slacktivists' were never activists to begin with, they are not in dereliction of their activist duties.”
Advertisement:
The bigger concern about this new form of viral activism is that participating in the "KONY2012" phenomenon and campaigns of its ilk may replace real and appropriate responses to crises with quick-fix, cathartic absolution of guilt.
There is a real option on the table where both international and local actors can play a vital role: support the re-ignition of peace negotiations. Talks between the LRA and the government of Uganda, in Juba, South Sudan, took place between 2006 and 2008. While they ultimately failed to produce a comprehensive peace agreement, they did deliver stability and order or what many northern Ugandans refer to as the “silence of the guns.” Numerous local groups, including the Acholi Religious Leader's Peace Initiative, are working on getting the parties back to the table. Doing so, of course, will require learning and applying lessons from past negotiations, notably ensuring that all regional parties to the war participate.
Of course, laying out those past negotiations may make for a far less digestible viral video.There isn’t really all that much innovation in the Brave browser itself except for the Brave Payments system that rewards the websites users are willing to pay for. I believe Brave Software made a big mistake when they choose to build a browser rather than an extension, and here is why.
Wouldn’t it be easier to convince potential customers to install an extension to supplement the web browser they already like than convincing them to change all their habits, and uproot and move to a new web browser?
The core of Brave Payments is already implemented as a Chromium browser extension (WebExtension), and could have been made compatible with existing browsers including Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and others rather than making it its own thing.
Advertisement
The Brave Browser isn’t a good browser. It’s still in beta, but Brave seem to be focusing on creating a minimal viable product without an identity of its own. There isn’t really anything special about their browser, and it lacks essential features like a history manager while the features it has is still missing years of development and polishing. Brave uses a weak fraud protection service and yet they recommend their customers go to the shadier corners of the web, cough up their credit cards, and purchase Bitcoins. Bitcoin exchanges have a long and established history of fraud and there are many bad actors in this market.
It will be very difficult for Brave to attract paying customers with a subpar web browser and a difficult to understand payment model where customers pay for something they’re used to get for free. I’ve not seen any marketing material nor anything special about the Brave browser that I believe would appeal to a mass audience.
I was curious about Brave and I’ve contributed funds into their payment scheme and used their browser as my daily driver. However, I miss Firefox. Brave is full of bugs and I don’t feel at home. The experience will of course be different to different people, but I believe many will already have a preference in web browsers and will want their browsers to work in the ways they’re used to.
Competition on the horizon Brave Payments isn’t the only micro-payment service aiming to block ads and ask for volunteer contributions from fans. The world’s most popular browser extension, AdBlock Plus, is partnering with the micro-donation service Flattr on Flattr+. Flattr+ will be a system built-in to the AdBlock Plus extension. It will keep a ledger of the websites users visit the most and give websites a share of users’ contributions. AdBlock Plus is a powerful brand, and as soon as Flattr+ launches we can except to see a media storm of coverage with publishers small and large chip in with their opinions. Some users will get curious and turn on the service. With a little luck and willingness to accept the funds given to them from what the publishing industry considers to be their worst enemy, Brave Payments could be a solution to the online publishing industry’s dwindling advertisement revenue. I fully expect Flattr+ to be way more popular than Brave. Not only because they’ll rely on traditional payment systems rather than Bitcoin, and not only because they’ll receive huge exposure through AdBlock Plus, but because their customers get to keep the web browsers they already know and trust. Flattr+ will be easier and far less painful to adopt than Brave.
It’s not too late for Brave to port what they have and turn it into a browser extension. However, I doubt we’ll see a Brave extension for other web browsers. Who in their right mind would put their business at the mercy of a competing company rather than strive to take control of the whole ecosystem?VR is incredible. Anyone who has spent any time with either of the top-of-the-range headsets - the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive - will know that VR is an experience that is almost impossible to explain, even to those that have tried the more accessible Gear VR.
That said, it isn’t perfect. One of the main things that feels unnatural is the fact that everything is in focus the entire time. It doesn’t feel too jarring to start with, it’s more that you just have a feeling that something isn’t right. Your brain knows that what it’s looking at isn’t real. It can’t be.
In the real world, when you look at an object, your eyes automatically focus to that point and the rest of the world goes out of focus. The problem with VR is that no matter where you are looking in the VR world, you’re only ever actually looking at the screen, which is the same distance away.
This leads to a problem catchily referred to as vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC), that according to Oculus: “has been attributed as a source of visual discomfort: viewers report eye strain, blurred vision, and headaches with prolonged viewing.”
And there was us thinking it was just having a screen an inch from your face that was causing that.
Watch the two flagship VR headsets square off in HTC Vive vs Oculus Rift
What am I looking at?
It turns out that Oculus has been working on a solution for this problem, detailing to TechRadar plans to implement a ‘focal surface display’. For an explanation about how this works, check out the video made by Oculus below.
In the video, there are a few different methods for creating focal length; quickly displaying'slides' of the different distances, using holography, and using focal surface display, where an image is seen through an element that manipulates the focal depth of subjects of the image.
One of the things that is still unclear from this video is how the screen decides which section of the screen is in focus and at what time. At this point the focal depth is being decided by a computer rather than by the need of a user, but there are significant mentions of the placement of the user’s gaze in the paper that Oculus published on focal surface display, hinting towards the use of eye-tracking technology.
This would seem to be verified by a statement made by Douglas Lanman, one of the researchers working on the technology, during a Q&A posted to Oculus' blog site: “I do see an emerging trend in VR displays: increasing use of adaptive optical elements like phase-only SLMs, often in concert with eye tracking technologies”.
An SLM is a Spatial Light Modulator, and is effectively the element that sits between the screen and the lens, which “bend[s] the focus as a sort of programmable lens element”. To get a visual reference of how a lens can bend light, check out the awesome picture from the Oculus lab below.
According to Lanman, we are only going to see more of these kinds of focusing elements in VR headsets in the future:
“After all, if the goal is to deliver more accurate focus in VR headsets, adopting digital focusing elements is an obvious path forward, but the use of adaptive optical elements could range from something as simple as a digital autofocus system (a so-called “varifocal” HMD) all the way through to near-eye holographic displays.”
Future gazing
Near-eye holographic displays sound awesome, and while Lanman seems to be intentionally vague about what this could be (he starts his statement with “I can't comment on future products from Oculus”) it is clearly a field he is excited about:
“I am very interested to see what lies between Focal Surface Displays and holography... Due to the common use of an SLM, holography and Focal Surface Displays inherit somewhat related benefits and limitations.
"Holographic display is a well-established principle, so its benefits and limitations are largely known (but reducing it to practice is by no means simple). With Focal Surfaces Displays it’s not entirely clear yet what the best way to drive and operate these displays is. I can't wait to learn how other researchers can carry forward and evolve this concept. ”
If this is all sounding very sci-fi, that is intentional. Another of the researchers said: “My personal motto for my own research is that if I’m not working on something that would count as a Secret Project in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri—i.e., something that would’ve been magic sci-fi future technology in 1998—then I’m not trying hard enough.”US president kicks off election campaign by declaring that US should move focus from foreign wars to domestic growth
Barack Obama has declared that his goal of defeating al-Qaida is within reach and that the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan would free up money to help rebuild the US economy.
The US president said on Saturday that it was time to focus on domestic concerns, such as helping the middle class who have been squeezed by the economic downturn.
Four days after he visited Afghanistan, Obama said that money saved from ending wars should be used to reduce the country's debt and to boost healthcare, education and infrastructure.
"The tide of war has turned in Afghanistan," he said in his weekly radio and internet address. "We've broken the Taliban's momentum. We've built strong Afghan security forces. We've devastated al-Qaida's leadership. And one year ago our troops launched the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. The goal that I set to defeat al-Qaida and deny it a chance to rebuild is within reach.
"After more than a decade of war, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home."
He said the country should concentrate on economic issues, such as tax disparities and targeted government spending.
Without mentioning the Republicans, he cast the party's view as one that promotes more tax cuts for millionaires while reducing the spending "that built a strong middle class".
"That's why I've called on Congress to take the money we're no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt and use the other half to rebuild America," he said.
The partisan subtext of the address was clear. Ahead of the presidential election, Obama is portraying the Republicans as the party of the wealthy, while emphasising his efforts to help middle and lower income voters affected by the sluggish economic recovery.
The address came as Obama began his first official presidential campaign trip, visiting college campuses in Ohio and Virginia.
In the Republican address, senator Bob Corker accused the administration and the Senate's Democratic leadership of fiscal mismanagement, saying they had put off difficult decisions that would tame government spending.
"The president punts on almost every tough decision," Corker said.
The Senate's failure to adopt a budget had helped create an atmosphere of uncertainty that was hurting businesses and impeding job creation, the Tennessee Republican said.
He called for an overhaul of the tax code that eliminates most of the $1.2tn in loopholes and tax breaks, lowers rates and broadens the tax base.Crime Lab Scandal Rocks Massachusetts
Massachusetts is reeling from a massive scandal in its state crime lab. Details are still emerging about what officials call a "rogue chemist" who may have mishandled evidence in as many as 40,000 cases over 10 years.
It could mean the unraveling of countless convictions.
Even lawyers prone to hyperbole may not be overstating it when they call the scandal a catastrophic failure and unmitigated disaster.
"Any person who's been convicted of a drug crime in the last several years whose drugs were tested at the lab was very potentially a victim of a very substantial miscarriage of justice," says defense attorney John Martin.
He represents the man believed to be the first convict sprung because of the scandal. David Danielli walked out of prison Thursday after a judge agreed his guilty plea was undermined by questions about the evidence. Those same questions may also undermine efforts to retry him.
Even Martin concedes countless guilty people will probably go free.
"Talented defense attorneys will be able to strongly suggest that any results from that lab are tainted, and people who deserve to be incarcerated for a very long time are going to walk — and that's the reality of it," Martin says.
Even prosecutors supported the defendant's release on Thursday, saying the Constitution demands it. And it's not the end of the fallout.
District Attorney Joe Early, head of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association, says prosecutors will move on some cases even before defense attorneys ask.
"The DAs are used to putting people in jail. They're not used to letting them out because of technicalities or mistesting. In that regard, a lot of people have some tough decisions to make," Early says.
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is investigating the chemist, Annie Dookhan, who's accused of tampering with samples to make them weigh more, or even to test positive. She and three others have already lost their jobs, including Department of Public Health Commissioner John Auerbach, who says supervisors should have picked up on red flags.
Dookhan was caught a year ago after she failed to sign out evidence and signed out evidence using aliases. She was handling three times the normal caseload.
"That the actions of a single person could cause so much damage, and the possibility that justice was not served — I'm furious at that," Auerbach says.
Defense attorneys like Max Stern are already buzzing about civil suits.
"There's many people who for years have not been able to get jobs, not [been] be able to get driver's licenses, not [been] able to live in particular housing," he says. "There are enormous consequences nowadays to drug convictions."
It's still unclear what the chemist's motive may have been, but if some innocent defendants were wrongly convicted, former prosecutor Wendy Murphy says people should be equally concerned about bad guys who may have gotten off.
"There is no legal remedy. Prosecutors cannot go back in front of a judge and say, 'I want this wrongfully acquitted man to be brought back up on charges,' because double jeopardy would bar that remedy, and that's a problem for the public," Murphy says.
Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge and now a Harvard law professor, agrees that the crime lab scandal could "turn the system on its head." She says courts might dismiss cases not only because of tainting, but also just to punish and deter misconduct.
"There have been times when government misconduct was so outrageous, the only response is to dismiss charges. It doesn't happen often, and it takes extreme situations, but this is a level of negligence which is really stunning," Gertner says.
The crime lab in question used to be run by the Department of Public Health but is now under the state police, as in most other states. But Northeastern University law professor Daniel Medwed says that can be problematic.
"There are often implicit pressures [on crime lab technicians] to help out prosecutors — to testify in cases in a way that supports their perceived colleagues in law enforcement," Medwed says.
A legislative panel is looking into possible reforms. Prosecutors say the obvious answer is better oversight.Kanye West had to lick Anna Wintour’s ass clean a thousand times to get that trash heap heffa Kim Kartrashian an invitation and this is what she wore. The theme of the night was “punk,” because the Costume Institute’s exhibit is Punk: From Chaos to Couture and I guess Kim thought that since she and Kanye are a couple of punk ass bitches they fit in with the theme perfectly!
I was watching the live feed of this mess, which was awkward comedy at its finest, and dumb ass Kim said that this was her idea of “punk.” It’s “romantic punk.” BITCH, my chihuahua’s swollen anal gland (I’m taking him to the groomer tomorrow, don’t worry) is more punk rock than the floral vomit she wore tonight. They should’ve thrown a plastic cover over her, because this is someone’s abuelita’s sofa.
She looks like that dusty, lumpy sofa that had your grandma has had for years and decided to finally get rid of it. So your grandma, with the help of two neighborhood boys, puts it on the curb for the garbage men to take, but they never take it. It just sits there on the curb. The dogs pee on it, the birds crap on it and it gets even lumpier from the rain. After a few weeks, your grandma finally gives in and drags it back into her house and puts it in her backyard. The only thing missing from Kim’s look is a grandma sitting on top of her.
Kanye’s alleged fuck buddy Riccardo Tisci made this for Kim and I could blow a million air kisses at his taint. He knew what he was doing and he should get the Nobel Peace Prize in SHADE for doing it!Most Republican members of the House and Senate claim not to believe in gun control. With straight and even passionate faces, they say reducing the influx and availability of firearms would do nothing to stem gun violence in their districts. But our tax dollars support plenty of gun control at their workplace. The U.S. Capitol Visitor website (visitthecapitol.gov) has a page devoted to items not allowed inside. Preceding the list is a paragraph that begins: “Before entering the Capitol Visitor Center, all visitors are screened by a magnetometer and all items that are permitted inside the building are screened by an X-ray device.” Prohibited items include liquid of any kind, aerosol spray cans, electric stun guns, and “guns, replica guns, ammunition, and fireworks.” It’s the kind of protection the general public is granted only when boarding an airplane.
At the state university where I teach in North Carolina, professors and students are considered less likely and presumably less valuable targets. My department’s building – renovated about a decade ago – has no magnetometer or X-ray device. There are deadbolt locks on classroom doors, but no interior knobs for them. If my classroom were unlocked when an active shooter entered the building I would have to open the door and insert my key from the outside in order to secure the room. When our department requested this be rectified, we were told the cost, and not the risk, was prohibitive. I now keep my classroom door locked at all times. Whenever a student arrives late, or returns after using the bathroom, we’re reminded of that looming specter, the possibility of becoming the daily mass shooting headline.
Advertisement:
Luckily at present, firearms are prohibited on university campuses in North Carolina. We may not have security checkpoints to enforce this, but at least we have the rule. Any person carrying a firearm could be detained simply for having possession of it. This may not always be the case. The NRA – which has provided financial support to both the senator and congressman from my district – backs legislation that supports gun possession on campus. If this ever passes into law we won’t be alone. North Carolina’s open carry laws allow firearms in a vast range of workplaces, including many grocery stores.
Certain politicians may say that increasing arms, not restricting them, is the road to safety. But doesn’t the rule preventing guns in the Capitol (and in nearly every state Capitol) support the theory of gun control in its simplest form? If guns are not permitted in a specific area, gun violence will be prevented, or at the very least limited. In a country that this year has seen more mass shootings than it has days, the theory bears expansion outside the workplace of those who consider themselves its most important citizens. The Second Amendment is not so sacrosanct when it comes to their safety. And if it is – if the Congress and Senate truly reject the concept of gun control – then tax dollars should not be spent enforcing it for them. Lift the ban on guns in the U.S. and state Capitols and remove the screening processes that keep their employees safe.
Of course all reasonable congressmen and senators – regardless of party affiliation – would reject this idea. Wouldn’t it be crazy to spend their day in a building where any person with a mental illness or political agenda could march in at will and open fire with one of the many assault weapons legally and readily available in the United States?
That’s exactly how the rest of us feel.Emir Filipovic, assistant professor at the Sarajevo Faculty of Philosophy, found the ancient paw prints while trawling the archives of Dubrovnik to research for his doctorate.
In and among the registers of the Republic of Dubrovnik he found cat’s paw prints, which he then photographed.
He said he was surprised by the popularity of his photographs on social networks and in the foreign media.
Source: Twitter, Emir O. Filipovic
“The document on which [cat] prints were made dates from March 11, 1445,” he said.
“The prints were most likely made while the document was being made, or some time then…but the possibility that they were made later cannot be excluded,” he added.
“While the writer was writing the document a cat probably passed by him and since the paint was near the book…the cat spilled it, dipped his paws in it and passed over the document and thus left its trace in history,” Filipovic explained.
The paw print was made on a document that the Republic of Dubrovnik wrote to traders and nobles at the time.I am fascinated by Mike Tyson. I can admit it. It’s an addiction. There is something utterly compelling and horrifying about the Mike Tyson story. It’s a parable of the bullied boy who became the beast. He’s the raging id of any persecuted kid let loose, transplanted from the body of a weed into the muscular capsule of the Hulk.
“I’m just a dark guy from a den of iniquity. A dark shadowy figure from the bowels of iniquity.”
Mike Tyson was beaten up with school. He didn’t fight back. He was picked on and punched and pilloried. He was a victim. Mike Tyson kept pigeons. That’s one of those facts that boggles the rational mind. Poor lisping little Mike Tyson and his pigeons in the ghetto, talking to them because he didn’t have any other friends to rely on. One day, a bully found his pigeon loft and ripped the head off his favourite bird. The fight that followed was the first Mike Tyson ever won.
Once the fighter inside him was unleashed, once the animal of anger and anguish was uncaged, Mike Tyson would never been the mild-mannered Dr Bruce Banner again. He was the Hulk, raging and rampaging, drawn into criminality and drug dealing, mugging and menaces.
“Boxing is the hurt business.”
That chaos and crime inevitably took him to a young offender’s institution and there he was introduced to boxing. His talent was spotted and, when he was released, that brought him to Cus D’Amato, the legendary boxing trainer who helped Floyd Patterson become the youngest heavyweight champion ever. It was a record he would not live to see Tyson better.
D’Amato was the father figure Tyson needed. He had never really known his own father. He lacked discipline and trusted no one. He was a frightening creature but one that frightened himself more than anything else. Cus D’Amato built up his confidence, made him see that he had a place in the world.
Talking about D’Amato in the 2008 documentary Tyson, the boxer cannot help but burst into tears. D’Amato was the man that saved Tyson from a fatal destiny. Many of his friends from the neighbourhood are dead, drug addicted or incarcerated. Tyson beat the odds for a young black kid living in 70s New York, the crack city.
But while he was saved from a common tragedy, Tyson’s life has been a more extraordinary tragedy. He is a deeply damaged human being. Watch him in Tyson (2008) and you see a man who is deeply emotional and possessed of a raw intelligence. He understands himself in ways many do not but he is a slave to his anger. He harnessed it in his career but those demons do not stay within the ring.
“Then I came out of jail and beat guys because they were basically scared.”
The rape conviction is an indelible stain on the record of Mike Tyson. It cannot be washed away with boxing statistics or cameo roles in pop culture staples like The Hangover. Mike Tyson still asserts that he was not guilty of the crime but he was convicted by a jury.
Boxing brought great opportunities for Mike Tyson but also a litany of dangerous temptations: women, money, drugs and hangers-on. And with Cus D’Amato dead, the father figure that had made Mike Tyson into a “gentleman” was gone. Don King is no one’s moral guide. Morality is an eight letter word to Don King. One of the finest things Tyson ever did was to knock King down in the street after he discovered the impresario had cheated him.
In the ring, Mike Tyson was one of the greatest. 50 wins (44 knockouts, 5 decisions and 1 disqualification), 6 losses, 0 draws and 2 no contests is an admirable set of stats. The losses would not have been there at all had he not found himself fighting beyond his fitness in bouts with journeymen losers like Kevin McBride. He said it best in the aftermath of the embarrassing bout with McBride: “I don’t have the stomach for this anymore. I don’t have anything to fight for anymore.”
“I lost my soul as a human being. I lost my self-respect. I’m not a loveable guy, so it’s really not hard for people to dislike me.”
There is a scene in Tyson: Uncaged [1996], a film that covers the boxers early career, includes a scene where Mike Tyson embraces a trainer in tears. They’re tears of happiness. He is sobbing and expressing utter disbelief that those around him like and even love him as much as they do. All of it, the fights, the public outbursts are drawn from that – Mike Tyson wants the world to love him and he fears that it never will.
For the adulation, the plaudits and the belts, Mike Tyson is still that bullied kid in the ghetto. The echoes of his childhood are still with him. In the most minor way, I feel that’s why I am so fascinated with Tyson. The ripples from my experience of being bullied have stayed with me into adulthood. I was lucky to have parents who loved me and a safe home to go to. The only true home Tyson ever knew was at Cus D’Amato’s and that safe harbour was taken from him very early in his career.
If Mike Tyson had avoided incarceration, been guided by D’Amato rather than the ghost of his memory, he would be spoken of in the same breath as Muhammad Ali. Tyson was the heir to Ali in the ring. He was swift and technical, a smart fighter whose intelligence was in his hands as much as in his head. A truly talented fighter who, like his hero Ali, fought on longer than he should have.
For now, Tyson seems relatively at peace, slipping into culture as an icon of craziness and chaos. But Mike Tyson’s life has never been predictable. It’s hard to know where he might go next. He is a barely contained maelstrom of emotions. If Tyson is playing Bruce Banner for the moment, the Hulk is never far from the surface.George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan is one of my favorite thinkers. His 2007 book The Myth of the Rational Voter offered an interpretation of why voters tend to have systematically biased, erroneous beliefs about economics that ultimately lead to bad policies. In Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: why being a great parent is less work and more fun than you think, Caplan discusses erroneous beliefs as they relate to parenting. We over-estimate the costs of having and raising children and do a lot of high-cost, low-benefit over-parenting. The implication is that our parental energies are better spent loving our children for who they are rather than trying to mold them into someone they are not.
Caplan summarizes and synthesizes high-quality research on the determinants of kids’ life outcomes like health, intelligence, and income and finds that for almost all of the people who are likely to read a parenting book, kids’ genes--”nature”--matters a lot while parental effort--”nurture”--matters relatively little. Nurture certainly matters a lot for the kinds of children you raise, but not for the kinds of adults they become. Nurture matters in the short run, but the effect fades over the long run.
Some readers and commentators might consider such a claim and think that Caplan is endorsing monocausal genetic determinism: genes are the only things that matter, and parenting doesn’t matter at all. This would be a mistake. Caplan is careful to qualify this conclusion because the research on which he relies has been conducted almost exclusively in first-world countries by first-world doctors studying first-world families; he argues that for people who are likely to be approved by an adoption agency, loads of extra parenting isn’t likely to matter much for purposes of explaining life outcomes. Obviously, taking my children into the wilderness to be raised by wolves would matter a lot. Taking them to be raised by our neighbors across the street probably wouldn't matter much at all.
One of Caplan’s major takeaways is that scaling back on structured activities is not going to wreck your child’s life. This means there are a lot of win-win opportunities for both parents and children: if loading a child’s schedule with activities is going to make both parent and child miserable without adding any discernible benefit over the long run, the schedule can be trimmed a bit and both parent and child can be made better off as a result.
There are exceptions--like stated religious and political alignments, if not necessarily religious and political observance--but if you’re reading this, odds are that a little more or a little less parenting isn’t really going to matter that much for the adult your child becomes. If you’re stressed out and exhausted all the time, you probably need to step back and think about what you can give up. This is backed up by survey evidence on kids’ impressions of their parents: kids “rarely wished for extra face time with their parents” but “were much more likely to wish their parents would be less tired and stressed” (pp. 32-33). We can relax and refresh by cutting out high-cost, low-benefit activities.
Caplan notes that parenting does affect a couple of things that are very, very important, however: your child’s current happiness, and your child’s future relationship with you. The insight here alters the strategic game that parents are playing. Instead of making ourselves and our children miserable with the latest parenting fads or schedules loaded up with activities that no one actually enjoys, we should focus on enjoying the parenting journey and (again) loving our children for who they are instead of trying to turn them into someone they’re not.
It gets better, too. Taking a cue from the late, great economist Julian Simon, Caplan disposes of the myth that having more children stresses the natural environment. Every new child brings another mouth to feed, yes, but most importantly every new child brings another brain. The human mind is what Julian Simon called The Ultimate Resource, and our ingenuity in the face of constraints is the reason why the inflation-adjusted prices of natural resources have been falling--albeit with some short-run spikes and fluctuations--rather than rising over the course of the last few centuries of massive population growth.
I agree with the back-cover blurb from Tyler Cowen: Caplan has written “one of the best books on parenting, ever.” Caplan combines his mastery of the economic way of thinking, a thorough command of the best and most relevant scholarly literature, a passion for his subject, and most importantly, his passion for his children into a book that is truly unique. If you are going to read just one book about parenting, it should be this one.NEWARK — In a sweeping reversal of Newark Mayor Luis Quintana’s makeover of City Hall, the state today rejected a slate of his picks to lead several city departments, said two officials with knowledge of the moves.
The state Department of Community Affairs, which has final say over all of Newark’s hiring, reversed the bulk of Quintana’s would-be appointments, citing a lack of information.
Among those rejected were James Stewart, the proposed fire director; Amos Crudup, the proposed director of neighborhood services; Danielle Smith, the proposed head of finance, and Rahaman Muhammad, the proposed director of operations, the officials said.
Also rejected was Hector Corchado, a former councilman and the recently retired head of the city’s taxi division whom Quintana hoped to appoint as a deputy police director. Since the police department already has a deputy director, a new position would have to be created.
The officials who spoke to The Star-Ledger requested anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly.
State officials declined to comment on specific cases.
"The DCA cannot and will not discuss individuals under consideration," said spokeswoman Tammori Petty in a statement. "However, we can verify that we have not received information from the City as to why an added administrative Deputy Police Director position is necessary when boots are needed on the ground. Until we receive information supporting that the position is needed, no requests to fill the position will be approved."
Officials said today that most of the appointments were rejected due to a lack of basic information such as résumés or proof of qualification.
Quintana said today that he had not heard about the rejections. In a Friday meeting with state officials regarding the appointments he said he stressed the need to move forward.
"We just told them we had a lot of things we’re doing," Quintana said. "We want to be prepared. We also want to get good government to the people of Newark."
Two of Quintana’s picks were approved. Esmeralda Diaz Cameron was approved to become the city’s director of communications, and his proposed chief of staff, Diane Johnson, is likely to be approved as well, officials said.
Just weeks after former mayor Cory Booker was elected to the U.S. Senate, Quintana, voted in by the city council last month, fired a host of directors the day before Thanksgiving.
RELATED COVERAGE
• Former Newark councilman tapped as deputy police director
• State warns Newark mayor his staff moves may not flyPresident Bashar al-Assad has an audio recording of a conversation between ISIS terrorists and the US military prior to the US airstrikes on Syrian troops.
The Military Intelligence Directorate intercepted a conversation between ISIS leaders and US troops shortly before their airstrikes near Deir ez-Zor on September 17.
Sputniknews.com reports:
“The Syrian Army intercepted a conversation between the Americans and Daesh before the air raid on Deir ez-Zor”, Hadiya Khalaf Abbas said as quoted by the Al Mayadeen broadcaster.
US warplanes hit Syrian government troops near the eastern city of Deir ez-Zor on September 17, leaving 62 military personnel killed and a hundred wounded. The Pentagon said initially that the airstrike was a mistake and targeted Daesh militants.
The head of the Syrian parliament, added during her visit to Iran that after the coalition’s airstrikes on the government troops US military directed terrorists’ attack on the Syrian army.
The attack on government positions put to test a US-Russia brokered nationwide ceasefire that came into being in Syria earlier that week. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last Friday it was necessary to separate Daesh terrorists from “moderate” opposition forces in order to salvage the truce.
Britain, Australia and Denmark confirmed their air forces’ participation in the deadly airstrikes.
The politician noted that the details would be made public later.The Pennsylvania Senate has approved legislation that would allow beer distributors to sell beer for off-site consumption in any amount, including six-packs and growlers.The bill, approved Monday, would let manufacturers ship up to 192 ounces of beer to consumers each month. Consumers would also be able to buy mixed drinks at the state's sporting venues that currently sell beer. The legislation now heads to the state House of Representatives. A spokesman for Wolf was non-committal Monday night on whether the governor would sign the bill. The state enacted sweeping changes to its liquor laws over the summer, including allowing grocery stores to sell wine.Get the WTAE Pittsburgh's Action News 4 App
The Pennsylvania Senate has approved legislation that would allow beer distributors to sell beer for off-site consumption in any amount, including six-packs and growlers.
The bill, approved Monday, would let manufacturers ship up to 192 ounces of beer to consumers each month.
Consumers would also be able to buy mixed drinks at the state's sporting venues that currently sell beer.
The legislation now heads to the state House of Representatives.
A spokesman for Wolf was non-committal Monday night on whether the governor would sign the bill.
The state enacted sweeping changes to its liquor laws over the summer, including allowing grocery stores to sell wine.
AlertMeFrench military patrol near the Eiffel Tower the day after a series of deadly attacks in Paris, November 14, 2015. REUTERS/Yves Herman
By John Irish, Robert-Jan Bartunek and Orhan Coskun
PARIS (Reuters) - There were multiple chances to stop the men who attacked Paris.
In January, Turkish authorities detained one of the suicide bombers at Turkey's border and deported him to Belgium. Brahim Abdeslam, Turkish authorities told Belgian police at the time, had been "radicalized" and |
Beastie Boys, together with his friends Michael Diamond (Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock). In 1986, The Beastie Boys released their first full-length album, "Licensed to Ill," which became the first hip hop album to top the Billboard 200.
Recently, The Beastie Boys were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but Yauch was unable to attend the ceremony.
"Beastie Boys regret that Adam 'MCA' Yauch will be unable to join Mike 'Mike D' Diamond and Adam 'Adrock' Horovitz at the band's induction into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in April," said a statement released by group in April. "Mike, Adam and Adam are truly grateful for the honor but with only two of the three Beastie Boys attending, they will unfortunately not be able to perform at the ceremony."
The Beastie Boys became just the third rap group to enter the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, after Run-D.M.C. (2009) and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five (2007). The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame telecast is scheduled to air on HBO on Saturday night.
In honor of the fallen Beastie Boy, HuffPost Entertainment is taking a look back at some of MCA's most memorable performances. "Now my name is MCA. I got a license to kill."Announcing VP9 support coming to Microsoft Edge By Jerry Smith / Senior Program Manager Share Share Skype
Today, we’re excited to announce that WebM/VP9 support is now in development in Microsoft Edge. VP9 is an open source video format that offers efficient compression to stream HD content at lower bitrates, and is well suited to UHD streaming. Initial support for VP9 will be available in Windows Insider Preview builds soon. This is part of our continuing effort to expand codec offerings in Windows. We continue to evaluate other formats and look forward to receiving feedback as we work on implementing them.
VP9 Support
Our initial VP9 implementation in Microsoft Edge will support adaptive streaming using Media Source Extensions, and will be detectable using the MediaSource.isTypeSupported() API. It will be specifically targeted to meet the needs of websites that use VP9 to deliver video in combination with MP4/AAC or other audio codecs already supported by Microsoft. We are working on future support for VP9 for media tags and local playback, as well as considering support for additional audio formats likely to be used with VP9 such as Opus.
VP9 Usage
Our implementation of VP9 will support software decoding and, when supported by the device, hardware decoding. Since decoding video is computationally complex, the best experience with the software decoder will be seen on more powerful desktop and laptop computers.
Given this, VP9 will initially be implemented behind an experimental flag in Microsoft Edge as we continue to work with industry partners on broader support for hardware decoding, and as we evaluate support for additional audio formats. Users can view their current experimental flag settings and change the defaults by navigating to “about:flags” in the browser. A setting will be available that alternatively enables or disables VP9 support.
Other Formats
We are committed to continually adding new formats to Microsoft Edge to ensure our customers have the best streaming experiences. As part of this commitment, this week Microsoft became a founding member of the newly formed Alliance for Open Media. This announcement represents a commitment from Microsoft and other member companies to specify and develop new open technologies and formats that meet the needs of future media applications. VP9 and other video technologies, such as Thor and Daala, will be a starting point for this new media format work.
Beyond this, there are other existing open source audio and video formats we are evaluating, beginning with OGG, Opus, and Vorbis. We will continue to regularly update Microsoft Edge Platform Status page to identify formats that are in development or under consideration for future releases.
A preview implementation of WebM/VP9 will be available in an upcoming Windows 10 Insider Preview release. We’re eager for your feedback so we can further improve our media format support in Microsoft Edge!
– Andy Glass, Principal Program Manager, Silicon, Graphics & Media
– Jerry Smith, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Edge
Updated November 25, 2015 11:30 amLos Angeles Police Sgt. Stacy Koon, center, and officer Timothy Wind, right, listen to court proceedings during arraignment for the videotaped beating of Rodney King. Photo by Reuters Photographer/Reuter
When a grand jury declined to indict Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown, this did not mean that all of the legal questions had been resolved. While Wilson may not be charged with a crime under Missouri law, a federal prosecution remains possible.* “Though we have shared information with local prosecutors during the course of our investigation,” declared Attorney General Eric Holder in a statement released Tuesday, “the federal inquiry has been independent of the local one from the start, and remains so now.” And even if Darren Wilson is not charged with a state or federal criminal offense, the Department of Justice can act to make it less likely that police will shoot unarmed black men in the future.
Superficially, it might seem as if there is a good basis for charging Wilson with violating federal law. There is precedent for the federal government to step in and prosecute police officers for violent acts when local authorities are unable to secure a conviction. Most famously, two of the policemen who were caught on camera beating Rodney King but acquitted by a local jury were convicted for violating the Civil Rights Act of 1870.
As the nationwide protests that have been sparked by the grand jury no-billing the case reflect, there is certainly the possibility that Wilson’s shooting of Brown violated the latter’s civil rights. The fact that a grand jury did not even find probable cause is not necessarily dispositive. Robert P. McCulloch, the prosecutor who investigated the Brown shooting, has a long history of favoring the police. The fact that McCulloch essentially set up the grand jury to not indict Wilson and gave an oddly defensive press conference at which he sounded more like Wilson’s defense attorney than a prosecutor do not inspire confidence that justice was done.
There are, however, crucial differences between the cases. Most importantly, the King beating was captured on videotape. In the Ferguson case, the crucial question of whether Wilson reasonably believed himself to be in danger relies on inherently unreliable eyewitness testimony, some of which supports Wilson’s account and some of which doesn’t. The story that Wilson told at the grand jury was not particularly plausible, but proving that it’s false without visual evidence would not be easy. As Slate’s Jamelle Bouie explains, the police are generally given a great deal of deference by juries as well as prosecutors when they use deadly force.
So while the failure to indict Wilson seems like a classic case where failures of local law enforcement compel federal intervention, the chances of Wilson being criminally indicted are probably quite low. “Federal civil rights law imposes a high legal bar in these types of cases,” noted Holder. The Department of Justice could almost certainly secure an indictment of Wilson—it virtually never fails—but prosecutors won’t proceed unless there’s a strong likelihood of conviction. It’s not impossible that they would reach the conclusion that they have a strong chance of winning the case, but it’s unlikely.
Given the unfortunate grand jury process in Ferguson, there would be real potential value in having a trial, even if the DOJ were uncertain about the prospects of conviction. However, the DOJ generally tends to focus its resources on cases it is confident of winning. (In the context of financial fraud, one can make a good argument that they have been excessively cautious, although on civil rights Holder’s DOJ has a much stronger record.) The Supreme Court’s narrow reading of the relevant civil rights statute further complicates matters, making it harder to secure a criminal conviction.
But indicting Wilson for civil rights violations does not exhaust the possibilities of federal intervention. The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice is empowered by statute to file civil charges if it finds a “pattern or practice” of violating civil rights on the part of local law enforcement. The DOJ can obtain a court order or negotiate a settlement that requires changes in police practices and maintains federal supervision to ensure that the changes are implemented.
These civil interventions can be very important. “Department of Justice’s civil pattern-or-practice investigation has the potential to make a real systemic change in the way policing is done in Ferguson,” explains Samuel Bagenstos, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School who served as principal deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights under the Obama administration. “It could lead to a consent decree or other agreement that changes the way the police hire, screen, train, and monitor officers, alters use-of-force policies, and so forth. I think the pattern-or-practice cases, far more than the criminal ones, are where DOJ can make real change to policing practices.”
As Josh Voorhees argued in this virtual space earlier this year, the importance of reforming police practices in Ferguson can hardly be overstated. In a tour de force of investigative reporting for the Washington Post, Radley Balko found that the police departments in Ferguson and other small towns in St. Louis County collaborated with local courts to function in large measure as a white supremacist protection racket. Overwhelmingly white police forces impose arbitrary fines for minor legal violations on overwhelmingly African-American residents, which are often compounded by penalties for failure to appear in court or to pay fines. (The average citizen of Ferguson has three outstanding arrest warrants!) Not surprisingly, there is good evidence that these draconian enforcements are racially discriminatory.
A civil suit that leads to a settlement or court order, therefore, could ultimately be more important than a criminal prosecution. An unsuccessful attempt to convict Wilson might be worse than nothing. Even a conviction would put in prison just one unrepentant police officer. Federal action that brings real changes to systematically unjust police practices in Ferguson has the potentially to bring much greater changes than indicting Wilson would have done. The shooting of Michael Brown has drawn attention to a thick web of injustices that needs to be addressed, and the Department of Justice has the capacity to spur real change.
Correction, Nov. 26, 2014: This article originally misstated that Mike Brown may not be charged with a crime under Missouri law, though a federal prosecution remains possible. Darren Wilson may not be charged. (Return.)
Read more about Ferguson in Slate.Posted on 2016/12/25 18:13:34
Framelines presents an Interactive Editing Project! Anyone can download the clips and edit the scene together! This one is not only about cutting the shots together, but also manipulating the color, which in turn should shape how the viewers perceive the scene.
FL INTERACTIVE - Color Grading 4K from Framelines TV on Vimeo.
BRIDGE SCRIPT
EXT. DAM - DAY
TOMMY, mid 30s stands on the dam, looking off. TAMMY, late 20s, approaches him.
Tammy hands Tommy a letter. He reads it, and Tammy walks away.
For this interactive tutorial, creating the sound design, music, and color are tools you can use to shape the mood and feeling of the scene. You are also tasked with shooting the INSERT shot of the Letter being handed off. You can write whatever you want it to be to further develop the tone of the scene to match your intention.SEE BELOW FOR MORE INFOHere is the script for the scene:Below is the FREE RAW FOOTAGE. Click on each clip and you can download each camera angle. Each segment has multiple takes. In the description are details, technical information and notes from the shoot, just like youd get on a real production.DAM CLIPS
RAW FOOTAGE - Color Grading - 01 WIDE from Framelines TV on Vimeo.
Scene 01Blackmagic URSA Mini3840x2160 23.975 Frames Per SecondAudio: MOS, no soundNOTES: Wide shot, multiple takes
RAW FOOTAGE - Color Grading - 02 CLOSE UP from Framelines TV on Vimeo.
Scene 02Blackmagic URSA Mini3840x2160 23.975 Frames Per SecondAudio: MOS, no soundNOTES: Close ups, multiple takes
RAW FOOTAGE - Color Grading - 03 CLOSE UP from Framelines TV on Vimeo.
Scene 03Blackmagic URSA Mini3840x2160 23.975 Frames Per SecondAudio: MOS, no soundNOTES: Close ups, multiple takes
RAW FOOTAGE - Color Grading - 04 WIDE from Framelines TV on Vimeo.
Scene 04Blackmagic URSA Mini3840x2160 23.975 Frames Per SecondAudio: MOS, no soundNOTES: Wide shots, multiple takes
RAW FOOTAGE - Color Grading - 05 INSERTS from Framelines TV on Vimeo.
Scene 05Blackmagic URSA Mini3840x2160 23.975 Frames Per SecondAudio: MOS, no soundNOTES: Insert shots, multiple takes, pans up to face shot
RAW FOOTAGE - Color Grading - 06 DRONE SHOTS from Framelines TV on Vimeo.
COLOR GRADING SCENE CREDITS
starring
Mike Maletic
Jocelyn Tanis
Director - Peter John Ross
Cinematographer - Naomi Rossman
Producers - Peter John Ross
Co-Producer - Mike Maletic
2nd Assistant Director - Cordelia Calrissian DeVille
Cameras provided by Production Partners Media
www.productionpartnersmedia.com
Post Production Facilities provided by Sonnyboo Productions
www.sonnyboo.com
Shot on Location at
Hoover Dam, Westerville, Ohio
Special thanks
Jim Higgins
TJ Cooley
Scott Spears
#framelinestv
www.framelines.tv
© copyright 2016 FRAMELINES
FRAMELINES (http://www.framelines.tv) is brought to you in part by
SONNYBOO PRODUCTIONS
www.sonnyboo.com
PRODUCTION PARTNERS MEDIA
http://www.productionpartnersmedia.com/
MID OHIO FILMMAKERS ASSOCIATION
www.midohiofilm.com
PLANETARY MEDIA
www.planetary-media.com
and grants from THE GREATER COLUMBUS ARTS COUNCIL http://www.gcac.org and the Ohio Arts Council http://www.oac.org
Scene 06DJI Phantom 3 - 4K3840x2160 23.975 Frames Per SecondAudio: MOS, no soundNOTES: Establishing and end shots, multiple takesAll you have to do is use the credits, either on screen on in the description. A lot of people put in the time and talent to make these clips for everyone to use, so please make sure to credit themOnce youre done, feel free and upload to any free video site. You can let us take a look by using the hashtag #framelinestv
TECH TIP - Color Grading from Framelines TV on Vimeo.
For those looking for free software for editing and color grading, you can Download Davinci Resolve HERE Alternate downloads on YouTubeNov. 8, 2014; Toronto; New York Rangers left wing Anthony Duclair warms up before playing against the Toronto Maple Leafs at Air Canada Centre. (Photo: Tom Szczerbowski-USA TODAY Sports)
He never put down permanent roots, opting instead to live in a hotel, but it made sense why winger Anthony Duclair wasn't fussing about his long-term outlook when focusing on the present was much more enticing.
The 19-year-old had nabbed a roster spot with the Rangers, was performing regularly at Madison Square Garden and shared a locker room with the likes of Martin St. Louis, Rick Nash and Henrik Lundqvist.
"It was probably the best time of my life, for sure," Duclair said.
RELATED: Coyotes' top pick Strome boasts hockey smarts
As it turned out, not purchasing a home in Manhattan was a smart call; Duclair's stint with the Rangers lasted 18 games before he returned to the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League and less than two months later, he was flipped to the Coyotes in one of last season's most significant trades that saw defenseman Keith Yandle go to New York.
It was a deal that triggered the Coyotes' rebuild, but it's also one that has the potential to help end the process sooner rather than later.
And that opportunity isn't lost on Duclair.
"I'm just a young guy trying to make the roster," he said. "I'm going to work as hard as I can to make that deal work for us."
RELATED: Coyotes' Perlini rebounds from injury, eyes roster spot
With NHL experience already banked up, Duclair is among the leading candidates to win a job in training camp. But even if he hadn't already scored a goal in the league and added six assists, his skill set would merit consideration on its own.
Tucked into skates since he was 2 years old, Duclair's speed is eye-catching – even among the other prized prospects on the ice this week at the team's prospect development camp.
As a kid, he took skating lessons from Anna Sherbatov for about eight years to develop a strong, lengthy stride. The sessions would be four-to-five times a week with each lasting two hours.
"I hated it, but my dad thought it was good for me," Duclair said. "And I knew it was good for me, but she's really tough. She's a small Russian lady always screaming at me, but it definitely helped me in the future."
Speed isn't isolated to his skates; his hands are quick, too, and help explain his prowess around the net. Upon returning to junior last season, Duclair tallied 34 points in 26 games with the Quebec Remparts — this after he had four goals and eight points to help Canada capture gold at the World Junior Championship.
"Some of the plays he makes out there are outstanding," coach Dave Tippett said. "He's a young player that he'll still have to learn how to play without the puck, some coverage things, but his assets of skating and quickness and skill all are very high priority for us."
With those kind of attributes on display in a middle-of-the-summer orientation camp, a few more months of training might fine-tune Duclair enough to land a roster spot.
Last fall, Duclair — a third-round pick in 2013 taken 80th overall — didn't think he was ready to make the Rangers but did.
NEWSLETTERS Get the Sports Breaking News newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Can't wait to read sports news? Get crucial breaking sports news alerts to your inbox. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-332-6733. Delivery: Varies Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Sports Breaking News Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters
This go-around is different.
There's pressure to live up to the expectations that linger in a trade of that magnitude and also motivation to get back to the stage he enjoyed so much.
But it's a probably a whole lot easier to accomplish both with a team craving what Duclair has to offer.
"They're pushing younger, so what better scenario for me," he said. "I'm pretty lucky to be here."
Ice chips
• Hall of Famer Mike Modano was a guest coach during Wednesday's development camp practice.
Modano, who has the NHL record for most goals (561) and points (1,374) by an American-born player, played for Tippett when the two were with the Stars and has a home in the Valley.
"He still loves the game, likes to be around it, so just a fun day for him," Tippett said.
• The Coyotes have added to their pro coaching staff, naming John Slaney an assistant coach.
Slaney spent the past four seasons as an assistant with the team's American Hockey League affiliate. He'll help with the penalty kill and be an eye in the sky during games, overlooking the action and video replay from the press box.
PHOTOS: Coyotes development campRecycling
New FHWA Survey Finds Asphalt Recycling Reaches 99 Percent;
Warm Mix Usage Skyrockets
Asphalt pavement is not only America’s most recycled and reused material, it now is being recycled and reused at a rate over 99 percent. Use of environmentally friendly warm-mix asphalt grew by more than 148 percent from 2009 to 2010, a trend that is expected to continue. Recycling of asphalt pavements and asphalt shingles in 2010 alone conserved 20.5 million barrels of asphalt binder.
These are some of the key findings in a new survey of asphalt pavement usage, which NAPA completed under contract to the Federal Highway Administration. The report, titled Asphalt Pavement Mix Production Survey: 2009-2010 (NAPA Information Series 138), is available as a free download. The survey examined the use of reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP), recycled asphalt shingles (RAS), and warm-mix asphalt (WMA) in 2009 and 2010. RAP, RAS, and WMA conserve raw materials; conserve energy; cut emissions from production and paving operations; and improve conditions for workers.
Some highlights from the data:
• RAP: The asphalt industry remains the country’s number one recycler. The amount of RAP used in asphalt pavements was 56.0 million tons in 2009 and 62.1 million tons in 2010.
Assuming 5 percent liquid asphalt in RAP, this represents over 3 million tons (19 million barrels) of asphalt binder conserved. About 96 percent of the contractors/ branches reported using RAP. Less than 1 percent of RAP was sent to landfills.
• RAS: Use of recycled asphalt shingles (both manufacturer’s waste and tear-offs) increased from 702,000 tons to 1.10 million tons from 2009 to 2010, a 57 percent increase.
Assuming conservative asphalt content of 20 percent for shingles, this represents 234,000 tons (1.5 million barrels) of asphalt binder conserved.
• WMA: Total tonnage of WMA is estimated at 19.2 million tons in 2009 and 47.6 million tons in 2010. This was a 148 percent increase. Plant foaming is used most often in producing WMA. Additives accounted for about 17 percent of the total WMA production in 2009 and 8 percent in 2010.
To view/download the full report Asphalt Pavement Mix Production Survey: 2009-2010, click here.
To view/download Appendix A, Survey Forms, click here.
To view/download Appendix B, State-by-State Use of RAP, RAS, WMA, and HMA, click here. Please be aware before printing that Appendix B is 148 pages long.
For the HMAT magazine article summarizing the survey, click on Asphalt Tops The Charts in Environmental Stewardship.
FHWA/EPA Report Showing that Asphalt Topped the Recycling Chart As Long Ago as 1993:
The Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Highway Administration issued a report showing asphalt as America's number one recycled product. For a PDF of a chart from that report,
[Click Here].
Asphalt producers also incorporate materials from other industries into pavements.
Recycled Foundry Sand
This two-part series discussing recycling foundry sand appeared in HMAT magazine.
Sources and Properties
In the MixLOS ANGELES (Friday, Aug. 11, 2017) – StubHub Center advises fans to arrive early to Sunday’s LA Chargers game against the Seattle Seahawks. Fans who don’t arrive to StubHub Center by 4 p.m. PT will risk missing the 5 p.m. PT kickoff for the 2017 NFL Preseason contest.
Additional information regarding parking, transportation, tailgating and StubHub Center’s bag policy, along with a timeline for Sunday, Aug. 13 are below.
<u>PARKING AND TRANSPORTATION</u>
Fans with pre-purchased parking passes are able to park at StubHub Center for LA Chargers games. Those with parking passes can access here. Chargers Season Ticket Members are able to pre-purchase parking by calling 1-877-CHARGERS. For all Chargers Season Ticket Members parking inquires, call 1-877-CHARGERS.
For those that do not have a pre-purchased parking pass:
The best way to ensure convenient parking is to pre-purchase a season parking pass by calling 1-877- CHARGERS.
Day of game parking is available for purchase in the Silver and Red lots on a first-come, first-served basis.
Direction to the Silver and Red Lots can be found here.
Parking is limited at StubHub Center for Season Ticket Members who have not pre-purchased parking passes.
Free parking is available at the Harbor Gateway Transit Center and the Del Amo Station. Park for free and take the free Chargers Express.
For ease of entrance, all StubHub Center parking lots will be subject to directed parking (directed to a specific parking space upon entrance).
Parking in surrounding neighborhoods is prohibited.
RVs and oversized vehicles are not allowed in the parking lots.
Driving directions to StubHub Center from throughout Southern California can be found here, while access to StubHub Center by public transportation via LA Metro can be found here. The Chargers Express offers fans free non-stop shuttles to and from StubHub Center for every Chargers home game. More information on the Chargers Express can be found here.
<u>TAILGATING</u>
Tailgating is permitted in the Silver, Gold and Bronze lots with a parking permit. Please see the parking map here for complete tailgating designations. Additional information on tailgating can be found here, along with details on the Chargers Express which offers fans free non-stop shuttles to and from StubHub Center for Chargers home games. Tailgating of any kind, with or without alcohol consumption, is prohibited in the Red, Blue and Green lots on the campus of California State University, Dominguez Hills.
<u>BAG POLICY</u>
To continue improving safety measures for all fans, effective immediately StubHub Center has implemented a policy that will limit the size and type of bags permitted to enter the stadium. This new policy, which will enhance stadium safety and expedite entry to the stadium, will apply to all events hosted at any of the StubHub Center venues. StubHub Center and the Chargers advise fans not to bring bags of any kind to the stadium for events.
Reusable Bags that adhere to the below standards will be permitted to enter StubHub Center:
* Reusable bags that are clear plastic or clear vinyl and do not exceed 12" x 6" x 12" * One-gallon clear plastic freezer bag (Ziplock bag or similar) * Small clutch bags, approximately the size of a hand, with or without a handle or strap can be taken into the stadium with one of the clear plastic bags
<u>TIMELINE: Sunday, Aug. 13th</u>
1:00 p.m. PT – Parking Gates Open
1:00 p.m. PT – Media Gate Opens (Southeast corner)
1:30 p.m. – Southwest, Southeast and Northwest Valet Gates open
3:00 p.m. PT – All StubHub Center stadium gates openPremier Christy Clark (left) listens as B.C. Finance Minister Mike de Jong tables the provincial budget in the Legislative Assembly in February. Last week, do Jong explained that even though the province has a budget surplus, taxpayers wouldn’t stand for that money being spend on teachers. Photograph by: CHAD HIPOLITO, THE CANADIAN PRESS
A citizen is a rare thing these days in Canada. Citizens have been expunged from the political lexicon and replaced with taxpayers and, as elections approach, voters.
Decrying the loss of a word may seem a bit pedantic. But words are powerful. They frame debates and influence our thinking.
Use the word taxpayer instead of citizen and the debate can only be about money.
Use citizen and the focus moves beyond economics, opening the prospect that the discussion might include other considerations, such as the common good.
By using the word citizens, taxpaying adults and corporations aren’t the only ones to be considered. Children, the poor and the vulnerable must also be part of the discussion.
I was struck by all of this recently when I listened to provincial Finance Minister Mike de Jong explain why even though the province has a budget surplus, taxpayers wouldn’t stand for that money being spent on teachers.
Of course, British Columbia’s 40,000 teachers are taxpayers as well as citizens. As for those nearly half a million schoolchildren who aren’t attending classes as the strike drags on, few are likely to be taxpayers, but they are citizens.
Perhaps it is unsurprising for a finance minister to think only in terms of money and of taxpayers, not of citizens.
But de Jong is not alone among the B.C. Liberals, and the B.C. Liberals are far from the only politicians who have deliberately removed the word citizen from their vocabularies.
The deliberate replacement of citizen with taxpayer began in the 1980s with the American anti-tax movement and has been promoted in Canada by groups like the Fraser Institute and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, whose attention focuses narrowly on fiscal matters.
Along with that change, politicians began talking more about how much governments spend, and less about the wide range of services that money provides — including health care, courts, policing, environmental protection, roads, transit, funding for the arts, and education.
A few years ago, the federal Conservatives went so far as to write a Taxpayer Bill of Rights.
It certainly wasn’t necessary since there is nothing in it that isn’t already covered by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including the rights to privacy, service in both official language and due process.
But curiously, it says that taxpayers have “the right to receive entitlements and to pay no more or no less than is required by law”, as well as “courteous treatment” and “timely information.”
It carries with it the suggestion that government services and courtesy are somehow not available to all.
The Harper government has so effectively eliminated the word citizen that it only seems to be used in the context of denying citizenship rights to people like child soldier Omar Khadr, stripping citizenship rights from others, or using it as bait among ethnic voters.
Keeping an eye on debt and deficits is important. But governing means more than just balancing budgets, as citizenship implies much more than just being a taxpayer.
To be a citizen means to belong, to have responsibilities, rights and shared values. It means having a stake in the future and, in democracies, a voice in determining what that future might look like.The Columbus Blue Jackets won't be bringing in reinforcements.
Following another down season that began with an 0-8-0 stretch in October, the Blue Jackets are counting on the roster pieces already in place - as well as some promising prospects - to help right the ship in 2016-17, due mainly to a lack of salary-cap space.
"Our improvement is going to come from within," general manager Jarmo Kekalainen told Aaron Portzline of the Columbus Post-Dispatch. "It has to come from within.
"We have several guys, veteran guys, who have a lot to prove after the season they had last year, and I think they're going to be better. We have a group of young guys who are going to push them to be better."
Chief among those who need to be better are captain Nick Foligno and goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky; the former experienced a 19-goal drop-off from the previous campaign, while the latter was oft-injured and unable to find his Vezina Trophy form.
"I, 100 percent, appreciate (management) having trust in us," Foligno said. "They know we can get the job done.
"We should be humbled by the fact that they're going to give us another shot, and now we're going to run with it. This core group... it's on us to push us to that next level."
The Blue Jackets also hope young players like Oliver Bjorkstrand, Zach Werenski, and Sonny Milano can parlay a Calder Cup championship at the AHL level into success with the big club as early as the upcoming NHL season.
According to General Fanager, Columbus holds less than $5 million in available cap space, and despite calls for improvement from players on the roster, Kekalainen will no doubt remain open to potential trades that would allow him to dump some of the more burdensome salary commitments.The Washington Post just published a huge NSA investigation. The findings, sadly, are unsurprising, but the scope is massive: nine out of 10 messages intercepted by the NSA come from regular folks, not targets, and those private conversations and photos have been living in plain view on NSA databases. Just 'cause you're a citizen doesn't mean you're safe.
Advertisement
How wide is the NSA's net? The report indicates that the agency stretches the bounds of reason and logic in determining who counts as a "foreign target." Write emails in a foreign language? Name show up on the chat buddy list of someone outside the U.S.? Use a proxy to watch World Cup coverage that doesn't air in North America? Congratulations: the NSA considers you eligible for eavesdropping. The Post reports that the agency can claim the IP address of an entire server, accessed by hundreds of people, counts as a "target."
The Post spent four months digging into a cache of 160,000 emails and instant messages given to them by Snowden, a trove of communications the NSA intercepted and saved to its databases between 2009 and 2012. Nearly half of those messages were marked by NSA analysts as belonging to U.S. citizens. The Post explains that many of those non-target messages contained some very private information:
Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.
Advertisement
The Post describes messages including medical records, resumes, children's school records, even family photos, all belonging to people the NSA has no interest in tracking—but all saved to the NSA's databases.
Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques. In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam or striking risque poses in shorts and bikini tops.
Legally, the NSA should only be able to target foreign nationals located outside the U.S. Intercepting messages from U.S. citizens should require a warrant from a special surveillance court. But the agency casts a very wide net, and the vast majority of people caught in the agency's searches aren't in any way considered targets.
Advertisement
But while other U.S. spy agencies follow strict guidelines to discard, say, wiretapped phone calls made by a suspect's spouse or child, the data Snowden gave to The Post indicates the NSA follows no such ruling.
While the NSA has previously claimed it can't estimate how many U.S. citizens get caught in its surveillance web, The Post says "it is not obvious why the NSA could not offer at least a partial count, given that its analysts routinely pick out 'U.S. persons' and mask their identities, in most cases, before distributing intelligence reports."
Based on the spying community's June 26th transparency report, The Post estimates that nearly 900,000 individuals have been subject to NSA snooping—whether or not they count as a legitimate target.
Advertisement
The full report is extensive and damning, but The Post even-handedly points out that the data collection has revealed some important info for our nation's security:
Among the most valuable contents — which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations — are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.
Advertisement
Snowden, however, tells The Post that these successes don't justify the unfettered snooping into innocent bystanders' lives, or the long-term storing of their private data in NSA lockers.
Even if one could conceivably justify the initial, inadvertent interception of baby pictures and love letters of innocent bystanders," he added, "their continued storage in government databases is both troubling and dangerous. Who knows how that information will be used in the future?
Ever since we first found out about the NSA, most folks have suspected that at some level ordinary folks were being snooped on. The Post's confirmation of that fact is not terribly surprising. But the revelation that nine out of ten of those messages are irrelevant, and that the NSA is hoarding those messages seemingly indefinitely, adds a whole new ominous layer to the discussion.
Advertisement
The NSA, it seems, is like a digital elephant: its ears are huge, and it never forgets, even when it's overhearing innocent bystanders. [The Washington Post]Arduino Radar Project
In this Arduino Tutorial I will show you how you can make this cool looking radar using the Arduino Board and the Processing Development Environment. You can watch the following video or read the written tutorial below for more details.
Overview All you need for this Arduino Project is an Ultrasonic Sensor for detecting the objects, a small hobbyist Servo Motor for rotating the sensor and an Arduino Board for controlling them. You can watch the following video or read the written tutorial below.
Components needed for this Arduino Project
You can get these components from any of the sites below:
Ultrasonic Sensor HC-SR04 ………… Amazon / Banggood
Servo Motor……………………………….. Amazon / Banggood
Arduino Board …………………………… Amazon / Banggood
Breadboard and Jump Wires ……… Amazon / Banggood
*Please note: These are affiliate links. I may make a commission if you buy the components through these links. I would appreciate your support in this way!
Building the device
First I made a cardboard stand for connecting the Ultrasonic sensor to the Servo motor. I folded it like it’s shown on the picture below, glued it and secured to the servo motor using a screw like this.
Also I attached a pin header on which I soldered 4 jumper wires for connecting the sensor.
Finally I secured the servo motor to the Arduino Board using an elastic band.
There are also some special mount bracket for the ultrasonic sensor from Banggod. You can get them from the following links:
Ultrasonic Sensor with Mounting Bracket ……… Amazon
Mounting Bracket For Ultrasonic Ranging …….. Banggood
Circuit Schematics
I connected the Ultrasonic Sensor HC-SR04 to the pins number 10 and 11 and the servo motor to the pin number 12 on the Arduino Board.
Source codes
Now we need to make a code and upload it to the Arduino Board that will enable the interaction between the Arduino and the Processing IDE. For understanding how the connection works click here to visit my Arduino and |
Then, on the December 8th, the Education Secretary Nicky Morgan was urged to reconsider the plans in an open letter published in the Independent. Signatures included Labour MPs, campaigners and union bosses – including Trades Union Congress (TUC) head Frances O’Grady and Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism Project.
They claimed that, “political history taught in schools is already biased towards the action of men”, and the changes sent, “a very worrying message to both young men and young women that feminism has little to no place in politics.”
A Department for Education source has told the Independent that they now consider it as a mistake to drop feminism as a major political philosophy, and are likely to not make the change. Nicky Morgan will also include more “female thinkers”, the source said.OAKLAND, Calif. -- Bob Melvin and Chili Davis have remained close friends since their days as teammates with the San Francisco Giants as young major leaguers.
Twice before, Melvin had expressed interest in hiring Davis as his hitting coach -- in Seattle and again with the Arizona Diamondbacks. They have golfed together and gone mountain biking.
Davis is on Melvin's staff at last, hired Saturday as Oakland's hitting coach to complete the Athletics' staff heading into 2012.
"I do understand this is a business. Bobby and I have been friends for a very long time," Davis said from his home in the Phoenix area. "I feel very comfortable having him as the guy that's running the show on the field for us. It's good to know you're working for someone you're familiar with, who's a friend and he has your back and you have his back also."
Melvin took over for the fired Bob Geren in June and went 35-35 after the All-Star break and 47-52 overall while dealing with key injuries to the starting rotation. He received a three-year deal late in the season to continue as the club's manager. The A's (74-88) went a fifth straight year without a winning record or playoff berth since being swept in the 2006 AL championship series by Detroit.
Davis plans to get to work right away making contact with players, meeting in person with those who are already in Arizona.
Oakland has a pair of switch-hitting starters, Jemile Weeks and Cliff Pennington, who stand to learn plenty from Davis.
"The biggest thing I've learned the last two years is the most important thing they look for is that you really care and you're going to be consistent with what you say to them and that you really are paying attention," Davis said.
Davis spent the first seven of his 19 major league seasons with the Giants, who selected the Jamaica native in the 11th round of the 1977 draft. Returning to the Bay Area to work under Melvin was appealing.
"I know he's tried to hire me twice, once with the Seattle Mariners -- a job I was looking forward to getting and didn't get it -- and then with the Arizona Diamondbacks. I guess the third time's the charm," Davis said. "This couldn't have happened at a better place and a better area. I have ties there. I have always loved the Bay Area. I spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. I started my career there. That's a huge part of the excitement for me."
Davis, one of baseball's most accomplished switch-hitters, was a three-time All-Star and won three World Series titles while also playing for the Angels, Twins, Royals and New York Yankees.
He is a career.274 hitter with 350 home runs, 1,372 RBIs and a.451 slugging percentage in 2,436 games.
Davis replaces Gerald Perry, whose contract wasn't renewed.American Kayla Harrison has another gold medal. Call it one more for the road.
Expected to retire following these Olympics and become the next female star in professional mixed martial arts, Harrison defeated France’s Audrey Tcheumeo to win a second judo gold medal in the 78-kilogram weight class in front of a disappointed Brazilian crowd that was hoping to watch Harrison take on Mayra Aguiar.
Harrison, 26, had predicted a matchup with Aguiar more than a year ago as the two have been longtime rivals and had split their first 14 meetings. It would have recalled echoes of 2012, when she beat Britain’s Gemma Gibbons in London in the gold medal match.
Instead, she faced Tcheumeo and did not seem to be getting the best of the action until the final minute when she finally got Tcheumeo on the ground for a decisive win by ippon.
Harrison rolled into the semifinals, defeating Anamari Velensek of Slovenia in 1 minute, 43 seconds with an armbar move that immediately ended the match. Her earlier matches weren’t any longer, confirming her dominance in this tournament.
Harrison is only the second American judoku ever to win two Olympic medals, following Jimmy Pedro (her coach) in 1996 and 2004.
PHOTOS: Thursday, Aug. 11 at the Rio Olympics <p>Aug 11, 2016; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Switzerland team members compete during the men's team pursuit qualifying in the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games at Rio Olympic Velodrome. Mandatory Credit: Andrew P. Scott-USA TODAY Sports</p> USA's Simone Manuel (L) and Canada's Penny Oleksiak react after they equally won the Women's 100m Freestyle Final during the swimming event at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games at the Olympic Aquatics Stadium in Rio de Janeiro on August 11, 2016. / AFP / GABRIEL BOUYS (Photo credit should read GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP/Getty Images) <p>Aug 11, 2016; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Simone Biles (USA) competes on the floor during the women's individual all-around final in the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games at Rio Olympic Arena. Mandatory Credit: Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY Sports</p> <p>Aug 11, 2016; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Competitors sail during the men’s Finn opening series race at Marina da Gloria during the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Mandatory Credit: Eric Seals-USA TODAY Sports</p> <p>Aug 11, 2016; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Michael Phelps (USA) during the men's 100m butterfly semifinal in the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games at Olympic Aquatics Stadium. </p> Aug 11, 2016; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; United States defender Katelyn Falgowski (23) and midfield Melissa Gonzalez (5) battle for the ball with India defender Namita Toppo (19) during women's field hockey pool play in the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games at Olympic Hockey Centre. Mandatory Credit: John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports Aug 11, 2016; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Nathan Adrian (USA) during the men's 50m freestyle semifinal in the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games at Olympic Aquatics Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Rob Schumacher-USA TODAY Sports Aug 11, 2016; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Simone Biles (USA) competes on the floor during the women's individual all-around final in the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games at Rio Olympic Arena. Mandatory Credit: Robert Hanashiro-USA TODAY Sports Aug 11, 2016; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Great Britain team members celebrate after the men's team sprint finals in the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games at Rio Olympic Velodrome. Mandatory Credit: Andrew P. Scott-USA TODAY Sports <p>Aug 9, 2016; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Team USA including Robin Prendes, Anthony Fahden, Edward King and Tyler Nas during the men's lightweight four semifinal in the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games at Lagoa Stadium. </p> RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL - AUGUST 11: Alexandra Raisman of the United States competes on the vault during the Women's Individual All Around Final on Day 6 of the 2016 Rio Olympics at Rio Olympic Arena on August 11, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)
Copyright 2016 KINGI am the sum of a cause that has no part, and the part of a cause that has no sum. What is the real are the qualities of the physical world driven by their own nature and causal directness. These qualities, or things of the world, show themselves as their own truth and nothing else. They are their own cause of natural beginning and end, formed in law and delivered through appearance. This unfolding through time paves the way for the “self” to act and react to the “given-ness” of the world and create a psychophysical being striving to disavow itself within its own horizon. Through its actions, and reactions, the “self” is in an endless mode of intentionality and is forever creating new, and not yet experienced, moments of existence.
Like this: Like Loading...
Related
Liked this post? Follow this blog to get more.But how does she collect the data, and why does she do it? Read my Q&A with Ms. Shepherd after the break.
Tyche Shepherd's Grid Survey site has become more invaluable than it already was, now that Linden Lab has decided to no longer publish Second Life economic stats. Along with Louis Platini's Metaverse Business, where I get my monthly most popular SL sims data, Grid Survey ( and Tyche's Twitter feed ) is where I first turn to find out how the SL economy is doing. I'm not her only fan: Her data has been praised to me by top Linden Lab staffers past and present as being pretty much on the nose. So in yet another rich irony of user-generated content, the best place to learn about Second Life is not Linden Lab itself, but someone who goes by the name Tyche, and in real life, is (she tells me) a senior statistician for a renowned multinational corporation who tracks the health of another corporation's lead product for fun.
Why she started Grid Survey
[T]here was no real plan to do so, it just evolved... [While working on a land development project] I realized I could track the coming and goings of regions over time. The land development project is long dead but Grid Survey grew, first with my weekly reports on SLUniverse, then the development of more sophisticated survey bots and the website to house this data, finally branching out to collect other SL statistics such as concurrency rates, Lindex Prices, Economic metrics and Incident reports (the latter two now no longer published by the Lab).
What motivates her to keep doing it
Probably because it's something I'm good at and I get some recognition for what I do. My first year in Second Life (I joined early 2007) was very much as a consumer, I learnt how to throw some prims together and apply a simple texture and I was a little more proficient at scripting, but I soon realised I probably didn't have the aptitude to be a significant Second Life creator, so Grid Survey has become my contribution to the Second Life community as a whole... The data collection now fills enough of my spare time, though I regret not having enough time nowadays to properly analyse the data I collect. By making it freely available, I have to leave much of the insight and analysis to others.
Her real life background with data
Does it show? Well, I suppose for someone to have such a geeky hobby, it probably follows that they do something similar outside Second Life. My background is in commercial statistical analysis, which I've been doing for many years. Currently I'm the senior statistician of a small but very well-known multinational corporation, working as part of a global strategy and insight team. Estimating Linden Lab's monthly private estate tier is bread and butter to me, and counting Second Life regions I can do in my sleep (mainly because I leave that to my survey bots).
Why she doesn't charge Linden Dollars for her data
I originally thought about how I could make money from this, but quickly rejected the idea. Having paying customers (if any could be found) introduces a level of commitment that I wasn't sure I could give when starting out, and having a commercial interest in the data I was publishing can sometimes be seen by others as a conflict of interest, especially when some of this data is only available through the good will of many land owners who allow my bots to have brief but regular access to their land. This is a hobby for me, not a business, and so I made a conscious decision to provide free access (I don't even have advertising on my site) to the data I collect and the insight I publish, through the website, SLUniverse, and via an API which can be used in world as well as outside.
But [analyzing data is]... not what drew me to Second Life in the first place, I think that's more down to my natural curiosity. I still remember my first day in Second Life flying (yes I'm flying...) that feeling of freedom as I flew over this vast world, not knowing where I was or what it was for, just blown away by the openness and what seem like unlimited potential. I still get that feeling every now and then nearly 5 years later. I'm sure I'd still be here in SL even if I'd never started Grid Survey.
TweetMy GitHub page, containing various open-source libraries for Mac and iOS development, and some miscellaneous projects
GCD Is Not Blocks, Blocks Are Not GCD
There's a lot of discussion going around the internet lately about blocks and Grand Central Dispatch. They're both great new technologies that have seen the light of day with the 10.6 release, and they see a lot of use together. However, a lot of the people discussing blocks and GCD don't seem to understand that they are not, in fact, the same thing, and aren't even really related. I just wanted to make a quick note here to describe exactly what each one is, how they're different, and how they work together.
Blocks
Blocks are a new C/C++/Objective-C language feature designed and developed by Apple. They were first released to the public as part of the clang project. This summer saw a nice packaged blocks-capable compiler in the form of PLBlocks, and they gained official Apple support in 10.6.
Blocks are what other languages commonly call lambdas or closures. They are anonymous inner functions which capture enclosing scope and which can live beyond the lifetime of that enclosing scope. In essence, they allow writing inline code which can then be passed to other functions or modules instead of being executed immediately.
Blocks are officially supported by Apple on 10.6 and up. Programs targeting 10.5 can use blocks if they use PLBlocks. Programs written for other platforms can probably use blocks if they are compiled with clang, but I'm not certain on the status of this work.
Grand Central Dispatch
GCD, also known as libdispatch, is a Mac OS X multiprocessing framework new in 10.6. Its major feature is an efficient system-aware thread pool implementation. "System-aware" means that it will automatically and dynamically scale the number of threads in the pool in response to system load, the number of CPU cores in the computer, and the state of the threads currently executing in the pool. GCD also offers other multiprocessing features such as an events system and semaphores.
As of this week, the GCD is now open source. The system awareness of GCD requires kernel integration which may make it more difficult to port to other platforms, and for now GCD remains a purely Mac OS X 10.6 library.
Why the Confusion?
Reading the above, I think that anyone can see that these two entities are very different. They really have nothing in common. So why is there so much confusion about what's what?
The answer is pretty simple: GCD is built around callbacks. You pass it a callback for an event trigger, or to execute a work unit, or as a cancellation handler, or for many other things.
Callbacks in C have always been clunky. Blocks make callbacks much easier to use. Since GCD is so heavily based on callbacks, the solution was easy: add blocks-based APIs to GCD. Thus, most GCD examples you see out there include blocks as well, as in this example from the dispatch_async man page:
dispatch_async ( my_queue, ^ { // critical section });
_f
The confusion is understandable, but it's important to understand the distinction between the two. You can use blocks without GCD, and in fact many new blocks-based Cocoa APIs in 10.6 do just that. You can use GCD without blocks, via thevariants provided for every GCD function that takes a block. They go great together, but they are in fact completely different technologies.
And now you know the rest of the story.
Did you enjoy this article? I'm selling whole books full of them! Volumes II and III are now out! They're available as ePub, PDF, print, and on iBooks and Kindle. Click here for more information
Comments:
Add your thoughts, post a comment:
Spam and off-topic posts will be deleted without notice. Culprits may be publicly humiliated at my sole discretion.
JavaScript is required to submit comments due to anti-spam measures. Please enable JavaScript and reload the page.(CBS) — There were dueling endorsements Friday: Latinos for Emanuel and progressives for Garcia.
That’s not all. CBS 2 Chief Correspondent Jay Levine says there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes of the Chicago mayoral race.
It’s a political triangle involving incumbent Rahm Emanuel, Gov. Bruce Rauner and a suddenly popular newcomer, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, who is squaring off for the mayor’s job.
“Get ready for March Madness in terms of endorsements,” Garcia said Friday.
Let’s start with Gov. Rauner, who’s known to have ties to both the mayor and ousted mayoral candidate, Willie Wilson, whose endorsement could help win over black voters.
Rauner says Wilson will decide for himself whom he’ll endorse. Wilson says Rauner hasn’t mentioned the contest to him.
Rauner, however, may have telegraphed his preference by criticizing Garcia’s relationship with the Chicago Teachers Union.
Meanwhile, City Clerk Susana Mendoza headed a prominent group of Latinos who threw their support behind Emanuel. Levine asked if they were turning their back on a fellow Hispanic, whose election would be historic.
“To make this into an issue of race is insulting to the electorate and to me as a Latina,” Mendoza replied.
Garcia responded with a group of progressive aldermen.
“My candidacy represents a coalition, like I said repeatedly, (is) multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-geographic,” he said.
The mayor, CBS 2 has learned, will meet with Willie Wilson again on Saturday. So will Garcia. And Rauner.
The suspense builds leading up to the April 7 runoff.On Monday, Damascus signed agreement with Arab League (AL) to allow AL observers to monitor months-old anti-government riots. This will open a flood-gate for Zionist-controlled western press to fabricate more anti-Assad propaganda lies through their embeded observers.
The Russian resolution at the UN Security Council that explicitly excludes armed action against Syria in calling for an end to violence there. It demands that both the government and anti-government militias to stop fighting. The resolution has spoiled Saudi Arabia-Qatar-Kuwait plan to use western Arab League (AL) puppet and prepare ground for a Libya-type war to remove and kill Bashar al-Assad as was done to Qaddafi a few months ago.
The AL meeting in Riyadh on December 18 has seen an erosion of unity against Syria after the introduction of the Russian draft resolution. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are threatening that on Dec. 21, the Arab League plan for observers, special courts to try Syrian army officers, and amnesty for the opposition will be taken to the UNSC for approval as a binding UN resolution. This would be the next step in moving for a NATO-type military action against Assad as was pushed by Qatar to overthrow and murder Libya’s Qadaffi.
Professor Igor Panarin, a prominent Russian research analyst has blamed pro-Israel British-American elites for playing a leading role in media campaign against Assad-regime. Panarin identifies that the British-American plot against Syria, including the use of the Arab League to isolate Syria (from Iran, Lebanon and Hamas) – follows precisely the “scenario’” used against Libya. He also exposes that “the BBC and Qatar’s supposedly independent Al-Jazeera channel (which in reality is a pro-Zionism Arab propaganda network) led the way in providing media support” against Libya, and Syria.
Thierry Meyssan, the French investigative journalist, has reported that the casualty figures cited by the UN Human Rights special commission accusing Syria of civilian massacres are “fabricated evidence”. The evidence that Syrian security forces killed 5,000 peaceful protesters, comes from a Zionist-funded London-based human rights organization called Observatoire Syrien des Droits de l’Homme (Syrian Observatory of Human Rights), which falsified many of the names.
Professor Michel Chossudovsky (University of Ottawa, Canada) in an article entitled Syria: Who is behind the protest movement?, published in Global Research on May 3, 2011, wrote:
“There is evidence of gross media manipulation and falsification from the outset of the protest movement in southern Syria on March 17th.”
Former FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, in an interview with Russia Today (RT) on December 16, had claimed that Washington is arming the anti-government rebels in Syria. Watch the video below.
Both former CIA agent Robert Baer and ex-MI6 officer Alastair Crooke point out that the Syrian people definitely want change, but not in the form of a NATO “humanitarian” assault.The blurb: "Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May bring the travelling Grand Tour tent to The Cradle of Humankind near Johannesburg in South Africa. In this show, the three hosts are forced to become special forces soldiers with an all action challenge at a top secret training base, deep within Jordan. Also in this episode, Jeremy introduces the 800 horsepower Aston Martin Vulcan to the Grand Tour test track, and James is sent to investigate an unusual form of motorsport called spinning."
What we want to know: We have so many questions. Why do they become soldiers? Do we actually get to see the "secret" base in Jordan? Why would anyone give Clarkson access to firearms? And isn't spinning a bit dangerous? (The sport, which started in the Soweto region of Johannesburg, is mainly done illegally and has caused severe injuries.)
Most importantly, what's Clarkson eating in that photo, and could we have some?
Episode 3: Opera, Arts and Donuts (Whitby)As we all know, motor racing is a tough business. It's very difficult to stay on top over a sustained period of time and even the most established and well-financed teams endure weak periods as we're seeing these days with Ferrari and McLaren in Formula 1, and Roush-Fenway in NASCAR. Williams too, has gone through some lean times in F1 in recent years although the team has been much more competitive this year.
Yet Team Penske continues to roll along at the top of its game, winning races and challenging for or winning championships in both IndyCar and NASCAR. Penske's cars finished first, second and fourth in this year's IndyCar championship while Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano are in the thick of the battle for this year's NASCAR title. If either 2012 champ Keselowski or Logano take this year's Sprint Cup it will be the first time any team has won both IndyCar and NASCAR titles in the same year.
Next year is Penske Racing's 50th season and 'The Captain' is expanding his operation, adding a fourth IndyCar for Simon Pagenaud and going into partnership with Dick Johnson Racing to run an Aussie V8 team with Marcos Ambrose at the wheel.
© LAT-USA
Penske's key lieutenants are: Bud Denker who is CEO of Penske Corp and also runs the Detroit GP; longtime right hand man Walt Czarnecki who oversees the NASCAR team; and Tim Cindric, president of Penske Performance, the team's sprawling headquarters in Mooresville, N.C.
Last week Cindric discussed Pagenaud's hiring and the IndyCar's team expansion to four cars for Will Power, Helio Castroneves, Juan Pablo Montoya and Pagenaud. Cindric said Penske and he have had their eyes on Pagenaud since 2008 and '09 when he drove Gil de Ferran's Acura LMP1 cars.
"It's the first time we've run four cars with Team Penske, so it will certainly be a challenge," Cindric said. "But when you have someone like Simon, who may seem as though maybe this has been something that we've looked at here in the short-term, that's not necessarily the case.
"Simon obviously had an association with (former Team Penske driver) Gil (de Ferran) back in the sports car days when they were running the ALMS program, and that's where we took notice of what his capabilities were. Really, this has been the opportunity that we've had to bring him on board.
"If that meant changing to a four-car program, that's what we were prepared to do. We feel like any time you can expand an organization, certainly it's satisfying to know that we can continue to add to the Team Penske heritage, and bringing Simon on board was certainly an added plus to that. So we're certainly looking forward to the challenge ahead."
© LAT-USA
"Personnel is the first challenge that you have, and logistically, how do you place four cars, how do you put them under the tent? How do you debrief? How do you put together what you need for our overseas trip at the Brasilia race and those sorts of things? It's certainly a logistical challenge, but more importantly the personnel is always what makes the difference, so that becomes your biggest focus.
"I think you see it, whether it's IndyCar or NASCAR, what you have in terms of car count obviously raises your odds in some ways. But if you don't do it right, it can also be a distraction, and we've seen that within our NASCAR program. We've been a stronger team with two guys than we were when we ran three cars. So I think it really depends on when you add those cars and what your capabilities are.
"I think if there was a time for us to add a fourth car, it was now. I think what we learn from the NASCAR side of it is if you don't have the two cars right, it's hard to add a third car. When we brought back the two cars in NASCAR, it benefited us in terms of our approach. So we felt like if we were going to add a fourth driver there really there wasn't another guy to consider.
"To have four cars, there is efficiency in doing that. The first car costs the most, and then each one after that costs a little bit less. That's not always the case for the driver, but it is the case for the sponsor in a way."
For his part, Pagenaud could not be more delighted to join Team Penske.
"It's a very special day in my career," Pagenaud said. "It's definitely the next step in my career. I've been working my whole life as a race car driver, and now was perfect timing for Team Penske to come and work together. You always hope that you'll get the best opportunity possible and luckily enough I had a very good opportunity with the team that I always dreamed to drive for. So the decision from then on was pretty easy for me.
"I'm really excited to get to work with Helio (Castroneves), Will (Power), and Juan Montoya. Having three teammates like them is definitely a huge help as a driver to complete the steps and it's going to help the team as well. I'm really excited. I think it's a tremendous opportunity for my career.
"It's really going to be a very interesting season next year. Feeding off each other will be an important task. We all work for Team Penske, and that's how it works here. I'm really excited about it, and I think it's perfect timing in my career."
© LAT USA
"I've always been interested in sports cars," he commented. "I've had a great career in sports cars. But my goal was to continue in IndyCar at the top level. I had some great opportunities and yes, I've been in talks with Nissan. It's been good talks, but I was very interested in my opportunities in IndyCar, especially with Team Penske. That was the bottom line."
Pagenaud believes his new teammates will help him improve his performance on ovals and make him a more complete IndyCar driver.
"It took time for anyone like Dario Franchitti or Will to win on oval, and I think it's the natural progress and natural improvement," he remarked. "I feel definitely ready to take on the fight on the ovals, and definitely having someone like Montoya with so much experience on the oval and Helio by my side will be huge.
"The big advantage of a team like Penske is definitely all the resources that you can have and all the research and development that you have available to make the car better and improve. As you know, I'm someone very technical, and that is the side of the sport that we enjoy. What better fit for me? There wasn't any better fit. So it's pretty exciting going into 2015 that way.
"As a driver, when you walk into a team like this one, the goal is different. You're here to win. That's the bottom line. The goal is to have complete success."
Meanwhile, 'The Captain' discussed his thinking in going Aussie V8 racing. His words emphasize the wide range of thinking, resources and synergies that make Team Penske unlike any other racing team in the world.
"I think that if you look at our history, we own Detroit Diesel," Penske said. "We bought the factory here in Detroit in '88 and then sold it to Daimler early in 2000. We operated Detroit Diesel in Australia and New Zealand and that part of the world for a number of years, and then sold the business. Following that we really had no business in Australia until we bought the truck distribution for Western Star, MAN and Dennis Eagle from Trans-Pacific Industries, which gives us a network of franchise dealers and service facilities.
"With that, we looked at how we might be able to extend our footprint, and with Rolls Royce Power Systems owning MTU and Daimler owning Detroit Diesel, we felt with our experience it might be a good opportunity. Keeping a long story short, we completed negotiations, and we'll be the distributor for those products and support the dealers, not only on the Western Star side but on the Freightliner side as we go forward.
© LAT USA
"It's perfect. It's our DNA. We're in the service business here in the United States. We have a leasing company with over 200,000 vehicles, and we rent them, we lease them, we service them, and we'd like to replicate that in Australia and New Zealand.
"When I stepped back away from this opportunity and really looked at our business that we've now been developing in Australia I saw that the V8 Supercars would connect with our customer base throughout Australia. There was no question that with our NASCAR and IndyCar heritage, a chance to go to Australia and take some of our people to an opportunity there would be something that we wouldn't want to turn down.
"Obviously when we look at the landscape coming down there by ourselves and trying to develop a team, we really said that wasn't an option. So we took four to five months really to look and see what we might be able to do to partner or do something with another organization. I found out very quickly that Dick Johnson Racing had such a great reputation. I had the opportunity to go to the shop, meet Dick and meet the key people there, and it was obvious that we could have a good fit."
At 77, Roger Penske remains as energetic and incisive as ever. His tremendous drive and business acumen have made Team Penske one of the most successful, wide-ranging racing teams of all-time. Without doubt, many more wins and championships lay ahead.
As we all know, motor racing is a tough business. It's very difficult to stay on top over a sustained period of time and even the most established and well-financed teams endure weak periods as we're seeing these days with Ferrari and McLaren in Formula 1, and Roush-Fenway in NASCAR. Williams too, has gone through some lean times in F1 in recent years although the team has been much more competitive this year.Yet Team Penske continues to roll along at the top of its game, winning races and challenging for or winning championships in both IndyCar and NASCAR. Penske's cars finished first, second and fourth in this year's IndyCar championship while Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano are in the thick of the battle for this year's NASCAR title. If either 2012 champ Keselowski or Logano take this year's Sprint Cup it will be the first time any team has won both IndyCar and NASCAR titles in the same year.Next year is Penske Racing's 50th season and 'The Captain' is expanding his operation, adding a fourth IndyCar for Simon Pagenaud and going into partnership with Dick Johnson Racing to run an Aussie V8 team with Marcos Ambrose at the wheel.And of course, racing is merely Roger Penske's avocation. He spends most of his time running the Penske Corporation, a giant, ever-changing business empire employing some 40,000 people. The boss spends half is waking hours aloft, wheels up, aboard his corporate jet flying around the world managing his many businesses. But he still finds time to make it to almost every IndyCar race and most NASCAR races.Penske's key lieutenants are: Bud Denker who is CEO of Penske Corp and also runs the Detroit GP; longtime right hand man Walt Czarnecki who oversees the NASCAR team; and Tim Cindric, president of Penske Performance, the team's sprawling headquarters in Mooresville, N.C.Last week Cindric discussed Pagenaud's hiring and the IndyCar's team expansion to four cars for Will Power, Helio Castroneves, Juan Pablo Montoya and Pagenaud. Cindric said Penske and he have had their eyes on Pagenaud since 2008 and '09 when he drove Gil de Ferran's Acura LMP1 cars."It's the first time we've run four cars with Team Penske, so it will certainly be a challenge," Cindric said. "But when you have someone like Simon, who may seem as though maybe this has been something that we've looked at here in the short-term, that's not necessarily the case."Simon obviously had an association with (former Team Penske driver) Gil (de Ferran) back in the sports car days when they were running the ALMS program, and that's where we took notice of what his capabilities were. Really, this has been the opportunity that we've had to bring him on board."If that meant changing to a four-car program, that's what we were prepared to do. We feel like any time you can expand an organization, certainly it's satisfying to know that we can continue to add to the Team Penske heritage, and bringing Simon on board was certainly an added plus to that. So we're certainly looking forward to the challenge ahead."Cindric itemized some of the specific challenges."Personnel is the first challenge that you have, and logistically, how do you place four cars, how do you put them under the tent? How do you debrief? How do you put together what you need for our overseas trip at the Brasilia race and those sorts of things? It's certainly a logistical challenge, but more importantly the personnel is always what makes the difference, so that becomes your biggest focus."I think you see it, whether it's IndyCar or NASCAR, what you have in terms of car count obviously raises your odds in some ways. But if you don't do it right, it can also be a distraction, and we've seen that within our NASCAR program. We've been a stronger team with two guys than we were when we ran three cars. So I think it really depends on when you add those cars and what your capabilities are."I think if there was a time for us to add a fourth car, it was now. I think what we learn from the NASCAR side of it is if you don't have the two cars right, it's hard to add a third car. When we brought back the two cars in NASCAR, it benefited us in terms of our approach. So we felt like if we were going to add a fourth driver there really there wasn't another guy to consider."To have four cars, there is efficiency in doing that. The first car costs the most, and then each one after that costs a little bit less. That's not always the case for the driver, but it is the case for the sponsor in a way."For his part, Pagenaud could not be more delighted to join Team Penske."It's a very special day in my career," Pagenaud said. "It's definitely the next step in my career. I've been working my whole life as a race car driver, and now was perfect timing for Team Penske to come and work together. You always hope that you'll get the best opportunity possible and luckily enough I had a very good opportunity with the team that I always dreamed to drive for. So the decision from then on was pretty easy for me."I'm really excited to get to work with Helio (Castroneves), Will (Power), and Juan Montoya. Having three teammates like them is definitely a huge help as a driver to complete the steps and it's going to help the team as well. I'm really excited. I think it's a tremendous opportunity for my career."It's really going to be a very interesting season next year. Feeding off each other will be an important task. We all work for Team Penske, and that's how it works here. I'm really excited about it, and I think it's perfect timing in my career."Pagenaud turned down an offer to drive one of Nissan's new LMP1 cars at Le Mans and in the WEC in favor of joining Penske."I've always been interested in sports cars," he commented. "I've had a great career in sports cars. But my goal was to continue in IndyCar at the top level. I had some great opportunities and yes, I've been in talks with Nissan. It's been good talks, but I was very interested in my opportunities |
forth…so I think, the people in the middle, if we’re talking about the average person, people who have jobs, they suffer the consequences – I think that’s very bad,” he said.
“The sanctions against Iran have been on air for a long time, and on Cuba – but the leaders never suffer. The people suffer, in both countries, so this is the reason I think that sanctions in principle are wrong,” Ron Paul added.
Paul believes that NATO expansion is a waste of money and it’s not “the rich that pay these bills.” What NATO is intending to do in regards to Ukraine is to make prices on energy and taxes go up, to freeze wages. It is promising 18 billion dollars to Ukraine while the US economy, the main contributor to the NATO and IMF budgets, is in a bad shape.
You can watch the full interview with Ron Paul on Monday’s edition of SophieCo.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.Unconditional Basic Income Europe (UBIE) advocates for the implementation of Basic Income in Europe. In 2013, we collected 300,000 signatures across all EU member countries for this cause, and our alliance grew out of this effort.
UBIE connects over 200 active members from 25 countries across the continent. They invest great amounts of their time, energy and money into organising regular meetings in cities all over Europe, developing projects to promote basic income and raising public awareness as well as support among decision makers. As a result, basic income is now on the agenda in the policy debates of many European countries.
With your help, we can strengthen our financial foundation in order to professionalise our work and accelerate the UBI journey. With Open Collective we can transparently show how your contributions make a difference.Beware; spoilers for BLACK BOLT #8 abound!
Previously in BLACK BOLT, our titular hero escaped an alien prison led by a ruthless villain known as The Jailer. As he made his escape, Black Bolt rescued a child with special abilities named Blinky. So, the conclusion of Black Bolt’s previous adventure resulted in his successful arrival to Earth. He is optimistic about his return, but he is not aware of how much has changed since his departure. As a result, BLACK BOLT #8 explores the Inhuman’s return to Earth and the many conflicts that await him.
There’s No Place Like Earth
BLACK BOLT #8 begins with the King of the Inhumans making his descent to Earth. He is accompanied by Lockjaw and Blinky, with the latter expressing much enthusiasm about the journey. She decides to use her inner eye, a representation of her telepathic powers, to get a peek at what Earth is like. At first, she is impressed by the planet’s vastness. However, upon closer inspection, she expresses fear towards the number of evil forces on Earth.
When Black Bolt and his crew finally arrive, their homecoming is met with ill will. The Inhumans and citizens of New Attilan actually believe Black Bolt to be Maximus in disguise. They even interpret Blinky to be an elaborate trap! Eventually, though, they come to believe Black Bolt is who he says he is.
However, the New Attilans continue to express hostility. They feel as though Black Bolt abandoned them during the events of SECRET EMPIRE. In response to this, Black Bolt expresses guilt. He has experienced much trauma throughout his solo run. So, he is still learning how to come to terms with his anguish.
Home is Where the Heart Is
This struggle within Black Bolt is my favorite aspect of BLACK BOLT #8. Saladin Ahmed’s writing is so eloquent and never fails to impress. With this, he addresses Black Bolt’s inner conflicts in a poignant way. After healing Lockjaw’s physical wounds, an Inhuman known as Panacea tries to heal Black Bolt’s emotional wounds. Unfortunately, Black Bolt turns Panacea away, seemingly out of a fear of exposing his vulnerable state.
This issue makes an effort to emphasize Black Bolt’s relationship with Blinky. She is the medium of communication between him and the rest of the world. As a result, she truly understands him. She has access to his vulnerability and is slowly alleviating him of his pain. This is apparent in the sequence where Black Bolt’s son, Ahura, expresses resentment towards his father and even turns away from his father’s embrace.
After Ahura turns away, Black Bolt immediately reaches out to Blinky. This is a brief moment, but it encapsulates the primary motifs of healing and vulnerability within this issue. Black Bolt is a king, and he is a superhero. However, his recent battles have affected him in ways he is struggling to understand. He actually may not want to understand or even acknowledge these struggles. However, his relationship with Blinky seems to help him feel more comfortable with confronting himself.
The Many Hues of BLACK BOLT #8
In regard to BLACK BOLT #8’s artwork, the cover by Christian Ward is absolutely astonishing. I love the way he juxtaposes Black Bolt’s vulnerability with the cosmic background. This vulnerability is a significant motif in this issue, so I love how the art parallels that. Additionally, Clayton Cowles’ lettering perfectly parallels the mystical, and at times psychedelic, nature of this work’s imagery. Of course, this is not the first time an entry in the BLACK BOLT series has maintained such cohesion in its artwork. The series thus far has featured impeccable imagery that meticulously ties in with Ahmed’s story.
Once again, a stand-out aspect of the art is Ward’s color palette. It is vibrant and totally fascinating. All elements from the character designs to backgrounds maintain their own respective intricacies. As a result, every element is distinct in its own way. The coloring of these elements only augments their distinctions further due to the detail of each and every hue. With this, I enjoy the lighter tone in BLACK BOLT #8. Previous entries have depicted slightly darker hues to support the grim narrative being told. Now that Black Bolt has returned to Earth, there is a brighter sense of hope. So, once again, I love the subtleties the artists incorporate to further support the story and characterization of Black Bolt.
What Lies Beyond
With our titular hero’s return to Earth, the game has changed. Now, he must face the consequences of SECRET EMPIRE. Also, Black Bolt must confront those who resent him, including his own son. I believe future issues in this series will dig deeper into Black Bolt’s psyche. Ultimately, in order for him to confront these new challenges, Black Bolt must confront the challenges within himself.by Kim Hill, Deep Green Resistance Australia
Why did the Australian aborigines never develop agriculture?
This question was posed in the process of designing an indigenous food garden, and I could hear the underlying assumptions of the enquirer in his tone. Our culture teaches that agriculture is a more desirable way to live than hunting and gathering, and agriculturalist is more intelligent and more highly evolved than a hunter gatherer.
These assumptions can only be made by someone indoctrinated by civilization. It’s a limited way to look at the world.
I was annoyed by question, and judged the person asking it as ignorant of history and other cultures, and unimaginative. Since many would fit this label, I figured I’m better off answering the question.
This only takes some basic logic and imagination, I have no background in anthropology or whatever it is that would qualify someone to claim authority on this subject. You could probably formulate an explanation by asking yourself: How and why would anyone develop agriculture?
First consider the practicalities of a transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture.
What plants would be domesticated? What animals? What tools would they use? How would they irrigate?
Why would anyone bother domesticating anything that is plentiful in the wild?
To domesticate a plant takes many generations (plant generations, and human generations) of selecting the strongest specimens, propagating them in one place, caring for them, protecting them from animals and people, from the rain and wind and sun, keeping the seeds safe. This would be incredibly difficult to do, it would take a lot of dedication, not just from one person but a whole tribe for generations. If your lifestyle is nomadic, because food is available in different places in different seasons, there is no reason to make the effort to domesticate a plant.
Agriculture is high-risk. There are a lot of things that could destroy a whole crop, and your whole food supply for the year, as well as your seed stock for the next. A storm, flood, fire, plague of insects, browsing mammals, neighbouring tribes, lack of rain, disease, and no doubt many other factors. A huge amount of work is invested in something that is likely to fail, which would then cause a whole community to starve, if there isn’t a back-up of plentiful food in the wild.
Agriculture is insecure. People in agricultural societies live in fear of crop failure, as this is their only source of food. The crops must be defended. The tools, food storage, water supply and houses must also be defended, and maintained. Defended from people, animals, and insects. Growing and storing all your food in one place would attract all of these. Defence requires weapons, and work.
Agriculture requires settlement. The tribe must stay in one place. They cannot leave, even briefly, as there is constant maintenance and defending to do. Settlements then need their own infrastructure: toilets, water supply, houses, trading routes as not all the food needs can be met from within the settlement. Diseases spread in settled areas.
Aboriginal people travel often, and for long periods of time. Agriculture is not compatible with this way of life.
Agriculture is a lot of work. The farmers must check on the crop regularly, destroy diseased plants, remove weeds, irrigate, replant, harvest, save seeds, and store the crop. Crops generally are harvested for only a few weeks or months in the year, and if they are a staple, must be stored safely and be accessible for the rest of the year.
Domesticated animals require fencing, or tethering, or taming. They would be selectively bred for docility, which is a weakness not a strength, so a domesticated animal would be less healthy than a wild animal.
The people too become domesticated and lose strength with the introduction of agriculture. The wild intelligence needed to hunt and gather would be lost, as would the relationships with the land and other beings.
Agriculture requires a belief in personal property, boundaries, and land ownership. Australian aborigines knew that the land owned the people, not the other way around, so would never have treated the land in this way.
Agriculture needs a social hierarchy, where some people must work for others, who have more power by having more wealth. The landowner would have the power to supply or withhold food. Living as tribal groups, aborigines probably wouldn’t have desired this social structure.
Cultivated food has less nutrition than wild food. Agriculturalists limit their diet to plants and animals that can easily be domesticated, so lose the diversity of tastes and nutrients that make for an ideal human diet. Fenced or caged animals can only eat what is fed to them, rather than forage on a variety of foods, according to their nutritional needs. Domesticated plants only access the nutrients from the soil in the field, which becomes more depleted with every season’s crop. Irrigation causes plants to not send out long roots to find water, so domesticated plants are weaker than wild plants.
Agriculture suggests a belief that the world is not good enough as it is, and humans need to change it. A land populated with gods, spirits or ancestors may not want to be damaged, dug, ploughed and irrigated.
Another thought is that agriculture may develop from a belief in scarcity – that there is not enough food and it is a resource that needs to be secured. Indigenous belief systems value food plants and animals as kin to be in relationship with, rather than resources to exploit.
Agriculture isn’t an all-or-nothing thing. Indigenous tribes engage with the landscape in ways that encourage growth of food plants. People gather seeds of food plants and scatter them in places they are likely to grow. Streams are diverted to encourage plant growth. Early explorers witnessed aboriginal groups planting and irrigating wild rice. Tribes in North Queensland were in contact with Torres Strait Islanders who practiced gardening, but chose not to take this up on a large scale themselves.
A few paragraphs from Tim Low’s Wild Food Plants of Australia:
The evidence from the Torres Strait begs the question of why aborigines did not adopt agriculture. Why should they? The farming life can be one of dull routine, a monotonous grind of back-breaking labour as new fields are cleared, weeds pulled and earth upturned. The farmer’s diet is usually less varied, and not always reliable, and the risk of infectious disease is higher…It is not surprising that throughout the world many cultures spurned agriculture. Explorer Major Mitchell wrote in 1848: ‘Such health and exemption from disease; such intensity of existence, in short, must be far beyond the enjoyments of civilized men, with all that art can do for them; and the proof of this is to be found in the failure of all attempts to persuade these free denizens of uncivilized earth to forsake it for tilled soil.’
After all this, I’m amazed that anyone ever developed agriculture. The question of why Australian aborigines never developed agriculture is easily answered and not as interesting as the question it brings up for me: why did twentieth century westerners never develop hunter-gatherer lifestyles?
From Stories of Creative Ecology January 5, 2013As FX turns 20, the "Louie" multihyphenate shares the secrets to how he writes his comedy: "I typically don’t write out in the world. I think people who do that are exhibitionists."
As FX turns 20, fifteen of TV's top scribes -- from Rescue Me's Denis Leary to Louie's Louis C.K. -- reveal what it's like to write for a network that encourages smart TV (almost) without rules as part of a series that The Hollywood Reporter is rolling out this week. This story first appeared in the May 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
I start each season by thinking of raw ideas and writing them in a notebook -- I don't write on a computer for a while. I compile ideas first. Some are story ideas overall; some are settings like: "Let's go on the road. Let's do something at a hospital." And some are just characters or funny moments. Then I make note cards for the stories, but I'm still not thinking about episodes; I just write the stories and themes. I essentially have an "idea season" and then a "writing season," where I write all the scripts. They're just pages, though -- I don't even know if they're going to be whole episodes or not. Only when we start shooting do we start seeing how long stuff is. For example, I wrote a story that was around 100 pages, and it turned into six episodes. We shoot and figure out in editing what works.
I typically don't write out in the world. I think people who do that are exhibitionists, showing off that they are writers. And I say that because I've done it -- you want to be in a coffeehouse with your notebook and look really thoughtful. Sometimes I will go sit at a diner, though; that's a great place in New York to kill off some thoughts. Mostly I'm not recognized; 99 percent of people don't give a shit or don't know who I am.
STORY: Zach Galifianakis to Star in FX Comedy From Louis C.K.
When I'm actually writing the scripts, I use a 13-inch MacBook. I have a few of them. When a new season starts, I like to have a clean computer -- I throw them around a lot. I also edit the show on a MacBook. I have a USB flash drive I carry around and plug that into whatever machine I'm using, but they get really wrecked because I wear them around my neck.
Most of my episodes end up being stand-alone pieces -- you don't need to have seen the ones that came before. I've always liked doing it that way. I like resetting the values in every episode; I like to have every one be free to go where it wants to go. Why not make every episode different? Let's tell the hell out of this story and forget about it! Although I'm getting more in to these longer arcs. There is actually a through-line of a love story this season: We know he's been dating this girl, and he likes her. But you wouldn't be lost if you hadn't seen the ones before.
STORY: TV Ratings: 'Louie' Makes a Softer Return After Two-Year Break
My process is very organic. It's kind of like a garden, the way it comes out. And I'm only able to do it this way because FX doesn't oversee the writing. If I had to go through the broadcast network approval process, I'd have to congeal every idea I have into an episode script! I'd have to know exactly what is going to happen throughout the season and then rewrite it over and over before shooting. FX approaches my show as if we are telling stories and being artistic. They're never worried about stuff like, "Is this guy likable or good-looking enough?"
So what I'm trying to say is, I could never make my show anywhere else.
RELATED: 'The Americans' Producer Reveals His Secret CIA History
RELATED: Denis Leary Calls Peter Tolan 'Gay' — And He Is
RELATED: 'Damages' Producers Remember Their 'Most Gruesome' Scene — and Why FX Was 'Thrilled'The costs of evacuating residents from near the Fukushima No. 1 plant and the dislocation the people experienced were greater than their expected gain in longevity, a British study has found.
The researchers found that at best evacuees could expect to live eight months longer, but that some might gain only one extra day of life. They said this does not warrant ripping people from their homes and communities.
The team of experts from four British universities developed a series of tests to examine the relocations after the Fukushima crisis and earlier Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
After a three-year study, the academics have concluded that Japan “overreacted” by relocating 160,000 residents of Fukushima Prefecture, even though radioactive material fell on more than 30,000 sq. km of territory.
“We judged that no one should have been relocated in Fukushima, and it could be argued this was a knee-jerk reaction,” said Philip Thomas, a professor of risk management at Bristol University. “It did more harm than good. An awful lot of disruption has been caused However, this is with hindsight and we are not blaming the authorities.”
The team used a wide range of economic and actuarial data, as well as information from the United Nations and the Japanese government.
In one test, an assessment of judgment value, the researchers calculated how many days of life expectancy were saved by relocating residents away from areas affected by radiation.
They compared this with the cost of relocation and how much this expenditure would impact the quality of people’s lives in the future.
From this information, they were able to work out the optimal or rational level of spending and make a judgment on the best measures to mitigate the effects of a nuclear accident.
Depending on how close people were to the radiation, the team calculated that the relocations added a period of between one day to 21 days to the evacuees’ lives.
But when this was compared with the vast amounts of money spent, the academics came to the conclusion that it was unjustified in all cases.
In some areas, they calculated that 150 times more money was being spent than was judged rational.
Thomas adds, the tests do not take into account the physical and psychological effects of relocating, which have been shown to have led to more than 1,000 deaths among elderly evacuees.
Other studies have also found that once people have lived away for a certain period of time it can become increasingly difficult to persuade them to return.
After Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear disaster, around 116,000 people were initially relocated away from the disaster zone.
Looking back on the incident, the team judged it was only worthwhile to relocate 31,000 people because they would have lost in excess of 8.7 months in life expectancy had they remained.
However, for the rest of the 116,000 people, it would have been a more rational decision to keep them where they were, given that their average loss of life was put at three months.
Four years later, a further 220,000 people were relocated from areas close to Chernobyl. Researchers found this unjustified.
Thomas says the loss in life expectancy following a nuclear accident has to be put into context alongside other threats all people face.
For example, it has been claimed that the average Londoner will lose about 4½ months in life expectancy due to high pollution levels.
Thomas concludes governments should carry out a more careful assessment before mounting a relocation operation of at least a year. A temporary evacuation could be a good idea while authorities work out the risk from radiation, he said.
In the future, Thomas would like to see more real-time information made available to the public on radiation levels in order to avoid hysteria and bad planning.
On a plus note, the team found that other remedial measures — decontaminating homes, deep ploughing of soil and bans on the sales of certain food products — were far more effective.
Thomas has already discussed his findings with colleagues at the University of Tokyo and he is keen that his findings can help better quantify the risks from radioactive leaks.
The project was sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Britain’s main agency for funding research in engineering and the physical sciences. It was intended to give advice for nuclear planners both in Britain and India.
The research team comprised specialists from City University in London, Manchester University, the Open University and Warwick University.Janesville, WI– American mothers, whose children were murdered by illegal aliens, spoke at two Saturday campaign rallies for Wisconsin businessman, Paul Nehlen.
Nehlen is running to unseat House Speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin’s August 9th open primary election.
The mothers told the crowd that Speaker Ryan has refused to meet with them, or even acknowledge their loss.
Laura Wilkerson, whose 18-year-old son was tied up, beaten, strangled, set on fire, and tortured to death by his illegal alien classmate, said that this administration is silencing families like hers and that Ryan “is part of the problem”:
They just don’t want you to know [about our families]. As average citizens, we’re not lining their pockets, and so they don’t really care what happens to you or I. They care more about illegal aliens than they do American citizens, more about cheap labor than Americans, more about a vote than American families… Nobody in this administration wants our voices to be heard. They want to silence us and they’re all about illegals in this country. Paul Ryan is part of the problem. We went to his house a few weeks ago and tried to talk to him—myself and three other mothers. And he gets out in his secure vehicle and flees the scene. He doesn’t have five minutes to come out and say, ‘Hello. What do you want to say to me? What’s your name?’ Absolutely nothing. He fled… [Ryan] has either lost his sense of common courtesy or he does not care [about our families] one bit.
“He doesn’t [flee] if you’ve got money,” one man in the crowd called out.
“He’s a coward,” shouted another.
“For shame!” another man in the crowd yelled.
Wilkerson told the rally attendees, “I want to you to hear this story so that you know this can happen to your family at any time.”
I was an average American family, blue collar, hard-working, stay-at-home mom, who taught values to my kids just like you did… This could happen to your family any day. I want you to see the consequence that landed on our family due to this administration’s failure to uphold the current immigration laws.
Wilkerson told the crowd that during the trial, her son’s killer recounted “with excitement, exactly how he systematically tortured and murdered my son.”
Josh was at school and a classmate asked him for a ride home. Joshua said sure. He was a compassionate kid. We taught him values, hard work, perseverance, honesty, kindness. He died doing exactly what we taught him to do— to show compassion and be kind to people. That classmate of Joshua’s is now a killer. He was brought here illegally when he was 10 by his illegal parents from Belize. His parents still reside in our community and his sister… This killer was a black belt in mixed martial arts. Josh weighed 100 pounds in the body bag. [Josh] had never been in a fight in his life—just a sweet, quiet kid. [His murderer] said his ‘killing skills took over’—‘his killing skills took over’… He said he first hit Josh in the nose, breaking all of the bones in his nose and his nasal cavity. Next he kicked Josh in the stomach so hard that Joshua’s spleen was sliced in two. So Josh went to the ground. He took a closet rod and beat Josh in the head until that rod broke in four pieces. Josh was still trying to gasp for air, still trying to breathe. So the killer strangled him, let him go, strangled him again, let him go again until it was finally over and Josh got his last breath of air. The killer cleaned up the scene. He tied up Joshua’s body with about 16 rope loops around his neck, to the back of his hands, through his back belt loop, and through his feet so that he could put Josh here and carry him… He put him in the back seat of my truck. He got Joshua’s wallet, took two dollars out, went and bought gasoline, went to a field, put Josh there. And the picture I remember from the court is Josh was in a fetal position, he looked like a [Wilkerson pauses]—he just looked so much like a child. He poured gas on him and set him on fire.”
Ryan has ignored Wilkerson’s family and the tragedy they suffered at the hands of an illegal alien, who would have qualified as a so-called “DREAMer.” Ryan has previously explained that he believes it is the job of a U.S. lawmaker to put oneself in the shoes of illegal immigrant “DREAMers.”
Local and national media have defended Ryan’s treatment of these “angel moms.”
For instance, the Janesville Gazette described the mothers’ decision to stand with Paul Nehlen and hold a press conference in front of Ryan’s personal border wall as “despicable.”
The Gazette editors wrote, “Ryan supposedly hopped in his vehicle and refused to meet with the mothers, and we can hardly blame him.”
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Christian Schneider echoed the Gazette’s criticism of Nehlen and the mothers’ “stunt.”
Most remarkably, Politico’s Rachael Bade went so far as to seemingly suggest that the mothers’ children may not even have been killed by illegal aliens at all.
Bade wrote that the “mothers of four children allegedly murdered by undocumented workers [went] to Janesville… to Ryan’s home to present him pictures of their deceased.”
It was unclear why Bade sought to suggest that the murderers’ immigration statuses were somehow in dispute.
As Breitbart reported, Bade’s description of Wilkerson’s “alleged” murderer as an “undocumented worker” is factually inaccurate. Wilkerson’s murderer was an illegal alien brought to the U.S. as a minor and was a high school student at the time he killed Wilkerson—i.e. the he was not an “undocumented worker.” Additionally, since Wilkerson’s murderer has been convicted of killing Wilkerson, he is not an “alleged” murderer— he is a murderer.
Bade’s editors were eventually forced to issue an update to Bade’s story after Breitbart had reported on some of its factual inaccuracies. Politico’s editors wrote: “This story has been updated to more precisely describe the deaths of four people whose mothers appeared in Ryan’s district to protest his immigration views.”
Similarly, when the President of the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) wrote a stinging letter to Speaker Ryan addressing concerns about Ryan’s record on immigration, local papers refused to cover it.
In his letter, the ICE Union president blasted Ryan for failing to be “vocal in championing an immigration policy that defends the rule of law, and represents the interest of American citizens.” The letter noted that Ryan has not reached out to ICE in any way and instead “pushed an omnibus spending bill that funds the current [immigration] lawlessness.” The letter said that ICE officers were “disturbed” by some of Ryan’s statements on immigration—noting that Ryan’s pro-amnesty rhetoric “could be adding to [the]… perception” that anyone who can get across the border will be allowed to stay.
The National ICE Council had tried to give the letter as an exclusive to Mark Schaaf at the Journal Times, and then to Frank Schultz at the Janesville Gazette. Schaaf told the ICE Council, “I checked with my editors and we will not be able to do the story.” Schultz similarly would not publish the story.
It was unclear why— at a time when Speaker Ryan is facing a primary opponent who’s attacking Ryan’s support for open borders, and at a time when Ryan has been flooding the district with ads attempting to defend and distance himself from his immigration record—that both publications felt it not important for their readers to hear the views of immigration law enforcement officers themselves.
Wilkerson explained that the media is enabling the push for open borders. “This preventable tragedy is not unique to my family,
Wilkerson said. “Day after day, family after family, it’s happening on a regular basis. You will not hear about it on media. They do not want you to know this is happening. They want one world, open borders, welcome everybody.”
At this point, members of the audience turned around to face the media and began booing loudly.
“Make sure you put this on TV,” shouted one man.
“Put it on TV. It’s time” said another.
“One of these days, you’re going to have to answer for this!” someone else yelled.
“Wait until it’s your kids!” one woman cried.
“Exactly!” another man said, in agreement with the woman.
Wilkerson concluded by telling the crowd why she supports Paul Nehlen.
“Remember when you vote for Paul Nehlen that he will be part of the solution,” Wilkerson said as the crowd began to applaud loudly. “He will listen to you. He will solve issues for my American family, just like he will for yours. It’s time to tell Paul Ryan: No more.
The crowd erupted in chants of, “No More. No More. No More” as Wilkerson left the podium.News in Science › Being Human
Saliva reveals asthmatic kids' smoke exposure
Tobacco tales Asthmatic children who are exposed to cigarette smoke are more likely to make repeat trips to the hospital for breathing problems. But researchers say asking parents about kids' smoke exposure may not yield the most reliable information.
In a recent study, saliva samples revealed exposure to tobacco smoke in roughly 80 per cent of children brought to the hospital for asthma or breathing problems. But only about a third of parents said their children came in contact with smoke.
What's more, finding evidence of nicotine, a chemical in tobacco, in children's saliva was a better predictor of whether they would need to come back to the hospital, compared to the information parents gave to doctors.
"We think saliva is a good and potentially useful test for assessing an important trigger for asthma," says Dr Robert Kahn, the study's senior author.
Previous research has found that being exposed to tobacco can lead to airway problems and poor asthma control among children, Kahn and his colleagues write in the journal Pediatrics.
By figuring out which children are being exposed to tobacco, doctors may be able to step in and identify and possibly eliminate the exposure, says Kahn, a paediatrician at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center in Ohio.
For example, if a parent is still smoking cigarettes and exposing the child to smoke, doctors can offer the parent smoking cessation tools while the child is hospitalised.
For the new study, the researchers assessed data from 619 children admitted to Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center for asthma or other breathing problems between August 2010 and October 2011. The children were between one and 16 years old.
During the children's first couple of days in the hospital, researchers asked their parents if the children had any exposure to tobacco — either at home, in the car or in another place the children slept. Nurses also collected blood and saliva samples from the children.
About 35 per cent of parents reported their children having some tobacco exposure.
However, about 56 percent of the children's blood samples and about 80 percent of their saliva samples tested positive for cotinine, a component of nicotine that's a marker for tobacco exposure.
Asking the right questions
The difference in the results of the saliva and blood tests and the parents' reports doesn't necessarily mean the parents lied about their children's exposure to smoke.
It could also be that the researchers and doctors didn't ask enough or the right questions or that the parents didn't know their children were being exposed to smoke.
"Sometimes a parent's response to a simple question may not reflect the nuances of life," says Dr James Kreindler.
He was not involved with the new study but is an attending pulmonologist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania.
One in six children in the study had to be readmitted to the hospital within a year.
Parents' reports of smoke exposure weren't tied to the likelihood of children returning to the hospital. But Kahn and his colleagues did find that children were more likely to be readmitted if their saliva or blood tested positive for cotinine.
The researchers write that saliva is an attractive testing option, because it's not hard or invasive to get a sample. It also appeared to be a more sensitive test than blood.
Avoiding second-hand smoke
But Kreindler cautions that the new results don't mean children should get tested for cotinine in the hospital.
"The test they are using to determine cotinine levels is a very sophisticated test - not one that would be available to every community hospital," he says. And the treatment for asthma wouldn't necessarily change based on whether a child was exposed to tobacco, he notes.
Kreindler says a cost analysis would also be needed to look at the expense of testing.
According to Kahn, a cost analysis would most likely follow a trial of whether smoking cessation after positive saliva tests decreased hospital readmissions among children.
"The take-home message should always be that exposure to second-hand smoke for both adults and children is a significant health risk factor - particularly for children with asthma and respiratory disorders," Kreindler says. "They should not be exposed to second-hand smoke under any circumstance."No.
overall No. in
season Title Original air date Prod.
code US viewers
(millions)
13 1 "Planes" February 28, 2014 ( ) TBA 1.111[6]
Dr. Brule witnesses a traumatizing airplane accident involving a new co-host. To assuage his fears, he decides to take an airplane ride of his own.
14 2 "Church" March 7, 2014 ( ) TBA 1.222[7]
Dr. Brule goes to church and sets out to become a priest; however, he is soon tempted by darker and more sinister activities.
15 3 "Home" March 14, 2014 ( ) TBA 1.052[8]
Dr. Brule learns about home by visiting the home of Jan and Wayne Skylar, but Wayne dies on-air due to many cancers. He then visits Hippy Joel's home, a tent in the woods, where Joel hunts down Brule with a crossbow.
16 4 "Horse" March 21, 2014 ( ) TBA 1.070[9]
Dr. Brule learns all about horses. He interviews a child clown who rides horses for a living.
17 5 "Children" March 28, 2014 ( ) TBA 1.050[10]
Dr. Brule visits a day care facility for boys, and learns that if they misbehave you just need to spray them with poison. Later, he helps his mother deliver her baby.
18 6 "Skateboards" April 4, 2014 ( ) TBA 1.183[11]The American Diabetes Association (ADA) and the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) have each outlined a set of dietary recommendations aimed at improving glycemic control and blood lipids, respectively. However, traditional vegan diets (low-fat diets that proscribe animal product consumption) are also effective at improving glycemic control, and dietary portfolios (vegan diets that contain prescribed amounts of plant sterols, viscous fibers, soy protein, and nuts) are also effective at improving blood lipids. The purpose of this review was to compare the effects of traditional vegan diets and dietary portfolios with ADA and NCEP diets on body weight, blood lipids, blood pressure, and glycemic control. The main findings are that traditional vegan diets appear to improve glycemic control better than ADA diets in individuals with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), while dietary portfolios have been consistently shown to improve blood lipids better than NCEP diets in hypercholesterolemic individuals.SIDizer is a state-of-art emulation of legendary SID chip (Commodore 64) in a form of a modern software synthesizer. Using circuit modeling technology nearly all unique features of two versions (6581-8580) of SID chip among their famous flaws are accurately modeled. This emulation focuses on simulating nonlinear character of SID filter and mimicking special 6581 distortion that mainly influence the alternation of filtered signal in a real SID chip. It offers additional envelopes, LFOs, mod matrix and a routable bit-cruncher for adding extra lo-fi sound quality. SIDizer GUI is inspired from HyperSID that offers easy tweaking for all parameters on a single page. It is not only a powerful instrument for creating chip-tune style but it can produce a unique type of analog sound colored with harmonic distortion that is suited for creating bass, lead and drum sounds.
MP3 audio demo by the official websiteThe Two Oceans Aquarium invites you to make a difference on the Ocean Conservancy's annual International Coastal Cleanup Day. Not only will we be doing our part to rejuvenate our precious coast, but there is a ton of fun to be had and prizes to be won.
Date: 16 September 2017
16 September 2017 Time: 10am to 12pm
10am to 12pm Location: Milnerton Lighthouse |
Gesso
Acryl colors (different gold and silver tones/shades, black and white)
6 aerosol paint of the color "cassis" (brilliant and best color for the Dragoon imho)
Nail polish in different purple tones/colors and a glittering white and blue one (you need it for the "orbs")
Casting resin (for the orbs and cool looking shapes)
3 different casting resin forms/molds (every mold had about 3-8 different forms)
Lots of different Brushes (for the color and for gesso)
1-2 meters of Velcro tape (to fix the parts together ^^)
A pair of silk gloves (I lost one … dunno how so I had to buy a second pair … damnit xD)
Shoes (I bought black stilettos/boots in a western look with only a 1 cm heel and modified most of it)
xD (the belly needs to be visible and the sleeves need to be short) Black cloth to make a modified turtleneck jersey xD
Pants to be ready for modification (I hate to sew pants so I used one I already have =P)
Lots of time and patience
My boyfriend who saved me from many attacks of rage "F*CK THIS S*IIIIITTTTT!!!" ヽ(`Д´)ﾉ ┻━┻
Old newspapers for the colored parts
If I missed something I'm sorry, I used so many things X3
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ WORK IN PROGRESS ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
So here's the story how everything started.
Since i never worked with wonderflex I had to start with the easiest parts. After a long time analyzing the screenshots I decided to begin with the belt.
I had to check all my screenshots to make the patterns as perfect as i could. It was much work of calculating and creating many patterns till i got the right one.
After that I apply each pattern on the smooth side of the wonderflex. (wonderflex has two different sides a smooth one and a one with a fabric grid)
For each piece i had to make a duplicate because wonderflex is really really thin (2 mm) To make it more stable you can glue 2 parts of wonderflex together.
Or use craft foam (it has to be 1-2 cm smaller then the WF pattern) and put it between the two (cut out) sheets of wonderflex (I used both possibilities, it depends on the piece)
---------------------
So back to the belt.
The front plate was rather easy and it was a good practice as my first piece (no craft foam for this one). For the details I also used WF. Just heat it up and press it on the right spot. The parts will stick together perfectly ^^
---------------------
Time for the sword things. X3 Phew they were a lot of work. I had to calculate everything and fortunately my boyfriend had dividers for me @_@ When I finished my pattern I could finally start with the wonderflex and the craft foam. (the craft foam needs to be 1-2 cm smaller than the original pattern. otherwise you can't stick the WF together ^^) With the wooden stick I gave the whole construct more stabilization. For a better result I used some of the light modeling clay to smoothen the surface on some parts (like the tip of the sword). The rest (like the details) will be self-explaining by the photos =P I had to do everything 4 times …. That sucked so much (>__<) The last part was that strange tail thing on the back. There's not much to say about it. It has a pretty simple shape, so no problem for me. ---------------------
When I started the belt I didn't know it would work out like I imagined. (horray for creativity and imagination) I had to bend it on some places to get the right shape. (it was kinda horrible with the craft foam in the middle but the result was fine. (at least from the outside hahaha)
It looked like that (see photo) when it was done :3 After the WF hardened again I added the details as well as that back tail thing and set it aside.
---------------------
The next part was the body. Holy s*it… I didn't knew how to make the pattern but fortunately I found a funny video tutorial from Kamui where she wraps herself in clingfilm and uses crepe tape to fix it. After that she drew the pattern on it and cut everything out xD So I used the same method. Wrapped myself in clingfilm + crepe tape and sogot my super awesome patterns for this cosplay hahaha ^^
---------------------
For the Torso it was the same process as for the belt, duplicate everything craft foam in the middle, hot air to stick it together and the details when it was done.
For the body part I also used light modeling clay. ( I wish my English was better to describe why…my lack of vocabulary is horrible… *cries*)
Each part overlaps the next one and there is a small raise where they overlap. This raise? (So sorry I'm not sure if it's the correct word) was created with the clay.
---------------------
Booooobs
Ya now we come to the breast plate. This was kinda fun. The pattern was pretty easy but I needed to form it on my body ^^
I had to heat it up (not too hot or you will burn yourself!) and put it on my chest with pressure so it got the right shape. (This process took several times xD)
The spikes/horns on the sides were a challenge. A of craft foam was needed for stabilization. It was so much work with the hot glue and I burned my fingers way too often >_> (so much rage on that day! Thank you Kyu (bf) for calming me down!) ╭(๑¯д¯๑)╮ substructure of craft foam was needed for stabilization. It was so much work with the hot glue and I burned my fingers way too often >_> (so much rage on that day! Thank you Kyu (bf) for calming me down!)
I was super happy when everything was done.
---------------------
Next was the part of the back/Neck/front piece… I HATED IT!!! I was so damn frustrated when I started to make the pattern!! I also hate it to make collars for fabric cosplays. They never turn out as I want them to be and they are never symetrical when they have to!! ヽ(ｏ`皿′ｏ)ﾉ FUUUUUUU
After 5 Collar patterns I finally found one that would suit and fit together with the back part and the front part. Thank the Twelve it worked. For the back plate I needed Kyus help. He had to press it agains my back so it got the right shape. (like with the breast plate … I bet Kyu would have liked that more hehehe…. ^^)
Now to the spikes/pointy things!Wohooo that was hell of work. I needed a substructure like for the spikes/horns of the breast plate…… I met my enemy the hot glue again. Curse you!! ヽ(ｏ`皿′ｏ)ﾉ I accidentially used too much heat when I stuck everything together. This way the WF lost some of its evenness. (do you say it that way? xD) So it was time for the lovely light modeling clay to smoothen everything that wasn't even. When the clay dried up I added the details. Time to fix the Spikes onto the back/neck/chest part. (I'm really not sure how to call it lol, if you have a clue share your thoughts with me xD) Phew I didn't know where to start and it was more of a fight with my hands, arms, legs, and the back/neck/chest part @_@ I didn't know how to hold that damn thing to stick the spikes on the back and neck area x'DDD Kyu was playing Warframe or another online shooter, so he couldn't help lol. Somehow I managed it and prettified the "stuck-together-area" (lol please help me with my vocabulary x'D) with the light modeling clay. (this clay is so awesome, it's super light and gets even lighter once it dried. Btw. I was always afraid that the spikes would put my eyes out if I didn't pay attention. Σ(-`Д´-ﾉ；)ﾉ
---------------------
The shoulder parts came next.
I had a pretty good day and the idea how I could make the pattern for it suddenly appeared in my mind. ^^
So I started to paint them on my brown paper and cut it out. I used the crepe tape to test it out et voilà it worked!
For the shoulder parts I used two layers of wonderflex (without the craft foam) so I could bend it much better.
Once the wonderflex harened I applied the modeling clay to erase smaller dents. After that I added the details and moved to the next part.
---------------------
Oh such pretty and shiny ORBS!! Time for the c asting resin! Oh man that stuff smells!!!! That day the wind outside was super strong and I really had problems working outside, so I had to work part inside the apartment and part outside on our terrace. The molds always tried to fly away and my cup with the mixed casting resin and the hardener nearly fell over @_@ Somehow I managed to fill the molds with the resign and put it to a safe place on our terrace. For the cosplay I had to create two bigger orbs for the shoulder parts. And 4 smaller ones for the gloves. (the gloves will be the next topic. Once the resign dried I pulled it out of its molds and started to paint the back with different nail polish. (purple, white, rose, light blue) Kamui made a tutorial about Orbs, her tutorial helped me a lot with this topic ^^ (I never worked with casting resin) ---------------------
Next thing were the arm parts. Woa more dangerous pointy things and hot glue action! Theres not much to say about it. By now you know how I work.
1.create a Pattern 2. Apply to wonderflex and craft foam then cut it out 3. Use the heat gun to stick everything together/Use hot glue for whatever it's needed 4. Details/light modeling clay :3 The only annoying part was to stick the spike to the arm part ^^ (like always)
The wrist armor was pretty easy and fast to create. I'll just show you some WIP photos cuz there's not much about to say. ^^
---------------------
THE SHOES!!!
You have to watch IT Crowd to understand the joke behind this sentence ^^ --->
First of all I had to modify and whipstitch the boots, then I could start to make the patterns for it. This time the patterns were pretty much fun to make.
I could wrap the paper over the shoe and paint my patterns on it. The rest was pretty easy. The only thing I didn't like to do was the star on the heel >_>
Bah I had to draw that sh*t 3 times till I got it right. Btw. the wonderflex sticks very well on the fake leather ^^ (but it didn't work with the silk of the gloves … I had to hot glue them >_>)
---------------------
The leg parts were kinda horrible. I have pretty thick legs… (guess I have them from my grandmother) so the boots needed the right shape to fit with my leg shape.
In Austria we would say I have legs like a potato masher. Not sure how you would express that in English =PPP
On the photos you will see the two different shapes. You need 8 of each for two legs. (remember I need to duplicate everything to have two layers of wonderflex)
The rest was just some heat gun action and put the parts together. The inner side of the boot needs to be open. It's the part where I added the Velcro tape to open and close the boots. The details were the best part of it. Except for the thing on the back of the lower leg. This thing was a desaster but I managed it somehow. (its shape is super weird)
--------------------- Next part the Gloves I'll just post some Photos again, cuz these parts aren't very spectacular xD ---------------------
Finally the last parts of the armor.
The thighs and the knee part. (；￣Д￣）
So many parts for it. (like the torso) First thing was to take measurements of my upper legs to the knee. I recognized my thighs are kinda chubby (ﾉ)´∀｀(ヾ) haha
*blush blush* Oh well back to topic. It was the same process as for the other parts, so I will post just some pics of it. ^^
The knee armor turned out better than expected. When everything was done I added some fabric to wear the upper part like garter o (◡‿◡✿) belts. (sexy!)
---------------------
The hair accessoires
This was a spontanious decicion i made. I thought the old hair accessoires were too old (too small) and not that good looking so I decided to remake them.
---------------------
The Gae Bolg (lance)
The relic weapon was the last part I wanted to to... and it was awefull. I only had 4 days left till the convention started @_@
So I spent every evening till night with it. When I nearly finished the wings my lance fell on the floor and all the clay broke down. (that was 2 days before the convention)
I really thought fuuuu, I can never make it in time. ヽ (ｏ`皿′ｏ)ﾉ I had to start all over again on the wings and wohooo they turned out even better than before! so i was kinda happy that this accident happened xD
On the last day (friday) the lance was still not ready. most of the details were missing and also the whole part on the other end of the lance. It was the longest cosplay making session of my life....
I worked till 2 am in the morning (saturday) to finish this stupid lance. I was so in panic mode that it motivated me that much to finish it, but... it was still unfinished!!! ╭(๑¯д¯๑)╮
The lance still needed some transparent spray to cover it from damage the lance needed that red curvy thing and the other end of the lance was still without color...
After 5.5 hours of sleep I had to get up to finish the last parts. at 7.30 in the morning. D:
2 hours later my sister and best friend arrived and we went to the convention... god what a day xD
Lol you can even see the 4 days on the pictures ^^ (the light photo from the afternoon and the darker photo from the night)
--------------------- To the clothes. I made a modified turtleneck jersey (at the beginning) and ordered my sister to my place. She had to paint the scales on it and also on the pants xD. (where they are visible) To give them a nice effect I used some gold/silver/black color on the tips and showed my sister how to draw them. (I already had the pants, cuz I don't like to sew them…)
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ GESSO AND PAINTING TIME ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Every time when I finished a part, I used Gesso to smoothen the surface. Wonderflex has a structure which doesn't look that good for my Dragoon Cosplay.
If you apply many layers of Gesso, the surface gets smoother and smoother. You get the best result when you sandpaper the whole thing.
Kamui also made a tutorial about painting the armor (and using Gesso ^^) it's super interesting.
---------------------
Once that is done I take the super awesome aerosol paint of the color "cassis". (I tried to spare the parts where I don't need it)
(and ya.. that situation i drew really happaned. xD not with that much color but some of it.... ^^)
---------------------
Next thing the gold color!
It's very important not to use just the same gold color for everything. It would look boring.
I mixed different gold tones also with black and silver to get the best result :)
That's it!This photo provided by NBCUniversal shows, from left, Taye Diggs as Harper, Morris Chestnut as Lance, Harold Perrineau as Julian, and Terrence Howard as Quentin, serenading the ladies in the film "The Best Man Holiday." The movie releases in theaters Friday, Nov. 15, 2013. (AP Photo/Universal Pictures, Michael Gibson)
I wasn't even going to blog about The Best Man Holiday. I was going to go in and watch the glorious reunion of Nia Long, Taye Diggs and company and just enjoy it. But after what USAToday tweeted about the film's success at the box office, I realized I had to. Here's the tweet in case you missed it:
Race-themed. When I think of race as a theme in film, I think of it as the way theme is defined. Here's how Merriam-Webster defines it.
"The main subject that is being discussed in a piece of writing, a movie, etc." Themes are what a film is about. If a film is race-themed, then it is about race. So imagine my surprise when I saw USAToday describe The Best Man Holiday as race-themed. Forget "race-themed": I struggle to see how the film is about race at all.
Like its predecessor, Holiday focuses on the intertwining lives of a group of men and women: authors, football players, mothers, fathers. It's about the bond of friendship and the tests of its strength. Financial worry. Parenthood. Marriage. Grief. Forgiveness. But what exactly does race have to do with grief aside from the fact that, in this instance, the people struggling with grief are black?
Well, nothing.
What USAToday's tweet reveals is that white audiences are unable to see black people as beings separate from their blackness. A movie featuring a black cast surely can't be about universal themes that any audience can relate to, this line of thinking goes: the subject matter must be about mysterious black things that only black viewers can comprehend; it must be black inside-jokes; black references; black experiences. Black movies are for black people -- not for everyone. Black people are defined by their blackness and so are their films, and USAToday's tweet tells us that explicitly.
Every day we are bombarded with movies and television shows in which white faces, white families, white marriages are plugged as the "default" experience... and no one would say that these films are about race. No one would say, "Oh, that's an all-white cast. It must be about what it means to be white in America." No one. Black audiences go see these films, despite their almost entirely white casts, because if black audiences only went to see films in which the cast looked like them, they'd see maybe five movies a year in mainstream theaters. Tops. Why not the same for white folks? Why was I the only white person in the theater for Best Man Holiday today? What is it about a black cast that is off-putting to white audiences? Do we really need to see ourselves reflected endlessly back at us to enjoy a film? Why did white audiences flock to see Django and 12 Years but not Holiday? Why can you relate more to a film about chattel slavery than you can about nine affluent people and their families? These are questions that need answers.
This is not to say that films with black casts are never race-themed. Of course they are. If a film is about race, then it's about race. But Best Man Holiday is not. A film's themes do not become about race simply because its cast is not white. Not only does this notion bind black actors to their blackness, it Others non-white experiences, casting white films as default, and everything else as "everything else." Films with white casts are then provided with the benefit of universality: free to be any genre, take on any subject matter or theme. A film with a black cast, no matter its story, is "race-themed," tied to the race of its actors simply by virtue of their blackness.
If we describe Best Man Holiday as "race-themed" we must ask ourselves the following questions.
Is football race-themed?
Is pregnancy race-themed?
Is marriage race-themed?
Is trust?
Is cancer?
Is friendship?
Is God?
Because these are the things that Holiday is truly about. Universal lessons of brotherhood and faith, the tests of love and the frailty of the human heart: these things are no more about race than love itself. To say this film is about race tells black actors -- and black audiences -- that no matter their experiences, their heartbreaks, their vows, their tribulations... at the end of the day, before they are human, they are black. This violent oversimplification of black roles not only dehumanizes black lives, but it perpetuates in white people the idea of their Defaultness and the lie that all experiences are relatable through whiteness.
We've all had our hearts broken. We've all been in love. We've all had a best friend at some point in their lives. How stunted is your imagination, how crippled is your notion of life, if the people on screen with broken hearts, the people in love, the people mending their friendships, have to look like you in order for you to feel a connection with their humanity?
Oh, and by the way... in case you didn't know...
This blog actually is race-themed.NEW YORK -- Not long after becoming a New Jersey Net in a draft-night deal, Richard Jefferson was driving around his hometown of Phoenix when he heard breaking news on the radio.
Jason Kidd had been traded from the Phoenix Suns to the New Jersey Nets. Meanwhile, in another part of Phoenix that late June day in 2001, while ordering carryout at a Taco Bell drive-thru, Kidd and his family learned that he had been dealt for Stephon Marbury.
The shockwaves were felt throughout Phoenix, spanning all the way to New Jersey.
"I literally almost wrecked my car on the freeway," Jefferson remembered. "I think I knew it before everyone else -- 'Oh, we are going to be really, really good.'"
Kidd pushed the Nets to new heights in his six-plus seasons with the franchise. Noren Trotman/NBAE/Getty Images
And just like that, the Nets went from perennial train wreck to back-to-back NBA Finals appearances in the flash of a Kidd-fueled fast break.
Two Eastern Conference championships and four Atlantic Division titles later, the Nets raised Kidd's No. 5 jersey to the rafters of Barclays Center alongside other franchise greats such as Julius Erving, Buck Williams and Drazen Petrovic before the Nets face the Miami Heat on Thursday.
ESPNNewYork.com caught up with former Nets general manager Rod Thorn and Kidd's two former alley-oop partners -- Kenyon Martin and Jefferson -- who shared some of their favorite Kidd memories with us.
NO KIDDING AROUND
It didn't take Kidd long to make an impression on his new teammates. During a team dinner before his first Nets camp, Kidd told the Nets they weren't just going to win, they were going to make the playoffs after winning a grand total of 26 games the season before.
"He said it and it was kind of like a quiet still over the room," Jefferson recalled after practice with the Utah Jazz on Monday. "[Guys were] like, 'Wow. Hey, we probably shouldn't say that to too many other people right?'"
In practice the next day, Kidd set the tone. The All-Star point guard started warp-speed fast breaks off rebounds, delivered head-turning passes and repeatedly dove for loose balls as if he were playing in Game 7 of the NBA Finals.
It wasn't long before Kidd had thoroughbreds such as Martin, Jefferson and Kerry Kittles all racing downcourt trying to beat one another to catch a Kidd pass. Combined with Keith Van Horn, Todd MacCulloch, Jason Collins and Lucious Harris, the Nets were on their way to a stunning 52 victories and the franchise's first division and Eastern Conference crowns in the 2001-02 season.
"We have been getting our butts kicked here for a while," said Thorn, who is now the NBA's president of basketball operations. "He turned it around from a franchise that was faltering and a team that was nondescript and not going anywhere to a team that made the Finals two years in a row."
BLOOD AND GUTS
Kidd soldiered on after colliding with Charlotte's David Wesley in Game 3 of the 2002 Eastern semis. AP Photo/Gerry Broome
During the Kidd era, there were countless moments Thorn, Martin and Jefferson will never forget.
Thorn recalls two games that stood out in particular. In Game 3 of the Eastern Conference semifinals against Charlotte, Kidd had a scary head-to-head collision with David Wesley. With blood gushing from a cut near his swollen-shut right eye, Kidd needed stitches at halftime.
"I went in the locker room at halftime and he was lying on the table and his eye was completely closed," Thorn said. "There was a question about not only could he play, but could he play later on [in the series]? They stitched it up and he went out and played. I remember we had a day off between the next game, and his eye was so swollen he could barely see. By the time game time came, he decided to play, played great and we won [Game 4 and went on to win the series]."
"The toughness that he showed is one thing that I'll never forget," Thorn added.
And who knows what would have happened to the Nets had they never escaped a do-or-die Game 5 against the Pacers in the first round earlier that postseason. Kidd collected 31 points, eight rebounds, seven assists and four steals in 51 minutes to outduel Reggie Miller in double overtime.
"If we don't win that game," Thorn wondered, "we may never have been the same team."
'THERE WAS ONLY ONE TEAM IN TOWN'
Kidd saved some of his flashiest performances for the New York Knicks. After playing before mostly half-empty home crowds at the Meadowlands, Kidd and the Nets relished playing on the Madison Square Garden stage.
"This is when the Nets and Knicks rivalry was high, and not because the Knicks were good," Jefferson said. "It was mainly because the Knicks sucked."Three Hindu teachers in Madhya Pradesh’s Dewas district have accused the management of a Christian school of hurting their religious sentiments by asking them to stop singing the Saraswati Vandana and removing a portrait of goddess Saraswati from the notice board.
Advertising
The Holy Trinity School management said the allegations were false and levelled by teachers with vested interests. The district administration ordered a probe Saturday, even as ABVP activists protested outside the school.
“A complaint had been received that the portrait of goddess Saraswati was removed from the school. I have asked the district education officer (DEO) to inquire,” Dewas Collector Ashutosh Awasthi told The Sunday Express.
The school has about 1,600 students and 50 teachers.
DEO Rameshwar Khede said the teachers had alleged that the management did not allow Saraswati Vandana to be sung after one day on the ground that prior permission was not taken. They also alleged that the principal had removed a portrait of the goddess from the notice board. He said the teachers stuck to their allegations but there were discrepancies in the accounts given by students. Teachers Sujata Sharma, Sheetal Goswami and Shirish Chandolikar, alleged that whey they confronted the management, they were threatened with dismissal.
Referring to Sharma’s allegation that the management celebrates Christian festivals with fervour but shows little interest in Hindu festivals, principal Sister Lucy said the teachers never raised this issue at the monthly staff meetings. She said the school celebrates more Hindu festivals in a year than Christian ones.
The principal also alleged that five years ago, Sharma had accused the management of forcible conversion, but could not prove the charge. “Despite the fabricated charge, we did not act against her. If we wanted, we could have sacked her then,” said school PRO Praveen Shrivastava.
The PRO claimed the school changes the portrait on the notice board daily and had removed goddess Saraswati’s portrait to make way for Mahatma Gandhi’s portrait on October 2. A teacher tasked with changing Gandhi’s portrait on October 3 forgot to do so, a lapse that led the teachers to fabricate the charge, the PRO said.
Advertising
The ABVP students submitted a memorandum to the DEO seeking initiation of criminal proceedings against the school and to take away its recognition.Benefits to young and old. According to Gerald Jay Westbrook of the Andrus Gerontology Center at the University of Southern California, pets, and especially pet dogs, can offer protection, companionship and unconditional love.
Pets are, he said, ''nonthreatening, nonjudgmental, open, welcoming, accepting and attentive.'' Unlike spouses or parents, they don't talk back, criticize or issue commands. They give people something to care and worry about and be responsible for and make them feel needed and wanted. They also provide a socially acceptable outlet for the need for physical contact. Men have been observed to touch their pets as often and as lovingly as women do.
Pets help to combat loneliness and have been shown to increase their owners' chances of meeting other people. A study in London's Hyde Park showed that when accompanied by their dogs, pet owners spoke to more people and had longer conversations than when they walked alone. In Sweden, 63 percent of dog owners surveyed said their pets had added to their opportunities to talk to people and 57 percent said their dogs had ''got them friends.''
Pets also help to organize a person's day (a dog used to being walked and fed at 7 A.M. is not likely to let you loll in bed until 9). They provide sense of purpose, help to enhance self-esteem and self-control and generally alleviate the adverse effects of stress.
Pets can also be a source of solace (a teddy bear for all ages) and help to dissipate negative emotions like anger, disappointment and grief. Virtually all people talk to their pets and sometimes use them to work through conflicts or problems. Some couples have been observed to talk to each other through their pets.
A study at the University of Maryland suggested that pets help to bring families closer together, reducing conflict and tension and increasing play among family members. Dr. Erika Friedman, a health scientist at Brooklyn College, says that people who are ''de-pressed by the loss of a relative or friend can learn to love others again through first learning to love and care for a pet.''
For children, pets help to teach responsibility, nurturing, compassion, loyalty and empathy. Unlike adults in their interaction with children, pets are uncritical, consistently loving and don't give orders. In this age when both parents are often at work when children come home from school, pets offer children a dependable ''welcome home'' and a feeling of security.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Pets are becoming popular visitors to nursing homes and old-age homes, and in some cases, residents themselves. A University of Minnesota study of 774 long-term health care facilities disclosed that about half were using pets to help their residents. Pets were said to provide nursing-home residents with entertainment and enjoyment, to serve as an outlet for the expression of feelings, rekindle pleasant memories and create a more homelike atmosphere.
Dramatic improvements in outlook and ability have been noted among nursing-home residents as a result of pet programs. Previously uncommunicative and bedridden patients have started talking to the staff and other residents about their pets and some have even got up and gone out to walk their pets.
However, Mr. Westbrook of the Gerontology Center cautions that the introduction of pets into a nursing home or other institutional facility must be carefully planned to insure effectiveness and safety for the residents, staff and the pets themselves. His group has established guidelines, which he will share with those who call him at 213-743-5158 or 213-876-7445.
Dr. Daniel Lago's program at Pennsylvania State University has given pets to 65 rural elderly people, nearly half of whom live alone. For some, he reports, the pets have sparked ''dramatic transformations,'' enabling severely disabled people to rise above their disability and helping depressed, reclusive people become more socially active. His preliminary observations suggest that closeness to a pet is the key to its benefits, showing an association with higher morale, greater social activity and better physical health.
Treating the emotionally disturbed. Pet-facilitated therapy has brought sometimes remarkable improvement in patients with otherwise intractable mental illnesses.
According to psychotherapists at the Ohio State University College of Medicine, Sonny was a 19-year-old psychotic who spent nearly all his time lying in his hospital bed. Nothing seemed to interest or reach him, his answers to questions were limited to ''yes,'' ''no'' and ''I don't know'' and he did not respond to traditional therapies. But when a wire-haired fox terrier was brought to his bed, Sonny showed an immediate interest, smiled broadly and was soon out of bed frolicking with the dog. He then asked his first question, ''Where can I keep him?''
For Sonny, his psychiatrist said, the terrier was the turning point of therapy, providing the needed wedge in Sonny's emotionally locked door. He began to take an interest in his surroundings and to request and respond to therapy and he was soon discharged as recovered.
In another instance, 25-year-old Marsha, diagnosed as suffering from catatonic schizophrenia, showed no improvement after drug and electroshock therapy. In fact, her condition worsened and she became totally withdrawn, frozen and almost mute.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Then a dog was brought to her and she began to follow it about, walk it, stroke it and talk about it to the other patients. Within six days of receiving the dog, Marsha had improved markedly and shortly afterward she was discharged from the hospital.
The Ohio therapists, Samuel A. Corson, Elizabeth O'Leary Corson and Peter H. Gwynne, stumbled upon the value of pets in treatment. They had established a dog ward at the hospital to study animal behavior. Hearing the dogs bark, several patients, some of whom had been uncommunicative throughout their hospital stay, broke their selfimposed silence and asked if they could play with or help care for the animals.
Impressed with the apparent benefits of the interaction between patients and dogs, the therapists began a more systematic study, discovering in the process that pets have been used occasionally in psychotherapy as far back as the 18th century and that modern petoriented psychotherapy had been described in detail by Boris M. Levinson in 1969. However, its effectiveness has received little systematic study to date.
Autistic children have shown some improvement in a special program in Florida involving dolphins. Pets have also helped to calm hyperactive and overly aggressive children. In an institution for the criminally insane, inmates were given pet birds, fish, hamsters, guinea pigs and gerbils. Some of the men became very nurturing and assumed full responsibility for the care of their pets. The animals helped to establish trust and a communications link between inmates and staff.
Many questions remain to be answered about pet-facilitated therapy. Who is likely to be helped by it, for example, how should the pet be matched to the patient and when in treatment should a pet be introduced.
Aiding the sick and handicapped. Seeing Eye dogs for the blind are universally known, but few realize that now there are also ''hearingear'' dogs for the deaf. Dogs can also be trained to retrieve and carry things for people confined to wheelchair or bed.
In addition, a pet can provide the impetus for improvement in a physical disability. Dr. Lago at Penn State tells of a woman disabled by a broken hip who was given a dog for protection. One day the dog ran upstairs and, not knowing why, the woman followed, discovering for the first time that she could navigate the stairs.
Learning to ride a horse can help to put a handicapped child on a more equal basis with normal children. Therapists have noted an improvement in muscle tone, self-confidence and spirits of handicapped children as a result of horseback riding.
The value of pets to people with various organic ailments is just beginning to be explored. In a pioneering study, Dr. Friedman of Brooklyn College and her former colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society showed that among 92 victims of heart disease, significantly more pet owners survived for at least one year than did those without pets. Twenty-eight percent of those without a pet were dead in a year, whereas only 6 percent of those with pets had died.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Dr. Friedman and Alan Beck of the University of Pennsylvania report that watching fish in a tank lowers blood pressure, promotes relaxation and counters the adverse physiological effects of stress. Dr. Aaron H. Katcher, a psychiatrist who heads the university's people-animal center, says his group is studying the importance of touching animals as a source of comfort that might not be available from other people.Canadian Pacific says two cars on a CP freight train derailed in Toronto on Thursday afternoon near Dupont Street and Howland Avenue, east of Bathurst Street, but no one has been injured.
Jeremy Berry, media relations officer for CP, based in Calgary, said both cars are empty and upright and no dangerous goods are involved. He said the derailment of the cars from a westbound train occurred at 2:20 p.m.
"CP immediately implemented our emergency response protocols and mobilized teams to the site. We take this incident extremely seriously, and will be focused on safety as we continue to deal with this incident," Berry said in an email.
The derailment occurred in the same area where two CP trains collided a year ago. (Michael Charles Cole/CBC) The cars left the tracks in the same area where two Canadian Pacific trains collided a year ago. That derailment on Aug. 21, 2016 injured a train conductor, caused a spill of 2,500 litres of diesel fuel and sparked a number of small fires. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada blamed the collision on human error, saying the crew missed a stop signal.
Berry said CP is investigating Thursday's derailment and has notified the relevant authorities. He said the train was a "manifest train," which means it can carry a number of different products.
According to information displayed on the side of one of the derailed cars, the car was transporting used motor oil.
Toronto police notified about derailment
Const. David Hopkinson, spokesperson for the Toronto Police Service, said Thursday's derailment is not causing any traffic problems in the area.
Hopkinson said police were told that no hazardous materials have been spilled.
"Normally, with a train derailment, you would expect |
I became more fully and truly myself, suspending the symbolic hold society's rules had over my body in order to achieve it. The rigidity of the rules is what is not natural.
There are specific struggles, such as trying to get legal recognition and legal rights in societies where one has to be either male or female. Attitudes are very fixed. In Britain, for example, even post-operative transsexuals are legally padlocked forever to the gender written on their birth certificates, even though this contravenes the European Charter on Human Rights. While in the US, gender non-conformists are still listed in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
But those who don't fit the rules are drawing encouragement from information about third-gender identities in other cultures. As this space expands, more transgender and intersex people are opting to live bi-gendered or hybrid gendered lives, choosing hermaphroditic bodies, through surgery, to match their core sense of who they are.
This expansion is not only an issue for intersex or transgender people. It liberates everyone from rigid and stereotypic ways of being masculine and feminine, mixing the best of all for everyone.
Perhaps it will help pave the way to greater gender equality - or better still, irrelevance.
Zachary I Nataf is a transgender activist, author of Lesbians Talk Transgender (Scarlet Press) and director of the International Transgender Film and Video Festival in London.
1 Guevote, Rolando Sanchez, Fama Film AG, Bern, Switzerland, 1997.
2 Julliane Imperato-McGinley et al, Androgens and the Evolution of Male Gender Identity Among Male Psuedo-Hermaphrodites, New England Journal of Medicine, No 300, 1979.
3 Gilbert Herdt, Third Sex, Third Gender, Zone Books, NY, 1994.
4 Bo Laurent, Hermaphrodites with Attitude Quarterly, Fall/Winter, 1995-96.
5 David Berreby, Biology will Defeat the Defense of Marriage Act, SLATE, Internet, 10 September 1996.
6 David Tuller, Intersexuals begins to Speak Out on Infant Genital Operations, San Francisco Chronicle, 21 June 1997.
7 Katherine Maurer, Clinical Psychiatry News, vol 25, No 7, July 1997.
8 Serena Nanda, Hijras: An Alternative Sex and Gender Role in India, in ed. Herdt Third Sex, Third Gender, op cit.Little Bear, the park’s new star attraction, turned one year old Saturday.
“Some even drove from the mainland for his birthday party,” said park manager Johnny Huntington.
“They came with birthday gifts of strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, apples and grapes," he said.
Many people came carrying the fruit in actual birthday bags and some people even brought birthday cards.
One birthday card read “Now you’re one,” on the front and was signed “Esther and Andrew MacNeil, Westmount.”
Huntington said some people gave donations or adopted Little Bear.
Little Bear’s saga began back in May when the black bear cub was discovered abandoned, dehydrated, severely underweight and suffering from pneumonia in Whycocomagh.
After a lot of time and love he was nursed back to health. However, he can’t be released back into the wild after being raised by humans and is too young to be put in with the park’s bears.
The Department of Natural Resources told the park they’d have to build an 18,000-foot enclosure with a pool — at a cost of $40,000 without the labour — by the end of the year or the bear would have to be put down.
Following a story in the Cape Breton Post, people have been rallying behind Little Bear across Canada and the United States to help raise the money.
Although the party Saturday was scheduled to start at 1:30 p.m., people began arriving at 10 a.m.
Huntington’s wife Kelly, who is a park attendant, said the party had to be delayed until 2 p.m.
“At 1:30 p.m. there were still people waiting in line a quarter of a mile, all the way out to Grand Mira Road.”
Little Bear has a divider in his current enclosure and when it was raised so he could get his cake, he ran not for the cake but park attendant Mike Timmons. Timmons raised Little Bear at the park from Day 1.
“He just loves Mike,” Kelly said.
“They hugged and wrestled and played for a bit.”
Little Bear is noted as quite a ham and loves a big crowd.
Little Bear’s cake was shaped like a teddy bear and included every type of fruit imaginable.
The crowd celebrated in a big way.
“Everyone sang ‘Happy Birthday,’” Kelly said.
Johnny said although the story in the Cape Breton Post asked people not to feed Little Bear, it’s obvious it the public — who love him so much — did sneak him berries and fruit.
“We know people were feeding him as when it came time to take the cake out he wasn’t really hungry,” he said.
“He had fun playing with it though, dipping in the whipped cream and picking out berries.”
A birthday reception followed in the park administration building.
Little Bear had fun at his party but the next day was “beary” tired.
“It was like the day after a big party — almost like a hangover,” Johnny said.
The fundraising drive for Little Bear’s enclosure is continuing. To adopt Little Bear or to help out, telephone the park at 902-727-2483.
Little Bear Essentials
• Turned one year old Saturday
• Originally of Whycocomagh
• Enjoys wrestling and hugging park attendant Mike Timmons
• Loves to show off
• Favourite toys: buoys and big sticks
• Favourite food: any kind of berry, apples and grapes
• Anyone wishing to help Little Bear can visitwww.tworiverspark.ca/index0.php, or phone the park at 902-737-2483
[email protected]
Little Bear, the park’s new star attraction, turned one year old Saturday.
“Some even drove from the mainland for his birthday party,” said park manager Johnny Huntington.
“They came with birthday gifts of strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, apples and grapes," he said.
Many people came carrying the fruit in actual birthday bags and some people even brought birthday cards.
One birthday card read “Now you’re one,” on the front and was signed “Esther and Andrew MacNeil, Westmount.”
Huntington said some people gave donations or adopted Little Bear.
Little Bear’s saga began back in May when the black bear cub was discovered abandoned, dehydrated, severely underweight and suffering from pneumonia in Whycocomagh.
After a lot of time and love he was nursed back to health. However, he can’t be released back into the wild after being raised by humans and is too young to be put in with the park’s bears.
The Department of Natural Resources told the park they’d have to build an 18,000-foot enclosure with a pool — at a cost of $40,000 without the labour — by the end of the year or the bear would have to be put down.
Following a story in the Cape Breton Post, people have been rallying behind Little Bear across Canada and the United States to help raise the money.
Although the party Saturday was scheduled to start at 1:30 p.m., people began arriving at 10 a.m.
Huntington’s wife Kelly, who is a park attendant, said the party had to be delayed until 2 p.m.
“At 1:30 p.m. there were still people waiting in line a quarter of a mile, all the way out to Grand Mira Road.”
Little Bear has a divider in his current enclosure and when it was raised so he could get his cake, he ran not for the cake but park attendant Mike Timmons. Timmons raised Little Bear at the park from Day 1.
“He just loves Mike,” Kelly said.
“They hugged and wrestled and played for a bit.”
Little Bear is noted as quite a ham and loves a big crowd.
Little Bear’s cake was shaped like a teddy bear and included every type of fruit imaginable.
The crowd celebrated in a big way.
“Everyone sang ‘Happy Birthday,’” Kelly said.
Johnny said although the story in the Cape Breton Post asked people not to feed Little Bear, it’s obvious it the public — who love him so much — did sneak him berries and fruit.
“We know people were feeding him as when it came time to take the cake out he wasn’t really hungry,” he said.
“He had fun playing with it though, dipping in the whipped cream and picking out berries.”
A birthday reception followed in the park administration building.
Little Bear had fun at his party but the next day was “beary” tired.
“It was like the day after a big party — almost like a hangover,” Johnny said.
The fundraising drive for Little Bear’s enclosure is continuing. To adopt Little Bear or to help out, telephone the park at 902-727-2483.
Little Bear Essentials
• Turned one year old Saturday
• Originally of Whycocomagh
• Enjoys wrestling and hugging park attendant Mike Timmons
• Loves to show off
• Favourite toys: buoys and big sticks
• Favourite food: any kind of berry, apples and grapes
• Anyone wishing to help Little Bear can visitwww.tworiverspark.ca/index0.php, or phone the park at 902-737-2483
[email protected] Colbert is not just America’s most famous Catholic (and self-proclaimed most famous Catholic), but in the past he’s also been named top choice for the papacy; he’s frequently sat down for conversations with America’s other top Catholic, Cardinal Dolan; and he’s never shied away from talking about his faith on the air. As you probably know, this host of The Colbert Report for the past nine years is bringing his show to a close this week before he heads off to take over The Late Show for David Letterman next year. We’re going to miss him, but before he goes we thought we’d take a look back at the more Catholic moments of his legacy as we say goodbye (for now) to our favorite celebrity Catholic.
#12: Stephen Sings and Dances “The King of Glory”
#11: Stephen Recites the Nicene Creed to His Audience (2/27/2006)
#10: Stephen Takes Offense at the Altered Wording in the Catholic Mass (11/29/2011)
#9: Stephen Attacks, while Fr. James Martin, SJ Defends, Social Justice (3/18/2010)
#8: Stephen Discusses Pope Benedict’s Papal Resignation (2/11/2013)
(Watch the 2nd video following this one to see Fr. Jim Martin, SJ make Colbert laugh.)
#7: Stephen Examines Pope Francis’ Secret Life as a Superhero (12/3/2013)
#6: Stephen Has Cardinal Dolan as a Guest (9/3/2013)
#5: Stephen is Sad That Atheists Can Also Go To Heaven (5/23/2013)
#4: Stephen Talks About the Vatican’s Crackdown on American Nuns (6/11/2012)
(When the Holy See came down on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, it wasn’t long before Colbert did too. Make sure to stay tuned and watch the videos playing after this one as Stephen proceeds to have Sr. Simone Campbell to discuss the issue, followed by actor Martin Sheen discussing his Catholic faith, making for a very big Catholic-themed episode.)
#3: “I teach Sunday School Mother#^@%*&!” (2/11/2008)
#2: Stephen Gives Up Being Catholic For Lent (3/9/2011)
#1: Catholic Trivia Throwdown With Jack White (6/23/2011)
(If this doesn’t prove Colbert is a great big, Catholic nerd than nothing will. Here, he goes head-to-head with Jack White, each trying to stump the other via Catholic trivia. NSFW — language.)19 Rare Vintage Photos that Celebrate Black Womanhood
These photos are from the Vintage Black Glamour book by Nichelle Gainer, released this past January. The book curates images of black women throughout the 20th century.
by Rachel Wilkerson Miller of Buzzfeed
1. Valaida Snow
Snow is pictured conducting an orchestra in London, October 1934.
2. Pearl Primus
Primus was a dancer and choreographer known for creating dances like “Strange Fruit” and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”
3. Margot Webb
The dancer is pictured in 1934.
4. Margaret Thynes
The internationally known singer is pictured in 1959.
5. Josephine Baker
The dancer, singer, and actress is pictured in Château des Milandes, her home from 1937 to 1969.
6. Adelaide Hall
The entertainer is pictured in 1928.
7. Ivie Anderson
Anderson is pictured performing with Duke Ellington circa 1935.
8. Charlotte Hawkins Brown
Brown founded the Palmer Memorial Institute, a day and boarding school for African‐Americans, in 1902. The educator and author is pictured here on her wedding day in 1911.
9. Lena Horne
Horne was an American actress, singer, dancer, and civil rights activist.
10. A Taste of Honey
Janice Marie Johnson (left) and Hazel Payne (right) were the duo known as A Taste of Honey, responsible for the 1978 hit “Boogie Oogie Oogie.”
11. Mary Lou Williams
The jazz musician and composer is pictured circa 1944.
12. Maria Cole
Cole is pictured in 1948, trying on one of her gifts at a party in Harlem celebrating her marriage to Nat “King” Cole.
13. Nina Simone
The musician is pictured in Pittsburgh circa 1965.
See the rest of the photos on Buzzfeed
Are you familiar with any of the above photographed women?Image caption Gas distribution firm SGN made a temporary repair to the gas mains early on Sunday morning
Hundreds of people were evacuated from homes in south London following what police described as a "huge" gas leak.
The leak was reported in Penge Lane, Penge at about 22:30 GMT on Saturday.
Gas distribution firm SGN had been carrying out ongoing repairs to the broken gas main in Penge Lane but had suspended work for Christmas.
Residents were evacuated to four centres overnight while SGN carried out a temporary repair. They were allowed to go home from 05:00.
Image copyright MPS Bromley Image caption Residents returning home after being evacuated in their slippers
'We'd like to apologise'
Ben Howard, from The London Borough of Bromley's transport and highways department, met SGN's supervisor on Christmas Eve and reported that SGN had made a temporary repair to the broken gas main in Penge Lane.
He said he had been informed that the readings were down and "the area was safe for over the Christmas period." Mr Howard said work was due to be completed by mid-January and had only been authorised until 29 January.
In a statement released earlier James Higgins, a spokesman for SGN said: "Penge Lane will remain closed at its junction with Queen Adelaide Road as we continue repairing the network.
"This is a particularly complex project involving specialist equipment and we are doing everything possible to minimise disruption for local residents.
"We'd like to apologise for any inconvenience caused while we carry out our essential work."
One resident, who did not wish to be named, said: "Huge amounts of escaping gas last night could have caused a catastrophic explosion had it ignited.
"The community should be assured that they have a plan in place to guarantee this won't happen again."
'Community spirit'
Mr Higgins said a temporary repair had been carried out but it was too early to tell what had caused the leak and investigations were ongoing.
A member of the public reported smelling gas shortly after 22:30 on Saturday and called the national gas emergency number, SGN said.
Image copyright Metropolitan Police Service Image caption The gas leak was in the Penge Lane and Queen Adelaide Road area
It was initially thought about 500 people had to leave their homes as a precaution but police later said it was fewer and that about 150 properties were affected.
Neighbourhood policing team @MPSBromley tweeted: "Huge Gas Leak Penge Lane / Queen Adelaide Road. Houses being evacuated. Please avoid this area."
A second tweet from the account at about 02:00 said: "Road closures remain in place in #Penge... 4 reception centres housing evacuees. Community spirit pulling through. Updates to follow."
Sgt Lance Chenery tweeted: "On scene with @MPSBromley dealing with a serious gas leak in #Penge #SE20 large evacuation of residents."
Penge Lane remains closed at the junction with Queen Adelaide Road and gas engineers remain at the scene.Massive Vegan Easter Giveaway! by Anticarnist
Why celebrate the rising of Zombie Jesus by eating dead lambs and bovine lactations shaped into hollow, chocolate chicken periods? I propose a much better idea – inspired by Little V Big V‘s fantastic Mother’s Day giveaway last month, you have the chance to WIN this massive Vegan Easter Giveaway Bundle! Presented by rescued ex-battery hen ‘Hen Herbivore’ …as named by my good friend Hench Herbivore *rolls eyes* Get it?
Ethics and Antics are a rare breed in the sports wear category when it comes to the ethics behind everything they do. 10% of their profits go to Huglett’s Animal Sanctuary so you can look as cool as Tim Shieff whilst helping to support a brand that cares about the impact it makes on the world.
Giving a percentage of profits to a different charity every month, Christy Robinson has been combining her skills as a jewellery artist with her passion for animal and human rights for over ten years now, made with Earth friendly recycled metals such as aluminum, sterling silver,copper and ethically sourced beads, gemstones and fair trade findings.
The box included in this giveaway is contains nine of Troffle’s dairy-free fondant chocolates, including Orange Blossom, Lime & Basil, Rosewater, Preserved Lemon and Cucumber & Juniper. Although they’re so incredibly pretty, it’s almost a tragedy to bite into them. Almost.
With not only an eye for design, fashion and attitude, this clothing brand focuses on the ethics every step of the way. In this Vegan Easter Giveaway bundle you can win a some cool accessories from these guys, but don’t forget to check out the website regularly, as new items are released weekly!
Teen VGN are a non-profit organisation providing a safe network for young vegans, giving them the opportunity to speak out, generate creative ideas and build them up to become enthusiastic advocates for the animals. To be in with a chance to WIN a Teen VGN ‘Plant Powered and Proud’ sweater, stickers and their latest mini-mags, find out how to enter below!
A vegan family business, sustainable, ethical, plant-based, hand made, free from SLSs, free from palm oil, cruelty-free, award-winning and not tested on animals… Living Naturally Soapnut Apothecary ticks all the boxes for laundry, hair and skin products. Whether, you win or not, be sure to check out their website!
A good friend of mine, Paul is a personal trainer, vegan nutritionist and a fellow local herbivore of Norwich. In this bundle you can grab some Raw Fruit & Nut Energy Balls hand made by his fiancé Gemma along with some accessories from the Hench Herbivore shop.
Vegan Living Magazine
Now available nationwide, Vegan Living magazine is full of interviews, recipes and vegan news. Enter this Vegan Easter Giveaway and get the Easter issue free!
For a chance to WIN an amazing Vegan Easter Giveaway Bundle full of vegan-friendly gifts featured above, see the Anticarnist Facebook page.
Big thanks to Vegan Living, Hench Herbivore, Soap Nuts,Teen VGN, Viva La Vegan, Troffle, Christy Robinson and Ethics and Antics for contributing to the giveaway.
FULL List of prizes in the Vegan Easter Giveaway Bundle:
Hardback Veganomicon cook book
Ethics and Antics ‘VGANG’ tote bag
Christy Robinson ‘Rescue’ necklace
Box of ‘The Vegan Collection’ chocolates by Troffle
Viva La Vegan patch
Viva La Vegan greeting card
Viva La Vegan bottle opener
Viva La Vegan badge
Teen VGN stickers
Teen VGN mini-mags
Teen VGN ‘Plant Powered and Proud’ sweater
Organic Soap Nut Fruit Shells Laundry Detergent
Living Naturally Soapnuts Man Balm
Living Naturally Soapnuts Balm
Living Naturally Soapnuts Natural Stain Remover Bar
Hench Herbivore Raw Fruit & Nut Energy Balls
Hench Herbivore badges
Hench Herbivore sticker
All Glamour No Guts ‘Full of Hate and Ready to Liberate’ pin
Moo Free Easter Bunnycomb Egg
Vegolino chocolates
Vego bar
Classic iChoc bar
Anticarnist stickers
Anticarnist patch
Anticarnist badge
Anticarnist ‘Respect Existence or Expect Resistance’ beanie
Chicken not included
GOOD LUCK!
Terms & conditions
1. How to Enter:
1.1. To join in the campaign entrants will need to ‘like’ the Anticarnist Facebook page and share the competition post on their Facebook timeline
1.2. The winner will be selected randomly
2. When to Enter and Who can Enter:
2.1. The Competition opens on Monday 3rd April 2017 and closes Monday 17th April 2017
2.2. Entrants can enter at any point between these dates
2.3. Entrants can only enter the Competition once, but can share as many times as they like.
2.4. The Competition is only to those aged 18 or over, excluding anyone professionally connected with the administration of the Competition. Proof of age may be asked for.
3. Prizes:
3.1. The Prizes for winning the competition are all items included in the Vegan Easter Giveaway Bundle photo (chicken not included!).
3.2. The Prizes are as stated and they cannot be sold or exchanged for cash, goods or services.
4. Data Protection and Publicity:
4.1. You consent to your surname, published on the digital channels or other media of Anticarnist if you win any Prizes under the Competition
4.2. Any personal data relating to participants will be used solely in accordance with current UK data protection legislation. By entering the Competition, you agree that Anticarnist may contact you in relation to the Competition
4.3. Competition winners will be contacted by Anticarnist. You must provide accurate contact details on notification.
5. Competition Rules
5.1. The Competition will be run and prizes will be awarded at Anticarnist’s sole discretion.
5.2. We reserve the right to refuse entry into the Competition
5.3. We reserve the right to change the Competition rules and these Terms and Conditions from time to time. If we do so, we will always have the most up to date terms and conditions on this page.
5.4. All intellectual property rights in the images and materials on the digital platforms, and used in the services provided by and no person may make any use of them without Anticarnist’s express permission.
6. Liability and Indemnities
6.1. Except in the case of death or personal injury arising from its negligence, or in respect of fraud, and so far as is permitted by law, Anticarnist and its associated companies and agents and distributors exclude responsibility and all liabilities, whether direct or indirect, arising from:
6.1.1. any postponement or cancellation of the Competition;
6.1.2. any changes to, supply of or use of the Prize; and
6.1.3. any act or default of any supplier, which are beyond Anticarnist’s reasonable control.
6.2. Anticarnist does not accept responsibility for any liability arising from technical incompatibility, problems relating to the internet, or technical difficulties of any kind
6.3. Anticarnist shall not be liable, whether in tort, contract, misrepresentation or otherwise for loss of profits, loss of anticipated savings, loss of goods, loss of use, loss or corruption of data or information, or any special, indirect, consequential or pure economic loss, costs, damages, charges or expenses
7. Jurisdiction
7.1. The Competition and these Terms and Conditions are governed by English Law. England & Wales shall have exclusive jurisdiction to settle any dispute or claim that arises out of or in connection with these Terms and Conditions.
8.Disclaimer
This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with Facebook or any other social network.
The post Massive Vegan Easter Giveaway! appeared first on Anticarnist.View Caption Hide Caption CLEVELAND, OH - NOVEMBER 30: Johnny Manziel #2 of the Cleveland Browns warms up prior to the game against the Baltimore Ravens at FirstEnergy Stadium on November 30, 2015 in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo by Jason Miller/Getty Images)
Johnny Manziel, this is your conscience calling.
Why are you doing this to yourself?
Didn’t it kill you to see some dude named Austin Davis soaking up all the glory in a game you should have been playing in?
You don’t see your career slipping away?
How about Tuesday’s news about quarterback Josh McCown? You know know, the guy who got the start over you because you lied to head coach Mike Pettine about being at an Austin bar during the bye week? Dude just broke his collarbone which opens yet another door for you. We both know that Davis won’t last another five games behind that offensive line.
You will be back in the lineup soon But will you be ready? Will you continue to drink or will you clean up your act? Will TMZ videos become part of your career story or will you one day look at this period in your life as a learning experience that led to you becoming a responsible, mature adult. I sure hope so.
Had you played your cards right in college, the Cowboys may have made you their first round pick. Romo’s broke his collarbone again. That could be you starting against the Redskins next week. Does it hurt to know Cowboys fans are saying the franchise was right to not draft you as Romo’s successor?
You earned the opportunity to start with your improved play on the field but that opportunity was gone as soon as you lost your coach’s trust. Where is your support system? Have you cut off anyone brave enough to give you the real truth about where your career is headed if you continue this spiral?
Are you getting prepared for this upcoming opportunity or is partying still priority one? Why is alcohol so damned important to you? You wouldn’t be the first promising player to drink himself out of the league. Where is your self awareness? Why in the hell do you keep coming to Austin? This isn’t the place for someone to trying to find sobriety.
You have put your head coach and the Browns franchise in a tough position. If you were picked in a later round, you would have been run out of town months ago. But now you find yourself possibly in the position to play over the last month of the season because Davis will either get hurt of play himself out of the starting job.
Did you hear the boos when Davis replaced McCown Monday? The fans want you in there but their catcalls were mostly your responsibility because you forced the coach’s hand by lying. You demoted yourself by telling him one thing knowing you did another.
When does this madness end: with you realizing your potential or getting your name added to to a long list of good players who didn’t have enough upstairs to make it in this league:? Do you want to mentioned with Ryan Leaf, JaMarcus Russell, and Akili Smith?
Contrary to popular belief, there isn’t as much time to get things straightened out as you might think. Just Ask Vince Young. He actually started 50 games before the league gave up on him. At your current pace, you will be gone long before a 50th start.
And it will all be your fault.
Listen to your conscience, Johnny. It’s well past time to grow up.As a father of three 10-year-old children, I read this account of United Airlines "losing" a 10-year-old girl (and then her baggage; a "crazier" story in and of itself) with an extra measure of astonishment. But you don't need to be a parent to imagine the fear experienced by young Phoebe Klebahn - traveling for the first time as an "unaccompanied minor" -- and her parents, Annie and Perry Klebahn.
A United spokesperson, responding to my email this morning in record time for such a matter, says: "We reached out directly to the Klebahns to apologize and we are reviewing this matter." (Full statement below.) In the meantime, we'll let a lengthy letter the parents wrote tell their story and United's online "customer commitment" document speak for itself. They offer quite a contrast. We'll start with the letter:
To Whom it May Concern: I was tempted to start this with the words "it concerns no one" after the unnerving experience we just had with United Airlines losing our 10 year-old daughter as an unaccompanied minor traveling alone on June 30th, 2012. The experience was so unbelievable that we had to write it down here, and send it to you; despite knowing no one at United reads or responds to anything in regards to their customers. It's for our own sanity and perhaps anyone in the press and travel reviews that are willing to listen.
UNITED: We are committed to providing a level of service to our customers that makes us a leader in the airline industry.... Our goal is to make every flight a positive experience for our customers.
We dropped our 10-year old Phoebe at the San Francisco airport on Saturday, June 30th for her first flight as an unaccompanied minor. She was traveling through Chicago to Traverse City, Michigan to summer camp for two weeks. The United personnel who gave her the wristband and instructions told her very loud and clear to "only go with someone with a United badge on and that she would be accompanied at all times". We waited with her and sent her off and did not leave SFO until the flight was airborne. We then tracked the flight on-line and watched it arrived on time in Chicago. We knew that she had 1:15 to transfer to the Traverse City flight. We then watched on-line as that flight took off and landed on time. We then waited and waited for the call from camp that she arrived safely. That call did not come. Instead we received a frantic call from the camp that Phoebe was not on the flight, nor did the United person in Traverse City know why she was not on the flight.
UNITED: We will provide our customers who require additional assistance, including individuals with disabilities and unaccompanied minors, with the attention, respect and care they deserve.
I proceeded to call United and was put on hold for 20 minutes (imagine if you are a parent waiting 20 minutes not knowing where your 10 year old is). When someone (from India) finally took the call they first told me that she had indeed arrived in Traverse City and that I was mistaken. Then (only when I started to panic on the phone) she put me on hold again for 10 more minutes only to come back and tell me Phoebe was still in Chicago and had missed her connection. When I asked how she could have missed it given everything was 100% on time she said, "it does not matter" she is still in Chicago and "I am sure she is fine". When I asked why no one called the camp or us she could not tell me. When I asked her to please confirm where Phoebe was in Chicago and who she was with she could not tell me. When I asked to speak with her to be sure she was fine she said that was not possible. When I asked frantically to talk to her supervisor she put me on hold for 40 minutes.
UNITED: We welcome young customers on our flights. We do, however, have rules about when a minor can travel alone and when an adult must accompany the minor during travel.... Children ages 5-11 may travel without an adult but are required to use our unaccompanied minor service. There is a fee for this service and paperwork to complete prior to travel.
In the meantime my husband also started to call United using his Premier status phone line and number. He more quickly got someone on the phone (in the USA) and asked for help. The first person he spoke with was not able to help but she finally transferred him to someone who also confirmed that Phoebe did not make her flight. When he asked why she could not say but put him on hold. When she came back she told him that in fact the unaccompanied minor service in Chicago simply "forgot to show up" to transfer her to the next flight. He was dumbfounded as neither of us had been told in writing or in person that United outsourced the unaccompanied minor services to a third party vendor. We were shocked to learn this. Regardless, he asked if she could help us find Phoebe to be sure she was okay and he got put on hold again. When she came back she said she was going off her shift and could not help. My husband then asked her if she was a mother herself and she said "yes"-he then asked her if she was missing her child for 45 minutes what would she do? She kindly told him she understood and would do her best to help. 15 minutes later she found Phoebe in Chicago and found someone to let us talk to her and be sure she was okay. From the moment of the first phone call from camp informing us that Phoebe did not arrive in Traverse City to when we spoke with her first hand it took almost an hour. But she had already been in Chicago for over two hours. She landed and no one came to get her. The attendants where busy and could not help her she told us. She told them she had a flight to catch to camp and they told her to wait. She asked three times to use a phone to call us and they told her to wait. When she missed the flight she asked if someone had called camp to make sure they knew and they told her "yes-we will take care of it". No one did. She was sad and scared and no one helped.
UNITED: We work hard to get you to your destination on time, as scheduled. There may be times when weather, air traffic control, operational or service considerations lead to flight delays, cancellations or diversions. When this happens we will make available the most current, accurate information about your flight's status that we have.
End of story? No - it gets crazier if that is possible. She finally made a flight to Traverse City four hours later and we informed camp that she would be arriving late that night and that they needed to make a trip back to get her. They did and then called to let us know that she arrived but that her luggage did not. I was back on the phone with United (in India) and my husband with United Premier (in the USA) with 40 minutes of waiting for one and the other telling us they could not find her bags but to call back in two hours or check to see if it made the next flight. Phoebe went off to camp and made the most of having no sheets, pillows or clothes for what capped off one of the most stressful days of her short 10 years. The next morning we were on the phone again and were told by United (in India) that they still could not locate her bag and then by United Premier that they could not help anymore because the baggage department was no longer something they could deal with and that we had to call the special baggage number (in India that I had already called). Three more sessions of being on hold with India ensued--for 45 minutes each and one of these was a non-stop request to speak to the person in charge (who ended up being one Tom Tang in Delhi who claims to be the most senior person but could "in no way help me") -- AND three more flights to Traverse City that day left from Chicago and her bag was not on any of them.
UNITED: We work hard to get your checked bags to you on time. If your checked bags are delayed or misplaced, we will make every reasonable effort to deliver your bags within 24 hours.
We then went back to trying United Premier again and my husband tried his "are you a Mom" tactic with the next woman on the phone who agreed to help the sad 10-year-old-girl at camp in 100 degree heat with no bathing suit, sheets or change of clothes (and no store to shop in for 45 miles). She put him on hold and 30 minutes later got back on having personally had someone in Chicago baggage locate the camp bag and describe it to us on the phone. We confirmed it was Phoebe's and they confirmed it would be on the next flight to Traverse City. We let camp know and sent them to the airport again to get it (United bags that arrive to TC don't get delivered to the camp until the next day they know from experience so they went personally). We thought that was it. AGAIN -- the bag did not arrive -- camp confirmed this. We started the same process again and another 90 minutes later we were assured by a United person that it would be on the next flight - "confirmed". We sent camp again to the airport - the bag again did not arrive. That was the last flight of the day. Phoebe was now going to bed again with no word and no clothes or bedding. The next morning we started the same process again (day three now mind you) and had someone assure us it would make the early flight but we asked for the Traverse City United baggage desk number to confirm its arrival before we sent camp to retrieve it this time to be sure (they would not agree to give the number until we begged them by telling the whole saga). It finally arrived at noon on the second flight and was to Phoebe by 2 p.m. after we called camp and they went to pick it up.
UNITED: We respond quickly to our customers' complaints. If you have a complaint regarding our services or our product, we want to hear from you.
End of story right? Not really. We logged a formal complaint via United Premier for the unaccompanied minor situation and were blown away to learn that when you file a complaint with United you cannot file it yourself. You have to tell someone on the phone what you are filing for, |
park curfew law and occasionally need to turn on the charm to get violators moving in a peaceful manner.
"People like to come up and meet dogs, they don't necessarily like to come up and meet rangers," said Johnston.
As a reserve Ranger, Johnston isn't permitted to carry a firearm or pepper spray, so it's all the more important to make sure things don't get confrontational. Despite working more than 10,000 hours of patrols over the years, Johnston said they've never had to call for backup.
Murphy has more than just a friendly face. The dog, now in his mid 90's in "human years," is trained to sniff out unfamiliar objects.
"He's trained to find anomalies in the park, so anything that's not commonly in each park--he has a baseline scent for each park--he will be interested in taking me to," said Johnston.
Johnston hopes he and Murphy still have a few good years left but knows the clock is ticking on his 14-year-old Labradoodle. He says when his dog dies--something he can barely think about--he'll retire too.
Until then, you'll find them walking through the city's parks in the morning and around dusk, talking with neighbors and letting kids get up close to the fluffy service dog.
You'll know them when you see them, they're an unmistakably unique team.Untitled a guest Apr 21st, 2015 1,175 Never a guest1,175Never
Not a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features!
rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint Python 1.98 KB # Found this in corporate module (companyname-common) used in every single # python code they release. def acquire_lock ( lock_file, max_try = 10, delay = 10, max_delay = 3600 ) : """Acquire a lock represented by a file on the file system If the process written in lock file doesn't exist anymore, we remove the lock file immediately If age of the lock_file is greater than max_delay, then we raise a UserWarning """ count = abs ( max_try ) while count: try : fd = os. open ( lock_file, os. O_EXCL | os. O_RDWR | os. O_CREAT ) os. write ( fd, str_to_bytes ( str ( os. getpid ( ) ) ) ) os. close ( fd ) return True except OSError, e: if e. errno == errno. EEXIST : try : fd = open ( lock_file, "r" ) pid = int ( fd. readline ( ) ) pi = ProcInfo ( pid ) age = ( time. time ( ) - os. stat ( lock_file ) [ stat. ST_MTIME ] ) if age / max_delay > 1 : raise UserWarning ( "Command '%s' (pid %s) has locked the " "file '%s' for %s minutes" % ( pi. name ( ), pid, lock_file, age/ 60 ) ) except UserWarning : raise except NoSuchProcess: os. remove ( lock_file ) except Exception : # The try block is not essential. can be skipped. # Note: ProcInfo object is only available for linux # process information are not accessible... # or lock_file is no more present... pass else : raise count - = 1 time. sleep ( delay ) else : raise Exception ( 'Unable to acquire %s' % lock_file ) def release_lock ( lock_file ) : """Release a lock represented by a file on the file system.""" os. remove ( lock_file )
RAW Paste Data
# Found this in corporate module (companyname-common) used in every single # python code they release. def acquire_lock(lock_file, max_try=10, delay=10, max_delay=3600): """Acquire a lock represented by a file on the file system If the process written in lock file doesn't exist anymore, we remove the lock file immediately If age of the lock_file is greater than max_delay, then we raise a UserWarning """ count = abs(max_try) while count: try: fd = os.open(lock_file, os.O_EXCL | os.O_RDWR | os.O_CREAT) os.write(fd, str_to_bytes(str(os.getpid())) ) os.close(fd) return True except OSError, e: if e.errno == errno.EEXIST: try: fd = open(lock_file, "r") pid = int(fd.readline()) pi = ProcInfo(pid) age = (time.time() - os.stat(lock_file)[stat.ST_MTIME]) if age / max_delay > 1 : raise UserWarning("Command '%s' (pid %s) has locked the " "file '%s' for %s minutes" % (pi.name(), pid, lock_file, age/60)) except UserWarning: raise except NoSuchProcess: os.remove(lock_file) except Exception: # The try block is not essential. can be skipped. # Note: ProcInfo object is only available for linux # process information are not accessible... # or lock_file is no more present... pass else: raise count -= 1 time.sleep(delay) else: raise Exception('Unable to acquire %s' % lock_file) def release_lock(lock_file): """Release a lock represented by a file on the file system.""" os.remove(lock_file)Made from 3M vinyl, Dbrand's Nexus 4 skins are precision-cut to match the back of the device, including the stylized "Nexus" lettering under the camera assembly. Dbrand provided us with a selection of skins for review, and each one of them was an exact match for the back of the Nexus 4 -- no rough edges, no overlap -- pretty impressive for a mass-produced skin.
Glass-backed devices like the Nexus 4 look great. But a glass back, like any design decision, is a compromise. Glass -- even reinforced glass like Corning's Gorilla Glass 2 -- is less durable than metal or plastics. And besides, not everyone is fond of the look and feel of a glass-backed smartphone. Hence the arrival of protective skins like Dbrand's that not only cover up the vulnerable glass, but come in a variety of colors and textures.
The attachment process can be tricky at first, and Dbrand provides newbies with a link to their official application guide. This suggests lining up the camera lens and flash first, then aligning the left edge so the skin is flush with the edge of the glass. If you screw up on your first try, it's easy enough to remove and readjust. After a few attempts, though, we were able to get things matching up correctly in just a couple of minutes.
Dbrand's range of textures includes titanium, carbon and leather, and the latter comes in a wide range of colors. We tried out all three textures and settled on carbon as a favorite, closely followed by leather. The black color fits in nicely with the Nexus's existing look, while white makes for a striking contrast to the phone's dark exterior.
On the whole, we couldn't argue with the quality of the product. The skins grip the back of the Nexus 4 firmly, so there's be no risk of slippage. All of Dbrand's skins are grippier than the glass they cover -- particularly the carbon texture -- making the Nexus 4 easier to hold. And equally importantly, they look great and don't upset the phone's design -- these could easily be an official Nexus accessory.
A word of warning, though...
Once a Dbrand skin is attached it can be tricky to remove, especially if you've followed the instructions correctly and not left yourself any loose edges. This was the case with one of mine, and so after a little searching I decided to pick at the inner edge near the speaker. Only, turns out it wasn't just the vinyl skin I was picking away at it, but the glass itself. The result was a small chip in the weakest area of the glass, between the speaker and the right edge, that splintered outwards, cracking the entire back panel.
Now, this probably wasn't the skin's fault -- there's no telling what underlying weaknesses there might've been in the glass itself -- but it's something to be aware of in the removal process. Glass is glass, and if you pry at the weakest part of it, it's going to end badly.
My newly-shattered Nexus 4 did give me an opportunity to use one of the remaining skins to cover up, though. And after scraping away some of the loose glass, those skins let me hide this shameful, jagged mess. So if you've got a cracked Nexus 4, a skin like this might be something to consider.
Despite our glass-related mishap, we'd still recommend Dbrand's Nexus 4 vinyl skins for those who want to protect the back of the device, or simply personalize the the phone. At $9 each they're not especially cheap, but the price is justified by the quality of materials and the closeness of the fit.
Dbrand's skins for Nexus 4 (and other devices) are available directly from the manufacturer's website.SEATTLE -- A veteran Seattle police officer is under investigation for allegations of use of excessive force and unprofessionalism.According to Seattle police, officer Clayton Powell, a 19-year veteran of the force, is being investigated for his conduct during a police response to a report of a drive-by pellet gun shooting in South Seattle on Thursday night.Police did not release details of the incident, which occurred in the 3700 block of S. Othello St. while officers were tracking down leads.However, video of the incident obtained by KOMO News shows a heated argument that involved Powell shoving a man. The pushed man and a nearby crowd then demand to know why he was pushed, and the man appears to spit in Powell's face. Powell then pushes the man again as the other officers try to control the angry crowd.A few moments later, the man is seen handcuffed and held against the hood of a squad car. Powell continues to talk to the man, but also appears to either touch him or hit him again. A loud thump is heard on the video.The department launched the internal investigation after other officers who were present during the incident alerted their supervisor."The officers at the scene wasted no time in letting their supervisor know," said Sgt. Sean Whitcomb, adding news of the incident had reached the acting chief within 90 minutes. Both Seattle Police Chief John Diaz and Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn were out of town.Powell has been placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation.Whitcomb said the department's leaders are pleased the other officers followed procedure and reported the incident immediately."What they saw from a fellow colleague was behavior that appeared excessive and unnecessary, and unprofessional, and they didn't tolerate it," he said.The cuffed man was arrested and taken to the South Precinct. He has since been evaluated for injuries and released. He was not charged.Anyone with information on the case is urged to call Office of Professional Accountability investigator Sgt. Yvonne Tovar at 206-684-8792.News of the incident came just days after the city of Seattle and the U.S. Department of Justice announced a plan to reform the Seattle Police Department. Seattle officials agreed to an independent monitor and court oversight of the city's police department following a damning report that found officers routinely used excessive force.The Justice Department launched its civil rights investigation early last year after the fatal shooting of homeless Native American woodcarver John T. Williams and other incidents involving force used against minority suspects. In December, a DOJ report found officers were too quick to reach for weapons, such as flashlights and batons, even when arresting people for minor offenses.The deal also calls for a special commission, appointed by the mayor, to concentrate on use of force issues.The U.S. Attorney's Office had no comment on the latest incident.Independent workers like freelancers and consultants have a new ally in The World's Longest Invoice. This campaign, which is being orchestrated by The Freelancers Union, hopes to draw Congress' attention to contingent workers' rights and especially their right to collect outstanding dues for services provided.
Freelancers can add their names to the World's Longest Invoice along with the services they provided and the amount that's still due to them. On May 22, 2012, the Freelancers Union will present the final invoice to the Senate Labor Committee in New York as ammo for the Freelancer Payment Protection Act. This act would empower freelancers to collect any unpaid invoices over $600 from clients.
Freelancers account for nearly one-third of the U.S. workforce. Some 77 percent have had to deal with nonpayment, according to a Freelancers Union survey. Do you think the World's Longest Invoice will help independent workers fight back against delinquent clients?
More From Payscale
Do You Know What You're Worth? GET A FREE PAY REPORT
Career Round Up: What Would You Give Up to Work from Home?
Should a 21-Hour Workweek Be the New US Standard?
The Future of Work: 3 Tips to Stand Out in a World of Freelancing and Temporary Jobs
(Photo credit: The World's Longest Invoice/The Freelancers Union)In August 1998, Gov. Mike Huckabee and his wife Janet were among 131 signers of an advertisement opposing same sex marriage and in support of a resolution enacted by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) earlier that year that erroneously suggested that prototypical 1950s-era “Ozzie and Harriet” style marriage and family life had its origins in the Bible:
‘Graciously submitting herself’ to her husband is a deceptively benign formulation for the status of women in biblical times.
“At a time when divorce is destroying the fabric of our society, you have taken a bold stand for the biblical principles of marriage and family life. We thank you for your courage,” the ad stated… The SBC article describes marriage as “the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment for a lifetime.” It also notes, “The husband and wife are of equal worth before God, since both are created in God’s image. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.”
“Graciously submitting herself” to her husband is a deceptively benign formulation to describe the status of women in biblical times. In the Hebrew scriptures that form the basis of the Old Testament, for example, women were treated as harshly as they are treated today in conservative Islamic cultures:
Unmarried women were not allowed to leave the home of their father.
Married women were not allowed to leave the home of their husband.
They were normally restricted to roles of little or no authority.
They could not testify in court.
They could not appear in public venues.
They were not allowed to talk to strangers.
They had to be doubly veiled when they left their homes.
Polygamy was commonplace, and, of course, only men could have multiple spouses. Famous polygamists from the Bible included Abraham, Jacob, King David and especially Solomon, who had 700 wives and 300 concubines.
The Bible dictates that women take an inferior role in almost every aspect of life, according to a conservative biblical scholar:
By divine design, man is to be the “head†of woman—in society, in the church, and in the home (1 Cor. 11:3; Eph. 5:22—24). This graduation of authority rests on two bases: first, the original constitution of the sexes as created; and, second, woman’s role in the Fall. 1. Woman was made as a help for man — not the reverse (Gen. 2:18,20).
2. Paul wrote: “For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man: for neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man†(1 Cor. 11: 8,9).
3. And again, “For Adam was first formed, then Eve†(1 Tim. 2:13). As to the woman’s role in the Fall, she believed Satan’s lie that she might become as God, and hence, was “beguiled†(Gen. 3:13; 2 Cor. 11:3) or “deceived†(1 Tim. 2:14), whereas Adam, laboring under no such deception (1 Tim. 2:14), merely sinned due to his weakness for the woman (Gen. 3:12). Accordingly, woman’s subjection was increased after her fall (Gen. 3:16).
The “Ozzie and Harriet” 1950s sitcom style of marriage is a byproduct of the Industrial Age, which produced historically unique educational and career opportunities for women. It has little or nothing to do with biblical teaching. The notion of romantic marriage did not come into vogue until the early 19th Century. Before then, for thousands of years of Western history, marriage was primarily a business arrangement between the fathers of the bride and groom.
Ironically, even Christians do not live up to their own sacred fantasy of marriage. Divorce is as rampant among Christians as it is in the wider culture. And the leading “threat” to Christian marriage is not same-sex unions or gay civil rights, as they often claim. It is adultery.
It’s hard to see how Huckabee can walk away from this one unscathed. If he tries to run away from his earlier position that women should graciously submit to men — as he has run away from pushing for the release of the rapist Wayne Dumond, who raped and killed two more women upon his release, and from advocating the quarantining AIDS patients — he risks losing favor with his Christian nationalist base.
But if continues to advocate biblically subservient roles for women, he’ll be out of the presidential race by February 5, at the latest.The News Minute | October 6, 2014 | 8:29pm IST Mumbai : Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi will Wednesday launch his election campaign for the Oct 15 Maharashtra assembly elections here, a party official said. He will start with a rally in the historic town of Mahad in Raigad district, and follow it up with a public meeting in Latur, Marathwada region. Gandhi's visit is significant for the Congress as he is the first central party leader to campaign for the crucial elections where the party is battling huge odds to bag power for the fourth consecutive term. Mahad in Raigad in the coastal Konkan region bears historical importance for the people of the state. While Raigad was the capital of Chhatrapati Shivaji's Maratha kingdom, Chavdar Lake in Mahad was the venue of B.R. Ambedkar's famous Water Satyagraha of March 20, 1927, after which Dalits and untouchables were permitted to use the lake. The Latur rally will be held in Ausa, in Marathwada region, an erstwhile Congress stronghold and home town of the late Vilasrao Deshmukh and former Lok Sabha Speaker Shivraj Patil. Top state leaders, including former chief ministers Prithviraj Chavan, Ashok Chavan, state party chief Manikrao Thakre, and other senior leaders will be present for Gandhi's rallies. IANSClose
Square Enix keeps the hype up for the Final Fantasy XV by releasing a new English-subtitled trailer for Final Fantasy XV that was showcased during the Tokyo Game Show 2016. The cinematic gives a peek at how the plot develops, introduces new characters and summons.
The four-and-a-half-minute clip starts off with a messy-haired, scarf-wearing guy walking up to Prince Noctis Lucis Caelum, who sounded like he was struggling, and telling him to claim the crystal's power and arise as the true king. A cutscene later, Noctis, along with the rest of his group, is shown to have met up with the same guy while on their way to board a boat back to Insomnia, the capital city of Lucis — the last remaining kingdom in the world with control over crystals.
The messy-haired, scarf-wearing guy was later revealed to be Ardyn Izunia, the imperial chancellor.
The crew then discovers through a newspaper that Insomnia has fallen and that the king was found dead after negotiations in the treaty room went sour. The article they were reading also said that Noctis died.
Outside the city, the enraged Noctis talks with Cor Leonis over the phone to clarify what he read in the paper. The guy confirms that his father, the King, is indeed dead. It was then revealed that what happened was not a one-sided attack, but that the king "waged war" with whoever he was negotiating with.
After a few melodramatic lines about his father and the role of a king, along with some encouraging lines from Cid, Noctis is shown to be confronted by Ravus Nox Fleuret, Luna's older brother. Ravus called him foolish and feeble, beat up Gladiolus and thus, the Prince readied for a fight.
A flashback where Gentiana lectures a young Noctis about the oracle and king standing together to protect the kingdom was also shown. The scene then shifts to Luna's speech about banishing evil.
The trailer then proceeds to a scene inside a train where Gladiolus confronts a melodramatic Noctis. Gladiolus tells him to get his act together and calls him a spoiled brat. The four of them were then shown running in an open field before they set up camp and ate cup noodles while seated around a bonfire. The group then takes off in their flying car.
So the story pretty much revolves on Noctis avenging his father and reclaiming his throne with the help of his crew and Luna. Since Ardyn Izunia is a new character, details regarding him are scarce and his intentions are unknown. It's also worth noting that scene in the new trailer shows him slapping Luna.
Of course, summons will not be out of the picture. The trailer includes the familiar faces of Leviathan and Ramuh. It also introduces what seems to be Shiva. She's not yet confirmed though. The other confirmed ones are Ifrit, Titan and Carbuncle.
Final Fantasy XV is slated for a simultaneous release on Nov. 29 for both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
ⓒ 2018 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Milan board disbanded
By Football Italia staff
The Milan Board of Directors have resigned after the final meeting of the Silvio Berlusconi era, as Yonghong Li’s takeover is almost complete.
This morning Yonghong Li flew in from Hong Kong, while Han Li had already been in Milan yesterday for meetings with new directors Marco Fassone and Massimiliano Mirabelli.
This afternoon the Milan Board of Directors had the last meeting of the 31-year Berlusconi era, in which the counsellors handed in their resignation.
It’s also reported that CEO Adriano Galliani, who has been at the club as long as Berlusconi, has started emptying out his office.
The only member of the Board of Directors expected to remain after the takeover is Leonardo Cantamessa.
There have been a series of meetings today, but Fassone, Li and Mirabelli have refused to speak to the media.
The closing is due to be completed on Friday with the shareholder’s meeting, formally ending Berlusconi’s time at San Siro.
Less than 24 hours later, Milan take on Inter in the Derby della Madonnina.Sports lover! Fan’s..Hello & Welcome Here to watch Las Vegas How To Watch National Finals Rodeo live stream Summer How To Watch National Finals Rodeo matches of this season. Las Vegas How To Watch National Finals Rodeo will be covered and streamed on this page. So don’t waste a time, get the game live through the provided TV Software and enjoy the excitement.
You’ll have to register and deposit funds in order to watch this match live. Live Online on your Desktop, Laptop, Mobile, Iphone Ipad and other devices. Game Details: Event: Wrangler National Finals Rodeo 2016
Date: Dec. 1 – Dec. 10, 2016
Arena: Thomas & Mack Center, Las Vegas, Nevada
Time: 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Stats: LIVE Full HD Coverage Online
We assure you that once you are registered on our site you are able to watch all our services of live How To Watch National Finals Rodeo and sports streaming and reliable networks which are available.
Where you will be completely satisfy with the system and features. We also offer you 3 best packages fees according to the customers pocket, you can purchase any package from our site, so you can able to watch all sports live streaming with instant access. You just require a internet connection; no need any extra hardware and cables. Extra features of our service are all sports live streaming and thousands T.V channels. We upgrade new features monthly wise. Your paying to our services will never make you annoying like TV cable and satellite providers do.Other good thing in our system is that you can watch one game on different channels and with different languages.
How To Watch National Wrangler Finals Rodeo live stream, How To Watch X Games Las Vegas live stream Honda,Summer How To Watch National Wrangler Finals Rodeo live stream broadcast, How To Watch National Wrangler Finals Rodeo live stream news, How To Watch National Wrangler Finals Rodeo live stream lemonsports, Summer How To Watch National Wrangler Finals Rodeo live stream pod cast, How can i watch How To Watch National Wrangler Finals Rodeo live stream, Where Summer How To Watch National Finals Rodeo live stream, How To Watch National Finals Rodeo live stream hd tv.The Top-100s are Coming. The Top-100s are Coming!
Update 2/13/17: Folded Baseball America & Baseball Prospectus rankings into model.
Weights for wValue: Baseball America (3x), Baseball Prospectus (2x), Keith Law (2x), MLB (1x), ZiPS (1x), Rotowire (1x)
——————————————————————————————————————————————————
As the offseason slog slogs on sloggily the weary baseball fan may be able to grasp some sunshine with the release of various top-100 lists. So far I have seen top-100 prospect lists from MLB, Keith Law and Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections. Naturally, we fans want to know how our team compares to one another using somewhat different perspectives. To that end I have compiled each of these three lists, though because two of them are behind a paywall I do not think it would be right to share the list. Instead, I’ve gone further.
I make it no secret how much I respect the quality of work in this study from the folks at The Point of Pittsburgh. The gist is that their research seeks to put ballpark estimates on the expected surplus of a prospect based on their ranking on the Baseball America top-100 list. Additionally, adjustments are made for whether the player is a hitter or pitcher, as each type of player faces different odds and future compensation. While we do not have what I would expect to be great work from Baseball America we do currently have these other three. Once other lists are publicly available then those can be folded in, but for now, let’s look at how the current lists rate these guys.
One challenge, first. Every single list will be comprised of different players. In fact, so far over these three lists I have found 149 total players. Since the PoP study only goes to 100 players I have estimated that these guys that would go unranked on a list, but showed up on another are equal to half of the expected surplus for the 75-100 pitcher or hitter. You can see all of the values used here:
After compiling the data and coding it for easy lookups you can start to play with the data. Here is a summary:
I have sorted here by total surplus, but I also want to highlight a few other things. You’ll find the total number of top-100 players for each team, the highest expected surplus within that team, the average surplus for that team and what I’m considering a risk profile. By dividing the mean by the max you can get a sense for how much of the team’s value is tied up in their highest rated player. The best teams combine a high level of total surplus with enough diversity so that if even a highly-touted player flames out the system can march on. The Braves highlight this extremely well having both very good prospects, but also a whole bunch of them. Here’s a look at the middle of the pack Rays:
The Rays have a few well-defined tiers here. Adames is one of the best prospects in baseball with a very high level of expected surplus. The two righty pitchers slot in next as future mid-rotation guys that carry enough risk or expected plateau that they’re more good than great values. Lastly, come Bauers and Robertson who might pan out as useful players (according to the lists, personally I think they’re terrific), but you probably shouldn’t bank on it. It’s important to note here that these lists aren’t everything. They’re wrong often enough that only a fool would completely take them seriously. Averaging several lists together does help give a little more information, and the more that comes in will help them tell an even more accurate story. Stay posted as further updates come on this front.Gujarati Tikha Gathiya Recipe
by Arpit, Published: June 13, 2012
Here we go with the recipe of Tikha gathiya, a tea time crunchy snacks. This spicy deep fried strands are made from gram flour dough. This
irresistible snack is a household food item in Gujarat. This addictive snack tastes best with deep fried chilies, carrot shreds, salad or mango pickle. Tikha gathiya is also one of the main ingredient in various types of chevdas and mixtures.
Serving Ideas: Tikha gathiya can be eaten alone. It is a perfect party snack. This addictive snack tastes best with deep fried chilies, carrot shreds and salad or mango pickle.
Taste: Crispy and Mild spicy.
Also known as: Jadi Sev/ Tikha Gathiya/ Gathia/ Ganthiya/ Ganthia.
Prep time: 10 mins
Cook time: 10 mins
Total time: 20 mins
Yield: Serves 6
Ingredients:
5 cups Gram Flour (बेसन)
1/2 cup Oil (तेल)
Salt to taste (नमक)
carom seeds as you like (अजवैन)
Red Chilli Powder (लाल मीर्च पावडर)
1 pinch Asfoetedia (हींग)
Method :With their ultra-feminine looks, pretty boys dressed up as their favorite female anime characters have been getting a lot of media attention in recent years. Now it looks like the trend for playing with gender roles is filtering through to women’s fashion. “Boy’s style” has even got so big that major fashion magazine Kera launched a sister magazine called Kera Boku in October last year aimed at the market.
The cover star of Kera Boku, according to an online article in Cafe Goo Girl, is Akira, front woman of the band DISACODE (see video above), whose androgynous features make her the perfect model for this new look. Though it is not a monthly publication, the spin-off has proved popular enough for a second issue to be published this month. Mini, another fashion magazine for women in their 20s, has devoted its June issue to “boyish” style defined by cropped haircuts and mannish jeans.
The terms “boyish” or “boy’s style” rendered phonetically into Japanese are roughly equivalent to the word tomboyish, though their meaning is restricted to describing how a girl dresses. But some girls are taking this further by completely transforming their gender identities and dressing up as men. This form of cross-dressing is called dansou in Japanese (as opposed to josou, which is applied to men dressing as women). Dansou is not a new thing. The Takarazuka Revue is an all-female troupe, some members of whom dress in drag to play male roles to an audience of adoring women. However, its huge popularity with hardcore female fans is on the wane with younger generations, so it’s interesting to see a resurgence in popularity for dansou.
Akihabara, which has been at the center of the josou boom, is now the location of With The Garçon dansou escort agency. The patrons of the agency are women who pay to go out on a date with another woman dressed in drag. They can chose between walking round Akihabara or drinking in a bar to “relieve stress.” One client said, “This shop can provide me with an experience that men these days can’t. They’re better than men, you know.” The writer of the Cafe Goo Girl article believes that these cross-dressing women, rather than being confused about their gender identities, are merely playacting the role of the “ideal man.” Disappointed with modern men, they are temporarily dressing up and showing guys how women ought to be wooed.
So with more men dressing up as women and women dressing up as men, where is this all going to lead? A light-hearted answer will be given to movie goers this August when the live-action movie of the manga “Ai Ore: Love Me!” is released in theatres. A romance between the tomboyish lead singer of a band and a girlish boy, the romantic comedy is bound to strike a chord with Japan’s youth.Germany booked their place in the Round of 16 with their 1-0 win over the US on Thursday and now face a determined Algeria side on Monday in Porto Alegre.
Algeria are one of the few teams Germany have yet to win against, losing both of their matches. One of those was the notoriou ls loss in their World Cup opener in 1982, which remains their only loss in the tournament’s first game.
Ahead of the game, coach Jogi Löw addressed the press about the dangers posed by Algeria, the keys to the game and tournament as a whole.
On Algeria…...”We’ll be up against a very very compact, tireless and extremely aggressive team. I haven’t seen a team defend an opponent so vehemently but also be able to attack so quickly. Algeria are a very dangerous opponent. I’m irritated to hear all this about “revenge”- our players weren’t even born then. For our players that’s not even on their minds. But Algeria will be highly motivated either way.”
On Algeria’s key players….”Algeria don’t just have one good player but many. Some play in Spain, England and France. The team functions well as a unit, everyone works for each other and they can counter ridiculously quick.”
On the tournament so far...”We won the game against the US and won the group. That was our primary goal. But we are also self-critical. We can play better, we haven’t reached our limit yet. And that’s a good thing. Now the knockout rounds begin. We don’t need any major changes to our system, we just need to improve the details.”
Thoughts going into the Round of 16…..“Our team is eager about this game. Games like this have a special feel. Games like this mean a lot to us, the team is focused and we’re going into it with a lot of confidence. If anyone thinks that we’re going into this game against an easy opponent then they’re making a big mistake. Concentration is key, every mistake will be punished.”
Potential things to improve…“The homework is: our game in the final third, efficiency in front of goal and more activity in the opponent’s sixteen. Our finishing can be better. If we want to reach the final it’s important to want to be at your best even early in games like this. The World Cup is a marathon, not a 100-meter sprint where you have to be at your absolute best at the beginning. Even at the last tournament we saw that teams that won their first three games can lose in their fourth. It is about making progress along the way.”
The mood within the team….“The togetherness of the team is very very good. Everyone understands and has seen the potential we have here and the options between the games. That’s very important during a tournament, to concentrate and be able to recover.”
The mild climate in Porto Alegre…. “Whether it’s an advantage I don’t know. Both teams are coming from hot climates to cooler ones, it’s easier than the other way around. But we handled the heat very well and now we’re playing in cooler temperatures. That’s easier for both teams. For us it was clear from the start that we had to adjust to these temperatures rather than lament them.”
The short rest after the USA match…“We’re not bothered about it. We already knew beforehand how the games would be scheduled. With the selection of our camp we made the right decision in the case we needed to make an extra long trip.”
On Bastian Schweinsteiger…. “Bastian started again for the first time in weeks. Considering that he did his job very well. Regardless of whether Sami or Bastian play, after their injuries more than seven games would be unrealistic for both. But they are both extremely important for the team. Sami needed a break after the first two games. Now we have to see how things will look for the next game. Who plays on Monday will depend on the situation, both are making a good impression in training.”
Comparison of Thomas Muller to Neymar and Messi….”Thomas Muller maybe isn’t under the spotlight as much in Germany. But abroad I hear his name in every stadium. He has a great reputation internationally. He is also a different player than Messi or Neymar but in terms of being a goal threat he is on the same level.”⇓ More from ICTworks
Jenna Burrell, assistant professor at the School of Information at UC Berkeley, is speaking today at the Berkman Center on her research on internet usage in Ghana, the subject of her (excellent) book Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana. Burrell is an ethnographer and sociologist, and her examination of Ghanaian internet cafes is one of the best portraits of contemporary internet use in the developing world.
Jenna doing fieldwork in Ghana
Her talk today covers some of the work she began in 2004 and published last year, but expands in some new directions, including questions about network security and preserving access in the margins of the Global Internet. Burrell’s understanding of Ghana has been built up through six years of fieldwork, both |
tta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator with the University of Arizona.
“The mission is driven by the return of pristine organic molecules from the early solar system. I’m really hopeful that we will get some unique material that isn’t in our meteorite collections because its probably friable and not easily surviving atmospheric passage, and that’s the reason we are going to protect it in our Sample Return Capsule.”
Known as the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx for short, the $800 million mission embarked on its 7-year, round trip journey to Bennu and back at 7:05 p.m. EDT (2305 GMT).
“Liftoff of OSIRIS-Rex, its seven-year mission to boldly go to the Asteroid Bennu and back,” NASA launch commentator Mike Curie called in tribute to the 50th anniversary of Star Trek.
The craft departed atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, blasting off from Cape Canaveral at the opening minute of the planetary-alignment window on the first try after a smooth countdown.
“This was an excellent launch,” says Tim Dunn, the NASA launch director. “Not a single anomaly was worked during the countdown, almost unheard of.”
The strange-looking launcher, with a single solid rocket booster mounted to its side to augment the first stage, powered away on 1.2 million pounds of thrust, coming off the pad “beautifully,” Dunn said, and headed eastward across the Atlantic Ocean.
Staging four minutes into flight saw the Centaur upper stage ignite for an eight-minute burn to boost the spacecraft into an initial Earth parking orbit. After coasting over Africa, the rocket fired for seven more minutes to escape Earth on an interplanetary trajectory before separating to fly solo an hour into flight.
It marked the 136th successful launch in a row for the Atlas program spanning 23 years, the 65th for the Atlas 5 over the span of 14 years and extended United Launch Alliance’s mission record to 111 in nearly 10 years.
OSIRIS-REx, built by Lockheed Martin in Denver, quickly deployed its two power-producing solar arrays and phoned home via the Canberra tracking station that it was in excellent health.
“The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is happy and healthy,” said Rich Kuhns, OSIRIS-REx program manager with Lockheed Martin Space Systems.
“We started the journey with a phenomenal launch on the Atlas 5. It delivered us right where we needed to be.”
The craft measures 10 feet tall and 20 feet wide and weighed 4,650 pounds at launch. It is equipped with 28 thrusters of various sizes for maneuvers and 2,700 pounds of hydrazine fuel.
OSIRIS-REx will swing by the Earth on Sept. 22, 2017, receiving a gravity-assisted slingshot to bend the flight path to intercept the destination — Asteroid Bennu — in August 2018 for a three-year stay.
“We can hover like a hummingbird, we can orbit around the thing, we can go in for the sample acquisition maneuver and we use very tiny amount of our rocket fuel,” said Lauretta.
“We are going to do hyperbolic flybys, so we that we can measure the mass as we look at the deflection, we are going to be able to stationkeep over certain areas of the asteroid as we do our survey and we’ll go into orbit around the asteroid. Since the gravity field is so low — the mass of the asteroid is small — it doesn’t require a lot of thrusting with our rocket engines to make those changes.”
From the a science mapping orbit, OSIRIS-REx will fly 5,000 feet, then a mere 3,300 feet above the asteroid’s surface and use its instruments to interrogate Bennu with an unprecedented level of detail.
“The size, orbit and the primitive, carbon-rich composition of Bennu make it a fascinating and accessible asteroid, and that is why it was ultimately chosen as the target destination for the OSIRIS-REx mission,” said Christina Richey, OSIRIS-REx deputy program scientist at NASA Headquarters.
“With a scientifically-exciting asteroid like Bennu…(OSIRIS-REx) will teaching us the fundaments about the formation of planetary bodies, our own solar system and even the ingredients to the origin of life.”
Bennu, discovered just 17 years ago, has an estimated mass of 86 million tons, is roughly spherical, bulges at its equator to 1,614 feet in diameter, has a rotation period 4.3 hours and is covered by very dark gravel, soil and dust. It orbits the Sun every 437 days and grazes past Earth at lunar distance every 6 years.
Part of the mission also aims to determine Bennu’s precise trajectory, which current estimates say there is a 1 in 2,700 chance it could collide with Earth late in the 22nd century — between 2175 and 2199.
“We are going to contribute to the science by measuring a phenomena called the Yarkovsky Effect, which is a fascinating interplay between sunlight and these small asteroids,” Lauretta said.
“The asteroids get their energy from the Sun, a lot of that energy, especially on a dark asteroid like Bennu, is absorbed, causing the asteroid’s surface to heat up. It has to release that energy back out into space, and when that happens it acts likes like a thruster and changes the trajectory of the asteroid.
“So if you want to be able to predict where an object like Bennu is going to be in the future, you have you to account for this phenomenon, and we’re going to provide the best-ever scientific investigation of this fascinating concept.”
OSIRIS-REx carries a camera suite that will document the asteroid, search for moons, image in color and features an 8-inch telescope, a laser altimeter that will acquire 6 billion measurements to map in 3D the shape and terrain of Bennu at centimeter-scale, a thermal emission spectrometer for mineral and temperature data, a visible and infrared spectrometer to identify organic material and a student-made X-ray imaging spectrometer that seeks to determine what elements are present on the surface.
“In the visible and infrared light, minerals have unique signatures, or colors, much like fingerprints. Scientists use these fingerprints to identify molecules like organics,” said Richey.
“For primitive, carbon-rich asteroids like Bennu, materials are preserved from over 4.5 billion years ago. We are talking about the start of the formation of our solar system. And these primitive materialis could contain organic molecules that may be the precursors life here on Earth or elsewhere within our solar system.”
After much practice, in July 2020, the small probe will use its 11-foot-long, pogo-stick arm to grab a specimen of the celestial object with a 0.22 mph touch-and-go maneuver.
“Once we leave the orbit around it, there’s two additional maneuvers we do that both match the asteroid’s spin rate and then put us on a trajectory were we go down towards the asteroid,” said Kuhns.
“So we actually do take thrusters and push ourselves, gently, towards the asteroid. When we are moving towards the asteroid, we’re actually only moving at 10 cm a second. That’s about a quarter-of-a-mile-per-hour.”
With the 12-inch-diameter disk-shaped sampling head in contact with the asteroid, penetrating the surface up to a foot, nitrogen gas will be fired to agitate the soil, creating a cyclonic vacuum to capture a bit of Bennu.
“We want this to be a safe, smooth, slow high-five of that surface,” said Richey.
But Lauretta cautioned there is inherent risk.
“The nature of an asteroid’s surface, a rubble-pile asteroid in microgravity, is a new realm of physics, and we’re not exactly sure what the surface is going to be like,” he said.
“Touching the asteroid is a great science experiment, and we’re going to learn an enormous about about asteroid surface properties…but we are explorers, and this is the unknown.”
The spacecraft will try to obtain at least 2.1 ounces and possibly up to 4.4 pounds of regolith. By performing a spin maneuver, controllers will determine if enough sample material was collected. Nitrogen is available for two more tries, if needed.
Once the scientific treasure is stowed in the protective return capsule, OSIRIS-REx will back away from the asteroid to a safe distance and wait for the Bennu departure window to open. That occurs in March 2021, allowing the probe to fire thrusters and head for home, a journey that will take over two years.
Approaching Earth and just four hours from landing, the spacecraft spring-ejects the container holding the sample, protected by a heat shield, to hit the atmosphere at 27,700 mph and experience 32 Gs before making a parachute-assisted touchdown on Sept. 24, 2023 at 9 a.m. local time in the Utah Test and Training Range, west of Salt Lake City.
The mission’s total distance to be traveled: 4.4 billion miles.
The Johnson Space Center in Houston is responsible for curation of the Bennu samples, which should be the largest amount of extra-terrestrial material returned to Earth since the Apollo moonrocks.
“We bring the sample back and can subject it to a battery of examinations and tests that we can’t do anywhere else but on Earth,” added Jeff Grossman, OSIRIS-REx program scientist at NASA Headquarters.
“Bennu is carbon-rich near-Earth asteroid that holds the record of the formation of the solar system and can answer some of the fundamental questions about our origins,” said Gordon Johnston, OSIRIS-REx program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
About 20 percent of the returned asteroid specimen will be studied by the OSIREX-REx team, while four percent is given to Canada for providing the mission’s laser altimeter. A half-percent goes to Japan under cooperative agreement with that country’s Hayabusa asteroid missions.
And three-quarters of the sample will be set aside for future study by instruments not yet invented.
Meanwhile, the OSIRIS-REx mothership, minus the 100-pound sample landing pod, will remain in space and available for a potential trek to another body to study with its scientific instruments. Twenty minutes after releasing the Sample Return Capsule, the spacecraft will fire thrusters to divert its path from following the canister into the atmosphere.
“As we are coming in for Earth return, we have a very precise corridor so that we line up the Sample Return Capsule with the right angle of attack to make sure it lands safely in the Utah Test Range. That really drives the trajectory of the spacecraft,” Lauretta said.
“That said, right after we separate, we will do a deflection maneuver and the spacecraft will be put into a parking orbit around the Sun. Currently, the team has no plans for an extended mission. However, we expect that it will be a healthy spacecraft, fully functional, and it’ll really be up to the agency to decide what kinds of extended missions they might be interested in for that vehicle.”
OSIRIS-REx is the third mission launched under NASA’s New Frontiers program, following New Horizons that departed in 2006, fly by Pluto in 2015 and is headed into the Kuiper Belt, and Juno that began its journey in 2011 and entered orbit around Jupiter on July 4.
“It really is a great adventure, going out into the unknown,” said Lauretta. “We are bringing back scientific treasure and, for me, looking forward to the day in 2023 when we open up that Sample Return Capsule is what has driven me for the past 12 years and what keeps us going for the next 7.”
See earlier OSIRIS-REx coverage.
Our Atlas archive.NEW YORK -- Amar'e Stoudemire had mixed emotions upon returning to Madison Square Garden for the first time since he left the New York Knicks last season.
But the former Knick had plenty of interesting things to say about Carmelo Anthony, Jeremy Lin and how some Knicks didn't buy into the triangle last season.
Asked if he feels for his former teammate Anthony for going through another tough season with the Knicks, Stoudemire hinted that Anthony needs to be better to pull the Knicks out of their mess. The Knicks (25-36) have lost 14 of their past 17 games.
"It's tough," Stoudemire said before the Heat beat the Knicks 98-81 on Sunday. "When you get involved in this situation, you have to take ownership of it. You have to make sure you made the right decisions for your team and teammates.
"You have to become a complete player in order to bring your team out of a rut. Everyone can't do it. It's not always easy."
When asked if he has any advice for Anthony moving forward, Stoudemire mentioned how he knew at this stage of his career that he needed to surround himself with "other class A players" to chase a title.
Asked if he had any advice for Carmelo Anthony, Amar'e Stoudemire pointed to his own situation and realization that he had to surround himself with "class A players" to chase a title. Jim McIsaac/Getty Images
"It's a situation where you have options," Stoudemire said. "If you want to win, that's the main priority. And if physically you can't do it as a player and make your teammates better and get them to the point they can win, then you surround yourself with a team that's built to win.
"And for me, I knew Father Time was ticking on my clock, so I wanted to put myself in a position around other class A players, put myself in a position to at least compete for a championship."
Stoudemire played four and a half seasons with the Knicks, and his time overlapped with former fan favorite Lin. Although he did not mention any names, Stoudemire said not every Knick was thrilled with Lin's exploding popularity back then.
"If he stayed, it would've been cool," Stoudemire said of Lin, who played one season in New York from 2011-12. "But everyone wasn't a fan of him being the new star, so he didn't stay long. But Jeremy was a great, great guy. Great teammate. He worked hard. He put the work in, and we're proud of him to have his moment.
"I truly bought into it. I thought it was great. Maybe three-fourths of the team thought it was great. But if you don't have a full team that buys into a system, it's never going to pan out."
"A lot of times, you gotta enjoy someone's success," he continued. "And that wasn't the case for us during that stretch.... You got to enjoy that. You got to let that player enjoy himself and cherish those moments. He was becoming a star, and I don't think everybody was pleased with that."
Anthony said Sunday night he did not think Stoudemire was talking about him when it came to being less than receptive to Lin's brief success in New York.
"Still?" Anthony asked when told that Lin came up when reporters talked to Stoudemire. "That was [four] years ago? I don't know. I don't have no comment about that. If [Lin] was becoming a star, we should embrace that. I don't know. We didn't embrace it? Was that the word?"
"S---, if that was the case then I'd be upset right now with KP [rookie fan favorite Kristaps Porzingis], if he's talking about me. I doubt if [Stoudemire is] talking about me. I doubt that. I highly doubt that."
Anthony did tweet a series of motivational thoughts on Monday afternoon, though it's unclear what prompted the tweets:
Stoudemire said he thought Derek Fisher was "doing well" as a first-time coach last season, but not all the Knicks bought into the triangle. Fisher was fired earlier in February.
"I truly bought into it," said Stoudemire, who had eight points and seven rebounds Sunday. "I thought it was great. Maybe three-fourths of the team thought it was great. But if you don't have a full team that buys into a system, it's never going to pan out."
"The triangle offense is based upon ball movement and ball penetration," Stoudemire said. "There's a lot of intelligence that's involved in the triangle offense that you have to conquer and understand. But if you don't have a full team that buys into it, it's not going to work."
When told of Stoudemire's triangle comments, Anthony asked, "Was I [part of] the quarter?"
Carmelo Anthony doesn't think Amar'e Stoudemire was referring to him when he talked about players being less than receptive to Jeremy Lin's success in New York. "If that was the case, then I'd be upset right now with [Kristaps Porzingis]," Anthony said. AP Photo/Jason DeCrow
"To be honest, I don't even know... what happened last year was a blur to me, bro," Anthony said when told Stoudemire didn't mention his name. "As far as buying into last year, buying into what? I don't have any recollection about last year."
Stoudemire, who had to deal with several injuries during his Knicks tenure, received mixed reception from New York fans.
"It's been a lot," Stoudemire said of what he thinks of all the Knicks' changes in the past few seasons. "It's been a lot going on, and it hasn't really been great over the years.
"It's hard for me to watch from the outside looking in because I was so involved with creating a positive atmosphere around the Knicks. Now it's gone the opposite way. Hopefully, things can pan out well in the near future."In the wake of the Weinstein scandal, one might think that sexual abuse allegations would be taken seriously, especially claims that a child had been assaulted by an adult Hollywood insider.
The first accuser, Anothey Rapp, was soon joined by allegations from multiple additional individuals. Vulture wrote that after the first allegations emerged, “others have come forward with further allegations… including the filmmaker Tony Montana, who said that Spacey groped him in public in 2003, and the actor Roberto Cavazos, who said he witnessed Spacey court and inappropriately touch younger male actors at the Old Vic Theatre, where Spacey was the artistic director from 2004 to 2015.”
The latest victim to come forward, as first reported by Vulture, claimed today that Spacey had attempted to rape him at the age of 15 after beginning a sexual relationship at 14.
The Washington Times reported on these latest allegations, stating that the artist, who wished to remain anonymous, told Vulture that he first met Mr. Spacey when he was 12 years old and the actor was teaching acting classes in New York in 1981.
Vanity Fair wrote that the newest victim to come forward, who is now 48, stated of Spacey: “I would call him a pedophile and a sexual predator.” Vanity Fair explained: “When the accuser was 14, Spacey gave him his phone number and asked him to come to his apartment. “He said he’d always been really drawn to me at the acting classes, but had stayed away because I was 12,” the man recalled. He alleged that they “started a sexual relationship that first visit, which mostly involved me f–king him.”
Additionally, The Guardian has reported that Old Vic, a renowned London theatre where Spacey performed, “paid no heed to allegations of groping and inappropriate sexual behavior by the actor.”
That Spacey would receive even a modicum of support from the entertainment industry is highly indicative of the rot which many claim has thrived in Hollywood’s midst for decades. If the allegations against Spacey are verified, it would be significant in terms of the larger culture of sexual abuse in Hollywood, and would no doubt throw others into question.
As late as yesterday, Slate published a report defending Spacey and incomprehensibly arguing that to characterize Spacey as a pedophile would ‘hurt the gay community.’ This report ignored the statements of many within this same gay community who have stated their concern and outrage regarding Spacey’s perceived attempts to deflect from accusations of abuse by announcing his homosexuality. Slate’s stance on the issue is particularly alarming given their role as a sponsor of the actors ‘Kevin Spacey Foundation.’
Shortly after allegations surfaced that Spacey had attempted sexually molest Anthony Rapp when the actor was 14, Hollywood insider Kim Richards, CEO of Allied Artists International, also appeared to make excuses for Spacey’s appalling behavior. Press reports indicate that Richards dismissed the abuse allegations as merely ‘acting on impulse’ via Twitter:
Such statements shocked many, as it appeared to support the exact culture of abuse that has been so widely disparaged during the ongoing fallout from the Weinstein scandal.
Sadly, even Kevin Spacey’s initial statement on the first allegations to emerge against him suggested that he was aware there were multiple ‘stories’ about him ‘out there.’ Like the recently accused Harvey Weinstein, Spacey is reported to be ‘seeking treatment’ in the wake of the abuse allegations made against him.
The allegations against Spacey are made more disturbing in light of his ties to billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, as well as his friendship with Bill Clinton. The Independent reports that Epstein “flew actor Kevin Spacey to Africa on his private jet as part of a charitable endeavor.”
Flight Logs from the infamous ‘Lolita Express’ trips made by Epstein show that Spacey attended such flights alongside former President Clinton. Spacey has also made numerous appearances at Clinton Foundation events and Clinton campaign fundraisers. Spacey was also reported by The BBC to have joined former President Obama during a visit to the Queen, alongside billionaire Richard Branson and others.
That yet another close Clinton associate would be accused of sexual abuses on the heels of the Weinstein scandal is highly concerning. Disobedient Media previously noted Weinstein’s close association with the Democratic Party and Hollywood establishment circles after a flood of allegations emerged stating that Weinstein had committed sexual assault against a mind boggling number of women.
Kevin Spacey’s foundation is also notably partnered with a number of influential media outlets, companies and individuals including Comcast NBCUniversal, Lockheed Martin, Netflix and The Washington Post. Supporters included City National Bank, Chevy and others. At the time of this writing, the Foundation’s website had been taken offline, though archives of its sponsors remain.
The latest allegations against Kevin Spacey are tragic not only because of the abuse which is alleged to have taken place, but also due to the continued support the actor has continued to receive from some corners of Hollywood and the media. The numerous allegations against Spacey should be taken no less seriously by the media and the public than those which were leveled against the now widely detested media mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Share this: Tweet
Print
More“My goal wasn’t to write an exposé, it was simply to understand Scientology.”
So says Lawrence Wright at the beginning of HBO's blockbuster documentary “Going Clear.” The film, which Wright adapted from his bestselling book of the same name, describes Scientology as a criminal cult that harasses former members who become critical of the church; physically and emotionally tortures some current ones; and once strong-armed the IRS into granting it tax-exempt status as a recognized religion. Beneath the sensational and harrowing stories, however, “Going Clear” amounts to a study of belief more broadly -- of “why people believe one idea rather than another,” as Wright puts it.
Advertisement:
One by one, former church members recount their involvement in the Church with a mix of shame, puzzlement and resignation. “I was really stupid,” says Academy Award-winner Paul Haggis, one of Scientology's most famous apostates. “I was part of this for 30 years before I spoke out. […] Why didn’t I do it earlier?” Others are even more self-critical: “Maybe my entire life has been a lie,” says Spanky Taylor, an ex-Scientologist who alleged that, as a pregnant mother, she was held in a “prison camp” and punished with grueling physical labor for objecting to the way the church “denied medical treatment to her boss.” Their embarrassment about their pasts becomes even easier to understand when Wright describes the church’s creation myth: A galactic overlord Xenu expelled hordes of people to a prison planet (Earth) 75 million years ago, dropped them into volcanoes, then dispersed their spirits (or “thetans”) with nuclear bombs. These spirits still possess humans to this day, and Scientologists expend a great deal of energy and money trying to exorcise them.
But “Going Clear” avoids the trap of incredulity. Those interviewed for the film, while eccentric, are accomplished, well spoken and, most of all, sincere. Parallel to their stories of abuse and warped belief are understandable explanations of their choices: Haggis explains that as a young man, worried about his relationships and anxious to get his start as a documentary filmmaker, he was partially seduced by Scientology’s reputation for advancing careers, and was comforted by their undogmatic facade. Indeed, the Church’s website still boasts that “[u]nlike religions with Judeo-Christian origins […] Scientology does not ask individuals to accept anything on faith alone.” As a curious and hopeful 21-year-old, he contributed a modest $50 to begin his training. Like many of those interviewed for “Going Clear,” he says that Scientology more resembled a self-help organization at first glance.
But, while there seems to be an unbridgeable gap between self-help and alien exorcisms, Scientology’s rigid, diagrammatic structure provides a clue to how one idea can lead to the other. According to the documentary, after signing up, a Scientologist embarks on something called “The Bridge,” a step-by-step course of spiritual advancement, through which one could eventually achieve a "Clear" state of mind. (“Every step to 'Clear' had a price tag,” notes the film’s narrator.) Along “The Bridge,” Scientologists attend compulsory and successive “auditing” sessions, which Wright describes resembling a sci-fi version of Freudian therapy. Scientologists discuss the most intimate details of their lives during auditing, details which the church records diligently -- and can later allegedly use for blackmail. It’s only after years of training, after they have told the church every private fact about themselves, that Scientologists hear about Xenu and humankind’s alien origins. Unsurprisingly, even after many years, Haggis and others still found the creation myth hard to stomach. Haggis even wondered if it was an “insanity test.”
Curiously, none of those interviewed in the film exited Scientology at that junction. As Haggis put it, “you have already paid for the next [session],” your social life centered around the church, and, besides, you weren't required to believe it. “If you were told [about Xenu the galactic overlord] on day one,” wonders the journalist Tony Ortega, “how many people would join?” He describes the Scientologist strategy as a “bait and switch.” But Scientology has perfected something more nuanced--a technique that separates the process of investing in belief from that of belief itself: By the time Scientologists are told about the creation myth, they have many persuasive emotional reasons to believe in it, or rather, to try to believe it.
In Philip Gourevich’s study of the Rwandan genocide, “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families,” he describes another case where acts proceed beliefs. When the Hutu Power movement led mass killings of ethnic Tutsis in the mid-'90s, the true measure of allegiance was not belief, but action. “Everyone was called to hunt the enemy,” says Theodore Nyilinkwara, a survivor interviewed for the book. If a Hutu was reluctant, the militias required him to attend massacres, then, later, to kill a Tutsi. “So this person who is not a killer is made to do it,” says Nyilinkwara. “And the next day it’s become a game for him. You don’t need to keep punishing him.” Once a person has killed for an idea, their ethical opinion of themselves relies on embracing that idea. Vicious, conspiratorial state radio broadcasts spoke of outlandish Tutsi plots against the Hutus that people readily believed because they partially justified the violence.
In the language of the Mafia, says Gourevitch, “a person who has become invested in the logic and practices of the gang is said to be owned by it.” When Jason Beghe, an actor and ex-Scientologist featured in “Going Clear,” describes the strange sensation of self-policing -- “the best traps are when you get a guy to keep himself in jail” -- he sounds remarkably like Nyilinkwara. Once a person has acted on a belief, they don’t need to be continually pressured. Ex-Scientologists who alleged that they were placed in “The Hole,” a holding facility in California where upper-level church members were held and beaten, found themselves actually fighting to stay there. If the FBI came to rescue them from what some described as a “prison camp,” says one of the captives, Tom De Vocht, they would have responded: “We’re doing this voluntarily. We like living in these conditions.”
Advertisement:
The technique is so effective that it appears to be at work on L. Ron Hubbard himself, the science fiction writer and founder of Scientology. According to his ex-wife Sara Northrup, he once cynically claimed that “the only way to make any real money was to start a religion.” But as his power over others grew, she says, “he began to believe that he was a savior, that he really was this god figure.” Over time, “he degenerated into a really paranoid and terrifying person.” “If he were just a fraud,” adds Wright, “at some point he would have just taken the money and run.” Marty Rathbun, a former high-ranking Scientologist, says that the current leader David Miscavige “has to believe because, if he looks at it rationally and sees that it is as I say, it will destroy him.” “He’s done a lot worse than I’ve done,” he adds.
Scientology’s persuasiveness is not in the logic of its beliefs but in its ability to control behavior. People believe in Xenu and thetans because it becomes exceedingly difficult not to in light of all they have committed to the church. At the close of “Going Clear,” Haggis reflects on his time within Scientology: “We lock up a portion of our own mind. We willingly put cuffs on. We willingly avoid things that could cause us pain if we just looked.” Each time Marty Rathbun is confronted with his past, he keeps “dying deaths. I don’t know how many more deaths I have left.”Max Kellerman finds it curious the Packers let Eddie Lacy walk to the Seahawks when Green Bay is depleted at running back. (1:01)
The Seattle Seahawks are giving Eddie Lacy financial incentive to hit his target weight.
Lacy's one-year contract with the Seahawks includes a $385,000 bonus that is tied to his weight, a league source told ESPN.
It is unclear what weight Lacy needs to maintain in order to earn the bonus, but Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said Tuesday that he'd like to see the former Green Bay Packers running back play in the 240s.
"I want him big. I want him big and tough and strong," Carroll said on The John Clayton Show on 710 ESPN Seattle. "But I want him in the best shape so that he can run at his best and be durable and handle the load -- 235, that's at the time he came out [of the draft], he was there.
"But he's developed. Into his [240s], he's really dangerous."
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Tuesday that Lacy weighed in at 267 pounds during one of his recent free-agent visits. Carroll indicated that Lacy has been somewhat limited in what he can do because he is still rehabbing from a season-ending ankle injury he suffered in Week 6.
Lacy's deal with the Seahawks is worth up to $5.55 million, a source told ESPN's Adam Schefter. The contract includes $2.865 million fully guaranteed, plus an additional $2.685 million in bonuses tied to how often Lacy is active on game days, his weight and his total rushing yards.
A second-round draft pick in 2013, Lacy posted back-to-back 1,100-yard seasons to start his pro career and was the NFL's Offensive Rookie of the Year in 2013.
But his weight became an issue in 2015, when Green Bay coach Mike McCarthy said Lacy needed to come back in better shape after rushing for just 758 yards. After trimming down last offseason, he appeared to regain at least some of the weight he lost while working out with P90X founder Tony Horton, though he was still effective.Verisimilitude is hardly a quality I would associate with my dreams, particularly when it comes to settings. But in this case my brain got it just right. I once drove the breadth of Kansas, and the landscape in my dream looked just like that: low-lying and treeless in all directions, with nothing to obstruct my imagined view of eight or 10 jet-black twisters writhing all about me like giant leeches.
Recieve emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events through a science lens. Email Address Zip Code Subscribe
There's no better place to set a tornado nightmare than in the Great Plains. Here, a massive funnel near Seymour, Texas, in 1979. © NOAA
Tornado heaven
Support Provided By Learn More
My mind had good reason to set my nightmare there. The Great Plains of the U.S. suffers more tornadoes—and more violent tornadoes—than anywhere else on Earth. Movies from The Wizard of Oz to Twister have drummed this fact into our collective unconscious, and every year we hear of killer cyclones that, tragically, have ravaged some midwestern town or trailer park.
But have you ever stopped to wonder why the Great Plains, and by extension the country as a whole, gets the lion's share of our annual planetary quota of tornadoes? I hadn't—mostly, I suspect, because I'm an East Coaster, and for us tornadoes lie in the realm of the freak occurrence. As we'll see, most people elsewhere in the world appear to feel similarly about tornadoes.
All told, about 1,200 tornadoes occur annually in the United States.
The answer, I found, is two-fold. It has to do with what you might expect (climatological conditions in the Great Plains are unparalleled for spawning tornadoes), but also with what might come as a surprise (very few nations even bother to record tornadoes). One expert I spoke with believes that even countries that report their worst windstorms may be underreporting by a factor of seven. And "tornadic events" that get reported as a single tornado in a country with a nonexistent damage-assessment system might, with a better such system, be found to have been 10 separate tornadoes. This makes assigning twister numbers by country even trickier.
The truth is, the U.S. very well may
not get three out of every four tornadoes that occur on Earth; it may just look that way.
The Great Plains climate cooks up the right ingredients for twisters. Above, a graceful strand touches down near Union City, Oklahoma, in 1973. © NOAA
Accident of geography
The Great Plains has been likened to a funnel factory. It possesses all the ingredients needed to produce, as one expert put it to me, "some hellacious thunderstorms"—the parents of tornadoes. In spring and early summer, warm, moist air blowing in from the Gulf of Mexico can become trapped beneath a "lid" of hot, dry air gusting from the high desert region of the Southwest and, above that, cold, dry air sweeping over the Rockies. Like a lid on a pot of boiling water, this "convection cap" keeps the warm air from rising. The pressure builds, until a cold front or other boundary between air masses moves in and weakens the cap. Quite suddenly, the warm, humid air can burst forth, billowing upwards at up to 100 miles per hour and swelling into 50,000-foot-tall thunderstorms in minutes.
Some of these thunderstorms begin rotating through most of their depth. (This happens because of wind shear, a dramatic change in wind speed or direction over a very short distance.) Called "supercells," these storms serve as ideal generators of tornadoes, from those that scrape off a few shingles to those rare, mile-wide monsters that leave nothing in their wake but cleared concrete foundations. "No other place on the planet has the source of warm, moist air on the equatorward side and a wide, high range of mountains extending from north to south on the west side," says Harold Brooks, a tornado expert at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma. "The Andes aren't as wide as the Rockies, and the Himalayas don't extend very far from north to south."
Tornadoes regularly touch down in places far from Tornado Alley. In June 1998, a twister demolished this house near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Liz Roll/FEMA News Photo
While the Great Plains gets the bulk of American tornadoes, other parts of the country witness them as well. Florida sees more twisters than Oklahoma, though they're far weaker. Cyclones also strike Colorado, and occasionally a ripsnorter will touch down in other states. In 1979, I was living in Hartford, Connecticut, when a tornado raked through nearby Windsor Locks. That tornado is fifth on a list of tornadoes that have caused at least $200 million in damage (in inflation-adjusted 1999 dollars). All 50 states, in fact, have experienced twisters.
All told, about 1,200 tornadoes occur annually in the United States. The entire rest of the world collectively reports just 200 to 300 every year. Yet only in this country is the number of reported tornadoes roughly equal to the number of actual tornadoes in any given year. The U.S. began officially collecting tornado reports back in 1953 and rating tornadoes using the Fujita Scale 20 years later. No other nation has such a robust or long-standing system.
As a sign of how lackluster tornado reporting is elsewhere, can you name a single country outside the U.S. where tornadoes regularly occur? I couldn't before starting this article. In fact, I couldn't remember hearing of a single tornado that ever struck anywhere else in the world. I'm sure I've heard of some, but they didn't stick in my mind.
Though outdated and far from comprehensive |
Both the Boeing “scandal” and the Afghan sales, however, are basically rounding errors in a $40 billion annual enterprise. That’s down from $46 billion at its wartime peak, Harnitchek said, and headed down to $37 or even $35 billion this fiscal year. The $2 billion uncertainty reflects the unpredictabilities of operational demand, especially as the US figures out its post-2014 commitment in Afghanistan. Over the Future Years Defense Plan period from 2014 to 2019, he said, the DLA expects to save the Defense Department $13 billion.
That brings us back to the infrastructure and inventory cuts mentioned at the opening of this article. Over the last two years or so, “we’ve taken.. about five of our $15 billon dollars in inventory out of the system,” Harnitchek said. “If you don’t need the inventory, you certainly don’t need the World War II-vintage buildings that it goes in, so….we’ve taken the equivalent of about 45 football fields of covered storage out. That’s warehouses that are coming down.”
(If you wince at the image of the government tearing down taxpayer-funded buildings, remember the words “sunk cost” and that these aging warehouses can be expensive to keep up).
DLA is getting more efficient as well as smaller, Harnitchek said. Already the agency has cut average time to award a contract by about 35 percent, and the goal is to double that figure. That requires taking the risk of trusting government employees to do their jobs: “We have gotten a little overbearing in terms of contract review,” Harnitchek said. His personnel are trained professionals, he said, “[so] we’re taking out a lot of what we think is unnecessary review time.”
Unlike other defense agencies, though, DLA doesn’t need Congress to change the law to reduce the layers of review, Harnitchek said. “I don’t really need anything in terms of legislative relief that will make me any more effective or any more efficient,” he said. “It’s really all up to us now.”Navjot Sidhu lashes out at Badal govt. after withdrawal of security cover
October 14, 2014 | By Sikh Siyasat Bureau
Chandigarh: Former BJP MP Navjot Sidhu today claimed that his security cover has been withdrawn by Punjab government. He said that Punjab’s ruling party and BJP ally Shiromani Akali Dal (Badal) was playing “petty” politics and hit him “below the belt”.
Navjot Sidhu who has open differences with SAD (Badal) leadership has been attacking Badal Dal during his election campaigns in Haryana. Withdrawal of Navjot Sidhu’s security cover comes close on the heels of his attack on Badal Dal in poll-bound Haryana, where it is in alliance with INLD.
“There were three security personnel provided to me for security. All of them have been withdrawn,” Navjot Sidhu reportedly told a news agency.
“I will not shy away from saying the truth and will not buckle under any pressure. Those who walk the path of truth have nothing to fear. If they believe in playing petty politics, what one can say,” the former MP from Amritsar said.
Navjot Sidhu’s wife Dr. Navjot Sidhu, BJP MLA from Amritsar (East) and Chief Parliamentary Secretary in the SAD-BJP Punjab government was also critical of the decision of the government.
She said that Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and his Deputy, Sukhbir Singh Badal will be directly responsible if anything happens to her husband.
“Earlier today, a security personnel attached with him got a call from his higher ups that all three personnel should immediately withdrawn from the security duty after which they left,” she said.
Tweet
Related Topics: BJP, Navjot Sidhu, Punjab Politics, Shiromani Akali Dal (Badal)Okay so it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these (3 weeks? a whole month? o.o) but here we go, back once again with a Locals Report.
This week’s tournament had 27 players. I used Kantai Collection for the first time in tournament, a deck which I’m sure not a lot of people knew I even had, considering I normally spam Sinon every week. The deck definitely performed, and I ended up going 5-0 to be the only undefeated of the tournament.
As usual, the list of decks used as well as the players who topped:
Kantai Collection (JP) – Blue/Green – Haguro Kai Ni focus (Hatsukaze Choice)
Kantai Collection (JP) – Red/Yellow – Haruna/Tenryuu/Tatsuta
Nisekoi (JP) – Red/Blue/Yellow – Pendant Choice
Nisekoi (JP) – Green/Blue – Freefresh Kosaki Choice
Love Live (JP) – Red/Yellow – Umi Waifu
Love Live (EN) – Yellow/Green – Hanayo healer/ Nico shoot
Love Live (EN) – Yellow/Red – µ’s healer/ TD Honker
Project Diva f – Yellow/Green – Soundless Voice
Project Diva f – Yellow/Green – Soundless Voice
Terraformars – Red/Yellow – Akari/Adolf
Terraformars – Yellow/Green – Adolf/Asimov/Shoukichi
Kill la Kill – Red/Blue – Ryuko/Satsuki
Kill la Kill – Green/Yellow – Ragyo/Nui/Mako
Madoka – Green/Red/Blue – Godoka/ Sayaka heal/ Kyoko heal/ Devil Homura
Fairy Tail (JP) – Red/Yellow/Green
Devil Survivor 2 – Yellow/Blue
Da Capo – Blue/Green/Red – Suginami Soul Rush
Phantom – Green/Red/Yellow – Drei healer/Elen early summon
Shin Chan – Red/Green – Red burner/ Green shooter
Disgaea – Yellow/Red/Green – +2 Soul Rush
Sword Art Online – Blue – Mono-Sinon (EN build, no 1/1 PR)
Milky Holmes – Yellow/Green – Melodia+Marine
Persona (EN) – Red – Yukiko
Bakemonogatari – Red/Green – Hitagi/Kanbaru
Little Busters – Yellow/Green/Blue – standard build (1x +2 Soul, 3x 2k1s)
Angel Beats – Yellow/Red
Rewrite – Red/Blue/Yellow
And today’s Top 4:
Me – Kantai Collection (B/G) 5-0 Love Live (R/Y Umi Waifu) 4-1 Love Live (Y/G) 4-1 Phantom (G/R/Y) 4-1
The build of Kantai Collection I used today was something I started messing around with like 3-4 weeks ago. It revolves around spending the level 0 and level 1 game filtering and fixing my hand to get cards for the level 2. Specifically, the cards I want to have in my hand going into level 2 are as many copies of Haguro Kai Ni and her Pants CX. Her CX Combo allows me to search my deck for free, and then afterwards I can sacrifice a Haguro Kai Ni to act as a 3000-power field counter. The deck’s overall strategy is hand fixing early and compression later.
ROUND 1 vs. Love Live (Yellow/Red)
I think this guy was newer to Weiss; his deck mainly consisted of TD cards with some additions from the booster set (a couple µ’s healers, a few 1/0 Elis, some other stuff, nothing huge). His overall power level was higher than mine until Level 2 (which is what’s supposed to happen with my Kantai deck; its level 1 game is poop) but once I hit Level 2, I played a 2 copies of Haguro Kai Ni and her pants CX and started searching my deck for late-game. I ended up compressing my deck hard enough that I cancelled a whole bunch and didn’t make didn’t make it to Level 3, and won the game at 2-6.
ROUND 2 vs. Bakemonogatari
This game was WAYYYY fast. I found out after the game that my opponent opened four climaxes (not like I would’ve known that though). Anyways, the first few turns went a bit slow; I hit Level 1 first. Then when I played a +2 Soul, I hit him for like 10 damage, from Level 0 to 2. The following turn I hit him from Level 2 to 3. It was over by like turn 5 or 6.
ROUND 3 vs. Terraformars (Yellow/Green)
Another game that went extremely fast. You can pretty much copy paste the previous game onto this game; I played +2 Soul, they didn’t cancel. oops. Also on his last turn of the game, my opponent triggered three CX in a row, after only going back with like 6.
oops harder.
ROUND 4 vs. Love Live (Umi Waifu)
Umi Waifu has potential to be a really solid waifu deck, if not a solid deck overall. It has access to two different gate CXs, an awesome plussing brainstorm, and a good Level 2 game with cards like Happy Maker Umi. However, my opponent was missing some of the above cards that make Umi so great (most importantly the brainstorm).
As a result, the game swung in my favor when my opponent started to run out of cards. First off, my deck runs Hatsukaze, which would shut down any Gate CXs that he would trigger (but he didn’t end up triggering any of them anyway), also he was not able to obtain any of the Umi brainstorm for his deck, so that’s another way to gain cards not there. Also not present in his deck was a 1/1 Umi from SIF2 which has a CX combo with a gate to salvage on-reverse. A lot of missed opportunities in the build. Mainly it went for a power game with a 1/1 Umi that gains +500 for every other red character, and the 3/2 Happy Maker. However, as he ran out of cards fairly quickly, he wasn’t able to keep up the damage output, and eventually lost the game.
We talked for a bit after the game about what direction the deck could go. Cool guy, I enjoyed talking to him. Apparently this was also his first tournament, and he ended up going 4-1 for 2nd place. Good stuff 🙂
ROUND 5 vs. Milky Holmes (Melodia+Marine)
AUGHHHHH I was the only undefeated person going into Round 5, so I couldn’t split q_q I mean… I DID win, but having the option to split is nice lol.
So anyways back to this game. The Melodia deck’s main advantage is its strong early game with Melodias and the 1/0 Marine whose effect mimics Marker Asuna. My opponent didn’t draw any copies of it (the 1/0 Marine), though, so that part of the early game strategy was immediately shut down. Going into my Level 2 game, I had 3 Haguro Kai Nis… AND NO PANTS CX. I had no better option to play, so I just dropped all three onto the board. Worst case scenario, they can use their Field Counter abilities on each other to keep at least a couple of them on the board and maybe I draw into a Pants (I never drew a Pants RIP in pepperonis).
The game ended in a rather interesting way, though. I intended to use a Clock Shooter (Hyuuga Kai) as part of my game winning play, but before I could attack with my clock shooter as the last attack of the turn, I had him at 3-5. He had a Level 3 in play across from my shooter, and I had a shooter with 4 soul (I played a +2 Soul that turn). Then I figured out that the last card of my deck was a trigger, and sided for 2 for exact game (LOL side attacking with Clock Shooters, next level tactics).
And that concludes this week’s tournament report!
Be sure to look out for a deck profile for my Kancolle deck on my youtube channel at http://www.youtube.com/Peshkatz as I will be uploading it soon™.
Thanks for reading! See you next time!
AdvertisementsMy family and I took a day trip to an amusement park and it wasn't until the next morning that I found a small package wedged between the front door/storm door. I was so excited to receive anything from my secret santa because my last exchange was a bust and I wasn't able to be rematched. In the box was a nice selection of teas in pretty tins that stack on each other. I love tea, and I can't wait to reuse the tins to store some of my art supplies.
When I came home from work that evening there was a big surprise waiting for me: two more packages had arrived! As if I couldn't be more excited, inside one box was a necklace inspired by Game of Thrones! DID I MENTION THE GIFT EXCHANGE I DIDN'T RECEIVE ANYTHING WAS GAME OF THRONES?!? I nearly started crying I was so happy! The necklace is fit for a Khaleesi, it says "My Sun and Stars/Moon of my Life". Even more amazing, the last box contained two of the books from the Game of Thrones series A Song of Ice and Fire! I recently started rereading the first book, so now I'm set for the summer and my family's week at the shore :)
Super Secret Santa, you restored my faith in gift exchanges and made me very very happy! And a special thank you to your two partners in crime, your wife and your assistant, they have good taste!UK broadcaster ITV is introducing a micropayment system for its online TV-on-demand service, in a move designed to counteract a fall in advertising revenue.
ITV reported its first fall in TV ad revenue in a year and a half back in May, and it has said that TV ad revenues will be down 2% in July and 4% in August.
As the Guardian reports today, ITV has announced plans to launch various payment systems to access ITV Player from early 2012 with ITV Chief Executive, Adam Crozier, saying:
“Our pay mechanism will launch at the turn of the year, we have picked our partners. We are working on the consumer proposition, what people are prepared to pay for and what will work and won’t work.”
It’s expected that a number of different payment models will be rolled-out in the first few months of 2012. Whilst ad revenue in September is expected to be roughly the same as last year, ITV has announced that total revenue is up 4% this year, reaching £1.03bn for the first half of 2011. ITV’s broadcasting and online division constituted £887m of the total figure.
More specifically, ITV’s online revenue increased by a third year-on-year, with ITV Player recording a 19% increase in average monthly unique users, and “long form video views” (whole TV shows watched on ITV Player) rose two-thirds to 180m.
We reported yesterday that ITV Player is now available on some Freesat boxes, and the broadcaster is clearly looking at ways to bring its product to a wider audience and optimize its potential revenue streams. It has been experimenting with various online viewing models, such as register-to-view trials for Champions League football matches, among other popular programmes.
ITV first discussed the possibility of introducing micropayments back in 2009, with Director of Group Development and strategy, Carolyn Fairbairn, saying: “Micropayments are absolutely on our agenda. We are part-funding the Digital Britain research into the viability of this.”
These plans were further outlined last August, when Adam Crozier said they hoped to have something in place by the end of 2011: “We need to invest online – our site isn’t as good as some of our competitors. We need to start to find a way to develop pay online and look to launch micropayments.”
But the desire for a ‘softer launch’ means that this will be put back to 2012. Crozier says:
“We originally said there was a possibility of doing it then [in the fourth quarter]. From a technical point of view we could do it but we want the consumer proposition right. We want a softer launch.”
ITV is forecasting TV ad revenue to be “broadly flat” come September, compared with the same period last year, whilst the overall ad revenue across the third quarter will be “slightly down”.
Read next: European venture capital outperforming the US, report claimsHoms Palestinian Camp, SYRIA — Jihadists are entering Syria at an accelerating pace, according to Syrian, UNWRA, and Palestinian officials, as well as residents in the refugee camps here. For the estimated 7,000 imported foreign fighters, Palestinian camps are seen as optimal locales for setting up bases across Syria.
“Syria’s Palestinian camps have become theaters of war,” said UNWRA Commissioner Filippo Grandi.
The Syrian people compassionately host 10 official UN-mandated Palestinian camps, along with three unofficial ones, whose populations total at least 230,000. Eight of these are “Nakba” (“catastrophe”) camps, organized soon after Palestinians were expelled from their homes in 1948, while two, Qabr Essit and Dera’a (emergency camp), are “Naksa” (“day of setback”) camps. The latter were set up in 1967 as a result of the internationally condemned Zionist-colonial aggression against the two sister-Arab-nationalist regions—Palestine’s West Bank and Syria’s Golan Heights.
And it was on the Ides of March of the year 2011 we saw an explosion of violence near one of these camps, the Dera’a camp established in 1950, in the south near the Jordanian border.
But first, perhaps a simple listing of the camps, along with their populations and dates of establishment, would be in order here:
1950, Dera’a, 5,916
1967, Dera’a (Emergency), 5,536
1950, Hama, 7,597
1949, Homs, 13,825
1948, Jaramana, 5,007
1950, Khan Dunoun, 8,603
1949, Khan Eshieh, 15,731
1948, Neirab, 17,994
1967, Qabr Essit, 16,016
1948, Sbeineh, 19,624
1955-6, Latakia camp, 6,534 registered refugees
1957, Yarmouk Camp, 112,550 registered refugees
1962, Ein Al-Tal, 4,329 registered refugees
As of October 8, seven of the camps—two in the north and five in the Damascus area and in the south of Syria—are presently with their throats under the jackboot of foreign Salafi-Jihadists. These jihadist cells moved against the camps early in the current crisis for purposes of forced recruitment, to benefit from a supply of noncombatant human shields, to shakedown the residents and take over UNWRA facilities, and to make use of the erstwhile “refugee camp security zones.” All these steps were precursory to the setting up of military bases from which to launch operations aimed at toppling the current government of the Syrian Arab Republic.
How do the jihadists infiltrate the camps?
How is it possible that more than half of the Palestinian camps in Syria not only fell, but did so, regrettably, without all that much resistance, to the point at which we see them now—dominated by largely foreign jihadists who continue to impose their unwanted extremist religious beliefs on a largely progressive secular Palestinian community? It is a subject currently much discussed here.
This observer has deduced from a number of conversations—with former and current camp residents, as well as members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, Palestinian NGO’s, and also with academics—that there is a ‘model of occupation’ metastasizing in Syria in a manner strikingly similar to what we saw six years ago at Nahr al Bared Palestinian camp near Tripoli Lebanon. The stories we hear today are quite similar to those from among the nearly 30,000 refugees at Nahr al Bared who were forced to flee to the nearby Badawi camp or to Lebanon’s ten other camps—reports related to this observer in visits to Nahr al Bared in May of 2007.
What we hear today in Syria bears an almost uncanny likeness. For instance, one lady, whose family is from Safad in occupied Palestine, explained: “First they (the intruders) appeared only a few in number. We noticed them and that some had ‘foreign’ accents and wore conservative clothes, most had beards. They were polite and friendly. Then more arrived, a few followed by women and children. They stayed to themselves at first and they began using the local mosque—even being welcomed at first by local sheiks who sometimes expressed admiration for the sincerity and devoutness. Then some of them began to preach their versions of the Koran, and at some point their gentle teaching became more strident, and soon these men were commenting on how some of the Palestinian women dressed in an un-Islamic fashion and even lectured young women about modesty and that they must change their ways, including stop smoking, and to leave public meetings if they were the only women present, and wear a full hijab.”
The lady’s sister interrupted: “Then guns appeared and some of the men appeared to be very skilled when they would use, for example, a school or playground to train. They were so serious and seemed to be in a trance of some kind. There was no possibility to talk or reason with them. All they seemed to want was martyrdom! Some actually believe that Syria was Palestine and they were here to liberate Al Quds!”
Upon some in the camps it began to dawn that the newcomers intended imposing their ideas, and that they fully intended that camp residents should submit to “pure Islam,” as they view it. Some resistance began to jell from camp residents, but the camp popular committees did not have the power to confront them, and a few actually joined them. The fighting with Syrian government troops accelerated the takeover process, and soon the camp residents were presented with a demand: join the gunmen and “liberate” the camps.
With respect to Ahmad Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command—and no offense meant to them and their officials, with whom this observer met in July and early August—several of their best Palestinian patriot commanders jumped ship in protest against the plan to “liberate” Yarmouk. At the same time, many of the PFLP-GC rank-and-file fighters split and joined the opposition for various reasons, including better pay and wanting to be on the presumed winning side. That being said, however, camp residents overwhelmingly rejected the PFLP-GC “defense” project, and insisted that their camp was neutral, that it was to be maintained as a safe zone for its residents, who were guests in Syria pending their return to still-occupied Palestine.
Again, this chain of events is singularly similar to what we saw (too late as it turned out) in Lebanon’s Nahr al Bared, a process which, like the one unfolding now in Syria, was accelerated by the civil war raging here.
There is fear that the Syrian army will sooner or later attack and destroy the camps in order to confront the rebel militias—similar to what the Lebanese army did during the 75 days of shelling in 2007. At that time, it took vengeance on the camp and demolished it in an unjustifiable frenzy of shelling for the criminal attack and killing of some Lebanese troops, an attack that had been carried out by camp invaders, not Palestinians. For Palestinians in Syria, it is the all too familiar fate of outsiders entering and seeking to control their camps, coupled with the threat of a host army attacking them to confront the invaders. The residents are once more killed or forced to flee and their homes are destroyed.
Here once more comes to mind the cliché: Where is the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic Council, the EU, or the UN? Where’s Waldo?
In order to gain control of the camps in Syria, two main processes appear to be made use of by the al Qaeda affiliates. One is what this observer labels the “Nahr al Bared model”. A Popular Committee member from Yarmouk, who just barely escaped the camp before his home was destroyed by a direct hit mortar round, put it this way: “Some come bearing gifts. They usually set up small problem solving centers. Maybe a little cash, offers of medical aid, bread distribution, pledges of camp security, these sorts of currently absent social services.”The local community in Ottumwa is rallying together to help a young boy after all of his fishing gear was stolen from him.
Just a couple of days ago, 15-year-old Michael Clark was fishing in a creek when a car pulled up, stole his equipment and drove off.
Michael says two bags and a fishing pole, totaling to nearly $200, was taken from him.
Savannah Archer is a friend of the family. She says she first heard about Michael’s story through a Facebook post. Since then, Archer set up a Go Fund Me page, asking people to donate and help out the boy.
Archer says so far about 10 to 15 people have donated items such as tackle boxes and fishing poles to Michael, and the Go Fund Me page has raised over $100.
“I mean it’s absolutely amazing. A lot of people don’t even this kid and they’re stepping up to help which is really cool," Archer said.
Archer says a lot of the donors have been people who fish with Michael.
“It’s really grateful to have everybody supporting me and things like that. And I can’t wait to get new fishing stuff and feel normal again about fishing," Michael said.
CLICK HERE for Michael's Go Fund Me page.Fans diving into the secondary market for NFL tickets will have to pay up for a shot at seeing the San Francisco 49ers and Seattle Seahawks at CenturyLink Field in Week 2.
2013 Cheapest NFL Tickets on StubHub
As of Monday, that game carried a $255 price tag for the cheapest ticket available through StubHub, a seat labeled "Upper Level Corner 300" -- not exactly prime real estate, but at least you can say you were there. None of the other NFL regular-season games carried a higher lowest price. Oh, and if you've got an extra $11,000 lying around, someone with four lower-level seats to the 49ers-Seahawks game will accommodate you.
Green Bay Packers home games filled the second through sixth overall spots, as the chart shows.
No other game involving an NFC West team ranked higher than 18th. The 49ers' games against Jacksonville (in London) and New Orleans tied for 18th with a $129 price for the cheapest ticket.
New Orleans at Seattle ranks 22nd at $120, with Green Bay at San Francisco two spots lower at $113. The Seahawks' game at San Francisco ($101) was just below a Tennessee Titans game at Seattle ($102).
These figures do not necessarily reflect what the typical ticket costs.
For example, Arizona's eight home games filled out the bottom eight spots, with cheapest "tickets" going for between $6 and $8. But when I tried to view those seats, I discovered someone was selling parking passes, not actual game tickets. The cheapest tickets for a Cardinals home game were about $30 apiece.
Note: Thanks to Brad from Seattle for tipping me off via the NFC West mailbag regarding where the 49ers-Seahawks game ranked. And if he was the guy offering the $255 ticket, very clever of him.
Followup note: As Sam mentioned in the comments section below, the lowest prices for some games were not displayed from the ESPN.com schedule page. I did not check those games manually. In some cases, the lowest prices could have been high enough to earn a spot on the chart.Fact No. 1: The Cleveland Browns desperately need a starting cornerback.
Fact No. 2: Alabama's Dee Milliner is the consensus top-rated cornerback in the draft.
Opinion: The Browns should trade out of the No. 6 overall pick even if Milliner is available.
Obviously, there's more to the Browns' first-round pick than filling a need and taking the best player available. It makes all of the sense in the world for the Browns to select Milliner. The argument here is whether it's the smartest move.
When a team takes a player in the top 10, the expectation is you're getting a game-changer. That was the thought when Cleveland landed running back Trent Richardson a year ago. Milliner doesn't have that same cachet, according to ESPN NFL draft expert Todd McShay.
Of the recent cornerbacks to get drafted in the top 10, Milliner is "a slight notch below" the likes of Joe Haden, Patrick Peterson and Morris Claiborne. Haden and Claiborne are better in man-to-man coverage than Milliner, and Peterson has more freakish ability. The biggest question for me is Milliner's playmaking ability. Although he's known for his aggressive play, he finished with six career interceptions, which hardly blows anyone away.
"With Milliner, he has average ball skills," McShay said. "I've seen a bunch of plays on tape where he's there and bats the ball down. Claiborne would've gone up and made the play."
McShay still believes Milliner is a top-10 pick. He's the only elite defensive back in this draft. McShay acknowledged that Milliner is probably more well-rounded than Haden, Peterson and Claiborne.
But given the Browns' needs beyond cornerback, the Browns would be better served to trade back and acquire a second-round pick. (The Browns used their 2013 second-rounder on wide receiver Josh Gordon in last year's supplemental draft.) Last year, the St. Louis Rams received a second-round pick from the Dallas Cowboys in moving from No. 6 to No. 14.
When fans began asking about the Browns' chances of trading back, I didn't think it would happen because I didn't see a player in the top 10 another team would covet. I underestimated the left tackle draft class and the Browns' fortuitous draft position.
The Kansas City Chiefs are expected to take the top left tackle in Texas A&M's Luke Joeckel with the No. 1 overall pick. The Detroit Lions are projected by many to select the second-best offensive tackle, Central Michigan's Eric Fisher, at No. 5 (Milliner is also an option for the Lions at this spot). If both offensive tackles are gone in the top five, the Browns find themselves with prime real estate at No. 6.
It's widely presumed the Arizona Cardinals are targeting Oklahoma offensive tackle Lane Johnson. That means any team wanting a top-tier left tackle -- namely San Diego at No. 11 and Miami at No. 12 -- will need to make a deal with the Browns in order to move one spot ahead of the Cardinals.
There's no debating that the Browns need a cornerback. Cleveland didn't re-sign last year's starter, Sheldon Brown, and backup Buster Skrine had more penalties than passes defensed last season. According to ESPN Stats & Information, the Browns allowed 22 touchdowns to opposing wide receivers last year (tied for second-most in the NFL), although that may be a reflection of a lack of pass rush as well.
If the Browns trade down in the first round, they still could get one of the top corners, such as Xavier Rhodes. AP Photo/J Pat Carter
So, why should the Browns trade down if Milliner is available? The depth at cornerback in this draft gives the Browns the option of dropping to the middle of the first round and still getting a starter-caliber cornerback like Florida State's Xavier Rhodes or Washington's Desmond Trufant. The Browns also would have a shot at getting LSU pass-rusher Barkevious Mingo, who is reportedly high on the team's draft board, if they slide back to No. 11 or No. 12.
The key to this deal is picking up an additional second-round pick. The Browns can use that to upgrade any number of starting spots, from free safety (Eric Hagg) to inside linebacker (Craig Robertson) to tight end (Jordan Cameron) to left guard. (Jason Pinkston is trying to return from blood clots in his lungs.) If the Browns decided to take Mingo in the first round, they can find a quality corner in the second round, whether it's Mississippi State's Johnthan Banks, Boise State's Jamar Taylor or SE Louisiana's Robert Alford. Teams don't need a pair of elite cornerbacks to win in this league. Look at the Baltimore Ravens, who captured the Super Bowl while starting Cary Williams and Corey Graham at cornerback.
There's also a chance the Browns could select a quarterback in the second round, such as Florida State's EJ Manuel. He has been compared to Cam Newton, which may interest new Browns coach Rob Chudzinski if he wants to run his Panthers offense in Cleveland.
The decision to trade out of the No. 6 overall pick will be tougher if either pass-rusher Dion Jordan of Oregon or Ezekiel Ansah is on the board. Both project to be better 3-4 outside linebackers than Jabaal Sheard, who is converting from defensive end.
And it wouldn't be easy to pass on Milliner, either. The Browns need a cornerback after not picking up a top one in free agency. But Cleveland has a lot of needs, which require a lot of picks. The best decision the Browns can make at No. 6 is to trade down.Tangy, salty green olives replace much of the fat normally found in traditional hummus. If you like olives and hummus, you’ll love this low-fat green olive hummus.
If you are beginning to think my family lives on hummus, you’re very close to being right. We use hummus for just about everything around here: a snack with veggies and crackers, a salad topping, a sandwich filling, and dinner with pitas, tabouli, and other Middle Eastern dishes. We love hummus.
We also love olives: Kalamata olives, green olives, and those jumbo black olives that my husband swears have no taste (but E and I love them anyway).
So you won’t be surprised to hear that green olive hummus is our very favorite type of hummus. I don’t make it often, because olives are high in sodium, but when I do, it doesn’t last very long.
This recipe uses less tahini because the olives contain fat and cuts down on the spices so that the olives carry the flavor. If you like olives as much as we do, you’ll love this hummus!
Want More Hummus?
I have about 20 hummus recipes and recipes that use hummus. Find them all here!
Print 5 from 1 vote Add to Recipe BoxGo to Recipe Box Green Olive Hummus Green olives give a salty tang to hummus without adding as much fat as traditional versions. Omit the tahini if you want to reduce the fat even more. Prep Time 10 minutes Blending Time 2 minutes Total Time 10 minutes Servings 6 servings Author Susan Voisin Ingredients 3 large cloves garlic
2 cans chickpeas (or 3 cups cooked chickpeas,) rinsed and drained
juice of one lemon
1/2 cup green olives stuffed with pimentos (about 10-12 olives depending on size)
2 tablespoons water or vegetable broth
1 tablespoon tahini optional
1/4 teaspoons sumac optional
1/8 teaspoons cayenne pepper
salt to taste
5-6 more olives Instructions Chop the garlic in the food processor. Add the chickpeas and lemon juice, and coarsely chop. Add the green olives, water or broth, tahini, and seasonings, and process until everything is mixed. (This will not be a smooth type of hummus, but all ingredients should be well-distributed.)
Taste for saltiness, and add salt if needed (the olives make it pretty salty already.) Process to blend in the salt, and then add the remaining 5-6 olives. Pulse a few times just to barely chop the olives. Serve with crackers, pita bread, or crudités or as a sandwich filling. Notes A serving, about 1/2 cup, is 1 Smart Point on Weight Watchers Freestyle program. Makes about 3 cups.A serving, about 1/2 cup, is 1 Smart Point on Weight Watchers Freestyle program. Nutrition Facts Green Olive Hummus Amount Per Serving Calories 124 Calories from Fat 36 % Daily Value* Total Fat 4g 6% Saturated Fat 0g 0% Sodium 121mg 5% Potassium 190mg 5% Total Carbohydrates 18g 6% Dietary Fiber 5g 20% Sugars 3g Protein 5.5g 11% * Percent Daily Values are based on a 2000 calorie diet. Tried this recipe? Post a photo and mention @susanffvk or tag #fatfreevegan
Please pin and share!American actress
Lyndsy Marie Fonseca (born January 7, 1987) is an American actress.[1] She began her career by appearing as Colleen Carlton on the CBS daytime soap opera The Young and the Restless, on which she starred between 2001 and 2005. Thereafter, she had a series of other recurring roles, including Penny Mosby on the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother, Donna on HBO's Big Love, and Dylan Mayfair on the fourth season of the ABC television series Desperate Housewives.
From 2010 to 2013, Fonseca starred as Alex Udinov on The CW's Nikita and Angie Martinelli on ABC's Marvel's Agent Carter from 2015 to 2016. Fonseca has also appeared in a variety of film roles, including Jenny in Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) and Katie Deauxma in Kick-Ass (2010) and its 2013 sequel.
Early life [ edit ]
Fonseca was born in Oakland, California, the daughter of Lima Lynn (née Bergmann)[2][better source needed] and James Victor Fonseca.[1] |
Shevardnadze seemed an improbable reformer. But he co-authored the liberating policy of glasnost and perestroika and forced its adoption by the unwilling Soviet hierarchy.
I twice interviewed Shevardnadze in Moscow: he was determined to sweep away the communist system and end the Cold War. We used to call him “Chevvy Eddy.” His quick wit and sardonic humor made him very likeable. I asked him if he might consider becoming president of an independent Georgia – which he later did until overthrown by the US-backed 2003 “rose revolution.”
ORDER IT NOW
Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I walked through the just abandoned GFSG headquarters in Wünsdorf, near Berlin. It was a scene of utter desolation: broken windows, phones and plumbing ripped out of the walls, secret files blowing in the wind. The mighty Red Army had gone. As a veteran cold war warrior, I found it incredible that an empire could disappear so quickly. Just a few regiment of Soviet soldiers and tanks, I mused, could have stopped the East German uprising.
In secret, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze agreed to a deal with US President George H.W. Bush and his senior strategy officials: the Soviet Union would pull out of Eastern Europe and the Baltic. In exchange, the US vowed not to advance NATO into Eastern Europe or anywhere near Russia’s borders.
Equally important, Gorbachev refused to use force to keep the USSR together.
The Soviet leaders believed they had an ironclad deal. They did not.
The next three US administrations – Clinton, Bush II, and Obama – violated the original sphere of influence accord and began advancing US power east towards Russia’s borders. The most recent NATO foray was the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian government, a ham-handed act that nearly sparked World War III.
For imperial-minded Washington, the temptation to kick Russia while it was down and gobble up its former dominion was irresistible. Gorbachev was mocked in western power circles – and by many angry Russians – as a foolish idealist: “the Soviet Jimmy Carter.”
Today, 25 years after the fall of the Soviet imperium, US promises have been revoked. Washington appears determined to undermine the Russian Federation and further dismantle it. Washington sees Russia as a has-been, a minor power unworthy of respect or amity.
The Russians have actually be told to stop complaining because the Gorbachev-Bush deal was not put in writing, only oral. A naïve oversight by the Russians?
From retirement, Gorbachev bitterly watches all he strove for turns to ashes as his countrymen blame him for destroying the Soviet Union. Shevardnadze died in Georgia last July. The Cold War is back, to the joy of the triumphant Republicans in Washington.
Soon after the wall fell, I recall writing that unless the western allies and the Soviets came to a firm agreement of spheres of influence and a neutral zone in Middle Europe and the Baltic that a dangerous series of clashes was inevitable. We are now there.DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran opened on Sunday a $1 billion extension of its southeastern Chabahar port which Tehran hopes will help the country become a key transit route to land-locked Afghanistan and Central Asia, competing with a nearby Pakistani port.
President Hassan Rouhani inaugurated the expansion, carried out with an investment of $1 billion including $235 million from India, which has more than tripled the port’s capacity to 8.5 million tonnes a year, state television reported.
India has committed $500 million to the Chabahar port on the Gulf of Oman which is Iran’s closest to the Indian Ocean and would allow it to bypass rival Pakistan. But New Delhi has proceeded cautiously at a time when the U.S. administration has taken an aggressive new approach toward Tehran.
In October, India sent its first consignment of wheat to Afghanistan through Chabahar, located about 140 km (88 miles) from Pakistan’s Gwadar port which is being developed with Chinese help.By William Brown
China surprised many Washington pundits by signing on in February to what looks like fairly tough trade sanctions on North Korea. Most importantly, it agreed to put a halt to its purchases of coal and metal ores to the extent that these provide foreign exchange to North Korea’s military and to the nuclear and missile programs. The move is significant because anthracite coal exports have long been a staple in Pyongyang’s export mix, earning over $1 billion last year in sales to China, and much of these seem to be managed by North Korean military units. Other specific prohibitions include Chinese sales of aviation fuel to North Korea, the rationale presumably that all but the smallest North Korean rockets are propelled by a kerosene type fuel imported largely from China or produced domestically using crude oil provided by China. There are lots of loopholes, so all eyes should be on China in the next few months to see if it is meeting the spirit, if not the often ambiguous letters, of these sanctions. As China says, they are not supposed to hurt the livelihood of people, instead aimed simply at convincing Pyongyang to change course on nuclear weapons, or at least come to table to discuss them.
So what should analysts be looking at? China’s Customs Bureau publishes extensive and timely export and import data on its trade with North Korea and this will be the first line in understanding Chinese actions and intentions. But right at the outset there is a big problem. As figure one shows, this official Chinese reporting stream shows a complete halt to Chinese crude oil exports beginning in January 2014 and lasting at least through February 2016. March data will become available in a few weeks. Objective analysis shows clearly that China did not cut off crude exports in 2014 and these numbers are, to put it politely, misleading.
Beijing has provided no explanation for zeroing out reported crude shipments, despite media reports that show they continue as they have for decades. North Korea Daily reporters, for example, have visited the transshipment site on the Chinese side of the border where officials told them crude continues to flow as normal. Commercial imagery also shows the refinery is working and there are no other reasonable sources for the crude feedstock. The crude, about 50,000 tons a month, probably originates in the big Daqing oilfield in Heilongjiang province and travels across the border through a short, 11-mile pipeline, to Ponghua, the country’s only continuously operational refinery. In past years there was an occasional month or two in which no crude was reported but these were always followed by double shipments in later months. The refinery has no seaport although there is a rail connection. North Korea has one other very old refinery, near the Russian border, which is served by a port facility, but it operates rarely with no dedicated source of crude. So if the Chinese data is accurate, North Korea has had no crude oil supply for over two years and has been depending entirely on very modest imports of petroleum products to fuel its entire economy. Clearly this is not the case so there must be something awry with the data. Beijing chooses not to explain this situation and U.S. and other foreign officials, for some reason, have not asked for an explanation, at least not one they have openly reported. In my view this is enough of a problem to question the validity of all Chinese trade with North Korea and thus to question whatever new data shows up in March and April.
Without what would seem to be an easy Chinese explanation, we are left to speculate. A likely hint is provided by a similar occasion in 2009 when Chinese Customs suddenly stopped reporting its usual detailed monthly trade data for North Korea. The data break lasted for four months, August through November, and was never, in my understanding, explained to users of the Chinese data.
With some effort one can figure out, however, that all of this data–detailed 8-digit Harmonized Code commodity information on exports and imports, volume and value, and prices–were tucked into a rarely used partner category “Other Asia, Not Elsewhere Specified” so that the data was never actually lost or misreported. In December figures in that category dropped back to near zero and all of the detailed commodity data showed up again as Chinese trade with North Korea. (The above graphic only shows the aggregate but details tell the same story.)
Although not conducive to building confidence in Chinese statistical methods, this procedure at least did not distort China’s overall trade with the world. A Chinese official whom I queried said simply that Pyongyang probably complained that China was revealing state secrets in reporting the bilateral data so for a few months Beijing acquiesced. Later, and after I asked the question, the Chinese must have thought better of it and again publish the data with North Korea as the trade partner.
I have searched at length to find another place in the Chinese data where the crude oil shipments to North Korea now could be hidden in the same way and perhaps for a similar diplomatic reason, but cannot find it. China is a net importer of crude oil but it exports occasionally to Japan and other countries. The country’s total crude oil exports are now apparently distorted by the absence of the North Korea data. Does this omission also reduce China’s overall commodity export figure, or even its GDP calculation? At about $150 million a quarter, this would have only a tiny 0.1 percent negative impact on quarterly GDP, but again why would Beijing mess up its data in this way.
Analysts speculate that China may have suddenly put the trade “off books” or that they now account for it as an aid shipment. But either clearly would distort Chinese data in ways that should bring more skeptical attention to its entire economic data reporting scheme. After all, if a political decision can alter data with North Korea, why can’t balance of payments or GDP numbers be similarly distorted by the whims of the politburo? The crude oil has most likely always been an aid shipment—an (eternal) gift from the people of China to the DPRK as offered by Chairman Mao in the 1960s—but that doesn’t mean it should not be accounted as an export. Proper double entry accounting means it should be an export commodity in the trade account offset by a negative in the remittances line in the current account, or, if the commodity is paid for by a long-term zero or low interest loan, it should be offset by a negative (outflow) in the capital account. Presumably, China’s National Bureau of Statistics, overseer of Chinese national accounts data, is making this adjustment; that is, it is making a change to the foreign aid or the external credit line, but this would mean it is probably distorting information on Chinese foreign aid and national oil production and consumption, needlessly confusing users of its data by such “off-books” accounting.
The only legitimate reason for excluding Chinese crude oil shipments from its Customs data that I can think of would be if China had changed its pattern and is now transshipping third party crude oil to North Korea, possible since China is a large net oil importer anyway. But given there is no port facility at Ponghua, this would lead to the seemingly absurd situation where the imported crude would have to travel inland to the transfer facility and then onward to North Korea. And again, if this is the case, why not announce it?
The aviation fuel issue is interesting as well but the sanction here is less than meets the eye. China exports a variety of petroleum products to North Korea, probably mostly on commercial rather than long-term aid program terms, and in low volumes compared to the crude oil. These alternate between gasoline, light diesel, and kerosene or “jet fuel” products. A significant volume of jet fuel is reported to have been provided in 2014 but essentially none since then, while shipments of diesel and gasoline have increased. But clearly this is not all of North Korea’s aviation fuel requirement. Jet fuel or aviation gasoline can easily be produced from the crude oil provided to the Ponghua refinery so more diesel imports mean the refinery can shift from diesel production to jet fuel production.
These data issues are not meant to question China’s North Korea policy. I for one think China has acted fairly reasonably with its troublesome neighbor and long-time ally. We do not give it much credit, for example, for not shipping military equipment to Pyongyang for more two decades, watching Pyongyang’s stock of everything from jet fighters, to radar systems, to ground equipment deteriorate and fall into obsolesce. If we are not careful, China could do a lot to make Pyongyang happy, for example in air defense, that would upset our military posture in South Korea. Moreover, its trade with North Korea is nearly balanced–aside from the crude oil and assuming we can trust the rest of the data–suggesting it is providing little aid or investment credit. And to the extent that China-North Korea trade is doing fairly well, it is in product lines that seem to be helping a market economy develop in North Korea, such as textiles. But without public explanation of the crude oil shipments, or better, a return to full reporting of these shipments, confidence in Beijing’s North Korea policy and indeed the transparency of all its economic data will be lacking. And whether or not Pyongyang thinks it is a state secret, China’s public deserves to know what it is giving to North Korea.
So, if the data for March and April on Chinese coal and ore imports from North Korea suddenly turn to zero, will we trust that is indeed the case?
William Brown is an Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Korea Economic Institute of America. The views expressed here are the author’s alone.
Photo from Joseph’s photostream on flickr Creative Commons.Scientist and atheist Richard Dawkins is challenged on whether religion is a force for good or evil in the world.
With the headlines covering fanaticism, fundamentalism, superstition and ignorance, religion is getting a bad press these days. And much of the conflict in the world, from the Middle East to Nigeria and Myanmar, is often blamed on religion.
But how are things from a different perspective? Some defenders of religion claim Adolf Hitler was an atheist. Communism under Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot or Mao Zedong banned religion, but also massacred millions. And science brought incredible and amazing advances, but also pollution and the atomic bomb.
A critic of religious dogmatism, Professor Richard Dawkins revolutionised genetics in 1976 with the publication of The Selfish Gene. He has since written 12 more bestsellers, including The God Delusion which sold millions of copies, was translated into more than 30 languages, and catapulted him to the position of the world's foremost atheist.
Mehdi Hasan challenges evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins at the Oxford Union in front of a varied and lively audience.
In a frank and at times heated exchange, they discuss: Is religion a force for good or evil? Can it co-exist with science? Is science the new religion? And why if god does not exist, is religion so persistent?
Source: Al Jazeera× Texas teacher arrested after allegedly having sex with student, taking him to Oklahoma without permission
FORT WORTH, Texas – A Fort Worth teacher at an all-boys school is accused of having a sexual relationship with a student and taking him to Oklahoma without his parents’ permission.
The 16-year-old boy’s father contacted police about the alleged relationship after he saw his son’s computer with Facebook messages from the woman, The Dallas Morning News reports.
“I hope you’re not filling my head with fairy tales,” the teacher reportedly wrote in one Facebook message to the boy. “I mean it when I say I love you and want to be with you forever.”
According to WFAA, Alina Leung, 29, teaches sixth and seventh grade at the Paul Dunbar Young Men’s Leadership Academy in Fort Worth.
Police say Leung’s relationship with the 16-year-old boy started in October 2015 when he was 15.
The student would reportedly visit her classroom and help her grade papers.
Authorities say the relationship evolved when the two started messaging each other on Facebook and watching movies at her apartment.
Police say she told the boy she wanted to wait until the boy was 17 to have sex with him because “it would be legal then,” The Dallas Morning News reports.
However, police say Leung did not wait and the two started having sex in November.
Police also say the two sent each other sexually explicit photos.
Then, during winter break, the teacher allegedly took the teenager to Oklahoma to tour the University of Oklahoma.
According to the affidavit, “the victim’s parents were unaware that the suspect took him to Oklahoma.”
Leung was arrested and charged with sexual assault of a child, unlawful restraint and improper relationship between a student and a teacher.
She is currently on paid leave.We’ve long been fans of Boutique Academia, an online store featuring geeky jewelry and scientific accessories. Math and science jewelry (and then some) – you just can’t go wrong! So, Pi necklace, anyone?
Whether you’re looking for geeky jewelry for yourself, or you are doing your Christmas shopping early, this is one giveaway that you will want to join.
Boutique Academia is giving away a $50 gift certificate to one lucky ForeverGeek reader! Depending on what you choose to purchase from the store, you can get a couple of items shipped to wherever you are in the world!
Here’s a sampling of what you can buy if you win this giveaway.
I saved the TARDIS necklace for last, but that is the piece that really got me all excited for this giveaway. Even if you’re not a Doctor Who fan (how can you NOT be???), there are tons of other items in the Boutique Academia store which you can pick if you win this giveaway.
Send in your entries
So let’s do this! One winner to receive $50 at the end of this giveaway. As usual, here’s the Rafflecopter widget to make things easy. We’re only requiring a comment and a tweet, but increase your chances by giving some social love to Boutique Academia and ForeverGeek, will ya? Thanks!
The giveaway runs from today till Sunday. We’ll announce the winner on Monday, November 25. Good luck!
a Rafflecopter giveawayThis briefing provides an overview of the number, population share, geographic distribution and nationalities of migrants in the UK.
The terms A8 and A2 refer to migrants from countries that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007 respectively. A8 (meaning “Accession 8”) refers specifically to migrants from Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Estonia, The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia while (similarly “Accession 2”) refers to migrants from Romania and Bulgaria.
The briefing includes all migrants, irrespective of their age and employment status. Most of the data in this briefing are taken from the ONS population tables based on the Annual Population Survey (APS) which is derived from the LFS but includes an additional sample boost. Some figures are based on the Labour Force Survey (LFS) because the APS data files available for public use do not yet all include the migration variables required for the analysis. As a result, there may be some minor differences between the figures in this briefing and the ONS published tables. For information about the limitations of the LFS, see the ‘evidence gaps and limitations’ section at the end of this briefing.
This briefing defines the migrant population as the foreign-born population in the UK. Wherever relevant and indicated, the briefing also provides figures for foreign citizens residing in the UK, as well as for recent migrants – defined as foreign-born people who have been living in the UK for five years or less. Definitions have a significant impact on the analysis of the number of migrants in the UK and there is significant overlap between those who belong to the foreign-born group and those who belong to the foreign-citizen group.
The foreign-born population nearly doubled from 2004 to 2017
The size of the foreign-born population in the UK increased from about 5.3 million in 2004 to just under 9.4 million in 2017 (see Figure 1). During the same period the number of foreign citizens increased from nearly 3 million to about 6.2 million.
Although the numbers of EU migrants have increased more rapidly than non-EU migrants over the past decade, Non-EU foreign born still make up a majority of the foreign-born population. In 2017, 39% of the foreign-born population were EU born.
Although the numbers of both female and male migrants have increased over time, women constitute a small majority of the UK’s migrant population. In 2017, 53% of foreign born population were women, according to LFS data.
Figure 1
Looking at the distribution of foreign-born by age (Figure 2), including children (those aged 0-15), youth (aged 15-25), adults (aged 26-64), and retirement age (aged 65+), between 69% and 76% of those born in different countries are adults, with the lowest percentage being for EU14 foreign born and North America. More variation is observed in the percentage of those aged 65+ spanning from 1% of A8 and A2 migrants to 17% of people born in India.
Between 5 and 11% of the foreign-born populations from different countries are children, including 11% of A8 and A2, and 5% of people born in African countries. Less than 13% of migrants are youth, with the smallest percentage (5%) being for Oceania and India, and the largest percentage (13%) of those born in Other Asia and A2 countries.
Looking at the UK born, only about half of the UK born population are adults aged between 26-64, while one in every 5 UK-born residents is a child; 11% of the UK-born population are youths, while the UK-born population has the highest proportion of retirement age individuals (19%).
Figure 2
Return to top
London has the largest number of migrants among all regions of the UK
Table 1 presents the distribution of the foreign-born population across England’s government office regions as well as Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. There is significant variation in the geographic distribution of migrants in the UK. In 2017, about half of the UK’s foreign-born population (52% in total) were either in London (38%) and the South East (14%). Northern Ireland, Wales and the North East have a low share of the UK’s total foreign-born population, at 7.5%, 6.3% and 6.2% respectively. In comparison, the UK-born population is more evenly distributed. In 2017, only 10% of the UK-born population lived in London.
Table 1: Distribution of foreign-born population, 2017
Region Number Percent of migrants living in each region Percent of region's population who are migrants All of the UK 9,382,000 100% 14% London 3,354,000 36% 38% West Midlands 784,000 8% 14% South East 1,211,000 13% 14% East Midlands 599,000 6% 13% East 741,000 8% 12% Yorkshire and The Humber 535,000 6% 10% North West 677,000 7% 9% South West 513,000 5% 9% Scotland 477,000 5% 9% Northern Ireland 138,000 1% 7% Wales 193,000 2% 6% North East 161,000 2% 6%
Source: ONS Population by nationality and country of birth, table 1.1
In 2017 nearly 1.5 million foreign-born people were living in Inner London and nearly 1.9 million were living in Outer London. The smallest number of foreign-born individuals was found in the North East and Merseyside (Met County). The largest percentage increases during the 2004 and 2017 periods occurred for “Rest of Yorkshire” and Scotland. This is not surprising given the small number of migrants Rest of Yorkshire had in 2004. Between 2004 and 2017 Outer London, West Yorkshire (Met County), and Inner London, experienced the lowest percentage increase in the number of migrants (up 68, 46 and 40% respectively).
Table 2: Number of foreign-born by region, 2004-2017
2004 2014 2017 2004-2017 % Change Total 5,270,000 8,309,000 9,382,000 78% Yorkshire and Humber (excl. Met Counties) 55,000 112,000 133,000 142% Scotland 203,000 382,000 477,000 135% East Midlands 266,000 481,000 599,000 125% West Midlands (excluding Met County) 110,000 179,000 244,000 122% South Yorkshire (Met County) 61,000 106,000 135,000 121% Merseyside (Met County) 43,000 85,000 90,000 109% South West 249,000 445,000 513,000 106% Tyne and Wear (Met County) 47,000 75,000 92,000 96% Greater Manchester (Met County) 196,000 341,000 376,000 92% Wales 101,000 180,000 193,000 91% East 390,000 653,000 741,000 90% Northern Ireland 73,000 125,000 138,000 89% North East (excl. Tyne and Wear) 36,000 59,000 68,000 89% North West (excl. Met Counties) 113,000 185,000 210,000 86% West Midlands (Met County) 295,000 474,000 540,000 83% South East 669,000 1,071,000 1,211,000 81% Outer London 1,115,000 1,761,000 1,868,000 68% West Yorkshire (Met County) 183,000 261,000 269,000 47% Inner London 1,065,000 1,334,000 1,487,000 40%
Source: ONS Population by nationality and country of birth, table 1.1
Return to top
The UK population was 14.4% foreign-born and 9.5% non-British citizens in 2017
The share of foreign-born people in the UK’s total population increased from 8.9% in 2004 to 14.4% in 2017 (Figure 3). During the same period, the share of foreign citizens rose from 5.0 to 9.5%.
Figure 3
Return to top
The share of migrants in the population varies significantly across regions
The share of migrants in the population varies significantly across regions. In 2017, the number of foreign-born people relative to total population was greatest in Inner London (42%) and Outer London (36%). The region with the third highest proportion of migrants was W. Midlands Met. County where 19% of the population was foreign-born. The North East excluding Tyne and Wear was the area with the smallest proportion of foreign-born people.
Inner and Outer London also remain the areas with the highest share of migrants in the total population when focusing on foreign citizens (see Figure 4). Foreign citizens made up 28% and 21% of the population respectively in Inner and Outer London, respectively.
Figure 4
Return to top
Poland is the most common country of birth and country of nationality in the UK
Poland, India and Pakistan are the top three countries of birth for the foreign-born (Table 3) accounting respectively for 10%, 9% and 6% of the total. Poland is also the top country of citizenship of foreign citizens, accounting for 16.4% of non-UK citizens living in the UK.
Table 3: Top ten countries of origin by country of birth and nationality, UK 2017
Rank Country of birth Number Percentage share Nationality Number Percentage share 1 Poland 922,000 9.8 Poland 1,021,000 16.4 2 India 829,000 8.8 Romania 411,000 6.6 3 Pakistan 522,000 5.6 Ireland 350,000 5.6 4 Ireland 390,000 4.1 India 346,000 5.6 5 Romania 390,000 4.1 Italy 297,000 4.8 6 Germany 318,000 3.4 Portugal 235,000 3.8 7 Bangladesh 263,000 2.8 Lithuania 199,000 3.2 8 Italy 232,000 2.5 Pakistan 188,000 3.0 9 South Africa 228,000 2.4 Spain 182,000 2.9 10 China 216,000 2.3 France 181,000 2.9
Source: ONS Population of the UK by nationality and country of birth, table 1.3 and 2.3
Return to top
Those born in India constitute the biggest group among the foreign-born population in London
India is the country of birth for 8.9% of all foreign-born persons living in London (Figure 6). Other Asian countries such as Bangladesh (4.6%) and Pakistan (3.8%) are also in the top-ten countries of birth of migrants in London. Poland, Romania, Italy, Ireland, and France are the five European countries in the top ten. With the exception of Sri Lanka and France the remaining top-ten countries of birth for migrants in London are also top-ten countries at the UK level.
Figure 5
Return to top
Evidence gaps and limitations
The LFS is a continuous survey of around 60,000 households each quarter. Although the LFS contains spatial information at a regional level, the standard release of LFS data set does not contain local authority identifiers. It is therefore not possible to use the standard LFS to analyse trends and characteristics of migration across local areas. The Annual Population Survey (APS) available since 2004 is more suitable for this purpose.
The LFS has some limitations for estimating the dynamics of migrants in the UK. First, it does not measure the scale of irregular migration. Second, it does not provide information on asylum seekers. Third, the LFS excludes those who do not live in households, such as those in hotels, caravan parks and other communal establishments. The LFS is therefore likely to underestimate the UK population of recent migrants.
Return to top
Further reading
Salt, J. “International Migration and the United Kingdom, 2010.” Report of the United Kingdom SOPEMI correspondent to the OECD, Migration Research Unit, University College London, 2011
With thanks to Martin Ruhs and George Leeson for comments and suggestions in an earlier version of this briefing, and to Madeleine Sumption and Robert McNeil for the current version.
Recommended citation
Rienzo, Cinzia and Carlos Vargas-Silva. “Migrants in the UK: An Overview,” Migration Observatory briefing, COMPAS, University of Oxford, August 2018Roy Moore, the disgraced Alabama Supreme Court justice who once installed a Ten Commandments monument into the courthouse (without permission, in the middle of the night) and then got suspended (again) for telling judges to ignore the marriage equality ruling, is currently running for the U.S. Senate in an upcoming special election.
He hopes to defeat Republican Sen. Luther Strange in the GOP primary because Strange is apparently too liberal for the state. How dare he pay lip service to the Constitution when the Bible is the only text that matters?
There’s a reason Moore’s called the “Ayatollah of Alabama.”
Moore’s new campaign ad goes all in on Trumpian rhetoric, talking about “draining the swamp,” attacking Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for failing to strip health care from millions of Americans, and (of course) telling everyone he “fears God.” As if that’s a qualification anyone should take seriously.
In a more rational state, admitting something like that would be disqualifying in the eyes of voters. Someone who “fears God” is basically saying he’s incapable of making a rational decision on the basis of the evidence. He’s more worried about what God says than what the Constitution says.
But this is Alabama, where the only way a Republican senator can lose a primary is by someone who makes a more compelling case for why God loves him more. And Moore is currently leading both Strange and U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks in the GOP race to replace Jeff Sessions.
If Moore doesn’t get 50% of the Republican vote on Tuesday, he’ll go to a September runoff against the second place finisher. If he wins that battle, he could be up against an unknown Democrat with a famous name, virtually guaranteeing himself a spot in the Senate.
Roy Moore, a man who makes Ted Cruz look reasonable by comparison, is well on his way to becoming a U.S. senator. The only way we avoid that is if Alabama says no to a man who’s as close to a theocrat as anyone in American politics.
Do you have that kind of faith in the state? I don’t.Not only did CBS’ Survivor return higher in ratings for last week’s premiere, Wednesday’s second episode managed to remain unchanged and avoid a second-week dip. The hour had 9.6 million viewers and a 2.4 adults 18-49 rating, same in the demo as last week, beating most other shows on the air.
Fox won the night with American Idol, up a notch. CBS was second with Criminal Minds rising from last week’s special 10 p.m. airing and CSI dipping. ABC ranked third with the comedy block rising rising from last week’s lows, new sitcom Mixology down 6 percent from last week’s premiere and Nashville up 8 percent. NBC ranked fourth with Revolution unchanged, SVU down 20 percent and freshman drama Chicago PD dropping 32 percent to match its low after last week’s cross-over episode stunt. The CW’s Arrow dropped 22 percent to an all-time low; Tomorrow People dropped 20 percent to a low.
Full chart:The potentially most consequential negotiations in the world this year will centre on Iran's nuclear program.
Until June, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany will continue negotiating with Iran a possible deal on preventing that country from building nuclear weapons in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.
Negotiations were supposed to end in early December. But negotiators did not reach a deal, so they agreed to a six-month extension. Both sides declared that serious progress had been made, such that more talks were worthwhile.
Story continues below advertisement
A deal is there to be had, and the collapse of oil prices can only put even more pressure on the Iranians to be reasonable, given the double whammy their country faces with sanctions and low oil prices.
The devil for a deal lies in the politics of Iran and the United States, but also in important details such as how many centrifuges Iran would be allowed, what level of uranium enrichment would be permitted, how large would be the stockpiles and the time frame for Iran to turn its nuclear capability into a weapon – the so-called "breakout."
Critics of the negotiations – led by Israel, of course, and the Harper government that follows Israel's lead on all Middle East issues – insist Iran should be stripped of centrifuges and essentially of its entire capability ever to make a weapon. For the critics, it's all or nothing, which is not how any successful negotiation ever ends.
The critics' bottom line would mean, of course, no possible deal, which is presumably what Israel, the Israel lobby in Washington, the U.S. Republican Party and irrelevancies such as the Harper government want. Their short-term alternative is to apply even more economic sanctions on Iran, hoping that the country would bend under their weight, which is what would not at all happen.
Instead, some of the six negotiating partners (Russia and China for sure; France perhaps) would assume no deal and likely begin to make their own arrangements with Iran. Other countries (India, for example) would increase economic ties. Iran would continue without bothering with any international inspections to spin more centrifuges and move closer to the possibility of some day wielding a nuclear weapon which, in turn, would so frighten Saudi Arabia (and perhaps Turkey) that a nuclear race might begin in the world's most volatile region.
No deal with Iran, coupled with phobias about the country elsewhere, would tempt Israelis and some Americans into a military option that could, at best, merely cripple the Iranian nuclear program but not prevent it from eventually unfolding. Such an attack would destroy the moderates (by Iranian standards) who won the 2013 presidential election and embolden the hardliners. It would also enjoin Iran to further support Hezbollah, Hamas and even the Syrian regime.
Professor Thomas Juneau at the University of Ottawa warns, quite wisely, in a recent paper for Middle East Policy of Iran's "strategic loneliness." By this, he means that Iran has no natural or historic partners in the region. All Iranian regimes, whatever their composition, will be prickly because the Iranians believe themselves surrounded by "threat and encirclement."
Story continues below advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
Iran has been attacked, after all, by Iraq, which was supported in that war by the United States. Iran's relations, as the world's leading Shia country, with Sunni states such as Saudi Arabia are poor. Iran's government was overthrown once by a U.S.-inspired coup. Around it, nuclear weapons are in the hands of China, Russia, Pakistan, India, Israel and the Western powers of the United States, France and Britain.
Given Prof. Juneau's warnings about "strategic loneliness," and Iran's sense of its own history (and importance), no one should expect a nuclear deal would transform the country's foreign policy. But it might, over time, lead to some thawing of relations with the United States, with which it has co-operated on such issues as the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State.
Iran is a very complicated place. It has a governmental system with elections but where ultimate power over internal and external security lies with the Supreme Ayatollah and the Revolutionary Guards, who own large chunks of the Iranian economy.
The middle-class and more educated Iranians – the kind of people who elected Hassan Rouhani as President – want to break free from the rigidities imposed by the regime and the sanctions imposed by the West.
To see Iran as a monolithic society with a monochromatic political system reflects a dangerous lack of sophistication and a failure to imagine possibilities.The Bureau of Labor Statistics’s more inclusive U-6 unemployment rate is at about 17.5 percent (source). This does not include “discouraged” workers, so the real proportion of the expected-to-be-working population that is unemployed is probably |
community, which felt singled out by Mateen.
“People often act out of more than one motivation,” Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch said in the days after the attack. “This was clearly an act of terror and an act of hate.”
A month later, though, a complete picture of what motivated Mateen remains murky and may never be known since he was killed in a shootout with police and did not leave a manifesto. Officials said there is no evidence thus far that Mateen, 29, was gay or that his attack was motivated by homophobia.
People who knew Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen describe him as a man who had many demons and possibly led a double life. (Erin Patrick O'Connor,Jayne Orenstein,Thomas LeGro/The Washington Post)
The assessment is based on interviews and an examination of his computer and other electronic media.
After the attack, speculation surfaced that Mateen was gay as people came forward to say they had seen him at the club previously and had contact with him on gay dating apps. One man told the Spanish-language television network Univision that he had slept with Mateen.
Even Mateen’s first wife, Sitora Yusufiy, raised the possibility that Mateen was possibly gay but conceded it was a suspicion and nothing more. His current wife did not think he was gay, according to a person familiar with the case.
The FBI, however, has been unable to verify that Mateen used gay dating apps and instead has found evidence that Mateen was cheating on his wife with other women.
Officials said there is nothing to suggest that he attempted to cover up his tracks by deleting files. They also added he did not make gay slurs during the shooting spree inside the club, based on witnesses.
In a 911 call, Mateen pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State and did not make any homophobic comments. FBI Director James B. Comey has said Mateen was radicalized and had previously been the target of a terrorism investigation.
Still, some maintain they had contact with Mateen on two gay dating apps, Grindr and Jack’d, and stand by their original claims.
Social media shared videos and pictures from the area surrounding the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where a gunman killed 49 people and injured dozens of others on June 12. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
“I know Omar was definitely on Grindr,” said Cord Cedeno, 23, of Orlando. “One of my good friends knew him from Adam4Adam app. There’s no reason to make this kind of thing up. I would never lie about anything like this.”
Kevin West, 38, of Orlando, also maintains that he had numerous conversations with Mateen on a dating app for men. West said it is common for users of such apps to create and delete multiple profiles on multiple mobile devices, making histories hard to track.
“He is not the first and not going to be the last closet case to be on those apps,” West said of Mateen.
On the day of the massacre, West drove to a police station in the Orlando suburb of Apopka to report that he recognized Mateen from the dating app.
Neither West nor Cedeno said they saved any of these conversations on their phones.
A spokesman for Jack’d has said the company has no records of Omar Mateen having an account, although it is possible that he used the app anonymously.
A Grindr spokesman declined to comment.
In the interview with Univision, a man named Miguel claimed he had a relationship with Mateen while living at the Ambassador Hotel in Orlando. He said the two saw each other for about two months.
Melanie Mercado, who works at the hotel, said she thought she encountered someone who might have been Mateen. She thought she saw his face on the news.
“I don’t want to say sure-sure, but it’s familiar,” she said.
Albert Segev, a manager at the Ambassador Hotel, said FBI agents visited the hotel and sought records.
Segev and Mercado said the hotel is equipped with surveillance cameras, but the footage is automatically deleted after 30 days, and they said they did not think it captured any of the interactions with the man who might have been Mateen.
Orlando City Council member Patty Sheehan said the gunman’s motives or his sexuality matter less to her than how to restore a sense of security to a community devastated by loss. “These families would like to see something good come out of this,” Sheehan said.
Sheehan, who has served on the city council for 16 years and is gay, expressed frustration with Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) and Attorney General Pam Bondi, both of whom visited Orlando in the days after the tragedy.
“They said, ‘We’re not going to talk about guns, and we’re not going to talk about gays; this is an attack on all Americans,’ ” Sheehan said. “That’s what they want the narrative to be, and that’s nonsense. We need to have hate crimes on the books for LGBT, and we need weapons of war off our streets.”
Earlier this week, there was a break-in at the Pulse nightclub soon after police turned the property back to its owner.
“Since June 12, we have seen the worst and best of human behavior,” owner Barbara Poma said in a statement. “We are disappointed that someone felt compelled to violate the privacy of our beloved Pulse Night Club and the sacred place it has now become. We have faith in the Orlando Police Department and its investigation of this break-in. The club will continue to remain closed to the public as we work to plan the future of Pulse.”
Anne Hull and Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report.You are no doubt aware that Dallas has a gaping divide separating the northern and southern parts of the city. In very broad strokes, north is rich and white, while south is poor and brown. There are complex historical and political reasons why this is so, most of them tied to racism and residential segregation, neither of which has entirely gone away. But back to the divide itself. It's easy, sometimes, to forget how stark it really is, which is where Dallas Area Habitat for Humanity's new "2015 Dallas Map Book," which the nonprofit recently distributed to the mayor, City Council and other City Hall decision-makers. In 22 maps — 23 if you count its map of Habitat neighborhoods — it presents a striking portrait of inequality in Dallas, not so much because of the individual maps themselves but because of the way they just keep coming.
Here's a geographic distribution of blight:
Continue Reading
These are the locations of the homes encumbered by a lien for failure to pay code citations for things like high weeds:
Lien Principal Report for Year 2012, City of Dallas
The map for Land Bank-eligible properties — i.e., those that are five years or more behind on property taxes — looks similar:
And it's not just like southern Dallas has a disproportionate share of bad stuff, northern Dallas has a disproportionate share of good stuff, like expensive homes:
2015 Esri Community Analyst, American Community Survey 2009-2013
And college degrees:
2015 Esri Community Analyst. American Community Survey 2009-2013
And money:
2015 Esri Community Analyst, American Community Survey 2009-2013
And here's distribution of poverty:
2015 Esri Community Analyst, American Community Survey 2009-2013
And the concentration of households with at least one person with a disability, which in surprisingly large swaths of the city is approaching 50 percent:
Jane Massey, Dallas Habitat's director of neighborhood research and revitalization, says the organization is presenting its map book now to help shape the conversation about Neighborhood-Plus, the City Hall housing program that grew out of Dallas' "voluntary compliance agreement" with HUD following the agency's four-year investigation of the city's tendency to steer affordable housing into low-income neighborhoods. The plan, which Habitat views as a vast improvement on Dallas' previous housing policy, has stalled as city and stakeholders have tried to iron out details. The City Council's housing committee will be briefed on the status for the umpteenth time on Tuesday. Meanwhile, next year's budget has eliminated additional funding for the program. Massey hopes the maps are numerous enough and stark enough to remind policymakers of the big-picture problems they are tasked with solving.This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has given us this stunning view of the bright Alpha Centauri A (on the left) and Alpha Centauri B (on the right), shining like huge cosmic headlamps in the dark.
The closest star system to the Earth is the famous Alpha Centauri group. Located in the constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur), at a distance of 4.3 light-years, this system is made up of the binary formed by the stars Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, plus the faint red dwarf Alpha Centauri C, also known as Proxima Centauri.
The image was captured by the Wide-Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). WFPC2 was Hubble's most used instrument for the first 13 years of the space telescope's life, being replaced in 2009 by Wide-Field Camera 3 (WFC3) during Servicing Mission 4. This portrait of Alpha Centauri was produced by observations carried out at optical and near-infrared wavelengths.
Compared to the sun, Alpha Centauri A is of the same stellar type, G2, and slightly bigger, while Alpha Centauri B, a K1-type star, is slightly smaller. They orbit a common center of gravity once every 80 years, with a minimum distance of about 11 times the distance between Earth and the sun. Because these two stars are, together with their sibling Proxima Centauri, the closest to Earth, they are among the best studied by astronomers. And they are also among the prime targets in the hunt for habitable exoplanets.
On Aug. 24, 2016, astronomers announced the intriguing discovery of a nearly Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone orbiting the star Proxima Centauri
Image credit: ESA/NASA Larger image
Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook.Luke Shaw has been missing in action for much of the season (Picture: Getty)
Jose Mourinho has insists Luke Shaw is not in the Manchester United squad because he is not fit enough to play.
Jurgen Klopp reveals truth about dressing room row with Mane & Henderson
The full-back has played just 13 times this season and has not been named in a matchday squad since November.
Reports have been circulating that Mourinho is ready to sell Shaw amid concerns about his fitness and the United boss admitted the defender was going through a rough patch at the club.
‘Of course, that’s basic,’ said Mourinho when asked if it was injuries that were preventing Shaw from playing.
Manchester United's remaining fixtures Crystal Palace (H) - Sun 21 May
Ajax - Europa League (N) - Wed 24 May
Jose Mourinho insists he is not preventing Shaw from playing (Picture: Getty)
‘You try to have in the squad the players with more minutes, the players in better shape, the players in better conditions.
Advertisement
Advertisement
‘And, in Luke Shaw’s case, even in the game where he was ready to play and to start the game and to have again 90 minutes against Reading [in the FA Cup], on the morning of the game he was ill and not ready to play.
‘So, even in that match that could be a good match for him to be back, he was not able to, so he’s having a difficult period.’
Mourinho says Shaw was too ill to play Reading on January 7 (Picture: Getty)
Shaw has been publicly criticised by Mourinho for his fitness this season while the player’s agent hit out at reports linking the 21-year-old with a move away from Old Trafford.
United have yet to see Shaw’s full potential with the left-back’s Red Devils career seriously interrupted when he broke his leg.
MORE: Jose Mourinho insists he wants Manchester United goalkeepers David de Gea and Sergio Romero to stayWASHINGTON -- The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to testify today before the Senate Commerce Committee on the Commission's National Broadband Plan. Free Press is calling on the agency to reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service to give the National Broadband Plan firm legal footing.According to numerous analysts and the FCC's own general counsel, the recentfederal court decision places in doubt the agency's authority to carry out many of the most important aspects of the National Broadband Plan. This jurisdictional crisis stems from past FCC decisions to classify broadband networks as "information services," a break from past FCC precedent and the framework of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Free Press is encouragingto relabel broadband as a telecommunications service to ensure the agency has the authority to implement the National Broadband Plan and to finally bring the United States up to the levels of broadband access of other leading nations., research director of Free Press, made the following statement:“Chairman Genachowski must move quickly to reverse the Bush-era FCC's misguided classification of broadband Internet access as an integrated information service. The federal court ruling has made it clear that past errors have crippled the FCC's ability to put the public interest ahead of big corporations. With strong leadership from Mr. Genachowski, the Commission will be able to adopt policies to preserve the value of the open Internet, bring broadband to rural and low-income Americans, and provide consumers with basic protections. Failure to act decisively and quickly will only embolden the special interest lobbies that have fought against public interest policies and jeopardize both the open Internet and the National Broadband Plan's chances for success.“The chairman should ignore the cynical lobbying efforts by AT&T, Verizon and Comcast that seek to render the FCC powerless to protect consumers. The Commission's authority over issues like universal service, emergency preparedness, customer privacy, nondiscrimination and access for the disabled must be ironclad. It is unthinkable for the FCC not to have clear authority to protect consumers on the nation’s dominant communications medium.“I cannot put it any better than Sen. John Kerry did today, “The FCC can act right now.' ”The Globe and Mail — the only national daily newspaper still coming into the province — announced on Tuesday that it would no longer be shipping copies of its daily newspaper to Newfoundland and Labrador due to the high cost of shipping.
Phillip Crawley, publisher and CEO of the Globe and Mail, said as of Oct. 1 customers will only be able to get the publication through its online services.
Crawley said the cost of sending the daily publication to the province was outweighed by the gains, with only 3,000 papers sold on average per day.
"The costs simply are quite outrageously high for the fact that we can provide the content of the Globe via various other digital delivery methods," Crawley said.
"So paying more than a million dollars a year for the relatively small number of papers that actually get shipped to Newfoundland and Labrador really doesn't make any economic sense."
According to Crawley, there have been just shy of 100 days so far in 2013 that the paper hasn't made it on time.
"We were losing money. We have to fly the papers from Halifax and it's often interrupted by weather and transport delays; so far this year there are 99 days when we've been either late or we haven't been able to deliver at all to St. John's or to other parts of the province," he said.
"The cost of getting to Newfoundland and then on to Labrador, they are the highest costs in the country because the transportation is the most expensive because it's basically relying on air all the way."
Crawley said the publication has made itself a multi-platform publication and will continue to be a national news provider for the entire country, but acknowledges that there will still be customers disappointed with the decision.
"It's not a decision we've taken lightly, but as the industry changes and evolves, the popularity of reading on-screen — particularly since iPads and tablets came along — that's changed our business quite a lot," he said.
"A lot of people are finding it a pleasurable experience to read on an iPad or another tablet."
The publication will also stop sending newspapers to some parts of British Columbia, such as Whistler, Prince Rupert, Prince George, 100 Mile House, Logan Lake, Sun Peaks, Houston, Blind Bay, Revelstoke, and surrounding areas.
Crawley said the same content will be available to everyone on the company's Globe Unlimited or Globe2Go services.BERKELEY — A 34-year-old man is being sought in connection with a stabbing this morning at a ShopRite supermarket in the Bayville section of Berkeley Township that left one employee injured.
Detective Sgt. James Smith, a spokesman for Berkeley Township Police Department, said Christopher Page of Bayville has been charged with attempted murder and weapon possession charges related to the stabbing at the Atlantic City Boulevard supermarket. His bail was set at $500,000.
Smith said Page had an argument with Noah Jackson, 37, of South Toms River, an employee at the store, at 11:15 a.m. today. The pair know each other, Smith said.
Authorities said the fight began in the lobby of the supermarket and spilled over into the area near the cash registers. At some point during the altercation, Smith said, Page stabbed Jackson several times.
Smith said it is unclear what the men were arguing about.
Page fled but was identified by Jackson and several witnesses, authorities said.
Karen Meleta, spokeswoman for ShopRite, said the store employee was airlifted to an area hospital, where authorities said he's in good condition. His injuries are not considered life-threatening.
"It's a safe supermarket," Smith added of the store, which was briefly closed after the morning incident. "It's an isolated incident between two people who know each other."
Related coverage:
• Supermarket worker stabbed by customer in Ocean County, report saysST CATHARINES, ONT.—What sounded like a head-on collision to Tom Murray from across the street seemed like a bomb explosion to Rose Watts. Watts, a retired GM worker, was upstairs in her home in St. Catharines Wednesday morning when she heard a loud bang.
Niagara Regional Police are investigating how and why a minivan drove straight through a St. Catharines home around 9 a.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2011. Somehow, the van did not hit a 66-year-old woman who was in the home at the time. The van stopped in the backyard after leaving a gaping hole and piles of dust and debris inside the house. The 52-year-old driver was taken to hospital with minor injuries. ( DAVID RITCHIE / SPECIAL TO THE STAR ) A minivan drove straight through a home in St. Catharines today. ( Special to the Star / Dave Ritchie )
“I thought ‘Oh my God, what the heck was that? I thought somebody threw a bomb through the door.” There were no explosives involved. Instead, a van drove clear through her semi-detached home at Dundonald St. The driver, a 52-year-old man, was treated in hospital for minor injuries.
Article Continued Below
Watts said she was lying down upstairs at around 9 a.m. and just getting ready to come down. “I was going to come down to feed my cats,” she said, explaining she usually gets up earlier in the day. “I would have been downstairs. I say someone was watching over me.” Murray, who was in his kitchen across the street at the time, said he heard screeching tires and a loud crash. He ran outside expecting to see signs of a head-on collision. “I was looking around for a car crash and then I finally noticed the front of her house was missing,” he said. Murray ran inside the house, calling for Watts. He stayed there, waiting for her to get dressed in order to assist her down the destroyed stairs.
Lyle Piper, who lives down the street, ran over when he heard the crash. With Murray trying to help Watts, he ran around the house to check on the driver, who was conscious in the van. Piper said he had a bad cut to his hand and looked dazed, but otherwise didn’t look too badly hurt. “I think he’s very lucky he wasn’t killed,” Piper said.
Article Continued Below
Niagara Regional Police Const. Chris Sirie said police suspect the driver had a medical condition but will also likely be looking into whether the mechanical condition of the van played a role. He said he’s never seen an accident like this before. “I’ve never seen a car go right through a house,” he said. “This is something — that was quite a big accident and thankfully nobody was seriously injured.”Daniel Hannan is an MEP for South-East England, and a journalist, author and broadcaster. His most recent book is What Next: How to Get the Best from Brexit.
On the morning of the referendum, I wrote an article on this website arguing that, whichever side won, there would need to be compromise. A narrow Remain vote, I averred, would not be a mandate to carry on as before. Likewise, “a narrow Leave vote is not a mandate for anything precipitate or radical. It is a mandate for a phased repatriation of power, with the agreement, wherever possible, of our European allies. Many of our existing arrangements will remain in place; and those which we want to disapply won’t be scrapped overnight.”
I stand by those words. It is in everyone’s interest to replace our EU membership with a strong and friendly relationship, one that allows for maximum collaboration. Theresa May has acknowledged this from the beginning with her calls for a “deep and special partnership” that would leave the UK as Europe’s “best friend and strongest ally”.
That objective should be uncontentious, but politics is a funny game. A referendum makes people tribal. Proposals which would otherwise appear perfectly reasonable are resented when they come from the other side. Decisions are made with an eye on newspaper headlines, or on internal party jockeying.
Still, it shouldn’t be hard to find a position around which the majority of Remain and Leave voters can unite. Not all them, perhaps. Some Remainers won’t accept anything short of full membership, and some Leavers, bitter after a lifetime of defeats, will rail against any deal. Most people in both camps, though, are interested in getting the best outcome starting from where we are. What sort of deal could both sides at least live with? Here are some broad principles:
1) The United Kingdom is a democracy
Votes here are not a tedious technicality, as in Venezuela or Russia. They mean something. All sides promised in advance to accept the 2016 referendum. The only justification for a second referendum would be if the question were significantly different – in other words, if the EU 27 came forward with substantively new terms. That plainly isn’t going to happen.
2) Britain should have the closest relationship with the EU compatible with sovereignty
Leaving the EU means that UK law once again becomes supreme on our own territory. That is what “take back control”, in its most elemental sense, means. Having taken back control, there is no reason why we shouldn’t replicate through domestic laws and bilateral treaties any aspects of policy which both sides want to retain.
3) Europe’s success matters to us
The EU 27 will remain our military allies and our trading partners. We want the eventual deal to benefit them as well as us. It would not be in our interest if, for example, prolonged uncertainty about Brexit led to another bout of worries about the euro. We should go into these talks looking for win-win outcomes.
4) Trade benefits everyone
When it comes to the EU 27, we enjoy broadly free trade now, and should aim to keep it. When it comes to the other 165 states in the world, including those that have existing deals with the EU, we should aim to liberalise further. The second of these objectives will be the more challenging since it means taking on, rather than accepting, the status quo. We should seek the closest customs arrangements with the EU compatible with being able to strike our own trade deals. It is worth noting that in none of the EEA countries, nor in Switzerland, is there any campaign to join the EU’s Common External Tariff.
5) Nothing wrong with a common market
Although some commentators lazily talk of “the-single-market-and-customs-union” as though it were one thing, it isn’t. Norway is in the single market but not the customs union. Turkey is largely outside the single market, but largely inside the customs union. For Britain, which conducts a disproportionate volume of its trade outside the EU, the customs union has never made sense. But there are aspects of the single market which are wholly unobjectionable. Indeed, you could argue that the real basis of the single market is the prohibition on discrimination against goods or products from other member states, something to which almost no one objects. Britain should keep that rule, enforced through some joint arbitration mechanism, à la Suisse.
6) All Europe matters
Of 47 states in the Council of Europe, 19 are outside the EU. Each has its own deal with Brussels, currently a random hodgepodge of arrangements. Brexit is an opportunity to create a stable and workable arrangement in Europe, by creating a market-only status for countries that either don’t want to join the EU’s political structures or are deemed unsuitable for full membership. This idea has long been popular with European federalists and could, if pursued, transform the atmosphere of the negotiations: we’d be building something new, not simply dismantling something.
7) Timing is secondary
After 44 years in the EU, who cares whether we have a two- or three-year transition? What matters is making the outcome beneficial to both sides, not the precise phasing.
8) No hard border in Ireland
A border is a demarcation of jurisdiction; it doesn’t need to be a line of control. The border between EU Sweden and non-EU Norway is barely noticeable: there is free movement of people, and customs checks may happen within 15 miles on either side. Millions of EU nationals cross the border every day to work in Switzerland, which is also traversed by some of Europe’s main north-south and east-west transport routes. The main purpose of the Swiss frontier is to check that foreign drivers have purchased the discs that allow them to use that country’s beautiful roads. Since Great Britain and Ireland are both islands, with a limited number of points of entry, it should be logistically easier to find a workable arrangement here than in either of those cases, one based on the sharing of information between the two states – something that already happens under the terms of the Common Travel Area.
9) Where it works, keep it
During the referendum campaign, much was made of the value of the EU’s various educational and research schemes. Fine: if they are valuable, let’s continue to participate, as numerous non-EU states do – not just Norway and Switzerland, but Canada and Israel. Obviously, in these circumstances, we should pay our share of the bill. The same goes for police, judicial and security co-operation. Britain’s intelligence services are unequalled in Europe, and it would plainly be wrong not to offer the fullest assistance to our allies.
10) British farming and fishing
For the avoidance of doubt, neither the CAP nor the CFP is, by any stretch of the imagination, in the “it works” category. I hope most Remainers are fair-minded enough to accept that, here at least, we could do better.
11) Controlled immigration
Bringing immigration under control doesn’t mean closing our borders. On the contrary, we should attract the world’s best talent. Once we leave the EU, and cease to be EU citizens, there will no longer be an automatic right to live in the UK – a right which, incidentally, can extend even to non-EU nationals, as we saw when the ECJ ruled that Britain could not deport Abu Hamza’s daughter-in-law following a criminal conviction, even though she was Moroccan, because her son was an EU citizen. Having taken back control, though, there is no reason why we shouldn’t agree reciprocal rights to work and study. I’d like to see EU nationals allowed to take up job offers here with a moratorium on benefits claims, and I’d like to extend that right to other friendly states, starting with Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
12) We pay what we owe
Britain is a country that honours its financial commitments. We want the EU to succeed (see point three). We should look at the final financial settlement as part of an amicable deal that will provide for a strong relationship.The BloodShot Minipult frame is a small catapult cut from a solid billet of quality aluminium alloy. Although small it is easily held in a large hand, the small size means it is very easy to keep in the pocket and with the 25mm wide Theraband Gold Bands or Dankung 3060 tubes it has all the power of a full size shooter.
On the flat band shooter the bands are secured to the frame with rubber strips and with the tube shooter the bands are secured to leather tabs. The catapult comes fully assembled and ready to shoot - just add ammo! As with all catapults of this style the bands are designed to be drawn over the top of the forks.
The frame is highly polished to a mirror finish.
Size is 6 cm wide x 9cm long and 1.5 cm thick
Customer review
by ghaddon 02 Jun, 2016 There's something about Bloodshot Minipults. I have been an avid slingshot shooter for a couple of years now. My collection is extensive and I have a breadth of different designs. From wide open, low forks to a couple of different types of PFS; this design provides a middle ground of sorts. I now have three of these little catapults from Bloodshot. A black one with (surprisingly) theraband black, a silver one with double theraband gold and most recently this one with the leather tabs and tubes. I love them all. It took me a little while to get a comfy grip. I ended up using the webbing between my thumb and forefinger over the forks with my ring finger in the pinkie hole. I have never looked back. They have almost the accuracy of PFS, the power of a full size slingshot (with the right bands and technique) and feel super comfy to use. They are also tiny, light and extremely pocketable. As a design it stands shoulder to shoulder with anything else I've shot thus far. I cannot recommend these more highly for EDC. Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: NewThe first ever NBA Award Show takes place Monday night, and we pretty much know who is winning each award, so there won’t be much suspense. Russell Westbrook is winning MVP, Mike D’Antoni is winning Coach of the Year, etc. Yawn.
Well, we’re here to inject a little excitement into the NBA’s award season by handing out our anti-awards. We’re crowning the league’s least valuable player, the least improved player and so on.
So let’s get to it and celebrate the season in bad basketball…
Worst “6th man”
Jeff Green
After signing a $15 million deal, Green put up career lows in points, rebounds, assists and field goal percentage in a reserve role for the Magic.
All-bad defensive team
PG: Isaiah Thomas
SG: Ben McLemore
SF: Shabazz Muhammad
PF: Kevin Love
C: Enes Kanter
Thomas actually received a vote for the all-defensive team, which is ridiculous considering the Celtics had to hide him on defense after teams started attacking him with the pick-and-roll.
As for the other selections, McLemore is still lost on that end of the court, Muhammad doesn’t really try, Love doesn’t have the foot speed to keep up with most of his assignments and the same goes for Kanter.
P&R lob to Capela causes Billy Donovan to tell Mo Cheeks, "Can't play Kanter." pic.twitter.com/4ROFSNpFw6 — Yaya Dubin (@JADubin5) April 17, 2017
Worst executive of the year
Phil Jackson, Knicks
Do I really need to give an explanation for this one? The Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah signings were disasters, Jackson publicly criticized his best player and now his most promising player doesn’t seem to be too interested in playing under him. Not a good season from the Zen Master.
Least improved player
Chandler Parsons, Grizzlies
Parsons dealt with injuries all year, but even when he did play, he looked nothing like the player we had come to know in both Houston and Dallas. Parsons scoring average dropped by six points and his 3-point shooting percentage dropped to 26.9%.
Oh, and he was also thoroughly roasted by C.J. McCollum…
good luck in the lottery show this year✊🏻 — Chandler Parsons (@ChandlerParsons) January 28, 2017
We hit the lottery by not signing you https://t.co/eSiBaNT061 — CJ McCollum (@CJMcCollum) January 28, 2017
Worst coach of the year
Earl Watson, Suns
For some reason, Phoenix rushed Watson up the NBA coaching ladder, promoting him from an assistant coach to a lead assistant to a head coach in a matter of years. And his inexperience shows. The Suns don’t play well together and are undisciplined on the defensive end.
Least valuable player
Deron Williams, Mavericks/Cavaliers
Williams played for two teams during the 2016-17, the Dallas Mavericks and Cleveland Cavaliers. Here are their records with Williams on and off the roster this past season…
Williams on the roster: 34-48 (.414)
Williams off the roster: 51-32 (.614)
And if you aren’t into the numbers, just watch this lowlight video of his NBA Finals performance.Muslim women like Kirsty Powell, above, face increasing discrimination. (CAIR-LA)
Long Beach, Calif., is embroiled in another Muslim-related controversy — the second in less than two years.
A male officer in the Long Beach Police Department allegedly removed a woman’s hijab, or religious headscarf, by force during an arrest, and now the United States’ largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization seeks justice. The Greater Los Angeles Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-LA) has filed a federal lawsuit in Los Angeles for Kirsty Powell, a practicing Muslim-American woman who allegedly was denied her right to wear a hijab by the LBPD.
CAIR-LA writes:
Kirsty Powell and her husband, who are both African-American, were driving near Market St. and Long Beach Boulevard when they were pulled over by the LBPD. Powell was arrested on an outstanding warrant. During the arrest she was told by the officers that she would have to remove her head scarf. Powell made several requests for a female officer to search her. The officers informed her that she was, “not allowed to wear her hijab” and that they were “allowed to touch a woman.” While handcuffed at the station house, the arresting officer allegedly forcibly removed Powell’s religious head covering and forced her to remain exposed overnight, in plain view of other male officers and dozens of inmates. “The actions taken by the Long Beach Police officers were unwarranted and a serious violation of Mrs. Powell’s bodily integrity,” said CAIR-LA Civil Rights attorney Yalda Satar. “The manner in which Mrs. Powell was treated by LBPD officers was simply a show of authority over a woman of color who was unable to protect herself, and is another example of the type of discrimination faced by women who wear a hijab.”
Observant Muslim women believe that Islam requires them to “cover their hair and much of their body as a symbol of modesty, especially while in the presence of men who are not related to them.”
The lawsuit—filed in conjunction with First Amendment and Human Rights attorney Carey Shenkman—claims that Powell remained exposed in a cell overnight and alleges violations under the First Amendment, Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), Bane Act and the California Constitution.
“I would never want anyone to go through what I felt from this experience,” Powell said. “It was horrible. I want my Muslim sisters to always feel comfortable and safe wearing a hijab and to stand up for what’s right. We are all human, we all deserve justice.”
Muslims are the fastest-growing religious group in the world, and according to Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, they have been in what is now the United States for over 400 years, since African slaves arrived in the 17th century. Muslims now make up 1 percent of the total U.S. population, or 3.3 million people, the Pew Research Center reports.
CAIR outlines Islamic beliefs for law enforcement in “A Law Enforcement Official’s Guide to the Muslim Community,” a booklet that includes information on how to handle body searches with religiously sensitive techniques.
In 2014, the LBPD deemed an incident involving the removal of a Muslim-American woman’s hijab a “hate crime,” and then-police chief Jim McDonnell said that “crimes of this nature will not be tolerated in our city.”
—Posted by Eric OrtizThe Kit Kat Chocoladilla is being tested in Wisconsin. Taco Bell
Taco Bell is testing a new quesadilla that's stuffed not with cheese, but with chocolate candy. Behold, the Chocoladilla.
According to a Taco Bell rep, they're currently testing Kit Kat Chocoladillas (Kit Kats stuffed into a flour tortilla and grilled) for $1 exclusively in Wisconsin. Apparently, a Twix version has been sold at some locations as well, according to Brand Eater.
The Kit Kat Chocoladilla is being tested in Wisconsin. Taco Bell
This isn't the first time that Taco Bell has tested this kind of wonky menu item. Around this time last year, the brand sold the Kit Kat Chocoladilla in the UK and, of course, the Internet kind of blew up. And Chocoladillas have been sold in several other countries abroad.
Think of it as a fast food version of a crepe. I've had crepes with Nutella, so a wrapped up Kit Kat is really not that different.
#SpoonTip: If you're not in Wisconsin, this seems like the kind of thing that you could definitely make at home with your leftover Halloween candy in the next coming weeks.There are two famous silences in the history of classical music: those of Rossini and Sibelius. Rossini's, which lasted nearly 40 years, was a worldly, cosmopolitan silence, much of it spent in Paris, during which time he co-invented tournedos Rossini. Sibelius's, which lasted nearly 30 years, was more austere, self-punishing and site-specific; and whereas Rossini finally yielded again to music, writing the late works he referred to as "the sins of my |
will speak about this in detail and explicitly explain the ordeal in an interview.
The charges are dropped, I have a clean record, but the fallout from the charges was so severe, I was hurt very badly for years, and I still don’t understand why I had to go through that hell. Legally this is behind me, I’m finally past the devastating financial fallout, but I’m definitely not over it.
One of the things I love about John McAfee is how supportive he is of me with this issue. He says it’s a positive for the campaign, allowing us to give an authentic inside account of the terrifying injustice of our Justice System, in an area that no one is willing to talk about.
John has faced some extreme injustice at the hands of authorities himself. Most famously, recently after denying a Belize politician’s extortion request for a donation (protection money), John had to escape the country through the jungles of Central America from a manhunt conducted by the Belize military. Because he refused to be extorted by corrupt politicians, John lost millions, leaving behind his home and other possessions during his escape, while Belize officials tried to smear him as a monster; months later they even burned down John’s home he left behind in Belize. A clear harsh message was sent to anyone who doesn’t pay when a politician requests a donation.
Both John and I know the importance of liberty on a very personal level, by experiencing what hell is like when you lose liberty and justice.
Amazingly John is giving me a ton of flexibility here. I’m allowed to be off message. We discussed it, if we’re ever off message, it’s only love, and an opportunity to learn and understand from our differences. I’m so grateful to him for that amount of trust in me. I won’t abuse it, I’m here to help. We’re a team. John and I click with each other surprisingly well, but I have my own voice, and I’m going to be me.
We are all individuals, and very different from each other. I’m not going to pretend that I represent you. I don’t represent anyone. I’m pushing hard to give you the power to represent yourself.
We do have some resources in this movement, let’s use them effectively. Say what you will about the Libertarian Party, but many people have worked hard for years to make it the only third party that managed to get on the ballot in all 50 states. Let’s put that blood sweat and tears to good use. We should get involved in the Libertarian Party for this election. Let’s try to remember that we’re all on the same team. There is intense division among Democrats, and the Republican party is imploding; this is our chance to have a massive impact while people are exploring other options. It’s time we cross the chasm.
We’re a strong combo. McAfee and I can reach these people who are not us. McAfee and I can introduce these ideas. McAfee and I can send people to the other voices in scene for deeper digging.
With John McAfee the liberty movement now has their own Most Interesting Man In The World, mixed with a bit of James Bond adventure, mixed with genius Tech CEO, mixed with a well-spoken love for philosophy and a passion for liberty.
John McAfee is cool, he’s bold, he’s powerful, he’s eloquent, he’s brilliant, he’s a media figure, he’s entertaining, he’s likable. I’ve been a John McAfee fan long before he joined this party. I’ve been in this scene so long, we’ve never had an opportunity for someone like this to champion us.
If the Libertarian Party wants to play it safe right now with a tame safe candidate, Gary Johnson is clearly the best option.
If the Libertarian Party wants to be a bold exciting alternative in this election, John McAfee is the presidential nominee we can be excited about.
This letter is already too long, I’ve got so many ideas we’ll have to get into later. A few final points:
I won’t just be focused externally on connecting with those outside the movement. I’ll also be focused inward on the liberty movement, helping activists become more powerful and effective communicators. One of my main goals with this campaign is to bring the wider liberty scene closer together, and spread a message and desire for internal cooperation.
I have a tremendous amount of friends throughout the wider liberty movement, but I will not be using our friendship to push for support. Pay attention to what we’re doing, if you’re excited about what you see I would LOVE your support. Financial, promotional, or just helpful volunteer support, we’re not doing this by ourselves, we can use every bit of help we get, because we want to do amazing things. And if you do choose to support someone else, I respect that, it won’t affect our friendship. I’ll be actively involved in the liberty movement a lot longer than this 2016 campaign.
Be A Libertarian will be a persistent campaign message. I just registered BeALibertarian.com and created a new campaign logo with a graphic designer. The campaign site has shifted to that domain a few days ago, the new logo is being used, and more changes are coming. I’m trying to finish up our first campaign video, it shows what I’m bringing to the table, and my goal is for it to be the most beautiful and inspiring video from any campaign in any party during this election. More videos are coming.
We’re putting together a team with real political campaign experience to build up an infrastructure to handle volunteers. Many are already asking how they can be a part of this, and I’m getting that set up. I’ll likely turn my house into an LA Campaign Headquarters. I have extra rooms and a lot of floor space. We’ll make great things happen, and have an amazing experience together. Fill out the volunteer contact info form on the site, and we’ll bring you in the loop as soon as we’re set up.
Right now, the most critical thing we need are people who want to come with us to the National Libertarian Party Convention in Florida to be a delegate with us (May 27-30). We’ll need a few hundred delegates to win this nomination and become the official Libertarian presidential ticket. If you’re interested in being a Libertarian Party delegate, please fill out this delegate contact info form on the site.
Very exciting times ahead, my friends. This will be memorable.Lauri Markkanen said he feels no additional pressure from forever being included in one of the most polarizing transactions in franchise history, the Bulls' decision to trade Jimmy Butler.
There's enough pressure anyway in being an NBA rookie, particularly one entering a rebuilding situation. Markkanen has to learn the league, master living in a new city, study a new system, figure how to play multiple positions.
Nevertheless, given that Butler is a proven All-Star who, barring injury, will remain among the game's elite two-way players for the Timberwolves, how Markkanen plays as the Bulls embark upon a full rebuild will determine a lot.
Perhaps it's best then for the soft-spoken 20-year-old to focus on the simple stuff first.
"I know how to get (to the Advocate Center) and the United Center and get to the apartment after that," Markannen said when asked about living in Chicago. "I haven't had a chance to go look around or anything. But I'm not here for sightseeing."
That last sentence is one that even the hard-driving Butler would approve. Butler sought teammates to push themselves, work out constantly and take their jobs seriously. Soft-spoken or not, Markkanen has shown flashes of those qualities early.
"I'm just trying to learn as much as possible," Markkanen said.
That has included playing both the power forward position he played in his lone season at Arizona and minutes at center alongside Nikola Mirotic as coach Fred Hoiberg is seeking shooting-oriented lineups. Markannen shot the ball far more efficiently for Finland at this offseason's EuroBasket than he did for the Bulls during summer league.
The former even featured Markkanen backing down smaller defenders in the post and shooting one-legged fadeaway jumpers over them, a la... forget it. Markkanen downplays any Dirk Nowitzki comparisons, as he should.
One's a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Markkanen is trying to win a starting spot in a crowded power forward rotation that also features Bobby Portis and Nikola Mirotic.
"Of course I'm trying to start, but it's not a deal-breaker for me if I don't," Markkanen said. "I know we have a lot of good players and it's going to be a competition. So I'm just trying to learn as much as possible and keep getting better just to earn my spot."
Through two days of training camp, Hoiberg likes what he has seen.
"He's a talented, versatile offensive player," Hoiberg said. "An underrated part of his game is his ability to put the ball on the floor and go around bigger guys. If you can get him some spot minutes at (center), take advantage of that quickness, it can help us. Plus, his ability to stretch the floor, he can shoot it with ease."
Markkanen has visited the Cloud Gate sculpture — or The Bean — at Millennium Park. But otherwise, his sightseeing has been limited to the buildings he knows — championship banners hanging in Advocate and United Centers.
"I feel like the pressure is always on when you're on the court, so it's a big thing for me to be here in the NBA organization and such a historic organization," Markkanen said. "It's a dream come true for me and just trying to make the best out of it."
[email protected]
Twitter @kcjhoopThat voice. Something about that voice is unmistakable. And if you can’t place the voice, his trademark chin should be a dead giveaway.
With an astounding 116 acting credits to his name, Bruce Campbell has seen—and played—it all. Many people probably know him best from The Evil Dead universe, where he plays the chainsaw-handed Ash Williams. This past Halloween, Starz unveiled their latest series, Ash vs. Evil Dead. In it, Campbell reprises his illustrious role—but this time as a PTSD-riddled Ash. The show was created and executive produced by original Evil Dead creator Sam Raimi.
With Ash vs. Evil Dead now in full swing, Campbell took to Reddit to answer the community’s most pressing questions on, well, a… wide range of subjects.
– Full Transcript Below –
Question #1
Question #2
Question #3
Question #4
Question #5
Question #6
Question #7
Question #8
Question #9
Question #10
Question #11
Question #12
Question #13
Question #14
Question #15
Question #16
Question #17
Question #18When both the Amway Coaches' and AP polls put Alabama at No. 1 in their preseason rankings, I went searching for perspective.
We already knew that made nine straight years the Crimson Tide has reached the top of the polls, or every year since 2008, a streak unprecedented in college football history since the AP started ranking college football teams in 1936.
I went to the 2016 SEC Football Media Guide, ran the numbers and found some even more amazing context.
Alabama has been No. 1 in more seasons under Saban than any other SEC program has been No. 1 in its entire history.
Using the granddaddy of them all, the AP poll, Florida has reached No. 1 in eight seasons: 1985, 1994, 1996, 1997, 2001, 2006, 2008 and 2009. Auburn (1957, 1958, 1985, 2010), LSU (1958, 1959, 2007, 2011) and Tennessee (1939, 1951, 1956, 1998) have gotten there in four seasons each.
Georgia (1942, 1980, 1982) has reached No. 1 in three seasons, Ole Miss in two (1960, 1961) and Mississippi State in 2014.
Alabama is 9 for the last 9.
One reader asked me to dig deeper to compare this run to Alabama's memorable past. So I did. Try this: Before Saban arrived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama had reached No. 1 in the AP poll - in its entire history - in nine different seasons.
Can you say wow?
Bear Bryant coached the Tide to No. 1 in the AP poll in eight seasons: 1961, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1973, 1978, 1979 and 1980. Gene Stallings did it once in the final poll of the 1992 season after thumping Miami in the Sugar Bowl to win the national title.
That's it. That means, in the 71 years of the poll era before Saban arrived, Alabama reached No. 1 in nine different seasons. Saban, in an age of parity and scholarship limitations, is 9 for 10 with the last nine in a row.
Process that.An employee of Big Dog Diner in Frankston has uploaded footage of a phone call she allegedly has had with her employer.
Brooke Hubbard, who says was on her break and returned to work to clean the diner, received a phone call from the owner saying he had tried to call to order a burger many times.
Neon. 📷 @_karabo_ A post shared by Big Dog Diner (@bigdogdiner) on Mar 21, 2016 at 1:59am PDT
The owner starts by saying ‘do you know how often people f***ing try me on and think I am dumb,’’ he continues to say that he has tried to call the diner 15 times, to no avail and could not order a burger.
The conversation gets more and more intense before he decides to fire his staff members saying ‘It’s been a real pleasure knowing you, you are out, you are going.’
When Brooke responds ‘Now? I don’t have a job?’ the owner replied saying ‘why do I pay you, when you do nothing, why am I paying you?’
The employee responds that she was merely on a break and had returned to clean the restaurant, but this does not stop the owner from continuing to rant saying ‘go and be f***ing low paid somewhere else, you are going to end up like everyone else.’
When we contacted Big Dog Diner for a comment they responded saying they were waiting for clearance to make a comment and will not be receiving any calls.Two Hawaii community groups have filed a civil-rights complaint against the state Department of Agriculture and Agribusiness Development Corporation for not doing enough to protect Native Hawaiians from pesticides sprayed on fields near schools, hospitals and homes.
Earthjustice, representing Moms On a Mission and Poai Wai Ola/West Kauai Watershed Alliance, sent the complaint Wednesday to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Agency.
“If anyone began spraying toxic chemicals so that they drifted into homes and schools in one of Hawaii’s affluent neighborhoods, there would be outrage and it would be shut down,” Earthjustice attorney Paul Achitoff said in a release. “But not on Kauai’s west side or on Molokai, because the Native Hawaiians there don’t have the political clout. It’s shameful and it’s against the law.”
PF Bentley/Civil Beat
Earthjustice says the two state agencies receive federal funding, so they have an obligation under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to ensure their programs and activities do not discriminate against communities of color, including Native Hawaiians.
“I live in a community that is home to the largest population of pure blooded Native Hawaiian, native speakers in Hawaii, what many would consider an endangered race and a wealth of cultural knowledge,” said Kekaha resident Malia Chun, member of the MOM group, in the release.
“We also happen to be a community that is inundated daily by exposure to industrial use pesticides,” she said. “When you consider the danger of frequent, long-term exposure to industrial pesticides, some may consider this to be a form of genocide.”
Scott Enright, head of the Hawaii Department of Agriculture, didn’t return a call for comment on Wednesday.
Read the complaint below.What’s New In Java 9 | 19 Added Features and Changes
Finally, Java 9 (formally called Java Platform Standard Edition version 9) has been released for private and commercial use. It’s the biggest upgrade to Java platform standard edition, coming after 3 and a half years. The last update was Java 8, released in March 2014.
Java 9 was previously delayed multiple times because of modularity controversy. But now, since it is here, we can reveal what exactly developers have changed in this version. Bringing the 10 biggest features and changes you are about to see while working on Java 9.
Before starting, we would like to tell you Java 9 introduces over 150 new features and functionalities, including module system that allows programmers to scale down the Java platform for smaller devices. Along with enhanced performance and better security, Java 9 makes it easier to build and maintain libraries and extensive applications.
19. New Module System
Java 9 introduces the new module – self describing and collection of code and data. It has optional phase and link time in-between compile and run time, during which you can assemble and optimize module into a custom runtime image.
There are some optional tools like jlink, java and javac, where you can define module path. Moreover, the new JMOD format (packaging format) can include configuration file and native code.
18. New Version String Scheme
Java 9 offers an efficient version string format to clearly identify minor, major, security or patch releases.
For instance, $Minor and $Major represent the incremented integer for each minor/major update, such as bug fixes. Similarly, $Security represents the number of security update release and $Patch is the version number for a release.
17. The Java Shell
Java 9 is packed with REPL (read-eval-print loop) functionality. The jshell tool gives you a command-line interface for evaluating statements, declaration and expressions. It allows you to easily develop prototype and explore coding options with quick outcomes and feedback.
Also, you can add more diagnostic commands in order to enhance the capability of diagnose issue with JDK.
16. Compile For Previous Platforms
Javac can now compile code to run on selected older platform versions. The compiled code may accidentally use unsupported APIs on the given target platform, while using -target or -source options. However, the option, –release will prevent any random use of unsupported API.
15. Better Java Control Panel
The presentation and grouping of options within the control panel have been improvised. Now, information is easier to locate, there are no modal dialog boxes, but search field is available.
Less useful APIs have been deprecated, as modern web browsers remove Java browser plugin support. The Applet classes that are still available in JDK 9 will be considered for removal in the upcoming version.
14. Java Linker: jlink
The jlink is responsible for assembling and optimizing modules as well as their transitive dependencies into a customized runtime image for a single program. Link time is defined as an optional phase between run time and compile time phase.
13. Compact Strings
To make strings compact, Java 9 adopts a space-efficient internal representation – a byte array plus an encoding flag field. The previous version stored characters in a char array, two bytes for every character. It’s entirely an implementation change that doesn’t affect any exiting public interface.
12. Filter Incoming Serialization Data
Java 9 filters the incoming object serialization data stream in order to improve security as well as robustness. Serialization clients can easily validate the input, and exported RMI (remote method invocation) objects can also easily validate invocation arguments.
11. HiDPI Graphics and GTK3 on Linux
Java 9 automatically scales AWT (abstract window tool) and Swing components for HiDPI (high dots per inch) display on Linux and Windows platform. It already supports retina display on Mac OS X.
Java graphical apps, whether it is AWT, Swing or JavaFX, use either GTK+ 2 or 3 on Solaris and Linux. By default, the JDK on Solaris or Linux uses GTK+ 2, if it is not available, it uses GTK+ 3.
10. Factory Methods For Collections
With Java 9, you can easily create instances of collections and maps with fewer elements. New static factory methods on the Set, Map and List interfaces make it very simple to build permanent instance of those collections.
For instance,
Set<String> characters = Set.of(“x”, “y”, “z”);
9. Transport and Application Layer Security
DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security) protocol is developed for “TLS over Datagram” traffic, which does not need, and provide reliable data delivery. JSSE (Java Secure Socket Extension) API and the SunJSSE security provider support DTLS 1.0 and 1.2 protocols, along with TLS and SSL protocols.
Since the TLS needs a transparent, reliable transport channel like TCP, it cannot secure unreliable datagram traffic.
The Application Layer Protocol Negotiation Extension allows the server and client on a TLS connection to negotiate the application protocol to be used. The client transfers a list of supported application protocols and the server selects a protocol and informs the client. This can be done via TLS handshake, without any additional network round trips.
8. Stack-Walking API
The new stack-walking API enables lazy access and easy filtering of information in stack traces. It supports both long walks (traverse the whole stack) and short walks (stop at specific frame). The short walks reduces the cost of analyzing all the frames, if the caller wants to explore only the top frames. Moreover, users can configure the stack walker to provide access to Class objects.
7. Parser API For Nashorn
JDK 9 comes with a parser API for Nashorn that aims to implement a lightweight, high-performance JS runtime in Java with native Java Virtual Machine. More specifically, it enables server-side frameworks and IDEs, to parse and examine ECMAScript code.
6. Dynamic Linking of Object Models
Dynamic linking of language-defined object operations at run time, like read/write a property, and invoke a function, to the suitable target method handles, based on the value types that have been passed.
Although java.lang.invoke offers a low level API to dynamic link of invokedynamic call sites, it does not offer a mechanism to define higher level operations on objects. With jdk.dynalink package, users can implement programming languages whose expressions cannot be determined statically (dynamic expressions) and operations are framed as invokedynamic call sites.
5. Different Resolution Images and TIFF Image I/O
Pictures with multiple resolutions can be encapsulated into a single multiresolution photo. It’s useful for apps to adapt to different devices whose resolutions vary from 96 dpi to 300 dpi during run time.
Java 9 has also integrated reading and writing of TIFF (tag image file format) image as standard to javax.imageio package.
4. Deterministic Random Bit Generator (DRBG)
Java 9 supports DRBG-based SecureRandom implementations. It uses strong, modern algorithms like AES-256 and SHA 512. You can configure each mechanism with different features and security strengths according to your requirements.
java.security.MessageDigest API supports SHAs-512, SHA3-384, SHA3-256 and SHA3-224 standard algorithms.
3. Segmented Code Cache
Java now divides the code cache into different segments, each containing a specific type of code, in order to enhance the performance and allow for future extensions.
More specifically, the aim was to improve execution time for compilation intensive benchmarks, better control JVM memory footprint, and reduce fragmentation of highly-optimized code.
2. Compiler Control
You can control JVM compilation using compiler directive options. The level of control is method-specific and runtime-configurable. It is backward compatible and overrides CompileCommand.
A compiler directive is a powerful tool that lets you write small, contained, Java Virtual Machine tests because tests could be executed without restarting the complete JVM. It is crucial for building workarounds for bugs in the compilers.
1. Enhanced Garbage Collector
The G1 (garbage-first) collector has been improved – it can automatically determine numerous crucial memory-reclamation settings. It is the default garbage collector (GC) on both 32 and 64 bit server configurations. Using a low pause collector like G1 provides far better experience as compared to throughput-based collector like parallel GC. Moreover, issues with determinism and usability have been fixed now.
Read: 40+ Useful JavaScript Frameworks for Developers
Other Minor Language Changes
Java 9 allows @SafeVargs on private instance methods. Now you can use final variables as resource in try-with-resource statement, and use the diamond with anonymous classes if the argument type is denotable. Furthermore, the new version supports private interface methods.× Expand Lawrence Jackson
At a rally in Iowa in late June, President Donald Trump responded to criticism of his millionaire- and billionaire-studded cabinet by saying that while he loves both rich and poor people, “I just don't want a poor person” running the economy.
Trump’s comment was offensive. But it was also a rare instance of a politician actually mentioning the poor.
A higher percentage of Americans—14.8 percent—were living in poverty in 2014 than during the late 1960s and early 1970s. And extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $2 a day, has roughly doubled from 1996 to 2012, according to Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer’s book $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.
But you wouldn’t know it from listening to the 2016 presidential campaign. Both Trump and Hillary Clinton’s economic addresses focused much more on the middle class than on the poor, a New York Times analysis found. And transcripts of the three presidential debates show the middle class was mentioned thirteen times compared to just four mentions of poverty, the poor, or low-income people.
In ignoring the poor, Clinton and Trump have plenty of company.
During his presidency, Barack Obama spoke less about people living in poverty than any of the past ten presidents. In contrast, Obama led those ten predecessors in talking about the middle class. Obama’s 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, said he was “not concerned about the very poor” and was instead focused on “middle-income Americans.”
To be fair, some presidential candidates have treated poverty as an issue worth discussing. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders brought up topics related to income inequality and poverty so much that Clinton accused him of being “a single-issue candidate.” John Edwards also made poverty a central aspect of his 2008 presidential campaign, taking his "two Americas" theme to the end of the primary season, before his campaign blew up.
Congress has also been criticized for ignoring the poor. “Missing in action,” is how Representative Marcia Fudge, a Democrat from Ohio, described Congress’s record on poverty.
Robert Moffitt, Krieger-Eisenhower professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, agrees that politicians generally avoid the topic of poverty and the poor.
“Most people in Congress aren’t really addressing it,” he tells The Progressive. “They seem to be more concerned with the prospects of the middle class.”
The poor have noticed how little they seem to matter to the politicians. "I feel like they're not talking to me,” one struggling mother told CNN. Many poor people don’t trust that the government has their back, and 60 percent of them believe the government should do more to help those in poverty.
Why do politicians ignore the poor?
C. Nicole Mason, executive director of the Center for Research and Policy in the Public Interest, believes politicians focus on those they think can help them the most.
“The middle class is a strong, vocal voting block, so they tend to get a lot of attention from politicians,” she tells The Progressive. “The poor, not so much.”
Timothy Noah, labor policy editor at Politico, tells The Progressive that the middle class is simply bigger than either the upper or lower classes, leading to a greater focus on them.
It wasn’t always this way. In his 1964 State of the Union Address, President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty.” During his presidency, he ushered in programs to help the poor, such as the Food Stamp Act and Medicaid.
But the very notion that government should help those less fortunate came under attack in the 1980s by a renewed rightwing intent on destroying social safety-nets. President Ronald Reagan’s “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” revolution changed the political and public mindset toward poverty.
“When Reagan started talking about poverty as a cultural pathology linked mostly to black women and communities,” Mason says, “the public will to really confront the root causes of poverty eroded.”
But the Democrats are also to blame. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton made Reagan’s rhetoric and actions against those in poverty bipartisan by limiting the poor’s access to welfare. The effect was devastating, leading to a huge spike in extreme poverty. And the Democrats have never undone the impact of that blow against the poor.
Mason says both parties tend to scapegoat those in poverty. “Some liberals and Republicans all think the same way about the poor,” she says. “They blame the poor for their condition of not being able to reach the middle class.”
Noah argues that this kind of rhetoric has “dehumanized” those in poverty. And he says today’s politicians are still steeped in that political attitude.
“The poor are still demonized by conservatives, and I think Democrats are intimidated by the Republican rhetoric on this,” Noah says. “So you don’t see much discussion of poverty.”
It’s worth noting that under the current administration, the poor might be better off being ignored. During his campaign, while rarely explicitly naming the poor, Trump promised to help struggling people. But since taking office, he has proposed a budget that would slash programs many in poverty rely on and a health care plan that would kick many off of their insurance.
Meanwhile, Moffitt says the large number of people still in poverty has created a perception among many lawmakers and voters that poverty is an intractable issue.
However, politicians may be missing out on potential voters by not talking about poverty. About 68.5 percent of adults with an income under $30,000 a year didn’t vote in 2014. That increases to 75 percent for people making under $10,000. Politifact reported the more money a person makes, the more likely they are to vote.
One reason people living in poverty don’t vote in big numbers is because of an explicit strategy to lock them out: voter ID laws minimize poor people's ability to vote. However, it’s also plausible that many poor people don’t vote because politicians aren’t speaking to their main issue—escaping poverty.
If Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party had spoken more directly to these voters and their needs, rather than focusing almost exclusively on the middle class, they might be in control of the levers of government instead of completely out of power.
Moffitt insists it’s possible for politicians to focus on both the middle class and the poor.
“There shouldn’t be any conflict,” he says. “The middle class has their problems and the poor have theirs, and neither one of them deserves priority over the other. It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.”We all have our own particular way of doing things, but there's a fine line between being particular and being controlling. If you're a controlling person, it's likely you're sabotaging your own relationships. What's even worse is that being a controlling person can take a toll on your partner's self-esteem. It can weaken your trust and interfere with communication. All these elements are essential for a healthy relationship.
When I worked with couples as a Domestic Violence Victim Advocate and Planned Parenthood Certified Responsible Sexuality Educator, control issues were at the heart of most of the failing relationships. What's sadder is that control was also a big part of the abusive relationships.
Remember, relationships should only enhance your life. They should never take away your identity, or your independence. And as a loving, supportive partner, you should never want to take away your love's sense of self and sense of control over their own lives. This is not an exhaustive list, but if you're doing any of these controlling behaviors in your relationship, it's likely that if you don't loosen up the reigns, your love story could be over without any kind of happy ending.
1. You Interfere With Friendships
Your partner's friends might be the worst, but they're still your partner's friends. You're certainly allowed to have (and respectfully voice) an opinion about who your partner hangs out with. What you can't do is tell your partner who they can or can't be friends with. That type of controlling behavior is a serious red flag for trust issues and other unhealthy relationship problems. You can't ban your partner from hanging out. You can't make rules about those friends not being allowed in the house (unless it's a safety issue). You can't throw a fit every time your partner wants to spend time with those friends. Healthy people in healthy relationships have the time and space to chose and nurture their own friendships.
2. You Dress Your Partner
We've all done this from time to time, but there's a difference between helping someone with their look and controlling it. If you're helping, it should be because your partner has specifically asked for your help. It's an even exchange of opinions, but your partner ultimately has the final say in what they wear. In a controlling relationship, you tell your partner what to wear, with the expectation that they have to wear it. This type of control is usually motivated by jealousy (you don't want your partner wear things that would cause others to look at them) or embarrassment (you don't approve of their style and want to control the image you present as a couple). Either way, it's not OK.
3. You Have High Standards For Your Home
Do people call you a clean freak? A tidy home is a awesome feeling, but it shouldn't come at the expense of your relationship. In a healthy relationship, chores are divided equally, in a way that you both feel is fair. If things slide once in awhile, it's totally fine. You might even step in to pick up the slack when your partner's life gets busy. In a controlling relationship, one partner sets expectations for the other without giving them any say. When those expectations aren't met, there's the threat of a fight, or even violence. That partner often walks on eggshells because they're afraid of what will happen if they don't meet their partner's rigid expectations.
4. You're All Up In Your Partner's Phone
Trust is everything. If you can't trust your partner, you either have to figure out a solution, or find another partner. Phones are a true test of trust. If you insist on seeing who your partner calls, texts, and interacts with on social media, that's part trust issue, part control issue. If you tell your partner who they can and can't talk to, or make your partner feel like they can't freely interact on social media without fear of getting in trouble, that's taking it too far. You have the right to ask questions and say how you feel, but you don't have the right to control who your partner can communicate with.
5. You Want Your Partner With You At All Times
It's OK to want your partner to be with you at all times. It's not OK to make your partner be with you at all times. Healthy people in healthy relationships spend plenty of time apart, even if they miss each other in the process. They do their own thing, work on their goals, hang with their friends, and see their families without their partners. A controlling partner will use anger, guilt, or shame to make sure you're together all the time. They'll make their partners feel like they have to turn down invites, or that they have to get home right away after work.
6. You're The Default Decision Maker
If you make all the decisions about where you're going, how you're spending your money, what you're eating, if you'll have a family, or how your future will look, that's controlling. Even if your partner is the kind of person who doesn't like making decisions, a good partner still takes their opinions and desired into account when making plans. If you're a controlling partner, then you live with the mindset that it's your life and your partner is coming along for the ride. That's not a true partnership at all.
7. You're The Sole Captain Of The Ship
Are you the boss? Do you expect certain things from your partner, and get angry when your vision of the perfect life isn't coming together? Do you make the rules? Sometimes when you're in a relationship, it's not about you. It's about your partner's goals, dreams, wants, and needs. The good thing about that is, you get your time, too. But if it's always about you and what you want, and you think it's your partner's job to serve you or spend their time making you happy, that's control rearing its ugly head. If you think you're the boss in your relationship, in more than a joking way, that's a problem.
8. You See Compromise As A Personal Attack
Always demanding to get what you want is a form of control. Relationships are about compromise. If you are never willing to meet in the middle, you're forcing your partner to do all the work of changing, adjusting, and sacrificing in order to please you. No person in a relationship is royalty. It's not anyone else's job to make you happy all the time. If you're unwilling to compromise, you're setting up an expectation that your needs and wants are more important, and that your partner's job is to comply. That's an unhealthy use of control.
9. You Dictate Your Partner's Future
Your partner's future, no matter how entwined it is with yours, is ultimately theirs to determine. That means if they want to go to school, get a job, change careers, or pursue new interests, in most cases you should be a supporter, not someone they have to go to for permission. These types of big life changes should be something you discuss openly and iron out together, not something you get the ultimate say in determining.
10. You Decide When You Have Sex
When you want sex, do you take it? That's totally fine if you know for a fact that your partner's on board. If, not, it's really controlling and unhealthy to make your sexual desires the default. I worked with so many people who felt that it was their duty to keep their partners satisfied weather their partners wanted to be or not. No person has to ever have sex with you if they're not in the mood, even if you've been married for 20 years. It is always the right thing to do to make sure your partner is down for sex instead of just expecting them to be.
11. You Use Anger & Negativity To |
readers in hairdressers or even at work. This reflects an aspect of reading we are all aware of but are often reluctant to admit. The book in your hand or on your coffee table is a public statement about who you are. Ereaders are, therefore, useful in getting over concerns with image and providing a kind of licence for us to follow our curiosity and interests more.
If used smartly, ereaders could provide a huge help to many, as evidenced by the title of one recent study by a Harvard team led by Matthew Schneps: “E-Readers Are More Effective than Paper for Some with Dyslexia”. Schneps told me that some dyslexics are “prone to becoming distracted by the words on the page adjacent to the target word being read at the moment”. Narrow columns can help with this, and of course “formatting is difficult to modify in a printed book, but trivial to alter in an e-reader.” With print, one size has to fit all, whereas with electronic devices, all manner of customisation is possible, potentially meaning that each user can create her own optimal reading environment.
Overall, there doesn’t seem to be any convincing evidence that reading on screen or paper is better per se. “If the cognitive component is strong,” suggests Benedetto, “the cultural one is even stronger.” For Margolin, “the preference for reading on paper or a screen seems to be just that: a preference.” And, increasingly, younger people are opting for digital. The National Literary Trust survey found 52 per cent of 8- to 16-year-olds preferred reading on screen, with just 32 per cent preferring print.
Anne Mangen from the University of Stavanger in Norway suggests that we need more longitudinal studies, conducted over decades, before we can figure out which effects of different reading media are due to familiarity or lack of it, and which are “related to more innate aspects of human cognition”.
Yet research has already told us a lot about how we read now. First and foremost, it emphasises that even using paper, there are many different approaches. Most of us probably have a settled style: you might be a skimmer, a skipper, a front-to-back completist, a keeper of the pristine page or an obsessive writer of marginalia. Whatever the case, our habits have probably been created largely as combination of childhood experience and how the medium we read in is nudging us. Simply being more aware of the alternatives might help us to read better, avoiding distraction to get immersed in fiction, for example, or self-consciously breaking the flow of non-fiction reading to make sure we’re processing the information.
Second, we might benefit from being aware of just how much habit, fashion and culture shape our preferences. When we sit on a train with a book open in front of us, how much has our choice of reading being influenced by our ideas of what a proper book should be like, and how a proper adult should appear in public?
Because it is obvious that reading is important, it can easily seem self-evident what reading is. Perhaps the real contribution of ereaders will be to make us re-examine that assumption.
Julian Baggini is editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine and author of ‘The Virtues of the Table: How to Eat and Think’ (Granta)
This article has been amended since original publicationAlistair Overeem has never been more hungry to win UFC gold. 'The Demolition Man' is a former Strikeforce, DREAM, and K-1 world champion and wants to etch his name into the MMA history books at UFC 203.
Overeem will challenge Stipe Miocic for the heavyweight title in the main event, and the 36-year-old believes Miocic has been taking things too lightly since capturing the belt at UFC 198 earlier this year.
Speaking at a pre-fight media scrum to promote the event, Overeem says he has been taking note of Miocic's partying ways on social media and believes it will be his downfall on Saturday night.
"You keep track of things, and it's not a difficult thing to keep track of things. You see things on social media, pictures. For example, I went to UFC 200, great event, Vegas. I didn't go to any pool parties. I was training every day," Overeem said, per Chuck Mindenhall of MMA Fighting.
"Stipe was going to different parties. You could see that. You could see that on his clothes, he was wearing different clothes. He's at different party events, he's acting crazy, having a drink in his hand. He has been celebrating his victory. And you know what? Who can blame him? He became the champion in record time. But while he was celebrating, I was working. I was training hard. And my life has been dedicated for the last two-and-a-half years. The last six months I have definitely put on a couple of notches more. We're ready, we're going to get that belt."
Miocic headed into UFC 198 against Werdum as the underdog, but walked away with the heavyweight title strapped around his waist after crumpling Werdum with a counter right hook in the first round. The 34-year-old became Cleveland's first champion and sporting hero in over 50 years, when the Cleveland Brown's won the NFL championship in 1964.
Overeem, who has reinvented himself over the last two years, is riding a four-fight win streak and has never looked better in the UFC. His latest win was a spectacular jumping front kick TKO against Andrei Arlovski at UFC Fight Night Rotterdam, and the multiple-promotion champ will look to fulfil his dream at UFC 203.
The pay-per-view, which also features a pivotal heavyweight clash between Fabricio Werdum and Travis Browne in the co-main event, takes place Saturday, September 10 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio.Ald. Tim Cullerton (38th) holds a picture of his father, Ald. Thomas Cullerton, who represented the 38th Ward from 1973-93. (DNAinfo/Heather Cherone)
PORTAGE PARK — Ald. Tim Cullerton's (38th) retirement from the Chicago City Council May 18 will close the books on one of the most enduring Chicago political dynasties — and usher in a new era of politics on the Far Northwest Side.
A member of the Cullerton family has been a member of the Council for 144 years, putting it on par with the Daleys on any list of Chicago's most powerful political families.
But the line of six aldermen will end with Tim Cullerton, 67, a former deputy city Buildings commissioner, who plans to spend more time with his wife, Nancy, and five grandchildren while avoiding the "down and dirty" politics at City Hall.
"It has not been a job, but a privilege," Cullerton said, adding that he has no regrets about retiring. "It has been an honor, really."
Heather Cherone says Ald. Cullerton is ready to move on:
Cullerton said he hoped his family left behind a legacy of public service.
"I never thought I would be an alderman," Cullerton said, praising his staff for its hard work. "But I've enjoyed these last four years. I hope I did some good for the neighborhood."
Cullerton said he was proud of his use of the city's zoning laws to protect residents of Portage Park and Dunning from unwanted developments, like crowded apartment buildings, bars, liquor stores and gas stations.
Cullerton will be replaced by Ald. Nicholas Sposato (36th), who decided to run in the 38th Ward after the boundaries of the 36th Ward were redrawn to include a majority of Latino residents.
"I hope [Sposato] will get to know the neighborhood," Cullerton said.
Cullerton endorsed nonprofit executive Heather Sattler to replace him, and he said he was disappointed the voters chose Sposato.
Sattler "would have been a great alderman," Cullerton said.
While Sattler isn't related to the Cullertons by blood, she has known the alderman her entire life. Her mother, Rita Sattler, was Cullerton's chief of staff until she retired in 2014 after running the 38th Ward Office for 21 years.
Once Cullerton vacates his family's seat on the Council, the entire Far Northwest Side will be represented by aldermen who hold no allegiance to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a far cry from the days when the Far Northwest Side was a stronghold for Mayor Richard J. Daley and his son Mayor Richard M. Daley.
Sposato and Ald. John Arena, who represents the neighboring 45th Ward, founded the Council's progressive caucus, which often finds itself at loggerheads with Emanuel. They expect to be joined by the new aldermen elected to represent the 36th and 41st wards to the south and north of the 38th and 45th wards.
Sposato explicitly campaigned against the "Cullerton machine" and promised a fresh start for the 38th Ward. His campaign was boosted by more than $82,000 in direct contributions from unions and $77,000 from the Service Employee International Union Illinois Council Political Action Committee.
"They all keep talking about the machine, but it doesn't look that different to me with all that money," Cullerton said, noting that residents got a mailer a day touting Sposato's candidacy. "I don't know how you compete with that."
Ald. Margaret Laurino (39th) said she would miss her neighbor on the Council floor for his kind words — and ready stash of mixed nuts he was always quick to share during the lengthy meetings
"He's a gentleman," said Laurino, whose father, Anthony, served with Cullerton's father for decades.
Despite Tim Cullerton's retirement, the Cullertons aren't entirely out of Chicago politics.
Patti Jo "P.J." Cullerton, the alderman's sister, remains the 38th Ward Democratic committeeman, a post she has held for 20 years, and members of the Cullerton family have been a part of the 38th Ward Regular Democratic Organization dating to the 1930s.
In addition, the alderman's cousin John Cullerton is president of the Illinois Senate, and another cousin, Thomas Cullerton, is a state senator, representing DuPage County.
The Cullerton dynasty began in 1871, when Ed Cullerton — the son of one of the tens of thousands of Irish immigrants who settled in Chicago — was elected alderman of the 6th Ward on the South Side.
Ed Cullerton — who then was elected state senator in 1872, serving in both roles simultaneously — chaired the powerful Council Finance Committee and got a street named after him before dying in office in 1920.
A 1915 campaign photo for Ald. Ed Cullerton, who launched the Cullerton dynasty in 1871. (Cullerton family photo)
As the city expanded north and west, the Cullertons followed its borders. One of Ed Cullerton's nephews opened a bar near what is now Six Corners at Irving Park Road and Cicero and Milwaukee avenues. On his second try, Patrick Joseph "P.J." Cullerton, who was also known as Parky, was elected alderman of the 38th Ward in 1935.
In 1954, Cullerton backed Richard J. Daley's bid for mayor, cementing an enduring alliance between the two families. Daley backed Cullerton's bid for Cook County assessor, and Willie Cullerton became alderman.
Willie Cullerton died in 1973, and was replaced by his son, Thomas, the current alderman's father.
Ald. Thomas Cullerton, who represented the 38th Ward from 1973-93, was replaced by his son's brother-in-law, Thomas Allen, who was replaced by Tim Cullerton, Thomas Cullerton's son. (Cullerton family photo)
Thomas Cullerton died in office in 1993, and former Mayor Richard M. Daley picked Tim Cullerton's brother-in-law, Thomas Allen, to replace him. When Allen became a Cook County judge, Tim Cullerton got the nod from Daley and won a full term in 2011.
Tim Cullerton, who lives near Portage Park's namesake park, across the street from where he grew up, said he learned most of what he knows about politics from his father, whom he watched help person after person in need.
"I kind of miss those days," said Cullerton, who was busy packing up his office this week. His Dunning office's walls were mostly bare — except for a picture of his father.
But there are some things Cullerton said he won't miss about being alderman — including the endless stream of requests to fill potholes, trim trees and plow streets during the winter.
"I won't miss the snowstorms, that's for sure," Cullerton said, shaking his head.
Nora Cullerton, Ald. Tim Cullerton's granddaughter, sits in the 38th Ward seat on the City Council floor. Her family has controlled that seat since 1935. (Cullerton family photo)
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:The Jewish doctor campaigning against circumcision
by Ivano Abbadessa - 2014.11.07
Male circumcision should be banned, just as female genital mutilation is prohibited. Jewish doctor Avshalom Zoossmann-Diskin tells West why he is fighting this ancient Jewish practice, which is also standard practice in Islam, and widespread in the United States. He says: “Male circumcision is a violation of the bodilyintegrity of minors, exactly like female circumcision.”
Dr Zoossmann-Diskin, who is also founder of the Israeli association, Ben Shalem, adds: “Actually, some forms of female circumcision including the most common one, the sunna, which entails cutting the clitoral prepuce, are less severe than the widely spread form of male circumcision.” However, in many societies, male genitals are not protected and are treated as if they don't belong to the child but to the parents and their community.
Dr Zoosmann-Diskin states that “we, the children born to Jewish and Muslim parents, have exactly the same rights as children born to Christian parents. If our parents refuse to understand this simple basic principle of human rights, then Europe has to intervene and protect us within its borders.” It could do this by granting asylum to those who are escaping circumcision.
And yet, the World Health Organisation recently took the view that circumcision could help decrease the risk of HIV infection. Dr Zoossmann-Diskin believes this is just an ideological position backed “by improper cultural (USA) and religious motives”. He continues: “You don't fight a disease by amputating healthy organs, even in cases, in which this amputation assures a great reduction in risk like in breast cancer.” Further evidence of the shaky health grounds behind the WHO’s position is that while the WHO recommends circumcision for men, it doesn't do so for women, “despite the fact that the corresponding female tissue (the clitoral prepuce and labia minora) contain the same cells that facilitate the entry of the HIV virus”.
The strong reaction from Jews and Muslims “should not stop Europe acting to protect children from a serious violation of their physical integrity”. On the contrary, “all European countries should be encouraged to enforce the ban on male genital mutilation”. Dr Zoossmann-Diskin says that while the debate continues, "the screams, suffering and life-long damage of victims are ignored by those who should be protecting them.”GARSEN, Kenya — Eritrea, a sliver of a nation in the Horn of Africa that is one of the most secretive and repressive countries in the world, was cast into confusion on Monday after mutinous soldiers stormed the Ministry of Information and took over the state-run television service, apparently in a coup attempt.
According to several people with close contacts inside Eritrea, the coup attempt failed, with government troops quelling the would-be rebellion and no one rising up in the streets. But many analysts said it was only a matter of time before President Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s brash and steely leader for the past 20 years, is confronted again — and most likely from within.
“There’s a lot of dissatisfaction within the armed forces,” said Dan Connell, a professor at Simmons College in Boston and the author of several books on Eritrea. “If this is suppressed, it won’t be the end.”
Eritrea is often called the North Korea of Africa because it is so isolated and authoritarian, with few friends and thousands of defectors in recent years as Mr. Isaias tightens his grip and the economy teeters on the brink of ruin.Oh man: we’ve been saving this for so long. We finished our European Trip well over a month ago, and we just kept this box in our fridge waiting for the day to review it. I don’t know why we didn’t film it right away, instead of waiting for Germany theme week for our WANKs and FAPFAPs, but it seemed befitting to film this at this time. Anyhow, that’s not the point. Point is this:
Super Dickmann. Super. Dick. Mannnnnn.
Yes, we were far too excited about this product, which isn’t really that great of a product. We just found the name insanely hilarious. Super Dickmann. You’re selling a treat called Super Dickmann. It’s so…so great!
We found this in Germany, and it brought about a very important discussion. Europe is generally a lot more liberal when it comes to sexuality in the media. You can see boobies and nipples, for example, while in media in Canada and the US, you can’t see that at all. It’s wrong!!!!!!! Murdering people gruesomely on TV and seeing blood splatter everywhere is totally acceptable, but heaven forbid someone expose an areola. People will in their lives see lots of nipples, but they will more than likely never see someone murdered. Man, censorship is so silly sometimes.
The point is, Europe doesn’t really ascribe to this silliness as much, I don’t think, and we got to thinking about that because of this product, Super Dickmann. Thank you, silly name, for making us rethink what’s important in life.
Also, check out these commercials we found for Super Dickmann. ZUPER DICKMANNNNN. Holy smokes. I’m so entertained by all of this. Yes, we’re far too old to be laughing at this, but that won’t stop us.
German people: please explain what this Dickmann is all about. Why is it called that. Does Dickmann have another meaning in your language, some other joke, perhaps? Maybe it’s clever wordplay? Something: there’s gotta be something here that’ll make sense of it for me.It is grim to realise that we have reached a point where our contemporary society is so sick, that it could be healthier for everyone if women were imposed the legal status of property instead of being free individuals. The fact that this absurd method could indeed create a safer society shows how cancerous our “progressive” Western world has become.
How it would work
Women would keep the status of human beings even by becoming property. They would become the asset of a Senior Male Authority (SMA) from birth until his death or their own. In practice, the bond between man and female property would resemble the one between a legal guardian and a minor, incapacitated senior or mentally handicapped adult.
With women being children in adult bodies, the comparison is appropriate. But where the authority of the legal guardian expires in time, the right over female property would not be finite. All decisions would be taken by the SMA (father, older brother, then husband). The auction of a young woman from a father to a suitor of his choice would be agreed upon by setting a dowry.
Purchasing power would be in the hands of the SMA, preventing women to spend male income on frivolous and useless items like female “holidays” (the real sex tourism), designer clothes, drugs, club entrances and the like.
Women becoming property: the barrel bomb of dread game
This measure would include the right of repudiation for the husband in case of serious misconduct. The decision would have to be studied and approved by a jury of adult all-male peers.
Repudiation would be efficient to keep women in line because they greatly fear being called out, held accountable, and losing resources or status because of self-inflicted behaviour, and this proposal would not deprive them from love. On the contrary, because of the affection that a man shows towards his property (added to the blood or family bound), the women he acquires will be safer. His “investment” has both a financial implication in addition to an emotional one.
To the triggered liberals, women are already property in Islam. But all I hear about it from the left on social media are crickets. Contrary to Shariah law, my theory does not include whipping, gang rape, honour killing, beheading or stoning when women are at fault.
10 societal benefits of declaring women legal property
1. No women in the military or police, so men and women would die less.
2. Divorce would plummet and single mommery would become a rarity.
3. No access to funds (under SMA supervision) for women would benefit the global economy.
4. Being a negotiable asset, women would be under constant male protection.
Loading...
5. Women (and men) would die less of drug, tobacco, alcohol abuse and the heart diseases, cancers and violent or accidental deaths caused by it.
6. Due to heavy competition, women would have to be thinner, reducing the epidemic of obesity and the health risks that it involves.
7. Less child mortality and death during childbirth (women giving birth younger combined with better healthcare hence greater chances of survival).
8. No more left-leaning parties elected as women would be deprived of the right to vote.
9. Conservative governments elected by men would favour traditional families over leeches and degenerates.
10. Less domestic violence as women would avoid damaged men, having no personal resources (and hitting your woman would be like keying your own car: pointless).
7 ways this proposal would bring balance to the sexual market
1. No more welfare policies encouraging women to remain single or raise bastards. Welfare would be focused on those who need it the most, like veterans or the elderly.
2. No more inflated ego and instant gratification through attention whoring on social media. Its restricted access would create saner women. Promotion of degeneracy would be greatly reduced in the mainstream and social media.
3. No Instagram prostitution for wealthy sheikhs, being defiled for platform shoes and handbags with “stylish” patterns worthy of a child doodle.
4. Women would actively seek males based on their ability to provide, as they would have no alternative access to wealth.
5. Males would access a healthier sexual market, their hard work being rewarded by regular sexual intercourse, relative loyalty and children.
6. No more violent third world hordes imported by the votes of bitter women. No more homosexual agenda, gateway to the next great taboo, the pedophile-friendly agenda.
7. Professional advancement and success earned by women through sexual favours, like the one popular in Hollywood, would virtually disappear as adultery would be a valid reason for repudiation. “Promotion through horizontal refreshment” would only be used by already repudiated women, nothing of value would be lost.
L’ami Bonaparte avait de l’idée
It is not a panacea. The nature of women can’t be changed, but women-as-property would be finally held accountable after the “empowered” ones spent such a long time driving the Western world into the ground.
Read More: Women Must Have Their Behavior And Decisions Controlled By MenClose video Maddow obtains apparent EPA memos on plan to eliminate… Rachel Maddow reports on a pair of memos believed to be from the EPA describing the new system and schedule for eliminating environmental regulations. share tweet email save Embed
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s controversial far-right choice to lead the agency, decided two weeks ago to
Five days later, EPA officials
And yesterday, Scott Pruitt traveled to western Pennsylvania to describe his regressive vision for the EPA at a coal mine. The New Republic’s Emily Atkin It’s been a difficult year thus far for the Environmental Protection Agency. Consider the developments from just the last couple of weeks.EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s controversial far-right choice to lead the agency, decided two weeks ago to side with Dow Chemical – against the advice of the EPA’s researchers – on the use of an insecticide. The next day, the EPA’s scientific integrity office said it was reviewing whether Pruitt violated agency policies when he publicly questioned the role of carbon pollution in climate change.Five days later, EPA officials proposed eliminating “two programs focused on limiting children’s exposure to lead-based paint.” The day after that, Trump’s EPA issued a press statement praising the Energy Star efficiency program that the Trump administration intends to scrap And yesterday, Scott Pruitt traveled to western Pennsylvania to describe his regressive vision for the EPA at a coal mine. The New Republic’s Emily Atkin explained that the EPA chief specifically chose the Harvey Mine, which opened in 2014 as part of the Bailey Mine Complex, owned by the 153-year-old energy company Consol Energy.
Pruitt might point to the Harvey mine as evidence of coal mining’s bright future. But a closer look at the Bailey complex shows it’s hardly a shining example of profitable, environmentally friendly coal mining. Last year, the EPA and the Department of Justice fined Consol $3 million for discharging contaminated wastewater from the Bailey complex into tributaries of the Ohio River, which provides drinking water for approximately 3 million people. In addition, all three mines in the complex have racked up millions of dollars in Mine Safety and Health Administration violations. […]
Granted, it would be a challenge to find an American mining operation that hasn’t broken environmental laws or struggled financially over its lifetime. But Harvey Mine is a bad symbolic choice for yet another reason: It’s owned by a company that wants to get out of the coal mining business altogether.
This comes on the heels of a Washington Post Oddly enough, Pruitt didn’t mention any of this.This comes on the heels of a Washington Post piece on the state of the Environmental Protection Agency itself.
Twice during an hour of interviews for this column, EPA workers in different parts of the country asked to communicate with me by using encryption software. All who spoke feared retaliation and would not allow their names to be used.
“It is pretty bleak,” one staffer, an environmental engineer, said about employee morale.
“It’s in the dumps,” said another.
“Pretty much everybody is updating their resumes. It’s grim,” added a third.
They and their colleagues are dedicated to EPA’s mission to “protect human health and the environment.” They fear that Trump administration policies will do the opposite.We just found out that LG will unveil its V30 phablet on August 31 at the IFA congress in Berlin but were unsure if LG will bring the device to European retailers and carriers.According to Faryaab Sheikh, former Sammobile Editor-in-Chief, it will.
I can also confirm that the #LGV30 will feature an OLED screen. #IFA2017 Faryaab Sheikh (@Faryaab) July 13, 2017
LG didn't bring its two previous V series phones to Europe officially so fans had to import them from elsewhere.
The LG V30 is expected to have an 18:9 6.2" OLED display, a Snapdragon 835 chipset, 6GB of RAM and a dual 13MP camera setup on the back (like the one on the LG G6). The switch to OLED means the LG V30 will likely drop the secondary screen its predecessors were defined by.We’ve seen things like this before, and while they do look comfortable, I’m wary of customizing my desktop to the point where I have a whole different set of WASD keys for my game-playing convenience. If I did get a WASD-gripper, though, this Nostromo from Razer is looking like a pretty solid choice. It’s a hell of a lot like the old Belkin one, but adds improved on-board memory and configuration.
The Nostromo is what it looks like: a disembodied piece of keyboard, with an 8-way rocker on it and onboard memory for storing profiles and macros. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense for a serious gamer, though for $70 (the asking price) you could get a new fancy keyboard instead, something you’ll probably use more often.
Either way, the thing is available now over at Razer. Surprise the hardcore gamer in your family with one.An evangelizing member of the white supremicist group the National Alliance has apparently made his or her way from Hillsboro, West Virginia all the way to the L train.
“STOP IMMIGRATION!” reads the black-on-yellow sticker spotted by a reader this morning. “Non-Whites are turning America into a Third World slum. They come for welfare or take our jobs. They bring crime. They are messy, disruptive, noisy and multiply rapidly. Let’s send them home now!”
Have any readers noticed stickers, fliers or literature? Does this signal rising racial tension on the often pale-faced shuttle?
The National Alliance provided a phone number on the stickers, which we dialed to find out whether there were any cocktail parties coming up in New York. “Thank you for calling the National Alliance,” a woman’s voice intoned. “America’s foremost organization working for the longterm interests of men and women of European descent.”
Among the National Alliance’s concerns:
the government makes only a transparent pretense to protect America’s borders
the Jewish monopoloy of our mass media
quotas, multiculturalism and political correctness in schools and workplaces
“We favor a free, strong, proud White America,” the recording says. “If you share some of our concerns, then you should learn more about what the National Alliance is doing.” The Observer left a message at the beep.
The Alliance was founded by neo-Nazi William Pierce in 1974. From Wikipedia:
Before the death of Pierce, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Alliance the best-financed and best-organized white nationalist organization of its kind in the United States. Membership in 2002 was estimated at 2,500 with an income of $1 million annually.[14] According to the SPLC, paid membership has declined to fewer than 800 and the paid staff was down to only 10 people as of 2006.[15] The infighting since the death of the founder Pierce apparently has greatly weakened the organization. In 2002, the organization ran a white power record label called Resistance Records and ran “Resistance Radio”, a now defunct web radio station that streamed white power rock music across the Internet 24 hours a day. It also has a radio show, American Dissident Voices, heard on shortwave and streaming audio on the Internet. This show started in 1992 and has been on every week since. At one point in the mid-1990s there were 22 radio stations, AM and FM, which carried the program, but most of these radio stations dropped these programs.
The organization is not on Twitter.about
I wrote this song after hearing a a radio interview with one of the astronauts who had walked on the moon.I was fascinated by this guy who had emerged from obscurity to reach the very pinnacle of human achievement, only to descend back into obscurity. I forget his name. I think he teaches physics somewhere in New Mexico. I was excited to sing with my friend and sometime touring partner Shannon Stephens on this.
lyrics
moon mission movin' on up
let's see how high she goes boys
moon mission fuel her on up and let's
get the hell out of this noise
black distance silent as time
tell me how how far does it go?
buckle me in and ill see for myself
and report back to you folks down below
I'll be your sweet sailor up in the sky
don't waste a wish for me, dear
I've had enough of this Earth-binding stuff
there's nothing for me down here
hey humans what will you find
water or life on a star
nothing at all? it's alright, no one minds
when you're up there so high and so far
so here we come, you unlucky old sun
we do what monkeys cant do
we'll steal your light then we'll take off and run
we'll fly some circles round you
All of my life I've been waiting so long
to get out of this gravity
look at me now I'm a white shining light
there's a black moth that burns up in me
re-entry fast-falling star
looks like you ran out of breath
they'll throw a parade say goodbye then replace you with
Ramblin' robots that never fear death
I'll be your sweet sailor up in the sky
but don't waste a wish for me dear
I've had enough of this earth-binding stuff
there's nothing for me down here
credits
Featuring:
Jason Harrod: vocals, acoustic and electric guitar
Joshua Stamper: double bass, electric bass
Patrick Berkery: drums, percussion
Brian Christinzio: piano
Jim Callan: pedal steel
Kenny Hutson: pedal steel
Colin McGrath: vocals, guitar
Reid Maclean: vocals
Michelle Bishop: violin
Erica Miller : violin
Shelley Weiss: viola
Naomi Gray: cello
Jon Rees: piccolo, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet
Paul Arbogast: tenor and bass trombone
--
Orchestral arrangements written and conducted by Joshua Stamper
Mastered by Grey Larsen at Grey Larsen Mastering, Bloomington, Indiana
Vinyl Mastering by Prairie Cat
Photography by Erica Pelaccia
Illustration and Graphic design by Vesper Stamper
--
produced by Brian McTear, engineered and mixed by Jonathan Low from Highliner, released September 12, 2013Featuring:Jason Harrod: vocals, acoustic and electric guitarJoshua Stamper: double bass, electric bassPatrick Berkery: drums, percussionBrian Christinzio: pianoJim Callan: pedal steelKenny Hutson: pedal steelColin McGrath: vocals, guitarReid Maclean: vocalsMichelle Bishop: violinErica Miller : violinShelley Weiss: violaNaomi Gray: celloJon Rees: piccolo, flute, clarinet, bass clarinetPaul Arbogast: tenor and bass trombone--Orchestral arrangements written and conducted by Joshua StamperMastered by Grey Larsen at Grey Larsen Mastering, Bloomington, IndianaVinyl Mastering by Prairie CatPhotography by Erica PelacciaIllustration and Graphic design by Vesper Stamper--produced by Brian McTear, engineered and mixed by Jonathan Low
license
all rights reservedMost people are interesting, inspiring in some way or another and have a story to tell, they usually tell it in their personal social media page. But the ones who get noticed and stand out from all others are usually the ones that do things differently and out of the ordinary, either liked or hated… Active preggers are getting a lot of attention these days as a lot of them are shattering myths and braking boundaries, but no doubt that women who CrossFit during their pregnancy get the most hated, judgmental remarks… The reason of course, is that they choose to do things differently… They kick all the pregnant myths’ a** while at it!
Meet Erin Comstock – a true inspiration!
Pro snowboarder 12 years… 5 times X-games athlete… Now, Personal trainer… NASM, CES, PES, CF-L1…. Mom to Kaius and baby girl on the way.
GF: Tell us a bit about your habits, daily routine and hobbies.
Erin: I currently live in Denver, Colorado. I am 38 years old and I am a CrossFit coach and personal trainer. I was a professional athlete for 12 years so my personal drive to stay fit is ingrained in me and my competitive nature keeps me determined.
I work out 5-6 days a week doing CrossFit, I take my 2 year old to school 2 days a week and on those days I coach and train clients. I’m in bed at 9:30 at night and up at 6. Working out is what makes me a better Wife, Mom and person. I love the high I get from a good sweat!
GF: What’s your experience been like at this current pregnancy?
Erin: This is my second pregnancy. We feel very grateful to have another child come into our lives. This pregnancy is much different then the first. I had already determined pre pregnancy that I was going to eat better and keep a more constant workout routine as my body allowed. This also meant I was going to workout my whole first trimester no matter how nauseous or tired I felt. That alone was the best decision I had made going into this pregnancy. Even though I felt yucky the days I worked out I still felt 100 x’s better then the days I didn’t. So I knew keeping exercise in my routine was key.
GF: Was being active part of your pre-pregnancy routine? If so – what did you do and how many times per week?
Erin: Yes, When I was pregnant with my first I was active too. So I want to clarify what activity I changed with the 2nd pregnancy. With my 1st I went to 24 hour fitness 3-4 days a week, I went on runs as my body allowed and walked a lot. I tried to eat healthy but it made me sick to think about healthy food, so I ate crappy food and did workouts that I thought were amazing.
I got into Crossfit 6 months postnatal to loose all the baby weight that I had gained. Doing the High intensity and variation training that CF offers really changed my perspective of what a good workout was. I stayed with CF and watched many other moms CF their way through pregnancy and it made me determined to be just like them. The thing with CF is that you can modify anything at any time and still get a killer workout. The MOST important thing I found with CF is that no matter how sick I felt or tired all I had to do was show up and I would leave a sweaty mess. These kinds of workouts I could never do on my own. My self motivation while being pregnant is just not |
”; volcanoes spew lava, the earth has a magnetic field, and so on. We are also taught the Earth was once a molten ball that revolved around the sun, but if a liquid were to rotate in zero gravity it would leave empty space in the center. Here is a little experiment performed by NASA.
You may wonder about the Inner Sun, a possible explanation would be cold fusion. The subject of cold fusion does not seem to enjoy much credibility in the USA. Some scientists regard cold fusion as a pseudo-science. Yet many countries in the world are pouring enormous sums of money into hard scientific research on the matter. Some scientists have already discussed the possibility of cold fusion occurring inside the Earth. P. Palmer, a geophysicist has already suggested this. Helium-3 emanating from inside the Earth has been regarded by some as an indication that cold fusion might be taking place deep down inside the Earth. Read more about this here.
As an alien theorist we understand the moon is not naturally the Earths satellite, there was a time in human history where there was no moon, even scientists today are beginning to realize there is something odd with Earth and its relation to the moon. Democritus and Anaxagoras taught that there was a time when the Earth was without the Moon. Aristotle wrote that Arcadia in Greece, before being inhabited by the Hellenes, had a population of Pelasgians, and that these aborigines occupied the land already before there was a moon in the sky above the Earth; for this reason they were called Proselenes. A lot of myths, legends, and tales say that there used to be no Moon in the sky. The Moon appeared after the Great Flood. This was noticed by the people who lived in the south of Greece, as well as by African tribes and others. We are told by others such as David Icke that the moon is a Death Star, a hollowed out planetoid space ship used by the Reptilians. According to those who embrace New Age, Pleideans/Nordics are planning to “take out” the reptilian base that is the moon. If you take a closer look at ancient “calendars” you can see most symbols are symmetrical, except for the creatures. These calendars are not telling us of time, they do not tell us anything about the heavens, they are all maps; the Mayan Calendar is a map of the concave planet. It would get one to wonder why it is that hollywood would even want to push this “conspiracy theory” of what the Mayans predicted, could it just have been disinformation? Yes. In the past humans could have possibly had some interaction with begins or species living beneath us. The animals on these calendars do not represent different “years”, but all the living creatures living on the concave plane that is the earth. Others theorize WE are the ones living on a concave plane, that we are the ones living in the hollow region. You can see what exactly represents the sun and the moon giving light to one part of the Earth, and darkness to the other. You can also see, at least in the Mayan “calendar” Map, there is a layer of water underneath the land.
Religious texts on the issue:
The Sages of Israel maintain: The sun travels beneath the sky by day and above the sky at night; while the Sages of the nations of the world maintain: It travels beneath the sky by day and below the earth at night.
In the Bible: Then God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse; and it was so. The firmament is the sky, conceived as a solid dome.According to Genesis, God created the firmament to separate the “waters above” the earth from those below.
There is no doubt in my mind the earth is not solid, many of us believe there are intelligent beings living “underground”; but what if our interpretation of the hollow earth is flawed, what if the beings “beneath” us, have other being living “beneath” them. These maps passed off as calendars could just be one of the “layers” of Earth.
Here is an Atlantian Model of the HollowEarth, and a 3D model I created below it to show what I mean. According to the book of Enoch, excluded from the King James Bible, the Earth has multiple cavities, layers, or hollows to it.
You may be skeptical of the theory that we are the ones living on a concave structure, but there is science that could prove this.
This man explains much on his YouTube channel if you are interested in learning more on the subject.
This man also goes into great detail explaining how and why this is possible.
I highly recommend his videos, you can visit this mans YouTube channel to get scientific explanations on this theory.
You may wonder, why can’t we see the Earths land curve upward if it were truly concave? Here is a video with an explanation.
The moon could be inside with us, monitoring us.Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:
We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.
*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.
*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.
*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.
*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.
Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:
We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.
Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:
We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.
With too many questions that still need answering, we’re just not ready for legalization, Brandon East Progressive Conservative MLA Len Isleifson said, sharing in some of Pallister’s concerns about marijuana, more accurately called cannabis.
This week, Pallister publicly requested that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delay legalization for an extra year beyond the proposed date of July 1, 2018.
Picking up related paraphernalia at Growers N’ Smokers on Friday, veteran Michael Gibson said that his “disrespect” for Premier Brian Pallister is “huge, right now.”
While Brandon’s political representatives encourage the delay of the legalization of marijuana, local advocates of the plant are saying the day couldn’t come soon enough.
Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 22/7/2017 (585 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/7/2017 (585 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Advertisement Advertise With Us
While Brandon’s political representatives encourage the delay of the legalization of marijuana, local advocates of the plant are saying the day couldn’t come soon enough.
Picking up related paraphernalia at Growers N’ Smokers on Friday, veteran Michael Gibson said that his "disrespect" for Premier Brian Pallister is "huge, right now."
This week, Pallister publicly requested that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delay legalization for an extra year beyond the proposed date of July 1, 2018.
With too many questions that still need answering, we’re just not ready for legalization, Brandon East Progressive Conservative MLA Len Isleifson said, sharing in some of Pallister’s concerns about marijuana, more accurately called cannabis.
"I’ve talked to a number of people, where we just don’t have a lot of answers for them," Isleifson said, citing several areas in which the federal government has yet to clarify either the legalities of cannabis or how it might handle some concerns, such as how to determine whether drivers are inebriated.
The federal government has put forward the idea that growing four plants would be legal, but how does one count them? Isleifson asked. Do you count plants that have been taken down to dry, or only those being grown? What if more than one person lives in a housing unit or building? Do they each get four plants?
"It’s not a matter of delaying, it’s a matter of getting things right," he said. "I think for the sake of Manitobans’ safety we need to make sure things are in place before we move forward."
Brandon West Progressive Conservative MLA Reg Helwer is on a provincial caucus working group, whose members, he said, have their hands full seeking answers to these and other concerns that have been brought forward.
While legalization is intended to take the criminal element out of cannabis sales, he said that Health Canada-approved growers aren’t set up to supply enough product to accommodate recreational sales, meaning the criminal element would remain.
"We only have one chance to get it right," Helwer said.
Dismissing similar concerns brought forward by Pallister as being delay tactics, Gibson said that he has found a benefit to medical cannabis that he wants to see more people
have the opportunity to experience without the risk of prosecution.
Gibson received a medical marijuana prescription approximately two months ago, though Growers N’ Smokers owner Rick Macl said that not everyone’s fortunate to have a doctor wiling to offer one.
Chronic back, knee and ankle pain resulted in Gibson receiving a recent medical discharge from the Canadian military, capping his nine-year career in what he considers a haze of prescription medicine.
Prescribed Percocet, he said that as his tolerance level increased, he began taking more and more of it.
"More than I should have, " he said. "I was almost taking fentanyl."
With encouragement from Macl, Gibson asked his doctor for a cannabis prescription, which he was granted.
Since then, he said he has regained the ability to sleep at night, adding, "Most days, I can get through the day" —a vast improvement from his previously overly medicated state.
Receiving a prescription isn’t the easiest nut to crack for some people in Brandon, with Macl linking those unable to secure a willing physician with others throughout the nation who are able to offer the service over the internet.
Although there are a handful of physicians in Brandon who prescribe cannabis, he said they don’t want their names out there out of fear they’ll be overrun by those seeking prescriptions.
With these legal barriers currently in place between those who might benefit from cannabis with what he has labeled a medicine, Macl has strong words against Pallister’s request that legalization be delayed.
"What’s (Pallister’s) problem?" he asked. "What are they sitting there still thinking about? Do these guys actually think that they know more than those who are already doing this?"
Brandon-Souris Conservative MP Larry Maguire plans on hosting public meetings this summer, at which he said he would strive to "allow everyday Westman residents to make their voices heard and to provide amendments, suggestions and ideas" on legalization.
Macl said he’s eager to attend these meetings, for which details are still being hashed out.
Like the city’s MLAs, Maguire has a number of questions and concerns that he wants to see the Liberals answer and resolve before legalization takes place.
Costs to policing are a big issue, which includes the means of measuring one’s THC levels —an ingredient in cannabis that can linger in one’s system for days, making its attribution toward impairment difficult to determine.
Maguire also questions whether four plants is the right number, what kind of public education campaign should accompany legalization and how it might be taxed, among other things.
Since he opened Growers N’ Smokers earlier this year, Macl said he has seen business boom with a wide swath of the population, but primarily with an older crowd, with his median customer approximately 60 years of age.
He’s still eager to begin selling cannabis as soon as legally possible and has expanded his business into a neighbouring property to accommodate the anticipated effort.
Whether recreational use becomes legal or otherwise, he said that his speciality would remain medical in nature because helping those trying to kick prescription drugs is where his passion lies.
There’s much to know that many doctors aren’t relaying to their patients, Macl said, adding that a simple "cannabis" prescription is meaningless if you don’t know what strain to ingest.
Providing an example, he said "Sativa is like the devil for PTSD patients because it makes your mind active."
Further to that, he said that although his business’s name is "Growers N’ Smokers," smoking isn’t actually the preferred means of absorbing cannabis, citing vaping and baked goods as the best means of doing so.
» [email protected]
» Twitter: @TylerClarkeMBESRBC Bike Co-op Launches in Watts, Members Look Forward to Aiding Community
This past weekend, the East Side Riders Bike Club (ESRBC) celebrated the ribbon-cutting on their brand new bike co-op and shop located at 11321 S. Central Ave. in Watts.
The event launched with a short bike ride through the community, including a stop at the Watts Towers, before ending up back at the co-op site for a celebration featuring music, a barbecue, and the raffling off of bikes and ESRBC gear.
For someone like myself, who has been tracking the growth of the ESRBC and the South L.A. cycling scene for the past several years now (see here, here), the ribbon-cutting was a welcome milestone for more reasons than one.
Yes, a bike co-op is sorely needed in a lower-income community where bikes are essential for transportation and getting a popped tire fixed can be too expensive for those who are really on the margins. And the safe gathering space, strong role models, and access to bike maintenance skills the space will provide for youth from a wonderful but struggling community is also much-needed.
But the wide range of groups that came by to support the ESRBC — including members from Black Kids on Bikes, The Others BC, Syndicate Riders, the South L.A. Real Rydaz, Barkada, the Eastside Bike Club, Los Ryderz, and the Ghost Bike Documentary folks — signaled that the bike community that has been on the rise in South and Southeast L.A. was continuing to grow and expand its reach.
It’s not that the groups are new — most aren’t. Or, at least, the riders aren’t new to cycling. Will Holloway, head of the Real Rydaz and one of the more recognizable South L.A. figures, for example, has been part of the low-rider cycling scene since 1990. But the way the clubs have come together to support each other over the past several years has been exciting to watch, as has been the shift toward using cycling as a way to give back to the community.
Los Ryderz, as we’ve documented here, has been active in mentoring at-risk youth in Watts and ensuring they had a positive community to belong to. Black Kids on Bikes, riding out of Leimert Park, has supported the development of the Ride On! co-op there, helping to fix bikes for folks in the community every other Sunday. And the ESRBC has been active in fixing bikes at community events and holding rides to feed the homeless. Members of all three, along with those of several other groups, have been involved in unity rides aimed at building better relations between black and brown communities, highlighting the dangers of hit-and-runs, reclaiming the streets in parts of town where the public space is contested, inspiring youth and families of color to take up cycling, taking pride in their communities, and changing stereotypes about who rides in Los Angeles.
The launching of the Watts co-op is a step forward in institutionalizing that spirit of community transformation.
It’s also clear that the co-op is something the ESRBC members view as the beginning of a new era for them, not the endgame. Even as he was grilling up food for the event-goers, founding member and former ESRBC president John Jones III was nodding towards the empty building on the adjacent lot and telling me it had inspired dreams of an after-school program site. Fred Buggs, Sr., current president of the ESRBC, mentioned he had just gotten his teaching certification from the League of Cycling Instructors and said he was looking forward to starting safety cycling classes for kids.
Given that they and the other club members were clearly exhausted after having spent many late nights getting their new space ready, it was hard to believe they were already thinking ahead. But they have operated this way since launching the club several years ago — they have never been particularly good at thinking small.
That inability to think small is one of the reasons that they are so beloved in the community — that spirit of giving is genuine, and it is infectious. And it has helped inspire others in the community to get involved in their cause and lend a hand however they can.
As Watts leaves commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the Watts Riots/Rebellion behind, initiatives like the co-op suggest the road ahead is going to be a little bit smoother.
* * *
John Jones III is our Civil Servant Streetsie winner this year. We recently sat down to talk about organizing a ride between the Leimert Park and Watts co-ops, ending in Watts with a BBQ and community party. We’ll have more details once we’ve hammered them out. In the meanwhile, check out this short video (below) that highlights some of the work that Jones and his club do in the community or visit the fundraising page for their co-op, here."In other personal pursuits, he once held the world’s second-highest score for the Nintendo Wii Tennis video game."
Last weekend's New York Times profile of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick had plenty of important revelations about Kalanick and the company he runs, both of which have been facing some tough PR lately. But there was one incidental, almost throwaway line buried in the piece that made me stop in my tracks:
The line baffled me for a number of reasons, not least of which was that the concept of a "high score" in "Wii Tennis" didn't make much sense. Claiming the "world's second-highest score" in Wii Sports tennis is like claiming the second-highest score in Pong based on nothing but playing against the computer and your friends. Absent some sort of sanctioned tournament or logical third-party ranking system, the claim just doesn't parse.
And yet, the boast is oddly specific. Kalanick hadn't earned the best "Wii Tennis" score in the world according to The New York Times. He achieved the second best. If this was just a fabulist boast, why limit yourself to number two? And if it wasn't just puffery, who was number one?
What's more, the paper of record doesn't hedge its declaration with a "he said" or "he claimed." Kalanick's "Wii Tennis" high score is stated as a fact, and one that piece author Mike Isaac said on Twitter was "triple sourced." (Isaac didn't respond to further request for comment on his basis for the line.)
I've spent an admittedly ridiculous amount of time looking into this one sentence over the past few days. As it turns out, getting to the bottom of Kalanick's Wii Sports skill requires delving into the vagaries of human memory, reverse engineered asymptotic leveling systems, and the semantic meaning of video game achievement itself.
What Sacca saw
Though The New York Times gave it a fresh burst of attention, Kalanick's claim to the second-highest "Wii Tennis" score is not a new one. The factoid appeared on Uber's about page at least as far back as 2013, where, in addition to other achievements, the site says that Kalanick "somehow... also managed to rack up the second highest Wii Tennis score in the world. Game, set, match." The boast is mentioned in a Chicago Tribune piece from last month as well.
In a 2014 Financial Times interview, Kalanick also claimed to be "number seven in the country in Angry Birds." In all these profiles, the boast is supposed to reflect a wider drive to win at pursuits others treat less seriously. "If somebody gives me a casual game and says, ‘OK, here’s the world record,’ I’ll just go until I’m there," Kalanick told the Financial Times.
For more details on the "Wii Tennis" story, we need to rely on Chris Sacca, the (recently retired) silicon valley investor who became something of a household name through ABC's Shark Tank. In a 2015 Medium post, Sacca uses a "Wii Tennis" anecdote to highlight Kalanick's extreme competitiveness.
As the story goes, during a holiday get-together with friends and family, Sacca's father challenged Kalanick to "a friendly Wii Tennis match." The elder Sacca held his own against Kalanick... until the Uber executive revealed that he was using his weaker hand. "With full Princess Bride panache," as Sacca writes, Kalanick switched to his dominant hand and proceeded to win every single point going forward.
The key detail in Sacca's story comes next, when Kalanick tries to "offer... a touch of consolation" to his vanquished opponent:
“I have a confession to make, Mr. Sacca. I’ve played a fair amount of Wii Tennis before,” [Kalanick said]. While talking, he used his controller to navigate through the settings pages on the Wii to a list of high scores. “In fact,” he continued, “on the Wii Tennis global leaderboard, I am currently tied for second in the world.”
Reading this detailed explanation only set off more alarm bells in my head. Wii Sports doesn't have any "global leaderboard," as Sacca claims. There is no "settings pages" on the system or the game to let you compare your performance to anyone else online. I literally wrote an entire reference book about the Wii, in which Wii Sports filled an entire chapter, so I'm pretty confident on this point.
Yet Sacca also seemed pretty confident in citing a "Wii Tennis global leaderboard." It's a story he's repeated at a convention and in a podcast in recent years, citing "global leaderboards" both times.
I tried desperately to come up with some explanation that meshed with what Sacca saw. Were they maybe playing on the Wii U re-release of Wii Sports Club, which did feature online multiplayer and regional leaderboards? Sacca said the story takes place on "New Year's Day, 2010 I believe," well before the Wii U was available, so that doesn't help.
Were they possibly playing another tennis game on the Wii? Titles like EA's Grand Slam Tennis and Sega's Virtua Tennis 2009 seem to have online competition, after all. This also feels unlikely; Wii Sports has been a pack-in game and primary system seller for the Wii since its 2006 launch, to the point that "Wii Tennis" can safely be assumed as the tennis mode in that game (though the wording is frustrating for the sake of clarity, in this case).
Maybe Kalanick had navigated to some sort of online score listing via the Wii's Web browser? There are a few sites that maintain high score lists for some Wii Sports training modes and the game's "skill level." However, Sacca refers to it specifically as a "settings page on the Wii" in multiple tellings, and training mode scores don't seem a likely focus for this kind of boast (Twin Galaxies, the closest thing to official scorekeepers that the industry has, says it has no idea what Sacca is referring to, for what it's worth).
Desperate for more details, I reached out to Sacca to confirm and explain some of the details in his story, specifically the details about a "leaderboard." To my surprise, he actually responded. You can see our entire discussion in the Twitter thread linked above, but here's the core of his reply:
I assure you there was a world ranking at that time. I just checked with other friends and family who were there. Among the reasons we remember it clearly is that we had a long discussion about whether #1 was actually a hack or not. We talked at length about whether hacking the top spot would be a penetration of the software itself or a mechanical hack of the controller. We also remember that he didn't exclusively occupy #2. He was tied with others. This again highlighted #1 as a potential hack. Sorry I don't have anything else to offer as you hunt this down.
It seems clear that Sacca (and his friends and family, apparently) has a distinct memory of seeing Kalanick at No. 2 on some sort of "world ranking" for "Wii Tennis." Yet it's just as clear that there has never been any in-game, online ranking in the original version of Wii Sports. What's going on?
Enter the "skill level"
While Wii Sports doesn't have any online leaderboards, it does have one in-game measure of progress through each of its component sports. This "skill level" is an Elo-style measure of performance that goes up and down depending on how well you do against the computer-controlled AI.
The skill level is the closest thing to an overarching "score" that it makes sense to refer to in Wii Sports, though I'd argue calling it a "score" is incorrect at worst and misleading at best. In any case, I believe confusion over this skill level is probably at the heart of Kalanick and Sacca's "Wii Tennis" claims.
The most detailed and accurate breakdown of the Wii Sports tennis skill level system I've been able to find is here. The full explanation gets into some pretty detailed math, so here's a brief summary:
In Wii Sports, every Mii you use starts with a skill level of zero. Every time you beat a computer opponent, that skill level increases based on your score in that match and the (simulated) skill level of the opponent.
The skill level of your next computer opponent goes up alongside your skill level until you face the top-ranked computer opponents in the game, Elisa and Sarah, who have skill levels of 2000 and 1900 respectively.
Once you reach Elisa and Sarah, the rate of skill level increase quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns. At a skill level of 2300, you can earn up to five skill levels per game won. At level 2350, you earn up to two levels per win. To go from skill level 2398 to 2399 requires 14 perfect games in a row.
All told, it takes at least 160 wins against the computer AI to reach a skill rating of 2399, and that's only if you can pull off dozens of perfect 40-Love matches against the toughest computer opponents the game can throw at you.Republicans are taking the War on Drugs to a whole new level. Republican Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas managed to get the House Judiciary Committee to pass his bill that would apply US law globally.
The new law would make it a federal crime to plan activities on foreign land that would violate the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA) even if the activities are legal in that country. To put it simply, if you are an American citizen and you smoke marijuana in a country where it is legal, you would be arrested when you return. It gets worse, you could be arrested for even talking about smoking marijuana in a nation where it is legal.
The “Drug Trafficking Safe Harbor Elimination Act of 2011,” allows prosecutors to bring conspiracy charges against anyone who discusses, plans or advises someone else to engage in any activity that violates the CSA, the massive federal law that prohibits drugs like marijuana and strictly regulates prescription medication. So if you travel to another country to try a prescription drug that could save your life, you would be prosecuted if that medication is illegal here in America. In fact, just e-mailing or texting advice to a vacationing friend on where to find a marijuana cafe or where to find a certain type of medication you would need an ID to access in the United States would be a criminal act. Essentially, this law would expand US law on a global scale, far outside the jurisdiction of American authorities.
The law is particularly concerning to civil libertarian attorney and author Harvey Silverglate. “Just when you think you can’t get any more cynical, a bill like this comes along. I mean, it just sounds like an abomination. First, there’s no intuitive reason for an American to think that planning an activity that’s perfectly legal in another country would have any effect on America,” Silverglate says. “So we’re getting further away from the common law tradition that laws should be intuitive, and should include a mens rea component. Second, this is just an act of shameless cultural and legal imperialism. It’s just outrageous… I don’t see any interest other than to a desire to impose our moral and cultural preferences on the rest of the world.”
So let’s say you’re planning a family get together in the Netherlands and a few of your family members express a desire to smoke pot during the vacation. Even if you do not smoke pot during the trip, the law would apply to every single family member and conspiracy charges would be levied against you. It’s a clear violation of the Constitution and it violates the sovereignty of the other nations of the world. Simply planning to do something legal in another country is NOT a crime. Sending an email isn’t either. This law is an egregious assault on freedom of speech and it shouldn’t have made it past the committee. Once again, Republicans think US law is global law.
They are also once again, committing hypocrisy. Many Republicans have been complaining about government attempts to pressure Switzerland to soften its privacy laws to help American officials to catch tax cheats and money launderers, something that would affect corporations and the wealthy. But if a middle class US citizen legally smokes pot in another country, Republicans think the full force of US law should apply. It’s a waste of money and time and shows just how imperialistic Republicans are. Next, they’ll probably make it illegal for Americans to speak French in France.I am amazed by just about everything having to do with birth….mothers, the creation of babies from a sperm and egg, the childbirth process, the placenta, the umbilical cord…
Aaahhhh….that umbilical cord. That magical connection that grows life. It filters, it provides, it knows when to start and it knows when baby no longer needs it.
For more information about the umbilical cord and it’s importance at birth, please see my supplemental blog post here – Clamping Umbilical Cords
I’ve often tried to explain to people the incredible changes that happen at birth – including to the umbilical cord – but I’ve had a hard time finding images to demonstrate what I’m trying to explain.
Until now! I recently attended a birth and asked the mother permission to take photographs of her baby’s umbilical cord to document the changes it goes through after the birth – and she said yes!
Umbilical cords have two arteries and a vein that run the length of it. Those three vessels are surrounded by a special substance called Wharton’s Jelly. This jelly is thick and gelatinous when functional – this is to prevent the baby from accidentally causing it to kink and stop functioning (even true knots in the cord rarely cause problems because the Wharton’s Jelly prevents it from being able to tighten down and occlude blood flow to baby!)
When baby is born, this cord continues to function, providing the baby with not only blood and oxygen – but providing baby TIME! Time to transition to air breathing, experiencing the changes that babies go through at birth. As long as that cord is pulsing, it’s working for the baby the exact same way it did before the baby came out.
Once baby’s breathing and the cord is no longer needed, it goes through its own transformation. The Wharton’s Jelly in the cord begins to liquefy…tightening down on those vessels…clamping them off naturally. The cord slowly becomes thin, white, limp – dramatic changes from the thick purple pulsing entity it was when the baby was born!
Not clamping or cutting the cord until this transformation has occurred provides the baby with the benefit of extra blood, oxygen, gentleness and time!
Here you can see the magical changes of the cord! These pictures are ALL of the same umbilical cord…progressively taken over time.
THE FOLLOWING PICTURES WERE TAKEN OVER A PERIOD OF ABOUT 15 MINUTES – BABY WAS ATTACHED THE ENTIRE TIME….
PLEASE REMEMBER TO GIVE CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE….DO NOT JUST TAKE THE PICTURES FROM THIS PAGE WITHOUT LINKING OR GIVING CREDIT BACK TO THIS BLOG!!! THANK YOU!
PLEASE REMEMBER TO GIVE CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE….DO NOT JUST TAKE THE PICTURES FROM THIS PAGE WITHOUT LINKING OR GIVING CREDIT BACK TO THIS BLOG!!! THANK YOU!In his State of the Union address this week, President Barack Obama proposed an increase to the federal minimum wage, from the current $7.25 an hour to $9.
And lest anyone hasten to cast that as a partisan proposal, Obama claimed to have support on the idea from an unlikely source: former presidential rival Mitt Romney.
"Working folks shouldn't have to wait year after year for the minimum wage to go up, while CEO pay has never been higher. So here's an idea that Gov. Romney and I actually agreed on last year: Let's tie the minimum wage to the cost of living, so that it finally becomes a wage you can live on," Obama said.
We know from last year’s dogged fight for the White House that Obama and Romney agreed on very little. But what about the minimum wage? We decided to check it out.
Running for Senate
Romney first expressed support for the idea of an indexed wage increase back in 1994, when he ran for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts against Ted Kennedy.
(Indexing the minimum wage means pegging it to a common measure of inflation, such as the Consumer Price Index. The idea is that when prices overall go up, the minimum wage would go up, too. Obama used the term "the cost of living" to refer to inflation, but the concepts here are the same.)
Kennedy criticized Romney for opposing a 30-cent increase to the minimum wage, which was then $4.25 an hour. In defense, he said he favored increasing it even more by tying it to inflation.
"I think the minimum wage ought to keep pace with inflation. I think the minimum wage is a good thing to have in our economy and I think it ought to be updated. We've had some inflation since the time it was set at $4.25 in April 1991, so I think an inflationary increase is appropriate," he said at the time.
Inflation had risen about 11 percent over the previous three years, so Romney's plan would have boosted the minimum wage by about 45 cents.
As Massachusetts governor
In 2006, Romney vetoed a bill passed by the Massachusetts legislature to raise the state’s minimum wage to $8 an hour over two years. Again, he defended the decision by asserting that the wage should increase modestly and regularly and be indexed to inflation.
He sent the plan back to lawmakers with a proposal to hike the minimum wage from $6.75 to $7 an hour, and study further increases every two years.
His spokesman told the Boston Globe, "The governor is not opposed to a minimum-wage increase, but he thinks it should be in line with inflation, so that's what he has put on the table. This is logical and consistent with what the governor has supported in the past."
Running for president
At a New Hampshire campaign event in January 2012, Romney was asked about his stance on raising the minimum wage.
"My view has been to allow the minimum wage to rise with the CPI (Consumer Price Index) or with another index so that it adjusts automatically over time," he said.
The interviewer followed up, asking, "So you’d support that as president?"
"I already indicated that when I was governor of Massachusetts, and that’s my view," he responded.
He confirmed in February that his opinion had not changed, which drew quick criticism from conservative players such as Steve Forbes, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Club for Growth.
Romney’s positioned shifted a bit after that. In a March interview on CNBC he conceded that the timing wasn’t right to raise the minimum wage during an economic recovery:
"On a regular basis, I said in the proposal I made (as governor of Massachusetts), every two years, we should look at the minimum wage, we should see what’s happened to inflation, we should also look at the jobs level throughout the country, unemployment rate, competitive rates in other states or, in this case, other nations.
"So, certainly, the level of inflation is something you should look at, and you should identify what’s the right way to keep America competitive. So that would tell you that right now, there’s probably not a need to raise the minimum wage."
Our ruling
Obama said that tying the minimum wage to the cost of living is something he and Romney "actually agreed on."
As far back as 1994, Romney favored this approach. He reiterated it in 2006 while governor of Massachusetts, and again as the Republican nominee for president last year. Under criticism on the national stage, he did back away slightly from that position given the fragile economy |
, automated FinTech that eliminates many cumbersome, slow, and expensive intermediate processes from their businesses.
Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 22nd CloudEXPO | DXWorldEXPO November 11-13, 2018 in New York City will find fresh new content in two new tracks called:
FinTechEXPO
New York Blockchain Event
which will incorporate FinTech and Blockchain, as well as machine learning, artificial intelligence and deep learning in these two distinct tracks.
Register for Full Conference "Gold Pass" ▸ Here (Expo Hall ▸ Here)
Sponsorship Opportunities ▸ Here
Speaking Opportunities ▸ Here
Sponsorship and Speaking Inquiries: [email protected].
FinTech brings efficiency as well as the ability to deliver new services and a much improved customer experience throughout the global financial services industry. FinTech is a natural fit with cloud computing, as new services are quickly developed, deployed, and scaled on public, private, and hybrid clouds.
More than US$20 billion in venture capital is being invested in FinTech this year. DXWorldEXPO | CloudEXPO are pleased to bring you the latest FinTech developments as an integral part of our program.
DXWorldEXPO | CloudEXPO are accepting speaking submissions for this new track, so please visit Cloud Computing Expo for the latest information or contact us at [email protected]
Register for Full Conference "Gold Pass" ▸ Here (Expo Hall ▸ Here)
Sponsorship Opportunities ▸ Here
Speaking Opportunities ▸ Here
Sponsorship and Speaking Inquiries: [email protected].
Download Slide Deck ▸ Here
Only DXWorldEXPO | CloudEXPO bring together all this in a single location:
Attend DXWorldEXPO | CloudEXPO. Build your own custom experience. Learn about the world's latest technologies and chart your course to Digital Transformation.
22nd International DXWorldEXPO | CloudEXPO, taking place November 11-13, 2018, in New York City, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world.
Register for Full Conference "Gold Pass" ▸ Here (Expo Hall ▸ Here)
Sponsorship Opportunities ▸ Here
Speaking Opportunities ▸ Here
Sponsorship and Speaking Inquiries: [email protected].
Download Slide Deck: ▸ Here
Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday's debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy. Meanwhile, 94% of enterprises are using some form of XaaS - software, platform, and infrastructure as a service.
With major technology companies and startups seriously embracing Cloud strategies, now is the perfect time to attend and learn what is going on, contribute to the discussions, and ensure that your enterprise is on the right path to Digital Transformation.
Every Global 2000 enterprise in the world is now integrating cloud computing in some form into its IT development and operations. Midsize and small businesses are also migrating to the cloud in increasing numbers.
Register for Full Conference "Gold Pass" ▸ Here (Expo Hall ▸ Here)
Sponsorship Opportunities ▸ Here
Speaking Opportunities ▸ Here
Sponsorship and Speaking Inquiries: [email protected].
Download Slide Deck: ▸ Here
Companies are each developing their unique mix of cloud technologies and services, forming multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures and deployments across all major industries. Cloud-driven thinking has become the norm in financial services, manufacturing, telco, healthcare, transportation, energy, media, entertainment, retail and other consumer industries, and the public sector.
Sponsorship Opportunities
DXWorldEXPO | CloudEXPO are the single show where technology buyers and vendors can meet to experience and discus cloud computing and all that it entails. Sponsors of DXWorldEXPO | CloudEXPO will benefit from unmatched branding, profile building and lead generation opportunities through:
Featured on-site presentation and ongoing on-demand webcast exposure to a captive audience of industry decision-makers.
Showcase exhibition during our new extended dedicated expo hours
Breakout Session Priority scheduling for Sponsors that have been guaranteed a 35-minute technical session
Online advertising on 4,5 million article pages in SYS-CON's i-Technology Publications
Capitalize on our Comprehensive Marketing efforts leading up to the show with print mailings, e-newsletters and extensive online media coverage.
Unprecedented PR Coverage: Unmatched editorial coverage on Cloud Computing Journal
Tweetup to over 100,000 plus Twitter followers
Press releases sent on major wire services to over 500 industry analysts.
Secrets of Our Most Popular Sponsors and Exhibitors ▸ Here
For more information on sponsorship, exhibit, and keynote opportunities, contact [email protected].
Sponsorship Opportunities ▸ Here
Download Slide Deck: ▸ Here
Speaking Opportunities
The upcoming 22nd International DXWorldEXPO | CloudEXPO November 11-13, 2018 in New York City, NY announces that its Call For Papers for speaking opportunities is now open.
Secrets of Our Most Popular Faculty Members ▸ Here
Submit your speaking proposal ▸ Here or by email [email protected].
Download Slide Deck: ▸ Here
About DXWorldEXPO LLC
DXWorldEXPO LLC is a Lighthouse Point, Florida-based trade show company and the creator of DXWorldEXPO - Digital Transformation Conference & Expo. The company produces and presents CloudEXPO, DevOpsSummit, FinTechEXPO - Blockchain Event, the world's most influential conferences and trade shows.History and title Edit
Background Edit
Plot Edit
Characters Edit
Main characters Edit 1984. A constellation of characters Winston interacts with in the book Winston Smith – the protagonist who is a phlegmatic everyman and is curious of the past before the Revolution.
Julia – Winston's lover who is a covert "rebel from the waist downwards" who publicly espouses Party doctrine as a member of the fanatical Junior Anti-Sex League.
O'Brien – a member of the Inner Party who poses as a member of The Brotherhood, the counter-revolutionary resistance, in order to deceive, trap, and capture Winston and Julia. O'Brien has a servant named Martin. Secondary characters Edit Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford – former members of the Inner Party whom Winston vaguely remembers as among the original leaders of the Revolution, long before he had heard of Big Brother. They confessed to treasonable conspiracies with foreign powers and were then executed in the political purges of the 1960s. In between their confessions and executions, Winston saw them drinking in the Chestnut Tree Café—with broken noses, suggesting that their confessions had been obtained by torture. Later, in the course of his editorial work, Winston sees newspaper evidence contradicting their confessions, but drops it into a memory hole. Eleven years later, he is confronted with the same photograph during his interrogation.
Ampleforth – Winston's one-time Records Department colleague who was imprisoned for leaving the word "God" in a Kipling poem as he could not find another rhyme for "rod"; [32] Winston encounters him at the Miniluv. Ampleforth is a dreamer and intellectual who takes pleasure in his work, and respects poetry and language, traits which cause him disfavour with the Party.
Winston encounters him at the Miniluv. Ampleforth is a dreamer and intellectual who takes pleasure in his work, and respects poetry and language, traits which cause him disfavour with the Party. Charrington – an officer of the Thought Police posing as a sympathetic antiques dealer amongst the Proles.
Katharine Smith – the emotionally indifferent wife whom Winston "can't get rid of". Despite disliking sexual intercourse, Katharine married Winston because it was their "duty to the Party". Although she was a "goodthinkful" ideologue, they separated because the couple could not conceive children. Divorce is not permitted, but couples who cannot have children may live separately. For much of the story Winston lives in vague hope that Katharine may die or could be "got rid of" so that he may marry Julia. He regrets not having killed her by pushing her over the edge of a quarry when he had the chance many years previously.
Tom Parsons – Winston's naïve neighbour, and an ideal member of the Outer Party: an uneducated, suggestible man who is utterly loyal to the Party, and fully believes in its perfect image. He is socially active and participates in the Party activities for his social class. He is friendly towards Smith, and despite his political conformity punishes his bullying son for firing a catapult at Winston. Later, as a prisoner, Winston sees Parsons is in the Ministry of Love, as his daughter had reported him to the Thought Police, hearing him speak against Big Brother in his sleep. Even this does not dampen his belief in the Party, and he states he could do "good work" in the hard labour camps.
Mrs. Parsons – Parsons's wife is a wan and hapless woman who is intimidated by her own children. The Parsons children – members of the Party Youth League, representing the new generation of Oceanian citizens, without memory of life before Big Brother, and without family ties or emotional sentiment; the model society envisioned by the Inner Party.
Syme – Winston's colleague at the Ministry of Truth. He was a lexicographer who helped develop the language and the dictionary of Newspeak. Although he is enthusiastic about his work and support for the Party, Winston notes that "He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly." Winston predicts, correctly, that Syme will become an unperson. Unseen characters Edit Whether these characters are real or fabrications of Party propaganda is something that neither Winston nor the reader is permitted to know: Big Brother – the leader and figurehead of the Party that rules Oceania.
Emmanuel Goldstein – ostensibly a former leading figure in the Party who became the counter-revolutionary leader of the Brotherhood, and author of The Book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. Goldstein is the symbolic enemy of the state—the national nemesis who ideologically unites the people of Oceania with the Party, especially during the Two Minutes Hate and other fearmongering.
World in novel Edit
Themes Edit
Nationalism Edit Nineteen Eighty-Four expands upon the subjects summarised in Orwell's essay "Notes on Nationalism"[37] about the lack of vocabulary needed to explain the unrecognised phenomena behind certain political forces. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party's artificial, minimalist language 'Newspeak' addresses the matter. Positive nationalism: Oceanians' perpetual love for Big Brother; Neo-Toryism and Celtic nationalism are, as Orwell argues, defined by love.
Negative nationalism: Oceanians' perpetual hatred for Emmanuel Goldstein; Stalinism and Anglophobia are, as Orwell argues, defined by hatred.
Transferred nationalism: Oceania's enemy changes, and an orator changes mid-sentence. The crowd instantly transfers its hatred to the new enemy. Transferred nationalism swiftly redirects emotions from one power unit to another (for example, Communism, Pacifism, Colour Feeling and Class Feeling). It happens during Hate Week, a Party rally against the original enemy. The crowd goes wild and destroys the posters that are now against their new friend, and many say that they must be the act of an agent of their new enemy and former friend. Many of the crowd must have put up the posters before the rally but think that the state of affairs had always been the case. O'Brien concludes: "The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." Futurology Edit In the book, Inner Party member O'Brien describes the Party's vision of the future: There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever. — Part III, Chapter III, Nineteen Eighty-Four Censorship Edit A major theme of Nineteen Eighty-Four is censorship, especially in the Ministry of Truth, where photographs are modified and public archives rewritten to rid them of "unpersons" (persons who are erased from history by the Party). On the telescreens, figures for all types of production are grossly exaggerated or simply invented to indicate an ever-growing economy, when the reality is the opposite. One small example of the endless censorship is Winston being charged with the task of eliminating a reference to an unperson in a newspaper article. He proceeds to write an article about Comrade Ogilvy, a made-up party member who displayed great heroism by leaping into the sea from a helicopter so that the dispatches he was carrying would not fall into enemy hands. Surveillance Edit The inhabitants of Oceania, particularly the Outer Party members, have no real privacy. Many of them live in apartments equipped with two-way telescreens so that they may be watched or listened to at any time. Similar telescreens are found at workstations and in public places, along with hidden microphones. Written correspondence is routinely opened and read by the government before it is delivered. The Thought Police employ undercover agents, who pose as normal citizens and report any person with subversive tendencies. Children are encouraged to report suspicious persons to the government, and some denounce their parents. Citizens are controlled, and the smallest sign of rebellion, even something so small as a facial expression, can result in immediate arrest and imprisonment. Thus, citizens, particularly party members, are compelled to obedience.
Newspeak appendix Edit
Main articles: Newspeak and List of Newspeak words "The Principles of Newspeak" is an academic essay appended to the novel. It describes the development of Newspeak, the Party's minimalist artificial language meant to ideologically align thought and action with the principles of Ingsoc by making "all other modes of thought impossible". (A linguistic theory about how language may direct thought is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.) Whether or not the Newspeak appendix implies a hopeful end to Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a critical debate, as it is in Standard English and refers to Newspeak, Ingsoc, the Party etc., in the past tense: "Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised" p. 422). Some critics (Atwood,[38] Benstead,[39] Milner,[40] Pynchon[41]) claim that for the essay's author, both Newspeak and the totalitarian government are in the past.
Sources for literary motifs Edit
Influences Edit
Critical reception Edit
In other media Edit
Main article: Adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four Nineteen Eighty-Four has been adapted for the cinema, radio, television and theatre at least twice each, as well as for other art media, such as ballet and opera.
Cultural impact Edit
Brave New World comparisons Edit
In the decades since the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, there have been numerous comparisons to Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, which had been published 17 years earlier, in 1932.[87][88][89][90] They are both predictions of societies dominated by a central government and are both based on extensions of the trends of their times. However, members of the ruling class of Nineteen Eighty-Four use brutal force, torture and mind control to keep individuals in line, while rulers in Brave New World keep the citizens in line by addictive drugs and pleasurable distractions. In October 1949, after reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley sent a letter to Orwell and wrote that it would be more efficient for rulers to stay in power by the softer touch by allowing citizens to self-seek pleasure to control them rather than brute force and to allow a false sense of freedom: Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.[91] Elements of both novels can be seen in modern-day societies, with Huxley's vision being more dominant in the West and Orwell's vision more prevalent with dictators in ex-communist countries, as is pointed out in essays that compare the two novels, including Huxley's own Brave New World Revisited.[92][93][94][84] Comparisons with other dystopian novels like The Handmaid's Tale, Virtual Light, The Private Eye and The Children of Men have also been drawn.[95][96]
See also Edit
References EditFormer Mexican President Vicente Fox told news media Thursday that he believes Donald Trump would pose a significant risk to U.S.-Mexico relations if he is elected president. He also apologized for disparaging remarks he made about the Republican candidate in February. File Photo by Kevork Djansezian/UPI | License Photo
SANTA MONICA, Calif., May 5 (UPI) -- In a sudden about-face, former Mexican president Vicente Fox has apologized for making derogatory and profane comments about Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump earlier this year, and even extended an invitation to go south of the border.
In an interview with Breitbart News, the former leader partially buried the hatchet that he used to beat Trump over the head about the candidate's plans to have a wall built on Mexico's border with the United States.
In February, Fox slammed the billionaire's plans to build the wall, and have the Mexican government pay for it, and called Trump "ignorant," "crazy," and "nasty."
Trump subsequently responded by promising that "the wall just got 10 feet taller" and asked for Fox to apologize. Thursday, he did.
"I apologize. Forgiveness is one of the greatest qualities that human beings have, is the quality of a compassionate leader," Fox said. "You have to be humble. You have to be compassionate. You have to love thy neighbor, love your nation, love the world."
"I'm humble enough [to be a] compassionate leader. If I offended you, I'm sorry. But what about the other way around?" he added.
The former Mexican leader continued by saying that, if elected, Trump could likely use some help with various issues like trade.
"I don't think he should follow the strategy of attacking others, offending others, to get to his purpose. There are other ways and means of doing it," He said. "I invite him to come to Mexico and to see what Mexico is all about.
"I can convince him to think intelligently."
Despite the apology, Fox didn't entirely backtrack with regard to a possible Trump administration.
"He's a false prophet. He is proposing ideas that will not work," he told Bloomberg. "He's not presenting things in the right context."
"We have been offended by his language, but mostly we are worried about his thinking" he added.
RELATED Trump says cut off money sent back home to force Mexico to pay for wall
As of Thursday afternoon, Trump had not publicly responded to Fox's remarks or invitation.
Since opening his campaign for president, Trump has been particularly outspoken about immigration. While stating that he supports Mexican Americans, he put some people off by calling for the massive wall and implying that porous border security allows "rapists" and "murderers" to cross from Mexico into the United States.
He further angered some advocates by later stating that all Muslims should be temporarily banned from entering the United States until the government's fight against terrorism is under control.Share this...
Many readers will recall the climate bet for charity this site and its readers (the coolists) entered into against the climate alarmists, principally climate loudmouth Dana Nuccitelli and Rob Honeycutt, back in January 2011.
The coolists maintain that the 2011 – 2020 decade will be the same or cooler than the 2001 – 2010 decade. The alarmists of course are absolutely convinced that the current decade will be warmer.
Listening to the media lately, one might think that the coolists are getting trounced. Nothing could be further from the truth. The bet is based on the RSS and UAH satellite data, and they tell us a different story. Nuccitelli and his buddies can cite NOAA, GISS or NCDC all they want, but those datasets are not going to matter come 12/31/2020.
Robin Pittwood of the Kiwithinker has been so kind to tabulate the race so far as it develops. The first four years of the decade are now behind us, and Robin tells the coolists are maintaining a slight lead. Yes, this decade so far is running COOLER than the previous one! Hardly a good development for the Nuccitelli & Co. The dang oceans must have eaten up all the heat.
Chart shows this decade continues to be cooler than the previous one. Source: Robin Pittwood of the Kiwthinker.
With the current CO2 emissions trajectory running at the IPCC’s worst case scenario, this decade so far theoretically should have been at least a good 0.2°C warmer, and certainly not cooler. Something must have gone terribly wrong for the cocky climate boy-wonder in California.
Robin writes:
We are now 40% through the race … and clearly it is still close with the coolists in the lead by half a nose. Now back to the hype we’re hearing about the ‘hot’ 2014. Notice that during 2014 (months 37 to 48) the green line just keeps trucking along at the same basic slope as it has for the past few years and much of the previous decade too. There was even a small El Nino in 2014, whose effect is conspicuous by its absence. Maybe the heat that is missing in the observed atmospheric temperature trend is hiding in the ocean? ;-)”
So we’ve got another 6 years to go and now is a good time to speculate how those might go. Personally I expect 2015 to be a warm one as well, because of the current Tiny Tim El Nino. But then we all know what happens after an El Nino. Right, global temperatures tend to drop due to La Nina that follows.
Also boding ill for Nuccitelli and Co. is the projection that the current solar cycle will soon be winding down and so it is quite possible we will be seeing a cool period around 2018, similar to what we saw back around 2008. Indeed it’s too early to call it for the coolists, but I must say I’m quite comfortable with our current position.
Let’s assume that the coolists do win the bet and thus deliver the major upset. How will the warmists react? Are they going to cry foul? Or are they going to be relieved and a bit happy because the planet is not warming like they thought. That would be the rational reaction.
I doubt very much Dana is sweating about this at all. He’s a master rationalizer and will creatively concoct a way to deny it.
Awhile back at this site William “Winston” Connelly demanded that the terms of the bet be modified. Sorry, it is a bit late for that, and it’s not his bet anyway.
Should the coolists win, the warmists are going to have a lot explaining to do. But they are well prepared, as already there is a huge supply of excuses out there for them to choose from.
And even if the warmists should somehow eke out a victory, it’ll be quite a hollow one because they all claimed it would be min. 0.2° warmer. A few hundredths warmer would also take the air out of the alarmism.
Fun blogging lies ahead.Alabama Football G01 vs West Virginia 2014
Alabama running back T.J. Yeldon (4) scores the first TD of the season on a leaping TD run during the second quarter against West Virginia on Saturday. The game was one of the most-watched games in the country, according to TV ratings. Vasha Hunt/[email protected]
(VASHA HUNT)
Birmingham was again the top metered ESPN market for college football broadcasts on Saturday with an 8.1 average rating, and the Alabama-West Virginia and Cal-Northwestern games were the most-viewed games across all networks, according to numbers released this week by ESPN.
Top-market status is nothing new to Birmingham, which was ESPN's top metered market for the 13th consecutive season last year, averaging its highest ESPN viewership ever with a 9.2 rating.
New Orleans was ESPN's second-largest market on Saturday with a 6.2 rating and Greenville, S.C., was third at 5.9. Nine of the top 13 markets were within the SEC footprint.
ABC and ESPN, both owned by the Walt Disney Company, were the top two networks of the night across cable and broadcast among households, viewers & all key demographics.
After Alabama-West Virginia and Cal-Northwestern, both of which aired on ABC, the next most-watched games were Florida State-Oklahoma State, LSU-Wisconsin, Georgia-Clemson and UCLA-Virginia.
WatchESPN, the network's online streaming product, produced a 41% increase in unique viewers and a 50% increase in minutes watched over last season. WatchESPN set product records for regular-season game usage on Saturday: Alabama-West Virginia (328,000 unique viewers) and LSU-Wisconsin (13.9 million total minutes).Way of the Painted Self
Monks of the Way of the Painted Self follow a tradition of artistry that channels and focuses their ki into unique tattooed patterns that empower their bodies and minds. These monks follow no monastery but instead work in pairs of master and student. Through practice and discipline, the artistry of the painted self can shine through the skin for all to see as vibrant tattoos that often detail the journies and beliefs of each individual.
Adorned in Art
Starting when you choose this tradition at 3rd level, your body becomes a canvas to display your life's work. You gain proficiency in Tatooer's Kit and gather the necessary components to begin your artistic journey.
Additionally, you craft the start of your adornment. Choose two tattoos from the Tattoo Adornment section below. While you must adhere to the location requirements of the tattoo, at your option, the tattoo can take on any style you deem appropriate. You may only have one tattoo for each location with the obvious exemption of arms, legs, and hands. In these instances, any desired effects must be declared prior to any roll made.
You gain one additional tattoo of your choice at 6th, 11th, and 17th levels. Given the magical nature of your inks, whenver you adorn your body with a new tattoo, you may force the old ink out and replace one existing tattoo with another from the Tattoo Adornment section.
Mystic Henna
At 6th level, you gain the ability to imbue your allies with temporary gifts of power through henna adornment.
Over the course of a short rest, you may adorn yourself or one ally with your art, foregoing any benefits of your short rest, including the recovery of expended ki. Select one of the benefits from the Henna table. This benefit remains in place until your next short or long rest or until you adorn another ally. Only one henna benefit from this feature can be in effect at a time.
Starting at 11th level, you may adorn up to three allies with the same henna effect over the course of a short rest.
At 17th level, you may, over the course of a long rest, adorn up to ten allies. All allies adorned benefit from the same effect regardless of variation in artwork and the effect remains until your next long rest.
Henna
Name Effect Heart of Ki Bearer gains temporary hit points equal to your Monk level. Focus of the Mystic While worn, the bearer is considered under the effects of the guidance cantrip. This effect does not require concentration. Body of Ki While worn, the bearer is considered under the effects of the resistance cantrip. This effect does not require concentration. Ki's Third Eye While worn, the bearer is under the effects of the darkvision spell. Soul's Tether While adorned, you always know the direction, distance, and overall health of the bearer as long as they are on the same plane of existence as you.
Tattoo Adornment
The tattoo adornaments are presented in order of required location. If a tattoo requires a level, you must be that level in this class to apply that technique.
Head and Face
Air of the Ancestors (Requires Level 11). Your face is adorned with images of elemental air. You no longer need to breathe to survive as your mystical ink absorbs, filters, or generates air from your surroundings, even in areas of little or no air such as underwater.
Mind's Eye (Requires Level 6). An image of mystical sight or an eye adorns your forehead. You may cast augury as a ritual without providing material components. You are gifted with a strong feeling that reflects the results of the spell.
Wind's Whisper. Mystical emblems of spiritual connection adorn your neck, scalp, or face. You may cast the message cantrip at will.
Aura of Ki. You adorn your scalp and face with images of flowing ki. You may expend 1 ki point as a bonus action on your turn to see the faint ki auras around even hidden and invisible creatures for 1 minute. Only you are able to see these auras.
Mystic Awareness. (Requires level 6). Decorations of connected threads, glowing suns, or other forces of illumination adorn your face and neck. Your awareness blossoms, when you roll initiative, you can treat a roll of 9 or lower as a 10.A Princeton professor has joined a group of US intellectuals offering to take 100 lashes each for a Saudi blogger who is being punished over his criticism of the country's hardline clerics.
Robert P George, who is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and the vice-chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, has volunteered to take the penalty on behalf of Raif Badawi.
He joins six other advocates for religious freedom, including Dr Zuhdi Jasser, who is the President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.
Scroll down for video
Robert P George, left, a leading professor at Princeton University, has joined six other advocates for religious freedom who have offered to take 100 lashes each on behalf of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, right
Dr Zuhdi Jasser, who is the President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a Syrian-American Muslim activist and a US Navy veteran, is also offering to take a flogging for Mr Badawi
Mr Badawi was sentenced to 10 years in prison, a £177,000 fine and 1,000 lashes after criticizing Saudi Arabia's powerful clerics on his blog.
The 31-year-old is facing 20 weekly floggings of 50 lashes each. The first was almost two weeks ago - but the second was postponed on medical grounds.
In a letter to the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Professor George and his fellow advocates call for the immediate release of Mr Badawi.
They ask that if Mr Badawi is not relieved of his punishment, they will take the flogging for him.
The other signatories are Mary Ann Glendon, of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, Hannah Rosenthal, CEO of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, Daniel Mark, an assistant professor at Villanova University, Eric Schwartz, Dean of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and, Katrina Lantos Swett, President of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice.
Mary Ann Glendon, left, of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and Hannah Rosenthal, right, CEO of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, are calling for an end to the 'grave injustice'
Saudi Arabia has been accused of 'outrageous inhumanity' for delaying Mr Badawi's sentence so his wounds could heal before he was whipped again
In the letter, the hypocrisy of Saudi Arabian officials is highlighted.
They note that officials attended the recent march in Paris in support of human rights and civil liberties and in memory of the victims of the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher market massacres - while in their country, Mr Badawi has been dealt an 'unjust' punishment which violates those same rights.
'Raif Badawi stands condemned under rules that flagrantly violate these human rights and civil liberties and is being subjected to an unspeakably cruel punishment of 1000 lashes,' the letter says.
'We call on the government of the Kingdom to put a halt to this grave injustice.'
It adds: 'Compassion, a virtue honored in Islam as well as in Christianity, Judaism, and other faiths, is defined as “suffering with another.”
'We are persons of different faiths, yet we are united in a sense of obligation to condemn and resist injustice and to suffer with its victims, if need be.
'We therefore make the following request. If your government will not remit the punishment of Raif Badawi, we respectfully ask that you permit each of us to take 100 of the lashes that would be given to him.
'We would rather share in his victimization than stand by and watch him being cruelly tortured.'
The letter, posted on the American Islamic Forum for Democracy's website, dated January 20, is addressed to Adel bin Ahmed Al-Jubeir, Saudi Arabia's Ambassador to the US.
The letter, dated January 20, is addressed to the Saudi ambassador to the US. Pictured, signatories Daniel Mark, left, and Katrina Lantos Swett, President of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice
Professor George and his fellow advocates, including Eric Schwartz, pictured, ask that if Mr Badawi is not relieved of his punishment, they will take the flogging for him
The group said: 'AIFD has long stood with Raif and has been calling for the U.S. to do more on his behalf since his egregious arrest, conviction, and sentencing.
'AIFD finds no difference between the crimes committed by the Islamist terrorists in Paris who assassinated cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo in Paris and the crimes against humanity committed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the name of blasphemy against innocent heroes for religious liberty like Raif Badawi.
Mr Badawi's official crime was to insult Islam but supporters say his real offence was to criticize the country's powerful Sunni clerics on his blog.
Leaked video footage taken on a mobile phone is believed to show the first flogging session, as a shackled and standing Mr Badawi is hit on his legs and back by a policeman with a switch.
Mr Badawi's wife Ensaf Haider, who fled to Canada, said after seeing the video: 'Every lash killed me'
The father-of-three faces being flogged 50 times each Friday for 20 weeks. His wife is living as a refugee in Canada with their three children, and fears the floggings may kill him
Mr Badawi's wife Ensaf Haidar, who fled to Canada with their children, says he started a forum that was simply meant to encourage discussion of the Muslim faith.
After seeing the video, she said: 'Every lash killed me.'
Yesterday, Amnesty International repeated its calls for the 'torture' so be unconditionally stopped.
The organisation's Middle East deputy director, Said Boumedouha, said: 'Instead of continuing to torment Raif Badawi by dragging out his ordeal with repeated assessments the authorities should publicly announce an end to his flogging and release him immediately and unconditionally.
'Raif Badawi is still at risk, there is no way of knowing whether the Saudi Arabian authorities will disregard the medical advice and allow the flogging to go ahead.'
Raif Badawi, pictured, his children Najwa, 11, Terad, 10, and Miriam, seven, has won international supportFor most WCW fans, Starrcade 97 marked the start of the end. After nearly two years away from the ring, Sting was finally making his return to vanquish the nWo by conquering ‘Hollywood’ Hogan for the WCW World title and would go on to a long title reign against challengers like Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, Ric Flair, Raven and newly arrived Bret ‘Hitman’ Hart.
It should have been a slam dunk. Sting does what he’d been doing for months to the entire nWo — wipe out Hogan in under 10 minutes and have the fans ecstatic that the good guys won. Instead, Hogan pulled an idiotic power play to sabotage Sting and botched the payoff to WCW’s biggest storyline. Now, WWE figure collectors can finally write this wrong.
Mattel shocked fans at the 2014 San Diego Comic Con by revealing Sting in its Defining Moments line. It’s been a long year of waiting, but now Sting has descended from the rafters to arrive on shelves. Was he worth the wait or is it another Starrcade 97 screw-up?
Package: I continue to rave about the Hall of Fame line thanks to the little personalization Mattel does with the outer and inner package. You can see the figure from most angles, which is especially helpful in detecting any problems. After getting a few rough WWE figures with paint issues on the back, which I wouldn’t see in the normal package, I appreciate the additional vantage point.
We get a nice bio to explain the specific time frame Mattel was shooting for with the figure. The top portion of the exterior package is outlined with scorpions while the inner package has a cool Sting portrait similar to a look we’ve seen on some Sting T-Shirts complete with Sting’s autograph. It’s a neat addition and one I’d love to see on future DMs.
Likeness: This is an iconic look of The Icon. There have been a few Sting figures from Toy Biz and Jakks, but this one best captures Sting in his Crow gimmick. At first glance, the torso may seem a tiny bit too slight, but in person it’s about right as the near full body outfit made Sting look a lot slimmer than his Surfer Sting days. The arms are a fraction too big but it doesn’t throw off the look noticeably unless you’re looking at pictures from 1997.
As expected, Sting’s trademark Mechanix gloves couldn’t be included on the figure due to licensing issues. so hope you’ve got a steady hand if you want a fully accurate likeness. On the plus side, Mattel did sculpt the outfit’s shoulder pads and the waist, thigh and knees as well as the chest piece for complete accuracy. Those really can’t be used by anyone else so you can be sure we’ll see another Crow-era Sting so Mattel can get some more use out of the mold.
Paint: With such minimal paint applications, you’d think it’d be pretty simple to find one that doesn’t |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.